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Other reviews: Fiction: Non-fiction: This first issue of Impulse<\/em> was actually Science Fantasy #82<\/em> in disguise, a magazine that had been running since 1950. By early 1966 its relatively new owners, Roberts & Vinter Ltd., had owned the magazine for about eighteen months\u00a0and, with this month\u2019s issues, both Science Fantasy\/Impulse<\/em>\u00a0and its sister magazine New Worlds\u00a0<\/em>increased their page count from 128 pp. to 160 pp. The editor of Science Fantasy<\/em>, Kyril Bonfiglioli, used the size change as an opportunity to change the magazine’s name to Impulse<\/em>, of which more later. The change of price will help to provide a larger budget so that the rewards of writing for us will be more substantial.<\/em>\u00a0 p.2<\/p>\n The contents page reinforces\u00a0this name change by stating \u2018The NEW Science Fantasy\u2019. Another notable change is the listing of Keith Roberts as \u2018Associate Editor\u2019 (as opposed to \u2018assistant editor\u2019 in the editorial) to replace James Parkhill-Rathbone, who had gone off to start his own literary magazine. The standard Bonfiglioli disclaimer at the bottom of the page remained: \u2018All terrestrial characters and places are fictitious\u2019. We feel that jettisoning the old name enables us to broaden our frame of reference to embrace any kind of speculative and unusual fiction which is of the quality we are looking for.<\/em> p.2<\/p>\n This is quite different from what he had written, in part, a month earlier in Science Fantasy<\/em> #81:<\/p>\n I simply felt shy about asking at a bookstall for this magazine\u2014I always felt that the assistant might give me an odd, sidelong look, as though I were a curate buying the latest number of <\/em>Frilly Scanties. Lastly, although the cover-designs were always very good of their kind, I must confess I was careful to tuck them inside my\u00a0newspaper when in public. All this is, I agree, very stuffy and pompous and cowardly of me but I cannot help feeling that there is a large potential market for our product amongst the stuffy, pompous and cowardly\u2014after all, they seem to make up some seventy per cent of the population.<\/em> p.2<\/p>\n What isn\u2019t touched on was that Bonfiglioli had originally wanted to rename the magazine Caliban<\/em>.1<\/sup> Also, after the above comments about the appearance of the magazine you would have to wonder, whatever you think of the merits of Lawrence\u2019s cover, at the choice of something that makes the magazine look like some sort of horror anthology.<\/p>\n As to the fiction in this launch issue it is largely an All-Star affair as Bonfiglioli had commissioned stories from several writers on the theme of \u2018sacrifice\u2018. I have minor reservations about this as a theme, but more of this later. Philip flushed a slow red. \u201cI\u2019ll leave you to your capers. I have to go and pack.\u201d As he turned, Yale caught his arm. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to go. You are almost adult.\u00a0 You must face violent emotions. You never could as a child\u2014but they\u2019re as natural as storms at sea.\u201d <\/em> It materialises that the superabundance of the species that Yale had been investigating (spoiler) is due to massively increased longevity caused by a virus. If man can be infected by this virus, near-immortality may be achievable. We\u2019ve kept our secret for five years. There are fifty of us now, fifty-three, men with power and some women. Before the secret comes into the open, we are going to be even more powerful: an Establishment. We only need a few years. Meanwhile, we make investments and alliances. Take a look at the way brilliant people have been attracted to Naples these last few years! It\u2019s not been just to the W.W.O. or the European Common Government Centre. It\u2019s been to my clinic! In another five years, we\u2019ll be able to step in and rule Europe\u2014and from there it\u2019s just a short step to America and Africa.<\/em>\u201d p.30<\/p>\n All you really need on the end of that is “Mwuh, mwuh, mwuh,\u201d he laughed evilly.<\/em> Interesting to note that Aldiss still hadn\u2019t completely jettisoned his pulp influences\u00a0by this stage in his career. The theme of sacrifice led me to think of the Messiah or, more exactly, the idea of the second coming and how this might take place in the twentieth century. In my version, which I would describe as a botched second coming, the Messiah never quite managing to come to terms with the twentieth century, I have used a fragmentary and nonsequential technique . . . and have tried to invoke some of the images that a twentieth century Messiah might see. You\u2019ll notice that the entries are alphabetised.<\/em> p.53<\/p>\n Some of the sections\/images reflect this but as a whole the piece doesn\u2019t make much sense. I can see why the first concentrated story, The Terminal Beach<\/em>, may have made for an interesting experiment but I fear the law of diminishing returns will\u00a0apply\u00a0to this continuing authorial obsession. Half the buildings in Druidsfall glistened with their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to anything they were blown against\u2014the wealth of Boadicea was based anciently in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold as radiation shielding for their spuriously tender genes. <\/em>p.63<\/p>\n He meets a playwoman\u00a0and spends time with her, only to find her dead one morning from a black fungal growth: his period of immunity is over. If he is going to sell High Earth\u2019s secrets he will need to survive first, so he takes a transduction serum which changes his appearance and also starts to change the way he thinks. He then finds the woman\u2019s half-brother and enlists