Watch This Space
(Heinemann, 10s.) THE SKY BLOCK. By Steve Frazee. (Bodley Head, 9s. 6d.) BRING THE JUBILEE. By Ward Moore. (Heinemann, 10s. 6d.) SCIENCE fiction, the only taste Dylan Thomas and Kingsley Amis had in common, is now neither rejected nor misunderstood, even in intellectual circles, or at least not so often. And publishers are now at last, on the whole, putting out reasonable material, not just something for the new market. In the random batch reviewed here there is nothing particularly wonderful, but there is nothing really bad either. What really is remarkable is the variety of style, subject matter and general attitude. No one reading the lot could ever feel that science fiction was stereotyped.
Three of these books are collections of short stories. The best science fiction stories are probably as good as any shorts being written anywhere, but none of these quite reaches that level. Those in Mr. Kornbluth's The Mindworm are extremely acheres. 'The Goodly Creatures' and 'The Altar at Midnight' fall some- where in that limbo between the very best slick and what you might call art. My own preference is for 'The Little Black Bag,' with its picture of the brilliant doctors of the future—virtually morons, but with fool-proof equipment doing everything for them.
About half the stories in Angels and Spaceships are not science fiction at all, but straight fantasy. And even the science fiction tends to be perhaps a trifle perfunctory in its technical background. But Fredric Brown is always interesting and usually amusing, and a couple of smoking-room stories of the future are an engaging novelty.
Looking Forward is an anthology. There have been so many of these already that one might expect that the barrel had been scraped. But almost all the stories here are readable, and if it is a trifle disappointing to find names like Eric Frank Russell (that doyen of British science fiction, too little known in his own country), Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov attached to work not up to their best, it is some compensation to come across a Ray Bradbury less nauseating than his usual level of sensitive caprice, in spite of a whimsy-religious plot.
In The Space Merchants, Messrs. Pohl and Kornbluth set them- selves, and completely achieve, a clear-cut and limited, though by no means easy, task : to produce a satire on a world ruled by adver- tising, and hence ruined by consumption, and to present it by means of a fast-moving, tightly-written thriller. The effective yet unobtrusive building up of the technical and social background is always one of the greatest difficulties in books like this. Here it never slows down the complicated'adventures in which the hero, a star advertisement man in a firm so rich that it can afford authentic, expertised, tree-grown wood for its boardroom table, conies gradually round to the views of the `Consie' (Conserva- tionist) underground and its plans to prevent Venus going the way of the Earth.
The Sky Block has plenty of wild mountain scenery, somewhere among which enemy agents have dug in. They are operating a machine which is causing drought over the corn belt. If it goes on America will be ruined more effectively than by war, yet publicity would bring panic. This is really just an American mystery story of. the other type, calm, deadly, localised, open- air, and as good as any of them.
Bring the Jubilee is different again. It deals with a world in which the Confederate States won the Civil War, and a poverty-stricken North is now very much a second-class power. It traces the life of a Northern historian who is finally transposed, for research pur- Poses only, back to the field of Gettysburg, where, having un- wittingly prevented a Southern occupation of Little Round Top, he finds himself marooned in a world in which the North has, after 411, won. Bring the Jubilee is not taut and quick, in the usual American tempo, but rich and slow—like plum cake,' as a not unfriendly American once characterised the British way of writing. And no worse for that.
The general tendency to be sensible about science fiction has brought another improvement : the demise of the convention that required reviewers to finish up by saying that H. G. Wells had done the same thing much better. This was always the queer sort of thing to say—after all one doesn't dismiss ordinary novels on the grounds that Stendhal did the same thing better. Perhaps an apter criterion is, would I exchange this batch for half a dozen ordinary novels taken at random? Answer : No. And I would expect anyone not irredeemably obsessed with a dive into the Introvert's whirlpool—`character'—to agree with me.
ROBERT CONQUEST
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