Category Archives: Science Fiction Monthly

Science Fiction Monthly v03n01, February 1976

ISFDB link1
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, Julie Davis; Executive Editor, Pat Hornsey

Fiction:
The Highest Dive • short story by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗
Deep Freeze • short fiction by David Grigg ∗∗∗
Second Einstein • short fiction by C. D. Renmore ∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Jim Burns
Interior artwork Tony Roberts (x2), Eddie Jones, Jim Burns, Patrick Woodroffe, Tony Masero, Bruce Pennington, Peter Jones, uncredited (x2)
Editorial
Book Reviews • by Malcolm Edwards (x4), John Brosnan, Peter Weston, Peter Linnett
A Look at Space 1999 • essay by John Brosnan
News • by Julie Davis
SF in the Cinema: The Ultimate Warrior • film review by John Brosnan
Paperbacks on Trial • book review matrix by Maxim Jakubowski
On the Way to the Stars: Part Three: Into the Abyss • essay by Peter Weston
Letters
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]

_____________________

The Highest Dive by Jack Williamson2 is an old-school SF story that opens with a young man called Max caught in a violent storm on Atlas, a massive alien planet with very low gravity and high winds. As Max struggles to avoid being blown away he lapses into unconsciousness, and the story flashbacks to his time on Earth, his decision to go to the planet, and his familiarisation on arrival. This latter includes a trip to a pool:

He saw no water anywhere. The ridge was nearly flat on top, flaked and cracked with time. Ropes stretched along its rim. The reddish desert lay far, far below. Feeling bewildered, he looked back at Komatsu.
‘There’s our pool.’ Komatsu leaned out to point straight down. ‘The only open water we’ve found on Atlas.’
He gripped the rope and looked. The time-worn wall of something like black rock dropped straight down so far it made him giddy. At last he found the pool—a small round mirror of bright blue water tucked under the very foot of that frightening cliff.
‘It’s deep enough.’ Queerly casual, Komatsu pointed at another hand-rope, stretching from their feet to a rock down in the pool. ‘We climb that to get back.’ He grinned at Max. ‘Want me to go first?’
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Max stared at his dark, gaunt face. ‘We’re too . . . too high!’
‘Just a thousand feet.’ Komatsu’s grin grew wider. ‘About the same as ten at home. You fall slow here, kid. With air resistance, your terminal velocity is about fifteen feet a second. From any height, you never fall faster. Watch me.’
He peeled off his yellow suit, moved to the rim in a lazy, one legged dance, floated over it. Max leaned out to watch him drifting slowly down, arms spread like wings to guide him. He was a long time in the air, and his body had dwindled to a far dark speck before he broke the blue mirror of the pool.  p. 3

When Max recovers consciousness he finds himself miles up in the air. As the near-permanent clouds temporarily clear, he sees (spoiler) a huge alien city. Max contacts his team, and they gain an insight into what the planet really is . . . . After this conversation, Max’s only chance of survival is to try control his descent to dive into a body of water beside the camp.
This has a slightly dated feel, and there is no explanation as to why the alien city wasn’t revealed earlier by ground radar, but the story isn’t bad, and the final scene gives a mini-sense of wonder buzz.

Deep Freeze by David Grigg starts with the protagonist waking up in an underground deep-sleep/suspended animation facility. When he explores the upper levels and the surface he discovers there has been a nuclear war, and two hundred years have passed—not the thirty he expected.
He wanders about on the surface for a while and then returns to the facility, where he wakes a young woman for company. She is devastated to find out her cancer won’t be cured (all the frozen, bar the corrupt protagonist, were put into deep sleep to await a cure for their conditions).
The man then goes out again, this time to look for food, and surprises a primitive tribe which flees. He takes their abandoned possessions and food back to the girl but, after they eat, she asks him to put her back to sleep. He does this, and then goes to find the tribe.
All of this back and forth is a setup for the final section where, after he has made contact with the tribe (spoiler), he goes hunting with them. The shock ending has him discover that they are eating the occupants of the cryogenic facility!
I remember liking this the first time around, and, apart from a dull section after he wakes, its grisly inevitability is still quite entertaining.

The last story Second Einstein, is by C. D. Renmore, and appears to be the writer’s debut.3 It starts with a failed PhD student called Lionel White in an observatory, where recalls his failed thesis defence at the hands of a professor called Haynes:

For the hundredth time, he re-lived the interview; every detail was still there even after five long years. He had started, at Haynes’ request, by outlining the main thesis, which he called his Creative Correlation Hypothesis.
In its simplest and most compact form, this hypothesis said that, in scientific research, if a discovery isn’t made by person A, then it will be made by person B, eventually.
[. . .]
But then White had gone further and, perhaps too enthusiastically, given his conclusion: that once the correlation of scientific effort exceeds a certain threshold, the tide of knowledge will advance at an average rate that is almost independent of individual brilliance. In particular, individual geniuses no longer set the pace of scientific progress. The massed attack on the frontier of science will progress, said White, at an average rate that even a Newton or an Einstein could not match.
Haynes seemed about to explode, but subsided sufficiently to be merely condescending in his reply. ‘Look here, young man, you had better get one or two things straight. Firstly, you can’t measure an Einstein or a Newton in multiples of lesser men. That would be as ridiculous as to suggest that two men each with an IQ of 100 are as good as one man with an IQ of 200. Secondly, you’re being too superficial in judging the equivalence of two peoples’ work. You said that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics were essentially equivalent to Schrodinger’s wave equation. Would you care to justify that in any detail? Any detail?’
White stared at the floor, as if seeking inspiration there. Even if he could answer Haynes’ question in detail—which he could not—it was the wrong question! Utterly beside the point.
[. . .]
‘I take your point, of course, sir. But look at it in this way: will you grant that over ninety per cent of the scientists who ever lived are still alive today, in 1976?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And that the combined resources of all the laboratories on Earth are sufficient to conduct literally thousands of related experiments on virtually any aspect of modern physics?’
‘With some reservations, yes; but what are you getting at?’
‘Simply this, sir: the probability of a major breakthrough depends on the number of scientists and the number of experiments; plus of course a correlation factor which will in general be complex. Although their experiments will not all be inspired ones, eventually someone, somewhere, will do just the experiment that an Einstein or a Newton would have suggested.
And, of course, they will make the same discovery. There are many millions of scientists now, and highly correlated efforts can produce results that no one person can achieve.’
[. . .]
Haynes now resumed the attack with something approaching personal animosity.
‘There are flaws in that. Just because someone does the right experiment it does not follow that they appreciate its significance. In fact, if they did the experiment more or less at random we have an independent probability to consider altogether: whether the significance of the result will be appreciated by a non-Einstein or a non-Newton at all. The combined probability that the same person will both do the right experiment and appreciate its significance is just about zero, I should think. Are you seriously suggesting that if Einstein or Newton had never lived, we might still have advanced to the state of our present know ledge in physics?’
White took a deep breath. ‘I am suggesting that as a distinct possibility; and further, I think that we might possibly be even more advanced than we are today.’  p. 26

After this intriguing (albeit talking heads) beginning, the story becomes something else entirely as the alien Fornax land near the observatory. The Fornax monitor numerous civilisations throughout the Galaxy and, as humanity has recently tripped the atomic-use alarm, they have come to make changes that will prevent humanity developing an interstellar drive.
Their solution (spoiler) involves sending White back in time to kill Newton and Einstein. This provides an ironic ending to the story, where White’s theories prove to be correct, and humanity has developed more quickly than they had in the world where the two scientists did not die. In this changed timestream, White is an acclaimed scientist, and humanity has conquered the aliens.
This is a relatively complex story, and one that has a lot of moving parts (the highbrow theory, the aliens, time travel, etc.). It probably has too much going on and, more importantly, it doesn’t quite convince, e.g., why are the original aliens still with White after the changes are made? That said, it’s an entertaining piece and an promising debut. It is a pity we didn’t see more work from this writer.

The Cover by Jim Burns is the one he produced for Kurt Vonnegut’s book The Sirens of Titan. The Interior artwork features two good paintings by Bruce Pennington (above) and Peter Jones (below), and there is also colour work from Tony Roberts (I also liked his piece for Beyond Apollo), Eddie Jones, and Patrick Woodroffe (I’m not sure why there are curved exhaust trails coming from the spaceship in the latter painting). One of the B&W story illustrations is by Tony Masero, the other two are uncredited.

The short Editorial contains the usual blather about the stories and articles, but there is an intriguing paragraph at the end:

We intend to publish special issues devoted to robots and UFOs; interviews with D G Compton and Harlan Ellison; a special French issue with stories and illustrations from France (in translation, of course); a science fact article on gravity which is more than apples dropping on your head; a history of sf film taking over from where John Baxter’s book Science Fiction in the Cinema left off; a retrospective look at Jefferson Airplane/Starship (the most sf orientated group around—as some will have it); an illustrated series about future transport, and lots more American sf artist interviews. How lucky can you get?  p. 1

There were only three more issues after this one, and they didn’t include the Harlan Ellison interview (presumably this surfaced elsewhere), or the intriguing sounding French issue which I would like to have seen (I suspect Maxim Jakubowski was involved with this project4).
Two of the Book Reviews aren’t actually on p. 17 but appear alongside the Editorial on the first page: these include John Bronsan’s piece on A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films by Jeff Rovin, and Malcolm Edwards’ on Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael G. Coney. Bronsan starts off with this:

It is just that; a pictorial history of science fiction films and little else. It’s silly to be disappointed by a book that lives up to its title but I can’t help feeling that author Jeff Rovin would have produced a much more valuable book if he’d put more work into the text accompanying the photographs. As it stands, the book is just a catalogue of sf films with, in most cases, one paragraph devoted to each film. The main exception is an extended piece on Things to Come but this, so Rovin tells us, was written by Alan Asherman, the same person who supplied all the stills for the book. I can’t understand why Asherman didn’t write the whole book himself as his piece stands head and shoulders above the rest of the written material.  p. 1

That, essentially, is the review: the other 90% is nit-picking about film minutiae, or the merits of various other films. As in the Space: 1999 piece below, Bronsan does tend to maunder—it’s a pity the editors didn’t get a grip.
Malcolm Edwards has this on Michael G. Coney (whose novel Hello Summer, Goodbye he liked):

[He] has not been writing novels for long, but he is proving a remarkably consistent and amazingly prolific performer with a real talent for constructing tightly-knit plots; and he seems to have established a name, a style and a string of credits in the batting of an eyelid. When I try to think of precedents, I can only come up with John Brunner at the outset of his career . . . but I would rate Coney higher than Brunner (as he was then). I do wish that he would stop setting his novels in dressed-up versions of English fishing villages, but I’m sure he will, in time.  p. 1

It is impressive that Edwards manages to describe the novel, and also contextualize Coney, within both the writer’s own career and the field, in such a short space (although I see the review is actually four hundred words long, approximately a paperback page). Edwards also contributes three more reviews (The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, The Jonah Kit by Ian Watson, and The Wizard of Anharitte by Colin Kapp). He manages to put his finger on one of the reasons I like Dick’s Castle but am lukewarm about the likes of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?:

Science fiction is full of ‘classics’ which make a great initial impression but don’t stand up to rereading. The Man in the High Castle is one of those rare books which actually improves on second reading. Dick writes with more care, albeit less exuberance, than in most of his novels, and the result is a finely-wrought novel that is one of the best in all science fiction.  p. 17

Peter Weston reviews the plotless Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke and, when he compares it with Rama and The Sands of Mars (1951), opines that the latter is the best of the three.
Peter Linnett reviews the Robert Sheckley Omnibus by Robert Sheckley, a volume I bought and loved, and still own.

A Look at Space 1999 by John Brosnan is an article about the execrable TV series from the mid-70s, and it starts with this:

Space 1999 swings right out of any conventional sci-fi dimension/ raves the ATV press release, ‘at the same time taking advantage of all the scientific facts that are known, such as the existence of a phenomenon known as a “black sun”, a mass of gaseous substance developing into an impenetrable ball from a burned-out asteroid, with such tremendous gravitation that it pulls everything into it, even light. Anything near it simply disappears. It upsets all theories of existence, even time. This provides the background to one episode. Time ceases to have any meaning. The players find themselves in eternity, with the sudden conviction that the whole Universe is a living thought.’  p. 4

It gets worse, when Brosnan describes the medical condition of one of the characters:

As for Professor Bergman, well he’s pretty straightforward compared with the others. ‘He is to some degree the father-figure of the key personnel on Moon Base Alpha. To some extent, he is very much the proverbial professor. He has a brilliant mind which has been responsible for a number of developments in space science, but he is unworldly in many practical matters.’ Apart from that his main problem is that he has a mechanical heart which . . . ‘because it responds more slowly to nervous stimuli than does a normal human heart, reduces his reactions to most emotional stresses. Whatever the situation, he is almost entirely physically immune from panic’. Just as the script writers are almost entirely immune from logic. If anyone can explain to me how a sluggish heart is going to prevent its owner from experiencing panic I would like to hear from them. The adrenalin might not be pumped through the system so quickly but I would imagine that the only way you could prevent the brain from experiencing fear or panic would be to shut off the blood supply completely—which wouldn’t make for a very lively character.  p. 4

Bronsan’s commentary continues in a similarly amusing vein but, unfortunately, the last quarter of the review is a superfluous examination of the wonderful special effects—as if anyone cares by this point.

