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Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #31 (March 1965)
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Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones
Fiction:
The Power of Y (Part 2 of 2) • novella serial by Arthur Sellings ∗
More Than a Man • short story by John Baxter ∗
When the Skies Fall • short story by John Hamilton ∗∗
The Singular Quest of Martin Borg • novelette by George Collyn ∗
The Mountain • reprint short story by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin] ∗∗
Box • short story by Richard Wilson ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Jakubowicz
Interior artwork • by Maeve Gilmore, James Cawthorn, uncredited
A Rare Event • editorial
Biological Electricity • science essay
Can Spacemen Live with Their Illusions? • science essay by Science Horizons
The Cosmic Satirist • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Silver Collections • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Did Elric Die in Vain? • book review by Alan Forrest
Hardly SF • book reviews by Hilary Bailey
Letters to the Editor
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The second instalment of The Power of Y by Arthur Sellings (a novel about a world where “Plying”, the limited identical reproduction of objects, is available) has Afford getting out of the sanatorium and going on a somewhat farcical journey (he is trying to lose any tail he may have) that ends at a safe house in the countryside. His Aunt Clarissa, Guy Burroughs, and Joanna are there. A disgruntled late arrival is Tom Mitchison (Afford’s minder, appointed by Aunt Clarissa). The group discuss the situation and note a surprising discovery: the President’s assistant is a disguised man called Rockstro, one of the two inventors of plying (both are reported to have died).
After this the novel partially turns into a synopsis, as a lot of the action happens off-stage and is then talked about in later meetings, such as when Burroughs turns up at a Chinese restaurant days later and lays out the plot to Afford and his aunt. He tells them that an old lab assistant of Klien’s (the other inventor) has told him about the plying of a dog, and how the copied creature was a docile and easily manipulated creature. Burroughs concludes from this that the real president is alive and a prisoner in the Europa Palace, and that they must break in and rescue him.
The rest of the novel is mostly fast-paced, if unlikely, action. Afford and Burroughs spend several days tunnelling into the Palace. When they finally break in (spoiler) they find the President and take Rockstro prisoner. There is a gunfight on the way out and they blow the tunnel. They get the President to the safe house and tell him about the plot.
The final twist occurs when the President disappears shortly afterwards, seemingly from a locked room with guards outside. Then the copy of the president gives a radio broadcast and, in the middle of his speech, he disappears too. Rockostro explains in a data dump what has happened: they haven’t borrowed copies of the objects from other spaces but from other times.
They go to the palace, and find it under military control: the plotters are arrested, and all ends well.
The second half of this novella is not as good as the first: a story told with a certain lightness of tone turns into an unlikely adventure, where the chess pieces are formulaically moved around the board. The plying gimmick is completely unconvincing too.2
More Than a Man by John Baxter starts with two captains in the Terran Navy who are on the surface of an alien planet preparing themselves for a mission. Once they are suitably disguised they go to the nearby town and arrange for a private audience with the sovereign. When they are alone we discover the latter is a robot, and it is then serviced by the two men.
On the way to their next job we learn of a previous space war with the opposing Hegemony forces:
He remembered Dubhe well enough, though he had been only a child at the time. It wasn’t something that any Earthman, especially a Navy officer, could hope to forget. Beyond that star a frozen graveyard of ships stood as a permanent reminder of the suicidal futility of blow-for-blow battling in space.
It had been the first and the last space battle. After Dubhe, both sides limped home and reconsidered their strategy. Out of that reconsideration had come the Hegemony’s all-enveloping net of colonial outposts and the Earth’s plan of robot subversion. So perhaps Dubhe had not been such a total loss after all. p. 53
During their next job (on a different planet) they struggle to find the tribal chief they are looking for until some of his tribesmen appear at their camp. They get to him and find he is malfunctioning due to gunshot wounds. One of the navy captains goes for spares, the other stays. When the tribesmen say their leader must accompany them on a raid, the remaining Terran captain changes his features and goes in the leader’s place. The punchline seems to be that he will find out if the robots are “more than men” (an idea briefly floated earlier in the story).
This story has a tired setting, is overlong, and it doesn’t have the early focus on the robot/man idea that its conclusion requires. All of which leaves the ending feeling like a non-sequitur.
