Summary:
This volume has the longest story in the series so far, Keith Roberts’ novella (and the first part of the novel of the same name about a telepathic gestalt) The Inner Wheel. There are two other good stories apart from the Roberts, John Baxter’s The Hands (a neat SF horror tale), and Robert Presslie’s The Day Before Never (a story about an Earth invaded by aliens that has a New Wave-ish edge).
There is also work from William Spencer (an early VR story), E. C. Tubb, Ernest Hill, and John Phillifent (John Rackham), and a new design for the paperback cover.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Joachim Boaz, SF Ruminations
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
Terry Jeeves, Vector #36, p. 20-21
Roddy Williams, Death Robots From Mars
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:²
The Inner Wheel • novella by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗
Horizontal Man • short story by William Spencer ∗
The Day Before Never • novelette by Robert Presslie ∗∗∗
The Hands • short story by John Baxter ∗∗∗+
The Seekers • short story by E. C. Tubb ∗
Atrophy • short story by Ernest Hill ∗
Advantage • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Foreword • by John Carnell

_____________________

The next volume of New Writings in SF that should have been reviewed here is #5 but, as I read Keith Roberts’ novel The Inner Wheel two or three months ago, this one got read first.
Roberts’ novella (and the first third of the similarly titled novel), concerns a telepathic gestalt (the “Wheel” of the title). The story is pre-Pavane Roberts, when he was still occasionally writing stories based on typical SF tropes like these, but this doesn’t stop him stretching his writer’s muscles—as you can see here from the deliberately inchoate beginning:

“See for us and tell again . . . Where is he . . . ?”
“Getting on a train . . .”
“Tell us what you see. Where is the train . . . ?”
“In a station, where do you think . . . ?”
There are hammers and whips and pincers.
“WHERE IS THE TRAIN?”
“T-Tanbridge. Please, THE STATION IS TANBRIDGE—”
There are flickerings. “Gently,” say the voices. “Gently. Tell us what you see . . .”
“I . . . There are roses. The platforms are covered with them. The . . . train is green. The sky is very bright blue. Everything is quiet, nobody moving about. The coach stands in its bay. I see the sunlight lying across it and on the platforms. It lies in s-squares on the platforms, on the footbridge. There is a breeze now. A piece of paper blows and skips; the roses sway. I hear the little thorny sound of leaves scratching together. Please, no more . . .”
Somewhere there might be giggling. Somewhere there might be rage. “Tell us about him . . .”
A lens moves, seeing but unseen, examining textures of glass and wood and leaves. The station is haunted in the hot, still afternoon.
“He is . . . sitting in the train. In the front seat, just behind the driver’s cab. He is . . . tall. He is . . . dark. His hair is dark and rather long. It hangs across one eye. His face is thin. His eyes are very blue. His hands look . . . strong. Well kept, bony. Square nails, white half-moons where the cuticle is pushed back. He uses a good aftershave—”
The giggling again. “You like him . . .”
“Leave me alone—”  p. 11-12

After a couple of pages of this the point of view switches to that of the watched man, Jimmy Stringer, and we learn about his life:

Jimmy remembered [. . .] the studio back in town. Light filtering through inadequate windows, littered drawing boards, filing cabinets top-heavy with drifts of paper and card. The yellowing fluorescents, their tubes flyblown; electric cords, cellophane-taped here and there to the edges of desks, that fed tired Anglepoise lamps from a medusan confusion. It was a place where you could work and work and see your dreams give up and curl at the edges and realize the ad game was a machine, a bloody machine that sorted the heavyweight souls from the middleweight, the middleweight from the lightweight, the lightweight from the souls that didn’t rate at all. The man who sat at your elbow painting in the shine on endless successions of brightgreen lawn mowers had been a Prix de Rome.
An element, an aspect of existence. Further back, buried in the impossible matrix of time, were others. His father . . . only the image of him was fading, losing itself under a rippling and a hotness; the glaring, hopeful, hopeless time people call adolescence. Stringer rubbed his face. Adolescence is the time you want freedom. You take it, snatch it, eat it, maybe, before the folk round you grab it back. Nobody can help you. Not then. Least of all a tired old man trying to come to terms with life.
So he’d shucked his father off and gone to London to learn how to be a Great Artist with capital letters, and maybe there’d been times over the years when he’d thought the old devil wasn’t too bad after all; he’d just breeze back home one day and say hello. But the day had never come. Instead, there was a telegram. It told him the thing he’d planned on doing, it wouldn’t get done now. It told him he’d run out of tomorrows.  pp. 14-15

Roberts worked for a large part of his life as a commercial/advertising artist, and the passage shows his artist’s view and possibly some of the personal aspects of his life.
Later, we find out that Stringer has inherited a large amount of money from his father’s estate and is now, due to a strange compulsion, on the train to a town called Warwell. When he gets there, everyone he speaks to in the town is “nice,” and he soon settles. He starts having strange dreams, though:

The dream was always the same. Always vague, impossible to grasp afterward, a thing of sensation only, an affair of mounting pressures that rose and rose to wake him, once, nearly screaming. After that the pressures eased, but he still knew of their existence, the way you can know of something in a dream without seeing or hearing. The Wheel, as he thought of it, was the central part of the nightmare, and he himself was at the centre of the Wheel, on or in its hub, sensing it move, feeling the thunder of it in his long bones. The Wheel so massive that size itself seemed an indecent, foul thing. And somehow, too, the hub was Warwell, its houses and its church. But the Wheel was useless; it moved, it ground, but it ground nothing. Its turning was aimless, the threat of it was simply in its being.  p. 22

He also senses things going on under the surface of the town, and there are strange coincidences, such as the night he goes out walking and thinks he could do with a dog for company—along comes a unaccompanied hound; then, alone in a pub, he wishes for some company—and in come a dozen people, all of who chat to him.
Matters come to a head when he is out in his car and a woman called Anne runs across the road. Stringer sees she is obviously distressed, and not just at her near escape. He takes her to the hospital to get her minor wounds attended to. Then, when he is taking her home, she asks to stop at a pub to use the loo, only to disappear through a back door.
That night Stringer has a dream about taking the train from from Tanbridge to Warwell, and a vast decay overcomes everything: the train, his car, Anne. He realises that the dream is to do with the Wheel, and that this was why Anne was running. The next day he goes looking for Anne in the town, and sees Boschian visions:

Watching the skeletons. Talking and laughing, shopping, eating. Drinking coffee in the Tudor Room and the Buttery, cleaning windows, driving cars, sitting in buses, pushing prams. Other skeletons lay in the perambulators, little grisly things that mewed and writhed. He sat on a seat outside the town hall, wiped his forehead, saw sweat on his hand. He clenched his fists; he was trembling. He asked himself, What’s the matter with me? Have I gone crazy?
It was all he could do to stop himself yelling, telling the people, didn’t they realize, didn’t they know they were all bone and slime, they were getting older, they were dying . . . He put his face in his hands, tried to stop the shaking.
Feeling the traffic grind and grind like one great wheel, seeing the fish eyes roll, hearing the bird gabble of skulls, tongues clacking inside the bone . . . He felt he was going to pass out again or vomit on the path.
God, he’d never felt like this since . . . when? His mind groped for a parallel. Warwell, the river and the valley, church spire and town-hall cupola thrust up from a writhing of goblins and demons, a medieval maggot heap . . . Away from the Starr, he knew the world was good; there were grass and trees and high, quiet roads. He had to get away. He was halfway to his hotel, scurrying to pack his bags and pay his bill, when he realized. Knew suddenly and with complete sureness that he wasn’t going crazy.
[. . .]
Quick now, think. For God’s sake, think…The skulls, the bones, the flaring light . . . Something Germanic, Die Brücker, the Blue Riders? No, older than that, further back. Holbein? No, not Holbein at all. Bosch . . .
And, by God, that was it. Old Hieronymus, the Adamite. The Millennium, incarnation of all evil, writhing, pallid . . . He’d studied it once for a holiday task, reached the stage where he could look through the painter’s eyes, see the world and its people as the master had seen them all those years ago. Now he was seeing them again.
A chain of logic had completed itself without his direction. The fantasies that had swamped him, rose bowers that had glowed, sweet organic nestling of river against town—these things he had been shown, as now he was seeing their obverse. Somebody, something, had tried to lull him with women and talk and drink and beauty, bright canvases, all of them, dangled in front of his face; and it hadn’t worked. He’d gone on searching and prodding [. . .] and he’d touched the makers of the dreams and they were frightened. He’d touched them through Anne.  p. 38-39

When Stringer realises these visions are being sent to him by the Wheel, he fights back, and goes to the places in town the senders don’t want him to go. Then he sees Anne in the distance, and follows her in his car. When he catches and interrogates her, he learns two names of the group that form the Wheel, Albert and Paul. When Stringer later meets another two in a pub—one of whom is Hazel, a disturbing young woman—he discovers to his cost Hazel that has telekinetic powers when he is badly beaten with a plank of wood when he later gets out of his car in the hotel car park.
The last part of the story sees Stinger meeting the members of the Wheel, the gestalt, where he tries to buy Anne’s freedom. But their leader Paul refuses, saying she is their eyes, and he tells Stringer to be gone by the end of the week. The final confrontation at the town fair (shades of Ray Bradbury) is exciting but not entirely convincing (the gestalt finally decide to spare both their lives and let them go).
Overall this is a bit of a mixed bag: the descriptive writing is very good and, at times, I found it completely immersive; what is less good is the motivation of the characters, the not entirely convincing plot that flows from this, and some of the melodrama. Nonetheless, there is a technical ability on show here from Roberts which shows, at times, that he was a talent head and shoulders above nearly all of the other new writers of his generation.

•

Horizontal Man by William Spencer begins with Timon in a virtual reality where he surfs numerous waves until he finishes the sequence:

At last, unbelievably, the scene faded, greying out from his sense channels, and leaving him back in the recording control room. He was himself again.
Timon gibbered and snuffled with pleasure. His shrivelled, shrunken body trembled, almost writhing with satisfaction, on the pillowy, contoured couch that supported his frail spine.
[. . .]
Timon viewed with some distaste the thick ropelike duct which was connected to him somewhere in the region of the navel, and which supplied all the sustenance that his feeble body required. Outside his range of vision was the flexible cable entering the top of his head, which provided the rich flood of sensory data that went into the illusory world created in his mind by the recording.  p. 77

Timon then discovers that he can’t go to sleep for another five hours (the VR machine’s programming) and so has to select two more experiences (which are a chess match, and an evening out with a date at a dancing performance/orgy). When he eventually wakes from these he fortuitously manages to get his finger stuck in the sleep button, which prevents him waking up again.
Later (spoiler), a machine trundles along and fixes the problem, and in the process changes Timon’s memory drum from Universe 23c to d, the implication being that Timon is destined to live endlessly in these virtual realities.
This all feels rather clichéd after so many later VR stories (this seems an early entry in the sub-genre, or at least the “trapped in VR” sub-genre), but notwithstanding that it’s just not that convincing, and it’s also the first of a number of stories in this collection that rely on a surprise or shock ending.

•

The Day Before Never by Robert Presslie³ begins with the narrator driving across a post-alien invasion Europe to get to the Latvian capital Riga. When he arrives we get an explicit look at the devastation wreaked by the invaders:

For one more time I cursed the Barbarians and their abominable glazers. There were immense vacant lots where they had used their bigger glazers to reduce whole streets of houses to a ghastly flux of molten stone and flesh.
[. . .]
A group of humans had been caught as they had sidled round one of the corners. Now they were smeared there for eternity. Or until the Barbarians decided to raze the building completely. Some were fused shallow reliefs on the ancient stone. Others hadn’t been so lucky. Not for them the quick, unfelt death. The glazer beams—powered by God-knows-what—had caught them in motion. The terrible grimace on an oldster’s face told the agonies of every minute of life he had left to him after an arm and a leg had been fluidly bonded to the house. There was half a torso here, a grisly fraction there. The worst I saw before I passed the building was the girl. About fourteen or fifteen to judge by the nubile breasts laid bare by a glazer’s freakish heat. If it hadn’t been for the breasts I would never have known it was a girl who hung against the wall, headless, suspended only by the strips of flesh-and-silicon compound that stretched upwards from her shoulders.  p. 93

He eventually arrives at an inn where he plans to meet a resistance contact and, when he meets her, we find about a bomb plot organised to rid Earth of the aliens. This only happens, however, after she forces him to have sex with her so she can ensure he is not one of the Barbarians wearing a human body suit (apparently there is one part that doesn’t work properly). Eventually they get around (spoiler) to triggering one of a number of bombs in a co-ordinated worldwide explosion intended to cause a resonance in the Earth’s surface that will destroy the aliens.
All this is told in a convincingly grim manner, and at a fast pace—which helps to compensate for some of the less convincing plot shenanigans at the end of the piece (the fact that the aliens have human suits, the bombs and the “resonance effect,” etc.). The story’s gritty realism, along with the downbeat ending, made me realise that New Writings in SF wasn’t entirely a continuity New Worlds (I’m talking about the Nova Publications’ version edited by John Carnell), and that it was also doing its small part in expanding the boundaries of the genre.

•

The Hands by John Baxter has a gripping start:

They let Vitti go first because he was the one with two heads, and it seemed to the rest that if there was to be anything of sympathy or honour or love for them, then Vitti should have the first and best of it. After he had walked down the ramp, they followed him. Sloane with his third and fourth legs folded like the furled wings of a butterfly on his back; Tanizaki, still quiet, unreadable, Asiatic, despite the bulge inside his belly that made him look like a woman eight months gone with child; and the rest of them. Seven earth men who had been tortured by the Outsiders.  p. 113

When the group are debriefed about their captivity we learn that the aliens on Huxley are shape-changers who can alter their form at will. The (sometimes humanoid) aliens altered the crew’s bodies, and one of them, Kolo, had the ability to control them by snapping his fingers.
The rest of the story sees Binns go out for a walk with his minder (eventually—Binns soon spots him and says they might as well walk together). However, Binns is in a slightly dissociated state, and spends most of the time listening to an inner voice saying unexpected things to him.
The final scene in the park (spoiler) brings this strange body-horror story to a climax: Binns feels compelled to kill his minder—his spare hands strangle him while his original hands hold him close. Then Binns meets up with the rest of the group, and one of his spare hands snaps their fingers. . . .
This has a great last line, and the almost dream like inevitability is chillingly effective. This is a pretty good story, and it would definitely be on my short list for a ‘Year’s Best’.

