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Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #33 (June 1965)
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Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones
Fiction:
Time Trap • reprint novelette by Charles L. Harness ∗∗∗∗
The Small Betraying Detail • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
Nobody Axed You • novelette by John Brunner ∗∗∗∗
Prisoner of the Coral Deep • reprint short story by J. G. Ballard ∗
Alfred’s Ark • short story by Jack Vance ∗∗∗
The Life Buyer (Part 2 of 3) • serial by E. C. Tubb ∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert Fuqua [as by Joe Tillotson]
Interior artwork • by James Cawthorn
The British Contributors
Long Shadows • editorial by John Carnell
Story Ratings NWSF 148
Recommended Paperbacks • by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
The Contributors
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This is a special/all-star issue to celebrate the magazine’s 150th appearance and it leads off with, surprisingly enough, a reprint from the August 1948 issue of Astounding: Time Trap by Charles L. Harness. This is not exactly the kind of story that you would expect to see in the magazine that was in the process of becoming the bleeding edge of the ‘New Wave’. However, Moorcock obviously had a soft spot for Harness’s work—he not only ran this impressive debut piece but would later reprint another story, and was instrumental in bringing out the book edition of a (forgotten) novella The Rose.2
It begins with a typical pulp hook:
General Blade sometimes felt that leading a resistance movement was far exceeding his debt to decent society and that one day soon he would allow his peaceful nature to override his indignant pursuit of justice. Killing a man, even a very bad man, without a trial, went against his grain. He sighed and rapped on the table.
“As a result of Blogshak’s misappropriation of funds voted to fight the epidemic,” he announced, “the death toll this morning reached over one hundred thousand. Does the Assassination Subcommittee have a recommendation?” p. 5-6
This ‘Weapon Shops’ like tribunal (not the only similarity with van Vogt’s work) introduces us to two key characters: the first is a mysterious man called Poole (he has a rose-bud in his lapel, which will prove significant later), one of the assassination operation planners; the second is Major Troy, who objects to Poole’s presence in the team as too little is known about the man. Even though Poole can’t be telepathically probed, and there are gaps in his personal history, etc., the board confirm his suitability.
After this decision Troy telepaths his wife Ann, a seeress of sorts who is at the meeting, and she tells him that Poole will ensure he draws the red ball from the bowl during the selection procedure for the assassination attempt. Troy and Ann will be the ones who kill Blogshak.
The story then leaps forward in time: the pair have been arrested and imprisoned after Blogshak’s killing, and two guards are talking outside the couple’s cell:
“Just ’path that!” whispered the jail warden reverently to the night custodian.
“You know I can’t telepath,” said the latter grumpily.
“What are they saying?”
“Not a word all night. They seem to be taking a symposium of the best piano concertos since maybe the twentieth century. Was Chopin twentieth or twenty-first? Anyhow, they’re up to the twenty-third now, with Darnoval. Troy reproduces the orchestra and his wife does the piano. You’d think she had fifty years to live instead of five minutes.” p. 9
Later, Ann is taken away to be “devitalised”, and the story becomes an extended courtroom drama as Troy faces his trial (the fact that his wife is tried and punished before him is somewhat unconvincing). Poole, now Troy’s lawyer, essentially admits his client’s culpability in the assassination but gets him off on a technicality at the end. When the judge dismisses the charges, and the pair leave the court, they are met by a car with the assassinated Provinarch inside it—alive and well. . . .
The group go to an underground location where, surprisingly, Troy finds Ann alive too, but unconscious. On Poole’s orders, she is then injected with a lethal substance and Troy is told that whether she continues to live is up to him. Poole forestalls Troy’s questions with a dramatic demonstration:
“Major, what you are about to learn can best be demonstrated rather than described. Sharg, the rabbit!”
