Summary:
The highlight of this issue is Thomas Burnett Swann’s very good novella, The Dolphin and the Deep, a mythological fantasy that tells of a young man called Bear on a quest to find the goddess Circe.
There is also a good, if minor, ‘Midnight Club’ tale by Steve Hall which involves a magician who disappears his assistant into another dimension or space; a (rare) short story by Mervyn Peake (the author of the Gormenghast series); Terry Pratchett’s debut story (produced at the age of 14); and an interesting if not entirely successful novelette by John Rackham.
Michael Moorcock also provides a short but interesting piece on Mervyn Peake. Definitely an issue that is worth reading.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 196-202)

_____________________

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:
The Dolphin and the Deep • novella by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗∗
Same Time, Same Place • short story by Mervyn Peake ∗∗
The Hades Business • short story by Terry Pratchett ∗∗
Party Piece • short story by Steve Hall ∗∗∗
With Clean Hands • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Gerard Quinn
Editorial • by John Carnell
Mervyn Peake: An Appreciation • essay by Michael Moorcock

_____________________

This issue of Science Fantasy comes from period towards the end of John Carnell’s editorship (there would be another four issues of the magazine from Nova Publications before it was taken over by Roberts & Vinter, Ltd.), and it opens with the longest story that Thomas Burnett Swann had published at that time, The Dolphin and the Deep. It is a mythological fantasy (like nearly all of Swann’s work), is set in Cretan times, and concerns a young man called Bear on a quest to find the goddess Circe.
The story opens with Bear asking the captain of the ship he is travelling on to let him visit a passing island in the Mediterranean. After he swims ashore he explores, and later discovers a deserted palace. Then, while swimming back to the ship, he is accosted by a playful triton (merman) called Astyanax. When they start talking, and Bear mentions the palace, Astyanax asks Bear if he was searching for Circe, as the goddess used to live there a long time ago:

A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits gathered to say good-bye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”
“Did the bear get back to shore?”
“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” [Astyanax] hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”
“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”
“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.”  p. 6

After learning more about Circe, Bear decides to set off to Libya to search for her, and he convinces Astyanax to come with him.
The passage above is a good example of the kind of material that follows, which is mostly a series of gentle, episodic adventures with a growing band of companions—but there are several setbacks en route, beginning with Bear overhearing a sailors’ plot to sell himself and the triton into slavery. The pair dive off the ship to escape, and Astyanax cuts loose the dinghy for Bear’s use. However, an albino dolphin (who Bear noticed at the island) appears and overturns the dinghy, and the boat’s crew quickly recaptures them.
When the pair eventually arrive at the slave market, Astyanax is quickly sold but, before his new (and scary) female owner can take possession, the triton is stolen by two brothers. Bear escapes during the confusion and quickly manages to track down Astyanax, who has been taken by two northern brothers called Balder and Frey. The two turn out to be innocents but, as Bear negotiates Astyanax’s freedom, they are found by the sailors who were trying to enslave them. A fight ensues and then, after they see off their attackers, Bear, Astyanax and the brothers approach a young man called Arun with a view to buying his boat, Halcyon. Arun decides that he wants to go with them on their quest, so they all set off together. They are joined by Atthis the albino dolphin, who, Astyanax says, only meant to surface near their dinghy not underneath it.
A month later they reach Artemis, re-provision, and set off for The Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). During this journey their comradeship develops, and Bear becomes increasingly infatuated by the thought of Circe:

Lit by the torch, the mast seemed a burning tree; somewhere ashore a wolf cub howled in hunger and, very close, a lamb bleated in terror. I thought of Circe, the end of all my voyages, the last and the loveliest of the will-o-the-wisps I had chased through twenty-five years. A hyacinth over the hill, a murex at the bottom of the sea: the distant and the perilous. I had sometimes loved in the past, for a week or a month; one girl had tired me with tears, another with laughter; I had tired of red hair and dark and hair the colour of barley when the harvesters come with their scythes; and most of all, of the waiting which love demands, the standing still while the moon curves up the sky and the birds fly south. But who could weary of Circe? Only Odysseus had left her, because of home.  p. 24

More adventures ensue when they pass out of the Mediterranean: a Carthaginian vessel warns them not to go further south, but they continue anyway. Later they see a phoenix on the beach, and go onshore to investigate, and see if they can maybe get a feather. Frey wanders off and is captured by two harpies, who fly off with him. The rest of them catch a third harpy and force her to take them to their nest. They eventually rescue Frey, but only with the help of the harpy they captured, who ends up dead like the others.
Later they begin close in on Circe, or what remains of her, when Atthis brings a Cretan sword up from the depths. Bear’s exploration of the wreck—with Atthis’s assistance—provides a passage that illustrates Swann’s ability to combine reality, history, and myth:

I straddled her back and held [Atthis’s] dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the bank, lifting water in their sinuous trunks, stared at us with lordly indolence. Beyond the mouth of the river we paused and circled. Directly below us a galley wavered in the lucid depths.
Then she dove. On the floor of the sea, anemones pulsed their tentacles in a purple twilight. Diminutive lantern fish, with rows of luminescent spots, twinkled from our path. In a forest of rockweed a blood starfish curled its crimson legs. Redbeard sponges clung to the planks of the ship, which rested as lightly on the bottom as if it had settled at anchor. We circled the deck and found the cabin, whose roof lay open to the water. Hurriedly we searched the room.
The furnishings were Cretan: a terra cotta priestess with snakes in her hands; a tiny gold frog embedded with pearls; a tall-backed chair in the shape of a throne. I opened a chest and lifted a woman’s robe, with a bell-like skirt, puffing sleeves, and a tight bodice cut low to expose the breasts. For an instant, as the gown unfolded, Circe herself seemed to rise, a ghost, to greet me. Atthis shared my discovery. She caught the skirt in her beak and wrapped it around her flanks, as if to savour its richness and regret its inevitable destruction by the sea. Yes, this was Circe’s ship. It had sunk not hundreds of years ago but less than a hundred and, since there were no skeletons, Circe and her crew had presumably escaped.  p. 36-37

After this underwater expedition Atthis leaves: the dolphin is upset that Bear brought back presents from the wreck for the boys but not for her and, more than that, she is jealous. However, when the ship is pursued by female pygmies she returns with a pod of dolphins who help them escape by pushing the ship. Bear makes amends:

I wanted to go to her myself, but my going must not, like my parting, seem thoughtless and crude. I must go to her partly as suppliant and partly as friend; indebted but not obsequious; grateful and gracious. With love and a gift which betokened love. I searched my mind for something which, even though belated, should not seem too late. I remembered the gown she had fondled in the sunken galley. I had no gowns or women’s cloaks, I had no jewels, no bracelets of amber stars nor necklaces of hammered gold. But I owned one object more precious to women than pearls: a bronze mirror with a handle like the neck of a swan.
Mirror in hand, I called to Atthis from the deck. She did not move; she waited on the surface, watchful, poised for flight (and also, no doubt, appraising the mirror). Guessing my intention, Astyanax left her and returned to the ship. I swam to her side.
Treading water, I held the mirror in front of her. She looked at the bronze and, seeing her image, recoiled; returned, and this time lingered. She tilted her head, she opened her beak, she rolled on her side with an artless and touching vanity. Then, having shown her delight, she spoke her gratitude—and her forgiveness—with a simple and eloquent gesture: she rested her beak on my shoulder.  p. 41

There is one more short adventure, when a siren lures Astyanax away, before Bear finally finds Circe. Although they go ashore and free him, they are finally captured by the female pygmies.
When Bear and Circe finally meet she appears before him as a corn maiden, and asks why he has come. Bear says it is because of her, but she says he is in love with a dream. Later, after they talk of love and friendship, she tells him that if he wants to stay with her he must send his friends away. After some agonising he says he cannot, and the goddess tells him that he has made the right choice—if he had chosen her she would have killed him: “You have chosen the dolphin and not the deep.”
She goes on to tell him about the long line of men that have pursued her, before telling him she “could have loved him once.”
When Bear goes back to the ship he finds that Circe has changed Atthis into a young woman, and that Astyanax has been changed into a man. When Bear looks back at Circe he sees an old woman leaning on a cane, waving a slow farewell.
This story is, for the most part, an episodic and sometimes sentimental tale that places its characters in little real jeopardy (and the boy-gets-dolphin ending won’t appeal to everyone)—but I think it is a charming piece with some wonderfully descriptive passages. I also thought the ending, where Bear chooses friendship over infatuation, lifts the story to a higher level. If you like Swann’s work, you’ll love this one.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 20,150 words.

•

Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake is the first of two stories that would appeared in the magazine that year, and opens with a description that evokes the grimness of post-war Britain:

That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly armchair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head.
And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges—not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human—like father.  p. 57

When the narrator’s mother starts nagging him he feels suffocated, and leaves the house, getting on a bus to The Corner House restaurant in Piccadilly. There he befriends a woman, and he goes back to meet her on subsequent nights (although he wonders why she is always already there when he arrives, and remains seated when he leaves). Eventually, they arrange to marry.
The final section provides (spoiler) a nightmarish denouement—when his bus arrives late at the registrar’s office he sees, from the upper floor of the vehicle, a group of freakish individuals in the room where he is to be wed:

To the right of the stage (for I had the sensation of being in a theatre) was a table loaded with flowers. Behind the flowers sat a small pin-striped registrar. There were four others in the room, three of whom kept walking to and fro. The fourth, an enormous bearded lady, sat on a chair by the window. As I stared, one of the men bent over to speak to her. He had the longest neck on earth. His starched collar was the length of a walking stick, and his small bony head protruded from its extremity like the skull of a bird. The other two gentlemen who kept crossing and re-crossing were very different. One was bald. His face and cranium were blue with the most intricate tattooing. His teeth were gold and they shone like fire in his mouth. The other was a well-dressed young man, and seemed normal enough until, as he came for a moment closer to the window I saw that instead of a hand, the cloven hoof of a goat protruded from the left sleeve.
And then suddenly it all happened. A door of their room must have opened for all at once all the heads in the room were turned in one direction and a moment later a something in white trotted like a dog across the room.
But it was no dog. It was vertical as it ran. I thought at first that it was a mechanical doll, so close was it to the floor. I could not observe its face, but I was amazed to see the long train of satin that was being dragged along the carpet behind it.
It stopped when it reached the flower-laden table and there was a good deal of smiling and bowing and then the man with the longest neck in the world placed a high stool in front of the table and, with the help of the young man with the goat-foot, lifted the white thing so that it stood upon the high stool. The long satin dress was carefully draped over the stool so that it reached to the floor on every side. It seemed as though a tall dignified woman was standing at the civic altar.  p. 63

The narrator stays on the bus and, after riding around for a while, eventually goes home. He now loves his mother and father, and never goes out again.
I wondered if this was an allegory about leaving home, only to see horror in the outside world (he variously refers to members of the group he saw as “malignant” and “evil”), and then wanting to return to an earlier time (Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen).
An interesting piece, but perhaps rather too dream-like to be completely satisfying.
∗∗ (Average). 3,500 words.

•

The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through the air. He ends up unconscious in the fireplace and then, when he comes around, finds the Devil leaning over him.
During their subsequent conversation the Devil tells Crucible that no-one has arrived in the Other Place for almost two thousand years, and that he wants to hire Crucible to head up an advertising campaign. After the Devil leaves, Crucible thinks about the offer and concludes he wants the money—but doesn’t want Lucifer running around. So he visits his local church.
The next part of the story involves Crucible’s journey to a (dilapidated) Hell:

A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls—pardon me—sculls.
“What happened to what’s-his-name—Charon?”
“We don’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh.”
Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.
“Of course, you’ll have to replace this by a bridge.”
“Oh, yes.”
Crucible looked thoughtful.
“A ha’penny for them.”
“I am thinking,” said Crucible, “about the water that is lapping about my ankles.”  p. 70

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the Devil do a lot of advertising appearances in an effort to promote Hell as a tourist destination, and the Other Place soon resounds to the general bedlam of humanity: the sounds of its many visitors’ jazz and pop music, their motorcycles, the click of slot machines, etc.
After a few weeks of this the Devil has had enough, at which point God appears out of a thunderstorm and asks him if he wants to come back up to Heaven. The Devil accepts the offer.
God then thanks Crucible, who has planned the whole endeavour with this outcome in mind.
This is a cutesy story, but it’s neatly and amusingly done—and it is a particularly impressive debut for a 14 year old. I wonder what became of this writer.²
∗∗ (Average). 3,650 words.

•

Party Piece by Steve Hall begins with some prefatory material about the President of the Midnight Club, Vance Seaton, organising the entertainment for the members’ Xmas dinner.
When the club’s science fiction, fantasy and horror writer members finally meet, and after they have finished their meal, Seaton introduces the first act—a magician called Levito and his daughter/assistant Gloria. After a series of tricks Levito finishes the act with his daughter floating in mid-air: the magician then moves his arms with a complicated flourish and she disappears.
Levito soon makes it clear to Seaton that Gloria wasn’t supposed to vanish, so Seaton gets the other act, a hypnotist, to go on while he and Levito discuss the matter. Seaton then conducts an examination:

Under Seaton’s directions, [Levito] gradually lowered the lighter from a point well above the warped space, where it was clearly visible to Seaton on the other side, until it moved into eclipse behind it. For a moment the flame seemed to wink out of existence, then it abruptly re-appeared and extended itself into a flaring, flickering curtain, as if distorted by some grotesque lens.
“Walk behind it yourself,” instructed [Seaton].
As Levito traversed the full length of the uncanny region, which was about waist high, the mid-section of his body seemed to expand and contract in an eye-wrenching fashion; at times it disappeared altogether, leaving his torso and legs to continue, apparently unconnected.
“Light doesn’t go through it,” muttered Seaton clinically, “it goes around it. I think I know what we’ve got here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something like a Klein Bottle.”  p. 81-82

Further discussions suggest that the enclosed space is a form of three dimensional Möbius strip (I think), and that Gloria may quickly run out of air or overheat.
When the Seaton finally reveals the dilemma to the club members, and asks for suggestions on how to free her, one of them suggests (spoiler) that Levito should move his arms in the opposite manner to unlock the space. However, when the magician tries to do this he cannot remember exactly what he did. Enter the hypnotist, who puts Levito into a trance . . . .
When Gloria finally reappears there is rapturous applause (some of the members think it is part of the act), and she reveals that virtually no time at all had passed inside the space (Seaton observes in passing that you probably can’t distort Space without affecting Time).
This probably sounds like a fairly slight piece, and a contrived one too—but it’s well told, and the hypnotist idea is a neat one.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,400 words.

•

With Clean Hands by John Rackham opens on a planet called Malin, where a planetary Governor called Ingersoll is hosting two anthropologists who have been living among the natives. The setting, though, is pretty much like the 1950’s British Empire in space, as can be seen from comments that Ingersoll’s wife’s Martha makes to one of the visitors later on:

“If you’re going to try to talk shop, Robert, take them into your study,” Martha got up. I’ve got work to do, as always. Stay single, my dear,” she shook her head archly at Olga. “Once you marry, well, you can’t really do anything else, afterwards. Children, housework, meals—it’s never ending. . .” and she went to the door to ring a hand-bell for servants.  p. 89

After Marta leaves, Ingersoll and his two visitors discuss a native plant called Gleez, the basis for a sought after fabric which also has a special place in Malinese society and religion. Then, when one of the Malinese servants brings in a native version of coffee, Ingersoll learns that the native’s “cough”, a normally untreatable and eventually fatal disease, has been cured by another native he refers to as The Healer. Ingersoll later phones the Chief of Police asks him to investigate.
At dinner that night Ingersoll and his guests discuss the natives’ evensong before Daniels, the policeman, gets back to Ingersoll and tells him that has tracked down the healer. He reports that his preaching “sounds like a cross between Christianity and Socialism”, and adds that his ideas are catching on, something which has led to labour problems in some areas. Daniels also says that he has bugged his accommodation.
We later see Ingersoll’s son develop a cough, initially assumed by the parents to be a normal, human one until Martha comes and shows Ingersoll blood on a handkerchief—when it appears that their son has caught the native disease. Finally, in the middle of all this drama, Olga (one of the anthropologists) visits Ingersoll one evening and sits on his lap! They have a conversation about interdependence before kissing.
The second half of the story sees all these plot elements merge together (spoiler) and, after further unrest on the planet, the native chiefs demand to see Ingersoll. When they are let in, Ingersoll sees that they have brought the healer before him and say they want him crucified (they need Ingersoll’s permission as he has banned public executions). Then, during the meeting, his son bursts in and is cured by the healer.
Ingersoll later questions the healer in private about his activities, and tells him that he can’t continue causing the same level of disruption. Ingersoll adds that he will be left alone to teach if he tones down his message and stops causing trouble for the native chiefs. The healer refuses.
Later, when the pressure to have The Healer crucified becomes overwhelming, Ingersoll once more meets the chiefs, this time asking for a bowl of water and a towel before consciously doing a Pontius Pilate act. After the chiefs take the healer away to his fate Ingersoll tells Daniels to slip the healer something that will help with the pain of crucifixion—and arranges for the native’s body to be spirited away afterwards.
Ingersoll later tells the anthropologists that he has arranged for the removal of the healer’s body from its burial place as he wants to help spread his message on Malin. Later, of course, Daniels finds the body has vanished. The story ends with Ingersoll telling Olga that he is going to send his wife and son back to Earth; Olga says she will stay on the planet with him.
Most of the first half of this story is an amalgam of colonial and social clichés from the 1950s, but the last part is an engagingly weird, if predictable, alien Messiah/crucifixion variant³—with an atypical side helping of adultery and marital breakdown.
∗∗ (Average). 11,500 words.

•••

This issue’s Cover is an eye-catching duotone illustration by Gerard Quinn, a regular artist for the magazine.
The Editorial by John Carnell opens with the news that the magazine is a Hugo finalist for Best Professional Magazine, quite a feat for a UK mag, as Carnell notes (he imagines that at least half the delegates won’t have seen an issue). He then goes on to note that Thomas Burnett Swann’s Where is the Bird of Fire? (Science Fantasy #52, April 1962) is also a finalist in the Best Short Fiction category.⁴
The rest of the editorial deals with the two Peake stories that Carnell has acquired, and the essay he obtained from Michael Moorcock, as well as a mention that Terry Pratchett was fourteen years old when he wrote his story.
Carnell ends with this exciting news:

At the moment we are planning on making Science Fantasy a monthly publication just as soon as possible. Exactly when will depend entirely upon how soon I get sufficient good material in hand to make this step a successful one. You can rest assured that you will be informed well in advance.

If only.
Mervyn Peake: An Appreciation by Michael Moorcock is an enthusiastic and interesting piece that made me want to rush out and read the Gormenghast trilogy, even though I had a fairly lukewarm response to Titus Groan when I read it some years ago.
In the course of the essay Moorcock comments on Peake’s writing:

Peake isn’t, in the strict sense, a fantasy writer—he is a writer. In seeking to classify his unclassifiable work some critics have labelled it ‘Gothic’ (albeit ‘Gothic masterpiece’) and have done it a disservice. The books stand as what they are—novels. They tell a story. Peake is a story-teller and his taste runs to the grotesque, the macabre and the bizarre, not to mention the purely comic (for there is zest, joy and humour in these books, a keen observation of the ridiculous in human types).
But his images are not there for their own sake (as Bradbury’s sometimes are, or Lovecraft’s often are)—they are there to push the stories along—the stories of bewildered Titus, scheming Steerpike, ironical Prunesquallor, vague Countess Gertrude, tormented Sepulchrave (these descriptions don’t do them justice) and, quite literally, a host of others.  p. 54

Then he provides several biographical anecdotes:

About this time, before the war, he was living in a converted warehouse on the Battersea side of Chelsea Bridge. He got home one night to discover that the floor was heaving and undulating, so he prised up a floorboard to investigate what was causing the disturbance beneath him. He discovered an elephant! Perturbed that the beast’s restless movement would shake the whole place down he found that it could be calmed if scratched on its back with a walking stick. He scratched the elephant all night, until Bertram Mills’s Circus, who had been forced, for want of a better place, to lodge their elephant there for the night, came to take it away.  p. 55

Captain Peake was one of the first Britons to witness the horror of Belsen. He has described this experience in a series of sketches and a particularly good poem The Consumptive, Belsen, 1945 (published in The Glassblowers, 1950). Some of the sketches have also been published in the Gray Walls edition of Drawings by Mervyn Peake.
While in the Army he conceived and began Titus Groan—at one time, whilst changing camps, losing his kit-bag containing the manuscript.
Luckily, both kit-bag and Ms., were eventually recovered and the novel’s publication in 1946 was acclaimed by the critics.  p. 56

Unfortunately, at the time of publication of this essay, Peake appears to have been in poor health (“On the wall, tantalisingly, is pinned the plan for the fourth Titus book which he feels he will never write, now.”) Peake subsequently passed away after a long decline in 1968.⁵

•••

This is an issue of Science Fantasy that is well worth digging out. Although the only outstanding story is the Swann, there is much else of interest here.  ●

____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 196-202) says this of The Dolphin and the Deep:

Like Swann’s earlier stories, this one is convincingly strange, conveying a sense of a world where people think differently to us. It’s longer and more wandering than the others and suffers from it, and the theme of the beautiful boy (admittedly, this one is a fish from the waist down) leading the long-unmarried protagonist into danger is less well integrated into the story than in The Sudden Wings. However, the story survives and is ultimately impressive and satisfying.

He adds that “the [religious] point of [Rackham’s With Clean Hands] escapes me”, especially given the wife/other woman subplot; that the Peake story is “outstanding” and “nightmarishly perfect”; the Pratchett is “reasonably amusing”; and the Hall, “mildly clever”.

2. Yes, I am joking: Terry Pratchett’s ISFDB page. I got about twenty books into the ‘Discworld’ series (about half way through) before the increasingly bloated size of some of the volumes started wearing me out (he always seemed to be incapable of efficiently wrapping up the story). Still, I must go back and re-read some of the better ones.

3. One of the most famous alien crucifixion stories is Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon, published in Science Fantasy’s sister magazine New Worlds a year earlier (#122, September 1962, as An Alien Agony). One wonders if Rackham saw Harrison’s story before writing his own.

4. This dual Hugo finalist feat was quite an achievement for what was, by this point, mostly a fantasy magazine—something that, if memory serves, its sister magazine New Worlds didn’t achieve.

5. The Wikipedia page and SFE page for Mervyn Peake.  ●

Summary: The quality of this issue is better than than usual (and more consistent). Although there is nothing particularly outstanding, Josephine Saxton’s debut story, The Wall, is noteworthy.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 268 of 365)
Graham Hall, Vector #36, November 1965, p. 12

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:²
The Day of the Doomed King • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
The Saga of Sid • short story by Ernest Hill ∗
Beyond Time’s Aegis • novelette by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford [as by Brian Craig] ∗∗+
The Wall • short story by Josephine Saxton ∗∗∗+
Yesterdays’ Gardens • short story by Johnny Byrne ∗
The Weirwoods (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
SF or Not SF? A Letter from a Reader • by Brian Stableford
Letter from a Reader • by Kenneth F. Slater

_____________________

The Day of the Doomed King by Brian W. Aldiss is set, presumably, in medieval times, and starts with the wounded King Vukasan and his general, Jovann, taking refuge in a countryside church after Turkish forces have defeated their Serbian army. When the king wakes up after resting he sees a wooden screen in the room with a painted design, and the nearby lake through the window.
The pair then leave for the capital to raise the alarm and another army but, en route, the king sees a magpie with a lizard in its mouth. The bird dies, and Vukasan thinks this as an omen, so he decides to detour to a nearby monastery to ask a seer what this means.
After the pair pass a shepherd boy, who points to signs of the pursuing Turks, and a cart with a dead driver, Vukasan still insists on going to the monastery rather than going straight to the capital. When Vukasan consults the seer, he gets two predictions, one good, one bad. The good one tells of a greater Serbian Empire:

“You rule wisely, if without fire, and make a sensible dynastic marriage, securing the succession of the house of Josevic. The arts and religion flourish as never before in the new kingdom. Many homes of piety and learning and law are established. Now the Slavs come into their inheritance, and go forth to spread their culture to other nations. Long after you are dead, my king, people speak your name with love, even as we speak of your grandfather, Orusan. But the greatness of the nation you founded is beyond your imagining. It spreads right across Europe and the lands of the Russian. Our gentleness and our culture goes with it. There are lands across the sea as yet undiscovered; but the day will come when our emissaries will sail there. And the great inventions of the world yet to come will spring from the seed of our Serbian knowledge, and the mind of all mankind be tempered by our civility. It will be a contemplative world, as we are contemplative, and the love in it will be nourished by that contemplation, until it becomes stronger than wickedness.”  p. 16

After this the king hears the other prediction—where the Turks triumph and his reign is lost to history—and the seer concludes by saying that he cannot tell which one will pass. He does, however, point out that the contemplative nature of the Vukasan’s society will not help win the war against the Turks, and points to the King’s delays and detours on his current journey.
Vukasan (spoiler) then wakes to find he is still in the church that he and Jovann first stopped at, and realises the journey to the monastery was a dream, or a vision. He dies, and Jovann arranges a proper funeral. Because of this further delay, the future Serbian empire seen in the vision never happens.
This is a well described, mainstreamish story, and one that offers a brief if tantalising alt-history vision.³

•

The Saga of Sid by Ernest Hill starts with a vicar watching a christening party from the vestry and thinking quite un-vicar like and borderline misanthropic thoughts before going in to officiate at the service. During this, the baby speaks:

They gathered around: the Jacques, the godparents, the woman next door, Hetty’s parents and old Molly Braddock absent from the cherry-picking with a sprained ankle. He took the child and held it, swathed in its christening robes, over the bowl that now for practical purposes had replaced the ancient Norman font.
“The child’s name?” he whispered.
“They are going to call me Sid,” the baby said, “I don’t like it very much as a name, but if it keeps them happy . . .”  p. 21

After the vicar’s initial irritation at what he presumes is a practical joke, the story moves on to its next scene, an abortive kidnapping attempt by a bell-ringer who overheard the baby, and a passing circus owner to whom he has sold the information. Baby Sid acts dumb at this point and the bell ringer exits stage left, pursued by the circus owner.
The rest of this rambling story charts Sid’s development, and there are subsequently mentions of Asgard, monotheism, and various other subjects. Eventually, his mother takes him to the vicar to be exorcised, whereupon Sid learns he can’t bear to be near mistletoe.
After the exorcism (spoiler) a transparent green flying saucer appears carrying Odin and Frigg, who inform Sid that his body hosts the soul of Baldur, which they rescued from “Hel.” They take Baldur away, leaving Sid’s body behind, which is now a normal infant.
This is a very odd piece and, although it has some interesting parts, they don’t fit together into a coherent or plausible story.

•

Beyond Time’s Aegis by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford begins with what seems to be gibberish:

Time is not merely a dimension measuring the passage of days and nights. Time is a property of the minds of men. And because the race of Man is finite, so too, in a sense, is Time. The present is ever moving to the future, and one day there will come a time when it has run its course. Then, for mankind, there will be no more future.
There will still be days and nights but, for the human race, Time will have stopped. There will be no more progress, no more hope for the future. Time will have exhausted the spirit which makes men build. And then cities will fall, and Man will cease to live—he will only exist.
But there are forces other than Time. And there will always be rebels.  p. 39

Anyway, the rebel mentioned above calls himself the Firefly (“because I reject this world and its torpor, and cast my own light”), and he has an number of adventures in this strange future world while on a quest to find a time walker, a man who Firefly hopes can take him back to the past, and a better life.
Initially Firefly consults a seer called The Red Wolf Queen at an inn; next he talks to a man in the desert who appears to have part of the sun suspended between two towers; then he meets a warrior called the Condor, who has a shield with fine art painted on it, created by the latter’s uncle, to whom the Condor later introduces the Firefly. Then there is a man dancing in the desert who is scared of his own shadow (and which later consumes the man); the Lungfish, who says that he and his kind are a bridge between mankind’s current existence and the new one coming when time finally stops; a religious cult who think the moon brings night; and, finally, a giant who thinks he is God and who makes statues.
Penultimately, the Firefly comes to a village and, in one of the houses, talks to a dwarf who offers him the chance to travel in time. The Firefly accepts the offer and finds himself in a city with many people around him, while he hears the voices of all the characters he has encountered on his quest. When the experience stops he realises the dwarf drugged him.
Finally, the Firefly comes to the Crossroads of the World, a series of metalled roads, and gets lost in the mist. After blundering around for a while, he meets the Guide, who points towards The Peak of the Thunderer. There he finds the The Man Who Walked Through Time, but learns it is only possible to travel forward in time, not back. In the ensuing discussion The Man Who Walked Through Time tells the Firefly that the Lungfish is correct about what man’s next evolution will be, and is part of a colony of mutants helping homo superior to evolve. Firefly refuses to have anything to do with the project, but The Man Who Walked Through Time knows that the Firefly will come back because everyone else in the world is happy except him.
This is, despite the description above, an entertaining enough read, and I was tempted to give it three stars—but there’s no escaping the fact that this story is episodic and far too padded. And God knows what all that allegory and symbolism is about—it’s a pretty typical example of the kind of overblown story you would expect from two smart undergraduates.⁴

•

The Wall by Josephine Saxton has a pretty good blurb from Bonfiglioli (or more likely from Parkhill-Rathbone), “A story as vivid as a Kafka nightmare, and as true as you think.” The piece begins by describing a saucer shaped valley with huge towering mountains at the sides, and a thick wall running through the middle:

It was a very high wall, thirty feet in height, and it was very ancient in its stone, dark blue, hard, impenetrable, but rough and worn. Crystalline almost, its surfaces sprang this way and that, revealing whole lumps of glittering faceted hardness, with smooth places where mosses and orange lichens had got hold; and at its foot many creeping plants; tough twisted vines bearing clusters of ungathered raisins, convolvulus white and pink, and ivy in many colours, thick, glossy and spidery. Here and there stones had fallen from its old structure, two and three feet thick, and in one place, almost halfway across the floor of the valley, there was a hole through the wall, only six inches across its greatest measurement, and three feet from the floor, which was moist red clay on the north side, and dry white sand on the south side. The top of the wall was sealed to all climbers by rows of dreadful spikes which curved in every direction, cruel, needle sharp, glassy metal rapiers set into green bronze. They were impenetrable in every way, these swords, and stood endless guard between north and south.  pp. 72-73

On either side of the wall are a man and a woman, who can only communicate through the hole. The story describes the pair and their love for each other, even though their relationship is restricted to talking and holding hands.
Eventually the man and woman decide to part, and they both move away from the wall to see if they can find other people with whom they can have a normal life. When they move up the slopes of either side of the valley, they meet people of the opposite sex, and make love with them. Afterwards they both look across the valley and see what the other has done, rush back to the wall, and start climbing it so they can be together. At the top of the wall (spoiler) they end up impaled on the spikes and then, at either side of them, they can see the bodies of many other couples along the top of the wall who have come to the same end—something they never noticed before.
After they die the story ends with another couple moving towards the wall.
This story impressed me less this time around than it has on previous readings, but that is probably because part of the story’s power is the final image of the lovers impaled on the top of wall—the effect of this is obviously lessened on the fourth (or fifth?) reading. And there are also parts of the story that felt like they could have done with some polishing. Still, this allegorical fantasy is one of the more notable stories the magazine published, and if you haven’t come across it, it’s worth a read.