•

After a strong start to the anthology, the remainder of the stories are a lacklustre lot. The Seekers by E. C. Tubb uses most of its space for a setup in which several crew members of a starship indulge their obsessions: painting, VR gaming under a dream cap, engineering, writing, etc. There is also some background information about the dead captain (he committed suicide), which includes a comment he made about how space-faring humans were “rats scurrying among the granary of the stars.”
This (spoiler) resurfaces at the end of the story, where the remaining crew land on an alien planet where there is a single cube-shaped structure. Inside, each of the men finds his idea of heaven:

Delray found it next.
He came shouting over to the others and glared at what rested between them.
It was naked satiation.
It was the euphoria of combat, the thrill of physical violence, the tease of mental struggle. It was his own deep, dark heritage of type and it opened before him like a flower within whose petals was to be found all he had ever sought. He sank into it and into an eternal enervating dream.  p. 132

The structure is, of course, a trap.
This is one of those stories that has a contrived set-up aimed at delivering a climactic scene: a one-trick story.

•

Atrophy by Ernest Hill opens, like a lot of these NWISF stories seem to, with the narrator plugged into some sort of device. It’s not entirely clear what this one does, but Elvin gets bored of it—as well as nagged out of any further use by his wife, who warns that he needs to stop using it so much or he’ll “atrophy.” Consequently, he later uses the IT (another machine, but one which appears to be for brain stimulation rather than entertainment) to earn some “approvals.” Elvin earns these by engaging intelligently with a computer:

“Think!” IT ordered.
“Damn the Unions,” he thought. “And the management. They don’t have to do this. IT is only for the Workers.”
“Phit! Phit! Phit! A proposition containing an expletive is a random digression!”
“Give me a chance,” he complained. “I haven’t thought of a proposition yet!”
“Think!” The red light glowed.
He was about to answer “Rats!” But this was probably an expletive and a double correction would automatically register non-Approval on this, his 97th card.
“Cats!” he said, in a moment of inspiration. To his surprise, the red light transfused into green. It glowed brightly.
“Go ahead!”
“Cats” was as good a subject as any. Simple really.
“A cat,” he said, “is a small furry creature with four legs, a head at one end and a tail at the other.”
“Phit! Phit! Phit!”
“What is it now!” He depressed the “Correction” button. How many corrections was this? How many did IT allow? He had forgotten.
“Description is correct, but mode of expression borders on to the facetious. Generic term for four-legged creatures required.”
“Quadrupeds!”
The green light glowed brightly. He was pleased that IT approved. Must do better.  p. 141

This goes on for three and a half pages before Elvin gets his approval.
The rest of the story sees him at work, which appears to involve Elvin monitoring various light sequences on a control board that monitor a nuclear reactor. During this there is another long scene where he detects a faulty electronic foreman. He then goes home and finds his wife has left him for a Thinker, so he takes extra shifts at work to distract himself.
Long story short (spoiler) Elvin detects another faulty “foreman” and, when he contacts the Management this time around, he finds the man atrophied. Elvin takes manual control and makes the calls and warnings that need to be made, and saves the day. When a representative of Management arrives he tells Elvin that it was a false alarm but promotes him to Thinker, anyway. When Elvin returns home he finds Meryl has come back, and she rewards him with sex.
Maybe there are some readers that will appreciate the energy and compulsive detail of this future world but this seems a slight piece to me, and I’m perplexed as to why there were so many mid-1960s SF writers fixated on these unlikely future dystopias.

•

Advantage by John T. Phillifent begins with Colonel Jack Barclay waking up and telling his orderly-robot to leave Mr Caddas for another thirty minutes before he is roused. (“He has had a bad night.”) It materialises that Barclay is a martinet who is in charge of building the infrastructure on the colony planet of Oloron, and we find out what role Caddas—a whiney, weedy, neurotic type—has in the operation when the pair go on a daily inspection after breakfast.
During the tour Caddas complains of pains in his arm and head when they are at one of the building sites. Barclay quickly questions him, and then orders work on the site to stop: the supervisors subsequently discover a robot hoist whose excessive load would have crushed one of the engineers. A similar situation occurs later when Caddas feels a prickling sensation, and they discover that an engineer was about to go into a conduit from a hot reactor. (I don’t know about you, but I think this project is overdue a visit from the HSE.⁴) Needless to say, Barclay has kept the knowledge of Caddas’s talents to himself, and the project is correspondingly ahead of schedule.
The story’s main plot complication comes when (spoiler) Barclay gets word that the planet is to be visited by a three person observation team, one of whom is a woman. Barclay, as you might expect, has certain views about this latter fact which he lays out to his second-in-command:

“There’s a certain class of female, Dannard, for whom the very thought of an isolated community of hard-working men, out on a frontier, has a dreadful fascination. Two classes, rather. One’s the sympathetic, mothering kind. I needn’t describe the other. Either is a pain in the neck. You’d better make her your special care. Let the other two make their own way.  p. 170

The woman, the unlikely named “Miss Dahlia Honey,” turns out to be an old flame of Barclay’s, and is maternally drawn to the bleating Caddas. Her welcome attention not only seems to mute his ability, but her later interference also brings him into the orbit of the medical staff, something that Barclay avoided lest they discovered his abilities. There are one or two other twists and turns during the rest of the story but Caddas eventually leaves with Honey.
This is a (very) old school tale, filled with cardboard characters in an unlikely, unconvincing future but, that said, it’s well told, and readable enough. It only just scrapes that two star rating, though, and I’m not sure why I rated it that high—possibly because Barclay doesn’t get his way at the end.

•••

The Cover for this paperback edition⁵ is the first of a new design, and one I quite like (probably because #9, with a similar layout, was one of my early paperback purchases). The art isn’t very good though.
The only non-fiction (other than the short story introductions) is the Foreword by John Carnell: he says the Keith Roberts story is “outstanding,” and then goes on about telepathy, etc. at great length:

Have you ever been thinking or speaking of someone whom you have not seen for a long time, when the telephone or doorbell rings or you walk round a corner—and there they are! Or received a letter days afterwards? (You could have been thinking about them at the time they were actually writing the letter to you.) Telepathy? Clairvoyance? Empathy? Some people are more “sensitive” to the phenomenon than others. Whatever it is, it is a form of mental communication and we know very little about it, if anything at all. It is even possible that somewhere along the evolutional tree of Mankind we managed to lose some of these developing mental powers, just as our sense of smell has deteriorated and our teeth become a liability rather than an asset, and our eyesight requires artificial aids.
Despite the fact that we now know the constituent parts of the human brain, can measure it, probe it, operate upon it, electrically stimulate it and even analyse some of its aberrations, this fantastic piece of biological machinery is still largely a mystery and we are not at all sure of its capabilities. It may be that the psi powers are developing, not diminishing, but, if so, we have a long way to go before we can understand them.  pp. 7-8

Carnell had obviously been quaffing Campbell’s psionic Kool-Aid at Loncon (the 1965 Worldcon).
The last part of the foreword notes that the Presslie and Baxter stories lean towards the macabre; the Hill and Spencer are stories of the far future; and that the Tubb and Rackham will appeal to those interested in interplanetary travel.

•••

This is probably the best volume of New Writings yet, with the John Baxter story, the long Roberts tale, and the Presslie all worth reading.  ●

_____________________

1. Boaz says that Robert’s The Inner Wheel “exudes gothic dread laced with attempts at recurrent poetic images and a New Wave vibe,” and that it is a “mood piece that takes a little too long to come together.” Jeeves agrees with the latter, saying “it is the half way mark [before] Mr. Roberts hit his stride, chucked out the nouveau rubbische and got up steam.” He says earlier on that “it starts off in the sickening (to me) style which throws everything and the kitchen sink, then rambles all over the place occasionally meeting a story on the way.” (I get the impression Jeeves likes plain stories told plainly.)
Williams says it is “the best story [in the book] . . . a highly poetic and stylised piece, reminiscent of Sturgeon’s ‘More Than Human’.” Darlington is the third person who mentions its poetic nature, saying it is “self-consciously poetic . . . its prose straining for profundity, and almost achieving it.” (I don’t personally think The Inner Wheel is poetic, it just has good descriptive prose with some decent images—something that would have stood out against the utilitarian writings of most other SF writers of the time.)
As for the rest of the stories, the favourite seems to be Baxter’s The Hands. Boaz says that, although the ending is a “cop-out” it is a “keeper”; Williams says, “it hangs in the mind like a stubborn dream”; Jeeves found it “truly gruesome”; and Darlington says “there have been many fine stories concerning aliens taking over human beings, but Australian writer John Baxter adds the grisliest touch yet in this return from a far star.”
The story liked least seems to be the Hill. Boaz: “I experienced a sense of atrophy reading this story”; Williams: “unmemorable”; even Jeeves fingers it as the “weakest,” although he generally thought that all the stories in the book (bar the Roberts maybe) were “well executed treatments or twists of old themes.”
The remainder of the stories fall between these two poles: Presslie’s story is described by Boaz and Williams as “bleak,” and Darlington observes that it “[anticipates] some elements of the New Wave with its casual cruelty and sexual content.” The Spencer and Tubb, while receiving mixed notices (and the Rackham even more so), got off easier than I expected.

2. The star ratings for my first read of this anthology (many moons ago) are as follows (my new rating is in brackets for easy comparison):

The Inner Wheel • novella by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗ (∗∗∗)
Horizontal Man • short story by William Spencer ∗ (∗)
The Day Before Never • novelette by Robert Presslie ∗∗ (∗∗∗)
The Hands • short story by John Baxter ∗∗ (∗∗∗+)
The Seekers • short story by E. C. Tubb ∗ (∗)
Atrophy • short story by Ernest Hill ∗∗∗ (∗)
Advantage • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗ (∗∗)

I’m surprised that I liked the Hill story (and another check of my notes reveals it’s the only story of his I’ve rated above mediocre), and underrated the Presslie and Baxter—although I think I can see why (possibly the body suits and downer ending in the Presslie, and the dreamlike vs. naturalistic progression in the Baxter).

3. Robert Presslie contributed a number of stories to UK magazines in the 1950s, so it’s interesting to see a writer from this generation stretch himself in this piece. Unfortunately he would only appear once more (in the next volume of New Writings in SF) before he stopped writing. If he was capable of stories like this then that is a pity.
Presslie’s ISFDB page is here, and there are informative webpages from Andrew Darlington here, and Greg Pickersgill & David Redd here.
I note that Presslie was born in Aberdeen, so presumably he is a Scottish writer.

4. The HSE is the UK government’s Health and Safety Executive.

5. I nicked the original unretouched scan of this cover from Alan Fraser’s page on Pinterest. If you are interested in 50s and 60s UK book covers (there are a lot of interesting paperback covers below the UK SFBC ones) you should really check his page out.  ●

Edited 30th January 2021: added Andy Darlington’s comment about John Baxter’s The Hands, which is buried in the index at the end of his essay.
Edited 12th November 2021 to show that Kolo in “The Hands” is an alien, and not one of the crew as I previously thought (thanks to Ed Chang for the correction).

ISFDB link

Other reviews:¹
Joachim Boaz, Science Fiction Ruminations
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction, December 1968
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #153, August 1965
Charles Winstone, Vector #33
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:
High Eight • novelette by Keith Roberts [as by David Stringer] ∗∗∗
Star Light • reprint short story by Isaac Asimov ∗
Hunger Over Sweet Waters • novelette by Colin Kapp ∗∗∗
The Country of the Strong • reprint short story by Dennis Etchison ∗∗
Parking Problem • short story by Dan Morgan ∗
Sub-Lim • novelette by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗
Bernie the Faust • reprint novelette by William Tenn ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by  Sir George F. Pollock
Foreword • introduction by John Carnell

_____________________

Keith Roberts follows up his pair of stories in the last volume with another brace in this one. High Eight is an atypical story for Roberts in that it is set in North America and written in that mid-Atlantic or imitation Yank voice that British writers sometimes use for stories presumably intended for the US market:

Stan was Outside Works Controller to Saskeega Power, Rick was line maintenance boss for the company. They were great buddies; they’d been through school together, clocked nearly fifteen years together at Saskeega. Rick was sitting on his boss’s desk skinning through a copy of the company magazine when the phone blew.  p. 13

The phone call tells them of a suicide at one of the remote hill stations, High Eight, and they both go off to supervise the operation to recover the body and complete the repairs:

They passed number seven; a few miles on and they could see High Eight perched over a cliff, its white walls shining in the sun. When they reached it Stan swung off the road and stopped. They got out. There were a couple of cars parked, one of the station service trucks and the Sheriff’s estate wagon. They walked towards the building and Sheriff Stanton came out the door. One of his deputies backed out after him, taking a bulb out of a flash camera. Stanton nodded to the Saskeega men, wagged his thumb at High Eight. He said, “Better take a look, fellers, your steak-frier’s sure done him proud.”
They went in.
It could have been worse. The body was lying curled up just inside the door, a little old man, grey-haired, clothes ragged. Just an old hobo. The flash had blown him clear instead of taking him in and cooking him, his hands were charred but that was all. He’d smashed the back of his skull on the guard-rail. Not that that mattered, he’d been dead when he hit it. A yard or so away was a tin box. The lid had come off, there were old papers scattered, a couple of photographs. And there were the bus bars shining in the half dark, the transformers singing all round.  p. 15

Later that night, when Rick goes home to his wife Judy, she tells him she can understand why the man did it, having herself experienced Bad Feelings at the site:

He’d taken her up to High Eight one day, and it had scared the Hell out of her. The big housings singing like cats, the static over their tops making blue crackles in the dark. She’d lived with the fear for years, but she’d got no better.
He could see the thing was on her back again. She said, “Why’d he do it, Rick, you find out why he did it? Maybe, you know, did he leave a note or something, say why . . . ?”
He said, “No note, honey, nothing. Just wasn’t a reason, I guess. Poor old guy was crazy, is all.” He stood squarely, facing her and frowning, worrying about something outside his experience and wondering how to quieten her.
She shook her head violently. She said, “I know why he did it, Rick, I can see why, can’t you?” She gulped. Then, “Was he . . . much burned?”
“Look, Judy . . .
She said. “It was the lines. It’s always the lines. Like the rails in a . . . station, in a subway, they pull, Rick, you never felt them pull? You stood there with the train coming and the noise and felt the rails pull harder and harder . . .”
“Honey, please . . .”
She ignored him. “It’s that way with the lines, Rick. They drew him. Can’t you see him up there, that poor old man, lonely, nobody to go to, nobody around? That’s when they pull most, when there’s nobody around. He was hungry and cold and the night was coming and there were the lights on the wall inside High Eight, like sort of red and amber eyes watching and saying come on, it’s O.K., come on . . . and the singing all round, and the shining things behind the rail pulling and pulling—”
He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Judy, for God’s sake.”  p. 15-16

This passage telegraphs the arc of the story, which is (spoiler) an ever-increasing number of suicides and unexplained deaths in that part of the grid. Later, High Eight starts attracting large groups of people, and eventually Rick and his supervisor realise that a malevolent entity which lives in that part of the grid is responsible.
I’ve already noted the unusual American voice (although there is more use of “bloody” as an epithet than I suspect an American would ever use) but what is characteristic is the story’s ‘technology out of control’ doom-mongering:

