B.E.A.S.T - Charles Eric Maine

 I have been fascinated by Charles Eric Maine since I learnt that he wrote the first sci fi radio drama, Spaceways (1952).   In those days Maine (the pseudonym of David McIlwain, 1921-81) was at the forefront of postwar British sci fi, a more literary version of Arthur C Clarke.   I say that because Maine was much more rooted in popular fiction than the scientific Clarke; Spaceways, in many ways, is a detective story with a technological setting.   But Maine was not able to maintain his standards.   B.E.A.S.T. (1966) is A for Andromeda with an added dash of nympho dolly birds.

Having recently read Andromeda I was straightaway startled by just how similar this is.   Setting, standpoint, theme - all pretty much identical.   Obviously Maine has done more than just change the names, but not much more.   The sci fi element in both is the creation of new life forms by computing.  The computers in both are housed in remote Cold War facilities where isolated men and women go slightly off the rails.   Our hero Mark Harland is sent in by the Department of Special Services (quite a promising idea, I thought) to follow up a whistleblower report that the Research Director of RU8, Dr Charles Howard Gilley, is spending a lot of time on an off-the-books project.   Given that the official remit of RU8 is genetic warfare, clearly this is something that needs looking into.

So off Harland goes.   Everyone other than Dr Gilley is standard fare hearty young scientific males interested in pubs and girls in that order.   The object of their shared lust is super-hot programmer Synove Rayner.   She is Swedish and blonde, this is 1966, so of course she responds with enthusiasm and soon falls prey to Harland's wiles because he is to all intents and purposes a spy and, moreover, a spy who already has a 'congential nympho) on the go in London.

The mysogyny is of its period but still hard to ignore.

Dr Gilley, on the other hand, is obsessed with his not so secret program, the Biological Evolutionary Animal Simulation Test - an intelligent entity which has been evolving on the computers and which is now possessed of an enquiring mind.   Its main interest, currently, is sex.   So Gilley has snapped gyneological photos of the ever-helpful Synove to feed in to the data banks.   He has also taken in a big way to vodka.   It all ends badly, of course.   I was inescapably reminded of the end of King Kong, albeit on a more modest British scale.

In conclusion, B.E.A.S.T is highly derivative, fairly predictable, and a repository of some very outdated attitudes.   But Maine is nevertheless a skilled writer and his work is never dull.   With a bit of toleration this story is good fun with some effective moments.   I enjoyed some of the period incidentals - none of your fancypants memory sticks here, it's good old manilla folders for Mark Harland.

It is such a shame that Maine, for whatever reason, couldn't realise the early promise shown by Spaceways.

ALSO BY CHARLES ERIC MAINE and reviewed on this blog: Spaceways, The Isotope Man, The Tide Went Out, and The Darkest of Nights.

The Isotope Man - Charles Eric Maine

 Nobody in British sci fi of the Fifties spread their talent as widely as Maine.   Spaceways (also reviewed on this blog) was a radio play that became a movie and finally a book.   The Isotope Man (1957) was originally a movie called Timeslip (1955) starring two B-grade Americans, Gene Nelson and Faith Domergue.   The interesting thing is that the novels don't suffer in any way from being simply novelisations.   In the case of Spaceways they add to the original.   I haven't yet fully traced the antecedents of Timeslip but The Isotope Man certainly stands on its own feet.

Maine is at his best when he sets cutting edge science in the time he was writing.   The London of The Isotope Man is absolutely austerity London in the first half of the Fifties.   American journalist Delaney has been seconded to London's View Magazine.   He has experience of atomic experiments in the US and is therefore the science correspondent.

His task today is to cover the opening of a new NHS maternity unit in Stevenage.   This is not sci fi but a record of a time in which new hospitals were routinely being built.   Before he leaves the office, his eye is caught by a photo on the crime desk.   A man has been plucked from the Thames.   He has been beaten and shot and is now in hospital undergoing emergency surgery.   Delaney recognises him: he is Dr Stephen Rayner, US atomic scientist, and Delaney interviewed him Stateside.   There is something odd about the photo, a sort of haze hanging over the body.   Delaney has a hunch it has something to do with Delaney's research.   He isn't known as the Isotope Man for nothing.

The police are informed.   They check with Rayner's employers, a provincial science establishment doing secret governmental work.   The Managing Director says the injured man can't be Rayner; he's at the factory, and to prove it, is called to the phone to speak for himself.

So Delaney is sidetracked into becoming a freelance investigator, backed up (eventually) by his photographer, Jill Friday - a slick name and an attractive character in her own right.   The timeslip element is cleverly incorporated and Maine never loses track of the thriller element.   There is genuine menace and a compelling villain.   I don't know who played Vasquo in the movie but I suspect Maine had Orson Welles in mind.

I'm a big fan of Maine and there are several reviews of his novels on this blog.   The Isotope Man has got to be one of my favourites by him.   I really love the cover of this Corgi paperback.  

