Fantastic Stories of Imagination - December 1964

 

Norman M. Lobsenz (editor)
Fantastic Stories of Imagination December 1964 (1964)
Someone deposited a stack of these at my local Half Price Books so I bagged all those issues which looked interesting, seeing as they were going for just two dollars each. The thing which looked interesting about this was it being the original home of Philip K. Dick's The Unteleported Man which I'd never read in this form. Dick added a second half for the reprint as an Ace Double, then eventually expanded the thing and renamed it Lies Inc., which I have read, and about which I don't remember a great deal beyond that it probably didn't need quite such a lengthy guitar solo half way through side one. The Unteleported Man seems to have been Phil trying his hand at a spy thriller, or at least something which borrows from spy thrillers. It's fairly typical of what he was writing in the early sixties, although feels a little more forced than usual, or at least lacking both the usual jazzy sparkle and the humour - which is perhaps why he revisited it. The story runs that Earth is suffering from overpopulation and so everyone is encouraged to relocate to a distant colony planet, communication with which has proven suspiciously difficult; so we don't know if the migrants are enjoying a new life in outer space, or if the teleport is simply a more technologically advanced gas chamber, meaning those Germans are up to their old tricks again. The paranoia is pronounced even by Phil's standards, and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with the suggestion of Germans being up to their old tricks again, but it generally works better than it did as Lies Inc.

Elsewhere we find Harry Harrison's They're Playing Our Song, Gordon R. Dickson's It, Out of the Darkest Jungle, Christopher Anvil's Merry Christmas from Outer Space, and John Starr Niendorff's I Am Bonaro. There's also The Fanatic by Arthur Porges which I read but can't remember any of the details, whether I got anything out of it or what. I'm likewise sketchy where Merry Christmas from Outer Space is concerned because I read no further than the first page. It's one of those stories told as a series of letters, a conceit which has always struck me as gimmicky, kind of lazy, and usually the last resort of a scoundrel, so I didn't bother. Similarly gimmicky and lazy is It, Out of the Darkest Jungle being written as a screenplay, either in reference to its achingly stereotypical b-movie narrative, or because Dickson just couldn't be arsed.

You might expect better from Harry Harrison, but in this instance you would be mistaken. Being 1964 and the height of Beatlemania, They're Playing Our Song is about a hit pop combo called the Spiders. They play a concert for their screaming fans, a couple of whom manage to sneak past security and make it to the groups' hotel room, only to be eaten alive because the Spiders really are spiders.

Clever.

I Am Bonaro was all right - nothing Earth shattering, but certainly readable. I have a few more issues of Fantastic to get through, but on the strength of this one, even with the presence of Philip K. Dick, I'm not too surprised it hasn't lasted.

New Worlds 157

Michael Moorcock (editor) New Worlds 157 (1965)
Here's another oddity, specifically a magazine, albeit a magazine published as a standard paperback - as I guess were other issues of Moorcock's New Worlds. Someone sent me this through the post, I made a mental note to read it at some point and it went onto the shelves, there to remain unread because I rarely bother with periodicals - which is an explanation of how my brain works rather than some sort of manifesto. I know Fantasy & Science Fiction to be wonderful, and Asimov's and Analog have their moments, but if I read the magazines I'd never find time to read books, and there's so much I still want to read and I don't even know if I'll be alive long enough to get through all of it.

Anyway, New Worlds ran for a long, long time, and was pretty much the English magazine of new science fiction. It had a reputation for innovation, for taking risks on weirdos, and as such is probably directly responsible for at least some degrees of the fame enjoyed by Brian Aldiss, Moorcock himself, Harry Harrison, J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs, and others. There's nothing historically remarkable about this particular issue beyond that it seems typically solid. Colin Fry's Ernie and Langdon Jones' Transient sort of make you wish that at least one of them had gone on to bigger, better publicised things, whoever they were; and Moorcock contributes something which ended up in one of the Jerry Cornelius books, but mostly this serves as a fascinating snapshot of its milieu, an era when science-fiction was something you read, nine times out of ten, which seems a more civilised state of affairs than is presently the case. Being a periodical, there's an editorial concerned mostly with a convention at which fancy dress was still termed fancy dress, and there's a review of Ray Bradbury's newie - Dandelion Wine apparently, and very good it sounds too - and, best of all, a terse advice column written by one Dr. Peristyle, apparently Brian Aldiss in stealth mode.

All I ask of a story is that it tells a story. Why do writers insist on trying to give me more? asks Betty Pierce of Diss, Norfolk.

I suppose the answer is that there are writers who write for the likes of you, madam, Aldiss responds, but the good ones hope to avoid you.

Excellent.

I might have to hunt down a few more of these.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat

Harry Harrison The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat (1972)
Collecting the first three of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat novels, two of which I vaguely recall from their comic strip adaptations in 2000AD. Whilst not really one of the mighty Tharg's more memorable offerings, the art of Carlos Ezquerra was impressive as ever, and it clearly did enough to instil curiosity sufficient to inspire my plucking this anthology from the shelf of Half-Price Books thirty or so years later.

The Stainless Steel Rat (1961), The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970), and The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972) are, as I expected, ripping futuristic spy-thrillers, unlikely to have one scrabbling for a well-worn copy of Plato's Republic in search of some obscure reference or other, but then that was never really their job.  I'd say Slippery Jim diGriz - the rat of the title - is essentially James Bond in space with a slight counter-cultural twist and a more well developed sense of humour, although being as I haven't actually read anything by Ian Fleming since I was about twelve this may well be bollocks; but hopefully you get the idea.

We have bank robberies, Robin Hood moments, time travel, typically futuristic gadgetry and overpowered security guards revealed to be wearing women's knickers beneath their uniforms - all somehow amounting to a suggestion of diGriz as a young Malcolm McDowell doing comedy turns to camera whilst his long-suffering boss, played by Leo McKern, fumes in silence. It's nothing deep and it's probably dated, but it's also nicely written and a lot of fun. These are the sort of novels you whiz through over the course of a long afternoon, and I suppose my only criticism is that welding three of them together like this somehow misses a point, although it's surely worth noting that I found myself reading all three in quick succession without a trace of boredom.