Summary:
The highlight of this issue is Thomas Burnett Swann’s very good novella, The Dolphin and the Deep, a mythological fantasy that tells of a young man called Bear on a quest to find the goddess Circe.
There is also a good, if minor, ‘Midnight Club’ tale by Steve Hall which involves a magician who disappears his assistant into another dimension or space; a (rare) short story by Mervyn Peake (the author of the Gormenghast series); Terry Pratchett’s debut story (produced at the age of 14); and an interesting if not entirely successful novelette by John Rackham.
Michael Moorcock also provides a short but interesting piece on Mervyn Peake. Definitely an issue that is worth reading.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]
Other reviews:1
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 196-202)
_____________________
Editor, John Carnell
Fiction:
The Dolphin and the Deep • novella by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗∗
Same Time, Same Place • short story by Mervyn Peake ∗∗
The Hades Business • short story by Terry Pratchett ∗∗
Party Piece • short story by Steve Hall ∗∗∗
With Clean Hands • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Gerard Quinn
Editorial • by John Carnell
Mervyn Peake: An Appreciation • essay by Michael Moorcock
_____________________
This issue of Science Fantasy comes from period towards the end of John Carnell’s editorship (there would be another four issues of the magazine from Nova Publications before it was taken over by Roberts & Vinter, Ltd.), and it opens with the longest story that Thomas Burnett Swann had published at that time, The Dolphin and the Deep. It is a mythological fantasy (like nearly all of Swann’s work), is set in Cretan times, and concerns a young man called Bear on a quest to find the goddess Circe.
The story opens with Bear asking the captain of the ship he is travelling on to let him visit a passing island in the Mediterranean. After he swims ashore he explores, and later discovers a deserted palace. Then, while swimming back to the ship, he is accosted by a playful triton (merman) called Astyanax. When they start talking, and Bear mentions the palace, Astyanax asks Bear if he was searching for Circe, as the goddess used to live there a long time ago:
A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits gathered to say good-bye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”
“Did the bear get back to shore?”
“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” [Astyanax] hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”
“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”
“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.” p. 6
After learning more about Circe, Bear decides to set off to Libya to search for her, and he convinces Astyanax to come with him.
The passage above is a good example of the kind of material that follows, which is mostly a series of gentle, episodic adventures with a growing band of companions—but there are several setbacks en route, beginning with Bear overhearing a sailors’ plot to sell himself and the triton into slavery. The pair dive off the ship to escape, and Astyanax cuts loose the dinghy for Bear’s use. However, an albino dolphin (who Bear noticed at the island) appears and overturns the dinghy, and the boat’s crew quickly recaptures them.
When the pair eventually arrive at the slave market, Astyanax is quickly sold but, before his new (and scary) female owner can take possession, the triton is stolen by two brothers. Bear escapes during the confusion and quickly manages to track down Astyanax, who has been taken by two northern brothers called Balder and Frey. The two turn out to be innocents but, as Bear negotiates Astyanax’s freedom, they are found by the sailors who were trying to enslave them. A fight ensues and then, after they see off their attackers, Bear, Astyanax and the brothers approach a young man called Arun with a view to buying his boat, Halcyon. Arun decides that he wants to go with them on their quest, so they all set off together. They are joined by Atthis the albino dolphin, who, Astyanax says, only meant to surface near their dinghy not underneath it.
A month later they reach Artemis, re-provision, and set off for The Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). During this journey their comradeship develops, and Bear becomes increasingly infatuated by the thought of Circe:
Lit by the torch, the mast seemed a burning tree; somewhere ashore a wolf cub howled in hunger and, very close, a lamb bleated in terror. I thought of Circe, the end of all my voyages, the last and the loveliest of the will-o-the-wisps I had chased through twenty-five years. A hyacinth over the hill, a murex at the bottom of the sea: the distant and the perilous. I had sometimes loved in the past, for a week or a month; one girl had tired me with tears, another with laughter; I had tired of red hair and dark and hair the colour of barley when the harvesters come with their scythes; and most of all, of the waiting which love demands, the standing still while the moon curves up the sky and the birds fly south. But who could weary of Circe? Only Odysseus had left her, because of home. p. 24
More adventures ensue when they pass out of the Mediterranean: a Carthaginian vessel warns them not to go further south, but they continue anyway. Later they see a phoenix on the beach, and go onshore to investigate, and see if they can maybe get a feather. Frey wanders off and is captured by two harpies, who fly off with him. The rest of them catch a third harpy and force her to take them to their nest. They eventually rescue Frey, but only with the help of the harpy they captured, who ends up dead like the others.