Shoot at the Moon - William F Temple

 A sci-fi semi-classic from the Sixties by a pioneer of the postwar British genre.   William F Temple was never as famous as Arthur C Clarke or as idiosyncratic as Brian Aldiss, but he knew them both and had his own literary characteristics.   I have already reviewed The Four-Sided Triangle, Battle on Venus and (the best title) Fleshpots of Sansato on this blog.   Shoot at the Moon is every bit as good.   As an extra bonus it took me back to the mid-Sixites when the debate among schoolboys was Is it even possible to land on the moon?

Well obviously it was, and Temple, being of a scientific bent, never seems to have doubted it.   He follows Clarke in his advocacy of atomic engines being the best and least damaging way to do it, and they may well have been right.   He then works in Charles Eric Maine's debut trick of murder in space.   Indeed, he doubles down on the device with two murders.   But the Endeavour only has a crew of five to begin with: the proto Musk, Colonel Marley, who has funded the expedition, his schizophrenic daughter Lou, who happens to be a leading scientist, her ex-husband Thompson, the celebrated Johan, Pettigue, who has a reputation of being the only survivor of several expeditions, and our narrator, the jobbing space pilot Franz Brunel.   Well, it can't be him, we assume - that would be taking the unreliable narrator too far.   And it can't really be either of the two victims, certainly not the first.   Temple hints that there are other crews elsewhere on the Moon, so it may be them, especially since the Endeavour is on a literal gold hunt on a forbidden patch of the Dark Side.

I'm not going to reveal the killer.   Just to say, it's a good one when it comes and provides an excellent chase to finish with.   The characters all have their strengths and weaknesses, their motives and guilty secrets.   Shoot at the Moon is Temple on top form.   If retro British sci-fi is your thing, you'll love it.

Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia - Paul Willetts

 Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) was a gifted but prodigal writer across most genres who could never keep hold of a pound note and who drank himself to an early death in the postwar pubs of northern Soho or, the catchier version, Fitzrovia.   He was close to Dylan Thomas when they worked together for a documentary film company in the later years of WW2.   He knew and drank with Nina Hamnett (see my review of her Laughing Torso), collaborated on a movie script with my favourite forgotten British sci-fi writer Charles Eric Maine, and is remembered chiefly for his posthumously published Memoirs of the Forties (also reviewed here), which is the key text for any student of British arts in the Twentieth Century. 

This, by Paul Willetts, is the only full-length biography.   The research is impressive - the cover is very good - the editing is not.   Whilst it is clear that JML led a peripatetic life and tried to hide his whereabouts from his legion of creditors, there is far too much made of his ever-changing address and, in the final chapters, when either Willetts or his editors were running out of vigilance, it is way too often accompanied by terms like 'about November' which is a nonsensical phrase, easily improved.   As it is, it hits like a cracked church bell striking midnight - over and over and over in the final chapters.   I would also suggest there are insufficient examples of our hero's writing to justify the claims made for his talent (which I agree with, by the way, having read his Memoirs more than once).

So, could have been better, but nevertheless Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia is worth having and well worth reading.   A genuine window into a vanished world.

The Darkest of Nights - Charles Eric Maine

 Charles Eric Maine (real name David McIlwain) was a pioneer of British sci fi in the late Forties through to his early death in 1981.   To my mind, only John Wyndham is better.   Maine's gift is for very near future cataclysm brought on by man's reckless technical innovations.   In The Tide Went Out nuclear tests crack the earth's crust and all the water drains away.   Here - startlingly - a covid virus develops in the Far East and becomes a worldwide pandemic.  In reaction, governments hugely restrict personal freedom and protect the elite in secure underground bunkers.

The relevance is so extreme that even this British Library reprint predates Covid 19.   The novel itself came out in 1962.   I mean ... wow!  OK, there are differences.  For one thing there are always two versions of the Hueste virus; one which kills in hours, another which is harmless to the victim, granting them immunity but making them carriers.  Actually, that second version sounds very much like Covid 19, now I come to think about it.   The other major difference is that the underclass rise up in rebellion when they are effectively left to die by the state.   Of course, Maine wrote before social media - indeed, before absolutely every household had a TV.

As ever, once he has set up his disaster, Maine personalises it through characters at the heart of the dilemma.   He does so especially well in The Darkest of Nights.   Pauline Brant works for the International Virus Research Organisation (IVRO) in Tokyo, and is thus on hand when the virus first begins to spread.   She is sent back to England where she reunites with her husband Clive, Foreign editor for a major Fleet Street newspaper.   Clive has been offered a gig in America and wants a divorce so he can marry the boss's daughter.   Pauline asks for time to think it over.   Then the virus comes to Britain and Pauline is subsumed back into IVRO where she meets DR 'Vince' Vincent.   The triangle plays out to very end, with a twist I didn't foresee.

