By Mx Kris Vyas-Myall

In the UK, there are two major sources of broadcast media: the publicly funded BBC and the primarily advertiser funded ITV, whose franchises are awarded under the Independent Television Authority (ITA). In 1967 the franchises were reviewed and shaken up.

One of the biggest changes was with ATV, which had previously provided a weekday service in the Midlands and the weekend service in London. In 1967, they lost the weekend service in London but gained the seven-day franchise for the Midlands.

In London, you might think they would grant Rediffusion (which became Thames after merging with the now franchiseless ABC) the full week’s service but, instead, the weekend contract was given to a new company, London Weekend Television (LWT).

London Weekend Television Logo

LWT was founded by David Frost and a set of ex-BBC staff members to try to provide a high-brow alternative set of programming on the commercial channels. ITV is primarily known for its populist output with soap operas such as Coronation Street and Crossroads, variety such as The London Palladium Show and David Nixon’s Magic Box, and game shows such as The Golden Shot and Wheel of Fortune. As such there was great appeal for this pitch.

However, a combination of mismanagement, bad luck and ill-feeling led them into severe financial trouble and last year they looked to be on the verge of going bankrupt. Step in Rupert Murdoch. As I already talked about previously, the Australian businessman has been entering into the UK market, already controlling two newspapers: the Sun and the News of the World. Following the troubles at LWT, he injected a huge amount of cash but in exchange appointed himself chairman and then managing director. He proceeded to fire a large amount of the original staff, with many more resigning in protest.

Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch

This has created severe debate, and a headache for the ITA. On the one hand, they cannot just let the franchise go under and have only the BBC broadcasting in London after 7PM on a Friday. On the other hand, it runs afoul of their rules in three ways:

Firstly, a franchise cannot be held by a foreign national. Technically, Murdoch currently has a less than 50% stake in the company, but it is still under his effective control.

Secondly, all the people who the contract was awarded to were gone after only a few years, so it is the same licence holder in name only.

Finally, there is no guarantee Murdoch plans to keep the high-brow mission of LWT in place, when this was the main reason they got the franchise in the first place. And his current approach to his newspapers suggests the opposite approach may be taken.

Whilst this fight goes on, I turned to a couple of anthologies that came my way, one that was heavily British and in the high brow spirit of LWT, the other entirely Australian and decidedly more old fashioned:

Science Against Man, ed. by Anthony Cheetham

Cover Artist Uncredited

Cheetham’s short introduction tells us that the kind of technical advances predicted by science fiction have become reality. As such, this anthology will not concentrate on "what if these devices are invented", but instead how people will cope with our new reality.

The Lost Continent, by Norman Spinrad

Two centuries in the future, Balewa, a professor of American history from Accra, goes to visit the collapsed civilization. However, it is not an easy trip. The air pollution is so bad, tourists are provided with government-approved air filters and self-sealing goggles. Whilst some of the natives are resentful, most appreciate that 30% of America’s GNP comes from tourism and are willing to accept their servile position.

Mike Ryan, their Native guide, offers them a special opportunity: the chance to venture down into the still-inhabited subways of New York and even try out a piece of Space Age Technology. That is, if they can survive it.

This kind of tale is not new. I reviewed a 19th Century take on it when Mitchell’s The Last American was reprinted in Famous, and even professional anthropologists have gotten in on the game, such as Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema. But there is a reason this kind of story is still important, as it puts the reader into the position of "the other", the way writers often unconsciously make "others" of much of the rest of the world. Even in contemporary science fiction, attempts to expand beyond New York or the Home Counties in SFnal settings far too often fall into exoticism over inclusion.

Also, it helps that Spinrad is such a terrific writer. His clever use of language, narrative and atmosphere are a marvel to behold, I sometimes wonder if he invented a device that allowed him to steal Philip Jose Farmer’s talent for producing weird but incisive fiction. There are a couple of points that might have needed tightening up to give it a full five stars, but it is still a great novella.

A high Four Stars

In the Beginning, by Robert Silverberg

Silverberg once more returns to the world of the Urban Monad. In Chicago 2382, fourteen-year-old Aurea Holston has been struggling to get pregnant. Even with her husband’s engineering skills, they are worried at next thinning they will be forced to move to a new Monad.

