ISFDB link
Other reviews:1
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #151, June 1965
W. T. Webb, Vector #31, March 1965
Roddy Williams, SF to Read Before You Die
Various, Goodreads
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Editor, John Carnell
Fiction:
The Subways of Tazoo • novelette by Colin Kapp ∗∗∗
The Fiend • reprint short story by Frederik Pohl ∗∗
Manipulation • novelette by Keith Roberts [as by John Kingston] ∗∗∗+
Testament • short story by John Baxter ∗∗
Night Watch • short story by James Inglis ∗∗∗
Boulter’s Canaries • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗
Emreth • short story by Dan Morgan ∗
Spacemaster • novelette by James H. Schmitz ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Foreword • introduction by John Carnell
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This volume leads off, as ever, with the longest story in the anthology, The Subways of Tazoo by Colin Kapp. This is a sequel to The Railways Up on Cannis (New Worlds #87, October 1959) and would end up as the second of five ‘Unorthodox Engineers’ stories.2
This has Fritz Van Noon, his sidekick Jacko Hine, and the rest of the team sent to help a group of archaeologists on Tazoo, where they are investigating the remains of an alien civilisation. After their arrival at the landing site the unit travels by ground-cat to the base, but the vehicle breaks down and they have to walk the rest of the way. They get a taste of both dry and wet storms: the first presents a potentially lethal lightning display; the second produces acid rain.
Once they get there, van Noon meets the base commander:
“Welcome to Tazoo, Lieutenant!” Colonel Nash beckoned him into the office.
Fritz explored the still-smarting skin on his face and hands, and was still painfully aware of the puffiness around his eyes. “Thank you, Colonel. That was quite an initiation ceremony out there!”
Colonel Nash smiled fleetingly. “Unpremeditated, I assure you, but the weather is part of the reason you’re here. A ground-cat is the toughest machine available, but as you saw for yourself it is totally incapable of standing up to the environment. The low pH of the celestial waters conspires with the sand to etch and tear the guts out of any transportation contrivance we’ve yet imported to Tazoo. When you consider atmospheric chlorine, hydrogen chloride, free sulphuric acid and ozone, plus high humidity and extreme ultraviolet radiation together with an additional nightly sandblast, you can guess that corrosion prevention is not the least of our troubles.”
Fritz shuddered involuntarily.
“I must admit,” said Nash, “that I haven’t always seen eye to eye with you before on the subject of unorthodox engineering, but if you can solve our transport problem I shall at least be open to persuasion. Certainly no orthodox engineers can give us transport on Tazoo at a cost less than the total budget for the entire enterprise.” p. 17
Initially van Noon’s team try modifying a couple of the ground-cats to make them more resistant to the environment, but this proves abortive. One of the archaeologists, Philip Neville, then turns up with a wishbone-shaped alien artefact he says is a machine; van Noon rebuilds what turns out to be an alien harp and plays it—much to Jacko’s aural distress. An alien city is later discovered and, shortly after that, they find a shaft. Fritz and Jacko investigate the next day and, a hundred metres underground, find what they think is an alien subway station and a train that looks like a weird kind of birdcage.
The rest of the story details the team’s attempts to get the trains working again: the alien harps (and the piezoelectric power producing properties they have) are a part of the solution. This is all rather contrived, but it is a competently told story, and there is some entertaining, light-hearted banter between Fritz and Jacko.
At the end of the story the colonel offers Van Noon a promotion, and his reply presumably sets up the next story in the series:
“Fritz,” said Nash. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you about the possibility of permanently establishing U.E. as a branch of the Terran Exploratory task force instead of merely a section of the Engineering Reserve. How would you react to that? Of course, it would mean promotion. . . .”
“I should personally welcome the idea, sir,” said Fritz, “but I fear I’ve already accepted another assignment on Tiberius Two. They’re trying to establish a mono-rail system there.”
“I see,” said Nash. “And just what is there about a monorail system on Tiberius Two that requires your peculiar talents?”
Fritz coughed discreetly. “I understand it’s something to do with their gravity. Apparently it changes direction by seventy degrees every Tuesday and Thursday morning,” he said, reaching for his cap. p. 53-54
The Fiend by Frederik Pohl (Playboy, April 1964) has a solitary starship pilot waking up a young woman from suspended animation: she is not best pleased at this, and spends most of her time making threats about what will happen to him if he does not return her to her pod. After a certain amount of back and forth, the pilot puts her back into hibernation and (spoiler) we find he is a remote presence on the ship (his body is on Mercury).
This has a more adult viewpoint than other SF of the time, perhaps, with the implied threat to the woman. The time lag between Mercury and the ship isn’t addressed.