him in a plan to take revenge on the Guild of Traitors. Much skulduggery and intrigue follows including the appearance of a shape-changing voombis, aliens who serve The Exarch, ruler of half the Galaxy! Specially written for this issue on the theme of \u201csacrifice”\u2014a slightly involuntary one in this case. . . <\/em>p.87<\/p>\n Deserter<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Wilson is an OK story about a young man and woman who get married just before the War starts but they are separated before their wedding night. Subsequently we follow the man, Bill, through training and it materialises that this War is between men and women. This is all a bit artificial and strikes me as the kind of satire that could have been in Galaxy<\/em> in the 1950s. The highlight of the issue is the first published story in Keith Roberts\u2019s parallel world story cycle Pavane<\/em>. The Signaller<\/em><\/strong> by Keith Roberts is set in a world where Elizabeth I was assassinated and the Spanish invaded and conquered England. The Reformation has never taken place, the Catholic Church still rules, and technological progress is anathema. As there is no electricity in this world, signals are passed by huge mechanically operated semaphore-like signalling stations in line of sight of\u00a0each other. One such copse crowned the summit of the knoll; under the first of its branches, and sheltered by them from the wind, a boy lay face down in the snow. He was motionless but not wholly unconscious; from time to time his body quivered with spasms of shock. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, blond-haired, and dressed from head to feet in a uniform of dark green leather. The uniform was slit in many places; from the shoulders down the back to the waist, across the hips and thighs. Through the rents could be seen the cream-brown of his skin and the brilliant slow twinkling of blood. The leather was soaked with it, and\u00a0the long hair matted. Beside the boy lay the case of a pair of binoculars, the Zeiss lenses without which no man or apprentice of the Guild of Signallers ever moved, and a dagger. The blade of the weapon was red-stained; its pommel rested a few inches beyond his outflung right hand. The hand itself was injured, slashed across the backs of the fingers and deeply through the base of the thumb. Round it blood had diffused in a thin pink halo into the snow.<\/em> p.127-128<\/p>\n Because I liked the story so much\u2014<\/em>even more than on previous occasions\u2014<\/em> there are pages of this\u00a0I want to quote: so this is going to be a (spoiler) ridden review. The varnished wooden spars shone orange like the masts of a boat; the semaphore arms rose and dipped,\u00a0black against the sky. He could see the bolts and loops near their tips where in bad weather or at night when some message of vital importance had to be passed, cressets could be attached to them. He\u2019d seen such fires once, miles out over the Plain, the night the old King died . . .<\/em> p.136<\/p>\n In the centre of the room, white-painted and square, was the base of the signal mast; round it a little podium of smooth, scrubbed wood, on which stood two Guildsmen. In their hands were the long levers that worked the semaphore arms overhead; the control rods reached up from them, encased when they passed through the ceiling in white canvas grommets.<\/em> p.137<\/p>\n These scenes from his childhood let Roberts do some convincing world-building. The arms of the Silbury tower were quiet; but as he passed they flipped quickly to Attention, followed at once by the cyphers for Origination and Immediate Locality. Rafe turned in the saddle, tears stinging his eyes, and watched the letters quickly spelled out in plaintalk. \u201cGood luck . . .\u201d<\/em> p.142<\/p>\n The Signaller training is physically hard:<\/p>\n There was a trick to the thing, only learned after bruising hours of practice; to lean the weight of the body against the levers rather than just using the muscles of back and arms, employ the jounce and swing of the semaphores to position them automatically for their next cypher. Trying to fight them instead of working with the recoil would reduce a strong man to a sweatsoaked rag within minutes; but a trained Signaller could work half the day and feel very little strain.<\/em> p.145<\/p>\n After a period of Signaller training there is a gruelling test to pass, and not everyone completes it. Rafe does and shows his willpower after he has successfully transmitted the set text:<\/p>\n And then, in black rage, he did the thing only one other apprentice had done in the history of the station; flipped the handles to Attention again, spelled out with terrible exactness and letter by letter the message \u2018God Save the Queen\u2019 Signed End of Message, got no acknowledgement, swung the levers up and locked them into position for Emergency-Contact Broken. In a signalling chain the alarm would be flashed back to the originating station, further information rerouted and a squad sent to investigate the breakdown. Rafe is then posted as a Signaller to a private house and a year later (spoiler) he is sent to a lone post at a D-class station. It is now\u00a0that we find out how\u00a0he was so badly wounded: he was attacked by a catamount, a large wild cat, while out walking. Into the void, He came; only He was not the Christos, the God of Mother Church. He was Balder, Balder the\u00a0Lovely, Balder the Young. He strode across the land, face burning bright as the sun, and the Old Ones grovelled and adored. The wind touched the stone circles, burning them with frost; in the darkness men cried for spring. So he came to the Tree Yggdrasil\u2014<\/em>What Tree, Rafe\u2019s mind cried despairingly, and the voice checked and laughed and said without anger \u2018<\/em>Yggdrasil, great World Ash, whose branches pierce the layers of Heaven, whose roots wind through all Hells . . .