The Household Gods and the Darth Vader Corkscrew
Category: Television
Out of the Unknown: ‘The Counterfeit Man’ (BBC2 11 October 1965)
The second episode broadcast was actually producer/story-editor Irene Shubik’s preferred series opener, but she was overruled by Sydney Newman, the Head of Drama. Presumably, Shubik encountered Alan E. Nourse’s story, first published as ‘Counterfeit’ in Thrilling Wonder Stories (August 1952), when Brian Aldiss included it in the More Penguin Science Fiction Stories (1963) anthology. Only Nourse’s third story (he debuted in 1951), it is a rather clunky knock-off of John W. Campbell’s ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938),1 without any of the humour or incipient paranoia of Philip K. Dick’s similar-ish ‘Beyond Lies the Wub’, published in Planet Stories (July 1952).2
Nourse is one of those generally competent writers with whose work, some of which is available for free on Project Gutenberg, I am not overly familiar. I remember in my early teens encountering ‘Brightside Crossing’ (1956) in at least one general anthology of stories for schools, and my PhD reading did include his The Bladerunner (1974) and its adaptation by William S. Burroughs as Blade Runner (A Movie) (1979), neither of which have any connection to Ridley Scott’s film other than he acknowledged them both in the credits for the use of their title.
The expedition to Ganymede, the first to explore a moon of Jupiter, has been a bust. As Captain Jaffe moans to Doctor Crawford:
Nothing. A big black heap of boulders. No atmosphere. No life forms. No valuable minerals. Nothing. For three months we explore, take pictures, write reports, and it all adds up to a big fat zero. (15)
But something is afoot. Crawford’s routine medical examination of the crew reveals that one of the eighty men on board has no blood sugar, and a follow up test shows he has one hundred and thirty-five milligrams of creatinine per hundred ccs of blood (ten would mean massive kidney failure, and twenty-five would mean the subject was dying of uremia). It is a nice and relatively underplayed point – this is not an anomaly, it is literally impossible for a human with these characteristics to live. Crawford ran the tests again, and found the subject now had normal human blood. While the doctor is explaining this to Jaffe, navigator Donnie Shaver keels over and dies. Jaffe assumes that whatever the test results meant, the matter is resolved, but Crawford is quick to correct him – the results were those of another crewman, Roger Westcott, and since there is no way Shaver could have been exposed to contamination on Ganymede, this must mean that was is loose on the ship is not a disease but a shapeshifting alien.
So let’s also suppose that these life forms had no particular rigid anatomy … Perhaps they were just some sort of jelly-like protoplasm, capable of changing to fit whatever conditions they might meet. Perhaps they could copy anything they wanted to copy, and sat watching us right under our noses, looking like rocks, looking like sand, like ammonia snow – maybe even looking like men. … Maybe one of them killed Roger Westcott, out there in the rocks somewhere, and came aboard this ship, looking like him, copying his appearance, copying his reactions … Maybe he couldn’t know, at first, just how the blood chemistry of a human being was supposed to balance. Maybe it took time for him to change and copy, so he came aboard with a nice, convincing outer shell all completed but with the inside still mixed up and uncertain … It could be a flawless copy. It would look like the man, act as he would, react just as he would react, down to the last cell. The creature would be that man except for a fragment of alien mind persisting, thinking, holding fast to an alien identity, moving with alien motives. (17-18)
Crawford’s breakneck page and a half of hypothesising – in which he also suggests this alien killed Shaver as a distraction, a way of tricking them into wasting the journey back to Earth searching for a non-existent extraterrestrial disease – is a strangely liminal, and very science-fictional, piece of text. Building such an edifice on a single piece of ambiguous evidence is hugely implausible, and yet for the experienced sf reader rendered plausible, or at least undisbeliavable, by three things: the fact that that those test results are impossible, combined with the pleasures of the extrapolative process and the memory of/resonance with Campbell’s story. In any case, Captain Jaffe is convinced:
A creature like that would have to be evil, wouldn’t it? To do something like this, treacherous, and sly, and evil. (18)
His leap into morality – and his blindness to terrestrial colonial endeavours in the face of a potential alien invasion of Earth – is stunning in its typicality. (The obvious reworking of Campbell reminded me of Ivan Yefremov’s ‘Cor Serpentis’ (1958), which reworks Murray Leinster’s ‘First Contact’ (1945), but sadly, unlike Yefremov’s spaceship crew, at no point do Nourse’s characters get a copy of the earlier story from the ship’s library and subject it to much-needed ideology critique.)3
Crawford comes up with a plan to confirm his (frankly wild) speculations before they reach Earth. He does not explain it, but it involves semi-framing Westcott for stealing the money the crew collected for Shaver’s widow, creating an atmosphere of escalating tension for the remainder of the journey home.
