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Other reviews: John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967 (Page 293 of 364, Location 5089 of 7028, 72% Kindle edition)

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Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, Keith Roberts

Fiction:
Corfe Gate • novella by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗∗∗
The Oh in Jose • reprint short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
The White Monument: A Monologue • reprint short story by Peter Redgrove ∗∗∗
The Beautiful Man • short story by Robert Clough ∗∗
Pattern As Set • short story by Douglas R. Mason [as by John Rankine] ∗
A Hot Summer’s Day • short story by John Bell ∗
The Report • short story by Russell Parker
Hurry Down Sunshine • short story by Roger Jones ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Critique • essay by Harry Harrison

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Keith Roberts contributes another cover and story combination to this issue with the appearance of Corfe Gate, the last story in his Pavane story-cycle. This 25,000 word novella is a very good end to the series and I will discuss it later.
The rest of the fiction is led off by reprints from Brian W. Aldiss, and Peter Redgrove, the poet. The Oh in Jose by Brian W. Aldiss (CAD, March 1966) isn’t a SF or fantasy story but probably has the feel of one with its three short tales wrapped up in a longer one. Three men are being led over a mountain by their servant and a local woman, when they come across a massive rock. It has the word “Jose” carved on it and they each tell a story about how it came to be inscribed there. It materialises that the real reason is known to the woman, who doesn’t speak.
The story by Peter Redgrove, The White Monument: A Monologue (first published by broadcast on the Third Programme¹ radio channel) is an interesting piece that is the kind of thing that you would have expected the supposedly more experimental New Worlds to publish. It is a surreal, fantastic tale of a feral man living at The White Monument. As he tells his tale, we learn that it was once his home but that it was blighted by a chimney that created a huge raspberry sound—so loud that the noise was debilitating. He eventually fills it with concrete, inadvertently entombing his wife, and starts a fire that makes the concrete glow so hot he can see her image:

The tomb was beginning to glow, and the fierce white light from the pit stretched its shadow along the charred lawn towards me, a shadow that thinned as the tomb took more light into itself. Perched on the white hot grate of rocks as it was, gas fired, it got hotter and hotter, red first, like a cube of cloudy jelly, and gradually I began to perceive shapes and shadows in it, which grew in definition as heat clarified it. Now it glowed like a ruby and I saw the china cabinet, tilted and suspended over the high back of her chair, which grew sharper at first, and then filmy, so that the sight of her shape fell through it. My forearm shielding my face I darted and then sidled round, closer and closer, my clothes smouldering again, my eyes staring, my face darker and darker tanned as I approached the sun in the heart of which my former love sat enthroned, my eyes starting and unblinking as their lids dried and stiffened, fixing my face in this expression of final worship and adulation.  p. 87

It goes on to an equally combustible end. This is a story that I didn’t care for much the first time around because (as my notes say) “the style is impenetrable”: I wasn’t paying enough attention.
The quality dips with the next story by Roger Clough, The Beautiful Man, although that is only apparent when we get to the end of the story. This tells of three goat-herders from a primitive flint using society who find a cave in the hills after it is exposed by a landslide. They find several skeletons and a crucifix, the latter having “the beautiful man” on it. There is further information at the end of the story about the goat-herders which (spoiler) drops this story into the post-nuclear holocaust category (and the crucifix point is also belaboured again), but it was quite a good effort until that point. Roger Clough, like Russell Parker later on, was a ‘one shot wonder’, never seen again in the fiction magazines.
After a good start to the issue (this includes the yet to be discussed Roberts piece), and two-thirds of the way through the magazine at p. 94, I wasn’t holding my breath for this winning streak to continue and, sure enough, Douglas R. Mason’s story Pattern As Set obliges. This one, like his story in #3, has another protagonist with a case of testosterone poisoning:

Twelve months’ solitary confinement was coming to an end, and in spite of all the training and the ample provision of every kind of substitute to fill the social vacuum, he was good and ready to hear another hum an voice coming across live, and see other human flesh in 3D. Particularly that. Particularly so, since his relief was Dena Holland.
[…]
Walking on springy turf across the headland. Sun all the time, burning pictures of Dena into his brain, like the etching fluid on a lithographic plate. Silky, red gold hair, which turned into a dark copper sheath when it was wet, emphasising the modelling of her head with its classically satisfying balance of proportion.  p. 95

Our protagonist is the only one awake on a deep-space ship where all the other crew members are in suspended animation. He is the process of getting ready to wake up his relief Dena, hence all of the above. Just as I was beginning to tire of this it gets interestingly grisly when he starts waking her. The problem is that she and the other crew don’t come round:

He had cleared the torso to the waist when it began to collapse. It melted away; withered away; shrank as a snow figure would disappear in front of a furnace door, until what was left was horrible, obscene, a twisted, atrocious caricature of a human being.  p. 103

Unfortunately, we soon find that it was all an induced psychological dream experiment used to assess space crew candidates. It then becomes utterly exasperating as the woman he was trying to wake up in the dream—and who he did not know existed, and has never met—turns up from another training facility. I think the technical term for this is ‘idiot plot’. It does have one good line though:

The only good committee was a committee of two, with one kept away by multiple injuries.  p. 106

A Hot Summer’s Day by John Bell confirms we are now in the middle of “typical Bonfiglioli space-filler” territory. This takes a bad day on the London Tube and splices it to this thought:

“But isn’t that the strain we’re living under? The Bomb, the population explosion, the coloured threat, rush hour, the pressure of business, noise, crowds of people everywhere—it isn’t surprising people lash out now and then.”  p.116

. . . and turns it into an overlong story about how miserable London life is. We get ten pages describing over-congested trains on the way to an unpleasant work place, with background political, colour, temperature, etc., problems, followed by another ten pages of uncontrolled violence, arson, murder, etc., as everyone kicks off. Eventually (spoiler) London becomes a smoking ruin.
The Report by Russell Parker is short squib about a post-nuclear-war world and an Indian Prime Minister opening a report (spoiler) to find that the first attack on Norfolk was actually a meteor strike. D’oh! as I think they say.
The quality improves slightly with Roger Jones’ second story Hurry Down Sunshine. This satirical and slightly surreal story reminded me of the work of John Sladek. It is about a man in a pointless office job who becomes the nation’s official scapegoat (all crime has been eliminated but there are adverse effects). He spends most of the story in a railway coach where the windows are blacked out. When he arrives at a station it is always foggy due to the fog machines the station staff deploy.
You can get a better idea of what this is like from the passage below, which occurs when a woman, Mrs Rose, serves him tea in the railway buffet and then disappears under the counter:

This left him free to concentrate on the problem of Mrs. Rose. He whipped a pencil and notebook from an inner pocket and jotted down a preliminary formulation, thus:
WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD IS THE OLD BAG DOING UNDER THERE?
Reduced to the more conventional symbols of algebraic logic it looked something like this:
N?
It was a fascinating and complex problem as it had both an epistemological and an ethical angle. Properly handled it might take days to solve and soon Smith was absorbed in a fury of calculation, postulation, counter-postulation, hypothecation and inference.
Somewhat to his chagrin he found himself, about five minutes later, confronted by the Answer as represented by the expression:
P.
Which translated out roughly as: “Try cutting the Gordian knot of metaphysical speculation with the sword of point-blank interrogation.”
“I say,” he called. “What are you doing under there?” No answer. “Are you by any chance . . . knitting?”  p. 157

There are two pieces of non-fiction in this issue. There is a short Editorial from Kyril Bonfiglioli where he moans once again about having to write editorials:

Science fiction magazines are almost the last survivors of the editor personality and readers’-letters cult which arose forty years ago: another example of the paradoxical old-fashionedness of science fiction.  p. 2

He introduces Harry Harrison, who will contribute an essay instead:

Indeed, this very issue contains his first critique, in which he whirls his great club Castigator about his head to no small purpose. Let it be quite clear that the publishers and I do not necessarily associate ourselves with anything Mr. Harrison writes.
Reserving only the right to change “cracker” to “biscuit” and to expunge four-letter words, we have given him a free hand: no-one who knows him would believe for a moment that he would settle for anything less.  p. 2-3

Bonfiglioli’s next editorial in SF Impulse #7 would be his last.
Harry Harrison’s first essay in the new series, Critique, does not inspire confidence. It starts off complaining about a TLS review of one of his books and then goes on to surmise that you need to have knowledge of SF to review it. Then he starts a competition for a definition of SF (groan) before finishing off with comments on various biologists’ views about the chances of life out there in the universe. I hope these improve because I think I’d rather listen to Bonfiglioli moaning.

