ISFDB link
Other reviews1:
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #146 (January, 1965)
Charles Winstone, Vector #29 (November, 1964)
Various, Goodreads
_____________________
Editor, John Carnell
Fiction:
Hell-Planet • novella by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗
The Night-Flame • short story by Colin Kapp ∗
The Creators • short story by Joseph Green ∗
Rogue Leonardo • short story by G. L. Lack ∗∗
Maiden Voyage • novelette by Douglas R. Mason [as by John Rankine] ∗∗
Odd Boy Out • reprint short story by Dennis Etchison ∗
The Eternal Machines • short story by William Spencer ∗∗
A Round Billiard Table • short story by Steve Hall ∗
Non-fiction:
Foreword • essay by John Carnell
_____________________
This issue, like the first, starts with a long story, a 19,000 word novella called Hell-Planet by John T. Phillifent. Like the previous effort (Key to Chaos by Edward Mackin, NWISF #1, 1964) it feels equally tired.
The story starts with the crew of an alien spaceship called Drendel coming out of warp. Captain Forsaan’s ship is damaged, as at their last destination they received an unpleasant surprise:
And so, unsuspectingly, Drendel had twisted out of warp, into a raving hell of swirling incandescence. Emergency trips and overloads had snatched her out again in split seconds, with her hull-sensors crippled, her mainspars wrenched and strained, and everyone aboard in shock and sickness. They had all taken massive doses of antiradiation drugs, the crew had slaved like dogs, and they had got the battered ship into something like trim, the while they hung at a safe distance and watched a sun that had gone nova. p. 15
Forsaan steers his ship towards the sixth planet, and organises his crew to make repairs. He then goes to brief his VIPs, scientific specialists impatient to do their research, but Forsaan has put them off as the ship repairs must take priority.
Forsaan’s first officer Pinat then tells him that they are receiving modulated radio signals from (spoiler) the third planet (Earth). From previous expeditions they know this planet is populated with simian-hominids, and it is also the site of equipment that Forsaan’s race left behind thousands of years ago. There is speculation about the languages heard in the broadcast, and Forsaan suggests one sounds very similar to theirs. During these conversations we also learn that the crew are humanoid, but from ursinoid (bear) descent. There is also talk that the previous exploration team may have interfered in the simians’ progress.
Later on, after they have done more analysis of the signals, there is a disagreement between Forsaan and the scientists about whether they should investigate the planet, and one of the latter loses his patience:
“Oh come, now!” Buffil could contain himself no longer.
“Caralen and I have seen your pictures and learned the languages, the major ones—and there is plenty to fear. Why not admit it? Captain, from the evidence of radio and visuals, we know quite a lot. For instance, we have identified cities, transport by land, sea and air, radio and visual communications linked by orbital relays, fission stage atomics, and much more. Yet, on that planet, which is slightly smaller than our own home world, there are almost three billion people, at least five major cultures, Urs knows how many minor ones—and all in savage conflict with each other.” Forsaan went cold as the bulky technologist elaborated.
“We have seen the picture-records, blatantly transmitted. They use, and are using, explosive devices, lethal gases, radiation and poisonous bacteria against each other on a massive scale. Worse still, they seem to rejoice in this hideous activity and award respect and status to those who show themselves skilled at it.”
“But that’s not possible, surely,” Forsaan clung to as much commonsense as he could. “If they practise wholesale slaughter on that scale—how can so many survive?’’
“They breed in proportion,” Buffil growled. “Like animals. And they squander materials at an incredible rate. So far as one can judge, their one aim seems to be to consume as much as possible.” p. 31-32
The other thing they learn is that the planet’s inhabitants live relatively short lives, eighty years, compared with Forsaan who is several hundred years old.
Forsaan agrees to change the ship’s course to the third planet’s moon, where they will complete their repairs. Professor Buffil will go down in a lifeboat to Earth to make observations.
