ISFDB link
Other reviews: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 by John Boston & Damien Broderick (Amazon)
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Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli
Fiction:
Pink Plastic Gods • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
The Contraption • novelette by Kenneth Bulmer
Blast Off • short story by Kyril Bonfiglioli [as by uncredited] ∗∗
Lazarus • short story by Brian W. Aldiss [as by Jael Cracken] ∗
Unauthorised Persons • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss [as by John Runciman]
Matchbox • short story by Peter Bradley ∗
The Great Chan • short story by Archie Potts ∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Roger Harris
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli
“Science Fantasy” • poem by Peter Levi
Competition: For Professional Scientists Only
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As I mentioned in my review of New Worlds #142 (Science Fantasy’s sister magazine), Nova Publications were struggling with the poor circulations of both magazines during 1963, a situation which caused Nova’s board of directors to close them down. When a new publisher was found at the last moment, a new editor was required as the previous one, John Carnell, had made other plans for the future. Both Michael Moorcock and Kyril Bonfiglioli were approached by (or had approached) David Warburton of Roberts & Vinter (the new publisher) about the job. Warburton decided to split the positions: Moorcock expressed a preference for New Worlds, so Bonfiglioli became Science Fantasy’s new editor.
Kyril Bonfiglioli, unlike Moorcock, was a complete unknown in the SF field and so his appointment “came as a surprise to many.” An Oxford art dealer friend of Brian W. Aldiss, he was “the director of two art galleries, a bookshop and an antique shop; and had at one time been a sabre champion.”1, 2 Apart from his swordsmanship skills, Bonfigliloi had no editorial qualifications.
The issue opens with the new editor’s Editorial, which is more in the ‘house-keeping’ rather than ‘manifesto’ tradition of inaugural addresses. After acknowledging the change of publisher and editor, the Editorial exhorts readers to buy rather than borrow the magazine as a small increase in circulation will make a big difference to the rates paid to writers (and the profits made by publishers, one presumes). His second exhortation to the readership is to start writing stories as, after having read a quarter of a million words of manuscript “so bad it made me blush,” he has concluded that no-one is writing the kind of material the readers want. Finally he denies that science fantasy exists but, before getting too far into his theological reasons why, wanders off into a list of the things he doesn’t want to see in a story, concluding with:
What you really cannot do—if you are writing for adults—is have a Venusian princess materialise out of the air, offering to free your hero from the BEM’s clutches if he will come to Krzk and kill the wicked High Priest of Zoz with the magic sword of Ugg. Ugh. My editorial watchword, then, is “Science Fiction for Grown-Ups!” I hope I shall be able to make it hold good. p. 3
After the editorial there is a poem titled “Science Fantasy”, “specially written” by Peter Levi (there is a short note about it after the Aldiss story). The individual stanzas are okay but the first pair don’t seem to have anything to do with the last.
The first of the stories is Pink Plastic Gods by Brian W. Aldiss, one of three pieces by him in this issue.3 It has an intriguing start:
Every day that hot August of 2111 I was in Long Barrow Field, getting on with the potato harvesting. The six neosimians I employed worked hard in their monkey way, the heat shimmering above their bent backs. They worked two hours on and a half hour off, scamping if I let them.
“Keep up with us, Judy! Hey, Tess, that’s Daisy’s trench!”
Judy was the laziest of the bunch, yet Judy was the one I liked best.
Our first shift began as Sol rose, and the last shift finished after he’d gone and we were up to our knees in a mist as thick as rice pudding. Slowly we worked our way round the long pillow shape of Barrow Hill, day in, day out, from pearly light to purple. Neosimians have their drawbacks—they’re slow for one thing—but they are vastly cheaper than machines; and unlike machines they never miss a potato—if you keep watching them.
I kept watching them. Every potato meant a penny off the load of debt I had shouldered since manhood. But that still left me time to glance up to the top of Barrow Hill every so often, to regard the solitary figure up there surveying me. p. 5-6
The figure is Smith’s affluent neighbour, Aurel Derek Seyfert. One day Seyfert comes to speak to Smith and, after Smith’s initial rebuff, convinces him to go to a party taking place at Seyfert’s home. The party segment reveals a number of things: first, Smith leads a circumscribed life; second, he is an person who is blunt to the point of rudeness; third, Seyfert is as out of place at his own party as Smith is; fourth, Seyfert’s son Monday is the inventor of the robots—styled after famous sculptures—that are serving at the party, the eponymous “pink plastic gods”:
I turned to Seyfert. Catching him looking at me in that same enigmatic way, I said angrily. “Why do you keep all these statues around?”