Manipulation by Keith Roberts is the first and best of the author’s two stories in this volume, and concerns a narrator who has a number of wild talents: telekinesis, telepresence, and a nascent telepathy. Roberts would shortly return to this psi-powers theme in his story The Inner Wheel (New Writings in SF #6, 1965).3
The story starts with an account of how the narrator previously used his powers to keep his mother alive:
No!
Nol No! No!
I said I would never use my Power again. I won’t. It’s wrong and vile. I remember what I promised myself ten years ago, walking in the dark after Mother died.
It kept her alive for years. The doctors had never seen anything like it. It was her heart. . . .
God knows it was difficult. Not like this thing I want to do now. This could be so easy.
When Mother was alive I used to stay up nights, work round the clock on that feeble old heart, strengthening, renewing. I built a new valve once, piece by microscopic piece. Three days and nights that took me, working nonstop. Do you know how many cells there are in the ventricles of a human heart?
I do. . . .
Mother knew what was happening. She could feel all the little adjustments going on, the million cobweb-forces twitching between us keeping her alive. She tried to give up three times. But she couldn’t die because her heart couldn’t stop. And her heart couldn’t stop because I was driving it.
[. . .]
Mother had won in the end. She was too clever for me. If she’d cut her wrists or opened her throat it wouldn’t have mattered because I’d have seamed up the wounded flesh as fast as the blade went through it. If she’d jumped from a building I’d have caught her and lowered her to the ground. But she didn’t do that. All she did was swallow a hundred little white tablets. I woke in the night. I was already inside her. I knew what was wrong. Knew she’d beaten me. I was fast enough to juggle cells as they multiplied and died, but these were molecules. The wrong sort of molecules. They came pouring and flooding through the universe of her body, changing things as they came. I could see amino acids and peptones, watch proteins building up like pearly chains against a void, but now there were too many molecules. I fought them, I was everywhere at once, grabbing them, altering them, making them harmless. But it was no use. It was like a locust plague. Like trying to catch the insects one by one in your hands and kill enough to stop the swarm, and the sky dark with them for miles. . . . p. 67-68
The story then goes on to detail various other aspects of his life, but the narrative always loops back to a failed love affair with a woman called Julie. We discover that this disappointment has poisoned him, and see him use his telepresence power to watch her as she drives at high-speed to an unknown place. We learn that she is probably involved with another man called Ted, and that the narrator is trying to summon his nerve to use a nascent telepathic ability to find out more:
First, I’ve got to beat the fear.
There are a lot of sorts of fear. I suppose one sort comes if you’re on your own some place and you cut an artery and there’s nobody to help and you know you’ve only got minutes. That’s fear . . . and another sort is when there are the footsteps in the night, and the creaks and the laughing, and the branch taps the pane, insistent there behind the curtains; but there isn’t any branch. . . .
I’m about to enter another mind. That’s the worst fear of all. . . .
I’ve done it before, but only seconds at a time. And then it was bad enough. This is going to be worse than opening a private diary, packed full of things about you. Worse than looking in a mirror under a glaring light. Worse than these things, more truthful than the diary, more searching than the light. I begin to see the only thing that keeps any of us sane is that we can’t communicate. Oh we can talk, write letters maybe or compose music, a poem, they’re better ways of getting across, but we still have to be tuned and nobody’s ever finally certain what the message is. . . . We’re all in a mist, thick, like cotton-wool. We hide in it from each other, from ourselves, wrap ourselves away. Deep down we want it like that because it’s for the best. . . .
But there’s a devil inside us, we call it hope. That last little thing the girl let out the box, that was the worst plague of all. It’s hope makes you ask the question when you already know the answer, hope makes you open that locked diary, turn on that glaring light. . . . I don’t want to hope, I’m through with it, done. But I’m hoping. . . . p. 75
When he finally uses his telepathy he receives the unwelcome image of Ted, her apparent lover. This is the final straw and, enraged, he decides to kill her, disconnecting the pin on the steering arm of the car. However, before it can drop he sees her crying and repents, but finds it impossible to put the linkage back together. Moreover he has no capacity left to contact Julie to get her to slow down, or to telekinetically apply the brakes of the car.
The story rushes on to a somewhat overwrought and melodramatic ending where the narrator leaves the lodgings he is in (fighting his neighbours on the way out and falling down the staircase) and attempts to drive towards her so that his power will be strong enough to rectify the situation. The last scene (spoiler) has her telepathically revealing to him that she is also a ‘talent’ before the steering column linkage fails and their cars crash head on into each other.