This first section is overlong, and reads like the tired and routine naval-analogue space-opera that it is. But at least it hangs together, which is more than the rest does: we have an unexpected moonshot launched by Earth that may or may not discover the Drendel on the dark side of the moon; a skullcap developed to act as an emotional damper for the professor visiting the planet (these humanoids can ‘read’ emotions, but this isn’t much discussed until later in the story); and there is also this, as the professor is briefed on his trip to the surface:
“Remember, now, on landing and making sure all is well, close the red switch. That will be our only signal from you. Then, be sure to be back in the pod and secure, before the deadline moment. Reverse that switch, which will tell us all is well with you. And leave the rest to us. Good luck, and may the ancestors take care of you.” p. 50
So a culture with warp drives can’t rig up a radio for the professor to contact the ship?
Then, in the last section, the professor returns with the news that they are simians too, just like the people on Earth (no explanation is given about why they previously thought otherwise). The professor also tells Forsaan that the people on the surface do not have ‘auras’ so they can’t tell each other’s emotional state (the reason for this is the destruction of the orbital platform left by the previous survey crew has caused permanent interference). The professor says he must go back and give them the technology to remove the interference, and otherwise shepherd them into becoming a more peaceful people:
“They are as emotionally sensitive as we, if not more so. I have had plenty of time to ponder this thing, to think about it very deeply. I am convinced that this one awful factor, by itself, accounts for almost all the seeming contradictions, the inconsistencies, of these people. Imagine how they have lived. Think of being completely cut off, walled up inside the shell of your own emotions, never able to know, to sense, to feel what anyone else is feeling. Your only contacts the pitifully inadequate interpretations of gesture, attitude, facial expression, and words. This, I tell you, is why their languages are so tortuous, so complex. This is why their values are so twisted, why they cannot trust or understand anyone, why they are hostile, suspicious, aggressive, and divided. They can never be sure of anyone else. And, by being driven in on themselves, they can never be sure of themselves, either. p. 61
A poor start.
The Night-Flame by Colin Kapp has as its narrator an Eastern European called Balchic, who lives in the British countryside. The story begins with him investigating a ‘night-flame’ that he has seen from his house. When he gets close to this phenomenon he realises he is in peril:
Balchic moved closer to the balls of fluorescence, trying to gauge their size and distance against a background which afforded no points of reference. Then he stopped. The balls were growing larger or nearer, and as they did so he felt the fear increasing. Fingers of ice were stalking up his backbone and the hair on his neck was rising sensibly. But that which gave him most cause for alarm was the glimpse of his watch dial in his sleeve emitting such a light that his hand was clearly illuminated by reflection.
Radiation! Data fell into place. This was no natural phenomenon. It took power to punch out radiation of such intensity over such distances. Just how much power it needed was known only to God and its designers—but Balchic was almost in the beam path! Its nature and its source were suddenly of secondary consideration. Now his fear had a tangible object and he was swift to react. The vicinity of a beam that could ionise air at atmospheric pressure was not a fit place for human flesh to be. He back-tracked in haste, wondering if he had already been exposed to sufficient radiation to do him some permanent harm. p. 71
He goes home to the sound of blacked-out army trucks moving in the night, and when he gets home his wife says that an army major wants to talk to him, and will visit in the morning.
When the major arrives the next day he raises the subject of the Balchics moving out of their cottage. Balchic refuses, so the major levels with him and says that his unit are operating beam weapons to neutralise satellites that would otherwise destroy the country. One day they may have to drop their aim, and the cottage may be in the way . . . .
The major is then interrupted by an urgent phone call and has to go back to his unit. Balchic drives him, and later witnesses an attack.
This story doesn’t suspend disbelief and it has an obviously contrived plot (spoiler: there is a tragic end). I’m not sure that the it’s attempt at gravitas works either (there is a backstory about the Balchics’ two daughters, who died at Auschwitz).
The Creators by Joseph Green concerns a galactic federation expedition consisting of humans and multiple alien species exploring a planet circling a burnt out sun. The main character is Fassail, an artist who is teamed up with a scientist, Nickno (both human); they are accompanied by two spherical aliens called Jelly and Belly. The expedition’s purpose is to work out how the previous occupants controlled energy, which they used in an unusual way:
They had created art forms.
