expert from Earth to say it (and then to leave hastily) because the women are “the inevitable product of a combination of pioneering and all the comforts of civilization. They’re spoiled here, utterly spoiled.... But they’re powerful.” And they like the loofards and oh, by the way, Voodoo has been reestablished, so the protagonist had better get off the planet fast if he knows what’s good for him, and thank you very much.
A couple of other big names make lackluster contributions. John Beynon’s “Time to Rest” (5) is a well written but sentimental story in which not much happens. Earth has blown up, stranding humans on the other planets, and Bert, who sails the Martian canals in his homemade boat, drops in on the Martian family he is friends with; notices that their daughter is getting grown up; gets nervous and leaves. Her mother says he’ll be back. (And he is, in the sequel, a year or so later.) This one is reprinted from the Arkham Sampler of 1949. Beynon a.k.a. John Wyndham was not really a New Worlds mainstay; he published about 10 stories in it over the years, most notably the “Troons of Space” series starting in 1958, which became The Outward Urge.
William F. Temple’s “Martian’s Fancy” (7) is a piece of slapstick, overlong and tiresome, about a space captain who brings his half-breed illegitimate Martian son home to Earth for a visit with the family, wringing yocks from such matters as the housekeeper’s hirsuteness. Temple made only five appearances in New Worlds. Though prolific, he spread his work around.
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One of the pillars holding up these issues is F. G. Rayer, who previously had an archaic but pleasant item in 3 and a story in Gillings’ Fantasy in 1947. He is a Little Known Writer of a peculiar sort, the quintessential New Worlds homeboy, once very well known in the UK but pretty much unheard of in the US. According to Miller/Contento, from 1947 to 1963, Rayer (1921-81) published some 58 stories in the UK magazines under his own name, eight as by George Longdon, and one as by Chester Delray. Over half of these were in New Worlds. After Carnell left New Worlds, that was it for his SF career. Except for the US reprint of New Worlds, he appeared in the US magazines only three times, each time with a story that also appeared in the UK (though one of them made it into print first in the US). His anthology appearances, few and long ago, were in UK books with no US editions, except for one George Longdon story in an old Andre Norton anthology. Rayer also had a few novels published, one of which, Tomorrow Sometimes Comes, actually made a bit of a splash, but none of them had US editions either.
Rayer is profiled in New Worlds 33 (March 1955), and it seems that his SF was only the tip of an iceberg: he had allegedly published over a thousand stories and articles in at least 53 publications, mainly SF and “scientific articles.” So he must have been a prolific science journalist somewhere. Rayer subscribes to Fans Are Slans: “I think the reading of present-day science fiction demands a certain mental liveliness and I would put readers of it as being generally of a higher intelligence level than average readers of other classes of fiction.” The profile declares Tomorrow Sometimes Comes to be his “most outstanding piece of fiction,” and Rayer says it “will remain the most personally satisfying, having also been translated and published in France and Portugal.” (In an autobiographical piece for a fanzine,27 Rayer recalls “the pleasure with which I received Olaf Stapledon’s most high and generous praise” of the novel—even better than being published in France and Portugal, I would think.) I read Tomorrow Sometimes Comes a few years ago after visiting Australia and finding it awash in old paperbacks of the book. It is a post-nuclear war novel that runs the changes on big questions of human destiny vs. stagnation, freedom vs. regimentation, etc.—a bit stuffy but a respectable try, much better than the stories described below in these issues of New Worlds. Carnell reviewed it in 10 and described it as “undoubtedly the finest British science-fiction novel published in this country in recent years.”
In his fanzine bio, Rayer says the best-remembered SF of his childhood was Scoops, back issues of which he borrowed from his cousin E. R. James, and he searched out Wells and Stapledon, the latter of whose “narrative style does not attract those who were more accustomed to minute paragraphs and endless (and often pointless) action.” He dislikes “women dragged into stories for the sake of the feminine or romantic interest; pictures of the latter undressed yet unfrozen in space, etc.; stories based on series of ‘clever’ incidents which do not really integrate. Admired traits are: real originality, fully reasoned and logical development, scientific premises which will stand pondering upon, and lack of superficial emotion.” He thinks SF should be at least as logical as detective stories. He continues:
These feelings, strong as they are, may have arisen from the large amount of work I do on electronic equipment; here, there is always a reason, though sometimes complex deduction is required to discover it.... At present, should the Editor see a mobile device come along the road, halt, survey him with an electronic eye, then withdraw, he will know that one of my radio-controlled models is on reconnaissance.
So was the prolific Rayer an exclusively UK writer for nationalistic reasons, or could he just not sell to the higher-paying US markets? On the basis of the stories here, either is possible. They are an exceedingly mixed bag. The best of the lot is probably “Quest” (7). Konrad, spaceship captain, has been tossed overboard by Everard, his thuggish second in command, but spots and manages to board an ancient alien spaceship. A telepathic voice tells him he’ll do fine for the job. (What job?) Everard and his sidekick show up at the airlock; the ship blew up after they got rid of Konrad. They’ve all got about 17 hours’ oxygen. They black out and wake up with the ship down on a world full of dust. A robot greets them, explains that its creators had split into physically competent and pure brain factions, but the former were wiped out in a plague, so the pure brains sent out spaceships to try to find new helpers for them. (That’s the job.) At their request, Konrad finishes assembling a machine they need, then asks to be sent back to Earth. The masters refuse, denounce mobile life as useless, and start to fry the robot. Konrad pulls it out of harm’s way and it expresses its gratitude. Everard, who has been skulking about, tries to ambush Konrad for his remaining oxygen, and the robot saves Konrad. They head off to Earth, Konrad to be put in suspended animation for the voyage since he’s running out of oxygen; he wonders whether he will arrive in a present he’s familiar with or in the far future. This is hardly great literature but there is plenty of plot and imagination in relatively few pages; it gives good pulp weight.
“Necessity” (5) is about as well done, though a bit more obvious. Captain Pollard of the Star Trail Corps is expounding his theory that all life is interrelated when his spaceship is drawn inexorably to Xeros II. It lands in a clearing in a heavily vegetated area and can’t take off again, for no apparent reason. The crew explores, but the plants don’t cooperate; breaks in the forest close before the crew can get to them, keeping them in the clearing. There’s a nasty-looking gray weed patch encroaching on the other plant life, and while they sleep it starts to envelope the spaceship. So they break out the weed killer and dispatch it. Suddenly the engines work again and they can leave. They’ve done what the other plants needed and brought them in for. Pollard’s theory is vindicated. Here Rayer tries out his chops as a stylist, and he’s not too bad in an overdone sort of way: “There was something so pathetic about the melody of the leaves that it was with a feeling of inexpressible melancholy that he at last fell asleep. It were as if the trees were telling of some long-drawn, secret agony which sapped their life, leaving them listless except to tell of their misery in the evening cool.”
The other two Rayer stories are a more rancid kettle of fish, with pretty serious defects of logic and plausibility. In “Adaptability” (6), in “the gigantic factory which was being built to mark the dawn of the 21st century—the beginning of an age of new mechanical and scientific wonder,” funny things are happening. A strange light appears, there’s a spherical vehicle from which grotesque forms appear and quickly disappear into the nearby woods; people give chase but just when they think they have one, it turns out to be a branch or a tree stump. Somehow, there seem to be more X-M units (whatever they are) than anyone ordered. So they analyze samples of all the X-M units. They’re metal, all right. The protagonist,
