{"id":12624,"date":"2020-04-25T13:43:48","date_gmt":"2020-04-25T13:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=12624"},"modified":"2020-04-25T13:43:48","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T13:43:48","slug":"argosy-uk-october-1955","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=12624","title":{"rendered":"Argosy (UK), October 1955"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Summary:
\nThis British fiction digest regularly published science fiction in its pages (sometimes as a \u201cScience Fiction Choice\u201d), and this issue has the second (and final) instalment of a novella-length version of John Wyndham\u2019s The Chrysalids<\/em><\/strong>, a post-nuclear-holocaust tale about persecuted mutant telepaths. There is also Forty Day Road<\/em><\/strong>, which is a timeslip story from Christopher Landon, author of Ice Cold in Alex<\/em>, the source novel for a classic WWII movie.
\nThe rest of the magazine is non-SF material, most notable of which is H. E. Bates\u2019 surprisingly transgressive (for its time) The Good Corn<\/em><\/strong>. There are also good stories from Brian Cleeve and David Beaty.<\/p>\n

Galactic Central link<\/a>
\nArchive.org copy<\/a><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

Editor not listed<\/p>\n

Fiction:
\nTrust Little Al<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Michael Gilbert \u2217\u2217<\/strong>
\nHaunted Summer<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Mary Lee Settle \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nCat\u2019s-Paw<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by W. S. Money \u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Good Corn<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by H. E. Bates \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nSix Legs Are Welcome<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Geoffrey Household \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nDuel <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 short story by Brian Cleeve \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nForty Day Road<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Christopher Landon \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nHeart of the Storm<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by David Beaty \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nAir on a G-String<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 reprint short story by Cordelia Baird Gross –
\nThe Chrysalids<\/em><\/strong> [Part 2 of 2] \u2022 novella serial by John Wyndham \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+<\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nFuchsias <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 poem by John Pudney
\nMixed Bag<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 quiz
\nRendezvous <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 poem and prose extracts
\nRiver Music<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 poem by Fleur Mountain
\nCarte Blanche <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 poem by Ogden Nash
\nGarden Pleasures<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 poem and prose extracts
\nArgosy Crossword<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