The beetle-browed man opened a large enamel pan on the table. A white rabbit eased its way out, wrinkling its nose gingerly. Sharg lifted a cleaver from the table. There was a flash of metal, a spurt of blood, and the rabbit’s head fell to the floor. Sharg picked it up by the ears and held it up expectantly. The eyes were glazed almost shut. The rabbit’s body lay limp in the pan. At a word from Poole, Sharg carefully replaced the severed head, pressing it gently to the bloody neck stub. Within seconds the nose twitched, the eyes blinked, and the ears perked up. The animal shook itself vigorously, scratched once or twice at the bloody ring around its neck, then began nibbling at a head of lettuce in the pan. p. 18
Poole then tells Troy that, in his presence, “life, even highly organized life, is resistant to death”. Further, Troy will be kept prisoner to prevent “It . . . from dying during an approaching crisis in its life stream”. Poole gives no clues as to what “It” is.
The rest of the story sprawls out from this point: there is a bomb in Ann’s head that will go off if the couple touch; the pair exchange telepathic messages coded in the notes and frequencies of a last concerto they ‘listened’ to; Troy finds a secret message from Poole in his wife’s ESP lobe explaining that “It” is a malevolent alien entity that has been on Earth since the pre-Cambian, and which feeds off of humanity by draining its vitality:
“Jon Troy, the evil this entity has wreaked upon the earth, entirely through his human agents thus far, is incalculable. It will grow even worse. You thought a sub-electronic virus caused the hundred thousand deaths which launched you on your assassination junket. Not so! The monster in the earth directly beneath you simply drained them of vital force, in their homes, on the street, in the theatre, anywhere and everywhere. Your puny League has been fighting the Outcast for a generation without the faintest conception of the real enemy.” p. 22
At this point the story then switches styles again, and becomes an extended cell biology lecture which culminates in a short burst of handwavium about how Troy’s aura works, and that it is produced by a duct in his body. He later locates this and learns how to control it.
When an opportunity to escape presents itself the couple flee, and end up on the roof of the skyscraper above the underground cell they were held captive in. They look out over a deserted, dead world. “It”starts talking to the couple through a rose on Troy’s lapel that is similar to the one Poole was wearing:
Troy suppressed an impulse of revulsion. Instead of tearing the flower from his coat, he pulled it out gently and held it at arm’s length, where he could watch the petals join and part again, in perfect mimicry of the human mouth.
“Yes, little man, I am what you call the Outcast. There are no other little men to bring my message to you, so I take this means of—”
“You mean you devitalized every man, woman, and child in the province . . . in the whole world?” croaked Troy.
“Yes. Within the past few months, my appetite has been astonishingly good, and I have succeeded in storing within my neurals enough vital fluid to carry me into the next sterechron. There I can do the same, and continue my journey. There’s an excellent little planet waiting for me, just bursting with genial bipedal life. I can almost feel their vital fluid within me, now. And I’m taking you along, of course, in case I meet some . . . old friends. We’ll leave now.” p. 33-34
Ann then tells Troy that his aura works by using reverse time-flow, and that if he closes his duct he will go back in time, where he can prepare a plan to fight the Outcast. She also tells him what his connection with Poole is before jumping off the skyscraper to her death.
As if Harness hasn’t already crammed enough into the story by this point, it now becomes a time-loop story (the “Time Trap” of the title) until, that is, the standing wave produced by this temporal anomaly attracts the attention of another alien called Mai-kel, “The Great One”, who summons his fellow creatures. . . .
Reduced to its constituent parts this story may seem rather kitchen sink and/or ridiculous and/or uneven. It is all those things in different places—but it all hangs together, and it is a massively impressive first story that out-van Vogts van Vogt. It still holds up today and, overall, is very good.
I note in passing the rose and classical music references that would be repeated to a greater extent in Harness’s novella The Rose.
