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

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СКАЧАТЬ too damn easy. It’s the sort of thing a more mature writer might have turned into a much better and longer story—as Brunner did, many times, later on.

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      The shorter fiction is an equally mixed bag, though definite trends are in evidence. There is much less earnestly amateurish science fiction, a generally lighter touch, a bit of outright fantasy, and several stories that are just about paradigmatic for the title Science Fantasy. For example, A. Bertram Chandler’s slickly turned “Late” (13) is about a man working by himself at an orbital research station. There’s some commotion on Earth, the radio goes dead, and his relief doesn’t show up. The research station started life as a space vehicle, so he manages to improvise and get back to Earth, which he finds deserted by humans. He’s missed the Last Trump and been Left Behind. This appeared later in the US as “Late Arrival” in Imaginative Tales, March 1956.

      Then there’s “Dear Ghost” by Alan Guthrie (pseudonym of E. C. Tubb) (15), which posits what amounts to relativity fatigue. You can only travel superluminally for so many hours before you turn into an invisible ghost, and that goes for your spaceship, supplies, etc., too. The protagonist is recruited on a quasi-suicide mission to deliver vaccine to a plague-stricken planet: he’s probably too close to his retire-by date, the ship’s pretty old too, but he rises to the quasi-suicidal occasion. Once embarked, he discovers that the ship is haunted, apparently by the ghost of a female pilot, whose picture is lying around, though it must be from a long time ago. After delivering the vaccine and being hijacked by colonists trying to escape, he “goes ghost” and finds her waiting. She’s a babe! Of course.

      Now for some outright fantasy. Helen M. Urban’s “Pass the Salt” (13) reads like what might happen if a 1953 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction were shipwrecked on a desert island and had no one to talk to but itself for several years. Sample: “He didn’t know she was a witch. There was no sign on the back. No mark on the forehead or witchlike actions to shout a warning. A nice sort of girl who was fire and some refrigeration and a lot of looks. Not too expensive. Not inexpensive either, but just tolerable to the paycheck.” He begins to suspect when she teleports the salt into his hand. Nonetheless he marries her. She gets annoyed when an old girlfriend calls him up, and casts spells she can’t undo, causing him to look so weird he can’t go out in public. So he listens carefully when she talks in her sleep and figures out how to cast a spell neither of them can undo making her invisible. Helen Urban had half a dozen stories scattered around the SF magazines—including Fantasy & Science Fiction—from 1955 to 1962.

      Less annoying but also less interesting is Douglas West’s “The Dogs of Hannoie” (15), about a man whose car breaks down in a remote small town, where they revere a pack of semi-wild dogs who are allegedly clairvoyant and howl at distant catastrophes. Here’s the harbinger: “Le bombe atomic, it is not good, no?” The dogs are howling at nuclear tests on the other side of the world.

      That’s about as outright as the fantasy gets. Everything else has at least a veneer of rationalization. Jonathan Burke, noticeably improved, is back with “The Adjusters,” a member of the same subgenre as Theodore Sturgeon’s “Yesterday Was Monday,” Damon Knight’s “You’re Another,” and Philip K. Dick’s “Adjustment Team”: reality is maintained by a bureaucracy of dubious competence. Here it’s the Ministry of Adjustment, which alters the past to improve the present, except there is always collateral damage. The two main characters meet cute at the Ministry’s Complaints Department. Their respective spouses have disappeared as a result of the Ministry’s adjustments. Getting no satisfaction, they eventually get married to each other. One of the original spouses reappears as a result of another Adjustment by the Ministry. The farce isn’t quite as broad as it could be but overall it’s a pretty amusing story. Burke also has the Guest Editorial in 13, to which we’ll return.

      In a similar vein of metaphysical lampoon, but decidedly stranger, is “Double Act” by Howard Lee McCarey (pseudonym of Richard Rowland, who had a few other stories in Science Fantasy and New Worlds) (14), which starts out with Dockett and Kroyd performing a dismal comedy act. They are arrested, charged, and convicted of “F.B.S.—Fell Below Standard.” (“Their script-writers were sent last week; good job too if you ask me.”) They are sentenced to time travel, choosing the future, and find themselves walking across an endless plain, until they see a bunch of people suspended in the air, performing normal activities except that they are not visibly clothed and, e.g., the chairs they seem to be sitting in are not visible. They accost someone who says, “Go away! I don’t wish to see you!” and is suddenly clothed. Later he says “Excuse me while I change” and his baggy trousers go from mauve to deep pink while a hat of curious design appears on his head.

      Eventually Dockett and Kroyd find their way to Reception, where they learn to make things (and, indeed, people) with their thoughts. They move into a town full of similarly talented people and play a lot of golf on imaginary courses, getting younger. They feel a compulsion to go back to Reception, which turns out also to be Departure, and then find themselves children, back in our world, talking about what they want to be when they grow up. If there’s a subgenre for this, it’s represented by Gene Wolfe’s “Forlesen.” Shaggy metaphysics? This one would fit into the imaginary anthology Great SF And Fantasy About The Metaphysically Absurd, along with Howard Schoenfeld’s “Built Up Logically,” Frank Belknap Long’s “To Follow Knowledge,” and James Blish and Virginia Kidd’s “On the Wall of the Lodge.”

      At the other end of several spectra is E. R. James’ “Smoothies Are Wanted” (13), an earnest and labored psi story. In the future, telepaths will be used as labor relations officers, nicknamed “smoothies” because they smooth things over by figuring out what the contending parties really are after. This one, like Richard Varne’s story, is hampered by ultimately making no sense at all. The Mars colony is threatened by a wildcat strike of the men who make the air. The smoothie’s efforts to head it off are hampered by another unknown telepathic presence. But it turns out he’s fighting himself (“You’ve been a schizoid—two people in one.”), though he manages to pull it together in the end and keep the air circulating. So what happens? He (or they) gets a promotion, not a psychiatric leave. Nonetheless this is an improvement over James’ previous efforts, which were pretty boring reshufflings of clichéd material. This is a more readable story with a fairly original idea.

      Equally earnest but more polished is James White’s “Dynasty of One” (15), in which the immortality treatment only works for people who can tolerate an intense heightening of conscience.

Recursive themes keep popping up. Here’s “Mossendew’s Martian” by John Kippax (13), a sort of “Don’t Look Now”24 variation about an astronomical artist who gets a chance for a big score doing effects for a Moon landing movie. He can’t possibly get it done on time, but a man he meets in the bar says he can help and produces some really fine fake Moon photos very fast, except of course they aren’t fake. At the end of the story it’s casually revealed that this contact was made at the Globe Tavern, where London’s SF crowd was then hanging out.

      A different kind of recursion appears in Gavin Neal’s “Reluctant Hero” (14), in which the author of the Rocket Brydon books, films, and comic strips goes to the Moon and is made the butt of practical jokes by the crew, but saves their bacon in the end.

      E. C. Tubb appears in all three issues, with “Poor Henry” (13), a sour-tasting misogynist domestic-in-space about a poor sucker whose selfish and manipulative wife leaves him to be eaten by Martian sand-ants; “The Agent” (14), a variation on “To Serve Man”; and “The Predators” (15), a novelette about advertising types whose cynicism keeps Earth out of the Galactic Empire. These display capable professionalism but no particular charm. Tubb also has a Guest Editorial in 14.

      Wilson Tucker is in two of the issues with “My Brother’s Wife” in 14 (previously in Fantasy & Science Fiction, February СКАЧАТЬ