•

Yesterdays’ Gardens by Johnny Byrne starts with a young girl pestering her uncle to let her go outside into the garden which, we learn later, is a post-nuclear war wasteland (withered vegetation, the night a “big light” came, etc., etc.):

The child altered carefully the position of a bed. She didn’t appear to hear him. “Why do you never go into the garden?” she said suddenly.
“Gardens are bad for people. They’re bad for the hair, bad for the bone and worse for little children.” Uncle Ernie spoke as if he were remembering a well-remembered lesson. His niece echoed him parrotlike:
.
Little boys and
girls should know
that gardens in
air are bad they
give pain in the
head pain in the
bone and all the
lovely hair is
vanished by the
nasty jealous air
.
“Why is the garden dry and yellow?” She never looked at him when she asked this question. “When I was little it was green and noisy. Why isn’t it noisy now?”  p. 80

The story goes on like this for a while before the girl eventually gets a box she has been repeatedly asking the uncle for, and then talks to (what I presume was) an invisible friend.
Parts of this are reasonably well done but it’s all rather inconsequential, and I didn’t entirely understand what happens at the end (if anything).

•

The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann concludes in this issue with a much shorter part (42 pp.) than the first, and starts with Tanaquil paralysed and surrounded by cats that Vel has put under a spell, including her pet Bast:

She was not surprised when he sprang onto the couch and placed an affectionate paw on her arm. Often he slept beside her. Often he laid his head against her cheek. Dearest Bast, your fur is warmth on a cold night. Friendliness. Familiarity. But where is Arnth? Where is my father? They too need your protection.
He prodded her with his paw. Then, foot over foot, he mounted her body and peered into her eyes. He was a heavy animal; it was hard to breathe with the weight of his pressing claws. She felt the heat of his breath and smelled an acrid, salty scent which she did not recognise. Not only his scent was different. He looked somehow—alien. Perhaps she had frightened him with her stillness. On other nights she had cradled him in her arms. He peered at her with nothing which she could read. Slowly, with deliberate grace, like a trained leopard in one of the great circuses at Tarquinia, he raised his paw.
Then she recognized the smell on his fur. It was blood. The prodding paw, the slow advance, and now, the fixedly staring, almost hypnotic eyes, were gestures shrewdly calculated to tease and torture her. He did not intend to hurry his play. His eyes looked as cold as a topaz under the water. Perhaps they had always been cold. But now she was able to read them without the sentimentalizing haze of her affection, and she grasped the terrible truth that love can never be compelled, from man, from sprite, from beast; that one who loves, however she longs for requital, however long she waits, may receive in return the reverse of what she gives, the dark side of the moon.  pp. 84-85

Vegoia comes to Tanaquil and Arnth’s rescue, and tells them that she only meant the cats to disable the guards so Vel could escape—but now there has been a massacre in the town. She tells Arnth that he must take Tanaquil away before the slaves wake and take their revenge on any of the masters who are still alive.
After the drugs eventually wear off the pair have a difficult time getting out of the town, and face abuse and threats on the way out, but eventually reach the forest. There, they meet Vegoia again. Much to Tanaquil’s chagrin (she now harbours carnal thoughts for Arnth), she watches as he and Vegoia embrace.
After this dramatic start to the second instalment, the rest is a downhill slide: Vegoia and Arnth spend the night together, and then she sends him to make love to Tanaquil. The visit is a disaster, with Tanaquil telling him she doesn’t want Vegoia’s “leavings.” Then Vel appears and attacks her, but dies when he jumps on a hatchet that Tanaquil picks up to defend herself.
The rest of the story is even gloomier: Tanaquil grieves (unsure whether this is for Vel, or her father, or both), and then Vegoia falls ill: it soon becomes apparent she is dying. Vegoia later takes Arnth to a clearing in the forest that is special to her and, after she explains what is happening to her, she sends him away. That night a corn-sprite summons him, and he canoes across the lake to talk to her spirit, and later finds her body.
A month later, Arne and Tanaquil leave for Rome and, as the last passage shows, they are now a couple:

“I’ll go to Rome,” she said. “I understand that there’s a shortage of women. Didn’t the first Romans have to steal their mates from the Sabines?”
“But that was a long time ago.”
“How do you know there isn’t still a shortage?”
“That’s their problem,” said Arnth firmly. “You’re with me.”
“Am I, Arnth?”
She placed a hand on his arm. It was a comfortable hand. What had Vegoia said? “It is the measure of a man that he can move from woodfire to hearthfire without bitterness, without reproaching the gods, his enemies, or himself.” He would never forget that brief, bright burning in a wintry forest, the blue and the amber.
But hearthfires were also good.  p. 126

This is an enjoyable novel, but it is nowhere as good as The Blue Monkeys, and the first part is better than this second—especially as the tragedy in the latter seems a little overdone. There is no particular explanation for Vegoia’s demise (although she has a heart at the end, which may explain matters). Maybe Tanaquil’s romantic rival just needed to disappear for plot reasons.⁵

•••

This issue’s Cover by Keith Roberts is one of his better pieces and, if you can drag your eyes away from the face in the painting (which I finally managed to do after a number of decades), you can see the magpie with the lizard in its beak lower left, which is part of a scene from the Brian W. Aldiss story.
SF or Not SF? A Letter from a Reader by Brian Stableford takes up the editorial space with one of those “Whither SF” letters. It starts with some pigeon holing before moving on to the magic of SF and its sense of wonder.
Letter From a Reader by Kenneth F. Slater is another long letter at the back of the issue (you wonder if Bonfiglioli has realised he can fill small holes in the line-up with reader’s correspondence). Slater’s letter is of more interest than Stableford’s, and it makes a number of points. First off he has this to say about the end of the pulps:

I must start by disagreeing with one point you make—hack writing was not the death of the pulps—the hack writer is still with us, ploughing the same old furrow for the pb editor. The pulps died because of a triple factor of economics (that old pulp paper just wasn’t that cheap any more), and competition from three sources—the ‘comic’ books—the One-eyed Monster—and the paperback. Incidentally, the hack still plies his trade for the comics, which are read by the same age-groups (the ten-year-old to the thirty-year-olds . . . and year by year that thirty goes up) who before the second WW were the main pulp market.  p. 127

After this he talks about the survival of the SF magazines, literary excellence vs. readability, and the overuse of certain tropes (“the overworked holocaust”).

•••

There is nothing particularly outstanding in this issue (although the Saxton is noteworthy), but the overall quality is much better than normal.  ●

____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 268-270) confirms that The Day of the Doomed King is “a retelling of a Serbian legend” (he gleaned this information from Aldiss’s The Twinkling of An Eye) and says:

It’s not my cup of tea but nonetheless very good, one of the early stories in which Aldiss began to shake the dust of SF as he had known it off his boots and to head for more ambiguous territory.  p. 269

I’d suggest this process had been going on for at least a couple of years by this point (Shards, Man on Bridge, Pink Plastic Gods, Man in his Time, etc.).
As for the others, he relays Bonfiglioli’s summary of reader comments (in Science Fantasy #80) about the Saxton, says the Hill is “better and funnier than [its] description makes it sound,” and adds that the Byrne is “literary and surreal” and “a return to form.” (He also notes that this is Byrne’s last appearance in the magazine and that he “would soon be snared by television.”)
He covers Mackintosh & Stableford’s Beyond Time’s Aegis in more detail, noting that it was “published when Brian Stableford was seventeen or so, [and] is readable though irritating.” He adds that each of the encounters is “more colorful and allegorical than the one before.” Boston says that he suspects the story was influenced by John Brunner’s Earth is But a Star.
He also thinks that Robert’s cover painting is his “most attractive [. . .] yet.”

Graham Hall (Vector #36, November 1965, p. 12) opens with the comment, “Apart from, or perhaps because of, the inexplicable absence of Kyril Bonfiglioli, this is a well-balanced issue”—before later ending the review by saying that the issue is “a feather in Bonfiglioli’s cap.”
In between he doesn’t do much more than label the stories (Aldiss, “fantasy in in its purest and most lyrical sense;” Saxton, “a story of frustrated love with its own wild logic;” Swann, “a flowery, verbose novel,” etc.). He does say that that Ernest Hill’s The Saga of Sid is “beautiful mixture of Norse legends and straight humour, expertly stirred,” that Mackintosh & Stableford’s Beyond Time’s Aegis “introduces a plethora of unforgettable characters” during its “allegorical wandering,” and that Johnny Byrne’s Yesterday’s Gardens is “far more mature than any of [his] other tales.”

2. My previous scores for the stories were (current scores in brackets):
The Day of the Doomed King by Brian W. Aldiss ∗ (∗∗∗)
The Saga of Sid by Ernest Hill ∗ (∗)
Beyond Time’s Aegis by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford ∗ (∗∗+)
The Wall by Josephine Saxton ∗∗ (∗∗∗+)
Yesterdays’ Gardens by Johnny Byrne ∗ (∗)
The Weirwoods (Part 2 of 2) by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)

3. Aldiss’s The Eyes of the Doomed King had a sequel, The Eyes of the Blind King, in SF Impulse #9, November 1966 (were it not for the name change in four issues time, this issue would have been Science Fantasy #90). Presumably these stories were the by-products of his travel book, Cities and Stones: A Traveller’s Yugoslavia (1966).

4. According to his Wikipedia page, Brian Stableford graduated with a degree in biology from the University of York in 1969, so I assume Beyond Time’s Aegis was written during his first year there.
A later novel, Firefly, was, according to ISFDB, “a rewrite of Stableford’s first, previously unpublished novel, a fix-up with his first published novelette, Beyond Time’s Aegis.”

5. The Ace Books volume of the Swann’s The Weirwoods (1967) states, “A slightly different version of this novel was serialized In Science Fantasy #77, 78, and is copyright ©, 1965, by Science Fantasy.”
I didn’t look at the text in detail but there is a slight OCR word count difference in the different versions (the number in brackets is the word count difference in the book versus serial version): Chapter 1 (+25), 2 (+124), 3 (+120), 4 (+83), 5 (+71), 6 (+125), 7 (-23), 8 (-24), 9 (-3), 10 (-56).
After reading this novel I went through the ISFDB listings for Swann’s novels, and was struck by how many of his books (until some of the relatively recent Wildside Press editions) only had a single English printing.*
I also note that all of Swann’s books bar one, Queens Walk in the Dusk, were paperback originals, so it is perhaps no wonder his work is almost entirely forgotten (I’d also add that I’m surprised at his omission from the Gollancz Masterworks of Fantasy series—especially his novel Wolfwinter).
* Queens Walk in the Dusk (1977), Lady of the Bees (1976), The Goat Without Horns (1971), Wolfwinter (1972), How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974), The Not-World (1975), Will-O-the Wisp (1976), The Minikins of Yam (1976), The Tournament of Thorns (1976), The Gods Abide (1976), The Dolphin and the Deep (collection, 1968), Where is the Bird of Fire (collection, 1970).
A handful of the others only had one subsequent reprinting or omnibus edition, and only a couple were published in both the USA and the UK. There were a small number of foreign language editions.  ●

Summary:
A pretty good issue, with a better than good first instalment of Thomas Burnett Swann’s mythic fantasy The Weirwoods, and Philip Wordley’s very good Goodnight Sweet Prince, a time-travel story set in Shakespeare’s time and which features the man himself.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 265 of 365)
Graham Hall, Vector #35, October 1965, p. 21

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:²
The Weirwoods (Part 1 of 2) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗+
Ragtime • short story by Pamela Adams ∗∗∗
Green Goblins Yet • short story by W. Price –
State of Mind • short story by E. C. Tubb ∗∗
The Foreigner • short story by Johnny Byrne ∗∗
Goodnight, Sweet Prince • novelette by Philip Wordley ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Agosta Morol
Editorial • by J. Parkhill-Rathbone

_____________________

The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann dominates this issue, with the first part of this mythological fantasy taking up almost two-thirds of the magazine’s space (p. 4 to p. 75 of 128 pp.). The story begins with a leisurely description of the Etruscan town of Sutrium and the nearby Weirwoods (and their human and non-human inhabitants), before detailing the uneasy relationship that exists between these two:

In return for the right to trade in the market place, the Weir Ones allowed the Sutrii access through the Weirwoods to Viterbo and Volsinii and other Etruscan cities of the north. Long ago, it was said, they had also offered access to the heart of the forest and their own sylvan cities. But the ancestors of the present Sutrii had scorned the offer and passed through the forest with the look of aristocrats in a foul-smelling compound of slaves. Thus, the Weir Ones no longer sought them as friends. Still, they allowed them to follow the one path—the Road, it was called—and claimed in return the right to trade.
In the market place, the Weir Ones seemed shy, halting, and clumsy; in the forest, when glimpsed from the road, they seemed to have put on strength, like a god who had donned a mantle of invulnerability. The backs of the Centaurs arched in manly pride and their clattering hooves became the beat of drums; the horns of the Fauns curved like daggers of bone. Such glimpses were not reassuring to those who travelled the road. If riding on horseback, they spurred their mounts to a gallop. If riding in carriages, they shut their eyes and imagined the forest to be inhabited solely by naked and compliant nymphs. As a matter of fact, there were many nymphs in the forest, the female Water Sprites, usually naked, always compliant to males of their own race, but liking the Etruscans no better than a dolphin likes a shark.  p. 5-6

Into this mix enters Lars Velcha, a nobleman travelling through the forest to Sutrium with his daughter Tanaquil. When he needs water he breaks the rules by going into the forest, and sees what he initially thinks is a sixteen-year-old boy sleeping in the sun by the shore of a lake. When Lars sees webbed feet, pointed ears, and soft fins at the boy’s temples, he realises it is a water sprite. He stuns the creature with a blow, and takes him as a slave and playmate for his daughter Tanaquil. The rest of the novel flows from this fatal act.
The next part of the story introduces the various other characters from whose point of view the story is mostly told: apart from Tanaquil, the daughter, and Vel, the water sprite (who turns out to be a semi-wild, sexual and amoral creature), we are introduced to Arnth, an itinerant musician whose cart is pulled by a one-eyed bear called Ursus. After Arnth plays for Lars and Tanaquil one evening he learns of Vel’s plight, and vows to free him. This leads Arnth, after he talks to Vel about smuggling him out of the city—unlikely to succeed given the guards on the gate—to a lake in the forest, and to another of the story’s major characters, Vegoia, the matriarch of the water sprites and a sorceress.
After Arnth and Vegoia discuss Vel’s plight they eventually sleep together, although not until after much discussion about the matter:

There was something decidedly pleasant about the prospect of claiming his guest-rights. But [Arnth] made it an inflexible rule never to accept the more compromising favours of young women, who, he had learned to his sorrow, held out a cornucopia with one hand and with the other, a net.  p. 39
.
It was time to explain his philosophy. “Everyone knows that women exact a price for their favours. They can’t help it—it’s the way they’re made. In the market place or in the bedroom, they’re always making bargains. That’s their privilege. As for me, I’m too poor to pay in coins and too free to pay with my liberty. I travel. I intend to keep on travelling. In a word, I don’t buy.”  p. 41

At one point in his life Swann was engaged to be married; then he wasn’t. You wonder to what extent that situation is reflected in the above and other similar comments.
Of course, the pair’s brief encounter does not go smoothly, and Arnth subsequently manages to upset Vegoia—and so during the next night he is on the floor. They do talk though and, when Arnth asks her why she doesn’t have a heart, there is a passage where she tells him the myth of the Builder, which has the Builder create the sprites late on the fifth day of Creation and not complete them. This digression eventually concludes with a final question from Arnth, and Vegoia’s answer:

“And you never miss having a heart?”
“I think,” she said, “that it is better to have no heart, than to have one and not use it.”  p. 51

After this romantic interlude, the final part of this instalment sees Vegoia going to town on market day. There she does tricks—which captivate the town’s serval cats—and is seen by Tanaquil, who correctly assumes she is Vegoia. The pair talk in a secluded temple, and (spoiler) Vegoia gives Tanaquil cats-eye jewels to give to Vel to assist his escape. However, when Tanaquil later passes on the jewels to Vel, he is as wild and disrespectful as ever.
That night, Arnth (who has also returned to the town to ensure Tanaquil’s safety during whatever plot is afoot) performs once again for her and her father. Vel plies the company with a heady wine.
Later, Arnth sleeps at the foot of Tanaquil’s bed but wakes up paralyzed to see Vel and the town’s cats arrive. After Vel takes Arnth back to the slaves’ quarters he dispatches the cats on their mission. When Vegoia finally arrives she tells Arnth the cats were only meant to kill the guards, but she finds Vel has unleashed them on the town.
This novel has some lovely description, lines, and dialogue, and it gains an added depth by echoing some of this throughout the story (hearts and nets make more than one appearance)—but it doesn’t, at least not in this part, reach the heights of his first novel, The Blue Monkeys (The Day of the Minotaur). That said, Swann’s previous novel begun in a light, gentle way before becoming much darker later on—so maybe this will also become more substantial in its second part. Nonetheless, it’s still pretty good stuff, and this latter criticism is only by way of comparison.

•

Ragtime by Pamela Adams starts with a couple renting a houseboat beside an island. The landlord tells them that the island has a strange history involving a missing man, and the sound of music from the 1920s.
Later that evening, after the couple have settled into the houseboat, they hear music, and then a rowing boat with several party goers passes by. The occupants offer to take the couple to the party on the island, but the wife (and narrator) has earlier twisted her ankle, so doesn’t go. However, she encourages her husband to attend. The next morning he hasn’t returned.
The story then skips forward a year in time, and the wife is back on the boat writing to her brother. In this account (spoiler) she lays out a theory about different time tracks that cross—and where time passes at different speeds. As she finishes her account, she hears music, and hopes to be reunited with her husband.
This is a pretty slight and straightforward story but it has an atmospheric ending that worked for me. I also got the impression that this piece is from an experienced writer, although I couldn’t find any other work by her.

•

Green Goblins Yet by W. Price, on the other hand, struck me as a refugee from the slushpile. It begins with a scientist from the future coming into cafe and telling two men (one of whom is the narrator) that he needs help to find his goblin. After some unconvincing vernacular (““Gobble off,” says Spike, “Me an’ Jigsy ain’t interested. Go peddle your vacuum cleaners somewhere else.”), the narrator drives him to Kinder Scout where several sheep have reportedly been mauled by a strange creature.
After losing the scientist in the wilds, the narrator eventually meets the goblin—revealed as a Venusian—and it speaks to him using the scientist’s voice. Then it gets on a flying saucer and leaves.
The ending makes no sense at all. A TBSF.³

•

State of Mind by E. C. Tubb is a competently done piece of Dickian paranoia about a man who starts to suspect his wife is an alien before (spoiler) he eventually kills her. At one point in the story he has a stroke during one of his belligerent outbursts and a doctor later warns him that:

“The brain’s a funny thing, you know, Henry. Sometimes it gets its wires crossed. If that happens don’t let it throw you.”  p. 98

I’m not sure this SF, but it is an okay read regardless.

•

The Foreigner by Johnny Byrne starts with a lodger in a guesthouse who hears a huge crash from upstairs. When he goes to the flat to investigate the story takes on a vaguely Kuttnerish air:

My eyes took in instantly the incredible confusion of the room and came to rest on the action that was taking place about six inches below the ceiling. Two high stepladders supported a wide heavy board on which a figure lay rocking gently from side to side. On my entrance the figure jerked up startled, caught its head smartly on the ceiling, lost its balance and with a shriek of fear and surprise toppled to land awkwardly on the floor. It groaned once and lay still. There was a nasty silence.
From what I could see I judged it to be a man. He appeared to be dressed only in a mattress. It was wrapped around him under the arms and reached to just below the knee. It was held in place by a profusion of straps, buckles and hooks. From inside the mattress a long snarl of cheap, plastic-covered flex ran to a plug in the skirting-board. A faint sound of radio crackle came from the mattress and, from time to time, a blue spark.  p. 99

It soon becomes obvious that the man in the mattress is a time traveller who is trying to get back home by “impacting” while operating the electronics surrounding him. When he sees a car crash outside (spoiler) the story proceeds to its obvious conclusion.
This, for all its slightness, is entertainingly enough told.

•

Goodnight, Sweet Prince by Philip Wordley⁴ is the fourth (and sadly last) of this writer’s contributions to Science Fantasy and it starts with time-travelling movie crew in Shakespearian times:

“Yes, yes, I know. But what I want is colour. Get that? Colour.” And Art Kirbitz’s horny little mitts grabbed a handful of none-too-fresh Tudor air and flung it skywards.
His director, Harry Gorrin, followed it with his eyes, as if expecting it to burst into iridescent bubbles and float over the lousy thatched roofs in a glory of Kirbitz-Kolor. If it had, it wouldn’t have surprised Harry.
“But, leader,” he ventured diffidently. “Surely authenticity is more—”
“Authenticity Schmorthenticity snorted Art, adroitly dodging a hurtling mess of ullage from a bedroom window.
“That’s a hunk of fruit salad and you know it. So we should be authentic? You want we should play the arthouses with this one? We’re playing to people, boy, not crumbs who grow hair on their nuts and still read books.”  p. 107

After this fairly typical SF scene the story switches to its other subplot, which has William Shakespeare writing an impassioned letter to his wife, Anne Hathaway, confessing his adultery:

Two tragedies together are too much for a man, even if he writes one and lives the other. Our tragedy is over now, Anne, so I can write you this letter; the tragedy I wrote—the play founded on Kydd’s old “Hamlet”—is finished too.
Richard, Gus and all the dear lads (Ned too, Anne) are learning their scripts in the tiring-room as I write this. I can hear Hal Condell’s stutter, Gus’s sage Polonius, and dear Dick (who longs to see you again, by the bye)—his voice soars into the rafters and comes down full of sunbeams.
[. . .]
So, my darling and my wife, one tragedy comes to the boards as the other leaves the bed. You have long known how it was with me, Anne, even though you have been so silent. You are a comely grave thing, wife, and when you say nothing, it is because there is too much to say. What was in your heart Anne, sitting at home and knowing? Did you feel the stranger in your bed? When Hamlet died, did you think I would draw to you again? God knows I tried; but I could not weep and gather you to me, and God forgive me, I could not love. Did you know that, Anne? I think you did, and knowing it, did you sit like Penelope in the fable, loving and waiting? There is a queen in my play, Anne; when her husband is murdered she marries the killer and takes him to her bed. Who killed me, Anne? Do you know? And if you had known, would you have opened your arms to my murderer? My murderer has been a woman, Anne, black as lust, white as leprosy and hot and rank as hell. I am telling you this, to show you her true picture; or have you seen it in my eyes as we were abed? She killed me, Anne; she killed you and me, and I went gladly to death, cursing to death, fighting, yielding, I know not what. You went to your death, the death of our love, because you had to. You had no choice.
Now, I am back from the grave like stinking Lazarus, hot from a black bed, and I must turn Orpheus and fetch you into the light again—if you wish to share it with me. Anne, may you and God forgive me, for this is a heavy tale and harder to tell as I know not what ending you will give it for me. I have wished for death to stay my telling you.  pp. 108-109

The rest of the story alternates between time traveller Harry’s problems with the production, and Shakespeare’s long and agonising confessional. There are some great sections in both of these strands: in the first there is, among other things, the entertaining banter between a teenage prostitute looking for trade and the uninterested Harry—who then suddenly realises that she is only fourteen years old, and needs to eat. He gives her two crowns, and hopes that the money will give her a chance to improve her life. In the second Shakespeare gives an account of the performance of one of his plays, the lords and ladies that attend, a fight among the groundlings afterwards, and the woman he becomes infatuated with:

I was left on the quiet stage. The floorboards were worn smooth by the long scuffling of buskins, and I sat down and ran my hands over the joins, trying to find a splinter. I found one. That was when she laughed. She was still in the gallery, a pale and eager face with her mouth half-open and her eyes burning into my cod-piece like coals.
There was a young bright lord with red hair and a pink fool’s face standing behind her. He seemed to want to go, but she would not. And how could she? We were joined by an invisible chain, and must stay where we were or draw nearer. My eyes locked with her black gaze and my heart was offal again, as before the play, stinking dead meat alive with worms of sheer naked hunger.
She came down to the stage. I followed the ripple of her thighs under the farthingale as she held it up and back in mock modesty to climb the steps to me.
“The lone player. Where is your speech? Give it to me,” she said. There was laughter in her voice and her mouth turned up at one comer. Her teeth were blackened, her face blotched, bosom too full and head too small. Her nose was too upturned and her hair was black straw, tousled as if straight from a pillow. And every movement and every look of her unwinking black eyes reeked of lust. I desired her more than any woman made by God, and I still do. Foolishly I stood there. The young kneebender turned on his heel and went. He said something, but I don’t know what.
I started the first thing that came into my head, a speech of Hieronymo’s when he plays mad. Up and down I strutted. Will Hemmynges came up to see what the noise was, said “Sweet Jesu!” and went back. Higher and higher, faster and faster, the whirling words came. She never moved her eyes from me. There was contempt in them. There was greed and want in them. I was nothing and she wanted me. I was a hired player. Give the word and I ranted. Put away the props and I was done. But it pleased her to hire me, and have me as well. I drew my lath sword and had at the air in my madness (mine, not Hieronymo’s now). She had stepped nearer and it caught the lacing of her bodice. I tore it away unthinking and her breasts were bare. Oh Anne, in God’s name why do I tell you this to murder you still more? She was a whore, I am a fornicator, and there’s an end to it. Must I twist your guts as she twists mine? I am trying to purge myself, Anne, and there is no-one but you and God who can shrive me. God won’t if you don’t.
I took her there on the stage, and neither of us cared who saw.  pp. 118-119

The two parts of the story eventually dovetail when Art takes Harry to a replica of the Globe that he has had built at Chiswick. There, Art realises he has left the scripts in the future, so he dispatches Harry to get a copy of the play.
Harry travels to Shakespeare’s Globe. There he looks through a window and sees the great man at his desk. When Shakespeare leaves the room, Harry sneaks in and steals a pile of papers, and then retires to a nearby tavern to read them. When he finds a letter in among the papers he reads it, and then decides to return the stolen goods.
On his return to the theatre Shakespeare watches Harry from the darkened corner of the room as he returns the papers to the desk; Shakespeare surprises and then questions Harry, and the two men end up talking. Harry eventually tells Shakespeare he is from the future, and the latter, after accepting the fact far too easily, impishly asks if he is remembered. When Harry tells him that everyone knows his name, Shakespeare asks, more seriously, “with joy or sorrow?”
The story ends with Harry agreeing to take Shakespeare’s letter to his wife, and the last lines of the story make it clear that the letter is not a confessional we have been reading, but a different letter full of news and gossip and homesick longing; Shakespeare thanks God “he had not written as he had thought.”
This is an ambitious time-travel story that paints a convincing portrait of Shakespeare and his times. It is a huge shame that this superlative piece is not better known, and that we heard no more from this promising writer.

•••

The Cover on this issue is again by Agosta Morol: I’m still not a fan—the last one was dark and muddy, and this one looks like a crude colour sketch (look at the figures in the middle of the piece for example).
This issue’s Editorial by J. Parkhill-Rathbone is prefaced by a brief note explaining why the magazine’s hard-working assistant editor is providing the text:

Mr. Bonfiglioli is in Venice observing heavenly bodies from a little observatory on the Lido.  p. 2

Parkhill-Rathbone provides an essay about what the future will be like (I think—it’s a bit of a ramble).

•••

A pretty good issue, with a good to very good serial from Swann to start, and a very good novelette from Wordley to finish. Even the filler in the middle (with one exception) isn’t bad.  ●

____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 265-268) says that Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Weirwoods “is about the best of his stories yet for Science Fantasy [. . .] and as enjoyable as anything I’ve read in the magazine.” He goes on to say that “The Weirwoods is by far the most sexually explicit story to have appeared in this magazine, though in 1965 that’s still not too explicit (on the other hand, it’s inexplicit at some length).” I’d have thought that title would have gone to Thom Keyes and his earlier Period of Gestation.
Boston also says:

Swann conveys a strong sense of displacement into a world where people, and not-quite-people, like the Water Sprites, think differently from us. His world is vividly realized through a wealth of sensory and social detail conveyed economically and unobtrusively. This is fantasy that is High without being Jumped-Up.  p. 266

He also liked Philip Wordley’s Goodnight Sweet Prince, calling it a “forgotten gem” and a “brilliant little tour de force, made by the sections comprising Shakespeare’s letter.” He concludes by saying that it “is shameful that it’s now totally forgotten.” Well, not in his book, and not here.
As to the rest of the stories, Boston thinks they are “well executed but not too interesting,” although he doesn’t seem to like Johnny Byrne’s story much, stating:

[Byrne] has contributed several very literate and surreal pieces to the magazine, but now he seems to have decided to write SF stories and start from scratch. This reads like a contrived beginner’s piece.  p. 267

Graham Hall (Vector #35, October 1965, p. 21) says that he personally doesn’t like Swann’s work, and finds his “flowery, verbose style is well-enough executed, but [. . .] stodgy and uncaptivating.” He is much more positive about Philip Wordley’s story:

A bright note to be found in this issue is that Philip Wordley finally fulfills the promise shown in earlier stories. His “Goodnight, Sweet Prince” makes a mockery of most tired time-travel stories; what author would dare to write half a story in the form of a letter from William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway? And how many authors could succeed in carrying it off? Coupled with his idea of films taken on time-location, this is one of the best of the new crop of stories. Along with Pippin Graham’s [Hilary Bailey’s] “In Reason’s Ear” (SFY 73) it is the best that Bonfiglioli has published.  p. 21

Hall adds that Price’s Green Goblins Yet is “an amusing tale, slightly spoilt by its narration by an illiterate teenager. But anyone using the phrase “in a voice all Network Three and rich Abernathy biscuits” deserves to be read.” He goes on to say that he found Adams “ghost story with an attempted SF twist” “rather weary.” Tubb “shows his limitations as a writer with a study of a man going slowly insane,” and Johnny Byrne “produces a story which, for once, deserves printing.”
Hall concludes that the issue is worth buying for the Wordley story, and that “Science Fantasy tends to have a much wider variation in standard than New Worlds. Science Fantasy prints the best and the worst—a pity it can’t just print the best.”

