Category Archives: New Worlds

New Worlds SF #159, February 1966, edited by Michael Moorcock

Summary:
This issue has another stand-out story by David I. Masson, A Two-Timer, which is about a time-traveller from 1637 travelling to modern times—and written in the kind of English such a person would use. Apart from this original stylistic touch it is, at times, an particularly affecting satire.
The rest of the issue is rather lacklustre—and I include in this description the non-fiction, which is not as interesting as usual.
[ISFDB page][Luminist copy]

Other reviews:1
Christopher Priest, Vector #38 (February 1966), p. 28
Mark Yon, Galactic Journey
Various, Goodreads

_____________________


Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
A Two-Timer • novelette by David I. Masson ∗∗∗∗
The Orbs • essay by John Watney
Entry from Earth • short story by Daphne Castell
Hi, Sancho! • short story by Paul Jents
Temporary Resident • short story by Philip E. High
The Sword Against the Stars • short story by A. F. Hall

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork
• by James Cawthorn, A. Thomson
Onward, Ever Onward . . . • by Michael Moorcock
The Craft of SF • book reviews by Langdon Jones
Streaked Through With Poetry • book reviews by James Cawthorn
Healthy Domination • book review by R. M. Bennett
Letters to the Editor
Next Month

_____________________

This issues leads off with A Two-Timer by David I. Masson. which is the second of five stories that he would produce for the magazine this year. It begins with a man in 1637 noticing an unusual occurrence:

. . . I was standing, as it chanc’d, within the shade of a low Arch-way, where I could not easily be seen by any who shou’d pass that way, when I saw as it were a kind of Dazzle betwixt my Eyes and a Barn that stood across the Street. Anon this Appearance seem’d as ’twere to Thicken, and there stood a little space before the Barn a kind of a clos’d Chair, but without Poles, and of a Whiteish Colouring, and One that sate within it, peering out upon the World as if he fear’d for his life. Presently this Fellow turns to some thing before him in the Chair and moves his Hands about, then peeps he forth again as tho’ he fear’d a Plot was afoot to committ Murther upon his Person, and anon steps gingerly out of one Side, and creeps away down the Alley, looking much to right and to left. He had on him the most Outlandish Cloathes that ever I saw. Thinks I, ’tis maybe he, that filch’d my Goods last Night, when I had an ill Dream.  p. 6-7

The rest of the story continues in the same style (you soon get used to it) and sees the man watching take the machine and end up in 1966. Much of the first quarter of the story is taken up by his learning how to further operate the machine. He soon finds that he has arrived in the ground floor flat of a modern building and, after one or two unproductive encounters with the neighbours (he can’t understand them), he tries to get out of the front door to investigate the outside world, but fails. He then learns that the machine can be made to move in space as well as time, and moves in stages to the middle of a road in nearby suburb. There he strikes up a conversation of sorts with a man washing his car, moves the machine to his driveway, and eventually accepts an invitation to stay with the man and his wife. The next part of the story sees the traveller settle in with the couple, who later suggest that he go back in time to recover some of his possessions so he can sell them to fund his stay in the present. When he travels back to his own house he comes upon himself sleeping in bed—there is a strange shimmering motion over his face, and a strange attraction drawing him towards himself. He flees back to the present. At this point in the story (about halfway) the traveller goes into town with his host to sell his belongings, and what was an interesting and novel time-travel piece becomes a more satirical and observational affair with a near-continual description of, and commentary on, what he sees and experiences. Some of this is tartly observed, and some particularly affecting; I could quote pages of it:

You will wonder especially, what sort of People they were indeed, that I was fallen among; and tho’ it took many Weeks in the Learning, yet I shall make bold to take only as many Minutes, in the Telling it. They spoke much then, of the Insolence of Youth, which they thought new, but it seem’d to me, that there was nothing new but Wealth and Idleness, that feed this Insolence.  p. 28

But the Spring of this, is in the Wives, for these own no Man’s Controul, not even in Law, but manage all things equally with ’em, and take all manner of Work, as bold as Men (for they are as well school’d), and High and Low dress them selves in Finery, and leave their Children to bring them selves up (so that many run wild), and are fix’d upon Folly and Mancatching, as I saw from a Journal, made in Colours (and more like a great Quarto, then a Journal) that is printed for Women alone. They go bare-legg’d or with Legs cover’d in bright Stockings but marvellous fine, and closefitting ; and their Legs shewing immodestly above the Knee. In this Journal I saw all manner of sawcy Pictures.  p. 28

They have great Safety, in the Streets and in the Fields, so that Thefts and Violence to the meanest Person are the cause of News in the Courants; but they slaughter one another with their Cars for that they rowl by so fast, and altho’ they are safe from Invasion, by their Neighbour Nations in Europe, yet they are ever under the Sword of Damocles from a Destruction, out of the other End of the Earth, by these same Air-Craft, or from a kind of Artillery, that can shoot many Thousands of Leagues, and lay wast half a Countrey, where it’s Shot comes to ground, or so they wou’d have me believe.  p. 29

In their Punishments they have no Burnings, no Quarterings, no Whippings, Pilloryings, or Brandings, and they put up no Heads of Ill-doers. Their Hangings are but few, and are perform’d in secret; and there are those in the Government that wou’d bring in a Bill, to put a stop even to that, so that the worst Felon, shou’d escape with nothing worse, then a long Imprisonment.  p. 30

Yet do they have a sweeter and a quieter Living, than any we see. I saw few Persons diseas’d or distemper’d, or even crippled. The King’s Evil, Agues, Plagues and Small Pox, are all but gone. Not one of a Man’s Children die before they come of age, if you can believe me; and yet his House is never crowded, for they have found means, that their Women shall not Conceive, but when they will. This seem’d to me an Atheistical Invention, and one like to Ruin the People; yet they regard it as nothing, save only the Papists and a few others.  p. 29

Yet in truth they are a Staid, and Phlegmatick Folk, that will not easily laugh, or weep, or fly in a passion, and whether it be from their being so press’d together, or from the Sooty-ness of the Air, or from their great Hurrying to and from work, their Faces shew much Uncontent and Sowerness, and they regard little their Neighbours. All their Love, is reserv’d to those at Home, or their Mercy, to those far off; they receive many Pleas, for Money and Goods, that they may send, for ailing Persons, that they never knew, and for Creatures in Africa and the Indies, whom they never will see. Every Saturday little Children stand in the Streets, to give little Flags an Inch across, made of Paper, in return for Coyns, for such a Charity. As for their Hatred, ’tis altogether disarm’d, for none may carry a Sword, or Knife, a Pistol, or a Musquet, under Penalty, tho’ indeed there be Ruffians here and there, that do so in secret, but only that they may committ a Robbery impunedly upon a Bank, or a great Store of Goods, and so gain thousands of Pounds in a moment.  p. 31

In truth, this goes on for a little too long but, as I was reading, it struck me as an excellent effort at reproducing the thoughts our ancestors might have about the current time. Normally in time travel stories we see people from our time go to the past or future and comment upon what they see, or we have people from the future come to our time—I can’t think of many time travel stories with this perspective shown in this one, and certainly not done as well. The story ends (spoiler) with the narrator and the wife becoming close as they use the time machine together on short trips (initially to check the weekend weather). Later they are found on the bed kissing by the husband, and the narrator hastily departs for his own time. He arrives shortly after he left, and goes back to his house to stock up on things to sell in the future, but by the time he returns to the machine it is gone. This may be a fairly perfunctory ending, but at the very least it provides the witty title. A very good story, and one I’d have in my ‘Best Of’ for 1966 (probably along with last issue’s The Mouth of Hell).
 (Very good). 15,700 words.

The Orbs by John Watney2 begins with the female narrator, Julia, telling of the appearance of huge floating “orbs,” (think of a much larger, longitudinal version of the spaceships in the movie Arrival) that appeared decades previously over certain parts of the Earth. After an initial period, where they provided better weather as well as a sense of general well-being for the humans below, they descended and sucked up all the people and other loose debris underneath them. This was repeated at intervals thereafter. Julia’s tells of her grandfather’s memories of this day, and how one woman fell back down onto a tree, living long enough to describe what had happened to her:

“She screamed. ‘There’s no-one there,’ she said, ‘just cold invisible hands, taking your clothes off, hanging you upside down, and the water swishing at you from all sides. I slipped off the hook. I don’t know how. I lay in a sort of gutter. The water was swishing over me all the time. I could hardly breathe. I was being pushed along by the water. The bodies were above. They were being split open like fish by invisible knives. Everything was falling down on top of me. The bodies swung away on the line. I fell down a chute’.” The woman died. But there have always been a few survivors, and their accounts, incoherent though they have been, have always been much the same: the invisible hands and knives, the continuous water, the bodies swinging emptily away into the interior of the Orb. Of course, the accounts come only from the early days when the victims were not anaesthetised, when indeed no-one knew the rhythm of the Orbs and were not able to calculate in advance the exact moment they would descend in search of their prey.  p. 51

The final part of the story (spoiler) reveals that Julia has been selected as part of the next sacrificial group, and we learn of the system that developed after Earth’s initial failed resistance. The story closes with Julia’s calm participation in a sacrifice ceremony. The weakest part of this is the alien abattoir part in the middle of the story, a silly idea that should have been left in the 1930’s pulp magazines. But the beginning of this is okay, as is the ending which describes human society’s adaptation (beauty contests are one of the ways the best are selected for the orbs). Julia’s dutiful acceptance of her fate is a particularly interesting (and novel) aspect of the story.
(Average). 5,050 words.

Entry from Earth by Daphne Castell gets off to a colourful start at a music festival on the alien planet of Pigauron. After this setup, the story cuts to Lord D’aon Auwinawo, a visiting cultural minister from Tren who is bored with the event and returns to his tents, only to be unexpectedly visited by Mirilith tak, an Assistant Secretary for the Festival, and Slok, a bulldog-like alien. The latter is the “Personal Complainant” to another of the attendees, and is there with a grievance about the noise D’aon’s slaves make by singing during the night.
D’aon stays awake that evening to listen to them, and then orders them entered into the festival where they are received politely. After their performance, D’aon talks to one the slaves about their history, and this reveals a pattern of enslavement. The story (spoiler) subsequently ends with them singing “The Rivers of Babylon” revealing them to be Jewish slaves captured from Earth.
This has a colourful start, and an okay idea, but you can see the end coming from a mile off, even without the foreshadowing.
(Average). 3,050 words.

Hi, Sancho! by Paul Jents starts with a fugitive in the future making a perilous crossing of one road (with high-speed traffic) to get to another, northbound, one that will take him to the city. After he manages to hitch a lift he ends up at an old flame’s house and, after a night with her, later ends up with a black man who wants to stage a bombing. Worried about the loss of innocent life, the fugitive hides the explosives and calls security.
The story then cuts to the fugitive’s interrogation, which involves a data dump about camps in Africa and a forced eugenics program. He escapes again, and takes the explosive back to the institution where he was imprisoned. In the closing passage there is some reference to Don Quixote that I didn’t get (and the character thus named refers to the fugitive as Sancho).
This is fast-paced, readable stuff, but it seems little more than a series of random episodes linked together.
(Mediocre). 4,650 words.

Temporary Resident by Philip E. High opens with a Terran representative called Savaran almost rammed by another car on a planet called Spheriol. Savaran continues his journey but, further down the road, he sees his own car being towed—it appears to have side impact damage. Matters become even odder when he arrives at his Embassy to find it staffed by people he doesn’t know. The next morning he wakes up to see a doctor standing by his bedside who explains that he is in “transition”, and is on another “plane of existence”.
Later he meets people from his life who he thought were long dead, and discusses Terran defence plans with one of them. At this point (spoiler) the story cuts to a Spheriol minister talking to a man called Detrick, who is explaining that Savaran’s experience is all a ruse (he is at a false location which is staffed with actors) set up to let them defeat the anti-interrogation brain psychographing he has undergone.
The final twist, which has Savaran turn up at the building where the Minister and Detrick are meeting, sees Savarand fade out of existence after he arrives there. The Minister then reveals to Detrick that he is the one experiencing a plane of existence shift, but a real one, and not a pretence like Savaran. Or something like that—it’s one of those stories whose endings can lose you.
This doesn’t convince, and it’s essentially the same old Terran spy nonsense that has been appearing in the magazines for decades already. And a Phil Dick-ian twist at the end doesn’t improve it much.
(Mediocre). 5,250 words.

The Sword Against the Stars by A. F. Hall3 begins pretty much as it goes on:

Dated the 42nd year of our exile The earth this year is death and stinking rubble, a pall of broken glass and rusted, empty cans. The earth this year is a thousand blasted cities, bleak and broken skylines, skeletons of buildings connected with crazy paving. There are some parts of our city which still burn with sporadic fires; a water main bursts and somewhere a stray dog howls. The earth this year is scarred and seared to wasteland, a planetary ghetto where all that’s left is dying, crawling to its slow, inevitable ending. The earth this year is sick of a million plagues, gaunt famines and a mad child’s crying.  p. 101

This initially appears to be a post-nuclear holocaust tale but we later discover that the devastation is the result of an alien invasion. The rest of the story is mostly description, and there is very little incident: a “dust priest” turns up at the narrator’s settlement; the group go scavenging in a city; the narrator finds a sword (which prompts much speculation about why there are red jewels in the handle):

The seven rubies must represent the stars—but why are the stars red? The sun is made of gold and the moon is silver but the stars glow with an angry light. When I was very young I used to think that the stars were white diamonds scattered on black velvet, I would have made the stars out of diamonds if the sword had been mine. It was only the forger of the sword who knew better, he must have known that the stars were hostile and he set seven red stones in his sword, red for the colour of war. He chose red stones so that those who came after him should remember when they saw his warning—but we who came after, we forgot. How did he know?  p. 109

Although the description is well enough done, there is far too much of it: this makes for a dull piece.
(Mediocre). 4,200 words.

•••

The Cover, a flat, static affair, is uncredited, and sets the tone for the non-fiction.
There are two pieces of Interior Artwork this issue, one from James Cawthorn and the other from A. Thomson. It is a pity they can’t afford more internal illustration as I’d like to see more of Cawthorn’s work in the magazine.
Onward, Ever Onward . . . by Michael Moorcock uses most of this editorial to respond to a complaint from a “hardcore ‘fanzine’ fan” that “publishers have betrayed the spirit of The Golden Age”. Most of the rest of this section cycles through various generalities about (a) reactionaries through the ages (b) subjective standards, and (c) notions vs. real ideas. I’m not sure any of this adds much to the developing new wave vs. old wave controversies, and certainly not when there are statements like this:

Another complaint sometimes heard is that there isn’t enough science in present-day sf. Here the person is usually complaining that there isn’t enough concentration on the physical sciences. The emphasis has tended to shift towards the ‘soft’ sciences like psychology and sociology, partly because the person who has these days managed to master modern physics is too busy to take time out to write fiction. Good speculation along these lines is nowadays virtually impossible for the amateur, whereas this wasn’t the case ten or twenty years ago.  p. 4

He also talks about Masson in some detail (which I’ll talk about below) before summing up his argument with this:

There is still a lot of progress to be made before science fiction as a form fulfils all its promise, both as a vehicle for intelligent escapism and as serious literature, but nostalgia for the past will achieve nothing. Writing standards are being raised, plots become more sophisticated, characters more convincing. There are fewer new real ideas in the world than there are notions—but it is how we dramatise them that is important. To get them across we must reject many of the conventional trappings of the past and writers must look to themselves rather than their predecessors for the ways in which they will present their stories.

The problem Moorcock has, unfortunately, is that very few of the writers he publishes in New Worlds are better than those that came before—they are just mediocre in a different way.
I briefly mentioned above that Moorcock talks about Masson’s work in this editorial, and this is what he has to say:

David I. Masson, in fact, whose third published story takes pride of place in this issue, is one of the few writers producing, as you will see in future issues, science fiction stories which have genuine scientific speculation as their basis. Not content with this alone, Masson manages to work in, as his leit-motif, a moral at the same time. Unlike the old-style sf writer, however, he respects his readers’ intelligence sufficiently not to hammer his points home. In Traveller’s Rest (NWSF 154) he wrote about the tyranny of subjective time and the fact that most of our troubles are self-created; neither points were overtly made, but both were intrinsic to the story. In Mouth of Hell (NWSF 158) he told the story of a tragic expedition into a vast crater in which every detail was scientifically plausible and which ended on a sardonic note that showed that the things which people died to achieve yesterday become part of today’s complacently accepted norm. The story in this issue is a more obvious satire, in which the 1960s are seen through the eyes of a time-traveller from the seventeenth century.
Writers like Masson are capable of hard scientific speculation but are also capable of taking a deeper look at the whole basis of our assumptions about ourselves. And these writers do not have the irritating glibness that mars so many of the sf tales of ten years or so ago—a glibness that often, it seems, passes for profundity in the eyes of some readers.  pp. 4-5

I recognise the last point (one of the most irritating things about Analog magazine, over various periods, are the bumper-sticker aphorisms that fill the spaces at the ends of stories—which almost never stand up to more than a moment’s scrutiny), but I am baffled by Moorcock’s comment about Traveller’s Rest—which apparently shows that “most of our troubles are self-created.” How so? In that story a soldier leaves a time-dilated front-line (spoiler), goes home, settles down and raises a family—only to be unexpectedly recalled to the war decades later to find that virtually no time has elapsed at the front. I’d suggest that he is a pawn in a greater game and not the author of his own misfortunes.

There are quite a few reviews this issue, and by several hands. The first one, in The Craft of SF by Langdon Jones, is of a writing manual, Of Worlds Beyond by Lloyd Arthur Esbach. Jones is not impressed (with the exception of the Taine article) and there are several waspish put-downs:

[The Heinlein] is not a terribly interesting article, suggesting, as it does to me, the kind of thing one would expect to get back from the Ealing Correspondence School for Successful Writing, although I must admit that some of the elementary rules about writing cannot be too often repeated.  p. 113

Jack Williamson’s contribution . . . rambles on pleasantly and interestingly.  p. 114

It is a pity that a lot of the quotes [van Vogt] makes from his own work are of very doubtful quality.  p. 114

In his contribution, Humour in Science Fiction, L. Sprague de Camp gives his thoughtful views on the subject [of writing]. However, I feel that some of his conclusions are less than authoritative. De Camp states that humour will not work if it is associated with subjects that people feel particularly strongly about—death, persecution, etc. The black comedy of Nabokov in stories like Laughter in the Dark and Bend Sinister or of Joseph Heller in Catch 22—or even of Harry Harrison in Bill, the Galactic Hero is appallingly funny, even though having a tragic basis. This kind of humour is the most effective I know.  P. 114

In his article, The Science of Science Fiction Writing, John W. Campbell writes with the embarrassingly jovial manner of an ageing scoutmaster. The constant use of the word ‘yarn’ instead of ‘story’ is somewhat irritating, together with the cinema-poster superlatives.  p. 114

He concludes:

The aspiring writer, I think, will benefit little from this book, but the articles make moderately interesting reading if you happen to be stranded with nothing to read and 13/6 in your pocket.  p. 115

Next up is Streaked Through With Poetry by James Cawthorn, which opens with a brief review of five early titles by Samuel R. Delany, although he provides mostly general comments about the content and style of the books:

[As] with Cordwainer Smith, the writer most closely allied in style to Delany, the value of the story is not so much in the plot-elements (several of which have been exploited to great effect by such writers as Van Vogt and Aldiss) as in the manner of the telling. Younger than Smith, Delany displays a command of the language which is comparatively even more impressive and seems less prone to the preciousness which so often mars the older writers’ work.  p. 115

The other two books that Cawthorn covers are two Burroughs influenced works, The Wizard of Lemuria by Lin Carter and Barbarians of Mars by Edward P. Bradbury (Michael Moorcock). Cawthorn liked the Carter better than I expected him to (nearly all the comment I see online about Carter dismisses his work):

Basically both books are derivative of Burroughs and Howard, the difference being that Bradbury is content to be derivative, while Carter unashamedly duplicates the work of the masters, in effect superimposing Conan upon a Barsoomian background. Yet Wizard does not lack pace, and the climax is exciting despite the fact that the build-up—which involves the fate of the Universe, no less!—is lost in a welter of trivial bloodletting. Next time around, perhaps we can have rather more of Lin Carter and rather less of John.  p. 116

Cawthorn always struck me as one of the less ideological driven and more normal of the New Worlds’ reviewers.
Finally, in Healthy Domination, R. M. Bennett reviews The Best of New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock. This was an unusual ‘Best’ volume that took stories from the last few years of Carnell’s editorship, and the first year or so of Moorcock’s. Bennett says the volume is “good, meaty reading” and states five out of the fifteen stories deserve special mention:

Probably the author most likely to appear in an anthology of stories reprinted from New Worlds is J. G. Ballard and his arid, stylistic trend setter, The Terminal Beach is a welcome inclusion, whilst also included is one of the most controversial of modern sf shorts, Langdon Jones’ somewhat over-rated I Remember, Anita. Hilary Bailey’s The Fall of Frenchy Steiner opens with a brilliant picture of London under a Hitler conquest but despite being entertaining the story falls off towards an unconvincing and disappointing conclusion. James Colvin’s The Mountain is merely disappointing. To counteract this feeling there is included, however, James White’s Tableau, as complete, as mature, as entertaining and as satisfying a story as is anyone’s good fortune to read (how has Tableau missed becoming an anthology “standard?”).  p. 117

There are quite a few Letters to the Editor this month as well (is Moorcock short of material or short of budget?) A few are pro/anti missives about a previous review of Fredrik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, one of which, by J. D. McMillan, from Broughton, spins off into a discussion of what kind of SF should appear in the future:

[The] time when science fiction “will explode into something that will produce many works of lasting importance”, to quote this month’s editorial, has not yet arrived. And although I feel sure that by this time most serious students of the genre would agree with you when you go on to says “If this means a rejection on the part of the writers of most of the conventions of sf, then the rejection must be made. We must progress, must adapt or die,” there seems to be little concrete indication or guidance these days as to what exactly we ought to be trying to adapt to. There is some talk on your part of “symbolism”, “surrealism” and the creation of “mythological figures”, and on the part of J. G. Ballard of “a more introspective and cerebral science fiction” that, will “share the vocabulary of ideas in painting and music”. But are these (and I take them to be the most up-to-date ideas on the subject) to be regarded as ends in themselves, or merely as yet further conventions to be adapted or rejected along with all the others, in the interests of at last producing these elusive “works of lasting importance?  pp. 123-124

There is also a letter from P. Hunt, from Wimbledon, which I thought might be pseudonymous parody written by Moorcock himself:

This weekend I bought a copy of New Worlds, the first sf book I have read for about five years. I gave it up because I considered that the standard had greatly deteriorated. I’m sorry, but this New Worlds seems even worse. I ask—‘Why are your authors so pre-occupied with the sexual angle?’ It is worked into very story, willynilly. This sex-mesmerism seems to have permeated all literature. The stories of years ago, gave one a sense of wonder, and of magic. The authors mentally transported one out to the galaxies, or took us through the avenues of Time. These stories were a joy to read. Now the leading character gets bogged down with some voluptuous tart, and nothing happens remotely resembling true Science Fiction. Also, I notice that most of your writers have atheistic leanings, and express it through the mouths of their characters. When I read sf I don’t want atheism flung at me, nor religion either, for that matter. The sf writers of the not too distant past were true craftsmen. They could make the impossible seem credible. If the story contained a female character, she was necessary to the story. As far as I am concerned, true sf writing ceased in 1939.  p. 125

He sounds a bit like me—I wonder if we are related.
Finally, Charles Platt closes with a letter stating that recent stories by David I. Masson and David Newton “both exhibit entirely fresh approaches which successfully integrate the science-based idea with the rest of the story.”

Next Month announces, after a majority reader vote, an increase in the price and size of the magazine.

•••

This issue is a game of two halves, with the Masson story offset by a handful of slushpile stories and more lacklustre than normal non-fiction. However, it is well worth getting for A Two-Timer. ●

_____________________

1. Christopher Priest (Vector #38, February 1966) opens his review by saying that Masson’s story “is only his third-published story, but it’s also the third I’ve enjoyed” before adding:

The appeal of the story, however, is not the satire but the way in which it is written. The style is strictly period and, contrary to my expectations, was totally readable. (What a pity, it occurred to me as I read the story, that the printers didn’t catch the spirit of the thing and give us illuminated capitals and f’s instead of s’s !) I recommend this story out of hand: it’s good, honest science fiction, complete with time-paradoxes, and yet it is a satire and the points it makes are valid and at all times amusing.  p. 28

Priest goes on to say that “the rest of the issue is not up to this high standard.” He found John Watney’s The Orbs’ idea of a grateful human society sacrificing itself to an alien one “a false assumption” as well as finding it “a bit sick.”
Hi, Sancho! by Paul Jents is a “paranoid-protagonist story” with a “twist at the end that made him groan.” (At least, unlike me, he understood it.)
Philip E. High’s Temporary Resident is “a fairly original idea” but has “two-dimensional” characters and the writer “insults the reader’s intelligence by hammering home the point of the story at least three times.”
The Sword Against the Stars by A. F. Hall was not to Priest’s taste and he found it “a bit passe.”

2. This was John Watney’s only story, although it looks from his ISFDB page that he wrote a biography or book about Mervyn Peake (which may have been his connection to Michael Moorcock, the editor of New Worlds).

3. This is A. F. Hall’s only SF story, according to ISFDB.  ●

rssrss

New Worlds SF #158, January 1966

Summary:
A much better issue this time around with good stories from Roger Zelazny (Love Is an Imaginary Number is an elegant, telegraphic piece about a man who introduces progress in many alternate worlds, and his escape from the people who would stop him), and David Masson (Mouth of Hell, a well described story about an exploration team investigating a huge hole and their slowly revealed discoveries). There is also a good effort from E. C. Tubb (Anne, ultimately an affecting piece about a space fighter pilot and his sentient ship).
There is also a novelette from Charles Platt, and the conclusion of editor Michael Moorcock’s The Wrecks of Time, which has some good images and scenes but doesn’t save the novel.
The non-fiction includes a ‘How to Write’ article from John Brunner, and an interesting letter from Ivor Latto.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Christopher Priest, Vector #38 (February 1966), pp. 26-27

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
The Failures • novelette by Charles Platt
Love Is an Imaginary Number • short story by Roger Zelazny +
Mouth of Hell • short story by David I. Masson +
Anne • short story by E. C. Tubb

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by David Kearn, James Cawthorn
Editorial: The New Prism • by Michael Moorcock
The Case • poem by Peter Redgrove
Next Month
Them As Can, Does
• essay by John Brunner
Thot Provoking Belly Laughs • book reviews by James Colvin
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

The third and final part of The Wrecks of Time by Michael Moorcock starts with all of the major characters having newly arrived on E—Zero. There is then an argument between Maggy and Steifflomeis about the “Principals,” and the fact that their presence may affect the activation of this simulation. Later there is a stand-off between Faustaff and Orelli’s men, but Faustaff, Nancy and Ogg eventually leave in an aircar.
During the ensuing journey they travel through a world that appears to still be in process of forming—there are many anachronistic objects that appear, a Baiera tree from the Jurassic period, a brand new 1908 Model T ford, etc. Nancy and Ogg also feel uncomfortable, as if their minds are changing to make them fit this world, but Faustaff remains unaffected.
In the next chapter, Faustaff wanders off on his own to what looks like a vast garbage dump:

All history seemed to have been piled together at random. It was a mountain of treasure, as if some mad museum curator had found a way of up-ending his museum and shaking its contents out on to the ground. Yet the artifacts did not have the look of museum-pieces. Everything looked absolutely new.
Faustaff approached the heap until he stood immediately beneath it. At his feet lay a near-oval shield of wood and leather. It looked as if it belonged to the fourteenth century and the workmanship seemed Italian to Faustaff. It was richly decorated with gold and red paint and its main motif showed an ornate mythical lion; beside it, on its side, was a beautiful clock dating from around 1700. It was of steel and silver filigree and might have been the work of the greatest clockmaker of his time, Thomas Tompion.2 Few other craftsmen, Faustaff thought abstractedly, could have created such a clock. Quite close to the clock he saw a skull of blue crystal. It could only have been fifteenth century Aztec. Faustaff had seen one like it in the British Museum. Half-covering the crystal skull was a grotesque ceremonial mask that looked as if it came from New Guinea, the features painted to represent a devil.
Faustaff felt overwhelmed by the richness and beauty—and the sheer variety—of the jumble of objects. Somehow it represented an aspect of what he had been fighting for since he had taken over the organisation from his father and agreed to try to preserve the worlds of subspace.  p. 14

There are more striking images and scenes in the next chapter, when Faustaff passes a column of Orelli’s men, seemingly in a daze, and wearing a variety of costumes: Roman soldiers, priests, women. When he later finds Orelli in the cathedral, he realises why they were dressed the way they were:

[It] was the life-size crucifix behind the altar which drew his attention. Not only was it life-size but peculiarly life-like, also. Faustaff walked rapidly towards it, refusing to believe what he already knew to be true.
The cross was of plain wood, though well-finished.
The figure nailed to it was alive.
It was Orelli, naked and bleeding from wounds in his hands and feet, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his head hanging on his chest.
Now Faustaff realised what Orelli’s men had represented—the people of Calvary. They must certainly have been the ones who had crucified him.
With a grunt of horror Faustaff ran forward and climbed on the altar reaching up to see how he could get Orelli down. The ex-cardinal smelled of sweat and his body was lacerated. On his head was a thorn garland.
What had caused Orelli’s men to do this to him? It was surely no conscious perversion of Christianity; no deliberate blasphemy. Faustaff doubted that Orelli’s brigands cared enough for religion to do what they had done.
He would need something to lever the nails out.
Then Orelli raised his head and opened his eyes.
Faustaff was shocked by the tranquillity he saw in those eyes. Orelli’s whole face seemed transformed not into a travesty of Christ but into a living representation of Christ.
Orelli smiled sweetly at Faustaff. “Can I help you, my son?” he said calmly.
“Orelli?” Faustaff was unable to say anything else for a moment. He paused. “How did this happen?” he asked eventually.
“It was my destiny,” Orelli replied. “I knew it and they understood what they must do. I must die, you see.”
“This is insane!” Faustaff began trying to tug at one of the nails. “You aren’t Christ! What’s happening?”
“What must happen,” Orelli said in the same even tone. “Go away, my son. Do not question this. Leave me.”
“But you’re Orelli—a traitor, murderer, renegade. You—you don’t deserve this! You’ve no right—” Faustaff was an atheist and to him Christianity was one of many religions that had ceased to serve any purpose, but something in the spectacle before him disturbed him. “The Christ in the Bible was an idea, not a man!” he shouted. “You’ve turned it inside out!  p. 20

Moorcock would return to this idea in his Nebula Award winning novella, Behold the Man, in New Worlds #166 (September 1966).
These two chapters are, however, the peak point of the novel, and it returns to its previous level after this, with Faustaff spending the remainder of the time seeing or intervening in various other surreal scenes that resemble magical or mythical performances (he saves a naked blonde woman from a Black magic ritual and sees Ogg, dressed as a white knight, fight with Steifflomeis). Eventually, Maggy takes Faustaff to see the Principals:

They stood on a vast plateau roofed by a huge, dark dome. Light came from all sides, the colours merging to become a white that was not really white, but a visible combination of all colours.
And giants looked down on them. They were human, with calm, ascetic features, completely naked and hairless.
They were seated in simple chairs that did not appear to have any real substance and yet supported them perfectly. They were about thirty feet high, Faustaff judged.
“My principals,” Maggy White said.
“I’m glad to meet you at last,” Faustaff told them. “You seem to be in some sort of dilemma.”
“Why have you come here?” One of the giants spoke. His voice did not seem in proportion to his size. It was quiet and well-modulated, without emotion.
“To make a complaint, among other things,” said Faustaff. He felt that he should be overawed by the giants, but perhaps all the experiences that had led up to this meeting had destroyed any sense of wonder he might have had otherwise. And he felt the giants had bungled too much to deserve a great deal of respect from him.  p. 40

I suspect by now many readers will feel the same way about the novel. Anyway, the Principals shuffle off to deliberate and, when they come back they tell Faustaff that their ancestors left Earth millions of years ago to travel the universe. When they came back to Earth they found a decayed society, and so created the simulations in an attempt to reproduce the civilization that produced them.
Faustaff then gives them a lecture on their failed experiment, comments on their morality, and suggests that they should develop their own pleasures (art, entertainments, etc.). They readily agree to move all the simulated worlds out of the sub-spatial bubble and into real space (and interconnect them).
This is completely unconvincing, but it does produce a good final image of all the other worlds appearing in the sky of E-Zero, their atmospheres merging to form an envelope around all the planets (apart from the nuked E3), and golden bridges of light forming between them.
In conclusion, this final part of the novel is probably worth reading for a few striking images and scenes, but the plot is as silly as in the first two instalments.

If I wasn’t droning on at great length in these reviews, and was writing waspish one-liners instead, then “A failure” would be the short review of The Failures by Charles Platt.3  Although this is supposedly set in the future, it is essentially about swinging 1960s London’s social and sexual mores.
The story begins with the protagonist Greg, a member of a successful beat group, The Ephemerals, picking up a woman called Cathy Grant, who he gives a lift home (while driving fast and recklessly). After she turns down the offer of dinner (a previous engagement) we join her in her flat (which she shares with a pet monkey) for some ennui:

That was when one tired of it all; when the novelty had gone, when each sophisticated, well-dressed, successful man said the same things in the same boring way, no matter how polished a conversationalist.  p. 61

Greg performs with his band that night, and the next day phones Cathy to arrange to take her out that afternoon. First though, he has lunch at “a small Greek café near Kilburn”:

He liked to eat there, because he could usually escape recognition, and because the food was good: real meat, home-baked bread. It was a small place, not very clean, and the workers from that area were usually the only people there. Tough, leathery old men, sitting over a sandwich and cup of tea; women, plump from too many children, waiting to buy take-away bags of food from the counter: pies, sandwiches, anything cheap. These were the people left behind by the affluence spiral; unskilled, often of sub-normal intelligence. In spite of their poverty, though, they possessed a certain natural assurance and equanimity that Greg almost envied. They came from a rigid, unchanging society; people who had never known any state other than poverty and who accepted it as being their only way of life.  p. 64

Sociology 101.
The story continues with the couple going to Greg’s houseboat and then spending the afternoon water skiing in the estuary. When Cathy says she needs to be back be nine, Greg is annoyed and, after he drops her off, waits outside her flat.
When a man arrives and, an hour later, leaves, Greg follows him to a pub and finds out, when he confronts him, that the man, Jamieson (a) is a “good friend” of Cathy’s, (b) is a Thalidomide sufferer (he has two prosthetics over his foreshortened arms), and (c) was a one-time post-doc Sociology student. After this latter revelation, Jamieson delivers a one-page data-dump about overpopulation, the space race, resources and expansionary capitalism before he eventually leaves.
The rest of the story has Greg take Cathy out again, this time to a dive/squat in Notting Hill, where they meet an unwashed and aggressive marijuana user called Tony. Cathy gets a high before she leaves with Greg, but (spoiler) later on in the story, after dodging an invitation to see Greg play, she returns to the area, bumps into Tony, and sleeps with him. Cue the bad sex writing awards:

She looked into his eyes and felt weakened, the tiny pupils in the ghostly pale irises boring into her, unblinking. She let herself go down into his arms and the odour of his body seemed to close around her. He circled his arms over her and she felt the tense, strong muscles; he rolled on to her and kissed her roughly, and it was as if she was falling backwards, losing touch with the world. With a sudden cry she gave way to him and clutched at his hard, tanned body, needing him and what he stood for, opening herself to him, losing a reserve that she suddenly realised she had never lost before.  p. 77

Later on there is a argument between Cathy and Greg about what is going on, a melodramatic encounter where she says that she makes wealthy men happy, self-identifies as a “whore” and a “slut,” and invites Greg to call her a bitch or slap her, before he finally leaves. Later on, when Greg gets a telephone call from Cathy saying their relationship is over (I wasn’t aware it had started), he jumps in his car to drive to her flat, but his reckless driving catches up with him this time around and he crashes the car, breaking another motorist’s arm. Greg then flees into the crowd, where he sees Jamieson, who wails that Cathy has gone to live with Tony (Jamieson has lost his prosthetics at this point and is waving his stubby arms/hands around). Greg continues on to Cathy’s flat, kicking a blind beggar on the way and, when he gets there, he finds a party in progress. Greg briefly talks to an out if work astronaut before going up to the party that’s happening in her (looted) flat. Cathy isn’t there and, after passing a woman holding a dwarf, he ends up in a room where Cathy’s pet monkey is sitting on its own:

It had no way of understanding what had happened; it only knew that somehow Cathy had gone away and left it. Without her to provide for it, it would soon sicken and die.
It pulled and bit at its chain, then crouched back into the corner, chattering senselessly.  p. 85

I guess the point of this one (and ignoring the terrible soap opera and melodrama) is that we are living in an overpopulated hell-hole, and that our lives are pointless There was quite a lot of this New Worlds/New Wave miserablism in the sixties and early seventies, and I could never understand why anyone would bother writing this kind of story. Misery likes company, I guess.

Love Is an Imaginary Number is the first of a handful of stories4 that Roger Zelazny would contribute to the Moorcock incarnation of New Worlds, and it is a poetic tale told in elegant and telegraphic prose, as can be seen from its opening passage:

They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever. Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.
I lay there staring over at her, arm outstretched above her head, masses of messed blonde hair framing her sleeping face. She was more than wife to me: she was warden.
How blind of me not to have realized it sooner!
But then, what else had they done to me?
They had made me to forget what I was.
Because I was like them but not of them they had bound me to this time and this place.
They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love.
I stood up and the last chains fell away.
A single bar of moonlight lay upon the floor of the bed chamber. I passed through it to where my clothing was hung.
There was a faint music playing in the distance. That was what had done it. It had been so long since I had heard that music. . . .
How had they trapped me?
That little kingdom, ages ago, some Other, where I had introduced gunpowder—Yes! That was the place! They had trapped me there with my Other-made monk’s hood and my classical Latin.
Then brainsmash and binding to this Otherwhen.  p. 86

The rest of the tale is kinetic chase sequence that has the narrator flee through many different worlds. During this we find out what his crimes were during a fight he has with one of his pursuers:

I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.
“Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!” he gasped.
“All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you speak, not the final results.”
“Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not change the men themselves?”
“Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly,” I said, and I dismounted and moved to his side. “All that your kind seek is a perpetual Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do.”
I unsheathed the knife at my belt and slipped it through his visor, but the helm was empty. He had escaped into another Place, teaching me once again the futility of arguing with an ethical evolutionary.
I remounted and rode on.  p. 89

This is pretty good piece, an accomplished blend of style and story, and I’m puzzled as to why this appeared in New Worlds rather than an issue of F&SF, where it would have earned the author considerably more money and have been a natural cover story.
This is a story that I’d have in my hypothetical Best of the Year collection.

David I. Masson returns this issue after his stunning debut in September (Traveller’s Rest) with a story that would be one of five he would publish this year (three of them would appear consecutively in this issue and the next two). Mouth of Hell is, like his first story, set in an unusual world, although it seems similar to ours:

When the expedition reached the plateau, driving by short stages from the northern foothills, they found it devoid of human life, a silent plain variegated by little flowers and garish patches of moss and lichen. Kettass, the leader, called a halt, and surveyed the landscape while the tractors were overhauled. The sun shone brightly out of a clear sky, not far to south for the quasi-arctic ecology was one of height, not latitude. Mosquitoes hovered low down over tussocks below wind-level, beetles and flies crawled over the flowers. Beyond a quarter-metre above the ground, however, a bitter wind from the north flowed steadily. The distance was clear but it was difficult to interpret what one saw, and the treeless waste held no clues to size. Ground undulations were few. There were no signs of permafrost beneath. After a time a fox could be made out trekking southward some way off. Some larger tracks, not hooved, showed by the edge of a bog pool. If one wandered far from the vehicles and men, the silence was broken only by the thin sound of the wind where it combed a grass mound, the zizz and skrittle of insects, the distant yipe of fox or other hunting animal, and the secretive giggle of seeping water. Here and there on the north side of a mound or clump traces of rime showed, and a few of the pool edges were lightly frozen.  p. 93

Initially there are only subtle indications of differences (the names of some of the team, the constant wind from the north, the permanent thunderstorm to the south, a herd of “greydeer” that they hunt, etc.) but it eventually becomes apparent that they are on an ever-steepening slope—but are already below sea level. When the gradient increases to the point that they can’t take their tractors any further their leader, Kettass, orders them to make camp.
After a discussion of the situation a team of three volunteers is sent ahead on foot, and the next section of the story follows Mehhtumm, ’Ossnaal and Ghuddup as they continue down the ever increasing slope using their “sucker gloves”:

The tilted horizon terminated in a great roll of clear-edged cloud like a monstrous eel, which extended indefinitely east and west. The ground air, at any rate, was here free of the gale, but the rush of wind could be heard between the thunder. The atmosphere was damp and extremely warm. The rock surface was hot. What looked like dark, richly-coloured polyps and sea-anemones thrust and hung obscenely here and there from crannies. The scene was picked out now and again by shafts of roasting sunlight funnelling down brassily above an occasional cauliflower top or through a chasm in the cloud-curtain. Progress even with suckers was slow. Mehhtumm got them roped together.
An hour later the slope was 70°, with a few ledges bearing thorn bushes, dwarf pines, and peculiar succulents. The torrents had become thin waterfalls, many floating outwards into spray. A scorching breeze was wafting up from below. Two parallel lines of the roller cloud now stretched above them, and the storm seemed far above that. The smooth, brittle rock would take no carabiners. A curious patternless pattern of dull pink, cloudy lemon yellow, and Wedgwood blue could just be discerned through the foggy air between their feet. It conveyed nothing, and the steepening curvature of their perch had no visible relation to it. Altimeters were now impossible to interpret, but they must clearly be several kilometres below sea-level. Crawling sensations possessed their bodies, as though they had been turned to soda-water, as Ghuddup remarked, and their ears thrummed.  p. 98

These physiological symptoms (spoiler) are nitrogen narcosis (of which they are unaware) and this eventually leads to disaster: ’Ossnaal has a fit and, when Mehhtumm tries to organise himself and Ghuddup to rescue him, the latter cuts his rope and continues down the hole. After securing ’Ossnaal, Ghuddup starts climbing to get help, only to later hear him fall.
After this attempt Kettass leads another team of three down the hole—this time with oxygen supplies—but another man falls, and the expedition is abandoned.
The story then moves forward five years in time to a point where the “authority” has built two VTOL (vertical take-off or landing) craft to explore the hole, and Kettass is on board to film and commentate. This expedition discovers that the hole is 163km wide and the base is 41km below sea level. They also see glimpses of lava at the bottom. But although the expedition is initially successful, a freak accident causes the loss of one of the craft.
The final section takes place thirty years later, where Kettass, now a septuagenarian, goes with his extended family on the pressurised cable railway that runs down the Terraces (the Western side of the hole) to within 700 metres above the oozing magma at the base.
The story concludes by remarking that Kettass did not live long enough to take the tourist rocket down Jacob’s Ladder (the Eastern side), or the North Wall lift.
I thought this was a pretty good story and, although not as good as his debut, it’s ‘Best of the Year’ worthy. I liked the descriptive writing, the slowly revealed physical environment, and the unconventional arc of the story (the two postscript sections probably shouldn’t work, but they do).

I haven’t been a fan of E. C. Tubb’s work in the Compact Books version of New Worlds so far (which strike me as fairly typical examples of the kind of story that I thought Moorcock was trying to get rid of) but I quite liked Anne. This one opens with a space fighter pilot called Argonne—expected to fight to the death—having fled a battle with the alien Hatachi. His apprentice is dead—his body disrupted in to a red mist inside the craft—and Argonne’s own legs are pulped. His ship is screaming with pain, but he can’t do anything to help as he can’t move.
The next section of the story has him wake in a room with his legs healed, and a woman called Anne standing by his side. After Argonne speaks to Anne for a time they leave the room and find themselves in a garden, seemingly instantaneously. When he thinks of winter, they arrive on a snow world, and then they finally end up on a beach.
There are a couple more dream scenes like this until the one where he has a hand to hand fight with a Hatachi—then his dream merges with the reality of his previous situation on the ship. He wakes up to find himself still badly injured, with a dream cap having slipped off his head. He then realises that the ship had, even though he couldn’t help her, put the cap on his head so he wouldn’t suffer the pain of his injuries. The last section is quite affecting:

But he was not sorry that the ship had failed—that the dream-circuit had been broken. He would not have liked to lie in the safe, snug world of illusion when the ship had nothing of comfort. It is bad to die alone.
Argonne had lived a solitary, dedicated life and it was natural for him to have followed ancient custom. The personalising and naming of weapons is not new. He looked at the four letters mounted above the instrument panel. “Anne,” he murmured. “With an e.”
The girl he had never had, the wife he would never get, the dream he would never know again. The ship he had tried to save by running from those who would hurt her.
Anne!
Who had shown him Heaven.
This time he did not try to blink away his tears. They belonged. For around him something beautiful was dying.  p. 112

•••

The Cover, by the look of it, is another piece of eye-catching zeitgeist from the photographic agency.
The Interior Artwork comes from regular James Cawthorn and a new artist David Kearn. Kearn would only appear in the magazine on this one occasion and, initially, I thought that this piece was by Keith Roberts (who contributed covers to the magazine from issue #163) but the signature doesn’t look like his.
The New Prism by Michael Moorcock is a somewhat lofty editorial that discusses how religion is being replaced by science before it moves on to discuss how SF may the tool best suited to view this “new prism”. Personally, I’d argue that most SF has little, if anything, to do with science.
The editorial also has this description of historical SF:

In sf, for nearly two-thirds of a century we have despaired. We have produced a literature of despair. We have produced a literature that might, in itself, be vital, but which has reflected that despair in works of an apparently cynical or hopeless nature and where we have supplied answers they have been confused.
This was natural in a century that has produced world wars, insane political creeds, H-Bombs; but the time has come when we are beginning to stop worrying about it and starting to worry what we’re going to do about it.  p. 4

And this of current and/or future SF:

There is an increasing atmosphere of positive and hopeful thinking in the world of art (and even in the political sphere). Young artists, in particular, seem to be fed-up with simply expressing how fed-up they are. They accept, like scientists and politicians, that things are bad, but they’re trying to work out how things can be made better.  p. 4

I’d suggest that both those descriptions are highly debateable—in particular the latter, given that future issues of New Worlds had more than their fair share of gloom (for a current example see Platt’s story above).
The Case by Peter Redgrove is a new feature for the magazine, a long poem (seven pages). It has a short introduction that mentions a schizophrenic boy who suffers from hysterical blindness and whose mother is dead, but the rest of it is mystifying. I assume the poem describes his inner vision of a garden, and his relationship to his dead mother, absent father, and God. I wasn’t really sure what this is about.

