no apparent reason, without visible correlation to their virtue. Eventually, everybody develops one except for the protagonist, whose life is consequently ruined. When the aliens in charge of the experiment get tired of it, everybody’s halo drops eight or ten inches and cuts their heads off. The idea is only workable as farce, but Temple treats it with earnestness, and then brings the story crashing down with a pointless ex machina ending. Aldiss’s story “Breathing Space” is a heavy-handed one about people who don’t know they are living in the remains of a moon base dominated by an out-of-control computer. There are rebels, bent on breaking out, who unfortunately succeed.
Overall, this issue 12 is the first one in which my reading enjoyment clearly outweighed my irritation. It’s also nice to look at. My appreciation for Quinn continues to grow. This cover in one sense is crude and ought to look muddy. But the more I look at it the more I appreciate the composition and use of color. It’s worth checking out, though this is one that doesn’t look quite as good on the screen as it does in the flesh.21
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The Guest Editorials skip a couple of issues but resume in 12 with Alfred Bester’s “What’s the Difference?”—between American and British SF, he means. It is odd to see this appear in Science Fantasy, since most of the talk about Britishness has been in New Worlds. Bester starts out by asserting that there is no difference in merit among writers, it’s all a matter of taste, but collectively....
The American and English cultures differ tremendously. We in the States are a nervous, high-strung people, anxious, insecure, generous but confused, painfully eager to get places but not exactly sure where we are going....
Our science fiction reflects this. It is nervous, high-strung, generous but confused. It is a painful striving for The Answers. We in the States want The Answer to Everything. It must be definitive, short and quick. Eternity must be explained in a sentence, our galaxy in a phrase, our place in it in a formula—and then off to other important Answers.
By contrast, the English culture revealed in its science fiction is “assured, relaxed, aware of its own value, conscious of a long, honorable history, and doubtful but not too alarmed about its future. It is too sophisticated, or at any rate too well-bred to run and shout.” Hence, says Bester, English SF’s quiet tempo, leisurely development, emphasis on character rather than action. “I have the feeling that it has been fabricated by a people who have forgotten the terrifying violence which we accept as everyday commonplaces in the States”; the “unmerciful warfare between human beings” that Americans take for granted “has long been bred out of English civilization.”
As a result, “American science fiction is exciting. To read it is like being cooped up in a room with an hysterical stranger.” But the bad news is its “devotion to The Answers”—defining God and man, ending war, perpetuating peace, and settling the fate of the cosmos. “American authors have a tendency to reduce life to round numbers.”
This is fine if you like tension and pat answers, but if you don’t, English SF will be more to your taste. “It is calm, slow, relaxed. It does not search for The Answers. It attempts to explore human behaviour, and brings to its exploration a mature sense of values and a confident courage. It makes a realistic appraisal of the future undistorted by the infantile dreams and delusions that afflict America.” But that’s a bug as well as a feature:
I have struggled through scores of English stories, chest deep in cliché, continually tempted to give up in disgust. Almost always I have been glad that I didn’t give way to the temptation because I have found, tucked away in the stereotype plot, a fresh and interesting idea. Just to balance the equation I might add that I’ve ripped through scores of American stories, enchanted by the air of excitement, only to be bitterly disappointed in the end to discover that they were all excitement and no idea.
18. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. Another disagreement from Broderick, who finds this rendering quite charming, in a comic strip way.
19. In fairness to McIntosh, I should add that the problems of plausibility and logic in his stories about which I repeatedly complain are much more pronounced in his stories for Science Fantasy. He contributed several much superior stories, and one excellent one, “Bluebird World,” to New Worlds during the 1950s, as described in volume 1 of our survey of that magazine, Building New Worlds.
20. Judith Merril (ed.), SF: The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy (Gnome Press, 1956).
21. See this cover at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.
5: SCIENCE FANTASY, VOLUME 5 (ISSUES 13-15)
Dated April, June, and September 1955, respectively, issues 13-15 confirm the impression of a magazine that has largely settled down in physical format and has also hit a stride in content—albeit a quirky and unpredictable stride, occasionally suggestive of the Ministry of Silly Walks. The magazine stays at 2/- and 128 pages. The advertising is limited to house ads except for about a third of a page in 13 and 14 for the Fantasy Book Centre, much reduced from their full back cover ads in earlier issues. The interior illustrations remain undistinguished, some reasonably competent and some pretty lame.
13 leads off with Quinn’s least interesting cover so far, a spaceship against a background of two-thirds-full Mars. Quinn’s weakness is precision of detail and his strengths are a pleasing balance of form and selection and vividness of color. This one plays to his weakness, looking overall pretty stiff and crude (look especially at the shadowed part of the planet and the terminator).22
14’s cover is uncharacteristically cluttered, of interest mainly for the trivial reason that the male figure in the foreground is said in a brief note to be a self-portrait of Quinn, who—like the protagonist of the story illustrated—is an Irishman.23 (More of that later.) In 15 he is back in form with a much better composed and more interestingly colored picture of an artist (clearly another self-portrait) at his easel, which also is another example of the recursive theme becoming common in this magazine: in the foreground is a stack of copies of Science Fantasy. They are all the same nonexistent issue of Science Fantasy, and moreover they bear the same cover painting that the artist is executing on his easel.
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The lead novelette in 13—one of the longest the magazine has yet published, running fifty-two pages—is “In a Misty Light” by Richard Varne. This is a sort of proletarian space opera that reads like a truncated Ace Double, pretty entertaining if you don’t mind that it makes no sense at all.
Sands is mourning his lost Laura, who mysteriously disappeared. An Earth spy on Mek, Sands receives from an extraterrestrial femme fatale a secret to be brought back to Earth (we don’t know what it is, it’s in a recording capsule), just before the secret police bust in and kill her. Sands escapes and stows away in a stolen spacesuit in the hold of an Earth-bound spaceship. When the cargo is loaded he is buried in grain. The Meks try to search and detain the ship, the Terran Consul gets in their way, the ship takes off. It apparently does not occur to Sands that it would have been simpler to give the Terran Consul the secret capsule.
The Meks are in hot pursuit and eventually overtake the Earth ship, the Terrans resist their boarding, people are killed. Sands knows the Meks will find him in the cargo hold, so he skulks