2. My previous historical scores for the stories were (current assessment in brackets):
The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗∗ (now ∗∗∗+)
Ragtime by Pamela Adams ∗∗ (∗∗∗)
Green Goblins Yet by W. Price – (-)
State of Mind by E. C. Tubb – (∗∗)
The Foreigner by Johnny Byrne ∗∗∗ (∗∗)
Goodnight, Sweet Prince by Philip Wordley ∗∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗∗)

3. TBSF=Typical Bonfiglioli Space Filler.

4. There was some discussion about Philip Wordley’s identity on one of my lists. One contributor pointed out that only six people called Philip Wordley were born in the UK in the period 1916-2006; four were born after 1954 (therefore too young) which left two people: Philip H. Wordley, born Lesk (this is probably Leek, as below), Staffordshire, 3Q 1934, and Philip J. Wordley, born Crosby, Glamorgan, 2Q 1946.
There were seven births prior to 1916, but only two after 1887, Philip Wordley, born Leek, Staffordshire, 2Q 1902, and Philip Millington Wordley, born Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 1Q 1906. Died Newcastle under Lyme, 4Q 1968.
The ages of these people at the time of the story’s publication were (approx.) 31, 19, 63, and 59 years old. The general consensus was that the writer was probably the 31-year-old Philip H. Wordley, who sadly collapsed and then drowned in the River Tiverton in 2014 (there is a news report here). I’m not entirely sure about that, and think there is an equal chance that it was one of the two older men (I don’t think the story is the kind of thing that the fourth candidate, a 19-year-old, could write).
I wish I started doing this blog 20 years ago, when all these people were still alive and you could track them down and ask them a questions about their brief writing careers (most obviously, why did someone so talented as yourself stop writing?)  ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 by John Boston & Damien Broderick (Amazon)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli

Fiction:
A Case of Identity • short story by Kenneth Bulmer ∗
God Killer • short story by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗
The Poachers • novelette by James Parkhill-Rathbone [as by James Rathbone] ∗∗∗
Building Blocks • short story by David Beech
Dear Aunty • short story by Daphne Castell ∗∗∗
A Dish of Devils • short story by James Goddard ∗
No Moon To-night! • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss [as by John Runciman]
Unto All Generations • short story by Paul Jents ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Roger Harris
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Our Cover
Advanced Intelligence • coming next issue
Competition Notice

_____________________

Bonfiglioli’s second issue starts off with yet another story that appears to have come from the deepest recesses of an author’s trunk. Kenneth Bulmer’s A Case of Identity starts with a police inspector investigating the murder of a young woman in the countryside. Apart from the murderer having vanished into thin air, there have been other odd occurrences: ravaged sheep, a line of holes in the ground made by an unknown machine, etc.
After his enquiries, a search of open country by the army, and a further assault on a patrolling farmer by a “dark shape,” etc., the climax of the story takes place at an isolated farmhouse. The Inspector sees a shining light in the (by then) burning house that looks like an open refrigerator: I presume the dark shape was an alien from another world/dimension/etc., but who would know?
God Killer is by another established writer, John T. Phillifent (better known as John Rackham in the UK), and this talking heads story is probably another trunk piece. A vicar who has lost his belief in God is approached after a Sunday service by a man and his two flunkies. He tells the vicar he wants to mind-scan him to get his idea of God, and then combine it those of many others. Then the man can use his machine to generate the opposite image and eradicate the diety. It has a suitably pious ending.
The Poachers by James Parkhill-Rathbone is a first sale that provides a breath of fresh air after the previous two stories—although not literally, as it concerns undersea farmers in a future over-populated Earth. It starts with Jim Pollock, who comes across miners drilling next to the aquatic settlement’s farm land and, in the process, blowing sediment over their weed farms. He asks the miners to desist, but they rudely refuse. He reports back to his colleague, and they set up blowers to do the same to the miners. They narrowly miss being caught by one of their magnetic grapples.
After the pair attends a council meeting at Triton (their undersea city) a number of ships go out to reconnect the blowers to the cables, which the miners have cut in the meantime. The situation escalates.
Running parallel to this is the work that Jim’s wife Freida has been doing with fish, a basic form of mind-control device for fish shoals, as he learns at dinner:

They ate in the glow from fish-lamps, hundreds of tiny luminescent organisms stimulated electronically from the centre of each bowl, casting a gentler radiance than the ordinary lighting. It was the normal light for love-making, but for them both at the moment it was more a symbol of their emotional unity, like the wedding-rings of the old days: there was no time to make love. Frieda suddenly began to steer the conversation, and Pollock watched her with ill-concealed amusement as she brought up the guidance of shoals, her pet subject. Torn between concern for her husband and the stage her work in the lab had reached, she was obviously working up to one of those triumphant statements of hers, in a deceptively calm tone of voice, as she tried to keep down her excitement. He gave her the opening she wanted, and she plunged in:
“We’ve got it this time, darling—a method of affecting the fish brain. We’ve had a proper circus in the big tank. The trouble is, it only affects the more complex brains; it’s no good on fry, either. With some of our equipment, you can be a proper fish-herd—move your shoal where you like without any trouble.”
“Sounds pretty good,” agreed Pollock. “Better than what we’ve got, anyhow. So this is what you’ve been keeping a secret.”
“Well, look at it, darling. It sounds a bit unlikely as a project. We’ve done it now, and nobody will be able to say it can’t be done and wasn’t worth our trying. Proper scientific spirit you need in my job . . . And an understanding husband.”
Pollock leaned over and kissed her. “You’ve been acting a bit odd lately. So that’s what it was about.”
Frieda left with: “There’s a carp named after you in that tank. I make it work harder than the others—oh!”
The rest was lost in a tussle. p. 42-43

As you can probably gather (spoiler) the device is used to end the conflict with the miners. This is a somewhat clunky deus ex machina ending, but it is mostly a well done and readable piece, and head and shoulders above the previous two. A pity that there weren’t other later stories in the magazine from this writer.¹
Building Blocks by David Beech starts with a discussion between a husband and wife about an undisclosed problem with newspapers and magazines that is affecting children: they resolve to keep their son Peter away from them. Needless to say he finds a pile of newspapers hidden in the house and, while reading one, a building block on legs appears and talks to him. He is led underneath the newspaper and finds that now he too has the body of a yellow building block. In this strange world there there are various colours and shapes of blocks/people there, mostly organised into four Empires, and they either fight/defend themselves from each other, or build towers to reach the top of a wall that surrounds them on all sides.
This allegorical interlude ends when Peter’s mother picks him up in our world, upset that he has been reading a newspaper. The last inexplicable paragraph has Peter go to the sideboard, light up a cigarette, and pour himself a whiskey. A twee shading to baffling piece.
Dear Aunty by Daphne Castell² is another début, and a promising one. It starts with Henry, the editor of a small magazine, at a party. An exchange he has with one of his writers illustrates the tone of the story:

Bouncing round, he saw Dick Hayman, correctly dressed for the occasion with a blonde and a bottle of Riesling.
“Henry, you old devil, how’s every little thing? Fatter than ever, eh, I can see that. No wonder, sitting around on your butt, while better men toil like galleyslaves for you.” Dick was already a little drunk, and apparently bent on improving his condition.
Henry’s good manners, hammered into him by a fond father at an early age, did not desert him. “Could be worse, Dick,” he replied, baring his teeth in a polite, if mirthless smile. “How’s that article on bribery in local bowls matches coming along? It should be a fizzer—aimed right at the great beating heart of the nation, eh?”
“Have to wait for it, chum. I’m busy doing a spot of research on bribery and its effects on the motivations of sex.” Dick prodded the blonde affectionately in a pneumatic section of her anatomy. She cooed at him, and batted both eyelids.
“That’s roughly what you said a fortnight ago,” complained Henry. “God knows I can’t stand the bilge you produce, but I can’t keep ‘Gaiety’ running with all its pages blank, just because my writers are feeling the urge of Nature. Last week we had to shove in a reprint of ‘The Englishwoman: Is She Really Frigid?,’ instead of Bart’s new expose of the call-girl racket in civil service offices, because Bart had left for the Bermudas with one of the call-girls.”
“Lucky Bart!” murmured Dick. “Oh, well, I suppose ‘Gaiety’ has its place in the scheme of things.”
He told Henry what he thought that place was, and the blonde squealed, “Ooh, you!”

Politically incorrect and dated perhaps, but lively.
Henry is looking for a woman to write an agony column for the magazine, and receives a suggestion from the hostess that he use a woman called Gala Dysico. He is later told by a number of people that “everyone knows Gala.” In the following days, and when all other possibilities are exhausted, he ends up going to see her:

Miss Dysico was perhaps 55 or 60, and well nourished. Her hair had been dyed a metallic green, and most of her visible teeth (a great many were visible in that welcoming smile) had been stopped with gold. She was hung with layers of mauve draperies, festooned with strings of clashing beads. Her fingernails were long and silvered, and she carried a long black cigarette holder. Her eyes, however, were wonderful, warm and violet and enormous. p. 74

During their conversation, Henry finds she has the answers to all his personal problems, or manages to make them seem irrelevant. He hires her and in the following months her columns are a huge success and Henry gets a raise. He uses the money to take a short holiday abroad, but trouble awaits him when he gets back:

He returned from the delights of sunshine, sparkling blue seas, and beaches full of exotic and lightly-clad beauties, just in time to correct the galley-proofs of the latest issue of ‘Gaiety.’ He was, in fact, stretching out his hand for them, when the telephone rang.
“Aye, well, Mr. Persimmon, ye see, there’s suthin’ gey wrang wi’ they galley-proofs,” said a voice. It was Mr. Carfrae, the foreman of the printing-room. Henry blenched at these sinister words. “There is, is there?” he muttered. “Exactly what, Mr. Carfrae?”
“Ah wisna gaun tae tell yon chiel wi’ the lang neb, ye ken, for he’d jist haver on the way a body couldna tell whit he was gabbin’ aboot.” Carfrae and Merridew [the assistant editor] had a fierce, though largely unspoken contempt for one another. They communicated mainly by means of grunts and snorts. “But jist tak’ a wee gleek at they letters o’ yon wumman—whit’s this they ca’ her, Aunty Galler?—man, that’s a fine wumman! Ay, she fair pits me in mind o’ the days when Ah was nocht but a bit laddie, rinnin’ aboot wi’oot a bawbee ahint ma sporran—” Henry put the receiver gently down. Conversations with Mr. Carfrae always reminded him rather forcibly that modern languages had not been his strong point at school. He turned to Aunty Gala’s Quiet Corner, and the relevant item leapt out and hit him in the eye.
It was about two-thirds of the way down the last column, and it read as follows:
L’tut, Orp. Hercules Cluster. This is a very unfortunate position for you, my dear, and I do not think that bripping the hixix would, as you suggest, solve the problem. You will simply have to confide in the local priest of your sub-clan. The recipe you mention has been known to Arcturans for several thousand years, but would not suit your particular life-form. If you will let me have a vibrafoil attuned to your personal wave-length, I will send details of a methane-based alternative. p. 78-79

The resolution of the story is probably fairly obvious. Henry (spoiler) goes to her office and discovers she is also working for an interplanetary publication as well as his—just before she and her niece arrive through a portal. There is a rather talky final scene where she explains everything, and that she cannot (as Henry suggests) use alien problems in her future Gaiety columns. Earth cannot know of the existence of life on other planets, not because Earth isn’t ready to join the various peoples of the Galaxy, but because they aren’t ready for Earth:

“But, my dear Henry, the astounding advances that Earth has made in every branch of civilisation that relates to her own comfort and convenience—well, quite frankly, they would be like gunpowder, let loose among the comparatively backward planets of the Federation. Take depilatories, for instance—Trenna, imagine depilatories suddenly released wholesale to those creatures on the third moon of Jupiter!”
Trenna shuddered eloquently, and Henry found it extremely difficult to take his eyes away from the resulting effect on her figure. “I know a planet in the Bootes region,” went on Gala, “where sanitary devices are the prerogative of the chief priest, whose name could be roughly translated as ‘The Divine Plumber.’ They are given only as the highest rewards for extreme courage or devotion. p. 85

This is minor stuff, and dated, but I rather enjoyed it.
A Dish of Devils by James Goddard is a first contact story between Sirian visitors and a sixteenth-century peasant. In the last paragraph the encounter is revealed as the inspiration for the nursery rhyme Hey, Diddle, Diddle.
No Moon To-night! by Brian W. Aldiss is another pseudonymous effort from the bottom of the writer’s trunk. The setup of this one is that something in space is causing an area of darkness, blocking out starlight, and the phenomenon is spreading towards Earth. When it does, the main character, Roger Furnish, a civilian on an army base, experiences complete darkness: no lights of any sort can be seen. He spends the first part of the story perilously driving home in the pitch black to get to his wife. On his arrival he is greeted not only by her but by a phone call from the colonel telling him to come back. He and his wife return.
At the camp the colonel tells Furnish that he wants to take the base’s secret amphibious tank out while it is completely dark, apparently to test it in secret. After they get going Furnish forces the colonel to reveal the real reason for the journey, which is to get to a scientist who lives in France. The colonel believes he will be able to explain the phenomenon they are experiencing.
After a journey along the bottom of the English Channel to Calais (spoiler), they go into the scientist’s house, where they can see normally again. Fergusson, the scientist, explains how the device he has built to counteract the darkness works:

“This little machine’s pretty simple. As you may have observed, it’s an old H/3 army type electric generator, rigged up. The shields really are shields, arranged about the works to produce a ‘dead’ field—the centre of the field coinciding with the centre of the armature, so that the whole contraption is virtually its own little watertight magnetic world, also its own North. The South Pole exists, of course, but over the border; that is, through the machine—in another dimension I suppose you’d call it, but whoever thinks up such terms is going to have to think up a better [one] when this spot of research gets published. I call it H-space, because it’s space plus something else—but we’ll come back to that in a minute. p. 113

. . . no, I’m fine thanks, don’t bother.
This lone-inventor lecture (a tired trope in the late 1930s) continues, and we find out about his discovery of H-space and various other related matters for the story’s last few pages.
This has little going for it, bar some sections of Fisher’s blind journey to his wife. However, even the interest that these sections arouse is fatally undermined by their lack of credibility: driving a car a couple of miles while unable to see? I don’t think so.
Unto All Generations by Paul Jents starts with a man and a woman, Cartwright and Mary, working on a nineteenth generation computer when the former recognises a circuit from a sixth generation model, a version that ran amok. Carwright reports it to his supervisor and then goes home for dinner. Here, he is served by computer controlled, lobotomised humans, similar to the ones that were assisting him in the lab.
The supervisor, meanwhile, reports the problem to a fifteenth generation computer He is told that the design will be modified and to come back later. The computer secretly decides that the problem is Cartwright and arranges for his disposal.
The rest of the story describes the (unsuccessful) trial of the completed nineteenth generation model:

The nineteenth Generation was a beautiful thing. From where Mary was sitting, some distance away, it looked like a tree of crystal. Each of the ‘leaves,’ perfectly symmetrical although varying in size, represented a different electro-chemical system complete in itself—in effect an individual, specialized brain. They fed back, in channels gradually growing larger and more closely integrated, via the ‘branches’ to the main control column, the trunk.
In turn this sub-divided again and again, into an infinite number of rootlets, in direct communication with every other computer in the world.
A tree, Mary thought again. A tree of knowledge. Of good and evil. p. 123

The creation of a twentieth generation begins after the failure of the nineteenth.
At the end of the story the twentieth generation computer awakens with a transcendent knowledge of God, which is instantly transmitted to the rest of the computer network.
There are the bones of a half decent story about computer totalitarianism here but, for the most part, it is buried under a lot of waffle.

This issue’s Cover is by Roger Harris, for David Beech’s Building Blocks. There is a short note at the end of the Rackham story crediting Harris for the cover, and stating next issue’s “will be by Haro, well-known to the readers of the Observer and Mail.” It wasn’t; Harris would provide another two covers for the magazine, and Haro was never seen.
The Editorial by Kyril Bonfiglioli has three parts. In the first he deals with circulation:

My first editorial struck a base and mercenary note: I said that what sf needed most was half-crowns, in the form of circulation. I also said that if more copies were sold we could boost the rate paid for stories and perhaps, in the end, check the drain to America of riper writers.
Well, thanks to a handier format, a new distribution network, and Roger Harris’ bold cover-design, we have broken a little ice. Latest indications suggest that around 15% more copies of the issue found good homes. NEW WORLDS, too, shows a similar healthy jump. Hoping that this is only the beginning of a sharp upward trend, I am sticking my neck out and raising the basic rate for this magazine by—to be exact—19.047%. A start, anyway. p. 2

In the second part he mentions that there will little adverse response to last issue’s editorial and his “attack on “fantasy” of the “sword and sorcery” vintage.” He goes on to add:

If sf has a future—and I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe that it has—it is not a future exhibiting all the signs of a decaying religion, with innumerable sects endlessly sub-splitting and high priests howling “heretic” at each other.
Science-fiction’s task is to abolish itself. At present it inhabits a sort of quarantine ward where it leads a sheltered but unwholesome existence. We tend to think that much sf fails to be printed because it is sf. Mr. Southworth, of Queen’s College, Cambridge, in a letter to me recently, posed the worrying question: ‘how much would get printed, purely on its literary merits, if it were not science-fiction?’ There’s a dusty answer to that one. p. 2

Bonfiglioli goes on to predict that in ten years’ time SF will have either abolished itself, be in the sick ward, or be extinct—I’d say don’t give up the editor’s job for one as a futurologist!
The last section is one of those tedious passages about manuscript preparation that non-writers semi-regularly had to sit through in some of the publications of the time. It does have this, however:

Most professionals use quarto paper and this is a great blessing: foolscap is the wrong size for most envelopes and files and is awkward to handle in hotel bars and other places where copy-reading takes place. The whole thing is stapled, clipped or pinned together and a stamped addressed envelope is always enclosed. (One doesn’t like to be mean over tenpence but there are only a couple of dozen of them in a pound note). p. 20

There are a couple of other notes apart from the one about the cover. Advanced Intelligence, which is a plug for the next issue, includes a puff for the Rudyard Kipling story, along with mentions of material from John Rackham and Thom Keyes. Competition Notice is an update stating that engineers and doctors are eligible to enter.
Finally, the inner back cover generously plugs New Worlds (this compared with Science Fantasy’s measly third of a page in New Worlds, with little more than a mention of its title and price):

This is a fairly poor issue, as I expected.³ ●

_____________________

1. James Parkhill-Rathbone would be the assistant editor to Kyril Bonfiglioli at Science Fantasy for issues #70 to #80, before leaving to set up his own magazine called The Idler. There is a short review of this publication (and the information that Josephine Saxton was a contributor) here. When asked, they couldn’t provide any more information about his having “settled down to a life as a writer of pretty conventional science fiction.”
I found only one birth and death record for his (uncommon) name: the name of the wife, Alys, matches up with the one mentioned in “Birth of a Son” on p. 3 of Futurian War Digest #26, Feb 1943. Talking of fanzines, he also published “the first fanzine to come from Scotland” when he was a teenager, Macabre.
James Parkhill-Rathbone’s ISFDB page.

2. In the mid-sixties Daphne Castell published three stories apiece in both Science Fantasy and New Worlds (and would continue to appear in various places until her death in 1983—her ISFDB page, listing twenty-three stories is here). Initially she was best known for a notable interview with J. R. R. Tolkien which appeared in New Worlds #168 (November 1966). There is an interesting article on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (backup screenshot here) that describes the intersection between Castell, Tolkien, Moorcock and New Worlds, as well as providing other bibliographic information (sadly, there is nothing at Science Fiction Encyclopedia, probably a result of its bias towards book publication).
There is a little more information in the afterword to her story Who’s in There With Me? on p. 123-124 of Judith Merril’s anthology England Swings SF, Doubleday, 1968:

I am over twenty-one and under forty . . . have a brilliant engineering husband and three brilliant musical children . . . Born in Southport, Lancashire, where tripe is eaten. I went to six schools before I was eleven, and ended my education peacefully with an Oxfordshire vicar, three mornings a week. This liberal education in the humanities gained me a scholarship to Oxford (St. Anne’s) and a sturdy Victorian prose style, leavened with heavy jocularity (I don’t know where “Who’s in there with me?” came from—it’s not typical). I did linguistic research under Professor Tolkien, who is a marvellously kind, helpful man . . . until I ran out of living money—a thing I do fairly often. p. 123

I became a qualified librarian, and worked with music and then with forestry literature until I had my second baby.
Interests? A lot. I used to try something different every year . . . chess, cricket, bell-ringing and music seem to stay, whatever else . . . I’ve written, produced and acted in plays, run a madrigal society, given song-recitals, conducted a village choir . . . At the moment, I look after the house and children, act as chauffeur to the family, experiment with foreign cooking, belong to a local choir, ring bells at a local church, study electricity and Grade 3 piano, and run a class for adults in English language.
[She prefers American to British SF]—though I would rather have written “Hothouse” than anything I can lay claim to.
I feel we’re all a bit besieged by the “short trot round a fevered mind” effect. If I could be my ideal writer, I would be a combination of James Blish (for plots and people), Robert Sheckley (for dialogue and situation), and Hal Clement (for background and detail). p. 124

Merril also mentions that Castell produced articles, interviews, reviews, etc. for The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, Christian Science Monitor, as well as news programs for the BBC (who also broadcast several of her stories).
Castell strikes me as one of those writers who may have produced much more short fiction if the paperback Science Fantasy and New Worlds (or a similar British F&SF-type publication) had continued publication through the late sixties, seventies and eighties.

3. I appreciated the Castell story a lot more this second time around. My scores from the first time I read the magazine (in the early 1990s?) were (scores from this review in brackets): Bulmer 0 (1), Rackham 0 (1), Rathbone 3 (3), Beech 1 (0), Castell 1 (3), Goddard 0 (1), Runciman/Aldiss 1 (0), Jents 0 (1). Consistent if nothing else, I guess. ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 by John Boston & Damien Broderick (Amazon)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli

Fiction:
Pink Plastic Gods • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
The Contraption • novelette by Kenneth Bulmer
Blast Off • short story by Kyril Bonfiglioli [as by uncredited] ∗∗
Lazarus • short story by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Jael Cracken] ∗
Unauthorised Persons • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss [as by John Runciman]
Matchbox • short story by Peter Bradley ∗
The Great Chan • short story by Archie Potts ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Roger Harris
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli
“Science Fantasy” • poem by Peter Levi
Competition: For Professional Scientists Only

_____________________

As I mentioned in my review of New Worlds #142 (Science Fantasy’s sister magazine), Nova Publications were struggling with the poor circulations of both magazines during 1963, a situation which caused Nova’s board of directors to close them down. When a new publisher was found at the last moment, a new editor was required as the previous one, John Carnell, had made other plans for the future. Both Michael Moorcock and Kyril Bonfiglioli were approached by (or had approached) David Warburton of Roberts & Vinter (the new publisher) about the job. Warburton decided to split the positions: Moorcock expressed a preference for New Worlds, so Bonfiglioli became Science Fantasy’s new editor.
Kyril Bonfiglioli, unlike Moorcock, was a complete unknown in the SF field and so his appointment “came as a surprise to many.” An Oxford art dealer friend of Brian W. Aldiss, he was “the director of two art galleries, a bookshop and an antique shop; and had at one time been a sabre champion.”^{1, 2} Apart from his swordsmanship skills, Bonfigliloi had no editorial qualifications.

The issue opens with the new editor’s Editorial, which is more in the ‘house-keeping’ rather than ‘manifesto’ tradition of inaugural addresses. After acknowledging the change of publisher and editor, the Editorial exhorts readers to buy rather than borrow the magazine as a small increase in circulation will make a big difference to the rates paid to writers (and the profits made by publishers, one presumes). His second exhortation to the readership is to start writing stories as, after having read a quarter of a million words of manuscript “so bad it made me blush,” he has concluded that no-one is writing the kind of material the readers want. Finally he denies that science fantasy exists but, before getting too far into his theological reasons why, wanders off into a list of the things he doesn’t want to see in a story, concluding with:

What you really cannot do—if you are writing for adults—is have a Venusian princess materialise out of the air, offering to free your hero from the BEM’s clutches if he will come to Krzk and kill the wicked High Priest of Zoz with the magic sword of Ugg. Ugh. My editorial watchword, then, is “Science Fiction for Grown-Ups!” I hope I shall be able to make it hold good. p. 3

After the editorial there is a poem titled “Science Fantasy”, “specially written” by Peter Levi (there is a short note about it after the Aldiss story). The individual stanzas are okay but the first pair don’t seem to have anything to do with the last.
The first of the stories is Pink Plastic Gods by Brian W. Aldiss, one of three pieces by him in this issue.³ It has an intriguing start:

Every day that hot August of 2111 I was in Long Barrow Field, getting on with the potato harvesting. The six neosimians I employed worked hard in their monkey way, the heat shimmering above their bent backs. They worked two hours on and a half hour off, scamping if I let them.
“Keep up with us, Judy! Hey, Tess, that’s Daisy’s trench!”
Judy was the laziest of the bunch, yet Judy was the one I liked best.
Our first shift began as Sol rose, and the last shift finished after he’d gone and we were up to our knees in a mist as thick as rice pudding. Slowly we worked our way round the long pillow shape of Barrow Hill, day in, day out, from pearly light to purple. Neosimians have their drawbacks—they’re slow for one thing—but they are vastly cheaper than machines; and unlike machines they never miss a potato—if you keep watching them.
I kept watching them. Every potato meant a penny off the load of debt I had shouldered since manhood. But that still left me time to glance up to the top of Barrow Hill every so often, to regard the solitary figure up there surveying me. p. 5-6

The figure is Smith’s affluent neighbour, Aurel Derek Seyfert. One day Seyfert comes to speak to Smith and, after Smith’s initial rebuff, convinces him to go to a party taking place at Seyfert’s home. The party segment reveals a number of things: first, Smith leads a circumscribed life; second, he is an person who is blunt to the point of rudeness; third, Seyfert is as out of place at his own party as Smith is; fourth, Seyfert’s son Monday is the inventor of the robots—styled after famous sculptures—that are serving at the party, the eponymous “pink plastic gods”:

I turned to Seyfert. Catching him looking at me in that same enigmatic way, I said angrily. “Why do you keep all these statues around?”
“You mean our pink plastic gods!” he exclaimed. Suddenly he became animated. “They’re at once our slaves and our rulers! How do you like them, eh? Aren’t they foul, aren’t they vulgar? Aren’t they the epitome of our stinking, decadent, useless, putrid civilization? Come on, Smith, I value your opinion as the first honest man I’ve met in years. Aren’t they just the goddammed end of everything?”
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“Beautiful! They’re cheap and nasty! They’re fakes. Famous sculptures brought to life. That was the Venus de Milo to greet us at the door. Michelangelo’s David gave us our first drinks. This little beauty is one of Canova’s marbles. The castle crawls with walking statues. ‘Any masterpiece copied for your delight’ is Monday’s motto. I told you he manufactures them? Pink plastic outside, wheels and levers inside. p. 12

The final section has Smith leaving the party and walking home, with Seyfert as unwelcome company. During the journey it looks like there will be a falling out over Smith’s bankrupt father (Seyfert was one of the creditors). However, Seyfert tells Smith he is indebted to his father, as it was after the collapse of his company that Seyfert travelled to another planet and met and married an alien woman. He tells Smith of his life with her, but (spoiler) the account has a tragic end:

“[In] twenty-seventy the Anti-Miscegenation Laws were passed with cheers from all the do-gooders in the universe. The net result was the establishing of strict segregation from which it’ll take Uffitsi ages to recover. If you can picture a cross between the colour bar in the United States and the apartheid that ruled what was the South African Republic last century, you have an idea of what happened on that beautiful planet almost overnight.
“So I found myself outside the law, with my marriage declared null and void, and Adam officially proclaimed a Sport. According to biologists it was amazing we’d had a living child at all. Yes, they caught up with us, the bastards. We could have gone on living peacefully in that valley for ever, Pampas and Adam and I, but the officials came with their cases full of forms and police support. Hardacre, I could have killed every mother’s son of them—yet they were nice polite men, personally very sorry for interfering, but orders were orders and the law was the law . . . You know the attitude. No law is so legal as a new law, and we couldn’t escape it.
“We were all three hauled up for trial in a city a thousand miles away from our valley. We did the journey on the Uffitsian monorail, under government escort. On the way—it must have been just the sorrow of it all—poor little Adam died. He did it so easily, James, so easily, like falling into an after dinner doze, and never a word he spoke.”
I did not know what to say. Dying has always seemed to me the hardest job a man can put his hand to. Of course, for all Seyfert said, his kid was a freak, no denying it. We walked in silence for some way while I mulled the matter over, until Seyfert wiped a hand across his eyes and spoke again. p. 19-20

The different parts of this story don’t really work together (the ‘pink plastic gods’ part in particular seems out of place) but I liked it nonetheless. The main characters are complex and fascinating characters, and I also liked the maturity and the grimness of the piece. These elements foreshadows Aldiss’s later, better work.
The Contraption by Kenneth Bulmer also gets off to a promising start with an attempt at defusing a booby trap on an unknown device in an alien ship:

They all saw him die without a sound. On the closed-circuit screen, the silent flare of the explosion, utterly sudden, utterly deadly, momentarily blinded the watching men in the bunker.
Bill Barrington was not the first man to gamble his life against the thing out there. He was, in fact, the fifth.
Like all the others, he had lost. Luke Rawson fought down the sick, helpless anger in him, the useless nerve-corroding rage. Bill Barrington had been a friend. Now he was only a memory. They wouldn’t find enough of him decently to bury in a matchbox. p. 23

Unfortunately it soon turns into a Royal Navy in space story, with a plot about the alien Brute ships (U-boats) decimating the Terran (Atlantic) convoys, and the humans (Brits) trying to discover the alien’s (Nazi’s) secret. The central character Rawson is dispatched to capture another ship. At the same time, a Terran Intelligence colonel waiting for a ride to a planet called Cudham I—this is added into the mix so it can provide a solution to the problem at the end of the story. (Cudham I is surrounded by a 3-D version of Saturn’s rings and, later, the colonel cannot penetrate the debris field. Sure enough, (spoiler) the booby-trapped device turns out to be a navigation device that enables the Earthmen to find a path to the surface of the planet.) However, before this finale the story plods on for what seems like forever.
As with most of these stories it suffers from many failures of imagination (advanced spaceships with the guns of a battleship, a colonel who carries a briefcase and unrolls a paper star chart, bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast, etc., etc.) A Carnell reject I suspect.
Blast Off is an anonymous piece subtitled “Astronaut’s thoughts from the Finnish.” When the story was later reprinted it emerged that Bonfigliloi was the author.⁴ It is an interesting work that presages the New Wave with the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of an astronaut about to board a spaceship:

