“I WASN’T EXPECTING THAT”: THE CAREER OF NORMA HEMMING, by David Medlen

[2008]

Norma Kathleen Hemming was the first Australian woman to have a career entirely dedicated to science fiction. A few female writers had used science fiction on occasion, such as in the nineteenth-century dystopias and utopias of Catherine Helen Spence and Henrietta Dugdale and then, after a sizeable gap, M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947). By contrast, every short story, essay or play in Hemming’s nine-year career was related to science fiction. However, Hemming’s life and career should not be celebrated because she was the first Australian woman to do something but because the passion and intelligence of her work deserves attention.

Norma Hemming was born in Essex, England in 1927 and migrated with her family to Sydney in 1949. A check of a number of bibliographies shows no indication of her publishing in British fanzines. However, I believe that she did submit her first professional work before leaving for Australia, but it was not published until Winter 1951/52. “Loser Take All,” published in Science Fantasy (Vol. 1, 3), a sister publication to New Worlds, demonstrated Hemming’s familiarity with the genre and her ability to manipulate clichés into the unexpected. The story starts with astronaut Mike talking to prototype spaceship “Liza” as if it is his girlfriend until interrupted by Jane, scientist daughter of the ship’s designer Professor Lawrence. News arrives that nuclear war has broken out, with East and West blaming each other. Then the sighting of an alien craft at the launch site reveals the real culprits.

The first five pages of this story filled me with dread, not of the aliens, but of the hoary old chestnuts of science fiction being trotted out, of which Mike’s “love talk” to the spaceship is especially nauseating. Hemming then turns this on its head. Within a few pages, assumed main character Mike has killed himself whilst destroying an alien base. Jane is revealed to be not the neglected love interest but the real heroine as the scientists race to create a weapon that will drive the aliens mad. The aliens are the Kalerians whose own home world has been destroyed. At war’s end the Kalerians are in control but in such small numbers that they cannot survive, and Earth is becoming a backward ruin. A peace deal is negotiated by the professor, who becomes quite creepy, arranging that Earth will accept Kalerian government in return for technology and that Earth women will have to mate with the (entirely male) Kalerian fleet as part of the deal. With skin-crawling rationality he addresses his daughter:

“They are not unattractive,” he said quietly. “And if there is unwillingness, there is also hypnosis.” He looked at her searchingly. “You are young, physically a... a fine specimen...” with a glimmer of a smile “and have a brain above average. Do you think you will escape.” (96).

The traditional triumphant ending to the Earth invasion story is discarded; there is no clear victory and the professor has prostituted his daughter for technology. Unfortunately, much of the drama is undercut for the modern reader by the naming of Earth’s secret weapon—“The Vibrator”—leading to a number of unintended double entendres.

While “Loser Take All” was being considered and published, Hemming had become active in the Sydney fan scene and her work had begun to appear in the much maligned Australian pulp Thrills Incorporated. In this part of her career Norma Hemming was always credited as “N. K. Hemming,” although Thrills Incorporated managed to misspell her name all but twice in the two years she wrote for the title. I had thought that the use of initials was an attempt to disguise her gender from readers, but when Robert Silverberg stated in a panel on C. L. Moore at Swancon 2001 (Perth, Western Australia) that Moore had used her initials to hide her writing career from her day job employers rather than to hide her sex, I had to reconsider. Certainly, males formed the majority of readers: a minor survey of a Sydney science fiction club in 1952 showed women were outnumbered by men at a rate of six to one—but did that automatically mean women writers hid their gender from their mainly male audience?20

Hemming “outed” herself as a female writer at the first Australian Science Fiction Convention in March, 1952. The moment was recorded in the fanzine Stopgap by Graham Stone during a debate on Thrills Incorporated:

Incidentally it came as a surprise to fandom that “N. K. Hemming” of Thrills is the “N. K. Hemming” of New Worlds and an actual person, Norma K. Hemming. Why doesn’t someone tell us these things.21

