Off Cuts
Out of This
World

All texts copyright Farah Mendlesohn

The index to Out of this World, edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis & Mably Owen, 1960-1972 was provided by William G. Contento and can be found at:
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/0start.htm.

The following is rather stodgy (which was why it was cut) but may still be of interest to others. The scope of these stories, and their incredibly high expectations of teens, is unmatched by any of the “YA” collections published in the past five years.

Heinlein and Norton wrote very specifically for the Juvenile market. I have been valorizing their works for the degree to which they operated as gateway texts, sharing the values of the adult market. For this argument to be sustainable, however, I need some evidence that these values did indeed appeal to contemporary teens. Some evidence can be culled from the letters pages of the science fiction magazines of the period, which suggest an entry age between thirteen and fifteen years old for both boys and girls (this is almost certainly indicative not of when individuals started reading—the survey suggests nine for boys and ten or eleven for girls—but the age at which teens had the money to purchase their own copies). However, this evidence is diffuse—we cannot see easily what stories the teens liked, and there is no sense of them as a discrete market. However, the twelve-year production of an anthology series of adult science fiction stories marketed to teens is something else. From 1960 to 1973 Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen (replaced by Michael Pearson for the final volume) produced ten volumes of an anthology called Out of this World: an anthology of science fiction. While again the existence of a teen market is shadowy, the success of this series can be read as an understanding on the part of the publisher (Blackie, a Scottish publisher specializing in teen fiction) that teens could perfectly well cope with the values of the adult genre. Similarly, the wide-spread presence of this anthology series in libraries suggests that they were both deemed suitable by librarians and were actually borrowed. The introduction to the series by Bertrand Russell presumably aided their respectability although homegrown UK sf has always had a higher respectability quotient than have the contents of the US pulps, and the inclusion of stories by Italo Calvino, Howard Fast and Graham Greene may have further assured librarians of the eminent suitability of the collections. For the teen reader, what they offered was a glimpse at the writing of some of the best known writers in the field: Aldiss, Asimov, Heinlein, Wyndham, Leinster, Clarke, Clement and others are all included in these volumes. Williams-Ellis and Owens were very clearly focussed on constructing a gateway into the field. For a full listing of the stories turn to Appendix 1.
What strikes the reader is how many of the stories are problem-solving stories. Whether concerned with evolution, with the physics of alternate worlds, or with politics, well over half the stories are structured in such a way that a th tag is asolution to be discovered, or link which clarifies a situation is to be unravelled (this last is most common with alien encounter tales), picking up on the idea of continuous education that was so near the surface in the Heinlein and Norton Juveniles. What is also noticeable is the absence of a trope which runs through Juvenile and YA sf in which “getting to know the alien will resolve our problems” is the dominant (and frequently allegorical) narrative. Of the eighty-one stories, only Murrray Leinster’s “The Aliens”—in which humans and aliens turn out to be interested in different planets—embraces this approach with any enthusiasm. The Out of this World anthologies contain a far wider range of sf staples—time travel, invention, invasion, subversion, chemical and physical experiments, ideas about evolution, ethical dilemmas etc than does the collection of Juvenile and YA sf I have assembled for this book. What they don’t contain is any sex, and there is little emphasis on inter-personal relations unless, as in Robert Presslie’s “Another Word for Man” (2), the relationship has a philosophical or ethical concern at its root (an alien convinces a priest of its humanity when it gives up its life to save his). The key values encapsulated in these stories are that humans can fix anything, but that if they don’t, there is little chance of rescue. There are few incidents of deus ex machina. Curiosity is the most valued of qualities. The stories draw on basic engineering, a knowledge of psychology, economics, maths, chemistry, biology and physics and a very great deal of ethics and philosophical argument. They demand of the reader an open mind and a willingness to engage in information density

The easiest way to discuss the values and range in the stories in the collections is to divide them roughly by the themes to which they can (loosely) be considered to belong. In some cases stories ended up with multiple labels, but most fit easily into a sub-category of science fiction. The labels I chose were: anthropology (1), bureaucracy (2, a very popular theme in the 1950s), chemistry (2), colonisation (2), crime fiction (2), economics (4), engineering (6), evolution (5), fantasy (two stories which I will not discuss here, although we should note the very low proportion of fantasy in these volumes), first contact (3), invasion (3), mathematics (3), philosophy (1), physics (5), psi power (1) psychology (14), politics (16), romance of the universe (1), scientific method (1), semiotics (1), science of sentience (1), theology (2) and time travel (1). Within this breakdown were several stories whose concerns were with political method had as their context colonisation stories [[again, this is not clear]]; there was only one story intensely concerned with biology (Hal Clement’s “Uncommon Sense”, vol. 6) and the focus was far more on the scientific method. An “at a glance” summary suggests that just under 30% of the stories are concerned with maths, science or engineering while 57% of the stories are concerned with manipulation (of humans, aliens or both): within this category the high number of stories interested in psychology is characteristic of the technocratic roots of science fiction. The divide is not absolute of course: some of the alien invasion stories, which I included in neither of those percentages, could fall either way. But in both William Tenn’s “The Sickness” (vol. 6) in which two members of a crew lose out when they fail to catch an alien symbiont, and Gerard Klein’s “Message for Zoo Directors” (vol. 7), which is a smuggled letter/club story, the game is played for laughs rather than serious speculation. Not coincidentally, both stories lack any sense of consequence beyond the confines of the tale.
There are simply too many stories to discuss all of them here, many of which are classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” (vol. 6) or Brian Aldiss’s “Who Can Replace a Man?” (vol. 2), so instead I will focus on a few categories: engineering, psychology and politics which between them have historically formed the core of sf writing, and will end with a brief look at the maths and physics stories. These stories are astonishingly information-dense. In chapter three, this will be a crucial issue in my argument about the configuration of modern sf for children and teens.
There are six engineering stories. Arthur Porges’ “The Ruum” (vol. 1), Colin Kapp’s “The Railways Up On Cannis” (vol. 2), Ellis Gywn Jones’s “When the Engines Had to Stop” (vol. 4), James White’s “The Trouble With Emily” (vol. 2), Vadim Okhotnikov’s “The Fiction Machines” (vol. 5) and James White’s “Fast Trip” (vol. 6). I will begin with Jones and Okhotnikov because both could be read as anti-engineering stories. Jones’s story is about the sudden disappearance of gas (petrol) and a return to the bucolic lifestyle of late nineteenth-century America. The punch to the story is that the protagonists like this lifestyle: they like the quiet, they like the distance from each other, but perhaps most important they like their own growing competence. This is a theme reiterated in John Christopher’s “Blemish” in volume 9, in which an alien task force decides that commercialised Earth is redeemable only by a small number of artisans who live in a village for the insane. This second story is more obviously a political narrative, Jones’s story emphasizes the delight in home-grown solutions, in very basic mechanical engineering skills. Okhotnikov does the same, but as a humorous comment on writing talent: a scientist, determined to write a book, decides that what he needs is a better pen; when the better pen doesn’t help him he invents a typing machine, then a dictaphone and then other, more complex writing tools. In the end, he is an inventor of fantastic tools for writers, but is still not a writer. It is a bitter-sweet tale which both engineering prowess while poking fun at its limits.
Arthur Porges’s “The Ruum” is deliciously simple: a man is chased by an ancient machine left by aliens to catch samples. When he has lost enough weight from running to fall out of the machine’s “catchment” range, it stops chasing him: a lovely comment on engineering parameters. James White’s two stories, “The Trouble With Emily” and “Fast Trip”, are as usual for this author a combination of engineering and psychology. I placed them here because the emphasis is on thought directed towards physical solutions. In “The Trouble With Emily” a space medic has to work out how to deal with a brontosaurus-like patient while his alien colleague is performing mysterious experiments: a good deal of the story is taken up with the engineering feats of the crew who rig up feeding stations and petting stations which allow the doctors to convince the brontosaurus that they are as big as she is. In “Fast Trip” a crew on board a damaged space ship, with a pilot trained for a different kind of ship, painstakingly work out how much food they have and ration their oxygen while the pilot attempts to retrain: at the end they figure out that it is better to reconfigure the flight deck than reconfigure the pilot. The solution is in psychology, but only as it is applied to engineering. Colin Kapp’s “The Railways Up On Cannis” tells of the Unorthodox Engineers, shipped to a planet recovering from a civil war and with a highly unstable surface structure: the team work out that to avoid volcanoes blowing up the railway line, they should create mini-volcanoes which can be used as track supports. In each of these stories the emphasis is on working things out and applying fairly straightforward solutions: they are tales not of invention, but of ingenuity.
Moving onto psychology we have Arthur C. Clarke, “Breaking Strain” (1), John Wyndham, “No Place Like Earth (1), John Kippax, “Friday” (1) and “The Dusty Death” (2), J. T, McIntosh, “Machine Made” (2), James M. White, “The Apprentice” (3), Arthur C. Clarke, “Who’s There” (3), Robert A. Heinlein, “Ordeal in Space” (7), John Rackham, “Catharsis” (9), Robert Ray, “The Heart of Blackness” (6), John Wyndham, “Dumb Martian” (3); Charles Harness, “The Chess-Players” (10), and Peter Phillips, “Dreams Are Sacred” (10).
There are some very shaggy dog stories in here. John Kippax’s “Friday” hinges on the emotional response of humans stranded in a crash to the robot which has existed for centuries on the cannibalised parts of other robots, lasts long enough to help them, and dies. Zenna Henderson’s “Ararat” follows the formula of all her “People” sequence in relating the story of a lost soul who finds her own people and is no longer lonely—all these stories combine “coming out” narratives with the psychology of loneliness. J. T. McIntosh’s story “Machine Made” in which a moron is rendered super-bright by a computer might as well be fantasy. Arthur C. Clarke’s “Who’s There” is the shaggiest of the lot, as a spaceman is freaked out by a “ghost” in his suit which turns out to be “the badly misnamed Tommy”, the ship’s cat and her newborn kittens. The entire story is wound up like a spring for this soppiest of all punch-lines… but then in science fiction, cats have traditionally had a free pass. The remainder of the stories can (loosely) be described as considering the effect of the universe on the human condition. Arthur C. Clarke’s “Breaking Strain” tells of two men stuck in a ship when the oxygen supply is holed. With only enough air left for one to make the trip,. One bends, one breaks. Although the conclusion focuses on psychology, Clarke shows us all the workings out and all the “ideal” possibilities of rescue and then explains why they wouldn’t work, the engineering is crucial to the racking up of tension for both the participants and the readers. John Wyndham’s “No Place Like Earth” recounts a lonely Earthman trapped on Mars after the Earth is destroyed, and his eventual reconciliation with his situation when he falls in love with a young Martian woman. The story is an elegiac study in the psychology of loneliness and adaptability. In contrast Kippax’s “The Dusty Death” is a very straightforward analysis of hostility which turns out in this story to be due to a moonbase crew member’s claustrophobia. A more sf-nal consideration of the issue is to be found in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Ordeal in Space” in which a space man conquers is post-traumatic agoraphobia when he rescues a kitten from the ledge of a skyscraper (yes, cats again). Rackham’s “Catharsis” and Philips’s “Dreams are Sacred” both explore the power of dreaming to cure. Rackham’s construction might now be written in virtual reality as acting out is used to explore stress. Philips’s work is more Jungian, in which the metaphorical aspect of dreams is undercut by the medic.
I’ve left the most interesting to last; Ray, Harness, White and Wyndham. Robert Ray’s “The Heart of Blackness” is heartbreakingly simple: a boy desperately wants to go into space, we follow him all the way through a conventional career story, only to find out that men cannot go into space, only women can cope with the emotional strain. Harness’s apparent shaggy dog story about a chess club that cannot see the attraction of a rat which plays chess… until they hear it’s written a chess book, is actually a study of obessives everywhere, and gets right under the skin of a “reason to know” mentality ; Wyndham’s “Dumb Martian” tells of Lelly, an abused “bought wife” of a Martian settler, who uses her carefully acquired education to kill her Terran husband: an unusually feminist story for it’s period, it probably better read as a comment on the interaction between intelligence and education (an argument central to the education and class debates of Wyndham’s Britain). Finally, we have James H. White’s “The Apprentice” which uses the shaggy dog story to talk about human psychology: when an alien is sent to a department store as an intern, the personnel manager must find this centaur like creature a nice round hole. While many of the episodes deserve the epithet “hilarious” the science fiction is in the developing interactions and our growing understanding of workplace psychology. The pay off—the personnel officer sent to intern on the alien’s home planet—provides us with a slingshot ending which confirms rather than undermining the intent of the story. What is most evident however, is that in all these stories it is not the agony of the human spirit per se which is the focus of the narrative, but the psychological engineering which resolves the situation.
Sixteen stories categorized as “politics” are too many to discuss here. The full list can be found in the footnote. I’ll focus instead on just four, John Brunner’s “Stimulus” (6), Martin Loran’s “An Ounce of Dissension” (7), “Four in One” by Damon Knight, and “Mantrap” by Kathleen James. Political science fiction if often he most interesting because it directly subverts scientific ideas to create allegory. In modern sf for children and teens, as we shall see in chapter seven, allegory rarely raised itself above the level of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses (2001) or LJ Addlington’s The Diary of Pelly-D (2005) in which there are simple swaps of oppressor or oppressed, or a futuristic setting used to create distance. Each of these stories however, makes the working out of a scientific idea the canvas for political discussion. John Brunner’s “Stimulus” may be the most simple in this sense. A planetary ecologist is dead, killed by the spitcats with which he was working. An investigate reveals that he did not make mistakes but was actively breeding for sentience: this choice, sets up the slingshot ending in which future colonists must consider how they will live with the spitcats in the future. In Brunner’s story, scientific investigation in itself becomes a profoundly political act. Martin Loran’s “An Ounce of Dissension” is more direct, a study of the effect of trade on repression. Our hero is a librarian in charge of the mobile library of the future. Landing on a planet that permits pornography but bans books, Quist delivers a printing press and an electronic “micro-library: to he resistance. Again, there is a slingshot ending in that Quist is well aware of the dangers of knowledge and leaves speculating about what will interest the resisters and where it will all go in the end. But there are two elements here that interest me: the understanding that economics and trade are part of the overall paradigm which supports science and supports an expanding future, and the emphasis on communications technology. Of the texts I’ll be discussing in this book, only Janet McNaughton’s The Secret Under My Skin (2005) and Conor Kostik’s Epic (2004) come close to this understanding of the entangled world, yet neither concept is actually all that difficult. ~”Four in One” by Damon Knight is the first of two stories about co-operation. In this four people are absorbed into a jelly fish like being. As one is an army officer and another the internal loyalty officer this rapidly turns into a struggle for dominance between the protagonist and a rather weak female, and the other two. The people have to figure out the creature’s capabilities and co-operate, but while they manage the former, they don’t manage the latter and the creature splits. Our hero and his girl survive and split again. Apart from the allegory of co-operation however, it is also an allegory of conquest and colonization: the two survivors reconstitute a form of blurred humanity (and the nuclear family) so that the story is peculiarly recursive and oddly Campbellian in its insistence of the pre-eminence of the human form, but it does all of this through a tale of the ultimate alien encounter. The second story of collaboration is Kathleen James’s “Mantrap”. In “Mantrap” a prisoner has is mind imprinted with that of a spy. The spy is sent to a planet that can disappear from the radar. But the lingering personality of Leyoti, supported by the expectations of the community that he is Leyoti, and by the intense collaborative psionic powers of the community, eventually force the spy beneath the surface and Leyoti comes to the fore. There are all sorts of issues here, worked into a simple enough story of psi powers: collaboration versus individuality, identity politics, the importance of community and friendship, the nature of the cold war. What all the stories have in common in fact is complexity and challenge, they can be read on level, but none of them make their readings obvious.
Before moving on, I want to consider the areas of maths and physics: these are almost completely absent from sf written for children—only William Sleator has made an effort to write seriously in this sub-genre. Taking both elements together, there are nine stories altogether of which one is Kathleen James’s “Mantrap” already considered, which adds to its already complex political speculation a solid description of inter-dimensional physics. Three of the stories are famous, Fredric Brown’s “Placet is a Crazy Place” is set on a planet whose suns provide a complex day/night cycle, regular hallucinations and insane life-forms: the solution to the “birds” knocking down the buildings by flying through the earth, is pure engineering—put air underneath the buildings—but the solution to survival is a matter of calculation, alter the day cycle to match the hallucination periods not the light. Isaac Asimov’s “The Feeling of Power” is a very sad story in which a prole reinvents mathematics only to see it adopted by the military to win a war, but it takes the reader through the basics of calculation to see the taken for granted power of arithmetic. Arthur C. Clarke’s “Inside the Comet” presides over a computer break down and the magnificent sight of two teams of astronauts calculating flight paths on abaci. Two stories attempt to use physics: Richard Hughes’s “The Vanishing Man” in which a professor discovers he fourth dimension but dies when his re-entry coincides with a solid object, is pleasantly gory, rather old-fashioned in its denial of any consequence or further experimentation, but passes on quite a lot of basic physics; Murray Leinster’s “The Middle of the Week After Next” is more interrogative. A scientist works out how to manipulate atoms so that people can pass through a solid object. He experiments on a deerskin but on a taxi-ride is thrown through time--leaving all his metal behind. Over the next week, people disappear, The driver is arrested. Then people start to reappear in reverse order. When the scientist comes back he explains to his friend that he was thrown “at right angles” into time, or the middle of next week. The effect constantly gets weaker so each subsequent person traveled to a nearer time and enough information is given to allow the reader to figure this outs. The story is a shaggy dog, but laden with physics at the end. Finally there is Italo Calvino’s elegiac “Games Without End”. In volume 9 Calvino contributed “At Daybreak” in which inter-stellar energy played games with matter as “stuff” began to emerge in the universe until they had created “the stuff” of the universe. In “Games Without End” an energy being playing marbles with atoms turns sour and the narrator and his friend chase each other across galaxies only to discover the universe is curved and they are simultaneously in front and behind each other. The story is pure allegory, there is almost no real physics, but it captures the wondrousness of the physical and scientific worldview.

The index to Out of this World, edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis & Mably Owen, 1960-1972 was provided by William G. Contento and can be found at:
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/0start.htm.