Fiction Reviews
Tomorrow Came
(1963) Edmund Cooper, Panther, £0:12.5p, pbk, 123pp
You may be forgiven for not knowing who was Edmund Cooper: he was a British SF author who died aged just 55 in 1982. Though I started attending SF conventions in the 1970s, I see that he was never an Eastercon Guest of Honour and if he was ever there, he never popped up on my radar. Likely, today, only really old, old-timers will know of him. Yet despite passing so young, and also being published in N. America, he was a prolific author with some 19 novels under his own name and a further seven under the pseudonyms George Kinley, Broderick Quain, Martin Lester (three books with the Curtis Books imprint) and Richard Avery (the 'Expendables' series). He also had nine collections published of which Tomorrow Came is the third. He also reviewed SF for the Sunday Times from 1967 until his death and he co-wrote the screen-story for the film The Invisible Boy (1957) – trailer here.
I picked up a copy of Tomorrow Came from an elderly member of my local SF group who has been divesting himself of his library (a few of us in the group are ginving some of these titles a good home).
What Tomorrow Came does do is provide an insight into a significant British SF author who was most active from the late 1950 to '70s: That's half a century ago as Britain pulled away from the shadow of World War II.
Its short stories, in order, are:
'Welcome Home'. Humanity's first expedition to Mars discover giant pyramids. Inside… Two things of note. This story sees Mars have a much thicker atmosphere than we know it today. This is because early estimates were made looking and the edge-on thickness an opacity of its atmosphere and likely over-estimated due to the planet-wide dust storms we now know Mars regularly experiences. The other point of note it that planetary destruction is a plot theme (this recurs in the first few stories).
'Death Watch' concerns the psychological impact on a nuclear weapons bunker operative when the unthinkable takes place.
'The Piccadilly Interval'. Passenger on a London underground (tube/metro) line arrive at the next station 10 minutes late, but to them they think they are still on time. And then some of the passengers are missing…
'The Mouse That Roared' sees a small country bullied by two rival super-powers, each of whom want the tiny nation be there vassal state. However, the country develops a new weapon… Or have they?
'Nineteen Ninety Four'. Unlike Orwell's classic dystopia of an impoverished world under an all-seeing ditctator, Cooper's story is set in an ultra-wealthy future where overconsumption is very strictly compulsory…
'When The Saucers Came' sees the reaction humanity has to the arrival of giant saucers over the major capitol cities of the world…. But one newly married couple have an encounter with a small one in the depth of the countryside…
'The First Martian' recounts the impressions the first human born on Mars has on his first visit to Earth…
'The Lizard of Woz' recounts the mission of a reluctant alien assessor of Earth and humanity. It doesn't end well…. This is a comedic story that delivers well.
'The Life and Death Of Plunky Goo' recounts the failure to cope with tremendous success of a puppeteer whose creation garners him great fame and wealth.
'Judgement Day' is viewed decades after 99% of the Earth's population has been wiped out by a virulent plague…
'Vertical Hold' concerns the battered, old TV set belonging to a jaded office worker who has little in his life… (This could easily have been a Twilight Zone episode.)
'The Doomsday Story' follows a scientist whose political master charge him to build a weapon that could destroy the world… Except that other nations have decided to do this too…
That seven out of the twelve stories involve actual or potential existential doom, and six of these war, speaks to this collection's time. This is broadly true of all science fiction which, after all is created by writers of their time and culture. The early 1960s was not even two decades after the end of World War II, an event fresh in everyone but the newly born baby-boomers and that war itself came on the heels of WWI – the 'war to end war'. Furthermore, the spectre of nuclear weapons and the arms race was high in the public's mind as exemplified by the Aldermaston Marches of the 1950s and '60s. Fear of a third World War was palpable and so not surprisingly it was a feature of much early 1960s SF. This perhaps is this collection's strength in that it offers a window onto the concerns, worries and fascination of its time. It was a very different world. At that time there were only two TV channels in Britain, both black and white and with very low resolution. There were no mobile (cell) phones, no internet, no home computers, no microwave ovens, no DVD/videos, no domestic satellite TV and satellite TV transmission was rare and very special, air travel was expensive and limited, there were no cash-point ATMs, supermarkets were new, there was toxic lead added to petrol, there were no CAT or PET hospital scanners, transistors were new and there were no microchip electronics. Science fiction conventions were a rarity and you had to really seek out the SF community to find it – there was no social media (it was an excellent Darwin filter) that helped make fandom of the day special. In Britain, its Eastercon had got going but Novacon had not. The Worldcon did exist but all but one Worldcon had been held in N. America. Writing SF at that time was very different to that of today.
I am not suggesting that you seek out this particular collection, but I do proffer that when browsing second-hand bookshops in the wild and you come across a collection of science fiction shorts from decades gone, then do bag it: it will provide you with its own window into its own author's time. Then, with your own familiarity of modern SF, you will be better placed to see where that stands within the evolving genre landscape. Such a wider perspective only adds value when reading present-day works and SF generally. That can be no bad thing.
Jonathan Cowie
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