Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick
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Rayer stories), and his couple of anthology appearances were in UK-only books. He has no entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and therefore presumably has not published a novel. So to those who go back a ways with British SF, he is probably reasonably well known, but otherwise, not. He might be described as the UK equivalent of, say, Winston K. Marks, author of many forgotten SF stories.
James did have a low-level second career, with another seven stories in Dream, New Moon, Fantasy Annual and Gryphon SF and Fantasy Reader from 1987 to 1998, all minor markets and several of them semi-professional low-circulation nostalgia operations. Miller/Contento has no dates for James, but New Worlds 37 (July 1955) has a profile of him, indicating he was 34 (therefore b. 1921, presumably). It says he started “to seriously plan a semi-literary career” in 1947, having survived Normandy blinded in one eye. “To this end he took a job as a postman in a rural Yorkshire area where he and his wife live because ‘I have found,’ he states, ‘that postal work fits in with a career of part-time writing very well. In fact, I declined an offer of an indoor clerical appointment in the Post Office because I felt that the outdoor work left my mind less exhausted and more eager for thinking up stories.’” Carnell adds: “With the courage of such convictions he has now sold over thirty-five stories....”
James’ “The Rebels” (4) is a scenery-chewer of the Planet Stories ilk. On a spaceship of a viciously hierarchical society, the likes of the Master Minder and the Overseer lord it over the crew, which is always terrified of falling into the Redundant Class. But the downtrodden stage a mutiny, hoping to divert the ship from its destination to the Independent City on Efferenter II. The plans go awry, they fail to kill all the big shots, and they wind up in a bloody free-for-all that ends in blowing the ship in half. Three survivors manage to crash-land their half-ship on Efferenter III, which is no help at all, but they figure out how to prop up and lash down the gyroscope so they can point in the right direction, fill the ship with helium so they can get off the ground with the aid of E.III’s high rotational velocity, and they’re on their way to E.II and freedom. It is a crude but grimly enthusiastic piece of blood-and-thunder storytelling.
Sydney J. Bounds (1920-2006), who had 16 stories in New Worlds over the years, published a total of about 70 in the SF magazines, remaining active as late as 2002 (though most of his output after the demise of Vision of Tomorrow appears to be in semi-professional venues). He too seems to have been a UK-only writer, with one sale to Fantastic Universe in the 1950s, but no more to the US magazines. His stories under his own name appeared in the higher-rent UK magazines—New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Nebula, and Authentic—but he also used a number of pseudonyms to publish in the downmarket ones like Worlds of Fantasy and Futuristic Science Stories, to which he contributed a story actually titled “Vultures of the Void.” He published a few paperback SF novels in the 1950s as well as confessions, juvenile, gangster and western fiction, according to his profile in New Worlds 32 (February 1955). He was a member of the late ’30s London circle that included Arthur C. Clarke and William F. Temple, and became a full-time writer in 1951, leaving a job as sub-station assistant on the London Underground. The profile says: “Still unmarried he prefers to smoke a pipe and paint pictures for relaxation—and prefers art to be spelt with a small ‘a’.”
On that last score, one cannot accuse Bounds of hypocrisy. “Too Efficient” (5) is a piece of pleasant yard goods: protagonist discovers his newly purchased electric motor is working at 107% efficiency, goes to the company to investigate. Of course they’re stranded aliens trying to raise enough money to get off the planet. These high-efficiency engines really have nuclear power plants concealed inside them. The aliens kidnap the protagonist to their spaceship, which is underwater. After they depart, releasing the protagonist, he heads home, gloating that he is in possession of “the secret of space travel!”
“The Spirit of Earth” (8) takes a great leap downward, however: it’s a displaced French Foreign Legion story set on Mercury that is best allowed to speak for itself. Here the Captain, disgraced and exiled of course, is assembling a rescue party for a crashed spaceship:
The Captain felt a pride in his men, a pride he had once felt in very different circumstances, and had never thought to know again. He walked slowly down the ragged line, picking his men.
“Long Tom.”
A gangling frame of creaking bones and mahogany skin straightened up. The gaunt face smiled, smiled as it had once under twin Martian moons, treading the red desert.
“Shilo.”
A squat figure shifted from one splayed foot to another. A light flickered deep in yellow eyes—eyes that had looked out over the hideous landscape of massive Jupiter.
“Sturm and Jeri.”
The brothers’ dark, impassive faces revealed nothing. They might have been volunteering to make up a foursome at space poker—or booking a return passage to their native Venus.
“Blacky.”
Once he had been a space jockey, riding Saturn’s rings: now he was just one more derelict at Outpost Sunspot, the dumping ground for broken men, the end of the journey from which there could be no return.
“Adoption” by Don J. Doughty (6), his only appearance in the SF magazines, competently rings a change on a standard plot: Johnny has an imaginary playmate Bugs, but Bugs proves to be real, from a pretty horrible future, so when he comes home with Johnny and then can’t get back to his own time, Johnny’s parents are happy to take him in.
J. W. Groves’ “Robots Don’t Bleed” (8) recapitulates Lester del Rey’s mawkish “Helen O’Loy,” this time as spite. Space pilot meets girl as a result of the lifelike robot rabbits she makes. They want to get married but he needs money, so he spaces out again (as it were) for a year, and when he gets back, there she is to meet him, except he figures out it isn’t really she when a spaceship crash-lands on her and she isn’t hurt. She’s made a lifelike robot of herself to occupy him, and meanwhile she’s married someone else. So he heads back to space with the robot (“If it was good for nothing else, at least it could do the chores.”). But he gets homesick, and returns and drops in on his ex-fiancé, who has grown fat and snobbish and has reduced her formerly spacegoing husband to puttering around making toy model spaceships. So it’s outward bound into the great void again, with his robot, no return planned. Carnell liked this one enough to anthologize it twice, in No Place Like Earth and The Best From New Worlds. Groves (b. 1910) published a dozen stories in the SF magazines in a curiously symmetrical career: one in 1931, 10 from 1950 through 1954 (one in Astounding, the others in the US pulps), and one in 1964. He also published two belated novels in the late 1960s, Shellbreak and The Heels of Achilles.
Ian Williamson’s “Chemical Plant” (8) belongs to a common subgenre in New Worlds and many other SF magazines: send the characters to a newly discovered planet and set them a technical puzzle. See Rayer’s “Necessity,” discussed earlier in this chapter, for another very similar example. Here, a spaceship lands on a planet covered with vegetation, near five lakes all of which have differently colored water, then disappears. Investigation by would-be rescuers reveals that the world-plant was extracting chromium for nourishment. The lakes are different acid baths, and the spaceship is a huge and tasty morsel that the plant humped into one of the lakes by selectively growing. There is a stereotypical clash between the pompous captain who wants to blast everything and the nice captain who gets down on the ground and turns over rocks to find out what is going on. It’s not badly done, and the readers put it first in the issue, ahead of Clarke’s “Guardian Angel.” Carnell anthologized the story in No Place Like Earth, and said: “Ian Williamson denies all credit for the story under his name, stating that it was actually written by a logical-computing machine which is kept in a cellar near Manchester University. As a physicist he stumbled across this ‘captive’ machine quite by accident—it had been built by a scientist who could prove that he was sane and the rest of the world quite mad. As nobody is likely to believe Mr. Williamson’s statement, he is quite happy in the knowledge that he can go on using the machine to further his own literary ideals.” It must have blown a resistor or something; Ian Williamson has no other credits in the SF magazines.
Norman Lazenby’s “The Cireesians” (4) is an amusing if incompetently