{"id":13305,"date":"2020-10-17T18:28:39","date_gmt":"2020-10-17T18:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=13305"},"modified":"2021-11-12T17:11:33","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T17:11:33","slug":"new-writings-in-sf-6-1965","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/?p=13305","title":{"rendered":"New Writings in SF #6, 1965"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

Summary:
\nThis volume has the longest story in the series so far, Keith Roberts\u2019 novella (and the first part of the novel of the same name about a telepathic gestalt) The Inner Wheel<\/em>. There are two other good stories apart from the Roberts, John Baxter\u2019s The Hands<\/em> (a neat SF horror tale), and Robert Presslie\u2019s The Day Before Never<\/em> (a story about an Earth invaded by aliens that has a New Wave-ish edge).
\nThere is also work from William Spencer (an early VR story), E. C. Tubb, Ernest Hill, and John Phillifent (John Rackham), and a new design for the paperback cover.
\n[ISFDB link<\/a>] [Archive.org copy<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Other reviews:1<\/sup>
\nJoachim Boaz, SF Ruminations<\/a>
\nAndrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher<\/a>
\nTerry Jeeves, Vector #36<\/a><\/em>, p. 20-21
\nRoddy Williams, Death Robots From Mars<\/a>
\nVarious, Goodreads<\/a><\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

Editor, John Carnell<\/p>\n

Fiction:2<\/sup>
\nThe Inner Wheel<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novella by Keith Roberts \u2217\u2217\u2217<\/strong>
\nHorizontal Man<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by William Spencer \u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Day Before Never <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 novelette by Robert Presslie \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>
\nThe Hands<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by John Baxter \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+
\nThe Seekers<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by E. C. Tubb \u2217<\/strong>
\nAtrophy <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 short story by Ernest Hill \u2217<\/strong>
\nAdvantage <\/em><\/strong>\u2022 novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong><\/p>\n

Non-fiction:
\nForeword<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 by John Carnell<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

The next volume of New Writings in SF<\/em> that should have been reviewed here is #5 but, as I read Keith Roberts\u2019 novel The Inner Wheel<\/em><\/strong> two or three months ago, this one got read first.
\nRoberts\u2019 novella (and the first third of the similarly titled novel), concerns a telepathic gestalt (the \u201cWheel\u201d of the title). The story is pre-Pavane<\/em> Roberts, when he was still occasionally writing stories based on typical SF tropes like these, but this doesn\u2019t stop him stretching his writer\u2019s muscles\u2014as you can see here from the deliberately inchoate beginning:<\/p>\n

\u201cSee for us and tell again . . . Where is he . . . ?\u201d
\n<\/em>\u201cGetting on a train . . .\u201d
\n\u201cTell us what you see. Where is the train . . . ?\u201d
\n<\/em>\u201cIn a station, where do you think . . . ?\u201d
\nThere are hammers and whips and pincers.
\n<\/em>\u201cWHERE IS THE TRAIN?\u201d
\n\u201cT-Tanbridge. Please, THE STATION IS TANBRIDGE\u2014\u201d
\nThere are flickerings. \u201cGently,\u201d say the voices. \u201cGently. Tell us what you see . . .\u201d
\n<\/em>\u201cI . . . There are roses. The platforms are covered with them. The . . . train is green. The sky is very bright blue. Everything is quiet, nobody moving about. The coach stands in its bay. I see the sunlight lying across it and on the platforms. It lies in s-squares on the platforms, on the footbridge. There is a breeze now. A piece of paper blows and skips; the roses sway. I hear the little thorny sound of leaves scratching together. Please, no more . . .\u201d
\nSomewhere there might be giggling. Somewhere there might be rage. \u201cTell us about him . . .\u201d
\nA lens moves, seeing but unseen, examining textures of glass and wood and leaves. The station is haunted in the hot, still afternoon.
\n<\/em>\u201cHe is . . . sitting in the train. In the front seat, just behind the driver\u2019s cab. He is . . . tall. He is . . . dark. His hair is dark and rather long. It hangs across one eye. His face is thin. His eyes are very blue. His hands look . . . strong. Well kept, bony. Square nails, white half-moons where the cuticle is pushed back. He uses a good aftershave\u2014\u201d
\nThe giggling again. \u201cYou like him . . .\u201d
\n<\/em>\u201cLeave me alone\u2014\u201d\u00a0 p. 11-12<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After a couple of pages of this the point of view switches to that of the watched man, Jimmy Stringer, and we learn about his life:<\/p>\n