Finally we come to Corfe Gate by Keith Roberts, a major novella to end his Pavane sequence. This is set in a parallel world where Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated, the Spanish Armada invaded England, and the Catholic church rules supreme.
The reason I am reviewing this story last is that I want to cover it at some length (and this includes multiple spoilers). Partly this is because it is a dense, resonant story that is worth examining in detail; partly it is because the story in the magazine varies considerably from the version that eventually ended up in the book. This is unlikely to be of interest to anyone who isn’t a Roberts completist or in love with the novel Pavane, so if you aren’t one of those people, move along.
The long simmering rebellion against the Catholic Church erupts in this final story it gets off to a cracking start with Henry, Lord of Rye, riding to Corfe Gate to force Eleanor, Lady of Corfe, to pay taxes to Rome—taxes that if paid will starve her people. Henry is brutal, and does not suffer fools gladly (I wondered if this character was Henry VIII in our world), and he treats both the local folk and the Signallers harshly on his way to Corfe Castle. Then, when Henry eventually arrives at the castle gates, there is a gripping confrontation when Lady Eleanor still refuses to pay the taxes or hand over her weapons:

He shouted again then, waving an arm; at the gesture a soldier spurred forward lifting a bag from the pommel of his saddle. “Then your liege-folk in this isle pay with their homes and their property and their lives,” panted Henry, slashing at the cord that held the canvas closed. “It’ll be blood for iron, My Lady, blood for iron. . . .” The string came free, the bag was shaken; and down before her dropped the tongues and other parts of men, cut away as was the custom of Henry’s soldiers.
There was a silence that deepened. The colour drained slowly from Eleanor’s face, leaving the skin chalk-pale as the fabric of her dress; indeed the more romantic of the watchers swore afterwards the blue leached from her very eyes, leaving them lambent and dead as the eyes of a corpse. She clenched her hands slowly, slowly relaxed them again; a long time she waited, leaning on the gun, while the rage blurred her sight, rose to a high mad shrilling that seemed to ring inside her brain, receded leaving her utterly cold. She swallowed; and when she spoke again every word seemed freshly chipped from ice. “Why then,” she said. “You must not leave us empty-handed, My Lord of Rye and Deal. Yet I fear my Growler will be a heavy load. Would not your task be lightened if his charge were sent before?” And before any of the people round her could guess her purpose or intervene she had snatched at the firing lanyard, and Growler leaped back pouring smoke while echoes clapped around the waiting hills.
The heavy charge, fired at point-blank range, blew away the belly of the horse and took both Henry’s feet off at the ankles; animal and rider leaped convulsively and fell with a mingled scream into the dry ditch. As if by common consent the crossbows of the defenders played first on them; within seconds they were still, pierced by a score of shafts. The grapeshot, ploughing on, spread ruin among the soldiers on the bridge, tore furrows from the buildings of the village square beyond. Shrieks sounded, echoing from the close stone walls; the arquebusiers fired into the struggling mass on the path; the Captain rode away, leaning from his horse while his blood ribboned back across the creature’s rump. Then it was finished, dying men whimpering while a thin haze of smoke drifted across the lower bailey toward the Martyr’s Gate.  p. 16-17

The narrative then flashbacks to Eleanor’s childhood, and works forward to her rebellion against the Church. This account of her life is enriched by details that bleed across from the other stories, such as her family origins (The Lady Anne/Lords and Ladies):

“Do you remember years ago telling me a story?” she asked. “About how my great uncle Jesse broke his heart when my grandmother wouldn’t marry him, and killed his friend, and how that was somehow the start of everything he did. . . . It seemed so real, I’m sure that was how it must have been. Well, I can finish it for you now. You can see the Cause and Effect right the whole way through. If we . . . won, it would be because of grandfather’s money. And the money’s there because of Jesse, and he did it because of the girl. . . . It’s like Chinese boxes. There’s always a smaller one inside, all the time; until they get so small they’re too small to see but they keep on going down, and down. . . .”  p. 52

And then there is the Signaller who arrives at the castle with a message warning them that troops are coming, which must have been sent by radio (The Signaller/The White Boat):

She went pale, but a red anger spot glowed on each cheek. “How can you know this, Captain?” she asked coolly. “London is well over a day away, and the towers have been quiet. Had it been reported, I would have been told.”
He shifted his feet where he stood with legs apart on the carpeting of the dais. “The Guild fears no man,” he said finally. “Our messages are for all who can to read. But there are times, and this is one of them, when words are best not given to the grids. Then there are other, swifter means.”
There was a hush at that, for he meant necromancy; and that was not a subject to be lightly bandied, even in the free air of Eleanor’s hall.  p .34

Jesse Strange’s locomotive (The Lady Anne) appears for the final time during an attempt to capture Eleanor and is destroyed in an accident:

She burned the rest of the day; it was night before a peasant child crept close enough to the wreck to prise the naveplate from one mighty wheel. He kept it in his cottage, polished bright; and half a lifetime later he would still tell his children the tale, and take the big disc down and fondle it, and say it came from a great road steamer called ‘The Lady Anne’.  p. 46

And then there are hints about a cyclic structure of time:

“Yes,” she said. “It’s like a . . . dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end. . . .” She tucked her legs under her, as she sat beside the fire. “Sir John,” she said, “sometimes I think life’s all a mass of significance, all sorts of strands and threads woven like a tapestry or a brocade. So if you pulled one out or broke it the pattern would alter right back through the cloth. Then I think . . . it’s all totally pointless, it would make just as much sense backwards as forwards, effects leading to causes and those to more effects . . . maybe that’s what will happen, when we get to the end of Time. The whole world will shott undone like a spring, and wind itself back to the start. . . .”  p. 52

There are also questions raised about the longevity of her seneschal, Sir John Falconer, and who or what he may really be:

“John,” she said, “how many years did you serve my father, Robert?”
He sat his horse impassively and considered before he answered. Then finally, “Many years, My Lady.”
“And his father before him?”
Again the same answer. “Many years. . . .”  p. 28

“Tell me, Sir John,” she said, and her voice was lost and tiny, barely stirring the harsh air. “Come to the window here, and tell me what you see. . . .”
He stood silent a long time. Then, heavily, “I see the night mists moving on the hills, and the watch fires of our enemies. . . . He made to leave her; but she called him sharply.
“Fairy. . . .”
He paused, back turned to her; and as he stood she used his proper name, the sound by which he was known among the Old Ones. “I told you once,” she said acidly, “when I required the truth, then you would know. Now I charge you. Come to me again, and tell me what you see.”
She stood close while he thought, head in hand; he could feel the warmth of her in the night, scent the faint presence of her body. “I see an end to everything we know,” he said at last. “The Great Gate broken, [Pope] John’s banners on the walls.”
She pursued him. “And me, Sir John? What for me?”
He didn’t immediately answer and she swallowed, feeling the night encroach, the dark slide into her body. “Is there death?” she said.
“My Lady,” he said gently, “there is death for everyone. . . .”  p. 58-59

All of this is woven into a compelling story that details the growing rebellion that spreads through the country, and the preparations made by Rome to deal with the uprising:

The semaphores seldom stopped. The country was aflame; Londinium was arming, levies from Sussex and Kent were marching toward the West. Then came worse news. From France, from the castles of the Loire, men were streaming to fight in the Holy Crusade while to the south a second Armada was embarking for England.  p. 53

Eventually, King Charles, who has been visiting the New World, returns and goes to Corfe Castle to establish peace:

He rode forward, ducking his head beneath the iron as it climbed up into the stone; they heard the hooves of his horse on the hard ground inside. He dismounted, going to Eleanor; and only then did the cheering spread, through the village and the soldiers and the ranks of people on the walls, up and away to the tower of the Great Keep. So the place yielded, to its liege-lord and to no other. . . .  p. 61

There are further developments concerning Eleanor but I will limit my comments here to saying I was not entirely convinced about what eventually happens to her.²
So far so good, and if you are reading the book version then this is the story of Corfe Gate, which is then followed by a 3,000 word Coda explaining that in this world the church deliberately delayed progress to stop mankind destroying itself, as it had in another timeline. Where the magazine version of the story differs—and to its considerable advantage—is that the Coda is broken into four sections and inserted into the aforementioned narrative about Lady Eleanor and the rebellion. And it is not the Coda in the book either, but a longer 5,000 word version that is significantly different.
The first section of this variant Coda appears after the confrontation with Henry. This tells of an arrogant young nobleman (a member of the Privy Chamber) visiting the ruins of Corfe Castle in the future (he arrives in a Falcon turbine and is informed by laserphone that his sister will be delayed). After wandering the castle ruins for some time—and having seen a huge crab symbol—he moves on to the village:

I wandered there a time, enjoying the stares of the local girls; curiously frank they are in their appraisal, as if a son of noble blood were no more to be respected than some local clod raised among ploughs and the feet of horses. At length I reached a churchyard.  p. 20

There he finds a grave with another crab symbol and the word ‘Eleanor’. He is joined by a stranger. The nobleman identifies himself as Paul, son of the Lord of Bristol and Bath; the stranger does not identify himself but, seeing Paul’s interest in the crab symbol on the gravestone, admits to carving both it and the one at the castle. This implies that he is Sir John, Lady Eleanor’s seneschal. . . . He goes on to tell Paul of his version of what happened in the Revolt of the Castles, and then continues with the story of Eleanor’s life.
The second of the Coda sections is a very short one just before King Charles’ intervention, explaining that he ended the revolt as his nation could not fight the rest of the world.
In the third section, Sir John explains that the Revolt of the Castles led to the downfall of the church some twenty years later. He explains the meaning of the crab symbol:

Then he took from round his neck a medallion [. . .] He turned the disc to me, covering the lower half of the design with his hand. “See,” he said, “two arrows. And again. . . .” He moved his fingers, concealing the upper part of the circle. “Two more.”
I frowned. “Two arrows point outward; two point in, toward each other. So there is some meaning in the scrawl. What’s it supposed to infer?”
“Progress,” he said, tucking the charm away. “This the Old Ones knew, when they carved it centuries ago. After fission, fusion; this was the progress the Popes fought so hard to halt.”  p. 62

This is a pivotal scene in number of ways. Not only is the meaning of the crab symbol explained but it tells us that the Old Ones have a perplexing knowledge of potential future events.
He continues:

“The ways of the Church were mysterious, her policies never plain. The Popes knew, as the Old Ones knew, that given electricity we would be drawn to the atom. Given fission, we would come to fusion. Because once, beyond our Time, there was a great civilisation. There was a Coming, a Death and Resurrection; a Conquest, a Reformation, an Armada . . . and a burning, an Armageddon. The Church knew there was no halting progress; but slowing it, giving us time to reach a little higher toward Reason . . . that was the gift she tried to give the world. And it would have been priceless.”  p. 62

Paul thinks about this:

I sat frowning ; my imagination refused to grasp at one attempt the ideas he had put before me. The notion of a repeating cycle, and endlessness of destruction and creation broken at last by what the Church had done, was altogether too big for me. But were it true, if the Popes had really achieved such a miracle as he suggested, then . . . it seemed I would have to return in all seriousness to my books. There was much I had never understood, and much I wished to learn, about this Church. . . .  p. 63