And it is just as well he does not explain it until near the end of the story.
Because it is really really silly.
Even more silly than the moment when the alien-Westcott, tricked into a pressure chamber by being ordered to clean it, sets about
scrubbing down the metal deck with a brush and soapy water. (29)
Surely that there is his not-human tell. Swabbing the decks. Why draw out all the air to kill him? Why not just make him walk the space-plank? (This is the kind of rapidly produced commercial sf that has no room for cultural speculation, so social structures merely imitate existing ones and sometimes unthinking cliché just plain takes over.)
Extrapolating from the alien’s earlier physiological error, Crawford concludes that although it
copied Westcott’s neural circuits … and [thus] assumed the proper conscious reactions to whatever situations arose [,] he couldn’t possibly follow unconscious human reactions and get them right. … There was one thing the alien missed that no human nervous system would have missed. The monster tripped himself up because he didn’t know enough about the function of the model he was copying. The counterfeit man didn’t have one thing that every other man on the whole ship had before this thievery business had run its course. … He didn’t have indigestion. (31)
Fortunately, Nourse has already set a secondary plot in motion.
Crawford suspects there is more than one alien on board, something Nourse has already confirmed for the reader, so before anyone can question the doctor’s decision to kill a man because he doesn’t have wind, he is busy disabling the shuttles and zooming off to Earth to ensure the ship and its crew are placed in quarantine.
There are two or three ways the story can go from here. Either Crawford is the alien and does not realise it, which is what PKD would have likely done, or when he heads back on board the deserted ship to collect his notes he will run into the alien and either kill it or be replaced by it.
Nourse opts for the latter, and I suspect this is one of the things that attracted Shubik to the story, because although Nourse kind of fluffs it, Crawford turning around and finding himself face-to-face with himself is a promisingly visual moment.
Sadly, the adaptation kind of fluffs it, too. The build up – canted Dutch angles, a roaming alien eye point-of-view shot that recalls the 2D version of the 3D alien povs in Jack Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space (1953) – is one of several visually and aurally striking sequences in the episode. But Crawford’s (Alexander Davion) hysterical screaming is prolonged and overdone. And the waters are a little muddied by the make-up effects on his charred corpse after he is shot, which too closely resemble the first stage of the make-up effects when Westcott (baby David Hemmings!) dies – effects that remain pretty effective, as his skin cakes and crumbles and his dessicated corpse melts and oozes.
The adaptation by Philip Broadley – who among other original scripts and adaptations, wrote episodes of Danger Man, The Champions, Department S and Jason King, so I am predisposed to liking his work – makes some very sensible decisions. It retains but downplays the guff about the alien’s inevitable evilness. It drops some useful hints about Crawford’s plan involving the unconscious mind and an increasing human need to dream when under stress. It has Westcott checking electronic equipment rather than scrubbing the floor. And it avoids any mention of indigestion – though this also presents a genuine problem, in that it remains a little unclear how Crawford’s strategy of tension actually reveals anything.
A nice early touch is to have Shaver’s (Peter Fraser) collapse preceded by him uttering lyrical and oddly broken memories of the greenness of Earth. Language collapses, he says something about the ‘egg of orang’ just before his words become disconnected, nonsensical. Is he possessed by an alien, too? Nourse himself is unclear on this point, as is Broadley’s script. But it is a well-written, disorientating, creepy moment.
The acting throughout is also pretty good – less theatrical and portentous, more naturalistic, than in ‘No Place Like Home’, with overlapping dialogue4 suitable to a self-consciously modern ‘quality’ television drama with an extremely mobile camera and a dynamic use of close-ups. This sense of modernity is emphasised in a couple of wordless montage sequences, combining superimposed images and a camera that roams the ship’s deserted bridge, accompanied by a strident score that combines percussive noises and strings with electronic sounds, as alien-Westcott lies in his bunk, unsleeping, compulsively squeezes a stress ball/rag until a strange goo leaks out of his hand. It helps that, even when young and pretty, David Hemmings never looked convincingly human.
In part, the mobility of the camera is related to the design of the spaceship’s bridge – a large open space dotted with equipment and consoles, but also clearly a studio space, if not on the scale of the one in Mario Bava’s Terrore nello spazio/Planet of the Vampires (1965).4 There are some nice bits of futuristic design, too. It is intriguing to see a representation of an expedition disavowing its own colonialism crewed entirely by white men with brushed forward blond hair, as if they have sprung fully formed from the loins of Midwich or UFO’s Commander Straker (Ed Bishop). Their uniforms look like some kind of space pyjamas, fastening down one side of the chest, with a Nehru-ish collars on each of which there is a two or three digit 
number – presumably indicating rank. Palm plates open silent sliding doors – no Star Trek whoosh, here. Oversize playing cards no longer have any images on them; the nine of hearts, for example, is just a paperbacks-ized card with 9H written on it in an old-fashioned futuristic font.