Hemming was prominent in fan politics, social events and publishing, so there was no attempt to hide her gender from the Sydney fan community that made up approximately 10% of the Thrills Incorporated readership.22 Also, someone who turns up to a con ball in the mid-1950s as a Venusian swamp girl in a costume consisting mainly of green vegetable dye is certainly conspicuous.23

In 1953 Hemming wrote a short satirical essay for the femme fanzine Vertical Horizons describing how she had to disguise her love of science fiction from her workmates to avoid ostracism.24 I think that this is possible evidence that, like C. L. Moore, Hemming used her initials to disguise her second career from her employers rather than her gender. In the latter half of her career Hemming alternated between her full name and her initials. When her final story was published in Britain in Science Fiction Adventures she used her initials but with the following introduction by the editor:

Australian writer N. K. Hemming makes a welcome contribution to this issue of Science Fiction Adventures—and is, to let the cat out of the bag, our first woman contributor (although she had stories in New Worlds some years ago). However, Miss Hemming is extremely well-known in Australian science fiction circles and wrote a special play for the 1958 Melbourne Convention.25

1951 to 1952 marked the most productive period in Hemming’s career with eight of her seventeen professional stories published in Thrills Incorporated in that time. However the lack of editorial assistance and tight schedules at Thrills Incorporated meant that this was not her best work. Fortunately for researchers, one of the writers making a start at Thrills Incorporated was to become perhaps the most successful author Australia has ever produced, Alan G. Yates. By the time of his death in 1985 he had sold eighty million books worldwide with most of his 300+ novels published under the pseudonym Carter Brown. However he started with short story pulps including Thrills Incorporated, where he wrote as A. G. Yates, Roger Garradine, Tod Conway and Paul Valdez and possibly under some house pseudonyms.26 Yates’ autobiography, Ready When You Are C. B! (Macmillan, 1983), is a goldmine of information on the pulp writing industry in the 1950s. Yates writes how, once under contract to the publisher, you were regularly told the name of the story and the pseudonym to be used. You then went away to produce a work to match both. Yates specifically mentions the editing style at Thrills Incorporated: “The editor was running to a tight schedule; he would have the art work already done and hand you a picture saying ‘Three thousand words and a title, old boy, and I do need them by Friday’.” (32).

Usually, to have your work featured on the cover of a magazine was a good thing, but starting with Hemming’s second story in Thrills Incorporated (Dec. 1951), “Amazons of the Asteroids,” we will see how it could be a curse. The story had to refer to both the cover art and the internal illustration which the writer had no control over and which could be totally unrelated. In this case Hemming had to create a hard science fiction story using illustrations with a strong fantasy element. I approached this story with some trepidation but found Hemming worked around the restrictions quite well. In “Amazons of the Asteroids,” three humans and a Venusian are in a spacecraft exploring the asteroid belt, theorizing that it was once a habitable planet. The Venusian is a ball of electrically charged gas who moves by telekinesis, which is a change from the humans-with-green-skin aliens in other Thrills Incorporated stories. Hemming often added interesting sf touches to make her stories distinctive. One of the crew has a crackpot theory that humanoids migrated from this destroyed planet to earth, an event we remember through myths like those of ancient Greece. The ship makes a forced landing on a large asteroid where the crew are surprised to find a thick but unbreathable atmosphere, gravity, and…beautiful blonde women riding winged horses.

Soon the humans are captured by the physically dominant Amazons, who are armed with arrows tipped with a ball of acid which the men are afraid will penetrate their spacesuits. The Venusian, who avoids capture in this Freudian field day, finds machines from the time of the planet’s break-up, no longer understood by the inhabitants, which give the asteroid its gravity. It engineers the humans’ escape, but dies of exhaustion in the process. As they leave, the scientists decide never to reveal their discovery. Hemming uses interesting imagery and ideas, such as the Venusian, but is let down by corny dialogue and poor sentence structuring. For example: “The radio broke into strident life. ‘Trouble’ came Lee’s voice, rather breathless, ‘These blondes play rough.’” Hemming was later to parody the Amazon story in her play The Matriarchy of Renok.

