Summary:
This British fiction digest regularly published science fiction in its pages (sometimes as a “Science Fiction Choice”), and this issue has the second (and final) instalment of a novella-length version of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, a post-nuclear-holocaust tale about persecuted mutant telepaths. There is also Forty Day Road, which is a timeslip story from Christopher Landon, author of Ice Cold in Alex, the source novel for a classic WWII movie.
The rest of the magazine is non-SF material, most notable of which is H. E. Bates’ surprisingly transgressive (for its time) The Good Corn. There are also good stories from Brian Cleeve and David Beaty.
Galactic Central link
Archive.org copy
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Editor not listed
Fiction:
Trust Little Al • short story by Michael Gilbert ∗∗
Haunted Summer • short story by Mary Lee Settle ∗∗+
Cat’s-Paw • short story by W. S. Money ∗
The Good Corn • short story by H. E. Bates ∗∗∗+
Six Legs Are Welcome • short story by Geoffrey Household ∗∗+
Duel • short story by Brian Cleeve ∗∗∗
Forty Day Road • short story by Christopher Landon ∗∗+
Heart of the Storm • novelette by David Beaty ∗∗∗
Air on a G-String • reprint short story by Cordelia Baird Gross –
The Chrysalids [Part 2 of 2] • novella serial by John Wyndham ∗∗∗+
Non-fiction:
Fuchsias • poem by John Pudney
Mixed Bag • quiz
Rendezvous • poem and prose extracts
River Music • poem by Fleur Mountain
Carte Blanche • poem by Ogden Nash
Garden Pleasures • poem and prose extracts
Argosy Crossword
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John Wyndham’s novella version of The Chrysalids concludes in this issue with what is essentially the ‘chase’ half of the much longer novel (a more comprehensive review of the latter can be found here, and you may wish to skim that before reading on).
This part starts with a horseman coming upon some of the group as they cluster round Petra after she has telepathically shouted for help for a second time (a ferocious mutant predator attacked her mount while she was horse-riding in the woods). The horseman is suspicious as to why several people have come from different directions to help her, but they manage to assuage his misgivings before taking Petra home. The group later discuss what happened, and agree that David should train Petra so she can control her telepathic ability. During this training she mentions to David that she can detect “thought-shapes” that are being sent from the distant south-west.
Uncle Axel later warns David that people are asking questions about the group found with Petra. When David discusses it with the others they conclude that, if the authorities interrogate Petra, they will find out about their group, so they make contingency plans to escape the village. Later, however, it is Katherine and Sally who are arrested and questioned, while David, Petra, and Rosalind narrowly avoid being captured and flee towards the Fringes. A posse from the village pursues them, and Michael—who isn’t identified by the authorities as one of the group—joins it so he can give them constant updates about the its progress.
During the threesome’s journey towards what they hope will be safety, Petra mentions that the thoughts from far away are getting stronger and, after messages relayed through Petra, they learn that (spoiler): the sender a woman; she lives in a place called Zealand (in a city with flying machines passing overhead; and that it is day there and not night. The woman tells David and Rosalind that Petra’s telepathic strength is exceptional, and that she must be protected at all costs. She also reveals her humourless superiority:
“We are the New People—so are you. The people who can think-together. We’re the people who are going to build a new world—a different world from the Old People’s and the savages’.”
“The kind of people that God intended?” I [David] suggested, with a feeling of being on familiar ground.
“I don’t know about that. But we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People. They were savages, half men. Shut off from one another, with only inadequate words to link them; tribes shut off by different languages; minds shut off by different religions. There was never any unity in them.
“Individually, some of them could think: collectively, they could not. The more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They could co-operate constructively in small units, but only destructively in large ones. They aspired greedily, and then refused the responsibilities they had created. With one hand they grasped reason, with the other they rejected it. Singly, some of them tried to be men; in groups, they remained primitive. There was, you see, no real communication between them: the system of words could work at all only where individuals were very similar: applied to large numbers, it broke down.