Jimmy remembered [. . .] the studio back in town. Light filtering through inadequate windows, littered drawing boards, filing cabinets top-heavy with drifts of paper and card. The yellowing fluorescents, their tubes flyblown; electric cords, cellophane-taped here and there to the edges of desks, that fed tired Anglepoise lamps from a medusan confusion. It was a place where you could work and work and see your dreams give up and curl at the edges and realize the ad game was a machine, a bloody machine that sorted the heavyweight souls from the middleweight, the middleweight from the lightweight, the lightweight from the souls that didn\u2019t rate at all. The man who sat at your elbow painting in the shine on endless successions of brightgreen lawn mowers had been a Prix de Rome.
\nAn element, an aspect of existence. Further back, buried in the impossible matrix of time, were others. His father . . . only the image of him was fading, losing itself under a rippling and a hotness; the glaring, hopeful, hopeless time people call adolescence. Stringer rubbed his face. Adolescence is the time you want freedom. You take it, snatch it, eat it, maybe, before the folk round you grab it back. Nobody can help you. Not then. Least of all a tired old man trying to come to terms with life.
\nSo he\u2019d shucked his father off and gone to London to learn how to be a Great Artist with capital letters, and maybe there\u2019d been times over the years when he\u2019d thought the old devil wasn\u2019t too bad after all; he\u2019d just breeze back home one day and say hello. But the day had never come. Instead, there was a telegram. It told him the thing he\u2019d planned on doing, it wouldn\u2019t get done now. It told him he\u2019d run out of tomorrows.\u00a0 pp. 14-15<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Roberts worked for a large part of his life as a commercial\/advertising artist, and the passage shows his artist\u2019s view and possibly some of the personal aspects of his life.
\nLater, we find out that Stringer has inherited a large amount of money from his father\u2019s estate and is now, due to a strange compulsion, on the train to a town called Warwell. When he gets there, everyone he speaks to in the town is \u201cnice,\u201d and he soon settles. He starts having strange dreams, though:<\/p>\n

The dream was always the same. Always vague, impossible to grasp afterward, a thing of sensation only, an affair of mounting pressures that rose and rose to wake him, once, nearly screaming. After that the pressures eased, but he still knew of their existence, the way you can know of something in a dream without seeing or hearing. The Wheel, as he thought of it, was the central part of the nightmare, and he himself was at the centre of the Wheel, on or in its hub, sensing it move, feeling the thunder of it in his long bones. The Wheel so massive that size itself seemed an indecent, foul thing. And somehow, too, the hub was Warwell, its houses and its church. But the Wheel was useless; it moved, it ground, but it ground nothing. Its turning was aimless, the threat of it was simply in its being.\u00a0 p. 22<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also senses things going on under the surface of the town, and there are strange coincidences, such as the night he goes out walking and thinks he could do with a dog for company\u2014along comes a unaccompanied hound; then, alone in a pub, he wishes for some company\u2014and in come a dozen people, all of who chat to him.
\nMatters come to a head when he is out in his car and a woman called Anne runs across the road. Stringer sees she is obviously distressed, and not just at her near escape. He takes her to the hospital to get her minor wounds attended to. Then, when he is taking her home, she asks to stop at a pub to use the loo, only to disappear through a back door.
\nThat night Stringer has a dream about taking the train from from Tanbridge to Warwell, and a vast decay overcomes everything: the train, his car, Anne. He realises that the dream is to do with the Wheel, and that this was why Anne was running. The next day he goes looking for Anne in the town, and sees Boschian visions:<\/p>\n