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John Wyndham\u2019s novella version of The Chrysalids<\/em><\/strong> concludes in this issue with what is essentially the \u2018chase\u2019 half of the much longer novel (a more comprehensive review of the latter can be found here<\/a>, and you may wish to skim that before reading on).
\nThis part starts with a horseman coming upon some of the group as they cluster round Petra after she has telepathically shouted for help for a second time (a ferocious mutant predator attacked her mount while she was horse-riding in the woods). The horseman is suspicious as to why several people have come from different directions to help her, but they manage to assuage his misgivings before taking Petra home. The group later discuss what happened, and agree that David should train Petra so she can control her telepathic ability. During this training she mentions to David that she can detect \u201cthought-shapes\u201d that are being sent from the distant south-west.
\nUncle Axel later warns David that people are asking questions about the group found with Petra. When David discusses it with the others they conclude that, if the authorities interrogate Petra, they will find out about their group, so they make contingency plans to escape the village. Later, however, it is Katherine and Sally who are arrested and questioned, while David, Petra, and Rosalind narrowly avoid being captured and flee towards the Fringes. A posse from the village pursues them, and Michael\u2014who isn\u2019t identified by the authorities as one of the group\u2014joins it so he can give them constant updates about the its progress.
\nDuring the threesome\u2019s journey towards what they hope will be safety, Petra mentions that the thoughts from far away are getting stronger and, after messages\u00a0 relayed through Petra, they learn that (spoiler): the sender a woman; she lives in a place called Zealand (in a city with flying machines passing overhead; and that it is day there and not night. The woman tells David and Rosalind that Petra\u2019s telepathic strength is exceptional, and that she must be protected at all costs. She also reveals her humourless superiority:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are the New People\u2014so are you. The people who can think-together. We\u2019re the people who are going to build a new world\u2014a different world from the Old People\u2019s and the savages\u2019.\u201d
\n\u201cThe kind of people that God intended?\u201d I [David] suggested, with a feeling of being on familiar ground.
\n\u201cI don\u2019t know about that. But we do know that we can make a better world than the Old People. They were savages, half men. Shut off from one another, with only inadequate words to link them; tribes shut off by different languages; minds shut off by different religions. There was never any unity in them.
\n\u201cIndividually, some of them could think: collectively, they could not. The more complex they made their world, the less capable they were of dealing with it. They had no means of consensus. They could co-operate constructively in small units, but only destructively in large ones. They aspired greedily, and then refused the responsibilities they had created. With one hand they grasped reason, with the other they rejected it. Singly, some of them tried to be men; in groups, they remained primitive. There was, you see, no real communication between them: the system of words could work at all only where individuals were very similar: applied to large numbers, it broke down.
\n\u201cThey brought down Tribulation, which all but destroyed them. They were inadequate.\u201d\u00a0 p. 125<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After more adventures in the woods (the Fringe folk capture the three and take them to their camp where they meet the spiderman, etc.) there is a climactic battle between the posse from the village and the Fringe folk. In the middle of the fight the Zealand woman arrives overhead in a helicopter and sprays everyone below with sticky webs which incapacitate them. The helicopter lands, and the woman releases the three children (while leaving the untermensch<\/em>\u2014and the horses\u2014to die). David, Rosalind and Petra leave in the helicopter with the woman.
\nThe last scene has them overhead the city in Zealand, where David senses the hive-mind below.
\nAlthough this part isn\u2019t as good as the first it isn\u2019t bad\u2014and is a lot better than the version in the novel. This is because a lot of the padding\u2014the idea of God\u2019s image, and the Zealand woman\u2019s evolutionary destiny lectures\u2014is excised. That said, the whole thing is somewhat over-compressed, but this version is definitely worthy of consideration for any Best of the Year anthology.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is only one other fantasy or science fiction piece in this issue (there were three last time), and that is a timeslip story, Forty Day Road<\/em><\/strong> by Christopher Landon (Landon is best known for the novel Ice Cold in Alex<\/em>,1<\/sup> which became a popular British WWII movie.)
\nThis story, like Ice Cold for Alex<\/em>, is also set in the desert, where the demobbed narrator is sent by his company to search for signs of a locust swarm. During this expedition the team end up camping on an old slavers\u2019 route, the \u201cForty Day Road.\u201d One night, after celebrating the birthday of an American biologist with the group, the narrator wakes up in the small hours and goes for a walk up the road. When he stops to rest, he falls asleep.
\nHe wakes to the sound of a large camel train coming up the road and, as it starts to pass him, he sees the slaves. Then the flank guards capture him and he joins the train. For the next four days he travels up the road with the slavers before (spoiler) slipping back through time to the future.
\nThis is a slight piece (man falls through time, and then falls back) but there is some good description of the camel train and its people, and a neat, if perhaps unoriginal, last line that confirms his journey wasn\u2019t a dream.<\/p>\n

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The rest of the fiction includes Trust Little Al<\/em><\/strong> by Michael Gilbert, which is a lightweight espionage story where a secret services type looks after a scientist on holiday in Austria. The latter is an unreliable womaniser (who paradoxically doesn\u2019t brush his teeth much), so it makes for a demanding job. There is also a femme fatale, a (spoiler) abduction attempt, and a final twist where we learn that a couple of the characters are not who they seem. Slick, but it\u2019s hard to care much about what happens.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although it isn\u2019t a ghost story (spoiler: the explanation at the end is mundane), Haunted Summer<\/em><\/strong> by Mary Lee Settle certainly feels like one for most of the way through, and starts with this:<\/p>\n