When the Skies Fall by John Hamilton starts off with three men seemingly talking over each other but, eventually, a religious discussion develops and this leads to a comment about the date of Armageddon. One of the men pencils this in his diary for a week hence, and then the other asks whether the knowledge of this date could cause it to change. The last scene (spoiler) is the unravelling of reality.
This story’s initial obliqueness is discouraging but the last scene is effective:
Dixey, still sitting to their left at the side of the room, had not been listening and was the first to hear an odd sound: over and above the mellow singing from downstairs sweet rippling chords from some musical instrument could be discerned—it took little reflection to recognise it was a harp.
All three listened to the rise and fall of the strings, quietly enchanted by the freshness and elegance and coolness of the air-borne notes. The singing below stopped—they too listened to the music which issued from a delicate flutter of unseen fingers. It was like the summer brook of Time rippling and playing over the stones of the centuries, washing them softly away.
Some time later the flow of music faded and Dixey coughed, almost apologetically. There followed a silence and then a strange muffled sound—as of a deck of cards falling, and the new silence was deeper than before, than ever before. It was the silence of a tomb.
Instinctively all three were drawn slowly to the window, and all three gasped or sighed from deep within their souls. Nothing. Void. Blank. The trees, the houses, the street, the sky—the world was gone.
The scene that met their eyes was a blank domino, a painting washed clean.
Dumas’ voice muttered something about being wrong. p. 66
The longest piece of short fiction in the issue is George Collyn’s novelette The Singular Quest of Martin Borg. It is described in the blurb as a “marvellously funny spoof” but is, in reality, an overlong, plodding story, and a bit of a chore to read.
It begins with a drug dealer and an exotic dancer/concubine meeting on a spaceship. After their brief encounter the dancer gives birth to a son. When the mother remarries some years later, the boy is left in the care of robots on a remote planetoid, and remains there until he is discovered twenty-five years later. He is taken to civilization.
The rest of the story runs through various SF tropes: Martin develops psi powers and later teleports back to the planetoid. There he sees a photo of his mother and changes his sex and appearance so as he looks like her:
He thought of lean thighs, white and clear-cut and felt their configuration as it would be and it was so. He thought of breasts swelling apple-round and sensed their touch and it was so. He formulated hair of gold in perfect fall to his shoulders and it was so. He imagined almond eyes and tulip lips, delicate curves and rounded femininity and it was so. He thought of yielding fragility and steel-tempered passion and Marti Marta reborn stood in the nursery; which sounds incredible but it was so. p. 77
Martita then goes to Hi Li City where she works as a concubine:
Martita Borg spent twenty years in Hi Li City and in that time she had many lovers and from nibbling at their subconscious thoughts, unshielded in moments of passion, she learnt many secret things.
For five years she was a dancer like her mother, a mime artist, adept of the five hundred Postures of Meaning and her naked and supple limbs traced intricate and erotic patterns for the delectation of the Great Minds.
Then for five years she was a jewelled one, her entire body, save the sexual and erogenous zones, gold-painted and encrusted with gems and precious stones, her body veined with sapphires and turquoise, arms outlined in garnets and opals, thighs of milk white pearl and bloodred rubies and a face diamond masked and emerald framed. An exquisite gem; finest product of the jeweller’s and goldsmith’s art; an expensive toy for the treasures of the galaxy. p. 78
She then meets a brutal Emperor, later revealed as Martin/Martita’s father. The Emperor’s heart stops when he sees what he thinks is his ex-wife:
So would have perished the body of the most powerful man ever to live had not his son captured his persona, memory and body in their dying spasm and reunited father, mother and son in one brain and body. p. 83
You get the idea. I think there is a time loop at the end, with Martin having a normal childhood the next time around, but I’d rather lost interest by then so I’m not entirely sure.
The Mountain by Michael Moorcock (first published as Le Montague in Nocturne 1) is a Ballardian post-holocaust story where two surviving men climb a mountain in pursuit of a woman:
Not without certain trepidation, Hallner followed behind his friend who marched towards the mountains without looking back or even from side to side.
Nilsson had a goal and rather than sit down, brood and die when the inescapable finally happened, Hallner was prepared to go along with him on this quest for the girl.
