Fantasy Annual 3Edited by Philip Harbottle and Sean Wallace
Cosmos Books
Review by Andrew Darlington (2000)
‘It was easy to forget the way things had been now he was seventy,’ comments Sydney J Bounds’ character in ‘Advent’. A weary nostalgia. Old wrinklies in an aimless crumbled world of dereliction and the teasing menace of feral kids. A world decimated by the blaring plague of advertising and limitless credit provided by self-replicating alien machines. In a neat metaphor for the growth of mindless consumerism the aliens finally come to collect payment, by foreclosing the whole planet. Bounds’ wry story sets the tone for this, the third in Philip Harbottle’s original fiction anthology series, and it’s a prime high grade delight. SF isn’t fixed in time. It is present and future, but it has yesterdays too. And here are the writers whose creative imagination took the monochrome skies of the British 50s and early 60s and crayoned them day-glo, with new atomic drama cutting through the intergalactic darkness with luminous novae of vivid primal colours.
There are more recent names here too, including my own. But even the contents page (illuminated by ‘classic SF imagery’ from Daleks and Dan Dare artist Ron Turner), which lists my name alongside new fiction from EC Tubb, Bounds and Philip E High, is a magical pure adrenaline experience.
But these books are no mere self indulgent retro trip. In the previous volumes, Tubb’s ‘Mirror of the Night’ is a rare example of his ventures into Gothic fantasy; Bounds’ ‘No Way Back’ is a remarkable fusion of trad SF overlaid with disturbing biogenetic concerns, coming together into a near Ballardian acceptance of mutational synthesis. High’s ‘The Kiss’ merges a mood of stark assassination documentary realism with a visionary transcendental quality. Each story matches moments of these writers at their best.
In the current volume, ‘Vibration’, a bizarre Bounds completion of a John Russell Fearn idea, aches with regret for the protagonist’s Father’s lab experiment (in Fearn’s time all protagonists were scientists), which inadvertently trapped his childhood friend in a freezing, supernatural void between dimensions. An irony just as hard as that in Tubb’s ‘Fallen Angel’ where a bartered time delay device given to an alien abductee leads inevitably to an endlessly recycled, endlessly delayed moment of terminal impact following a five mile fall from a mid Atlantic plane crash.
Or elsewhere, in Philip E High’s ‘The Gulf’, where an experimental project with weapons potential ‘freezes’ an island in time, resulting in a final reunion of a twenty-year-old father with his fifty-year-old son, a moment both poignant and surreal.
Editor Phil Harbottle’s fiercely partisan loyalties to this generation of writers began with his custodianship of the archive legacy of British SF’s earliest pioneer, John Russell Fearn. It continued through his editing of Vision Of Tomorrow, the last of the great British SF magazines of the 1960s, and it now finds its ultimate vindication in this excellent series. Subsequent decades might have bred more sophisticated stylists with greater lit-academic fine tuning, but when it comes to narrative skill, readability and pure entertainment value, these values have few equals.