I was ten. I spent the first part of the summer being wonderfully frightened by slipping into her room, and reading Ghost Stories<\/em> or True Spiritual Experiences<\/em> or Voices from Beyond<\/em>. I would sit in the corner in the afternoon, for she was never there then, she always slept in the hammock on the downstairs back porch.
\nThere in the half-dark, in the cool half-dark (for the blinds were drawn against the heat outside), the room was deep green, strangely larger than when the sun was allowed in, and it had the still silence of a room waiting\u2014or asleep. Her big rocker would be empty, but the overstuffed seat was bent with use so that it didn\u2019t seem empty.
\nAgainst the wall stood the huge bed that my Aunt Phemie had died in; my Aunt Eliza said she lingered for months after and that the hole never healed at all, not from the time they brought her home. The big bed sank in the middle, too, and that too seemed occupied, occupied by\u2014I was learning a new language\u2014ectoplasm and heat.
\nThere I would sit with my back tight against the wall, for what I could see I didn\u2019t fear so much, and I would read from the dusky pulp magazines about the ever-recurring spot on the floor, made by the drowned sailor, or stories about Things that weren\u2019t anything but seemed made of flesh and slithered under the study door and crawled onto the study desk where the man who was writing the story used to sit.\u00a0 pp. 18-19<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is (for the most part) a convincingly atmospheric tale about a young girl who lives in a big house in the deep South, and who thinks that the attic contains an \u201cIt.\u201d When she eventually sees a woman with lank black hair who gestures at her, she flees. After summoning her courage, the girl goes back for another look . . . .
\nThe explanation is disappointingly rational, which is a shame, but it\u2019s worth a look.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cat\u2019s-Paw<\/em><\/strong> by W. S. Money begins with two sailors on a ship, one of whom, Charlie, expresses a vehement dislike of the resident ginger tomcat. Charlie goes on to complain about his sister-in-law and her cat, who both live with him and his wife. Then, on the return trip, he sees a shipmate with a monkey that chases off the ship\u2019s tomcat, so he buys it, thinking that it will sort out his problems at home.
\nOn the next trip the narrator speaks to Charlie and discovers that (spoiler) the monkey made friends with the cat but attacked the sister-in-law, who then left with the cat! Much to Charlie\u2019s two-birds-with-one-stone delight.
\nIf you are in the mood for a story about an unpleasant protagonist with family grievances and a poor attitude towards animals, this will be right up your street. It wasn\u2019t up mine.<\/p>\n

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Highlight of the issue, apart from the Wyndham, is The Good Corn<\/em><\/strong> by H. E. Bates, which begins with much scene setting that involves a married couple on their rural small-holding. They put away money at the end of every market day for the family they plan to have but, after twenty five years, the woman has not conceived. When a new-born calf dies, she becomes depressed, and the doctor suggests to the husband that they make a fresh start somewhere else, and without livestock.
\nThe second half of the story sees the couple mainly growing corn at their new farm. Later on they employ a girl to help the wife with the chores, and we eventually we find that the she previously had an illegitimate child. As she didn\u2019t want to keep it her family gave it away. One day the husband and the girl talk while they are out in the fields, and (spoiler) he ends up kissing her. . . .
\nWhen the girl gets pregnant for a second time, the wife adopts a surprisingly pragmatic response to both her unfaithful husband and to the child that is born.
\nBates manages to get an amazing number of what I thought would be 1950\u2019s taboos into this story: failure to conceive, illegitimate birth, adultery, lack of maternal concern, and a wife adopting a husband\u2019s child by another woman.
\nI\u2019m becoming increasingly interested in this writer, and look forward to more of his work in the magazine.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Six Legs Are Welcome<\/em><\/strong> by Geoffrey Household has an intriguing start:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no good waving at them. Take this one, for example! She\u2019ll get bored with crawling up my arm in a moment, and fly off. For twenty-seven days in the month there\u2019s just the usual mixture of insects, and on the twenty-eighth, for no reason at all, one species gets completely out of hand and fills up all the available air.
\nNo, I don\u2019t know what these are called\u2014apart from their Indian name. Odd-looking creatures, aren\u2019t they? Six legs. Red and black Asdic. And about an inch and a half of torpedo tube in the stern. That\u2019s only a flying ant in your gin. Just pick it out. There you are\u2014neither of you one penny the worse!
\nWe\u2019ll go inside in another half-hour when the mosquitoes come on duty. But you needn\u2019t pay any attention at all to these fellows. They\u2019re just satisfying their curiosity, with only one day to do it in perhaps. Well, yes, there are limits. I quite agree. I don\u2019t hold with those Buddhist chaps who won\u2019t squash a cockroach in case it turns out to be their defunct mother-in-law. I\u2019ve no fellow-feeling for any of the little pests.
\nBut if it hadn\u2019t been for them I should be halfway through a life sentence now instead of farming this wonderful place. A man can never quite forget a bit of luck like that. It\u2019s bound to influence him. Let me get you another glass. That one\u2019s drowned herself. Weak heart, probably. Live and let live\u2014that\u2019s all I say.
\nThis bit of Paraguay belongs to them quite as much as to me.\u00a0 p. 43<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There then follows a tale about a young woman recruited from a convent by an insalubrious bar-owner. When the narrator meets her he tries, over a period of several days, to make friends with the woman, but eventually her angry brother arrives. There is (spoiler) a knife fight where the bar owner dies, followed by the narrator, brother, and sister escaping into the night with the police pursuing.
\nJust when they look like they will be caught, a swarm of fireflies blinds their pursuers and lets them escape. This is a clever ending and nice image, but the bulk of the story isn\u2019t entirely convincing.<\/p>\n

