Review: Sometime, Never, by William Golding, John Wyndham, and Mervyn Peake

Review: Sometime, Never, by William Golding, John Wyndham, and Mervyn Peake       

by Rich Horton

In my recent survey of potential Hugo winners and nominees from the 1950s I realized that this book was a major gap in my reading. It includes three original novellas, by major British writers. Of these three only John Wyndham (1903-1969) was part of the SF genre, and had a good deal of visibility to the general public -- books like The Day of the Triffids had been bestsellers. (His full real name was John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, and he used all of his names in various permuatations as pseudonyms, but it was John Wyndham that had the most success.) Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was an artist and novelist, best known for the Gormenghast Trilogy, an eccentric fantasy masterpiece. And William Golding (1911-1993), of course, was most famous for Lord of the Flies, but wrote other SF-adjacent work such as Pincher Martin and The Inheritors. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983. 

In a sense Sometime, Never is a precursor to the many three novella original anthologies that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. No editor is credited. It's quite a remarkable book, though, and it seems to have sold very well, as it had numerous reprints in its Ballantine paperback edition. Its first edition, in 1956, was a UK hardcover from Eyre and Spottiswoode. Ballantine published simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions in the US in 1957. 

The three stories are "Envoy Extraordinary" (about 22,000 words), "Consider Her Ways" (about 25,000 words), and "Boy in Darkness" (about 23,000 words.)

The opening story is William Golding's "Envoy Extraordinary". This is set in the Roman Empire. The old Emperor and his bastard son Mamillius agree to see a petitioner. This man, Phanocles, is accompanied by his sister. He has offerings for the Emperor, created based on his brilliant scientific insights. But it is only his sister Euphrosyne's beauty that interests Mamillius, who calls her the Tenth Wonder of the World -- a term Phanocles would apply to his steam engine, his pressure cooker, or his cannon. But Mamillius' infatuation with Euphrosyne is enough to allow the indulgent but skeptical Emperor to support a trial. Things are complicated, however, by the Emperor's legitimate son, Posthumus, who is impatient to take the throne, and jealous of his father's apparent preference for his bastard son. Once Posthumus hears rumors of a fantastic new ship, he makes his move ... with terrible consequences for many ... This is a darkly satirical story, and slyly funny. The message is an old one: scientific and engineering advancements must wait for a society ready for them. A simple message in its way, but well conveyed, and supported by Golding's portrayal of the Emperor and his variously foolish sons; and by the cynical Emperor's treatment of Phanocles and his sister -- not cruel but opportunistic.

Wyndham's "Consider Her Ways" opens with the narrator waking to a thoroughly confusing situation -- surely an hallucination. She is in a grotesquely huge body, recovering from what she soon learns was a pregnancy, resulting in four daughters. Her nurses are tiny women, who call her a Mother, and they are perturbed by her confusion, and her evident belief that this is not real -- it must be a dream of some sort. She is taken to a home -- on the way she sees nothing but women, of various body types. Over time her memory returns -- she knows her real name, Jane Waterleigh, and knows that her husband Donald has been killed in a plane crash. But what is this hallucination? Finally her case brings her to the attention of an older woman, an historian, who explains the situation -- this is the future, after an engineered plague which killed all males. The surviving women managed to preserve society, partly by creating several "castes", based on ant society: Mothers (or Queens), Workers, etc. Jane remembers that she had agreed to experiment with a new drug, hoping it would help her depression over the death of her husband. Instead, her mind was cast out of time into that of Mother Orchis. Her interlocutor, the historian, explains how superior their society is -- largely because there are no men to control -- to own -- women. Jane resists, but her arguments seem weak. (That said, the future society as portrayed seems -- to present day eyes, at least -- quite awful; and no woman, I would think, would sign up for the role of Mother in this society.) It's a pretty decent, again rather satirical, exploration of an idea, but I have to say I think it might have been more convincing if written by a woman -- partly because I suspect this future society would have been more interesting and would have portrayed a more convincing woman only future.

Finally, "Boy in Darkness" is fairly clearly a pendant to Peake's Gormenghast series, and the title Boy is surely Titus Groan, the protagonist of that series. Here, the Boy (who is occasionally called Titus) rebels against the constant ceremony of life in the castle, especially on this day, when he turns 14. At the end he escapes, and makes his way to the countryside, and a river, and a terrifying encounter with two odd creatures -- a Goat and an Hyena. These are both in thrall to a certain Lamb -- and we gather that the Lamb somehow has the power to turn humans into his idea of their essential animal nature. The Goat and Hyena have been searching for a long time for another human to offer to their lord, the Lamb -- and the Boy is at last a possibility. But the two are also sworn enemies, and the Boy is able to use that enmity to resist the peril he faces in his encounter with the Lamb. It's a very strange story, very dreamlike, but really quite impressive. Dark, yes, and weird in the best way.