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Other reviews: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 by John Boston & Damien Broderick (Amazon)

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Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli

Fiction:
A Case of Identity • short story by Kenneth Bulmer ∗
God Killer • short story by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗
The Poachers • novelette by James Parkhill-Rathbone [as by James Rathbone] ∗∗∗
Building Blocks • short story by David Beech
Dear Aunty • short story by Daphne Castell ∗∗∗
A Dish of Devils • short story by James Goddard ∗
No Moon To-night! • novelette by Brian W. Aldiss [as by John Runciman]
Unto All Generations • short story by Paul Jents ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Roger Harris
Editorial • by Kyril Bonfiglioli
Our Cover
Advanced Intelligence • coming next issue
Competition Notice

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Bonfiglioli’s second issue starts off with yet another story that appears to have come from the deepest recesses of an author’s trunk. Kenneth Bulmer’s A Case of Identity starts with a police inspector investigating the murder of a young woman in the countryside. Apart from the murderer having vanished into thin air, there have been other odd occurrences: ravaged sheep, a line of holes in the ground made by an unknown machine, etc.
After his enquiries, a search of open country by the army, and a further assault on a patrolling farmer by a “dark shape,” etc., the climax of the story takes place at an isolated farmhouse. The Inspector sees a shining light in the (by then) burning house that looks like an open refrigerator: I presume the dark shape was an alien from another world/dimension/etc., but who would know?
God Killer is by another established writer, John T. Phillifent (better known as John Rackham in the UK), and this talking heads story is probably another trunk piece. A vicar who has lost his belief in God is approached after a Sunday service by a man and his two flunkies. He tells the vicar he wants to mind-scan him to get his idea of God, and then combine it those of many others. Then the man can use his machine to generate the opposite image and eradicate the diety. It has a suitably pious ending.
The Poachers by James Parkhill-Rathbone is a first sale that provides a breath of fresh air after the previous two stories—although not literally, as it concerns undersea farmers in a future over-populated Earth. It starts with Jim Pollock, who comes across miners drilling next to the aquatic settlement’s farm land and, in the process, blowing sediment over their weed farms. He asks the miners to desist, but they rudely refuse. He reports back to his colleague, and they set up blowers to do the same to the miners. They narrowly miss being caught by one of their magnetic grapples.
After the pair attends a council meeting at Triton (their undersea city) a number of ships go out to reconnect the blowers to the cables, which the miners have cut in the meantime. The situation escalates.
Running parallel to this is the work that Jim’s wife Freida has been doing with fish, a basic form of mind-control device for fish shoals, as he learns at dinner:

They ate in the glow from fish-lamps, hundreds of tiny luminescent organisms stimulated electronically from the centre of each bowl, casting a gentler radiance than the ordinary lighting. It was the normal light for love-making, but for them both at the moment it was more a symbol of their emotional unity, like the wedding-rings of the old days: there was no time to make love. Frieda suddenly began to steer the conversation, and Pollock watched her with ill-concealed amusement as she brought up the guidance of shoals, her pet subject. Torn between concern for her husband and the stage her work in the lab had reached, she was obviously working up to one of those triumphant statements of hers, in a deceptively calm tone of voice, as she tried to keep down her excitement. He gave her the opening she wanted, and she plunged in:
“We’ve got it this time, darling—a method of affecting the fish brain. We’ve had a proper circus in the big tank. The trouble is, it only affects the more complex brains; it’s no good on fry, either. With some of our equipment, you can be a proper fish-herd—move your shoal where you like without any trouble.”
“Sounds pretty good,” agreed Pollock. “Better than what we’ve got, anyhow. So this is what you’ve been keeping a secret.”
“Well, look at it, darling. It sounds a bit unlikely as a project. We’ve done it now, and nobody will be able to say it can’t be done and wasn’t worth our trying. Proper scientific spirit you need in my job . . . And an understanding husband.”
Pollock leaned over and kissed her. “You’ve been acting a bit odd lately. So that’s what it was about.”
Frieda left with: “There’s a carp named after you in that tank. I make it work harder than the others—oh!”
The rest was lost in a tussle. p. 42-43

