David Redd, Collected Stories (Gostak Publishing, 2018, 444 pp.). The book is available in hardback (£25+p&p) or paperback (£15+p&p) from Lulu.com, and in electronic format from Lulu.com (£4), Amazon.co.uk (£3.66)/Amazon.com ($4.78), and iBooks.
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When one looks back at British magazine science fiction over the last seventy years or so, the period from 1964 to 1966 stands out as an obvious example of this sub-genre’s Golden Age, a time when many notable stories appeared and many new writers began their careers—and it almost didn’t happen.1
Early in 1964, the field2 consisted of two magazines published by Nova Publications (New Worlds, a monthly SF magazine, and Science Fantasy, a bimonthly fantasy magazine) and the business was struggling due to falling circulation. Nova Publications was making plans to wind up both of the magazines when, almost at the last moment, another publisher called Roberts & Vinter Ltd. acquired them.
By the start of 1966, the two 128 page bimonthly paperback format magazines that the new publisher produced in mid-1964 had grown to 160 page monthlies. Both magazines had different editors (John Carnell had edited both magazines for Nova), Michael Moorcock for New Worlds, and Kyril Bonfiglioli for Science Fantasy, and each magazine used all lengths of fiction up to and including serialised novels. As well as these two markets, Carnell had gone on to publish a quarterly anthology called New Writings in SF for Corgi Books, so British writers had an almost unprecedented number of home markets to pitch their new stories to. Many new voices emerged.
This last brings us neatly to David Redd, a Welsh writer who started publishing during this period with two sales to Moorcock’s New Worlds in 1966. Although Redd later contributed stories to other professional magazines over the following three decades (New Worlds, F&SF, Worlds of If, Interzone, Asimov’s SF, etc.), he never published any short story collections or novels (he wrote several of the latter during this period but none were published). This volume, a retrospective collection from Greg Pickersgill at new publisher Gostak Publishing, collects nearly all Redd’s work and rectifies that omission.
The book itself is a substantial volume (over four hundred pages), and the cover illustration is a painting done by Redd’s mother, E. C. K. Redd, for his story Sunbeam Caress. Inside the volume, as well as the thirty stories, are story notes by Redd (these overlap with the interview that appeared here recently but there is much new information), and an afterword by Greg Pickersgill.3
When it comes to the stories, I’d read nearly all of them a couple of months or so before the book appeared as research for the interview mentioned above. The ones that appealed to me most were the ‘Senechi’ and ‘Green England’ series stories.
The first of these two involves a future post-collapse Earth ruled by aliens, the centaur-like Senechi.4 The opening story, The Frozen Summer, has two Senechi going to the Arctic in a human-manned airship to find a “Summer Goddess” who, it materialises, is keeping her son in suspended animation until the ice age passes. The advanced technology (from an earlier pre-collapse period) that protects her and the valley proves difficult to overcome, and the story is mostly about how the airship party do this. I liked the vivid, economical style used in this piece and enjoyed the story until its rather baffling ending.
The second story in the series is Brother Ape, perhaps my favourite Redd story. This skips forward in time to when the advanced tech from the valley (now called the “Ludquist Anomaly”) is being investigated by a human called Blanchard at the behest of a Senechi called Ven Gonnel. The rest of the story is a fast paced and expansive adventure that involves, among other things, an assassination attempt on Blanchard, and his wife’s sister’s involvement with a group of intelligent apes she is trying to save from the Senechi. At times it feels a little like an extract from a longer work—although that is a good thing in this case as it lets the story hint at much more than is actually dealt with. That said, the narrative has a clear arc, and a transcendent last image that hints at something bigger to come in future stories.
The third story, Moon Pearls, is more of a mixed bag and, although I liked it well enough, it could have done with some more background or other development (I could tell you more if I could read my handwritten notes!)
There are two stories in the book from Redd’s ‘Green England’ series.5 Both are set in a totalitarian England that bears some resemblance to a future “green” version of Cambodia’s Year Zero. I thought this idea of a deeply dystopian green future quite novel, and it has not dated.
The first story is Green and Pleasant Land, a blackly amusing piece about paramilitary Greenshirts who go to rescue a family from an area that is scheduled to be razed:
Our target neighbourhood today is full of criminals, drug addicts, dole scroungers, heavy metal fans, general disposable scumbags. All of them hopelessly unecological in every cell of their useless bodies. In a few hours the main Greenshirt force will roll in and blast them all to pieces. We’ll enjoy that. But first, undercover teams like us here must sneak in and pull out the few decent clean-living families from there. We have a responsibility to rescue the good citizens and give them a better future. Perhaps they’ll be able to return later, after the area’s been recycled into grassland or farms…
As the home of a thousand people gets demolished before our eyes, and the last few refugees get gunned down, I remember some wise words from a famous ecological philosopher. He says that nuclear power stations can never be replaced by windmills unless somehow there a terrific population crash to reduce the demand for electricity. Well, if we go on weeding out all the irresponsible people from society, all the greedy and the wasteful and the just plain thoughtless, that population crash will work out just right.