News by Julie Davis is fairly thin on the ground this issue (half the space is taken up by John Bronsan’s SF in the Cinema: The Ultimate Warrior, which sounds like unpretentious fun). There is information about a revived BSFA, and what seems to be a verbatim press release from the L5 society:

The space colonies would have a virtually unlimited clean source of energy, an abundance and variety of food and material goods, freedom to travel and independence from large-scale government. The initial colonies would provide living accommodation (of a luxury standard) for up to 10,000 people and would provide plenty of jobs, shops, schools, libraries and other buildings. The colonies would also have their own rivers and lakes, stocked with fish, parklands (with birds, animals, trees) and there could even be hills and possibly mountains. Is this just a fanciful dream? No! The space engineering ability exists today and many detailed technical reports are now flowing out of universities and organisations in the USA, where the concept was born. There are participants in these studies from such institutions as [MIT], [Caltech], Princeton University, New York Polytechnic, and even the space agency NASA.
The first stage of the space colony, called Model 1 or ‘Sunflower’, could be built before the end of the 1980s.  p. 10

Good luck with that.
Paperbacks on Trial is the book review matrix complied by Maxim Jakubowski. I’ve mentioned my fascination with these before, and could happily do so again at length: I’ll limit myself to observing that Harrison and Jakubowski both thought Le Guin’s The Dispossessed mediocre. The next time you hate a book everyone else loves, remember that you aren’t the only one who feels that way.

On the Way to the Stars: Part Three: Into the Abyss by Peter Weston discusses the various types of space drives and their pros and cons with reference to various genre works, e.g., “A similar combination of cold-sleep and solar sails appears in Niven and Pournelle’s recent Mote in God’s Eye, while a first-class treatment is given by Poul Anderson in Orbit Unlimited.” It reminded me I still have several of these books to read (Anderson’s Tau Zero is probably the most egregious omission). I don’t know why the covers illustrating the piece are so badly cropped.
The Letters are mostly responses to Ian Covell’s letter in a previous issue attacking Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. Anne Looker, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, replies:

Your prolific correspondent. Mr Covell (SFM Vol 2 No 10) seems to be in danger of choking on his own spleen. So The Female Man makes him angry, angry enough to forbid discussion of a book and then go on to hurl abuse at it and the author—an example of masculine illogic perhaps? The Female Man made me angry as well, though. I’m sure, for very different reasons. I am not a ‘feminist’ in the accepted sense of the word nor do I wish to chase the subject of women’s lib into your columns, but I feel that it is up to someone, preferably a woman, to take up cudgels on behalf of Ms Russ and her book. Mr Covell states that the author is an ‘idiot’. That is his own private view. I am not acquainted with the lady and would therefore hesitate to form so harsh a judgement. However. I fail to see anything idiotic in the views she expresses in The Female Man. Admittedly, she exaggerates, but hyperbole has always been the legitimate tool of any writer or speaker who is trying to make a point: and Ms Russ has at least for me succeeded in making her point.
The Female Man has some of the qualities of a fable but there is an element of truth in it which brings the reader up short. I realise that the men in the novel are grotesque parodies of the men most women know (and love?) but, nevertheless, we women recognise them only too well. Man at his ghastly worst—being patronising when he means to be nice, man incapable of thinking further than his balls whenever he’s in the company of a woman. There are many men, I know, who are not like this but, unfortunately, Ms Russ’ prototypes still live and breathe and inflict themselves upon us.
Of course The Female Man is sexist. That is the whole point of the book. Try altering all the females to males as your correspondent suggests. You will end up not with a work expressing the male chauvinist point of view but with a work expressing nothing at all—incomprehensible claptrap. You could possibly rewrite Asimov, and many others, reversing the sexes . . . but Russ? It’s unthinkable. What she says about the sexes is valid only one way; and it is valid. Perhaps you have to be a woman to realise it. Maybe she goes too far but she does succeed in Shocking readers, both male and female, into an open awareness of what they already secretly know to be true: namely, the injustices and indignities the sexes inflict on each other. In our society the main victims are women, but it can work both ways. Ms Russ’ ‘heroines’ are generally as unpleasant as her ‘heroes’, the women’s excuse is that they are more sinned against than sinning.
Meanwhile, it would help if people refrained from childish abuse. It may be comforting to affix names like ‘male chauvinist pig’ and ‘female chauvinist sow’ to those whose views we do not share: such a method of classifying individuals means that once we’ve put an individual in a convenient category we can stop considering and evaluating what they have to say. A lazy man’s (or woman’s) way out!  p. 28

The more things change, the more they stay the same . . . .
Malcolm Edwards from Harrow, Middlesex, adds:

Your correspondent Ian Covell seems such a pleasant chap that I would hate to be forced into arguing with him. I would love to be convinced by the clever sophistry of his argument that Edmund Cooper’s clearly self-contradictory remarks were really perfectly consistent all the time, but I’m afraid my mind refuses to bend quite far enough.
I suppose I should apologise for having enjoyed A Far Sunset eight years ago. I didn’t actually say that I thought it represented the direction in which sf ought to go. I happen to enjoy, for example, the stories of Leigh Brackett, but I would hate Philip K Dick or J G Ballard to start copying her. In fact, oddly enough. I don’t happen to look upon sf as a single object to be steered in a particular direction, as though it were a car.
It’s strange that Mr Covell should demonstrate such hatred for Joanna Russ’ views, as expressed in The Female Man, and yet should apparently wish to defend Edmund Cooper’s views, which he admits are ‘reverse-identical’ to Ms Russ’. I am equally out of sympathy with both of them, though I can see, sadly, that it is the attitudes of people like Mr Cooper which produce overreactions like Joanna Russ’. What it is that produces Ian Covell’s over-reactions is another matter—but that’s his problem.  p. 28

The final letter is about UFOs, and news of a special UFO issue—which thankfully did not appear.
The Query Box by Walter Gillings is the regular pre-internet Q&A column (you don’t know how lucky you are these days). I learned this about Thea von Harbou, the impressive actress from Metropolis (which I just watched for the first time recently and thought marvellous):

[Fritz Lang] wrote the screenplays of some of his early movies, such as Destiny (1921), before collaborating with Thea von Harbou, who later became his wife. She was the author of the novel on which the film Metropolis (1926) was based, and which was published here in 1927 by the Readers Library.  p. 28

This is quite a good issue, with better than normal artwork and stories.  ●

_____________________

1. ISFDB lists this as “January” because, when there is no date on a magazine, ISFDB uses the actual month of publication for the issue date. However, Mike Ashley states in Gateways to Forever, p. 128: “The first issue of Science Fiction Monthly appeared on the last Wednesday of January 1974.” He adds in footnote #147: “All issues were undated, carrying only an issue and volume number, but technically the first issue was for February 1974 and it continued on a monthly schedule.”
So—all the ISFDB dates are out by one month, and this can be seen most clearly by looking at v01n11 and v02n11, the two Christmas/December issues, which are listed as November ones.

2. The Williamson story is one of the few stories from this British magazine to be selected for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology. It appeared in The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 edited by Terry Carr (Dell Rey/Ballantine, 1977). (Bob Shaw’s Dark Icarus was also in a ‘Best’, but it appeared in Worlds of If a couple of months after it was published in Science Fiction Monthly).

3. Renmore’s ISFDB page shows only this story and a couple of fact articles, all from the mid-70s.

4. Maxim Jakubowski was a regular contributor to both Science Fiction Monthly and SF Digest (the single issue successor to SFM ), and he later edited/translated the anthology Travelling Towards Epsilon, a collection of French SF. Its ISFDB page is here.  ●

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Science Fiction Monthly v03n04, April 1976

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

_____________________

Editor, Julie Davis; Executive Editor, Pat Hornsey

Fiction:
To Lay the Piper • reprint short fiction by Robert Holdstock
Spaceout • short fiction by Philip Boast
Scoop • short fiction by R. M. Lamming [as by Robin Douglas]

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Tim White
Interior artwork • by Tony Roberts (x3), Christos Kondeatis, Chris Foss (x2), Robin Bath, Tim White, David Bergen, Tony Masero (2)
Introduction
News • by Julie Davis
The SF Novels of D. G. Compton • essay by Peter Linnett
Letters
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
An Interview with D. G. Compton • by Peter Linnett

_____________________

This issue’s News column has an important announcement:

Yes, dear readers, we’ve come to the end of the road and this will be the last issue of Science Fiction Monthly. However, do not despair, all is not lost: in a matter of a few weeks you’ll be able to buy an even better science fiction magazine called SF Digest. The first issue will appear in mid-May and regularly from then on at three monthly intervals. It will contain all that’s good about SFM and avoid all that’s bad. For a start it will be half of SFM’s page size, so you won’t find it difficult to handle, but there will be many more pages. The fiction will be of a very high standard—for instance, the first issue includes stories by Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Michael Coney—and there won’t be so much emphasis on factual articles, although there will always be one in every issue. The amount of colour artwork will be much reduced, but there will be a full-colour, pull-out poster free with every issue. All the stories will be illustrated and great pains have been, and will be, taken to make sure that all the illustrations fit the stories they accompany.
John Brunner has written an editorial and there are consumer guides to Heinlein, Van Vogt and Asimov as well as a quiz. SF Digest will be available at newsagents and bookstalls from mid-May and will cost 50p.

The mid-seventies were a difficult time economically, with rampant inflation causing three price rises for the magazine in the previous year (from 30p to 50p), so perhaps this outcome was no surprise. And perhaps the novelty of all that poster size artwork had worn off.

The stories in this issue are the usual middling efforts. To Lay the Piper by Robert Holdstock (Sfinx #7, January 1973) has four men go back in time to investigate the Pied Piper legend. This one takes ages to get going—the team spend forever arguing about various issues before they interview a survivor. Eventually they go further back to the event itself. The finale feels anti-climactic (spoiler: the story has a natural, horrific, and medically obscure explanation), and is confused by the impression that spirits of the dead appear during the final events (this is later ignored by the team).
I remember not much liking this when I first read it, and I haven’t changed my mind. Although Holdstock later won acclaim for his ‘Mythago’ series, his earlier work was of a much lower standard.

Best of the three stories is Spaceout by Philip Boast. This one begins with an astronaut called Kelloran who, after servicing an orbital bomb, suffers from a stuck propellant valve. This leaves him too far away from his ship for his crewmate to rescue him.
The rest of the story alternates between his time in orbit and scenes on Earth where the mission managers discover he has a mistress. This is apparently (and unconvincingly) a problem in this particular future, and lead to conversations like this with his wife:

‘This is all most unfortunate,’ said Carey.
‘I cannot help but agree,’ said Mrs Kelloran.
‘You had no suspicion of the existence of the woman, Elvira?’
‘None.’
‘Your sexual relations with Mr Kelloran were normal?’
‘Perfectly. We made love in the attic bedroom after the religious programmes every Sunday.’
‘So you had no reason to suspect another woman.’
‘That’s right. I never imagined.’
‘Naturally she will be escorted from the base immediately.’
‘How kind.’
Carey said delicately, ‘And if your husband survives, will you take him back?’
‘Naturally. Of course I shall impose certain conditions. The woman Elvira must go, also a certain old armchair he keeps by the fire to snore in during the evenings, and I will insist he have his moth-eaten old dog put to sleep.’
‘You realise it is an offence for a serving astronaut to have an emotional-sexual relationship with anyone but his or her wife or husband. Will you require us to take disciplinary action in this matter?’
Mrs Kelloran stood up. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I will be doing that myself.’  p. 11

This is all very odd—which is a pity as the rest of the story is pretty good, such as when Kelloran re-enters the atmosphere in his armoured spacesuit:

The ice on his faceplate cleared and the sea was a smooth blue sheet, impossible to say how far below, but he could no longer see Africa. He could hear the muted roaring of the wind; he was the first true skydiver.
Carey: Rate of descent six hundred twenty-five. . .
In front of his face a red light was flashing beside the faceplate. He was on oxygen reserve. It gave him half an hour.
Driver: Assuming a spreadeagle position, his terminal speed at sea level in that suit is one hundred seventeen miles per hour. Survival?
Carey: Negative.
Across the sea a silver delta was crawling, towing a long white vapour trail. He recognised it for a plane.
For the first time he felt a faint hope.
Driver: SST7 moving into position. They’re ready now. Fifty thousand feet.
In his faceplate the aeroplane grew and grew as he fell towards it, then suddenly it was gone and he had only a momentary impression of a succession of black dots leaping through the rear doors. So that was how they were going to do it.
Carey: The operation is still proceeding according to plan.
The black dots resolved into orange-suited men as they swooped head first towards him, lessening their air resistance so as to catch him up as quickly as possible. He smiled at them, but their faces were expressionless. One of them grabbed his arm.
Driver: They have contact with him. The suit’s in bad shape but Kelloran’s alive. They’re attaching the flotation ring now.
Carey: That suit weighs two hundred pounds in Earth gravity, Mrs Kelloran. Without the flotation ring he would sink immediately on hitting the sea.
The flotation ring was a long empty bladder that flapped and lashed in the airstream like a mad thing.
Somehow they got it round his shoulders, stretching it around the bulky systems unit on his back. The orange men were clustered about him now like moths around a light. They had a parachute for him and tried to strap it to his front but someone’s shoulder hit the compressed air switch and the flotation ring inflated with a bang. Increased air resistance snatched Kelloran up; the orange men fell impotently away below him and disappeared.
Carey: Damn that man to hell.
Driver: It’s up to SST 12 now, and they won’t have much time. He’ll be under thirty thousand any moment.
Though hope had been snatched from him, hope was born again. With icy nerve the pilot in the supersonic transport passed only a few hundred yards from him and Kelloran again saw the black dots pour from the rear doors and resolve into orange men. He glanced down: he was close enough to see the ocean wrinkled and flecked with white.

A promising first story, but there wasn’t any more short SF from this writer.1

Scoop by R. M. Lamming opens with an alien specimen collector on a prehistoric Earth who is making his way back to his craft. After successfully avoiding the primitives, he arrives at his ship, but senses something is wrong.
The story then cuts to the current day, where two men are in the process of gathering various objects together to take to an old woman who is a psychic. After she proves she is genuine, by successfully identifying the provenance of several objects, she eventually handles a strange scoop they have brought. This connects her across time to the alien, who realises that he has mislaid the tool, and that someone is watching him . . . .
I’m not sure this entirely works, but it’s an okay story, and the scene where the alien and the woman connect is convincingly spooky.

