fiction domain. The more we find experienced "serious" authors experimenting in the field—as they have long done with fantasy—the better the reading is going to be. The Priestley book shows that clearly. But the writer has also got to accept the same disciplines that bind every writer for this magazine and its fellows. We can't have "gravity wicks" just because they have an amusing sound. We can't have preachment for its own sake: how much better, for example, to show the Martians following the Christian philosophy.
We've all agreed here, over and over, that science-fiction writers are going to have to learn to write (I think they're doing it). By the same token, writers are going to have to learn to write science fiction.
"Robert Crane" is said to be the pen name of a young British novelist who has turned his own memories of a walk through London's blitz into a story of a future walk through a New York under bombardment from space.
In a long flashback we watch the internal maneuvering in InterCos—a future U.N.—gradually shaken by mysterious whisperings from far space. Our representative in the InterCos inner circle is Neil Harrison, a minor member of the American delegation. And to Neil's brother Mark, a scientist monstrously deformed by radiation, the whisperings are a warning to Earth to stray no farther than Mars or suffer the consequences.
The story is of the internal struggle of the British-American faction to stop InterCos President Werner, backed by a Russian-Asian bloc, from launching and arming a space-station beyond Mars—while in a parallel race against time Mark Harrison tries to discover the identity of the "Ampiti," the invading voices, and translate their babble.
Somehow there is no feeling of suspense or urgency about the book. The threat of the Ampiti is never real, even when bombs begin to fall in rising arithmetical progression, and Neil Harrison's final search for his girl through the ruined city is only a stroll before a Hollywood process screen. Make it "Hero's Stroll."
This collection of short stories—and one novelette: "The Angelic Angleworm"—which appeared in this magazine and Unknown between 1941 and 1949 is a joy indeed. They are by no means in a class with last year's "The Lights in the Sky Are Stars," but—fantasies and science fiction alike—they're good fun. The least of the lot, in my rating, is "The Waveries"
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Astounding Science-Fiction