Thrills Incorporated 22 (May 1952) had the Hemming story “Peril of the Sea Planet,” which has the ironic cover illustration of a prawn trying to eat some people as entrée. And well may the man look nervous, he doesn’t appear to be wearing any pants and has a condom pulled over his head. The story could virtually write itself with those elements! The internal illustration for the story is of a spaceship crashing into a rocky planet. It would be easy to create a parody but Hemming takes these illustrations and the title, which constituted her editorial guidance, and creates a rather bleak story. A military captain of a ship carrying civilian VIPs crashes on a barren planet. Attempts to organize rescue fail as an airborne infection causes illness. The captain attempts to quarantine the infection but while exploring the planet with a haughty female passenger, Kay, he realizes that the passengers are mutating into the sea creatures that populate the planet. The infection is a means of reproduction. They return to the ship to find the passengers have fully mutated, killed the crew and moved to the sea. The captain and Kay realize that they cannot escape the mutation and commit suicide.

Thrills Incorporated 19 (Feb. 1952) gave Hemming the freedom of having to contend with only one illustration to which to match her fiction. However the printers cared as little as the editors and mis-aligned the two halves of the illustration. “Lifeline on Luna” is set in the near future (the mid 1960s) when the space race is more overtly part of the Cold War. Both East and West need a rare element, Cerium, that may be available on the moon, for weapons production. The western powers send a rocket containing three men and a woman, Julie Carruthers, to the moon to collect Cerium. A traitor on board lifts off in the rocket, leaving crewmembers Julie and Lee stranded on the moon and Doc set adrift in space. Luckily Julie and Lee come across a powerful alien spaceship. Everyone is saved, but the handsome alien ambassador refuses to intervene in Earth’s affairs to prevent a war as he thinks humans are innately hostile to strangers. The humans suggest that this fear of aliens will prevent a war but the ambassador still refuses. Finally it is implied that Julie, who has a reputation as an ice maiden, seduces the ambassador into agreement.27 The story concludes with Julie visiting the crewmembers to tell them the good news:

Lee called after her. “Hey, where are you going off to?” She came back, a mischievous and gamin grin was the only way to describe it, spread across her face. “To further Vegan-Earth alliances,” she said and the door closed behind her. Lee stood rooted. “Well, I’ll be damned!” he exploded, “Julie Carruthers!” (23)

As I mentioned earlier, the editors of Thrills Incorporated were not fans of science fiction. While the reading public were aware of nuclear energy and warfare, the United Nations, early computers, etc., and these changes were reflected in overseas science fiction, Thrills Incorporated remained firmly stuck in the 1930s. Stories more often than not were of the mad scientist, monster and rampaging robot ilk. The editors knew so little about contemporary science fiction that when Durham Keith Garton submitted Ray Bradbury and Clifford Simak stories under his own name to Thrills Incorporated, no one noticed until fans pointed this out.28 Earlier I mentioned Alan Yates getting an illustration to which he was to provide a story. This is what happened next:

One picture he (the editor) gave me didn’t allow a lot of scope as far as the title was concerned, I thought, so I called it “Jet-Bees of Planet J”. He took another look at the picture when I brought in the manuscript, then looked at the title again. “See what you mean, old boy.” He nodded approval. “Sort of self propelled by their own farts.”29

Hugo Gernsback, this guy was not.

Yates was an unstoppable writing machine, who by 1963 was producing at least two novels a month in addition to other material such as comics, radio plays, etc.30 However, other authors found the Thrills Incorporated schedules difficult and the lack of editorial input showed. Hemming recognized this problem herself and in at least one fanzine appealed for contact details for overseas agents.31 We know from reports from the first Australian Science Fiction Convention that fans loathed the low grade and often dated stories in Thrills Incorporated.32 So why was this title produced and purchased?