This issue’s Cover is by Tim White, who has another piece of artwork inside the issue, the impressive double page centre spread:

The Interior artwork is a mixture of colour paperback paintings and black and white story and article illustrations by Tony Roberts, Christos Kondeatis, Chris Foss, Robin Bath, Tim White, David Bergen, and Tony Masero.
The Introduction is a few paragraphs of blurb for the stories and the Compton article. They might as well not have bothered and, judging by one comment, you get the impression the writer feels the same way:

Now I’ve given away the plot of nearly all the stories in this issue, we’d better move on to the author interview.  p. 1

The News column by Julie Davis leads off with John Brosnan’s negative review of The Man Who Fell to Earth (I didn’t much care for the film myself, although I haven’t watched it recently):

If somebody wanted to be really nasty about The Man Who Fell to Earth he could describe it as the ‘thinking man’s Space 1999’. This is because both of them have absolutely nothing to do with science fiction but pretend they do; they exploit the themes and devices of sf for reasons entirely their own. In the case of Space 1999 the reason is to make money for Sir Lew Grade and Gerry Anderson; in the case of The Man Who Fell to Earth it’s to add fuel to Nicolas Roeg’s reputation as an important film-maker.
Now Roeg has made a number of fine films, such as Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now, all of which have been rather solid, ie highly symbolic, full of artistic and literary allusions, multi-layered and rich to the eye. These descriptions equally apply to The Man . . . but with this film Roeg seems to have reached a kind of artistic dead end, as too much of it is self-indulgent and inbred. At times it even seems like a parody of his earlier films, particularly Performance with which it shares many similarities. The sex scenes, for example, employ the same device that was used to such good effect in Performance and Don’t Look Now; that of intercutting the writhing bodies with flashes back and forwards … but because of this repetition it’s now lost its effectiveness and become merely a Roeg cliche. Other similarities include the sequence where David Bowie and the girl (Candy Clark) play with a revolver full of blanks; a direct reference to the scene in Performance where James Fox shoots Mick Jagger. And, as in Performance, a painting provides the symbolic key to the whole film (in Performance it was a portrait of the writer Borges; in The Man . . . it’s a painting showing the fall of Icarus).

The rest of his review takes up most of the News space; the rest contains the closure announcement discussed above and some other news snippets.

The SF Novels of D. G. Compton by Peter Linnett starts with this introduction to the writer:

D G Compton is a new kind of sf writer. His concerns are new to sf, he owes nothing to the pulp tradition, and the outlook which informs his work is shared by few other sf writers. Here, I believe, lies a clue to the paradox surrounding his work. In my opinion, and that of a good many critics, Compton is one of the best sf novelists writing today, yet, for all the attention his work has received, he might as well not be writing at all. Happily, the situation seems to be improving, but until now his novels have not been widely reviewed, and have sold poorly, with the result that many sf readers seem not even to have heard of him. All this despite the fact that he’s maintained a steady, tremendously good output ranging from The Quality of Mercy (1965) to The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974)—eight novels in which he has succeeded in both creating a clearly delineated, recognisable world of his own and establishing a sharply-flavoured, individual style. Most important, he possesses a mastery of characterisation far in advance of most other sf writers I can think of. Why the neglect? Certainly Compton is at the opposite pole to the writer of hardcore sf, in style, approach and technique. His main concerns are with his characters, which are among the most credible in sf, and with the working out of the moral problems arising from the situations in which they find themselves. As Mark Adlard, writing in Vector 66, said: ‘At the most basic level he is perhaps the first sf writer to continue that tradition of moral seriousness which runs from Austen to James.’
It’s easy to see why traditionally-minded readers, reared on sf containing indestructible heroes with no scruples whatever, are repelled by Compton’s novels: they bring them too close to the real world which much sf ignores. The fact that Compton’s moral seriousness is always contained within the framework of a good story well told, and never becomes obtrusive or didactic, is a tribute to his skill as a novelist. The combination makes him a writer of considerable importance.
The first point to make itself obvious on reading his work is that he uses the themes, trappings and symbols of sf because they happen to suit the expression of his personal vision, and aid the statement he wants to make, not because he grew up with the genre or has any great love for it. His first sf novel, The Quality of Mercy (1965; revised 1970), was written with little knowledge of previous work in the genre and, indeed, with no awareness that he was writing sf at all.  p. 17

It is a comprehensive and interesting article about the writer’s work.2

Letters consists of one long letter of complaint from Bill Little, Stoke-on-Trent. It starts with the familiar lament that the magazine isn’t New Worlds:

As a sf magazine the above mentioned issue [SFM v03n02] was an utter waste of money! I buy the magazine in the (apparently vain) hope that it will change and adapt. But it seems that my hard-earned pennies are being wasted. There can surely be no doubt now that SFM is not a vehicle for literature of a speculative nature, never has been, and never will be. With 50% plus devoted to decorative trappings—no matter how nice the trappings are—the fiction must of necessity take the back seat. I find myself caught in a vicious circle: the price of paperbacks rocketing, one hopes SFM would present more fiction and of a more original nature; no such luck!

He goes on to make several specific criticisms of the fiction and articles:

Thanks to Sandra Miesel, I sleep so much easier now that I know that Kelly Freas gets his lovely effects ‘by swirling, splotching’ (such an artistic word, that) ‘or crackling the paint’. Crackling for God’s sake? Such minutiae are of interest only to the most feverent Freas-ians, not the majority of fiction-loving readers.
[. . .]
Congratulations, Mr Brosnan! You bore in the most expert way. Tell me pray, why you are a traditionalist when it comes to cinematic effects? And why do you prefer film to videotape? I’m so, so interested, along with, I bet, two others! Your analysis of The Invisible Man was bloated, padded and all but concealed by in-crowd technological gobbledygook making sense to you, yourself, and nobody else! Delete all but the first two, and the final paragraphs (and of course, the photo) and you have a concise criticism of the show, with half a page, free for something else.

He concludes with this prediction:

I’ll continue to buy the magazine, dedicated idiot that I am, but I don’t for one solitary moment suppose my letter will make the slightest difference to the style and format of SFM. Believe it or not, however, there is nothing I would like more than for SFM to succeed, but the way it’s going it will be dead before the end of 1976.  p. 25

I think Little’s problem is that he wants a completely different magazine. I wonder if SF Digest was more to his taste.
The Query Box by Walter Gillings has a couple of interesting queries this month, including this one:

COMPUTER POET
At the beginning of Brian Aldiss’ Earthworks are some lines of poetry which are accredited to ‘RCA 301 Computer’. Is this a joke of his or did a computer actually write them?
Owen F Ransen, Biggleswade, Beds.
.
To make sure, I put your question to author Aldiss, who replied: ‘The quotation is genuine; an RCA computer did write it. I seem to remember I got the quotation from Time in 1964.’.3 I remember it, too, and the bother it caused among human poets at the time. I can’t accede to your request for some more lines, though I kept them by me for several years, but I can offer you this Japanese product of ‘Cybernetic
Serendipity’ exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1968. It is mercifully brief:
.
eons deep in the ice
I paint all time in a whorl
bang the sludge has cracked

An Interview with D. G. Compton by Peter Linnett follows on from the article. It’s another interesting piece (partially because Compton is a forthcoming, almost garrulous, subject), and it yields a number of interesting snippets:

I was writing very symbolic radio comedies—all those great meanings somewhere. They didn’t sell,
I’d run out of money and was on National Assistance, so I thought I had better try one of those awful long things, a book. I wrote a crime novel, which sold immediately for £75. It was almost the first money I’d ever earned from my writing. I wrote six of those, in fairly quick succession. During this time I’d got myself an agent for my plays, who discovered the German market for me, and all those earnest, culture-filled comedies, which the BBC hadn’t been able to make anything of at all, Germany lapped up.
[. . .]
I tried to write [the crime novels] as well as I could. I wish they had been better; they’re not at all good and are best forgotten. I was certainly learning about putting together a book and, I hoped, getting some overwriting out of my system. At the end of six of those, we hadn’t made the breakthrough that my publisher and I had hoped for and we didn’t see much point in going on. I didn’t mind very much because I’d just had an idea for a novel. I was very concerned at the time about overpopulation. I was interested in its control, had an idea about how it could be done and wrote The Quality of Mercy. I sent it off to Hodder & Stoughton, who accepted it at once and said it was science fiction. I wasn’t at all happy about it being called sf because I knew nothing about it at all. I imagined it was still Amazing Stories, of which I’d seen the jackets and hadn’t even read—how vulgar and tasteless, I thought, I don’t want anything to do with that. However, one doesn’t argue; what is in effect one’s first book is sold to a publisher.  p. 26

At first I couldn’t comprehend why my books were selling to anybody at all, because if they were sf, what the hell was this other thing which was also sf—Amazing Stories and so forth? I still do not comprehend the enormous span of what is called sf; I do not know if the same people read the entire spectrum. I’ve never had any idea for whom I am writing. I once addressed a group of sf enthusiasts in Cambridge and it was a disaster, because I’m not an addresser of enthusiasts—I’m not an addresser of anybody. I suddenly realised how young the readership was, in that they were referring to books of mine which were six years old, which they had read when they first came out. They were only about 20 at this time, so they had been reading my books at the age of 15. That astonished me; I hadn’t imagined that sort of readership at all.  p. 26

One of the things that comes out of Compton’s interview is that a mid-list writer could survive in the mid-70s even though they didn’t necessarily have a huge readership. Most hardbacks would sell hundreds of copies (or more) into the library system, and then end up with a subsequent paperback edition. Changed days.

In conclusion, this isn’t a bad issue of the magazine: there are a couple of okay short stories, and the Compton material is an interesting look at a not much examined writer.
I was sorry to see the magazine fold (I was a reader at the time, and it was the first SF magazine I bought). It was a fairly lightweight and mixed quality publication for sure, but it was nice having something like this to pick up each month at the newsstands—at an absolute minimum (and there was always more than that) there were some lovely pictures to look at. In any event, I obtained the July 1976 issues of Analog and F&SF 4 a couple of months later (if SFM hadn’t folded, I wonder if I would have bothered asking my newsagent to order these elusive American digests) and after that it was down the rabbit hole for good.  ●

_____________________

1. If this is the same Philip Boast, the writer would have been in his early twenties when this appeared. His ISFDB page is here.

2. Compton has always exerted a strange fascination for me, possibly because of his extra-genre origins, but most probably because at school I based my Sixth Year Studies English* essay/dissertation, in part, on Farewell Earth’s Bliss (I think Ballard’s Concentration City and Stewart’s Earth Abides were the other two—God knows what the link was). I didn’t like the novel much, or The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe later, and I suspect I read them when I was too young. Probably time for another go.
* I liked the subject but wasn’t much good at it.

3. Aldiss’s Earthworks contains the following stanza:

While life reached evilly through empty faces
While space flowed slowly o’er over idle bodies
And stars flowed evilly upon vast men
No passion smiled . . .

There is a short news clipping with what I presume (they have a similar style) are more RCA 301 poems here:

Our bloom flayed evilly through ugly bodies
And water loomed evilly o’er inhuman loves
Your dream blazed freely ’round ugly hovels
A foe itched
.
The stars flayed slowly upon furtive bodies
And light flayed blindly o’er crowded faces
While gloom blazed foully from broken loves
Our genes giggled.

I’ve read worse from humans.

4. I reviewed the July 1976 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction here.  ●

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Science Fiction Monthly v03n03, March 1976

ISFDB link

Executive Editor, Pat Hornsey; Editor, Julie Davis

Fiction:
Schwartz Between the Galaxies • reprint novelette by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+
Reaching Out • short fiction by Garry Kilworth
Compensating Factor • short fiction by Robert Wells

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Roger Dean
Interior artwork • by Chris Foss, John Higgins, Tony Roberts, Mark Lowden, Robert Burton, A. R. Lowe, Roger Dean (6), Adrian Arnott, Tony Masero
Introduction
The Metamorphosis of Robert Silverberg
• essay by Brian Stableford
News • by Julie Davis
A Boy and His Dog • film review by R. A. Ashford
Paperbacks on Trial • book reviews by Maxim Jakubowski and others
Review: Views by Roger Dean • by Jenny Jacobs
Letters
The Query Box
• essay by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]

The fiction in this issue starts off with Schwartz Between the Galaxies by Robert Silverberg (Stellar #1, 1974), which was published to mark Silverberg’s appearance as that year’s British Eastercon GOH.
Schwartz is an anthropologist who travels the lecture circuit in a homogenised future Earth:

Then a smiling JAL stewardess parts the curtain of his cubicle and peers at him, jolting him from one reality to another. She is blue-eyed, frizzy-haired, straight-nosed, thin-lipped, bronze-skinned — a genetic mishmash, your standard twenty first-century-model mongrel human, perhaps Melanesian-Swedish-Turkish-Bolivian, perhaps Polish-Berber-Tatar-Welsh. Cheap intercontinental transit has done its deadly work: all Earth is a crucible, all the gene pools have melted into one indistinguishable fluid. Schwartz wonders about the recessivity of those blue eyes and arrives at no satisfactory solution. She is beautiful, at any rate. Her name is Dawn — O sweet neutral non culture-bond cognomen! — and they have played at a flirtation, he and she, Dawn and Schwartz, at occasional moments of this short flight. p. 2

He laments that this homogenisation has effectively killed his profession, and in his lectures he proselytises for a diversity of subcultures, while unconvinced it will happen:

Clinging to the lectern, he outlines the programme he developed in The Mask Beneath the Skin. A rebirth of tribalism without a revival of ugly nationalism. The quest for a renewed sense of kinship with the past. A sharp reduction in nonessential travel, especially tourism. Heavy taxation of exported artefacts, including films and video shows. An attempt to create independent cultural units on Earth once again while maintaining present levels of economic and political interdependence. Relinquishment of materialistic technological-industrial values. New searches for fundamental meanings. An ethnic revival, before it is too late, among those cultures of mankind that have only recently shed their traditional folkways. (He repeats and embellishes this point particularly, for the benefit of the Papuans before him, the great-grandchildren of cannibals.)
The discomfort and confusion come and go as he unreels his themes. He builds and builds, crying out passionately for an end to the homogenisation of Earth, and gradually the physical symptoms leave him, all but a faint vertigo. But a different malaise seizes him as he nears his peroration. His voice becomes, to him, a far-off quacking, meaningless and foolish. He has said all this a thousand times, always to great ovations, but who listens? Who listens? Everything seems hollow tonight, mechanical, absurd. An ethnic revival? Shall these people before him revert to their loincloths and their pig-roasts? His starship is a fantasy; his dream of a diverse Earth is mere silliness. What is, will be.
p. 3

Throughout all this, Schwartz falls in and out of a reverie about a Golden Age spaceship, packed with different species:

With the Antarean not-male beside him, Schwartz peered through the viewport, staring in awe and fascination at the seductive vision of the Capellans coiling and recoiling outside the ship. Not all the passengers on this voyage had cosy staterooms like his. The Capellans were too big to come on board; and in any case they preferred never to let themselves be enclosed inside metal walls. They travelled just alongside the starship, basking like slippery whales in the piquant radiations of space. So long as they kept within twenty metres of the hull they would be inside the effective field of the Rabinowitz Drive, which swept ship and contents and associated fellow travellers toward Riegel, or the Lesser Magellanic, or was it one of the Pleiades toward which they were bound at a cool nine lights? He watched the Capellans moving beyond the shadow of the ship in tracks of shining white. Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, they coiled and swam, and every track was a flash of golden fire.