This introduces into Pavane an A Canticle for Leibowitz-ian concept of a cyclical rise and fall of humanity.
The scene ends with the Seneschal’s identity all but confirmed:

“And what about her seneschal?” [Paul] asked. “I’ve gathered through your story he was more than a little attracted to her; did she ever see him again?”
He nodded. “He found her, alone of all her people. She had taken the dress and the patterned nylons of a serving-wench, but he knew her for his mistress. He the Fairy. . . .
I laughed, pleased at so charming an ending to the legend. “Why then,” I said, “I suppose he had his way with her. When she was no longer a great lady there would have been no barrier of rank.”
He clenched his hands at that, and looked so queer and black I reached for the gun at my belt again; but the mood was past in an instant. “He served her till she died,” he said quietly. “She was the Lady Eleanor, and he her seneschal.”  p. 64

The final half page is a great ending to the novella, and has a transcendent last line:

The minstrel fell silent once more; and I own I was deeply disturbed by the strange things I had heard. To hide my confusion I began to part the grasses by the grave, there in that sunny place under the warm sky. I came on the Sign again, stamped over and over in the stone, and the symbols of Eleanor’s house, the leopards passant and the Flower of Lys; and I was startled too, for as I touched the grass some bird burst from it and rushed into the sky, was lost in the brightness of the zenith before I could properly make out its shape or size. Also I saw, coiled round and round the stone, what I had not noticed before, sprays and leaves of briar. I drew back startled, then collected myself; for necromancy died with the breaking of the Old Church, ours is the Age of Reason.
I made to speak to the storyteller, but could not. It seemed some heaviness had touched my limbs, so that though I heard the monorail call and the voices from the village street I could neither speak nor move. And he himself seemed vague, as though seen across a great space of air; though that was absurd, for he sat so close I could have touched the hem of his cloak with my hand. Also the stones on the hill glowed suddenly above his head, but no longer ragged; they shone white and proud and foursquare against the blue. In time the fantasy vanished; and then I think I dozed. I must have dozed; for how may a man turn to a golden glamour, and melt into a restless sea of glass, unless one sleeps and dreams?  p. 68

For some reason, both Roberts and Bonfiglioli felt that this version was problematic and, in the book version of Pavane, the Coda parts of Corfe Gate were stripped out and rewritten to become a separate section, although the rest of it was left largely untouched.³
I think this was a mistake. As I hope the extracts above show, the material in the original Coda sections reinforces and amplifies and, in some cases, explains matters from the Lady Eleanor narrative, e.g. the cyclical time motif, the politics behind the rebellion, Sir John’s longevity, etc. It also partly shifts the centre of gravity of the story from Eleanor to John the seneschal, which has the effect of tying the story to the Fairies/Old Ones material which runs through the series. Further, it lets the story telescope backwards and forwards in time giving it an almost four-dimensional reality and, finally, the original Coda has a narrative arc which the revised one does not.
Perhaps the best description of the damage done can be taken from from the pavane/tapestry metaphor passage above:

“So if you pulled one [thread] out or broke it the pattern would alter right back through the cloth.”  p. 52

I think this is essentially what happened to Corfe Gate on revision: a number of threads were removed from the story resulting in a less detailed, less complex, and less impressive work
Even before I found this original version, I thought the book Coda was an unsatisfactory end to the novel. It reads like an unnecessary and clunky deux ex machina that retroactively alters your impression of everything read to that point.⁴
If you love Pavane, and haven’t read the magazine version of the story, I strongly recommend you do so.⁵

A highly recommended issue.  ●

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1. The Third Programme (which run till 1970) sounds like it was a very high-brow and elitist radio channel (a bit like an ultra version of Radio 3 or BBC 4, but without the latter’s excellent cop dramas The Bridge and Spiral). There is a Wikipedia page here.

2. In the book there is a line that is not in the magazine version (emphasis mine): “From Charles Eleanor got an open door, the sleepiness of a sentry. A horse at the postern, these things can be arranged. Money was provided, and advice. She ignored both. She fled back to what had been her home.”

3. The Eleanor thread in the revised version of Corfe Gate has an extra 500 words inserted at the end of the King Charles section (p. 259 Gollancz Masterworks edition of Pavane) and before the section starting on the October day. There are some minor changes in the remaining material.
The book version of the Coda section is completely different, and is a stand-alone section which consists of three parts. The first has a short ‘tourist guide’ introduction before a man arrives at Corfe Castle and explores the area. The intensely atmospheric writing makes it clear to us that he is more than a tourist:

He reached the great grassy prow of the mound. The road wound by it, up into the village square. He followed it. Or rather he was borne without volition on some strange earth-tide of memory. A memory not of the brain, but of the blood and bones. He shook his head, half angry at himself, half amused. He asked himself, how could a man come home, to a place he’d never seen?  p. 271

He moved on slowly. Through broken archways, past spurs and shattered groins of stone, up to where he could feel again the fresh wind from the heath. Sat in the shadow of the Great Keep, feeling the stone cool against his flesh. From that height the reactors of Poole Power Station were visible, gleaming silver in the sun. Far out in the purplish haze of the sea white dots showed where the hovercraft boomed over the waters of the Channel.
He became aware, by slow degrees, of the Mark. It hung there frozen on the stone, deep-carved, level nearly with his face. The voices of the tourists below seemed momentarily to fade; he moved forward to it in a cold dream. Touched the carving, fingers tracing over and again its smoothness. Big it was, a full yard across; the symbol, enigmatic and proud, the circle enclosing a crab-network of triangles and crossing lines. Over it the cloud shadows moved, birds flapped and cawed in the sky above; its outline echoed the shapes of the reactors, its configuration stirred deepest roots of memory. His lips moved, soundless; one hand went unconsciously to his throat, touched the thin gold chain, the medallion beneath his shirt. The symbol he had always worn, the tiny copy of the thing there on the wall.  p. 271-2

In the second part he reads a letter and we find out that the man is called John. It tells of the Church losing its New World colonies ten years after the breaking of Corfe Castle’s walls. It more clearly explains the Mark:

Two arrows point outward ran the letter. Two point in, toward each other. This is the end of all Progress; this we knew when we first carved the mark many centuries ago. After fission, fusion; this was the Progress the Popes fought so bitterly to halt. The ways of the Church were mysterious, her policies never plain. The Popes knew, as we knew, that given electricity men would be drawn to the atom. That given fission, they would come to fusion.  p. 275

The letter also explains the Church’s actions in restricting science and technology:

Because once, beyond our Time, beyond all the memories of men, there was a great civilisation. There was a Coming, a Death, and Resurrection; a Conquest, a Reformation, an Armada. And a burning, an Armageddon. There too in that old world we were known; as the Old Ones, the Fairies, the People of the Hills. But our knowledge was not lost. The Church knew there was no halting Progress; but slowing it, slowing it even by half a century, giving man time to reach a little higher toward true Reason; that was the gift she gave this world. And it was priceless. Did she oppress? Did she hang and burn? A little, yes. But there was no Belsen, No Buchenwald. No Passchendaele.  p. 275

This holds closer to Roberts’ stated intent that the concept was supposed to be one of a dual timeline, and not the cyclic one partly suggested in the original.
The last scene has the man disturbed by a young woman after several hours. In this rather aimless sequence she eventually departs to see if she can organise accommodation in her father’s pub. This maybe refers to Anne/Margaret from the very first story, which would again hint at the cyclic view of history in the original version. Whatever, this revised Coda has a most peculiar structure.

4. I thought that the ending of the book version of Pavane was referred to negatively in a number of reviews, but could only find one when I went looking through the ISFDB list. Algis Budrys said (Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, April 1969):

The book would be very much improved as a work if the afterword entitled Coda were torn off and thrown away.  p. 117

He is more pointed later on:

Only in the Coda are we in any way brought in touch with this Earth, and only in the Coda is there a clear statement of intervention from this Earth, for reasons germane to this Earth. Roberts has done his work too well, by that time. All your involvement is with Pavane’s England, and the events of “Coda” became a pious meddler’s insult.  p. 117

The original story does not suffer in the same way, or at least not to the same extent.

5. If you can’t find a copy of Impulse #5 (or a scan on Luminist.org), the original story is in Perchance to Wake: Yet More Selected Stories from Science Fantasy by Damien Broderick & John Boston, which is a ‘Best Stories from Science Fantasy/Impulse’ volume 3.  ●

Edited 13^th November 2018: Several minor-ish text changes; formatting changes; addition of Budry’s quotes; edited cover, and added page and back cover images.

Other reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967 (72%, Page 293 of 364, Location 5089 of 7028 in the Kindle edition)

Fiction:
Hatchetman • reprint novelette by Mack Reynolds ♥♥
George • short story by Chris Boyce ♥♥♥
The Golden Coin of Spring • short story by John Hamilton ♥
Lords & Ladies • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥+
The Superstition • short story by Angus McAllister
Clay • short story by Paul Jents
Synopsis • short story by George Hay ♥
A Visitation of Ghosts • novelette by R. W. Mackelworth ♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Keith Roberts
Guest Editorial • by Harry Harrison

With this issue the cover artwork has expanded to use around eighty percent of the cover as compared to the sixty per cent of the previous square artwork panel. Also, the lead story’s title now overlays the cover artwork. If this was an attempt to entice casual paperback buyers to pick up an issue you would have to wonder why they didn’t move the ‘Impulse’ title further up the page to between the ‘Compact SF’ and ‘3/6’ and extend the artwork to cover ninety per cent of the cover. That said, I think this cover design is probably more attractive than the older one.
The only non-fiction in the issue is an editorial. Bonfiglioli, who I suspect found editorials something of a chore, has handed over the space to a Guest Editorial by Harry Harrison. This is an interesting piece that speculates about the books that will be published in1968 but are being written now. There are some choice quotes about the direction the ‘New Wave’ is heading in:

Much has been made of William Burroughs, but it has not been pointed out often enough that he has failed. Clarity, conviction and content are hard enough to get across without mixing up your pages at random. p.101

Other writers could import the best of the outside world into our little cosmos. This does not mean rushing out to buy the most avant-garde novel to transpose into sf. It does mean that sf writers could profit by more catholic reading of fiction in the hope that new techniques might fill them with enthusiasm so that they could cast their ideas in newer forms. p.101

I think this can probably best be summarised as wanting to have your cake and eat part of it. It will be interesting to see what response there is. (Although there is no letter column at the moment, comments occasionally turn up in editorials.)