Cameron shook his head. It was like he couldn’t think straight any more. “You can’t just let it build, Stan. It’s too bloody awful to think about. If this thing gets started—”
Mainwaring shook his head. “Rick, I’m in a vice. I’m caught in the same trap as everybody else. It’s the sort of trap only the human race could have invented for itself. It could have sprung any time. It’s chosen now. We’re hooked on our own technology.
“Those lines have got to stay in. We need ’em. We’re dead without them. Could be we’re dead with them as well, that’s just too bad. But we can’t turn the clock back. We can’t scrap electricity just because it’s turned mean.”  p. 41

The strengths of the story are its pacing and intensity, which will sweep readers away to a greater or lesser extent, and the horror elements (there is some gory description of the electrocuted people, and a last scene involving Cameron’s wife where matters spiral out of control).
I thought this was very good when I read it years ago—I didn’t think it was as good this time around, but it is still one of Roberts’ better early stories.
The first of three reprints (which few NWISF readers would have seen before) is Star Light by Isaac Asimov (Scientific American, Oct 1962). This is a short squib (four pages) about a spaceship pilot getting away with a theft by jumping to a far distant part of the universe where the police can’t follow. Once there he intends to use a newly invented computer (stolen from a murdered partner) to do a spectral analysis of the stars to determine his location. Of course when he arrives at his destination (spoiler) a star has gone nova, which ruins the plan. There is no explanation why the computer can’t be reprogrammed to ignore this one variable or why he can’t jump back to where he started from. A weak gimmick story.
Hunger Over Sweet Waters by Colin Kapp is set on Hebron 5, an alien planet that is mostly ocean, and which hosts a number of mineral extraction factories and research bases which are built on widely spaced artificial islands connected by a long railway that also floats. The latter connects the stations to one of the few land masses on the planet.
The protagonist of the story is a chemist called Blick, whose station is two hundred miles from base, and his problem is that the supply train is sixteen hours overdue and the communication lines are down. He contacts a colleague called Martha at one of the other stations using an alternative circuit, and they discuss their perilous situation. If the problem is what Blick thinks it is—a huge break in the line—the machinery to repair it will have to come from off-planet, which will take weeks. The pair have limited food and this will not last until help arrives. Further, Blick, who is married, and Martha, who is single, have history (although they have not been lovers) as indicated in one of the conversations they have about their predicament:

“First,” said Blick, “[. . .] we move you down here and pool such foodstuffs as we have available. We’ll work out some sort of rationing system which will give us a chance of surviving for a maximum period.”
“Whoa!” said Martha, laughing. “Whose welfare are we interested in? I don’t really see how mine is going to be improved by moving into your cabin, and I can diet here as well as anywhere. Apart from the social prospects, give me one good reason why I should be any better off at your station than at mine?”
“In a word,” said Blick, “water. Your supply is limited to your tank, and that was due to be refilled by the train that didn’t arrive. I’d guess that only gives you a maximum of two day’s supply in hand unless you give up such luxuries as washing, in which case you can last out for about a week. Here I can use my resin columns to produce as much pure water from the sea as we’re ever likely to require. Stay there if you like, but remember where to come if you get thirsty.”
“I might even do that if you can twist your crazy columns into producing gin, but if you think I’m going to walk five kilometres just for a drink of water, you don’t know Martha Sorenson.”
“How much water have you got, Martha?”
She was silent for a moment. “None, and you damn well know it, Blick.”
“Uh! I’ll come and give you a hand with your supplies. Shall I come tonight or in the morning?”
“Best make it the morning, Blick. I’ve something I must sort out before I leave.”
“Such as?”
“Me,” said Martha, putting down the phone.  p. 69-70

The rest of the story mixes (a) their problematic relationship and (b) their efforts to build a boat which will take them to base using the limited materials they have to hand.
The relationship material concerns Blick’s love for Martha, even though he is married, and Martha’s resistance (her marriage was broken up because of a third-party and she does not want to do the same to Blick’s wife). This isn’t as always handled as well as the passage above would suggest and is, in places, a bit cringe-worthy and/or mawkish. It is interesting to see, however, a hard science fiction writer such as Kapp introducing material like this into his work. For the period the story was written he makes a better attempt than most at dealing with the complexities of interpersonal relationships (and apart from the Blick-Martha dynamic, there is an uncomfortable situation with his boss at the end of the story which is pragmatically resolved).
The science material concerns the construction of their rescue boat using the ion-exchange columns to copper-plate a wax mould. This is moderately interesting, but I say that as someone whose degree was in physics and chemistry: non-scientists may find this harder going, but I didn’t think there was an overabundance of detail.
The final section details their voyage to base in the boat. This is slightly anti-climactic, probably as they do little more than drift with the current in the hope of hitting land. That said, Kapp manages to add a little twist at the end which injects some excitement.
Overall this is an uncomplicated piece but an enjoyable one. It will be of interest to those who like his ‘Unorthodox Engineers’ series.
The Country of the Strong by Dennis Etchison (Seventeen, 1962) is set in a vaguely post-holocaust landscape, and starts with a man taking another woman’s daughter to the park. Before they go the woman shows the girl’s club foot to him.
At the park the man and the girl meet another couple and they all end up attending the “Daily” at the pool. This turns out to be (spoiler) an occasion where the SS (the Selective Survival teams mentioned earlier in the story) euthanize malformed children. They discover the girl’s club foot.
This is a chilling but rather plotless story about eugenics, and one that could have as easily been set in Nazi Germany: it would have probably been a better story, if not an SF one, if it had been.
Parking Problem by Dan Morgan begins with a data dump prologue that introduces the story’s gimmick, an extra dimensional chamber that is later put into use as parking lockers which can store three hundred and sixty vehicles in the space occupied by a normal garage.
The story then starts with a local crime boss giving one of his flunkies a key that will open any locker and sending him off to steal a car. The garage the flunky robs yields a pink tricycle, obviously of alien design. Another tricycle appears after the flunky has left, driven by an alien set on recovering the first vehicle.
When the crime boss realises that the vehicles can pass through matter his thoughts turn to robbing banks. In due course, the police and military and the alien get involved.
This is all done as “humour”, presumably to mask the gimmicky idea, the stereotypical characters, and the weak storyline. This is quite poor.
Sub-Lim by Keith Roberts, like his story above, starts off in a style that you would be hard pushed to recognise as his:

No don’t get me wrong, Doc, not pictures, Images. That was how he explained it to me, he said a film director, say Hitchcock, anybody you want to name, is always worrying consciously or subconsciously about Images, trying to get some shape on the screen that’ll help the actors along, make you feel what’s going on. He said that was what a good film was, not a lot of shots of actors and such, but a set of Images that made you feel what you were supposed to. He said it was done with the picture composition and the lighting and everything. And he said, for instance, if you saw every thriller ever made and studied them all over and over you could work out a shape from all the Images all the directors had ever used, and the shape would sort of represent fear, all on its own. He said if you drew it and showed it to a guy he’d get scared to death and he wouldn’t know why. He said if the Image was right it would sort of lock onto his mind and make him feel whatever it meant. He said it was possible to make an Image for every emotion, every one in the book, once you’d got the hang of drawing them.  p. 136

This is another story which makes use of Roberts’ cinema background,² and concerns the invention of a subliminal film technique by a small company that is on the verge of going bankrupt—that is until they discover they can manipulate the emotions of viewers using certain images projected in parallel with a normal film. The story features four main characters: the narrator; J. R., one of the company owners; Connie the receptionist; and Freddy, who draws the subliminal images.
The first half, which covers the production of the films and their spectacular success, is a little unbelievable and a bit dull to be honest, but the story improves towards the end. In that latter part, as well as dumping most of the style above, the narrator (spoiler) becomes involved with Connie, who turns out to be devious and manipulative (she later dumps him for J. R. and a promotion). The narrator then goes to see Freddy and forces him to draw a love image to help him win back Connie. This works, but she knows what he has done, and she goes to Freddy and gets a suicide image. . . .
The last scene is an entertainingly unhinged Grand Guignol finale.
Bernie the Faust by William Tenn (Playboy, 1963) concerns the eponymous businessman, a pushy and distrustful individual, receiving a strange visitor in his office who proceeds to offer him a twenty-dollar note for a five-dollar one. Bernie is not impressed:

I looked him over and I said, “Wha-at?”
He shuffled his feet and coughed some more. “A twenty,” he mumbled. “A twenty for a five.”
I made him drop his eyes and stare at his shoes. They were lousy, cracked shoes, lousy and dirty like the rest of him. Every once in a while, his left shoulder hitched up in a kind of tic. “I give you twenty,” he explained to his shoes, “and I buy a five from you with it. I wind up with a five, you wind up with a twenty.”
“How did you get into the building?”
“I just came in,” he said, a little mixed up.
“You just came in.” I put a nasty mimicking note in my voice. “Now you just go right back downstairs and come the Hell out. There’s a sign in the lobby—NO BEGGARS ALLOWED.”
“I’m not begging.” He tugged at the bottom of his jacket.
It was like a guy trying to straighten out his slept-in pyjamas. “I want to sell you something. A twenty for a five. I give you—”
“You want me to call a cop?”
He looked very scared. “No. Why should you call a cop? I haven’t done anything to make you call a cop!”
“I’ll call a cop in just a second. I’m giving you fair warning. I just phone down to the lobby and they’ll have a cop up here fast. They don’t want beggars in this building. This is a building for business.”
He rubbed his hand against his face, taking a little dirt off, then he rubbed the hand against the lapel of his jacket and left the dirt there. “No deal?” he asked. “A twenty for a five? You buy and sell things. What’s the matter with my deal?”
I picked up the phone.
“All right,” he said, holding up the streaky palm of his hand. “I’ll go.”
“You better. And shut the door behind you.”  p. 161-162

After getting rid of the man from his office Bernie reflects on the encounter, and realises that it may be part of a TV reality show with stupendous prizes, so he goes to the address on the card that the man gave him before leaving. Over the course of the day Bernie not only buys the twenty for five but makes more deals. These involve selling his share of various things (San Francisco Bridge, etc.), and culminate with the sale of his part of the planet.
Afterwards, Bernie contacts a TV agent friend to find out more about this reality show, only to be categorically told that no such production exists. After reflecting on the man’s strange appearance and the weird TV set he had in his room, Bernie realises (spoiler) that he may actually have sold part of the Earth to an alien. When an academic friend subsequently points out he is an authorised reseller for the United Nations, Bernie realises he may have sold the whole planet, and needs to undo the deal. . . .
This is pleasant, humorous stuff, and (spoiler) ends up with the biter well and truly bit. That said, it is told in a very American (New York?) voice which makes it feel a little dated.

I usually detest psychedelic artwork or photographs on SF magazine Covers but I rather like this one by  Sir George F. Pollock. I doubt that this image was used for the usual cost saving reasons given that there is a “Sir” involved.³
The Foreword by John Carnell is one of his boilerplate introductions. He ends with this:

All the stories, however, have been selected with a view to entertainment; the fact that science fiction has a penchant for making people think is an added bonus for which there is no extra charge.  p. 10

I think he has said all this before, so it’s déjà vu all over again.⁴
This is one of the better volumes of the series with four fairly good stories (most only have one or two).  ●

_____________________

1. P. Schuyler Miller notes that the Asimov (Star Light) and Etchinson (The Country of the Strong) “come from sources that most readers won’t see” but that the Tenn (Bernie the Faust) “should be familiar to most American readers by this time”.
The Stringer (High Eight) “combines what reads like practical knowledge of high-tension technology with a concept of life like something out of Hoyle’s “Black Cloud” or Stapledon’s “Last and First Men”.” He adds that the Kapp (Hunger Over Sweet Waters) “is another kind of technological story that would have fitted very well here in Analog—overcoming disaster on a world where there is little or no land. It’s my favorite in the book, though the Etchison story is more grimly cruel and powerful—a horrible vignette of life after mutations have become common.”
He finishes by noting that the Morgan (Parking Problem) is a “comedy”, and that Roberts (Sub-Lim) “quite outdoes Pohl and Kornbluth in his satire of advertising ethics.”
He concludes, “You should like ’em all.” (p. 165-166, Analog, December 1968)

Michael Moorcock says of New Writings in SF 4 that “the undemanding reader who is happy with fresh twists on old themes will find plenty worth reading—though the best of these are the reprints from Isaac Asimov, Dennis Etchison, and William Tenn. He adds that the other stories by Kapp, Morgan and Roberts “are up to the standard normally expected from these writers”, and notes new writer Stringer’s debut.
He finishes with this: “Editor Carnell says in his introduction that readers are demanding more accuracy and authenticity in their SF. True enough—but this includes greater accuracy of character-observation, too, and this is in the main lacking in the stories so far published in this series. (p. 125-126, New Worlds #153, August 1965)

2. Mike Ashley states in his essay Keith Roberts: The Patient Craftsman (p. 2, Science Fiction Monthly, December 1975): “Roberts’ father had been a cinema projectionist at Kettering, and [Escapism] reveals much of Roberts’ obvious boyhood association with cinemas.”

