Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick
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message to Earth. A few hours later they get the response that it worked, the Galnos have been overthrown, but not before launching a doomsday weapon that is going to blow up Centaurus IV and the Blue Moon in about two hours. All die, but not before Amber realizes everything has been in the service of the Phrynx’s master plan to hand over the universe to the decent (non-Galno) remnants of humanity elsewhere in the galaxy.
Overall this series is an ambitious nice try by a literate but inexperienced writer who doesn’t quite have the wherewithal to bring off a novel-length plot. Too much of what happens has an ex machina quality, there’s too much implausible super-technology cobbled together overnight (like a kinder, gentler, less noisy E.E. Smith) without much thinking through of implications (especially the Predictor), and the society of Alpha C IV never comes to life because all we see of it is the doings of eight or so characters in the foreground.
As noted earlier, these stories were fixed up (or this novel was reunited) into World Well Lost, published as by John Padget in the UK in 1970, but under Aiken’s own name in the US by Doubleday in 1971. A superficial look at the text shows that Aiken learned something in the intervening two decades. The stories have been comprehensively revised and updated stylistically and culturally; for example, Anstar’s observation to Amber in the first story, “You’re a tawny little fury when you’re angry,” fortunately has disappeared. Everything is described and explained more clearly. The plot seems to remain pretty much the same, including the demise of all the characters at the end. There is a note about the author on the back flap that is positively Pinocchian. After saying nothing about Aiken’s life and activities except that he moved to England young, graduated and got a Ph.D from London University, and now lives in London, it says: “Although World Well Lost is his first science fiction novel his writings have been published in all the well known science fiction magazines.” Well, there was that Probability Zero piece in Astounding...
Aiken had two more stories in New Worlds, one of them in these issues. “Edge of Night” (4), not part of the Anstar series, pleasantly executes a familiar plot. Three people are snatched from their times (arbitrarily, it seems at first) to enact a great destiny: Grierson, a submarine commander in trouble in 1942; Laura, a housewife tending her dying husband in 1940; Jimmy, a young working-class chap who was trying to get his child into a bomb shelter during the Blitz. They find themselves walking up a spiral ramp around a tower above the clouds. At the top of the tower, they find a captivating old man who introduces himself as Man (i.e., “the fusion of the minds of the last race of man”) and says his body is really Earth (he handwaves and it becomes visible beneath them). It seems that over the millennia, Earth’s elements “gradually built into denser, subtler ones” with atomic numbers “hundreds of times as great” as their predecessors (transcendence and cold fusion! This from a chemist, too, remember).
Now Man reveals the mission. These three people have been snatched from the past because they are the “minds most fitted to the task,” which is of course the struggle of good vs. evil. The Black Mind, which has taken over a large part of the universe, has become aware of Man, and has snatched Pluto in a cross between colonization and possession. The characters’ mission? To fly to Pluto in a spaceship designed to serve as a condenser for the projected mental force of Man (“some of the new heavy elements can focus thought”), for which they will be in effect a relay station. Where’s this spaceship? “‘Ah,’ said the old man. ‘That must be thought of.’” So he thinks it into existence, complete with galley stocked with stuff you couldn’t get in wartime London (“Butter, eggs, oranges—blimey, a pineapple—never ’ad one in me life!” says Jimmy) and they’re off.
It takes about three hours to get to Pluto, or at least to get past the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, and once there they engage, or are used by Man, in a typical science fictional mind battle, which they of course win. Pluto blows up. Back on Earth, Grierson and Laura declare their love, though the latter says she won’t leave her husband if he pulls through. Man breaks it to them that he has to wipe the memories of the two from 1940 because they mustn’t retain what they’ve learned about 1942, so Grierson says he’ll look her up if it turns out her husband died, and he’ll look Jimmy up too and get him into the Navy, assuming Grierson survives the depth charges (but it looks as if he won’t). This absurd fairy tale is made reasonably enjoyable, indeed charming, by competent and matter-of-fact writing and appealing characters, including Man. It would have been right at home in the back pages of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
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The lead story in 8 is Arthur C. Clarke’s “Guardian Angel,” later incorporated into Childhood’s End. It was written in July 1946, bounced by Campbell at Astounding, rewritten, and sent to agent Scott Meredith to sell; he had it revised by James Blish and it was first published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1950. In it, Stormgren, the Secretary of the United Nations and effectively world president, deals with Karellen, the representative of the extraterrestrial race that has brought its civilizing mission to Earth. Karellen will not show himself. Why not? Famously, because he looks like traditional renderings of Satan, and people would talk. New Worlds uses Clarke’s original text and not the Blish revision, though not out of any agenda. Carnell says in 10 that the story was sold to him and to the US magazine at the same time, but the latter got it into print two months earlier.
Clarke says he thought Blish’s ending was “rather good,” but he didn’t find out about the revision for a long time.23 The revisions, overall, are relatively minor, consisting mostly of cuts of sentences and paragraphs from Clarke’s version, including the removal of some internal framing material. The “new ending” actually just repeats a few lines of dialogue from earlier in the story that sharpen the analogy to Satan. Neither version is particularly interesting nor impressive, though both are capably written; in the novel, this material served mainly as set-up and seemed to me a bit of a distraction even before I knew it had been published separately. It is not entirely surprising that this story took second place in the readers’ poll to a short story by an unknown writer.
Of the non-featured fiction, Clarke’s “The Forgotten Enemy” (5) is probably the best known, minor as it is, and the last piece of non-reprinted Clarke fiction in New Worlds until 1958. In one of his short and quietly elegant early pieces, the glaciers return to London.
The best story in these issues may be Peter Phillips’ “Plagiarist” (7), a high-quality museum piece set in a Bradburyesque future in which the irrational and atavistic have been banished from human culture. The protagonist is the imaginative young rebel who finds a time capsule and tries to flog Beethoven and Shakespeare at his rite of passage performance. Nobody much likes them, and they accuse him (correctly) of plagiarism and kick him out. Though ultimately the story is a bag of conventional sentiments, it is quite well turned and presents a pharmaceutical grade sample of one of the great tropes of SF of the late ’40s and the ’50s. The readers voted it best in the issue.
Phillips’ other story here, “Unknown Quantity” (5), is equally facile but considerably more annoying, a pseudo-think-piece in which a religious figure known only as the Preacher rants against the “soulless” Servotrons, i.e. androids, prompting the company that makes them to challenge him to a philosophical debate. The joker is that the company trains a Servotron to do it, named Theo Parabasis no less,24 and then to reveal his provenance after the debate. But the Preacher, too, is really an android put up by a rival company to help drive down Servotron’s stock. When Theo exposes his nature, the Preacher declares Theo his equal (“His God is my God—and yours, if you have wit to reason. For does not all reason reach toward God?”) Then the Preacher reveals his own androidicity, explaining later to his handler: “There comes a qualitative change in a brain when it is given so much knowledge. A subtle change. True reasoning begins. And something is born. A soul. I found that I had a soul.” Later, we see Theo playing the piano again—this time, with expression.
The reason this one is annoying is that it raises a significant question about consciousness and then buries it in unexamined sentimentality, worse than not asking the question at all—a sort of cogitus interruptus. (For a considerably better time on this subject, which I