Overall, I think Shubik was right. This would have been a much better series opener than ‘No Place Like Home’. Sure, Nourse would not have been the draw Wyndham was, but ‘The Counterfeit Man’ actually often feels like cutting edge television drama. Less stagey. Pacier.
And the adaptation genuinely transforms – and improves upon – the original story. Though I wish it would have changed some character names. When I read the story I was
distracted by what I assume was an instance of Nourse reaching for character names and, consciously or not, coming up with traces of Hollywood character actors when it came to the captain and the doctor
Other things to watch out for
— Alexander Davion’s tendency, when shot from a low angle, to look like James Mason
— Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell as Captain Jaffe. He seems to have been in an episode of everything ever made, so it took me a while to work out that it was not Breaker Morant (1980) I most recognised him from but Neighbours, Home and Away, A Country Practice, The Flying Doctors and Prisoner Cell Block H (of which he also directed some episodes).
— The rubber outfitted security guards right at the end, one of whom is Derek Martin – Alex from Eldorado and EastEnders’ Charlie Slater.
Last episode, ‘No Place Like Earth’
Next episode, ‘Stranger in the Family’
Notes
1
Already adapted as The Thing (from another world) (1951), it had at that point, as far as I can tell, only been reprinted in J. Francis McComas and Raymond Healy’s Adventures in Time and Space (1946), so Shubik may well have been unfamiliar with it. On the other hand, she was evacuated to Canada in 1939, and later, after gaining an MA at University College London, settled for a while in the US, living first with a brother in Princeton, and then with another brother in Chicago, so she might have encountered the Campbell story in the US but settled for the variant at hand. It would probably have been cheaper and easier to get the rights, too. But this is all speculation.
2
Dick’s story was not reprinted until his The Preserving Machine (1969).
3
There are three excellent ideology critiques of Campbell’s story: John Rieder’s ‘Embracing the Alien: Science Fiction in Mass Culture’, Science-Fiction Studies 26 (March 1982): 26–37 ; Wendy Pearson’s ‘Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer’, Science Fiction Studies 77 (March 1999): 1–22; and Sherryl Vint’s ‘Who Goes There? “Real” Men, Only’, Extrapolation 46.4 (Winter 2005): 421–438.
4
There is, however, a mismatch between this space and the design of the spaceship. The opening effects shot shows the craft to be a donut-ring design, with a giant central array, but it is the array, not the torus, that revolves. The implication is that the bridge is in the torus since the starry backdrop visible through its windows – a blackened studio wall with some lights on it representing stars – remains motionless. But where, then, does its artificial gravity come from? And why does the array revolve if not to produce artificial gravity?
Sources
Alan E. Nourse, ‘The Counterfeit Man’, in The Counterfeit Man. London: Corgi, 1965.
Out of the Unknown DVD boxset. BFI 2014.
Out of the Unknown: ‘No Place Like Earth’ (BBC2 4 October 1965)
‘No Place Like Earth’ was not producer Irene Shubik’s choice for Out of the Unknown’s opener. She was concerned about its languid pace and, following the recent Mariner 4 flyby of Mars, about its old-fashioned representation of the red planet (and it was apparently taken to task over this when reviewed on the BBC’s discussion programme, Late Night Line Up (1964-72)).
Shubik would have preferred the adaptation of Alan E. Nourse’s ‘The Counterfeit Man’ (1952),1 and David Campton’s original teleplay ‘Stranger in the Family’ was also ready to air. But Sydney Newman,2 the Head of Drama, selected the episode based on a story by John Wyndham, by far the most famous of these authors…
Although as far as I have been able to determine, the story had still not appeared in print anywhere under Wyndham’s name.3
Wyndham’s story follows Bert, one of a small number of humans on Mars after the complete destruction of the Earth fourteen years earlier. Unlike the others, who have settled into a life of hopeless dissolution, Bert is an itinerant tinker, travelling the Martian canals from place to place, fixing pots and pans and basic mechanical devices for the indigenous population, who are unskilled at such things. They live lives of quiet contentment, without regret or strife, long after the decline of the ancient Great Ones, whose ruins dot the landscape. The gentle Martians offer Bert a home among them, even a wife, Zaylo, but he cannot bring himself to abandon his memories of Earth, his sense of difference, of human ambition. He is incapable of embracing a world he knows is dying.