3. There is a little more information about Sir George Pollock here. The 1971 reissue had a new cover by “SOLUTION”, whoever they are:

4. One of Yogi Berra’s “Yogi-isms”. Given my grasp of the English language I’m aware of the irony. (I only had to write the previous sentence three times to get something that sounds right.)  ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews:¹
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #151, June 1965
W. T. Webb, Vector #31, March 1965
Roddy Williams, SF to Read Before You Die
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:
The Subways of Tazoo • novelette by Colin Kapp ∗∗∗
The Fiend • reprint short story by Frederik Pohl ∗∗
Manipulation • novelette by Keith Roberts [as by John Kingston] ∗∗∗+
Testament • short story by John Baxter ∗∗
Night Watch • short story by James Inglis ∗∗∗
Boulter’s Canaries • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗
Emreth • short story by Dan Morgan ∗
Spacemaster • novelette by James H. Schmitz ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Foreword • introduction by John Carnell

_____________________

This volume leads off, as ever, with the longest story in the anthology, The Subways of Tazoo by Colin Kapp. This is a sequel to The Railways Up on Cannis (New Worlds #87, October 1959) and would end up as the second of five ‘Unorthodox Engineers’ stories.²
This has Fritz Van Noon, his sidekick Jacko Hine, and the rest of the team sent to help a group of archaeologists on Tazoo, where they are investigating the remains of an alien civilisation. After their arrival at the landing site the unit travels by ground-cat to the base, but the vehicle breaks down and they have to walk the rest of the way. They get a taste of both dry and wet storms: the first presents a potentially lethal lightning display; the second produces acid rain.
Once they get there, van Noon meets the base commander:

“Welcome to Tazoo, Lieutenant!” Colonel Nash beckoned him into the office.
Fritz explored the still-smarting skin on his face and hands, and was still painfully aware of the puffiness around his eyes. “Thank you, Colonel. That was quite an initiation ceremony out there!”
Colonel Nash smiled fleetingly. “Unpremeditated, I assure you, but the weather is part of the reason you’re here. A ground-cat is the toughest machine available, but as you saw for yourself it is totally incapable of standing up to the environment. The low pH of the celestial waters conspires with the sand to etch and tear the guts out of any transportation contrivance we’ve yet imported to Tazoo. When you consider atmospheric chlorine, hydrogen chloride, free sulphuric acid and ozone, plus high humidity and extreme ultraviolet radiation together with an additional nightly sandblast, you can guess that corrosion prevention is not the least of our troubles.”
Fritz shuddered involuntarily.
“I must admit,” said Nash, “that I haven’t always seen eye to eye with you before on the subject of unorthodox engineering, but if you can solve our transport problem I shall at least be open to persuasion. Certainly no orthodox engineers can give us transport on Tazoo at a cost less than the total budget for the entire enterprise.”  p. 17

Initially van Noon’s team try modifying a couple of the ground-cats to make them more resistant to the environment, but this proves abortive. One of the archaeologists, Philip Neville, then turns up with a wishbone-shaped alien artefact he says is a machine; van Noon rebuilds what turns out to be an alien harp and plays it—much to Jacko’s aural distress. An alien city is later discovered and, shortly after that, they find a shaft. Fritz and Jacko investigate the next day and, a hundred metres underground, find what they think is an alien subway station and a train that looks like a weird kind of birdcage.
The rest of the story details the team’s attempts to get the trains working again: the alien harps (and the piezoelectric power producing properties they have) are a part of the solution. This is all rather contrived, but it is a competently told story, and there is some entertaining, light-hearted banter between Fritz and Jacko.
At the end of the story the colonel offers Van Noon a promotion, and his reply presumably sets up the next story in the series:

“Fritz,” said Nash. “I’ve been meaning to speak to you about the possibility of permanently establishing U.E. as a branch of the Terran Exploratory task force instead of merely a section of the Engineering Reserve. How would you react to that? Of course, it would mean promotion. . . .”
“I should personally welcome the idea, sir,” said Fritz, “but I fear I’ve already accepted another assignment on Tiberius Two. They’re trying to establish a mono-rail system there.”
“I see,” said Nash. “And just what is there about a monorail system on Tiberius Two that requires your peculiar talents?”
Fritz coughed discreetly. “I understand it’s something to do with their gravity. Apparently it changes direction by seventy degrees every Tuesday and Thursday morning,” he said, reaching for his cap.  p. 53-54

The Fiend by Frederik Pohl (Playboy, April 1964) has a solitary starship pilot waking up a young woman from suspended animation: she is not best pleased at this, and spends most of her time making threats about what will happen to him if he does not return her to her pod. After a certain amount of back and forth, the pilot puts her back into hibernation and (spoiler) we find he is a remote presence on the ship (his body is on Mercury).
This has a more adult viewpoint than other SF of the time, perhaps, with the implied threat to the woman. The time lag between Mercury and the ship isn’t addressed.
Manipulation by Keith Roberts is the first and best of the author’s two stories in this volume, and concerns a narrator who has a number of wild talents: telekinesis, telepresence, and a nascent telepathy. Roberts would shortly return to this psi-powers theme in his story The Inner Wheel (New Writings in SF #6, 1965).³
The story starts with an account of how the narrator previously used his powers to keep his mother alive:

No!
Nol No! No!
I said I would never use my Power again. I won’t. It’s wrong and vile. I remember what I promised myself ten years ago, walking in the dark after Mother died.
It kept her alive for years. The doctors had never seen anything like it. It was her heart. . . .
God knows it was difficult. Not like this thing I want to do now. This could be so easy.
When Mother was alive I used to stay up nights, work round the clock on that feeble old heart, strengthening, renewing. I built a new valve once, piece by microscopic piece. Three days and nights that took me, working nonstop. Do you know how many cells there are in the ventricles of a human heart?
I do. . . .
Mother knew what was happening. She could feel all the little adjustments going on, the million cobweb-forces twitching between us keeping her alive. She tried to give up three times. But she couldn’t die because her heart couldn’t stop. And her heart couldn’t stop because I was driving it.
[. . .]
Mother had won in the end. She was too clever for me. If she’d cut her wrists or opened her throat it wouldn’t have mattered because I’d have seamed up the wounded flesh as fast as the blade went through it. If she’d jumped from a building I’d have caught her and lowered her to the ground. But she didn’t do that. All she did was swallow a hundred little white tablets. I woke in the night. I was already inside her. I knew what was wrong. Knew she’d beaten me. I was fast enough to juggle cells as they multiplied and died, but these were molecules. The wrong sort of molecules. They came pouring and flooding through the universe of her body, changing things as they came. I could see amino acids and peptones, watch proteins building up like pearly chains against a void, but now there were too many molecules. I fought them, I was everywhere at once, grabbing them, altering them, making them harmless. But it was no use. It was like a locust plague. Like trying to catch the insects one by one in your hands and kill enough to stop the swarm, and the sky dark with them for miles. . . .  p. 67-68

The story then goes on to detail various other aspects of his life, but the narrative always loops back to a failed love affair with a woman called Julie. We discover that this disappointment has poisoned him, and see him use his telepresence power to watch her as she drives at high-speed to an unknown place. We learn that she is probably involved with another man called Ted, and that the narrator is trying to summon his nerve to use a nascent telepathic ability to find out more:

First, I’ve got to beat the fear.
There are a lot of sorts of fear. I suppose one sort comes if you’re on your own some place and you cut an artery and there’s nobody to help and you know you’ve only got minutes. That’s fear . . . and another sort is when there are the footsteps in the night, and the creaks and the laughing, and the branch taps the pane, insistent there behind the curtains; but there isn’t any branch. . . .
I’m about to enter another mind. That’s the worst fear of all. . . .
I’ve done it before, but only seconds at a time. And then it was bad enough. This is going to be worse than opening a private diary, packed full of things about you. Worse than looking in a mirror under a glaring light. Worse than these things, more truthful than the diary, more searching than the light. I begin to see the only thing that keeps any of us sane is that we can’t communicate. Oh we can talk, write letters maybe or compose music, a poem, they’re better ways of getting across, but we still have to be tuned and nobody’s ever finally certain what the message is. . . . We’re all in a mist, thick, like cotton-wool. We hide in it from each other, from ourselves, wrap ourselves away. Deep down we want it like that because it’s for the best. . . .
But there’s a devil inside us, we call it hope. That last little thing the girl let out the box, that was the worst plague of all. It’s hope makes you ask the question when you already know the answer, hope makes you open that locked diary, turn on that glaring light. . . . I don’t want to hope, I’m through with it, done. But I’m hoping. . . .  p. 75

When he finally uses his telepathy he receives the unwelcome image of Ted, her apparent lover. This is the final straw and, enraged, he decides to kill her, disconnecting the pin on the steering arm of the car. However, before it can drop he sees her crying and repents, but finds it impossible to put the linkage back together. Moreover he has no capacity left to contact Julie to get her to slow down, or to telekinetically apply the brakes of the car.
The story rushes on to a somewhat overwrought and melodramatic ending where the narrator leaves the lodgings he is in (fighting his neighbours on the way out and falling down the staircase) and attempts to drive towards her so that his power will be strong enough to rectify the situation. The last scene (spoiler) has her telepathically revealing to him that she is also a ‘talent’ before the steering column linkage fails and their cars crash head on into each other.
Notwithstanding this rather unlikely ending the story is more convincing than many others of its type due to its very intense, personal, and descriptive style. It is one of Roberts’ better early works.
Testament by John Baxter begins with a primitive man going out on a perilous hunt for food to prevent his family dying from hunger and thirst. The first sign that matters are not as expected is in this passage:

Once I even found myself dreaming of water. It shocked me. I had not thought I would ever be that thirsty, nor that I could remember what water tasted like. The only time I had drunk it was at my initiation, three years ago, and yet out there in the desert my memory was as sharp as if it had been only yesterday.  p. 96

Later he arrives at the hunting ground and finds an odd-looking vehicle. When its occupant returns he kills it with a spear:

When my body had stopped trembling I stood up and walked to the thing I had killed. It did not move. Would a demon move after being speared? I did not know. I walked closer. In death, the creature was less horrible. It sprawled like a discarded doll, legs and arms thrown out awkwardly. Only a stain of blood around the spear shaft showed that this thing had once lived. Now that my fear was almost gone, I could see things more clearly. What I had thought to be a single horrible eye was just a window of the same material as in the hut on wheels. And when I bent closer I could see something behind the window; something very like a face, looking up into mine.  p. 98

The story avoids what I thought was going to be an obvious ending featuring a NASA astronaut and, instead (spoiler), reveals that the hunter and his people are the devolved descendants of earlier human settlers. After the astronaut’s companions fly over the settlement, the tribe prepares his body and places it on a funeral platform.
Night Watch by James Inglis is about a probe sent from Earth waking up and beginning its mission. The story then charts its course through our galaxy, and another period of dormancy lasting millions of years. This ends when it wakes again at the edge of our galaxy.
It then reverses course back to the galactic centre in search of light sources that will keep it powered, and on arrival it meets many other probes that have followed the same course. They share their data and watch the eventual death of our galaxy before setting off through interstellar space.
This characterless but cosmic and aeon-spanning tale provides some welcome variety.⁴
Boulter’s Canaries by Keith Roberts is the first of his ‘Alex Boulter’ stories.⁵ Boulter is the hobbyist friend of the narrator, Glynn, and tells the latter about poltergeist activity at Frey Abbey and the unusual effects seen on photographs taken there. They go up later with Alex’s film gear and manage to capture something similar on film. As the pair investigates further they start transmitting high frequency sounds, which irritates the poltergeists (or energy life-forms) which are causing these photographic anomalies: this results in the “canaries” tracking the pair down. The climactic scene has them causing a lot of damage to Alec’s film and sound equipment at his house.
This is well enough done but there is not much of a story here.
Emreth by Dan Morgan has Phillips, a scout for a space tour company, finding what seems is the perfect planet—that is until he sees what he thinks is the brutal murder of one of the alien children by the others. When he challenges their headman about this incident the latter shrugs it off by saying that it is just a realistic child’s game. When Phillips refuses to be fobbed off he is taken to the supposed crime scene (there is no body present but there is a red fluid the headman identifies as “fruit juice”). Phillips is not convinced.
Back at his ship he discovers the sample he took at the scene is actually blood but, before he can confront the headman again, he goes walking in the jungle and meets a scout from another tour company:

The girl stopped and turned towards him. Her dark hair was short, in loose curls about her head. Phillips caught his breath as he saw her face. It was nearer to his ideal of beauty than that of any woman he had ever seen.
“Well, hallo there!” Her voice was low pitched, with an intriguing huskiness.
It was fairly obvious that any Earthwoman this far from home must be a scout, like himself. Some of the smaller companies, like Astral, took on women scouts occasionally. Maybe it worked all right when the planet concerned was as gentle as Lequin, but there had been some during his career that would have been no place for a woman.  p. 152

After he arranges to see her again he goes to see the headman, who admits to Phillips that he was previously less than truthful, and proceeds to tell him of an inimical native life form called an Emreth, a creature that can mimic the natives’ form, and which eventually kills as it feeds on its victims’ life- force.
This unlikely and contrived story proceeds to a predictable conclusion.
Spacemaster by James H. Schmitz begins with a man called Haddan waking up in a strange room observing his environment (a rather lazy and clichéd start). A little while later the wall vanishes and a man called Vinence appears. Haddan is then interrogated.
Initially the story gives the impression that Vinence’s Spacemaster organisation is a totalitarian group bent on control of the people living in the Eighty Two cities, and that they have genetically modified the populace to become weaker and less viable. We also learn that Haddan and his group had left one of these spacebourne cities to set up a free colony on a planet but that they were intercepted by the Spacemasters just before landing—hence his current incarceration.
During the rest of the interview Vinence drip feeds Haddan various items of information which gradually change the perspective of the story. Eventually (spoiler) the Spacemasters are revealed as a group that is attempting to save humanity by placing selected individuals on a primitive planet to breed out humanity’s accumulated genetic damage. As to the Spacemasters themselves, they are biological machines that have a one-thousand year lifespan, and they were originally humans: Haddan elects to join them to help with their grand project.
This is all skillfully and enjoyably done, but I’m not convinced that the ability on show here masks that the piece is essentially an extended explanation.

The Foreword by John Carnell is the usual collection of story introductions. I’m glad I read them after finishing the book as I don’t think I would have been motivated by this comment, coming as it does after puffs for alien archaeology, psi, and poltergeist tales:

For those who like space stories, however, there are at least four different types in this collection, each with a moral to prove if you look at them in retrospect.  p. 8

Carnell ends with this:

Basically, then, this is a new collection of stories designed primarily for enjoyment. That one or more of them will evoke speculation in some readers’ minds is almost certain, for this has been the main feature of S.F. for over fifty years. A sense of wonder and a sense of enjoyment go hand in hand. New Writings in S.F. — 3 should provide you with both.  p. 8

A mixed bag but the best volume in the series so far.  ●

_____________________

1. In New Worlds #151, Michael Moorcock says:

New Writings in SF 3 [. . .] is perhaps the best of the series so far, with a wider selection of themes and styles. My feelings about Kapp are mixed. He has a strong visual imagination, a talent for scientific speculation, and a style—if that’s the word—which imitates the worst elements in a score of different “hack” styles. It is, in fact, a pastiche-style. I cannot regard Kapp as a writer, but rather as a non-writer. His story The Subways Of Tazoo is a sequel to his well-liked The Railways Up On Cannis. Maybe I’ve got a blindspot.
Last time I reviewed [NWISF #2] I asked for a wider variety of backgrounds—fresher backgrounds. These seem to be appearing. I’m looking forward to [NWISF #4].  p. 117-118

In Vector #31, March 1965 , W. T. Webb says of Kapp’s effort:

Told in plain English, one would imagine the story would not amount to much, but Colin Kapp has narrated it in a language that is far from simple. By use of much jargon, brain-straining sentences and generally [nonrhythmic] prose, he has made the story difficult and obscure, but strangely fascinating.
It is not so much a story, one feels, as an exercise in scientific phraseology. The language is of a type which one may not entirely enjoy reading, but which occasionally one admires for its display of technological erudition. Now and then, almost by accident it would seem, it verges upon the poetic.
Colin Kapp, in fact, is like one who tries  to write poetry in mathematical symbols—and almost succeeds.  p. 23

It would seem that one man’s non-writer is another’s poet.
Webb comments on the language or the writing of several other stories: The Fiend by Frederik Pohl is “narrated in concise and fluent language that is a pleasure to read”; Kingston’s Manipulation has “a good deal of scientific language” but “can be boiled down to the best and oldest plot in the world, boy-meets-girl” and is “well worth reading”; Testament by John Baxter is “simply told” but “the ideas involved are profound. A story that will linger in the mind long after the book is closed”; Night Watch by James Inglis is “expertly-written” but “lacking human characters it can hardly, to my way of thinking, be called a story”; Emreth by Dan Morgan is “a well-written tale”.
His favourites seem to be the Roberts and the Schmitz:

Boulter’s Canaries by Keith Roberts is a very good story, intriguing and exciting from start to finish. There is enough gadgetry to satisfy the most technically minded reader and enough human interest and excitement to satisfy anyone. Clever characterisation, a reference to an age-old psychic phenomenon, expert writing, and a first class plot all add up to a splendid piece of workmanship.
[. . .]
“Spacemaster” by James H Schmitz is, in my opinion, the best in the book. It has everything one could hope to find in a good SF yarn; a well-constructed plot, a galactic breadth of plotting, a poetic, almost hypnotic fabric of language and an imagery that verges upon the dreamlike and the surreal—in short, a sort of egghead’s space-opera.  p. 25

2. Coin Kapp’s ISFDB page is here.

3. Roberts would also use this psi theme in his story The Worlds That Were (Worlds of Tomorrow, May 1966, reprinted in Science Fiction Monthly, December 1975, reviewed here).