The Small Betraying Detail by Brian W. Aldiss starts with a man on his way to a TB sanatorium who is taken on a detour by his two companions to Grimmer’s Graves, an area of Neolithic flint mines. When they go underground the narrator, afflicted with mild hallucinations, has even stranger thoughts:
Strange irrelevancies bubbled through my mind; Sir Alister Hardy’s theory that man had become, for a while in his early career, an aquatic creature living mostly in the sea returned to my mind, possibly because we were only a few miles from the coast that was our destination. To support his theory was the comparative hairlessness of man, as against the hairiness of the other primates.
Suppose, I thought, there was truth in Walter’s absurd hypothesis about there being other, similar phases in the total universe, or however he expressed it? Then might there not exist an earth on which man was as he is now—yet totally alien, man without aquatic ancestry, man with no love of the sea, man with hair . . . p. 43
After this he collapses, and comes round to find his companions bundling him into the car to take him to the sanatorium. During the journey he thinks he can see fine hair on their faces, but later realises it is a trick of the light. The rest of the trip is punctuated by these mild hallucinations, thoughts of a possible altered reality, and the “small betraying detail” that would reveal itself in such a situation.
When they finally reach the coast we find, in something of an anticlimax (spoiler), that the people sitting on the beach have their chairs facing the land. . . .
Despite the story’s unlikely theory and ending, the narrative has an engrossing fever dream quality which is quite well done. Minor but good.
The other standout story in this issue is a masterful black comedy by John Brunner, Nobody Axed You. This is another story with a good hook:
I felt so detached and critical it was almost as though I were watching someone else chopping open Denise’s head. That was a knack I’d acquired through long experience. Detached or not, though, I felt elated. This was good! This was the most wonderful thing I’d ever done!
I could feel the hot, sweat-slippery handle of the hatchet threatening to slip from my grasp as I swung it again and again. I could feel the slimy stickiness of blood on my hands. It sprayed all over my shirt and jacket and made the synfab stick to my chest. I could smell its sickly scent.
Fabulous!
She was dead, there could be no doubt. Probably the first swing of the hatchet would have been enough. But I had to make sure. Then the next step would be to dismember her and put her in the disposal tube before anyone came in— p. 49
We quickly discover that the narrator, Gene Gardener, is making a TV program, one of many that he has made to encourage copycat murders in his overpopulated world. The “DOA” rating for the show—the number of similar murders in the forty-eight hours after transmission—is the subject of a contentious after show meeting with his boss. Once the meeting is over, Gene leaves to go home and, during his car journey to pick up his wife (cars are a luxury available only to a few), we get a glimpse of the overpopulated world outside:
At first we got along quite quickly, the speedo hitting as high as 12 m.p.h. Then at the usual jam around Plane and Tenth we slowed to a crawl. On the packed sidewalk someone noticed that the seat beside me was empty. He came over and rapped on the window. Of course, I couldn’t hear what he said, the car being soundproof, but other people could—other loafers idling around on the sidewalk. Within a few seconds a fair crowd had gathered: nine hundred to a thousand, I judged.
I could tell from their contorted faces that they were being worked up to a fever pitch by the man who had started the trouble. [. . .]
There was no real call to worry, I was sure. Once the crowd began to interfere with traffic, the police would show in seconds. Which they did. A few bursts from an automatic weapon put the pedestrians back where they belonged, apart from about half a dozen who got trampled in the rush, and the original troublemaker who stood his ground obstinately, yelling at the police and pointing at me.
I rolled down the window as an officer approached. He recognised me, naturally, and as soon as I’d explained that the seat was empty because I was picking up Denise, he apologised, shot the troublemaker and got back aboard his copter.
So in spite of the fuss I was only a few minutes late at my rendezvous with Denise. I had no idea where she’d been all day—shopping, perhaps; she could afford to shop occasionally now, and I wasn’t going to rest till she could do it at least once a week. p. 57
Denise then tells Gene the news around which the rest of the story will pivot: she is pregnant. Gene is not impressed and loses his temper with her. Doesn’t she know how this will affect the show’s ratings? Doesn’t she care about the purpose his show serves?