And, he admitted, there was a faint chance that if the winds continued to favour them, they might have a chance of life. In which case there was a logical reason for Nilsson’s obsessional tracking of the woman.
His friend was impatient of his wish to walk slowly and savour the atmosphere of the country which seemed so detached and removed, uninvolved with him, disdainful.
That there were things which had no emotional relationship with him, had given him a slight surprise at first, and even now he walked the marshy ground with a feeling of abusing privacy, of destroying the sanctity of a place where there was so little hint of humanity; where men had been rare and had not been numerous or frequent enough visitors to have left the aura of their passing behind them. p. 90-91
Of course they never catch her, and it all comes to a nihilistic end. I suppose the journey up the mountain, with its perils and its passage through the mist, may be a metaphor for the ascent of humanity and the ultimate futility of this process, but I’m not sure of this interpretation.
Although this kind of thing isn’t usually my cup of tea, I thought this was okay.
Box by Richard Wilson has a narrator who lives in an efficiency apartment, a small box, and he has not been out of it for some years, but wants to get together with a woman he is infatuated with called Maria. Hitherto he has got his life and sexual experiences through the “dreamies”:
When Harry was in the mood for something more active he used the Triveo-Plus, also known as the tactiloscope or dreamies. Through the magic of TP (available at extra cost) he had climbed Everest and Tupungato, breathing normally. He had explored the Antarctic and the Sahara, in 72-degree comfort. He had skin-dived, dry, off the Great Barrier Reef. He had spelunked, without anxiety, in Fingal’s Cave and Aggtelek and Devil’s Hole. And, on a bootleg channel (available at extortionate cost) he had lain in the arms of five hundred variegated young women. That averaged out, over five years, to two a week. Harry McCann felt that in his sex life, as in his other habits, he was a temperate man. p. 105
He eventually manages to conquer his agoraphobia and make the journey across the city to see Maria. Of course (spoiler), once he gets to her flat he isn’t allowed in as she hasn’t been out for years, and couldn’t cope with a real visitor.
This reads like the kind of story the 1950s Galaxy might have run, although it may have contained too many autobiographical elements for the editor Horace Gold (the agoraphoboia, etc.).
The Cover by Jakubowicz is rather dark for my taste, and I’m not sure that the blue colour-blocks set it off that well.
The Interior artwork is by the same two artists as last issue, and the bulk of it is by Maeve Gilmore for the Selling serial.3 Only two of the short stories are illustrated; one is signed by Cawthorn. The thumbnail sketches for the editorial, books and letters columns have been changed: the attractive sketches have been replaced by boring planets:
A Rare Event isn’t credited and, as Moorcock’s picture isn’t at the top of the page anymore, perhaps this one is by Langdon Jones. Who knows? It starts with a description of the 1957 World SF Convention in London:
Only once before has a World Science Fiction Convention been held in Britain. This was in 1957 at London’s Kings Court Hotel. It was attended by hundreds of SF enthusiasts, publishers, writers, editors and artists from all over the world—there were even a few from behind the Iron Curtain. John W. Campbell was the Guest of Honour and amongst the American personalities were H. Beam Piper, Bob Silverberg. Harry Harrison, Ray Nelson, Sam Moskowitz, Forrest Ackerman and others. Well known British writers were there in strength—Wyndham, Clarke, Eric Frank Russell, Aldiss, Ballard, Sellings, John Christopher. Tubb, Bulmer, Brunner, James White and, of course. John Carnell. It was an exciting affair and it gave many readers a chance to meet their favourite authors for the first time for—as always—it was informal. p. 2
The writer goes on to plug the 23rd Worldcon, which is once again being held in London in August (1965), as well as mentioning the Easter BSFA convention in Birmingham. There are a couple of other notes as well, so it is housekeeping this month, not proselytising.
Last issue I mentioned that I expected the science essay to be the usual dry stuff: it wasn’t but the two in this issue are. The first essay, Biological Electricity, has this:
In, 1963, scientists of the General Electric Company’s Space Sciences Laboratory at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, demonstrated the use of biological electricity in a simple, painless experiment with a laboratory rat. They implanted electrodes into the rat’s abdominal cavity. A current of 155 microwatts generated by the rat’s body was led from those electrodes by a thin insulated wire through the skin and used to power a radio-transmitter. p. 102
Painless for the scientists.