“You mean our pink plastic gods!” he exclaimed. Suddenly he became animated. “They’re at once our slaves and our rulers! How do you like them, eh? Aren’t they foul, aren’t they vulgar? Aren’t they the epitome of our stinking, decadent, useless, putrid civilization? Come on, Smith, I value your opinion as the first honest man I’ve met in years. Aren’t they just the goddammed end of everything?”
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“Beautiful! They’re cheap and nasty! They’re fakes. Famous sculptures brought to life. That was the Venus de Milo to greet us at the door. Michelangelo’s David gave us our first drinks. This little beauty is one of Canova’s marbles. The castle crawls with walking statues. ‘Any masterpiece copied for your delight’ is Monday’s motto. I told you he manufactures them? Pink plastic outside, wheels and levers inside. p. 12
The final section has Smith leaving the party and walking home, with Seyfert as unwelcome company. During the journey it looks like there will be a falling out over Smith’s bankrupt father (Seyfert was one of the creditors). However, Seyfert tells Smith he is indebted to his father, as it was after the collapse of his company that Seyfert travelled to another planet and met and married an alien woman. He tells Smith of his life with her, but (spoiler) the account has a tragic end:
“[In] twenty-seventy the Anti-Miscegenation Laws were passed with cheers from all the do-gooders in the universe. The net result was the establishing of strict segregation from which it’ll take Uffitsi ages to recover. If you can picture a cross between the colour bar in the United States and the apartheid that ruled what was the South African Republic last century, you have an idea of what happened on that beautiful planet almost overnight.
“So I found myself outside the law, with my marriage declared null and void, and Adam officially proclaimed a Sport. According to biologists it was amazing we’d had a living child at all. Yes, they caught up with us, the bastards. We could have gone on living peacefully in that valley for ever, Pampas and Adam and I, but the officials came with their cases full of forms and police support. Hardacre, I could have killed every mother’s son of them—yet they were nice polite men, personally very sorry for interfering, but orders were orders and the law was the law . . . You know the attitude. No law is so legal as a new law, and we couldn’t escape it.
“We were all three hauled up for trial in a city a thousand miles away from our valley. We did the journey on the Uffitsian monorail, under government escort. On the way—it must have been just the sorrow of it all—poor little Adam died. He did it so easily, James, so easily, like falling into an after dinner doze, and never a word he spoke.”
I did not know what to say. Dying has always seemed to me the hardest job a man can put his hand to. Of course, for all Seyfert said, his kid was a freak, no denying it. We walked in silence for some way while I mulled the matter over, until Seyfert wiped a hand across his eyes and spoke again. p. 19-20
The different parts of this story don’t really work together (the ‘pink plastic gods’ part in particular seems out of place) but I liked it nonetheless. The main characters are complex and fascinating characters, and I also liked the maturity and the grimness of the piece. These elements foreshadows Aldiss’s later, better work.
The Contraption by Kenneth Bulmer also gets off to a promising start with an attempt at defusing a booby trap on an unknown device in an alien ship:
They all saw him die without a sound. On the closed-circuit screen, the silent flare of the explosion, utterly sudden, utterly deadly, momentarily blinded the watching men in the bunker.
Bill Barrington was not the first man to gamble his life against the thing out there. He was, in fact, the fifth.
Like all the others, he had lost. Luke Rawson fought down the sick, helpless anger in him, the useless nerve-corroding rage. Bill Barrington had been a friend. Now he was only a memory. They wouldn’t find enough of him decently to bury in a matchbox. p. 23
Unfortunately it soon turns into a Royal Navy in space story, with a plot about the alien Brute ships (U-boats) decimating the Terran (Atlantic) convoys, and the humans (Brits) trying to discover the alien’s (Nazi’s) secret. The central character Rawson is dispatched to capture another ship. At the same time, a Terran Intelligence colonel waiting for a ride to a planet called Cudham I—this is added into the mix so it can provide a solution to the problem at the end of the story. (Cudham I is surrounded by a 3-D version of Saturn’s rings and, later, the colonel cannot penetrate the debris field. Sure enough, (spoiler) the booby-trapped device turns out to be a navigation device that enables the Earthmen to find a path to the surface of the planet.) However, before this finale the story plods on for what seems like forever.