Even on the fantasy spaceship the question of his own identity, and his contribution to this proposed revival of ‘ethnic tribalism’ plagues him:

‘A Jew,’ the Antarean said. ‘You call yourself a Jew, but what is that exactly? A clan, a sept, a moiety, a tribe, a nation, what? Can you explain?’
‘You understand what a religion is?’
‘Of course.’
‘Judaism — Jewishness — it’s one of Earth’s major religions.’
‘You are therefore a priest?’
‘Not at all. I don’t even practise Judaism. But my ancestors did, and therefore I consider myself Jewish, even though . . .
‘It is an hereditary religion, then,’ the Antarean said, ‘that does not require its members to observe its rites?’
‘In a sense,’ said Schwartz desperately. ‘More an hereditary cultural subgroup, actually, evolving out of a common religious outlook no longer relevant.’
‘Ah. And the cultural traits of Jewishness that define it and separate you from the majority of humankind are . . . ?’
‘Well . . .’ Schwartz hesitated. ‘There’s a complicated dietary code, a rite of circumcision for newborn males, a rite of passage for male adolescents, a language of scripture, a vernacular language that Jews all around the world more or less understand and plenty more, including a certain intangible sense of clannishness and certain attitudes, such as a peculiar self-deprecating style of humour . . .’
‘You observe the dietary code? You understand the language of scripture?’
‘Not exactly,’ Schwartz admitted. ‘In fact I don’t do anything that’s specifically Jewish except think of myself as a Jew and adopt many of the characteristically Jewish personality modes, which, however, are not uniquely Jewish any longer — they can be traced among Italians, for example, and to some extent among Greeks. I’m speaking of Italians and Greeks of the late twentieth century, of course. Nowadays . . .’ It was all becoming a terrible muddle. ‘Nowadays . . .’
‘It would seem,’ said the Antarean, ‘that you are a Jew only because your maternal and paternal gene-givers were Jews, and they . . .’
‘No, not quite. Not my mother, just my father, and he was Jewish only on his father’s side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs, and . . .’
‘I think this has grown too confusing,’ said the Antarean. ‘I withdraw the entire inquiry. Let us speak instead of my own traditions. The Time of Openings, for example, may be understood as . . .’
p. 3

In the end (spoiler) it appears as if Schwartz undergoes a physical or mental breakdown, or both, and the story ends in the fantasy world with him, the Antarean, and all the passengers spilling out of the ship to joyously join the Capellans.
The first time I read this as a teenager I loved it (I got a real sense of wonder high off of it) but I didn’t feel the same way this time around, perhaps because I’m not entirely sure what the story is about. One unlikely theory I have is that, on one level, it may be a metaphor for SF fans escaping the mundanity of the ‘normal’ world for the diversity of fandom (the story did place third in that year’s Locus poll and was also a Hugo finalist). Or perhaps I should just take it at face value: Silverberg is known for his worldwide travel: perhaps this is just a genuine lament for the McDonaldisation of the world that was occurring in the mid-1970s.

The story is followed by an essay, The Metamorphosis of Robert Silverberg by Brian Stableford, which is a heavyweight but lucid examination of Silverberg’s work, as shown in this passage where Stableford shows how the writer progressed from the ironic endings of his earlier stories:

‘To See the Invisible Man’, was the best piece Silverberg had produced to date. Its protagonist is punished for repeated transgressions of the law by expulsion from society: he is declared ‘invisible’. The condition, he finds, has both advantages and disadvantages: he can steal or play the voyeur without interference, but he cannot get medical help and is cut off from all human intercourse. In a sense, he is godlike in his ability to interfere mischievously in the ordered lives of others, but he is also totally vulnerable — if he goes too far, ‘accidents’ may happen. In the end, it is the torment of being unable to communicate which triumphs over all other aspects of the situation, and his torture is complete when even another invisible man refuses to recognise him. When his sentence ends, he is approached by that same invisible man, who has by now learned what the other man had learned and pleads for recognition in his turn. After an agonised moment of decision he embraces the man, and goes to trial facing probable condemnation for a second time.
The situation at the end of ‘To See the Invisible Man’ permits the invocation of the same irony so characteristic of Silverberg’s early work, but it is rejected. The theme destroys the method, and the actual meaning of what is happening in the story forbids its trivialisation. The mousetrap is unsprung, the invisible man does not turn away to confirm the neatness of situation and system, and the implications of the central idea are left naked. Silverberg invites the reader to be more interested in the problems of the character than those of the storyteller.
p. 10

Reaching Out by Garry Kilworth has Captain Flashbender sent to recce a far-off alien planet. Two previous attempts have failed, the last explorer having gone mad and flown his ship into the sun on return from the mission. Captain Flashbender is an unusual choice for a pilot as he is blind; he does, however, have a probe that comes out of his head that gives him a crude, shadowy type of ‘sight.’
When he gets to the planet (after several years) he lands and starts surveying. During his EVA he is ‘attacked’ by a creature and his probe breaks. Although now he is totally blind, he continues to gather samples before returning home. En route he gets the computer to destroy the film taken of the planet.
The reveal at the end (spoiler) is that he has deduced that the creature on the planet was a dog-analogue—he has realised on the trip home that it did not attack him but licked his cheek. He erased the film as he does not want to be responsible for the invasion and destruction of the planet by humanity.
This early effort by Kilworth is overlong and is rather contrived.

Compensating Factor by Robert Wells has an indigenous alien delegation turn up at a mining company headquarters on the planet M19. They are represented by another species of alien that looks like a cat,1 and it files a complaint that stops work:

‘Clearly my clients have every justification for complaint. Look at the proximity of that waste to the river! Quite inexcusable! I can’t see any way such dumping could avoid polluting the flow and hence the sea, in due course.’
Ensor felt his mouth very dry. Some way he had to start talking to this cat about a deal. ‘Do they care?’ he said harshly. ‘And what about the waste from their mining? They don’t do anything pretty with it.’
‘They don’t use radioactive crackers or chemical solvents,’ said the cat icily. ‘And they’re mining the ore because you want it. It’s of no interest to them. You should be educating them, setting an example.’
‘So the scenery gets spoiled for a while,’ said Ensor irritably. ‘Listen, the Insosi draw a very good royalty on the pronucleon we take out. It’s not as if M19 was over-populated. So this area gets spoiled, polluted. Their crops don’t grow; the fish don’t breed. With the credit they draw it’s no problem to move some place else.’
‘Typical,’ Sinn murmured. ‘Typical. Quite a few species are like it. You find them around. Never mind
the pattern of the economy. Never mind evolution. Never mind ecology. If there’s something you want, go in and get it. Spoil! Pollute! Lay waste! Don’t worry, we’ll pay you not to notice!’
p. 27

One of the human managers later tries to bribe the cat and, when that doesn’t work, tries to bully him into submission. After that the humans fly in another of the natives from Sinn’s planet, Reror, and it turns out to be an even larger version of a ‘cat.’ When the two ‘cats’ first meet (spoiler) the larger chases the smaller and eats it.
Apart from this ridiculous ending, the story has unpleasant and crudely drawn characters, and, by the by, I don’t like that the amoral and rapacious humans win. I suspect this one came from Well’s reject pile, and had been everywhere else before appearing here.

The best of the Interior artwork is provided by the Cover (a striking piece) artist Roger Dean, who contributes several other works to illustrate Review: Views by Roger Dean, an article on his new book by Jenny Jacobs.2

The other artwork is a sometimes lacklustre selection by Chris Foss, John Higgins, Tony Roberts, Mark Lowden, Robert Burton, A. R. Lowe, Adrian Arnott, and Tony Masero. With the colour reprints you definitely get the feeling that they are beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
News by Julie Davis starts with an explanation about the magazine’s price rise to 50p.3 This is followed by news of a poster offer which will be in the next issue (and which I didn’t take up at the time, alas). Various writer and book news follows.
A Boy and his Dog by R. A. Ashford is an interesting review of a movie I’ve never seen:

According to the author, surely the most critical judge, the film is a faithful version. In order to achieve this, though, mountains had to be moved. A mountain, 43,000,000 lbs to be precise, was actually moved 82 miles to the Coyote river bed. The set itself covered 4½ miles and was filled with 4,700 tons of building materials, to create the setting of a world devastated by a fourth world war. Impressive as these figures are, except for a single shot of a half-buried car and some sunken telephone poles, the extent of the effort put into creating the world is not apparent in the film. This is to the film’s advantage; the aura of desolation is relegated to the background, providing a setting for the story, yet not becoming the story itself. p. 12

Paperbacks on Trial by Maxim Jakubowski and others uses the grid-box method of multiple reviews I’ve commented on before:

As ever, it is interesting to not only see the average ‘score’ each book gets, but each reviewers’ likes and dislikes (why did John Clute not particularly rate Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside for instance?)
The Letters column this month has Ian Butterworth miss the point of Paperbacks on Trial, and there are a couple of letters responding to John Bronsan’s savaging of Space: 1999: John X. Hind mostly agrees, while (inexplicably) C. Morris defends the program (probably the worst piece of TV SF I have ever seen).
The Query Box by Walter Gillings runs its usual reader questions and his expert answers.

An okay issue, with the Silverberg material improving the overall quality.

1. The Well’s story’s tenuous connection to cats gives me an excuse to post a photo of Layla (I’ve already posted a photo of the other cat I am a full-time butler to, Troy):

2. Roger Dean is an atypical example of an SF artist: you couldn’t miss his many album covers and posters in the 1970s, but I can’t remember him appearing on an SF paperback or magazine cover apart from this one.
3. There was a lot of inflation in the mid-1970s as a result of the OPEC oil price increase. The magazine had debuted at 25p at the beginning of 1974 and had then been 30p, 35p and 40p per issue before this rise.

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Science Fiction Monthly v01n10, October 1974

ISFDB link

Editor, Patricia Hornsey; Assistant Editor, Julie Davis

Fiction:
Song of the Dead Gulls • short story by Chris Penn ♥
Sitting on a Starwood Stool • short story by Ian Watson ♥♥♥
The Fall of Atlantis • short story by E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith ♥

Non-fiction:
Earthworks • cover by Bruce Pennington
Interior artwork • by Bruce Pennington, John Bolton, Mike Little, Robert McAulay, Cheryl Drower, Bob Fowke, and J. Allen St John
Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 4: EE ‘Doc’ Smith • essay by Walter Gillings
The Winning Paintings
News • by Aune R. Butt
Letters
The Query Box • essay by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
The Artist in Science Fiction: Bob Fowke • essay by Julie Davis
Edgar Rice Burroughs • essay by Frank Westwood

I picked up this issue as it had an article on Doc Smith, Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 4: EE ‘Doc’ Smith by Walter Gillings,  which I thought might be useful to read given that I’ve just finished Smith’s Galactic Patrol (in the September 1937 to February 1938 issues of Astounding). It’s a short but useful introduction to the author.
There are a couple of other articles in this issue. The Feminine Feature by Mike Ashley is another useful introduction, this time to women in SF, and covers the period from Mary Shelly to the mid-70s. It quotes a London bookseller saying that only 1% of his clientele is female, which seems very low even for the time. Equally brief is Edgar Rice Burroughs by Frank Westwood, which is almost entirely an account of the writer’s life (which included long periods of poverty) and doesn’t go into his fiction in any detail at all.
These three articles very much give the impression the magazine thinks (probably correctly) that its audience are complete newcomers to the SF field.
There are the usual columns. News is almost completely devoid of any, more a listing of fanzines, conventions, and synopses of newly released books that sound like a right load of old rubbish:

Heart Clock by Dick Morland. Published by New English Library Ltd, 40p. The economy of Britain was in a precarious state. Doom threatened large on the horizon, until Matthew Matlock solved the problem so simply. Economic stability, he said, was directly related to population growth. Regulate the latter and the former will reappear naturally. And he had his own original ideas on regulation methods too. Now, forty years later, he no longer upholds this system. His fight is to undo all the work he accomplished so many years ago. A startling new work of imaginative fiction is a Sunday Times fiction choice of the year. p. 17

The Disappearance by Philip Wylie. Published by Panther Books, 50p. ‘The world’s most startling novel’ (Daily Express), set in a world where suddenly ail the women disappear from the men’s point of view, and all the men disappear from the women’s. In these two parallel, monosexual worlds different sorts of adjustments have to be made to meet the problems that occur. p. 17

There are also, from this more innocent time, items like this:

Neil S**** of B*** House, Old H*****, Near Kendal, Westmorland, L** O** has written to us asking for a mention on this page for a junior science fiction club he is interested in starting. Strictly for 10-14 year olds, this club will be formed by Neil and his friends. Anyone who is interested in joining please write to him at the address given above. p. 17

Nowadays, knowing what we do about the seventies and eighties, it would not surprise me to find out that Neil S. was a 49-year old paedophile. Yes, I am joking.

