ISFDB
Luminist

Other reviews:¹
Graham Hall, Vector #35 (October 1965)

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Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
E=mc²—OR BUST • serial by Harry Harrison ∗∗∗
The Golden Barge • short story by Michael Moorcock [as by William Barclay] ∗∗∗
Heat of the Moment • short story by R. M. Bennett ∗∗∗
Emancipation • short story by Daphne Castell ∗∗∗
Jake in the Forest • short story by David Harvey –
. . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie • novelette by Bob Shaw ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by James Cawthorn
Making the Transition • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Story Ratings No. 153
Self-Conscious Sex • book review by Charles Platt
Dr. Peristyle • Q&A column by Brian W. Aldiss [as by uncredited]

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E=mc²—OR BUST by Harry Harrison is the third part of the novel Bill the Galactic Hero and, as per the last instalment, less funny than the first. It starts with Bill on trial for being AWOL and, after his conviction, he ends up in prison with an immortal (or mad) cell mate. The pair have a good life taking advantage of the penal system until they are eventually transferred to the battle zone by mistake.
The second half of this finds Bill on a ‘Deathworld’ type planet, where he once more meets Eager Beager (before the latter is eaten by a giant snake). Bill then fights his way through the jungle and ambushes a convoy of human prisoners. He finds Drang among them, terminally wounded, and Bill eventually ‘inherits’ his fangs.
This is all well enough done, but the problem is that this reads more like Deathworld than a parody of it. That said, it finishes with (spoiler) an amusingly ironic coda which has Bill as a recruiting sergeant enlisting his own brother despite the protestations of their weeping mother.
The Golden Barge by Michael Moorcock is a fairly straightforward allegory which has a man called Tallow chasing a Golden Barge on the river. During his pursuit he gets stranded on a sandbank:

The sun shone on the boat, on Tallow, on the river, on bushes and trees and on a white house, five storeys high, which gleamed like the newly-washed face of a child.
Tallow lifted red eyes and sighed. He tried once more to move the boat, but could not. He looked around him. He saw the house. He would need help. With a shrug, he splashed knee-deep through the water, to the bank, climbing up its damp, crumbling, root-riddled earth and cursing his luck.
Tallow, in some ways, was a fatalist, and his fatalism at last came to the rescue of his sanity as ahead of him he saw a wall of red-brick, patched with black moss-growths. His mood changed almost instantly and he was once again his old, cold cocky self. For beyond the wall he could see the head and shoulders of a woman. The barge could wait for a little while.  p. 37

Tallow and the woman, Pandora, later become lovers and live in the house but, over time, relationship problems develop. Tallow eventually leaves to pursue the Golden Barge, and Pandora tries to go with him. As she later sleeps in the boat, Tallow realises that she is an encumbrance, and that without her he might yet find the Golden Barge—so (spoiler), he unceremoniously chucks her over the side! (Marriage guidance counselor required for this writer, stat!)
I got most of the allusions in this piece (the big white house and Pandora’s “purple talons”, etc.) but the last one escaped me (a huge pile of intertwined bodies has Pandora’s arm coming out of the top).
There has been a varied selection of Moorcock stories over the last three issues (the ‘Jerry Cornelius’ story Preliminary Information in #153, and The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius in #154) but this is the one I liked best—next issue sees the start of a serial from him as “James Colvin”, The Wrecks of Time.
Heat of the Moment by R. M. Bennett² starts with a travelling salesman arriving at a motel and going to sleep. Later he wakes up to find his room on fire and, as he tries to escape, is abducted by aliens who take him on a spaceship to Rigel Two. En route they tell him he is destined for a zoo, and that conditions there will be as near to what he is used to as is possible.
This has a realistic beginning, a routine spaceflight section in the middle, and (spoiler) a punchline ending (after the aliens vacate his recreated motel room, they light the fires). This ironic ending made me smile, but it may not be everyone’s hot beverage preference.

