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

by nostalgia (for this was the literature of my remembered youth), I insisted to John Boston that his work deserved to be read by as many interested people as possible. He was busy on important legal work in defense of those lost in an overburdened US criminal justice (or “justice”) system, and had no time for such laborious scutwork. I rapped on his internet door from time to time, insisting that it would be a shame—a crime, even—not to allow this material to be read by the world at large.

      At last he buckled, passed me his large files covering all the issues of Carnell’s New Worlds and the short-lived Science Fiction Adventures (some quarter million words), plus the current book’s worth of equivalent reading into Science Fantasy (my favorite as an adolescent, in colonial Australia). All three volumes of reading and commentary really comprise one large book of some 350,000 words. This third volume carries the saga through to the brief flowering of the New Wave in SF and fantasy both—a trend to which Science Fantasy stood in ambiguous and sometimes arm’s length relationship.

      §

      Science Fantasy’s forerunner New Worlds had a long and difficult gestation, and finally struggled into existence in 1946, although it managed only three issues before bankruptcy of its initial publisher, and only five more by the end of 1950 under the newly organized Nova Publications. It did not become a successful monthly until well into 1954, but in the meantime one of Nova’s founders, Walter Gillings, became the first editor of the new companion magazine, Science Fantasy, in 1950. Gillings had already launched his own magazine, Fantasy, which failed after only three issues and was followed by a semi-professional critical magazine, Fantasy Review (later Science-Fantasy Review). Gillings attempted to continue his earlier interests in commentary as well as fiction in the new magazine, but it was buffeted by post-war printing strikes and paper rationing, and by the third issue the board of Nova decided to oust Gillings and save costs by bringing in Ted Carnell as editor of both their magazines—to Gillings’ dismay and outrage.

      Technical trade publisher Maclaren & Sons took over both magazines, later adding a reprint edition of the US Science Fiction Adventures, with the latter and Science Fantasy appearing bimonthly to New Worlds’ monthly. By 1963, all were in trouble—perhaps due to competition with cheap imported paperbacks from the US—and both New Worlds and Science Fantasy were rescued the following year by a somewhat disreputable publisher, Roberts & Vinter, Carnell departing to create his own quarterly series of original SF anthologies, New Writings in SF, with New Worlds’ editorship going to Michael Moorcock, although his notable work to that date had been the darkly brooding Elric fantasy stories published in Science Fantasy. Oxford art dealer Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928-1985) took on Science Fantasy, whose title he disliked and later changed to Impulse. When that title apparently confused the genre audience while failing to attract new readers of more refined tastes, it was switched, too late, to SF Impulse.

By general assessment, Bonfiglioli was a lazy and offhand helmsman, whose work was largely left to his assistants, James Parkhill-Rathbone and Keith Roberts (no relation to the magazine’s publishing house Roberts & Vinter), especially after Bonfiglioli famously bought a Tintoretto at a country auction for forty pounds and sold it for a thousand times (or perhaps 10,000 times) as much.4 Indeed, Roberts became, in effect, the editor, as well as providing some of the most remarkable fiction (especially the tales that would be compiled as Pavane) and many of the rather effective impressionistic covers.

      For a brief moment it seemed that J. G. Ballard would become editor, and it is clear that he would have changed the magazine very drastically away from its science-fantasy roots—perhaps even more than Mike Moorcock was in the process of changing New Worlds into the battleship of the New Wave. In the event, Ballard was furious, and gone, when he learned that two issues (or at least the covers and tables of contents) had been put in process by Keith Roberts, and US writer Harry Harrison was brought in briefly to take the editor’s chair. As before, Roberts did most of the grunt work and more besides, and Harrison soon decamped to Europe. The publishers’ distributor went broke, and in February 1967, with its ninety-third issue under its third title, Science Fantasy was closed by Roberts & Vinter. It was a disheartening end to a magazine that in its various incarnations had provided a new kind of fiction not only to British readers but to the rest of the world as well, in the many stories drawn from its pages that appeared in US Year’s Best and other anthologies, or were listed as Honorable Mentions by the premier SF anthologist of the day, Judith Merril.

      For some of us, Science Fantasy still sings a sirens’ song of magical memory, and its passing is a sting of frustration and rebuke. I am reminded of the opening of John Brunner’s long novella “Earth Is But a Star,” one of the great stories from the magazine:

      “It’s a very small star,” said the man in gold doubtfully.

      “Big enough,” said Creohan, and thought how tiny Earth was in comparison. The man in gold eyed him, and then gave another glance at the image in the field of the great telescope.

      “This, then, is your device for seeing into the years to come?” he asked. “And is that all it will show?” [...]

“I have given you the chance to see into the future,” Creohan snapped. “Is it to be blamed on me that you have neither the wit nor the will to use that chance?”5

1. One of the magazine stories combined into The Incomplete Enchanter was titled “The Mathematics of Magic” (Unknown, August 1940).

2. Kenneth Johns, “The First Decade,” Science Fantasy, 43 (1960), p. 108.

3. See “The Long Road Toward Reform,” http://www.wahmee.com/pln_john_boston.pdf.

4. Different versions of this tale exist. Kevin Jackson, in The Independent, reports: “In 1964, Bon heard rumours that a Resurrection by a certain well-known 16th-century Venetian master was up for sale at an absurdly low reserve price. He went to the auction...and bought it, as if on an absent-minded whim, for 40 quid. It was, as he had immediately seen, a genuine Tintoretto. He immediately sold it for £4,000—a not inconsiderable sum...back in the Sixties” (19 July, 1999: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/celebrations-for-a-right-charlie-1107408.html) (visited 10/19/11). Brian Aldiss, who gets the painter wrong—he says it was “a Giorgione”—claims Bonfiglioli knew it was “worth a half million”: http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/aldiss/html/glass_forest_4.html.

5. Science Fantasy, 29 (1958), pp. 2-3.

      1: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 1 (ISSUES 1-3)

By the time of its demise in 1967, the British magazine Science Fantasy had an international reputation as one of the better magazines in the field. (Under new editorship begun in 1964, it was also known briefly, from March 1966, as Impulse and then SF Impulse.) Its specialty is captured in its title: neither traditional science fiction nor routine fantasy, but a blend of both—even if many stories wavered from this hybrid goal and fell back into one of the more familiar categories. I read through the file of Science Fantasy and successors for the first time during the early twenty-first century, and this book records the journey.6 Executive summary: Pretty bad start. But the magazine improved, and eventually did live up to its reputation, and published much excellent work that might never have existed without Science Fantasy.

      The magazine was published by Nova Publications, which by the time of Science-Fantasy issue 1 (dated Summer 1950) was, according to the back cover ad, about to publish New Worlds issue 8. The first two issues were edited by Walter Gillings (1912-79), who had previously edited Tales of Wonder and Fantasy (the UK 1946-47 magazine); the now better-known E.J. (John or Ted) Carnell (1912-72),