The usual Next Month filler in this issue has a fairly stellar list of names “due to appear soon,” a mixture of established British names (Aldiss, Ballard, Brunner, Moorcock), established American names (Zelazny, Merril) and a number of up and coming new writers (Masson, Jones, Platt, Collyn). That sounds like the successful mix I remember from my previous fragmentary reading of the magazine.
Them As Can, Does by John Brunner is one of those advice-to-new-writers essays you see every now and then in the SF magazines—when the editors have finally lost their patience with the rubbish they see in their slushpile:

So you had an idea for a science fiction story .
So after considerable effort you got it down on paper.
So you mailed it to John W. Campbell and sat back to await the cheque, and no cheque came—just the MS, with a note on the rejection slip informing you of the existence of International Reply Coupons and intimating that if you want the next story returned you’d better enclose some. So you chewed off an eighth of an inch of fingernail and sent it (the MS, not the piece of nail) to Michael Moorcock, and it came home again, and you sent it in desperation to a fanzine and it came back from there, too.  p. 113

I’m not sure that any of the advice proffered in this article (ms preparation, plotting, length and structure, characterisation, dialogue, etc.) will make any difference to the standard of submitted material, and it always annoys me a little that editors waste precious magazine space on something that applies to a minority of readers. That said, there are a few interesting snippets, including one about Brunner’s own work:

The first story I ever sold to Astounding stemmed from a single sentence in Cliff Simak’s Time Quarry; much of the material in Telepathist derived from the key element of Peter Phillips’s Dreams are Sacred.  p. 114

The first book reviewed by Moorcock (as by James Colvin) in Thot Provoking Belly Laughs is Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison (serialised in New Worlds #153-155), of which he says:

If you didn’t have the pleasure of reading [this recently], it might be enough to tell you that running it did wonders for the magazine’s subscription list.  p. 121

After he describes it as “wonderfully vulgar” and “influenced by Catch-22,” he concludes that it is an American novel in the traditions of Mack Sennet (who?), the Marx Brothers, and Mad magazine.
After this Moorcock reviews another of his own novels (there were two or three in the last column), The Fireclown, beginning with some background information:

[This] was written two or three years ago, I believe; around the time he was writing The Sundered Worlds and his Elric stories, yet it is untypical of this period. The first few pages, describing the Fireclown himself in his underground cavern, addressing a Hugo-esque rabble, are written in his familiar style, but then the writing becomes rather dull and both plot and style (though there are one or two other colourful and original scenes scattered here and there) seem vaguely reminiscent of Disraeli’s Coningsby.  p. 122

He goes on to say that this “futuristic political novel” is minor Moorcock and not as ambitious as his other work.
The other three books reviewed are anthologies. The first one is Rulers of Men, is edited by Hans Stefan Santesson and, although Moorcock didn’t like all the stories, he found that this was:

A memorable and readable collection with the same distinctive and attractive atmosphere that Fantastic Universe used to have. Winey—mellow—quite clever. Not ‘thot-provoking’, particularly, but not intrusive, either.  p. 122

Next up is A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels, edited by Damon Knight. Moorcock says that the Wells (The Time Machine) and the Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) are worth rereading but laments that Knight edited Capek’s The Absolute at Large (although he doesn’t say why).
As for Gulf by Robert Heinlein, we are reminded that Moorcock hasn’t seen a story by this writer that he didn’t dislike at least a little bit:

[This] hasn’t the sense of conviction one receives from the preceding writers, but it is good commercial sf and fluently written, about the first superman and what it means to be a superman in a world of ordinary people. A bit tedious, after a while. If, as the book claims, Heinlein has exerted a revolutionary influence on the field, I don’t know quite what it is, but if it’s what I think it might be I don’t think it’s fair just to blame Heinlein.  p. 123

I do wish Moorcock would stop inserting these gnomic observations into his reviews—what do you think the the influence is?; if not him, who?
Also mentioned are Sherred’s E for Effort (“good mood,” “well-written”). McKenna’s Hunter, Come Home (“cardboard characters,” but “one of the best I’ve read in contemporary American science fiction.”).
Moorcock finishes with this about the publisher of the last two books:

Gollancz seem to be improving, judging by the above pair, but they’ll have to make a big effort this year to make up for all the bad, bad books they published last year.  p. 123

The final anthology, New Writings in S-F 6, edited by John Carnell, “arrived too late for a proper review” (I think Moorcock covers it in a subsequent column).

Letters to the Editor come from two readers. The first is (future contributor) Michael Butterworth, who wants short fiction and not novels, and suggests that “every form of art” should appear in New Worlds’ pages. His letter then spirals out to “tales” vs. “stories,” and that the former will offer readers a “uniform whole” (no, me neither).
The other letter is a long and interesting one from Ivor Latto, who asks why so many of the stories in New Worlds deal with death (of men, planets or races) and why new writers seem to be the culprits. The whole letter is a worthwhile read so I’ve pasted it in above. If by now you are too bored with this post to read it, the best line in it is:

[If] I felt like being flippant, I would suggest that, as Analog is the engineers’ sf magazine, then New Worlds is the undertakers’ magazine.  p. 125

•••

This issue gets off to a lacklustre start, but the rest of the issue has two better than good stories (Zelazny, Masson) and one that isn’t bad (Tubb). The non-fiction material, as ever, picks up some of the slack.  ●

_____________________

1. Christopher Priest (Vector #38, February 1966) opens his review by saying that Moorcock/Colvin’s serial “concludes on a far stronger note than I would have suspected from the first two episodes.” He adds:

In a way, it typifies the kind of story New Worlds, at its present stage of development, tends to stress. On the surface of the story there is a fairly straightforward plot, which suffers only from an artificiality of construction. The writing is competent, and at times works up some strong images. (The timeless world of E-Zero with its formless agglomeration of ‘new’ history stands out in this context). Beneath the superficial plot the author is implying another kind of image: one of reversal of character and motivation. The story is not totally satisfying in itself, but it will make for unobjectionable reading and, if the reader wishes to seek a meaning which is a little deeper than mere plot, he will find it.  p. 27

I think that wildly oversells it.
As for the short stories, Priest recommends Masson’s Mouth of Hell “unhesitatingly,” saying “it is quite unlike anything I have read before”; Zelazny’s Love is an Imaginary Number is “not totally to my own taste”; Tubb’s Anne is “a simple story, very well written”. He appears to like Platt’s story least (for reasons that seem not dissimilar to mine):

The Failures is an extrapolation of a few contemporary trends, but apart from this says very little. The sentiments expressed are naive and clumsy, and the action and locale of the plot are limited by their close resemblance to mainstream writing.  p. 27

Moorcock’s editorial is “long and intelligent;” Brunner’s how-to writing guide is “good,” and Priest adds that “this feature alone is worth the half-crown.” (Priest, as a budding writer at the time, would think that wouldn’t he?) He concludes by noting that Moorcock/Colvin seems to be “mellowing.” I can’t say I’ve noticed.

2. Moorcock’s detailed description of the Tompien clock in the scrapyard/dump scene makes me wonder if it’s his advertisement in the “Wanted” section of the classifieds:

3. For those of you who are interested in SF writers as failed futurologists, there is an interesting description of the future Notting Hill in Platt’s The Failures:

The route took them through Notting Hill Gate; it was still a slum area. Everyone knew it, but there was no money to do anything about it, and few people really cared, least of all those who lived there. These were the dregs, the unproductive population: the old, crippled, moronic, criminal, and anyone else who preferred dirt and semi-starvation to work. The advertising campaigns passed them by, the fads and fashions had no appeal. These people were non-consumers, uncared for and forgotten.  p. 71

The average Notting Hill house price as of October 2020 is £1.74 million.

4. The five Zelazny stories that were published in New Worlds during the mid-sixties were:

Love Is an Imaginary Number (ss) New Worlds SF #158, Jan 1966.
For a Breath I Tarry (nv) New Worlds SF #160, Mar 1966.
The Keys to December (nv) New Worlds SF #165, Aug 1966.
In the House of the Dead (ex) New Worlds Speculative Fiction #173, Jul 1967; extract from Creatures of Light and Darkness (Doubleday, 1969).
The Last Inn on the Road [with Dannie Plachta] (ss) New Worlds Speculative Fiction #176, Oct 1967.  ●

Edited 11th October 2020: rewrote and expanded summary.rssrss

New Worlds SF #157, December 1965

Summary: Apart from Langdon Jones’ story Transient, this is another lacklustre issue for fiction. Moorcock’s editorial gives an informative account of the 1965 Worldcon in London.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Christopher Priest, Vector #37 (December 1965), p. 20

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Transient • short story by Langdon Jones
J Is for Jeanne • short story by E. C. Tubb
Further Information • short story by Michael Moorcock
Dance of the Cats • novelette by Joseph Green
To Possess in Reality • short story by David Newton
A Mind of My Own • short story by Robert Cheetham –
Ernie • short story by Colin R. Fry –

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork
• by Harry Douthwaite, James Cawthorn
Conventions and Conventions • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Looking Back • book review by Langdon Jones
No Characters • book review by R. M. Bennett
Dr. Peristyle’s Column • Q&A by Brian W. Aldiss [as by uncredited]

_____________________

This issue leads off with the second part of Michael Moorcock’s The Wrecks of Time, which I found even less interesting than the first—probably because much of this section sees Faustaff talking to people about events happening off-stage.
This instalment begins with Steifflomeis pointing a gun at Faustaff’s head when they are interrupted by the arrival of a helicopter carrying Cardinal Orelli (there is no explanation as to how he found the pair in the middle of nowhere). After some chit-chat Orelli takes the two men back to his camp, and Faustaff sees that the Cardinal now possesses a disruptor—acquired from one of the D-squads. Orelli also has two of the D-squad men, who appear to be in suspended animation:

As they talked, Steifflomeis had bent down and was examining one of the prone D-squaders. The man was of medium height and seemed, through his black overalls, to be a good physical specimen. The thing that was remarkable was that the two prone figures strongly resembled one another, both in features and in size. They had close-cropped, light brown hair, square faces and pale skins that were unblemished but had an unhealthy texture, particularly about the upper face.
Steifflomeis pushed back the man’s eyelid and Faustaff had an unpleasant shock as a glazed blue eye appeared to stare straight at him. It seemed for a second that the man was actually awake, but unable to move. Steifflomeis let the eyelid close again.  p. 7

After a bit more of this they depart through a portal for Orelli’s base on E4, a huge cathedral in the centre of a vast ice plain, the latter the product of a previous disruption. There they conduct tests on the D-squad men in Orelli’s lab, and discover they are androids.
Just as things are getting interesting Faustaff is “invoked,” i.e. bodily transferred, back to his headquarters in the E1 version of Haifa. Here he catches up on the current situation, which is that a new Earth, E-Zero, is forming, and tensions are rising between East and West on E1, with war imminent. When Faustaff goes home for a change of clothes he finds Maggy Smith waiting for him, and she tells him that all the E worlds (of which there have been thousands so far) are “simulations.”
When the war starts on E1, Faustaff evacuates his team to E3. There he finds out from Mahon and Ogg that the situation is worse than he thought—E13 and E14 have been destroyed as well as E1—and Orelli and Steifflomeis have joined forces. Orelli’s cathedral on E4 has also disappeared. Meanwhile, Mahon’s teams have found a cottage used by Steifflomeis which contains strange equipment.
Faustaff, Nancy and Mahon decide to drive to the cottage, and when they arrive they surprise Orelli before Stefflomeis and Maggy also appear—at which point they are all whisked off to E-Zero.
This is a lacklustre instalment of a story that mostly has Faustaff running around finding out stuff. It’s just not dramatically engaging.

Transient by Langdon Jones has what seems to be a man waking up in a hospital. Eventually (spoiler) we find out that he is a male chimpanzee whose intelligence has been artificially uplifted, but only temporarily. The realisation that he will shortly lose his new found intelligence makes the chimp cry, and he explains his emotional reaction to the doctor:

“I speak your language, I understand what I am and what has been done to me. And for the first time I come alive. You don’t understand that; you have had intelligence all your life; you don’t know what it’s like to be as I was. I see how shallow was the life before this moment. You do see, don’t you? Intelligence is intelligence, no matter what form it takes, or how it was created. Do you think I want to go back and live in the shadowed world I used to inhabit? And yet I am not happy as I am. How could I be when I can look at my wife, whom I love—yes, love—and yet whom I find as being something so far beneath me as to be laughable? And yet at the same time, the thought of returning to that state of mindless half-life fills me with dread.
“And I—and I—don’t—I . . .”  p. 39

This is pretty good as far as it goes, but its five pages overly compresses its Flowers for Algernon story arc.

J Is for Jeanne by E. C. Tubb is another short piece, which starts with a woman telling a man called Paul about a recurring nightmare:

The dream was always the same. There were lights and a hard, white brightness and a soft, constant humming which seemed more vibration than actual sound. There was a sense of physical helplessness and the presence of inimical shapes. But, above all, was the ghastly immobility.  p. 41

When she sees a specialist called Carl, he speculates that her dream may be about the future (Dunne is name-dropped in this section, Freud in the psycho-babble in the first). Eventually there is a confrontation between Jeanne and Paul that reveals (spoiler) she is actually a malfunctioning computer, and that Paul is a troubleshooter:

“I thought for a minute she was going to be a stubborn bitch but she came through like a thoroughbred. I tell you, Carl, I should have been a ladies’ man. I can talk them into anything—well, almost.”
Carl made a sound like a disgusted snort.
“All right,” said Paul. “So you’ve got no romantic imagination. To you this is just a hunk of machinery.”
“And to you it’s a woman.” Carl repeated his snort.  p. 48

This is one of those dreary stories where the writer keeps the mystery going by keeping back any information that the reader can use to figure out what is going on—until they are ready to produce the reveal.

Further Information by Michael Moorcock is his second ‘Jerry Cornelius’ story and a sequel to Preliminary Information in New Worlds #153 (August 1965). Its random or inconsequential plot is a big step towards the type of fully blown New Wave story the magazine would later run (mostly in its large-size issue incarnation).
This one starts conventionally enough though, with a long action sequence that has Jerry, Miss Brunner and several others arrive on the Normandy coast to storm Cornelius’s father’s house (now owned by Jerry’s brother Frank). There are lots of SF gadgets on display as Jerry and his team fight through the fortified house’s defences (stroboscopic towers, needle guns, LSD gas, nerve bombs, etc.) and there is the odd deadpan remark as well so, initially at least, the story is in territory adjacent to the James Bond movies.
Later on however, after they manage to pin down Frank, events become rather more random: Jerry leaves the fight and the house to find his sister, Catherine. When he gets to her cottage bedroom Jerry finds Frank there and, in the ensuing needle gun duel, their sister is killed. During a later interrogation of Frank (who is captured during the skirmish) by Miss Brunner, she finds out that the microfilm they seek is supposedly in the vaults.
When Jerry and Miss Brunner go looking for the film they can’t find it, and then find out they are trapped by the guards outside. Cornelius turns on the stroboscopic towers to aid their escape, and they make it to the cliffs where they jump into the sea. Cornelius briefly comes to in a boat, and then awakens fully in Sunnydale Nursing home.
This story appears to  consist of a number of random situations through which pass a number of arch and/or disinterested characters: this is pretty standard for the ‘Jerry Cornelius’ stories, and explains why I never had much time for them. I note in passing that the story has a permissive sixties feel (e.g. drug and genital references, etc.).

Dance of the Cats by Joseph Green sees the return of Silva de Fonseca from Tunnel of Love (New Worlds #146, January 1965), and opens with him and his movie making partner, Aaron Gunderson, trying to obtain a permit to film the cat people on Episilon Eridani. The government bureaucrat is ready to grant their request—as long as they keep their eyes on another man, Danyel Burkalter, the son of a circus owner who has used his father’s connection to bypass the official to get a permit.
Burkhalter next appears in the story when the de Fonesca and Gunderson land next to his spaceship on Epsilon Eridani—where the pair clock him for a lothario and braggart—and again at the end when they (spoiler) stop him from abducting the cat people’s priestess and her dancing troupe.
In between these two events this old school SF story examines an alien society of ruling cat people and subservient dog people. Key to this relationship are the cat-people’s famous dancers (who the pair are there to film) whose performance, Aaron later discovers, is the prelude to a telepathic flight to the dog people’s settlement where the cat people feed on the latters’ life energy:

“Eat, Oh travellers! Drink, Oh travellers! Feast, Oh travellers! Feast!”
The ground was rushing upward. He sensed the entire tribe of Cat-people diving with him. Somewhere ahead he felt the woman who led them reach the ground, and abruptly the sense of communion with her was gone. He was alone, but it did not matter now. Close beneath him in the darkness, like flickering rosined torches in ancestral castle halls, bright concentrations of life-force—energy—pleasure awaited his coming. As he drew close he realized the lights were Dogpeople. His headlong rush slowed as he neared them and he exerted some not-understood means of control and veered away from the first one, a male, moved on past the next, an old woman, passed the next, already taken by a companion, and reached a young girl, nubile, strong, and sullenly acquiescent. He entered her quickly, and possession had something of the sensual pleasure of sex, the taste of ambrosia, the pounding excitement of triumph in battle. The total emotional experience was the most pleasing he had ever known, and he ignored the dimly sensed resentment in his captive. He revelled in this new and unexplored wonderland without conscious feeling, without thought, without consideration.  p. 84

The two men put a stop to these rapey shenanigans after they save priestess and before they leave the planet.
This is competently done, but the psi gimmick is unlikely and contrived.

To Possess in Reality by David Newton starts in a typical fairy tale setting, with unicorns and castles, and princes with lutes . . . and then:

Far, far away beyond, the icewhite mountains a dragon roared . . . And yet not a dragon’s roar! A spaceship slid down to the meadow upon a pillar of noisy sunlight. In the dead silence which followed the cutting of the engines the cracking of the rocket-tubes as they cooled was clearly audible on the highest coign of the Castle. The Prince, without a second’s hesitation, gallantly leapt into the unicorn’s saddle and cantered across to the ship. The Lord watched his future son-in-law’s courage with pride, his handwringing daughter with love, awe, fear, hope and despair.
As the unicorn crossed the shrivelled grass-circle to the tail vanes of the vessel its milky paws inked with ash.  p. 95

After Xavier, the spaceship pilot, is welcomed by the Prince he goes to the castle for a meal (and some light flirting with the princess). After a night there he returns to his ship and tries to fix his spacial position before realising that, when he jumped to escape the alien fleet, he actually jumped into an atom of his own memory. A later romantic complication with the princess forces Xavier to jump back to the normal world (taking the princess with him).
There then follows an anti-climactic section where, after his initial success with the princess, Xavier hits a rough patch. His analyst tells him he has lost his dream.
The story finishes with a massive spacefleet arriving over the Earth—but it isn’t the aliens that Xavier fled from previously: the Prince has come to rescue his Princess (although how a fairy tale prince in one of Xavier’s brain cells manages to develop a space drive to jump out of his mind is not explained).
This is readable enough but the world-in-an-atom trope is not convincing.

A Mind of My Own by Robert Cheetham is narrated by the “Sensitive” of a Sensitive/Traveller empath pair (the former stays in Earth while the latter explores other planets). After this setup we hear about the about Mike the Traveller’s explorations, and then about a woman, Juline, who becomes his lover (the Sensitive narrator vicariously experiences their relationship):

When Juline came to work at the Centre, every man in the place attempted to court her. She was a tall, graceful girl with glistening red-gold hair. Her eyes, as I remembered so often through Mike’s eyes, were a brilliant green, and her heart laughed easily along with her lovely mouth. She had every free man at her feet.
And she chose Mike, surrendering to him quickly and wholely.
We—that is—Mike was stunned by his good fortune, and at first treated her with the deference one has for a fragile ornament. This did not last long, however, as his natural virility gained the upper hand and his attitude became more one of the dominating male. This was a good thing, for Juline had been too wild and free all her life, used to worship and supplication. She needed a strong arm, not only to support her, but also to direct her. Under this new treatment Juline flowered, and it became apparent to the rest of the field that she was very much Mike’s woman.  p. 108

Needless to say (spoiler) an alien kills Mike on his next exploration trip. The narrator is subsequently plagued with doubts that his jealousy delayed his warning to Mike about the beast—but then he realises that Juline would never be interested in “a wizened, egg-bald, four foot tall Sensitive like me!”
There is probably the seed of a better story here, but (even excepting its dated attitudes3) this is pretty poor beginner’s piece that has a number of typical flaws (tell instead of show, weak twist ending, etc.).

Ernie by Colin R. Fry is this writers third and last appearance in New Worlds4 and it opens with the narrator, a “rocketman,” losing all his money at a casino, fighting with the bouncers, and getting thrown into the street. There he is offered a job as a supervisor in an etherium mine on Luna. En route he meets two (mutant) dwarves also destined for the mines: one of them, a hunchback, tells the narrator he is going there to get revenge.
In the remainder of the story we see that the dwarves/miners are treated worse than animals:

They could get into cracks and crevices where you or I would hesitate to send a dachshund after a rabbit And they had tough hides They could stand up to scrapings against those rough, sharp rocks that would give you or me septic cuts. They just got scratched. Eventually, of course, they got a lot of scratches and some of them did go septic. Then the doctor certified them as incurable, and the welfare officer killed them humanely in the gas chamber just outside the camp. There was even a priest who used to come in from Moon City and hear their last confessions, if he was wanted. Allen had that place really well equipped.  p. 113

The story ends with a fight between the vengeful dwarf and another of the miners, but we never find out what the dispute was about.
This is not only a unlikely story (does anyone think that a human race capable of flight to the moon will use manual labour rather than machines for mining?), but a pointless and needlessly unpleasant one (and it seems typical of new writers who, when they little to say, or no real story to tell, substitute edginess, violence, or nihilism instead).
I note the use of the word “shit” on p. 114, the first usage I think I’ve seen of this word in the magazine.

•••

The anonymous Cover looks like another random psychedelic swirl from the photographic agency—but I like it anyway, and it’s better than the last two covers.
There are two pieces of Interior artwork this issue: one is by Harry Douthwaite, and the other is from James Cawthorn.
Conventions and Conventions, Michael Moorcock’s editorial, begins with a report on the recent Word Science Fiction Convention in London:

The mood of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, held over the August Bank Holiday in London this year, was perhaps a trifle less convivial on the whole and a trifle more business-like than previous conventions held in this country, but what marked it was the interest shown by writers, readers, publishers and editors in the improving of the overall level of the field. Complacency and cynicism were both markedly absent; literate, realistic opinions and suggestions were very much there. There were very few who disagreed that the field could not do with extra sophistication, though, sadly, weary cries of ‘Shame!’ were heard, notably from John W. Campbell, editor of Analog (which won this year’s Hugo again) who spoke for some length at the opening discussion (‘Science Fiction, the Salvation of the Modern Novel’), telling us that Homer was a simple Bronze Age barbarian who told a good story and that no-one read him for the poetry—or, indeed, because of the poetry. Luckily, the voices of hope predominated, principally in the shape of Miss Judith Merril, Mr. Brian W. Aldiss and Mr. Harry Harrison. Hope was, in fact, fully restored by John Brunner’s erudite talk on certain marked aspects of science fiction, a talk which we hope to reprint in a slightly abridged form in a later issue.  p. 4

Moorcock then adds that the field is jettisoning “some of its less attractive cargo” but doesn’t give any details. Later he gives an account of a lively panel:

On the last day, Monday, a panel of politics in science fiction found John W. Campbell advocating slavery as a reasonable system (‘There are always bad masters—like the fool of a farmer who beats a good horse to death—but . . .’) and what he called ‘benevolent dictatorship’. The panel soon developed into a discussion between Mr. Campbell and John Brunner, who make excellent opponents, and, with some interesting opinions coming from the floor, showed that whilst the majority of people there disagreed with Mr. Campbell, he had certainly succeeded in provoking an interesting discussion.  pp. 4-5

Moorcock concludes his con report by stating that it was “an extremely satisfying and stimulating convention,” lists a number of the writers who attended, and says that the exceptionally large attendance shows how popular SF has become.
The rest of the editorial discusses the second issue of Brian W. Aldiss’s and Harry Harrison’s critical magazine SF Horizons #2, in particular Brian W. Aldiss’s article:

[Aldiss] takes three writers, Lan Wright, Donald Malcolm and J. G. Ballard and uses their work to show what is right and what is wrong with the British scene. His criticism is positive and thoughtful and his tendency to make fun of the afflicted quite often has you laughing in spite of yourself. We might point out that we only approve of making fun of the afflicted when the afflicted appear to wish their own afflictions on everyone else.  p. 123

He concludes by saying that SF Horizons is “still the most stimulating magazine of its kind ever to appear in the sf world.”
Looking Back is a long book review by Langdon Jones examining Dandelion Wine, which begins with a look at the nostalgia sub-genre:

Bradbury has received a lot of unfavourable criticism, even from such balanced sources as my colleague, James Colvin, a great deal of which I think is completely unfounded. In general, Bradbury’s critics attack the escapist element in his writing. A glance at a few American sf and fantasy books should be enough to demonstrate that the easiest way of cashing in is to write about the Good Old Days.
[. . .]
This tendency is, granted, unhealthy, but at the same time, quite understandable. The trouble is, from the writing point of view, that this tendency is likely to produce badly written stuff, which gets by purely on the overwhelmingly sickly sentimentality and nostalgia it contains. However, the critics of this backward-looking genre are likely—like Mr. Colvin—to be misled into criticising every single work that contains these elements.  p. 119

In his subsequent examination of the book (which he describes as a “curiously heady brew”) he also has a go at another group of readers:

There are, as I have discovered, some very, very literal people in this world. Those who would rather spend their time crabbily counting up the halfpennies of logic whilst ignoring the fluttering riches of meaning, I advise to keep well away from this book and this author. Those who would prefer the transparent but sweaty engineer working frantically on his logical machinery while blue-scaled Venusian lizards batter down the papier-mache door will not feel at home in Green Town with its solid, but distorted perspectives. In parenthesis I would point out how strange it is that this kind of reader will often condemn an author’s work on the grounds of non-realism over some trifling technical ‘error’ that isn’t really an error at all, while the stuff that they are fond of reading is as unreal (in an imaginative sense) as it possibly could be.  p. 120

The whole review is worth reading, both for its description of the book (which I haven’t mentioned here), and the related contextual comments (two of which I’ve shown above).
No Characters by R. M. Bennett is a short review of the collection Somewhere a Voice by Eric Frank Russell. According to Bennett it is a mixed bag with a couple of good stories (the title story and I Am Nothing), and he expected better from this author.
Dr. Peristyle’s Column has more reader questions and Aldiss’s waspish answers. This is his reply to Betty Pierce of Diss, Norfolk, when she asks why writers try to give her more than a story:

A prize question, and your scribe is floored by it. I suppose the answer is that there are writers who write for the likes of you, madam, but the good ones hope to avoid you. In your ideal world, publishers would presumably publish only synopses of the stories they received. A true writer’s answer to you would be, possibly, that the interest never lies entirely in a story but in the details of how it happened and who it happened to, and also whether what happened had different effects on all concerned. Many writers, too, are as interested in how to tell what happened as in what happened; and they may be the individuals who are more interested in their subject matter than their readers.  p. 125

So—insult your questioner, mischaracterise what they want, and end with waffle. I think this is the last Peristyle column, which is probably for the best as a little of this kind of thing goes a long way.

•••

Another poor issue for fiction, with Editor Moorcock contributing most of the chaff. At least the non-fiction is interesting.  ●

_____________________

1. Christopher Priest takes over the magazine review duties in Vector #37, January 1966 (Graham Hall reappears in later issues to co-host the department).
Priest begins by saying that Colvin/Moorcock’s serial “has latent plot gimmicks and pseudoscientific paraphernalia” but “it reads quickly and well”; Jones’ Transient “is similar to Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon”, but it doesn’t create the same poignancy or character-identification that that classic short story did.” Tubb’s J for Jeanne is slight, and Green’s Dance of the Cats “straight SF” and “very good of its kind”. Newton’s To Possess in Reality is “difficult to describe without giving away too much” but “a few fantasy cliches come off the worse in the process.” Cheetham’s A Mind of My Own is “a trifle,” and Fry’s Ernie is a “somewhat sadistic story” that is “a bit too callous, but makes its point.”
The story Priest liked least appears to be Michael Moorcock’s Further Information:

This is a pointless story with esoteric footnotes, awkward and unnecessary sex and a quite obscure plot.
Not recommended.  p. 21

Priest concludes:

A fair issue, not properly representative of the average quality.  p. 21

2. I’d always thought of Joseph Green as an Analog writer who occasionally slummed in New Worlds, but checking his early publication record shows him to be very much a protégé of John Carnell (this list of stories is partially from Galactic Central):

The Engineer (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Feb 1962
Initiation Rites (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Apr 1962 [Loafers]
The Colonist (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Aug 1962 [Loafers]
Once Around Arcturus (nv) If Sep 1962
Life-Force (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Nov 1962 [Loafers]
Transmitter Problem (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Dec 1962 [Loafers]
The Fourth Generation (nv) Science Fiction Adventures (UK) #30 1963
Fight on Hurricane Island (ss) Argosy (UK) Jun 1963
The-Old-Man-in-the-Mountain (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Jun 1963 [Loafers]
Refuge (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Jul 1963 [Loafers]
Haggard Honeymoon (nv) (with James Webbert) New Writings in SF #1 1964
The Creators (ss) New Writings in SF #2 1964
Single Combat (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Jul/Aug 1964
Treasure Hunt (nv) New Writings in SF #5 1965
Tunnel of Love (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Jan 1965 [Silva de Fonseca]
The Decision Makers (nv) Galaxy Science Fiction Apr 1965 [Allan Odegaard (Conscience)]
Dance of the Cats (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Dec 1965 [Silva de Fonseca]
Birth of a Butterfly (nv) New Writings in SF #10 1967

Most of Green’s later stories were in F&SF and Analog (although there were also another three in New Writings in SF).

3. I notice that the character’s attitudes towards women in this 1960’s magazine issue are probably worse than in the majority of the 1940’s and 50’s magazines I’ve read. Apart from the passage about Juline from the Cheetham story (“Juline had been too wild and free all her life, used to worship and supplication. She needed a strong arm . . . to direct her,” etc.), Nancy in the Moorcock serial only ever appears when Faustaff wants fed or to get his leg over, and there is also the “bitch” comment in the Tubb story.

4. Colin R. Fry’s ISFDB page is here: three stories published in New Worlds during 1964-65, and one in Fantastic in 1965.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #156, November 1965

Summary: A mix of mediocre and average work, relieved by only the Platt story (and to a lesser extent by the Pratchett). Moorcock’s serial looks as if it is another potboiler like last year’s The Shores of Death.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #36 (November 1965), p. 11

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
The Music Makers • short story by Langdon Jones
Until We Meet • short story by Colin Hume
Time’s Fool • short story by Stuart Gordon [as by Richard Gordon]
Night Dweller • short story by Terry Pratchett
50% Me, at Least • short story by Graham Harris
Cultural Invasion • short story by Charles Platt

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork
• by James Cawthorn
The Santa Claus of the Atomic Age • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Paperbacks • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
“Sorry About the Sound Effects, Daddy.” • book reviews by Hilary Bailey
Cosmonauts on Venus • film review by Alan Dodd

_____________________

This issue opens with another serial from Michael Moorcock, whose last was The Shores of Death just under a year ago—although this one, for whatever reason, is under his James Colvin pseudonym.

The Wrecks of Time begins with a short introduction (or maybe it’s just a blurb) that sets up fifteen quite different parallel Earths which exist in a “subspatial well”. After this we meet the protagonist, Professor Faustaff, driving across the American desert in a Buick convertible. He picks up a young woman called Nancy, who is wearing only a bathing suit (she was dumped by a trucker for not performing sexual favours):

He grinned at her and she grinned back, her eyes warming. Like most women she was already attracted by Faustaff’s powerful appeal. Faustaff accepted this as normal and had never bothered to work out why he should be so successful in love. It might be his unquestioning enjoyment of love-making and general liking for women. A kindly nature and an uncomplicated appreciation for all the bodily pleasures, a character that demanded no sustenance from others, these were probably the bases for Faustaff’s success with women. Whether eating, boozing. smoking, love-making, talking, inventing, helping people or giving pleasure in general, Faustaff did it with such spontaneity, such relaxation, that he could not fail to be attractive to most people.  p. 7

After this (tell instead of show) it isn’t long before they kiss.
Later on in their journey Faustaff gets a call on his private radio stating that Earth-15, the last of the series of alternate Earths, is unstable. Faustaff’s team also tell him that they have discovered a D-squad tunnel in Faustaff’s area (the D-squad are the people who are responsible for the instabilities that have taken place on some of the parallel Earths, and have resulted in the destruction of some of them). Faustaff becomes wary of Nancy.
They eventually stop at a motel, get a room, and go to the restaurant to eat. Faustaff, a giant of a man, has a similar appetite and eats four steaks. There is one other customer in the restaurant, a mysterious man called Steifflomeis, who speaks briefly to the couple and is obviously going to reappear later in the novel.
The chapters that follow this don’t advance the story much. Faustaff leaves his motel room naked later that evening, and takes an “invoker” from his car into the desert. Here he communicates with one of his team on E-15, and a man called George tells him about the D-squad attack, the resultant casualties, and that their “adjustor” is partially damaged (this is the device that Faustaff’s side use to counter the instabilities the D-squad cause). Faustaff says he’ll arrange for E1’s adjuster to be sent to them.
Faustaff and Nancy get up the next day and drive to Faustaff’s HQ in San Francisco. After Faustaff meets his team and gets an update he takes a new recruit called Bowen to E1 (the latter’s induction lecture is a data dump about Faustaff’s father discovering the alternate Earths, and how they are being destroyed by the D-squads).
Then E15 is attacked again. Faustaff goes there and has various adventures, which include seeing an unexpected D-squad attack by helicopter. The D-squad eventually destroy the already damaged adjustor, and Faustaff orders an immediate evacuation. His team’s portal collapses, and Faustaff only just manages to escape himself by using the “salvagers” one (another group with access to portal tech who scavenge anything useful from the sites of instabilities) before E15 is destroyed.
The first part finishes with the scavenger team who rescued Faustaff on E15 leave for E3—but they won’t take him along (which seems rather inconsistent), so Faustaff wanders off into the wilderness rather than put himself at the mercy of another scavenger boss, Orelli.
When Faustaff later stops to sleep, he awakes to find Steifflomeis sitting there waiting to kill him—but not until there is a lot of exposition. Steifflomeis not only reveals that he is (probably) working for the D-team, but also cheerily reveals himself as a nihilist who thinks the humans on all the various planets would be better off dead.
This is the first part of a mediocre potboiler based on made up pulp science (and not even particularly imaginative science at that), which was most likely hacked out at a fast pace to either (a) fill a hole in the magazine or (b) get its editor some extra cash. I note in passing that it has more of a sixties’ feel (the casual promiscuity, etc.) than its contemporaries and predecessors.

The Music Makers by Langdon begins with a lead violinist called David having an intense and emotionally painful experience as his orchestra plays a concerto on Mars. Afterwards he discusses the performance with the similarly affected Maxim Blacher, the conductor, who goes on to dismiss the audience as “peasants”.
Later, the pair go outside onto the Martian surface for a walk (where, atypically, the environment is blue-coloured rather than red). There the pair have a deep conversation about music and what it communicates, their poor opinion of the masses, and whether the extinct Martians would have a similar view of humanity. Blacher eventually goes back inside, leaving David on his own.
David then decides to play his violin, and the story ends with (spoiler) him hearing Martian music which fulfils him to the point that he realises that there is no point in living any more. As he dies, he sees Martian players moving towards the dome, and realises what they are going to do.
This is passably done but, as with most stories about music, it struggles to describe its effect on humans:

The urge came again, just like the end of the Berg; a desire for an unknown fulfilment that bloomed within him. It was a desire that could never be expressed in words; the price of his music. A perpetual irritation, it had been with him for most of his life. Music was just not enough. Sometimes, when he listened to the climax of a Bach fugue, he felt that he was approaching something—something big and incomprehensible. But he never attained it. He was like a drowning man, clasping the weeds at the side of a river, pulling himself half from the water and then slipping back again. He wondered what would happen if he ever found what he was looking for.  p. 61

The ending sounds a bit snobbish:

The Martians didn’t know what they were up against; a wall of philistinism, a defence inconceivably powerful. A nasty shock was in store for them. He wondered what the outcome of the contest would be; he just could not see victory for the Martians.  p. 66

Middling Jones and, if I recall correctly, not up to the standard of next month’s Transient or last year’s I Remember, Anita.

Until We Meet by Colin Hume2 begins with a man watching waves splashing on jagged rocks until he suspends the motion. Then a woman called Sylvia appears and they begin a conversation that occurs first against this backdrop and then various others (the stars, a ballroom, etc.). The subject of their discussion is the fact that they have spent thousands of years trying to meet in real life.
This goes on for a bit until the man wakes up in his dingy room, whereupon he reflects that he doesn’t need dream girls as he has a wife called Christine. He then looks out of the window and sees Sylvia in a distant window. He doesn’t recognise who she is, and she isn’t looking at him. It seems as if it will be a few more years before they are on the same page, if ever.
This feels a little like a variant of an “I woke up and it was all a dream” story. It’s an okay read as far as it goes but is very slight.

Stuart Gordon follows up his debut in New Worlds #152 (A Light in the Sky) with Time’s Fool. This has the Marquis de Sade transported through time so he can be quizzed by academics about his life and philosophy so they can come to a decision about the accuracy of his reputation. This inquisition takes place on a television program compered by a cheesy host (an unnecessary and irritating part of the story):

A cacophonous fanfare of some raucous instrument sounded, De Sade saw some mechanical monster, spherical and studded with openings, swoop down out of the ceiling and hover in the air in front of his face. It was humming slightly. Wallace motioned for him to keep still.
A young man with an idiotic face came on stage and began announcing the programme. De Sade disliked him immediately.
“Ladies—and—gentlemen! Your favourite tri-di station presents your favourite programme—Man or Monster! This week, who do we have . . . wait for it, ladies and gentlemen.” Spotlights caught de Sade full in the face, and he blinked angrily, feeling that he was made to look a fool.
“Yes, folks, believe it or not, this week our guest is the Marquis de Sade!” The announcement finished on a highpitched scream, and an impressed ooohh came from the audience. The young man continued: “As you all know, folks, the Marquis was born in 1740, and died in . . . well, it would hardly be fair on the Marquis to spill it, would it?”  p. 78

At the end of the story (spoiler) he returns to his own time with no memory of the trip.
Readers who know nothing (or next to nothing) about de Sade (such as myself) will know more by the end, and may come to the conclusion that the portrait painted by history is not accurate. This is more of a history documentary than a story, but it’s okay for all that.

Night Dweller by Terry Pratchett (the second published story by the sixteen-year-old) concerns the interplanetary creatures that live in our solar system:

Space is an ocean. I remember that now as I watch the armada of blue Nisphers sailing down against the solar wind. They are heading for the sun, to bask safely in the golden shallows. Even they flee from the storm.
Besides the low sighing of the Nisphers there is only the ever present hiss of space. No squeaks or squeals or grunts that mean the teeming life of the firmament itself. We are only just past the Pluto orbit and the Ear has been silent for days.  p. 83

Donovan, the narrator, is a member of a spaceship crew that is hunting for a creature known as the Night Dweller:

Above the chart-table, which serves me as a desk, hangs a framed parchment. I know its message by heart.
‘It has a soul that hungers for warmth, yet warmth would kill it. For it is not of a sun or a space, a place or a race, but a hatred, a coldness, a deeper blackness slinking in the sunless shadows. It is the dweller in the darkness. And, because it is not of them, it hates all the creatures of the golden shallows and the light that is blessed.
‘Undreamt of, it waits in its misery and cold loneliness, and in its hatred it howls at the stars.’
Those are the last words of the Fragment—it has no other name. It was written, sweated into stone, by the survivor of a dead race. The rest of it tells of the manner of their death, and of something that howled at the stars.  p. 84

The rest of the story is an account of the men on board (two have volunteered rather than face the death penalty, one suffers from a terminal disease, etc.) and their mission to kill the creature with a nuclear weapon.
It’s an effective mood piece with some atmospheric passages but, unfortunately, it just stops.

50% Me, at Least by Graham Harris has the narrator coming out of his coma in the hospital to find that (a) he has been in a traffic accident and (b) that the surgeons have given him a replacement artificial leg and arm. Initially he struggles to understand the doctor:

“You’re a member of Appen?” asked the doctor, his whole being, white and mingled with nothing and everything, gently lowered to the level of Bob Forton’s eyes.
“Am I? er—what?” Forton asked, wondering if he were the only patient in the room.
The teeth disappeared for a moment behind a skin full of hair.
“Robert Forton,” said the teeth once again, more slowly, “You remember what happened?”  p. 90

There is a lot more of this (it is rather overdone) before the story eventually moves on to Forton falling in love with the nurse. He is initially baffled by her cool response to his advances, but this is explained in the story’s denouement (spoiler), which reveals that he is actually a malfunctioning robot.
A beginner’s story that should probably have stayed in the slushpile.

