Spectrum II - Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest

 Amis and the polymath Robert Conquest published five Spectrum sci fi anthologies from 1961.   This, self-evidently, is the second, published in 1962, contain eight stories from the period 1946-58.  Those anthologised are mainly American because in that period sci fi was mainly American.  Only Brian Aldiss is British and I find him very difficult to get on with.   James Blish, it should be pointed out, did not move to the UK until 1964 and his story here, 'Bridge', dates from 1952.

The longest story here is Wyman Guin's 'Beyond Bedlam' (1951).   I enjoyed it - it is clever and well-sustained twist on schitzophrenia.    Other, shorter stories, such as Asimov's 'The Feeling of Power' and Mark Clifton's 'Sense from Thought Divide' seemed to me pedestrian and unambitious.  'Resurrection' (A E van Vogt) and 'Vintage Season' (Henry Kuttner) were more substansial and more satisfying.   Best of all was Philip K Dick's 'Second Variety' from 1953, very early in his career and twenty years before he underwent his psychic revelation.   It has the clever twist of the better short stories whilst developing empathetic characters and an Armageddon-like warscape that, at the time of reading it, was only too relevant for me.

Blish's 'Bridge', I should point out, is typical Blish, a deconstructed metaphor.   When I was a lad and Blish was still amongsr us, I read his Doctor Mirabilis.   That's a book I really should read again.

Tales from the Forbidden Planet - Roz Kaveney (ed)

 This was a chance aquisition.   I was in London, in my favourite second-hand bookshop (Skoob, in the Brunswick Centre) and I didn't want to leave without a purchase.   That, I felt, would be letting the side down.   So I saw this, thought what the hell?   Wandered up to the counter where, of course, one of the books I had wanted for some time was on display ... but that's another story.

It was only when I was on the train, leafing through, that I realised this was a collection from the sci fi era currently interesting me - the Interzone Eighties, 1987 in fact, featuring several writers I have beens looking into recently.   Moorcock, of course (an End of Time story), Kilworth, Keith Roberts, and Lisa Tuttle, all of whom featured in the Other Rdens and New Worlds anthologies reviewed here in the last few weeks.   Aldiss is here, too, with a really enjoyable one called 'Tourney', and Iain M Banks (excellent).   I liked John Brunner('A Case of Painter's Ear'), Josephine Saxton's 'The Interferences' and Gwyneth Jones's 'The Snow Apples'.   I did not like in any way the story by Harry Harrison, but that's the point of anthologies, isn't it?

One of the things that attracted me in the shop was the fact the stories all had an illustration by a British illustrator of the period.   I thought this would be a bonus for me and my own illustrations.   As it happens, the only one I enjoyed was Dave Gibbons for the Banks story 'Descendant'.   I liked the cover illustration, too, the work of Brian Bolland.

Turns out the common denominator for the collection is that all these authors had done sessions at the Forbidden Planet bookshops.   As good a connection as any.

Other Edens - Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock (eds)

 Other Edens is a sci fi collection from 1987 and very much from the Interzone period of British imaginative fiction.   Some of the most noted writers are respresented - Moorcock, Harrison and Aldiss - but not with their best work.   Those who stand out here are those who were then breaking through: Garry Kilworth, who I only knew from Interzone; Lisa Tuttle, who I had heard of but never read; and a couple of others completely new to me, such as Graham Charnock and Keith Roberts.

Roberts' story Piper's Wait was probably my overall favourite, a temenos story stretching very effectively over the ages.  Tuttle's The Wound was a close second, a very exciting take on mutable sexuality.   Kilworth's Triptych was by far the most radical and complex, a fragmented three-parter positively bursting at the seams with ideas.   I am increasingly interested in Kilworth.  He seems to have been extraordinarily prolific with over eighty novels spanning many genres, so it shouldn't be too hard to track one down.

SF The Best of the Best Part Two - ed. Judith Merril

Had to pick this up if only for the cover and the convoluted title. These mid-Sixties anthologies are notable for the oddments you find and how elastic they are willing to make the Sci Fi genre. The best story here, 'The Wonder Horse' by George Byram, has nothing whatever to do with either Sci Fi or fantasy. The premise is entirely about natural genes and it can hardly be a fantasy because every now and then a wonder horse does come along. I'm thinking Galileo and, currently, Enable. Byram captures the race fan's reaction perfectly. Indeed it is his immersion in the detail of the racing business that makes his story so good.

