Another of the British Library's wonderful reprints of mid 20th century UK sci fi. Four-Sided Triangle was originally a short story in the US magazine Amazing Stories (November, 1939). Temple then expanded it into a novel during his wartime service - as Mike Ashley recounts in his useful introduction, Temple had to do so three times, having twice lost the manuscript in battle action.
The end result is a peculiar animal. The padding is obvious and in expanding a very short story into a 300 page novel is going to take some significant new material (a subject I hope to expand upon myself in a forthcoming monograph). But the question arises, what if anything could be cut? And I can't answer that one. The story certainly takes a while to get going but I could argue the delay is necessary to establish the credentials of reckless inventor Bill. Perhaps moving the key development into a prologue to hook us in would be the answer.
However what Temple has really done in adding material is develop characters we are intrigued by, something so often lacking in science fiction of the period. The story of their relationship is as old as the hills - two friends love the same enigmatic girl, but only one can have her. The twist, the sci fi maguffin, is to make a duplicate so they can both have one. Again Temple cleverly develops this through his narrator, a bachelor doctor too old to be interested in young girls but who happens to be Bill's foster parent. He sees what the youngsters cannot, he is a practitioner of other people's science, not an innovator.
It's slow but it is engrossing. Nothing else Temple wrote came anywhere near, apparently, though the British Library has also reprinted his Shoot at the Moon, which I will certainly try. I am also intrigued to find that Four-Sided Triangle became an early Hammer film, directed by Terence Fisher and available on DVD. That might be on my list of acquisitions too.
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