Watching the skeletons. Talking and laughing, shopping, eating. Drinking coffee in the Tudor Room and the Buttery, cleaning windows, driving cars, sitting in buses, pushing prams. Other skeletons lay in the perambulators, little grisly things that mewed and writhed. He sat on a seat outside the town hall, wiped his forehead, saw sweat on his hand. He clenched his fists; he was trembling. He asked himself, What\u2019s the matter with me? Have I gone crazy?
\nIt was all he could do to stop himself yelling, telling the people, didn\u2019t they realize, didn\u2019t they know they were all bone and slime, they were getting older, they were dying . . . <\/em>He put his face in his hands, tried to stop the shaking.
\nFeeling the traffic grind and grind like one great wheel, seeing the fish eyes roll, hearing the bird gabble of skulls, tongues clacking inside the bone . . . He felt he was going to pass out again or vomit on the path.
\nGod, he\u2019d never felt like this since . . . when? His mind groped for a parallel. Warwell, the river and the valley, church spire and town-hall cupola thrust up from a writhing of goblins and demons, a medieval maggot heap . . . Away from the Starr, he knew the world was good<\/em>; there were grass and trees and high, quiet roads. He had to get away. He was halfway to his hotel, scurrying to pack his bags and pay his bill, when he realized. Knew suddenly and with complete sureness that he wasn\u2019t going crazy.
\n[. . .]
\nQuick now, think. For God\u2019s sake, think\u2026The skulls, the bones, the flaring light . . . Something Germanic, Die Br\u00fccker<\/em>, the Blue Riders<\/em>? No, older than that, further back. Holbein? No, not Holbein at all. Bosch . . .
\nAnd, by God, that was it. Old Hieronymus, the Adamite. The Millennium, incarnation of all evil, writhing, pallid . . . He\u2019d studied it once for a holiday task, reached the stage where he could look through the painter\u2019s eyes, see the world and its people as the master had seen them all those years ago. Now he was seeing them again.
\nA chain of logic had completed itself without his direction. The fantasies that had swamped him, rose bowers that had glowed, sweet organic nestling of river against town\u2014these things he had been shown, as now he was seeing their obverse. Somebody, something, had tried to lull him with women and talk and drink and beauty, bright canvases, all of them, dangled in front of his face; and it hadn\u2019t worked. He\u2019d gone on searching and prodding [. . .] and he\u2019d touched the makers of the dreams and they were frightened. He\u2019d touched them through Anne.\u00a0 p. 38-39<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Stringer realises these visions are being sent to him by the Wheel, he fights back, and goes to the places in town the senders don\u2019t want him to go. Then he sees Anne in the distance, and follows her in his car. When he catches and interrogates her, he learns two names of the group that form the Wheel, Albert and Paul. When Stringer later meets another two in a pub\u2014one of whom is Hazel, a disturbing young woman\u2014he discovers to his cost Hazel that has telekinetic powers when he is badly beaten with a plank of wood when he later gets out of his car in the hotel car park.
\nThe last part of the story sees Stinger meeting the members of the Wheel, the gestalt, where he tries to buy Anne\u2019s freedom. But their leader Paul refuses, saying she is their eyes, and he tells Stringer to be gone by the end of the week. The final confrontation at the town fair (shades of Ray Bradbury) is exciting but not entirely convincing (the gestalt finally decide to spare both their lives and let them go).
\nOverall this is a bit of a mixed bag: the descriptive writing is very good and, at times, I found it completely immersive; what is less good is the motivation of the characters, the not entirely convincing plot that flows from this, and some of the melodrama. Nonetheless, there is a technical ability on show here from Roberts which shows, at times, that he was a talent head and shoulders above nearly all of the other new writers of his generation.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Horizontal Man<\/em><\/strong> by William Spencer begins with Timon in a virtual reality where he surfs numerous waves until he finishes the sequence:<\/p>\n

At last, unbelievably, the scene faded, greying out from his sense channels, and leaving him back in the recording control room. He was himself again.
\nTimon gibbered and snuffled with pleasure. His shrivelled, shrunken body trembled, almost writhing with satisfaction, on the pillowy, contoured couch that supported his frail spine.
\n[. . .]
\nTimon viewed with some distaste the thick ropelike duct which was connected to him somewhere in the region of the navel, and which supplied all the sustenance that his feeble body required. Outside his range of vision was the flexible cable entering the top of his head, which provided the rich flood of sensory data that went into the illusory world created in his mind by the recording.\u00a0 p. 77<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Timon then discovers that he can\u2019t go to sleep for another five hours (the VR machine\u2019s programming) and so has to select two more experiences (which are a chess match, and an evening out with a date at a dancing performance\/orgy). When he eventually wakes from these he fortuitously manages to get his finger stuck in the sleep button, which prevents him waking up again.
\nLater (spoiler), a machine trundles along and fixes the problem, and in the process changes Timon\u2019s memory drum from Universe 23c to d, the implication being that Timon is destined to live endlessly in these virtual realities.
\nThis all feels rather clich\u00e9d after so many later VR stories (this seems an early entry in the sub-genre, or at least the \u201ctrapped in VR\u201d sub-genre), but notwithstanding that it\u2019s just not that convincing, and it\u2019s also the first of a number of stories in this collection that rely on a surprise or shock ending.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