Cultural Invasion by Charles Platt is a distinct change of pace from his last story in New Worlds #152, the Ballardian Lone Zone. This one, an amusing farce, begins on a Russian spaceship returning from the first moon landing, and when one of the cosmonauts prematurely fires the retro rockets they land in England, midway between the villages of Willy-in-the-Mud and Leyton.
The arrival of the re-entry capsule initially interrupts a courting couple, but soon involves an extensive list of characters including a local farmer, a drunk cyclist, a school-teacher, etc., all of whom end up involved in various mishaps (and who all end up squabbling and fighting with each other to the point that the Russian landing craft is ignored). The events in the narrative are summed up when PC Plod arrives towards the end of the story:

Constable Brown thought for a moment. He still wrote nothing in his notebook. “What exactly has been going on, here?” he asked [. . .].
Smith took a deep breath. “There’s a man who claims his daughter’s been assaulted, a young lad ran off in a Land Rover, there’s a drunkard staggering about claiming Farmer Knight rammed his car, Farmer Knight himself is worked up about his damaged fields, and on top of that, there’s a Russian space ship up there, and some woman who I suspect to be in collusion with the people inside . . .”
“Let’s have one thing at a time, sir,” the constable interrupted. “What was the registration number of the stolen vehicle?  p. 115

This is, by contemporary standards, probably rather unsophisticated stuff—but I imagine it would have gone down well at the time, and I enjoyed it.
It also has the benefit of a line that sums up British weather:

In this part of the world, it was usually raining, and when it wasn’t, it looked as if it would do very shortly. p. 100

•••

The Cover for this issue is uncredited, and there is only one piece of Interior artwork by James Cawthorn for Moorcock’s serial.
The Santa Claus of the Atomic Age by Michael Moorcock discusses, to begin with, The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. His comments about this book confirm the impression I have that he (probably like a number of other SF editors of the time) would have been happier running a modernist or post-modernist literary magazine:

[Bit] by bit, here and there, we are beginning to shake off the limiting conventions of sf and expand the field, seeking new subject matter and new techniques, trying to produce, to use that crude phrase we so often fall back on for want of something better, a more lasting ‘sense of wonder’. What Jarry has done can be done again—in the terms of today. It may be some time before the sf field produces its Jarry, but the moment will come when sf will explode into something that will produce many works of lasting importance. If this means a rejection on the part of the writers of most of the conventions of sf, then the rejection must be made. We must progress, must adapt or die. The growing general interest in and understanding of symbolism and surrealism encourages us to hope that the old philistinic cries of ‘Obscure!’ and ‘Bad Taste’ will soon cease to be heard for good. The work of men like Jarry must be made to look as conventional as the work of Cervantes, Swift, or H. G. Wells. Jarry created Ubu, whom Cyril Connolly has called ‘The Santa Claus of the Atomic Age’. It is up to us to create a whole range of mythological figures not only for the Atomic Age, but also for the Space Age.  p. 3

Moorcock then goes on to say:

A little paradoxically, considering all we’ve said, this issue contains a selection of fairly conventional sf stories, primarily by young writers.  p. 3

This sentence highlights a long-running dissonance between the editorialising in New Worlds and what the magazine actually presents to its readers. Over time, and with the advent of the larger format magazine in 1967, this mismatch disappeared.
The rest of Moorcock’s remarks are about the writers in this issue and their work, and include comments about his own pseudonymous serial (see my further comments about his self-referential remarks below) being “straightforward stuff” with “a freshness of approach and idea.” He also mentions that Pratchett first published at age 14 and is now 16, and that Graham Harris has published two SF novels.
Paperbacks by Michael Moorcock (under his James Colvin pseudonym) is mostly taken up by reviews of Penguin’s release of five new titles: Fifth Planet by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle “convinces on a superficial level most of the time”; Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is “thoroughly recommended as above-average sf” (although Moorcock says it’s not much better than Vonnegut’s contemporaries, like De Vries and Southern—who?).
The Space Merchants by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl gets a more detailed examination:

In New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis saw fit to say that The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth (Penguin, 3s. 6d.) had ‘many claims to being the best science fiction novel so far’. Amis’s tastes must be limited, for though this book is slickly-written, fast-moving and fairly mature in its outlook, its main target—the advertising world—is an old, tired target and no really original shots are fired at it.
[. . .]
Is it ‘satire’? Since the fears it expresses and the dangers it warns against have been the subjects of numerous newspaper leaders, Sunday Supplement articles, daily paper features, not to mention articles in the weekly reviews, novels and short stories. I can’t call it satire as I think of the term. To me satire should point out what is not obvious, and everybody’s suspicious of the advertising companies, aren’t they? Amis also gave the impression that Kornbluth was the passenger in the team. A reading of stories written independently by the two writers, a glance at Pohl’s work since Kornbluth died, should right that impression immediately. Reading The Syndic, for instance, clearly shows that Kornbluth had a talent for invention and, yes, satire, but was a bit shaky on plot construction. It would appear to me that Pohl’s big contribution to the team was his ability to construct a balanced plot. As light-reading, The Space Merchants is recommended.  p. 120

Moorcock then comments on More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon:

I’m not a great fan of Theodore Sturgeon, finding his writing emotionally imprecise and his characterisation often corny, but More Than Human (Penguin, 3s. 6d.) is perhaps his best book and the first section, The Fabulous Idiot which describes a moron with a hypnotic power to make people do whatever he wants, two girls brought up in a house by a paranoid father to whom sexual desire is the greatest of many evils and will not let them see or even touch their own bodies, is as powerful and horrifying a piece of writing as I have ever come across in sf.  p. 120-121

I thought it interesting that he mentions that part of the novel rather than the more widely acclaimed Baby is Three (the central novella).
He finishes with the Penguin quintet of books by stating that the new translation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne “is more readable than any [. . .] I have seen.”
There are various other books covered by Moorcock, with Weird Shadows from Beyond by John Carnell getting the best review. During this “Colvin” comments on one of Moorcock stories included in the collection:

[Science Fantasy] became top-heavy towards the end, with too much emphasis on ‘sword and sorcery’ stories (in particular, Moorcock’s ‘Elric’ series) but even this made it different to the rest and it published my first story, which gives me even more affection for it. Moorcock is represented, as it happens, by the only sword and sorcery story he didn’t publish in Science Fantasy and the only one I have really been able to read—Master of Chaos.
This has many of the elements of his Elric stories but they are crystallised into a shorter length, the writing is better controlled and the metaphysical theory of Earth’s creation (cut from ‘the stuff of Chaos’ by heroic men with imagination who have sufficient force of personality to exert an influence on ‘unformed matter’ and turn it into organised landscapes of plains and trees and the like) less outrageous than usual.  p. 122

Moorcock comments again on his own work at the end of the essay in the review of Blades of Mars by E. P. Bradbury (another pseudonym used for a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches):

[This] emulates Burroughs, even down to the latter’s reactionary, Victorian-style philosophising. I suspect that parts of this have been written with tongue in cheek, but perhaps I am doing Mr Bradbury more justice than he deserves. A colourful, action-packed romance, it has a pace that never falters and a clean, old-fashioned style that carries you along in spite of yourself. This, I gather, is what they call the work of a natural story-teller. I read it feeling I shouldn’t be wasting my time, but I did find it hard to put down.  p. 124

There would be a riot on Twitter if you did this kind of self-reviewing nowadays (and rightfully so).
There is a shorter book review column by Hilary Bailey, “Sorry About the Sound Effects Daddy”, where she examines New Writings in SF 5, edited by John Carnell, and Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert Heinlein. She says of NWISF that none of the stories are “wholly memorable” and adds:

I felt that five out of the seven, with a little more imagination, a little more intellectual hard work and more concrete visualisation, could have been more than good. Secretly I have the feeling that if sf writers would follow their own star a little more, and cling less to the work of other sf writers, the standard would improve. If they dropped this I’m-just-a-craftsman, less-literary-than-thou pose, sf might make a sudden jump forward.  p. 125

Bailey did not like the Heinlein and, after conceding that the book makes you read on, has this to say:

And yet—and yet—Heinlein is an sf Great, but his writing is mediocre, his dialogue banal and his imagination sparse. As so often in sf a ghastly facetiousness comes over the characters in times of crisis. Have people facing death ever spoken like this?: “Are you breaking it to me gently that we are going to be baked alive?” And: “Any time I’m too hot to put my arm round a girl I’ll know I’m dead and in hell.” In contrast the classic war-film dialogue “Sarge, Sarge, help me! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” seems refreshingly naturalistic.
This is not a matter of detail, but points up Heinlein’s weakness, a sheer paucity of imagination, lack of sense of how people behave, which weakens the whole book. The characters’ utterly incredible obsession with their sleeping pills, their sanitation and the question of mixed sleeping and bathing arrangements which permeates the whole shelter sequence again betrays Heinlein, like so many sf writers, as a man who has no competence in dealing with his stock in trade—disturbance, change and crisis and how people react to it.
But this book is not really about any group of people—it is wish-fulfilment of a high order. The central character (revealingly starting as ‘Mr Farnham’ and then taking over and becoming ‘Hugh’) is always in control, ditches his old wife, gets the nubile girl, threatens to shoot his son, complacently accepts it when his daughter offers herself to him, comes up trumps every time. In fact the author is so anxious to keep Hugh safe that it weakens the book. Typically, he is discovered in the first and last ten pages of the book in two separate bomb-shelters.
In the middle of the book a character screaming in the agonies of prolonged and eventually fatal childbirth, rallies in true Heinlein fashion and jests: “They went that-a-way. Sorry about the sound effects, Daddy.”
It’s a horrid thought that if the radiation don’t get you, Heinlein’s characters will.  p. 126

Cosmonauts on Venus by Alan Dodd is a film review of a Russian production which sounds like a bad dinosaur movie set on another planet.
Also present in this issue (like the last Science Fantasy) are a number of house adverts filling the gaps at the end of the story

•••

This is poor issue, a mix of mediocre and average work relieved only by the Platt story (and to a lesser extent by the Pratchett).  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall opens his review in Vector #36 (November 1965), by saying:

The November issue of New Worlds is another written predominantly by the younger generation of British SF writers and, for that reason, is disappointing.  p. 11

Ouch. Take that, new writers.
He has this about the serial:

James Colvin’s novel The Wrecks of Time starts off promisingly, with a handful of strong characters and an intriguing picture of the fifteen alternate Earths. The ending of the first part seems to intimate that it could be soaring off into the surrealist realms that Colvin is so fond of. Let us hope it is not to be.  p. 11

Hall goes on to say that Pratchett is “the youngest contributor” but that his story “shows an encouraging maturity”; Richard Gordon’s Time’s Fool is “less expert” but “demonstrates an admirable knowledge of the misunderstood pervert’s life”; and Harris’s 50% Me, At Least is mediocre, not saved by giving “an old, old gimmick a new twist.”
He did like the Jones and Hume stories though, saying that The Music Makers is “a magnificent handling of a magnificent idea,” and Until We Meet is “a fine fantasy.”
Charles Platt’s story is another Hall didn’t care for:

Cultural Invasion is hard to reconcile with the sheer inventive brilliance of Lone Zone. It is, in short, a tired, strained comedy of what happened the night a Russian space capsule landed in a Hertfordshire village and is oh-so-feeble.  p. 11

2. This was the second and last of Hume’s short stories according to ISFDB. The other was Dummy Run in Science Fantasy #67, September/October 1964.  ●

rssrss

New Worlds SF #155, October 1965

ISFDB
Luminist

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #35 (October 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
E=mc2—OR BUST • serial by Harry Harrison ∗∗∗
The Golden Barge • short story by Michael Moorcock [as by William Barclay]
Heat of the Moment • short story by R. M. Bennett
Emancipation • short story by Daphne Castell
Jake in the Forest • short story by David Harvey –
. . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie • novelette by Bob Shaw

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork
• by James Cawthorn
Making the Transition • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Story Ratings No. 153
Self-Conscious Sex
• book review by Charles Platt
Dr. Peristyle • Q&A column by Brian W. Aldiss [as by uncredited]

_____________________

E=mc2—OR BUST by Harry Harrison is the third part of the novel Bill the Galactic Hero and, as per the last instalment, less funny than the first. It starts with Bill on trial for being AWOL and, after his conviction, he ends up in prison with an immortal (or mad) cell mate. The pair have a good life taking advantage of the penal system until they are eventually transferred to the battle zone by mistake.
The second half of this finds Bill on a ‘Deathworld’ type planet, where he once more meets Eager Beager (before the latter is eaten by a giant snake). Bill then fights his way through the jungle and ambushes a convoy of human prisoners. He finds Drang among them, terminally wounded, and Bill eventually ‘inherits’ his fangs.
This is all well enough done, but the problem is that this reads more like Deathworld than a parody of it. That said, it finishes with (spoiler) an amusingly ironic coda which has Bill as a recruiting sergeant enlisting his own brother despite the protestations of their weeping mother.
The Golden Barge by Michael Moorcock is a fairly straightforward allegory which has a man called Tallow chasing a Golden Barge on the river. During his pursuit he gets stranded on a sandbank:

The sun shone on the boat, on Tallow, on the river, on bushes and trees and on a white house, five storeys high, which gleamed like the newly-washed face of a child.
Tallow lifted red eyes and sighed. He tried once more to move the boat, but could not. He looked around him. He saw the house. He would need help. With a shrug, he splashed knee-deep through the water, to the bank, climbing up its damp, crumbling, root-riddled earth and cursing his luck.
Tallow, in some ways, was a fatalist, and his fatalism at last came to the rescue of his sanity as ahead of him he saw a wall of red-brick, patched with black moss-growths. His mood changed almost instantly and he was once again his old, cold cocky self. For beyond the wall he could see the head and shoulders of a woman. The barge could wait for a little while.  p. 37

Tallow and the woman, Pandora, later become lovers and live in the house but, over time, relationship problems develop. Tallow eventually leaves to pursue the Golden Barge, and Pandora tries to go with him. As she later sleeps in the boat, Tallow realises that she is an encumbrance, and that without her he might yet find the Golden Barge—so (spoiler), he unceremoniously chucks her over the side! (Marriage guidance counselor required for this writer, stat!)
I got most of the allusions in this piece (the big white house and Pandora’s “purple talons”, etc.) but the last one escaped me (a huge pile of intertwined bodies has Pandora’s arm coming out of the top).
There has been a varied selection of Moorcock stories over the last three issues (the ‘Jerry Cornelius’ story Preliminary Information in #153, and The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius in #154) but this is the one I liked best—next issue sees the start of a serial from him as “James Colvin”, The Wrecks of Time.
Heat of the Moment by R. M. Bennett2 starts with a travelling salesman arriving at a motel and going to sleep. Later he wakes up to find his room on fire and, as he tries to escape, is abducted by aliens who take him on a spaceship to Rigel Two. En route they tell him he is destined for a zoo, and that conditions there will be as near to what he is used to as is possible.
This has a realistic beginning, a routine spaceflight section in the middle, and (spoiler) a punchline ending (after the aliens vacate his recreated motel room, they light the fires). This ironic ending made me smile, but it may not be everyone’s hot beverage preference.

Emancipation by Daphne Castell starts off with convincingly described section about an alien society:

Krug of Stok unhooked the wooden hasp of the wives’ pen, and stooped under the low lintel into the main yard, chilly and yellow-grey in the light of approaching dawn. None of the other men of the village were about yet—Krug was an early riser, liked to get out and about before the paths grew crowded and the communal rakers and sowers had all been rented out. Still, there were drawbacks to being a keen farmer; it was cold, for one thing, this early in the day—Krug’s thick brown skin, tufted and warted as some of the reptile life of Stok, was crinkled in an effort not to shiver. He looked into the iron trough under the great boiler; the fire was low. Skag, the night-watchman was asleep on the other side of the boiler, skulking good-for-nothing. Krug growled—he would have to wake the fat fool up to tell him his duty was over—duty, pah! Any right-thinking Stokka would scorn to be a night-watchman over the wives’ pen: it was a post given only to the slowest-moving and slowest-thinking of the race—not one of honourable service and renunciation, like being a nurse of children for instance, or a food-dresser. Definitely a post worthy of no respect at all. Krug kicked the slouched brown figure at his feet awake with a fierceness which was partly due to the knowledge that in a moment he would have to begin the other task which made early-morning work less than welcome. He would have to poke the fire and coax it into fresh vigour, before preparing the morning feed for the communal livestock in the wives’ pen.
“Oh! Thak take you, master, that was a shrewd kick!” Skag lurched to his feet with a peevish moan.
“Anything to report?” Krug picked up a shovel and began heaving tash-dung on to the dying fire.
“The creatures were making a bit of a din round about the setting of the moons. Can’t let a man take a nap, upsy swine,” grumbled Skag. It was not quite clear whether he was referring to the livestock or to Krug. Just to be on the safe side, Krug swung smartly at him with the shovel, and the nightwatchman went on his way more hastily, with a stifled yelp of pain.  p. 62-63

We learn more about this feudal planet, and the three-armed reptilian race that occupy it, as the story progresses; in particular we learn that the males are the only sex who are intelligent, and the females are kept as herd animals in pens.
Later there is a conversation between Krug and Skag and another man called Lopp, who is back from his travels around their solar system (although their society isn’t advanced enough to have spaceships, neighbouring planets do, and the young males work their passage). During Lopp’s account, he tells the pair that Terrans have landed on one of the other planets, and have claimed the solar system as part of their Galactic Empire; many labour-saving technological marvels will now be available in return for this annexation. The only problem is that Krug’s people will have to pretend that the females are their equals, as Terrans have odd views on the subject of sexual equality.
This news plays out later at a Council meeting where all of the alien males attend, and there is trouble at the thought of heretical ideas like letting the females live with the males. Matters comes to a head when Lopp mentions that the Terran’s demands are the lesser of two evils: there is another race approaching their solar system, and they have a matriarchal society! The Council decides to submit to the Terrans.
After this entertaining set-up the story ends on a bit of a flat note, as the hypno aids used to teach the females a simple form of speech (to help fool the Earthmen) also make them less placid, and they eventually insist on having their own way in other respects—having pets in the house, telling the Earthmen what the real situation on the planet is, etc.
This is the best thing I can remember reading by Castell, and it is an interesting early feminist SF story.
Jake in the Forest by David Harvey3 is about a man who wanders through a forest until he comes to a lake. Looking back to where he has come from he sees a hidden house. He enters the building and finds a speechless woman there; she indicates a table full of food and later shows him a bed where he can sleep. The woman later visits him and then, I think, there is a dream sequence where he falls onto jagged rocks. He wakes the next morning, has breakfast, and goes outside to find the woman lying spreadeagled on a flat rock.
I have no idea what this was supposed to be about, and the writing is so overly descriptive you get the distinct impression that the author isn’t writing a story, but Writing:

Each pine tree possessed an underlying form of conic symmetry and this pervaded everything. This gave Jake great pleasure, particularly when he surveyed the landscape from some panoramic viewpoint, for the vertex of each tree provided a series of focal points which guided the vision. And when Jake moved the parallax of vertices moved slowly and irrevocably too. And when he moved under the pines he was able to look up through the symmetrically spaced branches to the final conic of the sky above. Sometimes Jake felt disatisfied with the constant upward pointing of the conic shapes and then he would imagine that the roots of each tree pointed downward. and outward into the earth. The most pleasurable moments of all came when he came to one of the numerous lakes, for here he was able to see the conic shapes pointing downwards into the water. Here the land was neatly balanced on the vertex of each tree and Jake trembled in case the crash of the axe should destroy the support of the land and leave nothing save the sky.  p. 77

In moderation the above wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s seventeen pages of this (as well as quotes from Ibsen at the start and end—never a good sign), and I soon started zoning out. No doubt there are Symbols and Deep Meaning here, but they were lost on me: I suppose I should have given this another go but it seemed too much like the opaque stories that made the later large-size issues of New Worlds virtually unreadable.

Bob Shaw, after several years away from the field,4 returns with . . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie. It starts with war-hero Lt Col Johnny Fortune, commander of a UN Planetary Defence Unit, giving a news conference about a Nesster spaceship which may land in Fortune’s sector (he is in Iceland). These alien ships have been arriving regularly for three years, and Fortune is a hero of previous armed engagements where the supposedly invading Nessters were exterminated. However, Fortune now suspects that the Nessters aren’t a threat but are actually unarmed refugees.
After the conference, Fortune goes to see a businessman called Geissler, a mathematical prodigy who runs a business launching orbital packages with the help of a huge cannon. Together they are trying to find the scout satellite they believe is leading the Nesster ships to Earth.
Another part of the story concerns Fortune’s dysfunctional marriage, and we first witness this when Fortune goes home to a party organised by his adulterous wife. He meets his wife’s lover, Efimov, and then goes off to deal with other matters. When Fortune later finds the pair in his office at a locked desk drawer, Fortune knocks Efimov unconscious. Fortune then gets a call from the base about the inbound ship: they have calculated that it will definitely land in Fortune’s sector, so he returns to base.
The rest of the story involves Gleissner finding the satellite, and his and Fortune’s attempts to shoot it down in the face of opposition from Efimov and other external forces.
Although the fundamental idea behind the story is a little shaky (why has no-one else suspected what Fortune has?) there are a number of things that mark this story out from other contemporary work. First there is the hero himself—Fortune is an overweight chocolate guzzler; second, the marital infidelity in Fortune’s relationship is atypical; third, the story takes place in Iceland. All this (and more) made me think that, in some respects, this piece points to a time after the New Wave when traditional SF would be better characterised and more adult.

The Cover is another awful, uncredited one—the magazine badly needs a cover artist or artwork that reflects the ambitions of the fiction. There is one uninspired piece of Interior artwork by James Cawthorn.
Making the Transition by Michael Moorcock is another editorial which stretches the SF envelope:

Although the six stories in this issue are all speculative and imaginative, two of them do not conform to the conventions of sf as we usually think of it. They are much closer to the imaginative fantasies of Kafka, Peake or Borges than to, say, the work of Heinlein or Asimov. We found them stimulating and, encouraged by the unanimous support of letter-writers on the subject of our ‘Almost anything goes’ editorial in NW SF 149, we decided to publish them.  p. 2

Moorcock goes on to describe the “Barclay” story as an allegory, and the Harvey story as something similar:

The imaginative story—of which the sf story is an aspect—is well-suited for doing this. It should be easy for the reader used to interpreting the terminology of the conventional sf story (FTL, tri-di, hyper-warp and so on) to make the transition to interpreting the symbolism of less overt allegories like Jake in the Forest and its like. Such stories are not written from any desire to be obscure, but from a creative need to find fresh methods of telling a story and making a point.  p. 2

Uh-huh. The second part of the editorial mentions the critical magazine Riverside Quarterly, and picks up on a point in its letter column:

In reply to a correspondent who asks ‘but which is the more vital to sf: emotions or concepts?’ Mr Sapiro replies ‘In literary or “mainstream” writing, as opposed to the journalistic or pulp variety, ideas are conveyed indirectly, rather than by explicit statement; so that the reader can gain that emotional satisfaction involved in synthesizing the object for himself. Such emotion, I think, is the more poignant, since it results from an entire chain of mental associations rather than the single memory involved in naming something. In short, it is not a question of more or less emotion in sf, but a question of how this emotion is to be conveyed’. Our feeling is that some sf authors could well think about Mr Sapiro’s statement.  p. 3

I’m thought about this but couldn’t figure out what Sapiro meant, so I ‘phoned a friend’. This baffled several other people too, and the best explanation I got was that the writer means (I paraphrase) “inference (which occurs within the reader’s emotional apparatus) is more powerful than unadorned information, i.e. a data dump.” I’m not entirely sure that Sapiro answers the question posed if this is the case.
Story Ratings No. 153 were discussed in the review of that issue.5
The only book review in this issue is a withering half-page on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land by Charles Platt titled Self-Conscious Sex:

[This] is a remarkably dull book. Stylistically, cloying American cliche and banter merge with a coyness (‘mammary gland’ used instead of ‘breast’) inconsistent with the self-consciously bold aim to be frank about sex, the result being a sort of adolescent Playboy philosophy.
There is an amazing amount of superfluity: the meat of the book—the reaction to human society of a man reared in an alien environment—only begins after the first 150 or so pages, and the unreal-sounding situations are bogged down by painstakingly detailed ‘authenticity’. This book could only have caused a stir in the naive world of sf ‘fandom’; the characters and action are entirely subordinated to Heinlein’s arguments, and since these are as trite and shallow as the writing itself, it is difficult to find any kind of value here. Heinlein might do better to return to writing adventure fiction, to which perhaps his talent is better matched.  p. 124

Brian W. Aldiss returns with the second of his Dr. Peristyle question and answer columns, and provides more waspish, polemical replies. I enjoyed this one more than the first.

The Small Advertisements page at the back of the issue is of interest this time around as it mentions some of the other SF books that Compact SF has recently published (see the right hand column in the image above). There had been the odd house ad for these before, and these would appear more often in future issues.

There are a number of generally good stories in this issue, but they are either minor or slightly flawed.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall says that Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, “ends quietly and predictably with a heavy touch of irony.” As for the two allegories in this issue, he thinks that Moorcock’s* The Golden Barge is “fairly straightforward but pointless”, and Harvey’s Jake in the Forest “futile through its own incomprehensibility”.
Bennett’s Heat of the Moment is “an old idea with a new twist obvious from the third page”, and Castell’s Emancipation, “apart from being eight pages too long, is very fair indeed.” Tough crowd.
Hall liked Shaw’s . . . And Isles Where Good Men Lie best of all, and says it is “well-written, contains good SF ideas, and deals with the human condition, and does it all concisely and comprehensibly.”
*Hall is aware that “Barclay” is Moorcock, and adds that the piece may be an excerpt from an early, unpublished novel.

2. R. M. Bennett is the reviewer (and fan) Ron Bennett from a previous issue. His ISFDB page is here and here (hopefully in the process of being merged).

3. David Harvey was a one-shot wonder, although there were some other letters and essays. His ISFDB page is here. His more impressive Wikipedia page (as a “Marxist economic geographer” among other things) is here.

4. Shaw published eight stories in Nebula and Authentic in the mid to late fifties, and a collaboration with Walt Willis in If in 1960, then fell silent for a handful of years. His ISFDB page is here (some of the other early stories listed—along with the fannish classic The Enchanted Duplicator—appeared in Willis’s Slant, a fanzine).

5. There are no story ratings for this issue—it appears this issue’s were the last.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #154, September 1965

ISFDB
Luminist

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #35 (September 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Girl and Robot with Flowers • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗∗
Old Time’s Sake • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
Traveller’s Rest • short story by David I. Masson
A Dip in the Swimming-Pool Reactor (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Harry Harrison
The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius • short story by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin] +
At the End of Days • short story by Robert Silverberg

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by Harry Douthwaite, James Cawthorn
A Welcome Choice • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Brian W. Aldiss: The Image Maker • essay by Edmund Crispin
Story Ratings No. 152
Brian Aldiss • essay by Peter White
An Outstanding Space Story • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Cutting Past the Defences • book review by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

This is a special Brian W. Aldiss issue which has two stories from the writer as well as two essays about his work. Moorcock explains the reason for this celebration in A Welcome Choice, his editorial:

This year, over the August Bank Holiday weekend, the twenty-third World SF Convention will be held at the Mount Royal Hotel, Marble Arch. One of Britain’s outstanding sf writers, Brian W. Aldiss, is to be Guest of Honour. To celebrate this choice we are publishing two new stories by Brian Aldiss, plus articles on him by Edmund Crispin and Peter White. The first story was specially written for the issue and the second is an early, previously unpublished, piece of work which illustrates that Mr. Aldiss has always had the deft style and ability to handle character which marks all his fiction.
Apart from being admired for his talent, Brian Aldiss is also amongst the most well-liked sf writers; charming, ebullient, fluent, not unhandsome, a gourmet and man of good taste and humour, he is as interesting to meet as he is to read. His criticism, in The Oxford Mail and SF Horizons, is intelligent and pithy, matched only by a few.  p. 2

The remainder of the editorial briefly mentions the rest of the issue’s contents, and Moorcock, once again, adds contextual comments about his pseudonymous story:

James Colvin contributes an experimental story of a kind he believes hasn’t been tried before and which, he says, is ‘meant to be enjoyed, not studied’, The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius.  p. 2

The first of the essays about Aldiss, Brian W. Aldiss: The Image Maker, comes from Edmund Crispin, and he makes some interesting observations about the writer’s work:

The difference between science-fiction and science-fantasy may be hard to define, but it does, I think, exist. Emphasis is the clue. A science-fiction story can be good even when its visualisation—of a Martian, a megalopolis, a mutant—is relatively sketchy and commonplace; it can succeed because of its other merits. As against this, in a science-fantasy story the quality of the visualisation is the all important thing.
Brian W. Aldiss has written both kinds of tale, yet it seems to me that his natural inclination is towards the second type. As he himself has said, he is interested chiefly in ‘the images’. This interest is not, of course, allowed to become all-devouring: themes, ideas, narrative, plotting and so forth, though subservient to the images, are not the less skilfully handled for that (here Aldiss easily outdistances other science-fantasy writers, many of whom have too often seemed to assume that once they have dreamed up something sufficiently vivid and bizarre, their job is over). No: all I mean to suggest is that in a good proportion of Aldiss’s best work, it is the images which dominate.  p. 3

After a brief survey of some of the writer’s recent fiction, Crispin concludes that Aldiss has the eye of a painter:

In Hothouse, the big canvas, the primaries, the palette-knife. In Greybeard (appropriately) water-colours unassertive and subtly mingled. In the short story Old Hundredth, pastels: faded, yet still clean and clear and pure as the story demands.  p. 4

The first of the two Aldiss stories is Girl and Robot with Flowers, which opens with Aldiss at home with his wife in Oxford on a sunny afternoon. He is having problems with a story he is writing, and his wife suggests that it might help to talk it over.
Aldiss lays out the plot, which involves an alien race declaring war on Earth. Because of the long voyage times to the aggressor’s planet, the Earthmen send robots to fight for them, with a plan to remove all the oxygen in the aliens’ atmosphere, rendering it unbreathable. Meanwhile, the aliens arrive in our solar system and attack, killing 70% of humanity. This doesn’t stop the robots though, who wipe out the aliens and message Earth before tidying away the corpses. Years later, the remnants of humanity receive the message, and they decide to send a manned scout craft to the aliens’ world to investigate; the crew return with information almost two hundred years later. Aldiss continues his description:

[The photographs] show a world covered with enormous robot cities, and tremendous technological activity going on apace. This looks alarming.
But Earth is reassured, it seems that the war robots they made have turned to peaceful ways. More than one shot through the telescopic lenses shows solitary robots up in the hills and mountains of their planet, picking flowers. One close-up in particular is reproduced in every communication medium and finds its way all round rejoicing Earth, it shows a heavily armed robot, twelve feet high, with its arms laden with flowers. And that was to be the title of my story: “Robot with Flowers”.
Marion had finished washing up by this time. We were standing in my little sheltered back garden, idly watching the birds swoop along the roof of the old church that stands behind the garden. Nikola came out and joined us.
“Is that the end?” Marion asked.
“Not quite. There’s an irony to come. This shot of the robot with flowers is misinterpreted—an automated example of the pathetic fallacy, I suppose. The robots have to destroy all flowers, because flowers exhale oxygen, and oxygen is liable to give the robots rust troubles. They’ve not picked up the human trick of appreciating beauty, they’re indulging in the old robot vice of being utilitarian, and in a few years they’ll be coming back to lick the Earthmen on Earth.”
Inside the kitchen, I could hear the fridge charging again. I fought an urge to tell Marion about it; I didn’t want to disturb the sunlight on her face.
She said, “That sounds quite a good twist. It sounds as if it ought to make a decent run-of-the-mill story. Not quite you, perhaps.”
“Somehow, I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it.”
“It’s a bit like that Poul Anderson robot story you admired—’Epilogue’, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe. Every SF story is getting like every other one.”
It’s also a bit like one of Harry’s in his ‘War With the Robots’ collection.”
“‘Anything that Harry wrote can’t be all bad,’” she said, quoting a private joke.
“‘Wish I’d written that,’” I said, adding the punchline.
“But that isn’t really why I don’t want to finish ‘Robot With Flowers’. Maybe Fred Pohl or Mike Moorcock would like it enough to publish it, but I feel disappointed with it. Not just because it’s a crib.”
“You said once that you could always spot a crib because it lacked emotional tone.”
The goldfish were flitting about under the water-lily leaves in my little ornamental pond. Both Nikola and Marion had got interested in them; I said that they were alike. I looked down at them in love and a little exasperation. Her last remark told me she was carrying on the conversation just for my sake—it lacked emotional tone.  p. 7-8

Marion goes to get ready for the picnic, and Aldiss dissatisfiedly mulls over his idea while he watches the cats. He realises that he would prefer to write a story about the sunny afternoon he has been enjoying rather than something so divorced from normal life. When he later tells Marion this she asks him what he means. Aldiss replies:

“Why can’t I get the fridge into an SF story, and this wonderful sunlight, and you, instead of just a bunch of artless robots? See that little furry cat outside, trying to scoop up goldfish? She has no idea that today isn’t going to run on forever, that the rest of life isn’t going to be one golden afternoon. We know it won’t be, but wouldn’t it be a change if I could make a story about just this transitory golden afternoon instead of centuries of misery and total lack of oxygen, cats, and sexy females?”
We were outside the front door. I shut it and followed Marion to the car. We were going to be a bit late.
She laughed, knowing by my tone that I was half kidding.
“Go ahead and put those things into a story,” she said. “I’m sure you can do it. Pile them all in!”
Though she was smiling, it sounded like a challenge.  p. 11

This is a clever, playful, and perceptive piece of meta-fiction about subject matter the field too often ignores. I enjoyed it a lot, and think it is one of Aldiss’s better pieces from the mid-60s.

Old Time’s Sake by Brian W. Aldiss is, as per the blurb above, an early piece about an immortal man called Alec Sampson. Every twenty years he goes to Oxford and reports to the board of the company responsible for his treatment. The first half of the story is largely taken up with Sampson’s visit, and his interaction with the board members—who are all now twenty years older while he is unchanged. After coping with the resultant awkwardness, and completing the medical examinations, Sampson goes home.
A member of the board called Granville later visits Sampson with the results, which suggest that he can expect to live for thirty thousand years. After they finish talking about this and related matters, Sampson tells Granville he wants to marry, and introduces him to his girlfriend Lynette. Granville later tells Sampson he will only hurt her, and writes to Lynette to let her know about Sampson’s treatment and his extended lifespan. The couple break up.
The final part of the story tells of Sampson’s return to Oxford twenty years later.
This is, for the most part, not a bad mainstream take on a standard sfnal theme, but it does drag a little in places. I could also have done without the twist ending (spoiler: we discover that Granville has married Lynette) which squashes the story into a genre template.

The next story, Traveller’s Rest by David I. Masson,2 completely upstages the Aldiss material—it is probably the best (or one of the best) stories from this period of New Worlds. This initially appears to be a future war tale, but it is one that takes place in a very strange environment:

It was an apocalyptic sector. Out of the red-black curtain of the forward sight-barrier, which at this distance from the Frontier shut down a mere twenty metres north, came every sort of meteoric horror: fission and fusion explosions, chemical detonations, a super-hail of projectiles of all sizes and basic velocities, sprays of nerve-paralysants and thalamic dopes. The impact devices burst on the barren rock of the slopes or the concrete of the forward stations, some of which were disintegrated or eviscerated every other minute. The surviving installations kept up an equally intense and nearly vertical fire of rockets and shells. Here and there a protectivized figure could be seen “sprinting” up, down or along the slopes on its mechanical “walker” like a frantic ant from an anthill attacked by flamethrowers. Some of the visible oncoming trajectories could be seen snaking overhead into the indigo gloom of the rear sightcurtain, perhaps fifty metres south, which met the steepfalling rock surface forty-odd metres below the observer’s eye. East and west, as far as the eye could see, perhaps some forty miles in this clear mountain air despite the debris of explosion (but cut off to west by a spur from the range) the visibility-corridor witnessed a continual  onslaught and counter-onslaught of devices. The audibility-corridor was vastly wider than that of sight; the many-pitched din, even through left ear in helm, was considerable.  p. 27

Matters do not become any clearer during a subsequent conversation between soldier H and his “next-up” B:

“But if the conceleration runs asymptotically to the Frontier, as it should if Their Time works in mirror-image, would anything ever have got over?”
“Doesn’t have to, far’s I can see—maybe it steepens a lot, then just falls back at the same angle the other Side,” said B’s voice ; “anyway, I didn’t come to talk science: I’ve news for you, if we hold out the next few seconds here: you’re Relieved.”
H felt a black inner sight-barrier beginning to engulf him, and a roaring in his ears swallowed up the noise of the bombardment. He bent double as his knees began to buckle, and regained full consciousness. He could see his replacement now, an uncertain-looking figure in prot-suit (like everybody else up here) at the far side of the bunker.
“XN 3, what orders then?” he said crisply, his pulse accelerating.
“XN 2: pick em-kit now, repeat now, rocket 3333 to VV, present tag”—holding out a luminous orange label printed with a few coarse black characters—“and proceed as ordered thence.”
H stuck up his right thumb from his fist held sideways at elbow length, in salute. It was no situation for facial gestures or unnecessary speech. “XN 3, yes, em-kit, 3333 rocket, tag” (he had taken it in his left glove) “and VV orders; parting!”  p. 27-28

The story then details H’s journey away from the battle. During this we learn that time speeds up (relative to the front line) the further south he goes, something that H occasionally notes:

A minute later (five seconds only, up in his first bunker, he suddenly thought ironically and parenthetically) the next car appeared. He swung himself in just as a very queerlooking purple bird with a long bare neck alighted on the stoat-lizards’ tree-fern. The cable-car sped down above the ravines and hollows, the violet southern curtain backing still more swiftly away from it. As the time-gradient became less steep his brain began to function better and a sense of well-being and meaningfulness grew in him. The car’s speed slackened.  p. 31

As H gets further and further away from the front (and the relative time differential increases), we see other changes too: the flora and fauna change from prehistoric to modern day, electronic communication becomes easier, and the “sightlines” recede further into the distance (these are caused by the red- and blue-shift of visible light due to the time differences north and south). Another unexplained change is that H’s name begins to lengthen, first to Had, and then to Hadol and, after a couple more changes, to Hadolarisóndamo.
Eventually he reaches a town and is prepared for civilian life:

Some hours later the train arrived at Veruam by the North-Eastern Sea. Thirty miles long, forty storeys high, and 500 metres broad north-south, it was an imposing city. Nothing but plain was to be seen in the outskirts, for the reddish fog still obliterated everything about four miles to the north, and the bluish one smothered the view southward some seven. A well-fed Hadolaris visited one of the city’s Rehabilitation Advisors, for civilian techniques and material resources had advanced enormously since his last acquaintance with them, and idioms and speech-sounds had changed bewilderingly, while the whole code of social behaviour was terrifyingly different. Armed with some manuals, a pocket recorder, and some standard speechform and folkway tapes, he rapidly purchased thin clothing, stormwear, writing implements, further recording tools, lugbags and other personal gear. After a night at a good guestery, Hadolaris sought interviews with the employing offices of seven subtropical development agencies, was tested and, armed with seven letters of introduction, boarded the night liner rocktrain for the south past the shore of the North-Eastern Sea and to Oluluetang some 360 miles south. One of the tailors who had fitted him up had revealed that on quiet nights very low-pitched rumblings were to be heard from, presumably, the mountains northward. Hadolaris wanted to get as far from that North as he conveniently could.
He awoke among palms and savannah-reeds. There was no sign of either sight-barrier down here.  p. 35

Hadolarisóndamo eventually settles down hundreds of miles away from the front line, marries, and has three children. Then, one day at work, after twenty years away from the front line (spoiler), the military police come for him—he has been recalled to duty. On his railway journey back to the front line Haldolaris (his name starts contracting again) calculates that only twenty minutes will have passed at the front line by the time he returns.
When he finally arrives back at the bunker he sees that his replacement is dead, killed by a new enemy weapon. H then realises that the weapon is identical to one his own side has just started using—at which point he has an epiphany about the war, and who the enemy may be.
This a highly original, dense, and intellectually engaging piece, and a very impressive debut story.
A Dip in the Swimming-Pool Reactor is the second part of the Bill the Galactic Hero serial by Harry Harrison which started last issue (no reason is given for the title change), and it starts with Bill arriving by spaceship at the centre of the Empire:

“Bowbidy-bowb! Look at that! “ Bill felt elated as their ship broke through the clouds and there, spread before them, was the gleaming golden sphere of Helior, the Imperial Planet, the ruling world of 10,000 suns.
“What an albedo,” the gunner grunted from somewhere inside his plastic face. “Hurts the eye.
“I should hope so! Solid gold—can you imagine—a planet plated with solid gold?!”
“No, I can’t imagine. And I don’t believe it either. It would cost too much. But I can imagine one covered with anodized aluminium. Like that one.”  p. 45

Of course, we soon find that things are not as they seem:

The gleaming upper level was dotted with space ships of all sizes, while the dark sky twinkled with others arriving and departing. Closer and closer swam the scene, then there was a sudden burst of light and the window went dark.
“We crashed! “Bill gasped. “Good as dead . . .”
“Shut your wug. That was just the film what broke. Since there’s no brass on this run they won’t bother fixing it.”
“Film—?”
“What else? Are you so ratty in the head you think they’re going to build shuttleships with great big windows in the nose just where the maximum friction on re-entry will burn holes in them? A film. Back projection. For all we know it’s nighttime here.”  p. 46

Bill later receives his medal at an awards ceremony presided over by a fake Emperor. After this, Bill goes sightseeing, and visits the roof of the planetary city before going to the legendary Hanging Gardens. When he falls asleep in the gardens, his guidebook/map is stolen, and losing your guidebook on Helior is not only inconvenient (it is impossible to find your way around otherwise) but, like a number of other things, is also a capital offence.
Bill eventually arrives back at the transit camp eight days late, and is then arrested for impersonating himself (he has supposedly shipped out according to the erroneous admin records). Deathwish Drang is one if the two MPs who arrive to take him into custody and, at that point, Bill runs for it.
The rest of the instalment charts Bill’s descent down through the city until he eventually reaches the surface of the planet.3 During this journey he becomes involved in various shenanigans including a criminal gang’s thefts, a sanitation department overwhelmed by the amount of waste the planet produces, and a resistance movement that ultimately proves to have more spies in its membership than conspirators.
This second instalment begins well but it flags a little towards the end. It is not as good, or funny, as the first part, and is more obviously episodic as well.

The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius by Michael Moorcock has Minos Aquilinas, a “Metatemporal Investigator” arriving in an alternative Berlin to investigate a murder. (Bismarck is the Police Chief in this world, and various other historical characters appear in other roles: Hitler is a Captain of Uniformed Detectives; Einstein and Stalin also appear.)
Aquilinas discovers the murder occurred in a strange garden owned by Otto Bismarck and, after he examines the body (and finds that it has paper lungs), he talks to Sagittarius, the gardener:

I looked out at the weird garden. “Why does it interest you—what’s all this for? You’re not doing it to his orders, are you? You’re doing it for yourself.”
Sagittarius smiled bleakly. “You are astute.” He waved an arm at the warm foliage that seemed more reptilian than plant and more mammalian, in its own way, than either.
“You know what I see out there? I see deep-sea canyons where lost submarines cruise through a silence of twilit green, threatened by the waving tentacles of predators, halffish, half-plant, and watched by the eyes of long-dead mermen whose blood went to feed their young; where squids and rays fight in a graceful dance of death, clouds of black ink merging with clouds of red blood, drifting to the surface, sipped at by sharks in passing, where they will be seen by mariners leaning over the rails of their ships; maddened, the mariners will fling themselves overboard to sail slowly towards those distant plant-creatures already feasting on the corpse of squid and ray. This is the world I can bring to the land—that is my ambition.”
He stared at me, paused, and said: “My skull—it’s like a monstrous gold-fish bowl!”  p. 105-106

In the rest of this (more straightforwardly told) story, Aquilinas discovers that Bismarck has a lover called Eva, and later meets Captain Hitler. The pair eventually end up in a bar run by a man called Weill (presumably Kurt Weill, the Jewish composer; Alfred Einstein also briefly features here as one of the customers). Aquilinas discovers more about the case, and the piece eventually resolves with (spoiler) the revelation that the murdered man is Stalin (and Eva’s jilted lover), who was killed by the plants when he broke into the gardens to attack Bismarck.
The plot isn’t entirely lucid or convincing, but the pleasure in this one is the strange setting, and the use of known historical figures in other roles.

At the End of Days by Robert Silverberg is a short mood piece about an old man mulling the end of Earth’s civilisation who receives a child visitor from another part of the Galaxy. The child states he traveled by a process called “quadrature” and, after he leaves, the old man realises that humanity’s time may not be over:

The wind had grown colder. Old Narin rose to go inside. The sun had set; the lulls were dark, and grey clouds hung in the blackening sky. But, bright as a billion candles, the stars were beginning to shine.  p. 117

A reverse The Nine Billion Names of God ending.

The ghastly Cover is another one of those uncredited photographic agency transparencies that blighted the SF paperbacks of the late 1960s and early 1970s; I suppose they seemed modern at the time.
There are two pieces of Interior artwork in this issue: Harry Douthwaite’s is the best I’ve seen from him so far, and it complements the strangeness of the Masson story well. The other piece is by James Cawthorn.
At the end of the issue there is Brian Aldiss, a longer essay about the writer by Peter White. This opens with comments about how much SF fails because it is not truly contemporary (an arguable proposition at best), and notes that Ballard and Aldiss are two exceptions:

Aldiss has not always been this kind of artist, for his aims have changed somewhat since he began writing, and it is possible to follow this development in his work. He is blazing a trail that leads away from science fiction as it is today: away from the contrived action of the sf thriller, and the contrived problems of the sf brain-teaser, towards a more serious—and more fully entertaining—form of writing. He says himself: “At first, in the Space, Time and Nathaniel era, I just wanted to be clever. Now I want to try and get an insight into life. I still want to be clever too . . .  p. 118

I’ve always thought that, during the mid-1960s, that Aldiss was in transition between his more conventional early work and his later literary and experimental output. White notes this too:

Aldiss’s work has moved in idiosyncratic jumps, and he occasionally produces work today that is similar to his earliest material.  p. 119

White also makes several other observations in this interesting article:

[His] style is not without its faults; puns and aphoristic clichés often intrude into the most serious passages.  p. 119
.
[Aldiss] has also said that many of his early works were therapeutic fantasies, in which he worked off his petty neuroses. In stories such as Outside and The New Father Christmas there is an almost hysterical sense of isolation and ennui. Dumb Show is the best of these, and must be amongst the most lyrical horror stories written. Aldiss claims to have run out of phobias around the time of Space, Time and Nathaniel, and is now concerned with writing itself—art, if you like—rather than self-therapy.  p. 120
.
He is now literary editor of the Oxford Mail, which takes up most of his time, though he does like sitting and chatting in bars. Although an unhappy private life has undoubtedly influenced his work, he remains a generally extrovert personality, and particularly enjoys travelling abroad.  p. 121-122

Story Ratings No. 152 was discussed in that issue.4
The Books column in this issue contains two essays by Michael Moorcock. An Outstanding Space Story begins, suitably enough, with a review of Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss:

An example of what the space story can do in the hands of a really good writer is the recently re-issued Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss (Faber Paperback, 7s. 6d.). I first read this when it appeared in 1958 and thought it excellent. Today I am possibly more critical of sf than I was then. I still find Non-Stop excellent. Here the space setting contributes to the atmosphere of loss and bewilderment experienced by the characters. It is completely gripping on a second reading and the writing and characterisation is outstanding in the sf field.  p. 123

He follows this with a short review of Best SF Four by Edmund Crispin (“To the new reader many of [the stories] should be very entertaining. Personally I found the collection only average in general standard”), before briefly mentioning New Writings in SF 3 by John Carnell, and panning Colin Kapp’s The Dark Mind:

Kapp is heavily in debt to Alfred Bester’s Tiger, Tiger! in this novel. His visual imagination is above average but his handling of character and dialogue is poor in the extreme and his technique, where it is his own, does not match his imagination or his ability to come up with convincing scientific ideas. One is inclined to feel that the author should spend much more time studying his craft before attempting his next novel.  p. 124

The second essay, Cutting Past the Defences, examines The Drought by J. G. Ballard:

This is a novel which is hard to review in the normal reviewer’s terms. It effects one like an hallucinogenic drug and although plot and characterisation are there, the visions dominate. It has ceased to rain, cities burn, rivers and lakes evaporate, the earth turns to desert and, still living in his houseboat, Dr. Ransom contemplates the true meaning of the change, fails to communicate its significance to the others with whom he comes in contact—Philip Jordan the wild Swan Youth, Catherine Austen who identifies herself with the lions she releases from the zoo, Lomax the sinister, mocking dandy, Miranda his depraved sister and Quilter the deformed half-wit.
[. . .]
Quilter, like all the characters but Ransom himself, are creatures of fantasy; not of fantasy fiction, but the deep, archetypal fantasies which form a mutual link between us all.  p. 125

Letters to the Editor has three letters, two of which are from writers: Edward Mackin praises Tubb’s novel, and John Brunner outlines the genesis of this novel The Whole Man (the details of this are in my review of the previous issue5). The main event is the letter from P. Johnson (above) supporting the “Anything goes” policy.

A must-get issue.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall says that Aldiss’s Girl and Robot with Flowers is “an over-esoteric non-SF tale”, and that it “sets out to show the failure of SF to come to grips with life—and does it quite successfully, although it is over personalised.” He says the second story does “not [show] off the best of Aldiss’s talent”.
Masson’s Traveller’s Rest “constructs a very unusual and peculiar world where time ratios vary by latitude”. It is “a very interesting story” that “is well written for a first story and is one of the most original ideas in recent issues”.
Hall doesn’t know if the Colvin’s (Moorcock’s) “very experimental/straight piece [. . .] comes off or not, because I don’t understand what Mr Colvin was trying to do.”
The Harrison serial “continues in its admirable vein”, and the Silverberg vignette is “poor”.
Hall briefly mentions the non-fiction material before concluding that this is “a disappointing issue after some recent ones”.

2. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest is the only story from New Worlds that made it into both the American ‘Best SF of the Year’ volumes. (Masson’s Traveller’s Rest, Vernor Vinge’s Apartness and Arthur C. Clarke’s reprint Sunjammer made it into the Wollheim/Carr volume, there were no stories from Science Fantasy. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest also appeared in the Merril volume for 1965 along with New Worlds stories from E. C. Tubb and David Rome, and Science Fantasy stories from A. K. Jorgennson, Josephine Saxton, Keith Roberts, and Johnny Byrne.)

