being just what they needed. (There is no mention of any weight gain.) But the idea that a redistribution of matter would result in a redistribution of personality (or anything else other than a nasty explosion) is silly beyond words. It might be made to work in an outright fantasy, but not, as here, in any supposed context of science. Or as John Wyndham put it a few issues previously: “The unities of likelihood must be preserved to the best of the writer’s ability... Invention, then, cannot afford to lunge out wildly.”
McIntosh also has the lead novelette in 11, “Live For Ever,” and here my beef is not so much with the premise (arbitrary and implausible as it is) but rather with its development. The secret of immortality is discovered, and it’s just a matter of modifying your ideas. If you can follow an argument, you can read the instructions in the newspaper and you’re in. (Too bad if your IQ is below 88, you’ll just have to die.) The story purports to follow the social consequences over a period of years, which initially feature more hate killings, not fewer, because it is now more worthwhile to kill an enemy, and more necessary to remove anyone who might be dangerous. There are more strikes and labor trouble, more traffic accidents, more people who won’t do their jobs, because now that everybody’s immortal, everybody is somebody and won’t be pushed around.
But the violence eventually dies down because it’s mostly criminals killing each other and soon enough they’re mostly dead. The meek inherit. One can argue about how likely this scenario is, but the main problem is the author’s complete failure to address the other obvious and huge problems of humanity’s suddenly becoming immortal without becoming sterile: a population explosion starting very quickly and the precipitous collapse of the medico-thanatic-industrial complex with all its economic consequences. The complete neglect of these issues, in a story that purports to look panoramically at the results of immortality, is a vastly bigger plausibility problem than the flimsy starting premise, and a fatal one for me.
The lead story in 12 (announced for 11, but postponed allegedly because of its length), is A. Bertram Chandler’s “The Wrong Track,” under the George Whitley pseudonym. This genial first-person story starts recursively at a session of the Circle of the Globe, the successor to the White Horse Tavern, and mentions John Carnell, Arthur Clarke, Peter Phillips, and Bertram Chandler as being in attendance. On the train home, the narrator and his wife feel odd, as if they are somehow facing or moving in the wrong direction. Trying to visualize things differently, they wind up in a series of parallel worlds. First the train is full of German newspapers and swastikas. They visualize themselves out of that and find themselves pulling into the Place de Trafalgar station (Napoleon won). Then they wind up in a train full of gray and beaten-down people living under the mental domination of thuggish extraterrestrials whose strings are pulled by a central intelligence. Avoiding capture, the couple hook up with the underground, people whose minds can’t be dominated (mostly redheads, including the counterpart in this world of the narrator’s wife). They participate briefly in an uprising and help blow up the central intelligence, and are fleeing for their lives when they are precipitated back into Hounslow Central. This unpretentious and entertaining pulp adventure story is made particularly enjoyable by the contrast of outré incident and homely detail.
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The short fiction in these issues continues to get quirkier—not always better, but at least more interesting and less like imitations of the bottom of the rest of the market. 10 features John Wyndham’s “The Chronoclasm,” a clever, lightweight time travel story that I think might be the first much-reprinted story published in Science Fantasy after the Arthur C. Clarke stories in the first two issues. It is immediately preceded by Martin Jordan’s “Zone of Youth,” a peculiar story about a war between Youth (holed up in the Asteroid Belt) and Age, which for some reason makes me think of David Masson.
There is “Unborn of Earth” by Les Cole, a well-known fan of the time; this is the first of a dozen or so stories and articles he published in the SF magazines, under his own names and pseudonyms Les Collins and Colin Sturgis. It is a rather rambling story about extraterrestrials monitoring Earth scientists. The female passes for human, marries the main scientist they’re interested in, and is relieved from duty on grounds of pregnancy. And it gets more complicated from there. Again, not necessarily good, but a bit unusual. Also unusual for different reasons is Francis G. Rayer’s “Dark Summer,” which consciously or unconsciously recapitulates the plot of Lewis Padgett’s “Jesting Pilot” and anticipates Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress. E. C. Tubb’s “Bitter Sweet” is another of his sentimental mini-epics, this one about an old forgotten spaceman nostalgizing over his mothballed spaceship. John Ashcroft is present with his second story, “Stone and Crystal,” in which a sensitive young man rebels against a brutish future society, and loses.
Highlights of 11 are G. Gordon Dewey’s “The Tooth” (reprinted from Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1952), which is told in reverse chronology and whose characters find a wish-fulfillment device and figure out how to make good use of it; Tubb’s “The Enemy Within Us,” about a mental patient who says his body is out to get him; and Joseph Slotkin’s “The Mailman,” involving mail deliveries from the future and a cad who marries women for their money and contrives to kill them. Slotkin published ten stories in the SF magazines from 1953 to 1956, three of them in Science Fantasy, and then was gone. Also present: Richard Rowland’s “Where’s the Matter?”, about a crank inventor but not as funny as it should be; Eric Frank Russell’s “I Hear You Calling,” a lame vampire story; Francis G. Rayer’s “Co-Efficiency Zero,” a pleasantly earnest story about an alien cop from a world of extremely high temperatures who tracks down some malefactors from his home world, while helping and being helped by some human children; Sydney J. Bounds’ “First Trip,” about the first Martian colonist to return to Earth; and “Dimple” by John Kippax (pseudonym of John Hynam, 1915-74), Damon Runyon with a tinge of Amos ‘n Andy on Mars. Kippax had a career arc similar to several of the writers who became regulars: about three dozen stories 1955-61, without exception in Carnell’s magazines, Nebula, and Authentic, then a couple later in New Writings in SF. After that, nothing—another writer who seemingly had nowhere to go after Carnell’s era.
12, in addition to the Chandler lead story, includes Alan Barclay’s well-turned “The Dragon,” in which a man scouting out the post-nuclear countryside encounters a village whose people are much exercised about a dangerous dragon. He finds the dragon, who turns out to be a mutant of the sort he’s looking for, makes friends with it, and brings it back to the village to work for them. In E. C. Tubb’s “The Last Day of Summer,” a man who has passed the point where longevity treatments work is ready to be euthanized, and enjoys his last day; I think it’s the best Tubb story so far, and Judith Merril thought it worthy of inclusion in her first annual “year’s best” anthology.20
“Auto-Fiction Ltd.” is attributed to Wanless Gardener, which I assume is a pseudonym and suspect is also a pun (along the lines of “I’m quitting my day job”). A businessman and writer are in a bar, talking about how hard it is to get rich with a new idea. “Why not mechanize my trade?” suggests the writer. Discussion turns to cardboard plot-finders, the police identification system, etc. They start out with a card file and move to computers, with the author laying about him satirically. E.g.: “We’d be cutting out the three main time wasters: research, continuity, and inspiration.” Soon enough all the human writers have been driven out of the market and are turning to, e.g., “nihilinguistics” (“‘We nihilinguists,’ announced the Striped Monk, ‘have dispensed with all physical impedimenta, even language itself.’”) As the computer becomes more and more powerful the farce becomes broader and broader. Also amusing is “Free Will,” a sort of shaggy robot story by Australian Dal Stivens featuring a robot and the ghost of a robot.
Surprisingly, the least worthy stories in the issue are by William F. Temple and Brian W. Aldiss. Temple’s “Eternity” is identified by Mike Ashley in the Tymn/Ashley volume as the first Unknown-type fantasy to appear in the magazine (which I think is not quite right; its predecessor is Temple’s “Double