“They brought down Tribulation, which all but destroyed them. They were inadequate.” p. 125
After more adventures in the woods (the Fringe folk capture the three and take them to their camp where they meet the spiderman, etc.) there is a climactic battle between the posse from the village and the Fringe folk. In the middle of the fight the Zealand woman arrives overhead in a helicopter and sprays everyone below with sticky webs which incapacitate them. The helicopter lands, and the woman releases the three children (while leaving the untermensch—and the horses—to die). David, Rosalind and Petra leave in the helicopter with the woman.
The last scene has them overhead the city in Zealand, where David senses the hive-mind below.
Although this part isn’t as good as the first it isn’t bad—and is a lot better than the version in the novel. This is because a lot of the padding—the idea of God’s image, and the Zealand woman’s evolutionary destiny lectures—is excised. That said, the whole thing is somewhat over-compressed, but this version is definitely worthy of consideration for any Best of the Year anthology.
There is only one other fantasy or science fiction piece in this issue (there were three last time), and that is a timeslip story, Forty Day Road by Christopher Landon (Landon is best known for the novel Ice Cold in Alex,1 which became a popular British WWII movie.)
This story, like Ice Cold for Alex, is also set in the desert, where the demobbed narrator is sent by his company to search for signs of a locust swarm. During this expedition the team end up camping on an old slavers’ route, the “Forty Day Road.” One night, after celebrating the birthday of an American biologist with the group, the narrator wakes up in the small hours and goes for a walk up the road. When he stops to rest, he falls asleep.
He wakes to the sound of a large camel train coming up the road and, as it starts to pass him, he sees the slaves. Then the flank guards capture him and he joins the train. For the next four days he travels up the road with the slavers before (spoiler) slipping back through time to the future.
This is a slight piece (man falls through time, and then falls back) but there is some good description of the camel train and its people, and a neat, if perhaps unoriginal, last line that confirms his journey wasn’t a dream.
The rest of the fiction includes Trust Little Al by Michael Gilbert, which is a lightweight espionage story where a secret services type looks after a scientist on holiday in Austria. The latter is an unreliable womaniser (who paradoxically doesn’t brush his teeth much), so it makes for a demanding job. There is also a femme fatale, a (spoiler) abduction attempt, and a final twist where we learn that a couple of the characters are not who they seem. Slick, but it’s hard to care much about what happens.
Although it isn’t a ghost story (spoiler: the explanation at the end is mundane), Haunted Summer by Mary Lee Settle certainly feels like one for most of the way through, and starts with this:
I was ten. I spent the first part of the summer being wonderfully frightened by slipping into her room, and reading Ghost Stories or True Spiritual Experiences or Voices from Beyond. I would sit in the corner in the afternoon, for she was never there then, she always slept in the hammock on the downstairs back porch.
There in the half-dark, in the cool half-dark (for the blinds were drawn against the heat outside), the room was deep green, strangely larger than when the sun was allowed in, and it had the still silence of a room waiting—or asleep. Her big rocker would be empty, but the overstuffed seat was bent with use so that it didn’t seem empty.
Against the wall stood the huge bed that my Aunt Phemie had died in; my Aunt Eliza said she lingered for months after and that the hole never healed at all, not from the time they brought her home. The big bed sank in the middle, too, and that too seemed occupied, occupied by—I was learning a new language—ectoplasm and heat.
There I would sit with my back tight against the wall, for what I could see I didn’t fear so much, and I would read from the dusky pulp magazines about the ever-recurring spot on the floor, made by the drowned sailor, or stories about Things that weren’t anything but seemed made of flesh and slithered under the study door and crawled onto the study desk where the man who was writing the story used to sit. pp. 18-19
This is (for the most part) a convincingly atmospheric tale about a young girl who lives in a big house in the deep South, and who thinks that the attic contains an “It.” When she eventually sees a woman with lank black hair who gestures at her, she flees. After summoning her courage, the girl goes back for another look . . . .
The explanation is disappointingly rational, which is a shame, but it’s worth a look.