Emancipation by Daphne Castell starts off with convincingly described section about an alien society:

Krug of Stok unhooked the wooden hasp of the wives’ pen, and stooped under the low lintel into the main yard, chilly and yellow-grey in the light of approaching dawn. None of the other men of the village were about yet—Krug was an early riser, liked to get out and about before the paths grew crowded and the communal rakers and sowers had all been rented out. Still, there were drawbacks to being a keen farmer; it was cold, for one thing, this early in the day—Krug’s thick brown skin, tufted and warted as some of the reptile life of Stok, was crinkled in an effort not to shiver. He looked into the iron trough under the great boiler; the fire was low. Skag, the night-watchman was asleep on the other side of the boiler, skulking good-for-nothing. Krug growled—he would have to wake the fat fool up to tell him his duty was over—duty, pah! Any right-thinking Stokka would scorn to be a night-watchman over the wives’ pen: it was a post given only to the slowest-moving and slowest-thinking of the race—not one of honourable service and renunciation, like being a nurse of children for instance, or a food-dresser. Definitely a post worthy of no respect at all. Krug kicked the slouched brown figure at his feet awake with a fierceness which was partly due to the knowledge that in a moment he would have to begin the other task which made early-morning work less than welcome. He would have to poke the fire and coax it into fresh vigour, before preparing the morning feed for the communal livestock in the wives’ pen.
“Oh! Thak take you, master, that was a shrewd kick!” Skag lurched to his feet with a peevish moan.
“Anything to report?” Krug picked up a shovel and began heaving tash-dung on to the dying fire.
“The creatures were making a bit of a din round about the setting of the moons. Can’t let a man take a nap, upsy swine,” grumbled Skag. It was not quite clear whether he was referring to the livestock or to Krug. Just to be on the safe side, Krug swung smartly at him with the shovel, and the nightwatchman went on his way more hastily, with a stifled yelp of pain.  p. 62-63

We learn more about this feudal planet, and the three-armed reptilian race that occupy it, as the story progresses; in particular we learn that the males are the only sex who are intelligent, and the females are kept as herd animals in pens.
Later there is a conversation between Krug and Skag and another man called Lopp, who is back from his travels around their solar system (although their society isn’t advanced enough to have spaceships, neighbouring planets do, and the young males work their passage). During Lopp’s account, he tells the pair that Terrans have landed on one of the other planets, and have claimed the solar system as part of their Galactic Empire; many labour-saving technological marvels will now be available in return for this annexation. The only problem is that Krug’s people will have to pretend that the females are their equals, as Terrans have odd views on the subject of sexual equality.
This news plays out later at a Council meeting where all of the alien males attend, and there is trouble at the thought of heretical ideas like letting the females live with the males. Matters comes to a head when Lopp mentions that the Terran’s demands are the lesser of two evils: there is another race approaching their solar system, and they have a matriarchal society! The Council decides to submit to the Terrans.
After this entertaining set-up the story ends on a bit of a flat note, as the hypno aids used to teach the females a simple form of speech (to help fool the Earthmen) also make them less placid, and they eventually insist on having their own way in other respects—having pets in the house, telling the Earthmen what the real situation on the planet is, etc.
This is the best thing I can remember reading by Castell, and it is an interesting early feminist SF story.
Jake in the Forest by David Harvey³ is about a man who wanders through a forest until he comes to a lake. Looking back to where he has come from he sees a hidden house. He enters the building and finds a speechless woman there; she indicates a table full of food and later shows him a bed where he can sleep. The woman later visits him and then, I think, there is a dream sequence where he falls onto jagged rocks. He wakes the next morning, has breakfast, and goes outside to find the woman lying spreadeagled on a flat rock.
I have no idea what this was supposed to be about, and the writing is so overly descriptive you get the distinct impression that the author isn’t writing a story, but Writing:

