Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick
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subscribes to Fans Are Slans: “I think the reading of present-day science fiction demands a certain mental liveliness and I would put readers of it as being generally of a higher intelligence level than average readers of other classes of fiction.” The profile declares Tomorrow Sometimes Comes to be his “most outstanding piece of fiction,” and Rayer says it “will remain the most personally satisfying, having also been translated and published in France and Portugal.” (In an autobiographical piece for a fanzine,27 Rayer recalls “the pleasure with which I received Olaf Stapledon’s most high and generous praise” of the novel—even better than being published in France and Portugal, I would think.) I read Tomorrow Sometimes Comes a few years ago after visiting Australia and finding it awash in old paperbacks of the book. It is a post-nuclear war novel that runs the changes on big questions of human destiny vs. stagnation, freedom vs. regimentation, etc.—a bit stuffy but a respectable try, much better than the stories described below in these issues of New Worlds. Carnell reviewed it in 10 and described it as “undoubtedly the finest British science-fiction novel published in this country in recent years.”
In his fanzine bio, Rayer says the best-remembered SF of his childhood was Scoops, back issues of which he borrowed from his cousin E. R. James, and he searched out Wells and Stapledon, the latter of whose “narrative style does not attract those who were more accustomed to minute paragraphs and endless (and often pointless) action.” He dislikes “women dragged into stories for the sake of the feminine or romantic interest; pictures of the latter undressed yet unfrozen in space, etc.; stories based on series of ‘clever’ incidents which do not really integrate. Admired traits are: real originality, fully reasoned and logical development, scientific premises which will stand pondering upon, and lack of superficial emotion.” He thinks SF should be at least as logical as detective stories. He continues:
These feelings, strong as they are, may have arisen from the large amount of work I do on electronic equipment; here, there is always a reason, though sometimes complex deduction is required to discover it.... At present, should the Editor see a mobile device come along the road, halt, survey him with an electronic eye, then withdraw, he will know that one of my radio-controlled models is on reconnaissance.
So was the prolific Rayer an exclusively UK writer for nationalistic reasons, or could he just not sell to the higher-paying US markets? On the basis of the stories here, either is possible. They are an exceedingly mixed bag. The best of the lot is probably “Quest” (7). Konrad, spaceship captain, has been tossed overboard by Everard, his thuggish second in command, but spots and manages to board an ancient alien spaceship. A telepathic voice tells him he’ll do fine for the job. (What job?) Everard and his sidekick show up at the airlock; the ship blew up after they got rid of Konrad. They’ve all got about 17 hours’ oxygen. They black out and wake up with the ship down on a world full of dust. A robot greets them, explains that its creators had split into physically competent and pure brain factions, but the former were wiped out in a plague, so the pure brains sent out spaceships to try to find new helpers for them. (That’s the job.) At their request, Konrad finishes assembling a machine they need, then asks to be sent back to Earth. The masters refuse, denounce mobile life as useless, and start to fry the robot. Konrad pulls it out of harm’s way and it expresses its gratitude. Everard, who has been skulking about, tries to ambush Konrad for his remaining oxygen, and the robot saves Konrad. They head off to Earth, Konrad to be put in suspended animation for the voyage since he’s running out of oxygen; he wonders whether he will arrive in a present he’s familiar with or in the far future. This is hardly great literature but there is plenty of plot and imagination in relatively few pages; it gives good pulp weight.
“Necessity” (5) is about as well done, though a bit more obvious. Captain Pollard of the Star Trail Corps is expounding his theory that all life is interrelated when his spaceship is drawn inexorably to Xeros II. It lands in a clearing in a heavily vegetated area and can’t take off again, for no apparent reason. The crew explores, but the plants don’t cooperate; breaks in the forest close before the crew can get to them, keeping them in the clearing. There’s a nasty-looking gray weed patch encroaching on the other plant life, and while they sleep it starts to envelope the spaceship. So they break out the weed killer and dispatch it. Suddenly the engines work again and they can leave. They’ve done what the other plants needed and brought them in for. Pollard’s theory is vindicated. Here Rayer tries out his chops as a stylist, and he’s not too bad in an overdone sort of way: “There was something so pathetic about the melody of the leaves that it was with a feeling of inexpressible melancholy that he at last fell asleep. It were as if the trees were telling of some long-drawn, secret agony which sapped their life, leaving them listless except to tell of their misery in the evening cool.”
The other two Rayer stories are a more rancid kettle of fish, with pretty serious defects of logic and plausibility. In “Adaptability” (6), in “the gigantic factory which was being built to mark the dawn of the 21st century—the beginning of an age of new mechanical and scientific wonder,” funny things are happening. A strange light appears, there’s a spherical vehicle from which grotesque forms appear and quickly disappear into the nearby woods; people give chase but just when they think they have one, it turns out to be a branch or a tree stump. Somehow, there seem to be more X-M units (whatever they are) than anyone ordered. So they analyze samples of all the X-M units. They’re metal, all right. The protagonist, a big wheel (not a cog) in the factory, does the only sensible thing—he lurks, and when the vehicle appears again and the grotesque forms have disembarked, he leaps into it and gets taken whence it came, which proves to be an extradimensional world full of the aforesaid grotesque forms bent on world conquest—all the worlds—through their uncanny imitative ability. He learns this because they are telepathic and he eavesdrops; somehow he keeps his own thoughts under control and manages to hijack the vehicle back to the home dimension, where he and the factory crew take all the X-M units—which he realizes are disguised aliens who have managed to adjust their molecules as well as their outward form—and put them to the test of heating inductors, killing the invaders. A homemade bomb thrown into the vehicle on its next pass completes the defense of humanity.
The worst of the lot is “Deus Ex Machina” (8). It is the first of Rayer’s “Magnis Mensas” series, which comprises five stories over 11 years in New Worlds and Science Fiction Adventures, and which also includes the above-mentioned novel Tomorrow Sometimes Comes published the following year, though there the eponymous world-dominating computer is called Mens Magna. In “Deus Ex Machina,” an employee of Subterraneous Architects is accused of criminal negligence, charged with murder, and sentenced to death at the instance of Magnis Mensas, which saw the whole thing, and which is allowed to testify without oath, since the oath would be meaningless to a machine and machines can’t lie anyway.28
After the trial, several people—the employee’s boss, his fiancé, his lawyer—point out to Magnis Mensas that since it did see the whole thing, its failure to warn the deceased is equally culpable. MM locks them up so they can’t tell anyone else. (Why they didn’t point this out during the trial is not explained.) Why is MM doing this? For the good of humanity. The employee was directing an excavation that shortly would have discovered the existence of “negative matter vessels and negative matter beings,” and it would cause mass neurosis to “let man know his Earth is honeycombed by beings a hundred times more powerful than himself.” But Padre Cameron puts a bug in MM’s ear about how humans swear before an Ideal (a.k.a. their Maker) and how terrible it is for humans to die unready to meet their Maker (connection of the latter point to the story is a bit unclear). Problem solved! MM brings forth the prisoners and gets them to swear they won’t tell a soul about negative matter vessels and beings, and lets them out.
E(rnest) R(ayer) James is almost Rayer’s shadow, as well as his relative and sometime collaborator—prolific, though not as much as Rayer, with 42 appearances in the UK SF magazines (the respectable ones—New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Authentic, Nebula), from 1947 to 1963. His only appearances outside the UK consisted of two stories reprinted in the US edition of New Worlds. This story is his second, following a first appearance in Gillings’ Fantasy in 1947. He seems to be another writer whose career was effectively ended by Carnell’s