4. James Inglis published a handful of stories from 1958-1965. The first two appeared in Nebula; the other pair in New Worlds. Inglis’s ISFDB page is here.

5. Roberts’ other ‘Alex Boulter’ story was The Big Fans (F&SF May 1977). Roberts would have been 83 this Thursday (birth date: 20^th September 1935). ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews¹:
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #146 (January, 1965)
Charles Winstone, Vector #29 (November, 1964)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:
Hell-Planet • novella by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ∗
The Night-Flame • short story by Colin Kapp ∗
The Creators • short story by Joseph Green ∗
Rogue Leonardo • short story by G. L. Lack ∗∗
Maiden Voyage • novelette by Douglas R. Mason [as by John Rankine] ∗∗
Odd Boy Out • reprint short story by Dennis Etchison ∗
The Eternal Machines • short story by William Spencer ∗∗
A Round Billiard Table • short story by Steve Hall ∗

Non-fiction:
Foreword • essay by John Carnell

_____________________

This issue, like the first, starts with a long story, a 19,000 word novella called Hell-Planet by John T. Phillifent. Like the previous effort (Key to Chaos by Edward Mackin, NWISF #1, 1964) it feels equally tired.
The story starts with the crew of an alien spaceship called Drendel coming out of warp. Captain Forsaan’s ship is damaged, as at their last destination they received an unpleasant surprise:

And so, unsuspectingly, Drendel had twisted out of warp, into a raving hell of swirling incandescence. Emergency trips and overloads had snatched her out again in split seconds, with her hull-sensors crippled, her mainspars wrenched and strained, and everyone aboard in shock and sickness. They had all taken massive doses of antiradiation drugs, the crew had slaved like dogs, and they had got the battered ship into something like trim, the while they hung at a safe distance and watched a sun that had gone nova. p. 15

Forsaan steers his ship towards the sixth planet, and organises his crew to make repairs. He then goes to brief his VIPs, scientific specialists impatient to do their research, but Forsaan has put them off as the ship repairs must take priority.
Forsaan’s first officer Pinat then tells him that they are receiving modulated radio signals from (spoiler) the third planet (Earth). From previous expeditions they know this planet is populated with simian-hominids, and it is also the site of equipment that Forsaan’s race left behind thousands of years ago. There is speculation about the languages heard in the broadcast, and Forsaan suggests one sounds very similar to theirs. During these conversations we also learn that the crew are humanoid, but from ursinoid (bear) descent. There is also talk that the previous exploration team may have interfered in the simians’ progress.
Later on, after they have done more analysis of the signals, there is a disagreement between Forsaan and the scientists about whether they should investigate the planet, and one of the latter loses his patience:

“Oh come, now!” Buffil could contain himself no longer.
“Caralen and I have seen your pictures and learned the languages, the major ones—and there is plenty to fear. Why not admit it? Captain, from the evidence of radio and visuals, we know quite a lot. For instance, we have identified cities, transport by land, sea and air, radio and visual communications linked by orbital relays, fission stage atomics, and much more. Yet, on that planet, which is slightly smaller than our own home world, there are almost three billion people, at least five major cultures, Urs knows how many minor ones—and all in savage conflict with each other.” Forsaan went cold as the bulky technologist elaborated.
“We have seen the picture-records, blatantly transmitted. They use, and are using, explosive devices, lethal gases, radiation and poisonous bacteria against each other on a massive scale. Worse still, they seem to rejoice in this hideous activity and award respect and status to those who show themselves skilled at it.”
“But that’s not possible, surely,” Forsaan clung to as much commonsense as he could. “If they practise wholesale slaughter on that scale—how can so many survive?’’
“They breed in proportion,” Buffil growled. “Like animals. And they squander materials at an incredible rate. So far as one can judge, their one aim seems to be to consume as much as possible.” p. 31-32

The other thing they learn is that the planet’s inhabitants live relatively short lives, eighty years, compared with Forsaan who is several hundred years old.
Forsaan agrees to change the ship’s course to the third planet’s moon, where they will complete their repairs. Professor Buffil will go down in a lifeboat to Earth to make observations.
This first section is overlong, and reads like the tired and routine naval-analogue space-opera that it is. But at least it hangs together, which is more than the rest does: we have an unexpected moonshot launched by Earth that may or may not discover the Drendel on the dark side of the moon; a skullcap developed to act as an emotional damper for the professor visiting the planet (these humanoids can ‘read’ emotions, but this isn’t much discussed until later in the story); and there is also this, as the professor is briefed on his trip to the surface:

“Remember, now, on landing and making sure all is well, close the red switch. That will be our only signal from you. Then, be sure to be back in the pod and secure, before the deadline moment. Reverse that switch, which will tell us all is well with you. And leave the rest to us. Good luck, and may the ancestors take care of you.” p. 50

So a culture with warp drives can’t rig up a radio for the professor to contact the ship?
Then, in the last section, the professor returns with the news that they are simians too, just like the people on Earth (no explanation is given about why they previously thought otherwise). The professor also tells Forsaan that the people on the surface do not have ‘auras’ so they can’t tell each other’s emotional state (the reason for this is the destruction of the orbital platform left by the previous survey crew has caused permanent interference). The professor says he must go back and give them the technology to remove the interference, and otherwise shepherd them into becoming a more peaceful people:

“They are as emotionally sensitive as we, if not more so. I have had plenty of time to ponder this thing, to think about it very deeply. I am convinced that this one awful factor, by itself, accounts for almost all the seeming contradictions, the inconsistencies, of these people. Imagine how they have lived. Think of being completely cut off, walled up inside the shell of your own emotions, never able to know, to sense, to feel what anyone else is feeling. Your only contacts the pitifully inadequate interpretations of gesture, attitude, facial expression, and words. This, I tell you, is why their languages are so tortuous, so complex. This is why their values are so twisted, why they cannot trust or understand anyone, why they are hostile, suspicious, aggressive, and divided. They can never be sure of anyone else. And, by being driven in on themselves, they can never be sure of themselves, either. p. 61

A poor start.
The Night-Flame by Colin Kapp has as its narrator an Eastern European called Balchic, who lives in the British countryside. The story begins with him investigating a ‘night-flame’ that he has seen from his house. When he gets close to this phenomenon he realises he is in peril:

Balchic moved closer to the balls of fluorescence, trying to gauge their size and distance against a background which afforded no points of reference. Then he stopped. The balls were growing larger or nearer, and as they did so he felt the fear increasing. Fingers of ice were stalking up his backbone and the hair on his neck was rising sensibly. But that which gave him most cause for alarm was the glimpse of his watch dial in his sleeve emitting such a light that his hand was clearly illuminated by reflection.
Radiation! Data fell into place. This was no natural phenomenon. It took power to punch out radiation of such intensity over such distances. Just how much power it needed was known only to God and its designers—but Balchic was almost in the beam path! Its nature and its source were suddenly of secondary consideration. Now his fear had a tangible object and he was swift to react. The vicinity of a beam that could ionise air at atmospheric pressure was not a fit place for human flesh to be. He back-tracked in haste, wondering if he had already been exposed to sufficient radiation to do him some permanent harm. p. 71

He goes home to the sound of blacked-out army trucks moving in the night, and when he gets home his wife says that an army major wants to talk to him, and will visit in the morning.
When the major arrives the next day he raises the subject of the Balchics moving out of their cottage. Balchic refuses, so the major levels with him and says that his unit are operating beam weapons to neutralise satellites that would otherwise destroy the country. One day they may have to drop their aim, and the cottage may be in the way . . . .
The major is then interrupted by an urgent phone call and has to go back to his unit. Balchic drives him, and later witnesses an attack.
This story doesn’t suspend disbelief and it has an obviously contrived plot (spoiler: there is a tragic end). I’m not sure that the it’s attempt at gravitas works either (there is a backstory about the Balchics’ two daughters, who died at Auschwitz).
The Creators by Joseph Green concerns a galactic federation expedition consisting of humans and multiple alien species exploring a planet circling a burnt out sun. The main character is Fassail, an artist who is teamed up with a scientist, Nickno (both human); they are accompanied by two spherical aliens called Jelly and Belly. The expedition’s purpose is to work out how the previous occupants controlled energy, which they used in an unusual way:

They had created art forms.
With control of the known universe at their fingertips, with such power available as was never known to a living intelligence, they had created art. Their expression-forms possessed a strange, overpowering beauty, a variety of colour and shape almost unimaginable to anyone not a fellow artist. Some of the huge buildings had been hollowed out until only the exterior remained, and filling it from top to bottom would be a single great formation. Others contained small formations of stirring beauty and infinite variety. Some showed clearly, by the open spaces near which projectors still crouched, that they had been occupied by formations now vanished. p. 94

The rest of the story details the conflict between the scientist and the artist about the approach to take in discovering how these creations work. While Nickno tries to dismantle the transmitter box for one installation, Fassail wanders round looking at the artwork.
This trundles on for a bit until it is all explained in an info-dump, amid some cosmic waffle, by Fassail: (spoiler) the creatures learned to control energy, first with technology, then with their minds, and eventually became energy life-forms themselves—at which point they all emigrated from the planet to acquire more energy and later became the suns of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This is a non-story with an unconvincing ending.
Rogue Leonardo by G. L. Lack² has short introduction about an old man who is a pavement artist in the future. The story itself concerns Trafford, who is on charge of reproduction machines that produce perfect copies of great artworks. These need regular calibration, and there are occasional problems.
One day he visits Cambridge and meets with Acilia, the female supervisor there. Although everything appears in order, something still niggles at him after he leaves, and he has a dream about seeing multiple Acilias, whose appearance progressively changes. He forgets the dream before waking but remembers when he goes out at lunchtime and sees the pavement artist.
When he goes back to Cambridge to see Acilia (spoiler), he finds her viewing a number of pictures produced by a Leonardo machine that show a series of evolutions. Over the objections of Acilia he arranges for the machine’s destruction. Later, he discovers the old man has died.
This story about the stagnation of art in the future didn’t entirely grab me, but it is encouraging to see one of the NWISF writers writing about something other than the same old stuff.
Maiden Voyage by Douglas R. Mason is another ‘Dag Fletcher, Space Molester’, sorry, ‘Dag Fletcher, Space Patrol’ tale. I made a side bet with myself that he would be letching at an attractive woman before I got more than two hundred words into the story. I won.³ This is start of the story:

“The board will see you now, Mr. Fletcher.”
Dag Fletcher picked his long dangling legs from the sofa in the plushy ante room of the Space Projects’ H.Q. and followed the trim attendant into the corridor. He liked the way her bottom moved in the tight blue-grey cheongsam and he was wondering if he ought to pinch it, when the debate was cut short by their arrival at the bronze doors which filled the end of the white passage. She spoke quietly into a grille in the left hand wall. p. 121

The board meeting is to hear Fletcher’s objections about the drive of a new spaceship called Nova. Lucas, the captain of the latter, is confident of his ship, so it is decided that instead of grounding Nova, Fletcher will accompany it with Interstellar Two-Seven as a safety ship.
In flight, Nova goes missing, and Fletcher and his crew manage to track it down to a planet called Taurus, which has a violent hominid race that is slowly devolving to extinction.
The rest of the story concerns the rescue of the other crew, and this involves (spoiler) winching down cliffs, attacks by the hominids, and, after they rescue the crew, Lucas’s final sacrifice to hold off the attackers (he was critically injured in the crash, and wrong about the drive—so it’s poetic justice, I guess). Never one to miss the chance of some titillation, Mason has Yolanda get her kit off during their retreat to Interstellar Two-Seven to distract the attackers:

Gutteral commands brought the hominids into two lines from the rock to the forest and then they began a slow forward movement. In the fantastic light they looked like figures from a medieval picture of hell. They moved in silence. Black eyes and mouths flecked red. Dag waited for the rush that had come before which would annihilate them before they reached the cleft.
Ten yards to go. The six remaining men fanned out in an arc with Dag at the centre, covering the stretcher party. A figure appeared on a ledge thirty feet above the ground on the cliff face. Lit up by the lurid glare of the rocket fire, Yolanda looked bigger than life size. She wore only two golden bracelets. Against the green cliff her skin had an unearthly pallor. She was an incarnation of the rock sculptures of ancient Hindu mythology. Golden breasted Kali. Great Earth Goddess. Sensual. Compelling.
The advancing lines stopped dead and every eye turned to the rock. Then a growling roar came from thrown back throats. p. 144-145

There is more of this kind of thing at the end when the survivors, minus Lucas, are all safely back on Interstellar Two Seven:

Dag made his way slowly to his cabin. He felt no pleasure at being proved right. Only weariness and the sense of waste in the loss of good spacemen. Why did they do it? Why not be a banker or a salesman? As he slid back the cabin door he met a perfume of sandalwood.
Yolanda said, “Come in, Controller. I hope you will not mind if I share your cabin. I take up very little room.”
She was still dressed as an apostle of Vedic culture. Dag said, “Be my guest.”
There might, after all, be a lot to be said for the Space Service. p. 147

I think this ‘catastrophe followed by a sexual encounter’ trope shows that Mason is channelling James Bond.
This story is, like the others in this series, readable but uncomplicated and predictable. I should also add that, although I poke fun at the dated sexual attitudes in Mason’s stories, I would have been oblivious to this stuff at the time, and probably for decades afterwards.
Odd Boy Out by Dennis Etchison (Escapade, 1961)⁴ is about two young women and a man in the woods trying to make a mental connection with three nearby children. The man, Cam, is the only one who can manage. Before he completes his ‘transfer’ into the boy’s body he and one of the woman, Zoe, speak. Most of the story is emotional dialogue between the two:

As soon as she began speaking, her voice broke.
“Sometimes, Cam, sometimes—it’s happened several times before—I feel like—like I almost wish we—weren’t what we are. That the parents who raised us were really our own, that we hadn’t been sent here by the Group to do whatever it is they’re doing to this world, that we didn’t have the telepower lobe on our brains . . . that we could just . . . marry and . . . live like the rest here. I know I’m being very immoral by Group standards, or unethical, or whatever you want to call it. But Cam? Can you tell me why it had to be us? Can you just tell me that one thing, so I can go on feeling like I really belong in this body after today? Can you just tell me something to keep me from—Cam? Do you know. Do you know why it had to be us?
Are . . . are you going to be able to keep your sanity sleeping tonight in a little boy’s body?” p. 157

There is no explanation about who the ‘Group’ are, or why the three have to transfer between bodies. It is all a bit perplexing, and matters are not helped by a twist ending that seems rather gimmicky.
There is also evidence of a new writer trying too hard. This description:

After a long, pitiful pause he started back, blinking fast, keeping his eyes aimed up into the gold coin pattern the falling sun made high in the leaves of the trees. p. 157

. . . is followed shortly afterword by this one:

They sat at the mouth of the bridge in the waning light of a burnt-orange sun which flashed like golden teeth through the trees. p. 158

If this doesn’t quite work as a story, it is at least another piece that reads like something from a writer of the future and not one of the past.
The Eternal Machines by William Spencer⁵ is about Rosco, the caretaker of the planet Chaos, which is a dumping ground used by the other planets in that solar system (which makes it another story examining contemporary society). Rosco spends part of his time repairing broken machines that have been left there, and has cleared a space for the ones he has brought back to serviceability. He intends them to be a memorial to humanity, one that will outlive the species. Included in this collection is his video diary.
One day, (spoiler) a spaceship in orbit has problems with its engines and decides to make an emergency landing on the planet. The story has an ironic ending.
A Round Billiard Table by Steve Hall leads off with an anecdote about the subject of the title before going on to recount a story about a professor who can make glass invisible (by physically aligning the planes or some such). After making a bet with a man in a bar the professor demonstrates the procedure, although the effect soon wears off as it is temporary.
Later, the man reappears with a colleague, and they ask the professor to subject several diamonds to the procedure (although the professor does not know that is what they are).
The punchline (spoiler) of this unlikely gimmick story is that the harder the ‘glass’ is, the longer it takes to become visible again . . . .
An unlikely and facile gimmick story, but readable enough I guess.

The only non-fiction in the volume is the Foreword by John Carnell. He starts with a definition of SF (“Speculative fiction based upon known facts and extended into future possibilities.”) before briefly discussing the stories:

Today, S-F literature pays far more attention to Man as an individual and as a dominant factor controlling the machines he has invented, as will be seen in most of the stories in this second volume of New Writings in S-F.
Sometimes, as in John Rackham’s “Hell-Planet”, humanity does not shape up too well, although the author allows us to hope that, despite our shortcomings, there is some justification for our actions. Incidentally, the theme behind this story is one which has intrigued me for a long time—just what would the first alien visitors make of all our radio and TV broadcasts?
William Spencer’s story, “The Eternal Machines”, also points up Man’s continual desire to register his mark upon the Universe while his own cleverness defeats him in G. L. Lack’s “Rogue Leonardo” and Steve Hall’s “A Round Billiard Table”. However, it is in such stories as Colin Kapp’s “The Night-Flame” and Joseph Green’s “The Creators” that we find the better qualities triumphing over adversity—man against man in the former and man against a cosmic mystery in the latter. Both call for an enquiring mind. A faculty Man is fortunately endowed with . . . .
As are most science fiction readers. p. 7-8

This is just over-generalised waffle, and tells the prospective reader little if anything. (As you can probably gather, these Forewords were not my favourite part of the anthologies.)

A poor collection of stories that is worse than most, if not all, of the contemporaneous issues of Science Fantasy and New Worlds magazines. ●

_____________________

1. In New Worlds #146 (January, 1965), Michael Moorcock (as James Colvin) says:

The second New Writings in SF (Dobson, 16s.) is a bit disappointing. Stories by Rackham, Hall, Kapp, Lack, Spencer, Etchison, Rankine, Green. Most of them suffer from overtired backgrounds, the like of which have been seen in SF for a good twenty years. The stories which succeed best are set on Earth. p. 117

He goes on to say this about Colin Kapp’s story:

I’ve never been a great fan of Kapp’s—his writing has in the past been erratic and derivative, using several different styles in a single paragraph when at its worst—but his The Night Flame is probably the best story in the collection. It is simply the story of a man who leaves his wife to investigate peculiar disturbances in the sky and learns that a war has been going on for some time between the West and the East. p. 117

He goes on to briefly discuss G. L. Lack’s story before saying this about the series:

A hard-cover collection of new SF stories is a revolutionary idea, but I can’t help feeling that the stories themselves ought to be somewhat revolutionary, too. At the moment, perhaps, they are evolutionary—and time will show if the series succeeds in fulfilling the function of blowing fresh winds into the field, as I believe it can. p. 118

In Vector #29 (November, 1964), Charles Winstone’s review rates Phillifent/Rackham’s story much more highly than I do:

[Hell Planet] lives up to the claim made by John Carnell in New Writings 1. This story is a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story. It is a detailed description of an alien race’s first contact of the planet Earth. It describes the aliens’ confusion at the many contradictory puzzles of the Earth’s cultures as presented by the multi-lingual and radio and television broadcasts. [. . .] Suffice it to say that John Rackham has caught very well the aliens’ terrible confusion when confronted with the Earth’s present day culture. p. 33

Of the others, he appears to have enjoyed the Green (“rather original”) and the Mason/Rankine (“so well-written that the reader’s interest is sustained to the end.”)

2. G. L. Lack contributed one other story to NWISF #10, and one to Science Fantasy. The ISFDB page for this author is here.

3. I couldn’t help but think what would happen nowadays if Dag Fletcher gave into his desires and pinched her bottom (be warned, I have a warped imagination): the attendant complains and HR suspends Fletcher while they investigate. The space police get involved, arrest Fletcher, interview him under caution. After he is bailed, galactic social media erupts as several other women, alerted by the #DagFletcherSpaceMolester hashtag, come forward with similar stories. Fletcher appears in court and, despite pleading guilty, receives an exemplary custodial sentence of six months, as well as being placed on the sex offenders’ register.
He ends up in Rikers #417, a Stellar Penal Station for sex offenders of all species. A few days later he is in the showers, standing one stall away from an alien Shuggoth from Epsilon Sigma, a seven-foot tall vertical cylinder of pink slime with a crown of eyes and several dangling pseudopods. Fletcher notices that several of the eyes are fixed on him. Unnerved, he drops the soap, and reflexively bends down to pick it up. He feels several pseudopods coil around his thigh . . . Fletcher finally knows what it feels like to be at the hands of a sexual predator.

4. This may be a reprint of Etchinson’s debut story—I can’t find an earlier publication at ISFDB, Galactic Central, or Wikipedia. ●

5. William Spencer had an odd writing career. He wrote a dozen stories for Carnell’s New Worlds and NWISF in the sixties and early seventies, and then popped up a couple of decades later with four stories in David Pringle’s Interzone. There can’t have been many Carnell-only writers who also appeared in Interzone (Aldiss, Ballard, Bayley, Roberts, etc., all appeared under other editors too). Here is Spencer’s ISFDB page.
There is an interesting interview with Spencer (among other things he was a student contemporary of J. G. Ballard, and later took art classes taught by Eduardo Paolozzi) conducted by David Pringle in Interzone #79 (January, 1994). Spencer has this to say about John Carnell, and perhaps gives one of the reasons for the pause in his own writing after 1971 (there is also a later mention of an English doctorate started in 1970):

“[Carnell] had an office in fairly central London, and I was in walking distance. I suppose there was no particular need to go and see him in the flesh, but it was often convenient to do so and I found him very affable. He had a gentle, considerate manner. He wasn’t a very big chap; he was rather slight in physical stature and he had an unassuming manner. If he’d stood next to you in a bus queue you wouldn’t really have noticed him. His voice was quiet, but it was nicely modulated. It often seemed to me that when he was talking to writers he spoke to them in this reassuring tone as you might speak to a nervous horse, a wild horse that might at any moment kick up and gallop off into the distance. I hope he wasn’t making a special exception in my case! — but his manner was almost as if he was close to and quietly conversing with a rather dangerous maniac who might suddenly burst out into some unpredictable behaviour. It was part of his character really, but I think he realized that writers are often rather nervous people. With some editors and publishers, I sometimes felt that they want to browbeat the writer because they have this suspicion that he has an ego the size of the Royal Albert Hall and at all costs it must be damped down if there’s to be any hope of dealing sensibly with this terrible person . . . But Ted Carnell had an encouraging manner. Also, he did quite a lot in the way of getting overseas sales and so on. One of my stories was read on German radio, which would never have come about unaided.
“Later on Ted moved out of central London to Plumstead, which is still very much in greater London as far as I’m concerned. I never went to see him there, but when I spoke to him on the phone he seemed to feel it was an idyllic retreat (certainly by contrast with central London it would have been). It’s nice to think of him in what were in fact the final years of his life having this relaxation and lowering of tension and so on. One thing that he did in New Worlds, which got lost in New Writings in SF, was that it was a twoway thing, a link between the author and the reader. He had these author profiles, and letters and Guest Editorials. (This is also the good thing, I think, about Interzone: it has the feeling of being a forum, a two-way traffic of ideas.) This is quite important for writers, to feel they are in touch with an audience, to get feedback. But this element unfortunately got lost in New Writings because that came out as a hardcover book, and though it had an editorial by Ted Carnell it was purely a stiff-backed anthology of stories. If I’m clutching at straws to answer why I stopped writing science fiction this might have come into it a bit: it was very much a take-it-or-leave-it activity, it made little difference to one personally whether one wrote stories or not.” p. 43-44

ISFDB link

Other reviews¹:
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog (January 1967)
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #144 (September-October 1964)
Various, Goodreads
Roddy Williams, SF to Read Before You Die
Charles Winstone, Vector #28 (September 1964)

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:
Key to Chaos • novelette by Edward Mackin –
Two’s Company • short story by Douglas R. Mason [as by John Rankine] ∗∗
Man on Bridge • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
Haggard Honeymoon • novelette by Joseph Green and James Webbert –
The Sea’s Furthest End • novelette by Damien Broderick ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Foreword • essay by John Carnell

The third leg of the stool for British SF magazine readers in 1964 (New Worlds and Science Fantasy being the other two) wasn’t another magazine but a new original anthology series by John Carnell. Although there had been earlier SF anthologies containing new fiction, they were not common, and NWISF was unique—it had initial hardcover publication by Dobson Books², followed a few months later by the paperback from Corgi Books³.

The anthology was initially quarterly in frequency but this publication schedule would not be maintained for long. However, the series lasted thirty volumes, and to 1977. Beyond John Carnell’s death in 1972 it was edited by Kenneth Bulmer.
The interior format stayed remarkably consistent throughout its run: there would be an editorial or foreword by the editor, and each story would have a short introduction, followed by a blank page, followed by the story itself.⁴

The Foreword by John Carnell starts with this:

New Writings in S-F is a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story. As its name implies, not only new stories written specially for the series as well as s-f stories which would not normally be seen by the vast majority of readers, will appear in future editions, but new styles, ideas, and even new writers who have something worth contributing to the genre, will be presented. p. 7

He then mentions short fiction and the SF magazines, and how anthologies have until now presented already published material. He goes on to say:

Now the time has come to take this development one natural stage further—and introduce new material specially written and selected for the new market. p. 7

He briefly trails the contents before finishing with:

Science fiction (an unwieldy and unattractive title which should more aptly be called “Speculative fiction”) is now expanding into the field of general literature and has largely outstripped the western romance in popularity and is fast catching up with the thriller. New Writings in S-F will, in future volumes, form a bridgehead between the old and new versions of speculative fiction. p. 9

Given this editorial pitch, it is surprising that the volume opens with Key to Chaos, a long novelette by Edward Mackin⁵ which reads like an overly padded, single-draft story from the 1940s. It is one of Mackin’s series about the cyberneticist and all-round chancer Hek Belov. It starts intriguingly enough:

The first time I met Frank Tetchum he was hammering on the front door of an apartment house block on East Third Level. Beside him was a chair, a small table, and a plastic bowl with some cutlery in it. Evicted tenants are not an uncommon sight in these parts, and I was about to walk on when he spoke to me.
“It’s one thing being slung out,” he said heatedly, “but it’s a bit thick when they slap an order on your furniture and you don’t even owe any rent. The scoundrels have got my id-scope in there, too, and they’re hanging on to it.” He recommenced his hammering on the door, using the chair this time.
I looked at him, curiously. He was slimly built, perhaps thirty years old, and badly in need of a shave. “What’s an id-scope?” I asked.
He put the chair down, and frowned at me. “It’s a thought visualizer,” he said. “I invented it.” Then he went back to his frenzied assault on the door, and smashed the chair without eliciting any response. p. 13

The story then details how the two of them obtain the device under false pretences from the businessman who has repossessed the flat. They hide away in a nearby deserted building, and Belov gets Tetchum to demonstrate the device. He sees (lascivious) visions from his own id, and then sees Tetchum’s. The latter involves a nightmarish machine making all sorts of devices, including what would seem to be killer robots.
The two are soon found by Benson, the businessman that appropriated Tetchum’s flat, and they are both pressured into working for him.
Long story short, the machine they build produces a small globe that is a rejuvenation device. There is some attempted double-dealing after this, and then the discovery that the machine is actually some sort of chaos device. If it sounds like I am struggling to synopsise this story it is because I am. The story wanders all over the place, and my comprehension was not aided by all the scientific gobbledygook. Take this far from atypical example:

“What’s this?” I asked him.
“A simple K-type amplifier.”
I shook my head. “As far as the machine, or I should say the computer, is concerned that’s a key. A key to Chaos. My guess is that this is anything but a simple K-amp. The bit about youthfulness was the barb. I programmed that as part of an explanation; but the computer has referred to its standard banks, and got some other answers, which it chewed over in that decision box, the homeostatic part of the set-up. The result was that the computer was faced with something of an insoluble problem. It knew what to produce; but the materials weren’t available, not all the materials, that is.
“Now this is where we have to make a leap in the dark. Here we are, a speck in the cosmic eye. The tiniest of tiny islands, where two and two make four, and logic—our peculiar brand of logic—holds sway. Outside, and everywhere, the primal stuff of the universe patterns itself crazily on stray thoughts escaping from the odd, alien, organism in its midst, because Chaos has its own logic. The logic of perfect illogicality. The infinite patterning that both is and isn’t, now and forever, in the shifting nevernever land of everything and everywhere and nothing anywhere. That’s what lies outside the mind; but it doesn’t lie outside the mental scope of a machine. A machine has no fear, and only the mental reservations with which man, in his wisdom, endows it. . . .”
“Cut the prologue and get to the explanations,” said Tetchum impatiently. “I still think you’re waffling.”