Both the Letters and The Query Box columns are dull, although the latter does have this:

STALKING-HORSE
May I appeal for help in finding a picture that appeared in the late 1940s? The drawing showed a canal on Mars with a British waterways style of barge on it: but the bargee and the horse pulling the barge were noticeably alien, both having their eyes on the ends of stalks.
John C Rudge, Harlington, Middlesex

I take it you’re seeing a magazine cover rather than an interior illustration, which at least narrows the search. Even so, in the two years 1947-8, for instance, a dozen magazines published over 120 issues—and I don’t have all of them. Can anyone with a photographic memory, if not a complete collection, help? p. 20

I wouldn’t mind seeing that myself.
The Artist in Science Fiction: Bob Fowke by Julie Davis covers an artist whose work I don’t particularly care for but, having said that, I thought that his cover for the Corgi edition of Earth Abides by George Stewart was well done.
After a striking cover by Bruce Pennington, Earthworks, there are relatively few artwork posters inside the magazine this time around. The reason for this is that three pages are given over to The Winning Paintings (the successful entries in the recent painting competition, none of which I rate except the McKie and Marlin),1 four pages to illustrate stories and articles, and one page is a plug for next issue’s double page 1975 calendar pull-out.
What poster artwork there is in this issue includes a double page spread by Bruce Pennington, a ghastly (and unattributed) picture of a plastic heart attached by wires to a clock, and a full page piece for the Brian Froud article. The B&W artwork for Penn’s story, by John Bolton, is quite good.2

As for the fiction, there are three short stories. Song of the Dead Gulls by Chris Penn starts off with a spaceship crashing on an alien planet, and uses more adjectives in this opening section than most writers do in an entire story:

He lurched as the ship keeled over onto its bubble, air-grit and darting sparks building a cyclone in the tumbling cabin. Blood squished in spasms from his amputation, a paint-sprayer coating the mosaic of segmented canopy with a gaudy, lisping film. The aquiline, bronze ochre hulk of the skitter shuddered in epilepsy as its sensitive nose burned a cinderous cave in the shore. It rolled like a shot brontosaurus, the anti-grav playing kaleidoscopic patterns with the salt-spray and the emergency jets gorging blue-white shimmers of thrust at broken angles. The ground wound in toward him on the final pivot, then the impact in a crush of antennae and xenobiological samplers, throwing him forward through the cantilevered arch of framework and console, out onto the bare, wet beach, rolling uncontrollably in a queer, eccentric manner—fast over the stub of his right arm, slowing as his body took the friction, then fast again, the sand forming a swab over the coagulating blood and tendons flapping like ribbons down to an imaginary hand. p. 2

After exiting the wreckage he makes it to a nearby lifeboat just before the ship’s reactor goes critical and blows up. He attends to his injuries as best he can, and then moves the lifeboat to get away from the worst of the radiation. In the process he stumbles across a nearby village that has been destroyed by the explosion.
He next sees a naked young woman and pursues her. When he catches up he tries to encourage her inside the lifeboat, and away from the radiation, but she escapes. The next day he finds her suffering from the fallout (she has a head-sized tumour on her shoulder—there is no explanation as to how this has grown so quickly—amongst other physical deprivations). He contacts a representative of his church to get permission to kill her and end her suffering, but this is refused. He (spoiler) does so anyway and when the rescue mission finally arrives they find his body near hers.
The over-written nature of this is probably fairly typical of a new writer3 but I’d wager that the nihilistic ending was a hangover from the New Worlds’ New Wave.
The beginning of Sitting on a Starwood Stool by Ian Watson establishes that Starwood is a superconducting material that is only found on one particular planet, one with a highly eccentric orbit. It is prohibitively expensive, but highly sought after from the enigmatic aliens who sell it:

But the remarkable thing about Starwood is this. If you sit on it, it radiates its energies into you. And it rejuvenates any human being. A properly cut and tailored piece of Starwood recharges the mitochondria (the powerhouses) in the cells. It tones up the brain waves. It balances the Yin and Yang. A chess-player squatting on Starwood is unbeatable. A philosopher can work out the universal truths in his head. A businessman can build empires. It’s the ultimate conditioner. Hair grows back—even brain cells regenerate. The impotent recover their virility. The immune system can eat up any cancer, however metastised. p. 6

The narrator is suffering from terminal cancer and arranges an audience with the Grand Monk of the Yakuza, in order to steal his Starwood stool…. Matters do not proceed as he expects.
There isn’t much complication to this one but the ending has a visceral, SF horror ending that improves on what has gone before.
Oh yes: it is no fault of the artist, but whoever did the page design on this one needs to reflect on the fact that black type on a brown background is really quite difficult to read.
The last piece of fiction, The Fall of Atlantis by E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith, is not really a story but a self-contained extract from Smith’s ‘Lensman’ novel Triplanetary (Chapter 3, it seems). It starts with the leaders of Atlantis discussing a nuclear threat from two neighbouring countries. The story then cuts to a spy who has been sent to one of the countries, Uighar, where he meets up with a female agent who is an old childhood friend. She tells him that the Uigharians are going to fire a nuclear missile and the only way the pair can stop it is to fly down the tube as it is launched!
This is a plodding piece with wooden characters and fairly awful dialogue. You could say the same about Galactic Patrol, but that has something that this doesn’t. However, Smith manages to wrap up the clichéd plot well enough (spoiler: the nuke is launched at Atlantis but falls short, sending a destructive tidal wave to city as well as triggering a geological fault).

Apart from the Ian Watson story, a very weak issue.

  1. The winners of the artwork competition:There is larger (3Mb) version of the image here.
  2. John Bolton’s internal artwork for Chris Penn’s story:
  3. ISFDB only lists this one story by Chris Penn.
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Science Fiction Monthly v01n11, November 1974

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
A World of Sound • reprint short story by Olaf Stapledon ♥♥
The Legend of GX-118 • short story by David S. Garnett ♥
The Last Weapon • short story by Douglas Fulthorpe ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Ray Winder
Interior artwork • Martin Venning, Josh Kirby, Barry Robson, Chris Bent, Bruce Pennington, Ray Feibush, Tim White, Malcolm Poynter, Cheryl Drower, Bob Layzell,
Back Issues
Future issues • editorial
Jack Arnold SF Film Director Extraordinaire • interview by John Brosnan
The Artist in Science Fiction: Roger Dean • essay by Julie Davis
Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 5: Olaf Stapledon • essay by Walter Gillings
Fanzines in Focus: Peter Weston and Speculation • essay by Aune R. Butt
Are You Alive (and Intelligent) Out There? • science essay by C. D. Renmore
Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin • by Malcolm Edwards
News • Julie Davis
The Query Box • Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
Letters

The Xmas Cover for this issue was, I think, Science Fiction Monthly’s first use of original artwork rather than a previously published one from NEL’s paperback line (although I’d have to check #5 to be sure). I think that Ray Winder produced a cover that was not only seasonal but eye-catching as well.1

The fiction, as per usual for the magazine, is the usual lacklustre selection, although the Olaf Stapledon’s piece A World of Sound (Hotch Potch, 1936) is of some interest. In this, one of his few short stories, a man finds himself quite literally in a world of sound. He describes the physicality of the world before he is attracted to the equivalent of a female, who he subsequently pursues.

A newcomer now approached from the silent distance to join my frolicking companions. This being was extremely attractive to me, and poignantly familiar. Her lithe figure, her lyrical yet faintly satirical movement, turned the jungle into Arcadia. To my delight I found that I was not unknown to her, and not wholly unpleasing. With a gay gesture she beckoned me into the game.
For the first time I not only changed the posture of my musical limbs but moved bodily, both in the dimension of pitch and the “level” dimension. As soon as I approached, she slipped with laughter away from me. I followed her; but very soon she vanished into the jungle and into the remoteness of silence. Naturally I determined to pursue her. I could no longer live without her. And in the exquisite harmony of our two natures I imagined wonderful creative potentialities.
p.11

Later, he is pursued by a ‘wolf.’
The last line of this made me smile somewhat: although this type of ending usually irritates it works quite well here and, for what it is worth, is set up at the start.

The Legend of GX-118 by David S. Garnett starts with two men from Earth’s department of Extraterrestrial Affairs visiting a planet that is inhabited by natives who have no interest in interacting with the humans. The boss of Galentic, the company that discovered the planet, shows them around.
The two visitors notice that there are no children or old people and later realise that the natives must be immortal. The men (spoiler) are subsequently involved in a cover up and are killed, or appear to be killed, by company employees.
The final part is rather perplexing as it involves one of the two men—who had been shot after discovering the other’s body—arriving on the planet years later. By this point in time the natives have been wiped out and Galentic have made a fortune selling the planet’s water—the secret of the alien’s immortality.
None of this hangs together, not why one of the men has survived, nor why the water would work on humans as it does on the alien natives. I also didn’t understand the point of the framing device, which is of a movie about the discovery of the alien’s immortality being shown on his arrival on the planet. Perhaps I missed something.

The Last Weapon by Douglas Fulthorpe is labelled as a satire, which is just as well as I’m not sure I would have noticed. A man is treated by a psychotherapist and told the reason he has been unable to hold down a job is because he has been wearing shoes that have been two sizes too small all his life (his mother wanted him to be a ballet dancer).
He next turns up at a Ministry appointments board after smashing through a supposedly unbreakable exterior window and shows off a new weapon that changes peoples’ temperament. This provides perhaps the only amusing paragraph in the story:

The room had been thoroughly searched before the meeting. Only the previous week an American spy had been discovered lashed to the underside of the table in this very room. The juicy sounds of his chomping on a wad of mentholated gum had proved his undoing. (He had taken the precaution of jamming the building’s acoustic detectors, but had overlooked the natural hearing faculty of the board members.) p.28

The non-fiction is as unexceptional as the fiction, although there are a few pieces that are quite good.
Jack Arnold SF Film Director Extraordinaire is an interesting interview by John Brosnan. The director of It Came from Outer Space, Creature of the Black Lagoon, etc., is a good subject and there are a number of interesting and or funny anecdotes. I’ll limit myself to the one where he needed to do some shots of the creature underwater:

When I went down to scout locations the oceanarium people showed me this tremendous tank full of sharks, barracuda, moray eels, even an octopus. They were fed by divers going into the tank and feeding them by hand. I looked into the tank and said, could you guys possibly screen off half the tank with a net and then take out the most dangerous fish so that I can shoot the creature inside it. I told them I not only had to get the creature in the tank but also my leading man and lady. I said if they took one look at those sharks in there I would never get them in. So they assured me they would but when I returned with the company and we got ready to shoot I saw there was no net. Where’s the net, I asked. And they said, you don’t need a net . . . those fish won’t bother your actors . . . they’re too well-fed.
So I was in a fix. How was I going to get my actors to go in there? Now I had a crazy cameraman on that picture, he was nuts. He said to me that I’d better go into the tank with him to demonstrate to the actors that it was safe. He talked me into it so I put on a mask and air tanks and jumped in. I closed my eyes at first. After a while I opened one eye and there was a damn shark, at least 12’ long, his mouth open and looking at me. And he was only about a yard away. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to make any movement or to stay absolutely still . . . so I just shut my eyes again. It seemed the best thing to do. Then he brushed by me and I felt his skin . . . it was like sandpaper.
I shot to the surface then and said, come on in . . . nothing to it! But the amazing thing is that by the third day . . . after all our initial reluctance to go in the tank . . . all of us were so used to the sharks that we were actually kicking them out of the way. The only animal that gave us any trouble was a turtle. It developed a liking for the creature’s costume and kept biting chunks out of it. Finally we had to assign a grip to stay underwater with the sole job of making sure that the turtle didn’t bother our monster.
p.4

Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 5: Olaf Stapledon by Walter Gillings is an interesting article about Stapledon’s work that left me wanting to read his Last and First Men, and Star Maker (the only one of his I’ve read is Sirius).
Malcolm Edwards’ Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin is a detailed review of that book and made me resolve to reread it. It has been so long since I read it that I had forgotten what is was about.

