Stranger than Truth
Great World Mysteries. By Eric Frank Russell. (Dennis Dobson, 16s.)
Fallen Star. By James Blish. (Faber, 15s.)
PROFESSOR AUDEN has recently pointed out that the virtue of curiosity is one which emerges in childhood but is desirable in the adult. Yet how often it fails to penetrate the self-absorption of adolescence. Do you care what really happened to the Mary Celeste? Do you have the slightest interest in the Devil's Hoofmarks in Devonshire? In what happened to Benjamin Bathurst? In the creeping coffins of the Barbados? Questions like these (dealt with by Mr. Russell) will sort you out.
Mr, Russell is, of course, widely known as a science-fiction writer of eccentric imagination and macabre humour, a good deal of which penetrates Great World Mysteries, though it yemains on the level of popular magazine articles. His Three to Conquer is a most admirable piece of straight science-fiction, about a telepath's struggle' to thwart the takeover of the human race by a para- sitic life-form from Venus.
Mr. Clarke is Mr. Russell's co-doyen of British science-fiction. This time he has found a novel locale—the planet Earth. A grounded spaceman is, indeed, the hero, and the action takes place in the future, among the whaleherds who control a large part of the world's food supply. This calm and exciting story ends up on an ethical problem. The ethics are adult too : and how often can that be said of any piece of fiction whatever?
Fallen Star is American. It is embellished by one of those dust-cover blurbs—this time with enthusiastic remarks by Kingsley Amis. As a mere post-publication reviewer may I add my humble ten-cents-worth? James Blish's work is never less than excellent; his tale of presumed Martian intervention to suppress the most sensational dis- covery of the current Geophysical Year is well
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