The fiction leads off with Hatchetman, a long ‘United Planets’ novelette by Mack Reynolds. This is a reprint of part of an Ace Double that appeared some months previously¹ and initially it has a whiff of ‘first draft’ about it:

He was a slight youth, just past the pimply age, with a sallow face, dirty blond hair and baby-blue eyes—the traditional eyes of the man killer. His teeth were buckteeth enough usually to show through his lips. In spite of youth, he could never have been called good-looking. He was five-foot eight, weighed slightly less than one-fifty, and he moved with the grace of a girl—no, not a girl; with the grace of a panther on the hunt. p.5

This is essentially a crime story masquerading as SF. Billy Antrim is a teenage hitman from Palermo, a ‘mafia’ planet, who has assassinated an informer on Earth. Subsequently, Ronny Bronston, an agent of Section G, who sorts out problems on other planets, is given the task of capturing him.
Once I’d finished rolling my eyeballs at all this ‘mafia planet’ nonsense I actually found myself guiltily enjoying this chase story. Every time the police net closes in Billy manages to give them slip. That is until an ending (spoiler) that is a bit too pat, especially when Billy sees the light and tires of killing. A bit dated really but an enjoyable enough pulp story.

The first time I read George, Chris Boyce’s second published story,² I was not impressed with it. This time around I rather liked it. It starts by showing us George, who is trapped in a bitter marriage at the start of an alien invasion, and tells of this in a light eccentric style:

“They’re back, George. Wake up. This is serious.”
“Oh aye.”
“Stop sleeping and listen to me. I’ve just heard it on the radio. Hundreds of them, All over the place. They’re in London, George.”
“Tut, tut.”
“Wake up. I’m talking to you.”
So I gather. Honey sweet.
[…]
“People are being killed in swarms. George, they’re back!”
“Who?”
“The dinosaurs,”
“Lovely.”
“For God’s sake will you get up off of the sofa and pay attention. I am your wife, you know.”
Could I but forget. Dovewillow. p.50

It continues in more staccato style as the alien invasion continues and the situation becomes brutal:

About four hundred yards away. Cloverleaf flyover. Small tented colony left in obscene ruin under the bridge. Dragon munching with great carnivorous chomps of blood drooling mouth. No survivors? Two running people there. Approaching. p.58

I found the combination of this odd style and bleak story worked well for me but suspect it will be a Marmite story: those who get on with the style will probably like it, those who don’t, won’t.
Boyce’s short story is followed by another by John Hamilton, The Golden Coin of Spring. This is a well enough told tale but revolves around a fairly daft idea (spoiler): over-literal aliens who have sent a coin-like sensor probe to Earth allow themselves to be convinced that Earthmen can do magic.

The second of three longish novelettes is the fourth ‘Pavane’ story, Lords & Ladies by Keith Roberts. This tells the story of Anne, who would appear to be the child of Jesse’s brother Tim and the barmaid Anne—who jilted Jesse in The Lady Anne. I’d actually forgotten about this part of the story, although it is not particularly important:

For the child’s mother too had been called Anne; her dad kept a pub out Swanage way and when he died and left her no place to live she’d been glad enough to settle for a man years her junior. Though it had cost Tim Strange his job and his home…  But it hadn’t taken the woman long to tire of being the wife of a common haulier; two years later she’d run off with My Lord of Purbeck’s jongleur, and Tim had come trailing back with his scrap of a kid and Jesse had laughed quiet and long, made over to him the half of his business. But that had been in the long ago, before Anne grew a remembering brain. p.78

It tells of Anne’s childhood, and how as a young woman she becomes involved with the arrogant and impetuous Robert, son of Lord Purbeck:

Robert was brooding, silent, in a mood she hadn’t seen. A fire was burning up by the kitchens, the glow wavering on stone, limning the huge pile of the donjon. Flakes of ash were whirled up sparkling in the sky; he said to him they were like the souls of men moving through endlessness, shining awhile then vanishing in the dark. He didn’t use his born language; instead he spoke an old tongue, a clacking guttural she’d never realized he owned. She could answer him; she stood close giving sentence for sentence, trying to comfort. She spoke of the castle. “Rude, ragged nurse,” she said, “old sullen playfellow for tender princelings….”
He seemed surprised at that. She laughed, her voice muted in the night. “One of those minor Elizabethans, we had to do him at school. I forget his name; I thought he was rather good.” p.94-95

These recollections come to her as she sits watching her gravely ill uncle, Jesse Strange, while a priest performs an exorcism:

The group around the bed was utterly still, with the frozen stillness of sculpture. A single lamp, hung from a heavy beam, threw their faces into sharp relief, accentuated the pallor of the sick man as he lay with one end of Father Edwardes’ violet stole tucked beneath his neck, the fabric stretched between them like a banner of faith. The old man’s eyes rolled incessantly; his hands plucked and plucked at the bed-clothes. His breathing was short, noisy, obviously painful. p.70

Jilted by Robert, she has a vision of the old god Balder (who appeared in a scene from The Signaller) who partially prophesies her future. Like the scene in that previous work, this one is again slightly at odds with the rest of the story and I wondered if this—and some minor unexplained poltergeist activity during the exorcism—was the hallucination of an over wrought young woman.
It was a strange experience re-reading this. When I first came to the story it was the one I liked best after The Lady Anne. This time, although I still enjoyed it, it seemed a more uneven, less satisfying work.

The next three shorts are all fairly poor. The Superstition by Angus McAllister is a story that for the most part reads like an OK Astounding tale from the 1940s about an exploration team on an asteroid. Despite it being an asteroid there is supposedly enough air for the native Krett to exist. They believe in ‘Zungribs’ that prey on them from above. Sure enough, one of the team go missing… This finishes with a jarring omniscient synopsis detailing the Earthmen’s hackneyed end as well as a silly last line. This should never have made it out of the slush pile.³
Clay by Paul Jents is a tedious story about a teacher supervising three children’s thought sculpting. One of them misbehaves so the teacher gives them all ‘modelling clay’ and returns to see what they have made and mark their work:

“Ye-es, that’s very ingenious—I like that. You’ve developed those triangles well. As they grow older—how old do they live? Yes—as they grow they gradually expand into the third dimension. Cones and pyramids. Why the difference? Oh, the pyramids are male, of course. They propagate, do they? Prop-a-gate—it means breed,” she explained. “I see. Two-dimensional babies growing into the third.” p.116

After several pages of this we eventually move on to the misbehaving child and find he has made… Earth. Including the McAllister and the Hamilton, that is three cliched story endings so far this issue, and they are not even cliches worth reusing.
Synopsis by George Hay is marginally better than the last two but writing a story in synoptic and slightly satirical form doesn’t mask what is essentially a story outline full of stock ideas such as time travel, parallel worlds, spaceships, etc.

The last of the three long novelettes in this issue is A Visitation of Ghosts by R. W. Mackelworth. For most of its length this manages to balance its narrative abilities against an odd setting and plot. At the end however it overdoes the plot complications. It starts with a teacher at school thinking about the various characters—gardener, headmaster, children, etc.—who irritate him. He is also unsettled by a diagram in his possession that, when he looks at it, induces visions and then subsequently transports him to the future. So, after several pages of meandering through this set up, he finds himself in what would seem to be a post-apocalypse version of the school. He encounters a couple of the inhabitants, one a mutant, one a cripple, and ends up with the job of escorting a group of children out of the town and through the radiation belts, a task he accepts as one of the children looks like a woman he has seen in a previous vision.
Up to this point I was just about hanging in there but on the journey out of town they encounter creatures that live in the radiation areas. These are attracted to light and kill humans. Of course these creatures don’t affect him, and before much longer he is headed back to our present to deal with a teacher who has stored multiple explosive devices in the school. His intervention and rescue of one of the schoolchildren from an explosion creates another future but, by that point, not only was my disbelief unsuspended I was past caring.

A mixed bag of stories in this issue.

1. This is what ISFDB has to say about Planetary Agent X: ‘Per the copyright page of Ace Double: “This novel originally appeared in Analog in two parts under the titles Ultima Thule and Pistolero“. Pistolero was the intended title, but it was never published. Instead, it was published later as Hatchetman in Impulse, June 1966.
2. His second story yes, but from a genre viewpoint effectively his first. That one, Autodestruct, was published outside the field in International Storyteller in 1964 and according to SFE has not yet been traced.
3. The use of so many reprint and slushpile stories in Impulse was obviously due to a shortage of material. Keith Roberts, who was with the magazine in a full-time capacity between July and December of 1966, recalled:
   “I’d been working with Bon on the old Science Fantasy for eighteen months or so before I got lumbered with the editorship. His last act was to institute the name change that in fact marked the beginning of the end. My new Editor-in-Chief (curious designation) was Harry Harrison; but he was in southern Italy, from whence issued a stream of conflicting and frequently inoperable instructions.
   Like getting rid of my slushpile, because the whole lot was Goddam crap. It wasn’t Goddam crap by any means; but even if it had been, I couldn’t have afforded to do it. At fifty bob a thousand, the mag largely relied on reprints and keen amateurs. Plus fall guys like me of course. But I had no option; I had to fill my seventy thousand words a month somehow.”  Introduction to Keith Roberts: British Science Fiction Writers vol.2, 1983, edited by Paul Kincaid and Geoff Rippington

Other reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967 (71%, Location 4981 of 7028 in the Kindle edition)

Fiction:
Seventh Moon • novelette by Douglas R. Mason [as by John Rankine] ♥
Brother John • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥+
The Pace That Kills • novelette by Keith Roberts [as by Alistair Bevan] ♥♥
The Run • short story by Christopher Priest ♥
Cry Martian • short story by Peter L. Cave
Homecalling (Part 2 of 2) • reprint novella serial by Judith Merril ♥♥♥

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

This issue begins with an short editorial by Bonfiglioli. It is essentially about how literature has humanity at its core, and how SF moved away from that model but needs to go back.

