Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967. Damien Broderick
be precise), price one and sixpence. The cover stock has more of a matte finish than most of the digest magazines of its day.
The cover pictures are both quite well done in their modest way. The cover of issue 1, by Powell, is a pleasant view of Earth from the remains of the Moon in muted colors. The cover of 2, by Turner, is more striking and colorful, portraying a crowd of people with stylized angular faces, and several with stylized draped cloaks and/or hoods, who seem to be fleeing up a beach away from a craft of some sort at the shoreline, with an equally stylized raging sea behind it. It’s pretty explicitly derived from Japanese painting, and offhand I don’t remember seeing anything quite like it on an SF magazine. For that matter, I don’t remember seeing anything like the cover of 1 on an SF magazine before—space scenes are almost always more colorful and dramatic.7
The interior illustrations—including those by Turner and Powell—are thoroughly undistinguished, though they are also poorly displayed. They are small and do not seem to be well reproduced, though one can’t tell by looking what problems result from reproduction and sizing and what from the deficiencies of the original.
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At first, Science-Fantasy probably gave more of its total wordage to reviews and criticism than any SF magazine before or since except possibly the much later British Interzone. Indeed, on the contents page colophon (though not on the cover) it identifies itself as “Science-Fantasy, incorporating Science-Fantasy Review,” the latter title being Gillings’ fanzine or critical journal.8 The two issues feature respectively five and four “Articles and Reviews” whose nominal authors were mostly pseudonyms of Gillings (Geoffrey Giles, Valentine Parker, Thomas Sheridan, Herbert Hughes), though John K. Aiken (1913-90), who has a review article in each issue, was a genuine person, poet Conrad Aiken’s son, in fact.
Most of these are review articles, running around two pages, of several books that are related thematically or otherwise. For example, Aiken’s article “A History of the Future” in 1 reviews three books by Robert Heinlein, and his “The Charms of Space Opera” in 2 covers Nelson Bond’s Lancelot Biggs, Spaceman; L. Ron Hubbard’s The Kingslayer; George O. Smith’s Nomad and A Pattern For Conquest; and Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Port of Peril. (Bond—“approximately, the P.G. Wodehouse of science fiction”—comes out much better than Smith—“His dialogue is flat with a terrible flatness, despite the fact that no character ever says anything which cannot possibly be snapped, hissed, grinned, thundered, grimaced, chorused, laughed, exploded, wisecracked or snarled.”) These reviews are all perfectly capable and literate, but not very interesting at this late date given the familiarity or deserved obscurity of the subjects and the solemn tones and middle of the road opinions of most of the reviewers.
The other nonfiction items in 1 are Thomas Sheridan’s “The Battle of the Canals,” about the controversy over the existence of the Martian canals, and Herbert Hughes’ “The Djinn in the Test-Tube,” reacting to an article about SF by the celebrated scientist and humanist Jacob Bronowski (misspelled Brunowski) in the Continental Daily Mail. 2 features an article bylined Sheridan about the risks of Earth’s colliding with a comet, plus Valentine Parker’s “The Dawn of Space-Travel,” which rambles from a Hayden Planetarium show to the films Destination Moon and Rocket Ship X-M to the book The Conquest of Space.
Advertisements on the inside front cover of 1 are from Arkham House and the bookseller Postal Preview; on the inside back cover, from the Fantasy Book Centre; and on the back cover for New Worlds and Astounding Science Fiction (“Famed throughout the world!”—no doubt the British Reprint Edition or BRE). The headline of the Postal Preview ad reads “Now is the TIME to obtain some of the absorbing books reviewed in this magazine,” and the four time-travel books from one of the review articles are listed. This coordination between advertisement and the contents of the issue in which it appeared gives a hint of what a small world SF must have been in the UK at the time. The ads in 2 are similar to those in 1.
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The fiction...there’s the rub. The fiction contents of 1 include one novelette, “The Belt” by J. M. Walsh, and four short stories: “Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke, “Monster” by Christopher Youd, “The Cycle” by P. E. Cleator, and “Advent of the Entities” by E. R. James. 2 similarly contains one novelette, F. G. Rayer’s “The Ark,” and four short stories: John Russell Fearn’s “Black-Out,” Arthur C. Clarke’s “Silence, Please!” (under the pseudonym Charles Willis) and “History Lesson,” and Norman C. Pallant’s “Martian Mandate.”
SF scholar Mike Ashley notes that some of this material was left over from the demise of Fantasy, Gillings’ previous magazine, a few years before.9 Frankly, much of it reads more like leftovers from the earlier Tales of Wonder or from Hugo Gernsback’s inventory. The lead novelette in 1, Walsh’s “The Belt,” posits that a planetoid sails by, causing the Moon to approach the earth and break up, its fragments becoming a Saturn-like ring, which, when the characters visit, seems to have resolved itself into a more or less solid object rather than a collection of fragments. The characters fly to it, walk around on it, and defend themselves from ravening moon worms with their electronic guns, and by spraying them with oxygen. This one seems straight out of the middle range of the 1930s Wonder Stories.
The lead novelette in 2, Rayer’s “The Ark,” smacks of a later but not necessarily better vintage (Thrilling Wonder Stories circa 1940?). The world has been done in by nuclear power which first causes “radioactive infection” and then, after the atomic piles are shut down, a volcanic period that mostly wrecks civilization. Humanity has become divided into the governing Intellectuals and the beaten-down and brutish Workers. Now a comet is on the way to shut down the whole show. What to do but build an Ark to ride out the cataclysm and start a new civilization with a few carefully selected survivors? The obligatory beautiful stowaway is very much present and chewing the scenery, as are all the other stereotyped characters, and the plot is ponderously melodramatic.
Neither story fits the Fantasy part of the magazine’s title. Both are examples of science fiction, although of a rather primitive kind more common decades earlier.
Most of the other stories are similarly old-fashioned—smoothly so, in the case of John Russell Fearn, or clumsily in the case of “Advent of the Entities,” a story as awkward and clichéd as its title, or “Martian Mandate,” which puts forth the exciting proposition that Atlantis was colonized by Mars. In this company the three stories by Arthur C. Clarke leap out as deft, urbane, and clever, especially “Time’s Arrow” (“History Lesson” being an extended gimmick, though a good one). “Silence, Please!” is bibliographically interesting. It is listed in Miller/Contento and probably elsewhere as one of the Tales from the White Hart,10 but Miller/Contento does not note that the story was very thoroughly rewritten after this magazine publication, preserving nothing but the basic idea and sequence of events. There is no spoor of the White Hart itself in this version.
So what exactly did Gillings think he was doing? It’s hard to say—apparently as hard for him as for anybody else. The first issue starts off with an editorial manifesto of considerable length but little discernible content. A sample:
If few had faith in an inner world [referring to the Hollow Earth], there were thousands who believed in 1835 that there was a world of green mountains and blue lakes in the moon...and of flying men! Richard Adams Locke’s science-fantasy, better known as The Moon Hoax, was presented in the New York Sun in such clever style that it seemed gospel truth—at least for a week or so. More recently, New Yorkers exhibited no less belief in Mr. Wells’ invading Martians, as dispensed by radio by Mr. Welles. And the flying saucers? Space-ships, and little men from Venus...? Truly, science-fantasy has a potency which does not always depend on its plausibility; for its dreams very often come true.
SCIENCE-FANTASY which is—intentionally—fiction. Science-fantasy which is—or might well be—fact. In this new magazine