I think I have been feeling the same way as my colleagues on this series that, at this point, it seems like it is just spinning its wheels. We know the system won’t break, we know it is overcrowded and its hedonism is a cover. But what is it actually all about? Is there anything new that can be gained from a fifth tale of someone’s depressing fate inside this Monad? Also, if it was another writer, I would assume it was definitely satirical in its discussion of teenage sex. With Silverberg’s repeated writing on this subject I have to wonder if, at this point, it is just something he likes to include, particularly with descriptions such as:

“Her breasts are full and her lips broad.”

One Star

The Hunter at His Ease, by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss continues his recent fascination with westerners in South Asia, now with a 21st Century visit to the volcanic island of Amelegla in the Indian Ocean. Once famed for its Giant Tortoises, they have all been wiped out to make room for a relay station. Whilst the westerners believe it will bring in prosperity, many of the locals wish to just live as they are.

An effective and beautifully tragic piece.

Four Stars

Man's Estate, by Paul Ableman

Ableman is a new writer to me. Apparently, he is a British playwright of some renown who has written both an SF novel and a censored book on oral sex. Anyway, this is a train of thought story, following an intelligence in a data rich world, where it is unclear if it is a machine or a human.

It is an interesting concept, but it can be a bit opaque and rambling at times.

Evens out at Three Stars

Harold Wilson at the Cosmic Cocktail Party, by Bob Shaw

In the next century, death does not have to be the end. Biosyn offers for consciousnesses to be scanned just before death and stored in The Tank, a computer matrix. People can then rent out these consciousnesses' services whenever required. In Africa, the nation of Losane had been carved out by Colonel Crowley as a British imperial enclave. To maintain power, the loyalist party rely on his consciousness’ regular guidance. Unfortunately, Crowley has grown bored of this and has instead created his own fantasy kingdom, where he brings in the other consciousnesses and hunts them on dragons.

President Martin M’tobo comes angrily to Biosyn and demands that they return contact with Crowley within five days or their problems will be revealed to the general public. Their technical director has a plan, however. They need to get Crowley to face the risk of an even bigger threat, an interstellar invasion by a Labour Prime Minister!

For a novel this already sounds completely absurd a synopsis, yet somehow Shaw manages to make this intelligible and engaging in a twenty-page story even allowing for diversions into animated sales films and odd side details (I am not sure if I am more horrified by the idea of wearing a vibrating bra to work or drinking cofftea). A real achievement.

Five Stars

Statistician's Day, by James Blish

In 1990, Wiberg, the foreign correspondent for the New York Times, goes to interview Edmund Gerrard Darling. He is surprised when Darling starts telling him that he can statistically prove that people are being killed off based on profession—a government policy.

Part of the problem is this is based in an alarmist future of the Ehrlichs and their ilk, where global population control is instituted after the world famine of 1980. Even if I chose to believe the predictions of neo-Malthusians (which are as regularly wrong as the prophets of the second coming, relying as they do on exponential population increases and no technological progress) the idea that people will just submit to state mandated birth control and euthanasia so we can have village greens is just laughable.

The other issue is that the style is just a very dull arch conversation between two newspapermen on the facts of the current world.

Two Stars

The Invisible Idiot, by John Brunner

War is brewing between Earth and Mars, as a result of inexplicable messages full of nonsense sentences, being distributed at random throughout the solar system. When one arrives of the desk of Dr Casper Minsky of Paré Polyclinic, he believes he knows the cause and solution, all of which relate to a young boy having bad dreams.

The title is based on a story about a computer programmed for language translation, where they tried to translate the idiom “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” into Chinese (or Russian in some versions) and back into English and it came out as “Invisible Idiot”. This is most likely apocryphal* but it is useful to illustrate both the problems of overly trusting computers and how minds work.

Whilst the cause of the problem does feel a little anthropomorphic, it is still somewhat plausible and I was intrigued throughout.

A high three Stars

*Part of the issue with this anecdote is that it would require the computer to make multiple semantic errors at the same time, assuming one phrase is about an object which is unable to be seen, the other is about an object without a mind and that these two phrases, separated by a comma, should then be combined into a single statement. More likely clunky machine results would be along the lines of “external vision, external brain”, “hidden, exclusive of knowledge” or “outside the eyes, outside the head”.

Small Mouth, Bad Taste, by Piers Anthony

Miss Concher and Mrs Rhodes are on an expedition in Tanzania, to discover what predator gave man the impetus to evolve speech. The search discovers a lost civilization with surprising builders.

Where to even start with this one? First off, the theories Anthony puts into the text on man’s evolution are ones I have not only never heard before but are so bizarre I wondered if he was being satirical. How would you even know if early humans tasted bad? Even the least implausible parts have been discredited for decades.

Secondly, a large part of it is concerned with the fact that Concher has some kind of special ability to see into the past. She will just suddenly stop to say “do you see that?” and then proceed to explain at some length about another extinct animal. No explanation of this power is given, and it makes the story dull and dragged out.

And then the conclusion is, humans were originally servants for ancient lemurs who couldn’t contain them once the humans learned to hunt. Yes, it is Planet of the Apes, but with the time periods inverted and the semi-plausible great apes replaced by the Strepsirrhini suborder, who, I am guessing, were primed to develop sailing millions of years ago due to… their wet noses and grooming claw? Maybe there was also a bushbaby colony in Australia who came up with competitive surfing.

A low Two Stars, primarily over the amusement I got by imagining a family of lemurs in Victorian dress, riding carriages pulled by naked hominids.

The Ever-Branching Tree, by Harry Harrison

Thankfully, we have Harrison, who seems to have more of a handle on evolution. This is less a story and more a science fact article on the history of natural selection via the mode of a science class time travelling. Pretty good stuff.

Three Stars

Sea Wolves, by Michael Moorcock

What would an anthology such as this be without another visit from Jerry Cornelius? This edition of “the scarcely sane adventures of Michael Moorcock’s quirky modern myth figure” (as Cheetham’s introduction puts it) is another episode in his spy career in East Asia. Even though the war between the US and China still rages on, Jerry is more concerned with the rise of autonomous factories, who require more human input than you might expect.

I found it curious that the editor said he struggled to understand the inner meaning of it, because I actually found it the most straight-forward of the Cornelius stories, almost verging on the didactic at times. Yes, we have the usual surreal elements like the side switching Brigade of St. Basil in their strange uniforms and Jerry driving so many different vehicles you would think he was being sponsored by a second-hand dealership, but it is fundamentally a tale of where we are going with the approaching computerization of the world and how business and government are diving headfirst into it without thinking of the consequences. Interspersing it with actual advertisements from Business Week is a delicious twist.

As an aside, I know it is antithetical to its purpose, but sometimes I wish someone would produce a guide to the Cornelius stories, trying to estimate the approximate order in which they happen. I have a suspicion this is set between The Sunset Perspective and The Last Hurrah of The Golden Horde, but I would have to check all the references, and my brain cannot let go of trying to organise them in some way. Now I am the kind of person who spent their teen years trying to align Thomas Mallory with the Mabinogian even though they were written centuries apart, so I am in good company about it, but there are also regular themes and interesting concepts emerging in these recent tales. In particular a split has been forming between Cornelius and Brunner, with the latter favouring magic leading her down a dark path. I can’t help but wonder if this is going to lead to a bigger confrontation between them or perhaps in some way lead to the devastation of England we see in The Ash Circus and The Anxiety in the Eyes of the Cricket.

Anyway, Four Stars

The Penultimate Trip, by Andrew Travers

This Penultimate Trip is actually the final one in this collection. It tells of a prisoner who goes on trips to weird worlds, one where they are a spider on a low gravity planet, one where they are a worm inheriting the planet from extinct humanity, and, strangest of all, one where bipeds exchange coins for essential goods and live in locked houses.

This is apparently the SF debut of this writer, and it gives us a solid if fairly predictable tale of “science fiction or madness” told in long paragraphs of flow of consciousness. It does gives some interestingly imagined details of these other futures which indicates promise.

Three Stars.

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As it turns out, another science fiction anthology, from Murdoch's native land of Australia, has also just arrived at my desk.  But that's a story for two days hence…

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[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

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