Abruptly, a ship from Venus arrives. There, other human survivors are racing to transform their precarious colony into a new Earth before the Slav settlement, at the other Venusian pole, expands to threaten them. Venus, however, turns out not to be what he’d been led to expect. Behind the façade, there is a strict hierarchy of privilege, and he is put to work as an overseer of indigenous slave labour. He revolts, escapes to Mars and, after ensuring there can be no future contact between the two worlds, returns to join his new Martian family.
Such a mixture of introspection and exposition, with only a little violent action, must have seemed quite manageable for a more-or-less studio-bound production, but for the need to represent two very different alien worlds – the declining Mars and the jungle Venus of pulp sf. But the staging is quite ingenious, involving maybe half a dozen sets. The ruins of a Martian building, vaguely resembling a classical temple, appear differently dressed as the two key Martian settings. Venus is represented by a pair of enclosed spaces, a kind of train station and a small train carriage; there is also a quarry set, and two other sites which might actually be part of the same set. And there are a couple of rooms in the spaceship. 
A brief location shoot at Loch Lomond provided images of the canals, with Martian mountains matted into the top half of the frame; a single shot of what appears to be a quarry was presumably filmed somewhere nearby. There is also a briefly glimpsed effects shot of a spaceship blowing up in the distance, and a stock shot of quarry blasting. And when Bert (Terence Morgan) first hears of the Venus settlement and fantasises about the new and ultramodern human society being built there, an image of the Martian ruins fades into a view of a skyscraper at a sharp angle that emphasises its height, and shots of the moderne arched vaults beneath – I think it is Centre Point, constructed in 1961-66, and at the time one of the tallest buildings in London.
One of the most interesting aspects of Wyndham’s story is the way in which it thinks about colonialism, drawing on and overlapping British and American traditions, stereotypes, clichés and expressions, while also offering a gentle, if deeply compromised, critique.
Bert recalls the first human encounters with the Martians:
They were a gentle, sympathetic people, and sincere. It was a tragedy, one of a string of similar tragedies that the first Earthman to ground on Mars had seen them as a weak, effete race; the ‘natives’, inferiors, to be kicked about, and exploited when convenient. … Their quietness, their lack of hurry and their calm philosophic ways were a soothing antidote to [Bert’s] sense of drive and thrust. He found out quite soon that what his companions had called their laziness and effeteness was a misunderstanding of minds that worked differently in some ways, and certainly saw life differently; whose conception of the virtues was altogether alien, and he found out how his abilities could help their deficiencies in exchange for the foods they knew how to grow. (12, 15-16)
Despite his profound sympathy for the Martians, Bert still sees humans as the norm – he does not see his mechanical orientation or his lack of agricultural knowledge as deficiencies. And British colonial idioms recur:
The Martian grapevine wasn’t any more reliable than other bush-telegraphs. (24)
Some of the other humans
had taken Martian girls and tried to go native (13)
because almost all the humans working in space were men, and therefore the survivor settlement on Mars is all male – although briefly, and in the story’s most overtly misogynist passage, Wyndham seems to have imagined it more as a wild west town:
There had also been two women, hostesses or stewardesses. Good enough girls, and amiable at first, though no great beauties. But circumstances were against them, and the pressure was great. They had gone quickly to the astonishing depths of badness good women can reach once they start. It was reckoned they had caused a score of murders each before they were found to be susceptible to the same method of disposal. Things were quieter after that, with drinking the main amusement.
Later, as Bert contemplates leaving Mars for Venus, he hears men singing, not
drunken bawling … but men singing lustily, cheerily, with hope in their hearts … (30)
And what do they sing? A song about prospecting for gold on the banks of the Sacramento river.4
Shades of the forty-niners, ghost of covered wagon trains crawling, crawling across prairies and deserts, over mountains, forging on against hardships and hunger. With not much gold at the end, perhaps – only an arid land. But a land which their sons would make to bloom like a garden there beside the Pacific. . . . (30-1)
The episode presents the Martian women and children as somehow Mediterranean-ish. Their faces and exposed skin are in swarthy but not too dark blackface; their hair, make-up and jewellery recall stereotypical images of ancient Greece (or maybe Rome or Egypt). Their simple dresses are suited to labour rather than elegantly draped robes, and this semiotic confusion is extended by their clearly unskilled pounding with large mortars on maize- or corn-filled pestles. (They 
also seem to have white mouthguards in place, smoothing out their teeth, but it is quite a subtle alien effect.) I don’t think we ever see an adult Martian male, which is one of the ways in which the episode develops the differences between the two worlds. On Venus, no-one wears natural fabrics, and the setting is all male. There are said to be women – fewer in number than the men and protected from the vicissitudes of life on the planet in the compound reserved for officers and the government – but we never see them. The Venusian settlers are promised wives in the future, once they prove themselves, but somehow that day never seems to come.