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Duel <\/em><\/strong>by Brian Cleeve2<\/sup> is a tale of unrequited love and jealousy in a small Irish village, and starts with the narrator, \u201cJamie the Book,\u201d walking a girl home after a dance:<\/p>\n

I could feel the warmth of her, and sometimes her arm would brush against mine by accident. There was a faint scent from her dress, and her hair was like a dark shadow swinging at her shoulders.
\nI wanted to say something to her, tell her how beautiful she was, but I was afraid. I knew how she\u2019d turn to me, her eyes grey-green and cold as the sea, her mouth contemptuous, and she wouldn\u2019t need to answer me. And I\u2019d just blush and stammer, as I had a dozen and two dozen times before.
\nThat was the kind of thing that drove the other boys away from her. The sureness of her, the bold swing of her when she walked, and the way she\u2019d look a man straight in the face. They may like that kind of thing in the cinema in Ireland, but they don\u2019t like it in a wife. It\u2019s the girl with the little, meek voice and a couple of hundred pounds put by from her wages that they\u2019re looking for.
\nA girl like Fran only frightens them, when she doesn\u2019t annoy them.\u00a0 p. 56<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later, Fran meets a stranger, and the narrator has to cope with his jealousy:<\/p>\n

And for an hour I stravaiged up and down the hillsides round Ballysaggart, looking for the pair of them, although I still hadn\u2019t an idea in my mind as to why I was doing it. I scrambled through the heather and over grey, naked rocks that burnt my hands with the heat of them from the sun, until my bad leg ached and the sweat blinded my eyes so much that I couldn\u2019t have seen them if they were standing within five yards of me. At last I gave it up and went home again, flinging myself down on the bed and lying there until it was dark and the rage of jealousy inside me drove me out into the street again.
\nI wasn\u2019t out long before I heard all about the stranger that had danced with Fran and come for her that same morning, laying his hand on her in broad daylight in the open street, and she letting him. The slut, they said. We always knew she was that kind of girl, we always knew it. And I didn\u2019t know whether I wanted to kill them for saying it, or Fran for giving them reason, or myself for misery. But I only asked them about the stranger.
\n\u201cFrom Clare,\u201d they said, \u201cwhere his father is an auctioneer. Rotten with money, and the boy down here spying out the land for a bit of a farm for himself. And maybe a wife.\u201d
\nThey looked sideways at me when they said that, and laughed, and I know now why men sometimes run crazy in the streets and kill whomever they meet.\u00a0 pp. 59-60<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fran and the stranger eventually become a couple until one day when she is cruelly jilted in public. When she slaps the stranger he retaliates, and Jamie comes down from his vantage point up at the top of the street. He and the stranger fight each other with blackthorn sticks. Jamie wins, and Fran laughs. They walk defiantly down the street together.
\nThis is a convincing portrait of village life, with good description of the characters and their emotional states.<\/p>\n