Cat’s-Paw by W. S. Money begins with two sailors on a ship, one of whom, Charlie, expresses a vehement dislike of the resident ginger tomcat. Charlie goes on to complain about his sister-in-law and her cat, who both live with him and his wife. Then, on the return trip, he sees a shipmate with a monkey that chases off the ship’s tomcat, so he buys it, thinking that it will sort out his problems at home.
On the next trip the narrator speaks to Charlie and discovers that (spoiler) the monkey made friends with the cat but attacked the sister-in-law, who then left with the cat! Much to Charlie’s two-birds-with-one-stone delight.
If you are in the mood for a story about an unpleasant protagonist with family grievances and a poor attitude towards animals, this will be right up your street. It wasn’t up mine.
Highlight of the issue, apart from the Wyndham, is The Good Corn by H. E. Bates, which begins with much scene setting that involves a married couple on their rural small-holding. They put away money at the end of every market day for the family they plan to have but, after twenty five years, the woman has not conceived. When a new-born calf dies, she becomes depressed, and the doctor suggests to the husband that they make a fresh start somewhere else, and without livestock.
The second half of the story sees the couple mainly growing corn at their new farm. Later on they employ a girl to help the wife with the chores, and we eventually we find that the she previously had an illegitimate child. As she didn’t want to keep it her family gave it away. One day the husband and the girl talk while they are out in the fields, and (spoiler) he ends up kissing her. . . .
When the girl gets pregnant for a second time, the wife adopts a surprisingly pragmatic response to both her unfaithful husband and to the child that is born.
Bates manages to get an amazing number of what I thought would be 1950’s taboos into this story: failure to conceive, illegitimate birth, adultery, lack of maternal concern, and a wife adopting a husband’s child by another woman.
I’m becoming increasingly interested in this writer, and look forward to more of his work in the magazine.
Six Legs Are Welcome by Geoffrey Household has an intriguing start:
It’s no good waving at them. Take this one, for example! She’ll get bored with crawling up my arm in a moment, and fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there’s just the usual mixture of insects, and on the twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all the available air.
No, I don’t know what these are called—apart from their Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren’t they? Six legs. Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo tube in the stern. That’s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick it out. There you are—neither of you one penny the worse!
We’ll go inside in another half-hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn’t pay any attention at all to these fellows. They’re just satisfying their curiosity, with only one day to do it in perhaps. Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don’t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won’t squash a cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in-law. I’ve no fellow-feeling for any of the little pests.
But if it hadn’t been for them I should be halfway through a life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. A man can never quite forget a bit of luck like that. It’s bound to influence him. Let me get you another glass. That one’s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably. Live and let live—that’s all I say.
This bit of Paraguay belongs to them quite as much as to me. p. 43
There then follows a tale about a young woman recruited from a convent by an insalubrious bar-owner. When the narrator meets her he tries, over a period of several days, to make friends with the woman, but eventually her angry brother arrives. There is (spoiler) a knife fight where the bar owner dies, followed by the narrator, brother, and sister escaping into the night with the police pursuing.
Just when they look like they will be caught, a swarm of fireflies blinds their pursuers and lets them escape. This is a clever ending and nice image, but the bulk of the story isn’t entirely convincing.
Duel by Brian Cleeve2 is a tale of unrequited love and jealousy in a small Irish village, and starts with the narrator, “Jamie the Book,” walking a girl home after a dance:
I could feel the warmth of her, and sometimes her arm would brush against mine by accident. There was a faint scent from her dress, and her hair was like a dark shadow swinging at her shoulders.
I wanted to say something to her, tell her how beautiful she was, but I was afraid. I knew how she’d turn to me, her eyes grey-green and cold as the sea, her mouth contemptuous, and she wouldn’t need to answer me. And I’d just blush and stammer, as I had a dozen and two dozen times before.
That was the kind of thing that drove the other boys away from her. The sureness of her, the bold swing of her when she walked, and the way she’d look a man straight in the face. They may like that kind of thing in the cinema in Ireland, but they don’t like it in a wife. It’s the girl with the little, meek voice and a couple of hundred pounds put by from her wages that they’re looking for.
