Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967. Damien Broderick

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY DAMIEN BRODERICK

      Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories

      Building New Worlds, 1946-1957 (with John Boston)

      Chained to the Alien: The Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]

      Climbing Mount Implausible: The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer

      Embarrass My Dog: The Way We Were, the Things We Thought

      Ferocious Minds: Polymathy and the New Enlightenment

      Human’s Burden: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)

      I’m Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners (with Rory Barnes)

      New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1958-1964 (with John Boston)

      Post Mortal Syndrome: A Science Fiction Novel (with Barbara Lamar)

      Skiffy and Mimesis: More Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]

      Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 (with John Boston)

      Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature

      Warriors of the Tao: The Best of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature [Editor with Van Ikin]

      x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction

      Zones: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)

      Borgo Press Books by John Boston

      Building New Worlds, 1946-1957 (with Damien Broderick)

      New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1958-1964 (with Damien Broderick)

      Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 (with Damien Broderick)

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2012 by John Boston and Damien Broderick

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      As always, for Dori and the Guys

      J.B.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      These books were first aired in more rudimentary form on the Fictionmags Internet discussion group, and benefited greatly from the robust and erudite commentary and correction customary among its members. In particular we thank Fictionmags members Ned Brooks, William G. Contento, Ian Covell, Steve Holland, Frank Hollander, Rich Horton, David Langford, Dennis Lien, Barry Malzberg, Todd Mason, David Pringle, Robert Silverberg, and Phil Stephensen-Payne, as well as David Ketterer, for the encouragement, insight, and information that they respectively provided.

      —J.B. and D.B.

      INTRODUCTION, by Damien Broderick

      Science fantasy is a blend, as you’d expect, of science fiction (the literature of drastic change precipitated by new phenomena and knowledge) and fantasy (the literature of unchecked imagination). So it tends to be bolder, more highly colored, than pure SF (as we’ll abbreviate “science fiction” or “speculative fiction”) but more disciplined than the exotic vapors or psychological uncanniness of pure fantasy.

As a commercial form, science fantasy got its clearest start with the American magazine Unknown, edited (rather surprisingly) by the classic nuts-and-bolts SF editor John W. Campbell, Jr., whose Astounding Science Fiction, later Analog, was the seed around which Golden Age SF crystallized in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Much of Unknown’s appeal lay in the imposition of the logic, or semblance of logic, of SF on the familiar matter of fantasy. Thus, in L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt’s famous The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), the characters are translated into worlds of myth by capturing and internalizing their laws and assumptions—building a syllogismobile, as one character puts it.1 But while Campbell’s SF stormed toward a kind of hegemonic success in the new literatures of imagination, his Unknown (retitled Unknown Worlds for its last two years) never really caught on except among aficionados. It lasted from March 1939 to October 1943, and was killed by wartime paper rationing, which disrupted many magazines.

      It can come as some surprise, then, that a parallel universe of science fantasy developed in Britain around the middle of last century, sometimes borrowing stories from the established US writers and magazines but also developing its own distinctive strains of fantasy narrative, most famously by new or accomplished writers such as Brian W. Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Michael Moorcock and Thomas Burnett Swann. This book looks closely at the classic British science fiction magazine, Science Fantasy, that played a key role in this parallel-but-entwined history. From 1950 through mid-1964 it captured the sub-genre in its title, and often if not always in its contents, while for its last three years it appeared in rather different form, as Impulse and then SF Impulse, before shutting down in February, 1967 when its distributor was bankrupted.

      The voice Science Fantasy aimed for, at its best, is caught well by Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman, writing as “Kenneth Johns” on the magazine’s tenth anniversary:

The added element of fantasy...gave a lightness and freshness, a whole new dimension to the contents that a magazine devoted solely to science fiction must, perforce, lack.... Certainly the magazine set out to bring before its readers material with that delicate touch of literary and imaginative magic, that slender but electric spark of wonder, that was rapidly dying out of much magazine science fiction.2

      §

Two companion volumes to this one examine Science Fantasy’s fellow British magazines, New Worlds and the younger sibling of both, Science Fiction Adventures. As noted in the other books, Building New Worlds: The Carnell Era, Volume One, and New Worlds: Before the New Wave: The Carnell Era, Volume Two, John Boston is an occasional amateur science fiction critic of long standing, and attorney (Director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the New York City Legal Aid Society and co-author of the Prisoners’ Self-Help Litigation Manual).3 Several years ago, Boston read through every issue of Carnell’s New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures—sometimes with grim disbelief, sometimes with unexpected pleasure, often with gusts of laughter, always with intent interest. All three magazines were edited during their important early years by Edward John (Ted, or John) Carnell (1912-1972). Ted Carnell was a pillar of the old-style UK SF establishment, but gamely supportive of innovators—most famously, of the brilliant J. G. Ballard, whose first work he nurtured.

      John Boston, for his own amusement, found himself writing an extensive commentary on those early, foundational years of New Worlds, Science Fantasy, and Science Fiction Adventures. He posted his ongoing analysis in a long semi-critical series to a closed listserv devoted to enthusiasts of popular fiction magazines. The present extensive study, published in three parts due to the length of its exacting but entertaining coverage of these fifteen years of publication, is an edited and reorganized version of those electronic posts. This volume covers not only Carnell’s years with Science Fantasy, from the point at which it had become solidly established as a leading UK magazine of fantastika, but also its transformation and finally extinction under other hands.

      I found Boston’s issue-by-issue forensic probing of this history enthralling and amusing, and read it sometimes with shudders and grimaces breaking through, and often with a delighted grin at a neatly turned bon mot. Don’t expect a dry, modishly theorized academic analysis. This is a candid and astute reader’s response to a magazine that, by today’s standards, was often not very good—but one that was important in its time. The story of how Science Fantasy got better, achieving and consolidating its position, is an essential piece of the history of the genres of the fantastic in the UK, and indeed the world.

      I had the good fortune, as