The second one, Can Spacemen Live with Their Illusions?, is by “Science Horizons”, whoever they are.4
The Cosmic Satirist by Michael Moorcock (rave) reviews The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (I’m surprised this doesn’t appear under Moorcock’s own name). He has this to say to readers who are uncertain about attempting the book:
The reader who likes a book with a “beginning, a middle and an end” need not be in the least alarmed by The Naked Lunch. I am much more inclined towards the conventional novel myself. I certainly do not welcome novelty for novelty’s sake, nor obscenity for obscenity’s sake—I find most of the fiction produced under the label of “beat” and “avant-garde” boring and pretentious, disguising bad, undisciplined writing under a superficial cloak of equally bad and undisciplined “experimental” styles. Just as the Buck Rogers brigade of SF writers bring SF into disrepute, so do these so-called experimental writers bring the handful of genuine innovators into disrepute. The simple fact with Burroughs is that he can write. He can write better than anybody else at work today. He has an ear for dialogue, an eye for reality, an ability to conjure up phantasmagoric visions that immediately capture the imagination, a powerful, uncompromising style that rips away our comforting delusions and displays the warts and the sores that can fester in the human mind. Not a pleasant vision at first, yet we are soon captured by Burroughs’s deadpan style which aids us to look upon the horrors without revulsion, and take, instead, a cool, objective look at perversion in all its states and forms—mental, physical and spiritual. p. 116-117
I’m not entirely sure why a quote from Limbo 90 (by Bernard Wolfe) follows this, nor is the next quote from the book itself (a description of the city of Interzone) particularly appealing.
The rest of Moorcock’s reviews are in Silver Collections, and find him in a less dyspeptic mood than last issue.
Did Elric Die in Vain? by Alan Forrest is a long review of Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock, and reminded me of how different the ‘Elric’ stories were, with their physically weak anti-hero and his malevolent sword.
Hardly SF by Hilary Bailey is the final review essay, and it makes its titular point about Who? by Algis Budrys.
Letters to the Editor includes a long letter from Peter J. D. Matthews of Yeovil, Somerset, where he charts what he suggests is a decrease in the quality in Bradbury’s work from The Silver Locusts (The Martian Chronicles) through Fahrenheit 451 and Golden Apples of the Sun. He goes on to say that Ballard and Moorcock are on the same slippery slope:
With each successive story he is plunging at the moment, except that Equinox and The Drowned World are almost identical. The editor, who, as far as I know, first rose to prominence in the fantasy field, for a time seemed to be graduating to SF, but now seems to be following Bradbury and Ballard, that is if Goodbye Miranda is anything to judge by.
Basically the fault seems to be that there is a trend for authors to attempt to appeal to the emotions directly with word pictures—a job for the poets in my opinion—rather than writing a story and letting the story do its work on the emotions or the intellect. Go back to the old days, the blood-curdling days of the Vargo Statten Magazine etc. What so you find? Clean-cut stories, painted with broad, crudely aimed strokes of the pen, but stories. Write stuff like that, only better, to suit a more adult readership—throw in a good percentage of more serious stuff (the first half of Blish’s A Case of Conscience is the sort of thing I mean) and I’ll buy monthlies filled with that, faster than you can print them! p. 125-126
The editorial reply:
We agree, and have always agreed, that there is a place for the good, intelligent action story in SF and we should never miss the chance of publishing any we receive. But, it seems, the trend away from this kind of writing involves the authors— old and new—as well as the readers. Certainly this is true of this country. The more popular British SF writers such as Wyndham, Christopher, Aldiss and Ballard, have appealed perhaps because they have placed the accent on character and so on, rather than on the action element.
It has often occurred to us that if it had not been for the necessity of selling to what was essentially a pulp-magazine field the work of Asimov, Clarke and others might have been that much better. We also endorse your view that SF could currently do with a few more good, straightforward craftsmen, as well as writers of the more thoughtful kind. p. 126
The next letter, from John R. Orr, Emsworth, Hants., hopes for stories from Philip E. High, as well as more ‘Hek Belov’ stories from Edward Mackin. The editors say that High is concentrating on novels for the US market but that they have a long Hek Belov story coming up . . . oh dear, it’s at times like this I wish they were more ruthless with the old guard.
