_____________________
Editor, Julie Davis; Executive Editor, Pat Hornsey
Fiction:
To Lay the Piper • reprint short fiction by Robert Holdstock ∗
Spaceout • short fiction by Philip Boast ∗∗
Scoop • short fiction by R. M. Lamming [as by Robin Douglas] ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Tim White
Interior artwork • by Tony Roberts (x3), Christos Kondeatis, Chris Foss (x2), Robin Bath, Tim White, David Bergen, Tony Masero (2)
Introduction
News • by Julie Davis
The SF Novels of D. G. Compton • essay by Peter Linnett
Letters
The Query Box • by Walter Gillings [as by Thomas Sheridan]
An Interview with D. G. Compton • by Peter Linnett
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This issue’s News column has an important announcement:
Yes, dear readers, we’ve come to the end of the road and this will be the last issue of Science Fiction Monthly. However, do not despair, all is not lost: in a matter of a few weeks you’ll be able to buy an even better science fiction magazine called SF Digest. The first issue will appear in mid-May and regularly from then on at three monthly intervals. It will contain all that’s good about SFM and avoid all that’s bad. For a start it will be half of SFM’s page size, so you won’t find it difficult to handle, but there will be many more pages. The fiction will be of a very high standard—for instance, the first issue includes stories by Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Michael Coney—and there won’t be so much emphasis on factual articles, although there will always be one in every issue. The amount of colour artwork will be much reduced, but there will be a full-colour, pull-out poster free with every issue. All the stories will be illustrated and great pains have been, and will be, taken to make sure that all the illustrations fit the stories they accompany.
John Brunner has written an editorial and there are consumer guides to Heinlein, Van Vogt and Asimov as well as a quiz. SF Digest will be available at newsagents and bookstalls from mid-May and will cost 50p.
The mid-seventies were a difficult time economically, with rampant inflation causing three price rises for the magazine in the previous year (from 30p to 50p), so perhaps this outcome was no surprise. And perhaps the novelty of all that poster size artwork had worn off.
The stories in this issue are the usual middling efforts. To Lay the Piper by Robert Holdstock (Sfinx #7, January 1973) has four men go back in time to investigate the Pied Piper legend. This one takes ages to get going—the team spend forever arguing about various issues before they interview a survivor. Eventually they go further back to the event itself. The finale feels anti-climactic (spoiler: the story has a natural, horrific, and medically obscure explanation), and is confused by the impression that spirits of the dead appear during the final events (this is later ignored by the team).
I remember not much liking this when I first read it, and I haven’t changed my mind. Although Holdstock later won acclaim for his ‘Mythago’ series, his earlier work was of a much lower standard.
Best of the three stories is Spaceout by Philip Boast. This one begins with an astronaut called Kelloran who, after servicing an orbital bomb, suffers from a stuck propellant valve. This leaves him too far away from his ship for his crewmate to rescue him.
The rest of the story alternates between his time in orbit and scenes on Earth where the mission managers discover he has a mistress. This is apparently (and unconvincingly) a problem in this particular future, and lead to conversations like this with his wife:
‘This is all most unfortunate,’ said Carey.
‘I cannot help but agree,’ said Mrs Kelloran.
‘You had no suspicion of the existence of the woman, Elvira?’
‘None.’
‘Your sexual relations with Mr Kelloran were normal?’
‘Perfectly. We made love in the attic bedroom after the religious programmes every Sunday.’
‘So you had no reason to suspect another woman.’
‘That’s right. I never imagined.’
‘Naturally she will be escorted from the base immediately.’
‘How kind.’
Carey said delicately, ‘And if your husband survives, will you take him back?’
‘Naturally. Of course I shall impose certain conditions. The woman Elvira must go, also a certain old armchair he keeps by the fire to snore in during the evenings, and I will insist he have his moth-eaten old dog put to sleep.’
‘You realise it is an offence for a serving astronaut to have an emotional-sexual relationship with anyone but his or her wife or husband. Will you require us to take disciplinary action in this matter?’
Mrs Kelloran stood up. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I will be doing that myself.’ p. 11
This is all very odd—which is a pity as the rest of the story is pretty good, such as when Kelloran re-enters the atmosphere in his armoured spacesuit:
The ice on his faceplate cleared and the sea was a smooth blue sheet, impossible to say how far below, but he could no longer see Africa. He could hear the muted roaring of the wind; he was the first true skydiver.
Carey: Rate of descent six hundred twenty-five. . .
In front of his face a red light was flashing beside the faceplate. He was on oxygen reserve. It gave him half an hour.
Driver: Assuming a spreadeagle position, his terminal speed at sea level in that suit is one hundred seventeen miles per hour. Survival?