Soon after Wyndham’s evocation of manifest destiny, and now on Venus, British orientalism and idiom reassert themselves:
long leaves rippled in the Wind, writhing like Medusa’s hair. Crowning the central rise of the Settlement stood the massive palisades of the seraglio. (31)
which an unnamed settler labels
Jam tomorrow (31)
(The expression, from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), had gained fresh currency as a term for politician’s promises following John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’.)
This unnamed character, out of favour with the Venusian ruling class, explains how the system works, in terms that resonate with immigrant experience (in 1948, Empire Windrush had brought the first group of post-war West Indian immigrants to London). Bert will be given full citizenship if his work proves satisfactory, but reasons will always be found to test him just one more time. If and when he does become a citizen, he will discover there are no women available for him to marry, but he will be put on the waiting list. If he makes a fuss, his citizenship will be revoked. If he becomes a problem for the regime, he will just disappear.
Visually, the episode’s vision of the Venus settlement owes more to the 1954 Nigel Kneale/Rudolph Cartier adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). The walls of the futuristic waiting room at the railway station are adorned with slogans:
VENUS IS THE FUTURE
WORK OBEDIENCE PROGRESS
STRICTER CONTROL GREATER OUTPUT
Bert’s interlocutor, named Freeman (Joseph O’Conor), drapes a coat over a surveillance camera, adding something like ‘they can watch us through these, too’, even though it is clearly not a telescreen.
In both story and episode, their ensuing conversation about the ways in which humans are failing to build the best possible world on Venus draws upon the Gettysburg Address, citing the line about ‘a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’. Obviously intended by Wyndham as part of the Americanisation of his mid-Atlantic voice, it has an acute resonance, given that Venusian civilisation, such as it is, is built upon slave labour (in the episode it stands out as implying a US pulp vision of a future populated by inevitable and endless Americans, but is contradicted by the cast’s obviously British accents). The name ‘Freeman’ also evokes the immediate post-bellum context, though it does not appear in the story, only the episode. And although the episode does include two actors of colour,5 neither is cast as Freeman; intriguingly, though, he is played by an Irishman.
Of the slaves with whom Bert is charged, he thinks:
They were intelligent little creatures, but the general opinion was that they were dead lazy. … that just showed narrow thinking. Laziness is a relative term to be measured against work. Nobody called a flower or a tree lazy. The point was that a wild griffa never had any conception of work. When it was caught and shown work, it didn’t like it. Why should it? The captives netted by a drive in the forest came in as sad-eyed, bewildered little figures, of whom a number promptly went into decline and allowed themselves to die. The rest had no great will to survive. Life in captivity was very little better to them than no life at all. The only thing that made them work at all was the desire to avoid pain. They were intelligent enough to be taught quite complicated duties, but what no one had been able to instil into them was the sacred idea of duty itself. They could not be brought to the idea that it was something they owed to these human invaders of their planet. … There was also the uneasy feeling that his position in Venusian society was not all that different from theirs. . . . (37-8).
Despite the common deployment of stereotypes about laziness, this seems to reflect British colonial thinking rather than American slavery and Jim Crow discourses.
The episode does not convey much about the Venusian griffas. Slighter than the humans, they are vaguely simian in their demeanour, but in a neat bit of cost-cutting they are invisible beneath synthetic overalls and head-encompassing helmets. Instead, it focuses on Bert’s immediate and utter revulsion at slavery while also evoking the Holocaust labour camps (remember those slogans, remember ARBEIT MACHT FREI). Bert is under the command of Khan, played by the Cypriot actor George Pastell, who was regularly cast as Egyptians, Indians, Arabs, Latin Americans, Russians, Italians, Spanish, and so on.6 Here, his Mitteleuropan accent wavers in and out of sounding German, and his costume is clearly intended to invoke some kind of Venusian fascist. Later, when Bert is called upon to explain his presence on the spaceship back to Mars, he deadpans that he is ‘just obeying orders’. However, the image of the Middle Passage is perhaps evoked when, having lied about a mission to round up Martians as slaves, an Officer – played by Geoffrey Palmer! – points out that the difference in gravity between the two worlds would make them useless.7 Bert shrugs off this ‘wastage’.
