Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967. Damien Broderick
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both facts and fancies. Hence—SCIENCE-FANTASY.
Matters are not much clarified in the second issue, in which Gillings’ editorial, titled “Going Your Way,” starts with apologies for the irregular schedule, occasioned by a printing strike. 1 was Summer 1950 but there was no Autumn issue, and 2 is Winter 1950-51. He solicits the readers’ views, not to mention their stories, especially those of 3,000 to 6,000 words. As to his plans, he intends to enlarge the non-fiction content, to present the best fiction he can get but to have no “fixed policy,” and to “keep a careful eye to what [he] considers the proper development of this medium for an audience more concerned with literary quality than with the familiarity of authors’ names or mere extravagance of conception.”
Well, that’s an idea, and not a bad one as far as it goes. What is conspicuously missing is any explanation of how Science-Fantasy was intended to differ from its companion magazine New Worlds, and what the point was of publishing a second quarterly magazine rather than increasing the size and/or frequency of the established magazine.11 However, what if anything Gillings had in mind, other than his desire to be editor of an SF magazine, quickly became academic, since he was gone by the next issue, which did not appear for a year.
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The editorial in 2 announces an intention to “enlarge on” the non-fiction content. The “In the Next Issue” squib promises “Nemesis” by Arthur C. Clarke. A box in one of the reviews says “it is hoped” to continue “Fantasy Forum,” a letter column, and invites readers who have “any comments to make on the contents of this magazine or on any matters arising,” to send them on.
None of these things came to pass. The third issue of Science-Fantasy—Winter 1951-52, a year after 2—features no Clarke, no letter column, and no non-fiction except for a rather stiff “Guest Editorial” by Gillings titled “The Time Is Not Yet” noting with much verbiage and little explanation that he is out and John Carnell is now the editor. Gillings says, with customary vagueness: “[I]t has become evident that the plan of development I had in mind for Science-Fantasy can hardly be carried through successfully at this stage—for a variety of reasons, which it is hoped may not obtain once the magazine gets properly into its stride and the special features I envisaged can be introduced with the full effect of topical interest and critical value.”
So what actually happened here? Mike Ashley’s Tymn/Ashley essay refers to “internal disagreements” within Nova Publications and the fact that the board of directors decided it was “uneconomical to keep two editors.” Gillings lost the vote. What the internal disagreements were about is not recorded. But Ashley’s SF magazine history The Time Machines adds that the decision was “swayed to some extent by the fact that the design and make-up of Science-Fantasy were more expensive than those of New Worlds.” Why that should have been the case is not clear. A New Worlds issue (10) from midway between the two Gillings issues of Science-Fantasy has the same number of pages, the cover stock is slicker, page size and illustrations are larger and seem to be better reproduced. There’s even a photograph. I suspect that the main “internal disagreement” may simply have been that Gillings’ view of the field was hopelessly mired in 1939 or thereabouts, and Carnell was more forward-looking. Carnell maintained a tasteful silence in the magazine, and his later comments (in an interview reproduced in Philip Harbottle’s revised Vultures of the Void) pointed in two directions in consecutive sentences, first citing Gillings’ “finding it more and more difficult to devote as much time editorially to the magazine as he wished,” and then observing that Gillings’ above-quoted editorial “reads obscurely, and does little to emphasize the fundamental differences of opinion that were then contributory causes for his relinquishing the editorship.”
One of the minor mysteries of the transition is what happened to the promised Clarke story “Nemesis,” but it’s easily solved: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2000) says that it is the same story as “Exile of the Eons,” which first appeared in Super Science Stories, March 1950, and then in Clarke’s first collection Expedition to Earth. Why was it dropped from Science Fantasy? Maybe because by the time it would have been published (even on schedule, sometime in 1951) it would already have appeared in the US magazine—though later on, Carnell published plenty of stories that had appeared in the US.
I suspect, however, that it was a casualty of regime change. “Nemesis” is a very old-fashioned story for Clarke, about a militarist dictator referred to only as “the Master” who flees defeat in war through suspended animation, and millennia hence encounters Trevindor, who was banished from the inhabited Galaxy for philosophical nonconformity (“in the whitely gleaming Hall of Justice,” no less, where he “stood proudly facing the men who had proved stronger than he.”) Trevindor kills the Master. This story is full of the posturing and sonorous diction of 1930s SF—though rendered with Clarke’s vastly greater skill—and is probably just the kind of thing the Carnelloids wanted to get rid of, however well done in this instance. (“The Master’s dreamless sleep was more than half ended when Trevindor the Philosopher was born, between the fall of the Ninety-seventh Dynasty and the rise of the Fifth Galactic Empire. He was born on a world very far from Earth, for few were the men who ever set foot on the ancient home of their race, now so distant from the throbbing heart of the Universe.”)
Other changes were made before the appearance of issue 3. New Worlds 10 has a list of authors to appear in that issue, and they include A. Bertram Chandler and “Robert Wright” (Robert Lowndes and Forrest J Ackerman), neither of whom actually appear. So here’s the new Science Fantasy: 96 pages, 8 ½ x 5 ½ inches, glossy but flimsy cover stock, paper that looks higher-quality to my untutored eye than in the first two issues, price two shillings.
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The most immediately striking feature of 3 is the cover by Reina Bull, which sounds pretty ordinary by genre standards in its elements but is rather bizarre in execution. It depicts a voluptuous, scantily clad woman being carried off into the sky by a caped humanoid cyborgesque monster, with futuristic cityscape in the background. It sounds like a typical Earle Bergey cover for Thrilling Wonder Stories, but it looks like what Bergey might have painted after a long night in an opium den with Hannes Bok or maybe Margaret Brundage. It has a sort of busy and overheated decadent quality to it that I don’t recall seeing on SF magazines elsewhere.
The cover of 4, the next issue, is of similar ilk though the use of color is less striking. Here a man is struggling in the tentacles of a mechanical monster, with more voluptuous, scantily clad women making stylized and futile gestures of distress. Bull did these two covers plus two more on New Worlds around the same time (New Worlds 11 and 18). The style of the latter is similar to the Science Fantasy covers but the presentation is altogether more wholesome, without the Weird Menace overtones. The Science Fantasy covers are well worth looking at.12
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That issue 3 cover, though, has nothing to do with any of the fiction contents, from which skynapped voluptuous women are conspicuously absent. All the stories are short items, with none flagged as a lead story except by their order on the contents page.
In John Wyndham’s “Pawley’s Peepholes,” gaggles of futuristic tourists suddenly start intangibly but visibly appearing in a small town. Solution: turn the town into a tourist attraction for people who want to gawk at the time travelers. It’s an American town, probably reflecting an earlier sale in the U.S. (a different version of the story appeared in Suspense, Summer 1951). Later the story was Anglicized (or re-Anglicized) for reprinting in the UK Argosy, as “A New Kind of Pink Elephant,” and retained the English setting in yet another revision in Wyndham’s collection The Seeds of Time. This plot is essentially the same as in Bob Tucker’s “The Tourist Trade,” though the stories were published close enough together (Worlds Beyond, January 1951, for the Tucker) that given the publication delays involved, it’s unlikely that one influenced the other.
F. G. Rayer’s “The Undying Enemy” is old-fashioned but not too bad if one makes the necessary allowances: the protagonist grows up underground under the tutelage of an old man. He has custody of the remnants of humanity