Yes, well, there it stands, that’s the thing you have to ride on, next stop the heavens ha ha and don’t think you aren’t scared don’t let anyone think I’m scared I mean I’m don’t anyone think I’m not scared oh you know. But anyway there it stands and I suppose like the man says it has a kind of stark beauty and all—long and slim and pointing up to the stars my destination and don’t anyone think I’m oh hell. p. 55

I wonder what old-school readers of Carnell’s New Worlds and Science Fantasy made of this.
The second of the Aldiss stories, Lazarus, is published under his ‘Jael Cracken’ pseudonym, which (as with the John Runciman pseudonym for the next story) would be used once more in Science Fantasy and never again.
The story starts with an ex-astronaut giving a speech at a school. He tells the boys the story of the space station project he was part of before the Third World War started. During this mission one of the three crew members died on the moon but, before they could recover him, the war started and the two remaining astronauts were brought back to Earth.
He goes on to say that some years later the other surviving astronaut contacted him to say they had received a message from the station. When usable rockets were found on enemy soil shortly after this, he and the other astronaut organised a mission to the station. There (spoiler) they found the dead astronaut, apparently alive but host to an alien organism. The astronaut that contacted the narrator dies during this mission, and the latter takes both of the bodies back to Earth along with a religious message from the original dead crewman:

“I am beyond medicine. But I am not dead, for up here I cannot die. No life can come into being except on earth. No death can come into being except on earth. This is all my message.” p. 77

A new cult/religion starts, the war ends.
The first half of this is an overly padded setup, and the second isn’t convincing. That said, the scene on the space station where they meet the dead man has a certain momentum of its own.
Unauthorised Persons by Brian W. Aldiss is his third story in the issue and by far the worst. It starts with a bumptious colonial administrator called Pepkinson going to a planet where an archaeologist called Bullock has found a city from the First Galactic Empire buried in ice. The planet is part of an unusual binary star system, and its eccentric orbit has taken it a long way from the major sun. Consequently, the atmosphere has frozen and life has died out, except for some mutated vermin in the underground (or under-ice) city.
They descend and start exploring, and discover a previously buried tunnel that leads to a building that, bizarrely, has a warning sign in English telling them to keep out. They ignore it and find a time machine inside which takes them back eight thousand years.
Back in the past the time machine guards take them to one of the city’s leaders. Bullock is shown around while the leader’s daughter entertains Pepkinson. Bullock is lectured about the peculiarities of the local star system, and told that a catastrophic ice-age is imminent. The city’s occupants will use the time machine to escape the disaster.
The last part of the story is a time travel escapade with various versions of Pepkinson, Bullock and the daughter running around in the future city.
There is too much sfnal furniture in this overly gimmicky story, and it full of cardboard characters. A poor piece.
The last two stories are what would later be described in a reader’s letter as “typical Bonfiglioli space-fillers”. Matchbox by Peter Bradley (a one-shot writer) is about a reporter covering a Women’s Institute meeting for a local newspaper. The winner of their competition to put the greatest number of objects in a matchbox appears to have one that is a tesseract (larger on the inside than the outside). The reporter and the women retire to her house to experiment with it. The ending (spoiler: it is used develop a space drive) is weak.
The story is little more than a notion, but is told in an entertaining enough style:

I left, having persuaded Mrs. O’Neill to let me have the matchbox and its vital contents, and exchanged a not very subtle pleasantry with the milkman as I let myself into my lodgings. I awoke a couple of hours later feeling as fresh as if I’d just had a couple of hours sleep, and made my way to the office.
Harvey, my news editor, glanced up at me as I entered. His glance evidently took in my all-night eyes and unshaven (no, if I must be scrupulously honest, even unwashed) features for, after looking at the Diary for the previous day, he started to warn me against the perils of being drawn into Women’s Institute orgies.
“You mark my words, Sock,” he said (Sock is short for Socrates. How I got this nickname is a long and not very interesting story.) “I’ve seen it happen too often. These harpies out in the county drag you into their midst, load you up with rhubarb wine, and before you know where you are you’re passing round mystery parcels and taking part in other obscene rituals, and . . .
It went on for several minutes more. Our Mr. Harvey was noted for his ingenious improvisations on original themes, and this morning he was in good voice. He concluded by asking me what I had got out of my night’s work. p. 122

The Great Chan by Archie Potts⁵ is another story told to a third party.⁶ This one concerns the last performance of the Great Chan, a magician, at a town music hall. The narrator is a newspaper reviewer who interviews Chan at the end of the show:

He was seated in front of the mirror getting his greasepaint off, and waved me to a seat without stopping his work.
“You won’t mind, I hope, if I carry on with this as we talk?”
To my surprise, his yellow complexion and almond eyes were disappearing under the cream as I watched, revealing unmistakably European features beneath the make-up. Seeing me stare, he laughed.
“No, the Chinese guise is just part of the act. People don’t like an ordinary-looking man performing apparent miracles so in Europe I always make-up Chinese-style. When I tour the Far East, of course, I have to wear a top-hat and tails.” p. 127

The twist (spoiler) is that he claims, on departing the building, to be Alessandro Cagliostro, the eighteenth century magician and occultist. No, me neither.

Roger Harris’s abstract design for the Cover is strikingly different from anything seen on an SF magazine of the time or before, and presumably we have Bonfiglioli’s art dealer eye to thank for it. I rather like it; the magazine looks rather smart, and very non-pulp. Harris would be the cover artist for the next three issues.
Apart from the Editorial there is no other non-fiction, but there is a one page notice about a Competition: For Professional Scientists Only. I think that the quite substantial prize would have been better used in a general competition (if you adjust a 1964 £50 for inflation, it is supposedly worth just short of a grand now⁷).
Finally, a few miscellaneous notes. First, the external physical appearance of this magazine is different from that of New Worlds #142 (which Roberts & Vinter had published a month earlier). Rather than the flimsy, coated (shiny) cover #142 had, this issue has a slightly stiffer, matt finish one, presumably a cost-saving measure. I’d also note that these magazines are probably the smallest A-format paperbacks I’ve seen.⁸
The inner front cover carries an advert for the Science Fiction Book Club (just like New Worlds #142) but the inner rear cover has an advert for New Worlds #143, the July-August issue, out June 24^th.
Last of all, the title page has a quirky “All terrestrial characters and places are fictitious” disclaimer at the bottom:

The cover, the first of the Aldiss, and the Bonfigliloli are fairly good quality, but the rest of the issue is quite poor. My recollection is that the next issue is much worse. ●

_____________________

1. Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines 1950-1970 by Mike Ashley, p. 237 (Amazon UK).

2. There are a number of posts by Don Wells that recall Bonfiglioli’s early military life on the blog Bonfiglioli Remembered – and other stuff.
There is one striking passage where Wells mentions the death of Bonfiglioli’s first wife:

Only once in our time together did I see Bonfig in a vulnerable moment. I suppose the hurt was still fresh in his mind. He told me his first wife Elizabeth had died in her sleep; he woke to find her dead beside him. More than once — no, many times more than once — in my 45 years of marriage, I lay quiet in bed, listening for my wife’s breathing.
Fifty years after Bonfig’s Elizabeth died, my first wife Margaret died beside me.

Bonfiglioli’s Wikipedia page is here.

3. “[Bonfiglioli] was feeling his way in the first few issues, relying heavily on bottom drawer material from Brian Aldiss.” (Ibid. p. 243)

4. I found out about Bonfiglioli’s authorship of Blast Off from John Boston’s review (link above).

5. Potts was a two-shot writer: he previously had a story, The Warriors, in New Worlds #124, November 1962.

6. I’ve come to the conclusion that fiction told in the form of a stories related to a third party are probably using a chatty conversational mode to distract from the slightness of the tale.

7. I used this website for the inflation adjustment. I’m not entirely convinced.

8. Science Fantasy #65 is 109 x 178mm in size; New Worlds #142 is 107 x 180mm in size, very slightly narrower and taller (this size variation holds broadly true for the issues #66 & #143 too), making me wonder if Rugby Advertiser Ltd. had two different presses. By comparison, my Corgi edition (1965 reprint) of New Writings in SF 1 edited by John Carnell (to be reviewed here soon) is 111 x 180mm. These differences are minute, so maybe it is the thinness of the books (128 pp.) that give the impression that they are smaller. ●

Edited 8^th March 2018 to add Wells passage in footnote 2.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 256 of 365) (Amazon UK)

Fiction:
Boomerang • short story by E. C. Tubb ♥
Coming-of-Age Day • short story by A. K. Jorgensson ♥♥♥
Temptation for the Leader • short story by R. W. Mackelworth
At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein • short story by Harry Harrison ♥♥
Sule Skerry • short story by Rob Sproat ♥♥♥
The Jobbers • short fiction by Johnny Byrne
Omega and Alpha • short story by Robert Cheetham ♥♥+
The Furies (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Keith Roberts ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover
Instead of an Editorial • essay by Brian W. Aldiss

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

The highlight of this issue was the publication of a taboo breaking story by A. K. Jorgensson¹ called Coming-of-Age Day. Notable for its explicit (for an SF magazine at the time) sexual content, Kyril Bonfiglioli had this to say about it in his introduction:

My first reactions to this story were—’Great stuff, but of course I can’t print it’ . . . my next reaction was ‘Why on earth not?’ It is not the sort of thing usually discussed in science fiction—or anywhere else, for that matter—but if SF is going to grow up perhaps it’s time we stopped talking about what is proper for the genre. p.13

The first section is a rather muddled one where an eleven year old’s sexual curiosity is set against hints about the changed practises of a future world. Although you might expect an eleven year old’s knowledge to be unclear, this unfortunately extended to my comprehension of what was going on.
The second section is considerably more lucid and recounts the boy’s thirteenth birthday, when he goes for compulsory medical checks:

“Good afternoon, Andrews. Nice to see you again. Still feeling in good health?”
“Yes, sir, thank you.” One never admits that one has never felt quite the same since being pumped with inoculatives.
“Ready to have a consex fitted! Now, Andrews, this is a most private matter which I think will explain itself. We are not afraid to be scientific about sex as a subject, but I trust you will keep this to yourself. If you are not completely satisfied—for any reason whatsoever—tell no one but come and see me. Is that understood?”
“Yes, doctor.”
“I am a sexiatrist, actually, not a doctor. Now come and look in this glass container.”
I looked. As I believe it usually does to others, it struck me with a sort of horror to see this thing alive, a collapsed sort of dumpling with ordinary human skin, sitting in its case like a part of a corpse that he been cut off.
“Get used to it,” he said. “It’s only ordinary flesh. It has a tiny pulse with a primitive sort of heart, and blood and muscle. And fat. It’s just flesh. Alive, of course, but perfectly harmless.”
He lifted the lid and touched it. It gave, then formed round his finger. He moulded it like dough or plasticine and it gave way, though it tended to roll back to a certain shapelessness.
“Touch it.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Go on.”
He was firm and I obeyed. It had a touch like skin and was warm. It might have been part of someone’s fat stomach. I pushed my finger in, and the thing squeezed the finger gently with muscular contractions.
“It’s yours,” he announced.
I nearly fainted with horror. It strikes everyone that way until they realize how simple, harmless and useful free living tissue can be, and its many healing purposes. It embarrassed me to guess where the “consex” was to be located on my body, and my intuition was uncertain with equally embarrassing ignorance. But one only has to wear a consex a short while to realize how utterly natural it is, and how delightfully pleasant when in active use. It is a boon to lone explorers, astronauts, occupants of remote weather and defence stations, and so [on].
“Don’t worry,” said the specialist as I drew back in disgust. “It’s no more horrible than the way you came into the world, or the parts each of your parents played in starting the process. In fact, it’s cleaner, more foolproof, and efficient, and far more satisfying than a woman. Thank heaven, without them we’d be overrun.” p. 18-19

The final part involves the boy lying on a bed for half an hour getting used to his consex while he listens to the doctor argue with another boy who is refusing to have one fitted.
There is no particular story here but it is an interesting and notable piece.

There are a couple other stories of interest in this issue. Sule Skerry by Rob Sproat² is a medieval fantasy about Thalia Willow, and how she falls unexpectedly pregnant. Later, when her son is an infant, she is visited at her grandmother’s house by the last of the selkies, a huge man-like creature:

Thalia was frightened enough by the prospect of dealing with an outsize man, but her terror increased as the details of her giant’s appearance became clearer. His hair appeared to be light in colour and very short, quite unlike the shoulder-length styles common among the Northumbrians. The same soft, fine hair seemed to cover every visible part of his body—he wore only a whitish tunic, open to the waist. He was dripping wet; he glistened with water all over, and it ran off him to form pools on the floor. His head was massive, even in proportion to his vast body, and very round in shape, blending into a very short and thick neck. At first sight, his wide face appeared to be featureless, then Thalia saw that his mouth was nothing but a tightly closed slit. His eyes likewise seemed to be firmly shut. No nostrils or nose were visible, and he had nothing which could rightly be called ears. Thalia Willow trembled and knew that this was no mortal man who stood so silently at the foot of her bed.
This much was abundantly clear from his looks, but over and above that, there was an air about him such that you knew that he did not belong in the world of men. It was nothing Thalia could pin down, but there was something foreign even about the way he stood, so that you knew he had no place there. Something strange and yet familiar, because you recognised it at once. Thalia thought of Will’s awkwardness, and of Gran saying: “Yon’s no earthly child, Thalie,” and she knew who her visitor was.
“You are my Willy’s father,” said Thalia Willow.
“I am thy bairn’s father,” said her giant, without opening his eyes. His voice was loud and yet gentle, and very deep and strange. p. 54

He explains he is the last of his race—because of the deprivations of man—and impregnating her while she was asleep was the only way he could have a son to keep him company. Thalia refuses to let him take her son away and she returns home. The story (spoiler) has a tragic end.
By the by, it is bookended with sections describing a historical society gathering oral recordings of folk music and poetry, etc. I can’t make my mind up if these add to or detract from the main story, but it is a pretty good fantasy nonetheless, and I would suggest it is the kind of thing that could easily have found a home across the Atlantic in Ed Ferman’s F&SF.

Also of interest is the dystopian Omega and Alpha by Robert Cheetham. This is a grim diary account about a would-be writer and his pregnant wife on a remote island to the east of the Seychelles. There has been a nuclear war and the atmosphere is full of ash. He describes their existence as they slowly die of radiation poisoning.
The last image (spoiler) is quite a horrific one of two young babies/toddlers eating dead fish at the shore line, but confusing given that the writer’s wife has just given birth. This scene was consequently weakened for me as a result, but it is an interesting piece.

The rest of the fiction is a very mixed bag. Boomerang by E. C. Tubb gets off to a promising start with its tale of a man in the future who commits a series of heinous crimes, i.e. he kills his another man’s friends, burns his house, mutilates his pets, etc., but leaves him alive.
Marlow, the killer, is subsequently exiled to an alien planet called Hades where he is left alone without any supplies. He survives, and one day the victim arrives to seek his revenge.
This is a completely unbelievable story. Never mind that it is not credible that a future court would pass such a cruel and unusual punishment but would they really dispatch a crew to trail half way across the galaxy to drop him on an inimical planet where he has little chance of survival? I don’t think so. The last line is pretty dumb as well.
Temptation for the Leader by R. W. Mackelworth has a president conducting a negotiation with an alien. As with his story in #74 we have more talking heads and, once again, Mackelworth demonstrates he is the master of ‘don’t show, tell’. At the end of all this chatter (spoiler) the alien is seen to begin to manifest horns on his head. The aide also suspects the alien to have a devil’s tail.
If all of this isn’t bad enough, Kyril Bonfiglioli makes this risible comment about the story in his introduction:

The central idea in this story has been used before although in a completely different way; there is no suggestion of plagiarism and this story is, in my opinion, an important one. p. 28

At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein by Harry Harrison is about the descendant of Victor Frankenstein supposedly exhibiting the monster in an American carnival. A visiting reporter gets to the bottom of the act which (spoiler) involves a zombie not an assembled monster. The reporter is drugged, dies, and becomes the replacement. Daft but well enough done.
The Jobbers by Johnny Byrne tells of a man who wakes up to find two tiny men on him. They subsequently make a dash for his ears and, once inside his head, they tell him that they are there to ‘scrape and drain.’ Yeah. TBSF (Typical Bonfiglioli Space Filler).

The Furies by Keith Roberts, concluding in this issue, carries on much as before (spoilers follow). Bill recovers from being blown up by the army. The wasps come back with the better weather. The original group decide to do something more permanent and decide to attack the city nest with a petrol tanker. This precipitates a massive retaliation from the Furies and the group are chased into the depths of the Chill Lear cave system and only escape when they go through an underwater pool to another cave, where they hide in the dark.

Sometime, Greg started talking again. He was back in control of himself; he used his voice to fight the silence, break it up before it crept into our bodies as surely as the cold and sent us scatty. He told how the caves had been formed. How the hills had come shouldering up from an old sea, slowly, slow, with the rain working inside them all the time, carving its passages deeper as the rock bulged above the water table. He talked about the stalactites edging and inching to touch the floor, growing through the ages till they seemed not so much products of stone and rain as the glassy fossils of time itself. The hills were forever, and the caves were as old as the hills. They once underpaved the camps of Rome and they were there before that and before, when the great red deer moved in the mist and there were no men. Here for once we could touch the eternal. Recorded history was nothing to the life of Chill Leer; all civilisation, jetplanes and longboats, pyramids and comptometers, was a bright flash against the abyss of geologic time, one tick of a clock whose pendulum was the earth, whose face was the sun . . . p. 94

They are attacked once again when they emerge by sentries that have been left behind, and soon only Bill and Pete are left. After hiding out in a cottage for five days they leave and are pursued by the remaining Furies who, surprisingly, don’t kill them but take them to see the queen.

The chamber was high and airy, filled with the dim roaring of the swarm. Pulp windows, veined and textured like rich stained glass, reached from floor to vaulted roof, making a golden cartwheel of light. At the far end of the place a pulp ledge was built out from the wall on a level with our heads. It was some moments before I saw the Queen. She was resting on the ledge as if on a dais; below her, on a raised nub in the floor, stood a tapedeck like the one in the van. It looked incongruously bright and modern. As I watched the spools moved. “Come closer,” said the speaker. “You will not be harmed . . .”
Pete was trembling, whether from fear or suppressed hatred I couldn’t tell. I walked forward. I wasn’t conscious of speaking but I heard my own voice. It said, “Why did you bring us here . . . ?” I knew now I was dreaming. Maybe I died alongside Greg in the caves with a Fury pecking at my throat; this was the death fantasy, immense and vague. p. 113

She tells them that the Furies are all going mad and they are handing the planet back to the humans. Pete tries to kill the queen and also provides more associated personal-issues melodrama. The queen wasp eventually commits suicide by stinging herself.
The pair go to the coast and get picked up by a helicopter and taken to the islands, where they are debriefed by Neill, the commander of the original armoured car patrol. Bill finds out that Jane never made it—her boat was found but she wasn’t on it (one wonders if Roberts realised half way through the novel that the burgeoning relationship between Bill and the teenager needed to be very deeply buried). News of the wasps committing mass suicide comes through.
There is an epilogue with Bill and Pete as farmers four years later.
Overall, this is an episodic and pretty average disaster novel with a deux ex machina ending. It exhibits little of Roberts’ usual talent, but there is the odd flash here and there that will be of interest to completists.

The Cover in this issue is uncredited, but if I was going to guess I would say Agosta Morol, who did a couple of other covers for the magazine.³
Instead of an Editorial by Brian W. Aldiss provides an interesting review on his novel Non-Stop. It starts with this:

Nowadays, anyone who wishes can set up as reviewer. It needs only energy and a sense of one’s own importance. This is perhaps especially so in the science fiction field, which has always been afflicted by the do-it-yourself mania. p. 2

Well, that’s me told. The rest of it is equally quotable:

Originally, I wrote it as a novelette at about a quarter of its present length. I sent it to Ted Camell, who said, “It’s a marvellous idea, far too good to waste on anything less than a novel. But I’m short of material, so it goes in the next issue. Meanwhile, why not turn it into a novel?” Good idea, I thought.
[. . .]
With Ted’s encouragement, the novel was written and published in April 1958 without a word of the text being altered. That’s one of the many virtues of my publisher; while the American publishers, Criterion, insisted on removing a few entirely innocuous passages about Vyann’s breasts and so on, Fabers didn’t even correct the grammatical error in the dedication. p. 2

Plot and story are one; what the characters find out, the reader also discovers. This still seems to me a sound plan, though it is open to the objection voiced by one of Thomas Love Peacock’s characters in, I think, “Headlong Hall”; this fellow has been shown round one of those intricate landscaped gardens stuffed with grottoes, hermits, weeping willows, pagodas, and the other marvels that our ancestors enjoyed at the turn of last century, and the proud owner says that he has added to the principles of the picturesque and the beautiful the element of surprise; whereupon Mr. Milestone asks in all innocence, “But, sir, what happens when one walks round your garden a second time?”
Well, at least the picturesque and the beautiful are still there in “Non-Stop”—though I must admit that some of the original reviewers couldn’t take them in the first place. My thought-sensitive rats and rabbits and moths are a bit much, I suppose, and The Times Literary Supplement chap called me a “maniac Beatrix Potter”, a label I tried to get the publishers to use in their publicity, without success. p. 3

I was lucky with “Non-Stop”. The ideal story-line came along to suit the way I could best write at the time. It may not have netted me the praise that “Greybeard” did, the cash that “Hothouse” did, the opprobrium that “Dark Light Years”—my best-written book—did, but at least it encouraged me, whatever it did to its readers. p. 48

A middling issue with two or three items of interest.

1. A. K. Jorgennson was the pseudonym of Richard W. A. Roach according to ISFDB. The story was reprinted seven times.
2. Rob Sproat has only two stories listed in ISFDB, this one and Wolves in SF Impulse #6 (which would have been Science Fantasy #87 if the magazine hadn’t changed its name).
   There is also a writer called Robert Sproat who produced two volumes for Faber & Faber, Stunning the Punters, (1986), and Chinese Whispers, (1988), and who also appeared in their Introduction 8: Stories by New Writers (1983). The Tottenham Journal has him dying in 2011, aged 67. He was subsequently the subject of a BBC program called Heir Hunters (s09e06). In 1965 he would have been 21-22, so they are probably the same writer.
   
3. Agosta Morol at ISFDB.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 256 of 365) (Amazon UK)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:
The Desolator • short story by Eric C. Williams
Chemotopia • short story by Ernest Hill ∗
Idiot’s Lantern • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗+
Paradise for a Punter • short story by Clifford C. Reed ∗∗
A Way with Animals • short story by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗∗
Grinnel • short fiction by Dikk Richardson –
The Furies (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Keith Roberts ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

This issue reprises last month’s contributions from Keith Roberts: he provides the cover plus a serial instalment and a short story. I think the Cover may be an illustration of the wasp nests from the final part of his serial, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
In this second instalment of The Furies the story has the same episodic form as the last. The wasps deliver Bill Sampson and the rest of the lorry load of survivors to a camp and leave them, more or less, to their own devices. Later, they start to get themselves organised, and the wasps escort them out of the camp on runs to gather food and provisions. On one of these trips they pick up a cockney girl called Pete, who has a badly torn face and isn’t expected to survive but does.
There are also non-Carnell sleeping arrangements:

Julie and Maggie made a point of spending every other night with one of the men. Julie told me they’d worked out a rota; I’ve never been sure whether to believe that or not. She said she’d put me on it; there was something undeniably attractive about a night with a raw-boned, enthusiastic blonde but I turned the offer down. I don’t exactly know why; I think it was to do with Jane.  p. 103

The thing that struck me most about this middle section of the novel was how markedly working class the characters are—I have vague memories that in other British disaster novels the protagonists are usually doctors or professors or the like. As well as Pete’s broad East London/Cockney accent, the rest of the camp inmates come from a Ken Loach movie, which makes a change for this kind of story:

Most of the first lorryload had in fact been hauled from Bristol; Harry West was a piano tuner who’d survived a wasp attack on one of the suburbs, Freddy Mitchell a scaffolding erector who’d been working on the redecoration of a ballroom. Owen, the Welshman, was a chef from one of the big hotels there. Len Dilks, the two girls Julie and Margaret, Dave the guitarist and some three or four more were the remnants of a Beatnik colony.  p. 66

After the camp has fallen into a routine of sorts Len manufactures a crossbow with Bill’s help, and a breakout is discussed with the rest of the hut. During this, Harry West the piano tuner disagrees with the plan and is shot by Pete before he can warn the wasps. The rest then break out and head for the hills.
The last half of this instalment is set in the caves at Chill Leer in the Mendips. Here we get a few pages of spelunking before they set up camp and begin waging a guerrilla war on the wasps. When winter comes the wasps die off naturally, which makes you wonder why they bothered with hit and run attacks in the first place. They then start a winter hunt for the hibernating queens to prevent any future colonies.
Towards the end there is a scene that has a drunk Pete holding a queen Fury captive—rather than having killed it outright Pete has taken it for ‘interrogation.’ Bill finds her, bayonet in hand, with the wingless, legless queen strapped to a board. She tells Bill how her parents died during the attack by the Furies and reveals aspects of her life before the invasion, another section that you probably wouldn’t have found in the Carnell version of the magazine:

She said wildly “They all knew me, in Westrincham. You ask anybody, did they know Jan Peterson. You’d have got a real laugh. That’s the biggest laugh of all. Din’t I ever tell you what I was Bill, din’t I say?”
“I’m more interested in what you are now. What you’re doing to yourself . . .
Her voice had developed a thin edge of hysteria. She said “I was a whore, Bill. Common muckin’ prostitute. Best ride in town . . .” She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “Now look shocked. Now tell me I’m a bleedin’ barbarian again . . .’’
I didn’t speak.
She said “I were the old black sheep. That’s the laugh. I were the one that wadn’t no good. Dad used to tell me. ‘Never come to no good you won’t, my gal,’ that were what he used to say. ‘Never come to no good . . .’ But when they come, they took him orf instead. Him and Mum and the kids. That’s the joke, they left me . . .
“I used to work three nights a week at the flicks. Used to get a lot o’ trade from that. Rest o’ the time I was on the streets. I used to do all right. I’d got this place I went to, this pub. They didn’t care. Everybody knew about it. The old man knew. They all knew Jan Peterson. I was at it up in the smoke only Dad didn’t know then. But you couldn’t keep things quiet in Westrincham. It wadn’t the same . . .  p. 124-125

This comes over as somewhat overdone melodrama, although the cruel treatment of the Fury queen gives it a visceral edge.
After this, Bill decides he has had enough of Chill Leer: he grabs a car and drives off to the coast. He runs into the army who open fire on him when he won’t stop. The car crashes, and he loses consciousness.
The story that Keith Roberts also contributes to this issue is Idiot’s Lantern, an ‘Anita the Witch’ story, and it is probably one of the best of that series.
Anita arranges for a TV to be installed in the cottage to entertain both the witches during the dark winter nights and, after some initial resistance, Granny Thompson is captivated.
Anita later tires of the device when she discovers that it interferes with her other senses: this leads to the loss of some of her favourite wildlife when she isn’t there to defend them. She later sees a chance to get rid of the TV when Granny Thompson applies to be a contestant on a quiz show.¹ They are accepted and travel to London, but when they eventually end up on air, it does not go well:

The quizmaster introduced them as “Mrs. and Miss Thompson, from Northamptonshire” and asked for “a big hand” for some obscure reason. Applause pattered like gunfire and Granny looked startled. She muttered to Anita, “We ent done nothink yit . . .”
The machines caught the words and flung them out on the air. The audience roared delightedly and Granny Thompson’s lips set in a thin line. Anita began exultantly planning the best escape route. Everything was working out just as she’d thought it would. It was one thing to watch this show from an easy chair at home but quite another to be up on stage helping provide the kicks. That wasn’t quite so damn funny . . .
The compere beamed. “But you will do something, Mrs. Thompson, you will. We’re all quite sure of that. Now, this really most delightful girl, would you step forward a little, please, my dear, that’s it, let all the folks have a good view. Now this is your granddaughter you tell me, Mrs. Thompson, that is correct is it not?”
Granny turned from glaring at a camera that was very obviously examining Anita’s cleavage. She opened her mouth, considered, then closed it again like a rat trap. She said frostily, “No, has a matter hof fact . . . she ent. She ’eppens ter be the daughter hof a third cousin. Hon me mother’s side . . .”
“But you have brought her up?”
“Yis . . .”
“And very charmingly too if I may say, yes very charmingly . . . For the benefit of his audience the compere rolled his eyes and appeared about to drool. “Very nicely too . . . And you’re going to answer questions on, let me see, on folklore, isn’t it, that is correct, folklore?”
“Om orlready tole yer twice,” muttered Granny fiercely. “You blokes do goo on, dunt yer?”  p. 32

Things continue to deteriorate during the first question and finally fall apart when the compere asks the second:

Now for two pounds, two pounds, can you tell me three old-time cures for rheumatism? Any three you can think of now, any three at all . . .”
Anita thought she was going to burst. This was it, this just had to be it . . .
“Toads,” snarled Granny. “Round yer neckit usually though yer can stick ’em practic-ly anywheer. I dunt ’old with ’em though. Sheep jollop’s best, that kent ’ardly be beat ..
The compere’s face changed abruptly. Up above, someone began a frantic signalling. “Yer dries it,” bellowed Granny inexorably. “Then rubs it uwer anythink wot ’urts. That gen’rally answers. But if it dunt, try dugs’ wotsits . . .”
The quizmaster was aghast. The audience convulsed. “Only they ent so easy come by ner more,” explained Granny. “They’re the things though—”
“Mrs. Thompson, please—”
“You ’as ter spell ’em up,” screeched the old lady. “Bile ’em. I kent tell yer the spells ’cos they’re a trade secret but if yer teks my advice—”
The compere was trying to hustle them away from the mikes. He no longer looked suave. “I ent‍ finished,” fumed Granny. The great man spoke between his teeth. “You have, lady, by God you have . . .”
“Dunt you blaspheme in my presence,” shrieked the elder Thompson. The stick was up at last, beating the air. Faint blue crackles emerged from its tip. “Tek yer ’ands orf,” snarled Granny. She swung round. “An’ stop pokin’ that thing down our gel’s frock . . . The camera received a full charge from the spellstick, whistled backward and began making thunderous circuits of the stage.  p. 34

After they escape to their cottage Granny Thompson takes her revenge. The last line is as appropriate today as it was fifty years ago.
The rest of the fiction is a very mixed bag. The Desolator by Eric C. Williams² is a pretty dreadful time-travel story that involves a man from a grim future time-travelling back to the past to make his fortune and live comfortably. . . Until the police catch up with him that is. It is clichéd, and has clunky science explanations too.
Chemotopia by Ernest Hill is, I suppose, a satire about the treatment of three teenage droogs, sorry, delinquents who are picked up from a police station and taken for medical treatment after the murder of an old woman. The doctor and nurse chat away dispassionately during their further transgressions, e.g. bad language, exposing themselves, etc. After medicating them they go home and do the same to themselves. This one reads a little like a B-movie version of A Clockwork Orange.
Paradise for a Punter by Clifford C. Reed is a fantasy about a man at a racecourse getting particularly good odds from the bookies for the favourites, and he can’t quite understand why. The ending (spoiler) reveals that he is dead. That said, it is well enough done, if obvious.
A Way with Animals by John T. Phillifent has a man in police custody explaining why there was a fire in his flat. It materialises that while on holiday at his aunt’s he freed a dragon that was trapped in a cave. Subsequently, it came back to his flat to live with him, or more accurately on the flat roof of his building, although it pops in every now and then—hence the fire. This is a readable enough story and better than it sounds.
Grinnel by Dikk Richardson³ is a short-short which starts off like this:

Shelley had never liked Granville. Now, he had been pushed too far.
Looking Granville straight in the eye, he said ”Grinnel.”
“I beg your pardon,” said his boss, an outraged look on his face.
“Grinnel,” repeated Shelley. “Grinnel. Grinnel.”
“Are you swearing at me?” demanded Granville.
“Grinnel,” said Shelley again, making it obvious that he was not. “Grinnel. Grinnel. Grinnel.”
“Don’t be a bloody fool.”
“Grinnel.”
“Shelley!—Damn it, man, stop!”  p. 58

. . . and continues in a similar manner for another couple of hundred words. Another TBSF (typical Bonfiglioli space filler).