Australia, due to balance of payment problems, had trade restrictions on overseas magazines, including all US and most UK science fiction titles. One effect was to stimulate the Australian fan scene as people formed libraries to exchange imported magazines and novels; another effect was to provide that most important aspect of fandom—something to bitch about. Fanzines produced by clubs provided news and contents listings of overseas magazines. I think it was similar to the situation in Perth in the 1990s where a number of pirate science fiction video screening clubs existed to give access to television sf years ahead of the TV networks. The trade restrictions meant Thrills Incorporated could publish knowing it would be cheaper and more easily available than superior overseas magazines.

The unsophisticated content can also be partly explained by the target audience. Graham Stone pointed out to me that Thrills Incorporated was a mass market title with a distribution of about 800 copies in New South Wales alone. Sales relied not on science fiction fandom but on casual buyers at newsagencies and street vendors33 who were as likely to pick up a lightweight western or detective pulp.

I have often been asked how much writers were paid for their work. Alan Yates states that at that time he was paid one pound per 1000 words published, including worldwide rights. To put that into context, Yates in his day job as an editor for the Qantas in-flight magazine earned just under £16 per week (£825 p.a.). A pulp novella written in his spare time earned an extra £20.34 Norma Hemming in an essay indicates that she was an office worker, so the £3 from each 3,000-word Thrills Incorporated story was probably a nice top-up to income but hardly enough to allow her to turn professional.35

Early 1952 saw the easing of restrictions on directly imported science fiction. Fans now had access to overseas magazines to compare to the local product—and the local product was found wanting. By June Thrills Incorporated died, unmourned, but—like so many of the monsters from within its pages—it rose from the dead in the form of a general adventure magazine, Action Monthly Magazine, and a misguided attempt to export bad Australian science fiction to Britain called Amazing Science Stories. I can only assume that it was called Amazing Science Stories because the title Amazingly Dated Stories was already taken. Having missed the mad scientist/rampaging monster period in science fiction by twenty years, it folded after two issues. Hemming had at least one story published in Action Monthly Magazine that we know of. The continuing decrease in trade restrictions until their abolition in 1958 eventually stifled local science fiction publication.

Hemming’s first post-Thrills Incorporated story appeared in a semi-prozine called Forerunner (not to be confused with similarly titled later fanzines) which wanted to publish local fiction of better quality than Thrills Incorporated. It only ran for two issues in 1952-53, of which only the first was widely distributed. Hemming’s contribution to the first issue was “Starchild,” possibly her longest work. This story of a boy developing psychic powers in a repressive post-nuclear society reminded me a great deal of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, published three years later. It contains many original ideas, such as the boy being able to communicate with a mental imprint of his dead mother. It also contains a familiar flaw in Hemming’s work—that of telling rather than showing the reader. For example, we are told that the society is dominated by an oppressive cult, but this is obvious already from events in the story. A narrative Greek chorus probably is a hangover from the Thrills Incorporated style where it was necessary in setting up a plot in less than 3000 words. However the plot of “Starchild,” dealing with sexual abuse by the cult, torture, and alien breeding experiments, is aimed at a more mature readership than Thrills Incorporated. It does mark a progression in the quality of Hemming’s work.

For a short period the competition from imports did seem to stimulate the quality of local writing. Sister publications Future Science Fiction and Popular Science Fiction mixed local and imported stories and included local science fiction news and reviews. The editor seems to have been more knowledgeable regarding the genre and the stories were not illustration-driven. In March 1953, Hemming’s “Symbiosis” was published in Popular Science Fiction (1), in which a super-intelligent but microscopic crystalline alien from a destroyed planet searches for a host to form a symbiotic relationship with. After an initial aborted attempt with one man, the alien—Muron—bonds with a poor urban boy, Andy, aged ten. Muron begins to communicate with Andy and to increase his intelligence. Andy’s fear as he becomes more intelligent is well presented, but the story lacks any suspense. Muron’s motives are never questioned and the increasing gap between Andy and the rest of humanity is only hinted at. It is as if Hemming simply wanted to do something, anything, that was the opposite of a Thrills Incorporated tale. In this fairy tale in modern guise Muron might as well have been a genie.36

A much better story was the 1954 “As We Were” in Future Science Fiction (5). While less a character piece than “Symbiosis,” it has tension in spades, pacing, and some good twists. The story starts with a great hook: an intelligence, possibly a computer, lies deep under an island. When people migrate to the island by boat and start to build, the intelligence starts to affect them, although we are not shown how or even when this occurs. Upon seeing these undescribed changes, the entire population of the island commits suicide. And that’s page one!