As you can probably gather (spoiler) the device is used to end the conflict with the miners. This is a somewhat clunky deus ex machina ending, but it is mostly a well done and readable piece, and head and shoulders above the previous two. A pity that there weren’t other later stories in the magazine from this writer.¹
Building Blocks by David Beech starts with a discussion between a husband and wife about an undisclosed problem with newspapers and magazines that is affecting children: they resolve to keep their son Peter away from them. Needless to say he finds a pile of newspapers hidden in the house and, while reading one, a building block on legs appears and talks to him. He is led underneath the newspaper and finds that now he too has the body of a yellow building block. In this strange world there there are various colours and shapes of blocks/people there, mostly organised into four Empires, and they either fight/defend themselves from each other, or build towers to reach the top of a wall that surrounds them on all sides.
This allegorical interlude ends when Peter’s mother picks him up in our world, upset that he has been reading a newspaper. The last inexplicable paragraph has Peter go to the sideboard, light up a cigarette, and pour himself a whiskey. A twee shading to baffling piece.
Dear Aunty by Daphne Castell² is another début, and a promising one. It starts with Henry, the editor of a small magazine, at a party. An exchange he has with one of his writers illustrates the tone of the story:

Bouncing round, he saw Dick Hayman, correctly dressed for the occasion with a blonde and a bottle of Riesling.
“Henry, you old devil, how’s every little thing? Fatter than ever, eh, I can see that. No wonder, sitting around on your butt, while better men toil like galleyslaves for you.” Dick was already a little drunk, and apparently bent on improving his condition.
Henry’s good manners, hammered into him by a fond father at an early age, did not desert him. “Could be worse, Dick,” he replied, baring his teeth in a polite, if mirthless smile. “How’s that article on bribery in local bowls matches coming along? It should be a fizzer—aimed right at the great beating heart of the nation, eh?”
“Have to wait for it, chum. I’m busy doing a spot of research on bribery and its effects on the motivations of sex.” Dick prodded the blonde affectionately in a pneumatic section of her anatomy. She cooed at him, and batted both eyelids.
“That’s roughly what you said a fortnight ago,” complained Henry. “God knows I can’t stand the bilge you produce, but I can’t keep ‘Gaiety’ running with all its pages blank, just because my writers are feeling the urge of Nature. Last week we had to shove in a reprint of ‘The Englishwoman: Is She Really Frigid?,’ instead of Bart’s new expose of the call-girl racket in civil service offices, because Bart had left for the Bermudas with one of the call-girls.”
“Lucky Bart!” murmured Dick. “Oh, well, I suppose ‘Gaiety’ has its place in the scheme of things.”
He told Henry what he thought that place was, and the blonde squealed, “Ooh, you!”

Politically incorrect and dated perhaps, but lively.
Henry is looking for a woman to write an agony column for the magazine, and receives a suggestion from the hostess that he use a woman called Gala Dysico. He is later told by a number of people that “everyone knows Gala.” In the following days, and when all other possibilities are exhausted, he ends up going to see her:

Miss Dysico was perhaps 55 or 60, and well nourished. Her hair had been dyed a metallic green, and most of her visible teeth (a great many were visible in that welcoming smile) had been stopped with gold. She was hung with layers of mauve draperies, festooned with strings of clashing beads. Her fingernails were long and silvered, and she carried a long black cigarette holder. Her eyes, however, were wonderful, warm and violet and enormous. p. 74

During their conversation, Henry finds she has the answers to all his personal problems, or manages to make them seem irrelevant. He hires her and in the following months her columns are a huge success and Henry gets a raise. He uses the money to take a short holiday abroad, but trouble awaits him when he gets back:

He returned from the delights of sunshine, sparkling blue seas, and beaches full of exotic and lightly-clad beauties, just in time to correct the galley-proofs of the latest issue of ‘Gaiety.’ He was, in fact, stretching out his hand for them, when the telephone rang.
“Aye, well, Mr. Persimmon, ye see, there’s suthin’ gey wrang wi’ they galley-proofs,” said a voice. It was Mr. Carfrae, the foreman of the printing-room. Henry blenched at these sinister words. “There is, is there?” he muttered. “Exactly what, Mr. Carfrae?”
“Ah wisna gaun tae tell yon chiel wi’ the lang neb, ye ken, for he’d jist haver on the way a body couldna tell whit he was gabbin’ aboot.” Carfrae and Merridew [the assistant editor] had a fierce, though largely unspoken contempt for one another. They communicated mainly by means of grunts and snorts. “But jist tak’ a wee gleek at they letters o’ yon wumman—whit’s this they ca’ her, Aunty Galler?—man, that’s a fine wumman! Ay, she fair pits me in mind o’ the days when Ah was nocht but a bit laddie, rinnin’ aboot wi’oot a bawbee ahint ma sporran—” Henry put the receiver gently down. Conversations with Mr. Carfrae always reminded him rather forcibly that modern languages had not been his strong point at school. He turned to Aunty Gala’s Quiet Corner, and the relevant item leapt out and hit him in the eye.
It was about two-thirds of the way down the last column, and it read as follows:
L’tut, Orp. Hercules Cluster. This is a very unfortunate position for you, my dear, and I do not think that bripping the hixix would, as you suggest, solve the problem. You will simply have to confide in the local priest of your sub-clan. The recipe you mention has been known to Arcturans for several thousand years, but would not suit your particular life-form. If you will let me have a vibrafoil attuned to your personal wave-length, I will send details of a methane-based alternative. p. 78-79

The resolution of the story is probably fairly obvious. Henry (spoiler) goes to her office and discovers she is also working for an interplanetary publication as well as his—just before she and her niece arrive through a portal. There is a rather talky final scene where she explains everything, and that she cannot (as Henry suggests) use alien problems in her future Gaiety columns. Earth cannot know of the existence of life on other planets, not because Earth isn’t ready to join the various peoples of the Galaxy, but because they aren’t ready for Earth:

“But, my dear Henry, the astounding advances that Earth has made in every branch of civilisation that relates to her own comfort and convenience—well, quite frankly, they would be like gunpowder, let loose among the comparatively backward planets of the Federation. Take depilatories, for instance—Trenna, imagine depilatories suddenly released wholesale to those creatures on the third moon of Jupiter!”
Trenna shuddered eloquently, and Henry found it extremely difficult to take his eyes away from the resulting effect on her figure. “I know a planet in the Bootes region,” went on Gala, “where sanitary devices are the prerogative of the chief priest, whose name could be roughly translated as ‘The Divine Plumber.’ They are given only as the highest rewards for extreme courage or devotion. p. 85

This is minor stuff, and dated, but I rather enjoyed it.
A Dish of Devils by James Goddard is a first contact story between Sirian visitors and a sixteenth-century peasant. In the last paragraph the encounter is revealed as the inspiration for the nursery rhyme Hey, Diddle, Diddle.
No Moon To-night! by Brian W. Aldiss is another pseudonymous effort from the bottom of the writer’s trunk. The setup of this one is that something in space is causing an area of darkness, blocking out starlight, and the phenomenon is spreading towards Earth. When it does, the main character, Roger Furnish, a civilian on an army base, experiences complete darkness: no lights of any sort can be seen. He spends the first part of the story perilously driving home in the pitch black to get to his wife. On his arrival he is greeted not only by her but by a phone call from the colonel telling him to come back. He and his wife return.
At the camp the colonel tells Furnish that he wants to take the base’s secret amphibious tank out while it is completely dark, apparently to test it in secret. After they get going Furnish forces the colonel to reveal the real reason for the journey, which is to get to a scientist who lives in France. The colonel believes he will be able to explain the phenomenon they are experiencing.
After a journey along the bottom of the English Channel to Calais (spoiler), they go into the scientist’s house, where they can see normally again. Fergusson, the scientist, explains how the device he has built to counteract the darkness works:

“This little machine’s pretty simple. As you may have observed, it’s an old H/3 army type electric generator, rigged up. The shields really are shields, arranged about the works to produce a ‘dead’ field—the centre of the field coinciding with the centre of the armature, so that the whole contraption is virtually its own little watertight magnetic world, also its own North. The South Pole exists, of course, but over the border; that is, through the machine—in another dimension I suppose you’d call it, but whoever thinks up such terms is going to have to think up a better [one] when this spot of research gets published. I call it H-space, because it’s space plus something else—but we’ll come back to that in a minute. p. 113

