Vacui Magia: by L.S. Johnson

L.S. Johnson's utterly beautiful story Vacui Magia engineers a spell into formal breaks, each one a principle containing within and between its clauses the emotional power of prickling skin, and of goosebumps so deep that they ripple on the bone. The physiognomy detailed here is the creation of a life for ulterior motives; these are not base, but nor are they convincing, being rooted in social constraints. This practitioner is performing, for sentimental reasons, a spell to create a child which she can present to her mother as continuity - sentiment is not an adept nor is it apt to have retaining power - there is entropy in magic, as in all things; order into disorder; resolve into dissolve, possible into impossible. However, the sentiment of continuity of life will suffice for a while if the proprieties are observed. To this end Johnson scratches life lines into her text, using an array of words which autopsy her practitioner's intent with a precision scalpel acting as a wand of sorts.

There is never a problem invoking magic through hindsight; but to transform such magic into second sight by means of a ceremonial narrative is a spell on its own. I had attempted this myself in a stage play which was workshopped out of existence in Belfast a few years ago - largely because of a refusal to admit of ceremonial magic by the minds of those involved. Perhaps they were right: In a curiously pleasing twist the play was referring to itself - it was never formally acted, but was enacted to great effect. And so it is with Vacui Magia: the act of creation contains its undoing.

You can read Vacui Magia at the Strange Horizon website here.

Satan's Shrine: by Daniel F. Galouye

I rather liked this 1954 story by Daniel F. Galouye, originally published in Galaxy and reprinted in Poul Anderson's 1986 anthology Terrorists of Tomorrow. The plot seems ahead of its time, fusing elements of a military-industrial complex into a computer which runs a global conspiracy, and which finally acquires for its identity the ultimate super-villain, Satan. This solid-state Satan acquires half the globe as a server for total war, and the free world, such as it is, comes to resemble London under the assault of Hitler's V-weapons during World War Two, or Orwell's Oceania.

On a mission to destroy Satan, a group of highly-trained specialists and soldiers are assassinated by techniques which game their compassion and common humanity, turning these into battlefield weakness and tactical hurt. The party is splendidly inserted into the Shrine through the barrel of a gigantic canon, wherein a maze of tunnels are booby-trapped by as many inventions of death as the mind of a conductive Satan can imagine. It is only by the discovery of the remains of previous missions that the soldiers gain any clue of the ingenuity of their imminent deaths - the assimilation of this knowledge is akin to pulling a trigger or tripping a wire. Also striking is how Satan is able to play on the national characteristics of the party - made up of an Englishman, a German, a Frenchman, a Russian, etc - and to auto-translate these national differences into suspicions and then errors of judgement which cost lives. Eventually, as the survivors find comradeship in the fact of just being alive, this too is used to whittle their number down to one.

The last survivor reaches Satan's control room to find not a devil but a technocrat, whose administrative function is to ensure continuity of what is revealed to be a very human conspiracy - everything is a hoax, a charade, a painted set; everything, that is, but the blood and anguish and death. Suffice to say that Satan's Shrine has many rooms, each one equipped with a device of torture which has been reverse engineered from the bones of its victims.

The Fittest: by J.T. McIntosh

J.T. McIntosh's novel of societal collapse and inter-species conflict is misunderstood as a story of super-intelligent animals waging a war of attrition on mankind - in fact these animals are not super-intelligent; rather their creator Paget has given them only a limited facility of memory, so that they do not need to be taught or shown something more than once or twice to be able to understand it. That slight change is enough. The animals retain their often brutal natures, but with the advantage of memory, which permits them to organise and coordinate their attacks on human beings and human infrastructure. Even more striking is the fact that with memory comes self-regard - these animals are not rabidly suicidal; they are aware enough to be so self-serving that they can be diagnosed as psychopathic. And once they have destroyed power and communication cables to render mankind helpless, they find themselves on an equal footing for the fight - because a human society without its intrinsic advantage of civilisation is reduced to nothing more than a collection of individuals whose memories are those of automation rather than adaptation.