The Day Before Never <\/em><\/strong>by Robert Presslie3<\/sup> begins with the narrator driving across a post-alien invasion Europe to get to the Latvian capital Riga. When he arrives we get an explicit look at the devastation wreaked by the invaders:<\/p>\n

For one more time I cursed the Barbarians and their abominable glazers. There were immense vacant lots where they had used their bigger glazers to reduce whole streets of houses to a ghastly flux of molten stone and flesh.
\n[. . .]
\nA group of humans had been caught as they had sidled round one of the corners. Now they were smeared there for eternity. Or until the Barbarians decided to raze the building completely. Some were fused shallow reliefs on the ancient stone. Others hadn\u2019t been so lucky. Not for them the quick, unfelt death. The glazer beams\u2014powered by God-knows-what\u2014had caught them in motion. The terrible grimace on an oldster\u2019s face told the agonies of every minute of life he had left to him after an arm and a leg had been fluidly bonded to the house. There was half a torso here, a grisly fraction there. The worst I saw before I passed the building was the girl. About fourteen or fifteen to judge by the nubile breasts laid bare by a glazer\u2019s freakish heat. If it hadn\u2019t been for the breasts I would never have known it was a girl who hung against the wall, headless, suspended only by the strips of flesh-and-silicon compound that stretched upwards from her shoulders.\u00a0 p. 93<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He eventually arrives at an inn where he plans to meet a resistance contact and, when he meets her, we find about a bomb plot organised to rid Earth of the aliens. This only happens, however, after she forces him to have sex with her so she can ensure he is not one of the Barbarians wearing a human body suit (apparently there is one part that doesn\u2019t work properly). Eventually they get around (spoiler) to triggering one of a number of bombs in a co-ordinated worldwide explosion intended to cause a resonance in the Earth\u2019s surface that will destroy the aliens.
\nAll this is told in a convincingly grim manner, and at a fast pace\u2014which helps to compensate for some of the less convincing plot shenanigans at the end of the piece (the fact that the aliens have human suits, the bombs and the \u201cresonance effect,\u201d etc.). The story\u2019s gritty realism, along with the downbeat ending, made me realise that New Writings in SF<\/em> wasn\u2019t entirely a continuity New Worlds<\/em> (I\u2019m talking about the Nova Publications\u2019 version edited by John Carnell), and that it was also doing its small part in expanding the boundaries of the genre.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

The Hands<\/em><\/strong> by John Baxter has a gripping start:<\/p>\n

They let Vitti go first because he was the one with two heads, and it seemed to the rest that if there was to be anything of sympathy or honour or love for them, then Vitti should have the first and best of it. After he had walked down the ramp, they followed him. Sloane with his third and fourth legs folded like the furled wings of a butterfly on his back; Tanizaki, still quiet, unreadable, Asiatic, despite the bulge inside his belly that made him look like a woman eight months gone with child; and the rest of them. Seven earth men who had been tortured by the Outsiders.\u00a0 p. 113<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When the group are debriefed about their captivity we learn that the aliens on Huxley are shape-changers who can alter their form at will. The (sometimes humanoid) aliens altered the crew\u2019s bodies, and one of them, Kolo, had the ability to control them by snapping his fingers.
\nThe rest of the story sees Binns go out for a walk with his minder (eventually\u2014Binns soon spots him and says they might as well walk together). However, Binns is in a slightly dissociated state, and spends most of the time listening to an inner voice saying unexpected things to him.
\nThe final scene in the park (spoiler) brings this strange body-horror story to a climax: Binns feels compelled to kill his minder\u2014his spare hands strangle him while his original hands hold him close. Then Binns meets up with the rest of the group, and one of his spare hands snaps their fingers. . . .
\nThis has a great last line, and the almost dream like inevitability is chillingly effective. This is a pretty good story, and it would definitely be on my short list for a \u2018Year\u2019s Best\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

After a strong start to the anthology, the remainder of the stories are a lacklustre lot. The Seekers<\/em><\/strong> by E. C. Tubb uses most of its space for a setup in which several crew members of a starship indulge their obsessions: painting, VR gaming under a dream cap, engineering, writing, etc. There is also some background information about the dead captain (he committed suicide), which includes a comment he made about how space-faring humans were \u201crats scurrying among the granary of the stars.\u201d
\nThis (spoiler) resurfaces at the end of the story, where the remaining crew land on an alien planet where there is a single cube-shaped structure. Inside, each of the men finds his idea of heaven:<\/p>\n

