The Complete Short Stories
Page 46
We need reviews of science fiction novels, written the way they write them in the fanzines, so that we can get our shot of the incredible in a solid undiluted chunk. Like:
Something in the City (Knave, 40c.) is the latest from up-and-coming Stan Kenyonne and describes the taking over of a city by a giant brain. This reviewer thought it was great, like an Avram Davidson story re-written by John W. Campbell. Needless to say, the city is New York. Dave Baxter, just sacked from the biggest advertising agency on Madison Avenue, is walking disconsolately home when he sees some strange grey matter oozing out of a gutter. There is a hospital nearby, where the famous gangster Jamie Girdiron has died under the surgeon’s knife following an operation for a brain tumour. Girdiron’s brain got thrown out along with some other chemicals that cause it to live and proliferate.
Dave Baxter stoops to pick it up, and it grows into his brain and takes him over, making him into a sadistic killer – and everyone he touches turns into a sadistic killer too. Even the people he casually brushes against in the street turn into sadistic killers. Soon New York is full of sadistic killers. The police are completely mystified. Luckily, Dave is a schizophrenic, and one half of his split personality does not catch the killer bug. But the chemicals seep through into it and make it proliferate. This is the good side of his brain, and everyone who is brushed by this side is turned into a saint.
Kenyonne has written a great parable about the perpetual duel between Good and Evil, and given us a love affair for extra measure. Although the climax of a gun battle in Central Park may seem a little hackneyed, Kenyonne cashes in usefully on his allegory by having the saints fire apples from bazookas at the killers – a special ingredient in the apples being the only substance that can stop the proliferation of the sadistic brain. Pretty good.
Ingurgitators of the Infinite (Rave, 50c.) is by an old master of the space opera, Lance Corporal E. E. Green. Like his equally famous name-sake, Graham Greene, E. E. gets down to the plot straightaway. We begin with a massive spaceship very realistically described heading out of the solar system on a secret mission, propelled by a new drive, the McMoorcrow Drive. Its inventor, Merdoe McMoorcrow, a Hungarian, is aboard, together with his beautiful daughter, Wosbee. She is in love with Jed Faircloud, the captain of the ship, but Jed is worried. He thinks the drive is not all it should be.
Sure enough, after two days, the ship vanishes from normal space and finds itself in a universe consisting almost entirely of something like sponge cake. Desperately, Wosbee volunteers to go outside and taste it, but Jed says no. He is getting more suspicious than ever. He recalls the plot of the previous book, and remembers how the apples were useless after they had gone bad; he figures that if this really is a sponge cake universe, it will soon go stale.
The crew is almost mutinying and holding Jed at gunpoint when he points to the windows – the unknown substance is going green and crumbling away! He uses the ship’s computer to work out that they are in a nanosecond universe, where all time values are a million times Earth’s. They blast off just before the entire universe vanishes into elapsed time.
Now Jed is in love with Wosbee. He tells her their secret mission – the ship was invented to go out into the galaxy to find God. They have a special new nuclear weapon aboard, Sol-Vex, with which to blast Him if they find Him, to make the universe safe for man. The girl pales. He realises she knows something!
Under torture, she confesses that her father, who is a religious maniac and a deacon in the Church of Scotland, learnt of the mission long ago, and his drive has special tricks built into it that will foil the God-seekers. They are lost in space with a crazy drive with a mind of its own!
This is only the beginning of an action-packed novel full of brand-new ideas. No more must be given away! Despite the heavy emphasis on religion, this is never boring, and E. E. Green fans will be delighted, especially with the climax – where God wins, but in a very ingenious way.
The Whine of the Last (Cave, 15s.) is a British offering by Anne Chagford, which was once thought to be a pen-name of Robert Heinlein. This is Miss Chagford’s first full-length novel, and certainly shows promise, though the opening is a bit slow. The authoress has had the idea of a noval catastrophe that destroys civilisation in Britain. As so often with the more intellectual science fiction, nothing much happens in the first few chapters – the kind of thing that gets SF a bad name. People have headaches, particularly Doris Rickmanson and her handsome brother Terry, who has just been sacked from the biggest advertising agency on Frith Street. They also spend a lot of money, as do their friends, who also get headaches and begin to dissolve a bit. The gardener and his wife on their father’s estate are very poor and are okay.
