Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Best of Philip E. High by Philip E. High The Best of Philip E High. I have fond memories of the novels of Philip E. High. I recall finding an Ace Double edition of The Mad Metropolis in a secondhand bookshop in Melbourne when I was in my teens, and being swept away by its heady rush of ideas and action-adventure. Months later I tracked down Prodigal Sun and, my favourite, The Time Mercenaries --the latter about a submarine's crew revived from death and brought to a future age to fight off alien invaders on behalf of an evolved, effete human race. Over the course of the next few years I read every book-length work by High (with the exception of Blindfold from the Stars , still a hard book to locate) and enjoyed them all. It has been said that High is a pessimistic writer, a Dystopian; it has also been said that he begins his novels (and it's often true of his short stories, too) from a 'worse-case-scenario' standpoint, after which things get increasingly better--an effective dynamic for the propulsion of an exciting storyline. Two stories in this collection (High's first, published almost twenty-five years after his last novel) employ the same method. "To See Ourselves" has a series of volunteers descend to an alien planet, and to almost certain death, in the spirit of exploration; yet what the explorers discover there will effect a dramatic and improving change on humanity. "Psycho-Land" starts with the premise of an entire village sent mad when a psychiatric experiment goes wrong: the malaise spreads, threatening to engulf the entire land, until a man of integrity is sent in to solve the problem--with uplifting effect. Other stories fuse pessimistic scenarios with possible solutions. High often pin-points humankind's failings, and then offers a grain of hope: in "A Schoolroom for the Teacher" human expansion is commented upon thus: "I hate to think," said Lange, "what they thought of Federation history. The number of worlds we have - er - acquired, during our expansion, the number of life forms pushed into reservations. " But it is humankind which is about to be taught a lesson when a vegetable hive-mind hitches a ride aboard the returning exploration vessel. In "Fallen Angel" an evil human city is used as a testing ground for the probity of a superior alien being--again with optimistic consequences. The best stories in this volume are each quite different. "The Collaborator" falls into the 'hope from despair' category: humanity is depicted as corrupt and cynical, though one good man's collaboration with the alien 'invaders' suggests hope for the future. It's a spare, economical, and incredibly fast-paced story, without a wasted word, a pastiche of the American hard-boiled school of detective fiction, and excellently done. "Risk Economy" posits a fascinating premise: a lone star-traveller returns to Earth after nine hundred years to find a new form of economy holding sway. Humankind is immortal, and in an effort to curb the population growth, citizens earn credits in return for risks taken: there are enough ideas in this story alone to furnish a complete novel. "Routine Exercise" is my personal favourite. The crew of a Royal Navy submarine falls through a hole in time and finds itself in the distant past, there to encounter alien visitors to Earth. The detail of life aboard the submarine is convincing, and the dark, dank mood, and the sense of threat, is well conjured. The story closes with an interesting twist, an effect High handles well in a number of his stories. In "The Jackson Killer"--High's favourite of all the stories in this volume--an assassin is sent to a colony planet to execute a 'Jackson', a man deemed to be a threat to the stability of society: it's intriguing and fast-paced and closes with another twist-in-the-tale dénouement. These stories, edited for this collection with an informative introduction by Philip Harbottle, were first published between 1956 and 1970, most of them in the late fifties and early sixties. They are very much of their time, an era in the genre when pace and ideas were valued above such literary considerations as style and characterisation, and if a cavil were to be levelled at the stories it would be on this count. But it would be churlish to criticise High for not doing something he never intended in the first place! What he does do, and does well, is to present often interesting ideas in fast-paced, exciting and entertaining stories typical of the best of the Golden Age of science fiction. High, Philip E. 1914- Born April 28, 1914, in Biggleswade, England; son of William (a bank clerk) and Muriel High; married Pamela Baker, August 17, 1950 (died, September, 1997); children: Jacqueline, Beverly. Education: Attended high school in Canterbury, England. Politics: "Tory." Religion: "Raised Church of England, now unorthodox believer." ADDRESSES: Home— Canterbury, Kent, England. Agent— Philip Harbottle, 32 Tynedale Ave., Wallsend, Tyne and Wear N28 9LS, England. CAREER: Worked as insurance agent, realtor, shop assistant, psychic medium, and journalist, 1935-50; East Kent Road Car Co. Ltd., Kent, England, bus driver, 1950-79; writer, 1955—. Military service: Royal Navy; served during World War II. WRITINGS: SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS, EXCEPT WHERE NOTED. No Truce with Terra, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1964. The