Later they begin close in on Circe, or what remains of her, when Atthis brings a Cretan sword up from the depths. Bear’s exploration of the wreck—with Atthis’s assistance—provides a passage that illustrates Swann’s ability to combine reality, history, and myth:
I straddled her back and held [Atthis’s] dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the bank, lifting water in their sinuous trunks, stared at us with lordly indolence. Beyond the mouth of the river we paused and circled. Directly below us a galley wavered in the lucid depths.
Then she dove. On the floor of the sea, anemones pulsed their tentacles in a purple twilight. Diminutive lantern fish, with rows of luminescent spots, twinkled from our path. In a forest of rockweed a blood starfish curled its crimson legs. Redbeard sponges clung to the planks of the ship, which rested as lightly on the bottom as if it had settled at anchor. We circled the deck and found the cabin, whose roof lay open to the water. Hurriedly we searched the room.
The furnishings were Cretan: a terra cotta priestess with snakes in her hands; a tiny gold frog embedded with pearls; a tall-backed chair in the shape of a throne. I opened a chest and lifted a woman’s robe, with a bell-like skirt, puffing sleeves, and a tight bodice cut low to expose the breasts. For an instant, as the gown unfolded, Circe herself seemed to rise, a ghost, to greet me. Atthis shared my discovery. She caught the skirt in her beak and wrapped it around her flanks, as if to savour its richness and regret its inevitable destruction by the sea. Yes, this was Circe’s ship. It had sunk not hundreds of years ago but less than a hundred and, since there were no skeletons, Circe and her crew had presumably escaped. p. 36-37
After this underwater expedition Atthis leaves: the dolphin is upset that Bear brought back presents from the wreck for the boys but not for her and, more than that, she is jealous. However, when the ship is pursued by female pygmies she returns with a pod of dolphins who help them escape by pushing the ship. Bear makes amends:
I wanted to go to her myself, but my going must not, like my parting, seem thoughtless and crude. I must go to her partly as suppliant and partly as friend; indebted but not obsequious; grateful and gracious. With love and a gift which betokened love. I searched my mind for something which, even though belated, should not seem too late. I remembered the gown she had fondled in the sunken galley. I had no gowns or women’s cloaks, I had no jewels, no bracelets of amber stars nor necklaces of hammered gold. But I owned one object more precious to women than pearls: a bronze mirror with a handle like the neck of a swan.
Mirror in hand, I called to Atthis from the deck. She did not move; she waited on the surface, watchful, poised for flight (and also, no doubt, appraising the mirror). Guessing my intention, Astyanax left her and returned to the ship. I swam to her side.
Treading water, I held the mirror in front of her. She looked at the bronze and, seeing her image, recoiled; returned, and this time lingered. She tilted her head, she opened her beak, she rolled on her side with an artless and touching vanity. Then, having shown her delight, she spoke her gratitude—and her forgiveness—with a simple and eloquent gesture: she rested her beak on my shoulder. p. 41
There is one more short adventure, when a siren lures Astyanax away, before Bear finally finds Circe. Although they go ashore and free him, they are finally captured by the female pygmies.
When Bear and Circe finally meet she appears before him as a corn maiden, and asks why he has come. Bear says it is because of her, but she says he is in love with a dream. Later, after they talk of love and friendship, she tells him that if he wants to stay with her he must send his friends away. After some agonising he says he cannot, and the goddess tells him that he has made the right choice—if he had chosen her she would have killed him: “You have chosen the dolphin and not the deep.”
