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

a lot that’s attractive about the story. The women characters are unusually prominent and well drawn for this era. The story is unusual for its time in its acknowledgement of the existence of black society in London. Brunner draws interestingly on the anthropology of magic and the story presents a point of view on it that’s unusual for fantasy (though not surprising for Brunner the rationalist), and refreshing to my taste: yes, magic is knowledge, but that doesn’t mean it should be preserved. It’s not neutral knowledge because it can only be used for personal gain. The sooner it’s forgotten and replaced by medicine, scientific agriculture, etc., the better off we’ll all be.

      As with “The Man Who Played the Blues,” there are touches that now seem quaint, like Brunner’s slightly ostentatious hip knowingness (“Reaching behind him, he picked up the guitar again and played a little silvery run ending in the E minor seventh harmonics produced by half-stopping the strings at the octave fret and lifting the barre while they are still sounding”), and the careful articulation of good liberal views of the time (“I had a high respect for the negro race—it wasn’t their fault that they got themselves stranded on a continent whose climate was too equable and where game was too abundant for them to develop a technological civilisation.”) But he did push the envelope a bit, with his protagonist approving interracial marriages: “It’d solve all our racial problems if we all mixed up into one uniformly coloured species.” Then, at the end of the story, the white protagonist’s white semi-girlfriend, with whom he is hopelessly in love, turns up at his hospital room engaged to the black guitarist. But when she leaves, the glamorous Jamaican witch enters, and romance is clearly in the air. Not bad for 1956, probably unpublishable in the US then.

      The story was expanded into Black is the Color (1969), a non-genre novel described as “a thriller involving black magic.” This version, however, is unequivocally fantasy—while the effectiveness of magic seems to depend to some degree on the victim’s belief in magic, it doesn’t depend on the victim’s knowledge of the particular magical acts.

      The cream of the short stories is Brian Aldiss’s “The Failed Men” (a.k.a. “Ahead”), one of his best early stories, though it had never been anthologized, just reprinted in Aldiss’s collections, until it appeared in Broderick’s Earth Is But a Star. Far-future humanity has literally buried itself and gone comatose, for reasons unintelligible to anyone else, and time-traveling civilizations including ours have banded together to rescue them and start the species up again. And the rescuers are losing their minds. It’s as downbeat a story as anyone has ever written, but impressive and moving in its brief length. One might congratulate Carnell for appreciating a story so contrary to the conventionally cheery and positive assumptions of the genre, but in fact Aldiss recounts:

Carnell was honest down to the last half penny, and brought his magazines out regularly. He had no literary taste. When I submitted to him one of my best early short stories, “The Failed Men,” he wrote back saying, “This will make you laugh. I hated your story and couldn’t make sense of it but, since we were going to press and I was short by five thousand words, I shoved your effort in. Here’s the cheque.” I didn’t laugh. One wants appreciation as well as money. Particularly money on Carnell’s miniscule [sic] scale.30

      Jack Williamson’s “Guinevere for Everybody,” reprinted from Frederik Pohl’s anthology Star Science Fiction Stories 3 (Ballantine 1954), is certainly topical these days. A fellow finds a woman for sale for $4.95 in an airport vending machine. She’s manufactured from the cells of the winner of a contest to identify “the woman that every man wanted.” He needs information about her background but she won’t talk unless he buys her, at which point she persuades him he also needs the $19.95 accessory kit. He’s on a mission to figure out what has gone wrong with Athena, the computer that runs the factory that has started producing the Guineveres. (It was sabotaged by a disgruntled ex-manager whom Athena automated out of a job. The sabotage consisted of programming it to do something that would provoke its destruction, i.e. manufacturing Guineveres.) When he gets back to the motel where he has installed Guinevere, she is horribly aged—it’s planned obsolescence, intended to insure replacement demand, and he can get a nice trade-in on her if he wants. And that’s not all. The story flails out in several other directions as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of clear-the-decks satire from Williamson. It’s a mess, but a sharp and vigorous one.

      Lan Wright’s “Wishes Three” is an Unknownish rehash of the “be careful what you ask for” theme, trivial but redeemed by lively writing, not always a feature of his work.

      After those, it’s downhill as usual. Peter Phillips’ brief “First Man in the Moon” is merely inconsequential, while Julian Frey’s “Head First”—about some alien children enrolled in a school where the headmaster’s name is Wilmar P. Quagmire, which is probably all you need to know—is actively silly. (Frey was a penname for John Hynam, who usually wrote as John Kippax.) A more baroque sort of lameness may be found in John Kippax’s “Fair Weather Friend,” admittedly a merciful improvement over the Dimple the dachshund on Mars stories. Here the characters run a rainmaking operation in the United States—authentic local color is provided by a “sherriff” who says “Well I’ll be hoodooed,” and a farmer named Eb Doorbell. Their materials are being stolen by a time-traveling magician from ancient Egypt who needs to steal the thunder (as it were) of a competing rainmaker back home. The real-time rainmakers oblige him by providing him a new, improved rainmaking agent. His competitor, by the way, is named Noah.

      In a similar vein is Dan Morgan’s “Beast of the Field,” in which a miserable man comes to a psychiatrist with the delusion that he is an alien. Of course, he is an alien, and he’s trying to track down another shipwrecked alien, and now he has. The psychiatrist admits that he’s the guy, but he doesn’t want to go home because the crash destroyed his telepathic centers and he’d be a cripple. So the investigator leaves him, saying, “Goodbye and good luck—Doctor Freud.” What next? Adam and Eve?

26. See this cover at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.

27. See it at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. As usual, Broderick disagrees, finding it quite pleasing.

28. Little, Brown, 1998, chapter XVIII.

29. See it at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.

30. Aldiss, “The Glass Forest,” http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/aldiss/html/glass_forest_4.html (visited 10/19/11).