3. I suspect this instalment of Bill is largely a parody of Asimov’s The Caves of Steel.

4. No story ratings for this issue appeared in future volumes—it looks as if the ratings for #153 were the last to be published.

5. The details about the origins of The Whole Man are in this review, footnote 4.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #153, August 1965

ISFDB
Luminist

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #34 (August 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Bill, the Galactic Hero (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Harry Harrison ∗∗∗∗
The Source • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
And Worlds Renewed • short story by George Collyn
The Pulse of Time • short story by W. T. Webb
By the Same Door • short story by Mack Reynolds
Preliminary Data • short story by Michael Moorcock
Songflower • short story by Kenneth Hoare

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by Harry Harrison
An Effective Use of Space • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Dr Peristyle • question column by Brian W. Aldiss
Story Ratings 151
Book reviews • by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin], Ron Bennett, and Hilary Bailey

_____________________

This issue sees even more of a mix of fiction types than hitherto—we have parodic comedy from Harrison, traditional SF from Collyn and Hoare, horror from Webb, and more progressive work from Aldiss and Moorcock.

Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison is the first part of the eponymous novel (the second and third parts have different titles rather than “part 2” or “part 3” for some reason), and it is initially a parody of futuristic military adventure SF (I suspect, in particular, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers2).
The story opens with our hero Bill ploughing a field with a robomule on Phigerinadon II when a military recruitment parade comes along the road. Bill follows the procession into the village and is soon manipulated into joining the army by underhand means (ego-reducing drugs dissolved in the free drinks, and hypno-coils that control his body movements). He marches away to a camp, and the next day meets his instructor:

 “I am here to break your spirit,” a voice rich with menace told them, and they looked up and shivered even more as they faced the chief demon in this particular hell.
Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang was a specialist from the tips of the angry spikes of his hair to the corrugated stamping-soles of his mirrorlike boots. He was wide-shouldered and lean-hipped, while his long arms hung, curved like those of some horrible anthropoid, the knuckles of his immense fists scarred from the breaking of thousands of teeth. It was impossible to look at this detestable form and imagine that it issued from the tender womb of a woman. He could never have been born; he must have been built to order by the government. Most terrible of all was the head. The face! The hairline was scarcely a finger’s width above the black tangle of the brows that were set like a rank growth of foliage at the rim of the black pits that concealed the eyes—visible only as baleful red gleams in the Stygian darkness. A nose, broken and crushed, squatted above the mouth that was like a knife slash in the taut belly of a corpse, while from between the lips issued the great, white fangs of the canine teeth, at least two inches long, that rested in grooves on the lower lip.  p. 10-11

The story then describes Bill’s basic training, which includes some very funny set pieces, such another recruit’s account of why humanity is at war with the Chingers, supposedly a race of seven-foot high saurian aliens (but see the later passage):

“The Chingers are the only non-human race that has been discovered in the galaxy that has gone beyond the aboriginal level, so naturally we have to wipe them out.”
“What the hell do you mean, naturally? I don’t want to wipe anyone out. I just want to go home and be a Technical Fertilizer Operator.”
“Well, I don’t mean you personally, of course—gee!”
Eager opened a fresh can of polish with purple-stained hands and dug his fingers into it. “I mean the human race, that’s just the way we do things. If we don’t wipe them out they’ll wipe us out. Of course they say that war is against their religion and they will only fight in defence, and they have never made any attacks yet. But we can’t believe them, even though it is true. They might change their religion or their minds some day, and then where would we be? The best answer is to wipe them out now.”  p. 14-15

On completion of his training, Bill is assigned to a spaceship, and he has various adventures: one of his comrades turns out to be a spy (he/it is a robot operated by a seven inch high Chinger); and then Bill experiences his first interstellar flight:

“We’re moving,” [Tembo] said positively, “and going interstellar too. They’ve turned on the star-drive.”
“You mean we are breaking through into sub-space and will soon experience the terrible wrenching at every fibre of our being?”
“No, they don’t use the old sub-space drive any more, because though a lot of ships broke through into sub-space with a fibre-wrenching jerk, none of them have yet broke back out. I read in the Trooper’s Times where some mathematician said that there had been a slight error in the equations and that time was different in sub-space, but it was different faster not different slower, so that it will be maybe forever before those ships come out.”
“Then we’re going into hyper-space?”
“No such thing.”
“Or we’re being dissolved into our component atoms and recorded in the memory of a giant computor who thinks we are somewhere else so there we are?”
“Wow!” Tembo said, his eyebrows crawling up to his hairline. “For a Zoroastrian farm boy you have some strange ideas! Have you been smoking or drinking something I don’t know about?”  p. 44

The next few chapters largely focus on a space battle with the Chingers and its aftermath; Bill is a hero during the engagement, and he later recovers from his injuries in the hospital:

[The doctor] unclipped the wires that held up Bill’s arm and began to unwind the bandages while the troopers crowded around to watch.
“How is my arm, Doc?” Bill was suddenly worried.
“Grilled like a chop. I had to cut it off.”
“Then what is this?” Bill shrieked, horrified.
“Another arm that I sewed on. There were lots of them left over after the battle. The ship had over 42 per cent casualties, and I was really cutting and chopping and sewing, I tell you.”
The last bandage fell away and the troopers ahhhed with delight.
“Say, that’s a mighty fine arm!”
“Make it do something.”
“And a damn nice seam there at the shoulder—look how neat the stitches are!”
“Plenty of muscles, too, and good and long, not like the crummy little short one he has on the other side.”
“Longer and darker—that’s a great skin colour!”
“It’s Tembo’s arm!” Bill howled. “Take it away!” He squirmed across the bed but the arm came after him. They propped him up again on the pillows.
“You’re a lucky bowb, Bill, having a good arm like that. And your buddy’s arm too.”
“We know that he wanted you to have it.”
“You’ll always have something to remember him by.”
It really wasn’t a bad arm. Bill bent it and flexed the fingers, still looking at it suspiciously. It felt all right. He reached out with it and grabbed a trooper’s arm and squeezed. He could feel the man’s bones grating together while he screamed and writhed. Then Bill looked closer at the hand and began to shout curses at the doctor.
“You stupid sawbones! You thoat doctor! Some big job—this is a right arm!”
“So it’s a right arm—so what?”
“But you cut off my left arm! Now I have two right arms . . .”
“Listen, there was a shortage of left arms. I’m no miracle worker. I do my best and all I get are complaints. Be happy I didn’t sew on a leg.” He leered evilly. “Or even better I didn’t sew on a . . .”  p. 57-58

This installment has a strong start and finish, even if the middle part is more light adventure than comedy, and it’s a very good start to the issue.

The Source by Brian W. Aldiss has a blurb (see above) which filled me with a feeling of foreboding that was subsequently borne out.
The story starts with a detachment of “Seekers”—they travel throughout the Galaxy looking for man’s greatest achievement—who have recently arrived on a ruined, primitive Earth.
One of the Seekers, Kervis, and his year wife Ysis, take a car and travel away from camp. During this Kervis starts seeing visions of Ysis as an old crone. After a few pages of this kind of thing, Kervis stops the car and gets out, sheds his clothes and wanders off alone through the undergrowth. He eventually comes upon a group of primitives who have Ysis with them, and the pair then go on until they come to a building. Here Kervis wanders through various passages, and is again separated from Ysis. He eventually comes upon what he thinks is a statue of a beast holding a woman and, when he realises the woman is real, he frees her from the beast. Kervis later experiences a mystical event.
At the end (spoiler maybe, but probably not), Kervis and Ysis return to camp, where he is relieved of his command by the other Seekers. The expedition leaves but Kervis stays behind—he has apparently fulfilled his destiny.
This is all rather baffling, and pretty boring as well.
And Worlds Renewed by George Collyn gets off to a clunky data-dump beginning despite its Ballardesque chapter titles:

The two men could not have been more different.
There was Junter Firmole—rock-hard, ruthless, intolerant, ambitious, homicidal and leading entrepreneur in an era of cut-throat trade. Perhaps to his grandchildren he would appear as white-haired, lovable and gentle. To the peoples of Humankind he was an ogre with which to frighten naughty children; a man of blood who drank his wine from a human skull.
Then there was Nefo Setiri, environmental artist—an absent-minded and obsessed visionary with as much financial acumen as a two-week-old child. Twenty years would pass before he would reach his creative peak in the formulation of the Pleasure Worlds of Ilgadin with Hi Li City—his masterpiece—at their spangled heart. At the time of which I speak he had attempted nothing greater than continental construction—the remodelling of Antarctica was his graduation test-piece at the Slade. Nor, at that time, did he seem destined for greatness, since the range of his creative imagination was so undisciplined that those patrons who had planetary commissions in their gift fought shy of his genius.
Yeman Sorl, dictator of Tramoth and first prospective patron, laughed in Setiri’s face where he would have crawled on his belly to Firmole, and the elaborate blueprints for the remodelling of the Tramoth worlds hit the dictatorial cigars for a twelve-month.

After several goes at that last sentence I’m still not sure what it means.
The story goes on to tell of Setiri’s capture by space pirates, who send him to a labour camp on a planet when he can’t pay the ransom. While he works there he takes artistic exception to the way that the planet is being reshaped and, after managing to catch the visiting Firmole’s eye, manages to convince him that he could make a better job. Setiri gets the commission:

Setiri intended a work in three textures—climate, vegetation and physical configuration. The finished work to be a range of intensity across a spectrum from limpid water-soft to sun-baked hard.
In climate the planet would shade from insufferably hot at the equator to temperately cool at the poles; with no precipitation at the former but perpetual rain at the latter.
The poles would be seas of permanent water with no island or peninsula to impinge upon their liquidity. At 10° latitude this would shade into a sheer insubstantiality of marshlands, a morass that would spread across thirty degrees of latitude. This would then give way slowly to two belts, each of twenty degrees; the first of tropical rain forest, the second of prairie grasslands. The central belt, stretching ten degrees north and south of the equator would be raw ochrous desert and each hemisphere would mirror the other.
The seas would necessarily be flat; the swamps interspersed by isolated hillocks; the forest clothing square-cut plateaux ; the prairies, rolling hills of grass ; but the desert would be a region of soaring mountains and plummeting canyons—a wasteland in all three levels.  p. 81-82

While Setiri completes the project he prevents Firmole from visiting the works by use of a force field and, when the latter later arrives at the opening ceremony, it looks as if he is going to denounce the work. However (spoiler), Firmole’s daughter approves of it and then, when a particular angle of sunlight catches the planet, Firmole sees his own face momentarily etched on the planet’s surface.
A neat ending.
The Pulse of Time by W. T. Webb opens with a cardiac consultant called Humbolt who is visited at home by a man who wants him to come to attend to his employer. Even though Humbolt isn’t told the employer’s name, or where he lives, he gets in a chauffeur driven car and goes.
When Humbolt arrives at the house of “Mr X”, he meets a very old man who, as they chat, shows him a variety of curios, culminating with (spoiler) photos of an alien visitor to Earth, etc.
This unlikely and unconvincing set up is for a striking final image:

Mr. X opened the door, entered the small room beyond it and switched on the light. On one wall Humbolt saw a clock-face rising above a cabinet made of flesh-coloured plastic. Mr. X opened the doors of the cabinet to reveal several glass globes joined together by transparent tubes. A red liquid circulated round the tubes and the globes and in and out of the clock-face. And the largest of the globes contained something that to him was horribly familiar.
“As you see,” said Mr. X. “This clock has a human heart for a mainspring. It is not keeping good time. And I would like your advice on how to correct it.”
Humbolt felt outraged. As a student he had often seen the heart of a chicken or a goat kept alive artificially. But this . . .
“You monster!” he said to Mr. X. “Don’t you realise that I am fully aware that this heart must have been cut out of a living person?”
By way of reply Mr. X opened the lapels of his dressing gown to reveal a thorax made of transparent plastic. Within it, immersed in colourless oil, a mass of machinery of alien design, worked rhythmically and constantly, like the mechanism of a clock.  p. 94

This struck me as the kind of story you might find in the Pan or Fontana series of horror anthologies.
By the Same Door by Mack Reynolds opens with a man visiting a business which provides transfers to alternative worlds. He asks to be sent to one where they openly discuss the secret perversion alluded to in many books and magazines of his world but which is never described.
The man gets his wish, and the story concludes appropriately (spoiler: the reader is still in a universe where the secret perversion is mentioned but not described).
I saw the end coming about three paragraphs ahead, but there is a neat irony to it that made me smile.

Preliminary Data by Michael Moorcock is the first of his long running ‘Jerry Cornelius’ series, and opens with Jerry and a Brahmin physicist called Professor Hira discussing, at length, the cosmology of various religions, concluding with comments on the cyclical nature of time:

“Then at the end of the manvantara the cycle repeats itself, does it? The whole of history all over again!”
“Some believe so. Others believe that the cycles vary slightly. It is basically an extension of our convictions concerning reincarnation. The strange thing is that modern physics begins to confirm these figures—in terms of the complete revolution of the galaxy and so on. I must admit that the more I read of the papers published these days, the more confused I become between what I was taught as a Hindu and what I have learned as a physicist. It requires an increasing amount of self-discipline to separate them in my mind.”
“Why do you bother?”
“My career, old man, at the University, would suffer if I let mysticism influence logic.” The Brahmin spoke with some irony and Cornelius smiled.  p. 99

There is a more of this before the story breaks and picks up with both men in bed together (possibly a first in a UK SF magazine). The men discuss a Mrs Brunner. When Cornelius later goes home to his wife Maj-Britt in Sweden, Brunner is there waiting for him. After a tense stand-off Brunner kidnaps Cornelius and Maj-Britt, and takes them to her secret cave-lab in Lapland, where they meet Professor Hira. “G-day” is discussed.
The rest of the story isn’t entirely clear—at some point Jerry undergoes a process that leaves him feeling “totally alive”, policemen turn up and the mouth of the cave, and then, in the ensuing struggle, Jerry is shot. Then he (or his spirit?) watches as Brunner give a speech to the assembled scientists about project DUEL:

“DUEL’s purpose was two-fold, as you know. The first job was to feed it the sum total of human knowledge and have it systemise and relate this knowledge into a single unified integer. This was at last achieved three days ago and I congratulate you.
“It is the second part which mystified most of you. The technical problem of how to feed this programme directly into a human brain was overcome with the help of notes donated by Doctor Leslie Baxter, the psycho-biologist. But what sort of brain could accept such a fantastic programme? That question is answered as I answer the question you have all been asking. DUEL’s ultimate use is to satisfy an aim which, whether we realised it or not, has been the ultimate aim of all human endeavour since homo sapiens first evolved. It is a simple aim and we are near achieving it. We have been working, ladies and gentlemen, to produce an all-purpose human being! A human-being equipped with total knowledge, hermaphrodite in every respect—self-fertilising and thus self-regenerating—and thus immortal, re-creating itself over and over again, retaining its knowledge and adding to it. In short, ladies and gentlemen, we are creating a being which our ancestors would have called a god!”  p. 109-110

Cornelius and Brunner are then combined by DUEL to become that god-like hermaphrodite. It gathers a huge mob of people which surges around Europe before finally rushing lemming-like into the Atlantic. Cornelius Brunner is the only survivor.
The first half of this story could have been shorter, and I didn’t understand exactly what happened after the shooting, so I found the story’s mix of the contemporary, the bizarre, and the comic only partially successful. It is notable, perhaps, as the first in the long-running series, and for its thematic experimentation and formerly taboo content (the bisexuality of Cornelius, and the hermaphrodism).

Songflower by Kenneth Hoare is marred by a couple of clumsy sentences on the first page3 but turns out to be a colourful if slight tale about a spacer who goes on a pub crawl with an alien friend. The spacer later buys a singing plant from one of the natives, who cooks him a meal first:

[The Terran] led the way through the shop, dusty despite the air conditioning, and into the room beyond. The contrast was so great that Alec drew in his breath in surprise. The walls were lined with fine scarlet fibres, shining in the light of an artificial sun, dimmed to the rich glow of an autumn evening. On the walls hung relics of many different cultures. On the carved chests that stood by the walls and on shelves by the old-fashioned electric fire, leaping and crackling with blue-white flames, stood bowls of plants.
Hundreds of exotic varieties were contained in that room, some in gastight containers to reproduce the conditions of their native planets. Some were tiny and starlike, others huge and fleshy in great stripes of contrasting colour. There were feathery water plants and spiky desert blooms. Representations of flowers in a dozen different art-forms stood or hung about the room.
“Flowers are my greatest interest,” said Fred, “but I think you will find that I do not neglect the provision of a proper cuisine.”
The change in the little Terran was very noticeable. He seemed to expand like one of his flowers in the exotic atmosphere of the room. The effect was enhanced when he shrugged off his drab street jacket and pulled on a scalloped robe designed for a Dafnian batrachian.
They sat down at a table constructed from the flat shell of some turtle-like creature. After a moment a robot appeared in answer to Ellington’s signal, carrying a tray loaded with food in each of its four hands, and proceeded to set out the food.
An hour later, Alec declined another drink. “Not another mouthful. I really couldn’t.”  p. 118

The mediocre Cover is uncredited, and there is much less Interior artwork than normal—just a single illustration by Harry Harrison. Budgetary constraints, I presume.
An Effective Use of Space by Michael Moorcock mostly discusses this issue’s contents:

We decided to run Harry Harrison’s new novel as a serial for several reasons. The main reason, of course, is that the book is as generous a piece of unpretentious entertainment as we have read for a long time. Another reason was because it fitted well into our editorial policy, illustrating how the space story can be used effectively to make a serious point in a light-hearted way.
[. . .]
Preliminary Data is something of an experiment, an example, if you like, of the anarchic approach to SF story-telling, all we ask is that you take it in the spirit the author intended and don’t take it too seriously—further episodes should fill you in.
We felt that this month was a good time, too, to begin the first of Dr. Peristyle’s columns answering readers’ queries on SF. The pungent and forthright gentleman made his debut in Vector, Journal of the BSFA, but we felt his opinions deserved a wider airing and invited him to contribute to New Worlds.

Moorcock also mentions that John Brunner’s The Whole Man (UK title Telepathist)4 is on the forthcoming Hugo ballot, and plugs a number of seemingly anarachic publications from Future City Press (“The issue of Amazing Rayday we have to hand at first seems to be a wild effusion of unrelated words, drawings and photographs, but a closer look shows that this publication has a hysterical logic of its own.”)

The Dr Peristyle column is uncredited, but I discovered5 that these were written by Brian W. Aldiss. The plan announced in the editorial is that this will alternate with the letter column (it turns out that this was the first of only three columns which would appear).
The questions get arch, eclectic answers (there is another example in the image above):

David E. Mortimer
Assuming SF is written by technically advanced countries, did the Arabs write SF or something like it when they led the world in mathematics and astronomy?
.
Interesting question. Frankly I don’t know the answer, learned though I am; I suspect it to be buried below the desert sand, so that some Abdul Anderson, some Mohammed Moorcock, is forever lost to us. But evolution rather than technology is the real power behind SF, for it provides a speculative dimension to work in. And isn’t SF essentially a city literature? Who ever wrote it in a tent?  p. 122

The Story Ratings 151 were discussed in the review of that issue.6
The Book reviews come from three people: Michael Moorcock, Ron Bennett, and Hilary Bailey. Moorcock opens with a useful review7 of The Old Die Rich by H. L. Gold:

H. L. Gold was perhaps the most incisive editor ever to produce an SF magazine, on matters of technique he knew the craft of SF writing inside out and the fact that he rewrote a considerable portion of the material published in Galaxy under his editorship earned him many writers’ gratitude rather than their chagrin. I personally know several writers who feel they owe their present knowledge of technique to Gold’s pungent comments on what he rejected and his doctoring of what he accepted. Some feel that this resulted, in the end, in a magazine that contained craftsmanly but characterless stories—stories, in fact, with too much ironed out. What is sometimes said of the last years of Galaxy under Gold’s editorship might also apply to his own work and one is inclined to feel that if he never wrote a bad story, he never wrote a brilliant one, either.  p. 124

Moorcock later adds that Gold was the master of the twist ending and one of the first modern SF writers to make it his trademark. He concludes by stating that the volume contains the “quintessence of a certain kind of slick, clever SF writing,” but that it doesn’t have the seriousness of intention that newer writers “like Aldiss, Ballard, Vonnegut—or even Moorcock” exhibit. So? Do all writers need to produce serious work?
Moorcock also reviews New Writings in SF 4 by John Carnell ( “the undemanding reader who is happy with fresh twists on old themes will find plenty worth reading”).
Ron Bennett reviews The Joyous Invasions by Theodore Sturgeon, and Hilary Bailey seems pleased enough with routine sounding stuff from John Lymington, Rick Raphael, and L. P. Davies.

This is worth getting for the first part of the Harrison novel, but the rest is middling stuff.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall enjoyed Harrison’s “rollicking parody”, which he thought stands “head and shoulders above most of the SF [. . .] published in the past few years.” He adds:

Harrison proves that his faster-than-light writing pace can be adapted from the tension of Deathworld to the humorous mockery of the military-galactic novel. Such characters as Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang, the Rev. Tembo, Eager Beager and Bill himself will go down in SF’s Hall of Fame—but one word of warning: Heinlein fans—it’s illegal to assault anybody, including American SF writers inhabiting Denmark.  p. 16

The Aldiss is “a let-down” but paradoxically “worth reading”; Collyn’s story is less experimental but more to Hall’s taste; Webb’s “isn’t far from the conventional horror story”; Reynold’s vignette is infuriating but stuck in his memory.
Hall says this about the Moorcock and Hoare pieces:

I’ll steer clear of [Preliminary Data], not wishing to show my ignorance by under or overestimating it. Apart from becoming terribly confused in the first few pages, I enjoyed it. No more will I say.
The idea behind Songflower is rather good, and the vividness of the writing certainly lifts it above the normal. I have a feeling that Kenneth Hoare may be a pen-name for a more established writer.  p. 16

2. I haven’t read Starship Troopers as I didn’t get very far with Robert Heinlein in my youth. Part of this was due to my struggle with Stranger in a Strange Land (I got fed up of the lectures halfway through and gave up), and a sub-optimal sampling of his other work (Glory Road was okay, as were Double Star, Waldo & Magic Inc., etc. but nothing made me want to read further). I note on consulting my bookshelves that I also read The Best of Robert A. Heinlein but remember little of it (apart from Crooked House and Zombies).
I enjoy Heinelin’s work more nowadays, funnily enough—I’ve recently read Jonathan Hoag, The Roads Must Roll, Waldo, Goldfish Bowl, etc. and enjoyed all of them to a greater or lesser extent.

3. As for the clumsy sentences in the first page of Hoare’s Sunflower, in my opinion, “They made planetfall soon after dawn at the capital”, would be better as “They made planetfall at the capital soon after dawn.” And “As Alec walked along by his scaly green flanks, 7 was bumbling away happily to himself” should be “As Alec walked alongside 7’s scaly green flanks, [7/the alien/the creature] bumbled away happily to himself.” Both p. 114.

4. Brunner describes the genesis of The Whole Man/Telepathist in the letter column of the next issue, #154:

The review Langdon Jones gave to Telepathist is so kind I hate having to point out that there are a couple of facts he got wrong. He says: ‘The book consists of three short stories dating from 1958 to 1959’. Actually it doesn’t. There were only two Gerry Howson yarns—novelettes—published confusingly under three titles, of which the second, disapproved of by the American magazine editor, survives as the title of the American edition of this final book: The Whole Man. Of these, the first has dwindled to pp. 143-159, twenty thousand words compressed into about four. That was City of the Tiger. The other, completely rewritten, is sandwiched around it to make Book Three, ‘Mens’—except that barring p. 115 the whole of the first  seventeen chapters are original material: i.e., the first two Books and part of the third as well.  p. 127

Both of the novelettes (City of the Tiger and The Whole Man) appeared in the Carnell edited Science Fantasy (#32 & #34) and were then reprinted in the USA (in Fantastic Universe, November and December 1959; The Whole Man was retitled Curative Telepath in that latter issue).

5. David Pringle and Langdon Jones confirmed that Peristyle was Aldiss in the British Science Fiction Magazine Collectors group on Facebook, 16th September 2019.

6. The ratings for this issue appeared in #155. The Harrison is a worthy winner, but the rest of the stories are in an odd sort of order:

7. David Pringle mentioned J. G. Ballard’s review of Gold’s book in The Guardian (21st May 1965) in the British Science Fiction Magazine Collectors Group:

H. L. Gold’s collection of short stories is described as a how-to-do-it book for would-be science-fiction writers (a diminishing band), on the strength, one assumes, of the notes the author provides after each story rather than the stories themselves. Gold, the former editor of Galaxy, who established the brittle and atmospheric stories which were the magazine’s hall mark, was noted for his rejection slips—these brilliant and acid gems are far more worth publishing than his stories. Unluckily he is nowhere near so acerbic in assessing his own efforts.

It sounds like Ballard was on the receiving end of a few of those rejection slips. ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #152, July 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #34 (August 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Lone Zone • novelette by Charles Platt +
The Leveller • short story by Langdon Jones
The Silent Ship • short story by Eric C. Williams
A Funny Thing Happened . . . • short fiction by Dikk Richardson –
A Light in the Sky • short story by Stuart Gordon [as by Richard A. Gordon]
Supercity • reprint short story by Brian W. Aldiss
The Night of the Gyul • short story by Colin R. Fry

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by James Cawthorn, Maeve Gilmore, uncredited
Does Space Still Come Naturally? • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Story Ratings 150
Cinema: Roger Corman and Edgar Allen Poe
• by Al Good
Books: Tomorrow in Retrospect • by George Collyn
Books: Is Blish Over-Rated? • by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Books: Holes in the Sky • by Langdon Jones
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

Lone Zone by Charles Platt2 gets off to a rather slow start with of a group of “Loners” beginning their day in the deserted and lawless Linear City Seven (this future world has—somewhat unrealistically—built huge cities ahead of an anticipated population increase only to have fertility rates plummet, leaving them as largely unoccupied “Lone Zones”). After they have eaten their processed breakfasts they leave their temporary accommodation and go to a local meeting spot. Here the foursome (Vincent is the leader, and he travels with Clement and Franklin, and a woman called Kitt) meet a man called Johnson, a “Civic” who says he has left his normal populated city to live more freely in the unoccupied Zone.
They allow Johnson to accompany them (they do not particularly trust him so he is not formally accepted into the group) and go to find lunch, which gives him his first experience of their nomadic, scavenging lifestyle (all the shops in the pre-prepared cities are stocked with food, clothing, etc., which the Loners just help themselves to). Later, while the others have a siesta, Johnson wanders off and finds himself in a Fun Palace. His exploration of the amusements is interrupted when other Loners turn off the lights and try to shoot him (they do not like Civics). He eventually escapes from a room of mirrors, and rejoins his group:

They climbed up to the monorail, but it was too slippery to be safe, so they dragged on at street level through the rain, along the endless roads that served only to separate one Block from the next: roads that were gutters running with dirty water. All around the world was grey and dull, depressing and demoralising. The claustrophobic nature of the giant vertical concrete surfaces was stronger in the dim light that made them dark silhouettes against the cloudy sky. These were the graves of human beings unborn, the men and women and children who had never entered the world to fill their space allocation with a few meagre possessions, who never knew life, never ate a TV breakfast or an instant lunch or a pre-packed supper, never experienced the communal life led when you were within twelve feet of another human being every night and day of your existence, never enjoyed the share-air schemes, the waste-water-is-quite-all-right, CO2-smells-good advertising campaigns, the public transport problem, the rising food prices and exhausted resources, the wonderful blossoming affluence of galloping inflation . . .
In such a demoralised, disenchanted world was it surprising that men found nothing for the next generation or themselves to live for? That human society lost initiative, lost interest, and just gave up?  p. 22

In this first part the influence of J. G. Ballard is very obvious—not only the apocalyptic setting of the story, but also in some of the writing:

Like every other room in every apartment, in Block Seventy and all the other Blocks in Linear City 7, it was a container of settling, drifting time dust, a terminal cancellation of dying energy differentials.  p. 4-5

The corridor, too, was a stagnant backwater of accumulated time. An estuary off the slowing, thickening time stream where, until the entry of the Loners, all action, all life, all movement, had died.  p. 6

In the second half of the story, the group spot an occupied apartment and investigate: during a subsequent shoot-out, Clement is wounded, and the old woman who lived in the apartment killed. They later find a young woman called Jane hiding in one of the other rooms.
Later, when three of them go out for food, they are shot at by the same people who were after Johnson previously, and flee back to the apartment. They make a perilous escape from the building and escape via an unused sewer. That evening they find food and clothing in a distant supermarket, and spend the night there. The next day Clement is dead.
In this part of the story it develops its own voice, and the action is intercut with scenes that illustrate the clash of cultures between the Loners and Johnson the Civic. One example of this is Johnson’s instance on taking the injured Clement with them when they escaped, even though the others wanted to leave him behind so as not to slow them down. When Johnson talks to Franklin about this later their conversation ends (spoiler) with a dispassionate comment that Clement was Franklin’s brother.
Johnson also grills Kitt after Vincent and Jane supposedly go off to find food, although Johnson thinks Vincent is taking her away to have sex:

[Kitt] looked up at him suddenly with hard eyes.
“You don’t find accepting circumstances easy, do you?”
“All right, I agree to some extent with what you say,” said Johnson. “[But] why do you let Vincent treat you like he does? How can you accept everything so philosophically?”
She seemed to be examining his face.
“You really don’t understand, do you,” she said slowly. “You expect me to fight to keep Vince, or burst into tears, or act like any of your delicately emotional civic women would. Don’t you see, if Vince has found another girl and wants to leave, it’s his decision?”
“So much for the equality of men and women,” Johnson cynically.
“Equality doesn’t come into it. Sex doesn’t come into it. I don’t think I have a right to try to influence another person in the making of a personal decision, that’s all. It’s his private affair.”
“Then don’t you care at all?”
She laughed abruptly.
“You think I don’t care? You think I haven’t been fighting to hold on to him for the past three months? Of course I care. But it’s better that it should happen this way; better this than a parting that would have lasted three months more, a gradual separation that no one could stop.”
[. . .]
“But you’re being used! Don’t you care? Haven’t you ever wondered what will have happened to you in ten years’ time? It can’t last forever, whatever your relationship. Why don’t you get away from this while you can, escape back to civilisation? Get back to where there’s still some decency, some morals, a cultured way of life. You have a chance, now; why not take it?”
She smiled, obviously uncomprehending.
“Because I belong here, it’s my life; I couldn’t exist in your society . . .”
“Yet you live here, a whore who, like all whores, is one day discarded. Don’t you ever want to find a husband, settle down, fall in love?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘whore’. I’m happy here, now. Why should I disturb myself and spoil my happiness, by speculating on what may happen? And why should I tie myself down and stagnate, forfeit my own free will? Why should I find just one man to love, when I have three, here?”
“You have crude sex with them, you don’t love them . . .”
“Have you grown up in intimate contact within a small group of people, devoid of contact with a populated outside world? What you know about our relationships?” She stared at him with cold blue eyes.
“You don’t understand,” said Johnson.
“No,” she said, “it’s you who doesn’t understand . . .”
But before she could continue, she was interrupted by a burst of rapid gunfire from the street below.  p. 26-28

I suspect this and other similar passages mirror the pronounced inter-generational divide that existed in the mid-1960s.
At the end of the story Johnson (spoiler) tells the group that there is a plan for the civics to solve the city’s population problems by coming to the Zones to kill the men and kidnap the woman. As the group argue with Johnson about his deception he falls to the monorail below: they refuse to pull him back up even though there is a train coming. Johnson runs but slips and falls to his death.
Overall, this is an uneven but promising second story from Platt, with a good balance of action and sociological observation that plays out against an interesting dystopian background.

The Leveller by Langdon Jones begins with the intense reflections of a dying man:

And he didn’t want to die. He wanted to stay and carry on in this little play with all the others. He wanted to be down there now, on the sunny pavements watching the children playing, and the people going about their tasks that had now been rendered meaningless. This was what made him most sad. Nothing meant anything any more. The world had been rendered useless by the fact that he was to be removed from it. He wanted it to have meaning again. He wanted to join in. What would happen to him? What would happen? He had felt a desperate tear begin to roll down his cheek, and his wife had leaned over and wiped it away. His wife. She was his wife no longer. She was part of the world that didn’t matter to him any more. In his dying eyes, she was just a woman, just a stranger.
And now here he was with the doctor fussing, doing things to his outstretched useless body that wasn’t part of him any more. He wished that he could have lifted his head from the pillow to tell the doctor to save himself the trouble. “Doctor,” he would like to say, “that little wasted scrap of flesh isn’t me any longer. I am here—here in this gaunt head. Can’t you see the flicker of me behind the eyes? Why won’t you look, doctor? Are you scared of the light that glows in these eyes? Are you afraid to look? Are you frightened of what they would tell you? But it was too much effort, and he only lowered his eyes so that he might get a fuzzy picture of his own body. When he saw it he was shocked. Its thin and ravaged form was nothing to do with him. It was completely alien, and he looked on it with a tired and dispassionate gaze.
His death was so inevitable; that was what he couldn’t accept. Even if he had survived his illness, he would have had to face it sooner or later. This was what he was born for.  p. 49

The narrative then moves on to a middle section that has what I can only imagine is a delusion or pre-death vision where he sees a giant toad. After it disappears he has a sword fight with a flamboyantly dressed man. He then finds the doctor standing over him pronouncing his death.
The last section has him leave his body. As he looks down on his corpse he starts ascending, and eventually leaves the Earth behind, travelling further and further out of the universe until he is looking back down on the whole of existence. This (spoiler) has a pinkish colour and eventually resolves into an image of his face.
This is just a daft ending, and doesn’t work at all. That said, the first third of this is well worth reading for its emotional and descriptive prose.
The Silent Ship by Eric C. Williams has a prospecting spaceman who is either mad or sick coming back to Earth. A company investigator goes to examine the ship, and when he finds the cargo is only silica rock he orders it destroyed.
The investigator then goes to see the dying man in hospital and, when the latter experiences a period of lucidity, listens to his account of the discovery of a miniature civilisation in the rock of the asteroid he was exploring, and how the microscopic beings later invaded his body and started warring there.
There is some interesting Fantastic Voyage-type imagery here but the premise is largely unconvincing.
A Funny Thing Happened . . . by Dikk Richardson is a one-page slush pile escapee about aliens who sleep for aeons at a time, and who only occasionally wake. They are (spoiler) are Easter Island statues.

A Light in the Sky is the debut of future novelist Stuart Gordon,3 and it concerns a Durbanian prince on a once-in-a-decade trip to the city of Tarstar, where he will meet his arranged bride. Along the way we learn two important pieces of information: (a) the human civilisation of this time is in a gentle decline, a result of laws prohibiting investigation and (b) that there are strange flashing lights on the Moon.
After the caravan arrives at Tarstar, and the formalities have been observed, the prince meets his bride and everyone attends a banquet. Later, the couple slip away to a balcony and discuss the lights on the moon.
The woman tells him that she has discovered that the lights are a message that she has managed to decipher. She then takes him to a disused room containing futuristic devices. Long story short: humankind had previously spread throughout the solar system and fought a war destroying the colonies on Venus and Mars; a moon colony was left to survive on its own, and the lights are an ancient distress message that has been transmitted for many years.
The prince and the woman decide nothing can be done and that they will not be so curious in the future.
This is an overlong and slow-moving story, and it switches unevenly two-thirds of the way through from something that feels like a Weird Tales desert fantasy to an SF tale. Further, the ending is exasperating: they discover something momentous, then shrug their shoulders and move on. You can see, however, as with a lot of the stories that Moorcock bought from beginning writers around this time, glimmerings of better things to come.
Supercity by Brian W. Aldiss (Space, Time and Nathaniel, 1957) is a story told to “Nanthiel” about a man banished to a backward planet in Smith’s Burst for his romantic indiscretions. There he sets about transforming a singularly unprepossessing planet into a vibrant colony by using Earth government’s own bureaucracy against itself:

He began making official reports home. New York, which was at that time the hub of World Administration, was gratified. Generally, it was an impossible task to induce reports (which also mean returns) from anywhere but the major worlds; since all communications travelled via ship, the smaller galactic fry could always claim ‘Lost in Transit’ to any unpleasant referendums, a claim which might take years to refute conclusively.
New York responded with true bureaucratic fervour to Alastair’s tentative advances. Department upon department despatched sheafs of every imaginable type of form and questionnaire, and filed with glee the mocked-up statistics or nil returns which Alastair sent back.
What percentages of female colonist underwent marriage at the following age groups…………? What was the average yield per acre of the following types of wheat…………? What species of Earth cattle flourished best under Acrostic conditions…………? What were conditions on Acrostic in terms of annual rainfall, monthly rainfall, annual sunshine, monthly sunshine, isobars, isotherms…………? Etc.
It seemed as if the vast ledgers of Earth would absorb for ever the flow of information.
The space ships, which had never called more than twice in a decade, began to make monthly visits to All Saints. They brought with them, besides paper, wealth; they took back with them, besides paper, rumour of a growing city.  p. 95

Light, vaguely amusing stuff.
The Night of the Gyul by Colin R. Fry starts in the house of what turn out to be mutant dogs on an environmentally hostile future Earth:

It was a bad hot rain and a hot wet grey fog the night the Gyul came. At least, I say night, but it is hard to be certain because with the running, drumming, hissing rain we had lost count of time and our waterclock was broken. Ria broke it trying to dance on her hindlimbs. She is the one with the black patch over her left eye; at least, I say black, but it is more a grey discoloration of the facial skin.
“Before long I’ll be able to do it,” she said as she thumped down on her haunches, panting. She looks very sweet when her shoulders heave like that so I affectionately bit a flea out of her hair. Her hair is short white hair running all the way from her head down her back, very fluffy, and very pretty it is too. She takes great care of it. I bit a flea. The fleas are getting bigger and juicier. We must try Cooking them. I have heard of Cooking from the Singer. He knows a lot, that one. Well, he is a humute. It runs in his blood. To Cook, one uses heat. I think we might Boil dead fleas by leaving them out in the rain, in some kind of container. Perhaps we should skin them first. That is how the Ancients used to Cook their animals—skinned.
Mammah is the maternal one. I love to watch our little children clustering round her teats. I am a sentimentalist and very fond of home life, although I am ferocious when I am out hunting. I hunt when it isn’t raining. Then the sun is crimson in the mauve sky and the kangarabbits bounce away before me. But I use my footbow, stringing it with my strong white teeth, and I kill them! Ha!  p. 100-101

Later, a man and woman (referred to by the narrator as a “Boi” and a “Gyul”) appear, and ask for shelter and then for help to cross the water to what I presume is France. Singer the humute arrives then, and when it becomes obvious that the narrator can’t help, the couple go. Later, other men arrive looking for the couple and Singer takes them to the coast.
There is not much of a story here but the setting is intriguing and vivid, and the ending hints at possible sequels where things may change.4 Enjoyable.

This month’s uncredited Cover looks like the work of Keith Roberts. Even this average effort from him is better than most of the decidedly lacklustre efforts that have graced the magazine recently.
The first two pieces of Interior artwork are by James Cawthorn and Maeve Gilmore. The last, uncredited, piece may be Cawthorn’s as it uses the same silhouetting and hand lettering used in other illustrations.
Does Space Still Come Naturally? by Michael Moorcock states his previous editorial about space stories has been misinterpreted:

In our editorial in NWSF 148 we mentioned the possibility that the space story was declining. Many readers took this as a statement that New Worlds was not going to contain space stories in future; others thought that we said that good space stories couldn’t be written. We are rarely so dogmatic, as a careful look at that particular editorial will show. What we did say was that there weren’t many good ones being written.  p. 2

There is more on this but essentially Moorcock reiterates his previous assertion that naturalistic/realistic fiction is on the way out.
The next part is about the new writers that Moorcock has brought to the magazine:

Fresh to New Worlds this month are three new, young writers whose average age is eighteen. A lot of hard work has been put in by the editorial staff of this magazine in its attempt to find, encourage and—at last—publish new writers. A year ago we were beginning to wonder if these writers actually existed in any quantity. Now—almost overnight—a lot of the writers we had recognised as potentially worth publishing have come up with stories well-worth publishing. We feel sure that Charles Platt, Richard Gordon, Dikk Richardson and Colin Fry—not to forget Langdon Jones—will be producing a rich variety of stories in the near future. That all the stories published in this issue vary in choice of treatment and subject matter should indicate that our main ambition, to present the widest variety of ideas and treatments possible, is also being realised.  p. 3/123

He finishes with a request for reader’s thoughts about adding more pages to the magazine:

This would still be the best value offered in the SF magazine field. What do you think about it? Most of our “counterparts” are already 3s. 6d. or more for the same amount of reading matter found in NWSF for 2s. 6d. At 3s. 6d. we should be giving much more reading matter with the opportunity of printing short novels complete and still having plenty of room for some short stories. So—opinions please.  p. 123

I say go for it.
Story Ratings 150 was discussed in that issue.5
There is an extensive non-fiction section at the back of this issue (18 pp.), and it leads off with Cinema: Roger Corman and Edgar Allen Poe by Al Good, an interesting if brief review of Roger Corman’s horror films. There are some interesting snippets that piqued my interest about the films mentioned:

If Corman does not depend on his actors, he certainly owes a debt to his script writers, notable amongst whom is Richard Matheson. Rewriting a short story like Pit and the Pendulum into a film lasting one and a half hours, with the only similarity being the knife-edged pendulum, cannot be called an ‘adaptation’. Yet the film is not completely devoid of Poe’s atmosphere, and the horrific twist that does not come until the last frame of film is masterly.  p. 110

Corman has made intentionally humorous horror films. The Cat, one of the three stories from Tales of Terror and The Raven, both teamed up Peter Lorre and Vincent Price with great success. The talent of both these actors is at its best in their droll wine-tasting duel in The Cat. Lorre plays the part of a drunkard, and tastes his wine by drinking half a bottleful, whilst Price is the recognised master and takes just a sip. Price is highly amused to be challenged by the alcoholic, but needless to say Lorre comes off best, only to lose his wife to Price. For revenge he walls them up in his cellar. The humour of both these films is genuine because it never leaves the context of the film like, say, the infantile Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters. Corman-type humour has been sadly lacking from horror films, yet it would appear to be obvious that films which are so often hilariously funny when intended to be deadly serious, indicate that comic-horror would be a success. Cinemas may now become flooded with this type of film, but few, I fear, will be as good as The Raven or The Cat.  p. 111

Unfortunately this was the only film column to appear from this writer anywhere.
The Books column is split three ways, and begins with Tomorrow in Retrospect by George Collyn, who briefly discusses Aldiss’s Greybeard and Ballard before heralding Journey Beyond Tomorrow by Robert Sheckley as a significant development in the SF field. There are additional comments about Kurt Vonnegut, with whom Sheckley is compared.
Books: Is Blish Over-Rated? by Michael Moorcock is largely taken up by an extended review of the Best SF Stories of James Blish. Moorcock tells us he first encountered Blish in A Case of Conscience, which he thought excellent, but that he didn’t think much of the subsequent work he read (Earthman Come Home, The Night Shapes, Titan’s Daughters, The Star Dwellers, etc.). He continues:

[You] might feel that my faith in the author of A Case of Conscience was shattered. You would be wrong—such is the power of other people’s opinions that I was still convinced that Blish was a giant among SF writers. When Best SF Stories of James Blish turned up on my desk I decided that this was bound to be good and I would make a point of giving it a long review to do it justice.
It should prove how much I admire A Case of Conscience in that I am still not moved to my usual fury having read this collection of seven short stories. The fact is that all these stories are decent, craftsmanlike jobs and therefore stand out from a great many of the collections being produced today, but they are little more than that. Plainly Mr. Blish has been over-rated—not least by Mr. Blish himself, judging by his own introductions to his stories—and his reputation rests on the publication of one excellent novel that deserves all the praise it has received. Without Case of Conscience would Mr. Blish’s reputation be so high? I very much doubt it. It would still be good in SF circles—on the whole his craftsmanship is not in question—on the strength of some very reasonable stuff contributed to magazines and anthologies over the years, but the large proportion of his work is certainly no better than that of other good craftsmen in the field—Kuttner, Kornbluth. Heinlein, Simak, etc.—and does not give him a place beside Aldiss, Bester, Ballard—or even Asimov, in my opinion.  p. 116-117

He goes on to discuss the stories in detail: it would be interesting to come back to these comments after reading the volume.
There are short (positive) reviews of John Brunner’s No Future in It (a collection whose stories are “considerably more informative, entertaining and less pretentious than Mr. Blish’s”) and Telepathist (Brunner is “an author who deserves a far higher reputation and list of published novels in this country than he has so far received.”)
Books: Holes in the Sky by Langdon Jones reviews Spectrum IV by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, which includes a “very interesting” discussion between the editors that first appeared in SF Horizons, but is also a collection that is “curious in that it manages to hit such high and low levels in 320 pages.”6 Jones goes on to discuss the stories in some detail (Anthony Boucher’s Barrier, “goes on too long”, and Cordwainer Smith’s A Planet Named Shayol is, “an excellent, weird and horrible story”).
Jones then reviews Poul Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, a fix-up of three previously published stories, which he did not like:

The central story could have been called Death Gulch, and with a few changes of name, Anderson could have sold it to Wild West Weekly. The book contains all the points that prevented SF from being accepted by the general public until fairly recently—hackneyed plots, uninspired writing and lack of characterisation. Mind you, van Rijn has plenty of character. He must have, when he says things like “What in the name of ten times ten to the tenth damned souls on a logarithmic spiral to hell is going on here for fumbly-diddles?”  p. 122

Jones’s final comments are on Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky:

The story is a cross between Lord of the Flies and The Swiss Family Robinson, and contains plenty of action. An excellent story for the middle-teens, but adults will find it, although very readable, rather slight. However, I found it worth reading, if just for the memorable line, “My father always said that if the Almighty had intended us to use those gate things instead of rocket ships He would have provided His own holes in the sky.”  p. 122-123

Letters to the Editor is rather dull this time around, although all three correspondents make reasonable points (publish stories that fit in the magazine whether the stories are SF or not; the idioms that SF uses will take time to change; our classics novels are not classics outside the field.)