She goes on to tell him about the long line of men that have pursued her, before telling him she “could have loved him once.”
When Bear goes back to the ship he finds that Circe has changed Atthis into a young woman, and that Astyanax has been changed into a man. When Bear looks back at Circe he sees an old woman leaning on a cane, waving a slow farewell.
This story is, for the most part, an episodic and sometimes sentimental tale that places its characters in little real jeopardy (and the boy-gets-dolphin ending won’t appeal to everyone)—but I think it is a charming piece with some wonderfully descriptive passages. I also thought the ending, where Bear chooses friendship over infatuation, lifts the story to a higher level. If you like Swann’s work, you’ll love this one.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 20,150 words.
•
Same Time, Same Place by Mervyn Peake is the first of two stories that would appeared in the magazine that year, and opens with a description that evokes the grimness of post-war Britain:
That night, I hated father. He smelt of cabbage. There was cigarette ash all over his trousers. His untidy moustache was yellower and viler than ever with nicotine, and he took no notice of me. He simply sat there in his ugly armchair, his eyes half closed, brooding on the Lord knows what. I hated him. I hated his moustache. I even hated the smoke that drifted from his mouth and hung in the stale air above his head.
And when my mother came through the door and asked me whether I had seen her spectacles, I hated her too. I hated the clothes she wore; tasteless and fussy. I hated them deeply. I hated something I had never noticed before; it was the way the heels of her shoes were worn away on their outside edges—not badly, but appreciably. It looked mean to me, slatternly, and horribly human. I hated her for being human—like father. p. 57
When the narrator’s mother starts nagging him he feels suffocated, and leaves the house, getting on a bus to The Corner House restaurant in Piccadilly. There he befriends a woman, and he goes back to meet her on subsequent nights (although he wonders why she is always already there when he arrives, and remains seated when he leaves). Eventually, they arrange to marry.
The final section provides (spoiler) a nightmarish denouement—when his bus arrives late at the registrar’s office he sees, from the upper floor of the vehicle, a group of freakish individuals in the room where he is to be wed:
To the right of the stage (for I had the sensation of being in a theatre) was a table loaded with flowers. Behind the flowers sat a small pin-striped registrar. There were four others in the room, three of whom kept walking to and fro. The fourth, an enormous bearded lady, sat on a chair by the window. As I stared, one of the men bent over to speak to her. He had the longest neck on earth. His starched collar was the length of a walking stick, and his small bony head protruded from its extremity like the skull of a bird. The other two gentlemen who kept crossing and re-crossing were very different. One was bald. His face and cranium were blue with the most intricate tattooing. His teeth were gold and they shone like fire in his mouth. The other was a well-dressed young man, and seemed normal enough until, as he came for a moment closer to the window I saw that instead of a hand, the cloven hoof of a goat protruded from the left sleeve.
And then suddenly it all happened. A door of their room must have opened for all at once all the heads in the room were turned in one direction and a moment later a something in white trotted like a dog across the room.
But it was no dog. It was vertical as it ran. I thought at first that it was a mechanical doll, so close was it to the floor. I could not observe its face, but I was amazed to see the long train of satin that was being dragged along the carpet behind it.
It stopped when it reached the flower-laden table and there was a good deal of smiling and bowing and then the man with the longest neck in the world placed a high stool in front of the table and, with the help of the young man with the goat-foot, lifted the white thing so that it stood upon the high stool. The long satin dress was carefully draped over the stool so that it reached to the floor on every side. It seemed as though a tall dignified woman was standing at the civic altar. p. 63
The narrator stays on the bus and, after riding around for a while, eventually goes home. He now loves his mother and father, and never goes out again.
I wondered if this was an allegory about leaving home, only to see horror in the outside world (he variously refers to members of the group he saw as “malignant” and “evil”), and then wanting to return to an earlier time (Peake was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen).
An interesting piece, but perhaps rather too dream-like to be completely satisfying.
