who drop in out of nowhere and help Sir Charles Ravenstreet to find himself are men who have learned the Dunne trick of "looking down" on Time as on a great field where past, present and future all exist together and simultaneously.
In a purely science-fiction yarn—where this gimmick has been used again and again—the story would traditionally deal with Ravenstreet's learning to relive the past—and perhaps the future—and to change it. But Priestley is a mature novelist who is concerned with people as they are (his "Angel Pavement" and "The Good Companions" were as close as we've come to Twentieth Century Dickens), and what changes in "The Magicians" is not the past but the present—namely, Sir Charles himself. A lonely man, past middle age, tempted to fall in with plans for what amounts to the wholesale doping of mankind, he experiences "time alive" and comes out of it a very different person. He, not the twists of time, is the center of interest throughout.
"The Second Conquest," by Louis de Wohl (J. B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia. 239 pp. $3.00) is an attempt to do for Catholic theology what C. S. Lewis did much better for his own particular mysticism in "Out of the Silent Planet" (and less well in its sequels, "Perelandra" and "That Hideous Strength"). He uses the framework of a voyage to Mars, and some clumsily assimilated science-fictive trappings, to illustrate the dogma that God and Lucifer are actively struggling in the world today as they have been since the day of Adam. The Martians, whose civilization has developed without the drag of Satan, are consequently wholly good, and the physical climax comes when "Am-ba Om-bal," the serpent of Eden, attempts to lure the Martians within his sphere of influence and make a second conquest of them as he did long ago of mankind. Now this is very much the structure of the Lewis books, and the picture of Martian society is superficially interesting—if you can overlook the scientific absurdities: sapphires made of carbon, hair as "vegetable" and a good many more. But the preaching of a creed—even though to Catholics it is the creed—is anything but convincing, as the more mystical theologizing of Lewis and Charles Williams are. Science fiction is rarely a good medium for tracts.
It can be a good medium for satire of the Gulliver school, and that is Willy Johns' approach in "The Fabulous Journey of Hieronymus Meeker" (Lillie, Brown & Co., Boston. 370 pp. $3.50). However, Johns is no Swift and his alien societies are drawn with a very heavy hand and an occasional bawdiness much more self-conscious than the passages which are expurgated from children's editions of "Gulliver's Travels"—and illustrated in limited editions. Where Louis de Wohl
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