An issue worth getting for the Platt and Fry stories, and some of the non-fiction.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall says (Vector #34, August 1965, p. 15-16) that Platt’s Lone Zone is “a particularly memorable piece”, and that is “unusually excellent for a second-published story, and it certainly bodes well for Platt’s writing future”.
The Jones and Williams stories both remind him of other work: Wells’ Under the Knife in Jones’ case, and William W. Stuart’s Inside John Barth (Galaxy, June 1960) in William’s.
He thought Dikk Richardson’s short-short, “better than the usual run of vignettes”.
Richard Gordon’s story “is rather over-written, and one would have guessed that it was by an inexperienced writer. But it, too, bodes quite well.”
He thinks that Aldiss’s work “seems to get slighter and slighter—one day he will just float away. But “Supercity” makes up in amusement for what it loses in substance.” [It appears that Hall doesn’t realise that the story is a reprint that is several years old.]
Colin Fry’s The Night of the Gyul “has nothing new to say and says it quite entertainingly”.
Hall notes the non-fiction contents but offers no comments.
[Thanks to Jo at the British Science Fiction Association’s Vector magazine for providing a scan of the review above. The BSFA’s membership page is here.]

2. Lone Zone was revised and appeared as the third part of Charles Platt’s The City Dwellers (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970). I note (see my “slow-moving” comment above) that this revised section starts with an action scene from the end of the original story and is then told in flashback.

3. Stuart Gordon is perhaps best known for his ‘Eyes’ trilogy. His ISFDB page is here.

4. Unfortunately Colin R. Fry did not write any sequels to this story, and published his fourth and last story (and third for New Worlds) six months later. His ISFDB page is here.

5. The ratings for this issue appeared in #154:

This is more or less the order that I came up with.

6. I’m pretty sure that Amis and Conquest’s Spectrum III was one of the early anthologies I read when I was a teenager:

Introduction (Spectrum III) • (1963) • essay by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest
Killdozer! • (1944) • novella by Theodore Sturgeon
The Voices of Time • (1960) • novelette by J. G. Ballard
Call Me Joe • (1957) • novelette by Poul Anderson
We Would See a Sign • (1963) • short story by Mark Rose
Dreams Are Sacred • (1948) • novelette by Peter Phillips
Exploration Team • [Colonial Survey] • (1956) • novelette by Murray Leinster
Fondly Fahrenheit • (1954) • novelette by Alfred Bester
The Sentinel • [A Space Odyssey] • (1951) • short story by Arthur C. Clarke

Reading Killdozer in this volume rings a bell but I’m drawing blanks on most of the others.  ●rssrss

New Worlds #151, June 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Graham Hall, Vector #33 (June 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Ship of Disaster • short story by Barrington J. Bayley ∗∗∗+
Apartness • novelette by Vernor Vinge
Convolutions • short story by George Collyn –
Last Man Home • short story by R. W. Mackelworth
The Life Buyer (Part 3 of 3) • serial by E. C. Tubb

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by James Cawthorn, Harry Douthwaite, Arthur Thomson
Process of Elimination • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Story Ratings NWSF
Where’s it All Going?
• book reviews by Langdon Jones
Diary of a Schizoid Hypochondriac • book reviews by Charles Platt
Quick Reviews • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Gas Lenses Developed For Communications by Laser • science essay
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

The Ship of Disaster by Barrington J. Bayley starts with this:

The great Ship of Disaster rolled tirelessly over the deep and endless ocean. Long she was, strong and golden, and the sombre waters washed like oil beneath her prow. Yet a ship of disaster she truly was: vapours obscured the air about her, and nowhere could an horizon be seen. Her crew knew not where to find land, and already her hasty provisions ran low.
For it was by disaster that this ship lived. Disaster had struck the yards that built her, and now disaster had run its full course upon the elf-nation that had equipped her for war.
On a high seat in her poop languished Elen-Gelith, elflord of the Earth’s younger days when men had not yet come into their own. “Disaster,” he promised to himself, “shall come upon any accursed enemy that I find!”  p. 4

When Elen-Gelith (who is presumably an homage to Moorcock’s Elric) sees another ship and it turns out to be a human vessel, he orders it broadsided. After they ram and sink it, they pour oil on the surface of the sea and set it alight. The only human survivor is Kelgynn, who manages to board the elf ship, where he is put to work among the troll slaves who man the oars.
The rest of the story details the exchanges between Elen-Gelith and Kelgynn as they transit the strange, foggy ocean. We learn that the elves have lost a major war with the trolls, the crops they plant have been failing, and that their race appears doomed. This thread develops when (spoiler) strange visions rise from the depths of the sea:

They were more like pictures than real objects. Shapes, blocks, sights and scenes projected themselves up from the deep, spilling over the face of the sea. They were everchanging, rising up, displaying, falling and transforming like the turning pages of a book. Unimaginable buildings, streets and bridges spread themselves over the water. It was a scene of silent, deliberate activity.
Kelgynn blinked. He could not make up his mind at first if he really saw what he saw. It was like a film of memory occluding what lay before the eyes. Or like a vivid dream which persists in the mind’s eye, overlaying the real world, for several seconds after a man has forcibly awoken.
But even this impression did not take away the colour, the clarity, the senses of presence. If it was a phantom, it was an external phantom, not a derangement of the mind—unless this whole impossible sea was such a derangement.
No comment was made on the decks. The trolls’ muscles bore them steadily onwards into the region of the strange visions, and Kelgynn looked to left and right. Then they were in the midst of a fantastic city. Broad avenues, vast boulevards, giant buildings and throngs of people debouched on to the sea, and lingered, to be replaced by others. Rectilinear shafts of towers soared skywards. He craned his neck, up and up, but the summits simply disappeared into the mist.
“What is this we see?” wondered Elen-Gelith to himself. Yet in fact he already half knew. [. . .] He saw images of future ages.
The thought brought into motion a deeper, frightful knowledge which he fought to quell, for as they passed he had been inspecting closely the phantom inhabitants of this phantom city. Now they came to another part of it, which after a while he realised must be a harbour. The realisation took time, for it was by no means immediately that he was able to recognise the huge shapes resting there as . . . ships. They were such gigantic ships as made his own Ship of Disaster seem no more than a boat.
The elf craft bore down on one such floating mountain, and within seconds they had passed through the dull grey hull and were rowing through a cavernous interior. The vision hung around them, floating like thoughts in the mind. Unfamiliar contrivances lay about, tended by . . . men.
Where were the elf overseers who should have been supervising these animals? There were none. There had been none in any of the scenes in the city; and the men did not wear the expressions of slaves.
The elf-lord looked sharply this way and that, shifting uncomfortably. Then, despite all his efforts at self-control, a shudder passed right through him.
Kelgynn, who had moved closer, noticed this and laughed cruelly.
Kelgynn himself did not know it, but this was the sea of the Earth’s imagination. Here the Earth dreamed and thought to herself, planning the clothing with which she would adorn herself in future.  p. 17-18

Kelgynn goes on to taunt Elen-Gelith that the Earth is ridding itself of trolls and elves as they are no longer of use. The elf lord throws him overboard for his impertinence, and when Kelgynn surfaces he finds himself in another place where the sky is bright—and the elf ship has disappeared. He swims to a nearby beach.
When I first read this many years ago I thought it very good, but I didn’t enjoy it so much this time around. However, this atmospheric and entropic tale is still a superior piece.
Part of the fun of reading these old mags is that sometimes you come across a gem that you were unaware of: Apartness by Vernor Vinge is one of those stories.1
It opens on a South American Empire ship where an Australian scientist called Ribera is trying to convince Captain Delgado to land him on the nearby Antarctic shore as he has observed unexpected lights there. Notwithstanding this the captain is initially unhelpful due to the influence of the Emperor’s astrologers (the ship is on a quest for the mythical Coney Island in a world where a nuclear war two hundred years before has wiped out much knowledge, technology, and the whole of the northern hemisphere). Delgado eventually agrees to talk to them and try to make a landing seem like their idea.
The middle section describes the expedition that sets off to investigate the lights. Three boats set off and, when they land onshore, they discover a tribe of Inuit-like natives. The latter do not welcome the visitors and are passively hostile:

They did not scowl or wave weapons, but Ribera was distinctly aware that they were not friendly. No smiles, no welcome grimness. They seemed a proud people. The adults were tall, their faces so grimy, tanned, and withered that the anthropologist could only guess at their race. From the set of their lips, he knew that most of them lacked teeth. The natives’ children peeped around the legs of their mothers, women who seemed old enough to be great grandmothers. If they had been Sudamericans, he would have estimated their average age as sixty or seventy, but he knew that it couldn’t be more than twenty or twenty-five.
From the pattern of fatty tissues in their faces, Ribera thought he could detect evidence of cold adaption; maybe they were Eskimos, though it would have been physically impossible for that race to migrate from one pole to the other while the North World War raged. Both their parkas and the kayaks appeared to be made of seal hide. But the parkas were ill-designed and much bulkier than the Eskimo outfits he had seen in pictures. And the harpoons they held were much less ingenious than the designs he remembered. If these people were of the supposedly extinct Eskimo race, they were an extraordinarily primitive branch of it. Besides, they were much too hairy to be full-blooded Indians or Eskimos.  p. 28-29

When Cardona, one of the ecologists, tries to ignore the tribe’s warnings about going towards the village, Ribera has to intervene to prevent fighting. Later, the astrologers come back from a hill they have climbed saying they have seen two huge partly sunk ships in the water, and go off around the coast in two of the boats to investigate. Meantime, Ribera and Delgado go up the hill to look at the wrecks. Through a pair of expensive pre-war binoculars they recognise the names on the ships, which are of significance to both of them. The reason why is not explained to the reader.
On the pair’s return to the village they see a confrontation developing between Cardona and the natives, but arrive too late to avoid a bloody fight developing between the two sides. This section ends with Ribera looking at a harpoon sticking out the front of his chest.
The denouement takes place some months later after Ribera has recovered from his injuries. A two metre tall Zulunder (Zulu) called Luama comes to visit Ribera at his home in La Plata, and it soon becomes clear that he knows what Ribera and Delgado saw in the Antarctic (massive spoiler): the two wrecked ships were the ones which evacuated the Afrikaner survivors of a South African civil war two hundred years earlier (this conflict occurred after the Northern War deprived the apartheid government of its allies).
After some exposition Ribera pleads with Luama to convince his government not to kill off the devolved descendants of the Afrikaner survivors, the only polar natives left in this post-holocaust world. Luama’s response evidences a bitterness and anger that will possibly strike a chord with those who were opposed to the apartheid regime in South Africa:

“Destroy them?” He repeated the question. “Don’t be silly! They are proof of destruction. So they call their piece of ice and rock Nieutransvaal, do they?” He laughed. “And they even have a Prime Minister, a toothless old man who waves his harpoon at Sudamericans. [. . .] And they are even more primitive than Eskimos. In short, they are savages living on seal blubber.”
He no longer spoke with foppish joviality. His eyes flashed with an old, old hate, a hate that was pushing Zulund to greatness, and which might eventually push the world into another hemispheric war (unless the Australian social scientists came through with some desperately needed answers). The breeze in the room no longer seemed cool, gentle. It was cold and the wind was coming from the emptiness of death piled upon megadeath through the centuries of human misery.
“It will be a pleasure for us to see them enjoy their superiority.” Lunama leaned forward even more intensely. “They finally have the apartness their kind always wanted. Let them rot in it—”  p. 41

As well as having a genuinely double surprise ending, this is a well-told story and has some very good world building.

Convolutions by George Collyn is a story with a “inchoate consciousness” beginning:

It thought when It was not supposed to think and It became aware, aware of darkness and nothingness. It remembered seeing but It had no sight; It remembered sound but It had no hearing; It remembered scent but It had no smell; It remembered tasting but It had no taste; It remembered feeling but It had no touch. But It was conscious. It thought. It was.
Where was It? What was It doing? How long was it since last It was aware? It was aware of ridges and convolutions and pulsating matter filled with racing thoughts that whirled endlessly in confined space. I think It said, I think and I am an organism devoted to thought, I am a brain awash in blackness and floating in nothingness and where is the skull that was my home? Where are my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my body? Who is doing this to me?  p. 42-43

There are a couple more pages of this fairly impenetrable and/or tedious material before it becomes apparent what is happening. Eventually other consciousnesses appear, and we discover (spoiler) that there has been an alien invasion, and a number of unfortunate humans have had their brains extracted and put into a nutrient vat. Now the aliens feed off their fear.
I’m not sure we needed a New Wave version of The Brain Stealers of Mars. . . . Another ‘miss’ from this writer.
Mackelworth’s work hasn’t impressed me so far but Last Man Home gets off to a decent start:

Jenning’s eyes looked hungrily towards the round silhouette of the hills beyond Gat. The hills were gentle, featureless curves, growing like smooth bubbles from the green flatness of the plain.
It was only instinct but he knew behind them was the old place. He also realised, soberly, that it was the authorities in Gat who would be the barrier to his further progress and not the hills.
He wiped the dampness from his brow with a large red handkerchief. Then, he readjusted the old bowler hat firmly in its place on his head. The hat was his badge of eccentricity, the very soul of his personal impulse.
The red handkerchief he returned, with his habitual flourish, to the torn refuge of his breast pocket. He then thrust his hands deep into the hanging-down bags of his trouser pockets bulging above the thin bow of his legs.
The coat on his back sagged from his shoulders, like a sack, and was pushed back from his thin chest, revealing the sad blue of a worn and tattered shirt.
Jennings looked little more than the tinker he professed to be. Yet, despite this, and his blatant, cheeky dishonesty, he was nevertheless liked, even loved, by everyone. That was because he was different. Everywhere they welcomed him and played his game, haggling over his items of small value just for the joy of it. Items, which were nearly useless in a well-fed society with a good, simple technology.
The clothes befitted his part. At least, they would have been suitable in an earlier era. Now, they were outmoded, by at least half a century. Raggedly ancient, like himself, they gave him his inherent character, as if he was a rocky island left behind by a sea of modern sublimation.  p. 47

The rest of the story details his separation, at an early age and after a nuclear holocaust, from his parents, and how he has spent all his life trying to return home. This journey has involved him crossing a number of city states, where the populations are orderly conformists kept peaceable by the use of a drug obtained from mushrooms:

The small mushroom grew in profusion. After the terrible day of the bomb it was as if the spores of the big cloud had fathered the tiny fungus directly, instead of by a mutation from an ancient growth once known as Suma . . . the mushroom of the old seekers after contentment.  p. 50

As he transits these states he is careful not to reveal his status as a survivor to the authorities, and avoids their attempts to normalise him. Eventually he comes to the last city state before his destination: the wastelands.
The ending (spoiler) finds him in the badlands looking at signs of life (this after having being told that everything there is dead). He also finds messages left by his parents saying they are moving east.
I’m not sure this story works, but some parts of it are effective.

The Life Buyer (Part 3 of 3) by E. C. Tubb starts with Ransom questioning the maid about her ex-husband: the latter is apparently the long-lived man Sheil found. After getting the information he wants, Ransom scratches her with a poisoned pin. He then goes on a futuristic tour (undersea farm, lunar colonies, etc.) looking for the husband and leaving a string of bodies behind him. There are four chapters of this readable, versimiltudinous, and sometimes entertaining padding before (spoiler) Ransom kills his lunar guide and then accidentally dies in a dust bowl.
Meanwhile, King has a heart attack, and the last chapter has Steve and Markham go to the hospital treating him. There is then a massive explanatory data dump about what happened, who did what, and why.
This story is an almost textbook example of how not to structure a novel.

The Cover for this issue has been redesigned again—this layout feels very jumbled, with the magazine title seemingly an afterthought: you can see why some booksellers list these magazines by the title and author of the cover story. A retrograde step.
The abstract artwork is uncredited and is typical of those that plagued some of the SF (and other) paperbacks of the time. It is, however, better than the blurred photo equivalent on Science Fantasy #71.2
The Interior artwork in this issue includes a rather dull piece by James Cawthorn, as well as work by Harry Douthwaite, and Arthur Thomson. Those that like abstract work will probably prefer the Douthwaite; the traditionalists, the Thomson (I’m with the latter group this time).
Process of Elimination by Michael Moorcock is another “What is SF” editorial that yields little more than any of the others, although it does acknowledge the problem of identification.
As you can see from the page number, the editorial has its last half page in the middle of the magazine. Untidy.
I commented on Story Ratings No. 149 in that issue.3
There are several pages of book reviews (they are presumably catching up from last issue’s omission). Where’s it All Going? by Langdon Jones praises the The Man of Double Deed by Leonard Daventry, but is less charitable to Sundog by B. N. Ball:

[The] story develops into complexity only equalled by Van Vogt, although Van Vogt’s complications may eventually be unravelled. However, owing to the very lumpy writing, sections of which have to be re-read to grasp the meaning, one tends to read on through this long novel without understanding just what is going on. Everything seems to sort itself out very nicely in the end, though.
[. . .]
I hope [. . .] that if we see another book from Mr. Ball it will be considerably better than this one.  p. 112

Telepathist by John Brunner is an “excellent” novel, and he found Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury “tremendous”.
He finishes with this:

Of Demons and Darkness by John Collier (Corgi, 5s), consists of a large collection of stories by this vastly overrated writer. The quality ranges from the moderately good to the dreadful, though most of the stories are nearer in quality to the latter. Although there are thirty-seven stories, the number of plots is considerably less, as Collier is obviously the kind of writer who thinks that if a plot is worth using at all, it’s worth using several times. Also, one tends to become rather tired of the oft-repeated jokes, which might be funny for the first time, but tend to pall at the tenth repetition. I should hate to meet John Collier at a party.
Also released is New Writings In SF 2 edited by John Carnell (Corgi, 3s 6d), a not very exciting collection previously reviewed here.  p. 113-114

Diary of a Schizoid Hypochondriac by Charles Platt is a page long demolition of Earthworks by Brian W. Aldiss.4
Quick Reviews by Michael Moorcock covers a final half-dozen books. He starts with mini-essay on Poul Anderson covering two books he has previously read (raves for The Broken Sword and Three Hearts And Three Lions) before more mixed comments on After Doomsday and Shield.
There are short reviews of books by Asimov, Ballard, and Carnell, before longer comments on The Seventh Galaxy Reader by Frederik Pohl, which opens with this:

One always has an idea of one’s favourite magazine. I had thought mine F&SF. I was wrong. It was clearly Galaxy. It takes a collection of “the best from” to show you just how many memorable and enjoyable stories a particular magazine has given you—and I was surprised on opening up The Seventh Galaxy Reader to find that almost all the stories in the book are favourites of mine. It is the finest collection I have received for a long time.  p. 118

He cheekily finishes with a plug for one of his own pseudonymous books, Warriors of Mars (as by ‘Edward P. Bradbury’): “Bradbury is strongly influenced by E. R. Burroughs—but is actually much more readable.” There is also a plug for Charles Platt’s fanzine Tomorrowscope.
Gas Lenses Developed For Communications by Laser is a dull science essay.
Letters to the Editor has some interesting correspondence this month. The first letter is from T. B. Pulvertaft (B.A., BChir) of City Hospital, Exeter, and it is a critical one:


Since you have taken over New Worlds an atmosphere of obsessive Penguin New Writing has become apparent. The fact that a story vibrates with obscure meaning and ends in a crystalline, nebulous web of obscurity in a logical extrapolation of present day society does not make it “Good Literature”, how ever hard it may appear to be trying to. Your job is to please the customers (and don’t throw up your increased circulation at me) and to do this you must provide an alternate reality in your plot-forms. And more than a touch of the old cliché “sense of wonder”, which must not be confused with the “sense of utter bewilderment” you have succeeded in conjuring in me with recent issues.
If we have many more stories culminating in an unfulfilled sensation of malefic discontent I shall probably not stop reading the magazine, but shall do so in an atmosphere of malefic discontent myself.  p. 120-121

There is a letter from a previous correspondent, Elizabeth French Biscoe from Dublin, which starts with:

My blood chilled when I read this month’s directive (NWSF 148) from Commissar Moorcock, wherein he proclaims a bleak austerity regime bereft of space stories, when we are to “stick close to home.”  p. 121

The final entry is a more constructive letter from soon to be new writer (he would have a story in next month’s issue) Richard A. Gordon from Buckie in Banffshire (“just up the road from me”, as they say in this neck of the woods):

Congratulations on New Worlds 148. This is the best issue I have read yet, and had something for everyone, even if it was a bit short on the book reviews. I don’t suppose there is any chance of your expanding to, say, 160 pages, and containing features such as those in the French SF magazine Fiction, with lengthy book reviews, articles of general interest, not necessarily concerned with SF, more film reviews, perhaps even the odd cartoon or two provided it isn’t too corny! Plus more information on the authors writing the stories, which seems to be popular in other magazines. There was another aspect of Fiction which interested me, that is the practice of listing all the stories that the current authors have had published in previous issues of the magazine. Quite useless really, but good fun!  p. 122-123

He also offers his opinion on J. G. Ballard, intially suggesting that he is going over the same ground in his first three novels. He then adds:

Ballard, I believe, takes his own work very seriously, and he is undoubtedly—technically—one of the most gifted of modern SF writers. Yet I for one wish he would widen his apparent field of interest a bit more—one can almost forecast with complete accuracy that any new story by him will in some way be concerned with disaster so that he can write about the human being in some peculiar mental condition. Obviously he can write about what he likes, but it would make him a more interesting writer if he were to vary his subject matter more and write more stories with the scope of, for example, The Waiting Grounds. I like Ballard’s writing but I feel that his apparently permanent interest in just the one story form is a serious limitation—technical brilliance is not in itself everything.  p. 123-124

Moorcock muses about reader reaction to a larger but more expensive magazine, and then suggests that Gordon view Ballard’s three novels as a single work.

With two strong stories at the start this is an issue worth getting.  ●

_____________________

1. I thought it pretty obvious that Vinge’s story was politically inspired, but the introduction to the story in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (Tor, 2001) has this:

Michael Moorcock bought “Apartness” for New Worlds SF. It was my first sale (though “Bookworm, Run!” was written earlier). “Apartness” was later anthologized by Don Wollheim and Terry Carr in one of their best-of-the-year collections. Such success was a dream come true for this beginning writer. But I wonder if the story’s success had much connection with the question that originally brought me to write it: Why are there no “Eskimos”—no long-established human societies—in Antarctica? Is it too remote from potential colonists, or is the place that much less hospitable than the arctic? I did some reading, concluded that both reasons had some virtue. There might be a few places on the continent that could support pretechnical human settlers, but those colonists would need real motivation. So the question was to find such motivation. Given the context of 1964, there was a terrible possibility—and the story came close to writing itself.

The anthology mentioned above is Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr’s World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966.

2. The covers for New Worlds and Science Fantasy for 1965 are here, and a motley old bunch they are. Matters improved in 1966 (if you like Keith Roberts’ artwork).

3. The ratings for this issue appeared in #153:

It is almost unbelievable that Tubb’s novel would place above the Vinge and the Bayley.

4. Charles Platt mentions Brian W. Aldiss’s response to his review in New Worlds for Old, 1965-1970 in Relapse #20 (Autumn 2012), available here:

Times with Brian Aldiss were easier, because Brian was always so pleasant and full of enthusiasm. It didn’t start out that way, though. I had written a nasty review of his novel EARTHWORKS, for my little fanzine Tomorrowscope, which I maintained purely as an excuse to beg free copies of books from publishers. Brian is not the kind of writer who forgets a nasty review.
At the next science fiction convention, he and [?] responded to my critique by seizing me by the arms and hustling me into a wardrobe in Brian’s hotel room. Someone closed the door, and someone else then attempted to turn the wardrobe over on its face. I was drunk and barely aware of what was going on, and the revelers soon released me anyway. Having vented his grudge, Brian became a convivial companion. I never quite figured out why he was so friendly toward me, especially since I was incapable of participating in any wide-ranging conversations about books. But somehow I always felt comfortable with him and with Jimmy [Ballard], even while I was intimidated by their talent.  p. 12-13

Platt’s article gives a very gossipy account of what went on behind the scenes at New Worlds during this period. It is engrossing, amusing, and highly recommended.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #150, May 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #33 (June 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Time Trap • reprint novelette by Charles L. Harness ∗∗∗∗
The Small Betraying Detail • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
Nobody Axed You • novelette by John Brunner
Prisoner of the Coral Deep • reprint short story by J. G. Ballard
Alfred’s Ark • short story by Jack Vance
The Life Buyer (Part 2 of 3) • serial by E. C. Tubb

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert Fuqua [as by Joe Tillotson]
Interior artwork • by James Cawthorn
The British Contributors
Long Shadows • editorial by John Carnell
Story Ratings NWSF 148
Recommended Paperbacks • by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
The Contributors

_____________________

This is a special/all-star issue to celebrate the magazine’s 150th appearance and it leads off with, surprisingly enough, a reprint from the August 1948 issue of Astounding: Time Trap by Charles L. Harness. This is not exactly the kind of story that you would expect to see in the magazine that was in the process of becoming the bleeding edge of the ‘New Wave’. However, Moorcock obviously had a soft spot for Harness’s work—he not only ran this impressive debut piece but would later reprint another story, and was instrumental in bringing out the book edition of a (forgotten) novella The Rose.2
It begins with a typical pulp hook:

General Blade sometimes felt that leading a resistance movement was far exceeding his debt to decent society and that one day soon he would allow his peaceful nature to override his indignant pursuit of justice. Killing a man, even a very bad man, without a trial, went against his grain. He sighed and rapped on the table.
“As a result of Blogshak’s misappropriation of funds voted to fight the epidemic,” he announced, “the death toll this morning reached over one hundred thousand. Does the Assassination Subcommittee have a recommendation?”  p. 5-6

This ‘Weapon Shops’ like tribunal (not the only similarity with van Vogt’s work) introduces us to two key characters: the first is a mysterious man called Poole (he has a rose-bud in his lapel, which will prove significant later), one of the assassination operation planners; the second is Major Troy, who objects to Poole’s presence in the team as too little is known about the man. Even though Poole can’t be telepathically probed, and there are gaps in his personal history, etc., the board confirm his suitability.
After this decision Troy telepaths his wife Ann, a seeress of sorts who is at the meeting, and she tells him that Poole will ensure he draws the red ball from the bowl during the selection procedure for the assassination attempt. Troy and Ann will be the ones who kill Blogshak.
The story then leaps forward in time: the pair have been arrested and imprisoned after Blogshak’s killing, and two guards are talking outside the couple’s cell:

“Just ’path that!” whispered the jail warden reverently to the night custodian.
“You know I can’t telepath,” said the latter grumpily.
“What are they saying?”
“Not a word all night. They seem to be taking a symposium of the best piano concertos since maybe the twentieth century. Was Chopin twentieth or twenty-first? Anyhow, they’re up to the twenty-third now, with Darnoval. Troy reproduces the orchestra and his wife does the piano. You’d think she had fifty years to live instead of five minutes.”  p. 9

Later, Ann is taken away to be “devitalised”, and the story becomes an extended courtroom drama as Troy faces his trial (the fact that his wife is tried and punished before him is somewhat unconvincing). Poole, now Troy’s lawyer, essentially admits his client’s culpability in the assassination but gets him off on a technicality at the end. When the judge dismisses the charges, and the pair leave the court, they are met by a car with the assassinated Provinarch inside it—alive and well. . . .
The group go to an underground location where, surprisingly, Troy finds Ann alive too, but unconscious. On Poole’s orders, she is then injected with a lethal substance and Troy is told that whether she continues to live is up to him. Poole forestalls Troy’s questions with a dramatic demonstration:

“Major, what you are about to learn can best be demonstrated rather than described. Sharg, the rabbit!”
The beetle-browed man opened a large enamel pan on the table. A white rabbit eased its way out, wrinkling its nose gingerly. Sharg lifted a cleaver from the table. There was a flash of metal, a spurt of blood, and the rabbit’s head fell to the floor. Sharg picked it up by the ears and held it up expectantly. The eyes were glazed almost shut. The rabbit’s body lay limp in the pan. At a word from Poole, Sharg carefully replaced the severed head, pressing it gently to the bloody neck stub. Within seconds the nose twitched, the eyes blinked, and the ears perked up. The animal shook itself vigorously, scratched once or twice at the bloody ring around its neck, then began nibbling at a head of lettuce in the pan.  p. 18

Poole then tells Troy that, in his presence, “life, even highly organized life, is resistant to death”. Further, Troy will be kept prisoner to prevent “It . . . from dying during an approaching crisis in its life stream”. Poole gives no clues as to what “It” is.
The rest of the story sprawls out from this point: there is a bomb in Ann’s head that will go off if the couple touch; the pair exchange telepathic messages coded in the notes and frequencies of a last concerto they ‘listened’ to; Troy finds a secret message from Poole in his wife’s ESP lobe explaining that “It” is a malevolent alien entity that has been on Earth since the pre-Cambian, and which feeds off of humanity by draining its vitality:

“Jon Troy, the evil this entity has wreaked upon the earth, entirely through his human agents thus far, is incalculable. It will grow even worse. You thought a sub-electronic virus caused the hundred thousand deaths which launched you on your assassination junket. Not so! The monster in the earth directly beneath you simply drained them of vital force, in their homes, on the street, in the theatre, anywhere and everywhere. Your puny League has been fighting the Outcast for a generation without the faintest conception of the real enemy.”  p. 22

At this point the story then switches styles again, and becomes an extended cell biology lecture which culminates in a short burst of handwavium about how Troy’s aura works, and that it is produced by a duct in his body. He later locates this and learns how to control it.
When an opportunity to escape presents itself the couple flee, and end up on the roof of the skyscraper above the underground cell they were held captive in. They look out over a deserted, dead world. “It”starts talking to the couple through a rose on Troy’s lapel that is similar to the one Poole was wearing:

Troy suppressed an impulse of revulsion. Instead of tearing the flower from his coat, he pulled it out gently and held it at arm’s length, where he could watch the petals join and part again, in perfect mimicry of the human mouth.
“Yes, little man, I am what you call the Outcast. There are no other little men to bring my message to you, so I take this means of—”
“You mean you devitalized every man, woman, and child in the province . . . in the whole world?” croaked Troy.
“Yes. Within the past few months, my appetite has been astonishingly good, and I have succeeded in storing within my neurals enough vital fluid to carry me into the next sterechron. There I can do the same, and continue my journey. There’s an excellent little planet waiting for me, just bursting with genial bipedal life. I can almost feel their vital fluid within me, now. And I’m taking you along, of course, in case I meet some . . . old friends. We’ll leave now.”  p. 33-34

Ann then tells Troy that his aura works by using reverse time-flow, and that if he closes his duct he will go back in time, where he can prepare a plan to fight the Outcast. She also tells him what his connection with Poole is before jumping off the skyscraper to her death.
As if Harness hasn’t already crammed enough into the story by this point, it now becomes a time-loop story (the “Time Trap” of the title) until, that is, the standing wave produced by this temporal anomaly attracts the attention of another alien called Mai-kel, “The Great One”, who summons his fellow creatures. . . .
Reduced to its constituent parts this story may seem rather kitchen sink and/or ridiculous and/or uneven. It is all those things in different places—but it all hangs together, and it is a massively impressive first story that out-van Vogts van Vogt. It still holds up today and, overall, is very good.
I note in passing the rose and classical music references that would be repeated to a greater extent in Harness’s novella The Rose.
The Small Betraying Detail by Brian W. Aldiss starts with a man on his way to a TB sanatorium who is taken on a detour by his two companions to Grimmer’s Graves, an area of Neolithic flint mines. When they go underground the narrator, afflicted with mild hallucinations, has even stranger thoughts:

Strange irrelevancies bubbled through my mind; Sir Alister Hardy’s theory that man had become, for a while in his early career, an aquatic creature living mostly in the sea returned to my mind, possibly because we were only a few miles from the coast that was our destination. To support his theory was the comparative hairlessness of man, as against the hairiness of the other primates.
Suppose, I thought, there was truth in Walter’s absurd hypothesis about there being other, similar phases in the total universe, or however he expressed it? Then might there not exist an earth on which man was as he is now—yet totally alien, man without aquatic ancestry, man with no love of the sea, man with hair . . .  p. 43

After this he collapses, and comes round to find his companions bundling him into the car to take him to the sanatorium. During the journey he thinks he can see fine hair on their faces, but later realises it is a trick of the light. The rest of the trip is punctuated by these mild hallucinations, thoughts of a possible altered reality, and the “small betraying detail” that would reveal itself in such a situation.
When they finally reach the coast we find, in something of an anticlimax (spoiler), that the people sitting on the beach have their chairs facing the land. . . .
Despite the story’s unlikely theory and ending, the narrative has an engrossing fever dream quality which is quite well done. Minor but good.

The other standout story in this issue is a masterful black comedy by John Brunner, Nobody Axed You. This is another story with a good hook:

I felt so detached and critical it was almost as though I were watching someone else chopping open Denise’s head. That was a knack I’d acquired through long experience. Detached or not, though, I felt elated. This was good! This was the most wonderful thing I’d ever done!
I could feel the hot, sweat-slippery handle of the hatchet threatening to slip from my grasp as I swung it again and again. I could feel the slimy stickiness of blood on my hands. It sprayed all over my shirt and jacket and made the synfab stick to my chest. I could smell its sickly scent.
Fabulous!
She was dead, there could be no doubt. Probably the first swing of the hatchet would have been enough. But I had to make sure. Then the next step would be to dismember her and put her in the disposal tube before anyone came in—  p. 49

We quickly discover that the narrator, Gene Gardener, is making a TV program, one of many that he has made to encourage copycat murders in his overpopulated world. The “DOA” rating for the show—the number of similar murders in the forty-eight hours after transmission—is the subject of a contentious after show meeting with his boss. Once the meeting is over, Gene leaves to go home and, during his car journey to pick up his wife (cars are a luxury available only to a few), we get a glimpse of the overpopulated world outside:

At first we got along quite quickly, the speedo hitting as high as 12 m.p.h. Then at the usual jam around Plane and Tenth we slowed to a crawl. On the packed sidewalk someone noticed that the seat beside me was empty. He came over and rapped on the window. Of course, I couldn’t hear what he said, the car being soundproof, but other people could—other loafers idling around on the sidewalk. Within a few seconds a fair crowd had gathered: nine hundred to a thousand, I judged.
I could tell from their contorted faces that they were being worked up to a fever pitch by the man who had started the trouble. [. . .]
There was no real call to worry, I was sure. Once the crowd began to interfere with traffic, the police would show in seconds. Which they did. A few bursts from an automatic weapon put the pedestrians back where they belonged, apart from about half a dozen who got trampled in the rush, and the original troublemaker who stood his ground obstinately, yelling at the police and pointing at me.
I rolled down the window as an officer approached. He recognised me, naturally, and as soon as I’d explained that the seat was empty because I was picking up Denise, he apologised, shot the troublemaker and got back aboard his copter.
So in spite of the fuss I was only a few minutes late at my rendezvous with Denise. I had no idea where she’d been all day—shopping, perhaps; she could afford to shop occasionally now, and I wasn’t going to rest till she could do it at least once a week.  p. 57

Denise then tells Gene the news around which the rest of the story will pivot: she is pregnant. Gene is not impressed and loses his temper with her. Doesn’t she know how this will affect the show’s ratings? Doesn’t she care about the purpose his show serves?
At home a chilly atmosphere between the couple persists, and Gardener’s mood is not improved when he watches an up-and-coming competitor’s show that evening:

The main character was a janitor living in what used to be the elevator car of a big apartment building. He was presented as a socially well adjusted type. One of the fifty-odd people living on the twelfth floor was a pretty girl he’d fallen for. But because he was afraid he might lose control of himself if he struck up an acquaintance with her, and maybe get her in private and run the risk of increasing the already unbearable population-density in the block, he’d never even spoken to her.
Then a heel living on the floor below this girl started to hang around her, and the janitor was appalled to find that she—whom he’d pictured to himself as decently frigid—was letting him make time with her. He brooded and kept watch till he was sure beyond doubt. Then, heavy-hearted, he went into action.
On the landing at the foot of the stairway between the twelfth floor, where the girl lived, and the eleventh, where the heel lived, was a man-high window coming almost to the floor, which used to give on the fire escape before it was taken away under the municipal ordinance a few years back. He freed the catch on this window and oiled the hinges so it swung easily. Then he got some grease and smeared it all over the stairs.
The gimmick, naturally, was that when the heel came back to his own floor after being with the girl, he’d slip and go straight out the window to smash on the sidewalk eleven floors below. Ingenious. And the shots of the stairway were very atmospheric. Then there was a good comic sequence as the janitor waited to see his rival come out—only just about everyone else on the twelfth floor beat him to it: a gang of kids, then a fat woman with a huge ration-bag indicating a big family, then a couple of men a few moments apart. And the way the camera caught the look on the janitor’s face as he patiently pulled the window to after each failure and slopped more grease on the stairs was as fine a job as I’d seen in years.  p. 61-62

After a short argument with Denise, Gardener returns to watch the climax of the show:

The girl and the heel emerged from the girl’s room together, arms around each other, smiling, and duly lost their footing on the greasy stairs. Together they went diving through the window, the heel revealing his true nature as he tried to save himself at the girl’s expense. Cut to the janitor’s ludicrous expression as he realised his plan had worked too well.
So that left him to get his comeuppance. It came as he leaned out to pull the window closed; he leaned too far, over-balanced—and over a last shot of the swinging window the credits came up.  p. 63

The rest of Gardener and Denise’s story involves a plot that has: (a) Gardener enduring a turbulent sponsors meeting (the monopoly producer, government man and religious leader argue about using sterilizing drugs to control the population) before he pitches a show about a wealthy man who collects guns discovering his wife is pregnant; (b) an emotional Denise being pressured into a termination; (c) life-like mannequins.
I think you will be able to guess the plot outcome.
What is particularly impressive is how slickly Brunner manages to get there and add a second climax that I didn’t see coming but which is entirely consistent with the logic of the story.
This is an amusing and well constructed piece that manages to pack a lot into its length (even the narrator’s name—Gene Gardener—works for the story), and is a match for the best of Robert Sheckley’s work.
Prisoner of the Coral Deep by J. G. Ballard (Argosy (UK), March 1964) starts with a man finding a fossil shell on the beach after a storm. He is then surprised by a woman who has been watching him, and starts talking to her about the shell:

I weighed it in one hand. “Impressive, isn’t it? A fossil snail—far older than this limestone, you know. I’ll probably give it to my wife, though it should go to the Natural History Museum.”
“Why not leave it on the beach where it belongs?” she said. “The sea is its home.”
“Not this sea,” I rejoined. “The Cambrian oceans where this snail swam vanished millions of years ago.” I detached a thread of fucus clinging to one of the spurs and let it fall away on the air. “I’m not sure why, but fossils fascinate me—they’re like time capsules; if only one could unwind this spiral it would probably play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it’s ever seen—the great oceans of the Carboniferous, the warm shallow seas of the Trias—”
“Would you like to go back to them?” There was a note of curiosity in her voice, as if my comments had intrigued her. “Would you prefer them to this time?”  p. 84

The woman then asks if he can hear the sea. The man lifts the shell and starts hearing noises from millions of years in the past: “the growling of gigantic saurians, the cries of reptile birds”, etc. After some more of this (spoiler) he finally hears a man calling for help. It materialises that the man is from the future but is trapped in the past, and the shell is his distress message. When the woman approaches the narrator and tells him it is time to go, he throws the shell into the sea, and she disappears. This is a rather perplexing and unsatisfying ending: was the woman trying to recover the shell so the man in the past could never be rescued? Was she the one who imprisoned him?
Alfred’s Ark by Jack Vance starts in a newspaper office where one of the locals is telling the editor that another biblical flood is coming:

 “Six thousand years ago the world was like it is today—full of sin. You remember what happened?”
“Off-hand, no.”
“The Lord sent a great flood. He washed the world clean of wickedness. Ben, there’s going to be another flood.”
“Now Alfred,” said Ben briskly, “are you pulling my leg?”
“No, sir. You study your Bible, you’ll see for yourself. The day is coming and it’s coming soon! “
Ben rearranged the papers on his desk. “I suppose you want me to print big headlines about this flood?”
Alfred hitched himself forward, struck the desk earnestly with his fist. “Here’s my plan, Ben. I want the good citizens of this town to get together. I want us to build a big ark, to put aboard two beasts of every kind, plenty food and drink, a selection of good literature, and make ourselves ready. Don’t laugh at me, Ben. It’s coming.”
“Just when is the big day?”
“June 20th. That gives us less than a year. Not much time, but enough.”  p. 89-90

The editor declines to print the story, and Alfred goes home and starts building an ark.
When the rains start on the 20th of June, Arthur, having been disbelieved by everyone, then has people wanting to come aboard, and things turn ugly. . . .
The last paragraph (spoiler) changes this back to a mainstream story. The townspeople forcibly board the vessel and eject Alfred into the muddy water below. Then the rain stops, and they are all left staring at each other—presumably reflecting on how thin is the veneer of civilization.

The Life Buyer by E. C. Tubb begins its second instalment with more world-building grimness:

The place had a gymnasium smell. A row of showers stood to one side, the stalls open. The paint was dark with age, the ceiling black with smoke, the faded prints on the walls mottled and stained.
Two men faced each other in the ring. They were naked aside from shorts and held practice knives in their hands. A third stood before a training device parrying the random slashes of a steel whip with a short bar of lead. Others went through routine exercises designed to speed reflexes and toughen muscle. The place was a normal appendage to the Free Circuit, duplicated a dozen times in the city, the hang-out of those with their eyes on the Mecca of the big time.
A man leaned against a wall and watched the fighters in the ring. They were scarred with the cicatrices of old wounds, white beneath the raw weals of recent training. The practice knives they held were edged with acid-soaked sponge.  p. 96

The plot develops: Linda Sheldon appears to be the supplier of the altered krowns (the head worn devices that can control other people if illegally modified); King chairs a business meeting where he regurgitates chunks of the Financial Times (presumably the author’s idea of what is involved in running a company) before meeting Ransom (boyfriend of the wife of the krown-wearing pilot who tried to kill King); he tells Ransom he wants him to take over Sheil’s job (he is the one who died in the hotel wearing a krown), and Ransom accepts before going to a krown joint and whips a surrogate that looks like King.
I think the plot might end up having something to do with these krown things.
The final chapter in this instalment has Markham and Steve called in by a security boss: he tells them that Shiel was working on King’s quest for immortality. Shiel had been searching through records for long-lived people and had found someone, but did not leave a note of the name.
As I said last issue, competent but rather wooden and uninvolving.

The Cover by Robert Fuqua (ISFDB doesn’t give any source for the credit) is rather meh—why wouldn’t you go for warmer, cheerier colours? There is only one (good) piece of Interior artwork by James Cawthorn.

On the inside front cover, rather than the usual blank space, there is The British Contributors—someone has got the box brownie out of the cupboard and photographed several of the contributors. They all look in the prime of life, so it is a bit sad to realise that only Moorcock and Jones are still left among us.
Long Shadows is a guest editorial by John Carnell where he briefly recaps the magazine’s history:

The magazine’s very existence is inextricably entwined with the history of British science fiction, its record an impressive one of endeavour, experimentation and achievement, of battles with distribution, rising costs, contemporary opposition and the constant cycle of replenishing the gaps left by authors who graduated to other markets. Six times the magazine has changed printers; four times size; three times publishers and once editors. It was originally an irregular publication, then bi-monthly, monthly, again
bi-monthly and now back to monthly, yet during all these upheavals and changing patterns, the one primary object by everyone concerned in its presentation has been high quality science fiction and first-class entertainment value.  p. 2-3

He then notes that writers who have worked in the field do financially better over the long-term than general writers, and finishes by looking to the future.
It’s the same kind of general, anodyne thing he does in the introductions for New Writings in SF (this is an observation as much as a criticism).
Story Ratings NWSF 148 was discussed in that issue.3
Recommended Paperbacks by Michael Moorcock is a very short book column (two-thirds of a page) covering two items, both of which sound interesting:

We sf readers are rather prone to getting interested in crackpot pseudo-sciences—Scientology, General Semantics, The Dean Drive, and so on. Although the old image of the SF fan gazing skywards looking for Flying Saucers seems to have been smashed for good and all, the fact remains that, let’s face it, many of us are gullible. That’s why every SF reader should get himself a copy of Mr. Gardner’s gripping—and it’s impossible to put down—new edition of Fads and Fallacies [Dover Books]. With good humour and wit—not to mention logic and seriousness—he demolishes a vast range of pseudosciences from Scientology to Dr W. H. “Throw Away Your Glasses” Bates whose work had me fooled until I read this book. It also had Aldous Huxley fooled, so I feel in good company.  p. 48

The other book is a collection of articles, The World in 1984 edited by Nigel Calder (Pelican Books): I wonder how much they got right?
The Contributors is a page or so of short biographical information about the writers featured in this issue, and it fills the spaces at the end of the Ballard and Vance stories.

A pretty good issue, and well worth getting.  ●

_____________________

1. In Graham Hall’s review in Vector #33 (June 1965) he says “With a line-up of Brian Aldiss, Jack Vance, E C Tubb, Charles Harness, John Brunner and J G Ballard one cannot but expect first-class material. But if you do expect this, you’re likely to be disappointed.” He was as surprised as me to see Harness’s story as the lead, and adds that it is “written in good old pulp style with cardboard characters, great gimmicks and long explanations of complicated science processes”.
One of the best stories in the issue “comes, as was to be expected, from the pen of Brian Aldiss”. He adds that “for once, his technique is good enough to put over his ideas well.”
Brunner’s story is “memorable”.
Of the Ballard he says, “I guess I am biased when it comes to Ballard—I just don’t like his writing  in the main—but consider that I can, normally, detach myself sufficiently to appreciate his imagery. Even this is lacking in Prisoner of the Coral Deep.”
Vance’s story is “a delight to read.”
Tubb’s serial “moves along at a rapid rate, his characters merging in their puerile way into an indistinguishable mess—forget the names and you’re lost. But there are space-opera fans and this is for them. A disappointment.”
He briefly mentions the non-fiction before concluding, “Of course it’s better than the average issue, but it does help to prove that ‘names’ don’t always write that much better.”