Ultimately, my dissatisfaction with the episode is the same as with the story. Both versions hinge on Bert’s recognition that his memories of Earth are actually of the better world humans imagined, not of Earth as it actually ever existed. But in both, like some Candide-lite, he opts to let Venus (and the remaining humans on Mars) go to hell and settles for tending his own garden (and beautiful indigenous bride). Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
Other things to watch out for
— Hannah Gordon as Zaylo, the Martian hottie
— disgruntled Jack Russels in furs as Martian bannikuks
— brief glimpses of Bill Treacher – Arfur from Eastenders
— the human salute, which comes across as kind of premature, extremely white and rather awkwardly constrained black power fist
Next episode: ‘The Counterfeit Man’
Notes
1
Originally published as ‘Counterfeit’ in Thrilling Wonder Stories (August 1952), it was anthologised in the UK in Brian Aldiss’ More Penguin Science Fiction Stories (1963).
2
He had been poached by the BBC in 1962 from the commercial channel ABC, where his major successes included Armchair Theatre (1956-74) and The Avengers (1961-9), and where he had also produced the series of sf serials, Target Luna (1960), Pathfinders in Space (1960), Pathfinders to Mars (1960-1) and Pathfinders to Venus (1961). Shubik worked with him as a story editor on Armchair Theatre and on an sf anthology drama series Out of this World (1962). At the BBC, Newman soon initiated The Wednesday Play (1964-70) and Doctor Who (1963-89). Shubik joined him, becoming story editor on the contemporary drama anthology series Story Parade (1964-5) before proposing Out of the Unknown as a science-fictional companion; later she would oversee the transformation of The Wednesday Play into Play for Today (1974-80).
3
Wyndham published under a variety of monikers (John Beynon Harris, John Beynon, Wyndham Parkes, Lucas Parkes and Johnson Harris), all derived from his own rather lengthy name, John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris. The publishing history of ‘No Place Like Earth’ begins with a short story, ‘Time to Rest’, which constitutes roughly its opening third. ‘Time to Rest’ was published in two magazines: in the US, as by John Beynon Harris, in The Arkham Sampler (winter 1949), edited by August Derleth; in the UK, as by John Beynon, in New Worlds 5 (August 1949), edited by John Carnell. Derleth reprinted it in a US anthology, Far Boundaries (1951), and in the UK it was included in the Wyndham collection Seeds of Time (1956), published in hardback by Michael Joseph and paperback by Penguin. Beynon’s direct continuation of ‘Time to Rest’, the longer and rather less elegiac ‘No Place Like Earth’, appeared in Carnell’s New Worlds 9 (Spring 1951) and in the US, under the misleading title ‘Tyrant and Slave-Girl on Planet Venus’, in Donald A. Wollheim’s 10 Story Fantasy (Spring 1951). In October 1952, Carnell joined the two stories together as ‘No Place Like Earth’ as the lead story in an anthology of British sf, No Place Like Earth (Boardman), still as by Beynon, which enabled him also to include a John Wyndham story, ‘Survival’ (1952); the anthology was reissued by the Science Fiction 
Book Club in January 1954, and published in paperback by Panther in August 1961. (Joined together as a single story in this way, ‘No Place Like Earth’ also appeared under Beynon’s name in the first of an annual anthology series, Out of this World (Blackie), edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen; it reversed the order of the two opening stories in Carnell’s anthology, beginning instead with Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Breaking Strain’ (1949), but otherwise the contents do not overlap.) At least, this is the publication history I have been able to cobble together from internet sources. Shubik was, by all accounts, well-versed in sf, so it is hard to tell when she might first have read the story. However, the Panther paperback would have gone on sale around the time she was starting to look for stories to adapt for ABC’s Out of this World.
4
There is no direct equivalent in the episode, although Bert does sing snatches of the very British ‘A-Hunting We Will Go’ and, if I recall, the ‘Eton Boating Song’.
5
One of them, uncredited and apparently Asian, is seated among the group of humans on Mars; the other is the Jamaican Roy Stewart who, as a Venusian security guard, actually gets to speak a line of dialogue (badly). A stalwart of British film and TV throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he is perhaps best remembered as Toberman in the 1967 Doctor Who serial, Tomb of the Cybermen.
6
Pastell also appeared in Tomb of the Cybermen, as Eric Kleig.
7
In the story, Bert merely hopes that no one will raise this objection – maybe this addition is evidence of Shubik’s anxiety about the story’s badly dated planetary science.
Sources
Beynon, John, ‘No Place Like Earth’, in John Carnell, ed., No Place Like Earth. London: Panther, 1961. 9-42.
Out of the Unknown boxset.BFI, 2014.
