New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology]
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New Writings in
SF: 26
Ed By Kenneth Bulmer
Proofed By MadMaxAU
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Kenneth Buhner
A Planet Called Cervantes by John Keith
Men of Good Value by Christopher Priest
Three Coins in Enigmatic Fountains by Brian W. Aldiss
The Phobos Transcripts by Cherry Wilder
The Man Who by David S. Garnett
You Get Lots of Yesterdays, Lots of Tomorrows,
and Only One Today by Laurence James
Murders by Ramsey Campbell
To the Pump Room with Jane by Ian Watson
The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman
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FOREWORD
Kenneth Bulmer
Exactly ten years ago, in May, 1964, the first volume of New Writings in SF was compiled, and after a decade of highly successful sf publishing the series continues with unabated vigour and enthusiasm to present the best of current new writing.
The very first foreword indicated quite clearly the reasons behind the appearance of original short sf in hard cover and paperback form. ‘New Writings in SF is a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story. For nearly forty years the science fiction short story has been the main platform from which this fascinating literary medium developed. Without the specialized magazines in which these short stories originally appeared, there would be little or no background to science fiction today and it would probably languish in the ‘speculative romance’ of the H. G. Wells era. In recent years, however, the specialized magazines have only had a limited appeal, primarily to a male audience either technically trained or technically minded. It was left to the expanding hardcover publishing field and the mass market of the paperback to introduce this exciting medium to a vaster general public already conscious that Man was on the threshold of space travel. In this respect, its many editors were forced to select material from the best stories already published and familiar to the aficionados.
‘Now the time has come to take this development one natural stage further - and introduce new material specially written and selected for the new market.’
Six years after the launching of New Writings in SF a selection was compiled from volumes 1 to 4 and issued separately as a re-introduction to the idea. To quote again: ‘When the first volumes of New Writings in SF were first published in 1964 and 1965, none of us concerned with the production and publication of those editions could visualize the enormous success the series was to have, although we were all confident that the idea of presenting new science fiction stories in paperback format was one the general reading public as well as the aficionado would more than welcome.’
This has certainly been proved true, and of the twenty-six volumes so far published, twenty-one were compiled by the first editor, John Carnell, from whose introductions the above quotations are taken.
Because sf is the literature of change and is able to convey the necessary overview of life on this planet - where change is now fast enough for even the most blinkered of reactionaries to be unable to ignore what is going on about them - its value and indeed its vital necessity is no longer open to question. This sf overview derives not necessarily from the details of every individual story, but rather from the ambience of the whole corpus of sf, even the most fantastic-seeming of stories contributing its quota of understanding to the change going on in the universe and in ourselves.
There have been wide and dramatic changes over the whole area of sf in this past decade, many of them prefigured by John Carnell himself in his earlier sf magazine New Worlds. New Writings will continue to reflect these changes as well as maintaining its presentation of the best new writing from established and new authors. This volume, No. 26, in presenting nine brand new stories, is an excellent example of this process in action.
John Keith is a Canadian, although born in London, England, who is making an entrance into the US sf scene with novels and short stories, besides having sf serial plays broadcast over CBC, Winnipeg. He is therefore not a brand new science fiction writer, although ‘A Planet Called Cervantes’ is his first appearance in these pages, and his story should please all those who like their human and alien interactions to take place against a galactic background. John Keith has himself some experience of life in remote and exotic backgrounds, having been engaged on building radar lines in the Far North and operating out of a small airport in the Canadian western North West, and, as he says, he is not used to dreary overcast coastal winters, much preferring the Yukon where the sun shines brilliantly at 20 below.
Christopher Priest brings us much closer to home with ‘Men of Good Value’ which he has chosen to present in a most unusual way, thereby lending his basic premise a dreadful realism; for, of course, such a situation as he suggests could never find its way into our society, could it? In Volume 22 of New Writings in SF Mr. Priest’s novella ‘The Inverted World’ appeared and this convoluted story, extensively revised and enlarged into novel length, has recently been drawing much critical acclaim.
The middle Enigma of the trio by Brian W. Aldiss here presented. ‘The Daffodil Returns the Smile’, - number XI in New Writings reckoning - is longer than usual and contains many amusing and penetrating glances - both sidelong and revealing - at an area of science fantasy the pursuit of which, one is prevailed upon to believe, cost Brian Aldiss many pleasant if devious hours in his research for The Billion Year Spree.
Cherry Wilder, whose ‘The Ark of James Carlyle’ in Volume 24, was so well-received, appears again with ‘The Phobos Transcripts’, and this time her story is very different in presentation, leaving a taste of uneasiness about the hard practicality of men in space.