Quite.
I presume the random plot and gibberish explanations are meant to be overlooked as the piece is allegedly a ‘humorous’ one, but this appears to consist largely of Belov calling people names (one extended example is a two page diversion where Belov goes for a meal in a restaurant and the owner attempts to get Belov to pay an outstanding bill, p. 36-38). Now name-calling can be funny (e.g. John Cleese in Fawlty Towers) but it isn’t here. This is an awful start to the anthology.
Two’s Company by Douglas R. Mason is the first of his pseudonymous ‘Dag Fletcher, Womaniser in Space’ stories (although that description is accurate, it’s really the ‘Dag Fletcher’ series). In this one he is on an alien world, the Controller on a terraforming project, and his new colleague is a reserved female mathematician, Meryl Winguard. When I say reserved, I mean she pays no attention to Fletcher.
They go to one of the distant stations to rectify a computer fault and, when they are finished, leave in time to get back to base before the planet’s freezing night begins. En route they crash. They have to spend the night cuddled together in a makeshift sleeping bag, and then have work together to traverse rocky terrain and a cliff edge to get home before the next nightfall. During this they establish a bond.
This is an economically told story that is okay I guess—if you can ignore the period sexism, and that the story is essentially an adolescent sexual fantasy. Fletcher is almost constantly aware of Meryl’s model looks and figure—even when he is about to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation on her after the crash there is this:

He registered the light strength she had, the perfectly modelled knees and ankles and high round breasts. p. 82

And, of course, after they are safely back to base, and Fletcher has showered and dressed, he comes out of his room to find Meryl has made dinner and slipped into something more comfortable.
In the introduction to Man on Bridge by Brian W. Aldiss, Carnell says it has “overtones of 1984,” something repeated in other reviews. Personally, I don’t really think the story is more than tangentially about totalitarianism, but is perhaps more an examination of human consciousness. That said, you can see why some would make the comparison, given the story takes place in an unspecified Eastern European country where proles keep the intellectuals, called ‘Cerebrals,’ in camps under armed guard. This is from later in the story:

The common people had often revolted against the rich—but the rich were not identifiable once shorn of their money; then the tide of anger turned against the intelligent. You can always tell an intellectual, even when he cowers naked and bruised before you with his spectacles squashed in the muck; you only have to get him to talk. So the intellectuals had elected to live in camps, behind wire, for their own safety. Things were better now— because we were fewer and they infinitely more; but the situation had changed again: the stay was no longer voluntary, for we had lost our place in the world. We had even lost our standing in the camps. Throughout the more than-mediaeval darkness that had fallen over Europe, our cerebral monasteries were ruled over by the pistol and whip; and the flagellation of the new order of monks was never self-inflicted. p. 109

In the camp two of the Cerebrals, Grabowicz and Winther, have created a new kind of man, Adam X, by removing half his brain. Adam has no visceral responses at all.
Grabowicz and Winther are summoned by the camp commander, who interrogates them about Adam X, and later sends a report to his superiors. Grabowicz is taken away and punished for his insolence to the commander during their conversation, whereas Winther and Adam X are allowed to temporarily leave the camp to visit Winther’s family in the nearby village.
On the way there Winther, the narrator, talks to Adam X:

I took his arm and led him towards the gates. It was always an ordeal, moving towards those great slab-cheeked guards, so contemptuous of eye, so large in their rough uniforms and boots, as they stood there holding their rifles like paddles. We produced our identity sticks, which were taken from us, and were allowed to pass, and go through the side-gate, between the strands of barbed wire, into the free world outside.
“They enjoy their show of might,” Adam said. “These people have to express their unhappiness by using ugly things like guns and ill-fitting uniforms, and the whole conception of the camp.”
“We are unhappy, but we don’t find that sort of thing necessary.”
“No, Jon, I am not unhappy. I just feel empty and do not wish to live.”
His talk was full of that sort of conversation-stopper.
We strode down the road at increasing pace as the way steepened between cliffs. The ruined spires and roofs of the town were rising out of the dip ahead, and I wanted only to get home; but since I had never caught Adam in so communicative a frame of mind, I felt I had to take advantage of it and find out what I could from him.
“This not wishing to live, Adam—this is just post-operational depression. When it wears off, you will recover your spirits.”
“I think not. I have no spirits. Morgem Grabowicz cut them away. I can only reason, and I see that there is no point to life but death.”
“That I repudiate with all my heart. On the contrary, while there is life, there is no death. Even now, with all my limbs aching from that filthy prole punishment, I rejoice in every breath I take, and in the effect of the light on those houses, and the crunch of this track under our feet.”
“Well, Jon, you must be allowed your simple vegetable responses.” He spoke with such finality that my mouth was stopped. p. 104-105

They arrive at the village, and later socialise with Winther’s family and their neighbours. Later, Adam X disappears and Winther goes to search, finding him walking on the parapet of the bridge above a perilous drop. Adam only just avoids falling to his death and is rescued by Winther and two of the onlookers. On the way home, Winther has another conversation with Adam, and a realisation:

I told him then. “I can’t work on these brain operations any more.”
“Grabowicz can. Grabowicz will. You’re too late to be squeamish, Jon; already there is a new force in the world.”
After what I had seen on the bridge, I felt he might be right. But a new force for good or bad? How would the change come? What would it be? I closed my eyes and saw clearly the sort of world that Grabowicz and I, with the unwitting co-operation of the prole leaders, might have already brought into being. Given enough men and women like Adam, with their visceral brains removed, they would bring up children unswayed and unsoftened by human emotion, whose motives were inscrutable to the rest of mankind. The rulers of our world would find such people very useful at first, and so a place would be made for them.
And from being instruments of power, they would turn into a power in their own right. It was a process often witnessed by history. p. 116

I’m not entirely sure what this story is about, but it is an absorbing, intellectual piece that would have been a good fit for the New Worlds of 1966.
Haggard Honeymoon by Joseph Green and James Webbert is a long novelette in four chapters about an alien planet where a colony is mining uranium: the men do the mining, the women look after the domestic side of life, and the Rilli natives act as servants.
The first part of this story sets up one of many maguffins, which is that the planet causes men to crack up after a few months there. Previously, a young wife had smuggled herself out with her husband and it was found that newly-weds had the best chance of lasting the six months required to make the operation economically viable. The reason newly-weds last longer is never adequately explained.
When the narrator, Carter Mason, is watching an evening film in the rec room with his wife, he sees one of the other men have a breakdown. The next morning, after his mining shift at the lake (second maguffin: this is a weird place, with lumps of uranium at the bottom, and red water that acts as a radiation baffle) he is promoted to major to take the sick man’s place. Soon after this Carter’s wife, atypically, starts having the dreams. The colonel agrees that she and Carter need to go back early.
The third chapter introduces three more elements: one of the other colonists tells Carter he thinks the lake wasn’t made by an asteroid but by a spaceship; there is mention of the native Rilli temple on forbidden ground; and Valle has a waking dream where she is riding a creature between the stars and a Rilli swings a sword at her throat.
In the final act (spoiler) Carter deduces what the problem is: the Rilli are the descendants of the spaceship crew, and their priests are mind broadcasting to their people from the forbidden temple. Their transmissions are driving the humans crazy. Carter takes one of the crawlers to the temple and (after running over one of the defending Rilli) sabotages the coolant system and runs away, leaving the nuclear drive to go critical and explode (no fail-safe then), killing many Rilli and leaving others to die of radiation poisoning. The broadcasting stops.
Back at base he explains himself to the colonel, who is not convinced by Carter’s ‘ends-justify the means’ actions:

“But this doesn’t fully explain why you chose the drastic method of blowing up the tower, killing the broadcasting priests and ruining one valuable crawler, instead of simply telling me about your suspicions and letting us check them out together.”
“Valle couldn’t have lasted the night,” said Carter simply. “And it hadn’t occurred to me those people would be broadcasting on line-of-sight.”
“Well, it’s too late to worry now,” said Simpson with a sigh. “I suppose your contribution to the programme will far outweigh the demerits you’re in line for. You’ll have to go through a formal court-martial when we get back to Earth, of course, but that shouldn’t be for several years now.” p. 149

This is an unconvincingly contrived piece with many plot holes (why are the newlyweds better at surviving, why is Valle the first female affected, why didn’t he put Valle in the crawler and drive her away from the temple?). It also has a morally repugnant ending. (I know it is unwise to view older fiction from a modern perspective but I suspect some of the attitudes here may have been unpalatable even in the mid-sixties. With the excesses of the Vietnam War to come it is, at least, an unsettling ending.)
I’m not sure that The Sea’s Furthest End by Damien Broderick is his first published SF story but it is certainly an early one.⁶ It has a data dump beginning (including an italicised prologue) that describes a collapsed Galactic Empire, and centres around Aylan, the son of a new Emporer who intends to reunify it.
Aylan’s friend Milenn visits, and tells him that rebel forces at the Calais are in danger of being slaughtered. Millen asks Aylan to get the Emperor to give him control of the besieging forces, and suggests that Federation and not Empire is the way forward. When Aylan’s plan is humiliatingly rejected by his father at Council, he challenges him to a duel. Aylan already hates his father because of what happened to a lover of his:

Adriel was the lovely daughter of the ex-Tyrant of Corydon. The scientists of that Rim system had reached their finest achievement in her, for she was genetically, designed for beauty, intelligence, and . . . something else. Geneticists gave her a talent, a wildly improbable gift, and even they did not know what it would be.
She was an Emote.
“Chameleon-like” was the inevitable adjective, but it wasn’t accurate. Adriel could control her Emoting. It was a defence-mechanism, but it was more. It was a talent, and she could use it at will.
Of course, everybody loved her. In a fraternal, helping fashion. Her subconscious knew better than to Emote in a sexually attractive manner. She had no desire to be raped by every male who came within her Emotive range. But for Aylan, the quiet son of her father’s conqueror, she had felt the stirrings of love.
They had been like children, in their new discovery. Their love was sunrise and the scent of roses and the soft breath in the sheets. She drew the beginnings of manhood from the frightened adolescent who was Aylan, and their love was a burgeoning flower.
For Malvara, it was unthinkable that his son should have such a victory. So Adriel became his diplomatic mistress. p. 162

Before the duel Milenn gives Aylan a stasis gun from the old Empire to make sure he wins, which he does. Aylan departs with a small fleet for Calais to take control of the attacking forces. En route he learns of a mutiny by the Duke of Calais. Millen then gives Aylan plans for stasis weapons to fit to their ships (throughout there are a number of short italic passages suggesting an omnipotent ‘Player’ is externally manipulating the events that are unfolding). Aylan arrives at the Centre and puts down the mutiny.
Up until this point the story is a competent enough piece but clichéd and unexceptional. The last chapter’s revelations about Millen, however, lift it to another level:

So, finally, he became the Civilizer.
He was Gilgamesh, Odin, Ra, Indra, Zeus, Tonactechtli, Moses, Gandhi, Hammarskjold, Holden-Smith, Porter, and Andreas. In the mud of the Nile he trod water and straw; his statue was carried before the tallow candles in Tenochtitlan; he advised the Great One in Tibet while the wind whistled through his thin bones; he thundered in the Terran Planetary Parliament; he laboured on alien worlds, muscles twisting to hammer wood and steel into homes for his fellows. And everywhere, he remembered. Peace was his goal, for no man can go through a million years’ odyssey without learning compassion and humanity. p. 187

Then, during the peace conference on Calais, reality dissolves, and we find events have been controlled by Millen, who is also the Player, to amuse and distract itself. The last lines are pretty corny but still work for the story:

Alone. Darkness, bodiless, infinite. All the questions answered and the tears wept. The Immortal wondered at the memory, and knew the reason. There was no Player. There was only himself, alone, eternally lonely. Infinity is a quiet place, eternity a lonely time. The Immortal remembered himself as Milenn, and forever the memory satisfied him. But forever is a short while, and memory is no cure for loneliness. Only participation, and forgetfulness.
The Tasks had been a good idea, but they had ended. The problem he had set himself: a universe, a race of naturally belligerent sapients, a goal of peace, freely accepted by them. And three times he had succeeded. Planetary government, Galactic empire, Galactic Federation. Himself eternal, not knowing the reason, only aware of the compulsion.
An Immortal Child grows lonely in the dark of eternity, and he knew that there was forgetfulness in the Game. So again in the deep of himself he uttered the Words.
“Let there be light!”
And, yet again, there was light.

This bootstrapping of the story in the final pages really worked for me, and improved my opinion of the story considerably. I was reminded of Charles Harness’s more complex super-science stories of the late 1940s and 50s.

As for the volume as a whole, it is not so much a “bridgehead between old and new SF,” but a better than normal issue of the Carnell New Worlds. ●

_____________________

1. Because NWISF #1 is a book and not a magazine there are three off-line reviews listed on ISFDB. I managed to obtain copies (thanks to Andy Sawyer for his help with the Vector one). James Colvin (Micheal Moorcock) in New Worlds #144 says it is another of Carnell’s “solidly balanced” collections, and adds the Aldiss is “very good,” the Broderick “excellent,” and that he “enjoyed the Belov [Mackin] best.” I don’t think he particularly appreciated the Rankine.
P. Schuyler Miller in the January 1967 Analog says the Aldiss “is bound to get itself reprinted,” and the Mackin “is as close as we’ve come in years to the broad, outrageous comedy of the great “Gallagher” stories that “Lewis Padgett” ([Kuttner/Moore] used to writer for Astounding.” He found the Rankine “trite” and thought the Green/Webbert made the “psychic perils very convincing” despite some “unbelievable chemistry.” He ends on a positive note about the Broderick.
Finally, in Vector #28, Charles Winstone reckons the aim of the anthology , as John Carnell writes in the introduction, to be “a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story” is “not achieved.” He adds “the stories are new but the plots and characters are not. In only one story did the feeling of ‘I’ve been here before’ leave me.” Winstone liked the Aldiss best, was mystified by the Broderick, and had mixed feelings about the rest.

2. I presume they used the same plates for both editions as the editorial pages (i.e. everything apart from the publisher information at the front and the in-house ads at the back) in the hardback were identical to those in the paperback, except for the larger margins in the former (or at least they are in New Writings in SF #13, the only one I own in both formats). The publisher for both editions was Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd.

3. Those Corgi editions would be very popular—the collection was reprinted in 1965 and again in 1970 (with a different cover):

3. The story introduction and title pages look like this (the story is Keith Roberts’ Manipulation from the third volume in the series):

4. Our Edward Mackin should not be confused with Ralph McInerny, who used “Edward Mackin” as a pseudonym (the latter’s Wikipedia entry shows a huge number of non-SF books).