As with most of these stories it suffers from many failures of imagination (advanced spaceships with the guns of a battleship, a colonel who carries a briefcase and unrolls a paper star chart, bacon and egg sandwiches for breakfast, etc., etc.) A Carnell reject I suspect.
Blast Off is an anonymous piece subtitled “Astronaut’s thoughts from the Finnish.” When the story was later reprinted it emerged that Bonfigliloi was the author.4 It is an interesting work that presages the New Wave with the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of an astronaut about to board a spaceship:
Yes, well, there it stands, that’s the thing you have to ride on, next stop the heavens ha ha and don’t think you aren’t scared don’t let anyone think I’m scared I mean I’m don’t anyone think I’m not scared oh you know. But anyway there it stands and I suppose like the man says it has a kind of stark beauty and all—long and slim and pointing up to the stars my destination and don’t anyone think I’m oh hell. p. 55
I wonder what old-school readers of Carnell’s New Worlds and Science Fantasy made of this.
The second of the Aldiss stories, Lazarus, is published under his ‘Jael Cracken’ pseudonym, which (as with the John Runciman pseudonym for the next story) would be used once more in Science Fantasy and never again.
The story starts with an ex-astronaut giving a speech at a school. He tells the boys the story of the space station project he was part of before the Third World War started. During this mission one of the three crew members died on the moon but, before they could recover him, the war started and the two remaining astronauts were brought back to Earth.
He goes on to say that some years later the other surviving astronaut contacted him to say they had received a message from the station. When usable rockets were found on enemy soil shortly after this, he and the other astronaut organised a mission to the station. There (spoiler) they found the dead astronaut, apparently alive but host to an alien organism. The astronaut that contacted the narrator dies during this mission, and the latter takes both of the bodies back to Earth along with a religious message from the original dead crewman:
“I am beyond medicine. But I am not dead, for up here I cannot die. No life can come into being except on earth. No death can come into being except on earth. This is all my message.” p. 77
A new cult/religion starts, the war ends.
The first half of this is an overly padded setup, and the second isn’t convincing. That said, the scene on the space station where they meet the dead man has a certain momentum of its own.
Unauthorised Persons by Brian W. Aldiss is his third story in the issue and by far the worst. It starts with a bumptious colonial administrator called Pepkinson going to a planet where an archaeologist called Bullock has found a city from the First Galactic Empire buried in ice. The planet is part of an unusual binary star system, and its eccentric orbit has taken it a long way from the major sun. Consequently, the atmosphere has frozen and life has died out, except for some mutated vermin in the underground (or under-ice) city.
They descend and start exploring, and discover a previously buried tunnel that leads to a building that, bizarrely, has a warning sign in English telling them to keep out. They ignore it and find a time machine inside which takes them back eight thousand years.
Back in the past the time machine guards take them to one of the city’s leaders. Bullock is shown around while the leader’s daughter entertains Pepkinson. Bullock is lectured about the peculiarities of the local star system, and told that a catastrophic ice-age is imminent. The city’s occupants will use the time machine to escape the disaster.
The last part of the story is a time travel escapade with various versions of Pepkinson, Bullock and the daughter running around in the future city.
There is too much sfnal furniture in this overly gimmicky story, and it full of cardboard characters. A poor piece.
The last two stories are what would later be described in a reader’s letter as “typical Bonfiglioli space-fillers”. Matchbox by Peter Bradley (a one-shot writer) is about a reporter covering a Women’s Institute meeting for a local newspaper. The winner of their competition to put the greatest number of objects in a matchbox appears to have one that is a tesseract (larger on the inside than the outside). The reporter and the women retire to her house to experiment with it. The ending (spoiler: it is used develop a space drive) is weak.
The story is little more than a notion, but is told in an entertaining enough style:
I left, having persuaded Mrs. O’Neill to let me have the matchbox and its vital contents, and exchanged a not very subtle pleasantry with the milkman as I let myself into my lodgings. I awoke a couple of hours later feeling as fresh as if I’d just had a couple of hours sleep, and made my way to the office.
Harvey, my news editor, glanced up at me as I entered. His glance evidently took in my all-night eyes and unshaven (no, if I must be scrupulously honest, even unwashed) features for, after looking at the Diary for the previous day, he started to warn me against the perils of being drawn into Women’s Institute orgies.
“You mark my words, Sock,” he said (Sock is short for Socrates. How I got this nickname is a long and not very interesting story.) “I’ve seen it happen too often. These harpies out in the county drag you into their midst, load you up with rhubarb wine, and before you know where you are you’re passing round mystery parcels and taking part in other obscene rituals, and . . .