A girl like Fran only frightens them, when she doesn’t annoy them. p. 56
Later, Fran meets a stranger, and the narrator has to cope with his jealousy:
And for an hour I stravaiged up and down the hillsides round Ballysaggart, looking for the pair of them, although I still hadn’t an idea in my mind as to why I was doing it. I scrambled through the heather and over grey, naked rocks that burnt my hands with the heat of them from the sun, until my bad leg ached and the sweat blinded my eyes so much that I couldn’t have seen them if they were standing within five yards of me. At last I gave it up and went home again, flinging myself down on the bed and lying there until it was dark and the rage of jealousy inside me drove me out into the street again.
I wasn’t out long before I heard all about the stranger that had danced with Fran and come for her that same morning, laying his hand on her in broad daylight in the open street, and she letting him. The slut, they said. We always knew she was that kind of girl, we always knew it. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to kill them for saying it, or Fran for giving them reason, or myself for misery. But I only asked them about the stranger.
“From Clare,” they said, “where his father is an auctioneer. Rotten with money, and the boy down here spying out the land for a bit of a farm for himself. And maybe a wife.”
They looked sideways at me when they said that, and laughed, and I know now why men sometimes run crazy in the streets and kill whomever they meet. pp. 59-60
Fran and the stranger eventually become a couple until one day when she is cruelly jilted in public. When she slaps the stranger he retaliates, and Jamie comes down from his vantage point up at the top of the street. He and the stranger fight each other with blackthorn sticks. Jamie wins, and Fran laughs. They walk defiantly down the street together.
This is a convincing portrait of village life, with good description of the characters and their emotional states.
Heart of the Storm by David Beaty starts with a description of a developing hurricane in the Caribbean before cutting to a BOAC airliner flying through the storm. The aircraft’s radio operator then picks up an SOS from a ship and, when the tugs can’t find the ship, Kelson (the aircraft captain and a dry, stiff upper lip type) decides to go and look for it. The rest of the crew don’t seem so keen (they don’t have that much spare fuel), but Kelson made his mind up, so off they go.
Most of the first half of the story comprises of description of crew interaction and operation, such as when they fly towards a radio beacon on the islands to fix their position before letting down through the cloud to low level:
To Bates, listening hard, it seemed almost unbelievable that there was anything beyond these clouds, that the world’s laws of physics and motion still held good in this grey, limitless universe. As though some unseen hand was disciplining it, the needle on the radio compass started to hunt only about twenty degrees either side of dead ahead.
Seeing its performance, Bates felt more cheerful. “We’re getting nearer, Skipper,” he said. “Seems just slightly port. Could you alter 5 degrees to the left?”
“I’m following the needle now,” Kelston replied, “as far as it’ll let me.”
Ten minutes later, the pointer steadied. Still slightly left. FY was pounding out now with a much more heartening strength. Suddenly, the needle seemed lost. It turned now one way, now the other, as though trying to make up its mind. Then decisively, it toppled over, and pointed behind them.
“Over it, sir,” Bates shouted.
“So I see,” Kelston said. “I’m turning on to one-three-five degrees . . . out to sea. Throttles right back.”
The engines died down to nothing. “I’ll have to put gear and half flap down, Mr. Hawkins. We’ve got to get down fast and I don’t want the speed to build up. Not in this turbulence.” The pump whined as it forced the hydraulic fluid into the terrific pressure needed to put the wheels down. When they were locked, Kelston lowered the flaps. Due to their drag effect, only 140 knots showed on the indicator, yet Easy Zebra was approaching the sea at over 4,000 feet a minute. p. 82
If you don’t have an aviation background or interest, you’ll probably find this kind of thing as dull as ditchwater—but if you do, you’ll find these descriptions of steam driven aviation fascinating. Either way, these sections aren’t too long and don’t detract from the story.
Once the aircraft descends below the cloud they search the area and eventually find the ship, and then go to find the tugs. However, as they are low on fuel, they have to leave the area before the tugs and ship find each other. The aircraft eventually lands at San Miguel, after making an unorthodox visual approach below cloud.