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Heart of the Storm<\/em><\/strong> by David Beaty starts with a description of a developing hurricane in the Caribbean before cutting to a BOAC airliner flying through the storm. The aircraft\u2019s radio operator then picks up an SOS from a ship and, when the tugs can\u2019t find the ship, Kelson (the aircraft captain and a dry, stiff upper lip type) decides to go and look for it. The rest of the crew don\u2019t seem so keen (they don\u2019t have that much spare fuel), but Kelson made his mind up, so off they go.
\nMost of the first half of the story comprises of description of crew interaction and operation, such as when they fly towards a radio beacon on the islands to fix their position before letting down through the cloud to low level:<\/p>\n

To Bates, listening hard, it seemed almost unbelievable that there was anything beyond these clouds, that the world\u2019s laws of physics and motion still held good in this grey, limitless universe. As though some unseen hand was disciplining it, the needle on the radio compass started to hunt only about twenty degrees either side of dead ahead.
\nSeeing its performance, Bates felt more cheerful. \u201cWe\u2019re getting nearer, Skipper,\u201d he said. \u201cSeems just slightly port. Could you alter 5 degrees to the left?\u201d
\n\u201cI\u2019m following the needle now,\u201d Kelston replied, \u201cas far as it\u2019ll let me.\u201d
\nTen minutes later, the pointer steadied. Still slightly left. FY was pounding out now with a much more heartening strength. Suddenly, the needle seemed lost. It turned now one way, now the other, as though trying to make up its mind. Then decisively, it toppled over, and pointed behind them.
\n\u201cOver it, sir,\u201d Bates shouted.
\n\u201cSo I see,\u201d Kelston said. \u201cI\u2019m turning on to one-three-five degrees . . . out to sea. Throttles right back.\u201d
\nThe engines died down to nothing. \u201cI\u2019ll have to put gear and half flap down, Mr. Hawkins. We\u2019ve got to get down fast and I don\u2019t want the speed to build up. Not in this turbulence.\u201d The pump whined as it forced the hydraulic fluid into the terrific pressure needed to put the wheels down. When they were locked, Kelston lowered the flaps. Due to their drag effect, only 140 knots showed on the indicator, yet Easy Zebra was approaching the sea at over 4,000 feet a minute.\u00a0 p. 82<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you don\u2019t have an aviation background or interest, you\u2019ll probably find this kind of thing as dull as ditchwater\u2014but if you do, you\u2019ll find these descriptions of steam driven aviation fascinating. Either way, these sections aren\u2019t too long and don\u2019t detract from the story.
\nOnce the aircraft descends below the cloud they search the area and eventually find the ship, and then go to find the tugs. However, as they are low on fuel, they have to leave the area before the tugs and ship find each other. The aircraft eventually lands at San Miguel, after making an unorthodox visual approach below cloud.
\nThe second half of the story is quite different from the first part, and we see a more reflective Kelston in his hotel room:<\/p>\n