This issue’s Editorial sees Kyril Bonfiglioli discuss SF and science in the 1930s and the differences between then and now. This will give you a flavour:

But the s.f. of the 30s was not an inferior form of the art so much as something different altogether. No one took seriously the cardboard masks of the heroes and heroines of the space sagas. They were the masks behind which we became, in imagination, what we thought we should be. We felt our imperfection and we still had the idea that, somehow, perfection could be reached by striving, by will-power, by self-control. Such s.f. had something of the qualities of a myth or fairytale and became part of our experience. We participated in it and it changed us a little.
In a curious way, we have all grown up: even teenagers seem much more mature than they were. Perhaps the need for a myth has vanished. Anyhow, we have substituted illusions about ideals for illusions about ourselves being disillusioned, and get the kind of s.f. we deserve.  p. 3

A rather dreary issue with little of note bar Roberts’ Idiot’s Lantern. ●

_____________________

1. I think the quiz in Roberts’ story is based on Double Your Money, which was hosted by Hughie Green. I can remember watching it as a kid—if you are of a similar age and viewing experience to me you’ll get even more out of the story.

2. The majority of Eric William’s output was several novels for Robert Hale but he also published a number of short stories in three distinct batches. The first batch included three pieces to Amateur Science Stories in the late 1930s. Later, in the mid to late sixties, just before he got started on his novels, he published half a dozen more (sold to, believe it or not, five different editors: John Carnell, Michael Moorcock, Kyril Bonfiglioli, Harry Harrison—maybe that one was Keith Roberts—and Philip Harbottle). There was a final tranche of short stories around the beginning of the century. More at ISFDB.

3. I am informed by David Redd (personal email 15^th December 2018) that Grinnel was first published in Graham Hall’s one-off fanzine Doubt (October 1964), and that, more confusingly, “I discover[ed] on the web . . . that Graham sometimes borrowed Dikk Richardson’s name. However Doubt stated ‘NONE OF THE FAN-FICTION IS UNDER PEN-NAMES’.”
I personally do not think that either this Richardson story, or another squib, A Funny Thing Happened . . . (New Worlds SF #152, July 1965) were Hall’s work (contrast and compare these two with the latter’s vastly superior Sun Push in New Worlds SF #170).  ●

Edited 15^th December 2018: Footnote 3 about Richardson’s Grinnel added. Formatting changes.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 256 of 365) (Amazon UK)

Fiction:
The Furies (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Keith Roberts ♥♥+
A Distorting Mirror • short story by R. W. Mackelworth
The Door • short story by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan] ♥♥♥
The Criminal • short fiction by Johnny Byrne

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

This issue is almost entirely filled with Keith Roberts’ work. Apart from contributing a solid Cover to illustrate the first instalment of his debut novel The Furies (which takes up 97 pages out of the 128 in this issue) he also provides a pseudonymous short story, The Door.
The Furies is a conventional British disaster novel that has huge extra-terrestrial wasps attacking humanity at the same time as the Earth is subject to a catastrophic planet-wide earthquake. This latter event is due in part to the explosion of a nuclear bomb on the sea floor (the Neptune Project). These nuclear tests are mentioned a few times at the start of the novel, no doubt reflecting the political situation at the time.
The main character is Bill Sampson, who lives in the country and works as a cartoonist. He owns a dog, a Great Dane called Sek:

One of Sek’s minor advantages was that she seemed inordinately fond of my cooking. I could never resist the temptation to dabble about with fancy recipes; as often as not the results were disastrous but it seemed to me the more horrible the mess the more she enjoyed it. Maybe she was just being tactful; it was hard to tell with her, she was naturally polite.
When the daily battle was over I usually walked Sek for a couple of miles. We’d always finish up at the “Basketmakers Arms” in Brockledean. She was a firm favourite there. They kept biscuits behind the bar for her; she’d stretch her neck, push her great dark head over the counter, roll her lips back from her teeth and take the goodies as if they were made of glass. Then she’d eat them without leaving a crumb. She developed a fair taste for beer as well, though I usually restricted her to a dishful at the most. I felt one dipso in the family was enough. p. 8

Sampson befriends a precocious teenager called Jane before the disaster:

She was rubbing the great animal on the chest and Sek was standing there soaking it up and looking as sloppy as possible. The youngster straightened when she saw me; she was tall, she might have been fifteen or sixteen. It was hard to tell. She was neatly dressed in blue jeans and a check shirt; her face was round and rather serious with a straight, stubborn little nose and wide-spaced, candid blue eyes. She had a superb mane of dark hair, sleek and well brushed, caught up behind her ears with a crisp white ribbon. Altogether, a surprising vision. p. 13-14

When the Furies attack they are thrown together on a permanent basis and initially take cover in Sampson’s cellar, with the earthquake wrecked house above them. They later emerge and a British Army armoured car arrives, but after stopping briefly it moves on as they have no room for the pair of them. Sampson does find out where there is an army camp and, after a couple of minor solo adventures, picks up an APC (armoured personnel carrier) and returns to the cottage for Jane.
These events pretty much set up the template for the next thirty or forty pages: they move around the countryside, other people and forms of transport come and go, and the Furies attack, sometimes trapping them in the places they shelter. At one point the pair end up in Granny Thompson’s house (unlike the ‘Anita’ stories, here she is called Mrs Stillwell):

“Got a cat round somewhere,” said the old lady. “Or at least I ’ad. ’Aven’t seen her since this mornin’. Such comin’s an’ goin’s, I never seen anything like it I’m sure. Look at that . . .” She glared at the blocked window. “Messed all the paint, using pins an’ that tape stuff . . . I wouldn’t ’ave bothered only that young feller we ’ad round, he told me I better. Just like the war it’s bin, all over. I don’t know . . . She changed her tack abruptly. “Want a cuppa?” p. 82-83

She reports she managed to fight off two of the Furies, which surprises Bill and Jane as the giant wasps are lethal, and are usually only brought down with flamethrowers.
As you can probably gather from what I’ve described so far, the first six chapters are competent but episodic fare which don’t really advance the story. There are also a number of elements that don’t convince: there is no particular explanation as to how the Furies can exist (the square-cube law), and the earthquake that devastates the entire world feels a little too convenient. Also, more cringe-inducing today than in 1965 perhaps, why is a thirty-something man together with a fifteen or sixteen year old? (Sampson’s feelings for Jane mostly go unspoken but occasionally rise to the surface before disappearing back down into the deeps—we’ll see if that remains the case in the next couple of instalments.)
Fortunately, with the arrival of chapter seven, we start to see some flashes of Roberts’ ability. The pace picks up and there is a good description of what Bill and Jane see after they have left Mrs Stillwell and are trying to outrun the Furies in their car en route to the coast:

We crabbed out of a final bend and the view widened ahead. Jane shrieked something and started to point. Away to our left the land shelved into a bowl a mile or more across; and for hundreds of yards, as far as I could see, the grass was covered by a weird encrustation. It was as if somebody had let a king-size bowl of porridge boil over and spill down the slope. It was a few seconds before I realized what I was looking at. It was a nest, or a city.
The wasps had given up all attempt at concealment and allowed their woodpulp shanties to sprawl across the hill. There were combs and great brood cells all made of the same flimsy stuff; over them by way of protection they’d hauled all the junk imaginable, bolts of cloth and cocomatting, sheets of galvanised iron, chunks of linoleum, sections torn from fences, bits of furniture, even old motor car tyres and wheels. It was like a mile-wide corporation tip. Above the rubbish the Furies hung in a golden haze; the thousands of wings made a deep rumbling, like the noise of a massive waterfall. p. 93-94

Later they are separated, and Bill, after trying to follow Jane to the Isle of Wight in a yacht, finds he has travelled through a night-time storm only to end up back on the mainland. He then finds a pub and gets drunk. During this bout of self-pity we get an early example of an effective Roberts’ device¹ where his characters dream and/or hallucinate about other characters:

I think altogether I must have put down about four or five, and after that I couldn’t have gone far if I wanted to. I hadn’t eaten for a while of course; I suppose my stomach just couldn’t take the swilling I’d given it. I tried to reason with myself but it was too late. The drink had hold of me and I knew I’d never done a damn thing right in my life and it was no use trying. I’d killed my girl and I’d killed my dog; I was beat, the wasps were everywhere and we were through. Well, if I was only fit for getting drunk I’d try and make a job of it. I managed to edge my way back to the barrels and poured out another tankard . . .
Sometime in the afternoon Jane walked through the bar. I called her but she wouldn’t come. She was smart; she stayed just outside the range of my vision, flitting about like a little wraith. Sek was there somewhere too, but I couldn’t let her in. I pleaded with both of them, then lost my temper and damned them to all eternity. Then, mercifully, I passed out like a light. p. 99-100

In the morning he hears people singing and goes outside to find a truck full of people drunk and laughing. We are treated to a cliff-hanger image to end this instalment:

I was still glaring about vaguely when an ancient lorry came round the corner of the street, stopped alongside with a screech of worn linings. I looked up at it, trying to focus. The back was open and it was crammed with people. They were laughing and cheering and every other one seemed to be waving a bottle. I saw a little man in a striped, collarless shirt, three or four beefy farming types, a heap of girls with long untidy hair and leather jerkins, a bearded boy in a fisherknit sweater, guitar slung round his neck. It looked like an artists’ colony gone haywire. I reeled round to the tailboard. I said thickly “Wha’ the Hell goes on . . .”
Fingers gripped my arms. One of the popsies started to scream with laughter. Somebody said “Come on whack, join the party . . .” I landed in the truck and it careered off down the street. A bottle was shoved in my hand. A voice shouted “Drink up, th’ war’s over.”
I tried to take it in. “What happened? Are the wasps dead?”
Laughter broke like a wave. A blonde lurched across the lorry, tried to grab the bottle and fell over my knees. She jerked her thumb at the top of the cab, giggling. I looked up and for the first time saw the Fury, straddling the metal with its wide-spread legs and staring disinterestedly down at its human load. p. 100

The short story by Roberts, The Door, is a minor and perhaps even clichéd piece, but I liked it nonetheless. A man called Naylor has started a revolution in an underground city and is using the disorder as cover while he tries to force open an entrance to the surface. He believes that the buried city is on a post-holocaust Earth, and that the surface radiation—caused by attacks by Earth’s colony planets in the solar system—may have abated.
There is a neat description of the social order that exists underground:

Below Blue City the Levels increased in complexity and culture. There was the intermediate Brown Level, then the Red, then Orange and Yellow and finally, deepest sunk of all, White. White City was the financial and religious capital of the vertical empire, the seat of government and order. Naylor knew that under the old order he would never have been allowed to sink to full White status. Instead he had founded his own heretic creed; to rise. With him, seeking the heights was no longer a phrase of contempt. p. 123-124

There is a neat twist ending.

The other two short stories are awful. A Distorting Mirror by R. W. Mackelworth was a real slog to get through, not helped by the fact that it starts with several pages of talking heads between a couple, who appear to be under the influence of some kind of drug, and a housing manager of the future. Eventually the couple are vouchsafed a vision of their life in a new home, but this turns out to be a test to see whether they are suitable candidates to join the ‘Management.’
At least The Criminal by Johnny Byrne is short. A silver spaceship ejects a naked man who subsequently explains to the crowd he has been sent to Earth for punishment. At the end (spoiler) he reveals that there was another of his race called Adam who had been sent previously. Oh dear.

As to the non-fiction in this issue, I’ve already mentioned Roberts’ cover above. I note in passing two other items: the Science Fantasy cover logo has shrunk in size to make room for a featured story title and, once again, the back cover promises stories that aren’t in the issue (this time by Harry Harrison and, again, Philip Wordley).
In his Editorial, Kyril Bonfiglioli continues his discussion about ‘readability’ which he started last issue. I’m not sure he really adds anything (and manages to misspell ‘Azimov’ in the process).

A mixed bag, but this issue will always have a soft spot in my heart as it was one of the first copies of the magazine I ever bought (around forty years ago).

1. This dream/hallucination device is used to good effect in the final scenes of his novel Drek Yarman.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 247 of 365) (Amazon UK)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfilioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:
The Impossible Smile (Part 2 of 2) • novella serial by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Jael Cracken] –
Great & Small • short story by G. L. Lack ∗∗+
Ploop • short story by Ron Pritchett –
Peace on Earth • short story by Paul Jents –
Deterrent • short story by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan] ∗∗∗
A Pleasure Shared • reprint short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗+
Prisoner • short story by Patricia Hocknell
In Reason’s Ear • novelette by Hilary Bailey [as by Pippin Graham] ∗∗∗
Xenophilia • short story by Thom Keyes ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

The fiction in this issue of the magazine makes reading it a game of two halves: most of the fiction in the first half is fairly poor but the material at the back isn’t bad.
The Impossible Smile by Brian W. Aldiss completes in this issue. Wyvern is taken to Bureau-X, where he sees Parrodyce and warns him telepathically that Colonel H knows he is a telepath. Parrodyce flees. Wyvern later wakes up to find he is plugged into Bert the computer.
The rest of the story involves Wyvern and Parrodyce each going through several capture/escape narrative loops. Wyvern is dematerialised by Bert the computer at one point to escape being shot. At the very end of the story Wyvern learns to do this on his own, and transports himself to the rebels in the Yank zone of the Moon where he meets fellow telepath Eileen. She has cured Parrodyce of his mental ills and he ends up becoming a zither player in a Turkish band. All ends well.
Although this part is told in the same readable manner as the first, I became less resistant to its awfulness about half way through.
Great & Small by G. L. Lack is not bad and, with a couple of minor revisions, could have been quite good. This mood piece has a man waking up from radiotherapy treatment to hear a fly buzzing above him. When he recalls that they have all been wiped out, he wakes completely and finds that not only is everyone in the hospital dead but a similar situation pertains outside the building as well. The rest of the story details his last man on Earth wanderings. He is accompanied by the fly, which he makes some effort to keep as a companion.
The first of its two flaws is that there is a statement that seemingly contradicts the existence of the fly (and subsequently undermines the story’s quite good last line):

Flies were extinct—they had all been destroyed in World Pesticide Year when he was nine years old. p. 45

The second is a clunky and ill-explained rationale for the extinction of humanity:

He sat up looking through the open door at the sky. As a boy he had known all the constellations but this knowledge had faded with the accumulation of technical facts in adolescence. Now the patterns stood out prominently but he could not put a name to them. Why had he not seen them clearly for so long? Sleep was overtaking him again when the answer came—he had been unable to see the constellations for so long because there had been too many bodies between, confusing and masking the heavens.
Now the radiation brooms had gone. The clusters of satellites whose job it was to absorb the particles which bombarded the atmosphere from the radioactive belts were no longer there. Had the hundred billion to one chance occurred—that the sweepers had been drawn off into space in one direction only, thus enveloping the Earth on their journey? It accounted for the mass death and for the fact that all was apparently safe now. Was he on a planet free at last of man’s ambition and folly?  p. 51

Ploop by Ron Pritchett is about a human spaceship landing on an unexplored (I assume) planet and finding a dog there. The crew don’t seem to think it that unusual when they find the animal but pay more attention to it when it sets off their radiation alarms. The story is as ridiculous as its title.
Peace on Earth by Paul Jents is about soldiers travelling in rockets to the moon (during which they are sedated part of the time because of the gravitational effects). They land on the dark side of the moon and make a ‘surprise’ discovery.
The space travel detail is dated and the ending is lame.
The next few stories are all quite good, save for Prisoner by Patricia Hocknell, so I’ll deal with it now. This one describes a man suffering what would appear to be an awful, painful imprisonment . . . but it turns out that he is (spoiler) a baby in a crib. I think this is a representative of the kind of stories that would later be uncharitably but accurately described as “typical Bonfiglioli space-fillers.”

Anyway, on to the good stuff. Deterrent by Keith Roberts has an opening that reminded me a little of a later story of his, The God House:¹

Spears were sacred to the Valley Folk. The spears of their warriors kept danger at bay, and the great palisades of spikes with which they ringed their villages gave them security at night. The sun woke their crops with hot spears, so the weapon had become a symbol of fertility. And when storms flickered in the surrounding hills the people were glad because the Gods were striking evildoers with their own bright weapons.  p. 65

This is about a tribe that are under threat from marauding Raiders. Their seer tells of a great spear in the ground that will help defend them. After searching for some time the tribe’s warriors find exactly that, and they learn how to work the metal from the spear into weapons. The great spear is (spoiler) an abandoned ICBM.
This is a fairly good if minor piece.
A Pleasure Shared by Brian W. Aldiss (Rogue, December 1962) is probably the best story in the issue even if it is (a) a reprint and (b) not SF. A serial killer shares a house with two other people and, against his will, ends up getting involved with both of them. It has a great hook at the start:

At seven thirty I rose and went over to the window and drew back the curtains. Outside lay another wintry London day—not nice.
Miss Colgrave was still in the chair where I had left her. I pulled her skirt down. Female flesh looks very unappetising before breakfast. I went through into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea and poached an egg on the gas ring. While I did so I smoked a cigarette. I always enjoy a cigarette first thing in the morning.
I ate my breakfast in the bedroom, watching Miss Colgrave closely as I did so. At one point I rose to adjust the scarf round her neck, which looked unsightly. Miss Colgrave had not been a very respectable woman; she had paid the price of sin. But it would be a nuisance disposing of her.  p. 73

It is hard to believe that this is the same writer that produced The Impossible Smile.

The most interesting story in this issue is a longish novelette by Hilary Bailey² called In Reason’s Ear, which concerns the events that befall John Wetherall, an overseas civil servant who has just returned to London. During the ride home in a taxi he dozes but suddenly wakes up:

An unquiet thought crept in—he sat up suddenly. Good Lord, he thought, what’s going on round here?
With the speed of a man who has spent five years leaping out of bed at night to kill snakes and chase off pilferers, he jumped up and shot the window down. At once he noticed the drab, battered facades of Oxford Street, peeling like the Grand Hotel, Budapest, ten years after World War II. The crowd surging and shouting on the pavements beside the cab looked like a combination of existentialist Paris after dark and closing time at the circus. About his stationary cab washed the traffic-battered cars, scraped red buses and decrepit lorries, coming from all directions at once, coughing, wheezing and halting, hooting and squealing with no regard for traffic regulations or, indeed, the virtues of give and take and tolerance on the roads.
And beside his own cab, standing by a garishly candy-striped 1964 E-type Jaguar was a motley of young people, none a day over 18, arguing with the driver. Their spokesman was a tall girl, her blonde hair apparently hacked off by a vindictive army barber, her dress long and dun-coloured. She stood, lithe and menacing, with a small knife in her hand. Backing her up was another girl, dark and ugly, wearing the same orphanage dress and two longhaired boys, one in bright red and the other all in blue.  p. 90-91

The much changed and deteriorating social fabric of the country (due to its mass youth unemployment) is the subject of further description and comment throughout the piece: this isn’t written like genre SF but rather like a conventional novel of the time (what I think may be called the ‘English social novel’—if I ever read one I’ll let you know for sure).
The rest of the story is mostly concerned about Wetherall’s encounters with a man called Bob Pardoe. The latter had approached Wetherall while he was still overseas looking for money and a false passport to get out of the country. Wetherall obliged and they subsequently travelled home on the same ship. During the voyage Pardoe had appeared detached and listless.
When Wetherall is later debriefed in London it becomes apparent that his boss (or rather the government) is interested in the fact that he had travelled home with Pardoe. Later, when Wetherall visits his parents, he finds that Pardoe had been the third man on the moon and crash landed in Africa on return—this occurred when Wetherall was in the hospital for several months with a fever. The authorities reported that Pardoe had died.
When Wetherall meets his boss for a drink that evening he finds out that two Eastern Bloc Moon astronauts have also been behaving strangely. On returning to his parents he finds them with the Pardoes, their neighbours, along with their missing son.
The final section has Wetherall talking to Pardoe about his trip to the moon. The latter relates how it has changed him, and that he does not want to talk to the authorities about his trip as he fears the damage that could be done by mans’ outward urge, the exploitation and militarisation of the moon, etc. Wetherall tries to convince him to engage in the exploration process, to give the directionless young of the day something to strive towards. The ending, where Pardoe and one of the Russian astronauts are picked up by the authorities, is left open.
There are a number of other things that are interesting in this piece as well. One example is the detail about how Wetherall came to be divorced from his wife:

John had stared down his long nose at the red-handed, red-headed strange fruit lying in its crib at the clinic—and wondered.
“Just like his father,” Margot’s mother had exclaimed.
A light dawned in John’s eyes. “He most certainly is,” he exclaimed emphatically, turned, left the room and never saw Margot again.  p. 95-96

This is followed up by Wetherall’s reaction when his boss suggests visiting his ex-wife Margot after the pub:

He produced an invitation. “Margot wanted me to give you this. She’s been ringing up to ask after you occasionally during the past year. Do you want to go?”
“Are you going?”
“I will if you will,” said Plunkett. “I doubt if I’ll stay, though. You’ve no objections to seeing her?”
“Not really,” said [Wetherall]. “I’m not so sure about that redheaded bastard, though.”
“Cameron? Surely he can’t still be on the scene?”
“I meant it literally. The tiny tot who fraudulently bears my name.”
Plunkett looked at him sympathetically. “I believe he lives with his grannie in Cornwall.”  p. 113

Not the kind of thing you would have found when John Carnell was editing Science Fantasy.
This isn’t a totally successful work (the meeting of Pardoe and one of the Russian astronauts at the end is an unlikely contrivance for instance, and the space travel aspects are dated and unconvincing) but it is an almost endlessly interesting one and well worth a look.

Whereas Carnell would have been able to bowdlerise Bailey’s story and run it, I strongly suspect Xenophilia by Thom Keyes would have been considered beyond the sexual pale. This story is supposedly set on a starboat but, initially at least, it is a thinly veiled copy of a Mississippi paddleboat casino story until the protagonist approaches a non-human extra-terrestrial:

Twister straightened his tie and polished his shoes under the machine, then he went back into the Saloon and looked around for the Tarpan. The tables were full, but she was big. She should stand out. Then he saw her settling down beside a roulette table. He moved next to her. “May I take this seat?” he asked, and indicated the empty place.
“By all means,” she replied. Thank God she spoke Galactic.
He even introduced himself as Twister, in the earth form, of course, and they got on well. Twister was confident in his appearance of naive sensuousness. He exaggerated it in his quiet conversation. He was smooth and strong. The woman could never recognize what he was; a gigolo, a professional lover. In the simulated evening, after many drinks, he confessed his affection for her. They moved away from the observation rail and walked down the corridors to her cabin. Twister scored on his mark.  p. 125

They are together for the rest of the voyage and then, as the ship prepares for the final jump, he starts to work his way around to dumping her so he can rejoin his partner Kittia, who works as a conventional prostitute on the ship. There then follows an ending that is a little predictable but one (as with his previous appearance in Science Fantasy with A Period of Gestation) that gives a visceral thrill nonetheless.
This is another noteworthy taboo-busting story by Keyes (the gigolo theme, some description of human-alien sex acts, and probably the first sexual use of the word “frottage” in SF).³

As for the non-fiction, the Cover is once again by Keith Roberts. The second by him of a run of four, it is one of his weaker efforts. The back cover lists three stories, only one of which actually appears in this issue.⁴
In his Editorial Kyril Bonfiglioli discusses the difference between well-written and readable books. He provides a useful example:

The front page of the Daily Mirror is usually full of eminently readable, well-told stories—one would have to be blase indeed to be actively bored by it—but I am sure that even the editor would not claim that it is well-written. . .  p. 2

There is a subsequent comment about the James Bond novels:

The enormous success of the late Ian Fleming’s James Bond series might tempt one to describe them as “good” or “well-written” books. They are, of course, nothing of the kind. They describe with implicit approval the base actions of an amoral thug engaged in an unsavoury trade; they are implausible in content, undistinguished in style, palpably deleterious in their effect upon the young and clearly written within the terms of a cynically-devised formula intended to appeal to the most despicable elements in our characters. I read them avidly and so (statistically speaking) do you: cruelty, lechery, gluttony and snobbery are a group of indoor sports peculiar to what we laughingly call homo sapiens.  p. 3

Interesting piece: a pity he would soon tire of writing them.

In conclusion, a worthwhile issue or, perhaps more accurately, half of one.  ●

_____________________

1. I briefly discussed The God House in my review of New Worlds Quarterly #1 (1971).

2. Why Bailey’s story was published under the ‘Pippin Graham’ pseudonym, I have no idea. Her previous story, The Fall of Frenchy Steiner in New Worlds #143 (July-August 1964), reviewed by me here, was published under her own name and so was all her subsequent short work.

3. The OED gives two meanings for the word “frottage.” The first is “the technique or process of taking a rubbing from an uneven surface to form the basis of a work of art;” the second is “the practice of touching or rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification.” Who knew?

4. The Aldiss/Cracken story listed below appeared in this issue. The Wordley story appeared in #77, and the Roberts in #75 (presumably that is why Deterrent appeared under the Bevan pseudonym in this issue):

Edited 27th August 2020: Formatting changes.

ISFDB

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 247 of 365) (Amazon UK)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:
The Impossible Smile (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Jael Cracken] ∗
The Middle Earth • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗
Housel • short story by Alan Burns –
Vashti • novelette by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗+
Timmy and the Angel • short story by Philip Wordley ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

This issue has, perhaps, the most striking Cover that the magazine used in this period. I’m not sure I like it but it certainly grabs your attention, and I can see many newsstand buyers picking it up.¹
The fiction starts with The Impossible Smile by Brian W. Aldiss, which is the first part of a pseudonymous novella that starts in Norwich, “Capital of the British Republics”, in 2020. Jim Bull (“Our Beloved Leader”) is assassinated by a killer hiding in a wall cavity. Afterwards, he breaks out from the palace-barracks and ends up in a rocket headed for the moon.
After this dynamic opening section the narrative switches to Wyvern, who is the main character for the remainder of the story. Wyvern has returned from a black market which had been raided by the police and smashed up, and where his sister was arrested. He finds a note from her saying they were looking for telepaths like him. Later he watches TV with his cruxstistics pupils (‘the science of three-di mathematical lodgements) and the news announces Jim Bull’s death: when they show footage from the moon he gets a telepathic flash from a young woman called Eileen. He falls in love immediately and determines to go and find her.
The rest of the first part involves his arrest by the authorities, his encounter with another telepath called Parrodyce, and his subsequent release. He then goes to the moon and, while searching for Eileen, finds a murdered shopkeeper and another man dying of stab wounds upstairs.
All of this is about as bad as it sounds (and I haven’t even mentioned the reason that the authorities are looking for telepaths is so they can teach ‘Bert the computer’ telepathy to control the populace). It seems likely that this story was part of the same tranche of poor quality mss that Aldiss provided to Bonfiglioli when the latter was struggling for material when he started editing the magazine. The story certainly has that air of a rejected New Worlds story from the 1950s.²
That said, there is the (very) occasional flash of the writer Aldiss would eventually become. There is this slight nudge against genre prudery in a description of a neighbourhood on the moon:

JJ was not a savoury quarter. It had lodgings and snuff palaces and a blue cinema, and even one of the gadarenes beloved by spacemen on the search for orgies, thriving among the many tiny shops.  p. 36

Not something that would have survived John Carnell’s red pen, I suspect.
There is also quite a good description of Wyvern’s experience as he telepathically probes a dying man to discover who his killer was:

Then that bubble of memory also burst, burst into the garish colour of pain. It flowed round, over, through Wyvern, drowning him, bearing him seven seas down in another’s futility. It bore him Everest-deep, changing its hues, fading and cooling. It carried him where no lungs could live, and then it was going, gargling away into a whirlpool down the hole in the universe where all life goes. It broke foaming over Wyvern’s head, pouring away like a mill-race, tearing to take him with it, sucking at his body, whipping about his legs, screaming as it slid over the bare nerve-ends of Dorgen’s ocean-mind-bed.
The last drop drained. The little universe collapsed with one inexorable implosion. Dorgen was dead. p. 39

The Middle Earth by Keith Roberts is another of his ‘Anita the Witch’ stories. In this one Anita meets the ghost of a man who has recently died in a car crash. He is stuck on Earth and haunts a rural spot near to where his girlfriend (or ex-girlfriend, I suppose) lives:

There was silence between them for a time. The Fynebrook chuckled; they were sitting beside it, where an overhanging willow cast a pleasant shade. Weed swayed in the current; a fish darted upstream; beside the bank a patch of whirligig beetles danced like demented pearls.
[. . .]
“Do you realize there are fourteen voles in this brook between the bend up there and that big alder tree? Seven holes in this bank, curiously enough, and seven in the other. And two small pike . . . oh, and there’s an otter. I didn’t think there were any otters near here but I suppose one dies and learns . . . and there are about two dozen hedgehogs and thirty-eight bats, nine species of dragonfly, two kingfishers . . .”  p. 44-45

Anita feels sorry for him so she goes to see the local Controller to see if she can get him moved on.