\u2019 Balder came to the Tree, on which he must die for the sins of Gods and Men; and to the Tree they nailed him, hung him by the palms.<\/em> p.156-157<\/p>\n Times passes; Rafe appears to have recovered and leaves the station with the woman. The mark. It was everywhere, over the door, on its frame, stamped along the walls. The circle, with the crab\u00a0pattern inside it; rebus or pictograph, the only thing the People of the Heath knew, the only message it seemed they had for men.<\/em> p.159<\/p>\n When they go inside the station they find more of the marks. Rafe is lying in his bunk bed, dead from his dreadful wounds. The Captain orders the Corporal to send a heart-breaking signal:<\/p>\n In his mind\u2019s eye a map unrolled; he saw the message flashing down the chain, each station picking it up, routing it, clattering it on its way. Down to Golden Cap, where the great signals stood gaunt against the cold crawl of the sea; north up the A line to Aquae Sulis, back again along the Great West Road. Within the hour it would reach its destination at Silbury Hill; and a grave-faced man in green would walk down the village street of Avebury, knock at a door . . .<\/em> p.160<\/p>\n This is an impressive, near-excellent piece of work, and for much of the story I was completely lost in it. As I said previously, it has an immersive reality that nothing else in the issue comes close to matching.\u00a0If, though, I have a minor criticism of this story it would be of the creation myth section which, to me anyway, doesn\u2019t entirely gel with the rest of the piece and is also too long. However, I am quibbling here. It\u2019s well worth searching out this issue as it is probably the best Science Fantasy\/ Impulse<\/em> that was published.<\/p>\n Other reviews: John Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967 (70%, Location 4954 of 7028 in the Kindle edition) Fiction: The Circulation of the Blood \u2022 novelette by Brian W. Aldiss \u2665\u2665 High Treason \u2022 short story by Poul Anderson \u2665\u2665\u2665 You and Me and the Continuum \u2022 short story by J. 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\nJohn Boston & Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy 1950-1967<\/a><\/em> (70%, Location 4954 of 7028 in the Kindle edition)<\/p>\n
\nThe Circulation of the Blood<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Brian W. Aldiss \u2665\u2665
\nHigh Treason<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Poul Anderson \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nYou and Me and the Continuum<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by J. G. Ballard
\nA Hero\u2019s Life<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by James Blish \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Gods Themselves Throw Incense<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Harry Harrison \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nDeserter<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Richard Wilson \u2665\u2665
\nThe Secret<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 short story by Jack Vance \u2665\u2665\u2665
\nThe Signaller<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 novelette by Keith Roberts \u2665\u2665\u2665\u2665<\/p>\n
\nCover<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Judith Ann Lawrence
\nEditorial<\/em><\/strong> \u2022 Kyril Bonfiglioli<\/p>\n
\nBoth magazines also increased\u00a0their price from 2\/6 (12.5p) to 3\/6 (17.5p): a 40% increase in cost for a 25% increase in page count. As Kyril Bonfiglioli would comment in his editorial:<\/p>\n
\nThe introductory editorial mentions the magazine is a continuation of Science Fantasy<\/em>, and comments on the name change:<\/p>\n
\nThe first story is The Circulation of the Blood<\/em><\/strong> by Brian W. Aldiss, which I had remembered as being quite a good piece and up to the level of several others he produced for Science Fantasy\/Impulse<\/em>.2<\/sup> This time around I found it much more of a curate\u2019s egg. It tells of Yale, a marine scientist working for the World Waters Organisation, who has been investigating the superabundance of several ocean species: herring, blue whales, etc. After a year working away he returns to the\u00a0tropical island where his second wife and son from his first marriage live. This initial section has a good sense of place and convincing character conflict between Yale, his wife Caterina, and his son Philip, such as when there is an after dinner row that results from Yale talking about an ocean current that they followed on the Kraken<\/em>. When Caterina finds out the current is going to be named after her first husband who she loathes, she loses her temper and slaps Yale in front of his son:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cChild! You\u2019re the child, father! You think you\u2019re so poised and understanding, don\u2019t you? But you\u2019ve never understood how people feel!\u201d He pulled himself away. Yale was left standing in the room alone.<\/em>
\n\u201cExplain and I\u2019d understand,\u201d he said aloud.<\/em> p.18<\/p>\n
\nAt his point though, it all gets a bit silly (spoiler). Catarina\u2019s first husband, the head of the WWO, turns up with an ineffectual gun-wielding helicopter pilot determined to suppress the secret that Yale has uncovered. He explains:<\/p>\n
\nNext up is High Treason<\/em><\/strong> by Poul Anderson. This is a fairly good if rambling story about an officer waiting to be spaced, put out of an spaceship airlock, for treason. His account, as told to a\u00a0futuristic recording device, tells of the Morwain, an alien species at war with man, and the mission he is given to destroy one of their planets.