Carey: Negative.
Across the sea a silver delta was crawling, towing a long white vapour trail. He recognised it for a plane.
For the first time he felt a faint hope.
Driver: SST7 moving into position. They’re ready now. Fifty thousand feet.
In his faceplate the aeroplane grew and grew as he fell towards it, then suddenly it was gone and he had only a momentary impression of a succession of black dots leaping through the rear doors. So that was how they were going to do it.
Carey: The operation is still proceeding according to plan.
The black dots resolved into orange-suited men as they swooped head first towards him, lessening their air resistance so as to catch him up as quickly as possible. He smiled at them, but their faces were expressionless. One of them grabbed his arm.
Driver: They have contact with him. The suit’s in bad shape but Kelloran’s alive. They’re attaching the flotation ring now.
Carey: That suit weighs two hundred pounds in Earth gravity, Mrs Kelloran. Without the flotation ring he would sink immediately on hitting the sea.
The flotation ring was a long empty bladder that flapped and lashed in the airstream like a mad thing.
Somehow they got it round his shoulders, stretching it around the bulky systems unit on his back. The orange men were clustered about him now like moths around a light. They had a parachute for him and tried to strap it to his front but someone’s shoulder hit the compressed air switch and the flotation ring inflated with a bang. Increased air resistance snatched Kelloran up; the orange men fell impotently away below him and disappeared.
Carey: Damn that man to hell.
Driver: It’s up to SST 12 now, and they won’t have much time. He’ll be under thirty thousand any moment.
Though hope had been snatched from him, hope was born again. With icy nerve the pilot in the supersonic transport passed only a few hundred yards from him and Kelloran again saw the black dots pour from the rear doors and resolve into orange men. He glanced down: he was close enough to see the ocean wrinkled and flecked with white.
A promising first story, but there wasn’t any more short SF from this writer.1
Scoop by R. M. Lamming opens with an alien specimen collector on a prehistoric Earth who is making his way back to his craft. After successfully avoiding the primitives, he arrives at his ship, but senses something is wrong.
The story then cuts to the current day, where two men are in the process of gathering various objects together to take to an old woman who is a psychic. After she proves she is genuine, by successfully identifying the provenance of several objects, she eventually handles a strange scoop they have brought. This connects her across time to the alien, who realises that he has mislaid the tool, and that someone is watching him . . . .
I’m not sure this entirely works, but it’s an okay story, and the scene where the alien and the woman connect is convincingly spooky.
This issue’s Cover is by Tim White, who has another piece of artwork inside the issue, the impressive double page centre spread:
The Interior artwork is a mixture of colour paperback paintings and black and white story and article illustrations by Tony Roberts, Christos Kondeatis, Chris Foss, Robin Bath, Tim White, David Bergen, and Tony Masero.
The Introduction is a few paragraphs of blurb for the stories and the Compton article. They might as well not have bothered and, judging by one comment, you get the impression the writer feels the same way:
Now I’ve given away the plot of nearly all the stories in this issue, we’d better move on to the author interview. p. 1
The News column by Julie Davis leads off with John Brosnan’s negative review of The Man Who Fell to Earth (I didn’t much care for the film myself, although I haven’t watched it recently):
If somebody wanted to be really nasty about The Man Who Fell to Earth he could describe it as the ‘thinking man’s Space 1999’. This is because both of them have absolutely nothing to do with science fiction but pretend they do; they exploit the themes and devices of sf for reasons entirely their own. In the case of Space 1999 the reason is to make money for Sir Lew Grade and Gerry Anderson; in the case of The Man Who Fell to Earth it’s to add fuel to Nicolas Roeg’s reputation as an important film-maker.
Now Roeg has made a number of fine films, such as Performance, Walkabout and Don’t Look Now, all of which have been rather solid, ie highly symbolic, full of artistic and literary allusions, multi-layered and rich to the eye. These descriptions equally apply to The Man . . . but with this film Roeg seems to have reached a kind of artistic dead end, as too much of it is self-indulgent and inbred. At times it even seems like a parody of his earlier films, particularly Performance with which it shares many similarities. The sex scenes, for example, employ the same device that was used to such good effect in Performance and Don’t Look Now; that of intercutting the writhing bodies with flashes back and forwards … but because of this repetition it’s now lost its effectiveness and become merely a Roeg cliche. Other similarities include the sequence where David Bowie and the girl (Candy Clark) play with a revolver full of blanks; a direct reference to the scene in Performance where James Fox shoots Mick Jagger. And, as in Performance, a painting provides the symbolic key to the whole film (in Performance it was a portrait of the writer Borges; in The Man . . . it’s a painting showing the fall of Icarus).