Prodigal Sun, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1964. The Mad Metropolis, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1966, published as Double Illusion, Dobson (London, England), 1970. Reality Forbidden, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1967. These Savage Futurians, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1967. Twin Planets, Paperback Library (New York, NY), 1967. The Time Mercenaries, Ace Books (New York, NY), 1968. Invader on My Back, Robert Hale (London, England), 1968. Butterfly Planet, Robert Hale (London, England), 1968, reprinted, Wildside Press (Rockville, MD), 2002. Come, Hunt an Earthman, Robert Hale (London, England), 1973. Sold—for a Spaceship, Robert Hale (London, England), 1973. Speaking of Dinosaurs, Robert Hale (London, England), 1974. Fugitive from Time, Robert Hale (London, England), 1978. Blindfold from the Stars, Dennis Dobson (London, England), 1979. The Best of Philip E. High, edited by Philip Harbottle, Wildside Press (Rockville, MD), 2002. A Step to the Stars, edited by Philip Harbottle, Wildside Press (Rockville, MD), 2004. Contributor to magazines and newspapers, including Authentic Science Fiction . SIDELIGHTS: Philip High once told CA: "I write because I have to write. Once an idea is formed, it prods and nags until I begin. Once started, I keep hours that no work union would tolerate. My wife keeps calling me for meals, my friends write and ask if I am dead because I don't answer letters. I am hooked on the damn thing and my Muse stands over me with a whip. "I have never claimed to be a great literary figure. I am a storyteller and a square one to boot. I like all the loose ends tied up by the last page and I am psychologically incapable of writing anything but a happy ending. I suppose, deep down, I write as an off-beat do-gooder, hence the happy ending solution. "My advice to young writers is to write the type of yarn you like reading the best. If you like reading Westerns more than anything else, don't try to write a detective story. Soak yourself in Westerns, then try your hand. I papered an entire wall with rejection slips until I tried the form of literature I like most, science fiction. My first short story in this field was accepted at first attempt. Note: I don't think this rule applies to poetry. I love verse, but have written only nine poems (never considered for publication) which I can read without shuddering." High's novels are characterized by well-constructed story lines and bizarre settings without stylistic flamboyance. In Twin Planets, alien invaders wreak havoc on a future alternate Earth, and the humans are compelled to try to help this Earth avoid the same fate. Aliens are the antagonists in Invader on My Back, as well. In this book, the aliens have separated people into groups by personality type, but they all have one thing in common —a fear of looking up as the result of their subservient status. In Reality Forbidden, dream machines exist that are capable of lulling humans into conformity. Don D'Ammassa observed in Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, "Indeed, one of the many recurring themes in High's novels is a dread of conformity and the value of the individual." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: BOOKS. Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, 3rd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1991. PERIODICALS. Books and Bookmen, April, 1970, review of The Time Mercenaries, p. 26. Times Literary Supplement, November 28, 1968, review of Reality Forbidden, p. 1346. Philip E High. Philip E High was an English science fiction author. Born in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire on 28 April 1914 his writing career spanned over 50 years before his death in Canterbury, Kent on 9 August, 2006. In the course of his career he published some 14 novels and numerous short stories. Philip E High made his name initially in the 1950s with a series of short stories for magazines such as Authentic Science Fiction, New Worlds and Nebula. A collection of these short stories The Best of Philip E High was published in 2002. The Best of Philip E. High by Philip E. High. A Brief Biography of Philip E. High (1914-2006) Philip Empson High was an English science fiction author. High was born on 28 April 1914, in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire in England. His father was a bank worker and the family moved first to North Walsham in Norfolk, then to Great Yarmouth, and finally to Whitstable in Kent in 1921. Young High was a prodigious reader of all types of fiction and non-fiction, but especially of the novels of Nevil Shute. At age 16 he began to write his own stories in various genres, including detective stories, westerns and romances, and began to submit them for publication without success, but he did not try his hand at science fiction until many years later. Although he had encountered science fiction for the first time at the age of 13, it was not until the 1930s that High began to read British science fiction magazines such as Scoops . He would also buy imported copies of American SF magazines such as Astounding Stories when he could get them. High's career as a local newspaper reporter was interrupted by the Second World War. After serving in the Royal Navy he gained employment as an insurance agent before becoming a bus driver with the East Kent