With control of the known universe at their fingertips, with such power available as was never known to a living intelligence, they had created art. Their expression-forms possessed a strange, overpowering beauty, a variety of colour and shape almost unimaginable to anyone not a fellow artist. Some of the huge buildings had been hollowed out until only the exterior remained, and filling it from top to bottom would be a single great formation. Others contained small formations of stirring beauty and infinite variety. Some showed clearly, by the open spaces near which projectors still crouched, that they had been occupied by formations now vanished. p. 94
The rest of the story details the conflict between the scientist and the artist about the approach to take in discovering how these creations work. While Nickno tries to dismantle the transmitter box for one installation, Fassail wanders round looking at the artwork.
This trundles on for a bit until it is all explained in an info-dump, amid some cosmic waffle, by Fassail: (spoiler) the creatures learned to control energy, first with technology, then with their minds, and eventually became energy life-forms themselves—at which point they all emigrated from the planet to acquire more energy and later became the suns of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This is a non-story with an unconvincing ending.
Rogue Leonardo by G. L. Lack2 has short introduction about an old man who is a pavement artist in the future. The story itself concerns Trafford, who is on charge of reproduction machines that produce perfect copies of great artworks. These need regular calibration, and there are occasional problems.
One day he visits Cambridge and meets with Acilia, the female supervisor there. Although everything appears in order, something still niggles at him after he leaves, and he has a dream about seeing multiple Acilias, whose appearance progressively changes. He forgets the dream before waking but remembers when he goes out at lunchtime and sees the pavement artist.
When he goes back to Cambridge to see Acilia (spoiler), he finds her viewing a number of pictures produced by a Leonardo machine that show a series of evolutions. Over the objections of Acilia he arranges for the machine’s destruction. Later, he discovers the old man has died.
This story about the stagnation of art in the future didn’t entirely grab me, but it is encouraging to see one of the NWISF writers writing about something other than the same old stuff.
Maiden Voyage by Douglas R. Mason is another ‘Dag Fletcher, Space Molester’, sorry, ‘Dag Fletcher, Space Patrol’ tale. I made a side bet with myself that he would be letching at an attractive woman before I got more than two hundred words into the story. I won.3 This is start of the story:
“The board will see you now, Mr. Fletcher.”
Dag Fletcher picked his long dangling legs from the sofa in the plushy ante room of the Space Projects’ H.Q. and followed the trim attendant into the corridor. He liked the way her bottom moved in the tight blue-grey cheongsam and he was wondering if he ought to pinch it, when the debate was cut short by their arrival at the bronze doors which filled the end of the white passage. She spoke quietly into a grille in the left hand wall. p. 121
The board meeting is to hear Fletcher’s objections about the drive of a new spaceship called Nova. Lucas, the captain of the latter, is confident of his ship, so it is decided that instead of grounding Nova, Fletcher will accompany it with Interstellar Two-Seven as a safety ship.
In flight, Nova goes missing, and Fletcher and his crew manage to track it down to a planet called Taurus, which has a violent hominid race that is slowly devolving to extinction.
The rest of the story concerns the rescue of the other crew, and this involves (spoiler) winching down cliffs, attacks by the hominids, and, after they rescue the crew, Lucas’s final sacrifice to hold off the attackers (he was critically injured in the crash, and wrong about the drive—so it’s poetic justice, I guess). Never one to miss the chance of some titillation, Mason has Yolanda get her kit off during their retreat to Interstellar Two-Seven to distract the attackers:
Gutteral commands brought the hominids into two lines from the rock to the forest and then they began a slow forward movement. In the fantastic light they looked like figures from a medieval picture of hell. They moved in silence. Black eyes and mouths flecked red. Dag waited for the rush that had come before which would annihilate them before they reached the cleft.