Each pine tree possessed an underlying form of conic symmetry and this pervaded everything. This gave Jake great pleasure, particularly when he surveyed the landscape from some panoramic viewpoint, for the vertex of each tree provided a series of focal points which guided the vision. And when Jake moved the parallax of vertices moved slowly and irrevocably too. And when he moved under the pines he was able to look up through the symmetrically spaced branches to the final conic of the sky above. Sometimes Jake felt disatisfied with the constant upward pointing of the conic shapes and then he would imagine that the roots of each tree pointed downward. and outward into the earth. The most pleasurable moments of all came when he came to one of the numerous lakes, for here he was able to see the conic shapes pointing downwards into the water. Here the land was neatly balanced on the vertex of each tree and Jake trembled in case the crash of the axe should destroy the support of the land and leave nothing save the sky.  p. 77

In moderation the above wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s seventeen pages of this (as well as quotes from Ibsen at the start and end—never a good sign), and I soon started zoning out. No doubt there are Symbols and Deep Meaning here, but they were lost on me: I suppose I should have given this another go but it seemed too much like the opaque stories that made the later large-size issues of New Worlds virtually unreadable.

Bob Shaw, after several years away from the field,⁴ returns with . . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie. It starts with war-hero Lt Col Johnny Fortune, commander of a UN Planetary Defence Unit, giving a news conference about a Nesster spaceship which may land in Fortune’s sector (he is in Iceland). These alien ships have been arriving regularly for three years, and Fortune is a hero of previous armed engagements where the supposedly invading Nessters were exterminated. However, Fortune now suspects that the Nessters aren’t a threat but are actually unarmed refugees.
After the conference, Fortune goes to see a businessman called Geissler, a mathematical prodigy who runs a business launching orbital packages with the help of a huge cannon. Together they are trying to find the scout satellite they believe is leading the Nesster ships to Earth.
Another part of the story concerns Fortune’s dysfunctional marriage, and we first witness this when Fortune goes home to a party organised by his adulterous wife. He meets his wife’s lover, Efimov, and then goes off to deal with other matters. When Fortune later finds the pair in his office at a locked desk drawer, Fortune knocks Efimov unconscious. Fortune then gets a call from the base about the inbound ship: they have calculated that it will definitely land in Fortune’s sector, so he returns to base.
The rest of the story involves Gleissner finding the satellite, and his and Fortune’s attempts to shoot it down in the face of opposition from Efimov and other external forces.
Although the fundamental idea behind the story is a little shaky (why has no-one else suspected what Fortune has?) there are a number of things that mark this story out from other contemporary work. First there is the hero himself—Fortune is an overweight chocolate guzzler; second, the marital infidelity in Fortune’s relationship is atypical; third, the story takes place in Iceland. All this (and more) made me think that, in some respects, this piece points to a time after the New Wave when traditional SF would be better characterised and more adult.

The Cover is another awful, uncredited one—the magazine badly needs a cover artist or artwork that reflects the ambitions of the fiction. There is one uninspired piece of Interior artwork by James Cawthorn.
Making the Transition by Michael Moorcock is another editorial which stretches the SF envelope:

Although the six stories in this issue are all speculative and imaginative, two of them do not conform to the conventions of sf as we usually think of it. They are much closer to the imaginative fantasies of Kafka, Peake or Borges than to, say, the work of Heinlein or Asimov. We found them stimulating and, encouraged by the unanimous support of letter-writers on the subject of our ‘Almost anything goes’ editorial in NW SF 149, we decided to publish them.  p. 2

Moorcock goes on to describe the “Barclay” story as an allegory, and the Harvey story as something similar:

The imaginative story—of which the sf story is an aspect—is well-suited for doing this. It should be easy for the reader used to interpreting the terminology of the conventional sf story (FTL, tri-di, hyper-warp and so on) to make the transition to interpreting the symbolism of less overt allegories like Jake in the Forest and its like. Such stories are not written from any desire to be obscure, but from a creative need to find fresh methods of telling a story and making a point.  p. 2

