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

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      He receives the obligatory blow on the head about halfway through (“Then the pavement opened beneath me and I was falling, falling, falling. Falling into a black eternity.”) The story continues in this vein as we learn that everyone is double-dealing, and Lorna of course is dead by the end. The moral: “‘Yeah,’ I said, and didn’t recognize the sound of my own voice. ‘Freedom—it’s wonderful.’ Softly I kissed the dead lips.”

      §

      The short fiction in these three issues, overall, is a bit better than in the earlier ones, with fewer of the clumsy botches of the earlier issues—though also with little that is memorable. Those of greater interest include “Stranger from Space” by Gene Lees (7), about the emotional travails of a spaceman’s wife who has come to hate him because of his long absences. It’s quite well done up until the end, where it turns conventionally sentimental and O.Henry-esque. The blurb says “Miss Lees, a Canadian, captures the feminine angle in a manner no masculine author can hope to emulate.” Gene Lees did not appear again, but one Eugene Lees contributed an article, “Utopias—A Few Years Later,” to Science Fantasy 33 (February 1959). The blurb for that article acknowledges the earlier story by “Canadian journalist Gene Lees,” and adds: “Now working for an American newspaper, he has been on a European tour for his employer and is currently working from Paris” (emphasis supplied). Nothing is said about the earlier gender mis-assignment, so it’s unclear if Lees was engaged in a masquerade at the time or if Carnell simply assumed that anybody writing halfway competently about a woman’s emotional life had to be a woman. As Carnell revealed in his editorial in New Worlds 25, he learned the true state of affairs while attending a SF convention in Manchester, and met Lees, who had coincidentally checked into the room across the hall while stopping to visit a friend en route to a journalistic assignment.

Also interesting are a couple of pretty good stories by J(onathan) F. Burke (1922-2011), “Detective Story” in 7 and “Once Upon a Time” in 8. The former is a good-natured private eye spoof (“Jackson and I were on Mars at the time. We had been dealing with that grisly little business that was known on the telecasts for a week or two as The Case of the Corpse in the Canal. It was all tied up—the case itself, I mean: the corpse was too widely distributed ever to be thoroughly tied up, though we had done our wretched best.”) The latter is about a couple of kids from a benign and enlightened psi-powered future who get whisked into the paranoid and manipulative past (still our future) by somebody there trying to compose avant-garde music on his electronic instrument. It’s sort of at the intersection of “Mimsy were the Borogoves” (Lewis Padgett)17 and “The Skills of Xanadu” (Theodore Sturgeon), and very pleasant.

      Brian Aldiss appears in 9 with “Criminal Record,” his first published story (not first sold) in the SF magazines, about some old record buffs who come upon a police recording about a criminal “smoof” accused inter alia of “timesliding,” and who make the mistake of placing an advertisement inviting the smoof to drop over. It is inconsequential but clever and well executed. Arthur Coster—who had two stories in the Nova magazines, and is the pseudonym of Richard deMille, who had four stories in assorted other magazines—contributes “Family Secret” (9), which in its way anticipates the Whitley Streiber school of alien abduction accounts, except it is the abductee’s wife who wields the rectal thermometer. Captain Semper, of the Air Force Flying Saucer Investigation, has bad dreams: he keeps waking up in the body of Omarpeff, who seems to be an alien crew member in Earth orbit (so the hints suggest) and is under interrogation for espionage, until his superiors finally believe him and sort of exorcise him. The story oscillates cleverly between the nightmarish and the domestic sitcom-ish. This, and Aldiss’s story, and the two Burke stories, display the kind of quirkiness and idiosyncratic voice for which Science Fantasy eventually became known.

      What is surprising in these issues is how unimpressive are the stories by writers who had big reputations at the time. E. C. Tubb has one fairly trivial story, “Unfortunate Purchase” in 7 (a kid buys what he says is a heat ray at a junk shop, dad sees whatever it is needs fixing, and it is a heat ray—a story much like Aldiss’s except less lively), and one silly one, “Occupational Hazard” in 9 (spacemen commiserating in a bar about their wives being pregnant—space travel makes you sterile).

      John Christopher’s “Death Sentence” in 7 starts as a sort of police-procedural about a space murder committed by the protagonist, but the real story is that in the absence of capital punishment, murderers are sent into the past, and he arrives just before the start of nuclear war. It’s well written enough, but gluing these pieces together doesn’t make them a story. A. Bertram Chandler’s “Six of One” (9) is a protracted pun story with a long windup and not much delivery.

      And J. T. McIntosh’s “Beggars All” (7) is another story that convinces me that either McIntosh had a thought disorder, or I do. Space explorers arrive on a planet where colonists have been isolated for centuries living hand to mouth. They beg piteously for whatever technological boons might be available, incurring the Earth folks’ disdain. Meanwhile, there’s a beautiful female crew member (named Pretzel, for no discernible reason) for whom the ship’s commander has the hots, but he has suffered what he thinks is humiliating rejection. There is a revelation of why the colonists behave as they do which is then connected up with the romantic dilemma and its solution in a way that is as utterly uninteresting as it is strained and tenuous.

      The remaining stories in these issues are mostly reshufflings of familiar material at various levels of competence. There is a pod of space epics. Lan Wright’s novelette “The Conquerors” (8) starts out in the territory of John W. Campbell’s “Forgetfulness” and Eric Frank Russell’s “Metamorphosite”: space explorers land on a planet of Sirius and find a road with a good-looking young woman sitting by it. She escorts them to her father’s house, where our boys learn that (handwaving) certain elements in the atmosphere destroy metal, so the natives have developed along very different lines from us. They teleport, don’t really have bodies but just make the humans think they do, and have already infiltrated Earth. But unlike the usual outcome in this subgenre, muscle wins out: one of the Earth humans reveals that their spacedrive, which is too big and heavy for their hosts to teleport, is decomposing fast, soon to blow up half the planet unless the aliens play ball with us. It is charmless but competently executed. The first of two stories by Margaret Lowe, “The Shimmering Tree” (8), takes place on a Venus mainly populated by poisonous plants. Exploring Earthfolk are disappearing, either not to return or to come back babbling about the “shimmering tree,” which turns out to be hypnotic and to enslave its catch. The protagonist gets away, but wonders if he really did get away as he awaits return to Earth. Smooth matter-of-fact writing mitigates the clichés, the protagonist’s rescue by his pet dinosaur aggravates them. Less well done is Peter Hawkins’ “Haven” (9), as clumsy and overlong as his earlier “Outsider,” about some Earthfolks who find an inhabited planet after their warship blows up; it will take a long time to get back to Earth and the war, and the question is which of the crew members will desert and go native and which will go back. The contrived ending spares the duty-bound captain from the choice.

      “The Trojan Way” (7) by Francis Richardson (pseudonym of Lawrence Edward Bartle & Frank H. Parnell) is a smoothly written piece in which the characters flee Earth’s velvet-gloved totalitarian Welfare State (sic) for a distant planet, cleverly avoid detection and repatriation, and then СКАЧАТЬ