At home a chilly atmosphere between the couple persists, and Gardener’s mood is not improved when he watches an up-and-coming competitor’s show that evening:
The main character was a janitor living in what used to be the elevator car of a big apartment building. He was presented as a socially well adjusted type. One of the fifty-odd people living on the twelfth floor was a pretty girl he’d fallen for. But because he was afraid he might lose control of himself if he struck up an acquaintance with her, and maybe get her in private and run the risk of increasing the already unbearable population-density in the block, he’d never even spoken to her.
Then a heel living on the floor below this girl started to hang around her, and the janitor was appalled to find that she—whom he’d pictured to himself as decently frigid—was letting him make time with her. He brooded and kept watch till he was sure beyond doubt. Then, heavy-hearted, he went into action.
On the landing at the foot of the stairway between the twelfth floor, where the girl lived, and the eleventh, where the heel lived, was a man-high window coming almost to the floor, which used to give on the fire escape before it was taken away under the municipal ordinance a few years back. He freed the catch on this window and oiled the hinges so it swung easily. Then he got some grease and smeared it all over the stairs.
The gimmick, naturally, was that when the heel came back to his own floor after being with the girl, he’d slip and go straight out the window to smash on the sidewalk eleven floors below. Ingenious. And the shots of the stairway were very atmospheric. Then there was a good comic sequence as the janitor waited to see his rival come out—only just about everyone else on the twelfth floor beat him to it: a gang of kids, then a fat woman with a huge ration-bag indicating a big family, then a couple of men a few moments apart. And the way the camera caught the look on the janitor’s face as he patiently pulled the window to after each failure and slopped more grease on the stairs was as fine a job as I’d seen in years. p. 61-62
After a short argument with Denise, Gardener returns to watch the climax of the show:
The girl and the heel emerged from the girl’s room together, arms around each other, smiling, and duly lost their footing on the greasy stairs. Together they went diving through the window, the heel revealing his true nature as he tried to save himself at the girl’s expense. Cut to the janitor’s ludicrous expression as he realised his plan had worked too well.
So that left him to get his comeuppance. It came as he leaned out to pull the window closed; he leaned too far, over-balanced—and over a last shot of the swinging window the credits came up. p. 63
The rest of Gardener and Denise’s story involves a plot that has: (a) Gardener enduring a turbulent sponsors meeting (the monopoly producer, government man and religious leader argue about using sterilizing drugs to control the population) before he pitches a show about a wealthy man who collects guns discovering his wife is pregnant; (b) an emotional Denise being pressured into a termination; (c) life-like mannequins.
I think you will be able to guess the plot outcome.
What is particularly impressive is how slickly Brunner manages to get there and add a second climax that I didn’t see coming but which is entirely consistent with the logic of the story.
This is an amusing and well constructed piece that manages to pack a lot into its length (even the narrator’s name—Gene Gardener—works for the story), and is a match for the best of Robert Sheckley’s work.
Prisoner of the Coral Deep by J. G. Ballard (Argosy (UK), March 1964) starts with a man finding a fossil shell on the beach after a storm. He is then surprised by a woman who has been watching him, and starts talking to her about the shell:
I weighed it in one hand. “Impressive, isn’t it? A fossil snail—far older than this limestone, you know. I’ll probably give it to my wife, though it should go to the Natural History Museum.”
“Why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?” she said. “The sea is its home.”
“Not this sea,” I rejoined. “The Cambrian oceans where this snail swam vanished millions of years ago.” I detached a thread of fucus clinging to one of the spurs and let it fall away on the air. “I’m not sure why, but fossils fascinate me—they’re like time capsules; if only one could unwind this spiral it would probably play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it’s ever seen—the great oceans of the Carboniferous, the warm shallow seas of the Trias—”
“Would you like to go back to them?” There was a note of curiosity in her voice, as if my comments had intrigued her. “Would you prefer them to this time?” p. 84
The woman then asks if he can hear the sea. The man lifts the shell and starts hearing noises from millions of years in the past: “the growling of gigantic saurians, the cries of reptile birds”, etc. After some more of this (spoiler) he finally hears a man calling for help. It materialises that the man is from the future but is trapped in the past, and the shell is his distress message. When the woman approaches the narrator and tells him it is time to go, he throws the shell into the sea, and she disappears. This is a rather perplexing and unsatisfying ending: was the woman trying to recover the shell so the man in the past could never be rescued? Was she the one who imprisoned him?