Now that he was back on the ground, like most other airline pilots, Kelston had a lost look about him which even the kindliness of the room could not quite drive away. Not even his own house where he spent a week out of every three, could be called his home. The nearest thing to it was the inside of a Marlborough. That noisy, confined little kingdom was where normally he felt happiest
\nWhen he was not flying, Kelston tended to feel frustrated, conscious of the many things he had not done with his life He had gone into his father\u2019s export business, which had been one of the first casualties of the war. He had joined the Air Force, learnt to fly, acquired a certain tight-lipped stoniness on his face, which conveniently walled out his thoughts from other people.
\nAnd afterwards, partly because there was nothing else to do, partly because flying was now in his blood, he had joined British Empire Airways.
\nIt was a familiar pattern that he shared with many people, but in his heart he was not satisfied with it. As a kind of sop to an active and intelligent brain that largely lay idle, for his work was mainly routine, he wrote articles on the technical side of flying for several aviation magazines.\u00a0 p. 89<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kelston falls asleep, misses dinner time, and grumpily goes down to the bar. He is surprised when the head waiter comes to bring him to the restaurant, where they have kept food for him. The waiter asks him to phone the owner of the ship, and Kelston realises that the waiter and the serving staff (and nearly everyone else on the island) has a family connection of some sort to the crew on the ship\u2014hence his special treatment.
\nDuring the call, Kelston discovers that the tugs will try to bring the ship into harbour as the eye of the storm passes over the island, and the owner invites him to come down and watch.
\nAfter some more scene setting at the docks, and the introduction of a female character called Karena, the operation concludes successfully. This second half puts the more technical\/adventure oriented first part into a human context.
\nI enjoyed this. It\u2019s certainly of its period (the ex-forces and taciturn Kelston, the wearing of pajamas for a two hour nap(!), etc.) but there is a lot of interesting period description of both the aircraft and the characters.3<\/sup><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last, and most definitely least (I disliked this even more than Money\u2019s cat story) is Air on a G-String<\/em><\/strong> by Cordelia Baird Gross (Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/em>). This is about Pansy St Clare, a teenage stripper (her mother started her in the occupation \u201cwhen her voice changed\u201d) who wants to be a cook. Then one day she sees a competition where the prize is a stove . . . .
\nWrong in so many ways, but it has a clever last line.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There are three poems in this issue, Fuchsias <\/em><\/strong>by John Pudney (Sixpenny Songs<\/em>, John Lane, 1953), River Music<\/em><\/strong> by Fleur Mountain, and Carte Blanche<\/em><\/strong> by Ogden Nash (The New Yorker<\/em>, 1955), all of which seem dreadfully old fashioned or naff, and none of which I cared for. Ditto for the two poem and prose extract features, Rendezvous<\/em><\/strong> and Garden Pleasures<\/em><\/strong>.
\nThere is also a quiz, Mixed Bag<\/em><\/strong>, and the Argosy Crossword<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t as good an issue as the last one but there is still a lot of interesting and\/or entertaining work here.\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

1. Christopher Landon\u2019s Wikipedia page is here<\/a>. He also wrote the script of Ice Cold in Alex<\/em>, and one the movie\u2019s final scenes<\/a> spawned years of Carlsberg lager adverts. (PS The barman in that clip should have faced a war-crimes tribunal for the way he pours the beer.)<\/p>\n

2. Brian Cleeve was an award-winning broadcaster with RTE, as well as being a prolific novelist, and his short work mostly appeared in the likes of Argosy<\/em> and The Saturday Evening Post<\/em>. However, he also had two stories in F&SF<\/em> in 1968, The Devil and Jake O\u2019Hara<\/em> (August), and The Devil in Exile<\/em> (November).
\nHis stories are listed on Galactic Central<\/a>, and he has an extensive Wikipedia page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3. David Beaty\u2019s Heart of the Storm<\/em> is an extract from the novel of the same title. Normally I can\u2019t stand extracts as they aren\u2019t self-contained, but this one is, and it also interested me enough to make me dig out a copy of the novel from the Internet Archive<\/a>. The better quality PDF of the US edition is available here<\/a> (under a different title, The Four Winds<\/em>, and a cover that makes it look like a romance novel).
\nBeaty himself is an interesting character: after his flying career (the wartime RAF, where he won a DFC and bar, and then BOAC) he subsequently became a writer and later trained as a psychologist. Using this latter qualification, he went on to be one of the first people in the aviation field to write on the subject of Human Factors. His Wikipedia page is here<\/a>, and there is an informative Independent<\/em> obituary here<\/a>.\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: This British fiction digest regularly published science fiction in its pages (sometimes as a \u201cScience Fiction Choice\u201d), and this issue has the second (and final) instalment of a novella-length version of John Wyndham\u2019s The Chrysalids, a post-nuclear-holocaust tale about persecuted mutant telepaths. There is also Forty Day Road, which is a timeslip story from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argosy-uk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-3hC","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12624"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12674,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12624\/revisions\/12674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}