Jumping forward to the twentieth century, a group of explorers, husband and wife (Mike and Carolyn) and her sister Jan, come to explore the ruins. Hemming creates a great deal of foreboding as the ruins are explored, ending in finding a tunnel to a crypt. Their presence in the crypt activates the computer, then an alien in hibernation, Kralin of the Garan-Doy. Kralin ominously tells them that he is from a race that colonized earth in primordial times before a space storm killed everyone else. Humans are a degenerate mutation of a planned replacement species. He states: “From you I have learned that yours is an incomplete race. It must go back to that from which it came. The Garan-Doy will return to earth.” Kralin affects the memory of the explorers so that they have no recollection of their encounter. However, soon after their return home Mike begins to become violent and to have physical changes. After a frightening attack on Carolyn he is placed in an asylum. It becomes apparent that he is devolving. While having no memory of Kralin, Jan and Carolyn are certain the island has something to do with this. Jan returns to investigate while Carolyn, too, starts to devolve. At the end of the story, everyone ends up back on the island and Neanderthal Mike and Carolyn start to re-evolve as Garan-Doy. Jan is the last human left on the island and she cannot stop Kralin and the other Garan-Doy from erasing humanity everywhere. In a final paragraph reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, she cannot stop herself from falling asleep, knowing she will wake up alien. While problems remain with dialogue and narrative style, Hemming had improved to a stage where she was ready to return to international publishing.

§

I think Happy Days and American Graffiti have forever poisoned many people’s ideas of social changes in the 1950s. People did not turn on the radio one day, hear Bill Haley sing “Rock around the Clock,” and think to themselves “I must cast aside my conservative values.” Sydney science fiction fans, while enjoying a non-mainstream genre, had conservatives and liberals like the rest of society. As mentioned earlier, Hemming revealed her identity and gender at the first Australian Science Fiction convention in 1952. At that time women could not be members of some science fiction clubs, only guests. Shortly after the convention, Rosemary Simmons attempted to join the Futurian Society of Sydney, a science fiction club that still exists today. After very acrimonious debate she succeeded on the third attempt, with Hemming being the second woman to gain membership. Simmons and Hemming, along with other women in the Sydney science fiction scene, went on to form the Vertical Horizons Femme Fan group with a fanzine of the same name—which I think are the first women’s group and newsletter of its type in Australia.37 Anyone who reads this newsletter (1952-53) will be struck by the passion with which these women wrote about their favorite genre compared with the contents of other fanzines.

Hemming was also involved in the social side of fandom, costume designing for convention fancy dress, a topic that would be the basis for one of her stories, and helping form a science fiction theatrical group, the Acturian Players, for whom she wrote and performed. She wrote several plays for both fandom and the general public but the script for only one exists today, The Matriarchy of Renok. This is a parody of the Amazon planet and the “teach me about this earth thing called kissing” clichés of pulp science fiction. Written in 1956 and performed in 1958 at the Melbourne Science Fiction Convention, the plot involves an egotistical, sexist astronaut named Carter (but think Kirk) who lands on Renok, a female chauvinistic matriarchal society. He is taken prisoner and is dismayed to find males and sex are redundant due to a new incubation process. Men are just going to be left to die out. He escapes, taking Queen Vanaris, played by Hemming, hostage. However the matriarchy scientists are smarter than Carter and when he lands he finds he is on what is now matriarchal Earth. The play ends with Carter being dragged off stage by female guards screaming “YOU CAN’T WIN!” Very tongue in cheek: it would probably get as big a laugh today at a convention.