We’ll eliminate all the salesmen, the shareholders, industrialists, polluters, muggers, cocaine pushers, drunkards, the selfish and the inefficient. Our numbers will be small enough to be self-supporting, needing only self-renewing resources, living in harmony with each other and with the environment. And if any people are irresponsible enough not to live in harmony with the environment, we’ll nuke the bastards.
The other series story (and one I bought for Spectrum SF #7), Green England, has two Americans, Mizta Shagga and Miz Bina, arriving in Green England ostensibly to negotiate a trade deal—but they really there for espionage, and hope to eventually turn the country into a capitalist one like their own. The rest of the story is an account of their intelligence gathering, which mostly occurs against the backdrop of a number of culture clash set pieces.
All of this is, unusually, told in the dialect of the visiting Americans:
No easy for he finding answer, what happening is man making too much vegetables growings. No finding until Day Seven. Then Mizta Shagga checking England police force population control. Now he seeing potential good market, seeing need good American products.
Seeing how Green police force already studying foreign progress useful areas like Public Repression like Irreversible Negative Feedback. Also he finding Day Seven interpreter no Mister John Smith but young specialist police equipment advisor.
Mizta Shagga talking ordinary trade with Superintendent Random Civilian Bombings. He needing excuse start real talking, so pointing finger official title plate on desk. “By the way, Superintendent, do you still actually carry out “random bombings” of civilians to maintain order?”
“No longer, I fear.” (Young interpreter slow, young interpreter careful.) “Our country has been quiet for many years now. All our people are happy in the Green lifestyle.”
“And if they are not happy?”
“They are eliminated.”
Towards the end of the story there are interesting revelations about the true nature of both societies.
A third series comprises his ‘Nancy’ time-travel stories. The first story, The Way to London Town, introduces Nancy, a precocious eleven year old girl and time traveller, a mutant caused by the Tuesday war, who travels a hundred years into the future and becomes involved in a fire raising/protection racket. This is competently plotted, but it’s an uncomfortable mix of sf and the mundane (the fire-raising, etc.) told in an almost tongue-in-cheek style that didn’t really engage me. I also didn’t have much luck with the prequel Nancy, a fragmentary origin story.
Perhaps the best of the three stories with Nancy in them (there is a fourth associated story I’ll get to in a minute) is Eternity Magic, (I should add that I published this one in Spectrum SF #6). In this Nancy uses her time-travel and paranormal powers to save a future king from an attempted coup. It has a clever and complex plot but, in spite of this, the outcome always seems a tad inevitable. That said, it is told with a light touch—it almost has the feel of a far-eastern fantasy in places—and has a number of nice parts, such as this description from a sea voyage Nancy has to make with her daughter Alana:
Moonlight over a darkened sea, with stars above and glistening reflections below. A moonpath to guide the ship southward. A mother and daughter standing content under ghostly white sails that whisper above them. Little streaks of water-fire skipping from wave to wave, as silvery fish outpace the ship by leaping like stones thrown in play through the warm, gentle night. This is the moment that should last forever, this is the moment that eternity-magic should bring.
Related to this series is The Mammoth Hunters, which doesn’t have Nancy in it but does feature one of the previous story’s characters, and is a short and grim piece about a time-travel safari to shoot mammoths. It has an entirely different tone from the previous three tales, and has a neat penultimate line that refocuses the story to show the true quarry. This had a big impact on me when I first read it many years ago, and it remains one of the better entries in this volume.
These three series are all what I would call “conventional” SF and there are several other stories in the volume that could be similarly described (and a few that are not, but I’ll come to those in a moment): The Dinosaurs of London is pretty much self-explanatory, an enjoyable post-apocalypse light adventure story that should have gone (spoiler) for the bleaker ending it sets up. You can see how this could have been the first story in a series if Redd had access to a receptive market at the time of writing (I’d probably have taken it for Spectrum SF if it has still been going, and nudged his elbow for more). Sundown, another of the volume’s best pieces, tells the story of a man invading a snowy, northern wilderness (a not uncommon locale in Redd’s work) defended by a White Lady and her sprites and dryads, etc. Although the story uses fantasy language, it has SF underpinnings, and (spoiler) an unexpectedly brutal ending. Also set in a northern landscape is A Quiet Kind of Madness, which involves a young woman and a “Snowfriend” who tells her of a tunnel to a land where men do not exist. This last is perhaps more an allegory than ordinary narrative by the time it finishes.