Notwithstanding this rather unlikely ending the story is more convincing than many others of its type due to its very intense, personal, and descriptive style. It is one of Roberts’ better early works.
Testament by John Baxter begins with a primitive man going out on a perilous hunt for food to prevent his family dying from hunger and thirst. The first sign that matters are not as expected is in this passage:
Once I even found myself dreaming of water. It shocked me. I had not thought I would ever be that thirsty, nor that I could remember what water tasted like. The only time I had drunk it was at my initiation, three years ago, and yet out there in the desert my memory was as sharp as if it had been only yesterday. p. 96
Later he arrives at the hunting ground and finds an odd-looking vehicle. When its occupant returns he kills it with a spear:
When my body had stopped trembling I stood up and walked to the thing I had killed. It did not move. Would a demon move after being speared? I did not know. I walked closer. In death, the creature was less horrible. It sprawled like a discarded doll, legs and arms thrown out awkwardly. Only a stain of blood around the spear shaft showed that this thing had once lived. Now that my fear was almost gone, I could see things more clearly. What I had thought to be a single horrible eye was just a window of the same material as in the hut on wheels. And when I bent closer I could see something behind the window; something very like a face, looking up into mine. p. 98
The story avoids what I thought was going to be an obvious ending featuring a NASA astronaut and, instead (spoiler), reveals that the hunter and his people are the devolved descendants of earlier human settlers. After the astronaut’s companions fly over the settlement, the tribe prepares his body and places it on a funeral platform.
Night Watch by James Inglis is about a probe sent from Earth waking up and beginning its mission. The story then charts its course through our galaxy, and another period of dormancy lasting millions of years. This ends when it wakes again at the edge of our galaxy.
It then reverses course back to the galactic centre in search of light sources that will keep it powered, and on arrival it meets many other probes that have followed the same course. They share their data and watch the eventual death of our galaxy before setting off through interstellar space.
This characterless but cosmic and aeon-spanning tale provides some welcome variety.4
Boulter’s Canaries by Keith Roberts is the first of his ‘Alex Boulter’ stories.5 Boulter is the hobbyist friend of the narrator, Glynn, and tells the latter about poltergeist activity at Frey Abbey and the unusual effects seen on photographs taken there. They go up later with Alex’s film gear and manage to capture something similar on film. As the pair investigates further they start transmitting high frequency sounds, which irritates the poltergeists (or energy life-forms) which are causing these photographic anomalies: this results in the “canaries” tracking the pair down. The climactic scene has them causing a lot of damage to Alec’s film and sound equipment at his house.
This is well enough done but there is not much of a story here.
Emreth by Dan Morgan has Phillips, a scout for a space tour company, finding what seems is the perfect planet—that is until he sees what he thinks is the brutal murder of one of the alien children by the others. When he challenges their headman about this incident the latter shrugs it off by saying that it is just a realistic child’s game. When Phillips refuses to be fobbed off he is taken to the supposed crime scene (there is no body present but there is a red fluid the headman identifies as “fruit juice”). Phillips is not convinced.
Back at his ship he discovers the sample he took at the scene is actually blood but, before he can confront the headman again, he goes walking in the jungle and meets a scout from another tour company:
The girl stopped and turned towards him. Her dark hair was short, in loose curls about her head. Phillips caught his breath as he saw her face. It was nearer to his ideal of beauty than that of any woman he had ever seen.
“Well, hallo there!” Her voice was low pitched, with an intriguing huskiness.
It was fairly obvious that any Earthwoman this far from home must be a scout, like himself. Some of the smaller companies, like Astral, took on women scouts occasionally. Maybe it worked all right when the planet concerned was as gentle as Lequin, but there had been some during his career that would have been no place for a woman. p. 152
After he arranges to see her again he goes to see the headman, who admits to Phillips that he was previously less than truthful, and proceeds to tell him of an inimical native life form called an Emreth, a creature that can mimic the natives’ form, and which eventually kills as it feeds on its victims’ life- force.
This unlikely and contrived story proceeds to a predictable conclusion.
Spacemaster by James H. Schmitz begins with a man called Haddan waking up in a strange room observing his environment (a rather lazy and clichéd start). A little while later the wall vanishes and a man called Vinence appears. Haddan is then interrogated.
Initially the story gives the impression that Vinence’s Spacemaster organisation is a totalitarian group bent on control of the people living in the Eighty Two cities, and that they have genetically modified the populace to become weaker and less viable. We also learn that Haddan and his group had left one of these spacebourne cities to set up a free colony on a planet but that they were intercepted by the Spacemasters just before landing—hence his current incarceration.