While Hemming continued to write more plays for local production, her next three short stories were published overseas. The interesting aspect of this period is that polling by the magazines gives us some idea of what contemporary readers thought about Hemming’s work. “Dwellers in Silence,” published in New Worlds (51) in 1956, starts with an alien baby as sole survivor of a spacecraft crash. The child is raised as “human” by a bachelor farmer, who names her Carol. Carol’s telepathic abilities are so strong she cannot help but overhear the thoughts of everyone around her. After the death of her adoptive father she is sent to an orphanage, then to work in an office which she finds a living hell mainly due to the sexual thoughts of men. Eventually she accidentally makes contact with her race, mutant telepaths who use the distance of space to shield themselves from the thoughts of others. While I think the perfunctory ending weakens the story, the use of telepathy and office sexual harassment as horror is original and effective. Also, I think most readers would suspect this was written by a woman even if they didn’t know who N.K. Hemming was. The story rated third out of six stories in the readers poll.

There is then a gap of almost two years until “The Debt of Lassor” appeared in a 1958 issue of Nebula (33). Alien tyrants have ruled Earth for thousands of years after an apocalyptic war which has laid waste to the planet, but this story is not about a slave revolt, quite the opposite. Humans are mindless, nameless, numbered slaves with no concept of individuality and freedom, while the aliens have matured from their brutal past and wish to free humanity. The question being, how to free someone who has no concept of freedom? The alien in charge of liberating Earth, Thorval, starts a two-pronged plan of instilling individuality in humans by giving them names and treating them with physical and emotional abuse so that they will hate as well as fear their masters. Soon the humans break their conditioning and start to realize what freedom would mean. Thorval can now plan to hand back Earth. This unusual angle to the old Earth revolts story went down well, with readers rating it second out of the six stories.

“Call Them Earthmen,” published in October 1959 in Science Fiction Adventures (Vol. 2, 10), is set in the distant future where Earth is losing a war with a vicious alien race known as the Hamadans. The only hope may be in an ancient citadel which may contain weapons from a long ago terrible war with another alien invader. Finally the long-lost citadel is located and opened, but only seems to contain an alien in suspended animation. He is woken and to everyone’s amazement states that he, Grant Bendal, is human and that the entire population of earth is alien. The super weapon that had been used in the last war was a kind of memory eraser. When fired for the first time the backwash killed all humanity except Bendal, who was in the citadel. The aliens invading the planet were reduced to the intelligence of cavemen and had re-evolved in the ruins of Earth assuming they were the humans. Bendal still hates the aliens due to the actions of their ancestors. However, Bendal eventually gives the aliens the technology to defend Earth when he hears the Earth alien soldiers refer to the planet as home. Despite a few narrative flaws towards the end, it is a well written story.

A few months after that issue would have arrived in Australia, Norma Hemming died of lung cancer at the age of thirty-two. Her career lasted less than ten years and produced only seventeen professional works.

§

The article “Prophet and Pioneer: The SF of N.K. Hemming” (1998) by Sean McMullen and Russell Blackford suggests that Hemming’s favorite motif is the contact between human and alien. While this contact motif is present, so is an underlying darkness to her stories. Repeatedly we find stories that are apocalyptic or near-apocalyptic, involving the annihilation of a race or the annihilation of self through suicide. The majority of Hemming’s work was written in a ten year period that was in the shadow of Hiroshima. This was a time when the risk of the Cold War turning hot seemed very real in a country whose paranoia about a “yellow peril” was interchangeable with one about a “red menace.” We can laugh now at the idea of “domino theory” and monolithic communism, but along with the risk of global annihilation they seemed very real at the time. The 1950s were not Happy Days but scary days. A large portion of speculative fiction is taken up with what can be termed “horror for the rational,” where our fears are played out at a distance, in the future or on another planet, but close enough for us to have some kind of catharsis. Hemming’s apocalyptic futures reflected a 1950s’ fear. Sean McMullen reflected on Hemming:

There are a couple of really big ifs raised by all this: if she had gone over to a couple of American cons and met some publishers and if she had a chest x-ray in the mid 1950s, Hemming could have gained the stature that Le Guin or McCaffrey have today. Even as it is, her four or five plays made history. Add the surviving play to her collected short stories and there would be enough for a book. Probably what has prevented Hemming from gaining wider recognition is the fact she never had a standalone book published and she never had a story in an anthology. Being published only in magazines is a first class ticket to obscurity.38

Norma Hemming achieved a number of firsts—first Australian female career science fiction writer, first Australian science fiction playwright—but it was only at the end of her career that she reached her potential. Only with the return to overseas publication did she overcome problems in dialogue and narrative structure which a sympathetic editor would have ironed out years before. Norma Hemming’s greatest talent as a science fiction writer was that she always surprised the reader. Whether it was a gas alien, a tragic suicide, or a reformed alien despot, the reader could always say “I didn’t expect that!” and to me that is what makes her work interesting.

§

Credit where it is due. Sean McMullen and Russell Blackford’s research in “Prophet and Pioneer: The SF of N. K. Hemming” in Fantasy Annual 2 (Spring 1998) remains the quintessential source on Norma Hemming and was a template for my own research. Sean McMullen was kind enough to take time from his busy schedule to provide invaluable photocopies, tapes and opinions. He also put me in touch with Graham Stone who gave me the benefit of his first-hand experience of the Sydney science fiction scene in the 1950s. My sincere thanks.

20. Anon. (May 12 1952) “Take a look at yourself,” Notes and Comment, 2, 1-3 (Uncredited but probably Ken Martin and Vol Molesworth).

21. Stone, G. B. (March/April 1952) “First Australian Science Fiction Convention,” Stopgap; a letter, circular or publication, 43.

22. This very rough figure is based on the numbers attending a convention in Sydney in 1953 (84 people) as proportion of the New South Wales circulation of Thrills Incorporated (800 issues). Sources of figures: Australian National Science Fiction Conventions (http://home.vicnet.net.au/~sfoz/ntcon1st.htm) and correspondence with Graham B. Stone (14th Nov. 2001).

23. Crozier, I.J. (31st June 1955) “Fourth Australian Convention Report,” Etherline, 47, 3.

24. Hemming, N. K. (Oct. 1953) “On the Trials and Tribulations of being a Science Fiction Fan,” Vertical Horizons, 5, 5-6.

25. Carnell, E. J. (1959) [Introduction to “Call them Earthmen”], Science Fiction Adventures, Vol.2 (10), 91.

26. As well as the pseudonyms assigned exclusively to an author there were also “House Pseudonyms” under which a number of authors would write genre material. The best example of this were the “Scientific Thrillers” credited to the non-existent Belli Luigi. The idea was to create a kind of brand recognition within a genre. Belli Luigi deserves a place in Australia’s literary history alongside Ern Malley.

27. McMullen, S. and Blackford, R. (Spring 1998) “Prophet and Pioneer: The Science Fiction of Norma Hemming,” Fantasy Annual, 2, 65-75.

28. McMullen, S. (1994) “The Golden Age of Australian Science Fiction,” Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, Vol.12 (3), 12.

29. Yates, A.G. (1983) Ready when you are C.B.!: The Autobiography of Alan Yates alias Carter Brown. Macmillan: South Melbourne, 32.

30. Coupe, S. (February 1996) “Pulp Friction,” Mean Streets, 16,.34-39.

31. Molesworth, L. (April 1953) [Editorial],Vertical Horizons, 1, 1-2.

32. Stone, G. B. (March/April 1952) op. cit.

33. Stone, G. B. (2001) [Correspondence to author dated 14th Nov. 2001].

34. Yates, A. G. (1980) op. cit., 27, 31.

35. Hemming, N. K. (Oct. 1953) op. cit.

36. McMullen, S. and Blackford, R. (Spring 1998) op. cit. 65-75.

37. Molesworth, V. (Jan. 1985) “A History of Australian Fandom 1935-1963: Chapter Four,” The Mentor 85, 17-23.

38. McMullen, S. (2001) [Correspondence to the author dated 22 Aug. 2001].