Delray found it next.
\nHe came shouting over to the others and glared at what rested between them.
\nIt was naked satiation.
\nIt was the euphoria of combat, the thrill of physical violence, the tease of mental struggle. It was his own deep, dark heritage of type and it opened before him like a flower within whose petals was to be found all he had ever sought. He sank into it and into an eternal enervating dream.\u00a0 p. 132<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The structure is, of course, a trap.
\nThis is one of those stories that has a contrived set-up aimed at delivering a climactic scene: a one-trick story.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Atrophy <\/em><\/strong>by Ernest Hill opens, like a lot of these NWISF<\/em> stories seem to, with the narrator plugged into some sort of device. It\u2019s not entirely clear what this one does, but Elvin gets bored of it\u2014as well as nagged out of any further use by his wife, who warns that he needs to stop using it so much or he\u2019ll \u201catrophy.\u201d Consequently, he later uses the IT (another machine, but one which appears to be for brain stimulation rather than entertainment) to earn some \u201capprovals.\u201d Elvin earns these by engaging intelligently with a computer:<\/p>\n

\u201cThink!\u201d IT ordered.
\n\u201cDamn the Unions,\u201d he thought. \u201cAnd the management. They don\u2019t have to do this. IT is only for the Workers.\u201d
\n\u201cPhit! Phit! Phit! A proposition containing an expletive is a random digression!\u201d
\n\u201cGive me a chance,\u201d he complained. \u201cI haven\u2019t thought of a proposition yet!\u201d
\n\u201cThink!\u201d The red light glowed.
\nHe was about to answer \u201cRats!\u201d But this was probably an expletive and a double correction would automatically register non-Approval on this, his 97th card.
\n\u201cCats!\u201d he said, in a moment of inspiration. To his surprise, the red light transfused into green. It glowed brightly.
\n\u201cGo ahead!\u201d
\n\u201cCats\u201d was as good a subject as any. Simple really.
\n\u201cA cat,\u201d he said, \u201cis a small furry creature with four legs, a head at one end and a tail at the other.\u201d
\n\u201cPhit! Phit! Phit!\u201d
\n\u201cWhat is it now!\u201d He depressed the \u201cCorrection\u201d button. How many corrections was this? How many did IT allow? He had forgotten.
\n\u201cDescription is correct, but mode of expression borders on to the facetious. Generic term for four-legged creatures required.\u201d
\n\u201cQuadrupeds!\u201d
\nThe green light glowed brightly. He was pleased that IT approved. Must do better.\u00a0 p. 141<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This goes on for three and a half pages before Elvin gets his approval.
\nThe rest of the story sees him at work, which appears to involve Elvin monitoring various light sequences on a control board that monitor a nuclear reactor. During this there is another long scene where he detects a faulty electronic foreman. He then goes home and finds his wife has left him for a Thinker, so he takes extra shifts at work to distract himself.
\nLong story short (spoiler) Elvin detects another faulty \u201cforeman\u201d and, when he contacts the Management this time around, he finds the man atrophied. Elvin takes manual control and makes the calls and warnings that need to be made, and saves the day. When a representative of Management arrives he tells Elvin that it was a false alarm but promotes him to Thinker, anyway. When Elvin returns home he finds Meryl has come back, and she rewards him with sex.
\nMaybe there are some readers that will appreciate the energy and compulsive detail of this future world but this seems a slight piece to me, and I\u2019m perplexed as to why there were so many mid-1960s SF writers fixated on these unlikely future dystopias.<\/p>\n