During the rest of the interview Vinence drip feeds Haddan various items of information which gradually change the perspective of the story. Eventually (spoiler) the Spacemasters are revealed as a group that is attempting to save humanity by placing selected individuals on a primitive planet to breed out humanity’s accumulated genetic damage. As to the Spacemasters themselves, they are biological machines that have a one-thousand year lifespan, and they were originally humans: Haddan elects to join them to help with their grand project.
This is all skillfully and enjoyably done, but I’m not convinced that the ability on show here masks that the piece is essentially an extended explanation.
The Foreword by John Carnell is the usual collection of story introductions. I’m glad I read them after finishing the book as I don’t think I would have been motivated by this comment, coming as it does after puffs for alien archaeology, psi, and poltergeist tales:
For those who like space stories, however, there are at least four different types in this collection, each with a moral to prove if you look at them in retrospect. p. 8
Carnell ends with this:
Basically, then, this is a new collection of stories designed primarily for enjoyment. That one or more of them will evoke speculation in some readers’ minds is almost certain, for this has been the main feature of S.F. for over fifty years. A sense of wonder and a sense of enjoyment go hand in hand. New Writings in S.F. — 3 should provide you with both. p. 8
A mixed bag but the best volume in the series so far. ●
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1. In New Worlds #151, Michael Moorcock says:
New Writings in SF 3 [. . .] is perhaps the best of the series so far, with a wider selection of themes and styles. My feelings about Kapp are mixed. He has a strong visual imagination, a talent for scientific speculation, and a style—if that’s the word—which imitates the worst elements in a score of different “hack” styles. It is, in fact, a pastiche-style. I cannot regard Kapp as a writer, but rather as a non-writer. His story The Subways Of Tazoo is a sequel to his well-liked The Railways Up On Cannis. Maybe I’ve got a blindspot.
Last time I reviewed [NWISF #2] I asked for a wider variety of backgrounds—fresher backgrounds. These seem to be appearing. I’m looking forward to [NWISF #4]. p. 117-118
In Vector #31, March 1965 , W. T. Webb says of Kapp’s effort:
Told in plain English, one would imagine the story would not amount to much, but Colin Kapp has narrated it in a language that is far from simple. By use of much jargon, brain-straining sentences and generally [nonrhythmic] prose, he has made the story difficult and obscure, but strangely fascinating.
It is not so much a story, one feels, as an exercise in scientific phraseology. The language is of a type which one may not entirely enjoy reading, but which occasionally one admires for its display of technological erudition. Now and then, almost by accident it would seem, it verges upon the poetic.
Colin Kapp, in fact, is like one who tries to write poetry in mathematical symbols—and almost succeeds. p. 23
It would seem that one man’s non-writer is another’s poet.
Webb comments on the language or the writing of several other stories: The Fiend by Frederik Pohl is “narrated in concise and fluent language that is a pleasure to read”; Kingston’s Manipulation has “a good deal of scientific language” but “can be boiled down to the best and oldest plot in the world, boy-meets-girl” and is “well worth reading”; Testament by John Baxter is “simply told” but “the ideas involved are profound. A story that will linger in the mind long after the book is closed”; Night Watch by James Inglis is “expertly-written” but “lacking human characters it can hardly, to my way of thinking, be called a story”; Emreth by Dan Morgan is “a well-written tale”.
His favourites seem to be the Roberts and the Schmitz:
Boulter’s Canaries by Keith Roberts is a very good story, intriguing and exciting from start to finish. There is enough gadgetry to satisfy the most technically minded reader and enough human interest and excitement to satisfy anyone. Clever characterisation, a reference to an age-old psychic phenomenon, expert writing, and a first class plot all add up to a splendid piece of workmanship.
[. . .]
“Spacemaster” by James H Schmitz is, in my opinion, the best in the book. It has everything one could hope to find in a good SF yarn; a well-constructed plot, a galactic breadth of plotting, a poetic, almost hypnotic fabric of language and an imagery that verges upon the dreamlike and the surreal—in short, a sort of egghead’s space-opera. p. 25
2. Coin Kapp’s ISFDB page is here.
3. Roberts would also use this psi theme in his story The Worlds That Were (Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1966, reprinted in Science Fiction Monthly, December 1975, reviewed here).
4. James Inglis published a handful of stories from 1958-1965. The first two appeared in Nebula; the other pair in New Worlds. Inglis’s ISFDB page is here.
5. Roberts’ other ‘Alex Boulter’ story was The Big Fans (F&SF May 1977). Roberts would have been 83 this Thursday (birth date: 20th September 1935). ●