There is a Next Month filler at the end of the letter column which trails a new story from J. G. Ballard called Dune Limbo (actually an extract from his new novel The Drought).
There are no Story Ratings in this issue due to the change of publication schedule to monthly.5
Finally, I think I once again see Moorcock doing a spot of collecting in the Advertisements:
CHARLES L. HARNESS—anything in magazines. Some CORDWAINER SMITH in magazines. Also books written or illustrated by Mervyn Peake. Details to Advertiser, Box 826, NWSF. 17, Lake House, Scovell Rd. London, S.E.l. p. 128
Overall, this is an average to mediocre issue, but it isn’t the worst one so far (#145). ●
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1. Graham Hall’s review starts off with a comment about how the increased production schedule will no doubt cause “a drop in the standard of material, but that is not [yet] overtly noticeable”.
He likes the cover, thinks it looks like Powers, and is the magazine’s best yet. He was disappointed with the science fact articles.
As for the fiction, the Sellings has an irritating passage at the beginning (unspecified) but finishes with a “remarkable and high-standard ending.” He adds that the work is “mildly amusing, well-written but with that so frequent tendency of serials—a disappointing middle.”
The Baxter story is “good [but has] well treated second-hand, not new, [ideas]” while Hamilton’s piece is “pointless” and clichéd. Collyn’s piece has “a plot of van Vogtian complexity” but is “badly constructed.” Hall adds, “This ‘characterisation’ takes some beating. Holds out through some good ideas, a lot of bad writing and finally turns out to be the good old time paradox theme done up. Poorest item in the magazine.”
The Colvin has some good description but Hall would have preferred a more original idea. Wilson, “one of the few consistently good writers” contributes a piece that is “very extrapolatory and might well prove visionary.”
As for the non-fiction, Hall says that “weight is made” with the Book Reviews before describing the Letters column as “short and uninspiring”. He does not like the illustrations for the serial, saying that they are “childish scribblings—there isn’t a fanzine in the country that prints worse.”
“An issue treading water.”
2. The book version of Selling’s novella changed the title from The Power of Y to The Power of X (a backward move I felt . . . boom, tish). The novella is ~28,000 words and the novel is ~43,000 words, so it is a considerable expansion. One thing I noted is that the book version dumps the novella introduction about Afford wanting to be President of the USE and starts in his art gallery (a good move).
3. The artwork for the Selling serial is uncredited but I think it is by Gilmore as it is of the same style as the artwork for I Remember Anita in #144, and New Worlds only seems to be using her, Thomson and Cawthorn for illustrations.
4. There aren’t any more of these science articles in the next few issues, so it looks like it was a short-lived experiment (boom, tish, again!).
5. The story ratings for this issue appeared in #149:
I’d have gone with Wilson, Moorcock (Colvin), Hamilton as the top three. I note that the longest piece is in first place (again) and the second longest in second. ●
I’ve read a bunch of these — Moorcock’s The Mountain and the Collyn story (neither blew me away).
And Arthur Sellings…. I’ve tried multiple times to read a few of his novels that I have on my shelves. They are always so bland and slight that I give up after a few pages.
What I really came by to comment on was Jakubowicz’s cover! I had no idea New World’s actively procured French SF artists! (he illustrated a bunch of Fiction covers from 1962-1966).
For some reason your reply went straight into the bin. Anyway, have a look at the review of #144, that cover is Jakubowicz’s too, and there is a link in the footnotes to a page of his covers, IIRC.
I think that Selling’s ‘Junk Day’, his last, is probably the one to get, judging by what SFE has to say about it.
No problem.
I’ve checked Abebooks numerous times for a cheap copy of Junk Day (I won’t find it in stores as I’m almost positive it was only published in the UK) — but my previous exposure to his work has not justified the cost!
Are you tempted to read it?
That partially depends on the quality of the other short work of his I’ll read in due course, but eventually, yes (probably around the time I get to the large format New Worlds as it sounds like that kind of modern dystopian novel).