Car Road Company in 1950, a job he retained until his retirement in 1979. He married Pamela Baker in 1950 and they had two children, Beverley and Jacqueline. It was not until 1955 that High decided to try his hand at writing science fiction stories. His first attempt, The Statics , was published in the September issue of Authentic Science Fiction . This was a begin a successful period, with the publication over the next eight years of nearly fifty stories in magazines such as Authentic Science Fiction , Nebula Science Fiction and New Worlds Science Fiction . By 1964, the science fiction magazine market in the UK was changing. High had little sympathy for this new direction so decided to redirect his efforts to writing novels. His first, The Prodigal Sun , was published by Ace Books and lead to a string of fourteen novels and numerous reprints. With the exception of four short stories for the short-lived magazine Vision of Tomorrow , approached High with a request to contribute to more than thirty new pieces followed as well as two anthologies and reprints of some of his novels. Philip E. High died on 9 August 2006, aged 92. References - Vector - Issue 83, Vol.5, No.3, October 1977 - see pp.26-9 - 'The Man Who Invented Wooden Spaceships' by Andrew Darlington - Space Voyager - Issue 7, February-March 1984 - see pp.51-3 - 'Prophet Without Honour' by Marion Van Der Voort - Locus - Issue 548, Vol.57, No.3, June 2007 - see pp.82-3 - 'Philip E. High' by Philip Harbottle - Locus - Issue 548, Vol.57, No.3, June 2007 - see p.83 - 'Phil High' by Marion & Richard van der Voort - Philip E. High: A Tribute - Philip E. High - A History - retrieved 27 October 2016 - Philip E. High: A Tribute - Books Written by Philip E. High - retrieved 27 October 2016 - The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction - Philip E. High - retrieved 25 June 2011 - Infinity Plus - Phil High - Literary Craftsman - retrieved 25 June 2011 - Eight Miles Higher - The Man Who Created the Wooden Spaceships - retrieved 6 March 2016 - The Independent - Philip E. High - retrieved 25 June 2011 - Science Fiction Writers of America - Philip E. High (1914-2006) - archived 30 September 2007 - The Internet Speculative Fiction Database - Philip E. High - Summary Bibliography - retrieved 25 June 2011. A list of the first publications of Philip E. High's novels and short stories appears below. An illustrated bibliography can be found here. The Best of Philip E. High by Philip E. High. Of course, futures were different in those days. They use turbo-taxis and televids. They kill each other with viciously nasty hand-weapons called ‘Burners’ that chop victims in half to leave what bits remain black and unrecognisable. In fact, the first of the twelve stories in this stellar constellation originates as far back as November 1956, in the long-extinct ‘Authentic SF’ magazine. The cover of which – no.74, shows an exploration vehicle crawling the veiled surface of a Venusian desert, cat-tracks skirting warped rock formations melting molten into surreal shapes. Through to the final story, taken from ‘Visions Of Tomorrow’ (no.4 January 1970), with a formation of Eddie Jones mauve spacecraft weaving alien skies through green rock pinnacles and huge looming moons. Such magazines – along with their writers, editors and eager readers, obviously considered themselves tuned in to forward thinking. But what is such hard-wired commitment to future-technology without imagination? And – even in these way-back futures, Philip E High provides that element in abundance. His story “A Schoolroom For The Teacher” envisions an alien world with a single collective sentience pooled from its diverse but synergic organisms – a concept that resonates down much SF since, not least through Stanislaw Lem’s ‘Solaris’ . Just as the hard-boiled crime-fiction basis of “The Collaborator” – where a corrupt human resistance force opposes incognito alien refugees who are benevolently manipulating their host planet, has brained-up connecting points all the way through to Gene Roddenberry’s dumbed-down ‘Earth: Final Conflict’ . With its bonus of a faked Mars-landing that neatly prefigures the ‘Capricorn One’ movie. I first encountered the fiction of Philip E High in my teens. But even by then – based in Canterbury and navigating star-lanes through his day-job as a bus-driver, he’d already moved out of the magazines plundered here, into crafting a cool dozen novels through the decades following their demise. And I continued to follow his work clear through to his subsequent amazing resurgence through the various editions of Philip Harbottle’s invaluable ‘Fantasy Annual’ series. Yet my appreciation for his fiction has only increased across the intervening years. Of course, all those 1950’s futures glimpsed through these lost issues of ‘Nebula’ and ‘New Worlds’ – salvaged here complete with their original blurbs staccato with atmospheric promise, were different. But not THAT different. They smoke endless cigarettes. They use dial telephones. But while we now agonise over the introduction of GM species, in 1957 High was already using swarms of genetically-modified locusts to eradicate a hell-world alien jungle in preparation for human colonists fleeing an imminent solar nova (“Plague Solution”). And where cracking the genome-code now ignites new angles on the nature vs. nurture debate, High was already presciently exploring its