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New Writings in
SF: 20
Ed By John Carnell
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Foreword by John Cornell
Conversational Mode by Grahame Leman
Which Way Do I Go For Jericho? by Colin Kapp
Microcosm by Robert V. Holdstock
Cainn by H. A. Hargreaves
Canary by Dan Morgan
Oh, Valinda! by Michael G. Coney
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!*: 12OFOFEANNm and the output lFOREWORD
by John Carnell
This particular volume of New Writings In S-F could well be termed a collection of modern horror stories, for the old order changeth. There was a time, not so long ago, when weird stories and horror stories had a vast reading audience while science fiction and fantasy stories struggled in the throes of infancy, even though both genres had their roots in the nineteenth-century tree of Gothic gruesomeness. Indeed, one can still find the occasional anthology devoted to the macabre but their contents are but pale images of their predecessors. The Poes, Lovecrafts, Blackwoods, Machens and Dunsany’s of yesteryear have few-rivals in today’s storytellers.
Where now the old dark houses with creaking doors and built-in ghosts mourning the crimes of another era? Or the yawning graves with the vampires abroad at the dark of the moon surrounded by their zombie acolytes? Or the creeping horrors from the Pit and dimensions beyond? Exchanged for the psychosomatic illnesses engendered by hive-community life in sky towers, the instant everything, the allergies and psychoses brought on by modern technology which seem to be leading to the run-do-not-walk death wish of the human lemming’s. These invisible perils which seem to be building into a great neurotic explosion are far more insidious than the imagined horrors in the dark so popular a few decades ago.
Most of the stories in this volume, for instance, conceal untold depths of the macabre, if you look for them. Grahame Leman’s lead story, ‘Conversational Mode’, has that elusive horror quality of being so nearly true if you really think about the possibilities—the analytical computer programmed by human beings psychoanalysing another human being who constantly loses out on the answers. Isn’t this like the one-sided duel of the Inquisitor and his victim on the rack who cannot possibly win, even if he makes a-full ‘confession’? Or the psychological depths hidden beneath Colin Kapp’s plot in ‘Which Way Do I Go For Jericho?’ Not only is there pathos in the drama his characters play out but also the haunting thought that just around the corner there could be a weapon mightier even than the atom bomb.
The shorter stories all carry undertones of offbeat realism —Dan; Morgan’s ‘Canary’ deals with a ‘precog’ trying to outguess where an ICBM attack might develop, while Robert Holdstock, at present better known for his published weird-horror stories, has a little gem in ‘Microcosm’, with its double locale of the Man-Who-Wasn’t-There. Or was he ? Michael Coney’s ‘Oh, Valinda!’ also has sombre overtones of literary expressionism, conjuring up grey-green depths of arctic waters (polluted, of course) and long-dead whalers of another generation battling new and frightful undersea monsters.
What light relief there is in this volume comes in H. A. Hargreaves’ long novelette ‘Cainn’ and even here the background is a study in depth of the behaviour patterns of a section of humanity pyramiding upwards against a background of spiralling technology.
However, offbeat though the stories in this particular volume may be, I have no doubt later volumes will have their fair share of light relief and the banishment of death, doom and destruction.
May 1970
John Carnell
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