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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 that proves actually to be the locus of a sort of voodoo cult. He befriends the guitarist but manages to offend the cult leader, and finds himself on the bad end of various magickal gambits. With the aid of his intrepid semi-girlfriend, the guitarist, and the guitarist’s glamorous Jamaican witch-friend, he first tries to avoid and then to engage and defeat the magician. The story ends in a burst of quite well-turned melodrama.

      There’s 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 СКАЧАТЬ