Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick
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in 3 (after the apology for the year’s delay) notes the drop in price, the story rating competition, the death of Maurice G. Hugi and his story in that issue, and touts Walter Gillings’ Fantasy Review.
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To be frank, most of the fiction in these issues deserves its obscurity. Lead novelette in 1 is “The Mill of the Gods” by the doomed Maurice G. Hugi, in which the world is flooded with cheap and high-quality consumer goods from a mysterious company (a notion that also motivated Clifford D. Simak’s 1953 novel Ring Around the Sun). The boys from Intelligence do a black bag job at one of the company’s sites and find themselves on an alternate Earth, lorded over by refugee Nazis who have subdued the already docile native population for their factories. These refugees plan to return and reassert Germany’s rightful dominance as soon as their economic warfare has reduced Earth to chaos. So they explain, in time-honored pulp fashion, before locking our heroes up, rather than shooting them out of hand like any sensible gang of villains would do to prevent the good guys’ otherwise inevitable escape and triumph. It might have been competitive in Thrilling Wonder Stories a decade previously.
The other novelette, William F. Temple’s “The Three Pylons,” is an only slightly fresher kettle of fish, a piece of schematic moralizing involving the new king of an archaic kingdom whose deceased father has set him a quest: ascend three pylons he has had built, each of which requires a higher technology, and each of which has a message for him on the top. The new king meets these challenges but is such an arrogant and aggressive SOB that he destroys himself.
The rest of the issue comprises no fewer than four short stories by John Russell Fearn13 under his various guises, all ridiculous but somehow inoffensively so. There is a certain archaic charm to his work that makes it less irritating than, say, the earnestly laborious Temple story. Reading Fearn is like reading David H. Keller, maestro of the early Gernsback epoch. He doesn’t pretend to be anything but a moldy fig.
Here’s an example, “Sweet Mystery of Life,” under Fearn’s own name, capturing the tenor of these early issues of New Worlds. Maxted, who lives in a village but has a good Civil Service job in the City, is trying to grow a black rose, supposedly the Grail of horticulturists. His latest cutting withers, but something else appears in its place, looking at first a bit like a toadstool—but it has a face, and microscopic examination shows it’s a human being growing in the potted soil. Maxted tells his servant, “Belling, we’ve stumbled on something infinitely more amazing than a black rose!” Later, he asks Belling if he knows Arrhenius’s theory. “You mean the one about him believing that life came to Earth through indestructible spores surviving the cold of space and then germinating here?” Ah, for the days of old England, when every gentleman had a servant and the servants knew Arrhenius!
The visitor to the conservatory proves to be a woman, or the top half of one, and she’s from Venus. Her name is Cia and her years of sporehood have not impaired her memory or linguistic ability. “We of Venus need a race like yours to free us from bondage,” i.e., from being legless torsos growing out of the soil. Cia has gobs of advanced scientific knowledge ready to recite off the top of her head. Alas, Idiot Jake, whose favorite amusement is tearing up bits of paper and throwing them off the nearby bridge so he can watch them float down the brook, has been eavesdropping and telling tales. When he throws a tree branch through the window, letting in the cold night air (“charged with frost”), Cia freezes. The police arrive, with various snoopy locals, following up a report of a woman being ill-treated. By now Cia resembles a statue and Maxted passes her off as such. The visitors depart. At least Maxted has his copious notes of Cia’s scientific revelations. But wait—they’re gone! Pan to Idiot Jake, tearing up the notebook and throwing the pieces into the brook.
The other Fearn stories include “Solar Assignment,” as by Mark Denholm, in which a spaceshipful of reporters encounters people on Pluto, zombified and operated by aliens, and amorphous and viscous aliens at that. “Knowledge Without Learning” is a psi story guaranteed not to have pleased John W. Campbell, Jr. A telepath absorbs knowledge from others, but it’s zero-sum: what he learns, the sender loses, like the bus driver who suddenly discovered he didn’t know where he was or how to drive. “White Mouse” as by Thornton Ayre is about the first mixed marriage of Earth human and Venus human, and the climate of Earth doesn’t agree with the bride.
A much higher grade of the ridiculous appears in John Beynon’s “The Living Lies,” the lead (though not the cover) story in 2. On Venus, there are four races: the Whites, the Greens, the Reds, and the Blacks. The Whites—Earth colonists—lord it over the others, who exist in a state of mutual dislike and suspicion, to the benefit of the Whites. (The fact that not everybody on Earth is white, or White, is mentioned in passing, but that’s it.) These racial differences prove to be entirely manufactured by the Whites; everybody on Venus was white to begin with. Now, all children are born in hospitals, since the risk of infection on Venus is so large, and the doctors whisk newborns off to a hidden room where they are smeared with a pigmenting jelly and exposed to radiation that makes the pigment permanent. Somehow everyone has forgotten that things used to be different, the doctors keep the secret, and nobody else blows the whistle. Presumably all the mothers are anesthetized when they deliver. An idealistic young woman who first is repelled by the racist set-up and then, when she discovers the real story, tries to expose it, comes to a bad end.
Within its absurd premise, the story (by the author later much better known as John Wyndham, of Triffids fame) does a reasonably good job of pinpointing the interaction of self-interest and racist attitudes, and portraying the reactions of people who are uncomfortable with them—but usually only up to a point. Venus, by the way, is very different from Earth, which by this time is governed by the Great Union. Says one of the sympathetic characters, uncontradicted by anything in the rest of the story:
There was a day on Earth when the people revolted. They refused any longer to be thrown into slaughter of and by people of whom they knew nothing, for the profit of people who exploited them. They rose against it, one, another, and another, to throw out their rulers and rule themselves. And so came the Great Union, Government of the People, by the People, for the People, over the whole Earth. How long will Venus have to wait for that?
This unusually Bolshie rhetoric is quite refreshing, at least as a relief from the militarist, social Darwinist, and eugenicist rhetoric to be found elsewhere in the genre.
The cover story of 2, “Space Ship 13” by Patrick S. Selby, is something else entirely, in the running for the worst story I have ever read in an SF magazine. A sample:
“Oh, no you don’t! Hand that envelope over, brother!”
Chuck spun around. The cabin door had opened silently, and a powerfully built man with a sinister looking scar across his right eyebrow stood holding a deadly radium gun level with Chuck’s heart.
“Get out of here!” tried Chuck experimentally, and got slowly to his feet. Slim, away up at the controls, hadn’t noticed anything wrong, not that he’d be much help. “And put that gun away—any accident here might send the ship to dust!”
“I’ll do the worrying about accidents,” growled the man with the scar. “You worry about doing what I tell you. They don’t call me ‘Kleiner the Killer’ for nothin’. Now, gimme that envelope.” He held out his huge fist, and his dark, evil little eyes glittered. “Come on, now!”
If anything, it gets worse. (“‘You swine, Kleiner! I’ll get you before we’re through!’ The racketeer gave an evil chuckle.”) “The Literary Line-Up” in 3 says Selby will be back in the next issue, but apparently good sense prevailed: he wasn’t, and Miller/Contento lists no other appearances for him in the SF magazines.
Things could only get better from there, though not necessarily by much. John Russell Fearn has two stories in issue 2, both reprinted from American magazines: “Vicious Circle” as by Polton Cross (from Startling, Summer 1946) and “Lunar Concession” as by Thornton Ayre (from Science Fiction, Sept. 1941). “Vicious Circle” is about a man who is running for the Bond Street bus and suddenly finds himself in “a formless grey abyss,” and then on an unfamiliar