Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 43 — page 149: what you’re looking at

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

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION been an atomic war. But that wasn’t all. A personage called the Blessed Baumgarten had invented a Beam which deto- nated everything explodable at a range of thousands of miles. It went off accidentally and very nearly wrecked the world, killed off half the population, flooded a third of the land. But all that is history in Di’s future time. Permanent peace is kept by sweeping the world occa- sionally with the Beam, thus ensuring that de-armament is a real thing, rather than a paper treaty. And England of the fiftieth century is most interesting. Democracy has gone. Only little bits of Africa retain it. Most of the world, a// the Western world, is united under the papal ommniscience of Roman Catholicism. It is re- ligion that rules again, not politics. The spacious days have re- returned. Finery, elaborate dress, exquisite food, palatial dwellings have all come back to take their place in England’s society. So has serfdom! Di pursues the life of a gentleman in a way which gives that term a certain material-e¢ istic mean'ng. His youth has returned, as far as exertion is concerned, and, being of amorous bent, he succeeds in 148 enlivening his stay in the future by numerous collisions with “‘comely wenches.”” He very nearly marries one when a rapier through the lung— duelling, too, has come back— effects his return to his own time. He finds great difficulty in persuading his friends that his adventures were real. They all reach a compromise by assuming that he developed a neurosis. Though the book is laced with humour and ready wit, it contains a_ well-thought-out exposition of various forms of social control. It gives the lie to democracy in a most con- vincing way. It champions capitalism and shows how that kind of economy can work to the advantage of everyone in a society autarchly religious, where double-dealing and cheating and lying and stealing are anachronisms. Though the schematics of civilisation put forward in this book are astoundingly un- familiar, Frankau expounds them in such a way, with such evidence, such reasoning, that it is difficult to contend that it would be impossible to run a world like that. Frankau shows it running. And it looks good. Such a pity we would have to kill off half the people before we could have it! comicloooks.CcOnhn ™