As ever with apocalypse novels the question of division of spoils leads to charges of sexism as women are treated in much the same manner as tinned goods. It is not that one doubts that women would become commodities in such a scenario - really it is their acquiescence which leaves the author's presumptions open to question. This problem isn't unique to McIntosh; it's evident in Wyndham and Christopher and the rest. In fact The Fittest, by virtue of its title alone, confronts the problem head-on - the scramble to re-order relationships in light of societal collapse takes on a most depressing and predictable aspect, as men examine hip girth in women, and women appraise shoulders in men. Such considerations take up a good deal of the text, a sort of fumble in the jungle which is almost as tiresome as it is inevitable. Which leads us to the notion of "cosy catastrophe" as defined by Brian Aldiss. The Fittest ticks all the boxes, but its disharmony is not that of a formula; really you need to go back to Arthur Machen's The Terror to find a similar concept so effectively handled. In Machen's novel it was, ultimately, man's inhumanity to man which led to the animal world's uprising; in The Fittest McIntosh extends this idea - once humanity is gone between us it is gone from us, and we revert fully to the Darwinian, survival of...  However, this is not all. There is the process of stripping down a human being. In a way the risen animals only make mortal the wounding process of mortification begun by other human beings - the animals show remarkable solidarity in the face of their human enemy; human beings, conversely, display a complete lack of solidarity and turn on each other with the exact and rabid nature expected of wild animals. In this manner McIntosh notes that human progress is depressingly material and that human beings have used their smarts only to reduce the species to atomised individuals united by concepts such as wealth and status. Ironically these concepts are better suited to survive than the individuals who aspire to them.

The Fittest is not McIntosh's best novel - he is perhaps one of those authors without a best novel; rather his books gather around a fixed point in his bibliography, and The Fittest is sturdy enough to qualify as an entry point for readers. Later McIntosh exhibited some extraordinary imaginative turns - in Time For a Change (Snow White & the Giants) a group of warring superbeings from the future carry their inexplicable fight through a fireswept English village; in Transmigration the narrator dies accidentally and finds himself inhabiting the minds of his friends and colleagues, most of whom can't wait to get rid of him; One in Three Hundred is another apocalypse tale, in which Earth must be abandoned - but, of course, the selection process is highly suspect, leading to guilt and unrest. I retain only one vivid recollection of Norman Conquest 2066 - that of a 1960s Morris Minor trapped on a motorway that is ended by time rather than space. I suspect the memory is entirely false, but it is typical of how this author works - his books erupt into consciousness by placing a hand grenade under the pillow; you are allowed to dream that it's there, but waking is a pain in the head.

Kamtellar: by R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Be happy in the place of horseless carriages...

R. Chetwynd-Hayes is perhaps better known as a horror anthologist than for his own stories; yet in a productive career he published several well-received novels and collections, all of which are thankfully unabused by cult status. Kamtellar is the title story of his 1980 collection, and while it is billed as a novella, at 40,000 words it feels like rather more than that. There is much to admire in its deceptively simple premise, wherein it seems as though the characters of a Hammer movie have got behind the set to find it is, after all, painted on both sides. Inspired by one of Ambrose Bierce's anecdotes, and perhaps by the fate of Bierce himself, it pulls an Englishman out of the sedate Hampshire countryside and into a hellishly familiar colony, where social and spiritual arrangements are no more than a tax that the devil levies on the landscape.

Paul Sinclair's departure from our world is occasioned by a bicycle crash. He finds himself on the outskirts of a small village, the skyline of which is dominated by a huge black house that does not cast a shadow - being somehow its own shadow. He is taken in by one of the villagers whose beautiful daughter, Movita, does not escape his eye. Sinclair is immediately drawn into a struggle: every night doors and windows are barricaded as defence against the creatures which issue forth from the black house and lay siege to the village. Sinclair finds that these villagers inhabit a curious hell - they believe that the flying machines and horseless carriages of his own world are the heaven promised them for their endurance in the land of Kamtellar, and its capital, Hadelton. Sinclair persuades Movita to flee the village in the hope of reaching the capital. But in a hunt organised by the Great Satan, they are chased across the countryside by all manner of nightmare creatures; until Sinclair finds that in the land of the supernatural, rationalism is afforded its own distinct power. But, of course, it is possible to rationalise almost anything away, and Sinclair's found power proves his undoing, even at the very moment of relief. For as went the hunt, there goes Movita... like the Great Satan, he simply cannot help himself.

While it is possible to identify the moment when Chetwynd-Hayes realised he did not have on his hands the novel he wished for, and the accompanying note of disappointment, Kamtellar is still a wildly enjoyable story which often reads like Rogue Male rewritten by H.P. Lovecraft. True, there are few inventions of evil within its pages - rather its qualities are to be found in the extraordinary, stoic routines of the villagers; in the breathless chase of its climax; and in the shiftless angel Movita, whose presence in this world is a greater mystery than its existence.

