Something To Read by Ken Slater

The third novel from Charles Eric Maine is perhaps his best yet. Which is, of course, the way it should be. However, CRISIS 2000 (Hodder & Stoughton, 10/6) will not appeal to all readers, and I'd advise those who like Galactic epics to leave it alone. The scene is confined to the site of the Festival of Earth (circa 2,000 A.D.) and is mainly concerned with the activities of a small group of characters. "Characters" is the right word, at that. There is Senator Drazin, a loud-mouthed gentleman who has invited any "living creatures anywhere else in this universe of ours" to attend and watch the Triumph of Man. Senator Drazin is one of the most shaken of the group when his offer is taken up, and a batch of beings land in the Festival grounds, erect an impassable energy wall, and start what may be an invasion! (The fact that all the beings look exactly like Drazin is just one more staggering fact . . .)

Wayne, in charge of the Festival, calls for help, which arrives in the persons of Colonel Kyle (an offensive type—he believes in shooting a long time before you see the whites of their eyes) and Jon Dexter (Dex) of the F.B.I. Dex is not certain that Kyle is right, and does considerable fence-sitting throughout. Drazin is in favour of giving the aliens a chance to prove whether their intentions are honourable or not, but when after a warning the "Dupes" advance their fire-wall, causing a lot more damage to the Festival buildings, he is forced to give in to Kyle, who calls up an attack force—which is unsuccessful in doing anything but damaging itself. The story moves along quite rapidly, with some background incidents (including a love-interest element) and does reach some quite high levels of tension. The climax of the releasing of an atomic bomb, the discovery of the truth about the aliens, the adventures of Dex and Dr. Farrow (a lady scientist) inside the fire-wall, are all excellent. However, I was not quite able to get along with the single-mindedness of the various folk. Dex was more interested in Dr. Farrow than anything else; Kyle wanted to blow 'em off the earth to the exclusion of all other ideas; Drazin was of the open-armed welcome school, and in their lesser parts everyone else was equally one-tracked. Nevertheless, very readable.

Also very readable is Chad Oliver's SHADOWS IN THE SUN (Max Reinhardt, 9/6). Paul Ellery is making a sociological survey of an American small town, Jefferson Springs, and comes up with a list of co­incidences. No one in the town had been there more than fifteen years. A Texan town, settled for 132 years—in which every family had  town's culture is typical. So typical that it forms the impossible "average." Those are the two main points which worry Paul, and make him unsettled . . . and then when he sees a dark globe settle close to an outlying farm, passengers descend, and the globe takes off, well, he knows he is up against something far from "average." The reader is then taken into a complex philosophical study of the gentle art of colonisation—if your populace is too great for your lands, should you take land by force? Really civilised human races don't do that—they infiltrate gently, assuming a veneer of the barbaric culture, and carrying on their own culture underneath. The "savages" are pushed out, gently but firmly aided on the way their own culture is going—into the big-city groups! You perhaps gather from that just where Earth stands on Mr. Oliver's scale of reference and, yes, you are right. What Paul has discovered is an infiltration of civilised man into savage Earth. Just what Paul does about it, what his final decision is, I'll leave Mr. Oliver to tell you—for you really must read this one.

In BEYOND THE BARRIERS OF SPACE AND TIME (Sidgwick & Jackson, 10/6) expert anthologist Judith Merril has attempted—very successfully—to select "s-f" stories which are out­side the confines of the material world. A difficult task, but one not impossible, as this work shows. "The Wall Around the World," by Theodore Cogswell, deals with the seclusion and forced development of psi-trained humans; a flavouring of witchcraft lifting the story way above the normal. "Crazy Joey" by Mark Clifton & Alex Apostolides covers the problems of conceal­ment for the lone telepath. Anthony Boucher's "The Ghost of Me" and others by John Collier and John Wyndham, demon­strate that humour is not lacking in the s-f field; a rather terrible revenge is taken by the redskin in "Medicine Dancer" by Wm. Brown, and horror by Bradbury comes in "The Veldt." The inclusion of Rhoda Broughton  in the list of authors indicates that Miss Merril has not overlooked the older and more "standard" weird concepts, and helps to make the book a balanced whole, sure to appeal to all readers who do not limit "s-f" to "space-fiction," a current term I deplore.

The other collection is the work of one author, Robert Sheckley, a comparative newcomer to the field, but one who has definitely made a name as a reliable author. To me, half the enjoyment in Sheckley's work is the very simple things he takes as a starting point. Food packaging, for instance, becomes the delightful story of two space-men, right out of food, who find an alien store of packed foodstuffs. The consequences are little short of hilarious, and give the title to UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS (Michael Joseph, 12/6). Chivalry is all very well, and so far as humanity is concerned it could be practised more frequently with excellent effects; however, in the case of "The Monsters," it was hardly the thing. Construction contractors have problems — Mr. Sheckley dreams up one confronting a not-too-efficient constructor of galaxies. But not all of the work is in a light vein—in "The Ritual" two space explorers, dying of hunger and thirst, are faced with a (literally) long song and dance before they receive aid—a case of total misunderstanding. Horror, refined, is contained in "Warm." Of all the thirteen stories in the collec­tion, none can be picked as the best, but each is perhaps the best of its kind so far written by Mr. Sheckley.  

from Nebula No. 16. March 1956

 

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