Uh-huh. The second part of the editorial mentions the critical magazine Riverside Quarterly, and picks up on a point in its letter column:

In reply to a correspondent who asks ‘but which is the more vital to sf: emotions or concepts?’ Mr Sapiro replies ‘In literary or “mainstream” writing, as opposed to the journalistic or pulp variety, ideas are conveyed indirectly, rather than by explicit statement; so that the reader can gain that emotional satisfaction involved in synthesizing the object for himself. Such emotion, I think, is the more poignant, since it results from an entire chain of mental associations rather than the single memory involved in naming something. In short, it is not a question of more or less emotion in sf, but a question of how this emotion is to be conveyed’. Our feeling is that some sf authors could well think about Mr Sapiro’s statement.  p. 3

I’m thought about this but couldn’t figure out what Sapiro meant, so I ‘phoned a friend’. This baffled several other people too, and the best explanation I got was that the writer means (I paraphrase) “inference (which occurs within the reader’s emotional apparatus) is more powerful than unadorned information, i.e. a data dump.” I’m not entirely sure that Sapiro answers the question posed if this is the case.
Story Ratings No. 153 were discussed in the review of that issue.⁵
The only book review in this issue is a withering half-page on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land by Charles Platt titled Self-Conscious Sex:

[This] is a remarkably dull book. Stylistically, cloying American cliche and banter merge with a coyness (‘mammary gland’ used instead of ‘breast’) inconsistent with the self-consciously bold aim to be frank about sex, the result being a sort of adolescent Playboy philosophy.
There is an amazing amount of superfluity: the meat of the book—the reaction to human society of a man reared in an alien environment—only begins after the first 150 or so pages, and the unreal-sounding situations are bogged down by painstakingly detailed ‘authenticity’. This book could only have caused a stir in the naive world of sf ‘fandom’; the characters and action are entirely subordinated to Heinlein’s arguments, and since these are as trite and shallow as the writing itself, it is difficult to find any kind of value here. Heinlein might do better to return to writing adventure fiction, to which perhaps his talent is better matched.  p. 124

Brian W. Aldiss returns with the second of his Dr. Peristyle question and answer columns, and provides more waspish, polemical replies. I enjoyed this one more than the first.

The Small Advertisements page at the back of the issue is of interest this time around as it mentions some of the other SF books that Compact SF has recently published (see the right hand column in the image above). There had been the odd house ad for these before, and these would appear more often in future issues.

There are a number of generally good stories in this issue, but they are either minor or slightly flawed.  ●

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1. Graham Hall says that Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, “ends quietly and predictably with a heavy touch of irony.” As for the two allegories in this issue, he thinks that Moorcock’s* The Golden Barge is “fairly straightforward but pointless”, and Harvey’s Jake in the Forest “futile through its own incomprehensibility”.
Bennett’s Heat of the Moment is “an old idea with a new twist obvious from the third page”, and Castell’s Emancipation, “apart from being eight pages too long, is very fair indeed.” Tough crowd.
Hall liked Shaw’s . . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie best of all, and says it is “well-written, contains good SF ideas, and deals with the human condition, and does it all concisely and comprehensibly.”
*Hall is aware that “Barclay” is Moorcock, and adds that the piece may be an excerpt from an early, unpublished novel.

2. R. M. Bennett is the reviewer (and fan) Ron Bennett from a previous issue. His ISFDB page is here and here (hopefully in the process of being merged).

3. David Harvey was a one-shot wonder, although there were some other letters and essays. His ISFDB page is here. His more impressive Wikipedia page (as a “Marxist economic geographer” among other things) is here.

4. Shaw published eight stories in Nebula and Authentic in the mid to late fifties, and a collaboration with Walt Willis in If in 1960, then fell silent for a handful of years. His ISFDB page is here (some of the other early stories listed—along with the fannish classic The Enchanted Duplicator—appeared in Willis’s Slant, a fanzine).

5. There are no story ratings for this issue—it appears this issue’s were the last.  ●