The rest of his review takes up most of the News space; the rest contains the closure announcement discussed above and some other news snippets.
The SF Novels of D. G. Compton by Peter Linnett starts with this introduction to the writer:
D G Compton is a new kind of sf writer. His concerns are new to sf, he owes nothing to the pulp tradition, and the outlook which informs his work is shared by few other sf writers. Here, I believe, lies a clue to the paradox surrounding his work. In my opinion, and that of a good many critics, Compton is one of the best sf novelists writing today, yet, for all the attention his work has received, he might as well not be writing at all. Happily, the situation seems to be improving, but until now his novels have not been widely reviewed, and have sold poorly, with the result that many sf readers seem not even to have heard of him. All this despite the fact that he’s maintained a steady, tremendously good output ranging from The Quality of Mercy (1965) to The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (1974)—eight novels in which he has succeeded in both creating a clearly delineated, recognisable world of his own and establishing a sharply-flavoured, individual style. Most important, he possesses a mastery of characterisation far in advance of most other sf writers I can think of. Why the neglect? Certainly Compton is at the opposite pole to the writer of hardcore sf, in style, approach and technique. His main concerns are with his characters, which are among the most credible in sf, and with the working out of the moral problems arising from the situations in which they find themselves. As Mark Adlard, writing in Vector 66, said: ‘At the most basic level he is perhaps the first sf writer to continue that tradition of moral seriousness which runs from Austen to James.’
It’s easy to see why traditionally-minded readers, reared on sf containing indestructible heroes with no scruples whatever, are repelled by Compton’s novels: they bring them too close to the real world which much sf ignores. The fact that Compton’s moral seriousness is always contained within the framework of a good story well told, and never becomes obtrusive or didactic, is a tribute to his skill as a novelist. The combination makes him a writer of considerable importance.
The first point to make itself obvious on reading his work is that he uses the themes, trappings and symbols of sf because they happen to suit the expression of his personal vision, and aid the statement he wants to make, not because he grew up with the genre or has any great love for it. His first sf novel, The Quality of Mercy (1965; revised 1970), was written with little knowledge of previous work in the genre and, indeed, with no awareness that he was writing sf at all. p. 17
It is a comprehensive and interesting article about the writer’s work.2
Letters consists of one long letter of complaint from Bill Little, Stoke-on-Trent. It starts with the familiar lament that the magazine isn’t New Worlds:
As a sf magazine the above mentioned issue [SFM v03n02] was an utter waste of money! I buy the magazine in the (apparently vain) hope that it will change and adapt. But it seems that my hard-earned pennies are being wasted. There can surely be no doubt now that SFM is not a vehicle for literature of a speculative nature, never has been, and never will be. With 50% plus devoted to decorative trappings—no matter how nice the trappings are—the fiction must of necessity take the back seat. I find myself caught in a vicious circle: the price of paperbacks rocketing, one hopes SFM would present more fiction and of a more original nature; no such luck!
He goes on to make several specific criticisms of the fiction and articles:
Thanks to Sandra Miesel, I sleep so much easier now that I know that Kelly Freas gets his lovely effects ‘by swirling, splotching’ (such an artistic word, that) ‘or crackling the paint’. Crackling for God’s sake? Such minutiae are of interest only to the most feverent Freas-ians, not the majority of fiction-loving readers.
[. . .]
Congratulations, Mr Brosnan! You bore in the most expert way. Tell me pray, why you are a traditionalist when it comes to cinematic effects? And why do you prefer film to videotape? I’m so, so interested, along with, I bet, two others! Your analysis of The Invisible Man was bloated, padded and all but concealed by in-crowd technological gobbledygook making sense to you, yourself, and nobody else! Delete all but the first two, and the final paragraphs (and of course, the photo) and you have a concise criticism of the show, with half a page, free for something else.
He concludes with this prediction:
I’ll continue to buy the magazine, dedicated idiot that I am, but I don’t for one solitary moment suppose my letter will make the slightest difference to the style and format of SFM. Believe it or not, however, there is nothing I would like more than for SFM to succeed, but the way it’s going it will be dead before the end of 1976. p. 25
I think Little’s problem is that he wants a completely different magazine. I wonder if SF Digest was more to his taste.
The Query Box by Walter Gillings has a couple of interesting queries this month, including this one:
COMPUTER POET
At the beginning of Brian Aldiss’ Earthworks are some lines of poetry which are accredited to ‘RCA 301 Computer’. Is this a joke of his or did a computer actually write them?
Owen F Ransen, Biggleswade, Beds.
.