Whilst not perhaps the Maine novel closest to my academic interests (that remains Spaceways), The Darkest of Nights is a better novel than The Tide Went Out, itself very good.  My appetite for more is whetted and fortunately series editor Mike Ashley includes some useful pointers in his introduction.

The Tide Went Out - Charles Eric Maine

 

I have written before on this blog about the twisted road that led me to the speculative fiction of Charles Eric Maine (David McIlwain, 1921-81).  His writing career really only covered the Fifties and Sixties but he was at the top of his game from the outset and for a time was up there with John Wyndham, John Christopher and the young J G Ballard.  Like them, he tended towards the eco-disaster, which is what The Tide Went Out is.

It is 1958 (Maine is always contemporaneous) and US A-Bomb tests have gone too far.  A sub-ocean blast has cracked the Earth's crust and all the water is seeping away.  Philip Wade is seconded from the science weekly he edits and placed at the secret governmental hub in London's Kingsway (I suspect at the former General Electric building where the BBC started out) to produce sanitised news for the Press.  Officially the world's combined efforts and trying to pump water back from the core.  In reality, there is nothing they can do and ninety percent or more of the population is going to die very soon.  Wade's family, and the families of other personnel chosen to survive, have been taken to polar camps where there is still plenty of ice.

Maine paints a vivid portrait of London at the time as society slowly begins to crumble.  Barricades go up and the army comes in to protect the elite from the masses, and soon the soldiers go rogue too, but with all the weaponry they can want.

Maine explores the key questions we are currently asking about the COVID pandemic.  Why have we so crazily damaged the only world we have?  Who chooses the elite?  Can we trust anything the government tells us?

Another well-selected reprint from the British Library.

Spaceways - Charles Eric Maine

I was reading Arthur C Clarke's Prelude to Space (reviewed below) in the 1953 paperback when I was struck by one of the ads in the back. Spaceways (never heard of it) was "originally a radio play, broadcast by the BBC in 1952 with immense success. Later it was made into the first British science-fiction film." As regular visitors must know by now, my doctorate is in radio drama and, as I say, I had never heard of Spaceways. As for movies, what about The Shape of Things to Come (1936)? That was science fiction, surely? It was certainly British (London Films). Anyway, I had to investigate further. Firstly I bought the book.

Not as good a cover as the Clarke paperbacks of the same era. The science is not as heavy as in Clarke, but ironically that results in it being closer to what actually happened - rockets taking off vertically in the middle of nowhere, rather than Clarke's fancy of horizontal runways. Maine, however, is a much better novelist than Clarke. His characters not only have inner lives, they have sex lives too, something the early Clarke would never countenance. In fact Spaceways is a genre hybrid, a noir-ish murder mystery based on the eternal triangle and set on a space research facility in the Nevada desert. Oh yes, I should have mentioned that. The pseudonymous Maine was British but this is an entirely American novel.


The other thing I should mention is that the novel is not directly based on the radio play. The radio play was turned into a Hammer movie, written by Maine, which he then turned into this book. I have looked up the credits for the radio broadcast, which seems to me to use the framing device of a court trial. It lasted 75 minutes, as did the film. The protagonist of the novel, Barry Conway of the Security Division of Special Services, is not in either the radio play or the movie. The movie seems to have a different plot to either the play or the novel. The central plot device, however, remains the same.


One of the key scientists is having a torrid affair with the wife of a senior colleague. The wife has cheated on the husband before, and he has responded violently. On the morning before the launch of the first space rocket (the novel is specifically set in 1955) the husband turns up for work with a black eye. When the rocket is safely heading for orbit, from which it will never return, it is discovered that both the wife and her lover are missing. The theory is that Hills, the cuckold, has killed them and stowed their bodies aboard the rocket. On that basis he stands trial, only to cause a sensation when he offers to prove his innocence by flying the second prototype rocket and bringing back the original. This is what happens - with an almighty twist, which I won't spoil for anyone who wants to seek out this curiosity for themselves - albeit I have as yet no idea whether it was remotely the same in either the play or the film.


And I do intend to take this further. The movie is easily available on DVD but the play will be harder to track down. In the meantime I have discovered that Maine did the same trick with other stories. Timeslip aka The Atomic Man is the movie version of his novel The Isotope Man, both of which I have already acquired.


As for the suggestion that Spaceways was the first British science fiction film, my interim theory is that whoever wrote the blurb in the back of the Pan was drawing a distinction between the post-Hiroshima technology-based fiction of Clarke, Maine and their contemporaries, and the purely speculative future fiction of Wells and Verne. Interestingly, directly underneath the blurb for Spaceways is an ad for The Time Machine and The Man Who Could Work Miracles (the latter a celebrated BBC radio drama of 1934, adapted by Laurence Gilliam). This describes H G Wells as, specifically, a "Pioneer of Space Fiction".


In the meantime, check out the long-forgotten Mr Maine. He really does merit rediscovery.