Uneasiness is one of the themes of David Garnett’s ‘The Man Who’, an area in which, with ‘Now Hear the Word’ in Volume 24, he has tended to specialize just recently.
Laurence James, whose Simon Rack novels are establishing a character in the sf scene, uncompromisingly deals with happiness. He gives a loving attention to detail that touches and holds us in a world where genuinely natural happiness seems ever more difficult to discover as it is buried beneath the onslaughts of vicarious variety, even though we long for just one day of absolute perfection.
Another new writer to these pages, Ramsey Campbell, has had much published in the Lovecraftian tradition, a background he has now outgrown, and his story ‘Murders’ is concerned with the theme of separating the will and the deed, the private and the public. It leaves us with the feeling that the day-to-day uses of science and technology must inevitably bring with them new ways of looking at old laws.
‘To the Pump Room with Jane’, by Ian Watson, a writer just making his mark on the sf scene, is his first story for New Writings in SF. The origins of this story would appear at first sight to be a miscegenation, a hundred and sixty years apart, between the novels of a certain spinster and the work of modem sf practitioners; but a second look, I think, bearing in mind the irony inherent in the situation, tends to make one feel they were made for each other.
Of the ten writers represented in this volume, five have been published before in these pages, and three have appeared elsewhere before their first appearance here. The final two - who between them have written a story that crosses several fictional frontiers - appear here for the very first time in print. Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman say of their story: ‘For ‘The Seafarer’, whatever its eccentricities, was at least conceived as an attempt to shatter the axioms of conventional science fiction; it was our sincere attempt to introduce something original in t
he way of characterization, style and Zeitgeist.’ They add that they have further collaborative work in process of fruition, and suggest that time will show whether or not these zestful and exhilarating aims will join the general fructification.
And this, of course, brings us back to the success of New Writings in SF which, over the past ten years, has succeeded so admirably where so many other similar attempts have failed. I believe I speak for the whole readership of NW when I say that I see the next ten years as a decade of further progress when we will be enthralled and stimulated by many stories, enjoyable and thought-provoking, touching upon every aspect of the sf field. Changes also affect other areas of life, not least the meeting-habits of sf readers, writers, editors, artists, publishers and agents. The London Circle has been meeting regularly at the Globe in Hatton Garden for the last twenty-one years. During that period almost every sf notable has paid a visit and signed the book, and it is true to say that the London Circle is the most famous and widely-known sf group in the world. Now the London Circle has moved to The One Tun in Saffron Hill, where, every first Thursday of the month, the subject is sf - and any and everything else you can think of.
Kenneth Bulmer
Horsmonden,
May, 1974.
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A PLANET CALLED CERVANTES
John Keith
The porcine mutants of Rengol, victorious in their might, had a final reckoning to make with the remnants of the Keridish Empire. They were spacing in and exulting in their victory to answer a last dying challenge. They did not know what Kerrender knew, what he lived with day and night, what tortured him with superhuman agony. They did not know that on Rawn had died the Thirty Thousand...
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Out of nightmare he came, on the tail of the star-storm. Slipping down from the seas of space in his sliver ship, he eluded their radar with the ease of much experience. That is how Kerrender came to the planet called Cervantes.
On Rawn died the Thirty Thousand...
Thus the refrain that haunted his nights and his days, for he was Kerrender, and he was Rawn, and the nightmare from which he fled he carried with him through waking and through sleep, and there was never an end to it.
On Rawn died the Thirty Thousand...
And the backlash of the dis-guns’ sun-brilliant beams blinded his eyes again, while Kerrender left his sliver ship and walked to a field-side tavern on a planet called Cervantes, his darkness lit by the intermittent explosions of the star shells in the time when his old life had ended and when his new life had barely begun.
He threw open the door on a scene of Spanish gaiety; of the swirling, fiery Flamenco rhythms, and the dark-skinned peasants of a colonial planet. But these peasants were suddenly afraid. In the last, desperate days of the Veridish Empire’s crumbling, who knew what the seas of space might cast upon their shores? And the music died, and the men turned, and looked upon a figure out of nightmare.
Stooping to enter, he straightened to a towering seven foot five, his emaciated body close-wrapped in a black Saltrun cloak. His ravaged face was an alien wedge of wide-set amber eyes whose epicanthic fold paid tribute to an ancient terrestrial strain, olive-sallow skin (but of a different sallowness from that of the Cervanteans: if only it hadn’t been so different!), and a cruel, thin slit of a mouth, almost lipless. And his eyes—Madre de Dios—those eyes! They were windows into hell.
All in that room cowered at the look of the man who was Kerrender, who was Rawn.
But they came of a proud tradition.