implications through “Fallen Angel” (from a 1961 issue of ‘Analog’ ) where ‘The Experiment’ removes all socially coercive constraints of law from even the most highly evolved individual to release the savage beneath. According to High this story ‘mines’ the philosophies of Emanuel Swedenborg, but whether its upbeat conclusion – opting for the aspirational pull towards order eventually outweighing the downward urge to nihilism, is High’s or Swedenborg’s, all of their ethical equations, moral overtones and implications are undeniable, they’re there. Even though, where Philip E High really excels is in conveying such ideas through direct story-telling, breathlessly-readable adventures delivered straight with few affectations or lapses into obscurantism. The sheer ‘Starship Troopers’ vertigo-tension of “To See Ourselves”, or the ‘which- Starship-crewman-is-the-shapeshifting-alien’ of “Guess Who”. The kink in the Einstein effect that has an astronaut on a five-year mission, as 900- years pass on Earth, but on returning, an immortality serum has enabled his contemporaries to live on – while forgetting him, in a changelessly static society. Or the compulsively powerful strangeness of a nuclear submarine inexplicably cast back in time to the Jurassic (“Routine Exercise”). These are the precise stories that first introduced me to his work. And they retain their power to amaze. The past, they say, is history. These are stories that look to the future. Just as I imagined I was when I first read them. And even though those futures were different way back then, this collection only emphasises that they still carry a hell of a lot of relevance, and a mighty fictional kick of originality. Published in: ‘BUSSWARBLE no.69’ (January 2003 – Australia) ‘FANTASY COMMENTATOR nos.55/56: 60th ANNIVERSARY DOUBLE ISSUE’ (August 2003 – USA) ‘OMEGA no.4’ (UK – April 2006) Things happen fast in the worlds of Philip Empson High, with narratives that pull like raw gravity. A road opens up into an alternate world beneath a strange sun. Virtual dreams seep over into real-space, so that a man who dreams of flying grows wings, that then destroy him. There are other strange physical metamorphoses, a reptilian hand, a cloven hoof, and hunters who pursue a girl with gossamer wings. In “Funny Farm” a new drug casts users into a surrealist fairy-land. Then there’s the time machine… This is Science Fiction like they used to write it. With all the strengths that made you love the genre in the first place. Last years ‘Best of…’ (from the same publisher) rummaged through what we must now call Phil High’s first great era, his stories from late-1950’s early-1960’s editions of ‘Nebula’ and ‘New Worlds’ . And while these ten new stories may work from that same template, they infuse it with a knowing vigour and ideas-rich alertness that confounds easy categorisation as pure retro. There’s no preamble. Little setting up touch-feely Rodenberry-style character traits, emotional states or personality conflicts – you’re just hurled into the maelstrom of ideas. Like the old movies where the mad scientist invents the machine that does… something, and he’s about to project the hero into some unimaginable otherness, but the scientist’s daughter gets in the way sobbing ‘no, you can’t do it, it’s too dangerous’, and he goes into crisis-meltdown while all you want is for her to get the hell out of the way, for him to get into the machine, take the potion – just do it. High just does it. He cuts out the silt of mainstream calculation that results in all those space-filling Fantasy Trilogies of blank pages for blank minds, those artfully-contrived plotted-by-numbers Creative Writers Workshop logics of balance and construction, and just propels you into wonder. The conversationally relaxed narrative-voice guiding us through “Pioneer Plus” takes it as a given that we’re as familiar with worm-hole portals as he is, even though neither of us may understand the full complexity of its underlying science. Just as the way “The Thing At The Bottom Of The Garden” re-visits the stock alien-visitor concept, but takes it into the odd suburban terrain of police incident-response procedurals, concern over the welfare of paparazzi-trampled flower-beds and the possible radiation-contamination of domestic pets, to which the benevolently glowing ET becomes almost peripheral. While the gradually accumulating concepts of transfiguration, metamorphosis and transcendence, which sometimes occurs through the medium of such alien intervention, and sometimes not, gives the collection a unifying up-beat theme. Again, these elements of evolutionary change are consistent with some of Phil High’s earlier stories, but now he takes them places they’ve never gone before. From the wonderfully garish Ron Turner cover, through to the weirdly diverse bickering alien ambassadors in “Galactic Love Story”, who overcome their species-differences through the inexplicable outbreak of some awesome unifying power, the catalyst for which is suggested by the story’s title, these images – in High’s own terms, out-drama drama. Unique. For further details contact: COSMOS BOOKS Wildside Press PO Box 301, Holicong, PA 19828-0201, USA www.wildsidepress.com. or PHILIP HARBOTTLE, Cosmos Literary Agency, 32 Tynedale Avenue, Wallsend, Tyne & Wear NE28 9LS, England. Published in: ‘THIS WAY UP no.11’ (UK – August 2004) ‘MIDNIGHT STREET no.3 (Winter)’ (UK – December 2004)