have disembarked, he leaps into it and gets taken whence it came, which proves to be an extradimensional world full of the aforesaid grotesque forms bent on world conquest—all the worlds—through their uncanny imitative ability. He learns this because they are telepathic and he eavesdrops; somehow he keeps his own thoughts under control and manages to hijack the vehicle back to the home dimension, where he and the factory crew take all the X-M units—which he realizes are disguised aliens who have managed to adjust their molecules as well as their outward form—and put them to the test of heating inductors, killing the invaders. A homemade bomb thrown into the vehicle on its next pass completes the defense of humanity.
The worst of the lot is “Deus Ex Machina” (8). It is the first of Rayer’s “Magnis Mensas” series, which comprises five stories over 11 years in New Worlds and Science Fiction Adventures, and which also includes the above-mentioned novel Tomorrow Sometimes Comes published the following year, though there the eponymous world-dominating computer is called Mens Magna. In “Deus Ex Machina,” an employee of Subterraneous Architects is accused of criminal negligence, charged with murder, and sentenced to death at the instance of Magnis Mensas, which saw the whole thing, and which is allowed to testify without oath, since the oath would be meaningless to a machine and machines can’t lie anyway.28
After the trial, several people—the employee’s boss, his fiancé, his lawyer—point out to Magnis Mensas that since it did see the whole thing, its failure to warn the deceased is equally culpable. MM locks them up so they can’t tell anyone else. (Why they didn’t point this out during the trial is not explained.) Why is MM doing this? For the good of humanity. The employee was directing an excavation that shortly would have discovered the existence of “negative matter vessels and negative matter beings,” and it would cause mass neurosis to “let man know his Earth is honeycombed by beings a hundred times more powerful than himself.” But Padre Cameron puts a bug in MM’s ear about how humans swear before an Ideal (a.k.a. their Maker) and how terrible it is for humans to die unready to meet their Maker (connection of the latter point to the story is a bit unclear). Problem solved! MM brings forth the prisoners and gets them to swear they won’t tell a soul about negative matter vessels and beings, and lets them out.
E(rnest) R(ayer) James is almost Rayer’s shadow, as well as his relative and sometime collaborator—prolific, though not as much as Rayer, with 42 appearances in the UK SF magazines (the respectable ones—New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Authentic, Nebula), from 1947 to 1963. His only appearances outside the UK consisted of two stories reprinted in the US edition of New Worlds. This story is his second, following a first appearance in Gillings’ Fantasy in 1947. He seems to be another writer whose career was effectively ended by Carnell’s departure from New Worlds and Science Fantasy. He had a couple more stories in a 1947 UK-only original anthology or collection called Worlds At War (which also had some Rayer stories), and his couple of anthology appearances were in UK-only books. He has no entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and therefore presumably has not published a novel. So to those who go back a ways with British SF, he is probably reasonably well known, but otherwise, not. He might be described as the UK equivalent of, say, Winston K. Marks, author of many forgotten SF stories.
James did have a low-level second career, with another seven stories in Dream, New Moon, Fantasy Annual and Gryphon SF and Fantasy Reader from 1987 to 1998, all minor markets and several of them semi-professional low-circulation nostalgia operations. Miller/Contento has no dates for James, but New Worlds 37 (July 1955) has a profile of him, indicating he was 34 (therefore b. 1921, presumably). It says he started “to seriously plan a semi-literary career” in 1947, having survived Normandy blinded in one eye. “To this end he took a job as a postman in a rural Yorkshire area where he and his wife live because ‘I have found,’ he states, ‘that postal work fits in with a career of part-time writing very well. In fact, I declined an offer of an indoor clerical appointment in the Post Office because I felt that the outdoor work left my mind less exhausted and more eager for thinking up stories.’” Carnell adds: “With the courage of such convictions he has now sold over thirty-five stories....”
James’ “The Rebels” (4) is a scenery-chewer of the Planet Stories ilk. On a spaceship of a viciously hierarchical society, the likes of the Master Minder and the Overseer lord it over the crew, which is always terrified of falling into the Redundant Class. But the downtrodden stage a mutiny, hoping to divert the ship from its destination to the Independent City on Efferenter II. The plans go awry, they fail to kill all the big shots, and they wind up in a bloody free-for-all that ends in blowing the ship in half. Three survivors manage to crash-land their half-ship on Efferenter III, which is no help at all, but they figure out how to prop up and lash down the gyroscope so they can point in the right direction, fill the ship with helium so they can get off the ground with the aid of E.III’s high rotational velocity, and they’re on their way to E.II and freedom. It is a crude but grimly enthusiastic piece of blood-and-thunder storytelling.
Sydney J. Bounds (1920-2006), who had 16 stories in New Worlds over the years, published a total of about 70 in the SF magazines, remaining active as late as 2002 (though most of his output after the demise of Vision of Tomorrow appears to be in semi-professional venues). He too seems to have been a UK-only writer, with one sale to Fantastic Universe in the 1950s, but no more to the US magazines. His stories under his own name appeared in the higher-rent UK magazines—New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Nebula, and Authentic—but he also used a number of pseudonyms to publish in the downmarket ones like Worlds of Fantasy and Futuristic Science Stories, to which he contributed a story actually titled “Vultures of the Void.” He published a few paperback SF novels in the 1950s as well as confessions, juvenile, gangster and western fiction, according to his profile in New Worlds 32 (February 1955). He was a member of the late ’30s London circle that included Arthur C. Clarke and William F. Temple, and became a full-time writer in 1951, leaving a job as sub-station assistant on the London Underground. The profile says: “Still unmarried he prefers to smoke a pipe and paint pictures for relaxation—and prefers art to be spelt with a small ‘a’.”
On that last score, one cannot accuse Bounds of hypocrisy. “Too Efficient” (5) is a piece of pleasant yard goods: protagonist discovers his newly purchased electric motor is working at 107% efficiency, goes to the company to investigate. Of course they’re stranded aliens trying to raise enough money to get off the planet. These high-efficiency engines really have nuclear power plants concealed inside them. The aliens kidnap the protagonist to their spaceship, which is underwater. After they depart, releasing the protagonist, he heads home, gloating that he is in possession of “the secret of space travel!”
“The Spirit of Earth” (8) takes a great leap downward, however: it’s a displaced French Foreign Legion story set on Mercury that is best allowed to speak for itself. Here the Captain, disgraced and exiled of course, is assembling a rescue party for a crashed spaceship:
The Captain felt a pride in his men, a pride he had once felt in very different circumstances, and had never thought to know again. He walked slowly down the ragged line, picking his men.
“Long Tom.”
A gangling frame of creaking bones and mahogany skin straightened up. The gaunt face smiled, smiled as it had once under twin Martian moons, treading the red desert.
“Shilo.”
A squat figure shifted from one splayed foot to another. A light flickered deep in yellow eyes—eyes that had looked out over the hideous landscape of massive Jupiter.
“Sturm and Jeri.”
The brothers’ dark, impassive faces revealed nothing. They might have been volunteering to make up a foursome at space poker—or booking a return passage to their native Venus.
“Blacky.”
Once he had been a space jockey, riding
