Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick

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СКАЧАТЬ to his feet. Slim, away up at the controls, hadn’t noticed anything wrong, not that he’d be much help. “And put that gun away—any accident here might send the ship to dust!”

      “I’ll do the worrying about accidents,” growled the man with the scar. “You worry about doing what I tell you. They don’t call me ‘Kleiner the Killer’ for nothin’. Now, gimme that envelope.” He held out his huge fist, and his dark, evil little eyes glittered. “Come on, now!”

      If anything, it gets worse. (“‘You swine, Kleiner! I’ll get you before we’re through!’ The racketeer gave an evil chuckle.”) “The Literary Line-Up” in 3 says Selby will be back in the next issue, but apparently good sense prevailed: he wasn’t, and Miller/Contento lists no other appearances for him in the SF magazines.

Things could only get better from there, though not necessarily by much. John Russell Fearn has two stories in issue 2, both reprinted from American magazines: “Vicious Circle” as by Polton Cross (from Startling, Summer 1946) and “Lunar Concession” as by Thornton Ayre (from Science Fiction, Sept. 1941). “Vicious Circle” is about a man who is running for the Bond Street bus and suddenly finds himself in “a formless grey abyss,” and then on an unfamiliar and rather shiny-looking street. A helpful passer-by clues him in: “It may help you if I explain that you are in London—which was resurfaced with plastic in Nineteen Fifty Eight.” He shortly returns to his present, but keeps popping off to other times. He goes to a doctor, who diagnoses him as a freak of nature. (That’s what he says: “You are a freak of nature!” Now there’s a bedside manner.) Specifically, where everybody else’s time line is straight, his is a circle—an enlarging circle (sounds like a spiral to me), and by story’s end he’s about ready to hit the Big Bang and the heat death of the universe on the next swing of the pendulum.14

      “Lunar Concession” lacks even the modest charm of “Vicious Circle.” There’s a deposit of super-high-energy Potentium on the moon, conveniently in a valley with an atmosphere. One of the party exploiting it proves to be an Agent of a Foreign Power who wants the Potentium so he can make bombs and seek world domination, as he tediously explains in standard pulp-cardboard fashion while hero and heroine are tied up (once more: rather than just shooting them, as any sane villain would). The day is saved by Snoop, the hero’s faithful dog, who lays down his life, etc.

These are the last Fearn stories to appear in New Worlds. Shortly after, Fearn’s prolific publication in the SF magazines slowed drastically, presumably because he was busy writing novels for the paperback publishers that were springing up.15 He had one story in Science Fantasy but no more in any of the higher-echelon British SF magazines. The rest were in the likes of his own Vargo Statten’s SF Magazine.

      The remaining short stories in 2 are inconsequential. “Foreign Body” by John Brody is about an ancient spaceship discovered in a bed of coal and destroyed by ineptitude. Brody was an early case of the Carnell-only SF writer: seven stories 1946-58, all but one in New Worlds or Science Fantasy. He did have four stories in the UK weird magazines (1946-60) as by “John Body.” “The Micro Man” by Alden Lorraine (Forrest J Ackerman) is an inane story about somebody enlarged from the world inside an atom, but not quite enough—he comes to grief in the protagonist’s typewriter. “Green Spheres” by W. P. Cockcroft, is about an invasion by tentacled extraterrestrial carnivorous plants, ultimately done in by water. The author is a veteran of Wonder Stories, Tales of Wonder, and Scoops (not to mention Yankee Weird Shorts), and it shows in this dated War of the Worlds knock-off.

      * * * *

The lead story in New Worlds 3 is “Dragon’s Teeth” by John K. Aiken (misspelled “Aitken” on the cover), a “novel” at 27 pulp pages. Aiken (1913-90) is a moderately interesting Little Known Writer.16 He was the son of poet Conrad Aiken, co-editor of a fanzine consisting mostly of fiction and published in a single copy at the Paint Research Station in Teddington, 1942-44 (Aiken was a “biological chemist,” says Carnell in New Worlds 4), and active in the Cosmos Club until its postwar demise.17 He first appeared in the SF magazines with a Probability Zero item in Astounding in 1943.18 This is his second story; altogether, he had five in New Worlds from 1947 to 1952, and book reviews in the two Gillings issues of Science-Fantasy. (He’s the one who described Nelson Bond as “approximately, the P.G. Wodehouse of science fiction.”) He also appeared in a number of the issues of Gillings’ Fantasy Review.

      “Dragon’s Teeth” is the first of what Miller/Contento dub the Anstar series, after a main character, and years later Aiken fixed them up as World Well Lost, published as by John Padget in the UK in 1970 but under his own name in the US a year later. Actually, this is what might be called a “reverse fix-up.” Carnell said later (New Worlds 5, “The Literary Line-Up”): “It has taken us a long time to officially announce that the trilogy of stories by John K. Aiken... is in reality a long novel, and because of our somewhat infrequent appearance we had to split it into three separate parts instead of making a serial of the story.” Carnell adds with his typical cramped expansiveness that “the entire trilogy bids fair to become a minor classic of British science fiction.”

      In any case, “Dragon’s Teeth” is a reasonably intelligent if cardboard-populated rendition of the peaceful culture menaced by oppressive militaristic invaders, in this case the proponents of the Galactic New Order (Galnos for short), whose advance guard is neutralized by the pacifistically inclined colonists’ genetically engineered (though not so described) iron-eating lichen and hypnotic flowers. For the full Galno fleet, it takes an “adaptation of [the] mesotron beam” that they use to generate mutations. While the main characters are debating the ethical issues of defending themselves with something so destructive, the designated red-shirt sneaks off, blows the fleet out of the sky, and then kills himself, permitting the rest to have it both ways. There will be more on these stories and the book version later on.

      The short fiction in this issue is not necessarily better but is much more readable than its predecessors. “The Terrible Day” by Nick Boddie (Boddy on the contents page) Williams is a work of hard-boiled astronomy (“I could imagine that—Kiesel, squatty and bald, glued to the tail-end of that 100in. telescope while Halley’s Comet looped the loop.”), set of course in Los Angeles. A supernova triggers a near-collapse of civilization at the same time the astronomer protagonist is undergoing a near-collapse of his marriage. There is a happy ending on both counts, and as the story closes he is hugging the dog.

      F(rancis) G. Rayer’s “From Beyond the Dawn” is completely but pleasantly archaic, the kind of thing that you’d be pleased but not surprised to find in a 1932 Wonder Stories. Derek Faux has established a SETI-by-dots-and-dashes communication with somebody, but there’s no time lag. What’s going on? Suddenly craft full of invincible robots appear in the rock quarry next door. Resistance appears futile. But Faux’s telegraphy yields a clue as to how to destroy them. Meanwhile, in the far far future, highly evolved humans with bodies so feeble and brains so big that all their wheelchairs have headrests are talking about the mysterious signals they are receiving from somewhere and responding to, and the robots they are about to send out to explore for them, and the new theory that time is a loop.

      Maurice G. Hugi, who usually doesn’t get much respect, including from me, is back with “Fantasia Dementia,” which is pretty lively considering that the protagonist is in a coma. It’s in the tradition that stretches from “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” through Pincher Martin to Iain Banks’ The Bridge and Damon Knight’s Humpty Dumpty: An Oval. A car thief tries to flee the police and winds up going through the windshield and into a concrete pillar. After extensive brain surgery he’s paralyzed in the hospital, except—“Hummmm! Hummmm! СКАЧАТЬ