‘Global Recession in Century 21’, from Jason Wyngarde, Neo-liberalism and Other Economic Fantasies (Verso 2023)
The first major international organisation to fall
victim to the global recession was WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol. Funding cuts saw it broken up into smaller national units, many of which were immediately disbanded. Marineville, that icon of postwar internationalism and sixties 
design, was auctioned off to International Leisure, a division of Tracy International. It now combines a high-tech gated community with an exclusive resort. Its successful hosting of G7, G8 and G10 meetings, far from the media and even 
further from protestors, only enhanced its reputation among business elites. A retirement village for the super-rich is currently under construction.
ASP-UK, advised to expand its range of activities while right-sizing its operations, diversified into pollution monitoring, landfill management and recycling facilities. Around this time, mute amphibian beauty Marina became a 
subject of interest to Immigration Services. Sans papier and facing internment, she quietly disappeared, apparently preferring to return to life beneath
the seas as one of Titan’s slave-girls. Six months later, Captain Troy Tempest, fresh from rehab, married Lieutenant Atlanta Shore. Acrimonous divorce followed within the year.
Spectrum also suffered massive cuts as European governments shifted military funding away from international collaborations. Angel Interceptors were replaced with ill-suited Eurofighters, 
and the cost of retrofitting them to Cloudbase’s unique launch systems became just one more reason to scrap this ‘airborne monument to Keynesian folly and excess’. 
When irreconcilable differences in management styles saw attempts to share resources with SHIELD collapse, the fate of Spectrum was sealed. It slowly shrank to a clearing house for commissioning Private Military Contractors before formally disbanding.
Captain Scarlet, once the heroic face of this proud organisation, spent his final years as a Spectrum agent attending corporate events in a desperate bid to find alternative income streams. The extent of this desperation 
only became apparent when footage of a five-thousand-dollar-a-plate event was leaked onto youtube, showing Scarlet being shot and killed – over and over again – by drunken executives at ten thousand dollars a bullet. You can see in his eyes that he knows it will never be enough.
In later years, Scarlet became the repeated victim of Joe McClaine, a stalker suffering from multiple personality disorder. As a child, Joe was the 
subject of systematic abuse by his scientist father, apparently condoned – and certainly covered up – by his employers, the shadowy World Intelligence Network. During the course of his trial, Joe manifested as many as 90 different personalities. Ironically, Scarlet and his would-be killer are currently in separate wings of the same asylum.
One figure to ride out, and indeed profit from, the recession and era of austerity was billionairre Jeff 
Tracy. His reputation, however, took quite a beating. Media outlets controlled by Tracy International depict him as a very private man, withdrawn and introspective. Critics, however, insist that he no longer dare show his face in public after the scandals that rocked International Rescue. Did the CIA really subcontract extraordinary 
rendition abductions to International Rescue? Was Thunderbird 2 being used for human trafficking? What exactly happened to that refugee flotilla that sank without a survivor less than a mile from Tracy Island?
Jeff Tracy sporadically attempts to win back public support, philanthropically endangering the lives of his poorly-trained sons (and bystanders) by disregarding health and safety regulations in emergency situations. Courtesy of striking firefighters and ambulance crews, the once-lauded Tracy brothers are now commonly known as Scab Rescue.
29/10/10
I was beginning to think maybe the road trip wasn’t such a good idea…
…and then a giant
cactus only went and punched me lights out.
British soft imperialism conquers the Moon, the stars! At last!
Have you ever wondered why the British Experimental Rocket Group never got us to the Moon?
Nigel Kneale, authorised biographer of (and chief propagandist for) Professor Bernard Quatermass, was always quick to blame it on the militarisation of the British Space Programme, while American analysts tend to pin it on the UK’s lack of frontier spirit and yankee know-how (and there is certainly evidence that Britain tried to recruit some of that – though they ended up with a washed-up alcoholic who spoke so quickly you always had the sense that he was impatient for any conversation to end so he could get to the bar).
The truth, however, is revealed in Stephen Baxter’s Moonseed (1998).
On p.451 of a 534-page novel, we read that a US astronaut, who has landed on the Moon in a jerry-rigged emergency mission to save the Earth,
sipped her … tea. Even freshly made, it did not seem hot enough. One of the old clichés of lunar travel, she thought: water boils at lower temperature in low pressure.
And, as this model and the Winnerton Flats prototype reveal, the lunar domes Quatermass intended to build would not have solved the problem.
That’s right.
Basic physics robbed us of the Dan Dare future we were promised. Once it became clear quite how rare a nice cup of tea would be in space, we as a nation – an entire nation – just lost the will to go there ourselves. 
However, the story does not end there.