Similarly there's a Shirley Jackson oddment, "One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts", that just about scrapes in as fantasy, though I would be more inclined to call it a twisted tale. There's an early-to-middle period Brian Aldiss, "Let's Be Frank", which is simply a caprice, and there's the widely anthologised but nevertheless pure Sci Fi, J G Ballard's "The Sound Sweep", which I have discussed here before.

My favourites were "Nobody Bothers Gus" by Algis Budrys and "Day at the Beach" by Carol Emshwiller. Both well written, both leave as much to the imagination as they make explicit.

The Shape of Sex to Come - Douglas Hill (ed)

What a title, eh? Amazing to think that you probably wouldn't get away with it today but back in the Seventies a title with sex in it would get you a publishing deal by return of post. Not everything is progress just because it happens later. And a couple of the well-known writers, I was pleased to see, foresaw the return of the puritans.


All eight authors here - and anthologist Douglas Hill himself - are or were well-known Science Fiction writers, mostly connected with Michael Moorcock, who rounds off the collection. Hilary Bailey took the connection further than most; she was married to him.


The sex is not especially graphic. This is to be expected, as very few writers in the genre predict a better future. Only John Sladek's 'Machine Screw' was meant to have any pornographic overtones (it originally appeared in one of Paul Raymond's top-shelf magazines). It's about a machine raping sex robot and it is easier to understand once you know that Sladek liked his satire with his surrealism.


Moorcock and Anne McCaffrey serve up slabs of fantasy adventure, which is not top of my list. Of the two I preferred Moorcock's 'Pale Roses' which is longer and therefore richer in its strangeness. It is part of his Dancers at the End of Time subset, which I haven't yet tackled, and which put me off him back in the Seventies. For the time being, anyway, I'm sticking to Moorcock's stand alone work. Mother London is on my waiting-to-be-read table.


Brian Aldiss's entry, 'Three Song for Enigmatic Lovers', is him on top form. I may well read it again because I suspect I missed some of the inferences. A K Jorgensson's 'Coming of Age' is the story I found most disturbing, Thomas M Disch's lousily titled Planet of the Rapes' is a clever reversion of expectations, and Robert Silverberg's 'In the Group' the most relevant to today because it's basically about digital copulation. My favourite, though, is Hilary Bailey's 'Sisters', which is a near-future story about the consequences of female liberation and the loss of the maternal role. In theme it is not dissimilar to the Disch story; in treatment, however, it is a world away for the simple reason that it is by a woman who was very clever and something of a pioneer. I was extremely impressed and definitely want to read more of her work.

The Hand-Reared Boy - Brian Aldiss

The Hand-Reared Boy, part one of Aldiss's Horatio Stubbs trilogy, purports to be the autobiographical coming-of-age memoir of a sexually-precocious teenager on the eve of World War II. Horatio, we assume, is Aldiss thinly coated. But is it? Aldiss, who died last month at the grand age of 92, is clearly not called Horatio and I doubt very much he had a brother called Nelson. Horatio, it is very clear, was born in 1922; he is seventeen when war breaks out in 1939. Aldiss, however, was born in 1925. So what is going on? What is real personal experience, and what is novelistic construct?

That is essentially what kept me going with this ebook - that, and Aldiss's plain-speaking prose style. What is basically a pubescent marathon of masturbation is rendered extremely readable. I remember reading it when it first came out, when I was Horatio's age, in 1970. It didn't interest me because I had all the usual teenage emotions, hopes and guilt about sex but I didn't have siblings and I didn't attend a public school. In fact, it put me off Aldiss for a considerable period. My feeling at the time was, this is an impossibly middleaged man (who was 45, the same age Horatio declares himself to be as he writes) with a moustache like my dad's, who was trying to cash in on the somewhat sordid British take on the sexual revolution of the Sixties. Reading it now, much older and with much more impressive facial foliage of my own, knee-deep in an age of Neo-Puritanism, I read with more experience, technical knowledge, and compassion.


Is Sister Traven, the school nurse, who relieves the pressure for so many of the boys in her care, based in any way on a real person? Did Aldiss, like Horatio, really interfere with his younger sister? As a senior Youth Magistrate I have sent boys into youth custody for doing exactly that. As a non-family person, now with no relatives whatsoever, what the hell goes on in ostensibly 'normal' families?


I bought the other two volumes in an Amazon Kindle deal on the day Aldiss died, so we shall see what develops.