by Edward Heron-Allen (Tartarus Press £25.00 pp257 ISBN 1-87262135-X 1998)
Edward Heron-Allen you may remember by coming across his nom-de-plume, Christopher Blayre, and coming across it not on the shelves of new or second-hand bookshops, but in reference works. When I saw this book advertised in the Cold Tonnage catalogue I thanked the Old Ones for specialist dealers and telephoned in my order. For Christopher Blayre is better known as a name than an author - best-known perhaps because he was banned, and now Tartarus have brought him back to life, given us a chance to see why. Specifically, this collection includes "The Cheetah-Girl", suppressed shortly after the First World War.
"Christopher Blayre" is the keeper of the records of the University of Cosmopoli (an alternate Oxbridge), and the papers he collects are deposited by the university fellows. Some of the these stories are fantasies, super-natural or otherwise; others move in other ways. "The House on the Way to Hell" could have been written by Jorges Luis Borges, describing a road paved with all the works that have never been written. But others such as "Purpura Lapillis" (about crustaceans), "Another Squaw" (how can we study deep sub-marine animals in the normal atmospheric pressures in which we live?) and "The Cheetah-Girl" are science-fictional.
"The Cheetah-Girl" describes an experiment in implanting feline genes in a human foetus, and the social problems that the resulting child causes and experiences. It is one of the longest stories in the collection, partly because the narrator, a Professor of Physiology describes the then current status of genetics at the end of the first quarter of this century. H. G. Wells used to avoid a lot of hard science in his short fiction - Heron-Allen in some of his stories showed that it was possible to write science and fiction. As New Scientist has just reported again the problems reported in "Another Squaw" I found I was coming across many contemporary echoes as I read on. And echoes, of course, only come with depth.