Look Homeward, Earthman

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 12

Look Homeward, Earthman

EARTHMAN, COME HOME, by _ James Blish; Faber and Faber, English price 12/6. ONE IN THREE HUNDRED, by J. T. McIntosh; Museum Press, English price 10/6. STORIES FOR TOMORROW, selected by William Sloane; Eyre and Spottiswoode, Enf@lish price 18/-.

(Reviewed by

Denis

Glover

bit off the end of a hydroponic cigar. Out in space the spindizzy Okie outfit is having trouble with a bindlestiff which is out to capture the no-fuel drive, you see; and that was invented by Doctor Beetle, a Thing from another constellation who lived in a tank. The bandit boys on the planet He cooked the secret out of him "probably in his own tank," but it’s woncerful what you can do with Bethé blasters and mesotron guns. There is also a gas -a regurgitant, a sternutatory and a vesicant all in one-called polybathroomfloorine, Now get this: space-ships are out, By means of spindizzies whole cities take to the skyways. Ours is the City of New York, heading for the Rift after altering the Axis of He. The Rift, I take it, is the Coalhole in the Milky Way, as good a place as any for New York, especially as the Earth-cops are after Mayor Amalfi, a promising young

fellow of 900 years "give or take 50." Earth is only a place where old bureaucrats go td die, but-horrid thoughtspace is infested with Earth-cops chivvying the vagrant Okie cities. Now we've de-spaced Fabr-Smithe and de-wobbled He, it’s time to be off on another job. But darned if that Twentythird Street spindizzy doesn’t let the city down, with the planet Murphy in the Acolyte group the handiest space-

garage. And there’s a catch in it. And so on through the galaxies. This is a space-packed story, and should do much to counter the unhealthy and _ highlyrestricted heroics of Davy Crockett. Lieutenant Easson doesn’t fare further than Mars. He hasn’t time. Somehow another few shovels of coal have been put on the sun and come D Day everyone on earth will be roasted for peanuts. The young loot has to pick out 10 people to be space-shipped from the town of Simsoille (pop. 3261). The same thing is going on everywhere, with a planned exodus in mass-produced space-boats most of which will never get anywhere. Easson’s does, by luck and courage, They have a tough time settling in on Mars where high winds howl. If such a selective mass migration ever does have to be made, let’s hope no space-fiction writers are among the chosen few. The Astronomer Royal will doubtless be pleased to hear that there are 1642 planets in the Empire, 1200 of them occupied. In Stories for Tomorrow there ate 22 stories occupying 476 pages. Without trying to compile a_ tourist’s guide to space, I have jotted down a few places we can go to: Procyon III, Kenu, Meran, Olittra, Asplundh 4, Sector 14 Confederation, Amio (you can only get out of here by zeiui effect), Falder, or Norton’s Pink Heaven. Among the authors are Boucher, Lesser, Shiras, Blish and Simak. Like all collections this one has its superlatives-the ‘"88-A theta-88-aleph-D

and per-see-and" moments of co-ordin-ation. Murray Leinster in "First Contact" writes dramatically of the meeting of two space ships (one ours) 4000 light years from here. As the editor remarks, it is like two strange dogs sniffing one another, ready to fight or tail-wag. The tension ends on a grubby little snigger as both sides swop dirty jokes. "In Hiding,’ by Wilmar H. Shiras, is the story of a mutant. So is "Bettyann" (Kris Neville): the girl with that awful name is being persuaded back to Starland when a lump rises in her throat at the thought of her loving fosterparents; so she turns herself into a bee-utiful bird and flaps back to her little grey home in the west. Strewth! "And Then There Were None," by Eric Frank Russell, is the only humorous story of the great void I have read. Space is deadly serious stuff, not to be sneezed at. But the Gandians have a lovely disregard of the Earth invaderstheir definition of a U.S. sergeant is "a sort of over-above underthing." Don’t be in any hurry, scientists, to have us space-hung. The journalists will move in, and they are dull, factual dogs compared with space-writers who soar on their publishers’ profits.