Like the black house, this story is always its own shadow.

The Animal Women: by Alix E. Harrow

“Something beautiful and wild and red-toothed woke up in us. And we were not nothing anymore.”

As a young man I only ever identified years by their accompanying pop culture tags - 1968 was the year of the Beatles' White Album and Where Eagles Dare and Disch's Camp Concentration; later and older with it, I gleaned a little of history and politics and 1968 became the year of the Paris uprising, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the founding of the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland. The year changed from one of pop culture tags to body bags. Lately I had the pleasure to read Alix Harrow's story, The Animal Women, and 1968 changed again.

Young Candis falls into the company of a group of women living in a cabin on the edge of the woods. While the locals see only their colour, she sees their shapes, shapes which she attempts to capture on camera, but which are declined even by her light meter. The women register on the townsfolk only in relation to the racial strife which continues to creep across America as the year progresses. We are privy to it as a school year, and Candis is made extra-curricular by events beyond her control as she learns that the wounds these women bear have healed as more than themselves, as though they have fashioned the weals and welts into weapons of a feral kind. In a text which transforms adjectives into body doubles, Candis is placed in danger by her association wth the animal women, and learns herself how to fashion her wounds thus.

The Animal Women can be read at the Strange Horizons website in two parts, here and here.

The Zilov Bombs: by D.G. Barron

D.G. Barron's novel of Soviet-occupied Britain was first published by Andre Deutsch in 1962 and then by Pan in paperback in 1965. It has never been subsequently reprinted, perhaps because it falls into an uneasy territory between genre and literary fiction. The book demonstrably fails at both, but its charm is that it never really tries to be either - it is pure headturning pulp, and it is most amusing that the book's cover reviews are quotes from such quaint periodicals as Woman's Journal, Topic and The Listener. Of course, these are the good reviews - I have no idea what the Times Literary Supplement had to say about it, or Analog. If anything.

Following the ban the bomb demonstrations of the late 1950s, governments across Europe opt for nuclear disarmament, hoping the Soviets will reciprocate and withdraw their nuclear deterrent from their satellite states. Instead the Soviets simply roll across Europe, conquering former NATO countries and transforming them into People's Republics. In subjugated Britain, Guy Elliot, former writer and ex-peace campaigner, is now an agricultural commissar, slowly forcing the new rules of collectivisation on reluctant farmers in Norfolk. Guy is also involved with the resistance in a small way, much to the chagrin of his wife, who would rather he did not place them or their two children in danger. One night, while doing his rounds on a country road, Guy is witness to the theft a Soviet lorry and the murder of its driver - he then discovers the lorry carried several limited nuclear weapons, and that these have been hidden on a nearby farm. Guy informs the resistance and is then drafted into securing these bombs for use by the resistance in a country-wide rebellion. The bombs are secured, at great cost; so great, in fact, that Guy wants out. But it is too late - the Soviets have identified him as a key figure, rather than the minor player he so reluctantly allowed himself to become. He turns back to the resistance for help, but they simply make him their prisoner - because he is in possession of valuable information. A sensible enough precaution as it turns out - Elliott is well-remembered as one of those ban the bomb "traitors" who forced Britain to relinquish its deterrent in the first place. Now in a position to hear the plans of the resistance for a rebellion, he is horrified at the prospective loss of life. Sadly, at this point, the book degenerates into a straight will he/won't he thriller, with an unsatisfactory denouement.

Despite its faults The Zilov Bombs is a better than expected novel. It is obviously an anti-peacenik tract and the moral choices set up throughout the novel illustrate the author's intent, all the way to Elliott's final, explosive moments. Still, the characters are often well-drawn, the arguments both for and against are allowed to be made, and the Americans are kept out of it. So too, curiously, are the Russians - it is an all-English affair. And this perhaps is how the novel is so affecting - everyone resists in their own way, from Elliott's boss, who wants to sabotage collective farms by slowing their introduction, to the senior civil servants who find the ultimate use for the Zilov Bombs. It is not a novel about invasion - it is rather a peon to tradition, to the implacable management of British society, which can ameliorate the shock of ideology by simply absorbing it into a class system that looks and feels as solid as landscape.

