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A review by sjstuart
Lambda I and Other Stories by John Carnell
3.0
This is a collection of British sci-fi from the early 60’s, interesting to me mainly for the cultural snapshots than the quality of the stories. This was British sci fi, written for the British market, and it shows: in the language, the speech patterns, the class divisions and the characters’ motivations. Not that these tells aren’t present when some of these same authors are writing for a broader audience, but here it seems to permeate the background.
The stories themselves are solid, but not spectacular. I suppose that is to be expected, given that these were all from a single magazine (New Worlds Science Fiction) over a short time period and “previously unpublished in the USA”, so it necessarily excludes award-winners and those good enough to have made it into other anthologies. The story quality is about what you’d expect for a sort of consolation-prize anthology.
I didn’t care much for the title story, a slightly paranormal story of psychological distress caused by a new sort of travel by quantum tunneling, which managed to squeeze in a surprising amount of atomic physics. My favorite was probably John Rackham’s “The Last Salamander”, a short but impressively vivid recounting of first contact with a thermophilic species that thrives in the bowels of a coal furnace.
The stories themselves are solid, but not spectacular. I suppose that is to be expected, given that these were all from a single magazine (New Worlds Science Fiction) over a short time period and “previously unpublished in the USA”, so it necessarily excludes award-winners and those good enough to have made it into other anthologies. The story quality is about what you’d expect for a sort of consolation-prize anthology.
I didn’t care much for the title story, a slightly paranormal story of psychological distress caused by a new sort of travel by quantum tunneling, which managed to squeeze in a surprising amount of atomic physics. My favorite was probably John Rackham’s “The Last Salamander”, a short but impressively vivid recounting of first contact with a thermophilic species that thrives in the bowels of a coal furnace.