The fiction starts off with Seventh Moon, a long novelette by Douglas R. Mason using his John Rankine pseudonym which, according to SFE, he kept for ‘routine space operas and other adventures’. This is one of his ‘Dag Fletcher’ series¹ and concerns a missing spaceship.
Dag is given the job of leading the investigation into the disappearance and is given a 24-hour deadline (which is subsequently forgotten about). There are several pages of desk bound investigation which is pepped up by male-female interactions like this:

She said, “Director Xenia Cordoban. What can I do for you Controller?”
The voice was low pitched, and used English as if it was thick cream to be spooned out. He could have replied, in truth, that she had already done quite a lot for him; but, with a commendable sense of duty, he put business first. p.8

She was a striking redhead, with a tawny mane, which surged round her head in deep waves whenever she moved. On the sturdy side of perfect form, she had a pale, freckled skin, straight nose, short upper lip, wide mouth and more vitality than a confined space was meant to contain. p.17

Fletcher eventually crews up a spaceship and retraces the missing ship’s journey. They end up on a known planet called Bromius (Fletcher’s intuition of course) where there is a humanoid race that is excessively polite and helpful. After some running around on the planet (spoiler) they find a strange structure that suggests the planet has an uncharted seventh moon. Fletcher and his female sidekick use themselves as bait and eventually it turns out that there is a madness/death ritual connected with it. The rest of the crew nuke the moon, Fletcher and his sidekick are saved, job done.
As you have probably guessed, although this moves along well enough it doesn’t really engage at all and is just one of those fifties New Worlds stories populated by cardboard characters being manoeuvred through a unlikely plot. You do get the sense of a writer capable of more than this though.
Bonfiglioli described this as ‘solid fuel job’ in the previous issue. I think the solid fuel he was thinking of was wood.

The second and third stories, both novelettes, are by Keith Roberts. Brother John is the third in the ‘Pavane’ sequence and The Pace That Kills appears under his Alistair Bevan pseudonym.
Brother John starts well in its depiction of a monk who works in the abbey’s lithography room and who is also a talented artist. He is summoned by the abbot and told he is being given a commission to travel to Dubris to produce artwork for the Court of Spiritual Welfare:

But… nothing decent, nothing good, would ever come out of the doings of the Court of Spiritual Welfare, Father Meredith knew that as well as anybody else. Because there had once been another name for the Court, a name that even in the Church-owned West had fallen into evil repute.
The Inquisition…. p.54-55

Once he arrives in Dubris he is taken down into the castle and, as a brother priest fervently explains the necessity of what they are doing, he sees terrible instruments of torture:

There were spiked rollers, oddly shaped irons, tourniquets of metal beads; other devices, ranged in rows, he identified with a cold shock. The little frames with their small cranked handles, toothed jaws; these were gresillons. Thumbscrews. Such things then really existed. Nearer at hand a species of rough table, fitted at each end with lever-operated wooden rollers, declared its use more plainly. The roof of the place was studded with pulleys, some with their ropes already reeved and dangling; a brazier burned redly, and near it were piled what looked to be huge lead weights. p.56-57

And later:

The muttering of the priest at the far end of the chamber ceased abruptly. John’s guide smiled thinly, without humour. “Good,” he said. ‘‘Your waiting is ended, Brother. They will start soon now.”
“What,” said Brother John, “were they doing?”
The other turned to him, vaguely surprised. “Doing?” he said. “They were blessing the instruments of the Questioning, of course… p.58

He draws constantly during the horrific Questioning but is left a broken man by the experience. He subsequently returns to his order after drifting around the country for weeks on end. He has a fit, sees visions and leaves the monastery again.
The second part of this story is about his teachings and the rebellion that he foments in the land. Towards the end of this part there is a scene that involves a blind quarryman that I didn’t really understand. John cannot cure his sight so the quarryman goes into the mine and quarries stones till he dies. At this point either John has another vision or there is a solar event that people treat as a miracle, or both.

Brother John turned slowly, the rushing and the drumming once more in his brain, raised a white face as above him a weird sun glowed. Brighter it grew and brighter again, a cosmic ghost, a swollen impossibility poised in the blustering sky. John cried out hoarsely, raised his arms; and round the orb a circle formed, pearly and blazing.
Then another and another, filling the sky, engulfing, burning cold as ice till with a silent thunder their diameters joined, became a cross of silver flame, lambent and vast. At the node points other suns shone and others and more and more, heaven-consuming; and John saw quite clearly now the fiery swarms of angels descend and rise. A noise came from them, a great sweet sound of rejoicing that seemed to enter his tired brain like a sword. He screamed again, inarticulate, staggering forward, shambling and running while behind him his great shadow flapped and capered. p.76-77

Whatever happens at this point, it precipitates a huge uprising as people flock to him. At the final scene on the cliff top, with a heavily armed military closing in, he recounts to people a vision he has of the future:

In his brain visions still burned and hummed; he told them of the mighty Change that would come, sweeping away blackness and misery and pain, leading them at last to the Golden Age. He saw clearly, rising about him on the hills, the buildings of that new time, the factories and hospitals, power stations and laboratories. He saw the machines flying above the land, skimming like bubbles the surface of the sea.
He saw wonders; lightning chained, the wild waves of the very air made to talk and sing. All this would come to pass, all this and more. The age of tolerance, of reason, of humanity, of the dignity of the human soul. p.79

This has some very good parts, but some scenes are not that clear and structurally it doesn’t seem quite right—there is an awkward break between the Questioning  and his journey home. So overall a good story but also an uneven one.
Roberts’ second story in this issue, The Pace That Kills, is so different to the last that if you didn’t know Bevan was Roberts you wouldn’t guess. This story is set in the near future where society has increased traffic regulation to the point there is a Driver underground movement. Road transport is highly regulated by armed traffic wardens, and the maximum speed in cars, SafeTiPeds, is 25 mph. The narrative begins with two of the Driver resistance stopping to help a woman who has been speeding and has crashed. She is subsequently arrested and the incident headlines the news:

The Victim, Moira Alice Kelly, address unknown, was flown by police helicopter to the St. Martins Centre of Social Sciences, where she is still seriously ill. The governorbox of the SafeTiPed had been tampered with and the vehicle was described by witnesses, some of whom are still being treated for shock, as easily exceeding forty miles an hour.
Mr. Bigge, interviewed at our London news studios, said afterward, ‘I can but repeat a phrase that by now should be known to all; Speed Kills. I hope, with my colleagues, that this dreadful proof will be taken afresh to the hearts of every man, woman and child in this grand old country of ours.’ Presented with a personal message of congratulation from the King, Mr. Bigge said, ‘I only done my duty.’ p.87

She is drugged and interrogated and is destined for a laser leucotomy. The Driver underground decide to try and rescue her. While they are waiting in their cars for the convoy transporting her, one of their cell is approached by a traffic warden:

Sue opened the car door, lifted her handbag from the seat. Papers were exchanged; driving licence, insurance, certificates of physical and mental health, optician’s report, psycho-chart, testimonials and referee-list, three-month test chit; all the paraphernalia of the twenty-first century Road user. A torch flashed as the man began to scan the forms, reading with deliberate slowness. p.98

Before the warden manages to set up the mobile urine testing booth, the resistance strike.
For the first half of this Roberts exercises his frustration at the 1966 introduction of a 70 mph speed limit, amongst other things, in an enjoyably bonkers way, and he manages to make an entertaining story out of a quite ridiculous premise. Unfortunately, to its detriment, the second half of the story is more straightforward in execution. Worth reading for the first half though.

The Run by Christopher Priest is his debut story and it is a well described and engaging story but completely directionless. A politician leaves an airbase to return to a government location and as he does so there are rockets being launched behind him. On the run home, hundreds of ‘juvies’ approach his car on the aluminium strip along which it travels: some spit, some throw objects. He is forced to a stop (spoiler) by a number of them who are lying down on the road—just before a huge explosion that wipes out the government building he was heading for and kills the juvies around him.
Cry Martian by Peter L. Cave is about a boy who says he has seen Martians. It has an unlikely twist—he is on Mars and all of the Martians were killed 12 years ago. Oh dear… This is the kind of thing that Christopher Priest was describing as ‘typical Bonfiglioli space-filler’ in the last issue.
While I am dealing with this story I should note that its layout exemplifies some abysmal design. Two pages of this story are printed on p.127-128 with half a page on p.48; the editorial is printed on p.2-3 with half a page on p.81. This gives the issue quite a cluttered and untidy look, and I can’t help wondering why they didn’t print the editorial straight through on p.2-4, lose the Cave story and put in a one page filler advert for New Worlds #162 instead.

The last item of fiction is the last third of the novella serial by Judith Merril, Homecalling. This continues in a similar vein to last issue with the gradual assimilation of Deborah and Petey into the alien colony. The main issue to be resolved by Daydanda, the alien matriarch, is why Deborah is blocking memories of what is behind the locked door in the shuttle. Eventually, as the reader knows from the beginning,  the children’s dead parents are discovered.
Again, there are some good parts in this installment, e.g. Petey having a good time in the alien nursery, and some parts that drag, such as when Deborah is back to the ship and is trying to explain electricity to their host. The whole story also comes to something of an anti-climactic end, given we know what is beind the door. But for all that it is a pleasant, if minor, read.