Alfred’s Ark by Jack Vance starts in a newspaper office where one of the locals is telling the editor that another biblical flood is coming:
“Six thousand years ago the world was like it is today—full of sin. You remember what happened?”
“Off-hand, no.”
“The Lord sent a great flood. He washed the world clean of wickedness. Ben, there’s going to be another flood.”
“Now Alfred,” said Ben briskly, “are you pulling my leg?”
“No, sir. You study your Bible, you’ll see for yourself. The day is coming and it’s coming soon! “
Ben rearranged the papers on his desk. “I suppose you want me to print big headlines about this flood?”
Alfred hitched himself forward, struck the desk earnestly with his fist. “Here’s my plan, Ben. I want the good citizens of this town to get together. I want us to build a big ark, to put aboard two beasts of every kind, plenty food and drink, a selection of good literature, and make ourselves ready. Don’t laugh at me, Ben. It’s coming.”
“Just when is the big day?”
“June 20th. That gives us less than a year. Not much time, but enough.” p. 89-90
The editor declines to print the story, and Alfred goes home and starts building an ark.
When the rains start on the 20th of June, Arthur, having been disbelieved by everyone, then has people wanting to come aboard, and things turn ugly. . . .
The last paragraph (spoiler) changes this back to a mainstream story. The townspeople forcibly board the vessel and eject Alfred into the muddy water below. Then the rain stops, and they are all left staring at each other—presumably reflecting on how thin is the veneer of civilization.
The Life Buyer by E. C. Tubb begins its second instalment with more world-building grimness:
The place had a gymnasium smell. A row of showers stood to one side, the stalls open. The paint was dark with age, the ceiling black with smoke, the faded prints on the walls mottled and stained.
Two men faced each other in the ring. They were naked aside from shorts and held practice knives in their hands. A third stood before a training device parrying the random slashes of a steel whip with a short bar of lead. Others went through routine exercises designed to speed reflexes and toughen muscle. The place was a normal appendage to the Free Circuit, duplicated a dozen times in the city, the hang-out of those with their eyes on the Mecca of the big time.
A man leaned against a wall and watched the fighters in the ring. They were scarred with the cicatrices of old wounds, white beneath the raw weals of recent training. The practice knives they held were edged with acid-soaked sponge. p. 96
The plot develops: Linda Sheldon appears to be the supplier of the altered krowns (the head worn devices that can control other people if illegally modified); King chairs a business meeting where he regurgitates chunks of the Financial Times (presumably the author’s idea of what is involved in running a company) before meeting Ransom (boyfriend of the wife of the krown-wearing pilot who tried to kill King); he tells Ransom he wants him to take over Sheil’s job (he is the one who died in the hotel wearing a krown), and Ransom accepts before going to a krown joint and whips a surrogate that looks like King.
I think the plot might end up having something to do with these krown things.
The final chapter in this instalment has Markham and Steve called in by a security boss: he tells them that Shiel was working on King’s quest for immortality. Shiel had been searching through records for long-lived people and had found someone, but did not leave a note of the name.
As I said last issue, competent but rather wooden and uninvolving.
The Cover by Robert Fuqua (ISFDB doesn’t give any source for the credit) is rather meh—why wouldn’t you go for warmer, cheerier colours? There is only one (good) piece of Interior artwork by James Cawthorn.
On the inside front cover, rather than the usual blank space, there is The British Contributors—someone has got the box brownie out of the cupboard and photographed several of the contributors. They all look in the prime of life, so it is a bit sad to realise that only Moorcock and Jones are still left among us.