∗∗ (Average). 3,500 words.
•
The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through the air. He ends up unconscious in the fireplace and then, when he comes around, finds the Devil leaning over him.
During their subsequent conversation the Devil tells Crucible that no-one has arrived in the Other Place for almost two thousand years, and that he wants to hire Crucible to head up an advertising campaign. After the Devil leaves, Crucible thinks about the offer and concludes he wants the money—but doesn’t want Lucifer running around. So he visits his local church.
The next part of the story involves Crucible’s journey to a (dilapidated) Hell:
A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls—pardon me—sculls.
“What happened to what’s-his-name—Charon?”
“We don’t like to talk about it.”
“Oh.”
Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.
“Of course, you’ll have to replace this by a bridge.”
“Oh, yes.”
Crucible looked thoughtful.
“A ha’penny for them.”
“I am thinking,” said Crucible, “about the water that is lapping about my ankles.” p. 70
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the Devil do a lot of advertising appearances in an effort to promote Hell as a tourist destination, and the Other Place soon resounds to the general bedlam of humanity: the sounds of its many visitors’ jazz and pop music, their motorcycles, the click of slot machines, etc.
After a few weeks of this the Devil has had enough, at which point God appears out of a thunderstorm and asks him if he wants to come back up to Heaven. The Devil accepts the offer.
God then thanks Crucible, who has planned the whole endeavour with this outcome in mind.
This is a cutesy story, but it’s neatly and amusingly done—and it is a particularly impressive debut for a 14 year old. I wonder what became of this writer.2
∗∗ (Average). 3,650 words.
•
Party Piece by Steve Hall begins with some prefatory material about the President of the Midnight Club, Vance Seaton, organising the entertainment for the members’ Xmas dinner.
When the club’s science fiction, fantasy and horror writer members finally meet, and after they have finished their meal, Seaton introduces the first act—a magician called Levito and his daughter/assistant Gloria. After a series of tricks Levito finishes the act with his daughter floating in mid-air: the magician then moves his arms with a complicated flourish and she disappears.
Levito soon makes it clear to Seaton that Gloria wasn’t supposed to vanish, so Seaton gets the other act, a hypnotist, to go on while he and Levito discuss the matter. Seaton then conducts an examination:
Under Seaton’s directions, [Levito] gradually lowered the lighter from a point well above the warped space, where it was clearly visible to Seaton on the other side, until it moved into eclipse behind it. For a moment the flame seemed to wink out of existence, then it abruptly re-appeared and extended itself into a flaring, flickering curtain, as if distorted by some grotesque lens.
“Walk behind it yourself,” instructed [Seaton].
As Levito traversed the full length of the uncanny region, which was about waist high, the mid-section of his body seemed to expand and contract in an eye-wrenching fashion; at times it disappeared altogether, leaving his torso and legs to continue, apparently unconnected.
“Light doesn’t go through it,” muttered Seaton clinically, “it goes around it. I think I know what we’ve got here.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something like a Klein Bottle.” p. 81-82
Further discussions suggest that the enclosed space is a form of three dimensional Möbius strip (I think), and that Gloria may quickly run out of air or overheat.
When the Seaton finally reveals the dilemma to the club members, and asks for suggestions on how to free her, one of them suggests (spoiler) that Levito should move his arms in the opposite manner to unlock the space. However, when the magician tries to do this he cannot remember exactly what he did. Enter the hypnotist, who puts Levito into a trance . . . .
When Gloria finally reappears there is rapturous applause (some of the members think it is part of the act), and she reveals that virtually no time at all had passed inside the space (Seaton observes in passing that you probably can’t distort Space without affecting Time).
This probably sounds like a fairly slight piece, and a contrived one too—but it’s well told, and the hypnotist idea is a neat one.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,400 words.