. . . no, I’m fine thanks, don’t bother.
This lone-inventor lecture (a tired trope in the late 1930s) continues, and we find out about his discovery of H-space and various other related matters for the story’s last few pages.
This has little going for it, bar some sections of Fisher’s blind journey to his wife. However, even the interest that these sections arouse is fatally undermined by their lack of credibility: driving a car a couple of miles while unable to see? I don’t think so.
Unto All Generations by Paul Jents starts with a man and a woman, Cartwright and Mary, working on a nineteenth generation computer when the former recognises a circuit from a sixth generation model, a version that ran amok. Carwright reports it to his supervisor and then goes home for dinner. Here, he is served by computer controlled, lobotomised humans, similar to the ones that were assisting him in the lab.
The supervisor, meanwhile, reports the problem to a fifteenth generation computer He is told that the design will be modified and to come back later. The computer secretly decides that the problem is Cartwright and arranges for his disposal.
The rest of the story describes the (unsuccessful) trial of the completed nineteenth generation model:

The nineteenth Generation was a beautiful thing. From where Mary was sitting, some distance away, it looked like a tree of crystal. Each of the ‘leaves,’ perfectly symmetrical although varying in size, represented a different electro-chemical system complete in itself—in effect an individual, specialized brain. They fed back, in channels gradually growing larger and more closely integrated, via the ‘branches’ to the main control column, the trunk.
In turn this sub-divided again and again, into an infinite number of rootlets, in direct communication with every other computer in the world.
A tree, Mary thought again. A tree of knowledge. Of good and evil. p. 123

The creation of a twentieth generation begins after the failure of the nineteenth.
At the end of the story the twentieth generation computer awakens with a transcendent knowledge of God, which is instantly transmitted to the rest of the computer network.
There are the bones of a half decent story about computer totalitarianism here but, for the most part, it is buried under a lot of waffle.

This issue’s Cover is by Roger Harris, for David Beech’s Building Blocks. There is a short note at the end of the Rackham story crediting Harris for the cover, and stating next issue’s “will be by Haro, well-known to the readers of the Observer and Mail.” It wasn’t; Harris would provide another two covers for the magazine, and Haro was never seen.
The Editorial by Kyril Bonfiglioli has three parts. In the first he deals with circulation:

My first editorial struck a base and mercenary note: I said that what sf needed most was half-crowns, in the form of circulation. I also said that if more copies were sold we could boost the rate paid for stories and perhaps, in the end, check the drain to America of riper writers.
Well, thanks to a handier format, a new distribution network, and Roger Harris’ bold cover-design, we have broken a little ice. Latest indications suggest that around 15% more copies of the issue found good homes. NEW WORLDS, too, shows a similar healthy jump. Hoping that this is only the beginning of a sharp upward trend, I am sticking my neck out and raising the basic rate for this magazine by—to be exact—19.047%. A start, anyway. p. 2

In the second part he mentions that there will little adverse response to last issue’s editorial and his “attack on “fantasy” of the “sword and sorcery” vintage.” He goes on to add:

If sf has a future—and I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe that it has—it is not a future exhibiting all the signs of a decaying religion, with innumerable sects endlessly sub-splitting and high priests howling “heretic” at each other.
Science-fiction’s task is to abolish itself. At present it inhabits a sort of quarantine ward where it leads a sheltered but unwholesome existence. We tend to think that much sf fails to be printed because it is sf. Mr. Southworth, of Queen’s College, Cambridge, in a letter to me recently, posed the worrying question: ‘how much would get printed, purely on its literary merits, if it were not science-fiction?’ There’s a dusty answer to that one. p. 2

Bonfiglioli goes on to predict that in ten years’ time SF will have either abolished itself, be in the sick ward, or be extinct—I’d say don’t give up the editor’s job for one as a futurologist!
The last section is one of those tedious passages about manuscript preparation that non-writers semi-regularly had to sit through in some of the publications of the time. It does have this, however:

Most professionals use quarto paper and this is a great blessing: foolscap is the wrong size for most envelopes and files and is awkward to handle in hotel bars and other places where copy-reading takes place. The whole thing is stapled, clipped or pinned together and a stamped addressed envelope is always enclosed. (One doesn’t like to be mean over tenpence but there are only a couple of dozen of them in a pound note). p. 20