Sunbeam Caress is, perhaps, the polar opposite of the last story. In this tale we have a piece that, even though Redd was encouraged by Michael Moorcock to write it in the middle of the New Wave, harks back to the 1930s with its almost complete lack of human characters and relentless ideation. In this one we find ourselves on a far-future Earth dominated by a race-mind that controls several species (fruit bats, humans, etc.), and where alien columns of light are seen interacting with ambulatory crystals. There is a lot going on in this story (the longest piece in the book), perhaps too much so, but this is compensated for by the sheer volume of invention (you can see why Pohl said he’d take a chance on it rather than “let go of the imagination it represents . . .”).
Other stories in the book, which also tend to fall, more or less, into the “conventional” category, include (these are mostly novelettes): Warship (piracy in a post-atomic war society), The House on Hollow Mountain (aliens give two men the chance of a different life), When Jesus Came to the Moon for Christmas (self-explanatory, and perhaps the only one of the writer’s stories that touches on his faith), The Old Man of Munington (immortals in Wales), and Trout Fishing in Leytonstone (a slightly gonzo tale about a future poet with problems), and Yuhuna Am (an interesting future dystopia that shows Redd updating the style and content of his stories for the new millennium—only to run into a permanent writer’s block afterwards).
All of the above account for around three-quarters of the book’s length.
Most of the rest of the material, about eight or so stories, are of a distinctly different type, generally shorter material that has a literary or surreal feel, is a mood piece, or is a fantasy (while I was reading through all of this writer’s work and came across these, it became clear that he is probably two or more writers rolled into one). This material is generally shorter in length than the group above and, as a result, sometimes slighter.
Two of this group that are worthy of mention are On the Deck of the Flying Bomb, and The Wounded Dragon. On the Deck of the Flying Bomb is a perplexing story about a stowaway on a flying bomb who spends his time learning about how the craft operates and how the crew interact:
As a stowaway, hidden like an unseen parasite, I can use the lifeboat cameras to observe the workings of the Flying Bomb and its crew. My lifeboat is one bead in the necklace of three hundred lifeboats strung along the rim of the upper deck: no inquiring crewman will think to examine my little hermit cell until I lift it from the deck and glide away. This is a strange behemoth that I shall be leaving: a creature so vast that on its deck there is no sensation of motion. The Flying Bomb is four miles long and two miles wide, and its curving underbelly is over a mile deep. On its upper deck the buildings form a large town where the crewmen live and work. On the lower deck the maintenance staff move like pale ants in caverns, tending the machines which keep this artificial world airborne. And further below is the unstable cargo which will explode novalike when the Flying Bomb reaches its target.
He plans to establish the ship’s position and then leave in one of the lifeboats. Then they meet another flying bomb. . . . This brief story left much, much more of the iceberg hidden than I liked, but it was one of the titles that was repeatedly mentioned when I asked one of my Facebook groups what their favourite Redd stories were.6
The Wounded Dragon is one of Redd’s later stories which, like a couple of others, is set in Wales. This one begins after a battle, when three sons take a wounded dragon, their father, to an island of healers. The last time the dragon was there he learned how to change from a man into a dragon. This time the maidens tell him he will die before the next morning, so he goes into the castle to see the healer. The latter lets the dragon go through three magic doors: on each occasion these offer experiences of the normal life he missed while fighting (something accentuated by the fact that every time he returns through the door to the castle he finds one of his three remains sons has gone). The end of the story has him revert to a man and cross to the land where he meets a woman who asks him to stay with her. He decides to sleep for a while under the hill instead. . . . The ending rather lost me but I enjoyed the mythic feel of the story.
There is also, among the remaining stories, the first publication of The World of Arthur English, a post-apocalyptic tale which proved unfathomable to me.
I’ve already mentioned that Redd provides and introduction and notes for his collection: the story afterwords are not encouraging reading for would-be writers, as the notes for Nancy, published in 1971 (his fifth year of publication) illustrate:
By the time it appeared in print I had produced over a quarter of a million words in failed novel manuscripts plus several novel beginnings which all petered out around page 93. I was to make such attempts again and again, always without success.
Matters didn’t much improve for Redd, with years sometimes going by without any acceptances. And yet he kept on plugging away at it and, now and then, a story or two would break into print. Eventually there were the thirty pieces assembled here.