2. The second Harness story reprinted by Moorcock was Stalemate in Space from the Summer 1949 issue of Planet Stories (reprinted as Stalemate in Time over a year later in New Worlds #165, August 1966). The Rose, Harness’s long novella from Authentic #31 (March 1953), appeared in an eponymous volume (alongside two other stories) from Compact Books in 1966.
My review of The Rose is here.

3. The ratings for this issue appeared in #152:

How the Tubb serial beat the Aldiss or Vance, never mind the Brunner, I do not know. At least the readers got it right with the Harness novelette.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #149, April 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #31 (March 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Life Buyer (Part 1 of 3) • serial by E. C. Tubb ∗∗
The Changing Shape of Charlie Snuff • short story by R. W. Mackelworth
In One Sad Day • short story by George Collyn –
Death of an Earthman • short story by George Locke [as by Gordon Walters]
Third Party • short story by Dan Morgan
What Next? • novelette by Edward Mackin –
The Flowers of the Valley • short story by Keith Roberts
Reactionary • short story by Barrington J. Bayley [as by P. F. Woods]

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert Fuqua [as by Joe Tillotson]
Interior artwork • by Arthur Thomson, Maeve Gilmore (?)
Broadening the Scope • editorial
Microcosms and Macrocosms • book reviews by Langdon Jones
Story Ratings 147
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

The first part of The Life Buyer by E. C. Tubb has a decent hook to start the serial:

Marcus Edward King, eighty-seven years old, rich as Croesus, devoid of faith, sat up in bed and screamed into the darkness.
“No!”
Glass crashed as he fumbled at a bedside table, water gurgling, phials rattling, a book thudding softly to the floor. A button sank beneath a searching finger and soft rose-light flooded the room.
“No!”
The light brightened, comforting him with the revelation of familiar things; the statuette carved from Luna stone, the snowflake from Mars, the flask of turgid slime from the ebon depths of Venus. Trapped in a block of waterclear plastic an insect-thing from Ganymede stared at him with blind, iridescent eyes, wings a shimmering skein of colour. A solar clock rested diamond glitters on the hour of four.
“No,” he said for the third time. “Damn it, no!”  p. 4

His guard is quick to appear, and is quickly dismissed. King goes into the toilet:

A wall-mirror reflected his image for critical inspection.
He bared his teeth at what he saw.
The teeth were natural growths; fresh buds transplanted into his gums from the jaws of a child at a basic cost of five thousand to the mother. The hair was growing from the scalp of a twenty-year-old man who had sold it for three thousand and a dozen wigs. The heart had cost much more; bought from a spacefield worker cursed with cancerous lungs, a sense of responsibility and a beautiful young wife. The stomach had been relatively cheap, the kidneys had come from a voluntary donor, the varicosed veins which had once mottled his legs had been replaced by plastic surrogates.
For its age it was a good body. It had cost him over a quarter of a million.  p. 6

King’s psychologist is waiting for him when he gets out of the shower, and we find out that the former was dreaming about the death of his father (which he had a hand in) just before he woke. The pair talk for a while and then the psychologist leaves, leaving King to watch an aircraft flying on a collision course towards his tower block. King narrowly escapes before the crash.
The next chapter cuts to Dale Markham, a police detective, and Steve Delamonte, a security official, at the scene of the crash/assassination attempt. They discover the pilot was wearing an explosive “krown”, and we learn later that King’s company produces this headwear, which is used for inducing emotion, or sleep, in the wearer. If they are illegally modified and paired with another device, it can be used in master-slave mode. These krowns are the plot-device that drives what is essentially a detective story from this point on.
The rest of this instalment has Delamonte (referred to throughout, puzzlingly, as “Steve”, where Markham is called “Markham”) investigate various leads, culminating in the discovery of the body of a hotel security official. He, unknown to Steve Delamonte, was trying to blackmail King’s organisation after the death of a krown user at his hotel.
There is also one further chapter with King in his hideout, where we learn his research scientists are developing krowns which can receive a broadcast signal from a central source.
Although this is all readable enough, and (as I’ve said) has a good first chapter, it is quite difficult to engage with this story: the characters are little more than ciphers, the future is standard dystopia-lite, and the central conceit of the krown is too obviously just a hardware gimmick thrown in to drive the plot. The overall impression is one of a competent and professional writer going through the motions. As I said last issue: I wish Moorcock had managed to serialise Ballard’s The Drought instead.
The Changing Shape of Charlie Snuff by R. W. Mackelworth is about an alien that is forced to take the form wished upon it by other creatures. At the beginning of the story it has the appearance of a movie star and is lodging with a young woman. Matters are complicated when the alien senses a potentially lethal visitor—a scientist who was previously involved in bomb making, but never made the perfect bomb. . . .
For the most part I didn’t like this story: it takes too long to get going, has an unlikely concept, and suffers from some odd phrasing:

A last, desperate buzz on the bell was accompanied by a devastating insight into the very eye of the storm which had propelled the scientist to his door.  p. 44-45

The hopeful question hovered between them like a sparrow hawk over a mouse or a pregnant accident looking for somewhere to happen.  p. 52

Despite these irritations it has a final scene that is quite good, and which involves (spoiler) both the scientist and the alien getting their wish (returning home in the latter’s case).
In One Sad Day by George Collyn is his third story for the magazine but, judging by the quality, it reads like a first submission or sale. It takes place on a future twilight Earth and involves a man:

A naked, matchstick figure with arms and legs atrophied through non-use and a cranium over-developed because it had no activity save cerebration. It bore a body as unrecognisable to us, its ancestors, as would we be to the first amoeba to creep from the sea but it had the rough configuration which branded it as human and the organs which classified him male.  p. 54

After sitting about and thinking for a while he receives a female visitor (he was previously unaware that any other humans survived on Earth). They talk for a time before getting it on, or as the story explains:

Untold ages of mutation had made the bodies of this latter-day male and female mutually inconvenient for juxtaposition but in some way under that dying sun the last man and the last woman made ready to commit the act of love.  p. 57

Sadly (spoiler), the shock of orgasm is too much for their weakened bodies and they both die.
This is simultaneously both portentous and ridiculous, and should have been left in the slush pile.

Death of an Earthman by George Locke gets off to a slightly confusing start with an autobiographical data-dump from the narrator about his work as a “trace assessor” amongst aliens (a crime scene investigator, basically). Then, during his four months’ compulsory leave he is on a spaceship, The Seas of Deimos, when someone strangles the co-pilot, Harold Anderson. Also on the ship is Paul Gerrare, a former captain of the ship who lost his arms, and command, in a previous accident. Before Anderson’s death, we learn of the ill-feeling between Anderson and Gerrare during an unusual poker dice game where the co-pilot throws five aces several times in succession. . . .
The narrator examines the corpse and the cabin. Eventually, after discounting other leads, he focuses on Gerrare, despite the fact he has no arms to commit such a crime.
When the captain later falls ill, and there is no one able to pilot the ship through the asteroid belt, the narrator (spoiler) tricks Gerrare into using his telekinetic “ghost” arms to steer the ship to safety.
This isn’t entirely convincing, but this is a considerably better written story than usual—the author keeps your attention despite a pretty obvious ending.
Third Party by Dan Morgan is set in the near-future and starts with a population explosion infodump:

The World Council decided the only answer lay in a compulsory re-introduction of the outmoded social custom of monogamous marriage.
[. . .]
All marriages were under the strictest supervision at all stages, and only those which offered eugenically favourable environments were allowed to become fruitful.
[. . .]
MID [Marriage Integration Department] introduced a number of measures to improve the viability of marriage as an institution; including compulsory sterilisation as a penalty for adultery.  p. 79

The story itself starts with Harry, a father whose marriage is on the rocks, at the park with his son. While sitting on a bench and reflecting on his troubled relationship, he argues with a woman who sits nearby when her Modog (a modified dog that can talk) misbehaves and she blames Harry’s son. Harry tells her if she was fit to have children of her own then she wouldn’t be making a fool of herself over the dog.
This comment (spoiler) comes back to haunt Harry when he and his wife go for their compulsory counselling. Not only are they not permitted to patch up their relationship themselves, but Harry is refused re-conditioning, and their son is taken into care. The final scene has his reconditioned wife arriving home with a Modog. . . .
This is not only unconvincing but it is also difficult to feel any sympathy for the ill-tempered, stubborn, and over-emotional Harry. It struck me that this would have worked better if he had been a likeable but flawed character.

What Next? by Edward Mackin is another one of his ‘Hek Belov’ stories. I’m beginning to wonder if these all have the same plot: a skint Belov takes a dodgy job that involves him using his cybernetic skills to build a gadget; the gangster or millionaire funding the work turns up and throws his weight around; the machine that Belov creates has an unintended side-effect; Belov exits stage right and falls out with Emilio, the restaurant owner he owes money too.
This one broadly fits that template and starts with Belov meeting a man called Jonas Pinquil, who tells him that he was given Belov’s name by a third-party called Meerschraft. Belov eventually agrees to the job and is soon on his own with Meerschraft, where he learns about the job the client wants done:

[Meerschraft’s] face sagged, and he looked at me in a lugubrious fashion. “I don’t quite know what I’ve got myself into,” he said; “but to put it in a nutshell I thought he was just that, or what goes into it. A genuine, old-fashioned nut with oodles of dough, and completely harmless.”
“He’s not, of course?”
Meerschraft sighed, and pulled open a drawer. “He’s got some plans in here that he says he drew from memory. The originals were destroyed in a fire.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I commented.
“The Great Fire of London?”
“Is that what he says?”
Meerschraft nodded. “It may also interest you to know that he spent some centuries in a tree. You’ll appreciate I’m only roughing it out for you, of course. He goes into detail. I mentioned Merlin just to humour him. He said that Merlin was a distant cousin of his, and that they both came from the same planet, which appears to be slightly to the left of Andromeda, give or take a light year. To cut a long story short he wants to get back there, and the only way is by building a transmatter.” He nodded towards the platform contrivance. “His own transmatter went the same way as the plans.”  p. 95

There then follows the usual nonsense mentioned above, i.e. Hek Belov wires up various bits of cybernetic equipment, then a belligerent millionaire Grosmith shows up to check on the results of the project he is funding. During an argument the latter steps on the platform of the device and is left in a dazed, luminescent state.
There is some handwavium about why this happened but it scarcely matters as (spoiler) Grosmith was never really there: he was a video projection/hologram of a disguised TV presenter called McQuail who is doing a ‘Candid Camera’ type show, and nothing really happened to him. Of course, when this is revealed, Meerschraft steps on the transmatter platform and we find it really works. Belov has to recover him.
Another of the problems with these stories is that they leave little if any coherent memory of what they are about after you finish reading them (it took some effort to reconstruct a synopsis from my notes, written all of two days ago). All froth, no substance.

The Flowers of the Valley by Keith Roberts is set in the near future and has a man taking endless amounts of flowers home to his mentally ill partner. He later uses his influence with the “Director” to take her to see “Mother Nature”, a huge indoor plant factory:

The scent came first, growing from a faint suggestion to a rich, heady perfume that filled the great hall. We waited in silence while the emanation from the millions of blooms below became stronger and stronger; then, with dramatic suddenness, the throats of the delivery chutes were crammed with jostling masses of green flecked over with scarlet and pink, white and violet, blue, yellow and orange; peacock Niagaras that burst from the tunnels to flow in sparkling masses down to the waiting Transports, there to spill in heaps round their wheels. Bluebells and hyacinths, roses and coltsfoot and shy, creeping vetches; early blossoms of apple and pear and plum; all the flowers of all the months ahead in one titanic, unbelievable mass!
They say that in the old times plants actually grew. Grew, with their roots in the stinking, worm-ridden ground, swelling like little green vampires on water and salt and air. And, horror of horrors, in those days before Unifood had laid their continental mains, men actually grabbed the plants, fruit, seeds, everything, and ate them! That was before we built the Roof, when the rain could still fall on a man and soak him. What savages we must have been! I remembered the old stories and was grateful while I stood and watched Mother Nature, the greatest plant factory of them all, making Spring for the homes and gardens of half the world.  p. 119

His partner remains catatonic, of course, but sings under her breath a song that has the line “O there was a woman and she was a widow . . . .” I didn’t see how this ties in to the story (the line is at the start of the piece as well).
This anti-progress message was a recurring, if infrequent, theme in Roberts’ work.

Reactionary by Barrington J. Bayley has an alien scientist at a science society meal noticing that one of his inventor colleagues is impatient to reveal a surprise. After a short set-up conversation/lecture about the law of action and reaction (the “Postulate of the Dynamic Whole” as the aliens would say), the inventor unveils his device:

Silence fell as the guests gathered round it. Quonquo had evidently prepared everything beforehand. On the table stood a large spring balance, its pan holding a bizarre-looking engine comprising a number of fat elliptical rotors and a few cams and drive belts jammed together in a very complicated arrangement. The whole contraption was surrounded by a metal framework.  p. 123

This device (seemingly similar to the Hieronymus Machines that Campbell was writing about in Analog) rises off the pan without showing any downward force.
The story has a twist ending which shows how the Postulate is obeyed. . . .

There is a mediocre Cover for this issue by Robert Fuqua (the artist is not listed in the magazine, and ISFDB doesn’t list the source for the accreditation) and, once again, little in the way of Interior artwork. There is one illustration by Arthur Thomson and the other is probably by Maeve Gilmore (that illustration is uncredited but is similar to previous work by her). I don’t know if the text/illustration page order for the Tubb story is a mistake or intended. Reversing p. 4 & p. 5 would have looked better, and more conventional:

Broadening the Scope is another ‘manifesto’ editorial (by Moorcock, I presume) that states that the times are changing and so is SF. After referring to F&SF and its trail blazing, the writer says that New Worlds, while flattered by the comparison with that magazine, is doing its own thing. It continues:

We would guess that Anthony Boucher, during his career as F&SF’s editor, had the problem which we have. This problem is—should we insist that a story, no matter what its basic theme, should be carried on a ‘standard’ SF vehicle, or should we allow the authors to choose their own vehicles and rely on the readers to see the essential SF-ness of the theme, even though a story may not seem at first sight SF of the sort we’re used to? Naturally we should appreciate hearing from readers on this score. Should we reject an outstanding story simply because the treatment is not evidently an SF treatment? And, it follows, should we take poorer material just because the treatment is evidently SF? We think not, but we should like to hear readers’ opinions.
If the field is to stay fresh and entertain on as many levels as possible, then it must broaden its scope. Therefore while our motto won’t exactly be ‘Anything Goes!’, we should very much like it to be ‘Almost Anything Goes!’.  p. 2-3

I think this is a straw man argument given Carnell was publishing work like J. G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach years before (albeit with some encouragement).
There are a couple of house-keeping matters mentioned after this: Ken Slater (the well-known bookseller) has an order for SF Horizons with money but no address, and there is an editorial plug for next month’s special issue, #150 (there are a couple more fillers advertising this throughout the magazine).
Microcosms and Macrocosms by Langdon Jones begins with this:

In recent years one of the main evolutions of SF has been a certain change of emphasis. Science-fiction has been tending to spread outwards into super-galactic vastness, or inwards into the void of the mind.  p. 125

He reviews books by Sellings (The Silent Speakers), Moorcock (The Sundered Worlds), and Matheson (A Stir of Echoes), before concluding with this:

We see too that the multiverse of Moorcock has much in common with the inner world of Sellings. These books both show that in science fiction, the macrocosm ultimately turns out to be identical to the microcosm. Inner space and outer space are in reality the same.  p. 126

I think I would have liked to hear a bit more detail supporting that. The Matheson book sounds promising though.
I commented on Story Ratings 147 when I reviewed that issue.2
Letters to the Editor has only one letter, and it is split over p. 127, p. 53, and p. 57, which makes the magazine look untidy.
The letter itself is a long and interesting one by Dr Malcolm Burgess replying to points made in an earlier editorial about the difference in function between a magazine and anthology:

As has often been stated, SF, more than any other field, depends on its magazines for finding and encouraging fresh talent and publishing it so that future anthologists can have a wide selection of material from which to choose—and without the magazines we should have far, far fewer hardcover books and paperbacks—whether of short stories or of novels. The highest proportion of material finding its way into book-form had its origin in the magazines. I can think of many books we should very likely not have had if it wasn’t for the magazines—A Canticle For Leibowitz, More Than Human, The Stars My Destination, A Case of Conscience, The Drowned World and virtually all of the early Bradbury collections. The fact that a double-market exists for SF must encourage many to write it who might otherwise have tried more lucrative fields or written nothing at all—John Wyndham, John Christopher, Arthur C. Clarke and others spring immediately to mind as writers of tremendous general appeal who made their first appearances in the SF magazines.

I think he has a point about writers like Bradbury, but I suspect those that were also novelists would just have concentrated on that form. He goes on:

But New Worlds SF goes further—it is a magazine in every way. Its editorials vary from reporting news of importance to the SF reader—new critical journals, conventions, meetings, clubs and so forth—to commenting on modern trends in SF and spurring readers and authors to a more sophisticated appreciation and approach to the field.
Its letter-columns give readers a chance to read the opinions of their fellow enthusiasts and give their own, forming a forum which many would otherwise never have. Its book reviews are extensive and seem to cover the whole British field, allowing us to keep our reading up to date—and your longer reviews, in spite of their sometimes impatient tone, are broadening the potential scope of the field and help to educate readers like myself into a more constructively critical approach to SF. All these ‘personal touches’ have, in my opinion, contributed to the success of the new New Worlds. I, and many of my friends, always turn to the features first. They are always lively, always controversial, always provide material for thought and discussion. This is just what a magazine can and should do.

I think Burgess puts his finger on the success and enduring popularity of Moorcock’s New Worlds here. Science Fantasy probably had fiction that was as good or better than New Worlds, but it had little or no non-fiction content aside from the odd editorial from Bonfiglioli.3
Burgess goes on to suggest an American book news/review column, and gives a hint that he is not keen on science fact articles, pointing to the availability of New Scientist, Discovery and The Scientific American magazines.
He sums up by saying that he thinks the fiction and editorial approach matches F&SF at its best.
Moorcock replies, in part:

You leave us a little breathless, Dr. Burgess, but it is always pleasant to see our efforts appreciated—though we aren’t standing still. We feel that having an enlightened and interested publisher has contributed more than anything else to any improvements you have found.  p. 58

He adds that they have persuaded Judith Merril to send them a regular column on the American scene.

A lacklustre issue.  ●

_____________________

1. In Graham Hall’s review in Vector #32 (April 1965), he says “that he has heard that this is the best of Moorcock’s [issues so far] and I’m almost agreed. It is certainly the most well-balanced.”
Despite this he found Tubb’s serial heavily padded, but adds “time will tell”. Collyn’s piece is “rather wistful . . . a queer piece indeed”, and ends with, “Oh my word, this is a saucy one!”
Hall goes on to say that recent stories have not been memorable, but that this does not apply to Death of an Earthman by Gordon Walters: “Gerrare, the armless ex-space-captain-turned-artist and his bitterness will long stay in my Hall of Fame.” Dan Morgan’s piece “doesn’t really stand out”, and Hall likens it to Joey is a Man by Robert Heinlein.
Mackin’s piece appears to be his favourite: “Hek Belov would stand out anywhere—even in the company of SF’s finest characterisations and Ed Mackin has him riding again in his irrepressible, irrelevant and irreverent vein”. Hall also rates the Keith Roberts story, saying that “The Flowers of the Valley shows once again that [he] is a first-rate writer.”
Bayley’s story is “a fine example how just one SF-ish idea can be woven into a fairly memorable story by an experienced writer.” Macklelworth’s story is “yet another of this spate of stories that apparently satirise their own theme [. . .] Apparently Moorcock rather likes these mild unfunny satires. I don’t.”
He concludes with, “Striking cover, adequate book reviews, fair editorial and it’s all over for another month.”

2. The story ratings for this issue appeared in #151:

With a couple of exceptions the stories are pretty much ranked in length order (a common outcome in various magazines’ readers’ ratings).

3. New Worlds’ legacy was also helped by enduring in one form or another for another thirty years. There is nothing like not being dead to improve peoples’ awareness of your existence.rssrss

New Worlds SF #148, March 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #31 (March 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
All the King’s Men • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ∗∗
Sunjammer • reprint novelette by Arthur C. Clarke
First Dawn • short story by Donald Malcolm
Dune Limbo • novel extract by J. G. Ballard —
Escape from Evening • novelette by Michael Moorcock
The Uncivil War • short story by Robert J. Tilley

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by Thomson, uncredited
Symbols for the Sixties • editorial
Voyage to the End of the Universe • film review by Alan Dodd
“That Is Not Oil, Madam. That Is Jellied Consomme” • book reviews by Langdon Jones
Story Ratings No. 146
Letters to the Editor
Amateur Magazines

_____________________

The fiction in this issue leads off with the first of two novelettes. All the King’s Men, by Barrington J. Bayley, takes place on a future Earth where Britain, Brazil and parts of Africa are controlled by alien invaders while the rest of the globe remains unaffected. The story is narrated by Smith, one of the alien King’s advisors, and tells of the events leading to a rebellion, the climax of which occurs in the Atlantic between the opposing alien-directed navies of Britain and Brazil.
The story is principally concerned with describing the intellectual and cultural differences between the aliens and humanity: one example of this is when a human delegation arrives at the court to petition the King for a reduction in the length of the working week (which is sixty hours due to preparations for the looming war). The King listens to their concerns and then deliberates:

He spent a little while in the throne room, peering through thresholds, no doubt, gazing at pools and wondering about the mountainous. Then he returned and offered the petitioners a concession of ten minutes off the working week. This was the greatest check he thought he could allow on his big industrial drive.
They argued angrily about it, until things grew out of hand and the King ordered me to dismiss them. I had to have it done forcibly. Any one of the alien courtiers could have managed it single-handed by mere show of the weapons on his person, but instead I called in a twenty-man human bodyguard, thinking that to be ejected by their own countrymen might reduce their sense of solidarity.
All the humans of the court exuded uneasiness. But they needn’t have worried. To judge by the King and his men, nothing might have happened. They held their positions with that same crystalline intelligence which they had carried through ten years of occupation. I was beginning to learn that this static appearance did not wholly result from unintelligibility, but that they actually maintained a constant internal state irrespective of external conditions. Because of this, they were unaware that the scene that had just been enacted comprised a minor climax. Living in a planar mentality, the very idea of climax was not apparent to them.  p. 15

There are several sections like this which are of interest but the story spends a lot of its time going nowhere, making it slightly dull at times.
Sunjammer by Arthur C. Clarke first appeared in Boy’s Life (March 1964), the magazine of the American Boy Scouts organisation, and it provided a high quality reprint for the New Worlds to use (few if any UK readers would have seen the original publication). There aren’t any illustrations in New Worlds for the story, a tale of interplanetary sailing ships taking part in a race to the Moon and back, but it got the cover on Boy’s Life, and was lavishly illustrated by Robert McCall inside. I’ve included a few of these illustrations below as a respite from my maunderings:

Clarke’s story starts with this:

The enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds. In three minutes the race would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at peace, than at any time for the past year. Whatever happened when the Commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. After a lifetime spent in designing ships for others, now he would sail his own.

The rest of the story is a skilful example of lucid and integrated exposition:

[He] was checking the tension in the rigging. The needles of all the dynamometers were steady; the immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the sun.
To Merton, floating weightless at the periscope, it seemed to fill the sky. As well it might—for out there were fifty million square feet of sail, linked to his capsule by almost a hundred miles of rigging. All the canvas of all the tea-clippers that had once raced like clouds across the China seas, sewn into one gigantic sheet, could not match the single sail that Diana had spread beneath the sun. Yet it was little more substantial than a soap-bubble; that two square miles of aluminised plastic was only a few millionths of an inch thick.  p. 27

There is more detail in a radio interview with Merton:

“Hold your hands out to the Sun,” he’d said. “What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there’s pressure as well—though you’ve never noticed it, because it’s so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it only comes to about a millionth of an ounce.
“But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important—for it’s acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it’s free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it; we can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the Sun.”
[. . .]
“Of course, its acceleration will be tiny—about a thousandth of a g. That doesn’t seem much, but let’s see what it means. “It means that in the first second, we’ll move about a fifth of an inch. I suppose a healthy snail could do better than that. But after a minute, we’ve covered sixty feet, and will be doing just over a mile an hour. That’s not bad, for something driven by pure sunlight! After an hour, we’re forty miles from our starting point, and will be moving at eighty miles an hour. Please remember that in space there’s no friction, so once you start anything moving, it will keep going forever. You’ll be surprised when I tell you what our thousandth-of-a-g sailing boat will be doing at the end of a day’s run. Almost two thousand miles an hour!  p. 28

The rest of the story details the various incidents that occur during the race (some sailships manoeuvre to put others in the shade, an updated equivalent of old ocean-going ships becalming each other; other sailships fail due to design problems, etc.). Then, before the race can be completed there is the warning of a potentially fatal solar storm, which means the competitors must be rescued by the escort rockets. This sets the scene for a sense of wonder ending (spoiler): rather than jettisoning the sail to avoid fouling the approaching rescue craft, Merton dons his space suit and abandons ship. Diana, with its sail still deployed, will continue to accelerate past the Moon and out of the solar system.
A very good piece of modern SF.

Regardless of how good or otherwise First Dawn by Donald Malcolm is it was almost inevitably going to be becalmed by the Clarke. In Malcolm’s story, a mole-like alien on a non-rotating planet watches humans build massive rocket engines on its world. Once they are finished building them they start the engines, and the mole’s dark world begins turning towards its first dawn. I wasn’t entirely convinced about the mechanics of this, or the speed with which the world starts turning, but the ending is okay in a poetical sense of wonder way.

Dune Limbo by J. G. Ballard is an extract from his new novel The Drought. It has a very long and quite boring synopsis (see above) that eventually places its protagonist at a series of immense salt drifts beside the coast. After a couple more dull descriptive pages from the extract itself, it finally gets going with scene where Ransom and his tribe steal tidal water (and the associated fish) from another group.
There are some striking passages in this, such as the description of Ransom’s home, a beached ship:

Overhead the sunlight shone on the curving stemplates of the wrecked lightship, giving the portholes a glassy opaque look like the eyes of dead fish. In fact, this stranded leviathan, submerged beyond sight of the sea in this concentration of its most destructive element, had rotted as much as any whale would have done in ten years. Often Ransom entered the hulk, searching for pieces of piping or valve gear, but the engine room and gangways had rusted into grotesque hanging gardens of corroded metal.
Below the stern, partly sheltered from the prevailing easterly winds by the flat blade of the rudder, was Ransom’s shack. He had built it from the rusty motorcar bodies he had hauled down from the shore and piled on top of one another. Its bulging shell, puffed out here and there by a car’s bulbous nose or trunk, resembled the carapace of a cancerous turtle.  p. 60-61

Or this one, which limns the mental space these post-apocalyptic survivors inhabit:

Ransom gazed around the drab interior of the shack. The decline in his life in the five years since Judith had come to live with him needed no underlining, but he realized that this was part of the continuous decline of all the beach settlements. It was true that he now had the task of feeding them both, and that Judith made little contribution to their survival, but she did at least guard their meagre fish and water stocks while he was away. Raids on the isolated outcasts had now become more frequent.
However, it was not this that held them together, but their awareness that only with each other could they keep alive some faint shadow of their former personalities, whatever their defects, and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo. Like all purgatories, the beach was a waiting ground, the endless stretches of wet salt sucking away from them all but the hardest core of themselves. These tiny nodes of identity glimmered faintly in the grey light of the limbo, as this zone of nothingness waited for them to dissolve and deliquesce like the few crystals dried by the sun.  p. 64

In the latter part of this you almost feel the language (“unseen gradient of the dune limbo”, etc.) forcing you into the same mental space as the characters.
After the first couple of pages I rather liked this, and am surprised that Moorcock didn’t serialise the whole novel (I assume that Moorcock would rather have used this than Tubb’s novel which starts next issue).2 I’ll have to reread it.

Escape from Evening by Michael Moorcock is either the second and last ‘Scar-Faced Brooder’ story, or the sequel to The Time Dweller (New Worlds #139, February 1964), depending on your point of view. It starts on the Moon with Pepin Hunchback, a malcontent unsuited to the artificial environment of lunar society, boarding a rocket to the dying Earth so he can live a natural existence.
When he arrives at the Earth city of Barbart he tells the natives that he wants to settle there. However, he cannot fit in and, before long, becomes restless once more. When he hears tantalising hints that the citizens of another city called Lanjis Liho can time travel he decides to go there, hoping he will be able to return to a more suitable Golden Age.
He rather foolishly elects to journey alone to Lanjis Lho—there are blood sucking oozers to contend with, as well as other perils—and, sure enough, has to be saved by the Wanderer (a character from the previous story). Pepin later encounters Tall Laughter, Scarface Brooder’s sister (Brooder was also a  character in the last story, and is now the Chronarch of Lanjis Lho).
Once they arrive at the city, Tall Laughter takes Pepin to see Scarface Brooder so he can ask him about time travel. Brooder tells Pepin it is impossible for him to go back in time, and Pepin leaves, frustrated. Later, in Tall Laughter’s house, she tells Pepin that even if it was possible for him to travel in time he would not be satisfied:

“Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was,” she was saying softly. “It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.”
He looked up and smiled bitterly. “My childhood was not idyllic,” he said. “I was a mistake. My birth was an accident. I had no friends, no peace of mind.”
“You had your wonderment, your illusion, your hopes. Even if you could return to Earth’s past—you would not be happy.”
“Earth’s present is decadent. Here the decadence is part of the process of evolution, on Moon it is artificial, that is all. Earth’s past was never truly decadent.”
“One cannot recapture the past.”
“An old saying—yet your ability disproves that.”
“You do not know, Pepin Hunchback,” she said almost sadly.  p. 90

Tall Laughter goes on to reveal the existence of a disused Time Ship, which Pepin later steals. He finds (spoiler) that the past is a formless limbo and the future an acid trip.
After he is rescued by Tall Laughter and Scar Faced Brooder, there is an explanation of the structure of time that is little better than gobbledygook:

[Tall Laughter said,] “Tell him why he found only limbo in the past.”
“Yes,” said Pepin, turning to stare at the Chronarch. “Tell me.”
“I’ll try. Imagine Time as a straight line along which the physical universe is moving. At a certain point on that line the physical universe exists. But if we move away from the present, backward or forward, what do we find?”
Again Pepin shook his head.
“We find what you found—for by leaving the present, we also leave the physical universe. You see, Pepin, when we leave our native Time stream, we move into others which are, in relation to us, above Time. There is a central stream along which our universe moves—we call this the Megaflow. As it moves it absorbs the stuff of Time—absorbs the chronons, as we call them, but leaves nothing behind. Chronons constitute the future—they are infinite. The reason you found nothing in the past is because, in a sense, space eats the chronons but cannot replace them.”
“You mean Earth absorbs this—this temporal energy but emits none herself—like a beast prowling through Time gobbling it up but excreting nothing.” Pepin spoke with a faint return of interest. “Yes, I understand.”  p. 97

I wish I did.
This story is all over the place. It rambles in multiple directions for thirty or so pages, trots out the above and then sputters to a stop. Having enjoyed its predecessor, I was a bit disappointed with this one.3
The Uncivil War by Robert J. Tilley (the cover designer for a couple of recent issues) is back with a short story that has what I have come to describe as a ‘Big Sigh’ beginning:

“There’s nothing in the star-littered universe,” said the old space-dog, genially, “that sets a body up like a dram of gleeb-juice. True, eh, lad?”  p. 99

It continues in this vein with the man’s pirate/sailor speech contrasting with the mannered tone of the narrator, who is interviewing him. The interviewee tells the reporter about a spaceship on which he served and, in particular, of one journey that involved ferrying diplomats to trade talks.
During this trip an unplanned landing on an unknown planet to effect repairs saw the diplomats going off in an air car, and they stumble upon the planets’ inhabitants. The latter are engaged in conflict with others of their kind, and want to know what side the diplomats are on:

“They are at present waiting for us to identify ourselves as the emissaries of either Mif, the God-of-Strength-through-Deadly-Insult, come to teach them the ultimate insult that will strike the enemy a mortal blow, or those of his opposite number, Fungoo, the dreaded God-of-Treachery-and-Deceit, come to destroy them from within. It seems—”  p. 108

The story then turns into a quest for the greatest insult (spoiler: it is to be ignored).
This is all played for laughs but suffers from several deficiencies in this respect. First, and key, is it is not that funny; second, it isn’t apparent it is a comedy (as opposed to badly written) until a couple of pages in; third, it is too long; and, finally, the comedy is draped over a story that is weak and, in places, confusing (I’m thinking here of when they communicate with the missing diplomats, and how they get back to the ship—but maybe I was skimming by this point). It does, in its defence, raise the odd smile (the last line, etc.) but this doesn’t entirely compensate.

There is an uncredited Cover for this issue and little in the way of Interior artwork (perhaps a result of the change of publishing schedule to monthly). The Thomson piece for the Bayley story is one of his better efforts. The other piece looks like it may be by Gilmore.
Symbols for the Sixties, an uncredited editorial, though probably by Moorcock, starts with this:

In this issue you will find perhaps the widest variety of stories we have published at one time. They are stories representative of most of the forms taken by present-day SF—Clarke’s clear, factual speculation on a possible development in space-travel, Ballard’s fascinating surrealistic allegory, Bayley’s abstract and philosophical view of an alternative system of thought, the baroque Escape from Evening, and good variations on the conventional space story by Malcolm and Tilley. The first four are set on or near our own planet, yet they are all undoubtedly SF. They illustrate an increasing tendency in modern SF to stick close to home and deal with aspects of human life set against humanity’s natural background. The day of the space-story in serious SF seems all but over, the day of planetary exploration is waning and writers appear to be deciding that exploration of the human mind, its capacities and defects, is more rewarding.  p. 2

The beginning of ‘Inner Space’?
The rest of this editorial, a ‘manifesto’ one, has some interesting passages:

[SF] must be reshaped and new symbols found to reflect the mood of the sixties [. . .] too many of today’s stories are using the terms of the thirties, forties and fifties, terms which are becoming increasingly unrelated to present-day society. They feel that a good story, no matter what form it takes, is best when it applies to Now and that a story intended to apply to Now cannot do its job if written in terms applying to Then.
Part of the trouble could be that the young writer studies the work of a past generation and concludes that this is how to write a story. It was; it isn’t now.  p. 2-3

We need more writers who reflect the pragmatic mood of today, who use images apt for today, who employ symbols gathered from the world of today, who use sophisticated writing techniques that can match the other techniques of today, who employ characters fitted for the society of today. Like all good writing, good SF must relate primarily to the time in which it is written; a writer must write primarily for his own generation.
[. . .]
He can learn from his predecessors, but he should not imitate them.  p. 3

We feel that, in many ways, the image of North Country born Fred Hoyle driving a huge Buick convertible through a Californian summer, talking of the significance of quasars, is much more up-to-date that an image of a space-ship bearing a military-technician bending over a bench on which reposes a new secret electronic device for foxing the alien invaders.  p. 3

It ends with a comment about the “sense of wonder” controversy that “occasionally rages in the Guest Editorials and the letter columns”. Whether this refers the absence of a sense of wonder in the reiteration of earlier work, or whether it is absent in new work because of its content, I am not sure.
Voyage to the End of the Universe is a positive film review by Alan Dodd about a film that does not sound at all promising.
“That Is Not Oil, Madam. That Is Jellied Consomme” by Langdon Jones is a three page review of the collection The Weird Ones (Dobson, 1965).4 He reviews each story in some depth, apart from one or two (irritating) examples:

Sentiment, Inc. by Poul Anderson has much the same fault [“There were many interesting ethical problems and emotional situations that are merely skirted round, when they should have been gone into much more fully.”]. This seems a characteristic of a lot of American SF. The really interesting ideas that come out of a situation are often referred to obliquely, if at all. In this story the ‘villain’ turns out—almost predictably—to be a Russian spy. Still, the Soviets are not called ‘Reds,’ which I guess is something.  p. 118-119

What are the “interesting ethical problems and emotional situations” that are ignored in this story? What should be done with them? Give us a clue.
He points to the Mack Reynolds story, The Hunted Ones (Science Fiction Stories, November 1959), as the best in the book before ending with:

The general standard of most of the stories in this collection is equivalent to that of an average SF magazine. I don’t think that this justifies the hard covers or the 15s. price tag.  p. 120

Or the three page review in your magazine.
I commented on Story Ratings No. 146 when I recently reviewed that issue.5
Letters to the Editor has an interesting batch of correspondence. It leads off with a letter from Edward Mackin (of ‘Hek Belov’ fame) who writes in about Moorcock’s recent serial The Shores of Death: he wonders where the rest of it is and provides a plot skeleton.
The next letter, from A. D. P. Cornelius, Cambridge, makes some interesting points about the difference between British and American SF:

Thank you—and the editor of Science Fantasy—for excellent reviews of Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard. Sadly not everyone has your discrimination. I am thinking particularly of certain reviews that have appeared in the United States—and especially of Ron Goulart’s recent review in Fantasy and Science Fiction. When will these literal-minded dimwits cease reading everything that comes in front of their eyes on the level of a boys’ adventure story? Goulart seemed to see the novel purely as ‘yet another cataclysm-novel of the kind the English specialise in’. Didn’t he realise that, as in certain other British novels that begin with some sort of cataclysm, the cataclysm was simply a starting-point to a book which discusses, among other things, the poignant problem of childless old-age?
This, and other reviews, reminded me that it was high time we in this country stopped looking to America for our SF standards. Apart from a few honourable exceptions, the American scene has become barren in the last few years, whereas the British scene has suddenly become alive and dynamic—leading the field. From Swift onwards it has been a tradition among British writers to make use of imaginative concepts and landscapes in order to discuss whatever point they wish about human behaviour in some form or other. H. G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Angus Wilson—and Brian W. Aldiss—have all written in this tradition. The similarity between their work and the stuff appearing in American pulps for the last forty years is merely superficial. Anyone with the ability to see past the merely superficial must surely accept that?  p. 123

The editor offers a copy of Introducing SF to anyone who “takes up the gauntlet”.
This is followed by another interesting letter from Elizabeth French Biscoe, Dublin, continuing the recent discussion about Langdon Jones’ I Remember Anita (New Worlds #144, September-October 1964):

I suggest that the story cannot be made right because it is based on an unawareness of one of “those solid principles for the criticism of SF” which are mentioned in the Editorial.
The principle in question is defined by Kingsley Amis in his New Maps of Hell. He says that ordinary fiction can be compared with portrait painting, while SF can be compared with landscape painting. This pictorial comparison explains what puzzles many of us—why SF and sex rarely get on together. While no personal experience (portrait) may be complete without sex, in a landscape sex is detectable only as a pair of distant lovers beneath the trees. It is the trees (non-human forces) that are important.
Consider Gainsborough. He kept his portraits and landscapes utterly separate. When he painted a lady in a big hat she filled the whole picture, but in his landscapes human beings are of the same value as bushes or cows: dots to emphasize the height of his spreading trees.
The tremendous (and as yet unlived) imaginary experiences on which SF is based are the trees beneath which man and his sex life are dots, and if an artist (author) makes his dots too big he gets his picture (story) out of proportion. That is what happened in I Remember, Anita.
By contrast, the proportions are right in Tunnel of Love in NWSF 146. The mystery of the tunnel (not love) dominates the story.  p. 124

Thought provoking, but I’m not sure I entirely agree (where does Frederik Pohl’s Gateway fit into this?)
P. Johnson, Kent, comments on the review columns:

Congratulations on the monstrous book reviews plus the superabundance of reviewers! I notice, however, that SF reviewers have to work on two planes. It reminds me of a mainstream review of SF which described the latest Heinlein novel as a rattling good adventure yarn of its kind, and Miller’s Conditionally Human as not up to the standard of A Canticle for Leibowitz which left you guessing where the Miller stood in relation to the Heinlein. I feel you do the same. You describe The Dark Light Years as a failure, and then slip gear and recommend The Paradox Men. This is an admirable ability, and fulfils the spirit of the Aldiss extract from SF Horizons, but am I wrong in thinking that you preferred the Aldiss ‘failure’ to many other less ambitions successes?
James Colvin lets politics intrude into his reviews . . . and I would feel happier about Colvin if he would use adjectives other than ‘reactionary’ to condemn Anderson and Heinlein . . . p. 125-126

He finishes by saying they should leave Analog to do the science articles.
There is an editorial response:

About The Paradox Men, we don’t think we slipped gear there—Dark Light Years was a failure (we felt) but Paradox Men fulfilled its author’s intention.  p. 126

The column finishes with an earnest letter from Malcolm E. Wright (14), of Basildon. The editor encourages him to send his short stories in to the magazine.
After the Letters there is a review of Amateur Magazines. Two are from future New Worlds authors, Charles Platt and Graham M. Hall.
There is this comment about Ed Meskys’ Niekas #9:

Much larger and more substantial than most of its British counterparts, Niekas 9 contains some good stuff by Anthony Boucher, Philip K. Dick (on The Man in the High Castle), John Baxter and others.
Tolkien fans will be interested in the long glossary of names, terms, etc. used in Middle Earth. Production is clean and readable—again superior to most of the British SF fan magazines.  p. 127

And this on Peter R. Weston’s Zenith #6:6

Still has an excellent standard of production and the material seems to be improving, although the magazine-reviewer appears rooted somewhat in the past. If you’re rooted in the past and proud of it, then you’ll probably enjoy the reviews. This one’s worth watching—it shows promise.

A better issue than usual, thanks to the Clarke and Ballard pieces (not a phrase I expect to be using again).  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall’s review in Vector #31 gives the line-up of authors and then says, “One is tempted to leave the review at that”, but goes on to describe Clarke’s story as “typically excellent”, that Malcolm is “a master of the pen”, and that he finds Ballard’s piece “hard to judge” as he “is an avid Ballard anti-fan”. He adds that “more bumf is written about Ballard than almost anyone else writing SF today”, and that “this piece is easily as good as most of The Drowning World with its unsymbolic symbolism, first-rate imagery and colossal obscurity”. I was a little surprised at these comments as, given the artistic leanings of Hall’s later story Sun Push (New Worlds #170, January 1967), I would have thought he would have been a fan.
He says of the Moorcock story that “it’s hard to say whether it is bad or good” but that he “didn’t like it”. He adds that Moorcock “paints beautiful backgrounds and then neglects his main characters”.
The Tilley “stands on its own feet as a fair yarn”, and ATom’s one illustration is “way above average”.

2. Perhaps the magazine serial rights for The Drought were not available, or perhaps it was something to do with the fact that the first three chapters of the novel were published in Ambit #23, Spring 1965, Ballard’s first publication in Martin Bax’s long running literary magazine.

3. The Time Dweller (New Worlds #139, February 1964) starts with Scar Faced Brooder riding his seal across the surface of an Earth in its twilight years. He has left the city of Lanjis Lho after a disagreement with the ruling Chronach, and is making his way to one of the inland cities. En route he meets another man called the Wanderer. They eat and drink (during which it becomes clear that human body chemistry has changed significantly) and then, after sleeping for a while in the Wanderer’s tent, Scar Faced Brooder moves on to Brabart.
He is taken on a tour of the town by one of the locals:

The Barbartian introduced himself as Mokof, took the Brooder’s arm and led him through the series of squares, triangles and circles formed by the buildings, to come at length to the great central plaza and stare up at the pulsing, monstrous machine of burnished bronze.
“This machine supplies the city with its life,” Mokof informed him. “And also regulates our lives.” He pointed at the disc which the Brooder had noted earlier. “Do you know what that is, my friend ?”
“No. I am afraid I do not. Could you explain ?”
“It’s a
clock. It measures the hours of the day,” he broke off, noting the Brooder’s puzzlement. “That is to say it measures time.”
“Ah ! I am with you at last. But a strange device, surely, for it cannot measure a great deal of time with that little circular dial. How does it note the flow . . .?”
“We call a period of sunlight ‘day’ and a period of darkness ‘night.’ We divide each into twelve hours—”
“Then the period of sunlight and the period of darkness are equal ? I had thought . . . ”
“No, we call them equal for convenience, since they vary. The twelve divisions are called hours. When the hands reach twelve, they begin to count around again . . .”
“Fantastic !” the Brooder was astounded. “You mean you recycle the same period of time round and round again. A marvellous idea. Wonderful! I had not thought it possible.”
  p. 91-92

This cognitive dissonance forms the crux of the story.
Later, he is arrested for eating at a prohibited time and imprisoned, but is asked the next day to repair their clock. On examining it Scar Faced Brooder realises it will shortly fail in a lethal blast of radiation, and this forces him to learn to time travel, after which he repairs the mechanism. After this he returns home to tell the Chronarch about his ability to time-travel.
The final scene involves another conversation with the Wanderer, where Scar Faced Brooder realises that humankind’s journeys in space are coming to an end and will be replaced with journeys in time.
Although this probably doesn’t sound that attractive a proposition when reduced to its constituent parts, the time concept and exotic far future setting make for an interesting piece.

4. The editorship of The Weird Ones is the subject of some uncertainty according to its ISFDB page.

5. The story ratings for this issue were published in #150:

No great surprises there. The Moorcock presumably did better than it should have because of its length.