Ten yards to go. The six remaining men fanned out in an arc with Dag at the centre, covering the stretcher party. A figure appeared on a ledge thirty feet above the ground on the cliff face. Lit up by the lurid glare of the rocket fire, Yolanda looked bigger than life size. She wore only two golden bracelets. Against the green cliff her skin had an unearthly pallor. She was an incarnation of the rock sculptures of ancient Hindu mythology. Golden breasted Kali. Great Earth Goddess. Sensual. Compelling.
The advancing lines stopped dead and every eye turned to the rock. Then a growling roar came from thrown back throats. p. 144-145
There is more of this kind of thing at the end when the survivors, minus Lucas, are all safely back on Interstellar Two Seven:
Dag made his way slowly to his cabin. He felt no pleasure at being proved right. Only weariness and the sense of waste in the loss of good spacemen. Why did they do it? Why not be a banker or a salesman? As he slid back the cabin door he met a perfume of sandalwood.
Yolanda said, “Come in, Controller. I hope you will not mind if I share your cabin. I take up very little room.”
She was still dressed as an apostle of Vedic culture. Dag said, “Be my guest.”
There might, after all, be a lot to be said for the Space Service. p. 147
I think this ‘catastrophe followed by a sexual encounter’ trope shows that Mason is channelling James Bond.
This story is, like the others in this series, readable but uncomplicated and predictable. I should also add that, although I poke fun at the dated sexual attitudes in Mason’s stories, I would have been oblivious to this stuff at the time, and probably for decades afterwards.
Odd Boy Out by Dennis Etchison (Escapade, 1961)4 is about two young women and a man in the woods trying to make a mental connection with three nearby children. The man, Cam, is the only one who can manage. Before he completes his ‘transfer’ into the boy’s body he and one of the woman, Zoe, speak. Most of the story is emotional dialogue between the two:
As soon as she began speaking, her voice broke.
“Sometimes, Cam, sometimes—it’s happened several times before—I feel like—like I almost wish we—weren’t what we are. That the parents who raised us were really our own, that we hadn’t been sent here by the Group to do whatever it is they’re doing to this world, that we didn’t have the telepower lobe on our brains . . . that we could just . . . marry and . . . live like the rest here. I know I’m being very immoral by Group standards, or unethical, or whatever you want to call it. But Cam? Can you tell me why it had to be us? Can you just tell me that one thing, so I can go on feeling like I really belong in this body after today? Can you just tell me something to keep me from—Cam? Do you know. Do you know why it had to be us?
Are . . . are you going to be able to keep your sanity sleeping tonight in a little boy’s body?” p. 157
There is no explanation about who the ‘Group’ are, or why the three have to transfer between bodies. It is all a bit perplexing, and matters are not helped by a twist ending that seems rather gimmicky.
There is also evidence of a new writer trying too hard. This description:
After a long, pitiful pause he started back, blinking fast, keeping his eyes aimed up into the gold coin pattern the falling sun made high in the leaves of the trees. p. 157
. . . is followed shortly afterword by this one:
They sat at the mouth of the bridge in the waning light of a burnt-orange sun which flashed like golden teeth through the trees. p. 158
If this doesn’t quite work as a story, it is at least another piece that reads like something from a writer of the future and not one of the past.
The Eternal Machines by William Spencer5 is about Rosco, the caretaker of the planet Chaos, which is a dumping ground used by the other planets in that solar system (which makes it another story examining contemporary society). Rosco spends part of his time repairing broken machines that have been left there, and has cleared a space for the ones he has brought back to serviceability. He intends them to be a memorial to humanity, one that will outlive the species. Included in this collection is his video diary.
One day, (spoiler) a spaceship in orbit has problems with its engines and decides to make an emergency landing on the planet. The story has an ironic ending.
A Round Billiard Table by Steve Hall leads off with an anecdote about the subject of the title before going on to recount a story about a professor who can make glass invisible (by physically aligning the planes or some such). After making a bet with a man in a bar the professor demonstrates the procedure, although the effect soon wears off as it is temporary.