5. On Broderick’s ISFDB page there are a couple of earlier stories listed but no information as to where or exactly when they were published. It also states that this volume’s story was “rewritten and expanded” to become The Game of Stars and Souls (2009). ●

Revised 7th September 2018 to include disambiguation information for Edward Mackin (footnote 4).

Other Reviews:
Ian Watson: Foundation #6, May 1974
Chris Morgan: Vector 69, Summer 1975

Fiction:
The Lake of Tuonela • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥
Wagtail in the Morning • short story by Grahame Leman
Made to Be Broken • short story by E. C. Tubb
The Eternal Theme of Exile • by Brian W. Aldiss ♥♥
The Five Doors • short story by Michael Stall ♥♥
Sporting on Apteryx • short story by Charles Partington ♥♥
Rainbow • short story by David Garnett ♥♥
Accolade • short story by E. C. Tubb [as by Charles Grey]
The Seed of Evil • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ♥♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Foreword • editorial by Kenneth Bulmer

New Writings in SF wasn’t a magazine but an anthology series¹ started by John Carnell in 1964 and continued by Kenneth Bulmer after the former’s death just short of his sixtieth birthday in 1972. This wasn’t the first volume of this series that Bulmer edited, but that one, New Writings in SF #22, was a memorial to John Carnell so was more like the previous volumes that the later Bulmer-edited ones. So this is where I am starting.

After the childish comic book cover that mashes up images from a number of the stories, the volume starts off with Kenneth Bulmer’s editorial which discusses traffic. From there he introduces canals and airships for freight transport, mentioning Keith Roberts’s story in particular before moving on to introduce the others. Each of the stories also has a short blurb before a title page. The blurbs are mostly forgettable, but the layout of these, blurb, blank page, title page—always with the blurb and title page on the right hand side of the book—is quite smart.

The opening piece is The Lake of Tuonela by Keith Roberts, one of two ‘Canal’ stories set on the alien planet of Xerxes that Roberts published that year.² It begins with an Earthman called Mathis trying to get permission from the planetary administrators to take a canal boat up through the deserted canal system to the Hy-Antiel summit. The alien canals have fallen into disuse as a result of imported Earth technology (Ground Effect Machines) making the boatmen redundant. When refused permission by the bureaucrats he goes anyway, accompanied by Jack, a native of the planet.
There isn’t really much story to this one, and it is mostly a descriptive account of their languid journey along the canal:

In the second cutting they were delayed again, this time by mud and weed. The weed, slimy strings of it twenty feet or more in length, wrapped itself persistently around the propeller, building a solid ball between blades and hull. As the obstructions formed the Boatman sliced them away patiently. Mathis poled dully, disinterested in time; later the machetes were once more brought into use. Finally the narrows were passed; the second cutting opened up ahead. The rock rose steeply, a hundred feet or more, clothed still for most of its height with living green. Through much of the day the far lip caught the sun; the feathery trees that lined it seemed to burn, haloed with pale gold. Later, clouds grew across the sky. The drizzle returned; and a thin mist, veiling the highest rock. In time the mist crept lower, rolling slowly, clinging in tongues to the water. p.28

They navigate their way over the aqueducts and into the long tunnels in the hills, one of which spills out into the huge underground Lake of Tuonela:

He swung the big lamp left and right, discovering no sign of walls; the gloom ahead was likewise unrelieved. At last the abundance of summit water was explained; they had entered an underground lake, of unknown size. He wondered fleetingly if Bar-Ab and his engineers had known. Had they plotted the extent of the cavern, tunnelled to its brink; or had the miners burst into the void, startled and unsuspecting …
On impulse, he angled the light upward. Above, suspended it seemed from an infinite height, the Bar-Ko, dark red and dripping, marked the way. Beyond the great iron Sign hung another; and another, dimly seen.
He nodded to himself. They had known. p.33

While I liked the unhurried pace and setting of this one, it is a little uneven (the dull meeting with the administrators at the start seems less real than the journey, although the former is perhaps truer to life). Also, the section at the inclined plane could have been better explained, and there is also a vision of a woman from Mathis’s past at the end of the story which seemed somewhat tacked on.  A worthwhile read for all that.

The rest of the content from this story until the notable Barrington J. Bayley novelette at the end of the volume ranges from OK to awful so I’ll talk about his The Seed of Evil next. I had memories of this being one of the best stories that Bayley produced³ and wondered how it would stand up to rereading all these years later. I was still impressed by it.
The novelette consists of six chapters that generally telescope in time and length. The first is a short set-up describing an immortal being, Aeternus, who is part of space-time fabric and its desire for another immortal so it will not be alone.
After this (multiple spoilers) the story starts with an alien called Neverdie who, having fled from his pursuers, is given permission to settle on Earth. A surgeon, Julian Ferrg, who has adapted the alien for life on Earth, thinks it should have been forced to surrender the secrets of its immortality and FTL drive. The committee set up to oversee the alien’s settlement disagrees and Neverdie takes up residence in an apartment in a future bowl-shaped London. The rest of the story follows Ferrg and his single-minded determination to discover the alien’s secret. Several years later he kidnaps Neverdie, only to be caught on a ship he has fitted with theatres and laboratories to dissect and examine the alien.
Julian subsequently gets out of prison after fifteen years. He tries once more to make Neverdie reveal his secrets in an interview but fails. Julian puts himself into suspended animation and sets the timer for 500 years. A hundred years later, Neverdie discovers Julian’s location, breaks into the vault and disconnects the timer.
All these events play out in the final chapter of the story. Neverdie watches the fall and extinction of man and the rise of lupus sapiens millennia later. As these intelligent wolves are beginning to become a threat he decides to leave Earth and prepares his spaceship. Before he departs he travels to Ferrg’s chamber and releases him from his long sleep. However, Neverdie’s spaceship malfunctions on take-off and crashes. Julian finds him and takes him back to his chamber, dispatching two of the intelligent and hostile wolves en route.
After examining and dissecting Neverdie for some time he eventually finds a small sphere in a fold in the alien’s brain and is told that it is the ‘Seed of Evil’, originally meant as a punishment for a major criminal so he would never forget his crime. Neverdie makes one final effort to persuade Julian to forgo immortality but fails. As Julian swallows the device he has a momentary vision of the space-time being from the first part of the story:

That consciousness was calling him. Its call had caused the Seed to be made in the first place. Somehow, sometime, one of the beings enchained by the Seed would, in due course, be lifted out of the material realm to share Aeternus’ state, life without any of the means of life; and without end. Aeternus’ voice came to Julian; You are my only-begotten son, with whom I am well-pleased. And at that blasphemy he experienced a great fear that he was to be that eternal companion. p.190

This is an accomplished story in a number of ways. Not only does it manage to insert a sense of epic timescale into a relatively short story, and portray Ferrg as a convincing single-minded, amoral protagonist, but it manages to do so against a convincing backdrop. Recommended.

Of the rest of the stories, everything bar the two stories by Ted Tubb and the Leman are average fare.
The Eternal Theme of Exile by Brian W. Aldiss is the second of his ‘Enigma’ triptychs. These were a series of works that presented three short pieces together. I was going to quote the author’s introduction from the first of these but I am not sure that provides any illumination as to what these are supposed to be.⁵
The first of the three is The Eternal Theme of Exile, which has a man leaving for one of zodiacal planets as Anna Kavan thinks he is persecuting her. While he is there he experiences another personality.
All Those Enduring Old Charms has a man leaving for the zeepees to avoid the attentions of Anna K—. He then finds his grandmother in suspended animation and decides to have her reanimated so he can fall in love with her:

Daily, my master sent her one lemuroid after another, hoping to win her heart. One by one, the animals were returned, decapitated. My master sent her flowers, mathematical disputations, five-dimensional objects, sweetmeats, metaphors, plumes, plums, live jewels. All were returned. Grandmother was not to be moved.
‘How vexatious,’ said my master to the girls, ‘that I should leave one planet to escape the attentions of a woman, only to find myself on another planet where another woman plainly wishes to escape my attentions!’ He besought Vittoria to go to his grandmother and present his case personally. Vittoria was not returned. p.87

Finally, Nobody Spoke Or Waved Goodbye has Anna falling in love with a hired personality.
None of these singly or jointly act as a conventional story or stories, and they are probably best thought of as partially related and ambiguous glimpses of a strange future. Aldiss can write well enough to avoid these falling flat but I’m not sure they succeed either, certainly not in a conventional sense: you would probably have to be in the right mood to get the best out of them.
The Five Doors by Michael Stall has a cylinder appear in England that contains what seems to be the first of a series of five translocational doors which appear to be an alien test. Each of the worlds the doors lead to have their own particular problems that need to be solved (the first world is highly radioactive and kills the first man who went through). This is fine for the most part but there are one or two scenes at the end (the discussion of matter transmission devices is one) that are not that clear.
Sporting on Apteryx by Charles Partington tells of the people of Apteryx, who live beside a forest that has a cliff where there is a powerful wind. As the story opens one of their number, Mrogre, is being hunted by the tribe as he has developed a hump between his shoulders and is to be killed. His woman Minona is pregnant and later watches (spoiler) as Mrogre is burnt and wings spread from the hump… Ok as far as it goes but rather inconclusive. I think a monthly magazine editor would have asked Partington to compete the rest of the novella this is the seed of.
Rainbow by David Garnett is fine as long as you don’t think about its premise too much. A portal that leads to an OAP colony of 9000 people on an alien planet stops functioning and a breakdown of order occurs. One of my reservations is that there are too many staff members involved in the fighting to keep track of and they are not particularly well drawn. Another is that the ending doesn’t really flow logically from the rest of the story That said, it all moves along at an engrossing pace.

As to the ones I disliked, Wagtail in the Morning by Grahame Leman just lost me. A psychologist in the future gets a hand written letter to go and visit the Minister to discuss a way of controlling the ‘liveware’, e.g. the general population. There is a discussion with the Minister that I presume is meant to be satirical: when it is not there is not a lot of data dumping going on.
As to the Tubb stories, they are both pretty bad. Accolade is published as being by Charles Grey, a pseudonym, and until I found out from ISFDB I thought it was a slush pile story that has accidentally made it into print. A generation starship crew explore their new environment while the captain broods. There is some discussion about the fact they were able to travel faster than light and then (spoiler) they notice a dark shadow approaching before they are swatted like an insect. A truly daft story.
Made to Be Broken, however, has a different set of problems. My foreboding started with the first line:

Head aching slightly from the effects of the hypnotute Lieutenant Zac Karsov made his way through the ship to where the landing party waited before the main lock. p.59

Sure enough, this turns out to be a refugee from New Worlds of the 1950s, and not a particularly good one either. This is about a planetary contact team headed up by a woman, and the Lieutenant mentioned in the first line turns out to be a patronising male underling who is a know-it-all. Their first attempt to establish contact with the natives fails when they discover the captain is a woman.
Lieutenant Karsov then goes undercover to research the natives. As he is in RT contact with the Captain he uses the opportunity to chat her up (this after patronising her about the failed attempt in front of their superiors):

‘Remember to report everything and anything you see. I shall not be able to advise you without full data to work on.’
‘I’ll remember. Captain,’ he promised. ‘And it’s nice to know that you care.’
‘For the mission, Lieutenant,’ the voice said coldly. ‘There is nothing personal about this.’
‘A pity. With you I’d like to get personal.’
‘Lieutenant!’
‘Sorry,’ he said, smiling. ‘A sub-vocal wish, Captain. You shouldn’t have heard it. Not that it wasn’t genuine. As I said you are a very attractive woman.’ p.67-68

On the second attempt the contact team appear at the village in force and convince the natives to parley.
It also appears that Tubb has also placed a chip on his protagonist’s shoulder about academic education:

‘Thanks to you,’ she said when he pointed it out. ‘But how did you know what to do? At college they—’
‘Talk a load of guff,’ he interrupted. ‘Textbook theorising unbacked by actual experience.’ p.78-79

No doubt the gobby Lieutenant Karsov was voted ‘Most likely to be shot in the back by his own men’ during training. Old-fashioned, sexist and patronising.

To conclude, this volume was generally pretty much what I had remembered New Writings in SF to be like, and perhaps a bit better than that. Normally you could count on one or two notable stories in every volume, a wedge of material that was OK and some that… wasn’t. What it did have were British names that you wouldn’t find elsewhere. In those pre-internet days if you wanted to send your story to markets in the States it was relatively costly to do: paper mss were expensive to send to the USA, and you had to include a couple of IRCs⁶ for the reply. I suspect this was enough hassle to have a group of part-time UK writers who would write and send work to a British market if there was one around at the time, but wouldn’t bother if there wasn’t (the late 1970s for instance).⁷

This volume is recommended for the Roberts and Bayley novelettes.

1. As a regular anthology series it has many of the characteristics of magazines: regular-ish publication schedule, regular-ish stable of writers, editorials, story introductions, etc.
2. The other, and better, story was The Trustie Tree in New Worlds #5 (1973).
3. The other contender would be Bayley’s The Ship of Disaster (New Worlds #151, June 1965).
4. By the way, this story contains this phrase ‘He envied the myriad creatures whose lives were given meaning by the fact that those lives must end.’—the same dubious sentiment that the Michael Barrington story in New Worlds #89 (December 1959) had.
5. If you don’t believe me here is the introduction to the first Enigma triptych in New Writings in SF #22 (1973):
   ‘Here are three of my Enigmas. Consider them as paintings, as Tiepolo’s engravings crossed with de Chirico’s canvases.
   I have written other Enigmas and shall write more. When I have written fifty, the best of them can be collected and published as a book.
   Consider that statement. Its author appears to operate securely within well-defined parameters; his chart of his known world plainly contains at least a portion of the future. One would not suspect from the statement that the world in which he operates is full of ambiguities, of alternatives that open and close like sliding doors.
   Yet so it is. The author of the statement has chosen to make assumptions. He operates on the basis of those assumptions just as navigators of old operated on the assumption that the Pole Star was fixed. That assumption worked, although it was totally erroneous—the Pole Star travels millions of miles a year on its ineluctable errands. Which was something the ancient navigators could never guess.
   So with these other assumptions. They are probably incorrect in ways we cannot attempt to understand. And that is the assumption which underlies the Enigmas: that the world is a stage on which we, the players, have no adequate means of determining the nature of the drama in which we enact our bit parts—despite various dogmatic assertions on the subject from Religion or Science.’
6. IRC=International reply coupons, each was exchangeable world-wide for a surface postage stamp to reply to the sender. Two would be enough for an airmail stamp although, given they had probably sat on your story for nine months, I don’t see what the hurry was for the rejection letter.
7. Have a look at Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman on ISFDB for instance: three stories in New Writings in SF 26, 28 and 30, and then never heard from again. That said, a number of Australian names turned up in this series.