To make sure, I put your question to author Aldiss, who replied: ‘The quotation is genuine; an RCA computer did write it. I seem to remember I got the quotation from Time in 1964.’.3 I remember it, too, and the bother it caused among human poets at the time. I can’t accede to your request for some more lines, though I kept them by me for several years, but I can offer you this Japanese product of ‘Cybernetic
Serendipity’ exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1968. It is mercifully brief:
.
eons deep in the ice
I paint all time in a whorl
bang the sludge has cracked
An Interview with D. G. Compton by Peter Linnett follows on from the article. It’s another interesting piece (partially because Compton is a forthcoming, almost garrulous, subject), and it yields a number of interesting snippets:
I was writing very symbolic radio comedies—all those great meanings somewhere. They didn’t sell,
I’d run out of money and was on National Assistance, so I thought I had better try one of those awful long things, a book. I wrote a crime novel, which sold immediately for £75. It was almost the first money I’d ever earned from my writing. I wrote six of those, in fairly quick succession. During this time I’d got myself an agent for my plays, who discovered the German market for me, and all those earnest, culture-filled comedies, which the BBC hadn’t been able to make anything of at all, Germany lapped up.
[. . .]
I tried to write [the crime novels] as well as I could. I wish they had been better; they’re not at all good and are best forgotten. I was certainly learning about putting together a book and, I hoped, getting some overwriting out of my system. At the end of six of those, we hadn’t made the breakthrough that my publisher and I had hoped for and we didn’t see much point in going on. I didn’t mind very much because I’d just had an idea for a novel. I was very concerned at the time about overpopulation. I was interested in its control, had an idea about how it could be done and wrote The Quality of Mercy. I sent it off to Hodder & Stoughton, who accepted it at once and said it was science fiction. I wasn’t at all happy about it being called sf because I knew nothing about it at all. I imagined it was still Amazing Stories, of which I’d seen the jackets and hadn’t even read—how vulgar and tasteless, I thought, I don’t want anything to do with that. However, one doesn’t argue; what is in effect one’s first book is sold to a publisher. p. 26At first I couldn’t comprehend why my books were selling to anybody at all, because if they were sf, what the hell was this other thing which was also sf—Amazing Stories and so forth? I still do not comprehend the enormous span of what is called sf; I do not know if the same people read the entire spectrum. I’ve never had any idea for whom I am writing. I once addressed a group of sf enthusiasts in Cambridge and it was a disaster, because I’m not an addresser of enthusiasts—I’m not an addresser of anybody. I suddenly realised how young the readership was, in that they were referring to books of mine which were six years old, which they had read when they first came out. They were only about 20 at this time, so they had been reading my books at the age of 15. That astonished me; I hadn’t imagined that sort of readership at all. p. 26
One of the things that comes out of Compton’s interview is that a mid-list writer could survive in the mid-70s even though they didn’t necessarily have a huge readership. Most hardbacks would sell hundreds of copies (or more) into the library system, and then end up with a subsequent paperback edition. Changed days.
In conclusion, this isn’t a bad issue of the magazine: there are a couple of okay short stories, and the Compton material is an interesting look at a not much examined writer.
I was sorry to see the magazine fold (I was a reader at the time, and it was the first SF magazine I bought). It was a fairly lightweight and mixed quality publication for sure, but it was nice having something like this to pick up each month at the newsstands—at an absolute minimum (and there was always more than that) there were some lovely pictures to look at. In any event, I obtained the July 1976 issues of Analog and F&SF 4 a couple of months later (if SFM hadn’t folded, I wonder if I would have bothered asking my newsagent to order these elusive American digests) and after that it was down the rabbit hole for good. ●
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1. If this is the same Philip Boast, the writer would have been in his early twenties when this appeared. His ISFDB page is here.
2. Compton has always exerted a strange fascination for me, possibly because of his extra-genre origins, but most probably because at school I based my Sixth Year Studies English* essay/dissertation, in part, on Farewell Earth’s Bliss (I think Ballard’s Concentration City and Stewart’s Earth Abides were the other two—God knows what the link was). I didn’t like the novel much, or The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe later, and I suspect I read them when I was too young. Probably time for another go.
* I liked the subject but wasn’t much good at it.
3. Aldiss’s Earthworks contains the following stanza:
While life reached evilly through empty faces
While space flowed slowly o’er over idle bodies
And stars flowed evilly upon vast men
No passion smiled . . .
There is a short news clipping with what I presume (they have a similar style) are more RCA 301 poems here:
Our bloom flayed evilly through ugly bodies
And water loomed evilly o’er inhuman loves
Your dream blazed freely ’round ugly hovels
A foe itched
.
The stars flayed slowly upon furtive bodies
And light flayed blindly o’er crowded faces
While gloom blazed foully from broken loves
Our genes giggled.
I’ve read worse from humans.
4. I reviewed the July 1976 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction here. ●