The editorial, Future issues, looks forward to next year and volume two, and promises articles by Mike Ashley on Moorcock and Ellision, and more space devoted to TV and cinema, with pieces by John Bronsan on Star Trek and Dr Who (alas). They also promise more original fiction with the winners of the short story competition appearing from next issue.
The Artist in Science Fiction: Roger Dean is a short piece by Julie Davis about an artist whose album covers and posters were part of my youth. Dean makes some interesting comments about the architectural point of his artwork:

The attractiveness in the drawings is partially incidental and partially an attempt on my part to make people want to like them, so that I can introduce them to other ideas which I want them to like and which aren’t just pretty pictures. My drawings are not about art at all, I am not interested in art, I am not interested in fantasy in the sense that your magazine is.
What I am interested in is putting ideas represented on the sleeves actually into practice. If some of those buildings and some of those sections of worlds appeal I don’t want them to appeal only out of the pages of a book, I want people to be able to walk around them, climb the staircases, walk the corridors.
p.6-7

Fanzines in Focus: Peter Weston and Speculation by Aune R. Butt is a short chatty article about Weston’s fanzine, whereas Are You Alive (and Intelligent) Out There? by C. D. Renmore is a rather dull science essay about communication with aliens, which doesn’t contain much that I haven’t read before.
News by Julie Davis doesn’t contain much news. Half of the four columns are made up of synopses of recent books. Of the remaining text, half is given over to a half-baked idea by Mensa’s research officer and ideas chairman:

In short, Mr Kirby is suggesting an academic discipline of applied science fiction. He proposes that a comprehensive content analysis of all science fiction be prepared to provide a computer bank of hypotheses which can be fed to scientists; he is encouraging scientific researchers to send their problems to sf writers who will solve them in fiction; and he also suggests that liaison committees be set up between scientists and writers to combine the actual with the possible.
He rejects our passive role as objects in the universe, we are subjects and as such we should take the future in our own hands and define it into existence. Mr Kirby believes that the responsibility for this lies with the sf writers, he wants universities and research establishments to employ resident sf writers to stimulate new and worthwhile research. He even goes as far as to suggest that sf will no longer stand for science fiction but henceforth it will mean science fertiliser!
Needless to say Mr Kirby’s ideas were not received too favourably by the scientists present at the meeting.
p.26

The Query Box by Walter Gillings answers a selection of questions, and Letters has an interesting item of correspondence from C. R. Stanley of Southsea, Hampshire about SF music.
Finally, it will be no surprise that the Interior artwork in this issue is equally lacklustre, excepting Tim White’s illustration for the David Garnett story and Josh Kirby’s excellent two-page spread.2 The centrefold is a diary for 1975 printed on top of an illustration by Ray Feibush.

An issue that isn’t really worth digging out.

  1. There were quite a few eye-catching covers that first year, as the Back Issues page shows:
  2. Tim White’s illustration for David S. Garnett’s story:
    There is a double page spread of Josh Kirby’s cover for Ray Bradbury’s The October Country:
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Science Fiction Monthly v03n02, February 1976

sfmv03n02x600

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
Sadim’s Touch • novelette by Kenneth Harker ♥
Brother’s Keeper • short story by Anthony Peacey ♥

Non-fiction:
Zenya • cover by Frank Kelly Freas
Interior artwork • Chris Foss, John Storey, Frank Kelly Freas, John Higgins
Editorial
On the Way to the Stars: Part Four: Galactic Empires • essay by Peter Weston
The Artist in Science Fiction: Frank Kelly Freas • essay by Sandra Miesel
Frank Kelly Freas: The Artist in his Studio • essay by Sandra Miesel
SF TV Review: The Invisible Man • by John Brosnan
SF in the Cinema: Bug • by John Brosnan
Music and Science Fiction • by Maxim Jakubowski
News • by Julie Davis
Letters
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]

Of the half dozen issues of Science Fiction Monthly that I bought I think this one has the most memorable cover (although a few of the others run it a very close second). I don’t know if my teenage self appreciated the symbolism on an intellectual level, but I’m pretty sure I got the message.

There isn’t much in the way of fiction in this issue as the first story, Sadim’s Touch by Kenneth Harker, is a fairly long piece (approx. 8,500 words). The story starts with Bannerman, a down-and-nearly-out science columnist for a newspaper, and a scientist called Moncrief, who has developed a device that can let you see a short time, microseconds, into the future. Bannerman provides Moncreif with the funds for further development and starts to experiment with the device. Moncreif shows Bannerman that the device is set to look a fraction of a second into the future as he believes that a short term edge is all that is needed to improve the user’s confidence. Bannerman, against Moncrief’s advice, starts looking seconds along multiple time tracks into the future.
Up to this point it is a conceptually and philosophically intriguing piece but unfortunately it goes downhill from there as Bannerman (spoiler) slips across ‘time tracks’ to a future where Moncrief is swindling him. Bannerman subsequently kills the scientist and then finds he is in a time track where he is a mental patient. This all rather shakes the story to bits.

Brother’s Keeper by Anthony Peacey gets off to a good start with its opening paragraph:

Matz looked sideways at Jorvin, that lumpish head inches away to the right who shared the shoulders, shared all of the muscular, skin-clad body with him. Jorvin was intent upon the goat in the verdant, shut-in space between the stained cliffs of dead buildings with their rows of empty, black eye-sockets. They needed the goat. They had quenched the thirst of the dust bowl in a sewer where the water ran sweet after a couple of centuries of winter rains; but their hunger remained. p.26

There is a lot going on there: the description of the mutant brothers, the post-holocaust setting, and the push-pull comment about the sewer. Unfortunately the rest is a fairly derivative, and brutal, tale of their subsequent encounter with a young girl and, later, a group of marauding ‘norms.’ The ending (spoiler) where the good brother’s head grows back after the bad brother has hacked it off might have worked for a horror story but doesn’t really do so for this SF one.

The bulk of the non-fiction space is taken up by Sandra Miesel with a couple of articles on the featured artist. The Artist in Science Fiction: Frank Kelly Freas is a short introduction to Freas’s work and, although I knew he was a popular and successful artist, I wasn’t aware that he had (at the time of writing) won nine Hugo Awards, nor that he did so much work for NASA (including designing the mission patch for the Skylab 1 crew at the request of the astronauts). The Artist in Science Fiction: Frank Kelly Freas is a longer, more detailed article about how Freas physically creates his work, although it does have other interesting snippets:

At the beginning of a career getting work can be more difficult than doing it. The first portfolio Freas submitted to John Campbell was a masterpiece of neophyte pretension consisting of expensively contrived mockups of Astounding pages. It was returned to him scorched by Campbell’s wrath. Only after several humbling years in the pulps (when the train fare to a magazine office might equal the fee earned there) did he dare approach Campbell again. This meeting soon led to his first ASF cover, The Gulf Between, which Freas still counts among his special favourites. The painting shows a giant robot beseeching Someone to heal the mortally-injured human he holds in his hand. This sombre and innovative illustration ignited the artist’s career in sf. p.18

Work involving people requires simple costuming and appropriate models. Freas enlists family (his daughter posed for A Womanly Talent; the boy in Second Kind of Loneliness resembles his son), friends, and even total strangers in this enterprise. So indefatigable is he in the pursuit of interesting faces—restaurants are favoured hunting grounds—that an American fan has written a song warning people to stay alert in the artist’s presence lest ‘when you wake up, you’re on the front of Analog’ (this clever fellow appears on the cover for Renegades of Time). Freas also impresses himself into service as a model occasionally. He can grimace and wave a blaster convincingly (as for Your Haploid Heart) but finds comic roles more congenial: the hairless, green voyeur in Martians, Go Home! and the battered lion-man in Pandora’s Planet. p.19

Some of the covers mentioned above lead me neatly to the one criticism that I have concerning the selection of Freas’s artwork for inclusion. According to the editorial page Freas selected the paintings himself, but they lean too heavily on earlier work with six out of the nine pieces coming from the Planet Stories era. It would have been nice to see a couple of better known works in amongst these, e.g. The Gulf Between, Martians Go Home!, The Second Kind of Loneliness, etc.1
The rest of the non-fiction is the usual Science Fiction Monthly mix. On the Way to the Stars: Part Four: Galactic Empires by Peter Weston is an interesting article about Galactic Empires but it depressed me that I’ve read so few of the stories and novels listed (I’ve read some of Eric Frank Russell’s work, but not And Then There Were None, and I’ve not read anything by H. Beam Piper).
John Brosnan’s SF TV Reviews and SF in the Cinema cover the 70’s TV program The Invisible Man and the movie Bug, both of which sound like poor fare. Music and Science Fiction by Maxim Jakubowski provides a lukewarm review of Red Octopus by Jefferson Starship. There is a tiny News column by Julie Davis, a ho-hum The Query Box by Walter Gillings, and a Letters column that includes missives from two moaning Scots:

I remember someone writing in saying how prophetic sf was and how it was the literature of the future. I also remember that I was planning a long letter deriding this and asking you to refrain from printing such rubbish in SFM again.
I’m scared stiff by reading books, newspapers and magazines which make it obvious to me that we’re half way there already! Looking more deeply into the problem it also becomes clear that modern science is the cause. It’s dragging morality through the gutter and spitting in its face. Sex and love have gained different meanings, marriage is old-fashioned, God is non-existent. Test-tube babies, abortion, birth control, artificial preservation of life, sex before marriage, artificial insemination, parthenogenesis, transplants, transfusions, sterilisation, mechanical hearts and organs, sex changes, etc, abound everywhere. If you believe that any of these are perfectly natural then it just shows how you’ve been conditioned by society to accept them.
Ian Garbutt (Torbrex, Stirling) p.28

I have this month (October) cancelled my order for SFM for the following reasons:
(1) The magazine should be retitled Science Fantasy Monthly due to the fact that I like my science fiction to be reasonably believable. The recent fiction in the magazine would appear to be the product of disturbed imaginations.
(2) There are far too many articles on authors and books.
(3) The posters were excellent to begin with but now they have deteriorated into pure rubbish.
(4) Who needs comic strips?
I know of at least two other people in my area who have recently cancelled the magazine for the same reasons. David Quinney (Clackmannanshire, Central Scotland)
p.28

I’m not sure what the point of publishing either of these is. The first appears to have more to do with his personal political views than SF; the second has a point about the deterioration in artwork quality but the rest of it just seems to deny the magazine’s identity.

In conclusion, quite a lacklustre issue.

  1. Here are the nine paintings used for the feature, bar the cover (they could have squeezed in another two if they had left out the double-page Foss on the inner front/back cover):
    sfmv03n02freasx600
    My favourites are the cover and the these three:
    sfmv03n02i1x600
    sfmv03n02i2x600sfmv03n02i3x600
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Science Fiction Monthly v02n04, April 1975

SFMv02n04ax600

ISFDB link

Fiction:
Jupiter Laughs • short story by Edmund Cooper ♥♥♥
The Pause • reprint short story by Isaac Asimov ♥♥
Clown Fish & Anemone • short story by Chris Morgan ♥♥♥
Write-Off the Planet • short story by Ernest Hill ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Ray Feibush
Interior artwork • by Eddy Lowe, David Field, Karel Thole, Brent Armstrong, Robert McAulay, Lucinda Cowell, Alan Aldridge, M. J. Perry
The Size of Things to Come (4) • comic strip by Malcolm Poynter
Vol 2 No 4 • editorial
Science Fiction Monthly Painting Competition Mk II
Hope for the Future: The Science Fiction Novels of Edmund Cooper • essay by James Goddard
An Interview with Edmund Cooper • interview of Edmund Cooper • by James Goddard
News • by Julie Davis
SF in the Cinema: The Land That Time Forgot • film review by John Bronsan
Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 10: Isaac Asimov • essay by Walter Gillings
Butterfly Ball: An Illustrated Fantasy • essay by Julie Davis
The Query Box • essay by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
Letters

This issue of Science Fiction Monthly is essentially one that is dedicated to the writer Edmund Cooper. As the editorial on the first page states, almost half the issue is filled with material about or by him. Cooper was a popular British writer of the 70s and 80s, as well as the SF reviewer for The Sunday Times, but he almost disappeared from sight after his death in 1982.1
There is a price increase apology (35p) at the bottom of the editorial page. Between the editorial and that item is the notice and rules for the second artwork competition. Rather strangely the competition is open to ‘all residents of the UK, Eire and the British Commonwealth as constituted on 1 January 1947’!

The first item of the Edmund Cooper material is his story Jupiter Laughs. According to the introduction it was written for a US anthology of alternative histories2 due later that year, and it tells of a small unit of Roman centurions involved in Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. In this world they also kill the three wise men before they catch up with Joseph, Mary and their child…. The coda (spoiler) flashes forward to a Queen Victoria in a Roman Empire. Caesar tells her that the reason their empire still survives is because the Roman god Jupiter motivated them more than the tribal gods did their opponents. This is quite good story-telling but having Victoria as the Queen is a bit of a stretch given the branching point in that history’s timeline.
The essay that follows, Hope for the Future: The Science Fiction Novels of Edmund Cooper by James Goddard, gives a useful overview of his work and the second page is nicely decorated with the distinctive covers of Cooper’s Coronet paperbacks.3
The meat of the material about Cooper though, is a condensed version of an interview that appeared in Goddard’s fanzine Cypher.4 Cooper had very forthright, sometimes reactionary, views about a number of issues:

The whole point is that the average cranial capacity of the human female is 125cc less than that of the average human male; what I’m saying is that on the whole they’ve got a smaller computer, and, granted that they are the same type of computers, the bigger computer is better than the smaller computer.
Let them have equal opportunity. I’m all in favour of it. I dislike this idea that they are blocked in the City. For example, if you are a woman, you just cannot get on the Stock Exchange unless you’ve been very lucky; in industry, if you are a woman, you cannot rise above a certain level unless you’re very lucky. They’re blocked for two reasons; one, because men are afraid of them, and two, a valid reason, because they consider that most women are going to get themselves impregnated, and move off shortly after they’ve mastered the job and got themselves a decent salary. My point is that, in equal competition, and let them have totally equal competition, let them compete against men, they’ll see that they can’t make it.
 p.9

More people have been killed by internecine wars in the Christian Church than in the First and Second World Wars put together. There have been more destruction and more misery created by the brotherly love that is promulgated by this dreadful religion than by anything else throughout history, it really is appalling. We’ve got it now in Northern Ireland. Surely any thinking person must feel that if that’s what Protestantism is and that’s what Catholicism is, let any sane society outlaw both, because they are death and destruction. And talking of male chauvinism, for centuries the Church has kept women in bondage. Women are unclean when they have babies, they have to go and be churched afterwards so that they are fit for human consumption again. They don’t have rights, the Church has kept women in total subjugation. So I, male chauvinist pig that I am, want to grant them emancipation, and the Church is busy keeping them down. p.10