•
With Clean Hands by John Rackham opens on a planet called Malin, where a planetary Governor called Ingersoll is hosting two anthropologists who have been living among the natives. The setting, though, is pretty much like the 1950’s British Empire in space, as can be seen from comments that Ingersoll’s wife’s Martha makes to one of the visitors later on:
“If you’re going to try to talk shop, Robert, take them into your study,” Martha got up. I’ve got work to do, as always. Stay single, my dear,” she shook her head archly at Olga. “Once you marry, well, you can’t really do anything else, afterwards. Children, housework, meals—it’s never ending. . .” and she went to the door to ring a hand-bell for servants. p. 89
After Marta leaves, Ingersoll and his two visitors discuss a native plant called Gleez, the basis for a sought after fabric which also has a special place in Malinese society and religion. Then, when one of the Malinese servants brings in a native version of coffee, Ingersoll learns that the native’s “cough”, a normally untreatable and eventually fatal disease, has been cured by another native he refers to as The Healer. Ingersoll later phones the Chief of Police asks him to investigate.
At dinner that night Ingersoll and his guests discuss the natives’ evensong before Daniels, the policeman, gets back to Ingersoll and tells him that has tracked down the healer. He reports that his preaching “sounds like a cross between Christianity and Socialism”, and adds that his ideas are catching on, something which has led to labour problems in some areas. Daniels also says that he has bugged his accommodation.
We later see Ingersoll’s son develop a cough, initially assumed by the parents to be a normal, human one until Martha comes and shows Ingersoll blood on a handkerchief—when it appears that their son has caught the native disease. Finally, in the middle of all this drama, Olga (one of the anthropologists) visits Ingersoll one evening and sits on his lap! They have a conversation about interdependence before kissing.
The second half of the story sees all these plot elements merge together (spoiler) and, after further unrest on the planet, the native chiefs demand to see Ingersoll. When they are let in, Ingersoll sees that they have brought the healer before him and say they want him crucified (they need Ingersoll’s permission as he has banned public executions). Then, during the meeting, his son bursts in and is cured by the healer.
Ingersoll later questions the healer in private about his activities, and tells him that he can’t continue causing the same level of disruption. Ingersoll adds that he will be left alone to teach if he tones down his message and stops causing trouble for the native chiefs. The healer refuses.
Later, when the pressure to have The Healer crucified becomes overwhelming, Ingersoll once more meets the chiefs, this time asking for a bowl of water and a towel before consciously doing a Pontius Pilate act. After the chiefs take the healer away to his fate Ingersoll tells Daniels to slip the healer something that will help with the pain of crucifixion—and arranges for the native’s body to be spirited away afterwards.
Ingersoll later tells the anthropologists that he has arranged for the removal of the healer’s body from its burial place as he wants to help spread his message on Malin. Later, of course, Daniels finds the body has vanished. The story ends with Ingersoll telling Olga that he is going to send his wife and son back to Earth; Olga says she will stay on the planet with him.
Most of the first half of this story is an amalgam of colonial and social clichés from the 1950s, but the last part is an engagingly weird, if predictable, alien Messiah/crucifixion variant3—with an atypical side helping of adultery and marital breakdown.
∗∗ (Average). 11,500 words.
•••
This issue’s Cover is an eye-catching duotone illustration by Gerard Quinn, a regular artist for the magazine.
The Editorial by John Carnell opens with the news that the magazine is a Hugo finalist for Best Professional Magazine, quite a feat for a UK mag, as Carnell notes (he imagines that at least half the delegates won’t have seen an issue). He then goes on to note that Thomas Burnett Swann’s Where is the Bird of Fire? (Science Fantasy #52, April 1962) is also a finalist in the Best Short Fiction category.4
The rest of the editorial deals with the two Peake stories that Carnell has acquired, and the essay he obtained from Michael Moorcock, as well as a mention that Terry Pratchett was fourteen years old when he wrote his story.
Carnell ends with this exciting news:
At the moment we are planning on making Science Fantasy a monthly publication just as soon as possible. Exactly when will depend entirely upon how soon I get sufficient good material in hand to make this step a successful one. You can rest assured that you will be informed well in advance.
If only.
