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 happened to read around the same time, see Ken Liu’s “The Algorithms for Love,” from Strange Horizons, reprinted in the 2005 Hartwell/Cramer Year’s Best SF 10. It doesn’t answer the question but it doesn’t obscure it either.) Carnell, however, thought enough of “Unknown Quantity” to anthologize it both in The Best from New Worlds Science Fiction (Boardman, 1955) and No Place Like Earth (Boardman, 1952).25
Phillips (b. 1920) is probably two-thirds of the way towards Little Known Writer status even among SF cognoscenti. His career, boosted early by the immensely popular “Dreams Are Sacred” in Astounding in 1948, comprised 22 stories from 1948 to 1957, all but two appearing by 1954, starting with a couple in Weird Tales. Most of them appeared in the US magazines, and most of those in Astounding, Galaxy, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. “Lost Memory” may be the best of them. “Plagiarist” is the last original Phillips story to appear in New Worlds, though his last story, “Next Stop the Moon,” was reprinted in New Worlds after appearing in 1957 in the London Daily Herald. He never managed a collection, and “Dreams Are Sacred” is the only story of his that has been reprinted since 1990.
The oddest item in these issues is undoubtedly William de Koven’s “Bighead” (8), a definitive send-up of the genre. In the future, the Brooklyn Movement puts mediocrity in the saddle, until there is a counter-revolution based on brain size. Things were crude at first. The founder explains: “I had to go by hat-size and age.... Unfortunately, this eliminated those whose heads were tall but small in circumference.” Later, more refined methods were developed, relying on cranial capacity, ability to hold one’s liquor, and absence of certainty on questions of life, death, and fate. Now the Bigheads lord it over the Pinheads. But Bighead Zircon defies his father Pluton for the love of a Pinhead girl, Threnda. After they are married, Pluton’s agents go after Threnda, who survives a personality-tuned ray-ship attack only by discarding her clothes (“Clothes are part of the personality. Without them we are not the same. The magnetic emanations of an industrialist at a board meeting are not those of the same man in a bath-tub.”) So it’s war.
The Pinheads head to Mars, with Zircon sworn to help them. He learns he’s being used and Threnda is one of the betrayers; but with the help of Melissa, who is undercover as the chief Pinhead’s secretary (“She reached into the roots of her hair, extracted a tiny badge which fastened with a clip. ‘Melissa, Operative Q-47 of the Bighead Secret Police.’”), Zircon wins through. Peace is in sight. This one sat in inventory for several years; it was advertised in 3 in 1947 as coming next issue. The often humorless Carnell apparently did not know quite what to make of it, as witness his solemn blurb (“It was an old problem—a minority with brains and power, against a majority only endowed with numbers—and corruption.”) The readers didn’t either. They voted it into last place. Carnell later wrote that de Koven “was a pseudonym for a then well-known American author but neither my memory nor records throw any light on his true identity.”26
* * * *
A. Bertram Chandler, who published 23 stories in New Worlds under his name and the George Whitley pseudonym, has three stories in these issues. The best, as by George Whitley, is “Castaway” (6), reprinted from the November 1947 Weird Tales. The protagonist, on a ship investigating smoke signals from a Pacific island, suddenly finds himself struggling alone in the water, barely makes it to shore, and when he looks for whoever lit the fire, finds a derelict spaceship from the future, complete with Mannschen Drive and its time-distortion properties. He can’t keep his hands off it, and shortly finds himself in the water again. This is one of Chandler’s better stories, tight and nightmarishly vivid.
The other two are less pointed but typically ingratiating. “Position Line” (4) is an agreeable piece of the nautical geekery that Chandler thrived on for years. On Mars, a spaceship crash has taken out the spaceport and power plant and a lot of people need rescuing fast from the other colony town. The only way is a fleet of Diesel sand cats—but how to navigate across the desert, in this yesterday’s tomorrow without GPS? The protagonist, a dissatisfied policeman, formerly an equally dissatisfied mariner who came to Mars because sailing had become so automated, breaks out the bubble sextant he brought along, and it’s George O. Smith in two dimensions for the rest of the story. This is probably the most mundane story in the issue in terms of science fictional ideation and action, and it’s also the one the readers voted best in the issue.
It is followed by “Coefficient X,” in 6, another navigational opus. On Venus, which has lots of oceans, compasses have stopped working reliably, and ships are getting lost. The protagonist is a compass expert from Earth, and he finds the problem. There are creatures called “loofards,” combinations of loofah and lizard (honest), which the Venerians (here called Hesperians) like to take into the bath with them—for exactly what is not explained, though the loofards do like to eat soap. They turn out to have iron in their bones and to generate magnetic fields, a bit like an electric eel. But there is more going on than this rather arid (well, humid too) gimmick. According to Chandler, Venus is multiracial: “Venus was a huge melting pot in which white and yellow, black and brown, were being blended. The results were—pleasing. The ability to live, to play, of some of the coloured folks lost nothing by admixture with the drive—on Earth so often squandered, so often without a worthy objective—of the whites.” Later on, the ship’s Calypso Man, known as Admiral Stormalong and “not overly dark,” sings a song in the compass-mender’s honor, beginning:
“Eber since de worl’ began
De compass am de frien’ of Man...”
There is also gender