Later, the man reappears with a colleague, and they ask the professor to subject several diamonds to the procedure (although the professor does not know that is what they are).
The punchline (spoiler) of this unlikely gimmick story is that the harder the ‘glass’ is, the longer it takes to become visible again . . . .
An unlikely and facile gimmick story, but readable enough I guess.
The only non-fiction in the volume is the Foreword by John Carnell. He starts with a definition of SF (“Speculative fiction based upon known facts and extended into future possibilities.”) before briefly discussing the stories:
Today, S-F literature pays far more attention to Man as an individual and as a dominant factor controlling the machines he has invented, as will be seen in most of the stories in this second volume of New Writings in S-F.
Sometimes, as in John Rackham’s “Hell-Planet”, humanity does not shape up too well, although the author allows us to hope that, despite our shortcomings, there is some justification for our actions. Incidentally, the theme behind this story is one which has intrigued me for a long time—just what would the first alien visitors make of all our radio and TV broadcasts?
William Spencer’s story, “The Eternal Machines”, also points up Man’s continual desire to register his mark upon the Universe while his own cleverness defeats him in G. L. Lack’s “Rogue Leonardo” and Steve Hall’s “A Round Billiard Table”. However, it is in such stories as Colin Kapp’s “The Night-Flame” and Joseph Green’s “The Creators” that we find the better qualities triumphing over adversity—man against man in the former and man against a cosmic mystery in the latter. Both call for an enquiring mind. A faculty Man is fortunately endowed with . . . .
As are most science fiction readers. p. 7-8
This is just over-generalised waffle, and tells the prospective reader little if anything. (As you can probably gather, these Forewords were not my favourite part of the anthologies.)
A poor collection of stories that is worse than most, if not all, of the contemporaneous issues of Science Fantasy and New Worlds magazines. ●
_____________________
1. In New Worlds #146 (January, 1965), Michael Moorcock (as James Colvin) says:
The second New Writings in SF (Dobson, 16s.) is a bit disappointing. Stories by Rackham, Hall, Kapp, Lack, Spencer, Etchison, Rankine, Green. Most of them suffer from overtired backgrounds, the like of which have been seen in SF for a good twenty years. The stories which succeed best are set on Earth. p. 117
He goes on to say this about Colin Kapp’s story:
I’ve never been a great fan of Kapp’s—his writing has in the past been erratic and derivative, using several different styles in a single paragraph when at its worst—but his The Night Flame is probably the best story in the collection. It is simply the story of a man who leaves his wife to investigate peculiar disturbances in the sky and learns that a war has been going on for some time between the West and the East. p. 117
He goes on to briefly discuss G. L. Lack’s story before saying this about the series:
A hard-cover collection of new SF stories is a revolutionary idea, but I can’t help feeling that the stories themselves ought to be somewhat revolutionary, too. At the moment, perhaps, they are evolutionary—and time will show if the series succeeds in fulfilling the function of blowing fresh winds into the field, as I believe it can. p. 118
In Vector #29 (November, 1964), Charles Winstone’s review rates Phillifent/Rackham’s story much more highly than I do:
[Hell Planet] lives up to the claim made by John Carnell in New Writings 1. This story is a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story. It is a detailed description of an alien race’s first contact of the planet Earth. It describes the aliens’ confusion at the many contradictory puzzles of the Earth’s cultures as presented by the multi-lingual and radio and television broadcasts. [. . .] Suffice it to say that John Rackham has caught very well the aliens’ terrible confusion when confronted with the Earth’s present day culture. p. 33
Of the others, he appears to have enjoyed the Green (“rather original”) and the Mason/Rankine (“so well-written that the reader’s interest is sustained to the end.”)
2. G. L. Lack contributed one other story to NWISF #10, and one to Science Fantasy. The ISFDB page for this author is here.