Long Shadows is a guest editorial by John Carnell where he briefly recaps the magazine’s history:
The magazine’s very existence is inextricably entwined with the history of British science fiction, its record an impressive one of endeavour, experimentation and achievement, of battles with distribution, rising costs, contemporary opposition and the constant cycle of replenishing the gaps left by authors who graduated to other markets. Six times the magazine has changed printers; four times size; three times publishers and once editors. It was originally an irregular publication, then bi-monthly, monthly, again
bi-monthly and now back to monthly, yet during all these upheavals and changing patterns, the one primary object by everyone concerned in its presentation has been high quality science fiction and first-class entertainment value. p. 2-3
He then notes that writers who have worked in the field do financially better over the long-term than general writers, and finishes by looking to the future.
It’s the same kind of general, anodyne thing he does in the introductions for New Writings in SF (this is an observation as much as a criticism).
Story Ratings NWSF 148 was discussed in that issue.3
Recommended Paperbacks by Michael Moorcock is a very short book column (two-thirds of a page) covering two items, both of which sound interesting:
We sf readers are rather prone to getting interested in crackpot pseudo-sciences—Scientology, General Semantics, The Dean Drive, and so on. Although the old image of the SF fan gazing skywards looking for Flying Saucers seems to have been smashed for good and all, the fact remains that, let’s face it, many of us are gullible. That’s why every SF reader should get himself a copy of Mr. Gardner’s gripping—and it’s impossible to put down—new edition of Fads and Fallacies [Dover Books]. With good humour and wit—not to mention logic and seriousness—he demolishes a vast range of pseudosciences from Scientology to Dr W. H. “Throw Away Your Glasses” Bates whose work had me fooled until I read this book. It also had Aldous Huxley fooled, so I feel in good company. p. 48
The other book is a collection of articles, The World in 1984 edited by Nigel Calder (Pelican Books): I wonder how much they got right?
The Contributors is a page or so of short biographical information about the writers featured in this issue, and it fills the spaces at the end of the Ballard and Vance stories.
A pretty good issue, and well worth getting. ●
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1. In Graham Hall’s review in Vector #33 (June 1965) he says “With a line-up of Brian Aldiss, Jack Vance, E C Tubb, Charles Harness, John Brunner and J G Ballard one cannot but expect first-class material. But if you do expect this, you’re likely to be disappointed.” He was as surprised as me to see Harness’s story as the lead, and adds that it is “written in good old pulp style with cardboard characters, great gimmicks and long explanations of complicated science processes”.
One of the best stories in the issue “comes, as was to be expected, from the pen of Brian Aldiss”. He adds that “for once, his technique is good enough to put over his ideas well.”
Brunner’s story is “memorable”.
Of the Ballard he says, “I guess I am biased when it comes to Ballard—I just don’t like his writing in the main—but consider that I can, normally, detach myself sufficiently to appreciate his imagery. Even this is lacking in Prisoner of the Coral Deep.”
Vance’s story is “a delight to read.”
Tubb’s serial “moves along at a rapid rate, his characters merging in their puerile way into an indistinguishable mess—forget the names and you’re lost. But there are space-opera fans and this is for them. A disappointment.”
He briefly mentions the non-fiction before concluding, “Of course it’s better than the average issue, but it does help to prove that ‘names’ don’t always write that much better.”
2. The second Harness story reprinted by Moorcock was Stalemate in Space from the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories (reprinted as Stalemate in Time over a year later in New Worlds #165, August 1966). The Rose, Harness’s long novella from Authentic #31 (March 1953), appeared in an eponymous volume (alongside two other stories) from Compact Books in 1966.
My review of The Rose is here.
3. The ratings for this issue appeared in #152:
How the Tubb serial beat the Aldiss or Vance, never mind the Brunner, I do not know. At least the readers got it right with the Harness novelette. ●