About page sixty, they give refuge one stormy night to a very strange old Hungarian called Merdoe McMoorcrow, who poses as a writer called Lance Corporal Green and says he has come in from the infinite. One of his legs is missing and he admits to spending money. The Rickman-sons are suspicious – they do not believe any writers can be called Lance Corporal Green.
They are talking things over with the local chief of police when a news flash comes over the BBC saying that everyone in London is just breaking up and dissolving. Those in the wealthier sectors of town are going first. Suddenly, Terry guesses what is happening. Everyone is being taxed out of existence! He gets on to the Prime Minister right away.
Unfortunately, the Prime Minister is on holiday in the Scilly Isles. The rest of the story happily forgets all about the intellectual angle and follows the adventures of Terry and Doris and McMoorcrow as, painfully disintegrating, they race down to the Scilly Isles to inform the PM, while civilisation goes to pot all round them. Fortunately, they get there just in time but the chase – and the dreadful mutants they meet on the way – makes excellent reading.
Some of this book is rather corny (for instance, the authoress always puts ‘wireless’ for ‘radio’, but that must be allowed because she is British, always supposing she is not Heinlein) but the characterisation is good, as so often in this type of adventure, the neurotic and depraved PM being particularly vividly drawn.
The Curse of the Werewolf Women (Slave, 50s.) is a novelisation by Sol Hunter of the film of the same name made by Independent from the three-part serial ‘Curse of the Werewomen’ in the old Stupendous Stories of the forties. Like the film and the serial, it has one brilliant idea. If we only ever hear about male werewolves, there must be an alternate Earth somewhere stuffed with female werewolves.
It turns out that the portal between the two worlds is in the Ural Mountains in Russia. The hero, an American Air Force pilot who has crashed there, staggers through the portal in Chapter Two, and falls into the hands (or paws I should say!) of six of these deadly and beautiful women. He manages to alert Washington.
The US has to fly in its forces secretly, so as not to alert the Russians – who are already suspicious, since werewomen have been seen and interrogated in the streets of Moscow and outside the biggest advertising agency on Red Square.
Unfortunately, it is a quality of the portal that no machinery can pass through it, so the GIs go in loaded with sling shot and swords, led by the half-disintegrated figure of Lance Corporal Green, now promoted in rank, who just managed to get away from Britain in time.
After this rather dull start, the book hots up, and works up to a splendid bit of sword and sorcery. But one point of logic the author seems to have overlooked kills the whole thing dead for this reviewer. Who could possibly believe in a female werewolf?
Believe me, dear Editor,
Your underpaid servant,
– BRIAN W. ALDISS
About the Author
Brian Aldiss, OBE, is a fiction and science fiction writer, poet, playwright, critic, memoirist and artist. He was born in Norfolk in 1925. After leaving the army, Aldiss worked as a bookseller, which provided the setting for his first book, The Brightfount Diaries (1955). His first published science fiction work was the story ‘Criminal Record’, which appeared in Science Fan
tasy in 1954. Since then he has written nearly 100 books and over 300 short stories, many of which are being reissued as part of The Brian Aldiss Collection.
Several of Aldiss’ books have been adapted for the cinema; his story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ was adapted and released as the film A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001. Besides his own writing, Brian has edited numerous anthologies of science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as the magazine SF Horizons.
Aldiss is a vice-president of the international H. G. Wells Society and in 2000 was given the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Aldiss was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2005.
Also by Brian Aldiss
The Brightfount Diaries
Interpreter
The Primal Urge
The Monster Trilogy
Frankenstein Unbound
Moreau’s Other Island
Dracula Unbound
The Eighty Minute Hour
Brothers of the Head
Enemies of the System
The Squire Quartet
Life in the West
Forgotten Life
Remembrance Day
Somewhere East of Life
Cretan Teat
Jocasta
Finches of Mars
Comfort Zone
The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part One: 1960–62
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part Two: 1963–64
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part Three: 1965–66
The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Part Four: 1967–69
Poetry
Songs from the Steppes: The Poems of Makhtumkuli
Non-fiction
Bury my Heart at W. H. Smith’s
The Detached Retina
The Twinkling of an Eye
When the Feast is Finished
Essays
This World and Nearer Ones
The Pale Shadow of Science
The Collected Essays
And available exclusively as ebooks
The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy
50 × 50: The Mini-sagas
Supertoys Trilogy
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