3. I couldn’t help but think what would happen nowadays if Dag Fletcher gave into his desires and pinched her bottom (be warned, I have a warped imagination): the attendant complains and HR suspends Fletcher while they investigate. The space police get involved, arrest Fletcher, interview him under caution. After he is bailed, galactic social media erupts as several other women, alerted by the #DagFletcherSpaceMolester hashtag, come forward with similar stories. Fletcher appears in court and, despite pleading guilty, receives an exemplary custodial sentence of six months, as well as being placed on the sex offenders’ register.
He ends up in Rikers #417, a Stellar Penal Station for sex offenders of all species. A few days later he is in the showers, standing one stall away from an alien Shuggoth from Epsilon Sigma, a seven-foot tall vertical cylinder of pink slime with a crown of eyes and several dangling pseudopods. Fletcher notices that several of the eyes are fixed on him. Unnerved, he drops the soap, and reflexively bends down to pick it up. He feels several pseudopods coil around his thigh . . . Fletcher finally knows what it feels like to be at the hands of a sexual predator.
4. This may be a reprint of Etchinson’s debut story—I can’t find an earlier publication at ISFDB, Galactic Central, or Wikipedia. ●
5. William Spencer had an odd writing career. He wrote a dozen stories for Carnell’s New Worlds and NWISF in the sixties and early seventies, and then popped up a couple of decades later with four stories in David Pringle’s Interzone. There can’t have been many Carnell-only writers who also appeared in Interzone (Aldiss, Ballard, Bayley, Roberts, etc., all appeared under other editors too). Here is Spencer’s ISFDB page.
There is an interesting interview with Spencer (among other things he was a student contemporary of J. G. Ballard, and later took art classes taught by Eduardo Paolozzi) conducted by David Pringle in Interzone #79 (January, 1994). Spencer has this to say about John Carnell, and perhaps gives one of the reasons for the pause in his own writing after 1971 (there is also a later mention of an English doctorate started in 1970):
“[Carnell] had an office in fairly central London, and I was in walking distance. I suppose there was no particular need to go and see him in the flesh, but it was often convenient to do so and I found him very affable. He had a gentle, considerate manner. He wasn’t a very big chap; he was rather slight in physical stature and he had an unassuming manner. If he’d stood next to you in a bus queue you wouldn’t really have noticed him. His voice was quiet, but it was nicely modulated. It often seemed to me that when he was talking to writers he spoke to them in this reassuring tone as you might speak to a nervous horse, a wild horse that might at any moment kick up and gallop off into the distance. I hope he wasn’t making a special exception in my case! — but his manner was almost as if he was close to and quietly conversing with a rather dangerous maniac who might suddenly burst out into some unpredictable behaviour. It was part of his character really, but I think he realized that writers are often rather nervous people. With some editors and publishers, I sometimes felt that they want to browbeat the writer because they have this suspicion that he has an ego the size of the Royal Albert Hall and at all costs it must be damped down if there’s to be any hope of dealing sensibly with this terrible person . . . But Ted Carnell had an encouraging manner. Also, he did quite a lot in the way of getting overseas sales and so on. One of my stories was read on German radio, which would never have come about unaided.
“Later on Ted moved out of central London to Plumstead, which is still very much in greater London as far as I’m concerned. I never went to see him there, but when I spoke to him on the phone he seemed to feel it was an idyllic retreat (certainly by contrast with central London it would have been). It’s nice to think of him in what were in fact the final years of his life having this relaxation and lowering of tension and so on. One thing that he did in New Worlds, which got lost in New Writings in SF, was that it was a twoway thing, a link between the author and the reader. He had these author profiles, and letters and Guest Editorials. (This is also the good thing, I think, about Interzone: it has the feeling of being a forum, a two-way traffic of ideas.) This is quite important for writers, to feel they are in touch with an audience, to get feedback. But this element unfortunately got lost in New Writings because that came out as a hardcover book, and though it had an editorial by Ted Carnell it was purely a stiff-backed anthology of stories. If I’m clutching at straws to answer why I stopped writing science fiction this might have come into it a bit: it was very much a take-it-or-leave-it activity, it made little difference to one personally whether one wrote stories or not.” p. 43-44
