Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 118: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

116 shamanism or systematized and puri- fied in the world religions—we have been and still are brought up on the assumption that the so-called super- natural is real and present, that the arbitrary and unpredictable—save by a favored few—do and will always govern our lives. It is far easier to “see” a connection between some accident or clumsiness and a black cat or a broken mirror or the date, than it is to “see” a connection between turning a dial and seeing and hearing people thousands of miles away. And, for that matter, unless you’ve had technical training in electricity of a specialized sort, you still have to be one of a “favored few’ to predict what your TV set is going to do next. and how to get rid of that picket fence. To an extreme purist, who probably does not exist, science fiction would be fiction dealing only with known sci- ence. The story of a scientist’s life in our own times, such as Sinclair Lewis’ ‘**Arrowsmith,”’ should fit this defini- tion. Verne’s “Tour of the World in Eighty Days,” with its plot-saving gimmick based on an astronomical fact which many people still do not know or understand, is another extremely elementary example of science fiction which requires next to no suspension of disbelief—unless you’re one of that benighted clan who find fiction of any kind “frivolous,” in which case you’re not reading this. There are very, very few stories of this kind in the magazines today, and they are not very popular. Murray Leinster has done some little gems personifying existing machines, but nobody else seems to remember them. John Campbell’s “The Moon Is Hell” might be taken to represent the next step. Here, except for the kind of luck which helped Wyss’ “Swiss Fam- ily Robinson,”’ are men forced to live off a Moon which is shown as it is— no puddles of liquid oxygen to breathe, ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION no moon-lichens to munch, no moun- tains of ice to melt down into drinking water. Heinlein’s stories belong in this category, dealing with a world close to what we believe is reality. Step by step we show our willingness to suspend our disbelief in more and more fantastic assumptions. For the sake of a story, we agree that men can breathe on Mars—that a spaceship can be maneuvered into hairpin turns —that telepathy exists and will be a common property of advanced races. (Here you are dealing with what many readers and writers consider pure fan- tasy.) Needless to say, time-travel stories continue to be popular if—by every known tenet of present-day physics—impossible. Coming in from the other direction, what about fantasy? Can we always identify it? Ghosts—oh, sure. De- mons, called up by a spell—guess so. Elves and fairies—yeah; that’s kid stuff anyway, although there are Padgett and Pratt and de Camp— But what about Bradbury’s Mar- tians? What about Merritt? All right, what about Merritt. For my money, A. Merritt did only one out-and-out fantasy : “The Ship of Ishtar,” among whose characters are the Babylonian gods and goddesses. For the sake of argument, I'll give you two others: “Burn, Witch, Burn” and its sequel, “Creep Shadow,” although what is shown as witchcraft there is suggested as an unknown science. “Seven Footprints to Satan” is a not- too-good crime story of the Sax Rohmer school. But let’s have a look at the two books which for my money are Mer- ritt’s best, and which are now out in a single volume: “Dwellers in the Mirage” and “The Face in the Abyss” (Liveright Publishing Corp., New York. 1953. 295 + 343 + 4 pp. $2.75). I think you’re cheating yourself connicloooks.c© i