The second half of the story is quite different from the first part, and we see a more reflective Kelston in his hotel room:
Now that he was back on the ground, like most other airline pilots, Kelston had a lost look about him which even the kindliness of the room could not quite drive away. Not even his own house where he spent a week out of every three, could be called his home. The nearest thing to it was the inside of a Marlborough. That noisy, confined little kingdom was where normally he felt happiest
When he was not flying, Kelston tended to feel frustrated, conscious of the many things he had not done with his life He had gone into his father’s export business, which had been one of the first casualties of the war. He had joined the Air Force, learnt to fly, acquired a certain tight-lipped stoniness on his face, which conveniently walled out his thoughts from other people.
And afterwards, partly because there was nothing else to do, partly because flying was now in his blood, he had joined British Empire Airways.
It was a familiar pattern that he shared with many people, but in his heart he was not satisfied with it. As a kind of sop to an active and intelligent brain that largely lay idle, for his work was mainly routine, he wrote articles on the technical side of flying for several aviation magazines. p. 89
Kelston falls asleep, misses dinner time, and grumpily goes down to the bar. He is surprised when the head waiter comes to bring him to the restaurant, where they have kept food for him. The waiter asks him to phone the owner of the ship, and Kelston realises that the waiter and the serving staff (and nearly everyone else on the island) has a family connection of some sort to the crew on the ship—hence his special treatment.
During the call, Kelston discovers that the tugs will try to bring the ship into harbour as the eye of the storm passes over the island, and the owner invites him to come down and watch.
After some more scene setting at the docks, and the introduction of a female character called Karena, the operation concludes successfully. This second half puts the more technical/adventure oriented first part into a human context.
I enjoyed this. It’s certainly of its period (the ex-forces and taciturn Kelston, the wearing of pajamas for a two hour nap(!), etc.) but there is a lot of interesting period description of both the aircraft and the characters.3
Last, and most definitely least (I disliked this even more than Money’s cat story) is Air on a G-String by Cordelia Baird Gross (Harper’s Magazine). This is about Pansy St Clare, a teenage stripper (her mother started her in the occupation “when her voice changed”) who wants to be a cook. Then one day she sees a competition where the prize is a stove . . . .
Wrong in so many ways, but it has a clever last line.
There are three poems in this issue, Fuchsias by John Pudney (Sixpenny Songs, John Lane, 1953), River Music by Fleur Mountain, and Carte Blanche by Ogden Nash (The New Yorker, 1955), all of which seem dreadfully old fashioned or naff, and none of which I cared for. Ditto for the two poem and prose extract features, Rendezvous and Garden Pleasures.
There is also a quiz, Mixed Bag, and the Argosy Crossword.
This isn’t as good an issue as the last one but there is still a lot of interesting and/or entertaining work here. ●
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1. Christopher Landon’s Wikipedia page is here. He also wrote the script of Ice Cold in Alex, and one the movie’s final scenes spawned years of Carlsberg lager adverts. (PS The barman in that clip should have faced a war-crimes tribunal for the way he pours the beer.)
2. Brian Cleeve was an award-winning broadcaster with RTE, as well as being a prolific novelist, and his short work mostly appeared in the likes of Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. However, he also had two stories in F&SF in 1968, The Devil and Jake O’Hara (August), and The Devil in Exile (November).
His stories are listed on Galactic Central, and he has an extensive Wikipedia page.
3. David Beaty’s Heart of the Storm is an extract from the novel of the same title. Normally I can’t stand extracts as they aren’t self-contained, but this one is, and it also interested me enough to make me dig out a copy of the novel from the Internet Archive. The better quality PDF of the US edition is available here (under a different title, The Four Winds, and a cover that makes it look like a romance novel).
Beaty himself is an interesting character: after his flying career (the wartime RAF, where he won a DFC and bar, and then BOAC) he subsequently became a writer and later trained as a psychologist. Using this latter qualification, he went on to be one of the first people in the aviation field to write on the subject of Human Factors. His Wikipedia page is here, and there is an informative Independent obituary here. ●
