Search Results for: far-out

The Whims of Destiny

Jorian, the one-time unbeheaded king, was now safely retired from a long career of getting into trouble. But his younger brother Kerin lacked such wisdom. The outraged father of Adeliza had caught him in compromising circumstances with the maiden. So Kerin had to be sent at once on a mission by sea to the Far East.

But Kerin’s talent for trouble was not to be denied. First came Belinka, a sprite sent by Adeliza to bring him back safe for her. The ship captain believed Kerin was seducing his mistress. Though innocent this time, Kerin left hastily in a rowboat. That got him to a hermit-wizard’s island – and a voyage on a pirate ship, where the kidnapped princess Nogiri was held captive. Kerin was unable to save her – until he gained the help of the hermit-wizard, who then betrayed him by seizing the girl and fleeing with her to be used as a human sacrifice.

From then on, events became hectic as Kerin managed to save Nogiri again, helped by a wizard who was the enemy of the first one. Belinka was much distressed by what happened then between Kerin and Nogiri – with cause – as they set out again, this time to the Emperor of the Farthest East.

There Kerin discovered more magic, and the Emperor learned that no man should be absentminded when using a powerful spell. But it was later that Kerin discovered the limitations of roller skates.

A marvelous medley of Tiptree’s best, including:

“YOUR HAPLOID HEART” – When Ian Suitlov and Pax Patton landed on Esthaa to check for humans, the job wasn’t as easy as it appeared. Though the natives seemed human enough, only cross breeding would be conclusive proof. But how were they to prove anything, when sex was punishable by death?

“THE PSYCHOLOGIST WHO WOULDN’T DO AWFUL THINGS TO RATS” – Dr Tilly Lipsitz hated his name, loved his rats… and would be out of a job if he didn’t come up with a real zinger of an experiment soon. He didn’t have much in mind until he took a midnight trip to his lab and learned more than he would have thought possible.

“SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN” – She had eyes that could not see, but without sight she had powers that went far beyond those of all who came upon her.

Contents:
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
And So On, and So On (1971)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)

Michael Moorcock edited and produced the magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1973. Within its pages he encouraged the development of new kinds of popular writing out of the genre of science fiction, energetically reworking traditional themes, images and styles as a radical response to the crisis of modern fiction. The essential paradox of the new writing lay in its fascination with ‘entropy’ – the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key both to the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The fiction of the New Worlds writers, who included Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Moorcock himself, was not concerned with the far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world. As Ballard put it: ‘The only truly alien planet is Earth.’

The Entropy Exhibition is the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as ‘New Wave’ science fiction. It examines the history of the magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses development in stylistic theory and practice. Detailed attention is given to each of the three principal contributors to New Worlds – Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock. Moorcock himself is most commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels instead of by the magazine he supported with them, but here the balance is at last redressed: New Worlds emerges as nothing less than a focus and a metaphor for many of the transformations of English and American literature in the past two decades.

When Commander Herries of the Space Line began to sell the water of Mars as a ‘potion’ for lengthening life he had no idea that he was going to create the world’s greatest thirst and produce havoc among the two social grades of Earth – the Inelligentsia and the Normals. But produce it he did.

Among the confusion thus produced one man thinks clearly for his own ends – Vance Unthra, the leading scientist of the world – and he sees in the crisis which has hit Earth a way to be rid of all those who do not measure up to what he thinks as an intellectual standard. By his orders two synthetic worlds are created – Alpha and Omega – and to these are ruthlessly evacuated all the victims of the Martian water, there to rebuild there shattered fortunes and never cross the ‘Dark Boundaries’ which exist between those worlds and Earth.

Despite his careful planning, however, Unthra makes one mistake. In destroying the power of the Martian water over the evacuated thousands he miscalculates the strength of cosmic radiation on Omega with the result that the leader – the Controllix – of this world, Sylvia Grantham, becomes a far greater power in the grand scheme of things than her former lover, Dexter Carfax. Through the machinations of the wily Unthra open hostility breaks out between Dexter Carfax and the girl, and eventually their worlds are destroyed through the influence of a deadly chain reaction ‘disease’ from the Great Red Spot of Jupoter.

Both of them, however, through the various experiences they undergo, hold to one objective – to be avenged on Vance Unthra for his viciousness.

These stories which have never been brought together before are taken from Joan Aiken’s earliest writing years in the 1950s and 1960s when she was working for the English short story magazine, Argosy where they were first published. They demonstrate her wide ranging stylistic ability, with subjects as diverse as a rented apartment that comes with a resident swan, a man who buys a girl in a crystal ball, an invisible man-eating tiger, or a psychiatric patient who can always, sometimes unfortunately, conjure up a 93 London bus.


All these ideas seem to pour out of an endless imagination, making bold use of eccentric and unexpected settings and characters, and at the same time demonstrating an evident delight in parodying a variety of literary styles from gothic to comedy, fantasy to folk tales selected from her incredible reading background. But Joan Aiken always repudiated the suggestion that she was “a born storyteller” she would always argue furiously that it was a craft, like oil painting or cabinet making that she had learned, practiced and developed over the years. She described this period of her life as a single-minded engagement with the writer’s craft; and her grasp of the short story form as the foundation of her literary career.

What is far from apparent from these wildly inventive and freewheeling tales, is that this was in fact a bitterly difficult period of Joan Aiken’s life, when not long after the end of the Second World War she was left widowed and homeless with two young children. Having made the brave decision to try and support herself and her family by writing, she applied for a job on this popular short story magazine. In many ways, as she often said subsequently, this period spent working at Argosy could not have been bettered, both as a wonderful distraction and consolation during a bad time, and as an unbeatable apprenticeship in the craft of writing.