\u2022<\/p>\n

Advantage <\/em><\/strong>by John T. Phillifent begins with Colonel Jack Barclay waking up and telling his orderly-robot to leave Mr Caddas for another thirty minutes before he is roused. (\u201cHe has had a bad night.\u201d) It materialises that Barclay is a martinet who is in charge of building the infrastructure on the colony planet of Oloron, and we find out what role Caddas\u2014a whiney, weedy, neurotic type\u2014has in the operation when the pair go on a daily inspection after breakfast.
\nDuring the tour Caddas complains of pains in his arm and head when they are at one of the building sites. Barclay quickly questions him, and then orders work on the site to stop: the supervisors subsequently discover a robot hoist whose excessive load would have crushed one of the engineers. A similar situation occurs later when Caddas feels a prickling sensation, and they discover that an engineer was about to go into a conduit from a hot reactor. (I don\u2019t know about you, but I think this project is overdue a visit from the HSE.4<\/sup>) Needless to say, Barclay has kept the knowledge of Caddas\u2019s talents to himself, and the project is correspondingly ahead of schedule.
\nThe story\u2019s main plot complication comes when (spoiler) Barclay gets word that the planet is to be visited by a three person observation team, one of whom is a woman. Barclay, as you might expect, has certain views about this latter fact which he lays out to his second-in-command:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a certain class of female, Dannard, for whom the very thought of an isolated community of hard-working men, out on a frontier, has a dreadful fascination. Two classes, rather. One\u2019s the sympathetic, mothering kind. I needn\u2019t describe the other. Either is a pain in the neck. You\u2019d better make her your special care. Let the other two make their own way.\u00a0 p. 170<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The woman, the unlikely named \u201cMiss Dahlia Honey,\u201d turns out to be an old flame of Barclay\u2019s, and is maternally drawn to the bleating Caddas. Her welcome attention not only seems to mute his ability, but her later interference also brings him into the orbit of the medical staff, something that Barclay avoided lest they discovered his abilities. There are one or two other twists and turns during the rest of the story but Caddas eventually leaves with Honey.
\nThis is a (very) old school tale, filled with cardboard characters in an unlikely, unconvincing future but, that said, it\u2019s well told, and readable enough. It only just scrapes that two star rating, though, and I\u2019m not sure why I rated it that high\u2014possibly because Barclay doesn\u2019t get his way at the end.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n

The Cover<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0for this paperback edition5<\/sup> is the first of a new design, and one I quite like (probably because #9, with a similar layout, was one of my early paperback purchases). The art isn\u2019t very good though.
\nThe only non-fiction (other than the short story introductions) is the Foreword<\/em><\/strong> by John Carnell: he says the Keith Roberts story is \u201coutstanding,\u201d and then goes on about telepathy, etc. at great length:<\/p>\n

Have you ever been thinking or speaking of someone whom you have not seen for a long time, when the telephone or doorbell rings or you walk round a corner\u2014and there they are! Or received a letter days afterwards? (You could have been thinking about them at the time they were actually writing the letter to you.) Telepathy? Clairvoyance? Empathy? Some people are more \u201csensitive\u201d to the phenomenon than others. Whatever it is, it is a form of mental communication and we know very little about it, if anything at all. It is even possible that somewhere along the evolutional tree of Mankind we managed to lose some of these developing mental powers, just as our sense of smell has deteriorated and our teeth become a liability rather than an asset, and our eyesight requires artificial aids.
\nDespite the fact that we now know the constituent parts of the human brain, can measure it, probe it, operate upon it, electrically stimulate it and even analyse some of its aberrations, this fantastic piece of biological machinery is still largely a mystery and we are not at all sure of its capabilities. It may be that the psi powers are developing, not diminishing, but, if so, we have a long way to go before we can understand them.\u00a0 pp. 7-8<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carnell had obviously been quaffing Campbell\u2019s psionic Kool-Aid at Loncon (the 1965 Worldcon).
\nThe last part of the foreword notes that the Presslie and Baxter stories lean towards the macabre; the Hill and Spencer are stories of the far future; and that the Tubb and Rackham will appeal to those interested in interplanetary travel.<\/p>\n

\u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n

This is probably the best volume of New Writings<\/em> yet, with the John Baxter story, the long Roberts tale, and the Presslie all worth reading.\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n

