New Writings In SF-9 - Edited by John Carnell

NEW WRITINGS IN SF-9 - EDITED BY JOHN CARNELL

Another book of the science fiction variety bought and read based solely on the cover with its somewhat psychedelic overtones. But 'don't judge a book just by the cover, unless you cover just another' as Johnny Rotten once advised when singing about EMI, and they're wise words to this day and when it comes to New Writings In SF-9 they're very apt.

Edited by John Carnell and first published in 1966, it's a compilation of seven short stories that aren't really psychedelic at all not unless, of course, you're of the school of thought that says everything science fiction is psychedelic by its very nature? When it comes to cinema, there's arguably a case to be made for this as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Barbarella, Forbidden Planet, and many others testify. But for science fiction books? The jury is still out.

So what do we have? Well, there's Poseidon Project, by John Rackham, which is like an episode of Irwin Allen's Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea television series where a space station but based under the sea faces off danger from a giant squid but there's also the even greater danger from the sexual incompatibilities of some of the inhabitants.

Folly To Be Wise is about how a super-intelligent robot is no match for the primitive will to survive. The story is slight but the writing by Douglas R Mason is interesting.

Gifts Of The Gods, by Arthur Sellings, reads like one of those comic strip stories you'd get in old publications like Amazing Tales. It's pretty light fare though, where a suburban couple wake up one day to the world being turned into a junk yard for aliens to dump their rubbish in.

The Long Memory, by William Spencer, has an interesting scenario depicting a future world where absolutely everything - as in all human life - is recorded. Storage is a problem, however, because the Internet has yet to be invented so it's all being kept on spools of film. It's like 1984 and Big Brother is watching but worse, the only benefit being that crime is practically obsolete. The story, however, goes nowhere so ultimately it's an empty vessel.

Likewise, Guardian Angel, by Gerald W Page, has an interesting idea in regard to a sort of home computer system that talks to you and even has a will of its own - a sort of ultra-superior Alexa - though again the story goes nowhere.

Second Genesis, by Eric Frank Russell is without question the best-written story in the book and is about an astronaut returning to Earth after 2000 years only to find an empty world. Life in the form of grass, trees, animals and birds still exists but mankind and practically all evidence of man's existence has been erased. Going by this story alone, Eric Frank Russell was a good writer.

And lastly there's Defence Mechanism, by Vincent King. Set in a world of layers like a colossal car park, it's about hunting some aliens who turn out to be not so very different from the hunters. It's strangely-written which makes it interesting but making it doubly stranger is that during the course of hunting the aliens, the hunters stop off to have sex with a party of hairy dwarves. I kid you not.

New Writings In SF-9 is one of a series of anthologies designed to showcase the work of new British writers in the field of science fiction and in this aim, it succeeds. When going into a book such as this your expectations probably shouldn't be very high and therefore you probably won't be disappointed but for all that you may at times be surprised though not always for the right reasons.

John Serpico