A more mixed issue than the last two. If I remember correctly future issues are equally variable.

1. This story was expanded to become the fourth novel/book in the Dag Fletcher series, The Bromius Phenomenon (1973). For more on this writer’s work see here.

Other reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967 (71%, Location 4981 of 7028 in the Kindle edition)

Fiction:
The Lady Anne • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥♥♥
A Light Feint • short story by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ♥
Break the Door of Hell • novelette by John Brunner ♥♥♥
Homecalling (Part 1 of 2) • reprint novella serial by Judith Merril ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Editorial • Kyril Bonfiglioli

This issue’s cover¹ is one of many by Keith Roberts for the magazine and portrays the land locomotives from his story in this issue: these, at times impressionistic, covers gave the magazine part of its distinctive character. As to the novelette itself, The Lady Anne, this section of Pavane should have been the one that appeared last issue as it starts with a page of prologue describing the events that have led to this world: the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I, the invasion of the Spanish and the eventual world-wide dominance of the Catholic Church. The final passage places the story in the middle of the twentieth century with the suggestion that rebellion is in the air.
The story itself starts in a gloomy engine shed with Jesse Strange preparing a land locomotive called ‘The Lady Anne’ for a run to the coast. We later find out that the internal combustion engine is more or less banned in this world (limited to 150cc or less) and all haulage of freight is done by huge land engines that run on the roads. These first few pages set the tone for the first half of the story in that there is a lot of detailed and evocative description and little incident, but it makes for an engrossing story nonetheless. This is partly because of the detail which makes this world of the hauliers spring off the page and into three dimensions:

He laid the fire carefully, wadding paper, adding a criss-crossing of sticks, shovelling coal from the tender with rhythmic swings of his arms. Not too much fire to begin with, not under a cold boiler. Sudden heat meant sudden expansion and that meant cracking, leaks round the firetube joints, endless trouble. For all their power the locos had to be cossetted like children, coaxed and persuaded to give of their best. p.6

The driver grinned faintly and without humour. The starting drill was part of him, burned on his mind. Gear check, cylinder cocks, regulator . . . He’d missed out just once, years back when he was a boy, opened up a four horse Roby traction with her cocks shut, let the condensed water in front of the piston knock the end out of the bore. His heart had broken with the cracking iron; but old Eli had still taken a studded belt, and whipped him till he thought he was going to die. p.8

There is much more of this as he sets off on his run but what makes the story even more convincing is that the writer slips back and forth through three levels of reality during this journey. The first, as described above, is the world of the hauliers; the second is the Catholic controlled world he lives in:

And there were rumours of more restrictions on the road trains themselves; a maximum of six trailers it would be this time, and a water cart. Reason given had been the increasing congestion round the big towns. That, and the state of the roads; but what else could you expect, Jesse asked himself sourly, when half the tax levied in the country went to buy gold plate for its churches? Maybe though this was just the start of a new trade recession like the one engineered a couple of centuries back by Gisevius. The memory of that still rankled in the West at least. The economy of England was stable now, for the first time in years; stability meant wealth, gold reserves. And gold, stacked anywhere but in the half-legendary coffers of the Vatican, meant danger . . .  p.10

The final layer—which gives an emotional dimension to the other two realities—is where Jesse grieves for his recently dead father and owner of the firm of Strange & Sons:

So Eli was dead. There’d been no warning; just the coughing, the hands gripping the chair arms, the face that suddenly wasn’t his father’s face, staring. Quick dark spattering of blood, the lungs sighing and bubbling; and a clay-coloured old man lying abed, one lamp burning, the priest in attendance, Jesse’s mother watching emptyfaced. Father Thomas had been cold, disapproving of the old sinner; the wind had soughed round the house vicious with frost while the priest’s lips absolved and mechanically blessed… but that hadn’t been death. A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth. Eli had been a part of Jesse’s life, as much a part as his bedroom under the eaves of the old house.  Death disrupted the processes of memory, jangled old chords that were maybe best left alone.  p.15

It is not until half way through that we actually meet the other two characters who will be key players in the rest of the story. The first is Anne, who works as a barmaid near the hotel where Jesse will spend the night, and, it materialises, who his locomotive is named after:

Did she know? The thought always came. All those years back when he’d named the Burrell; she’d been a gawky stripling then, all legs and eyes, but she was the Lady he’d meant. She’d been the ghost that haunted him those hot, adolescent nights, trailing her scent among the scents of the garden flowers. p.25

The other is Colin de la Haye, Col, a rogue who Jesse went to Sherbourne College with before he gave it up to return to his father and the locomotives:

After College Jesse had lost touch with him. He’d heard vaguely Col had given up the family business; importing and warehousing just hadn’t been fast enough for him. He’d apparently spent a time as a strolling jongleur, working on a book of ballads that had never got written, had six months on the boards in Londinium before being invalided home the victim of a brawl in a brothel. “A’d show you the scar” said Col, grinning hideously, “but it’s a bit bloody awkward in mixed comp’ny, ol’ boy. . .” p.28

The remainder of the story is about how Jesse interacts with each of them.
When I originally read this excellent story some forty years ago it seriously impressed me and hooked me on Roberts for evermore. I was somewhat wary about coming back to it but this time around I think I may have enjoyed it even more. Though I knew how the story ended I found myself rather in awe of Roberts’s technical ability in the first half of the story: very few writers can write engrossingly while virtually nothing happens, and it was interesting to see how he achieved this.  I realise that this may be a Marmite story though, and if this doesn’t grab you in the first half you may struggle to finish it. That would be a pity, for you will miss out on the emotionally affecting and physically exciting second half.

A Light Feint by John Rackham is one of those tales that seem to be not uncommon to SF magazines: the chatty recollection of adventures had with a genius amateur-inventor type. In this one Fred develops wireless fencing foils and jackets for his local club which involve a laser device. While testing them he discovers that the foil cuts off the leg of the table. Cue mad dash to that evening’s fencing club to stop the new foils being used on people. The narrator and Fred get there by using another of Fred’s inventions, the Monster, a kind of hover-airplane. This involves much aerobatics and a couple of partially-dressed woman en route. None of this disguises a very slight piece.

The first time I read Break the Door of Hell by John Brunner I really did not care for it—’good idea, lousy execution’—and after a few pages I was beginning to feel the same way again. However, I finished the story thinking it quite clever and enjoyable. Which isn’t to say that it the first few pages couldn’t do with being brought into sharper focus. This is a little like the Blish story in the previous issue in that it is initially quite difficult to work out what is going on.
It starts with a bad case of the Moorcock’s, with lots of muttering about Time, the realm of Chaos, and various elementals buried under mountains, etc.:

Time had come to that great city: Time, in which could exist order and logic and rational thought. And so it was removed from his domain for ever, gone from the borderland of chaos which exists timeless in eternity.  p.61

The main character is the supernatural Traveller in Black whose role would seem to be sorting out the borderlands between Order and Chaos. He notices a city where Time still happens: this should not occur in Chaos. He then sets off on a somewhat circular journey to the city to resolve the problem.
On his travels he meets series of people and grants their desires, but in a way that does not necessarily help them:

In the rich city Gryte a thief spoke to curse the briefness of the summer night, which had cut short his plan to break the wall of a merchant’s counting-house. “Oh that dawn never came!” he cried. “Oh that I had lasting darkness whereby to ply my trade!”
“As you wish,” said the traveller, “so be it.” And darkness came: two thick grey cataracts that shut the light away.  p.65

His granting of multiple wishes works in a rather clever manner and the Traveller in Black manages to work his way back to the anomalous city. The Traveller seeks answers to the questions he has from a man he recognises and their conversation comes to a close like this:

“Good day to you, sir,” he added to the traveller. “It’s been pleasant to renew our acquaintance, and I greatly hope you find someone who can aid you in these inquiries where I failed you.”
‘‘As you wish, so be it,” said the traveller under his breath, and a great weight seemed to recede from his heart. p.69

A former inhabitant of the city in question soon comes along:

Then, to the instant, appeared a curious bewildered figure from the direction of the city gate: a pale-faced, wild-haired man in a russet cape, clinging to a pitiful bag of belongings as though to a baulk of timber in an ocean of insanity.  p.70

In conversation he tells the traveller that the inhabitants of the anomalous city have started dabbling in magic and then utters the fateful words:

“Doom!” cried Jacques, and an unholy joy lit his face. “I told them so—over and again I told them! Would I could witness it, for the satisfaction of seeing them learn how right I was!” The traveller sighed, but there was no help for it now; his single nature bound him to unique courses of action. He said sourly, “As you wish, so be it.” p.73

As to how the traveller deals with the inhabitants of the city when he finally arrives there (spoiler) the quote at the beginning of the story gives a clue:

I will break the door of hell and smash the bolts; I will bring up the dead to eat food with the living, and the living shall be outnumbered by the host of them.
—THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH  p.61

All told, an interesting, clever fantasy, and I look forward to tracking down the others in this series.²

The last item of fiction in this issue is the first two-thirds of Homecalling a novella by Judith Merril. This was another which I enjoyed more this time, probably because I took it on its own merits which are those of a fairly enjoyable juvenile. It concerns Deborah, an eight year old, and her baby brother Petey, who are the only survivors from a family whose spaceship crashes on an alien planet. Also on the planet are telepathic, insectoid aliens (these are more interesting than they sound) who soon realise that there is an intruder not far from their settlement.
The majority of this part is about Deborah and Daydanda, the mother of the aliens, getting used to, and negotiating with, each other. Sometimes this is overdone and the story definitely has its longeurs (Chapter 12 for one), but it also has some well written parts, such as where Daydanda travels out of her alien home for the first time in ages:

Once she had flown above the tree-tops, silver strong wings beating a rhythm of pride and joy in the high dry air above the canopy of fronds. Her eyes had gleamed under the white rays of the sun itself, and she had looked, with wild unspeakable elation, into the endless glaring brilliance of the heavens.
Now she was tired, and the blessed relief from sensation when they set her down on the soft ground—after the lurching motion of the forest march—was enough to make her momentarily regret her decision. A foolish notion this whole trip . . .
Kackot agreed enthusiastically.
The Lady closed her thoughts from his, and commanded the curtain at her side to be lifted. Supine in her litter, safely removed from the Strangers under a tree at the fringe of the clearing, her vast body embedded on layers of cellulose mat, Daydanda looked out across the ravaged black strip. And the sun, in all its strength, collected on the shining outer skin of the Strange Wings, gathered its light into a thousand fiery needles to sear the surface of her eyes, and pierce her very soul with agony.
Once she had flown above the trees themselves . . . p.126-127

There is also an experimental split chapter—the pages go from single to double column and simultaneously give both Deborah’s and Daydanda’s thoughts—which works not too badly I think.
I have one final quibble and it is that this was originally published in Science Fiction Stories in 1956: you have to question the advisability of reprinting a ten year old juvenile in Impulse in the mid-sixties. But hey, it is enjoyable enough even now, and maybe Bonfiglioli was short of material.