A careful reading of Baxter shows that it was Britons who unleashed the planet-destroying Moonseed, thus forcing the US and Russia to co-operate in the mission that would ultimately lead to the rapid terraforming of the Moon (and then, it is implied, human expansion across and beyond the Solar System). And should anyone doubt that this is ultimately a British triumph, observe what happens on pp.489-90. Henry, the American responsible for setting the lunar expedition in motion and for sneaking along the equipment necessary to make the Moon habitable at the speed (if not quite the absurdity) of Total Recall, knows that his crazy plan has worked the moment it starts to rain on the Moon.
James Garner, 1928-2014
This was the year we lost Big Jim.
A couple of weeks ago, on the way back from work, it suddenly struck me that I had forgotten that he had died. I even went online when I got home to check that I hadn’t misremembered (or misforgotten, or whatever). Saddened once more, I resolved to finish watching Nichols (1971-72), his western TV series just prior to The Rockford Files (1974-80), before heading overseas for the holidays. The final episode, ‘All in the Family’, produced another affective flip-flop as, in the opening sequence, Nichols is suddenly gunned down by Quinn
(Anthony Zerbe); there is a brief passage of what-the-fuck? as the funeral proceeds and it doesn’t all turn out to be one of Nichols’ scams; and then Garner turns up, admirably moustachioed, playing Nichols’ brother, who cons the town into bringing Quinn to justice. You can only imagine my delight when, a few days later in Tucson, we sat down to start watching season three of Maverick (1957-62), and in the opening episode, ‘Pappy’, Garner plays not only Bret Maverick, but also his father, Beau Maverick, and Bret pretending to be Beau. I hope he picked up three pay cheques, because he is always worth that much. 
(I have no idea what I am going to do about the final two seasons – in season four, Garner is replaced by Roger Moore, playing the Mavericks’ English cousin, Beauregarde; and in five, Jack Kelly carried on alone as Bart, interspersed with reruns of old Garner/Bret episodes. My inner completist is at war with my inner loyalist.)
I am curious, though, about the sensation of missing a celebrity, someone I never actually knew.
Like all right-minded people, I was appalled by the massive manipulation of public sentiment when Princess Diana died,* and scoffed at the miserable attempts to whip up a lacrimae rerum rerun when that vile, gin-swilling elitist, the Queen Mother, finally choked (I guess from having her greedy snout so deep into the public trough).** And despite being washed up alone in a Californian one horse dorp the day Thatcher died, I still managed to find myself partying into the small hours in the one gay bar in town.
On the other hand, but also like all right-minded people, I was bereft for months when Elisabeth Sladen died. Part early object-cathexis, I know; and partly because just as so many of us have a ‘my Doctor’ – mine would definitely be Tom Baker were it not for Peter Cushing – she was always ‘my companion’.
Maybe it was that unexpected feeling of loss that prepared me for Jim’s passing. And the fact that he had always been there – without ever actually being there –since I was a child. (A friend recently caught a late episode of 8 Simple Rules 
(2002-05) and said how much it made her long for a big living room centred around an open fire. Me, my wishes are simpler: a battered old armchair, from which James Garner comments wrily on my everyday foibles and mishaps.)
Garner was a big, handsome man, with an easy-going and amiable persona, and 
good liberal politics. He was not hard to like, even when playing an arrogant shit of a corporate CEO in Barbarians at the Gate (1993). But his real appeal, especially when playing Maverick and Rockford (both created by the equally admirable Roy Huggins), was his performance of human frailty. He played heroes who were cowards, gunmen who eschewed guns, a private 
dick who took plenty of lickings because he couldn’t always avoid a fight, no matter how hard he tried, and was not much good at fighting anyway. He played a cardsharp who did not cheat, except when he did. He pursued money but could not get hold of it. He fell for women he knew were trouble, and was suckered every time, because despite his mercenary instincts he also tended to trust people. Everyone jokes about how The Great Escape (1963) has a claustrophobic tunneller (Charles Bronson) and a 
blind forger (Donald Pleasence), but they forget that James Garner plays a scrounger with a heart of gold. He refuses to leave the forger behind when the POWs break out of Stalag Luft III en masse, and is finally captured when he refuses once more to abandon his friend.
So if you are looking for some kind of moral compass that understands our weaknesses, don’t ask yourself what Jesus would do.
Ask what Big Jim would do.
* The only good thing to come of it was the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, and then only because it inspired Stewart Lee’s Princess Diana Memorial Fountain Memorial Fountain Fountain routine.
** Despite constant media whitewashing and the vague resemblance, she was no more Paddington Bear’s Great Aunt Lucy than I am.
Mark Bould 