_____________________<\/p>\n

1. Boaz says that Robert\u2019s The Inner Wheel<\/em>\u00a0\u201cexudes gothic dread laced with attempts at recurrent poetic images and a New Wave vibe,\u201d and that it is a \u201cmood piece that takes a little too long to come together.\u201d Jeeves agrees with the latter, saying \u201cit is the half way mark [before] Mr. Roberts hit his stride, chucked out the nouveau rubbische and got up steam.\u201d He says earlier on that \u201cit starts off in the sickening (to me) style which throws everything and the kitchen sink, then rambles all over the place occasionally meeting a story on the way.\u201d (I get the impression Jeeves likes plain stories told plainly.)
\nWilliams says it is \u201cthe best story [in the book] . . . a highly poetic and stylised piece, reminiscent of Sturgeon\u2019s \u2018More Than Human\u2019.\u201d Darlington is the third person who mentions its poetic nature, saying it is \u201cself-consciously poetic . . . its prose straining for profundity, and almost achieving it.\u201d (I don\u2019t personally think The Inner Wheel<\/em> is poetic, it just has good descriptive prose with some decent images\u2014something that would have stood out against the utilitarian writings of most other SF writers of the time.)
\nAs for the rest of the stories, the favourite seems to be Baxter\u2019s The Hands<\/em>. Boaz says that, although the ending is a \u201ccop-out\u201d it is a \u201ckeeper\u201d; Williams says, \u201cit hangs in the mind like a stubborn dream\u201d; Jeeves found it \u201ctruly gruesome\u201d; and Darlington says \u201cthere have been many fine stories concerning aliens taking over human beings, but Australian writer John Baxter adds the grisliest touch yet in this return from a far star.\u201d
\nThe story liked least seems to be the Hill. Boaz: \u201cI experienced a sense of atrophy reading this story\u201d; Williams: \u201cunmemorable\u201d; even Jeeves fingers it as the \u201cweakest,\u201d although he generally thought that all the stories in the book (bar the Roberts maybe) were \u201cwell executed treatments or twists of old themes.\u201d
\nThe remainder of the stories fall between these two poles: Presslie\u2019s story is described by Boaz and Williams as \u201cbleak,\u201d and Darlington observes that it \u201c[anticipates] some elements of the New Wave with its casual cruelty and sexual content.\u201d The Spencer and Tubb, while receiving mixed notices (and the Rackham even more so), got off easier than I expected.<\/p>\n

2. The star ratings for my first read of this anthology (many moons ago) are as follows (my new rating is in brackets for easy comparison):<\/p>\n

The Inner Wheel<\/em> \u2022 novella by Keith Roberts \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>)
\nHorizontal Man<\/em> \u2022 short story by William Spencer \u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>)
\nThe Day Before Never <\/em>\u2022 novelette by Robert Presslie \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>)
\nThe Hands<\/em> \u2022 short story by John Baxter \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>+)
\nThe Seekers<\/em> \u2022 short story by E. C. Tubb \u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>)
\nAtrophy <\/em>\u2022 short story by Ernest Hill \u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>)
\nAdvantage <\/em>\u2022 novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] \u2217<\/strong> (\u2217<\/strong>\u2217<\/strong>)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m surprised that I liked the Hill story (and another check of my notes reveals it\u2019s the only story of his I\u2019ve rated above mediocre), and underrated the Presslie and Baxter\u2014although I think I can see why (possibly the body suits and downer ending in the Presslie, and the dreamlike vs. naturalistic progression in the Baxter).<\/p>\n

3. Robert Presslie contributed a number of stories to UK magazines in the 1950s, so it\u2019s interesting to see a writer from this generation stretch himself in this piece. Unfortunately he would only appear once more (in the next volume of New Writings in SF<\/em>) before he stopped writing. If he was capable of stories like this then that is a pity.
\nPresslie\u2019s ISFDB page is here<\/a>, and there are informative webpages from Andrew Darlington here<\/a>, and Greg Pickersgill & David Redd here<\/a>.
\nI note that Presslie was born in Aberdeen, so presumably he is a Scottish writer.<\/p>\n

4. The HSE is the UK government\u2019s Health and Safety Executive.<\/p>\n

5. I nicked the original unretouched scan of this cover from Alan Fraser\u2019s page on Pinterest<\/a>. If you are interested in 50s and 60s UK book covers (there are a lot of interesting paperback covers below the UK SFBC ones) you should really check his page out.\u00a0 \u25cf<\/p>\n

Edited 30th January 2021: added Andy Darlington\u2019s comment about John Baxter\u2019s <\/em>The Hands, which is buried in the index at the end of his essay.
\nEdited 12th November 2021 to show that Kolo in “The Hands” is an alien, and not one of the crew as I previously thought (thanks to Ed Chang for the correction).<\/em><\/p>\n\"rss\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: This volume has the longest story in the series so far, Keith Roberts\u2019 novella (and the first part of the novel of the same name about a telepathic gestalt) The Inner Wheel. There are two other good stories apart from the Roberts, John Baxter\u2019s The Hands (a neat SF horror tale), and Robert Presslie\u2019s […]<\/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":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-writings-in-sf"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pcj7-3sB","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13305","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=13305"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13899,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13305\/revisions\/13899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfmagazines.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}