Building New Worlds, 1946-1959 - Damien Broderick

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more, Carnell says nothing about what this “truly British” approach is. Many issues later, in 29, visiting US writer Alfred Bester does just that, rather well, in the letter column “Postmortem,” to which we shall return.

      The editorial in 7, “Good Companions,” announces the launch of Science Fantasy and anticipates the “friendly rivalry” that the two editors (Carnell and Walter Gillings) will develop. That lasted only two issues, and Carnell was editing both magazines starting with Science Fantasy 3. “Conventionally Speaking” in 8 announces the International Science Fiction Convention, to be held in the Bull and Mouth Hotel (not a typo) in May 1951, later shifted to the Royal Hotel because of the large projected attendance; it also mentions the ongoing gatherings of the London SF Group at the White Horse Tavern.

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      Overall, the quality of the fiction improves after the first three issues.

      The inane, the archaic, and the bloody awful still make their appearances, but they are a smaller part of the whole (John Russell Fearn is gone), and the median seems comparable to the median in the US pulps of the time, though not much is comparable to the best in those magazines. There are several stories by well-established British writers (Clarke with two stories, Temple and Beynon with one each), and some by newer writers who were flashes in the pan as far as New Worlds goes (John Aiken, Peter Phillips). What is interesting is the emergence of a substantial part of the stable of writers that would carry the magazine through most of the 1950s, including some who were virtually unknown in the US. In these issues the most prolific author is F. G. Rayer, with four short stories. A. Bertram Chandler—already well established, but also to become a New Worlds mainstay—has three, one under the George Whitley pseudonym. Sydney J. Bounds has two, and E. R. James’ first New Worlds story is here. Three of the stories had been previously published in US magazines, but one of them (Clarke’s “Guardian Angel” in 8) is explicitly said by Carnell to have been purchased more or less simultaneously in US and UK.

      “Move over, brother!” The voice came from the back of the cabin, a low, soft, voice that held a core of steel. “Don’t look back—and don’t argue. There’s a blaster six inches from your kidneys!”

      It’s the Underground, trying to recruit him for their revolutionary scheme, which is to destroy the material basis of society so everybody will have to get off their butts and struggle—and, of course, Man Will Go To The Stars. (They already have all the parts of a spaceship, but in this decadent society nobody remembers how to put them together.) We get several pages of John Galt-ish exposition on how progress requires regress. Dick bites, since he’s afraid his wife, the beautiful Veronica, is about to succumb to the siren call of the Mentasthetic Centres. Conspiracy and hugger-mugger ensue; his wife does succumb, and Dick is presented with the world-historical choice: pull the levers that will blow up the power system and bring a new world into being, and also probably kill most of the millions of people who are jacked in at the Mentasthetic Centres, including his wife. Or not. He pulls the levers—“The Cold Equations,” UK style.

      Or so it seems. Unfortunately the author does not quite have the courage of his bloody-mindedness. A few issues later, the lead story in 7 is Brody’s “The Dawn Breaks Red,” and here’s Veronica, big as life, but transformed. After the close of business in “World in Shadow,” Dick went to the local Mentasthetic Centre, where some 50,000 people were at risk of dying. There he found Veronica still alive, and made the doctor on duty, who was trying to save whom he could of the dying thousands, take Veronica out of turn by pointing a gun at him, and then spirited her out, noticing only later that her hair had turned white, and even later that she was demonstrating a remarkable intuition and ingenuity. Now, Veronica thinks it’s dandy that her husband pulled the plug on 50,000 dreamers and killed most of them.

      The band of conspirators who brought down civilization have been hanging out in their redoubts Atlas Shrugged-style for a year, and they’re beginning to wonder what’s going on out there, and how all the folks whose lives they wrecked are getting along. So they set out for various destinations, and Dick and company go to his old house and encounter his neighbor. The neighbor is a trifle annoyed at Dick for killing his wife but is willing to let bygones be bygones. He explains that at the Mentasthetic Centres, most everybody died, but there were a few dozen in each whose hair turned white and who developed both enhanced intelligence and a cruel and calculating view of the world—like Veronica. The regular folks are getting ready to have a pogrom against these “whiteheads,” who are also referred to as mutants through the rest of the story.

      The folks in the redoubts or “settlements” decide the whiteheads are the hope of humanity, and save them. (An unstated Lamarckian assumption is that people whose heads and follicles have been reorganized by pulling the plug on their artificial dreams will reproduce those characteristics rather than bearing ordinary human children.) However, hostility towards the mutants increases in the settlements, while Veronica has grown completely away from Dick. When the mutants take over, it transpires that they failed in one of the settlements, so the standard humans there are on their way with an aircraft full of atom bombs to wipe out the mutant-dominated settlements. Who ya gonna call? None of the mutants can fly a jet and none of the standard humans wants to save them—except Dick, who decides that only the whiteheads are going to make it To The Stars and he’s on their side; he dies in a kamikaze attack on the settlement aircraft.

      It’s hard to see anything peculiarly British about this saga. The motif of rebellion against stagnation and the casual willingness to dispose of the fates and sacrifice the lives of thousands or millions pursuant to a self-appointed elite’s theory of history and progress seems pretty solidly in line with a lot of American SF, as does the notion of throwing in with a new mutant master race in the service of the unquestioned transcendent goal, The Stars.

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      The other major feature in these issues is the continuation and conclusion of John K. Aiken’s series or novel that began in 3 with “Dragon’s Teeth.” There the peaceful and anarchistic Centaurians repelled the attack of the Galactic New Order, but they know another one is coming. In “Cassandra” (6), we learn that Vara, one of the sort-of-but-not-really governing group, and secondary protagonist Snow’s girlfriend, is in a coma induced by her horror at the violent self-defense of the previous story. A cat-like native race, the Phrynx, has fled to the Blue Moon, leaving behind instructions for building a peculiar machine, which turns out to be a Predictor, and it predicts the destruction of the colony world. Meanwhile, a supposed refugee from Earth has arrived and proves to be a spy; he obtains the Centaurians’ newly developed secret weapon, the hyper-explosive D, and nearly escapes to Earth with it. Luckily, one of the Centaurians has invented a thought projector and they subdue the spy with it. The Phrynx appear to Snow in a dream, announce that the crisis is afoot, and offer to straighten out Vara. This one is obviously an installment and not a story. (As previously noted, Carnell acknowledged in 5’s “Literary Line-Up” that the series is actually a novel broken into parts.)

      Fortunately, “Phoenix Nest” is in 7, the next issue, and starts with a bang: Centaurus IV is beset with incendiary “seeds,” apparently courtesy of the Galnos, which start burning the place up. Anstar’s plan is to build giant thought-projectors and change the minds, literally, of everybody on Earth. But the Phrynx offer to evacuate everybody to the Blue Moon. Anstar, the primary protagonist, is forced from his leadership position and winds up alone on Earth building his giant thought projector while everyone else flees.

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