6. Niekas #9 is available on Fanac.org here. Unfortunately their page for Zenith/Speculation doesn’t have a copy of #6, just (thanks to John Boston) #9 and #12.
In Zenith #9 there is a response (in the magazine review column Brickbats and Roses) to the New Worlds comments that their magazine reviewer (Terry Jeeves) “appears rooted somewhat in the past”:

Firmly rooted in the past as I am, and needing no acting-assistant-under-paid-deputy to scratch by back when it itches, I am not pandering to the gallery when I say that I welcome ANALOG’s return to the digest size.  p.3

There is more argy-bargy about various subjects in the letter column, Point-Counterpoint, as well as various comments about the magazines of the time, both pro and con. Jim Groves says, “New Worlds and Science Fantasy are now the worst of the magazine crop”.
Ivor Latto gives a considered view of the differences between New Worlds and Science Fantasy:

It isn’t quite fair to say that New Worlds is superior to Science Fantasy; the relative quality of the stories published is much the same. But Moorcock’s crusading zeal has certainly given NW a new lease of life, not entirely because of the stories he publishes, but also because of the way his philosophy is backed up in editorials, articles, and reviews. Either Bonfiglioli has no similar urge to convert, or he has been persuaded to accept NW as the dominant half of the Compact twins.
Maybe the publishers feel that they can’t afford to fund reviews, articles and letters in both mags. Whatever the reason [probably Bonfiglioli’s reportedly relaxed attitude to work] SF certainly suffers for it in a certain purposelessness. It’s always been like that, for some reason, a weak sister to NW in its departments, although usually superior in the stories it prints.  p. 19

There is more about Moorcock and New Worlds and how they are probably, in their own way, seeking after a “Sense of Wonder”.
Peter Weston replies:

The trouble is that science fiction fans are ‘hooked’ on the type of SF current in a particular period, and when the bias of SF storytelling changes, the readers don’t change. This is the reason for the dissatisfaction expressed by some readers because of ‘modern’ SF. They cannot assimilate a diet lacking in the essential vitamins supplied by ‘1950’s SF’.
But there is hope yet….many readers are attracted to the style of ‘action SF’ introduced in such magazines as Space SF, Infinity, and SF Adventures, and they really should try the Galaxy twins Worlds of If & Worlds of Tomorrow. The latter magazine especially is, in the editor’s opinion, the best SF magazine (of its type) on the market today. The January & March 1965 issues are really excellent, introducing also a new writer, Larry Niven, a real ‘find’.  p. 19

Peter Weston also comments more generally about the current magazine scene in his editorial (as part of his argument that the SF field—circa 1965—is in the middle of a “Golden Age”):

Magazines have lost ground in the battle to keep their reader’s interest, but they are to a large extent now on the upswing in readability and science-fictional appeal (even to older fans). Analog, since the reversion to the small size has shown a staggering increase in the quality of material, Galaxy, long much-abused, is now producing roughly one good issue in two, while companion magazines If and Worlds of Tomorrow are producing science fiction that is among the best ever written. There is still rubbish in good measure, but Editor Pohl’s policy of straightforward action with a respectably science fictional treatment, is paying remarkable dividends. The recent trend towards amorphous and meaningless stories may have been greatly overrated; certainly this looks to be one of the ‘blind alleys’ explored by speculative fiction.  p. 2

Worth a look.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #147, February 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #31 (March 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Power of Y (Part 2 of 2) • novella serial by Arthur Sellings
More Than a Man • short story by John Baxter
When the Skies Fall • short story by John Hamilton
The Singular Quest of Martin Borg • novelette by George Collyn
The Mountain • reprint short story by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Box • short story by Richard Wilson

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Jakubowicz
Interior artwork • by Maeve Gilmore, James Cawthorn, uncredited
A Rare Event • editorial
Biological Electricity • science essay
Can Spacemen Live with Their Illusions? • science essay by Science Horizons
The Cosmic Satirist
• book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Silver Collections • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Did Elric Die in Vain? • book review by Alan Forrest
Hardly SF • book reviews by Hilary Bailey
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

The second instalment of The Power of Y by Arthur Sellings (a novel about a world where “Plying”, the limited identical reproduction of objects, is available) has Afford getting out of the sanatorium and going on a somewhat farcical journey (he is trying to lose any tail he may have) that ends at a safe house in the countryside. His Aunt Clarissa, Guy Burroughs, and Joanna are there. A disgruntled late arrival is Tom Mitchison (Afford’s minder, appointed by Aunt Clarissa). The group discuss the situation and note a surprising discovery: the President’s assistant is a disguised man called Rockstro, one of the two inventors of plying (both are reported to have died).
After this the novel partially turns into a synopsis, as a lot of the action happens off-stage and is then talked about in later meetings, such as when Burroughs turns up at a Chinese restaurant days later and lays out the plot to Afford and his aunt. He tells them that an old lab assistant of Klien’s (the other inventor) has told him about the plying of a dog, and how the copied creature was a docile and easily manipulated creature. Burroughs concludes from this that the real president is alive and a prisoner in the Europa Palace, and that they must break in and rescue him.

The rest of the novel is mostly fast-paced, if unlikely, action. Afford and Burroughs spend several days tunnelling into the Palace. When they finally break in (spoiler) they find the President and take Rockstro prisoner. There is a gunfight on the way out and they blow the tunnel. They get the President to the safe house and tell him about the plot.
The final twist occurs when the President disappears shortly afterwards, seemingly from a locked room with guards outside. Then the copy of the president gives a radio broadcast and, in the middle of his speech, he disappears too. Rockostro explains in a data dump what has happened: they haven’t borrowed copies of the objects from other spaces but from other times.

They go to the palace, and find it under military control: the plotters are arrested, and all ends well.
The second half of this novella is not as good as the first: a story told with a certain lightness of tone turns into an unlikely adventure, where the chess pieces are formulaically moved around the board. The plying gimmick is completely unconvincing too.2
More Than a Man by John Baxter starts with two captains in the Terran Navy who are on the surface of an alien planet preparing themselves for a mission. Once they are suitably disguised they go to the nearby town and arrange for a private audience with the sovereign. When they are alone we discover the latter is a robot, and it is then serviced by the two men.
On the way to their next job we learn of a previous space war with the opposing Hegemony forces:

He remembered Dubhe well enough, though he had been only a child at the time. It wasn’t something that any Earthman, especially a Navy officer, could hope to forget. Beyond that star a frozen graveyard of ships stood as a permanent reminder of the suicidal futility of blow-for-blow battling in space.
It had been the first and the last space battle. After Dubhe, both sides limped home and reconsidered their strategy. Out of that reconsideration had come the Hegemony’s all-enveloping net of colonial outposts and the Earth’s plan of robot subversion. So perhaps Dubhe had not been such a total loss after all.  p. 53

During their next job (on a different planet) they struggle to find the tribal chief they are looking for until some of his tribesmen appear at their camp. They get to him and find he is malfunctioning due to gunshot wounds. One of the navy captains goes for spares, the other stays. When the tribesmen say their leader must accompany them on a raid, the remaining Terran captain changes his features and goes in the leader’s place. The punchline seems to be that he will find out if the robots are “more than men” (an idea briefly floated earlier in the story).
This story has a tired setting, is overlong, and it doesn’t have the early focus on the robot/man idea that its conclusion requires. All of which leaves the ending feeling like a non-sequitur.
When the Skies Fall by John Hamilton starts off with three men seemingly talking over each other but, eventually, a religious discussion develops and this leads to a comment about the date of Armageddon. One of the men pencils this in his diary for a week hence, and then the other asks whether the knowledge of this date could cause it to change. The last scene (spoiler) is the unravelling of reality.
This story’s initial obliqueness is discouraging but the last scene is effective:

Dixey, still sitting to their left at the side of the room, had not been listening and was the first to hear an odd sound: over and above the mellow singing from downstairs sweet rippling chords from some musical instrument could be discerned—it took little reflection to recognise it was a harp.
All three listened to the rise and fall of the strings, quietly enchanted by the freshness and elegance and coolness of the air-borne notes. The singing below stopped—they too listened to the music which issued from a delicate flutter of unseen fingers. It was like the summer brook of Time rippling and playing over the stones of the centuries, washing them softly away.
Some time later the flow of music faded and Dixey coughed, almost apologetically. There followed a silence and then a strange muffled sound—as of a deck of cards falling, and the new silence was deeper than before, than ever before. It was the silence of a tomb.
Instinctively all three were drawn slowly to the window, and all three gasped or sighed from deep within their souls. Nothing. Void. Blank. The trees, the houses, the street, the sky—the world was gone.
The scene that met their eyes was a blank domino, a painting washed clean.
Dumas’ voice muttered something about being wrong.  p. 66

The longest piece of short fiction in the issue is George Collyn’s novelette The Singular Quest of Martin Borg. It is described in the blurb as a “marvellously funny spoof” but is, in reality, an overlong, plodding story, and a bit of a chore to read.
It begins with a drug dealer and an exotic dancer/concubine meeting on a spaceship. After their brief encounter the dancer gives birth to a son. When the mother remarries some years later, the boy is left in the care of robots on a remote planetoid, and remains there until he is discovered twenty-five years later. He is taken to civilization.
The rest of the story runs through various SF tropes: Martin develops psi powers and later teleports back to the planetoid. There he sees a photo of his mother and changes his sex and appearance so as he looks like her:

He thought of lean thighs, white and clear-cut and felt their configuration as it would be and it was so. He thought of breasts swelling apple-round and sensed their touch and it was so. He formulated hair of gold in perfect fall to his shoulders and it was so. He imagined almond eyes and tulip lips, delicate curves and rounded femininity and it was so. He thought of yielding fragility and steel-tempered passion and Marti Marta reborn stood in the nursery; which sounds incredible but it was so.  p. 77

Martita then goes to Hi Li City where she works as a concubine:

Martita Borg spent twenty years in Hi Li City and in that time she had many lovers and from nibbling at their subconscious thoughts, unshielded in moments of passion, she learnt many secret things.
For five years she was a dancer like her mother, a mime artist, adept of the five hundred Postures of Meaning and her naked and supple limbs traced intricate and erotic patterns for the delectation of the Great Minds.
Then for five years she was a jewelled one, her entire body, save the sexual and erogenous zones, gold-painted and encrusted with gems and precious stones, her body veined with sapphires and turquoise, arms outlined in garnets and opals, thighs of milk white pearl and bloodred rubies and a face diamond masked and emerald framed. An exquisite gem; finest product of the jeweller’s and goldsmith’s art; an expensive toy for the treasures of the galaxy.  p. 78

She then meets a brutal Emperor, later revealed as Martin/Martita’s father. The Emperor’s heart stops when he sees what he thinks is his ex-wife:

So would have perished the body of the most powerful man ever to live had not his son captured his persona, memory and body in their dying spasm and reunited father, mother and son in one brain and body.  p. 83

You get the idea. I think there is a time loop at the end, with Martin having a normal childhood the next time around, but I’d rather lost interest by then so I’m not entirely sure.

The Mountain by Michael Moorcock (first published as Le Montague in Nocturne 1) is a Ballardian post-holocaust story where two surviving men climb a mountain in pursuit of a woman:

Not without certain trepidation, Hallner followed behind his friend who marched towards the mountains without looking back or even from side to side.
Nilsson had a goal and rather than sit down, brood and die when the inescapable finally happened, Hallner was prepared to go along with him on this quest for the girl.
And, he admitted, there was a faint chance that if the winds continued to favour them, they might have a chance of life. In which case there was a logical reason for Nilsson’s obsessional tracking of the woman.
His friend was impatient of his wish to walk slowly and savour the atmosphere of the country which seemed so detached and removed, uninvolved with him, disdainful.
That there were things which had no emotional relationship with him, had given him a slight surprise at first, and even now he walked the marshy ground with a feeling of abusing privacy, of destroying the sanctity of a place where there was so little hint of humanity; where men had been rare and had not been numerous or frequent enough visitors to have left the aura of their passing behind them.  p. 90-91

Of course they never catch her, and it all comes to a nihilistic end. I suppose the journey up the mountain, with its perils and its passage through the mist, may be a metaphor for the ascent of humanity and the ultimate futility of this process, but I’m not sure of this interpretation.
Although this kind of thing isn’t usually my cup of tea, I thought this was okay.

Box by Richard Wilson has a narrator who lives in an efficiency apartment, a small box, and he has not been out of it for some years, but wants to get together with a woman he is infatuated with called Maria. Hitherto he has got his life and sexual experiences through the “dreamies”:

When Harry was in the mood for something more active he used the Triveo-Plus, also known as the tactiloscope or dreamies. Through the magic of TP (available at extra cost) he had climbed Everest and Tupungato, breathing normally. He had explored the Antarctic and the Sahara, in 72-degree comfort. He had skin-dived, dry, off the Great Barrier Reef. He had spelunked, without anxiety, in Fingal’s Cave and Aggtelek and Devil’s Hole. And, on a bootleg channel (available at extortionate cost) he had lain in the arms of five hundred variegated young women. That averaged out, over five years, to two a week. Harry McCann felt that in his sex life, as in his other habits, he was a temperate man.  p. 105

He eventually manages to conquer his agoraphobia and make the journey across the city to see Maria. Of course (spoiler), once he gets to her flat he isn’t allowed in as she hasn’t been out for years, and couldn’t cope with a real visitor.
This reads like the kind of story the 1950s Galaxy might have run, although it may have contained too many autobiographical elements for the editor Horace Gold (the agoraphoboia, etc.).

The Cover by Jakubowicz is rather dark for my taste, and I’m not sure that the blue colour-blocks set it off that well.
The Interior artwork is by the same two artists as last issue, and the bulk of it is by Maeve Gilmore for the Selling serial.3 Only two of the short stories are illustrated; one is signed by Cawthorn. The thumbnail sketches for the editorial, books and letters columns have been changed: the attractive sketches have been replaced by boring planets:

A Rare Event isn’t credited and, as Moorcock’s picture isn’t at the top of the page anymore, perhaps this one is by Langdon Jones. Who knows? It starts with a description of the 1957 World SF Convention in London:

Only once before has a World Science Fiction Convention been held in Britain. This was in 1957 at London’s Kings Court Hotel. It was attended by hundreds of SF enthusiasts, publishers, writers, editors and artists from all over the world—there were even a few from behind the Iron Curtain. John W. Campbell was the Guest of Honour and amongst the American personalities were H. Beam Piper, Bob Silverberg. Harry Harrison, Ray Nelson, Sam Moskowitz, Forrest Ackerman and others. Well known British writers were there in strength—Wyndham, Clarke, Eric Frank Russell, Aldiss, Ballard, Sellings, John Christopher. Tubb, Bulmer, Brunner, James White and, of course. John Carnell. It was an exciting affair and it gave many readers a chance to meet their favourite authors for the first time for—as always—it was informal.  p. 2

The writer goes on to plug the 23rd Worldcon, which is once again being held in London in August (1965), as well as mentioning the Easter BSFA convention in Birmingham. There are a couple of other notes as well, so it is housekeeping this month, not proselytising.
Last issue I mentioned that I expected the science essay to be the usual dry stuff: it wasn’t but the two in this issue are. The first essay, Biological Electricity, has this:

In, 1963, scientists of the General Electric Company’s Space Sciences Laboratory at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, demonstrated the use of biological electricity in a simple, painless experiment with a laboratory rat. They implanted electrodes into the rat’s abdominal cavity. A current of 155 microwatts generated by the rat’s body was led from those electrodes by a thin insulated wire through the skin and used to power a radio-transmitter.  p. 102

Painless for the scientists.
The second one, Can Spacemen Live with Their Illusions?, is by “Science Horizons”, whoever they are.4
The Cosmic Satirist by Michael Moorcock (rave) reviews The Naked Lunch by William Burroughs (I’m surprised this doesn’t appear under Moorcock’s own name). He has this to say to readers who are uncertain about attempting the book:

The reader who likes a book with a “beginning, a middle and an end” need not be in the least alarmed by The Naked Lunch. I am much more inclined towards the conventional novel myself. I certainly do not welcome novelty for novelty’s sake, nor obscenity for obscenity’s sake—I find most of the fiction produced under the label of “beat” and “avant-garde” boring and pretentious, disguising bad, undisciplined writing under a superficial cloak of equally bad and undisciplined “experimental” styles. Just as the Buck Rogers brigade of SF writers bring SF into disrepute, so do these so-called experimental writers bring the handful of genuine innovators into disrepute. The simple fact with Burroughs is that he can write. He can write better than anybody else at work today. He has an ear for dialogue, an eye for reality, an ability to conjure up phantasmagoric visions that immediately capture the imagination, a powerful, uncompromising style that rips away our comforting delusions and displays the warts and the sores that can fester in the human mind. Not a pleasant vision at first, yet we are soon captured by Burroughs’s deadpan style which aids us to look upon the horrors without revulsion, and take, instead, a cool, objective look at perversion in all its states and forms—mental, physical and spiritual.  p. 116-117

I’m not entirely sure why a quote from Limbo 90 (by Bernard Wolfe) follows this, nor is the next quote from the book itself (a description of the city of Interzone) particularly appealing.
The rest of Moorcock’s reviews are in Silver Collections, and find him in a less dyspeptic mood than last issue.
Did Elric Die in Vain? by Alan Forrest is a long review of Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock, and reminded me of how different the ‘Elric’ stories were, with their physically weak anti-hero and his malevolent sword.
Hardly SF by Hilary Bailey is the final review essay, and it makes its titular point about Who? by Algis Budrys.
Letters to the Editor includes a long letter from Peter J. D. Matthews of Yeovil, Somerset, where he charts what he suggests is a decrease in the quality in Bradbury’s work from The Silver Locusts (The Martian Chronicles) through Fahrenheit 451 and Golden Apples of the Sun. He goes on to say that Ballard and Moorcock are on the same slippery slope:

With each successive story he is plunging at the moment, except that Equinox and The Drowned World are almost identical. The editor, who, as far as I know, first rose to prominence in the fantasy field, for a time seemed to be graduating to SF, but now seems to be following Bradbury and Ballard, that is if Goodbye Miranda is anything to judge by.
Basically the fault seems to be that there is a trend for authors to attempt to appeal to the emotions directly with word pictures—a job for the poets in my opinion—rather than writing a story and letting the story do its work on the emotions or the intellect. Go back to the old days, the blood-curdling days of the Vargo Statten Magazine etc. What so you find? Clean-cut stories, painted with broad, crudely aimed strokes of the pen, but stories. Write stuff like that, only better, to suit a more adult readership—throw in a good percentage of more serious stuff (the first half of Blish’s A Case of Conscience is the sort of thing I mean) and I’ll buy monthlies filled with that, faster than you can print them!  p. 125-126

The editorial reply:

We agree, and have always agreed, that there is a place for the good, intelligent action story in SF and we should never miss the chance of publishing any we receive. But, it seems, the trend away from this kind of writing involves the authors— old and new—as well as the readers. Certainly this is true of this country. The more popular British SF writers such as Wyndham, Christopher, Aldiss and Ballard, have appealed perhaps because they have placed the accent on character and so on, rather than on the action element.
It has often occurred to us that if it had not been for the necessity of selling to what was essentially a pulp-magazine field the work of Asimov, Clarke and others might have been that much better. We also endorse your view that SF could currently do with a few more good, straightforward craftsmen, as well as writers of the more thoughtful kind.  p. 126

The next letter, from John R. Orr, Emsworth, Hants., hopes for stories from Philip E. High, as well as more ‘Hek Belov’ stories from Edward Mackin. The editors say that High is concentrating on novels for the US market but that they have a long Hek Belov story coming up . . . oh dear, it’s at times like this I wish they were more ruthless with the old guard.
There is a Next Month filler at the end of the letter column which trails a new story from J. G. Ballard called Dune Limbo (actually an extract from his new novel The Drought).
There are no Story Ratings in this issue due to the change of publication schedule to monthly.5
Finally, I think I once again see Moorcock doing a spot of collecting in the Advertisements:

CHARLES L. HARNESS—anything in magazines. Some CORDWAINER SMITH in magazines. Also books written or illustrated by Mervyn Peake. Details to Advertiser, Box 826, NWSF. 17, Lake House, Scovell Rd. London, S.E.l.  p. 128

Overall, this is an average to mediocre issue, but it isn’t the worst one so far (#145).  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall’s review starts off with a comment about how the increased production schedule will no doubt cause “a drop in the standard of material, but that is not [yet] overtly noticeable”.
He likes the cover, thinks it looks like Powers, and is the magazine’s best yet. He was disappointed with the science fact articles.
As for the fiction, the Sellings has an irritating passage at the beginning (unspecified) but finishes with a “remarkable and high-standard ending.” He adds that the work is “mildly amusing, well-written but with that so frequent tendency of serials—a disappointing middle.”
The Baxter story is “good [but has] well treated second-hand, not new, [ideas]” while Hamilton’s piece is “pointless” and clichéd. Collyn’s piece has “a plot of van Vogtian complexity” but is “badly constructed.” Hall adds, “This ‘characterisation’ takes some beating. Holds out through some good ideas, a lot of bad writing and finally turns out to be the good old time paradox theme done up. Poorest item in the magazine.”
The Colvin has some good description but Hall would have preferred a more original idea. Wilson, “one of the few consistently good writers” contributes a piece that is “very extrapolatory and might well prove visionary.”
As for the non-fiction, Hall says that “weight is made” with the Book Reviews before describing the Letters column as “short and uninspiring”. He does not like the illustrations for the serial, saying that they are “childish scribblings—there isn’t a fanzine in the country that prints worse.”
“An issue treading water.”

2. The book version of Selling’s novella changed the title from The Power of Y to The Power of X (a backward move I felt . . . boom, tish). The novella is ~28,000 words and the novel is ~43,000 words, so it is a considerable expansion. One thing I noted is that the book version dumps the novella introduction about Afford wanting to be President of the USE and starts in his art gallery (a good move).

3. The artwork for the Selling serial is uncredited but  I think it is by Gilmore as it is of the same style as the artwork for I Remember Anita in #144, and New Worlds only seems to be using her, Thomson and Cawthorn for illustrations.

4. There aren’t any more of these science articles in the next few issues, so it looks like it was a short-lived experiment (boom, tish, again!).

5. The story ratings for this issue appeared in #149:

I’d have gone with Wilson, Moorcock (Colvin), Hamilton as the top three. I note that the longest piece is in first place (again) and the second longest in second.  ●rssrss

New Worlds SF #146, January 1965

ISFDB link

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #30 (January 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Power of Y (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by Arthur Sellings ∗∗+
The Sailor in the Western Stars • short story by Bob Parkinson
Tunnel of Love • short story by Joseph Green
There’s a Starman in Ward 7 • short story by David Rome
Election Campaign • novelette by Thom Keyes

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert J. Tilley
Interior artwork • by uncredited (2), Cawthorn (3)
Encouraging Signs • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Background: Space Drive • essay by George Locke [as by Gordon Walters]
Fancy and Imagination • book reviews by Michael Moorcock
Books for the Kids? • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Two Good Ones • book reviews by Langdon Jones
Letters to the Editor
Story Ratings 145

_____________________

The serial by Arthur Sellings,2 The Power of Y, starts with the narrator, Max Afford, stating he will not stand for President of the UES (United European States), that the following account was written for therapeutic reasons, and that he is just an art dealer. The story as such then starts with Afford in his gallery looking at a ‘plied’ copy of a Matisse that has just come in. It is number number 20, and this leads to a data-dump about the novel’s gimmick, plying (presumably short for ‘multiplying’):

Plying hit the headlines four years before—remember?
. . . the days when it was hailed as The Answer to Everything . . . The Dawn Of The Golden Age . . . when one car would go in one end and a million roll out the other. . . a genuine Mona Lisa in every home? — well, after the dust had settled, the Hyman Bascos and Oswald Bilbekkers of this world found they were still in business, only more so.
I’m no scientist, nor are a few thousand million other people, but it had all seemed so simple. All objects, so the theory ran, have an extension into the fourth dimension. We just happen to see, and use, one slice in this three-dimensional space. Plying meant simply taking other slices. The world was a side of bacon and there was nothing to stop you taking a dozen slices, a million—object x to the power of y, in fact—provided the hog was long enough. The sad truth was that it wasn’t. Or the cutters couldn’t reach more than twenty slices back. Or both. The “cutters” weren’t blades of steel, of course, but some kind of laser beam operating in a field of—well, there was enough about it in the Sunday magazines of the day.  p. 9

And that is about as interested as Sellings ever gets about the process (most of the novel revolves around the plot, and the upper middle class art gallery environment and society that Afford inhabits). However, there is one other twist that Sellings adds at this point: when Afford touches the painting he notices a strange sensation and, after more research at a friend’s gallery, he realises that he can tell the difference between the original and the copies, something that shouldn’t be possible as they are supposedly identical.
Next stop is Joanna Miles: as well as Afford’s possible romantic interest in her, she is also an executive at the Plying Plant. He tells her about his discovery but doesn’t really get anywhere, although she agrees to organise a tour of the Plying plant for him. When he goes on his tour he slips the guard a bribe and gets access a set of twenty identical paintings. He finds the real one by touch.
After this there is a break of a couple of months in the story. Afford goes to a country auction and notices a potentially valuable picture which he buys. It is a picture of President Masson’s grandfather. Afford (who is forced to take his pushy Aunt Clarissa along) presents his find to the President at an official reception. When Afford shakes the President’s hand he realises that the man is a copy!

The story now kicks up a gear. After the presentation ceremony, Afford contacts Joanna about plying living creatures and is bluntly told it is not possible. He goes to see his aunt, and she doesn’t believe him either. After a night in a bar drowning his sorrows he is abducted outside his house. Afford wakes up later in a sanatorium. His aunt arrives and tells him that Joanna contacted her after his visit saying her phone was tapped. Aunt Clarissa then arranged for Afford’s abduction for his own protection. Senator Burroughs, a friend of his aunt, then turns up and they discuss the situation. There is a lot packed into this chapter.

As you can probably tell, this is a fairly fast-paced story, and it is told with, perhaps, the style and lightness of touch more typical in a mainstream social novel of the time. It is certainly not your normal boilerplate mid-sixties SF novel. Perhaps this different tone or voice was what Moorcock found attractive.
It is pleasant enough but minor.3

The Sailor in the Western Stars by Bob Parkinson4 is a lyrical, future-myth story that tells of a space captain called Anistar:

Anistar then, as we have already noted, was a sailor; a proud, noble sailor of the ancient lineage of the Lindesfaarne — who sail their tall, gossamer-light ships across the high stars, silent as falling snowflakes. And as he dipped into the ports of one distant world or another, Anistar continued the business of the Lindesfaarne and traded in the intangible wares they carry; for the Lindesfaarne have long since found such cargoes most profitable, and quite portable.  p. 49

On one of the planets he visits he meets a lady called Calmoora, and they fall in love. Later Anistar becomes restless and wants to go sailing again:

The story meanwhile tells of how Anistar tarried a little while on Jildereen; and when the time came for him to leave that world, along with him went Calmoora, and Santihl, and others whose names are now lost to our histories and so are quite forgotten. So that all these quitted Jildereen at last, and came into that vast darkness of heaven, wherein the stars are as distant lanterns in the sky. And in the glory and the freedom of these heavens Anistar rejoiced, for he was a sailor of the race of the Lindesfaarne and hated the feel of a planet hard beneath his feet. Once again his soul flew free and happy with the ship as it spread its unseen, delicate sails of force and sailed onwards among the stars. And in the hold of that gossamer-light ship there now reposed a new cargo, perhaps the most curious that Anistar had ever carried.  p. 56

At the end of the story (spoiler) Calmoora is left on Caer-ome, while Anistar departs. The “intangible” he has brought to the planet is love.
This is a discursive and stylish piece that vaguely reminded me of Cordwainer Smith, and it’s the best story in the issue.

Tunnel of Love by Joseph Green starts with two young men getting a permit to go to a primitive planet and get film footage of the natives. These latter are the most attractive humanoids in known space and they go around naked. The two men intend to use their “ethnographic” film to make some money producing art house movies.
They arrive on the planet and, after the pair have most of their film footage, we learn more about the natives’ marriage customs: there are no extra-marital relationships, and to marry one of the women the men have to crawl through a tunnel in a metal pyramid to a conjugal chamber in the centre: not all the men make it—some are taken by “the monster”.
Needless to say one of the two men gets the hots for the chief’s red-headed daughter and decides to have a go. The other follows him with a drone—they want the footage for their movie—and sees him disappear along the way.
This all resolves with (spoiler) his rescue and the discovery that the pyramid is a huge genetic scanner, installed after the sun’s radiation levels increased thousands of years ago: those men who are not up to standard slowly die of starvation in the pyramid.
This is all unconvincingly contrived but it moves along slickly enough.

There’s a Starman in Ward 7 by David Rome5 is a piece narrated by a schizophrenic in an asylum. A new inmate joins them and claims he is a Starman from Alpha Centauri. He later organises a breakout (spoiler) but we never discover whether the Starman is an alien or just delusional. For that reason it is not entirely satisfactory as a story but is of interest on account of its unusual manic style and occasionally transgressive tone:

Alice and I walked home through Souter Woods! ! !
The Starman wanted to know why I killed Alice. I tell him because she said dirty words to me after I LOVED her. I also told him about the mother in the moon.
Mother in the moon
Rolled me in porridge
Turned me into a boy
When I was three
Years old
The Starman came from Alpha Centauri in a spaceship. He says nobody believes him, that’s why he’s here.
I said what happened to the spaceship. He said it’s still hidden in the swamp and when he gets the chance he’s getting out of here and going home.
After we got our pills THEY served us coffee on the verandah. We get one cup of coffee each and ONE biscuit, except Daddy who gets two when JOHN is on. The Starman ASKED JOHN FOR ANOTHER BISCUIT.
It was funny. JOHN gave the Starman a look, then pushed him and made him stumble against the wall. But the Starman went straight back and asked for another biscuit. JOHN got mad and took him to the dormitory and shut the door.
(all this is a lie!)
(ward 7 is fine)
(EVERYBODY here treats us right)
(I’m a dirty liar about JOHN)  p. 84

Election Campaign by Thom Keyes has an authoritarian, war-mongering General touring the planets during an election campaign. His government minder is, unusually, a doctor. During the trip they argue, and just as it is becoming physical the gravity goes off temporarily. Their spaceship pilot (who is a brain in a metal box) has malfunctioned, and the ship is spinning tail over tail, out of control.
When they investigate the pilot’s box they find the brain has suffered from a haemorrhage, and is irreparable. The only way for them to survive (spoiler) is for the doctor to remove the general’s brain and use it as a replacement. The operation is successful. (By the way, the described medical procedures aren’t as grisly as in Keyes’ previous story Period of Gestation (Science Fantasy #67, September-October 1964)—at least this time there is a doctor cutting people open rather than amateurs—but I won’t be having anything to eat before I read his next one.)
The story finishes with the general, now a spaceship, arriving at the colony planet and starting his stump speech. It has a good last line:

Meanwhile, the political machine swung into action.  p. 102

This issue’s Cover, according to ISFDB, is by Robert J. Tilley (but the source for this attribution is unknown).
The title page informs us that Langdon Jones is now the editor.

The Interior artwork is split between the uncredited but distinctive artist who illustrates Selling’s serial, while Cawthorn illustrates the others (he is rapidly becoming the magazine’s staff artist).
Encouraging Signs is, I presume, Michael Moorcock’s editorial (although uncredited it has a sketch of him at the top of the page) and covers a number of topics:

From this issue we are back on a regular monthly schedule and, for the first time, our companion Science Fantasy also goes monthly. This is largely thanks to you and we are grateful.  p.2

At least four brilliant books have appeared [in 1964], all vastly different—Aldiss’s Greybeard, Ballard’s The Terminal Beach, Harness’s The Paradox Men and, a book which can’t strictly be called SF, yet which deals with all the ideas found in SF, Burroughs’s Dead Fingers Talk. These four alone made it an exciting year for us—and an encouraging one.
Also encouraging was the number of new writers we have been able to attract to both magazines. Langdon Jones, George Collyn, John Hamilton, Colin Fry and Thom Keyes have all, in their different ways, brought freshness and diversity to the field and will continue to do so.  p. 2

He briefly mentions the contributions by Bob Parkinson and Arthur Sellings before moving on to this:

A further encouraging sign that SF is on the up in more ways than one— the publication of SF Horizons , the professional magazine of SF criticism, edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison. The best item in this was Aldiss’s long article on Jack Williamson’s Legion of Time, in which he analyses not only the book itself, but also the whole SF field, its strengths and its weaknesses. This is the first piece of serious SF criticism we have read which really lays down solid principles for the criticism of SF. It is witty, intelligent and clear.  p. 3

He then quotes a long passage from the Aldiss article which ends with:

“In other words, discover the purpose; judge its worth; criticise the technique . . .”  p. 3

All of the above comments suggest that it was an interesting time to be in and/or observing the British SF scene.
I didn’t expect to like Background: Space Drive by George Locke, which I thought would be another of those dreary science articles that occasionally turn up in SF magazines, but he writes in a breezy, entertaining style:

Twenty or thirty years ago, science fiction writers took great pains to work out a plausible scientific framework for their stories. But they quickly came into conflict with the accepted scientific theories of the day. Before the First World War, heroic adventures on Mars a la E. R. Burroughs were quite plausible in light of what was known about Mars. Today, the science fiction writer moans softly: “I mustn’t dream of cream princesses enthroned on Mars because the astronomers insist that mammalian life is impossible. So I have to find an outlet for my sexual fantasies among a bunch of nasty green lichens!”  p. 103

De Bergerac was a couple of hundred years ahead of his time as a science fiction writer, and the rocket was neglected in favour of the aforementioned antigravity. Jules Verne certainly didn’t use it. His unfortunate heroes were shot out of a gigantic cannon like a packet of puffed wheat. Ever since the publication of that story (English edition 1873), science fiction readers have condemned Verne on the grounds that after such a violent initial blastoff, the heroes would have resembled a rather soggy mass of red puffed wheat.  p. 106

He starts with Lucian and his sailing ships and works his way round to the modern equivalent by the end.
This issue’s reviews start with Fancy and Imagination by Michael Moorcock. I think I have finally figured out why Moorcock writes about some books under his own name and the rest under his ‘James Colvin’ pseudonym: those reviewed under his own name are those he wants to proselytise about, those he reviews under his pseudonym take their chances . . . .
This month Moorcock (as opposed to Colvin) reviews Greybeard by Brian W. Aldiss, and The Paradox Men by Charles Harness. In his illuminating reviews of both books (this is a very well written essay) he has this to say about them (amidst much else):

Wordsworth once distinguished between Fancy and Imagination in art—Fancy was the ability to create what hadn’t been conceived of before, Imagination was the ability to explore the deeper aspects of what we see around us. In Greybeard Imagination predominates with a sufficient dash of Fancy to make the whole very good modem SF indeed.  p. 112

Long-time readers of the genre may remember such beautiful stories as Time Trap (Astounding, 1948), Fruits of the Agathon (Thrilling Wonder Stories, 1948), Stalemate in Space (Planet [Stories], 1949) and that tour de force in Authentic, 1953—The Rose. All of them have, with The Paradox Men, a certain similarity of theme and mood, yet all of them show a writer of intellect and power whose faults—descent into pulp shorthand on occasions, plots tending to move a little too fast, tendency to use characters as mechanical chess-pieces in a too carefully plotted framework—are easy to ignore. It is high time we saw the republication of all of these.  p. 113

In his Calvin persona, Moorcock uses Books for the Kids? to dish out some praise but mostly punishment beatings. In his review of Andre Norton’s Judgement on Janus he says that the writer “feasts off the hard work of earlier writers, looting their backgrounds and ideas and producing barren pastiche after barren pastiche. If you’ve read one, you’ve read ’em all.” He says of A Life for the Stars by James Blish that “There’s nothing new here, either, but at least Blish is plagiarising himself to produce a juvenile version of his famous Oakie series.” Moorcock then covers another juvenile by Nourse, and airs his grievances about this type of material appearing in the SF magazines. I don’t really understand his objection: who cares as long as it’s good?
Next for the brickbat is Poul Anderson’s A Truce for Kings:

This pulp Western is dressed up as an SF story. It is badly written, highly reactionary and embarrassingly sentimental—and it won this year’s Hugo Award for the best short fiction. I began writing my review before I heard that piece of news. I’m still bewildered—can it mean that the Hugo has become valueless as an indication of what is good? I’m equally bewildered at Gollancz for selecting it. I always had the impression that he was a left-wing publisher. Not any more, it seems.  p. 116

His bafflement about the Hugo Award not being an indicator of quality is odd: was it ever a guarantee?
Later there is this about Damon Knight’s new novel Beyond the Barrier:

Damon Knight’s reputation is good, yet surely he can’t have gained it from his fiction? I hoped his latest novel would be an improvement on his short stories, but no such luck.  p. 117

This about the author of The Country of the Kind, among others.
There are a couple of positive reviews at the end (Ballard—naturally—and Burgess).
At his best Moorcock is a very good reviewer of material he likes—but with everything else his politics and bugbears (juveniles, sentimentality, etc., etc.) make him an unreliable arbiter of what is worth your time.
In Two Good Ones, Langdon Jones positively reviews The Uncensored Man by Arthur Sellings, and The Syndic by C. M. Kornbluth, although he starts with this about Selling:

I have always considered Arthur Sellings to be a greatly under-estimated and neglected writer. True, his output hasn’t been great, and in a world where a writer like Murray Leinster can get to the top, it is obvious that quantity comes before quality.  p. 119

This praising who you like and trashing who you don’t was a common New Worlds reviewing technique. This would continue, and get worse: I’ve heard people say that reading the later New Worlds’ book review columns (in the large format edition especially) was like reading Pravda—you would skim the reviews to see whose turn it was to be denounced.
Letters to the Editor opens with a long letter from Ivor Latto of Glasgow (who wins the new Harry Harrison novel, The Ethical Engineer), which is mostly about Langdon Jones’s I Remember Anita in #144:

Mr. Jones has as much right to employ blunt sexual realism as any non-sf writer . . . if he thinks it justified for his purpose . . . and in this case there is obviously a case for it, to present his characters as live, animal human beings. The sweaty realism of love and death has been employed to advantage by many writers, notably by the Existentialists. But when Sartre or Camus do this they use the language of realism.
The strangest thing about this story was the combination of a narrative which shows all the warts, with a style, rather, a Style, which was extremely literary, at times even affected. The oft-repeated devise of ‘I remember . . .’ is one example of this, while the language itself too often drifted into neo-Hemingway; phrases like ‘I stayed there, buried in the soft gentleness of you, I know not how long,’ or ‘the loin-heat that used to suffuse my abdomen,’ again, ‘we used to march, hand-in-hand, in arm-swinging boisterousness down avenues of stars.’
Nobody speaks like that. Nobody even thinks like that.
And there was enough of this sort of thing to be disconcerting in conjunction with the realism of the love and death scenes. This pretentiousness also was expressed in some surprisingly banal passages. How about: ‘My God, you had never really been loved.’ All this does not mean that I think Langdon Jones is a bad writer, only that I think that he was trying to be a Fine Writer. His theme was simple and powerful, it would surely have benefited from the use of simple and powerful language, rather than resorting to embarrassing and intrusive literary tricks. My second reservation about this story was the aura of incredible bitterness which pervaded it, no doubt part of the author’s intention. All right, this was a tragedy, but one does not leave Oedipus Rex feeling angry with the Gods, but rather one feels cleansed of emotion. In expressing such bitterness Mr. Jones does not guard his characters against self-pity, the stink of which suffuses much of the story. If I seem over-critical of this piece it is perhaps because the big build-up made me more sensitive than I might otherwise have been to its shortcomings. It was certainly the most adult item in this issue, and the strongest in emotion, but it was in my opinion over-written and suffered from an unfortunate placing of emphasis.  p. 123-124

Moorcock accepts the criticism before expressing his disappointment that some readers wrote in to complain about the story’s sexual explicitness (“Why must Mr. Jones express the feelings of a young, sensitive artist so crudely! It isn’t sex any more, it’s downright pornography!”).
Story Ratings 145 was discussed in the review of that issue.6

In conclusion I’d say that there is nothing particularly outstanding in this issue, but it is interesting to note that the tone or style of all the stories is different (to a greater or lesser extent) from what the magazine was typically publishing under Carnell’s editorship.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall’s review in Vector #30 notes that the magazine has gone monthly and that Jones has joined as assistant editor. He starts by saying that, “this issue is definitely the best to come from Moorcock”. I’d disagree: #143 is the best so far in my judgement (Bailey’s The Fall of Frenchy Steiner, and the second part of Ballard’s Equinox).
After talking about Selling’s increased stature in the field and synopsising the serial, Hall moves on to Bob Parkinson, mentioning that he is “one of the well-known Cheltenham SF Circle fen who went north to Nottingham to fool around in ballistics or some such.” He adds that Parkinson’s story is “quite well-written but occasionally over-poetic” and that the story’s idea and style reminded him of Cordwainer Smith’s The Lady Who Sailed the Soul.
Hall liked Green’s story a lot, describing it as “old guard” and that it “it is a pleasant change to find a really readable SF tale in these days of so much experimental writing”. I was rather baffled by that comment: they have only just got going with the New Wave stuff!
Hall says Rome’s story is “rather unsatisfactory but unusual”, and that Keyes “perpetrates a parsley gun” (no, me neither) and that it “stands on its own merits [. . .] despite similarities to others.”
Hall liked the cover, “the best I’ve seen for several years—eye-catching and pleasing”, and the Cawthorn illustrations.

2. Arthur Sellings was one of the few British writers (J. T. McIntosh was another) who sold regularly to Galaxy magazine in the fifties. However he didn’t make much of an impact on the British paperback lists: although all but one of his hardbacks was published in hardback by Dobson he never had a regular UK paperback publisher. He did better in the USA: three of his books appeared from Berkley Medallion, one from Ballantine, and one under a pseudonym from Banner. Consequently, when I was browsing the shelves in the mid-seventies he was nowhere to be seen, and I only came to know of him through New Worlds Quarterly, which published news of his premature death from a heart attack (he was 47).
His SFE page is here; his Wikipedia page is here.

3. In Selling’s serial, the fifth and sixth lines from the bottom of p. 42 are in the wrong order:

“That’s my boy! That’s disposed of that question
your dear departed parents, I never thought that I would
then. But—as somebody who made certain promises to

should read:

“That’s my boy! That’s disposed of that question
then. But—as somebody who made certain promises to
your dear departed parents, I never thought that I would

4. Bob Parkinson was a name I didn’t recognise, but he wrote a handful of stories and poems, as well as a number of articles and reviews (he turns up with an essay on Cordwainer Smith in 1971), and was President of the British Interplanetary Society. Given this latter information you would have expected a hard SF story. His ISFDB page is here, and there is some BIS information here.

5. David Rome was the pseudonym of David William Boutland. He had published over a dozen stories in Carnell’s New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures. This was his only appearance in the Moorcock New Worlds, although other stories appeared elsewhere from the mid-sixties to early seventies: I suspect he may have stopped writing SF due to the lack of a market. His ISFDB page is here, and there is more information about him on Steve Holland’s blog.

6. The story ratings for this issue appeared in #148:

The longest story tops the ratings again, just like it usually does in Analog. My pecking order would have been Parkinson followed by Sellings, Keyes, & Rome.  ●

rssrss

New Worlds SF #145, November-December 1964

ISFDB link

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock

Fiction:
The Shores of Death (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Michael Moorcock
Mix-Up • short story by George Collyn ∗∗
Gamma Positive • short story by Ernest Hill 
Some Will Be Saved • short story by Colin R. Fry 
The Patch • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley [as by Peter Woods] 
Emissary • short story by John Hamilton

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert J. Tilley
Interior artwork • by Cawthorn, Thomson
We Live in Hope • editorial by Michael Moorcock
A Dish of Dobsons • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Letters to the Editor
Story Ratings 144

_____________________

The Shores of Death (Part 2 of 2) by Michael Moorcock continues on its merry way for another couple of chapters before becoming an irritating read in chapter nine. On Earth, they are arguing about the content of the message that will be sent into the universe. Marca, meanwhile, arrives at the Bleak Worlds and lands on the planet Klobax. He speaks with the man who meets the spaceship and tries to find out the location of a man called Sharvis, an ex-member of the government cabinet. Take arrives shortly afterwards.
The rest of Marca’s story involves him tracking down various people on Klobax to get to Sharvis, who has what Marca wants, which is the ability to make him immortal. Before Marca can get to Sharvis, Take tracks him down and tells him (among other things in a long data-dump conversation) about the awful side-effects of his immortality (I was never really sure what these were, but they were bad enough that Take wants to die, preferably after getting his revenge on Sharvis). Take kills Marca to spare him having to endure the same thing.

Marca wakes up later on to find he has been resurrected by Sharvis, who then gives him another ear-bending until Take, who is has been unable to force his way into Sharvis’s lair, is let in. Sharvis tells Take he can give him death by using him in the process to make Marca immortal.
This final part just isn’t credible. Apart from the hand-wavey stuff about the side-effects of immortality, Sharvis is an almost comical mad-scientist type: this is just ludicrous. Also, the original storyline about the solar system in peril has been completely dumped (by now, people on Earth have started fighting and the aliens have left).

Marca eventually meets up with Fastina again and finds out the limitations of his immortality; he is also unable to end the foment on Earth. This is an unsatisfactory conclusion, given that none of the parts fit together and it all ends in failure.
By the by, I noticed a few clumsy sentences in this section, and again wondered if this was a first draft written in a hurry to fill a hole.1
Mix-Up by George Collyn is the first story by a writer who contributed a number of stories to the paperback-sized edition of the magazine.2 This one is about a teleportation mishap that swaps the minds of a nubile movie star and an English professor. Routine, but breezily told.
Gamma Positive by Ernest Hill starts with a scientist testing a drug on himself. The ‘negative’ version sends his consciousness back in time but the ‘positive’ appears to have no effect. He later goes to a psychologist who hypnotises him. The account the scientist gives of the future is a series of odd vocal sounds but the psychologist has more luck getting him to draw something. The result is a painting that is similar to prehistoric cave paintings. The scientist leaves (spoiler) and is killed in a road traffic accident, which the psychologist subsequently relates to the drawing.
This is all dressed up in lots of pseudo-scientific jargon which is a bit of a slog to get through.

Some Will Be Saved by Colin R. Fry has a priest wandering a post-apocalypse landscape who comes across a couple who are farming the land. They are called Adam and Eve, and (spoiler) they eventually turn out to be robots. Naff idea, but it has the odd interesting passage.