“So that’s the whole story, Controller,” said Anita simply. “An’ I came along to you to—”
“Gee-six,” said the Controller furiously to the empty air. “I told you area gee-six, you can’t cross to Leicestershire . . . No, I won’t clear you. You know the rules as well as I do, twenty-four hours’ notice for a county boundary . . . What? I don’t care what you think Ducky, over and out . . . He muttered to himself. “Old days, old days, it was always better in the old days. That’s all I hear, whining about the old days . . . let ’em all Timeshift, see if I care. By Golly . . . Cee-kay-nine-four-zero-fifty, you are cleared for Huntingdon, happy landings . . . Come in oh-fife-four . . .”
Anita sighed hopelessly and crossed her legs. She had been talking for nearly half an hour and she had only just got round to telling him what she wanted. The evening air was chaotic with messages, and most of them were passing through this room. Anita’s mess of senses detected a roar of silent conversation. She unravelled a strand and followed it.
“Four pun ten?” snarled Granny Thompson. “Fer that great mangy brute o’ yourn? Om ’ired better familiars than ’e’ll ever be fer thirty bob a week Aggie, an’ well you knows it . . .  p. 48-49

I’m not entirely sure that this one coheres as a story, but if you like the Anita series there are number of aspects you may like: the gentle melancholy of the first part (if you ignore his stiff upper lip English character, and the tonally incongruous offer of sex Anita makes at the end of that section), the descriptions of the country and wildlife, and parts of the scene with the local Controller.
Housel by Alan Burns³ is a terribly, terribly English production (emphasis on terrible) that is notable for its depiction of what I suppose were the class, social and sexual mores in early-sixties Britain. The story itself is about a “housel” repairman doing charity work for a young woman living on the state basic allowance. Her housel machine (an emotion amplifier for your house that produces bespoke feelings and visions) is causing her periodic terrors.
The repairman gets to work and tracks it down to a housel machine in the locked attic. In and around working out why it is malfunctioning he takes her out for meals, they party in town, and she eventually ends up staying at his friends:

I drove to the office, saw that everything was locked up for the night, called up my relieving Housel Repairer to advise him that I’d be occupied for a day or two on a case so he could take anything small that came in and drove Linette out to the complex. My friends the Rutters gladly took Linette in, promised to send her round so she could dine with me in the complex restaurant, and then chased me away. I changed quickly, giving myself half an hour with my text-books.
[. . .]
I put my books away and went down to the restaurant.
The Rutters had turned out a chic little mouse for me. We had a drink or two in the bar and then went in for dinner. Linette’s childhood training made her an interesting conversationalist over a meal, especially when the surroundings and food were several cuts above what comes in return for a State Basic food check.  p. 64-65

About three-quarters of the way through the story (spoiler) there is a huge data dump that attributes the problems to aliens that have a damaged spaceship. By then I was pretty much past caring.
Vashti by Thomas Burnett Swann is another of his mythological fantasies. This novelette⁴ concerns Ianiskos—a man in a child’s body, and a healer who serves the Persian King Xerxes. In the opening scene Ianiskos is at a feast with his king and Haman, a Kurdish general. The latter is fomenting discord between the King and his wife: Vashti is barren and Haman asks the king why he has never seen her completely naked. Provoked, the king orders Vashti to come and reveal herself. Vashti refuses, and the rest of the story’s events are set in motion by her divorce and banishment.
Before she leaves, Vashti meets with Ianiskos and we learn of his previous life, which involves amnesia about his early years, and a subsequent period as a slave. Vashti forbids him to follow her to the mountain kingdom of Petra but after she leaves he does so anyway.
The middle part of the story is about his travels to catch up with Vashti, and (spoiler) his eventual stay with a family of malevolent Jinn children. During the evening meal they take out their prized possession, part of a falling star. They think Ianiskos is the god Tishtar, and he cannot convince them otherwise. He tries to leave in the middle of the night but Tir catches and imprisons him.
Vashti later comes to his rescue and takes him to Petra, a huge valley surrounded by almost impassable cliffs. After resting there for a while, Vashti and Ianiskos are carried by vultures to a strange tree in the mountains. Ianiskos is taken by the tree and is reborn as a man. It materialises that he had previously been growing on the tree until he was ripped away by Eagles working for the Jinns. He later managed to escape, but was captured and made a slave.
He is finally revealed as the god Tishtar.
I thought more highly of this story the first time round. On this occasion it struck me that it could have done with another draft: there are places where scenes are unclear (the entry into the valley of Petra) and there are other things, such as the odd lump of exposition, especially in the final pages. Also, Ianiskos’s rescue from the Jinn children is rather too convenient.
On the other hand, there is some lovely writing:

Xerxes had once accused him: “Your heart is like a moth. It is always looking for another fire in which to burn its wings.” And Vashti had answered: “One day, I think, it will become a phoenix, which rises doubly beautiful from its own ashes.”  p. 102

Or this from when Ianiskos emerges from the mountains into the sunlight of the valley:

It seemed to Ianiskos that he stood like a phoenix in the heart of a fire which encompassed all brightnesses: the fire of sandalwood from the hearth of a temple; moonfoam shading from silver to amber to orange like the moon as it waxes to fullness; stars, strewn in a Milky Way without extinguishing their separate twinklings; bluewhite phosphorus from the wake of a galley on a night sea; the flashing bronze mirrors of a pharos on a dangerous headland. Many burnings, many brightnesses; one fire, encompassing and purifying. Atar, the Immortal Flame.  p. 107

More significantly, the closing scenes of his rebirth from the tree lift the story to another level.
Timmy and the Angel by Philip Wordley is about a seven year old boy who has paranormal powers. He receives a visit from an ‘Angel’ or alien, who shows him how humanity will spread out into the universe and the harm they will cause. Timmy subsequently uses his powers to go to a guarded facility and alter the nuclear power plants of a secret fleet of spaceships.
In the final passages (spoiler) he is revealed as being the offspring of the visiting alien and returns home.
The style and content of this one is all over the place (it goes from a twee opening to quite dark descriptions of the carnage caused by humanity, for instance) and it is hard to believe that this is the writer would produce the superior Goodnight, Sweet Prince a few months later. This is probably the worst of the four stories he produced for the magazine.

Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Editorial starts off with a plug for British Science Fiction Association and its magazine Vector, before moving on to the World SF convention (which was going to be held in London in 1965). He offers to publish details of other fanzines in forthcoming issues.
He then moves on to this:

I am continually tempted to embark, in these editorials, on one of those long dreary discussions about what Science Fiction really is, whether there is such a genre etc. I have succeeded in the past in fighting against this temptation and hope to continue to do so but there really is a strange idiosyncracy about this particular kind of fiction which continually invites speculation. The only parallel which has any validity is with the detective novel which also had its fixed conventions and rules, its fanatical enthusiasts, its pseudonymous part-time writers and its lovers of the pure and early vintages. But there the resemblance ceases: no ’tec story reader would have thought of running an amateur magazine for other enthusiasts, no editor would have bothered to discuss the nature of the medium in his magazine, certainly no World Congress of detective story writers and readers would have been held every year for twenty three years. What is the peculiar charm, where lies the importance, real or imagined, of this kind of story?
Letters, please?  p. 3

The last part of his editorial concerns letters and story ratings:

Many of the people who have asked for a letter page (absent this month only because of lack of interesting material) also often ask for story-ratings. I am afraid that I positively decline to use story space on this particular feature, because I do not believe it either useful or accurate. To discourage or encourage writers on the basis of a poll taken from those readers who can be bothered to write and tell me their opinions is manifestly unfair to say the least. If two hundred readers each month commented on each story this would still not be a fair sample: it would be some 80 per cent of the letter-writers but only 1.4 per cent or thereabouts of the whole readership and would tell us nothing about those readers who never write. The only way to get a fair rating for stories would be to pay a market-research firm to take proper random samples from the readership and this would be absurdly expensive. In short, sorry—no story-ratings.  p. 3-4

I think he makes a good point about story ratings. Simple arithmetic also informs us that (a) the magazine must have had a circulation of around 14,300 copies, and (b) Bonfiglioli was receiving 250 letters of comment every month (an average of ten every time the postie came!)

With the exception of Thomas Burnett Swann’s novelette, quite a dreary issue.  ●

_____________________

1. This cover was striking even when reproduced as a black and white image at much reduced size in Mike Ashley’s article on Keith Roberts (Science Fiction Monthly, December 1975). It was certainly one of the things about the feature that caught my attention:

2. Despite the fact this story should have been forgotten, Aldiss collected it and another piece called Equator (New Worlds #75, September 1958) in the 1987 book Cracken at Critical. The book adds a framing novella, The Mannerheim Symphony. I tried to find out what the critical reaction was but most of the original reviews were in out of the way places (or they are now). More at ISFDB.

3. I didn’t recognise the name Alan Burns but he published a handful of stories between 1955-1965. ISFDB appears to have mixed him up with another writer according to SFE.

4. Swann’s story is described as a novella by ISFDB. OCR says it is around 15,200 words.  ●

Edited 2^nd October 2019: formatting, and some minor text changes.

ISFDB
Archive.org

Other reviews:¹
John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 239 of 365) (Amazon UK)
Graham Hall, Vector #32 (June 1965)
Mark Yon, Galactic Journey

_____________________

Fiction:
Man in His Time • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗+
The War at Foxhanger • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗+
The Chicken Switch • short story by Elleston Trevor ∗∗
Susan • short story by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan] ∗∗∗
The Excursion • novelette by Brian N. Ball –
Over and Out • short story by George Hay –
Hunt a Wild Dream (Part 2 of 2) • novelette serial by D. R. Heywood ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

A couple of years after Brian W. Aldiss’s contribution to this issue was published, he would contribute an editorial to an issue of New Worlds which was a reprint of a speech he had made to the H. G. Wells’ PEN Club on the occasion of that writer’s centenary. In this article he mainly discusses Wells’ work but towards the end mentions Jules Verne, and how the latter was the guiding spirit of the SF magazines between the wars. Since then, Aldiss adds, a sceptical and more inquiring tone has crept in to genre SF, and that there are (circa 1966) a group of writers who “use the Wells technique of thrusting a splinter of the unknown into a human situation in order to examine man, his circumstances, his defects, his conditions, his conditionals.”²
This last quotation leads us neatly to Aldiss’s story, Man in His Time. It starts with Jack Westermark, his wife Janet, a behaviourist called Stackpole, and an administrator meeting in a hospital office. Jack is the only surviving astronaut of a nine-man crew that crash-landed on returning from Mars. Furthermore, he is 3.3077 minutes ‘ahead’ of everyone on Earth so that, for example, he answers questions before they are asked:

She saw Jack walk in the garden. As she looked, he glanced up, smiled, said something to himself, stretched out a hand, withdrew it, and went, still smiling, to sit on one end of the seat on the lawn. Touched, Janet hurried over to the french windows, to go and join him.
She paused. Already, she saw ahead, saw her sequence of actions, for Jack had already sketched them into the future. She would go onto the lawn, call his name, smile, and walk over to him when he smiled back. Then they would stroll together to the seat and sit down, one at each end.  p. 15

In the Vernian model of SF that Aldiss refers to, this would be a problem to be solved, or perhaps used as part of a larger adventure. What happens in this story, however, is almost the complete opposite. Jack and his wife return home accompanied by the behaviourist Stackpole, and the rest of the piece largely concentrates on the human aspects of the problem (although there are a few philosophical digressions). In particular, there is a focus on Jack and Janet as they struggle to talk to each other, perhaps a metaphor for the larger communication difficulties between men and women (this is reinforced by conversations between Janet and Stackpole, and also comments that Janet’s mother-in-law makes).
Although this an impressive work it is not without fault: it is sometimes unclear, is a little unfocused, and rather rambles towards an ending suggesting acceptance of the situation. Because of the first two it is a piece that readers will need to concentrate on while reading—the first time I reread it was before going to sleep, which led to me repeating the exercise . . . .
This is a notable story for Aldiss in that, perhaps for the first time (as in his contemporaneous novel Greybeard), he jettisons nearly all the trappings of genre SF. It was also a Hugo and Nebula Award finalist.
The War at Foxhanger by Keith Roberts is among the best stories in his series about the teenage witch Anita. The beginning is a masterclass in illustrating not only one of the protagonists’ characters (Granny Thompson) but also in setting up what the story is going to be about (a feud between two neighbouring witches):

Granny Thompson’s temper finally snapped when the jam refused to set. Anita stood by anxiously while the old lady spooned a sample onto a saucer, blew it, fanned it and then inverted it over the table. The jam wobbled, collected itself into a blob and fell off, plunk, onto the cloth. Granny Thompson gave a shout in which frustration and rage were nicely blended.
“Six hours! Nothink but bile an’ bile, an’ look at it! It ent even started . . . an’ it wunt, I can tell yer that, not in a month o’ Sundys. Yer kin tek it orf, it ent wuth wastin’ ’eat on.” She obeyed her own instruction, lifted the iron pot from the range and banged it down sizzling on the hearth. “Spelled,” muttered the old woman, casting round for book and glasses. “Spelled, that’s wot we are . . . an’ I dunt need to arsk ’oo by, neither . . . look at it!” And she whacked the offending jam with a ladle, startling Anita who had leaned over, eyes closed, to sniff the mauve steam of blackberries.
Granny Thompson stirred the mess vigorously. “Ter see the spells om put in, an’ orl . . . spells, spells, look, it’s thick with ’em, but set . . . set it wunt. I’ll give ’er spells . . . She began to leaf through her book, muttering from time to time, licking her horny fingers, eyes gimleting behind her glasses. “Mice in the milk, that ’ent ’ot enough be ’arf . . . She cackled. “Toads in the girdle, I reckon I’ll ’ave a goo at that . . . no, I kent, we’re out o’ noots eyes. That’s a very pertickler sort o’ spell, y’ave to ’ave orl the ingrediments right . . . I’ll find summat, dunt you worry . . .” p. 33

The rest of the story tells of an exciting and escalating battle of spells between the two witches, Granny Thompson and Aggie Everett, including one that almost proves fatal for Anita.
The Chicken Switch by Elleston Trevor³ is about a journalist who goes to interview an astronaut before the latter is put in sensory deprivation for a week as part of his training. After the interview the journalist goes home and starts becoming increasingly unsettled over the course of the next few days until he ends up requiring medical attention and sedation. He later returns to finish the interview and asks the astronaut what his secret is for coping with the isolation. The astronaut replies (spoiler) that he projects his feelings outside the capsule onto an individual he visualises…. The neat ending partially compensates for a not totally convincing idea and an overlong execution.
Susan is Keith Roberts’ second contribution to the issue, and his third story under his Alistair Bevan pseudonym. The first part of this is a convincingly described section about a strange schoolgirl called Susan in her Chemistry class at the end of the day. After the lesson is over she packs up and gets ready to go home but on her way out she is intercepted by an elderly English teacher who is shortly to retire. In the teacher’s classroom they have an odd conversation. In essence the teacher, who has never had children, wants to know what Susan has planned for her life. Susan doesn’t know and this upsets the teacher:

Miss Hutton stared at the desk and her hands clenched until the knuckles showed white with strain. The sound of the watch clattered in her mind and the little cottage room seemed suddenly to grow out of darkness, chilling her as if its very walls harboured an unearthly cold. Miss Hutton shuddered and gasped; then something seemed almost to shoulder past her into that room, something young and golden and intensely alive, something that brushed away fears and ghosts and oldness and snapped open windows to let in sunlight and warmth. Miss Hutton laughed uncertainly, seeing the little room before her with the vividness of hallucination. There was no darkness now; its windows were open and through them she could see June flowers, a brightness of grass, cumulus ships sailing the intense sky. This was a place to which she could come in dignity, and in peace. She could rest here, and she would not be alone . . .
Miss Hutton looked up and blinked. Susan was leaning over her and it seemed to the mistress that even while she watched a light was dying away from the girl’s eyes. She stared fascinated while a lilac brightness snapped and glittered and ebbed; then Susan was only a gentle-faced blonde girl in a dark blue school uniform and blazer. On her shoulder, a satchel of books.  p. 71

Later in the story another strange and more explicit event occurs as she nears her home. There (spoiler) she sees a man lying under a hedge: there is a red Angel and a white Angel vying for mastery of him. The red Angel wins and the man attacks Susan. She easily defends herself and mends the evil within him.
I don’t think this entirely works as a story but it is an interesting, well described, and absorbing piece of prose.
The Excursion by Brian N. Ball is a long novelette about five people on a galactic tour. They are all cardboard stereotypes: a brigadier, a lecturer, an older woman, and a young man and woman who turn out to be a smuggler and ex-prostitute. On one particular day they visit the Seventh Asiatic Confederation fort, guided by a robot called Homer. There is a rumour of a hidden part to the fort and, sure enough, they find a control panel which, when accidentally activated, transports them to it.
On arriving at the hidden section they soon pass out and regain consciousness in a cell. Here, the five of them continue their previous bickering. There are pages of this before a computer accuses them of being spies and interrogates them. Needless to say (spoiler) they subsequently manage to break out and return to the surface.
This is pretty dreadful stuff, and unfortunately the longest piece in the magazine (42 pp.).
Over and Out by George Hay is a forgettable squib just over a page long, and it is all in capitals as it consists of teleprinter conversations (an old paper output form of email). These are from a news editor who is sending out a warning that a computer has taken over everything. The ending, where the computer’s manipulation of written history seems to have come true, didn’t work for me.
Hunt a Wild Dream by D. R. Heywood concludes its unnecessary serialisation in this issue, and for convenience I’ll repeat what I said in the previous review. The story is about three white hunters in East Africa (Kenya?) at the time of the Mau Mau uprising. They load up their vehicles and go on a long drive to a plateau they intend searching. As this section proceeds we are introduced to a mythical creature known as the “Nambi bear” or “Chemosit”. Needless to say when the three men hack their way on through the bamboo at the base of the plateau they encounter this creature and shoot but don’t kill it.
After they take the Chemosit back to the camp, the expedition leader sits and watches it. Later (spoiler) he drives off from the camp and is ambushed by the Mau Mau. He then escapes into the jungle, and realises he has become the Chemosit. When he encounters the three men he is shot . . . .
This time loop ending to the story doesn’t work at all but it is probably worth reading for the local colour (albeit Colonial colour where black characters barely exist):

Cullen stepped out of his tent and looked critically at the unpretentious hills, which looked so easy to climb. He knew how deceptive appearance could be from previous experience in similar country. This gentle range of hills presented a climb of over two thousand feet, through a bamboo forest. The most treacherous type of forest that man could wish to penetrate. Where seemingly solid canes would collapse at the slightest touch; where fallen bamboo crossed each other in a lattice work barrier; and, where the unwary could crash through the apparently solid ground formed by years of fallen and decaying canes . . . .  p. 119

There is a short glossary of the African expressions used at the end of the story.

The uncredited Cover for this issue is the earliest example that I’ve found of those out of focus and/or psychedelic photo covers that would blight many a SF paperback or magazine from the mid-sixties into the early seventies. Awful.
Kyril Bonfiglioli begins another amusing and slightly eccentric Editorial by referring to a letter he has received:

I don’t suppose the editors of the Journal of Ethnographical Studies, the Manchester Guardian, the Rabbit breeder & Goat Fancier, The Times and the Anglican Review get many letters from strangers reading more or less as follows:
.
“Dear Bon.
Finding myself unable to buy a copy of Health & Efficiency on Wigan Station the other day I resorted to a copy of your periodical. I am glad to see that you are still going—the friend I used to borrow mine from has gone into prison and I haven’t seen it for months. Amused to see another story by old Ken & one by Bri., I suppose the others are all by old Chris under speudonyms. Don’t think much of your edditorials though, very ilitterate and rambling. I miss the old words and phrases—“extrapolation”, “sense of wonder”, “man’s destiney”, “tradition of H. G. Wells” ect., ect,. In fact, you may asume that I shall not go out of my way to borrow copies in future.”
.
I get lots of them. I like them. But when I took over this editorship I had no idea that this was one of the fringe benefits, nor that I should find myself hotly defending my editorial policies against heated attacks from Ontario, Witwatersrand and Wigan. It is hard to say which is the more pleasant—the free and unfettered rudeness of the few or the generous, warm-hearted friendship of the many.  p. 2

He goes on to say that current magazines have more competion from anthologies than the old pulps did, but that they are doing their best.
The rest of the editorial comprises of extracts from other letters, including a very positive one from Harry Harrison in the Baltic, and this one:

“I always buy your magazine because of the lovely covers and because the contents are the best sleeping medicine I know. Since two pages are usually enough to send me off, I find that each issue is equivalent to two months supply of sleeping-pills—and much better for me, I daresay. If I need a really strong soporific I try the editorial.
“May I have your autograph?”
(Mrs.) JUDITH MUGUSTON
Speen, Bucks.  p. 4

I suspect Bon may have made up the letters I have quoted, although there is a Speen in Buckinghamshire . . . .

This is a fair issue, with the Aldiss and both of the Roberts stories worth reading. The Heywood is also worth a look if you are interested in something different from the usual stuff.  ●

_____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67) says that Aldiss’s Man in his Time:

[Still] stands up, despite the utterly implausible premise: beautifully written and characterized, a model of Bonfiglioli’s slogan “Science fiction for grown-ups.” In this story, Aldiss (for the only time I’m aware of) used the device—probably prompted by Ballard’s The Terminal Beach—of heading each brief section of the story with an italicized phrase, usually taken or adapted from the text in that section or the preceding one, and ending the story with one as well, taken from the wife’s earlier description of Westermark’s isolation: “All events, all children, all seasons.”
In another story this device would probably be unbearably pretentious. Here it fits the elegiac mood and also highlights the theme of temporal displacement subtly and effectively. Bravo. Aldiss was on a pretty remarkable roll during the early and middle 1960s and this is one of the high points.

As for the rest of the issue, Boston comments on how little fantasy there is (in both this and the previous number), pointing out the exceptions of the Roberts story and the Heywood (“[Its] claim to authenticity is the main thing the story has going for it.”)
The Trevor story is a “polished but inconsequential story [. . .] with a weak paranormal twist at the end; the Ball has a “conventional but entertainingly rendered there-and-back-again plot”;* Boston is unsure if Keith Roberts’ Susan is a mutant or an alien (I thought the story was a fantasy).
Boston later observes:

After seven issues of the Bonfiglioli Science Fantasy, its differences from the Carnell version are beginning to gel. There’s little declared fantasy, though Thomas Burnett Swann is a notable exception. Most of the SF is surprisingly conventional, though (with some exceptions) capably done or better.

This comment about the fantasy content seems to underestimate the amount that has appeared so far: not only did Swann contribute a serial to three of the seven issues, but there were also four ‘Anita‘ stories from Keith Roberts, as well as the likes of The Typewriter, and Susan, etc. And that’s before you include material from other writers that could perhaps be described as fantasy (Potts, Beech, Jones, Heywood, etc.)
*There is a note that the Ball story was expanded into Night of the Robots a.k.a. Regiments of Night (1972).

Graham Hall (Vector #32, June 1965) says that Aldiss’s Man in his Time “presents an absolutely brilliant concept,” and that it “would have been worth reading even had it been written by a nitty amateur instead of Brian Aldiss.” Hall adds that Aldiss’s “handling of the theme is mildly experimental and seems more than slightly tinged with Ballardisms—but perhaps that is just prejudice on my behalf.”
Hall thinks that both the Roberts stories (he is unaware of Roberts’ Bevan pseudonym) are “gems of first-class writing”: The War at Foxhanger “continues [the] amusing and whimsical [Anita] series,” and “Mr Bevan’s [Susan] is superb in its precise descriptions and lucid theme.”
The Ball story is “pretentious”, and Trevor’s “description and SF ideas are very good indeed but the plot is pretty badly mishandled.” Hall adds that “if the latter lived up to its potential, it would have been among the best suspense SF in recent years.” Meanwhile, Heywood’s Hunt a Wild Dream has a “hackneyed Stormwater Tunnel type idea with an unusual treatment that suffered tremendously from being serialised and merely 15 sides long in all.”
Hall finishes by saying that this “good issue” has an “eye-catching” cover, and notes the presence of a nascent letter column, “which, though far from satisfactory as a letter column as yet, is a Good Sign: maybe Science Fantasy will become a magazine yet, instead of the monthly anthology it is at present.”

2. The relevant part of that article (The Man Who Invented the Future by Brian W. Aldiss, New Worlds #170, January 1967) is one of the paragraphs near the end:

We now have some extremely interesting American Writers: Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut, James Blish, Ward Moore, William Tenn, Thomas Disch. These writers, like the present English group, use the Wells technique of thrusting a splinter of the unknown into a human situation in order to examine man, his circumstances, his defects, his conditions, his conditionals. They would gladly admit, I think,  that they work within a field developed almost single-handed by Mr. H. G. Wells.  p. 28

3. ‘Elleston Trevor’ was a prolific writer outside the genre. There is a short Wikipedia entry here.  ●

Edited 26^th September 2019: formatting changes and minor corrections.
Edited 27-28th September 2019: revised and full cover artwork; John Boston and Graham Hall’s review comments added.
Edited 16^th April 2020: Mark Yon review link added.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:¹
John Boston and Damien Broderick, Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 239 of 365) (Amazon UK)
Graham Hall, Vector #31 (March 1965)

_____________________

Fiction:
The Outcast • novelette by Harry Harrison ∗∗
Song of the Syren • novelette by Robert Wells ∗∗
Moriarty • short story by Philip Wordley ∗
Bring Back a Life • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗
The Jennifer • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗
A Cave in the Hills • short story by R. W. Mackelworth
Hunt a Wild Dream (Part 1 of 2) • short story serial by D. R. Heywood ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Agosta Morol
Interior artwork • by Keith Roberts
Editorial • essay by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

In this issue R. W. Mackelworth joins the roster of regular names with the first of five stories, and we again see contributions from Harry Harrison, Philip Wordley, John Phillifent (Rackham) and Keith Roberts.
The Outcast by Harry Harrison is set on board a civilian spaceship. The first scene is on the planet of departure and has the captain and another crew member watch a man struggling through a mob to get on board. This is Origo or ‘Butcher’ Lim, a doctor who turns out to have been responsible for the deaths of over two hundred people.
Initially the captain treats him coolly, but he later discovers that the deaths weren’t Lim’s fault. When there is friction between Lim and the other passengers he agrees to let him use the officer’s mess. Lim finds the crew accept him readily enough and he eventually relaxes.
Subsequently, one of the passengers, the High-Duchess Marescula, develops a disease that requires the immediate amputation of her hands and feet; however, if Lim operates on her, having been stripped of his medical qualifications, it means a death sentence for him . . . .
This is really only SF by virtue of its setting but it is an entertaining enough yarn.
Song of the Syren by Robert Wells is another solid SF novelette, and is set on an alien planet where there is a scientific research team from Earth. Their prize asset is a collection of singing plants. After some scene setting the story kicks off when Sorenson, the chief scientist, finds that the plants have been destroyed.
Sorenson’s boss Barbera arrives and together they interview a number of the station’s personnel to find out what happened. It becomes clear that access to the restricted section where the plants were kept may have been compromised by male affections for the two woman among the station’s personnel.
This is well-told and assuredly developed but the ending is a convoluted and contrived affair.
Moriarty by Philip Wordley is the second of this writer’s four contributions to the magazine and it is a rather schmaltzy story that could have easily appeared in the 1940s pulps. The story is about a telepathic and teleporting female cop who repeatedly prevents a safecracker she likes from robbing banks: she doesn’t want him to become a criminal. During one thwarted attempt she enlists his help to clear out another bank which she knows it is going to be robbed. When the gang arrive (spoiler) he is supposed to make the call to the police but things go wrong and he ends up being the (surprise!) telekinetic hero.
It’s not a bad story, it’s just old-fashionedly naff, albeit in a pleasant enough way.
Bring Back a Life by John T. Phillifent is a real curate’s egg. It starts with a really creaky setup that has Raynor, the narrator, awakening to find that he has been abducted by some near-future parliamentary types. Long story short, vital negotiations with Mars and the lunar colony are in jeopardy as Sir Herbert Fremantle, the Prime Minister, has fallen ill. The only way he can be cured is if they send Raynor back in time to get a sample from a non-diseased ancestor.
After this nonsense (British PM negotiating interplanetary deals indeed!) the rest of the story improves considerably as Raynor travels to several historical periods, occupying someone of a similar somatype on each occasion, and having a number of engrossing encounters with ancestors of Fremantle’s. Each time he arrives he meets a woman called Jasmine, who he falls in love with. Eventually he gets back far enough in time to an uninfected Fremantle and discovers that the sample he needs is from Fremantle’s wife. The personality occupying the wife is the Prime Minister’s granddaughter—who has also travelled back in time, but from Raynor’s future. Still with me?
After Rayner completes his mission and he is back in the present recovering, he meets the Prime Minister’s sister and finds that she is going to be his Jasmine. The woman he has lusted after through time is actually his granddaughter. Ewgh!
The Jennifer by Keith Roberts is another in his series about Anita the teenage witch, and has a rare piece of interior art to go with it (I can’t think of any other illustrations in the Compact Books version of the magazine until they became a regular feature in mid-1966):

It’s a pity that Bonfiglioli didn’t commission interior art as well as covers from him.
Roberts also produced a cover for the story but, for whatever reason, it was used last issue:

This story doesn’t really have much in the way of a plot, but I can’t say I was that bothered as I like spending time in the company of Anita and Granny Thompson. It starts with the pair on holiday at the beach after Granny Thomson has had a small win on the pools²:

Her Granny glanced up fleetingly at the huge blue dazzle of the sea. “’Ell of a lot o’ worter” she pronounced grimly. That seemed to sum up her opinion . . . She went off on another tack. “Orlright fer you ter talk. Gooin’ on at yer indeed. Never ’eard nothink like it . . . You’re bin orf ’ooks with me ever since we started. Jist acause I wouldn’t ’ave nothink ter do wi’ that siv idea. Sailin’ down in sivs, very thought on it sets me rheumatics a-gooin’ . . . ‘No me gel’ I ses, ‘The train fer me or nothink at orl’ . . . an’ rightly too. Very idea . . .
“Well, witches do sail in sieves. I’ve read about it.”
“Not in my expeerience” snapped the old lady. “And I dunt goo much of a bundle on them there old fangled ways neither. They ent ’ygenic . . . I only ever ’alf believed that one anyways. I dunt reckon there’s a spell as ’ud ’old, not fer no time any’ow. Wadn’t nuthink ter stop you tryin’ . . .”
“I did try. I got one floating on Top Canal, you know I did.”
“Yis, an’ come ’um in ’Ell of a stew—”
“It was all right till Aggie’s nephew opened the lock . . .”
“Molecular tensions” explained Granny a little more kindly. “You ’adn’t put enough be’ind the spell. Orlright chantin’ uvver summat but if yer wants a spell ter take yore gotta work it right inside . . . I expects things got uwer-stressed when yer got in the race . . .”
“I know I got overstressed. I was nearly drowned.”
“Stuff” said the old lady firmly. “Wunt ketch no sympathy orf me.”  p. 99

Later, in an underground cave on the shoreline, Anita meets a mermaid, or Jennifer. The next day, during their second meeting, the Jennifer suggests to Anita that she should come and visit the depths, and that she can arrange for a huge Serpent to take her. This eventual encounter provides the story’s ending:

Anita called again, louder this time, conscious of all the black water beneath her.
“Serpent . . .”
There was a rumbling that grew to a roar, a burst of phosphorescence that looked a mile long, and he was there. Anita soared and dropped in the great waves that rolled back from him. But he was so big, she’d never dreamed he would be as big as that . . . he was like a reef in the night sea, the swell of his back was curving against the sky and all the length of him was alive with rivulets of turquoise light . . . His skin was craggy and knobby, wrinkled and rough, his flat head rose towering, his tail stretched away for ever. The sea touched him softly, muting itself because he was so old. Anita paddled towards him and the head snaked down till the eyes could see her and those eyes were a yard across, bulging and smooth as black mirrors, and there was everything in them, everything there had ever been in the world. Anita wanted to hug him but he was so huge, so huge . . .
He nuzzled at her and she saw a harness, the great stems of tangle-weed knotted and twisted to make a handgrip behind his head. She took hold, winding the fibres round elbow and wrist. He rumbled and began to move, circling out from the coast. His speed increased; Anita’s hair streamed, elbow and shoulder cut swathes in the sea, water flew yards in the air to fall back twinkling into the huger turbulence of his wake. Anita screamed to him and his head dipped, the surface of the sea rushed past her and there was a void, cold and noisy with bubbling. The monster’s body canted; pressure rose, like hands squeezing Anita. She chanted mechanically, drowning a little; at a hundred feet she gasped with relief and began to breathe again. Her gills opened, trailing back from her neck like pink chiffon scarves.
The Serpent’s body wagged like a metronome, pulses flowing along it seconds apart. Anita sensed the sea bottom dropping away, peaks and hill-ranges flicking beneath, wide curving valleys of grey silt. Then there was no bottom that she could detect. Instead far below was a pulsing, a greenish glow like city lights seen through a coloured fog. It lit the white throat of the Serpent and his long belly. Reflections sparked in the great dish of his eye. The speed was gone; he was sinking slowly and Anita knew from the surface he would already look frog-small, a speck falling into a hugeness of light . . .
And his voice sounded in her mind like an organ as he began to tell her how the hills were made.  p. 107-108

A Cave in the Hills by R. W. Mackelworth starts with a malcontented woman in a future society finding out her husband is in “Debtors”. After contacting Accounts, they tell her an Arbitrator will call. What happens next is that an attractive neighbour visits and takes her husband’s valuables: his books, paintings and papers. During this there is commentary about him being a subversive, and that this is the reason he was bankrupted. I didn’t really have much of an idea what this one was about.
Hunt a Wild Dream by D. R. Heywood is about three white hunters in East Africa (presumably Kenya) at the time of the Mau Mau uprising. They load up their vehicles and go on a long drive to a plateau they intend searching. As this section proceeds we are introduced to a mythical creature known as the Nambi bear or Chemosit. Needless to say when the three men hack their way on through the bamboo at the base of the plateau they encounter this creature and shoot but don’t kill it.
After they take the Chemosit back to the camp Cullen, the expedition leader, sits and watches it. Later (spoiler) he drives off from the camp, is ambushed by the Mau Mau, and escapes into the jungle. He then finds he has become the Chemosit and the encounters the three men and is shot . . . .
This time-loop ending to the story isn’t at all convincing but this is probably worth reading for the local colour (albeit colonial colour where black characters hardly feature):

Cullen stepped out of his tent and looked critically at the unpretentious hills, which looked so easy to climb. He knew how deceptive appearance could be from previous experience in similar country. This gentle range of hills presented a climb of over two thousand feet, through a bamboo forest. The most treacherous type of forest that man could wish to penetrate. Where seemingly solid canes would collapse at the slightest touch; where fallen bamboo crossed each other in a lattice work barrier; and, where the unwary could crash through the apparently solid ground formed by years of fallen and decaying canes. . . .   p. 119 (Science Fantasy #71)

There is a short glossary of the native expressions used at the end of the story.
Although I’ve reviewed the entire story here, its sixteen pages are actually split across this issue and the next. I can only presume this serialisation was a blunder, because if they had dropped the Roberts or the Wordley story, and added a couple of pages to the editorial, they could have fitted all of it into this issue.

This month’s Cover is a distinctive contribution by Agosta Morol, the first of three he would produce for the magazine.³
There is a new addition to the masthead of the magazine: assistant editor James Parkhill-Rathbone joins the editorial staff. He had previously published a story, The Poachers in #66:

In this month’s Editorial Kyril Bonfiglioli doesn’t have much to say as shown by the anecdote he relates:

People discussing wit usually end up by pointing out that brevity is its soul. Perhaps that is why the telegram⁴ lends itself so well to humour. My favourite example is the interchange between a newspaper editor and a dilatory journalist who had been sent abroad as a special correspondent. After a fortnight without receiving a single news story the editor cabled: EXPLAIN UNNEWS.
The reporter, a man of spirit who disliked “cablese” replied UNNEWS GOOD NEWS.
The editor, however, had the final word, as editors usually do, with UNNEWS UNJOB.
What I am working around to saying is that there is rather little to say this month, except that I hope readers will agree that our contents continue to show steady improvement.  p. 2

Bonfiglioli goes on for another paragraph or so, mentioning a number of new novels and stories written by various writers.

This is a comparatively lacklustre issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall begins his review by stating that the appearance of Roberts, Rackham and Harrison “help maintain the high standard [. . .] reached in recent issues.”
He describes the Harrison and Wells stories as “readable” and “well-handled”, and thinks the Wordley “amusing”, noting, “His easy style leads me to think that he may have had more writing experience—either in a different field or under a different name.”
The Rackham is “a competent time travel story [. . .] which proves his ability for conjuring up a different society and environment”. The Roberts is “a beautiful tale of Mermaidland”. He adds that these two are among the best British writers in the field today.
The last two items “spoil a good collection”. The Mackelworth is “unconvincing and obscure” and Hall is irritated to find that the Heywood is “to be continued”.
He concludes that “the odds a subscription would be good value have considerably shortened”.

2. The ‘pools’ was a pre-Lottery gambling activity that involved the selection of eight score-draws from a list of fifty odd football (UK soccer) matches every Saturday. Top prize was around half a million pounds, a huge amount of money at the time. Actually, a huge amount of money now. My grandmother did the pools religiously for years.

3. Agosta Morol’s ISFDB page.

4. A ‘telegram’ was a sort of printed out email delivered to your door before the advent of the internet.  ●

Edited 16^th July 2018: formatting changes, image changes, addition of review link/synopsis, text revisions.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:¹
John Boston and Damien Broderick, Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (Amazon UK)
Graham Hall, Vector #30 (January 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli

Fiction:
Present from the Past • short story by Douglas Davis ∗∗
The Empathy Machine • novelette by Langdon Jones ∗∗∗
Harvest • short story by Johnny Byrne
Petros • short story by Philip Wordley ∗∗+
Flight of Fancy • short story by Keith Roberts ∗
Only the Best • short story by Patricia Hocknell
The Island • short story by Roger Jones ∗∗
The Typewriter • short story by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan] ∗∗
The Blue Monkeys (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
The Jennifer • cover by Keith Roberts
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

This issue of Science Fantasy heralded a change in printer² and also in the physical appearance of the magazine. The pliable matt cover was replaced with the usual stiffer, glossy, paperback card, and redesigned.3 The internal typography also changed (41 to 40 lines and smaller type). Although the first impression is of a better quality product, the interior printing is of poorer quality and is harder to read. On a couple of the issues I have there is also faded type and a lot of ink smearing.⁴

There are three stories of interest (although I’d call only one of them ‘good’) in this issue. The best of the bunch is by Langdon Jones who, after having had a couple of stories in New Worlds, appears here with his third, The Empathy Machine. This starts with Henry Ronson looking into the mirror and deciding to murder his wife. But before he can finish shaving:

Suddenly the surface of the mirror became a mass of oily colours, and then resolved into the smaller image of another man. “I smoke Pop panatellas,” he said. “Do you smoke Pop panatellas? You should smoke Pop panatellas. Why don’t you smoke Pop panatellas? Why don’t you smoke Pop panatellas?” The man blew a puff of smoke which filled the mirror. “I smoke Pop panatellas for peace—calm—happiness.” The smoke cleared, showing a peaceful pastoral scene, while soft banks of violins shimmered in the wood-smoke, sunset air. “You need to smoke Pop panatellas too, like me . . . Enjoy your moments of peace, like me . . .”  p. 15-16

There follow several more adverts as Henry wipes his face and moves to another part of the house. He eventually loses his temper and throws a shoe at a wall screen running an advert and breaks it. After an argument with his wife the police arrive; they see he has intentionally broken the screen and physically assault him. So far, so The Space Merchants.
The story then moves to Mars, where he and his wife Marian have booked a touring holiday. Ronson intends to shoot his wife and bury her body but say that she disappeared in quicksand. However, while they are travelling through the landscape, they see a white spire in the distance and go to investigate. They find what appears to be an ancient Martian city. Exploring further, they end up in a building that has a number of cubicles that have been further separated into two sections. Ronson puts on the headset at one side of the cubicle and Marian takes hold of a handle on the other:

Where was he?
Awareness. Identity. Something something falling enclosed. I. The concept; the idea, hold that idea! I. Me. An existence, an entity. In nothing. An entity enclosed in nothing. All blackness, and a cowering entity. I. Who am I? Where am I? I am no-one. I am nowhere. Time has been passing, an incredible, unimaginable time. Time of what? There is no time. Nothing. Relaxation. Thought. What was I? Where was I? Gone. What? Gone where? What has gone? Something. Something before. Before what? Before this. What is this? Where am I? Self. I exist. I am I. Memories . . . OF WHAT? I. Memories of me. I am. I am a man. Henry Ronson. I remember! But what am I now? Where am I now? What is this darkness? Where is my body? I have no body. I am an idea; an entity. But how did I get here? The machine! The headpiece, the cubicles, the city.  p. 33-34

Ronson later finds that he can navigate the strip (sequence) of impressions that is his wife’s consciousness. Initially, he finds an experience she had as a baby; later, the pivotal event of their wedding night—which produces a passage that wouldn’t have appeared in the Carnell era:

She was in bed with her husband. He was kissing her. “Good God,” thought the observer, “It’s my wedding night!” Her body responded eagerly and warmly to his hands. She was full of overwhelming love and desire for her man. The feelings were almost too much for the observer to bear. She loved him, how she loved him! She loved him so much, that she gently moved to do something that would show him how she loved him. Suddenly his hand caught her chin roughly, and lifted her face. His mouth was twisted, and she felt sudden fear. What had happened?
He lifted his hand, and hit her viciously across the mouth.
“You filthy, perverted little bitch!” he shouted.
And then followed such an incredible torrent of pain and suffering and agony, that the observer blundered wildly out of the strip, his mind reeling under the impact of such strong pain. It was a long time before any coherent thought could emerge, but gradually, against his will, almost, he regained some rationality. “Oh God,” he thought, “No wonder she was frigid.”  p. 36

When he comes back to consciousness (spoiler) they reconcile. By no means do all the elements in this story fit comfortably together, but I think it is an interesting and readable piece with a good ending. You would certainly come away from this one looking forward to more from Jones.
The other two stories that show some promise are from Philip Wordley and Roger Jones.
Philip Wordley’s Petros initially starts off as a rather jokey post-holocaust story about Rafael, a builder’s labourer who is working on a wall around St Peter’s Dome to keep the barbarians out:

Domenico Ravazzi, Supreme Pontiff, formerly vicar of Brescia (pop. 3,000) craned his neck as he stood in the shadows of the wall and regarded Rafael. Down here in the courtyard a band of slaves who had been British and American tourists before the bombs went up were feeding the rope slings with more concrete cubes, under the enthusiastic supervision of Enrico Stacci, head of the Imperial Roman Army (formerly known as Rico’s Mob. Well, someone had to take over and keep law and order). Rico and his boys had just entered the vaults of the National bank of Italy when all hell broke loose, and when they had emerged, they realised that none of their cargo could ever be of any use to them now. Still, the vault had been a good fall-out shelter. And now Rico, former small-time hood and extortionist, was strutting about in his scarlet tunic, and Domenico, former small-time priest, was consecrating the concrete, and both were engaged in rebuilding Rome.
And Rafael? He was catwalking around the scaffolding, sixteen stone of rude muscular health, and certainly not over-awed by his unique position as first rebuilder of the world. He was getting hungry and he needed a shave, and he needed a woman, in that order.  p. 46

Rafael is ordained as a priest and sent to Britain to build a church. He is told that further instructions will be sent but by the time he arrives the Pope has died.
Later, after he finishes building the church, he has to defend himself against a group of men in a vicious fight, but gains the upper hand. Having gained their respect they come back to the church the next day, and before long he has a congregation. After conducting his first service he tells them:

“I don’t-a know nothing about being no priest. All I know is what I heard the Father say in my own-a church back home. I’ll do what I can, but that’s not much. I reckon that’s all I gotta say. Come again tomorrow, and I’ll try to think of something else.” He paused, “Oh, and something else I wanta say. Lotsa you look like you got-a nowhere to live. If you wanta shelter in my church, okay. I gotta no food for you, but I gotta roof and walls, and you’re welcome to that.” Then he stopped and sat down. The congregation still sat silent. Then they rose, and went, each one turning to look at Rafael before going out into the mist.
Well, thought Rafael, that’s that. They won’t come back no more. They came to me, and I didn’t have nothing to give them. Dio mio, help me. I built this church, and it’s ready, but I’m not. Send me the message, tell me what to do, and how to do it. If I don’t find out, they’ll kill me.  p. 52

He wonders what he will say to them the next day.
In the last scene (spoiler) he encounters a man who whispers a message in his ear. The message of the story is in the last line, and it is both fitting and touching:

“On this rock will I build my church.”  p. 53

The main problem with this story is that Wordley should have been asked to take it more seriously: cut or rewrite the humorous material at the beginning, and drop the cod-Italian accents. It would have been better for it.
This story was the first of four that Wordley would produce for Science Fantasy.⁵
The Island by Roger Jones is about three men on an island: Rastrick, Erg and Minus. Rastrick is in charge of the other two. Erg is also in charge of Minus and uses violence as well as words to enforce this relationship. Once a week Rastrick goes to the house for orders, and when he returns from the house he tells Erg and Minus how the stones on the beach must be arranged. Minus does the work. They are all waiting for the boat to come.
Eventually Minus decides to go to the house and try to find answers to the eight questions he has:

Minus had formulated the following questions which he considered to be pertinent to his situation: (1) Who lives at the House? (2) Are there more than one of him? (3) Supposing Erg is not lying, what was Rastrick doing in the copse? (4) How soon is the Boat coming? (5) And then what? (6) Why do the stones have to be changed so often? (7) Why is Rastrick so nasty? (8) Where can I find the answer to these questions?  p. 70

At the house (spoiler) he finds seventeen skeletons. He also finds a button similar to the one he has on his clothing. He goes to Rastrick for answers and finds him in the copse. Rastrick, surprised, falls off the adjacent cliff and dies. When Minus returns to Erg he finds him with a bread knife through his throat.
Initially, I thought this may be an allegory about the hierarchical nature of society but the final events lost me. A pity: this was a good read until its mystifying ending.
There are two of the remaining stores that are competent if uninspiring. Present from the Past by Douglas Davis, which, according to Kyril Bonfiglioli in his editorial, is “a new twist on the time-safari—one of my favourite science-fiction topics.” This has a palaeontologist going back in time to study Cynognathus, a dog headed half-mammal, half-reptile, crocodile-like creature. He ends up in a game of cat and mouse with one of these creatures when he returns to his time shuttle after a short patrol outside.
The Typewriter by Keith Roberts is his second pseudonymous effort as Alastair Bevan. It concerns the writer of a series of lurid spy novels and how his typewriter takes over the plot. It is an amusing story in parts:

At dawn the typewriter let its owner rest. Henry tottered to the bed, lay down on it and was almost immediately asleep. He was worn through; during the last few hours he had survived a stockwhip battle with Black Bart, the bullying king of the gipsy tribe; narrowly escaped death when the crazed Eileen had tried to force his car over a cliff; foiled an attempt by Partek to end his life by stuffing his pillow with tarantulas, and rescued Esmeralda from lingering death under the beaks of Black Bart’s troupe of trained cormorants.  p. 82

The writer starts to physically experience what is happening to his protagonist but this isn’t particularly well established before the inevitable ending . . . .
Now we come to the rest of the stories, which I either didn’t like or didn’t understand. Harvest by Johnny Byrne is an example of the latter. I read this one twice and still have no idea of what it is about. A man and a woman live in the country on the edge of a war zone. At one point she is tortured by passing soldiers, and her fingers and arms cut off. I think that at some point after that she is killed and her husband buries her head. A baby, an old woman and a stranger talking about the war also feature at various points. Unfathomable.
Flight of Fancy by Keith Roberts is a very short post-holocaust squib about the trajectory of an arrow, and what will happen if you fire it further and further . . . .
Only the Best by Patricia Hocknell is an awful story about a woman who wants a new washing machine that sorts, presses, folds, etc. The first part where Freda talks to her husband about getting one is quite stereotypical:

Jack laughed and stretched his arms over his head. “Yes, ma’am. I get the picture. It’s those ads for ‘Only the Best’ that’re getting you, isn’t it? But ducky, at that price!”
Freda played a trump. “Dick Jacobs is getting Irene one.”
“Really? Can’t be doing as well as he says, if that’s all they can afford!”
“She got a mink stole to go with it. Dick said that the machine would save so much of her time and his money that a mink was almost a necessity to go to all the places they intended to go, now.” She crossed her fingers and hoped. It wasn’t strictly true. Irene was getting the mink, but not for the reasons that Freda had just given. It was a present from Dick in a fit of guilty conscience. Something to do with his secretary.  p. 58

It goes from this to the ridiculous when the machine washes the cat and delivers up a clean piece of fur (it uses an organic solvent for cleaning that never needs replacing). Later, meat starts disappearing from the kitchen . . . .
This issue also has the last instalment of The Blue Monkeys by Thomas Burnett Swann, which is an excellent ending to the novel (multiple spoilers). In this he moves from writing small, gentle scenes to epic, sometimes brutal ones. The contrast intensifies the impact of the latter.
This part starts with an exciting battle sequence as the Achaean warriors invade the forest, and the Beasts lure them deep into their territory to take their toll of them. Eunostos ends up in a duel with Ajax, and nearly gets the better of him until the latter summons two of his warriors to help him:

While Xanthus recovered his sword, Ajax and Pluton pressed their attack. They thought, no doubt, to find me lamed and helpless. But my roar had vented anger and not defeat. The side of my axe bit into Pluton’s neck; in the handle, I felt the spasms of his death-struck body. I had no time in which to recover my axe. Ajax came at me with murder in his hand. He looked like a hungry sphinx. The stench of him struck me in the face.  p. 91

So much for descriptions of the ‘gentle’ fantasy of Thomas Burnett Swann.
The Beasts are almost victorious but then another army enters the field, so they retreat. At this point most of the Beasts head for the centaur camp but Eunostos, Thea and Icarus return to Eunostos’s house, where they and Pandia the bear are later besieged. The giant ant-like telechine rush outside, trying to protect the house from a harmamxa, a covered vehicle that protects the invaders as they assault the door. There is a grisly description of the fate of the insects:

“Strike at their joints, Men!”
Deflecting our arrows with their shields, they struck repeatedly at the waving, root-like limbs, and their sharp edged swords began to slice through the joints. The result was no less lamentable for being inevitable. My workers were soon hobbling over the grass in complete helplessness, while the warriors struck at the tough but not impervious membrane which joined the halves of their bodies, till the halves lay twitching in separate agony.  p. 98

Eunostos and the other inhabitants retreat to the underground bedroom and pull down an earth dam to block the entrance. After a night’s sleep, during which Eunostos saves Pandia from a vampiric Stirge, they wake to find that Thea has left by the secret passage to surrender herself to Ajax, thinking this will end the invasion. Eunostos and Icarus also leave and make for the camp of the centaurs.
When they arrive they see that the Acheaens have killed all the male centaurs and are feasting on, among other things, some of Thea’s beloved blue monkeys. She is being held hostage. Eunostos and Icarus make the heart-breaking decision to poison some of the other blue monkeys in the forest with wolfsbane and drive them towards the camp:

I looked at Icarus and saw the tears in his eyes. “We’re killing them for Thea,” I reminded him. “To save her from those ruffians.”
“I know,” he said, “but treachery is still treacherous. Otherwise, why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying,” I snapped so sharply that the monkey jumped from my shoulder. “I’m trying to comfort you.”
[…]
At the edge of the forest, still under cover of trees, we fed the monkeys. With a touching but not entirely successful attempt to avoid biting or scratching us, they plucked the roots from our hands and ate them so quickly that they did not have time to notice their bitterness. Then we waved our daggers and ran at the unsuspecting creatures with a show of great ferocity. At first they mistook our actions for a game and tried to wrestle the knives out of our hands. We had to strike them with the flats of our blades to prove our hostility. I shall never forget their cries of astonishment and disbelief. We watched them vaulting across the trellises of the vineyard, still in a pack and more aggrieved than frightened.  p. 112-113

The Achaeans kill and eat the monkeys, and all become unconscious. Many die; Thea is rescued; the battle is won.
After this bloody fight Thea and Icarus receive a message from their father: he wants then to return to Knossos to help fight the Achaeans. They go, and win there too when Thea and Icarus use the mythological equivalent of shock-and-awe:

The Princess Thea appeared on the walls and urged her warriors to victory in the name of the Great Mother and the Minotaur. The besieging Achaeans gasped when they saw her beauty: the crimson, helmet-shaped skirt emblazoned with jetblack ants; the bared breasts, flaunting fertility in the very graveyard of war: the golden serpents coiled around her wrists; the pointed ears and the greenly tumbling hair which lent to her chiselled features a wild and intoxicating barbarism.
Archers forgot to draw their bows. Swordsmen fell to their knees and raised their swords like talismans above their heads.
A hush and then an outcry.
“Sorceress!”
“Goddess!”
“Beast Princess!”
It was then that the boy Icarus charged them with his shield Bion. They saw his pointed ears. They knew him to be her brother. They had come to fight puny Men—sailors and merchants and perfumed courtiers—and not these bright, avenging children from the Country of the Beasts.
“The Beast Prince!”
They stared, they dropped their weapons.  p. 123

At the end of the novel the Beasts realise that, although they have won their battles against the Achaeans, and that their territory is be safe for the moment, it will eventually fall to mankind. As Rhode, the daughter of Chiron the centaur says:

“There will always be someone who comes to invade our peace. They will never leave us alone, will they, Eunostos? Isn’t it time we left the forest? Returned to the Isles?”
The Isles of the Blest, she meant. The land in the Western Sea from which we had come, in the age before men: a pleasant and sunny land, without dangers—and also without adventures.
“The gods will tell us the time,” I said. “It will be soon, I think.”  p. 120

Soon afterwards Thea’s father offers the Beasts two of his ships to take them to the Isles. They depart with Thea and Icarus in a melancholy and bittersweet ending:

After we have sailed to the islands, I think that legend will not be kind to us. The Centaurs will thunder through many a battle as the barbarous foe of Men and their well-ordered cities, and the Minotaur, the Bull that Walks Like a Man, what will they say of him? His tail will grow forked, his horns will sprout like the antlers of a stag, and the gloom of his lightless caverns will terrorize children and young virgins. “Beast” will become synonymous with “animal”, and “bestial” will be an epithet applied to savages and murderers. Men of the future, open this cave and find my scroll and read that we were neither gods nor demons, neither entirely virtuous nor entirely bad, but possessed of souls like you and in some ways kinder; capable of honour and sacrifice—and love. Consider if bestially is not, after all, akin to humanity. Read and understand us, forgive us for having once defeated you, and forgive the author if he has allowed his own loss to darken his story.  p. 126-127

The time of the Beasts has passed.
When the book edition of this novel was published as The Day of the Minotaur, it was a 1967 Hugo Award finalist, alongside his novelette The Manor of Roses (F&SF, November 1966).⁶

The non-fiction consists of Bonfiglioli’s Editorial only. He talks briefly about writers either being ‘putters-in’ or ‘takers-out’, states that Keith Roberts’ cover is for next issue’s Anita story, The Jennifer, and mentions the magazine is going monthly.
This issue’s Cover was the first of a number of highly distinctive pieces that Keith Roberts would produce for the magazine and which would give it a characteristic look of its own.

An interesting issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall begins his review by commenting on the poor reproduction, and how it isn’t up to the standard of previous issues (my copy of his review is partly illegible but I believe he is referring to the interior printing). He adds that “the glossy cover has a striking cover design by Keith Roberts” that makes it “more like a paperback book than ever.”
He goes on to give detailed reviews of several of the stories (this review is longer than the accompanying one for New Worlds #146, and he only just mentions the Swann serial). Hall’s favourites are the two Jones and the Wordley. He describes Langdon Jones’ contribution as another of his “science-love stories” and states that Jones makes up for a deficiency in writing skill (not described) by having a “vivid, pictorial and precise writing style.” Hall adds that he wonders why the writer inserts a science background into his stories when it detracts from the study of human emotions, and that Jones has the skill to branch out into mainstream fiction: “SF’s loss would be mainstream’s gain.”
Hall picks Wordley’s story as the best of the lot, and says it is told with “easy narration” and has above average characterisation. He thinks Wordley is a good find and would like to see more from him.
Roger Jones’s story wasn’t an immediate hit for Hall but he found it more compelling than any of the others, and that it “brought about an emotion in me with which I am not very familiar [and] it reminded me of how I felt during the Cargo-sect episode in Mondo Cane*.” He finishes by calling it “another first-time first-class story.”
The Davis and Bevan stories go in the average pile. Hall mentions Bonfiglioli’s positive editorial statement about the subject matter of the first one and says, “One can imagine a sudden flood of time safari stories at 18 Norham Gardens.”
The Roberts and the Hocknell rate below the two above and, at the bottom of the pile, is the Byrne: “almost unreadable in its experimental style—a pity, because the idea, as far as I could make out, was worthy of better treatment. Mr Byrne is trying too hard to make his stories original, and succeeding only in spoiling them.”
Hall finishes by saying that the magazine suffers from a lack of interior illustrations, letter column, and story ratings, adding that newcomers (new writers, I presume) will be unable to gauge audience reaction.
*Mondo Cane is an exploitation film. Its page at Wikipedia.

2. Richmond Hill Printing Works of Bournemouth took over from The Rugby Advertiser Ltd.

3. It took me a while to figure it out, but the font used for the Science Fantasy type on the cover is a bold version of Century Schoolbook.

4. One of the more poorly printed pages: 
That said, the copy of New Worlds #146 I’ve just read (from the previous printers, The Rugby Advertiser Ltd.) isn’t much better.

5. Philip Wordley’s four story run ended with the notable Goodnight, Sweet Prince (Science Fantasy #77, October 1965). He then disappeared from the SF world forever.