I started this review talking about the mini-Golden Age experienced by British SF in the mid-1960s, but what I didn’t mention was that it came to a precipitous end when Roberts & Vinter’s distributor went bankrupt at the end of 1966, and the decision was made to retrench and cancel the magazines. Moorcock subsequently funded and launched New Worlds as a large size and more progressive magazine in 1967, but Science Fantasy/SF Impulse remained dead. Writers were then faced with a single editor/single magazine market in the UK,7 a situation that would largely persist in Britain from that point on (and at some points during the 1970s there wasn’t even a magazine market).
You rather wonder what Redd’s writing career (not to mention many other Brit writers over the years) would have looked like if there had been a couple of supportive monthly British SF magazines during those decades. Perhaps he would have managed to stretch those long novelettes into novellas and then to novels; perhaps there would have been a couple of series that could have been fixed up into books. From the evidence here, it’s not hard not to come to the conclusion that there could have been many more good stories from this talented writer, someone capable of vivid, fast-paced and inventive adventure, to more dream-like8 literary material (and several types in between). Sadly we will never know—but what we do have is this volume and, for less than four quid from Amazon, it is a bargain. ●
David Redd, Collected Stories (Gostak Publishing, 2018, 444 pp.). The book is available in hardback (£25+p&p) or paperback (£15+p&p) from Lulu.com, and in electronic format from Lulu.com (£4), Amazon.co.uk (£3.66)/Amazon.com ($4.78), and iBooks.
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1. I don’t mean to be deliberately controversial, but I’ve limited the period to 1964-1966 because, after that period, the large-size New Worlds, for all the superior stories it published, seemed more of a transatlantic affair (notable work appeared from many Americans, including Disch, Sladek, Spinrad, Ellison, Delany, etc.). It was also more exclusive than inclusive,* and several semi-regular writers dropped by the wayside. In any event, after eighteen months or so it started disappearing into its own navel and finally ceased publication.
* Understandably enough Moorcock wanted to publish the magazine he had always wanted to produce, and he was, after all, the one paying the bills.
2. I’m concerned about original magazines here, not the UK reprints of Analog, Galaxy, F&SF and the like.
3. Pickersgill contributes an illuminating afterword where he tells us about the (considerable) birth pains of the book (I hope this hasn’t put him off future projects), and that he and Redd both live in the same Welsh town. We also learn that Redd apparently has the patience of a saint:
In our meetings back in the late 1960s David rather indulged my ideas of Being a Writer, though now I am sure he instinctively knew I lacked the right stuff. At that time my fantasies of writing had not met the impenetrable barrier of talentless inability to carry a plot in a bucket or create a character not stolen wholesale from anything by M John Harrison. He passed me two novel manuscripts to ‘try something with’. One was a roman a clef of his student days, a simply told observational narrative which I was taken with enough to read complete, though I felt it was short of dazzlement and enchantment. I rewrote a few sections in the style of an explosion in an adjective factory, with collateral damage in the pronoun and adverb plants along the way. A simple sequence of someone entering a room and being told to sit down by someone behind a desk positively whirled with artificial energy that would have been as tiring to enact as it was to read. And it was at least half as long again as the original. I remember David nodding in his rather mild-mannered way and saying “Well, it’s certainly different . . .”
4. There is an unpublished 15,000 word novelette, Solus, in the ‘Senechi’ sequence. Had Redd written one more story in this series he would have probably had enough material for a fix-up novel and a collection. Oh, and Redd used the money from the first ‘Senechi’ story, The Frozen Summer, to buy, fittingly enough, a sheepskin jacket.
5. There are actually four stories in the ‘Green England’ series. One, Doctor Sam, was omitted for some reason. A pity, it’s short and quite good and fits in well with the other series stories—a bonus for future electronic editions maybe? Another one, England’s Green and Pleasant Land, has only appeared in German (England, schönes grünes Land, 1996). This story (which I’ve read) has a good start and reasonable finish, but the (satirical) middle, which is about the Scientology based genesis of the Eco movement (against a background of a Thatcherite Britain), and a subsequent nuclear war, is very dated (something the writer has acknowledged himself).
6. Redd mentions in his notes that On the Deck of the Flying Bomb was originally bought and paid for by Hilary Bailey for New Worlds but, when that anthology series folded, he donated it to the new magazine Interzone (and it was subsequently reprinted in the first Interzone anthology).
7. New Writings in SF was still around throughout the sixties and seventies but reduced its publication frequency to one or two volumes a year.
8. I recently learned that the formal term for “dreamlike” is “oneiric”. The subject being discussed was van Vogt. Not a comparison being made here. ●