I don’t admire sf writers, I admire certain books. Take the case of Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop. I think, was an excellent book, An Age was an excellent book. Report on Probability A was rubbishy, it wasn’t even sf, it was a wornout essay in metaphysical speculation. Barefoot in the Head was a psychedelic fantasy with no real value, Frankenstein Unbound certainly wasn’t sf, it was fantasy masquerading as sf, with a great many loopholes. I think he’s only written two very good novels; so, do I admire Brian Aldiss or not?
No, I admire two of his books.
p.11

Some (or all) of these quotes will probably put people off reading his books which, I think, is a shame. I recently read his post-holocaust novel The Cloud Walker, and thought it a superior book: its story of Kieron and his dreams of flight in a feudal world where machinery is considered heretical is a good read, non-didactic and quite witty in places; the second half also has some exciting action.5

The Cooper material is followed by a rather uneventful News column and another good John Bronsan SF in the Cinema review of what would seem to be a crap film, The Land That Time Forgot. I was surprised to see Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn listed as the screenplay writers. There was one part that made me smile:

Use is also made of full-scale models—such as in the scene where a pterodactyl swoops down and picks up a man in its beak. That’s not very convincing either—it’s very stiff and you can see the supporting wires—but it’s not every day you see a full-scale model of a pterodactyl in action, so one shouldn’t really quibble. p.12

Modern Masters of Science Fiction: 10: Isaac Asimov by Walter Gillings is a short essay on that writer’s work. I think I knew that Pebble in the Sky had been rejected for serialisation but learnt that the same had happened to The End of Eternity. I also discovered that The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun had been dramatised in the BBC series Out of the Unknown.
The story picked to accompany this article is Asimov’s The Pause (Time to Come: Science-Fiction Stories of Tomorrow, ed. August Derleth, Farrar, Straus and Young 1954). This story’s maguffin is the cessation of radioactivity in the world and all the attendant consequences. The cause (spoiler) is an intervention by aliens who need time to alter us so we do not destroy ourselves. The main character wonders if we are sheep in a field… Not his best, nor his worst.

Butterfly Ball: An Illustrated Fantasy by Julie Davis is a short article about the ex-Deep Purple guitarist Roger Glover’s album The Butterfly Ball based on the William Glover verse and Alan Aldridge’s Illustrations. The latter are the high point of this piece.6
This is followed by the last of the non-fiction, a humdrum The Query Box by Walter Gillings with questions about Robert E. Howard, the Hugo and Nebula awards, Kilgore Trout, Star Trek, Perry Rhodan, etc.
The Letters column isn’t much better, with comments about definitions of SF (yawn) and complaints about one of the short story contest winners. It does have this from P. Kingsbury of Sunderland though:

l have bought your fine magazine since the first issue and enjoyed every one. Lately though, I have deplored the space you are giving to these ‘Fandom’ people. If this trend is to continue I will cease to buy your magazine.
I want to read good sf and not features about this lunatic fringe who have latched on to sf. They are a minority of your readership anyway and gave sf a bad name years ago.
Let the good sf and fine artwork continue please. That’s what I buy your magazine for.
p.25

I don’t have much to say about the art in this issue: nothing much grabbed me, and the less said about the juvenile two-page comic strip The Size of Things to Come by Malcolm Poynter, the better.

There are two short stories that close out the issue. The first is Clown Fish & Anemone by Chris Morgan. For the most part this is a readable enough if fairly routine story about an alien seeing a spaceship land on its planet and a human disembark. After gathering samples the human notices the alien and climbs up the hill towards it. The title telegraphs a rather too Earth biology analogous ending, but the alien’s final leap of faith improve matters. Nice illustration by Brent Armstrong.7
The second story is another example of unfortunate editorial scheduling in that it follows a work about human-alien interaction with the same. So there wasn’t another single page story in inventory? Write-Off the Planet by Ernest Hill is about an alien membron, a slug like creature, growing to reach a specific female membra on the other side of a cave. Some of the description of this sounds vaguely like alien porn:

She pulsated, radiated and he felt the drawing, clutching, tremulous appeal of her desire. A shiver passed up his stem, urging the tip onwards on its upward curve.
‘Oh my love! The tender power that fondles, coaxes and elongates the substance of my being and draws me to my goal like misty rays rising to the sun! Wait, my beloved! The years will pass. The wide earth will turn around its glowing sun, tilting in the elliptical orbit of its path. The sunlight will be lower in winter when the angle of the tilt is more pronounced.’
 p.28

Two humans then visit the cave and one demonstrates the connection between alien pairs by whacking the membron to show the reaction in the membra. Ouch. This becomes depressingly nihilistic by the end.

An interesting issue for the Edmund Cooper section but rather lacklustre apart from that.

  1. From what I can gather Cooper disappeared from sight for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, he died so there were no new books to keep his readership going. Secondly, it appears that after his death Hodder & Stoughton, his publishers, would neither reprint the books nor revert the rights. There is a useful biography by Joe Smith that can be found on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine here. Others seem to have been withdrawn due to a difference of opinion between various parties about Cooper’s life.
  2. That alternative history anthology is one I’ve never seen or heard of, Beyond Time, ed. Sandra Ley (Pocket Books ,1976).
  3. Cooper’s paperback covers:SFMv02n04cooper
  4. James Goddard kindly gave John Guy Collick permission to reprint the interview on his blog. Collick also wrote a reflective article about Cooper’s work.
  5. If you are considering reading any of his other novels it may be worth noting this from SFE: ‘In general, however, Cooper’s later work lacked much joie de vivre, and although accusations that he was anti-Feminist have been denied by some critics, it remains the case that his statement about women in a man’s world — “Let them compete against men, they’ll see that they can’t make it” — is difficult to spin into a very useful contribution to the long debate. A persistent edginess about women in power becomes explicit in Five to Twelve (1968) and Who Needs Men? (1972; vt Gender Genocide 1973), and surfaces less aggressively in Merry Christmas, Ms Minerva! (1978), a Near Future tale set in a Britain dominated by trade unions. These attitudes were neither politic, in the heightened atmosphere of the 1970s, nor in fact intrinsically becoming. Cooper died with his reputation at a low ebb; but he was a competent and prolific writer, and a better balance may some day be reached.’
  6. In the 1970s if someone wrote an article about an album you would probably only hear it if you bought it, although you might hear individual tracks on the radio. Nowadays, with streaming services such as Spotify, you can go and listen to what is being discussed straight away. In this case my recommendation would be not to bother…. Great album cover though:                        SFMv02n04butterfly2
  7. There are a couple of artists called Brent Armstrong on the internet but I’m not sure if either are the creator of the artwork in this issue. The first image is the illustration to the story and the second is the centrefold:SFMv02n04brent1 SFMv02n04brent2
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Science Fiction Monthly v02n12, December 1975

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Fiction:
The Worlds that Were • reprint short fiction by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥
On Cooking the First Hero in Spring • short story by Ian Watson

Non-fiction:
Cover • Richard Clifton-Dey
Interior artwork • Bob Layzell, George Underwood, Lucinda Cowell, Eddie Jones, Terry Griffiths, Bruce Pennington, Richard Clifton-Dey, Ian Miller, Tony Masero, Ray Feibush, Mark Lowden, James Cunningham
Editorial
Keith Roberts: The Patient Craftsman • essay by Mike Ashley
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
Book Reviews • Peter Weston, Malcolm Edwards
Letters
News • by Julie Davis
Film Review • by Robin McKie
When NASA Commissions Imaginations • essay by Sandra Miesel
Trieste ‘75 Film Festival • essay by John Brosnan

As a result of reading Keith Roberts’ ‘Pavane’ stories in Impulse I was taken back to the magazine article that started it all for me. Keith Roberts: The Patient Craftsman by Mike Ashley was an enthusiastic and informative article that not only kindled my love for Keith Roberts’ work but also for the magazine Science Fantasy (especially of the Bonfiglioli period). It wasn’t long before I bought Pavane, and later started finding the odd volume of Science Fantasy in a second hand bookshop I used to frequent.1
The article itself covers Roberts’ work from his debut in 1964 through to the mid-seventies, and is illustrated by four of Roberts’ covers for Science Fantasy although the B&W reproduction doesn’t really do them justice. I highly recommend it as an introduction to that writer’s work. However, at the end he says:

What a wonderful prospect there is for the sf readers of this country from an author who can produce masterpieces from a cold start. He is now 40, with a literary career just over ten years old. One can only gasp at the wonders the next ten should bring. p.4

Unfortunately this was not the case as Roberts’ second decade as a writer was a pale shadow of the first. Notwithstanding this, I hope Mike Ashley manages to produce a revised version of this article at some point covering all Roberts’ work.

While we are on the topic of Keith Roberts, Ashley chose The Worlds that Were2 as the story to accompany the article. This story has a rather dull start and it takes a while to get past the miserablist Midlands beginning:

I’m standing in a little park. It’s maybe a quarter mile square, bordered on two sides by railing and struggling lines of trees, on the others by walls of dull brick with buttresses set at ten foot intervals all the way along. Above the farther wall, houses hump stolidly under their glittering lines of roof. Paint-peeling, brown and sooty-pink, show-your-plumbing, outside-privied houses; nasty little houses, tall and mean-shouldered, wet-footed. Bathtins hang on lavatory walls, bikes rust in their sheds among heaps of coal, socks and underwear hang dispirited as they soak up the day’s fall of water and smuts. I can’t see it all from where I stand.
Not all at once. But I know it’s there.
p.9

It proceeds to a story of two brothers who have an unusual Talent. Alan and his brother Dicky can create whole realities:

I get my key out, push it in the lock and turn. Houses like mine don’t have handles on their doors. I shove the door, squinting a bit in readiness, and walk into the Sahara. I stand quite still, soaking in sensations. The smells first; an ancient sweetness and dryness, the mummy-breath of winds coming in over baking miles of sand; the nearer deep-green evanescence of water. It’s evening. Way off the sun is dropping over the rim of the horizon. The shadows it throws are undulating and miles long. Ahead of me is an oasis. Firelight glimmers through the trunks of trees; their tall fronds hang still, reflecting in the quiet mirror of a pool.

However, their life is disrupted when Alan brings back a woman, Andrea, to their house. Dicky’s anger causes Alan and Andy to have to survive a number of perilous worlds. Some of these are intriguing and you wish Roberts had actually given us his take on these scenarios in full-blown stories. In one or two he probably did (Weihnachtabend):

I ran forward again and saw Andy. She was wearing a checked shirt and a belted skirt of some rough cloth. Her face was white and she was standing fists clenched, facing the Obersturmfuehrer. The heavy automatic he was holding out at her looked too big for his hand.
Nacht und Nebel’, he said softly. ‘Nacht und Nebel, Fraulein… p.10

In others, you wonder what he would have made of an entire pulp story:

The sky colour altered and shifted and there were cloudy streaks running from horizon to zenith and dark clusters of planets. Simultaneously the Thing burst out of the ground beside me, followed by half a dozen others.
The first glimpse suggested the results of a high-speed car smash, a second sight put me more in mind of an abortion on a cat. The cat image was best; the machines, if they were machines, came hopping after me with metallic mewings. I blasted the nearest pair and ran ahead, shouting for Andy. No answer; then I saw her. She was chained to a rock, Andromeda-fashion; a half circle of the horrors were converging on her. The blaster whimpered again, turning the creatures to glowing puddles, but there were others coming fast and hundreds more thronging the horizon. A Possibility Twist disposed of the rock and fastenings but that was all I could manage, I was getting out of breath. Andy sat up, pushing the hair back from her eyes. ‘It’s the Khan,’ she said tonelessly. ‘As he threatened, he has released the Direcats…’
p.10

It is worth sticking with it for the roller-coaster ride of fast changing realities in the second half. That said, I think I would have probably chosen one of Roberts’ ‘Anita’ stories to go with the article (The Mayday, as mentioned in the article for example).

The other piece of fiction in this issue is On Cooking the First Hero in Spring by Ian Watson. This is about an exploration team who investigate alien slug-like beings called claymen. At one point they observe a rite:

They seized one of their own number out of the crowd, slung him over the cooking spit and wrapped him round it flexibly, binding his feet and head together. One clayman stuck long, thin clay pipes into the victim’s mouth, nostrils and rectum. Another kindled a fire beneath the spit. A third began cranking the handle to turn it. Others slapped wet clay onto the victim’s body. p.19

Later, one of the team, a Tibetan, communes with the creatures and then tells the others what he has gathered:

‘They must be the noblest logicians in the universe, these. Number can hardly exist for them, yet they affirm series. Cause constantly cancels logic out because they can’t see into outer space to know the true causes of these strange effects. Yet they affirm logic. They deny the very evidence of their senses for the sake of it. Only thus is culture possible for them. Only thus can there be rules from day to day, and form of time-binding.
Yet they can’t speak about their world, because to do so destroys logic.’ p.19

I had no idea what he was talking about.

