headings, notes, and scraps of copy for a novel dealing with a second deluge. (Or were they, perhaps, "captions" for his violently striking sketches on the same theme? Or were the sketches to be illustrations for the book: one is used, without identification, as the frontispiece for this one.) Where these fragments now are, we are not told. At any rate, Mr. Payne, who teaches at Alabama College, came upon them in a study of the Renaissance and has fitted them into what he imagines might have been Leonardo's story.
The original passages are clearly enough set off between pairs of asterisks, and identified again at the end. I suppose Mr. Payne has come close enough to matching their tone in his own interpolations. The result reads like a deliberate Victorian archaism, quite out of place in the here and now.
These are the three long novelettes which have been appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction during the last two years, assembled as a book—as they pretty well had to be, considering their popularity.
The author of "World Out of Mind" and "Born Leader" continues his progress in the direction of what Sam Mines, in the anniversary issue of James Taurasi's Fantasy Times, calls "a higher credibility index"—science fiction for general readers who have not cut their teeth on the conventions and clichés which are old stuff to the fans. This is the Noah's ark, the "Worlds Collide" theme with a leavening of realism in the recognition that when a cosmic catastrophe does impend Mankind won't be able to get more than one in three hundred of the population off the Earth, more than one in one thousand to another planet—and that in those few survivors there will be "one too many" who should never have survived.
We watch Lieutenant Bill Easson as he, first, selects the ten people in a little town of three thousand whom he will take with him to a refuge on Mars, then ferries them to safety. Finally, still with him, we watch the new human society building on the fragments of the old. It's a good job that deserves to be better: the people of the story are far from black-and-white stereotypes, but they don't really emerge as individuals and Morgan Smith's inner rottenness, in particular, seems to develop out of nothing—yet this week's papers are full of four "good" boys like Smith, who have been amusing themselves beating people to death: why ask a writer to do more then society does?
J. T. M'Intosh—which is no news to anybody—is a writer to watch.
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
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