The cover price states 2/6 - I'm not sure how much that is in roubles, or in new money.

The Darkest of Nights: by Charles Eric Maine

Although now sadly forgotten, Charles Eric Maine was one of the most successful British sf novelists of his time. Several of his books were filmed, most famously The Mind of Mr Soames in 1970, an attempt perhaps to cash in on the success of Charly. Unfortunately, Soames stars the insufferably 60s Terence Stamp, so I doubt I will ever get around to watching it.

Between 1958 and 1962 Maine turned out two major apocalypse novels - The Tide Went Out and The Darkest of Nights. The former is a rather quaint disaster novel in which nuclear tests cause the earth's oceans to drain away into Atlantic and Pacific fissures, leading to ecological disaster and societal collapse. It is a book that retains many excellent pulp credentials despite, or perhaps because of, its premise. The Darkest of Nights is an outstanding apocalypse novel and, to my mind, the definitive plague novel. While it shares many characteristics with the apocalypse works of John Wyndham and John Christopher - it is more artful than The Day of the Triffids, and more cruel than The Death of Grass - it is a true original in the sense that its characters act out the functions of pathogens, rather than simply being victims or not, as the case may be.

The Hueste virus, a possible side-effect of nuclear testing, begins work in China, killing millions of people. The outside world looks on, not entirely aghast as China is remote and the casualties there make splendid statistics with which to sell newspapers. The plague soon spreads to Japan where Pauline Brant, attached to the International Virus Research Institute, deals with the first of the casualties. She returns quickly to Britain to deliver samples and also meet with her estranged husband, Clive, Foreign Editor of the Daily Monitor, who solicits information on the plague and also a divorce. As the plague spreads across the Far East, the Brants part, Pauline to a virus research group, Clive to his newspaper and a frustrating round of new secrecy laws - why are massive incinerators being built in public parks? why are underground bunkers under construction in all major cities? The answer is, of course, obvious, but now routine censorship means that the population cannot really conceive of the scale of the Hueste virus - fully half the world's population will die, and the British establishment is keen to keep this a secret until it can secure the means for its own survival. Clive resigns his newspaper post and takes a job with an American television company. As the full force of the virus hits Britain, Clive and his American crew film much of the ensuing chaos and disorder for posterity, as it becomes open rebellion and then revolution. However, there is little for the population to rebel against as, in a piece of plotting later borrowed by Peter Van Greenaway for his novel Graffiti, the heads of government, business, industry and finance, and their extended families, are safely placed in the newly-built bunkers, complete with air filters, medical supplies and staff, while the rest of the nation is left to take its chances with the virus. As in Graffiti, these bunkers are set upon by an insurrectionist army, led more by outrage than by the prospect of imminent death, and the ensuing civil war is repeated across the globe. Pauline is detailed to serve in a bunker in Liverpool which manages to resist attack; Clive fares less well - his film crew is killed and he is captured by the rebel army. By now the situation is chaotic - there are not only revolutions and counter-revolutions, but medical advances mean there is virus and anti-virus; sadly, perhaps deliberately, the anti-virus is as lethal as the original virus, so those who survived Hueste are vulnerable to its cure; these too die in their millions, until victory for either side becomes a simple matter of attrition. Eventually, Clive and Pauline are reunited, but only so that one might cancel out the other.

In the end The Darkest of Nights resorts to Clive as a measure of civilised behaviour - somehow his character, presented as vain, scheming and ambitious at the beginning of the novel, is redeemed, not by a personal change in the man, but by the deterioration of his fellows. Clive becomes a civilised outpost, resorting only to outrages which have some semblance of moral continuity - some sensible looting; a revenge killing or two - and this continuity helps him revert to the status quo when it comes to a final choice as to whether to side with the insurrectionists or the government, no doubt taking many a reader with him. Maine's strength as a writer is that he makes us aware of this choice. Maine also has a happily informative prose style - he is able to impart huge amounts of information in just a few lines. This is not info-dumping on his part; rather he is interested in how things work, and he makes them interesting for the reader by infusing them with every detail of craft.

Maine's work was published in hardcover by Hodder & Stoughton throughout most of his career, and these 1st editions are well worth picking up, especially The Darkest of Nights with its fantastic petrie dish cover illustration by John Woodcock. My copy has the added attraction of an internal stamp reading RAF Leconfield.