And that was Kerrender’s undoing, as it had been before. For, in the last days of a dying Empire, no man who came out of night as came Kerrender could expect a reception without suspicion and fear upon a backwater planet such as this.
Still—they offered him courtesy. Before Kerrender could speak, one rose whose name was Valdez, and he bowed as had those before him in a long-dead, sun-drenched land.
He said: ‘Por favor, senor,’ then, realizing his guest wouldn’t know this language, switched to Galactic: ‘Greetings, sire—join us in a cup of wine.’
Kerrender showed irritation, for in his old life before the moment of truth of the star shells and the dis-guns, he had been an aristocrat, and arrogant. Old habits, as some men, die hard...
But on Rawn died the Thirty Thousand...
The first wave had been beaten back with staggering losses, and he remembered the invaders’ outraged surprise, as if such a thing couldn’t happen to them. And then they cut loose with everything. If only they had listened, if only they had not been such stupid peasants. And here before him was another roomful of stupid peasants.
His voice was a hollow hiss of High Galactic—that dialect which afforded such pride to the elect of the Veridish Empire. And had become the hallmark of hatred to all others.
He said: ‘Sorry, brothers ... no time. A Rengol attack force will be here by morning. Must replenish my fuel from your bunkers. You they will not bother, but me-’
And he saw that he had said the wrong thing again in that damned High Galactic.
Valdez’ face darkened until it was almost ebony at the insult for he was not half as stupid as Kerrender assumed.
His low Galactic came viciously: ‘So, we are not worth plundering, but still good enough to get fuel from, is that it?’
He leaped to the doorway where Kerrender stood, towering over him, and the silence of the room was shattered by a whipcrack as he backhanded the face of Rawn itself. Then all hell broke loose.
For Kerrender’s reaction came from the very marrow of his bones. He chopped Valdez in the throat with a vicious blur of speed (it had been drilled into him at fourteen ... if they were ever insolent enough to touch you ... and this one had slapped)—he chopped so viciously the Cervantes man flew back over two tables before his body dropped like a spent rag doll, head rolling limply on a broken spine.
Other Cervanteans flung themselves upon him from nearby tables and little that availed them but death and broken limbs. They still didn’t know they were trying to fight a man reckoned the equal of twenty elite combat soldiers of the Veridish Empire. For the Kreld training lies not only in the knowledge of where and how to chop—it lies in the reflex speed. This Kerrender, this very Rawn, had a reflex speed two and a half times that of the fastest normal soldier! It wasn’t a fight, a good barroom brawl such as the Cervanteans adored—it was a slaughter.
When ten men lay dead and another six with broken limbs, those stupid peasants saw that their reality-view of what was happening was at fault. It bore so little resemblance to the facts that it became obvious here was something drastically different from the man they had thought to pound to a pulp. Drawing back to a safe distance, they saw a monster in the shape of a Galactic man.
Kerrender perceived the irony of this. It was his Nemesis again, in a different guise. The more it changed, the more it was the same, as that wise ancient had said so long ago.
And on Rawn died the Thirty Thousand...
For, while he fought, the star shells burst about him and the cries from the communicators erupted like mad background music to the nightmare that never ceased, but only diminished at times, and his very sensory perceptions were overlaid with the night-black sky of Rawn as it died, and, like a Phoenix, was reborn again-
To a living breathing reality in him, Kerrender.
Their fears ebbing, the Cervanteans realized there was another way of getting at him. And those at the rear of the tavern made certain signs to their comrades, whose eyes lighted in understanding. Kerrender’s Kreld training included an extreme sensitivity: he was immediately aware of something transpiring at the back of the tavern. When he heard the closing door, he turned to run.
And stopped. For in all those furious moments of battle, he had forgotten one all-important fact: his sliver ship wasn’t going anywhere until he refuelled.
They had brought up a self-propelled siege gun when he came onto the field. A relic dating back to the
Interregnum. His savage, wedge-shaped face split in a brief smile at the gun’s vintage. They thought they had him. But he must dissuade them from this.
Kerrender of Rawn spread his arms wide in the Galactic sign of surrender. The men on the siege gun seemed nonplussed that they should have compelled surrender from a being such as this. Then, with typical Spanish appreciation, they smiled widely.
Por Dios, this one was much man!
For a moment, no one moved on either side. Then Kerrender advanced upon the gun crew, still holding his hands in the gesture of surrender. They tensed momentarily, then relaxed. He of Rawn saw by that relaxing that he was through the first barrier: they had accepted him as a man, a member of their in-group, no longer a monster they might dispatch in any way.
He halted ten metres from the gun.
‘It was well-fought,’ he said, ‘but too one-sided. You see, I have the Kreld training.’
Backward they might be, yet still they had heard of the Kreld training. Now there was awe in their eyes.