As to the non-fiction, you can tell that Bonfiglioli finds writing editorials a little tedious judging by the beginning of this one:

I must admit that after two years as editor of this magazine and its predecessor I am still by no means certain what my job is supposed to be when I sit down to write the editorial. Some American editors cheerfully pontificate about the future of life in general and the human race in particular: I fear my talent, like the housemaid’s baby, is just a very little one and quite unsuited for such bold brushwork on so cosmic a canvas. Others delight in muttering darkly about new devices which will make all traditional scientists look like a lot of Charlies. I have no access to information of this kind and no scientific vocabulary to exploit it with if I had it. To me, a 100 per cent negative feedback is what happens when you bounce a baby too soon after its breakfast. p.2

He subsequently goes on to say ‘what else is there to do but talk about the contents?’ At the end he also mentions Chris Priest’s comment in Vector #37 about ‘typical Bonfiglioli space-fillers’ and hopes the longer work in this issue will be welcomed.

It was. Another notable issue.

1. In a parallel world the magazine didn’t change its name to Impulse and this is the cover for Science Fantasy #83:
   
   In the parallel world next to that one, the magazine not only didn’t change its name, it didn’t redesign the cover with #74 either:
   
   This last one is my favourite type of Science Fantasy cover design. Yes, way too much free time…
2. There were five ‘Traveller in Black’ stories: the first, Imprint of Chaos, had also appeared in Science Fantasy (#42, August 1960). In this reality two further stories appeared in Fantastic (The Wager Lost By Winning, April 1970 and Dread Empire, January 1971) and one in Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine (The Things That Are Gods, Fall 1979). In the parallel world above they appeared in Science Fantasy #131, #140 & #244 . . .

Other reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967 (70%, Location 4954 of 7028 in the Kindle edition)

Fiction:
The Circulation of the Blood • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss ♥♥
High Treason • short story by Poul Anderson ♥♥♥
You and Me and the Continuum • short story by J. G. Ballard
A Hero’s Life • novelette by James Blish ♥♥♥
The Gods Themselves Throw Incense • short story by Harry Harrison ♥♥♥
Deserter • short story by Richard Wilson ♥♥
The Secret • short story by Jack Vance ♥♥♥
The Signaller • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • Judith Ann Lawrence
Editorial • Kyril Bonfiglioli

This first issue of Impulse was actually Science Fantasy #82 in disguise, a magazine that had been running since 1950. By early 1966 its relatively new owners, Roberts & Vinter Ltd., had owned the magazine for about eighteen months and, with this month’s issues, both Science Fantasy/Impulse and its sister magazine New Worlds increased their page count from 128 pp. to 160 pp. The editor of Science Fantasy, Kyril Bonfiglioli, used the size change as an opportunity to change the magazine’s name to Impulse, of which more later.
Both magazines also increased their price from 2/6 (12.5p) to 3/6 (17.5p): a 40% increase in cost for a 25% increase in page count. As Kyril Bonfiglioli would comment in his editorial:

The change of price will help to provide a larger budget so that the rewards of writing for us will be more substantial.  p.2

The contents page reinforces this name change by stating ‘The NEW Science Fantasy’. Another notable change is the listing of Keith Roberts as ‘Associate Editor’ (as opposed to ‘assistant editor’ in the editorial) to replace James Parkhill-Rathbone, who had gone off to start his own literary magazine. The standard Bonfiglioli disclaimer at the bottom of the page remained: ‘All terrestrial characters and places are fictitious’.
The introductory editorial mentions the magazine is a continuation of Science Fantasy, and comments on the name change:

We feel that jettisoning the old name enables us to broaden our frame of reference to embrace any kind of speculative and unusual fiction which is of the quality we are looking for. p.2

This is quite different from what he had written, in part, a month earlier in Science Fantasy #81:

I simply felt shy about asking at a bookstall for this magazine—I always felt that the assistant might give me an odd, sidelong look, as though I were a curate buying the latest number of Frilly Scanties. Lastly, although the cover-designs were always very good of their kind, I must confess I was careful to tuck them inside my newspaper when in public. All this is, I agree, very stuffy and pompous and cowardly of me but I cannot help feeling that there is a large potential market for our product amongst the stuffy, pompous and cowardly—after all, they seem to make up some seventy per cent of the population. p.2

What isn’t touched on was that Bonfiglioli had originally wanted to rename the magazine Caliban.¹ Also, after the above comments about the appearance of the magazine you would have to wonder, whatever you think of the merits of Lawrence’s cover, at the choice of something that makes the magazine look like some sort of horror anthology.

As to the fiction in this launch issue it is largely an All-Star affair as Bonfiglioli had commissioned stories from several writers on the theme of ‘sacrifice‘. I have minor reservations about this as a theme, but more of this later.
The first story is The Circulation of the Blood by Brian W. Aldiss, which I had remembered as being quite a good piece and up to the level of several others he produced for Science Fantasy/Impulse.² This time around I found it much more of a curate’s egg. It tells of Yale, a marine scientist working for the World Waters Organisation, who has been investigating the superabundance of several ocean species: herring, blue whales, etc. After a year working away he returns to the tropical island where his second wife and son from his first marriage live. This initial section has a good sense of place and convincing character conflict between Yale, his wife Caterina, and his son Philip, such as when there is an after dinner row that results from Yale talking about an ocean current that they followed on the Kraken. When Caterina finds out the current is going to be named after her first husband who she loathes, she loses her temper and slaps Yale in front of his son:

Philip flushed a slow red. “I’ll leave you to your capers. I have to go and pack.” As he turned, Yale caught his arm. “You don’t have to go. You are almost adult.  You must face violent emotions. You never could as a child—but they’re as natural as storms at sea.”
“Child! You’re the child, father! You think you’re so poised and understanding, don’t you? But you’ve never understood how people feel!” He pulled himself away. Yale was left standing in the room alone.
“Explain and I’d understand,” he said aloud. p.18

It materialises that the superabundance of the species that Yale had been investigating (spoiler) is due to massively increased longevity caused by a virus. If man can be infected by this virus, near-immortality may be achievable.
At his point though, it all gets a bit silly (spoiler). Catarina’s first husband, the head of the WWO, turns up with an ineffectual gun-wielding helicopter pilot determined to suppress the secret that Yale has uncovered. He explains:

We’ve kept our secret for five years. There are fifty of us now, fifty-three, men with power and some women. Before the secret comes into the open, we are going to be even more powerful: an Establishment. We only need a few years. Meanwhile, we make investments and alliances. Take a look at the way brilliant people have been attracted to Naples these last few years! It’s not been just to the W.W.O. or the European Common Government Centre. It’s been to my clinic! In another five years, we’ll be able to step in and rule Europe—and from there it’s just a short step to America and Africa.” p.30

All you really need on the end of that is “Mwuh, mwuh, mwuh,” he laughed evilly. Interesting to note that Aldiss still hadn’t completely jettisoned his pulp influences by this stage in his career.
Next up is High Treason by Poul Anderson. This is a fairly good if rambling story about an officer waiting to be spaced, put out of an spaceship airlock, for treason. His account, as told to a futuristic recording device, tells of the Morwain, an alien species at war with man, and the mission he is given to destroy one of their planets.
You and Me and the Continuum by J. G. Ballard is one of his ‘concentrated’ stories, of which the author says:

The theme of sacrifice led me to think of the Messiah or, more exactly, the idea of the second coming and how this might take place in the twentieth century. In my version, which I would describe as a botched second coming, the Messiah never quite managing to come to terms with the twentieth century, I have used a fragmentary and nonsequential technique . . . and have tried to invoke some of the images that a twentieth century Messiah might see. You’ll notice that the entries are alphabetised. p.53

Some of the sections/images reflect this but as a whole the piece doesn’t make much sense. I can see why the first concentrated story, The Terminal Beach, may have made for an interesting experiment but I fear the law of diminishing returns will apply to this continuing authorial obsession.
A Hero’s Life by James Blish, with its galactic empires and Traitor-in-Chiefs, has a plot which either doesn’t make much sense, or is hard to follow, or both. However, for all that it is quite entertaining. The story starts with the traitor Simon de Kyul emptying his poisons into a basin on the planet Boadicea. He is living under a period of immunity in the Traitor’s Quarter of this strange planet:

Half the buildings in Druidsfall glistened with their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to anything they were blown against—the wealth of Boadicea was based anciently in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold as radiation shielding for their spuriously tender genes. p.63