It went on for several minutes more. Our Mr. Harvey was noted for his ingenious improvisations on original themes, and this morning he was in good voice. He concluded by asking me what I had got out of my night’s work. p. 122
The Great Chan by Archie Potts5 is another story told to a third party.6 This one concerns the last performance of the Great Chan, a magician, at a town music hall. The narrator is a newspaper reviewer who interviews Chan at the end of the show:
He was seated in front of the mirror getting his greasepaint off, and waved me to a seat without stopping his work.
“You won’t mind, I hope, if I carry on with this as we talk?”
To my surprise, his yellow complexion and almond eyes were disappearing under the cream as I watched, revealing unmistakably European features beneath the make-up. Seeing me stare, he laughed.
“No, the Chinese guise is just part of the act. People don’t like an ordinary-looking man performing apparent miracles so in Europe I always make-up Chinese-style. When I tour the Far East, of course, I have to wear a top-hat and tails.” p. 127
The twist (spoiler) is that he claims, on departing the building, to be Alessandro Cagliostro, the eighteenth century magician and occultist. No, me neither.
Roger Harris’s abstract design for the Cover is strikingly different from anything seen on an SF magazine of the time or before, and presumably we have Bonfiglioli’s art dealer eye to thank for it. I rather like it; the magazine looks rather smart, and very non-pulp. Harris would be the cover artist for the next three issues.
Apart from the Editorial there is no other non-fiction, but there is a one page notice about a Competition: For Professional Scientists Only. I think that the quite substantial prize would have been better used in a general competition (if you adjust a 1964 £50 for inflation, it is supposedly worth just short of a grand now7).
Finally, a few miscellaneous notes. First, the external physical appearance of this magazine is different from that of New Worlds #142 (which Roberts & Vinter had published a month earlier). Rather than the flimsy, coated (shiny) cover #142 had, this issue has a slightly stiffer, matt finish one, presumably a cost-saving measure. I’d also note that these magazines are probably the smallest A-format paperbacks I’ve seen.8
The inner front cover carries an advert for the Science Fiction Book Club (just like New Worlds #142) but the inner rear cover has an advert for New Worlds #143, the July-August issue, out June 24th.
Last of all, the title page has a quirky “All terrestrial characters and places are fictitious” disclaimer at the bottom:
The cover, the first of the Aldiss, and the Bonfigliloli are fairly good quality, but the rest of the issue is quite poor. My recollection is that the next issue is much worse. ●
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1. Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines 1950-1970 by Mike Ashley, p. 237 (Amazon UK).
2. There are a number of posts by Don Wells that recall Bonfiglioli’s early military life on the blog Bonfiglioli Remembered – and other stuff.
There is one striking passage where Wells mentions the death of Bonfiglioli’s first wife:
Only once in our time together did I see Bonfig in a vulnerable moment. I suppose the hurt was still fresh in his mind. He told me his first wife Elizabeth had died in her sleep; he woke to find her dead beside him. More than once — no, many times more than once — in my 45 years of marriage, I lay quiet in bed, listening for my wife’s breathing.
Fifty years after Bonfig’s Elizabeth died, my first wife Margaret died beside me.
Bonfiglioli’s Wikipedia page is here.
3. “[Bonfiglioli] was feeling his way in the first few issues, relying heavily on bottom drawer material from Brian Aldiss.” (Ibid. p. 243)
4. I found out about Bonfiglioli’s authorship of Blast Off from John Boston’s review (link above).
5. Potts was a two-shot writer: he previously had a story, The Warriors, in New Worlds #124, November 1962.
6. I’ve come to the conclusion that fiction told in the form of a stories related to a third party are probably using a chatty conversational mode to distract from the slightness of the tale.
7. I used this website for the inflation adjustment. I’m not entirely convinced.
8. Science Fantasy #65 is 109 x 178mm in size; New Worlds #142 is 107 x 180mm in size, very slightly narrower and taller (this size variation holds broadly true for the issues #66 & #143 too), making me wonder if Rugby Advertiser Ltd. had two different presses. By comparison, my Corgi edition (1965 reprint) of New Writings in SF 1 edited by John Carnell (to be reviewed here soon) is 111 x 180mm. These differences are minute, so maybe it is the thinness of the books (128 pp.) that give the impression that they are smaller. ●
Edited 8th March 2018 to add Wells passage in footnote 2.