Mervyn Peake: An Appreciation by Michael Moorcock is an enthusiastic and interesting piece that made me want to rush out and read the Gormenghast trilogy, even though I had a fairly lukewarm response to Titus Groan when I read it some years ago.
In the course of the essay Moorcock comments on Peake’s writing:
Peake isn’t, in the strict sense, a fantasy writer—he is a writer. In seeking to classify his unclassifiable work some critics have labelled it ‘Gothic’ (albeit ‘Gothic masterpiece’) and have done it a disservice. The books stand as what they are—novels. They tell a story. Peake is a story-teller and his taste runs to the grotesque, the macabre and the bizarre, not to mention the purely comic (for there is zest, joy and humour in these books, a keen observation of the ridiculous in human types).
But his images are not there for their own sake (as Bradbury’s sometimes are, or Lovecraft’s often are)—they are there to push the stories along—the stories of bewildered Titus, scheming Steerpike, ironical Prunesquallor, vague Countess Gertrude, tormented Sepulchrave (these descriptions don’t do them justice) and, quite literally, a host of others. p. 54
Then he provides several biographical anecdotes:
About this time, before the war, he was living in a converted warehouse on the Battersea side of Chelsea Bridge. He got home one night to discover that the floor was heaving and undulating, so he prised up a floorboard to investigate what was causing the disturbance beneath him. He discovered an elephant! Perturbed that the beast’s restless movement would shake the whole place down he found that it could be calmed if scratched on its back with a walking stick. He scratched the elephant all night, until Bertram Mills’s Circus, who had been forced, for want of a better place, to lodge their elephant there for the night, came to take it away. p. 55
Captain Peake was one of the first Britons to witness the horror of Belsen. He has described this experience in a series of sketches and a particularly good poem The Consumptive, Belsen, 1945 (published in The Glassblowers, 1950). Some of the sketches have also been published in the Gray Walls edition of Drawings by Mervyn Peake.
While in the Army he conceived and began Titus Groan—at one time, whilst changing camps, losing his kit-bag containing the manuscript.
Luckily, both kit-bag and Ms., were eventually recovered and the novel’s publication in 1946 was acclaimed by the critics. p. 56
Unfortunately, at the time of publication of this essay, Peake appears to have been in poor health (“On the wall, tantalisingly, is pinned the plan for the fourth Titus book which he feels he will never write, now.”) Peake subsequently passed away after a long decline in 1968.5
•••
This is an issue of Science Fantasy that is well worth digging out. Although the only outstanding story is the Swann, there is much else of interest here. ●
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1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 196-202) says this of The Dolphin and the Deep:
Like Swann’s earlier stories, this one is convincingly strange, conveying a sense of a world where people think differently to us. It’s longer and more wandering than the others and suffers from it, and the theme of the beautiful boy (admittedly, this one is a fish from the waist down) leading the long-unmarried protagonist into danger is less well integrated into the story than in The Sudden Wings. However, the story survives and is ultimately impressive and satisfying.
He adds that “the [religious] point of [Rackham’s With Clean Hands] escapes me”, especially given the wife/other woman subplot; that the Peake story is “outstanding” and “nightmarishly perfect”; the Pratchett is “reasonably amusing”; and the Hall, “mildly clever”.
2. Yes, I am joking: Terry Pratchett’s ISFDB page. I got about twenty books into the ‘Discworld’ series (about half way through) before the increasingly bloated size of some of the volumes started wearing me out (he always seemed to be incapable of efficiently wrapping up the story). Still, I must go back and re-read some of the better ones.
3. One of the most famous alien crucifixion stories is Harry Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon, published in Science Fantasy’s sister magazine New Worlds a year earlier (#122, September 1962, as An Alien Agony). One wonders if Rackham saw Harrison’s story before writing his own.
4. This dual Hugo finalist feat was quite an achievement for what was, by this point, mostly a fantasy magazine—something that, if memory serves, its sister magazine New Worlds didn’t achieve.
5. The Wikipedia page and SFE page for Mervyn Peake. ●