\nYou and Me and the Continuum<\/em><\/strong> by J. G. Ballard is one of his \u2018concentrated\u2019 stories, of which the author says:<\/p>\n
\nA Hero\u2019s Life<\/em><\/strong> by James Blish, with its galactic empires and Traitor-in-Chiefs, has a plot which either doesn\u2019t make much sense, or is hard to follow, or both. However, for all that it is quite entertaining. The story starts with the traitor Simon de Kyul emptying his poisons into a basin on the planet Boadicea. He is living under a period of immunity in the Traitor\u2019s Quarter of this strange planet:<\/p>\n
\nIf you are in the mood for, say, a dark, dense, slightly sadistic Jack Vance story then you will probably like this, as I did.3<\/sup>
\nThe Gods Themselves Throw Incense<\/em><\/strong> by Harry Harrison is a story I really liked the first time around. This time the bones of the plot show through and the characters seemed rather one-dimensional. A spaceship explodes between the Moon and Earth and three people make it into the escape pod. Unfortunately, they have a three week journey and only two weeks of air. Lots are drawn to decide who has to take a suicide pill and go out the airlock, but matters proceed in a far from straightforward manner.
\nOne thing that occurred to me (spoiler) about this The Cold Equations<\/em> variation is that it always seems to be the woman that goes out the airlock. A couple of other related problems: first, the theme of \u2018sacrifice\u2019 probably isn\u2019t going to make for the most jolly of magazine themes (that is two people out of the airlock so far this issue); second, don\u2019t use spoiler blurbs like:<\/p>\n
\nThe Secret<\/em><\/strong> by Jack Vance tells of a young man on a tropical island who has a seemingly idyllic life. However, one by one, the oldest members of his community build catamarans and sail off to the west.\u00a0This is a fairly good allegory about growing old amongst other things, and the last line has a nice spike to it.<\/p>\n
\nThe story opens with Rafe, a member of the Guild of Signallers:<\/p>\n
\nAfter binding the worst of his wounds, Rafe struggles back to the signal station he operates and slumps into his bunk. Roberts\u2019s characters are frequently badly-used and it appears as if this story will be no different.
\nMost of the rest of the narrative is told in flashback and begins with Rafe as a young boy watching the local Avebury signal station when he is discovered by the Serjeant in charge. The Signaller takes the boy under his wing, and soon Rafe is spending a lot of his time at the station. There is Roberts\u2019s usual immersive level of detail in his\u00a0description of the signal station:<\/p>\n
\nRafe eventually takes and passes the exam to enter the Guild of Signallers and leaves Avebury to undertake his training:<\/p>\n
\nRafe stared blankly at the levers. He saw now the puzzling bright streaks on them were his own blood. He forced his raw hands to unclamp themselves, elbowed his way through the door, shoved past the men who had come for him and collapsed twenty yards away on the grass.<\/em> p.147<\/p>\n
\nThe last section has Rafe regaining consciousness to find he is being tended by a young woman\u2014<\/em>one of the Old Ones, The Haunters of the Heath. She tells him a long creation myth while she cares for him:<\/p>\n
\nThe coda of the story (spoiler) has a Captain and Corporal of Signals approaching the signal station. They notice that the exterior has been covered by marks:4<\/sup><\/p>\n
\nI also have a\u00a0criticism of Bonfiglioli the editor: this was the second story in Pavane<\/em> when the book came out and I think it would have been better if that order had been maintained in the magazine also. There isn\u2019t enough background information about the world in this story for it to stand entirely\u00a0on its own whereas the first Pavane<\/em> story, The Lady Margaret,<\/em> which would appear in the next issue, has a prologue that starts with\u00a0the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I and proceeds to\u00a0introduce\u00a0this parallel world. It seems Bonfiglioli changed the story order so it\u00a0would fit in with his \u2018sacrifice\u2019 theme.<\/p>\n\n
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