He meets a playwoman and spends time with her, only to find her dead one morning from a black fungal growth: his period of immunity is over. If he is going to sell High Earth’s secrets he will need to survive first, so he takes a transduction serum which changes his appearance and also starts to change the way he thinks. He then finds the woman’s half-brother and enlists him in a plan to take revenge on the Guild of Traitors. Much skulduggery and intrigue follows including the appearance of a shape-changing voombis, aliens who serve The Exarch, ruler of half the Galaxy!
If you are in the mood for, say, a dark, dense, slightly sadistic Jack Vance story then you will probably like this, as I did.³
The Gods Themselves Throw Incense by Harry Harrison is a story I really liked the first time around. This time the bones of the plot show through and the characters seemed rather one-dimensional. A spaceship explodes between the Moon and Earth and three people make it into the escape pod. Unfortunately, they have a three week journey and only two weeks of air. Lots are drawn to decide who has to take a suicide pill and go out the airlock, but matters proceed in a far from straightforward manner.
One thing that occurred to me (spoiler) about this The Cold Equations variation is that it always seems to be the woman that goes out the airlock. A couple of other related problems: first, the theme of ‘sacrifice’ probably isn’t going to make for the most jolly of magazine themes (that is two people out of the airlock so far this issue); second, don’t use spoiler blurbs like:

Specially written for this issue on the theme of “sacrifice”—a slightly involuntary one in this case. . . p.87

Deserter by Richard Wilson is an OK story about a young man and woman who get married just before the War starts but they are separated before their wedding night. Subsequently we follow the man, Bill, through training and it materialises that this War is between men and women. This is all a bit artificial and strikes me as the kind of satire that could have been in Galaxy in the 1950s.
The Secret by Jack Vance tells of a young man on a tropical island who has a seemingly idyllic life. However, one by one, the oldest members of his community build catamarans and sail off to the west. This is a fairly good allegory about growing old amongst other things, and the last line has a nice spike to it.

The highlight of the issue is the first published story in Keith Roberts’s parallel world story cycle Pavane. The Signaller by Keith Roberts is set in a world where Elizabeth I was assassinated and the Spanish invaded and conquered England. The Reformation has never taken place, the Catholic Church still rules, and technological progress is anathema. As there is no electricity in this world, signals are passed by huge mechanically operated semaphore-like signalling stations in line of sight of each other.
The story opens with Rafe, a member of the Guild of Signallers:

One such copse crowned the summit of the knoll; under the first of its branches, and sheltered by them from the wind, a boy lay face down in the snow. He was motionless but not wholly unconscious; from time to time his body quivered with spasms of shock. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, blond-haired, and dressed from head to feet in a uniform of dark green leather. The uniform was slit in many places; from the shoulders down the back to the waist, across the hips and thighs. Through the rents could be seen the cream-brown of his skin and the brilliant slow twinkling of blood. The leather was soaked with it, and the long hair matted. Beside the boy lay the case of a pair of binoculars, the Zeiss lenses without which no man or apprentice of the Guild of Signallers ever moved, and a dagger. The blade of the weapon was red-stained; its pommel rested a few inches beyond his outflung right hand. The hand itself was injured, slashed across the backs of the fingers and deeply through the base of the thumb. Round it blood had diffused in a thin pink halo into the snow. p.127-128

Because I liked the story so much—even more than on previous occasions— there are pages of this I want to quote: so this is going to be a (spoiler) ridden review.
After binding the worst of his wounds, Rafe struggles back to the signal station he operates and slumps into his bunk. Roberts’s characters are frequently badly-used and it appears as if this story will be no different.
Most of the rest of the narrative is told in flashback and begins with Rafe as a young boy watching the local Avebury signal station when he is discovered by the Serjeant in charge. The Signaller takes the boy under his wing, and soon Rafe is spending a lot of his time at the station. There is Roberts’s usual immersive level of detail in his description of the signal station:

The varnished wooden spars shone orange like the masts of a boat; the semaphore arms rose and dipped, black against the sky. He could see the bolts and loops near their tips where in bad weather or at night when some message of vital importance had to be passed, cressets could be attached to them. He’d seen such fires once, miles out over the Plain, the night the old King died . . . p.136

In the centre of the room, white-painted and square, was the base of the signal mast; round it a little podium of smooth, scrubbed wood, on which stood two Guildsmen. In their hands were the long levers that worked the semaphore arms overhead; the control rods reached up from them, encased when they passed through the ceiling in white canvas grommets. p.137

These scenes from his childhood let Roberts do some convincing world-building.
Rafe eventually takes and passes the exam to enter the Guild of Signallers and leaves Avebury to undertake his training:

The arms of the Silbury tower were quiet; but as he passed they flipped quickly to Attention, followed at once by the cyphers for Origination and Immediate Locality. Rafe turned in the saddle, tears stinging his eyes, and watched the letters quickly spelled out in plaintalk. “Good luck . . .” p.142

The Signaller training is physically hard:

There was a trick to the thing, only learned after bruising hours of practice; to lean the weight of the body against the levers rather than just using the muscles of back and arms, employ the jounce and swing of the semaphores to position them automatically for their next cypher. Trying to fight them instead of working with the recoil would reduce a strong man to a sweatsoaked rag within minutes; but a trained Signaller could work half the day and feel very little strain. p.145

After a period of Signaller training there is a gruelling test to pass, and not everyone completes it. Rafe does and shows his willpower after he has successfully transmitted the set text:

And then, in black rage, he did the thing only one other apprentice had done in the history of the station; flipped the handles to Attention again, spelled out with terrible exactness and letter by letter the message ‘God Save the Queen’ Signed End of Message, got no acknowledgement, swung the levers up and locked them into position for Emergency-Contact Broken. In a signalling chain the alarm would be flashed back to the originating station, further information rerouted and a squad sent to investigate the breakdown.
Rafe stared blankly at the levers. He saw now the puzzling bright streaks on them were his own blood. He forced his raw hands to unclamp themselves, elbowed his way through the door, shoved past the men who had come for him and collapsed twenty yards away on the grass. p.147

Rafe is then posted as a Signaller to a private house and a year later (spoiler) he is sent to a lone post at a D-class station. It is now that we find out how he was so badly wounded: he was attacked by a catamount, a large wild cat, while out walking.
The last section has Rafe regaining consciousness to find he is being tended by a young woman—one of the Old Ones, The Haunters of the Heath. She tells him a long creation myth while she cares for him:

Into the void, He came; only He was not the Christos, the God of Mother Church. He was Balder, Balder the Lovely, Balder the Young. He strode across the land, face burning bright as the sun, and the Old Ones grovelled and adored. The wind touched the stone circles, burning them with frost; in the darkness men cried for spring. So he came to the Tree Yggdrasil—What Tree, Rafe’s mind cried despairingly, and the voice checked and laughed and said without anger ‘Yggdrasil, great World Ash, whose branches pierce the layers of Heaven, whose roots wind through all Hells . . .’ Balder came to the Tree, on which he must die for the sins of Gods and Men; and to the Tree they nailed him, hung him by the palms. p.156-157

Times passes; Rafe appears to have recovered and leaves the station with the woman.
The coda of the story (spoiler) has a Captain and Corporal of Signals approaching the signal station. They notice that the exterior has been covered by marks:⁴

The mark. It was everywhere, over the door, on its frame, stamped along the walls. The circle, with the crab pattern inside it; rebus or pictograph, the only thing the People of the Heath knew, the only message it seemed they had for men. p.159

When they go inside the station they find more of the marks. Rafe is lying in his bunk bed, dead from his dreadful wounds. The Captain orders the Corporal to send a heart-breaking signal:

In his mind’s eye a map unrolled; he saw the message flashing down the chain, each station picking it up, routing it, clattering it on its way. Down to Golden Cap, where the great signals stood gaunt against the cold crawl of the sea; north up the A line to Aquae Sulis, back again along the Great West Road. Within the hour it would reach its destination at Silbury Hill; and a grave-faced man in green would walk down the village street of Avebury, knock at a door . . . p.160

This is an impressive, near-excellent piece of work, and for much of the story I was completely lost in it. As I said previously, it has an immersive reality that nothing else in the issue comes close to matching. If, though, I have a minor criticism of this story it would be of the creation myth section which, to me anyway, doesn’t entirely gel with the rest of the piece and is also too long. However, I am quibbling here.
I also have a criticism of Bonfiglioli the editor: this was the second story in Pavane when the book came out and I think it would have been better if that order had been maintained in the magazine also. There isn’t enough background information about the world in this story for it to stand entirely on its own whereas the first Pavane story, The Lady Margaret, which would appear in the next issue, has a prologue that starts with the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I and proceeds to introduce this parallel world. It seems Bonfiglioli changed the story order so it would fit in with his ‘sacrifice’ theme.

It’s well worth searching out this issue as it is probably the best Science Fantasy/ Impulse that was published.

1. Mike Ashley: Transformations – The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970. p.245 Although the Caliban title wasn’t used, the sudden name change badly damaged the magazine’s distribution.
2. There were a number of good Aldiss stories in the later Science Fantasy/Impulse: Man in his Time (#71), The Eyes of the Blind King (SF Impulse #9), Just Passing Through (SF Impulse #12).
3. The John Boston review above alerted me to an—supposedly—expanded version of this story: at the time of commissioning the author was restricted to a 10,000 word limit and later thought the story too compressed. So I dug it out the other version and started reading it. However, apart from the addition of a page and a half of turgid introduction, A Style in Treason (Galaxy, May 1970) seems to be the same story as A Hero’s Life. It is hard to be precise because of word count errors caused by the differing quality of OCR between the versions I have, but if you strip out the introduction in the later version, and take out the manual carriage returns in MS Word and set them to the same font size, they both run to seven and a half A4 pages—to within a line or two of each other.
4. The mark of the Old Ones is shown above the Pavane title: