Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
Genre bibliographers have tended to avoid Britain’s long-running humorous and satirical magazine Punch (1841–1992), for the excellent reason that it didn’t publish much fiction, still less science fiction. Occasional needles of sf or fantasy interest are lost in the vast and seemingly unindexed haystack generated by a century and a half of weekly publication. It was thus a slight surprise to learn from my old fan friend Roy Kettle that the magazine ran a whole season of sf stories in 1960. This emerged during his visit to a 2017 Jane Austen exhibition in Oxford, whose priceless memorabilia included a Punch spoof titled “Jane in Space” and written by—of all people—Stella Gibbons of Cold Comfort Farm fame.
“Jane in Space” was billed with lofty condescension as the first of several such: “To improve the standards of Science Fiction, PUNCH starts this week a series of sf stories in the manner of the great novelists” (26 October 1960). I instantly deduced that the sequence must have included Kingsley Amis’s “Hemingway in Space” (21 December 1960), anthologized by both Judith Merril and the Aldiss/Harrison editorial collaboration, and featured in Amis’s own Collected Short Stories (1980). Andy Sawyer of the SF Foundation library confirmed this by using his secret powers of librarianship to have the whole 1960 run of Punch delivered to his desk for his and my literary edification.
In between the Austen and Hemingway pastiches, Norman Shrapnel did Charles Dickens, H.F. Ellis did Anthony Trollope, Richard Usborne (best known to me for critical writing about P.G. Wodehouse) did Rudyard Kipling, E.V. “Evoe” Knox did Arthur Conan Doyle, Peter Dickinson did John Galsworthy, B.A. Young did James Joyce, and Philip Oakes did D.H. Lawrence. Overall verdict: the sf anthologists who failed to snap up all nine of these stories did not deprive the genre audience of much. The Kipling pastiche is the most conscientiously researched, being set in the future of the Stalky & Co. canon with a footnote link to “With the Night Mail,” but it never really comes to life; the Conan Doyle send-up, a Sherlock Holmes story of course, is awful beyond belief. These are stories not so much to be read as to be pondered for their cultural significance: 1960 was the year when the ineffably conservative Punch recognized the existence of science fiction. (Having given that hostage to fortune, I expect to be deluged with reports of nineteenth-century Punch mockery directed at that funny foreigner Jules Verne, or rumbustious 1930s parodies of Olaf Stapledon.)
In the same year though not in the Great Novelists Perpetrate sf series, Punch acknowledged the huge popularity of John Wyndham’s 1950s work with a pastiche titled “The Day of the Migwitch Crackens” (28 September 1960) by regular contributor Alex Atkinson, spoofing what Brian Aldiss would later call the cozy-catastrophe genre. The horror that afflicts the little English village of Migwitch may or may not result from the local Research Establishment’s mislaying of “a small bottle of assorted genes [that] also contained some radioactive molecules.” Whatever the cause, there is a plague of animated and subtly threatening furniture: “The few inhabitants remaining have had to nail their chairs to the floor. Couches are lurking in gangs in the woodland copses.” In a terrifying act of role reversal, a stool sits on an army corporal. All ends pluckily and reassuringly ... or ... does it? This cheerful nonsense and Amis’s “Hemingway in Space” were deemed worthy of immortality in the annual Pick of Punch anthology (London, Arthur Barker, 1961) compiled by Punch editor Bernard Hollowood. The other eight sf pastiches were not.
Which is how I came to write a Punch entry for the SF Encyclopedia, mentioning a few other needles from that haystack such as Robert Graves’s ghost story “The White Horse” (12 January 1955) and the late example from A.P. Herbert’s lengthy “Misleading Cases” sequence of courtroom japes (a regular feature from 1924) that stars a rogue sentient computer: “Reign of Error?” (13 February 1963). Later came a special issue anticipating 1984, published on 2 January 1974, whose stories included Brian Aldiss’s comic inferno “Listen with Big Brother” (which he later collected in Last Orders under his preferred title “Wired for Sound”) and Alan Coren’s famous Orwell parody “Owing to Circumstances Beyond Our Control 1984 Has Been Unavoidably Detained ...”, whose mockery of British institutional efficiency seems—unfortunately—as pointed today as when it was written.
Meanwhile, amid research in moldy old humor magazines and showcase anthologies (nobody in the world is impressed that I own almost the entire 1960s run of Pick of Punch), I don’t seem to have read many real sf books.
A Dodo at Oxford: The unreliable account of a student and his pet dodo (Oxford, Oxgarth Press, 2010), “edited by” Philip Atkins and Michael Johnson, is a somewhat unreal book but does contain sf elements and is blurbed by Philip Pullman as “a masterpiece ... full of wit and fantasy.” The slim volume contains a slimmer one titled A Bird Considered: Being a Faithful and True Record of the Unique Obſervacions of that Curious and Exceeding Rare Bird of the Tropics, The Dodo, printed at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, a.d. 1695, with all surviving pages reproduced in facsimile. This purports to be the diary of a nameless student—not strictly a member of Oxford University, but with undergraduate friends—who has acquired a live dodo from the late Dutch proprietor of a traveling “Menagerie-in-Miniature.” (Other exhibits, the Singeing Mice and Arithmetical Fleas, have perhaps fortunately perished with their owner.) Our man, being of a scientific bent, observes and meticulously reports on the dodo’s growth, appearance, appetite, psychology, and perambulations. His studies, alas, are all too often interrupted by adventures and escapades, including the sinister activities of would-be dodo thieves. Meanwhile, the editors provide voluminous marginal annotations for almost every page, covering not merely dodos, Oxford arcana, and seventeenth-century typography but such later additions to the alleged 1695 volume as children’s scribbles (monsters and noughts-and-crosses games) in modern felt-tip pen, interleaved cigarette cards, bookmarks carrying dire government warnings against smoking, and a 1973 fishmonger’s receipt, all explicated in a parody of fanatical scholarship which occasionally escapes the Dodo book entirely. At one point we are treated for no very plausible reason (“As there is some space left on this page ...”) to several captioned photographs of electrical pylons, not prominent features of the 1690s English landscape. The sole aspect which our editors pass over in steely silence is a series of odd dreams related by the diarist’s student friend Mr. Flay, which seem to be prophetic visions of modern UK road-works, signage, bicycles, double-decker buses, and the like. All this remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
In short, A Dodo at Oxford is a profoundly silly book which deserves to be shelved alongside Leonardo’s Kitchen Note Books (London, Collins, 1987) by Jonathan and Shelagh Routh, an earlier treatise that reinterprets a wide range of da Vinci sketches and scribbles as food-related. Massive fortifications are in fact ceremonial salt cellars, complex engines are explained as a Device for Eliminating Frogs from Drinking Water, and so on. It also emerges that Leonardo’s genius invented such condensed foods as the cow pastille, forerunner of the modern Oxo cube. There is ample further weirdness: strange recipes (Boiled Coot, Mock Dormice, Snail Soup, Shoulder of Serpent), tips about etiquette (On the Correct Positioning of Diseased Guests at Table), and an eclectic salad whose ingredients include “A carrot / An onion from Venice / A radish from Cremona / Some green beans from Tesco ...” Leonardo’s Kitchen Note Books has all the hallmarks of a cult classic, but never made it.
The Word of God, or, Holy Writ Rewritten (San Francisco, Tachyon Publications, 2008) by the late, great Thomas M. Disch is another highly eccentric work. Within its brief compass, Disch becomes or discovers himself to be God, soliloquizes entertainingly on this subject, cracks a few jokes, reprints a 1983 story of vague relevance (“The New Me”), and spends a lot of pages riffing on an old grudge against Philip K. Dick. Dick has duly been consigned to “a hell that is in no way my creation, but rather the inner truth of his own soul as, inexorably, his sins came home to roost.” He is sent on a diabolical mission into the past to prevent Tom Disch from ever being born; but with Disch not only writing the story but also being God, this is obviously a doomed enterprise. The tone oscillates between that of Disch in his generously witty prime and that of his last year when his blog celebrated the passing of Algis Budrys with “Ding-Dong! the witch is dead!” (Another old grudge.) As the back-cover blurb says: “You will laugh. You will cry. You will pray.”
Tailpiece. Lastly, brief mentions of a couple of titles in which I have some personal interest as a contributor or Kickstarter subscriber. Tripping the Tale Fantastic (Minneapolis, Handtype Press, 2017), edited by Christopher Jon Heuer, is subtitled “Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Authors” and contains 18 stories, mostly original but with four reprints including a cobwebbed Langford piece from the mists of 1982. J.P. Martin: Father of Uncle: A Master in the Great English Nonsense Tradition: 1879–1966 (Kibworth Beauchamp, Matador, 2017) is a biography, by his daughter Stella Martin Currey, of the author of the Uncle cult classics for children; six chapters deleted from the published novels are included, plus earlier drafts of three more that were significantly rewritten. What fan of Uncle could resist?
David Langford continues to release his own ebooks at <ae.ansible.uk>.
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