On the non-fiction side there are good reviews of two books each by Peter Weston and Malcolm Edwards. Part of the Weston review of Wilson Tucker’s Ice and Iron (about a new ice age) appealed to the cynic in me:

According to Reid Bryson, Director of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, there has already been a real and steady decline in global mean temperatures for the past twenty years. These are supposedly due to the activities of man, in putting vast quantities of dust in to the atmosphere and so causing the sun’s heat to be reflected back out in to space.
We are at present living in what is known as an ‘interglacial period’, only 10-12,000 years after the end of the most recent of four successive Ice Ages. No one knows what caused them; or whether there will be another.
This is where the article is really frightening. It says that . . . ‘sharp changes can occur in only seventeen years or so, switching climate from inter-glacial to a full glacial period in only a little over 100 years’.
p.11

It reminded that not so long ago we were worried about a premature Ice Age coming.
Also in this issue is The Query Box and the usual Letters column. The latter has a letter from Harry Harrison complaining about Peter Weston second guessing his assembly of The John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology and stating he was well aware of the gaps:

Let me tell you about the ones we missed. Robert Heinlein was in the middle of a novel the entire time the anthology was being put together and could not do a short story. I was on the phone to A. E. van Vogt many times; the story he was doing just did not gel in time. L. Ron Hubbard never responded to my letters. Unhappily, somewhere in his papers, there is a 10,000-word fragment of an unfinished sequel to First Contact by Murray Leinster. James Blish started a story that was never completed. p.12

There is also the News column which announces this issue’s price rise to 40p (from 35p). Ah, those good old days of rocketing inflation.
Robin McKie contributes a film column where he reviews Death Race 2000, which he liked, and David Cronenberg’s The Parasite Murders, which he didn’t:

The Parasite Murders, an all too successful attempt at shock and revulsion, must rank as one of the most pointlessly gory films ever made. It is the epitome of [that] that is puerile and silly in badly-made horror movies. The insistence that it is science fiction will do nothing but harm to the genre. p.20

There is also an article by John Bronsan covering the Trieste ‘75 Film Festival, which seems have shown only one film over the week that he liked (Rendezvous with a Joyous Death/Expulsion of the Devil) although he writes entertainingly about the others:

The Spanish entry, for instance, was a cheap and amateurish production called Refuge of Fear about two ‘typically middle-class American families’ trapped in a bomb shelter after World War III. Boredom, of course, causes an eventual breakdown in their minisociety but not before it has caused a similar breakdown in the minds of the audience. p.26

The last article is When NASA Commissions Imaginations by Sandra Miesel, which is about various types of artists being shown round a NASA launch site and viewing a launch.

Finally, the artwork in this issue: great cover, but the internal colour work is of variable interest and you rather wonder if the art inventory was beginning to run low after two years of publication.

  1. Dow’s Books at the top of King Street in Aberdeen was, to be honest, a grotty hole and they also had the foul habit of cutting off the rear topmost corner of most of their books and stamping them with an indigo price stamp, usually 20p. However, it was the source for me of quite a few of the Roberts and Vinter New Worlds and Science Fantasy of the 1964-67 period, and I also picked up most of the early to mid-seventies Analog there, amongst other things. I eventually bought a complete run of Science Fantasy from Ken Slater of Fantast Medway. They had originally belonged to James White, but he sold them when his eyesight deteriorated.
  2. From the introduction to the story: ‘The Worlds that Were’ originally appeared in the May 1966 issue of the American magazine ‘Worlds of Tomorrow’. The editor at that time, Frederik Pohl, commissioned Keith Roberts to write a story around an illustration which was to appear on the cover. As it happened, the artwork was extraordinarily bad and discouraged the author from accepting a similar commission a second time, nevertheless the story turned out to be surprisingly good. Since its first publication the story has eluded anthologists and editors alike but Keith Roberts has now prepared a revised and updated version especially for publication in ‘SFM’. p.8
    Why Pohl would commission a story from a writer he had never worked with before and would never work with again eludes me.
    The cover of Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1966: ‘Cover by Morrow suggested by The Worlds That Were:
    WOT196605x600
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Science Fiction Monthly v02n11, November 1975

SFM197511bx600

Fiction:
Artist • short story by Terry Greenhough ♥♥
By the Falls • reprint short story by Harry Harrison ♥♥
The Nunatak Wall • short story by Robert Jackson ♥
At the Pleasure Centre • short story by Thomas M. Disch ♥

Non-fiction:
Space Cracker • Cover by Tim White
Interior artwork • by Bruce Pennington, Harry Harrison, Glenn Carwithen, A. R. Lowe, Robert Offord, Tony Masero, Paul Mahoney, Peter Elson, P. Jepson, John Storey, K. Newstead, Ian Henderson, Michel de Saint Owen
Editorial
Harry the Galactic Hero: An Interview with Harry Harrison • by Malcolm Edwards
News • Julie Davis
Film Review: Rollerball • by John Bronsan
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
Letters
SF Artist Interview with Anthony Roberts • by Julie Davis
Book Review: The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication by Fredric Wertham • by Cy Chauvin

As it is the New Year—new beginnings and so forth—I thought I’d dig out the magazine that started it all for me: Science Fiction Monthly, November 1975. This was a large-size magazine started in 1974 by one of the UK book publishers (New English Library) to capitalise on an interest in SF art. After I’d read the first few pages of this issue I realised it was just past the fortieth anniversary of my purchase, so another good reason to comment on it now.

This was a LARGE magazine, the largest I ever saw until the first issues of Aboriginal SF many years later. Half of the 32pp. were taken up with full colour artwork on coated stock and the rest of the magazine was normal newsprint. The ‘normal’ pages contained a good selection of non-fiction: interviews, articles, news, letters, B&W artwork, etc., plus three or so short pieces of fiction including reprints. In fact, that appeared to be the magazine’s pecking order: art, non-fiction and then fiction.
I don’t know where I stumbled upon this magazine or why I didn’t notice it earlier. I’d been reading SF for years by then, and part of the after school walk to the bus-stop was down Union Street in Aberdeen to a bookshop that is now long gone. This magazine however, was bought from a newsagent about twenty yards from the bus-stop where I disembarked for school, so maybe it was on display there.1

As for the contents, the artwork in this issue is not actually as good as it usually was. The reason for this was that they had been running an artwork competition and used this issue to print a number of the entries (there were only two professional paintings in amongst these, one of them the marvellous Space Cracker cover from Tim White). The competition entries were of a pretty variable standard and the only artist that seemed to have a future was the winner, Peter Elson.2
The non-fiction in this issue is of a good variety and standard. There is a very good interview with Harry Harrison by Malcolm Edwards. Harrison is an interesting subject and fires back about three anecdotes for every question. Also, the subject matter is interesting, such as when he talks about John Campbell (Harrison was politically the polar opposite of Campbell but he managed to work well with him and also respected him greatly):

Campbell was an easy lay for people who wrote to his prejudices. He was also a grand editor who would fight with you, but would print what you wrote even if he didn’t agree with it. p.2

I wrote a book that I knew Campbell wouldn’t buy—a thing called Bill, The Galactic Hero. I never submitted it to him because I knew he wouldn’t go near it and it was sold elsewhere. I was absolutely right, because years later I was in the office and he said, in his own quiet, friendly way, ‘Why did you write Bill, The Galactic Hero?’ He had me backed up against the wall, so I said, ‘John, why do you ask?’ He said, ‘Well, I was going home and I saw your name on a book on the news-stand, so I picked it up.’ That’s a frightening thought to begin with: he only reads 2,000,000 words a week or so and he still buys a little science fiction to keep him busy on the way home! I asked him what he thought of it and, of course, he hated every word of it. p.2

Basically, he was an old-style technocrat. He believed that engineers could run the world, and they can’t, you know; it’s a very simplistic point-of-view, politically. p.3

[Rescue Operation] wasn’t really for the Analog readers, even though Campbell bought it. Many times he said he bought stories he knew his readers wouldn’t like, and to Hell with them. He knew better. And he really did know better. p.4

Harrison also speaks about the problems in placing his more controversial work such as The Streets of Ashkelon:

It was done over ten years ago, when you couldn’t use the words ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ in science fiction, and my hero was an atheist. And that was that, mate! Your hero could be a priest—or maybe a rabbi, reluctantly—and he could cross himself all the time (the priest, not the rabbi, that is) but you couldn’t use the word ‘atheist’. Science fiction was a lump of pulp that was still leading a pulp life. I sent the story to my agent in New York, and he said, ‘You can’t sell this: it’s about an atheist’.
So I tried: I sent it to every single magazine, and they sent it back. It was written for an anthology Judy Merril was doing of way-out stories, called
The Thin Edge. The publisher went bust and the book never came out. I thought Britain might be more generous, so I sent it to Ted Carnell, and he wouldn’t print it in New Worlds; he felt it was too far out. I asked Brian Aldiss what to do, and he said, ‘I’ll put it in my Penguin anthology’. We told Ted Carnell about it and he said, ‘Oh well, in that case I’ll print it’. That might give you the feeling he had a supple spine; but at least he had a spine, which the American publishers did not have at all. p.3

The SF Artist Interview with Anthony Roberts that Julie Davis does later on in the issue is the chalk to the cheese of the Harrison interview. All Roberts seems to be interested in is spaceship covers. I did learn, however, that Sphere Books swapped the paintings done for The Best of Fritz Leiber and The Best of A. E. van Vogt.

The News column announces the winners of the art competition. There is other news including the rumour that Pink Floyd may be providing the music for the Dune movie… Also on this page is a review of the film Rollerball and an advert for a 1976 Science Fiction Monthly calendar, which I wish I had bought.3 Letters is an interesting column, to me anyway, with Ian Covell writing in to criticise a review by James Goddard of Nebula Award Stories 9 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction #7 and Goddard’s long reply/rebuttal.4 There is also The Query Box by Walter Gillings, which answered reader’s questions because in those days we didn’t have SFE or ISFDB or Wikipedia at our fingertips. In this column he deals with ‘What is the New Wave?’ and series information on Star Trek and Planet of the Apes. The non-fiction is rounded out by a book review.

There are four short stories in this issue. Artist by Terry Greenhough is about Tamodil, a particularly unpleasant and arrogant artist who can create installations with the power of his mind. Tamodil has previously cuckolded a colleague, another mind-artist called Cjang. This tells of the latter getting his revenge when Tamodil presents a new installation.
In By the Falls by Harry Harrison (Worlds of If, January 1970), a reporter visits a man who lives at the base of The Falls, a vast waterfall, ‘a falling ocean,’ that almost deafens him before he gets inside the man’s shelter. While he is inside he starts glimpsing things that are in the falling water, a person, a wooden house, etc. The reporter and the man speculate about the world at the top of the falls. This has the feel and logic of a nightmare (and was similarly inspired).5 This will either work for you, or not.
The Nunatak Wall by Robert Jackson should have been probably been left in the slush pile. It begins with a passenger on an ion-jet to the South Pole: this section is basically a really clunky info-dump about ion-jets and how they work:

Nowadays, atomic personal phones and watches were universal; people trusted radioactive shielding implicitly. p.25

The magnets for the H-plasma draw their power from the fusion plant itself, so once inactivated they can only be started again while the jet is on the ground, near an external source of power. All power is lost if the magnets are cut off, so the situation has to be pretty bad before the cutouts operate. If HEF loss triggers them, then more than half the fluid has gone. p.25

This sets up the emergency that leads to him having to fight for survival on the ground after ejecting from the ion-jet. This next part details his struggle to survive as he slowly succumbs to hypothermia—probably the best section as it has some narrative drive. Finally, we see how he survives: an original resolution but not really a believable one. As I recall, this is fairly typical of a few of the stories Science Fiction Monthly ran: material picked from the slush pile by what seems like non-SF and/or inexperienced fiction editors.
Finally, there is a disappointing finish from Thomas M. Disch. At the Pleasure Centre is a short-short about a woman, Gloria, who goes to the Pleasure Centre where she is plugged in by a policeman. After she has received her ration of pleasure they have a short conversation. I have no idea what this is about; it seems completely fragmentary.

This issue was an interesting introduction to SF magazines for me because of the non-fiction if nothing else. Up until then I’d been in my own little world and these articles pointed to so much more. Eventually, I’d be hearing about other magazines that were still being published.
Many Happy Returns.

  1. I ended up getting quite a few magazines from that newsagent, and I can see the proprietor clearly in my mind’s eye now: a tall, stout grey-haired chap in a darker grey coverall. Those magazines were this title, SF Digest, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (the last two from July 1976), Galaxy (from April 1977), and I think the last one was Vortex, one of the many short-lived British SF magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. Looking at the magazines upstairs, this arrangement lasted until August 1980. I know it was around then as he had the annoying habit of writing my surname and sometimes the price on the magazines (I got over this about thirty years later, by which time my attempt at keeping a pristine set of magazines had been beaten by fading spines, browning pages and the dawning realisation that I personally was not going to defeat Entropy).
  2. Elson had provided the cover for Sphere Books Pebble in the Sky in 1975.
  3. That 1976 calendar could have been reused in 2004 and 2032. Isn’t the internet great?
  4. For one thing, I didn’t realise the Aldiss/Harrison The Year’s Best Science Fiction #7 was an abridged version of the American edition.
  5. Harrison explains the genesis of By the Falls in the interview and this is reprinted before the story: “By the Falls was the same in one sense: it had pure emotional content and very little else. We were living in this house at the foot of a hill called Suicide Hill, which will give you some idea of what it was like! When we first moved in, the road ended at the top of the hill and there was no traffic. After a few years they built a road and cars would come belting down it. The house was angled towards the hill, only about twenty or thirty feet back from the road. One night I was just going to sleep, sometime after midnight, and I was in that half-way state between waking and sleeping. It was dead quiet, there wasn’t too much traffic in those days, and I heard a car at the top of the hill, revving its engine. It came down the hill, crashing through the gears, right to the top, engine roaring—and the lights came through the bedroom window because of the way the house was angled—and I had the feeling that the car was going to come right into the bedroom and out again the other side of the house. All this while I was half asleep. I rose about five inches from the bed, just suspended in mid-air from the shock of this thing, while the car went by the house. But as I did this—which had never happened to me before—I had a vision, not of a car coming down a hill, but of a waterfall about five miles wide, pouring down, nothing but sound overwhelming me. This vision so shocked me that I lay there vibrating for a while, went to sleep, got up in the morning, thought about it—and instantly the emotion came back. I went into the studio and in one day wrote the story.”
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