Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967. Damien Broderick

The protagonist decides that he’ll give up any grander goals and just be a big shot in the insane society, but he’s thwarted in that too, and dismissed as “harmless” by the woman he aspires to. It’s well enough done but seems rather pointless and mean-spirited, reminiscent of the complaints people would make about the New Wave ten years later.

      What a difference there is between this short version and Non-Stop the novel—like day and night, or more aptly, in Mark Twain’s phrase, the lightning and the lightning-bug. It’s not just a matter of length but also of attitude. Non-Stop is not a great novel but it’s a pleasure to read, full of incident and detail, free of the contempt for the characters that marred the shorter version. The Teaching is still there, but it no longer dominates. It’s now a minor element in the depiction of a society of some complexity, and it’s also explained away as originated by a crackpot. The characters are given considerably more depth. We learn the tragic history that has led to the present degenerated situation. And the end of the story carries a weight commensurate with the preceding events, rather than trivializing them and the characters as did the shorter version.

Maybe Aldiss matured enough in that interval that he no longer felt a need to prove himself superior to his characters. In any case, he seems to have found his way as a writer between the two versions. He says in his memoir The Twinkling of an Eye28: “Telling myself the story gave me great pleasure; I was absolutely sure of what I was doing.” That’s exactly how it reads. Of the earlier version Aldiss says only that he wrote it in late 1955 and Carnell told him: “Since I am short of material for Science Fantasy, I am going to publish your story, but frankly you are wasting a great idea on such short length. If you would like to turn the story into a novel, I will advise you and will try to sell it for you in the United States.” Carnell mustered more enthusiasm for the magazine blurb: “It is a great pleasure for us to present the first novelette by Brian Aldiss insofar as we believe that, like several other British authors, he has a long and successful future in front of him as a fantasy writer.” Well, now that I think about it, he doesn’t really say anything good about the story....

      There’s nothing in 17 as good as the reprints in 16. The short stories range from the capably clever and amusing to the obligatory bloody awful. The US reprint in this issue is Judith Merril’s “Connection Completed” (from Universe, November 1954), a psi period piece. A telepathic guy is trying to hook up with a telepathic gal. Is it really she across the table from him, both of them trying to ask without really asking “Is it you?” It’s well enough done if you can accept the fantastic premise that people in such need wouldn’t just blurt it out, since if they were wrong they would only have embarrassed themselves before a perfect stranger. I suppose this reflects the more reserved social mores of the time (in fact, the story can and probably should be read as a fairly obvious allegory of sexual repression).

      John Brunner, very quickly the seasoned professional, again has two stories, both smooth but minor. “The Biggest Game,” under the Keith Woodcott pseudonym, is about a professional philanderer and exploiter of rich women, who muses about their being the biggest game of all. Of course someone turns out to be hunting him. The even slighter “The Man Who Played the Blues,” under Brunner’s own name, is told by a semi-professional jazz musician to a police officer who is investigating the disappearance of Ribble, who sat in on piano with the band and played blues like nobody ever heard before, until a severe-looking man showed up, ushered him away, and made him disappear with some alien gadget. It probably seemed pretty hip at the time. Now it’s mainly quaint.

      Probably the best of the lot is “Loouey,” by Alan Barclay, in which a London fixer gets wind of an apparent flying saucer landing and an alien on the loose, and learns that someone seeming to be the alien is holed up in a rural area racking up patents. So he and his muscle go to take possession, and get their deserved comeuppance. The story is told with great gusto and one gets the sense of an author having a really good time—not the case with most of Barclay’s other work, especially his stories in New Worlds.

      As to the “bloody awful” category, they all have one thing in common: they jumped, they weren’t pushed. That is, they are not just ineptly executed but deeply misconceived. The least dire is John Mantley’s “Uncle Clem and Them Martians,” which appears to be a sort of pastiche of Henry Kuttner’s Hogben stories by a writer who can’t quite lose his stiff upper lip. Think of a Masterpiece Theatre remake of “The Beverly Hillbillies.” The plot (bottom line, omitting the cameo appearance by Albert Einstein): Uncle Clem deduces that the menacing and seemingly invulnerable extraterrestrials are based on water soluble crystals inside an impervious skin that doesn’t feel pain, so he contrives to have their shoes lined with sandpaper and holes punched in them and then gets the aliens to walk through water.

      Proceeding downhill, we have “Proof Negative,” by Trevor Staines (pseudonym of John Brunner), in which the mysterious stranger proves to be Santa Claus. Next is “To Touch the Stars” by Joseph Slotkin, blurbed: “Ever since life began the forces of Good and Evil have been delicately balanced in mortal conflict, yet few writers in recent years—except the late H. P. Lovecraft—have managed to capture the macabre setting.” Suspicions confirmed: the story is a Lovecraft pastiche, value added negligible. Somebody brings a peculiar old console radio to the weird radio repair man to get it fixed. The repair guy discovers that he’s got a direct hookup to the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. In fact, he gets taken right over, just like that nice Mr. Charles Dexter Ward, and is bent on bringing the Things over for tea. Sample: “There, before his uninitiated eyes, the green arm of ghastly perdition reaches around the yielding body of a glowing creature, half human, half unnameable monster, dragging it back with it through a shattering screen into the dread beyond.” Pretty eldritch, huh?

      Of Len Shaw’s “Syllabus” Carnell blurbs: “During the past five hundred years the English language has changed out of all recognition—and is still changing. The following story could well be written in the twenty-first centry, perhaps by one erstwhile descendant of Will Shakespeare.” Well, you be the judge, here’s the beginning:

      Scrinch open sleep-leaded lids, John Smith. Savour sunbeam-flooded morn. Survey marital bedchamber in preprandial hour’s pellucid clarity. Consider accoutrements of mid-class domesticity—off-white ceiling, vitreous walls, nylon drapes, deep-piled fibre-glass fitted carpet. Eye-caress dressing table, top a-riot with erotically containered beautician’s magi-products, brushes, combs and oh-so-common curlers.

      Just goes to show that the sins of the New Wave were not the least bit original. There is a plot here, dimly visible through the undergrowth. Parents are supposed to sign their teen-age girl up for her irrevocable education and career path. She’s made and backed off several choices, now she’s fixed on marine zoology, except that Daddy keeps having dreams and visions of her being eaten by a whale. It turns out she’s really psi-talented and trying to hide it while manipulating herself out of any career choice, but now they are on to her and she will go into Advanced Psionics, like it or not. One is tempted to ask the author, “Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

      §

Issue 18 has a cover by a new artist, Terry (F. J. Terence Maloney), who did a number of covers for New Worlds from 1956 through 1958, but only this one for Science Fantasy—at least under his own name (see Chapter 8 for elaboration). It’s a pleasant enough alien landscape (reddish, so it must be Mars) with spaceship in the background.29 Closer scrutiny of the foreground shows several men in spacesuits standing around what looks like a flagpole, two of them in consternation, one of the two apparently shaking his fist. One could surmise that these intrepid space explorers are expressing rage and frustration that somebody else has gotten there first and raised their flag. Unfortunately, the title banner obscures whatever is at the top of the flagpole, if anything, and the third spaceman appears to be looking at his watch, so it is impossible to confirm this hypothesis. The cover doesn’t illustrate any of the stories, so there’s no help there.

      The lead novella is John Brunner’s “This Rough Magic,” the best to date of his contributions to the magazine. The protagonist, hearing the sound of a good guitarist, walks into a Soho club