There are a couple of other notes apart from the one about the cover. Advanced Intelligence, which is a plug for the next issue, includes a puff for the Rudyard Kipling story, along with mentions of material from John Rackham and Thom Keyes. Competition Notice is an update stating that engineers and doctors are eligible to enter.
Finally, the inner back cover generously plugs New Worlds (this compared with Science Fantasy’s measly third of a page in New Worlds, with little more than a mention of its title and price):

This is a fairly poor issue, as I expected.³ ●

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1. James Parkhill-Rathbone would be the assistant editor to Kyril Bonfiglioli at Science Fantasy for issues #70 to #80, before leaving to set up his own magazine called The Idler. There is a short review of this publication (and the information that Josephine Saxton was a contributor) here. When asked, they couldn’t provide any more information about his having “settled down to a life as a writer of pretty conventional science fiction.”
I found only one birth and death record for his (uncommon) name: the name of the wife, Alys, matches up with the one mentioned in “Birth of a Son” on p. 3 of Futurian War Digest #26, Feb 1943. Talking of fanzines, he also published “the first fanzine to come from Scotland” when he was a teenager, Macabre.
James Parkhill-Rathbone’s ISFDB page.

2. In the mid-sixties Daphne Castell published three stories apiece in both Science Fantasy and New Worlds (and would continue to appear in various places until her death in 1983—her ISFDB page, listing twenty-three stories is here). Initially she was best known for a notable interview with J. R. R. Tolkien which appeared in New Worlds #168 (November 1966). There is an interesting article on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (backup screenshot here) that describes the intersection between Castell, Tolkien, Moorcock and New Worlds, as well as providing other bibliographic information (sadly, there is nothing at Science Fiction Encyclopedia, probably a result of its bias towards book publication).
There is a little more information in the afterword to her story Who’s in There With Me? on p. 123-124 of Judith Merril’s anthology England Swings SF, Doubleday, 1968:

I am over twenty-one and under forty . . . have a brilliant engineering husband and three brilliant musical children . . . Born in Southport, Lancashire, where tripe is eaten. I went to six schools before I was eleven, and ended my education peacefully with an Oxfordshire vicar, three mornings a week. This liberal education in the humanities gained me a scholarship to Oxford (St. Anne’s) and a sturdy Victorian prose style, leavened with heavy jocularity (I don’t know where “Who’s in there with me?” came from—it’s not typical). I did linguistic research under Professor Tolkien, who is a marvellously kind, helpful man . . . until I ran out of living money—a thing I do fairly often. p. 123

I became a qualified librarian, and worked with music and then with forestry literature until I had my second baby.
Interests? A lot. I used to try something different every year . . . chess, cricket, bell-ringing and music seem to stay, whatever else . . . I’ve written, produced and acted in plays, run a madrigal society, given song-recitals, conducted a village choir . . . At the moment, I look after the house and children, act as chauffeur to the family, experiment with foreign cooking, belong to a local choir, ring bells at a local church, study electricity and Grade 3 piano, and run a class for adults in English language.
[She prefers American to British SF]—though I would rather have written “Hothouse” than anything I can lay claim to.
I feel we’re all a bit besieged by the “short trot round a fevered mind” effect. If I could be my ideal writer, I would be a combination of James Blish (for plots and people), Robert Sheckley (for dialogue and situation), and Hal Clement (for background and detail). p. 124

Merril also mentions that Castell produced articles, interviews, reviews, etc. for The Guardian, Good Housekeeping, Christian Science Monitor, as well as news programs for the BBC (who also broadcast several of her stories).
Castell strikes me as one of those writers who may have produced much more short fiction if the paperback Science Fantasy and New Worlds (or a similar British F&SF-type publication) had continued publication through the late sixties, seventies and eighties.

3. I appreciated the Castell story a lot more this second time around. My scores from the first time I read the magazine (in the early 1990s?) were (scores from this review in brackets): Bulmer 0 (1), Rackham 0 (1), Rathbone 3 (3), Beech 1 (0), Castell 1 (3), Goddard 0 (1), Runciman/Aldiss 1 (0), Jents 0 (1). Consistent if nothing else, I guess. ●