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

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_cbcb1fb2-5e49-5249-b358-9afdf6e51a8f">26 This illustrates the lead novelette, E. C. Tubb’s “The Wager,” an engagingly barbaric yawp about some decadent aliens dropped on Earth for a spot of urban sport hunting. Bad luck, they’ve picked the city where Gort, a member of the equally alien Guardians, is vacationing among the primitive Earthfolk. The viewpoint shifts among Gort, the bad guys, and the local police, and things move along quickly and bloodily in capable pulp fashion.

      However, the outstanding items in the issue are two US reprints, C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” and Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life.” Interestingly, the former is credited as coming from Kornbluth’s UK collection The Mindworm and Other Stories (Michael Joseph 1955) and not from his previous Ballantine collection The Explorers (1954). Its original appearance in Worlds Beyond in December 1950 is not mentioned. The blurb to “It’s a Good Life” (first published a couple of years previously in Frederik Pohl’s anthology Star Science Fiction Stories 2 [Ballantine 1953]) hints that it’s a reprint but isn’t explicit.

      In addition, there are three pretty good original fantasy stories. John Brunner’s “Death Do Us Part” is a clever and amusing Unknownish story about a ghost who wants a divorce. Equally lightweight and almost as clever is Duncan Lamont’s “The Editor Regrets...” in which a magazine editor receives a ms. titled “The Perfect Story,” which changes according to who’s reading it, and which always comes true.

      “Heart’s Desire” by Niall Wilde (pseudonym of Eric Frank Russell) is about a nasty and unattractive Irishman who makes a deal with the Devil—excuse me, the Divvil—to make him irresistible to women. As usual in deal-with-the-Devil stories, he wasn’t careful enough about what he wished for. (This is the same story later published in Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1960, modestly revised, as “A Divvil with the Women.”) I am surprised to see that Russell was capable of controlling his own mannerisms long enough to bring off this pretty smooth stage Irish performance.

      Bringing up the rear are John Kippax’s “Hounded Down,” another piece of tiresome whimsy and Runyon pastiche about Dimple, the Martian dachshund (“Cor stone me through an airlock I say,” etc.), and William F. Temple’s labored and tedious “Uncle Buno,” about a kid who has a Martian math tutor who also develops into the solar system’s greatest painter. The story bounces back and forth among nostalgia, moralism, irony and outright bitterness until it batters itself to death. But on the whole, I imagine the readers of 1955 thought they were getting their money’s worth from this issue.

      §

Issue 17 starts with one of Quinn’s worst covers, crude and stiff-looking, illustrating Brian W. Aldiss’s “Non-Stop.” 27 Aldiss didn’t think much of it either: he referred to “a cover illustration by Gerald Quinn, a cover to my mind as unconvincing as his enigmatic cover of orange shapes had been convincing” in Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s (Hodder & Stoughton 1990), chapter 8. (I can’t figure out what this “enigmatic cover of orange shapes” refers to.)

      “Non-Stop” is of course the first cut at what became Aldiss’s first novel. It is much shorter—thirty-seven digest-size pages—and it’s quite interesting, in the sense of “may you live in interesting times.” Frankly, it grated on me like fingernails on a blackboard. You know the story: primitive people obviously living in a generation-spaceship. The protagonist and company rebel, leave their community, and find out they’ve actually been in Earth orbit for generations. Their culture is dominated by the “Teaching,” a quasi-religion based on the idea that people are despicable. (“You know what the litany teaches us, father. We are the sons of cowards and our days are passed in fear,” says the protagonist to the priest who is trying to persuade him to leave. So the priest tells him that it’s really cowardly to run away, and then he’s game to go.)

      The revelation at the end is that they won’t be permitted on Earth, because they are an insane society, and are being kept alive on the starship only for study. 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 СКАЧАТЬ