6. The 1967 Hugo nominations.  ●

Edited 10^th June 2018 to update formatting, replace cover image, make minor text changes, and include a synopsis of Graham Hall’s review.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick, Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 227 of 365) (Amazon UK)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli

Fiction:
The Blue Monkeys (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗
Room with a Skew • short story by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗∗
The Charm • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗
Not Me, Not Amos Cabot! • short story by Harry Harrison ∗∗∗
The Madman • short story by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan] ∗
Joik • short story by Ernest Hill ∗
One of Those Days • short story by Charles Platt ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Roger Harris
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli
J. Carnell – A Quick Look • essay by Harry Harrison

_____________________

Readers who pick up this issue of Science Fantasy after the last one will perhaps get a feeling of déjà vu all over again:¹ as well as an instalment of Swann’s serial there are another two Keith Roberts stories, one of them an episode of ‘Anita’, and the other an SF tale under his Alastair Bevan pseudonym. This time around, however, any easily shocked 1960s readers will not have to cope with homosexuality, violence, suicide or cannibalism. Just some soft drug use . . . .
The Blue Monkeys by Thomas Burnett Swann goes off the boil slightly at the start of its second part. Not only does the pace slacken in Chapter 3 but the tone becomes, perhaps, a little too ‘gentle’—the perpetually hungry bear Pandia cadging honey cakes at a picnic is an example of this:

No sooner had I laid our basket on a tuft of grass than a small felt hat bobbed above the nearest ridge. No, it was Pandia’s hair.
“I smelled the cakes,” she said. “They smell like more than you can eat.”
“Come and join us,” said Icarus, nobly if reluctantly, since the cakes in fact were less than we could eat. Thea had yet to learn the extent of a Minotaur’s appetite.
“Too many are bad for you,” Pandia explained. “One of my acquaintances—not a friend, fortunately—gorged herself and got so sweet that a hungry bear came out of the trees and ate her. Ate his own cousin. Didn’t leave a crumb.” As always before a meal, she looked immaculate. She had spruced her tail, cleaned her kidskin sandals, and tied her belt of rabbit’s fur in a neat bow with exactly equal ends. p. 19

Now, I rather like this part as it happens—I’m really talking about the frequency of this kind of thing.
That said, it isn’t long before the domestic affairs of Thea and Icarus, the two children, and Eunostos, the Minotaur, give way to darker matters. Eunostos takes the children to a huge burnt oak in the forest, and recounts the tale of their wounded father, Aeacus, arriving there and being cared for by Kora the dryad. She would eventually fall pregnant with both of them. Aeacus later returned to Knossos taking them with him and leaving Kora behind. The dryad took to her tree and set it on fire . . . .
The last two chapters of this section detail a plot by the Acheans to kidnap the children and invade the forest. All the Beast tribes are summoned by Chiron the centaur to prepare a defence.
Room with a Skew by John Rackham features two amateur scientist-inventors.² In this story they are expecting a visit from a relative, so they invent a device that will shift all the junk in the spare room into what they think is the fourth dimension (but is actually a parallel world). Meanwhile, they start receiving some very peculiar programs on their TV set. The visiting aunt comments on what should be The Black and White Minstrel Show (ah, enlightened times) on the BBC:

“I don’t recognise any of the songs, this time” she said, “and they have done something different with the costumes, haven’t they?” They had indeed. For a change, the girls were blackface and the men were in revealing tights. Very revealing. I half-expected Auntie to complain, but she seemed to be enjoying it. I hope I’m as broad-minded as most, but some of the poses and dances weren’t just near the knuckle, they were half-way up your arm. Too, the cameras kept giving us a shot of the orchestra, and they were the queerest crowd I have ever seen outside of a science-fiction convention. p. 56

The Charm by Keith Roberts is another ‘Anita’ story. I thought this one rather good the first time I read it but was less impressed this time around, probably because I knew what happens at the end.
In this one Anita is trapped by an expert on witches, Sir John Carpenter. After he extracts witches’ honour from her not to harm him, he requests two favours. The morning after the first he tells her about the second, which is to tell him the purpose of a magic charm he owns. This leads to a scene with Anita and her Granny Thomson:

“Guz back” said Granny Thompson, prodding the winking jewel with her finger. “Or forrard, whichever soots. Dunt mek no odds in the long run.”
“Back where, Gran? ”
“In Time, o’ course . . . wheer d’yer git it?” Her Granny looked suspicious.
“Off a man.”
“Wot man?”
Anita could be very annoying. She picked up the dally and began to swing it. Reflections from it danced round the room like little blue searchlight beams. “Just a man.”
“’Oo were it? Yer dunt git things like that orf any Tom Dick or ’arry . . .”
Anita raised her nose a trifle. “Very well then, he was called Sir John Carpenter.”
Her Granny screwed up her face oddly. “Ho, was ’e? Hoity-toity hen’t in it, is it? ‘Horf Sir John Carpenter’ she says. An’ I needn’t arsk ’ow . . . Comin’ yer airs and graces . . . earned that on yer back, didn’t yer . . .”
“Gran, there’s no need to be crude . . .”
Granny Thompson snatched the amulet, quick as a snake. “Well yer kent keep it. I’ll look after it till yer got more sense . . .”
“But Gran you can’t; it’s his, it was only lent. I promised to take it back . . .”
Her Granny softened a little. “Orlright then, dunt git yer ’air orf . . . but I’ll tek it down a bit fust, it’s too sharp as it is, it’ll ’ackle too much . . .” She dropped the charm into a small lead-lined pot she kept on the sideboard. Anita had always thought of it as a tobacco jar.
“Yer kin ’ave it come Toosdey ” said Granny Thompson. “ It’ll ’ave ter soak.” p. 70-71

After Anita gets the charm back, she and Sir John go on journey through time, hurtling back to the start of creation, and beyond . . . .
Not Me, Not Amos Cabot! by Harry Harrison heralds the welcome arrival of this writer as a regular contributor to the magazine. Although Harrison had contributed stories to the magazine in the past, in the next couple of years he would contribute a number of fiction and non-fiction items, including two novels. Towards the end of the magazine’s run he would become its editor.
As for the story, it is an amusing one about an old man who starts getting free copies of Hereafter, a magazine to help people prepare for death. Outraged, he goes to the publisher and eventually manages to see someone who tells him he has a free two-year subscription. The circulation editor explains how it works:

“It’s a matter of statistics, sir. Every day just so many people die, of certain ages and backgrounds and that kind of thing. The people in the insurance companies, actuaries I think they call them, keep track of all these facts and figures and draw up plenty of graphs and tables. Very accurate, they assure me. They have life expectancy down to a fine art. They take a man, say like yourself, of a certain age, background, physical fitness, environment and so on, and pinpoint down the date of death very exactly. Not the day and hour and that kind of thing. I suppose they could if they wanted too, but for our purposes a period of two years is satisfactory. This gives us a number of months and issues to acquaint the subscriber with our magazine and the services offered by our advertisers, so by the time the subscriber dies the ad-messages will have reached saturation.” p. 84

Cabot determines to prove them wrong and goes to his doctor for a check-up and advice. He then makes a number of lifestyle changes. Two years later he waits to see if his Hereafter subscription has expired . . . .
The Madman by Keith Roberts is the first appearance of Keith Roberts under his Alastair Bevan pseudonym. At this stage in his career he had written so many stories that he needed not only a pseudonym for Science Fantasy but used two others for some of his work in the anthology series New Writings in SF (John Kingston—his two middle names—and David Stringer). Generally, but not always, anything in Science Fantasy that wasn’t an ‘Anita’, or later on a ‘Pavane’ story, appeared under the Bevan byline.
This story concerns an old man in a world where urban sprawl has covered the countryside. He destroys a plastic wishing well for children because it offends his sensibilities, and then goes on journey where he vandalises other such affronts. When he is caught at Stonehenge he is sent to a state asylum and interviewed about his actions. Later on (spoiler) the interviewer shows him some of the things they have in the asylum: a grassed area, books, old cars, coal fires, etc., and suggests he stays there. This is at best mawkish, and at worst unattractively Luddite. Either way, it does not convince.
I’m not really sure what Joik by Ernest Hill³ is about. Set in a future where everyone is naturally black or has their skin pigmented, Ngula, an investigator, is trying to establish why a spaceship using a joik (transportation) device has disappeared. This takes the form of an interrogation of Dadulina, the pilot’s partner. She eventually reveals to Ngula that the universe is a spiral, and that the pilot has gone to the reality that lies outside it. All the people in the spiral are ‘dream fragments’.
The general impression is of a story written after one spliff too many:

“Narcotics,” she said slowly, “are the only real thing in a world of dreams. They bring us nearer to the Dreamer. Beauty, music are the gateways to reality but reality is hard for us dream-symbols to fathom.” p. 117

“You will all be happier when you know that the quest for knowledge is futile and that nothing ultimately matters in a world that is fundamentally unreal.” p. 119

Phil Dick it isn’t, and I think there may be a final twist/wrinkle that went over my head.
One of Those Days by Charles Platt is this writer’s first published story. Platt would shortly produce other work but it would appear in Science Fantasy’s sister magazine New Worlds, of which he would later become designer and occasional editor. As with the last issue this story provides a cheery end to the proceedings (not). A man doesn’t feel well and then starts feeling worse. . . . Not really SF and on the slight side, but OK for all that.

In Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Editorial he raves about Brian Aldiss’s new novel Greybeard. I strongly suspect that if Bonfiglioli had been in the editorial role earlier, this novel would have been a Science Fantasy serial:

There really seems little point in writing an editorial this time about anything but the most important science fiction event for a long time—the publication of Brian Aldiss’ new novel GREYBEARD (Faber 18s.).
There is no doubt about this being Aldiss’ best work yet: the difficulty lies in trying to decide whether to invite attack by saying that I think it is the best science-fiction novel anyone has ever written. Perhaps the best plan is to compromise and say that I am sure it is in the best six. Those enthusiasts who may have, from time to time, been puzzled by his tentative steps in new directions; those who have felt, perhaps, that he may have been written out; those particularly who, like myself, have been frustrated by a kind of wilful perfunctoriness about his novels—all these must now sit back and say that they were wrong, for this novel is rounded, complete, mature and beautifully coherent. This may indeed be the novel we have all been hoping someone would write: the novel which is to emancipate science-fiction and clear it of the reproach of infantility. p. 2

He goes on to criticise the publisher for labelling the book as SF.
At the end of the editorial there is a promise of more pages, monthly publication, a letter page, line illustrations, and a regular science fact feature. Of this wish list, only the monthly publication materialised quickly, and some of the others (such as the science column) never materialised at all.
There is one other short non-fiction piece in this issue. E. J. Carnell – A Quick Look by Harry Harrison is a short (and deserved) appreciation of the previous editor Ted Carnell:

The man who carries these many portfolios is a dedicated Londoner, born in Plumstead in 1912 he still makes his home there. He sports a natty moustache and a fine ruddy complexion that only years of exposure to the rigours of the English climate—both indoors and out—can produce. I have many times tucked my legs under the family table and consumed the immense and satisfying teas his wife Irene uncomplainingly produces for all the flotsam of science fiction that wash up on the Carnell doorstep. After tea, and with a little prodding, the O.M. [Old Monopolist] will show some of the films he has made of historical science-fictional gatherings and one can sip a drink and wallow in nostalgia. The fire crackles in the grate and forgotten faces are recalled with enthusiasm and amusement. p. 62-63

I wonder what happened to those home movies.
The Cover by Roger Harris,⁴ presumably illustrating a scene from Swann’s novel, is the last of his four attractive efforts.
A solid enough issue but nothing special. ●

_____________________

1. Yes, I know. Pick up a copy of Private Eye’s Colemanballs.

2. Another story featuring these characters, A Light Feint, is reviewed in Impulse #2, April 1966.

3. This was the third of Ernest Hill’s published stories and he would produce another dozen or so (as well as three novels). A handful appeared in Science Fantasy but he also sold to New Worlds and New Writings in SF of the same period; later on his work would also appear in Galaxy, If and Science Fiction Monthly. Ernest Hill at ISFDB.

4. This may be the same Roger Harris as on this site. The ‘Blue Fairy’ piece in the top-centre would make a good cover for Science Fantasy #94, July 2020, the seventieth anniversary issue. . . . His biographical information puts him in the London area in the mid-sixties. I’ve sent the gallery an email, and will update this footnote if I receive a reply. ●

Edited 8th May 2018 to change the formatting, make various minor text changes, and add the quote to the Harrison piece on Ted Carnell.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 227 of 365) (Amazon)

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli

Fiction:
The Blue Monkeys (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗+
Period of Gestation • short story by Thom Keyes ∗∗∗∗
The Witch • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗
Anita • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗∗
Dummy Run • short story by Colin Hume
As Easy as A.B.C. • reprint novelette by Rudyard Kipling
Symbiote • short story by George Rigg
Escapism • novelette by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗
Love Feast • short story by Johnny Byrne

Non-fiction:
Editorial • essay by Kyril Bonfiglioli

_____________________

The first two issues of Kyril Bonfiglioli’s editorship were mediocre stuff, but that changes with this issue, and for three reasons:  first, there is the welcome return of Thomas Burnett Swann (who had been an important contributor during John Carnell’s editorship with several stories, including the Hugo Award finalist Where is the Bird of Fire?); second, Keith Roberts makes his début in the magazine with three stories, two of them introducing ‘Anita the Witch’—over the next couple of years Roberts would go on to dominate the magazine’s pages and covers, ending up as its Associate Editor by the time Science Fantasy/SF Impulse finally folded; third, it contained Thom Keyes’ genuinely transgressive/taboo-breaking story (the kind that New Worlds was usually given credit for publishing). This wouldn’t be the last time that Bonfiglioli would publish this kind of material.
Kyril Bonfiglioli’s Editorial echoes the sentiments above by stating that this issue is “the first with which I am fully satisfied”, before talking a little about the stories and taking the mickey out of James Goodrich’s (of Middletown, New York) letter:

“I deduct from reading your editorial, skimming thru the stories (read Aldiss’) and noting the competition for scientists that u are not going to pub anything that might be labelled fantasy, weird, horror, mythical or—perish the thought—sword & sorcery. If this conclusion is correct, then u may remove a potential subscriber from the list. When I became convinced that I could rely on Ted to include 1 fantastic story in almost every ish & decided to mail a check, the old Science Fantasy ceases. Overjoyed to learn SF was to return, I eagerly awaited the 1st no. only to have my hopes ruined.
Did I like anything about your debut? No. The cover is fashionably avant garde & consequently repugnant. The contents are uniformly ugh. I am over 35, have a degree in biology, am a responsible adult tho highly unconventional, am a parent & a professional public librarian; yet scientific s/f of any calibre bores me completely.
Regardless of my feelings I wish u much success in reaching your fictional goals.”
.
(Dear Sir, I regret to deduct that u found debut ish ugh & note that u wd prefer unscientific science-fic in unfashionable cover. I hope u dislike this ish less. Sincerely—Ed.) p. 3

The fiction leads off with the first part of Thomas Burnett Swann’s first novel The Blue Monkeys (this was later reissued by Ace as The Day of the Minotaur).¹ I think I first read this in my late teens and thought it OK but wasn’t otherwise impressed. I liked it a lot more this time around, possibly because I am now a Swann completist and have read everything else he wrote.²
After a ‘lost manuscript found’ introduction, this gentle mythological fantasy starts with Thea and Icarus, the strange adolescent children of Aeacus, who returned to Knossos with them after three years wandering in the country of the Beasts. Their ears are delicately pointed and their hair has tints of green: they are half human-half dryad.
When their home town Knossos is invaded by Achaeans they manage to escape by glider, but are recaptured on landing. Ajax, the leader of the Achaeans, sets his mind to ravishing Thea and tells her to bathe and then dress like a woman. Her brother Icarus goes with her and later comments on her choice of clothing:

“He is going to be disappointed,” said Icarus, entering the room. “He wanted you to dress ‘as becomes a woman.’ ”
“Haven’t I?”
“You know very well what he meant. He wanted to see your breasts. Myrrha always said they were like melons, and if they kept on growing they would soon be pumpkins. I expect he feels like gardening.”
“He can see enough of them now.”
“I know, but you’ve diminished them. Perhaps you could paint your nipples with carmine.
“Do you want me to look like a Moabite temple girl?” she protested, though nipples were also painted in worldly Knossos.
“It can’t hurt to pacify him,” said Icarus realistically.
She thought with a start: He does not suspect what Ajax really wants of me. He still believes that a woman pleases a man only by showing her breasts and perhaps giving him a kiss.
“You see,” he went on, “if he likes your dress, he may not make you kiss him.”
“If he likes my dress, he will make me kiss him.”
Icarus looked surprised. “But that seems greedy. Must he get everything the first night?”
“Achaeans are greedy men. That’s why they’ve come to Crete.” p. 21-22

Ajax subsequently summons Thea and, after an unsuccessful attempt by Icarus to save her by ‘losing’ his tame snake Perdix in the chamber, she has to resort to a pin in her hair to cool Ajax’s ardour . . . .
After injuring Ajax both Thea and her brother are banished to the Lair of the Minotaur in the Forest of the Beasts where they fear being killed and eaten. However, the minotaur, Eunostos, is a kind soul whose bellowing and prowling is all for show, a ruse to keep humankind away from the Forest and its mostly gentle Beasts. The minotaur takes them to his home:

The house had once been a mountainous oak, broad as the Ring of the Bulls at Knossos, but thanks to a bolt of lightning, only the trunk remained to a height of twenty feet, like the walls of a palisade with a walkway and narrow embrasures near the top in case of a siege. I went to the door and rang the sheep’s bell which hung above the lintel. Behind the red-grained oak I heard the quick pattering steps of a Telchin as he came to raise the bolt. In the forest, it was always necessary to lock one’s door. According to an old proverb, “Where locks are not, the Thriae are.” The shy Telchin did not wait to greet us. He and his race are frightened of strangers, though among themselves they boast and wench and fight at the drop of a toadstool.
I had hollowed the trunk of my tree to encompass a garden, which held a folding chair of citrus wood, a large reed parasol like those of the Cretan ladies when they walk by the sea, a clay oven for bread and honey cakes, a grill for roasting meat, and a fountain of hot spring water which served as my bath and also to wash my dishes. Around the fountain grew pumpkins, squashes, lentils, a grape vine hugging a trellis, and a fig tree with small but shapely branches and very large figs. Between the hearth and the parasol grew my favourite flowers, scarlet-petaled, black-hearted poppies, and Zeus help the weed which stole their sunlight or the crow which bruised their buds!
I have always felt that a garden should extend and not circumscribe nature; I plant my flowers haphazardly instead of in rows, and sometimes I scatter my tools in pleasant disorder, like branches under a tree. But Thea was used to the tidiness of palace courtyards. I felt rebuked by her look and hurried to pick up a rake, muttering, “I wonder how this got there,” though of course I had laid it there myself three weeks ago and stepped around it every morning. p. 33-34

The plot synopsis and the two quotes give a good idea of the flavour of the novel. I suspect readers’ reactions will be Marmite ones: some will be keen to read this enchanting fantasy, others not so much . . . .
I do have a minor criticism of this first part of the novel and that is its structure and viewpoint. After starting the novel with the contemporary introduction about this being a lost manuscript, Thea, and to an extent Icarus, are the point of view characters for the next chapter and a half. Then the narration is almost entirely from the viewpoint of the Minotaur for the rest of the novel. This all makes for a very choppy start, and seems a rather first-novel type of flaw.
Period of Gestation by Thom Keyes³ is a grim tale of mad astronauts that most assuredly wouldn’t have appeared under the earlier Carnell regime. Not only that, it was as transgressive as anything its supposedly more taboo-busting companion New Worlds published at the time. Bonfiglioli notes in his editorial:

I was solemnly warned not to print Thom Keyes’ PERIOD OF GESTATION since it deals with matters more familiar in the pages of THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM than in the curiously chaste and prudish ambience of science fiction. I do not think it is an immoral story: to record unnatural crime is not to endorse it. Moreover, I think it is the first story I have seen which takes a really straight—if disillusioned—look at what might really happen to human nature when subjected to the intolerable strains of space. p. 2

The story starts several years into a long spaceship voyage, by which time all the crew members have gone crazy and indulge in intermittent violence against each other. Move over Barry Malzberg. Also:

Berry was a darling boy, a sort of Botticellian Lucretia Borgia, who had let his hair grow long after his first madness, when they had all convinced him that he was Jesus Christ. They learned that this was a dangerous game to play. Berry had an ideally pale skin for the picture as well, because he refused to sit under the sun lamps as they all did as part of their daily ritual. His face was roundedly thin, and the cheekbones were high, and his long hair fell fair. So whether they bullied Berry or whether they slept with him, it was all the same to them, because he was a lower form of life in some way, like a woman. p. 41

Matters take an unexpected turn when Berry appears to be pregnant. The rest of the crew has trouble dealing with this development:

There had always been tension among them, but never the sort of hostility that was growing up now. Berry, of course, was obviously trying to pretend that he knew nothing about this at all. And the rest of them decided that this was the best course to follow in their relations with him; to act as if there was nothing wrong, and that they had not even noticed. Prokosch tried to work out how far gone he was, and after careful observation and tabulation they decided on two months. Prokosch tried to set himself up as the father and acted like a complete bastard all the time, and would lie awake all the night and worry, and then he tried to bully Wrenn and Newman until they ganged up on him and nearly kicked him to death in order to keep him in place.
They had to decide then that they were all the father, and that was the nearest to the truth. p. 42-43

Once they are almost within radio range of Earth (spoiler) Berry’s pregnancy comes to term in a grisly and horrific way. Although the homosexuality isn’t surprising today, the violence of the ending still has a punch. I suspect some of the readers of the time would have been a little shocked to find a story like this in a SF magazine.
Next up is Anita by Keith Roberts. This is actually the first two of the ‘Anita’ series stories, The Witch and Anita rolled into one, but which are separate in the later Anita collection.⁴
The Witch is a pleasant if minor introduction to Anita, a teenage witch who lives in English countryside with her Granny Thomson. In this first instalment Anita undergoes an initiation to turn her into a fully fledged witch. It introduces two recurring characteristics of the stories: first, the person conducting the initiation, her no-nonsense guardian Granny Thomson. She has a distinctive Northamptonshire dialect:

She added a pinch of black powder to the brew and shook in a few frog’s legs from a polythene bag. The fumes intensified. She said “’Ere y’are then, sit yer down. I ent got orl night. Bring that there chair uwer.” The contents of the pot had begun to solidify; she withdrew a horrible-looking blob on the end of a stick. She said “Undo the top o’ yer dress then. Look smart.”
Anita wailed “Oh, no!” She clapped a hand to her throat. Granny Thompson’s eyes gimleted at her. She said “Git it orf. Clean on yisdey, that were. Think I got nothink to do but wosh for y’ all day? Wan’ it all done for yer, you young ’uns do.” p. 49

Secondly, it describes Anita’s rapport with the natural world:

It took a few moments for her to recognise the callsign, for it was very distant. When she did she answered joyfully. It was a bat, the nocturne who lived in the church over the hill. She waited until he came zigging across the moon to her, then got up and walked on with the little animal circling above her head. She talked to him as she went. He always intrigued her. His mischievous little mind was full of strange thoughts about glow-worms and bells, and spires so old God had forgotten them. p. 53

Not much happens in this one beyond the initiation rite and Anita going out to attempt some magic.
The second story, Anita, is a different kettle of fish. This one is powerful, dark and tragic; rather atypically so for the series. The story starts with Anita spying on a young couple who regularly meet by the lake. The girl, Ruth, is there on her own occasionally and she and Anita eventually become friends. Anita has lived a sheltered life away from humankind and learns a lot about Ruth and her life:

One night Ruth persuaded Anita to walk back with her so she could see her home. When the houses came into sight Anita stopped and refused to go any farther. She said “They aren’t like mine. They’re just not proper places to live. Where do you grow food?”
Ruth laughed. “We don’t grow anything. We just buy it. Or at least Mummy does. There’s a van that comes round on Tuesdays. We put a lot of things in the refrigerator. They keep for ages like that.” Anita winced. She thought she had never heard anything so sinful. p. 58

Anita learns that Ruth’s boyfriend, Jem, is Romany. Her parents do not approve:

The next night Jem did not come and Ruth cried again. Anita put her arms round her and felt most peculiar as a result. She was not supposed to be sorry for humans, only hinder and impede them. At this rate she would not go to Hell at all but to the Other Place.
Mimicking her Granny, she said “‘Ere, ’old ’ard. I kent stand orl this sniftin.” It made Ruth laugh and she began to talk again. But it was all about unhappy things; how her father had told her the Romanies were no good because they had lice and even if Jem’s folk got a house on the council estate she could not see him because he was only a Gippo and would never do an honest day’s work, and how would she like looking after a dozen kids while he was down in the pub swigging his money away and anyhow he was sure to beat her. p. 59

At this point, what has been a relatively light melodrama turns rapidly (multiple spoilers) into something much darker. Jem and his family are turfed off the common by the police, and he leaves Ruth no signs for her to follow. She goes home, has a violent argument with her father, and then runs out of the house towards the lake:

The water was icy and knifed at her as it rose above her waist but she only noticed it in a detached fashion. Soon she was half-swimming, kicking awkwardly to push herself into the deep places at the centre. She felt sorry for her parents, for Jem, for Anita and herself but she would have to do it now. To go back muddy to her neat home would be worse than not going back at all. Soon her clothes became heavy with water and began to pull at her like hands urging her toward the mud of the lake bottom. She relaxed, feeling herself drawn down to the dead leaves that waited there, and apart from the first few moments it was not too bad at all. p. 59

Anita senses Ruth’s turmoil but arrives too late to save her:

She stood on the edge of the dull grey water clenching her hands and feeling drums roll inside her head. Then everything went red and started to flash and when she could see the lake again there was a furrow in the water like that made by a plough in a field and Ruth was walking up it toward her. She came jerkily, swinging her arms and legs like a puppet and with her eyes staring straight ahead. Anita felt a little bit of her mind that was still alive saying ‘Had to, had to,’ then even that was gone and there was nothing. p. 62

After reanimating the corpse, Anita marches it back to the estate where Ruth lived:

Nearly all the lights of the little houses were out and the cars stood in the drives, patient humps waiting for the morning. Anita squealed to the sky. “Come on, ’oomans, up yer gits. Jump about.” She took Ruth’s cold hand and skipped in a mad imitation of gaiety. “See wot om brought for yer!”
She stopped by the hedge that bordered the lane and glared with eyes that were phosphorescent with rage; then she summoned all her power and sent the zombie running awkwardly across the road and through the first gate to fumble and beat at the door. Then the next and the next. “You tell them” choked Anita. “Tell them who sent you. Tell them what I am. Say I’ll come in the night. I’ll be the thing that jumps in the river when all the fish have gone. The bush on the common that isn’t there in the morning. The bird that screeches when the owls are in their holes. The branch that bumps the roof when they’ve cut down all the trees. Tell them I’ll kill them all!” And Ruth went bang-bang-banging along the doors while inside saucepans danced with pressure-cookers and mincers and dinner-mats and old stacks of women’s magazines burst into flames in their cupboards and the tubes of Murphys and rented Cossors imploded and refrigerators vomited their scraggy contents and wept ammonia, while spillholders and plastic roses jumped from their shelves and the hardboard backs burst from cheap wardrobes and shiny city suits leaped in the air and lights and screams came on in every little house . . . p. 63

It is a quite an extraordinarily dramatic sequence of events, especially from a new writer. That said, the change in pace and tone between the first and second halves is rather like going from a gentle walk to jumping on a skateboard at the top of a steep flight of stairs. Nevertheless, a very good story and one of Roberts’ best.
Apart from the third Roberts’ story towards the end of the issue the rest of the fiction isn’t up to much. There are several short-shorts: Dummy Run by Colin Hume is about an out of work ventriloquist being snatched by a flying saucer crew for a pre-invasion interrogation. Subsequent misunderstandings save the planet. Symbiote by George Rigg is about a man seeing pink elephants, mostly narrated from their point of view. Love Feast by Johnny Byrne cheerily ends the issue by describing post-holocaust auto-cannibalism.
As Easy as A.B.C. by Rudyard Kipling is a reprint (The London Magazine, March 1912) that tells of the future Aerial Board of Control going to Illinois to put down a rebellion. Certain of the citizens have gathered in a crowd to demonstrate for democracy, so the rest of the populace have shut down the transportation grid to force the ABC to remove them. I suspect the endless talk that the characters engage in to describe their futuristic technology and political system is fairly typical of this kind of period piece. I have no idea why Bon, or any number of other anthologists, thought this was worth reprinting.⁵
Escapism by Keith Roberts is a well enough done traditional SF story about the narrator befriending a man called Dave, who is the projectionist at the local cinema. Later, Dave starts screening film for a strange film crew who are on location, and their film has a 3D quality that doesn’t require any special equipment . . . . After running several reels of their historical film they realise they are dealing with time travellers from the future.
This story will be of particular interest to Keith Roberts aficionados as parts of it foreshadow aspects of his future work. First, there is the love of machinery—in this case film projection equipment that he would have known from his father’s job as a cinema projectionist in Kettering⁶:

The mechs were years out of date; Simplex heads, Western bases, Ross arcs, they looked like ancient mechanical patchworks. But they had the sleek air that comes from careful handling, the spoolboxes were polished, the driptrays scoured and gleaming. p. 105

Then there is the dislike of modern life, as when Bill talks about the past they have seen on film:

“That was the time to live, Bill. No main roads, no housing estates. America a pirate’s Eldorado, London a town out of fairy tales. It was quite a time.” p. 120

There is also the mythology of the land:

[Dave] had strange fancies about the chalk hills. They intrigued him; I remember once when we were walking on the downs near the sea he stopped and asked me whether I was afraid of waking them. He said we were moving on their backs like fleas on a whale. I asked him what he was talking about and he laughed and said they’d been asleep too long, we didn’t mean anything to them now. p. 106

Finally, there is the foreshadowing of the medieval battle scenes that would appear in Corfe Gate, at the end of Pavane:

They held the camera on the battle.
I’d seen good filming. I’d seen All Quiet and Gone with the Wind, the Odessa steps massacre and the fall of Babylon from Intolerance, but I’d seen nothing like this. It was the details that got me. A man loping for cover, sweating and grinning with his hands full of his own entrails. Severed flesh on the grass. A soldier’s arm stripped by a swordcut. I saw a horse take a pike head in the nostril, saw its face turn to smashed bone. I saw something else too as Monmouth’s men rose to receive the Royal cavalry. That upset me worst of all.
Five minutes later it was over. A riderless horse moved past the camera cropping grass. Smoke drifted slowly. There was a noise of birds, mixed with the baby-voices of dying men. The reel ended. p. 119

One of the better issues of Bonfiglioli’s reign and highly recommended to anyone interested in this period. ●

_____________________

1. The publication of The Blue Monkeys in paperback form as The Day of the Minotaur was not helped by Swann’s then agent John Carnell. This is from a letter to Bob Roehm 7/13/73, quoted in Thomas Burnett Swann: A Critical Introduction by Robert A. Collins, in the Matt Hargreaves published The Minotaur Trilogy by Thomas Burnett Swann:

After leaving the editor’s post at Science Fantasy to Kyril Bonfiglioli in 1964, Carnell set up a literary agency, and Swann was among his customers.
“He was a fine editor but a poor agent for me,” Tom wrote. “I suggested Ace and Ballantine to Carnell, but he said he had already queried them.” Dropping Carnell as agent, Swann wrote to Donald Wollheim (then SF editor at Ace) who immediately asked him to submit the two novels he’d published earlier in Science Fantasy—The Weirwoods and Day Of The Minotaur. Wollheim “accepted Minotaur in three weeks,” Swann reported. “Two weeks after Minotaur appeared [he] accepted [Weirwoods] too. Later I learned from Mrs. Ballantine that Carnell had never approached her about my stories, just as he hadn’t approached Wollheim . . . . I think he was so busy that he forgot just whom he had written and whom he hadn’t. I met him once in London and thought him delightful, though even then he was always rushing about, catching omnibuses and such.” p. 305-6

The novel was subsequently a Hugo Award finalist in 1967.

2. It took me a long time to get hold of all Thomas Burnett Swann’s books in those pre-internet days. They were difficult to find, expensive, sometimes both. I remember spending a couple of days on one holiday to Los Angeles in the ’90s driving to various second-hand book stores spread far and wide looking for those elusive volumes. At one store I found three of them, and it wasn’t a speciality store either. I felt like I’d won the lottery.

3. I first read Thom Keyes’ story in Best SF Stories from New Worlds #4. Michael Moorcock also nicked Hilary Bailey’s In Reason’s Ear and Josephine Saxton’s The Wall from Science Fantasy for other volumes in this series.

4. The original Ace edition of Anita had fifteen stories in it, eleven from Science Fantasy, two from F&SF and two originals. The later, attractive Owlswick Press edition added The Checkout, a 1981 story from F&SF, as well as Stephen Fabian illustrations.

5. As Easy as A. B. C. at ISFDB.

6. There is a little information about Roberts’ childhood in Keith Roberts: The Patient Craftsman by Mike Ashley, p.2, Science Fiction Monthly, v02n12 (December, 1975). ●

Edited 24^th April 2017 to make text changes to the introduction, and change quote formatting.