Now it was summer and he stared about him with a renewed interest as he stumbled carefully through the trackless jungle that the countryside had become. He watched one of the groundspiders cunningly trap a blindmouse: if he wanted to guess at the most likely survival form, the groundspiders would have his bet. He shuddered as he thought of it, and felt a kinship with the blind little mouse struggling panic stricken in the evil creature’s sticky trap. Yet: evil creature? It was not evil. It was simply trying to survive. But he was glad he did not see its kind often. It preyed on little mammals, little animals who belonged, if the evolutionists were right, to the far roots and branches of his own family tree. And there was always the nightmare thought that one of the spiders might grow big enough to trap a man.  p. 80

The Patch by Barrington J. Bayley starts with Jundrak, the representative of the king of a space empire, visiting a rebel prince called Peredan. Jundrak offers Peredan a pardon if he will help the king fight a phenomenon known as the Patch. This has been travelling through space and killing planets, leaving dead animals and vegetation in its wake. Pederan refuses and Jundrak leaves.
Unknown to Pederan, Jundrak’s ship uses a new form of space drive that enhances the slipways it travels along, and this effect will lead the Patch to the rebels. Later there is space battle between the forces of the prince and king but, even though he wins, Pederan’s forces are then engulfed by the Patch.
The final scenes (spoiler) have Pederan attacking the king’s planet. Peredan’s forces, thanks to the strength of their damper fields, managed to survive being engulfed by the Patch long enough to communicate with it. Pederan explains to Jundrak what the Patch wants:

“The Patch searches for food. But its food is of a peculiar kind. It feeds off the individuality of organic beings, the mysterious essence that makes each man, woman and animal a conscious entity subtly different from any other. When this is absorbed by the Patch, individuality is lost and the body decomposes into its chemical constituents—as death ensues.
[. . . ]
“We found that the Patch is not particularly interested that the individual be full-grown, any stage of development is acceptable. It is the being it wants.”
Jundrak uttered a sound that was part grunt, part growl, part chuckle. “So we offer it our new-born children.”
“Not quite. The Patch gets just as much satisfaction from fertilised ova. It derives a deal of sustenance even from unfertilised ova, or from male spermatozoa. We offered it something to which everyone in the kingdom will have to contribute: from the women, a proportion of their Graafian follicles; from the men, regular donations of sperm. In return for an unmolested populace, we shall give the Patch the equivalent of the population of the kingdom in fertilised ova, and several thousand times that number of spermatozoa. This is to be repeated every month.  p. 109

This is a solid if dated space opera for the most part, but it is spoiled by its ridiculous ending.

The final story is Emissary by John Hamilton3, which describes a man wandering around a town touching many people, and buying various things only to dump them later on. He ends up in the sewers (spoiler) making radio contact with invading aliens, and notifies them he has contaminated humanity and (he finds out as the biter is bit) himself. One that should have stayed in the slushpile.

This issue’s rather bland (and given its limited colour palette, probably cost-saving) Cover is by Robert Tilley.4 There is Interior artwork (although the artists are not credited in this issue) by James Cawthorn, Thomson, Gilmore and Graham. The Moorcock and the Fry story are illustrated by Cawthorn and Thomson respectively, so presumably one of Gilmore or Graham did the illustration for the Hamilton, and the other did the Editorial, Books, and Letters to the Editor thumbnails, (the one for Books shown below is new to this issue).
We Live in Hope, Michael Moorcock’s editorial, slates Charles H. Schneer’s film of First Men in the Moon before plugging a semi-pro fanzine called Epilogue.

A Dish of Dobsons by Michael Moorcock has this review:

I did not expect to like another book which Dobson’s published recently. This is Heinlein’s The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (18s). In spite of a deep dislike of Heinlein’s mentality and his barren style, I have to admit that the short novel of the title and its companion short stories are extremely polished, readable and entertaining. Jonathan Hoag is scarcely SF (it was originally published in Unknown, 1942). It is really a fantasy following a formula that may well have originated in Unknown (Fear is another) and was used some years later with great effect by Frederick Brown (Come And Go Mad! in Weird Tales) and Fritz Leiber (You’re All Alone! in Fantastic). Yet even though I guessed what was coming, Heinlein still managed to keep me reading and the shock ending really did shock me. The other stories are all good Heinlein, apart from The Man Who Travelled in Elephants which struck me as an attempt to cash in on over-sweet Bradbury territory. It’s a piece of sentimental nostalgia which may delight those Americans who respond to Goldwater’s Myths and Legends of America, but which finds no response at all in the non-American reader (for whom this collection was published). Here we get a good glimpse at Heinlein in a cosy reactionary mood (just as insidious as his more often noted violent reactionary mood). Other stories include They (which is a trifle close to Jonathan Hoag in theme, and particularly to Come And Go Mad), All You Zombies (one of Heinlein’s best), ‘And He Built a Crooked House . . .’ (another of his best) and Our Fair City (which tends to fall down on its construction towards the end, but isn’t at all bad). A much better collection, I must admit, than many published recently.  p. 119-120

The wealth of information you get from this passage illustrates why I like his reviews: apart from all the normal information you expect, you get a genre history lesson about this kind of story, he gives you an insight into his biases and the writer’s, and he does it all with pith and concision.
One of his ‘Paperbacks Received’ reviews at the end made me smile:

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Signet (Four-Square here), 7/6. Never has such terrible old rubbish appeared between the covers of a book. If you want a good laugh (if a slightly horrified one) from start to finish, try this. At times it reads like Goebbels writing in the style of Marie Corelli.  p. 121

There is also a half-page plug for Brian W. Aldiss’s Greybeard elsewhere.
Letters to the Editor has a missive from the author of next month’s serial, Arthur Sellings:

[Equinox]? I don’t know—read through it and around it; felt the same way about it as I did the parallel story in F&SF . . . style, yes . . . basic image, yes . . . but story—most decidedly no. I don’t know who acclaimed Ballard ‘the finest modern SF writer’ but his ideas are too thin—like those other admirable lads Sturgeon and Aldiss. Give him the title of the best writer writing SF, which is a bit different. It’s probably the main problem today. Critics both in and out of SF plead for better writing and characterisation in SF, but they carp when, as it inevitably must, it crowds out the old SF elements.  p. 122

There are a number of fanzines listed at the end of the column including Les Spinge #13, Peter Weston’s Zenith #5 (“A bit earnest but worth a try”), Camber #14 (“Another well-produced duplicated job, with a special ‘art folio’ by Cawthorn, material by Rackham, and Moorcock on the private life of Elric”), Charles Platt’s Beyond #6 (“This has a somewhat strident note at the moment”) & Amra #29.
The final items are Story Ratings 144 (discussed in the review of that issue),5 and the Advertisements page, which has one which I believe is Moorcock’s:

Wanted [. . .] Also AUTHENTIC SF 31, March 53, TWS, Dec. 50, TWS Fruits of Agathon, 1948 plus TWS, Planet, F&SF cont. C. L. Harness stories . . .  p. 128

That issue of Authentic has Charles L. Harness’s classic novella, The Rose; the December 1950 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories has The New Reality. Compact Books gathered together these two stories and The Chessplayers (F&SF, October 1953) in the collection The Rose (1966). This was one of the few paperbacks of the time that went on to have a later hardback edition (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1968).

A lacklustre issue and the worst of the four Moorcock edited ones so far.6  ●

_____________________

1. I later found this in the author introduction to The Shores of Death (Mayflower, 1974):

This novel started life as a somewhat loosely knit and hastily written short serial in New Worlds when I had just started editing the magazine and long material was hard to come by. It was a romantic, extravagant piece of work, like most of my stuff, on a kind of Faust theme (like most of my stuff) and although it got a better reception than it deserved, many readers asked “Where’s the last instalment?” because the ending hadn’t made the point clear it was meant to make. Others hinted—or stated blindly—that the science wasn’t all it could be, particularly the idea of clashing galaxies “exceeding the speed of light and converting to energy”. They were right. I wasn’t convinced by the science either. Thus, I have rewritten the novel entirely, with only a fraction of the original plot and material, using a deliberately formal style, and making quite sure, I hope, that my theme is coherent this time.  p. 7

2. George Collyn contributed eight stories (and a couple of reviews) to this version of the magazine and another story appeared in one of the early large-size editions. He also sold one story to F&SF. His real name was Colin Pilkington and his ISFDB page is here.

3. John Hamilton was blurbed as “an extremely promising writer”: he would produce two tales for New Worlds and one for Science Fantasy/Impulse between 1964 and 1966.

4. Robert J. Tilley is probably better known for his stories to Authentic, Nebula, New Worlds, F&SF, etc., than the three cover designs he contributed to New Worlds. He was one of a minority of UK SF writers to make multiple sales to F&SF, and over a significant period too: 1960-1986. His ISFDB page is here.

5. Here are the story ratings for this issue (from #146):

I agree that the Collyn is the best of the short stories, and the Hamilton one of the worst.

6. Lest you think I am being harsh, there are only four stories from the last two issues that were reprinted: the Jones, Tubb and Bayley from the last issue, and the Collyn from this one. Even then, they all reappeared only in a Best From New Worlds collection, apart from the Bayley (Integrity from #144) which was also reprinted in the author’s The Seed of Evil.  ●

_____________________

First published 28th April 2017.
Edited 2nd May to add illustrations and alter formatting, as well as make some minor textual changes.
rssrss

New Worlds SF #144, September-October 1964

ISFDB link

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock

Fiction:
The Shores of Death (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by Michael Moorcock ∗∗
Private Shape • short story by Sydney J. Bounds
Integrity • short story by Barrington J. Bayley [as by P. F. Woods] ∗∗∗+
I Remember, Anita . . . • short story by Langdon Jones ∗∗∗
Andromeda • novelette by Clifford C. Reed ∗∗∗
New Experience • short story by E. C. Tubb

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Jakubowicz
Interior artwork • James Cawthorn, Maeve Gilmore, Arthur “ATom” Thomson, Graham
What’s the Argument? • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Books • by Michael Moorcock, James Colvin
Letters to the Editor
Story Ratings

_____________________

Michael Moorcock’s editorial, What’s the Argument?, opens the issue with this:

Sparked off originally by the recent Guest Editorials, fanned by Ballard’s article on William Burroughs (NW 142), a dispute has been in progress between our readers. Largely it has been between those who are nervous that SF will become too far-out and obscure for their taste and those who want it to go as far-out as it can without coming back on itself. The former say that they read SF for entertainment, not ‘art,’ the latter say that SF may be the only hope for literature and want it to be as artistic as hell.
Controversy is healthy in any field and gives it progression, but we feel that those who want ‘art’ and those who want ‘entertainment’ in SF may simply be quarrelling over terms. All good entertainment is art of its kind, all good art is entertaining.
[. . .]
We get a lot of ‘straightforward’ stories from authors which are merely re-workings of themes so tired, so over-used that they can’t possibly entertain. We also get ‘experimental’ stories which, apart from seeming to be obscure for obscurity’s sake, are also badly written. We don’t want either.  p. 2

He goes on to discuss the difference between anthologies (‘the best of the old’) and magazines (‘the best of the new’), and how the latter have an obligation to innovate:

Really new treatments of old ideas, fairly conventional treatments of new ideas, and best of all new treatments of new ideas, all have a place here.  p. 3

It’s a shame that this is followed by something that would seem to be none of the above:

Moorcock’s serial The Shores of Death (later expanded and published as the book The Twilight Man, 1966) has a first part that isn’t bad, it just that it reads like a quickly written potboiler (produced, I suspect, to fill a hole in the magazine).
It is one of those far-future pieces that have a familiar decadent setting, i.e. lots of art installations, men in colourful tights, anti-gravity cars, etc. Indeed, the opening has a glimmer of his later ‘Dancers at the End of Time’ series, but without the humour:

The party was being held in his honour, celebrating his return from the cold misery of space. But he thought of it also as something of a farewell party for the human race, a premature Wake held by the soon-to-be-deceased.
It was a noisy party, a colourful party, a splendid, exciting party, and it swirled all around him in the huge hall. It was packed full of life; full of heads and hair and bellies and breasts, legs and chests and arms and hands; people with flowing blood in their veins, pumping hearts under their ribs, nerves at work, muscles moving. Their bizarre and grotesque costumes were of a dazzling multitude of colours. They drank down the liquor and ate up the food and they danced and flirted and they talked—they talked all the time.  p. 5

Clovis Marca is at the party after returning from space, and he sees a man in dark clothing. Marca has seen the man several times before and wants to know why he is being followed but can’t get to him. Later, Marca goes to a meeting where people discuss the collision that will occur in two hundred years between their galaxy and another, destroying all life.
A woman called Fastina also goes to the meeting and afterwards finds Marca and proposes marriage. He is non-committal but says that she can come back and stay at the artist Narvo Velusi’s for a few days. Later, when Marca and Fastina go to his room, they encounter the dark man who tells them his name is Take and that he knows what it is that Clovis seeks. He then escapes.

The rest of the first part cycles through several episodes: they meet a returning spaceship and find that the crew, like most others, were affected by space sickness and died after crazed behaviour (the examination of the craft is quite a good scene); Narvo addresses the populace and suggests they build a transmitter to say “We Are Here!”; meanwhile, an alien spaceship turns up.

The final section details the attempt to communicate with the aliens, and the plan they have to save the solar system by moving it out of the galaxy. Now that salvation is on hand, Marca feels able to pursue his still unrevealed plan. He gives Fastina the slip and leaves for the Bleak Worlds. Take is standing behind Fastina as she watches him leave.
This has the feel of something from a late 1940’s or 1950’s pulp and is an average effort at best.
Private Shape by Sydney J. Bounds isn’t much better. A shape-shifting alien PI is employed to get the goods on a husband who has apparently left his wife for another woman. This is told in a light, breezy style but it is painfully dated by a stereotypical scenario that involves photographing the husband in a compromising encounter.
Integrity by Barrington J. Bayley is the second of three stories by him in consecutive issues, all under different names.1 It is described on the back cover as “an ironic story of Free America—the kind dreamed of by Barry Goldwater and his supporters—where rugged independence is taken to the ultimate . . .” It is actually a satire (although the ending is, indeed, ironic) and starts with this:

The wedding had been lively. The bride was a remarkably pretty girl, and to keep her the groom had been forced to battle desperately with about a dozen determined men. The refrigerated armour which he wore both by custom and necessity had at times glowed cherry-red as it absorbed the energy of assorted heatguns.
If the wedding ceremony was one of the most savage traditions in the social life of Free America, it was also one of the most entertaining. Juble was in a good mood by the time his companion Fleck eventually flew him home. “Ah nearly had her,” he boasted in his drawling voice, carefully wiping over the parts of his disassembled heat-gun with a clean rag. “This neat package nearly got me the neatest package you ever did see. What a night this would ha’been!”  p. 55

It continues in an equally entertaining and over-the-top manner as Jubal decides to offer his services to a scientist/inventor type called Joe to earn enough money to pay his taxes. He wants to do this rather than give the equivalent day of labour (under police supervision) to maintain public buildings (“It offends against mah personal integrity to be degraded so”).
Scientist Joe wants to build a machine that will enable him to perceive reality beyond the normal reach of his senses.
The ending (spoiler) involves the pair using the perception enhancing headsets that Joe subsequently develops, whereupon they discover that their brains and nervous systems only function as highly organised and ordered entities. Unfortunately, Joe transmits his libertarian philosophy to both their nervous systems with fatal results. This is a neatly ironic ending and, along with a typical Bayleyian SFnal idea about reality perception, plus lots of entertaining satire throughout, it is an original and satisfying piece.

Another story of note in this issue is I Remember, Anita . . . by Langdon Jones. The narrative is a straightforward one of a young man who meets an older woman in Scotland while they are both on holiday, and they start an affair. This is written in an, at times, almost ridiculously overwrought and mawkish manner:

You told me how you had been born illegitimate. You told me of your mother, and how she had tried to give you everything, to make up for the loss of a father. You told me of how you had shown yourself to be an intelligent child, and how you had gone from Grammar School to University. How your mother had died when you were eighteen, and how you realised then what a strong relationship there had been between you. How you were completely shattered by her death.
How, to try to escape your morbid ideas, you went to a wild party, only a month after her death, and how there you were raped. . . And how you were twenty-five before you next touched a man. He was a man whom you met at work. You felt instantly attracted to him, he seemed generous and kind. How he flattered you, took you out on long, happy evenings, bought you presents, and made you really feel like a woman. And how you became pregnant, and at last, after days of sickening, nervous worry, finally told him, and never saw him again. . .
And you told me of the long, dark evenings in your little bed-sitter, of the bitterness in you as you lay in tears on your bed. Of how the date when the baby was due used to hang over your whole life like a black cloud, but then, later, how you wished and wished, with your whole being, that the time would pass quicker, so that at last you would be rid of the alien thing within you.
And you told me how the baby was still-born. And how you were so happy, and yet, at the same time, torn by an inner grief. And you told me of how, for the rest of your life, you had nothing whatever to do with men; and how you fought against the increasing aridity and bitterness within you.
My God, you had never really been loved.  p. 73-74

Later on there is, for the SF field of time, some quite graphic sexual description (even if today it rather reads like an entry for a bad sex writing award):

I remember the weeks that followed. Oh Anita, Anita, I remember our love-making! I remember the perfection of your body; the smoothness of your flesh. I remember the smooth beauty of your breasts, the sleekness of your stomach, as I used to run my hand over it. The yielding firmness of your thighs. The black triangle, where I used to find the warmth of you. I remember your clumsy, skilful hands as they brought ecstasy to the straining symbol of my passion. I remember the sounds our love made. The little sighs you used to give, and then later, the gasping and the coughing noises you made in your convulsion. I remember the liquid sounds of our love, and the rhythm of our bodies. I remember the musky odour of your excitement.  p. 76

At the end of the story (spoiler) there is a nuclear attack on London. He picks his way through the devastation to find Anita terribly injured, and she dies in his arms.
Given the comments above you may wonder why I originally said it was a notable story. Well, there are a few things. First, you get used to the style after a while. Second, there is an attempt here to write about adult matters in the (at the time) rather taboo-bound field of science fiction. Finally, the last scenes in the story, which describe the aftermath of the nuclear blast, are graphic and brutal enough to still pack a punch. It is worth a sympathetic reading.

I didn’t hold out much hope for the last two stories, given that they are both by New Worlds old-timers and, with New Experience by E. C. Tubb, I wasn’t wrong. This is one of those stories where a man wakes up to a shifting reality (this is actually an effective first scene). After a few pages of his experiences of objects appearing and disappearing randomly we find out that he is trialling an experimental drug. This makes him think he is God, as the only things that seem real to him are those he concentrates on. His handler, who has been following him around in the real world, eventually gets him back to the clinic, where he wakes up and they tell him it was all a dream. If there is a point to all this I didn’t get it.
Andromeda, the novelette by Clifford C. Reed, however, isn’t that bad.2 This one is set in a future that has humanity spread throughout the solar system, and its opening scene has the police breaking up a demonstration on Earth:

So far as the ordinary citizen observed, it was a normal Free Speech Sunday. There appeared to be no more than the average number of armoured personnel carriers and pick-up wagons about. There did not seem more riot police about than usual. The licensed marihuana vendors shrilled their wares as usual; the habituees browsed at the pavement porno stands.
In the centre of the square several hundred citizens stood with their personal ear microphones tuned to a speaker on the rostrum. They packed close to the platform, shutting out the activity around them, as a fresh orator moved forward to underline the convictions of the converted, and crystallize the emotions of those not yet committed.
From the upper side of the square, on the steps of one of the buildings, two men watched the scene.
“That the woman?” the civilian asked.
The uniformed man nodded.  p. 81-82

The rest of the story follows the attempts of the authorities to make this woman conform. After the demonstrators are arrested they are all shipped to camps rather than being released as normally happens. At the camps there is an effort is made to recondition and release them:

No violence. Only the day and night, never-ceasing insistence of the hammering loud-speakers. No flesh and blood opponents to refute, but canned arguments which went on, and on, and on.
After a week all the weaker rebels had been weeded out, removed to other centres. From which, when they were safely cleansed, they could be fed back into normal society. For those who still held fast, there was more pressure on another flank.
They had stuffed their ears with cloth against the canned voices. Now they would have to close their eyes.
Overnight, posters bloomed all around the camp, accusing, exhorting. The pointing finger, “Why are You still in prison? Don’t you want to be Free?”
The signs and slogans, static and mute, could be shut out by mental discipline. But movement caught the eye, was harder to ignore. Projectors could be swivelled and aimed at will. Without warning, walls and ceilings, even floors, could come suddenly to life, the message smashing at the prisoners’ minds before they had time to shield themselves.
“It’s inhuman,” the woman protested. Two warders led a man away towards the hospital; a man who stumbled as he walked, a man who laughed, turning his head from side to side. A stream of blood ran down either side of the man’s nose. He clutched a pointed piece of metal in one hand. There was blood on the metal. The woman clung to the chairman’s arm. “Why are they doing this to us?”
The blind man was led out of sight, and he looked at the woman. “I think they are afraid,” he said.
“Of us? Of us!”  p. 84-85

The last few are later shipped to the moon. There, a doctor tells the woman that the governments on Earth are making this extraordinary effort to break them as, simply put, they can’t afford to tolerate dissent now that humanity has stopped progressing. This isn’t convincing, and it isn’t helped by an overlong and tenuous explanation either.
Eventually she is the last one left, and the powers that be decide to put her on a spaceship called Star Seeker and send her out of the solar system. This way they can still pretend that the human race has an outward urge, and the populace won’t find out that they have lied about re-educating all the dissidents. The final scenes involve a three-way showdown between her, the various world leaders and her doctor.
This doesn’t entirely work, and Reed takes a lot longer than necessary to wrap matters up in the final scenes, but I rather enjoyed this one. It covers a lot of ground for a novelette, there is the odd flash of intelligence, and it perhaps has a 1984 thing going on too.

The Cover by Jakubowicz is the first full colour cover used in Moorcock’s editorship. The artist would contribute another cover for New Worlds #147.3 Moorcock notes in his editorial that they have started using Interior artwork again, and there are four artists listed for the three illustrated stories, and the (new) thumbnail sketches below for the Editorial and Letters pages. The Cawthorn and Thomson contributions are obvious, and the illustration for Langdon Jones’ story is by Gilmore,4 leaving Graham as the artist of the thumbnails presumably (they stop crediting artists altogether from #146 onwards). I like Cawthorn’s work, and we’ll see more of it in the future.

The Books column leads off with a review of J. G. Ballard’s collection The Terminal Beach under Moorcock’s own name before he switches to his James Colvin pseudonym for the rest. It starts with this rave:

There can be no question now that J. G. Ballard has emerged as the greatest imaginative writer of his day. This latest collection of stories is profoundly stimulating and emotionally exciting. It shows us a writer whose intellectual control of his subject-matter is only matched by the literary giants of the past, and it shows us a writer who is developing so rapidly that almost every story he writes is better than his last. He is the first really important literary talent to come from the field of modern SF and it is to his credit that he is as popular with his magazine audience as he ever was. He has shown that SF need make no concessions to the commercial publisher’s idea of what the public wants.  p. 119

He explains a little about the title story:

In The Terminal Beach, however, Ballard dispenses with formality and uses an impressionistic technique which is absolutely effective in its description of a wartime American bomber pilot who returns to Eniwetok obsessed with the idea of finding ‘a key to the present.’  p. 119

As James Colvin he gives a better review than I would have expected to two anthologies by John Carnell (New Writings in SF #1 and Lambda One)—old loyalties perhaps—but is less than impressed with Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100:

They’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here. 3 stories on overworked themes by SF’s shadow-Hemingway.  p. 122

Letters to the Editor starts with a letter from P. Johnson of Orpington in Kent, who has this to say:

Although the two best SF writers in the world are British, and several other British writers are among the top ranks, Britain has no strength in depth. The Nova magazines published some stories that were unsurpassed by American writers, but the average stories which make up the bulk of most magazines were particularly weary and unoriginal in New Worlds and even Science Fantasy. Why not, therefore, try for some American writers. I can only deduce by the prolific amount that they write, that Laumer, Damon Knight, Dickson etc. are professionals. Surely they would welcome a new market? The only obstacle (a big one, admittedly) would be less financial gain.  p. 123

Writer Joseph Green of Seattle, WA says:

I question whether Burroughs, Anthony Burgess or any other writer should move so far out of the realm of common understanding that the essential message of the book is lost to a majority of readers.
[. . .]
I think Finnegans Wake and Ulysses are eminent examples. Any person of normal intelligence can enjoy the latter, while Wake is customarily issued over here with an explanatory book which attempts to help you understand it! Both are highly original works. Ulysses is a classic. Wake was a dud.  p. 124

Moorcock suggests that everyone is capable of training themselves to get the most out of a book, and that perhaps the guide and Wake should be regarded as one book. I’m still not going to bother.
There is a third letter in this interesting column from Eric L. Vorbez of New York, who asks Ballard and Moorcock for more specifics on what they regard as good SF.
Finally, there are Story Ratings for issues #140 to #143, which I’ve commented on in the reviews for #142 & #143.5

An interesting issue, with a good Barrington Bayley story that I hadn’t read before. ●

_____________________

1. Presumably Moorcock asked Bayley to use different names for these three stories so it would seem like there was a larger group of contributors than there actually was. He would contribute six stories to the first ten issues of the paperback format magazine and then only one solo effort and one collaboration for the remaining twenty-one.

2. According to ISFDB, this was Reed’s penultimate story. A decade’s worth of production stopped a year or so later.

3. If you look at the bottom of this eFanzines page you can see Michel Jakubowicz’s original cover art for this issue, and some other work. You can see his covers for the French magazine Fiction (a foreign edition of F&SF) by clicking here.

4. Michael Moorcock kindly identified Gilmore as the artist via FB message in June 2018. Her husband was Mervyn Peake, and her Wikipedia page is here.

5. The story ratings for this issue appeared in issue#145:

My choice for the top three would have been Bayley (Woods), followed by Jones and Reed. How the readers of the time thought the Tubb or Bounds story better than the latter baffles me. ●

_____________________

Edited 16th April 2018 to add better images, change quote formatting, and make minor text changes.
Edited 16th June 2018 to add attribution for Gilmore’s artwork.
rssrss

New Worlds #1, July 1946

ISFDB link
Archive.org link

Other reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick, Building New Worlds, 1946-1959: The Carnell Era (Location 159 of 5623)
Matt Leivers, Facebook: British Science Fiction Magazine Collectors Group

_____________________

Fiction:
The Mill of the Gods • novella1 by Maurice G. Hugi –
Solar Assignment • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Mark Denholm] –
Knowledge Without Learning • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by K. Thomas] ∗∗
Sweet Mystery of Life • short story by John Russell Fearn
The Three Pylons • novelette by William F. Temple +
White Mouse • short story by John Russell Fearn [as by Thornton Ayre] –

Non-fiction:
Cover and internal artwork • by R. A. Wilkin
Editorial • by E. J. Carnell

_____________________

This month marks the seventieth anniversary of the most important and iconic of British SF magazines, New Worlds. This magazine originally started as a fanzine under two editors, Maurice K. Hanson and E. J. ‘Ted’ Carnell, and there had been one abortive attempt at publishing it professionally just before WWII started. It wouldn’t be until after the war ended, when a demobbed Ted Carnell met Stephen Frances of Pendulum Publications, that a professional magazine would see the light of day.
Its initial publication history was precarious, and this issue actually ended up having two covers—a result of the magazine only selling 3000 of its 15000 copy print run due to wholesaler apathy.2 The second issue of the magazine had a better cover and sold out due to a concerted effort by Pendulum Publications, so the covers were stripped off the remaining issues of #1 and a redesigned version of the second cover applied.3 Having cleared this hurdle, Pendulum Publications subsequently went bust after the third issue appeared. It was only when a group of fans and professionals formed Nova Publications that matters settled down.4
In this first issue all the artwork is by R. A. Wilkin. The cover is very contemporary but rather flat and amateurish looking in execution. His internal artwork was better but it is obvious that he was essentially a comic-book artist.
The internal contents are very basic. Apart from the inside and back cover advertisements (for “Stafford Herbs/Rheumatism”, “Ambitious Engineers”, and “Sleeping Hairs that cause Baldness”) there is the artwork, fiction, a half-page editorial and the contents page.
It is 7¼ inches x 9¾ inches in size and has 64 pages plus covers.

The fiction was about as bad as I had expected, although there was one pleasant surprise. The opening story, The Mill of the Gods by Maurice G. Hugi, unfortunately isn’t it. In this one a company called Mills Inc. starts flooding the world with cheap, superior products, starting for some reason with marmalade and syrup, before progressing to automobiles, etc. When this starts affecting the world’s economy, a MI5 team go to investigate.
After breaking into one of Mills Inc.’s factories, and discovering a strange room with a metal plate on the floor and no other entrances, they end up in a parallel world. Much evasion and capture ensues before they find out (spoiler) that this world has been taken over by those pesky Nazis—that’s why they couldn’t find the missing ones at the end of the war! The subsequent interrogation scenes are the campest I have ever read:

“I said before, I’m a very unimportant individual in the scheme of things— just an interrogation officer”—again the prodigious wink—“and as such I cannot answer your questions. And you won’t answer mine? Too bad! The High Council will be very cross. I shouldn’t try and tempt them to lose their temper. The Lunar Lords are really very terrible when aroused. No, please, don’t think I’m trying to fool you. Oh, dear, it makes me feel quite faint when I think of some of the tortures they inflict! Really, my dear Lawrence, don’t antagonise them, whatever you do. It’s too, too terribly dangerous!”  p. 15

Needless to say (spoiler) the agents escape and get back to this world and inform the authorities. Pretty dreadful, but at least it moves along.

Next up is the first of four short stories by John Russell Fearn under various pseudonyms.5 Solar Assignment concerns two journalists cruising around Pluto looking for a newsworthy story (as you do) when they spot a glass structure below. When they investigate they see human bodies through one of the windows, and break in, only to be captured by crystalline aliens who have possessed the frozen corpses. They are then taken to a huge underground cave where there is then some backstory about a lost human colony before the journalists break free and leg it. The ensuing fight scene provides a striking image, and the only good thing in this fairly crude pulp story:

Furious, desperate, Len clenched his fist and drove it with stunning force into the blank, granitelike face in front of him. A cold, sickly chill went through him as he found the power of his punch had knocked the man’s head right off! No blood flowed: the body was as hard and brittle as though it had been immersed in liquid air—but there was something revolting about seeing the head go flying, to smash into a thousand splinters on the floor. It had been like hitting a plaster statue. Len hesitated, appalled—and his horror rose still higher when the man did not drop, but continued to bar the way! Of course! The truth flashed through Len’s mind. The creature did not rely on the dead man’s nerves, arteries and muscles. He merely used them, could do without them if need be. Instinct was his sole guide. The missing head made no difference as long as the body could move. . . .
[. . .]
The leader came hurrying up and fired his gun. By a fluke he missed—and by that time the two men were through the doorway, pursued by the weirdest assortment of damaged men that ever came out of a nightmare.  p. 28

How the bodies are frozen but can still move is not explained. In any event, they eventually (spoiler) kill the aliens by accidentally turning on the aircon. Well, repressurising the cave actually. This is on a level with the pulpier SF stories I’ve read in Amazing and Weird Tales.

Knowledge Without Learning is a rather better effort. This is a about a man who can obtain knowledge from others when he is near to them, the problem being that when he does so the donor loses the information transferred. This proves problematic when he absorbs a bus driver’s ability to drive and the bus crashes. At this point he meets a young woman psychologist who deduces his power and wants to study him. He is having none of that and matters go from bad to worse.
If you can ignore the protagonist’s lack of ambition (he thinks it cool to absorb the skills of a bus driver) and his stupidity (having caused a bus crash he almost does the same again on a locomotive) this is OK, although the ending is rather perfunctory.

Sweet Mystery of Life is a Weird Tales-type tale that is about a man who ends up growing a half-human/half-plant alien woman in his conservatory. They eventually find out that she is from a moon of Venus and she later agrees to give him the secrets of atomic power and space travel so their two races can work together. Spliced into this story is Idiot Jack, one of the villagers who observes the woman growing—and singing—in the conservatory. It does not end well. Rather unlikely, but one star for the clever last paragraph. And while I remember, I think this is the second story in the issue where one of the characters has a ‘man-servant’. Different times. . . .

Fearn’s fourth and last story in this issue is White Mouse, which is a load of mawkish old rubbish about the first time an Earthman marries a Venusian woman and takes her to Earth. Initially she is homesick, then three months later the oxygen differential makes her seem drunk. Finally (spoiler), our Sun’s radiation—which she wasn’t exposed to on cloudy Venus—causes brain damage and kills her. Nice last line, though:

She was silent. A wistful smile was fixed on her small mouth. Her eyes were wide open, unblinking. Stupidly I followed their direction towards the open window, where the curtains stirred restlessly.
Over the sunset was a star, a glowing planet, brilliant and alone.  p. 64

I rather liked The Three Pylons by William F. Temple. This novelette is in that sub-genre where current day technology or knowledge is discovered by people at a considerably earlier stage of development. The events occur in the distant past, on a huge island that was later destroyed by volcanic action.
After an opening scene where the King of Argot’s guard all commit suicide to follow him into the afterlife, we are introduced to his heir. Rodan is a nasty piece of work who has been left a letter by his father, who wants him to conquer the other kingdom on the island, Mag:

My wish was this: That I should become Emperor of the World, King of Argot and Mag together. But the path to that greater throne is hard. Hard to build, harder to follow. And the Gods decree that there shall be no other path for he who would conquer.
Before I began even to build, my spirit quailed. I knew I had not the qualities to tread that path. My dream of Lordship of the Two Kingdoms was just a dream—for me. But in you, my son, I perceive the qualities of the true conqueror, and therefore over many years and with much labour I have builded the path, for you. That you may gain the prize for our line.
The first necessary step is that you climb to the top of the White Pylon, the Pylon of Life, which stands without the Palace, and learn what is written upon the top thereof. That will place your feet firmly on the beginning of the road.  p. 45

Rodan promptly ignores Benevo, his advisor, and sets off to climb the White Pylon, a huge four-sided needle-like building with bars coming out its side. He arrives at the top as it is getting dark and spends a cold night curled up on the small platform. Once dawn breaks he reads the message and discovers the location of his next challenge.
After travelling to the Red Pylon he finds it smooth-sided and impervious to his sword so he returns to his palace and consults Oelin, his soothsayer and astronomer. Over the course of the next two challenges (spoiler) he discovers gunpowder (which he uses to blow up the Red Pylon) and builds a hydrogen balloon (to get to the top of the Blue Pylon, which encircled by water). He then uses both these technologies to blow up the mountain fort of the Mags and gain access to their kingdom. However, his adviser Benevo, who tries several times throughout the story to moderate the King’s behaviour, has other ideas. . . .
This isn’t bad at all, and is head and shoulders above the rest.7

The only non-fiction is a short Editorial by Ted Carnell about the possibilities of tomorrow. There are a couple of passages that are very much of their time:

With one great discovery now within our grasp—the secret of atomic power—Man can reach to the stars, or return to the ooze from whence he crawled long eons ago. He can write his name in letters of fire across the heavens or obliterate it entirely from the scroll of Time itself.  p. 22

We also suggest that to ensure receiving your copy of the next “New Worlds,” on sale in approximately eight weeks time, you place an order with your news dealer now. Paper restrictions and other factors will still make it difficult for everyone to obtain a copy.  p. 22

Now that is what I call Austerity Britain.

An issue for completists really, but possibly worth checking out for the unreprinted Bill Temple novelette.  ●

_____________________

1. ISFDB lists The Mill of the Gods as a novelette, but a quick cut and paste shows 17900 words.

2. Ted Carnell wrote two essays about the birth of the magazine: The Magazine That Nearly Was (Vision of Tomorrow #9, June 1970) and The Birth of New Worlds (Vision of Tomorrow #12, September 1970). These articles are quoted extensively in Vultures from the Void (revised & expanded edition) by Philip Harbottle.

3. This was the other cover the first issue of the magazine had:

4. New Worlds at SFE.

5. John Carnell in Vultures fom the Void by Philip Harbottle, p. 73:

Fearn responded to my urgent request for material by sending over one quarter of a million words and in all those first few months produced over half a million, all of which had to be read and from which a selection had to be chosen for that vital first issue.

6. John Carnell in Vultures fom the Void by Philip Harbottle, p. 72:

Bill Temple, who had spent a lot of his spare time in Italy writing a novel which periodically was either blown up or sunk in transit home [The Four-Sided Triangle] sent me an unusual fantasy titled The Three Pylons.  ●

Edited 29th January 2019: Formatting changes and addition of images, plus minor text changes.rssrss

New Worlds #170, January 1967

NW170x600

Fiction:
The Day of Forever • reprint short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥
Saint 505 • short story by John Clark
Sun Push • short story by Graham M. Hall ♥♥♥♥
Coranda • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥♥
Sisohpromatem • short story by Kit Reed ♥♥
Echo Round His Bones (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Thomas M. Disch
Ballard of a Whaler • short story by James Cawthorn ♥♥

Non-fiction
Cover • Langdon Jones
Interior artwork • James Cawthorn, V. Y., uncredited
The Man Who Invented Inventing the Future • essay by Brian W. Aldiss
The Silver Needle • poem by George MacBeth
Open Does Not (Have To) Equal Empty • book review by Judith Merril
To the Past—But Fast • book reviews by James Cawthorn

This issue’s cover is probably for the J. G. Ballard story (see the p.25 quote below) but could as well be for Langdon Jones’s own story The Great Clock (New Worlds #160, March 1966).
The Day of Forever by J. G. Ballard (The Impossible Man and other Stories, April 1966)1 is a strange dreamlike story that tells of Halliday moving to the deserted town of Columbine Sept Heures as he cannot sleep. The town has the suffix ‘Sept Heures’ as the Earth has stopped rotating (or is rotating very slowly) and this is the local ‘time’:

This warm night-world he could find only by moving south. Two hundred miles to the east of Trondheim the dusk-line was a corridor of freezing wind and ice, stretching on into the Russian steppe, where abandoned cities lay under the glaciers like closed jewels. By contrast, in Africa the night air was still warm. On the west of the dusk-Line was the boiling desert of the Sahara, the sand-seas fused into lakes of glass, but along the narrow band of the terminator a few people lived in the old tourist towns. p.12

At the town he finds two other residents, one of whom, Mallory, is a doctor. They eventually leave and another woman, Gabrielle Szabo, arrives. Mallory finds he can now sleep. There are more developments in this piece but they don’t really amount to anything in conventional narrative terms. I sometimes wonder if these stories would mean more to me if I could read them while in REM sleep. Best perhaps just to treat this like his condensed stories and enjoy what you can of the imagery and writing:

Halliday walked around the paintings in the suite, then he gathered his clocks together and carried them onto the balcony. He hurled them down one by one onto the terrace below. Their shattered faces, the white dials like Mallory’s eyes, looked up at him with unmoving hands. p.25

Saint 505 by John Clark is about a computer in an university spire that glows. It is written in a style over content manner, e.g.:

“Come, come, Mr. Thaxted, please explain yourself. What is causing that glow? It looks dangerous.” He may well have asked. Up till then the Occult Sciences had suffered from a lack of voltage. “It’s glowing because it’s good,” said Thaxted fiercely, and, pushing his way through the crowd, he ran up the stairs of the Tower of Goodness.
Harvey College is famous for its three towers, Goodness, Holiness and Truth. They were built by a pious Master, Leocinus (pronounced “Looks”) just before he was beheaded by Henry the Eighth. p.30-31

Sun Push by Graham M. Hall was a pleasant surprise. This is a striking work that initially would seem to be about WWI trench warfare until it becomes apparent that this is a future civil war in Britain between a communist supported London government and the American backed Bristol one. This becomes an increasingly grim account of laser and napalm warfare, the murder of seepee (communist party) sympathisers, the lynching of collaborators, military brothels, etc.:

In the house, a radio was on. Sergeant Trelawney halted the section to listen. Rogers’ cockney Oxford voice was unmistakable.
“We of the British Liberation Front . . .”
The broadcast was coming from Shepherd’s Bush or one of the other big rebel stations. Case proved.
The section burst into the house like stormtroopers, fanning out and filling the warm, farm-house room.
The farmer stood rapidly, little boy agony at being caught out. His wife and rape-aged daughter sat nearby.
The radio clicked off. Rogers, frenetic, faded in midsentence.
p.40

Smith pulled aside the stiff old curtains, gnarled with filth, until he found an unoccupied woman. The whores were seepees. Captured living with the Reds, they were drugwashed, doped into senseless nymphomania and shunted into redlight service. p.44

Throughout all this the main character, Tim Saint John (‘Sinjun’) Smith, an artist before the war, draws and paints and obsesses about sunlight:

Smith set up his Martian-striding easel, and began to paint the ruins, sitting in spring sunlight by the Cherwell. Water colours washed onto the paper, yellow and gold. The pencilled outline was picked out carefully with golds and reds, shaded with grey and shadow-black. The lawns, pocked with rubble and craters, green and brown like the knees of a cricketer’s trousers. Smith sat in the sun and painted. Yellow, golden-sun. Mist-wan, like yellowed nylon. With tear-blue flesh welling. . . . The brothel images crowded in, weeping and gibbering like clouds on the face of the sun. Smith painted on. p.45

An impressive piece from a writer who only ever produced three short stories.2

The novelette that follows challenges Hall’s piece for the best story of the issue. Coranda by Keith Roberts is set in the future ice age of Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner, where primitive communities sail ice ships on a frozen Earth. Moorcock’s serial was finishing in the same month’s issue of SF Impulse and Roberts had been doing the work involved in its publication.  Roberts got permission from Moorcock to set a story in that world and the latter subsequently published it.3
In the village of Brershill a vain young woman called Coronda sets a challenge for the young men who would seek her hand in marriage:

“A man who loved me,” she said, “who wanted to feel me in his bed and know himself worthy, would go to that land of shadows on the rim of the world. He would bring me a present to mark his voyage.” Abruptly her eyes flicked wide, scorning at them. “A head,” she said softly. “The head of the unicorn. . . .” Another pause; and then a wild shouting. “Ice Mother hear me,” bellowed Skalter. “I’ll fetch your toy for you. . . .” “And me. . . .” “And me. . . .” p.52

The ‘unicorns’ will turn out to be mutant narwhals that live on the ice far to the south of their community.
There follows an engrossing journey and hunt in their ice yachts as they pursue their prize. They will not only have natural dangers to face:

The yachts moved steadily through the day, heading due south under the bright, high sun, their shadows pacing them across the white smoothness of the Plain. With the wind astern the squarerigger made ground fast; by evening she was hull down, her sails a bright spark on the horizon. Stromberg crowded Snow Princess, racing in her wake; behind him, spread out now, came the others, lateens bulging, runners hissing on the ice. The cold was bracing and intense; snow crystals, blowing on the wind, stung his cheeks to a glow, beaded the heavy collar of his jerkin. Lipsill forged alongside, Ice Ghost surging and bucking. Karl raised a hand, laughing at his friend; and instantly came the chilling thought that one day, for Coranda, he might kill Lipsill, or Lipsill him. p.54-55

It comes to pass that some of the men drop out and some die: this feeds into an exciting and ultimately fitting ending to the story.
The one minor criticism I have of this is that it is initially quite difficult to keep track of who the different characters are in the initial part of the voyage, but this becomes less of a problem as the story develops.

There a couple of other short stories. Sisohpromatem by Kit Reed is an OK reverse Metamorphosis where a roach wakes up to find he has become a man.  Ballard of a Whaler by James Cawthorn is a short one page spoof on the ‘Ice Schooner’ theme, this time as imagined by J. G. Ballard:

Architectural rather than organic, the white bones of the stranded monsters traced the structural relationships of underlying strata with the world above the ice, counterpointing in their curved sequence the prismatic and crystalline complexity of the glaciers, embodying the forms of all sequential aspects of duration. p.157

Amusing last line.

Last and very definitely least for the fiction is the second part of Echo Round His Bones by Thomas M. Disch. This second part is awful. Chapter nine starts with Nathan Hansard finding there are three Bridgetta doppelgangers (Jet, Bridget or Birdie) and two wheelchair bound Dr Bernard Panofskys. At the end of the chapter there is a ridiculous scene where the two Bernards try to romantically interest Hansard in one of their wives, at which point Hansard baulks because they are married.
Then a fourth Bridgetta turns up and one of the original three commits suicide: ‘It’s all in the Malthus’. By now Hansard is saying that as a Capitan he can marry people so he should be able to divorce them too. Ah, Nathan, I think that used to be a ship’s captain not an army one…
This reads like part of a really bad Heinlein novel and matters don’t improve over the next few chapters, where we get a lot of hand-waving type explanations about the science behind the manmitter and the sub-reality doppelgangers it produces. Take this ‘explanation’ of why the dopplegangers sink through matter if they are moving too quickly :

“Call it surface tension,” said Bridie. “Though actually it is a form of potential energy that is inherent in all matter at whatever level of reality. Like static electricity, it forms an equipotential surface over all objects—a sort of ‘skin’ of energy. What keeps sublimated objects above the ground—the cans on the shelves, for instance, or your feet—is the small repellent force generated by the two surfaces, a force that decreases in proportion to the distance between the two realities. Thus, a sub-four and perhaps a sub-three can would sink through a sub-one shelf, but in two adjacent fields of reality the repellent force is quite sufficient for most purposes, though not so great that it cannot be overcome by an opposing force. p.103

So by now it doesn’t even read like bad Heinlein but bad 1930’s pulp SF.
Matters improve slightly as the Mars thread resurfaces and the threat of a nuclear holocaust becomes imminent, and this is resolved in a reasonably inventive manner, albeit one with, again, more of a nod to 1930’s pulp than you would like. Frankly, by the time you get to this point you will probably be, as I was, past caring.

As usual for New Worlds there is a healthy amount of non-fiction material. Instead of an editorial there is The Man Who Invented Inventing the Future by Brian W. Aldiss, a speech given to the PEN club about Wells and his influence, latterly touching on the Vernian tradition found in the early SF magazines.
The Silver Needle by George MacBeth is a long poem that starts with an unpromising introduction:

A strip cartoon for Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833—1898)

(The story: Attila, robot-knight of the Psychiatric Society, is again invited to unravel a knot in the star-system of inner space. This time it is the imperialism of a drug-ring, Hallucinogenics Unlimited, he is briefed to combat. Their cult of primitivism and ritual pity, inspired by the virgin queen, Medulla, is out of line with the normal sex-worship orientation of the Planet 4 group and its ruling clique, the Tablemen. Attila is called by them, and flies to work. Now read on.)

It made no sense to me.
Judith Merril contributes Open Does Not (Have To) Equal Empty, a rather dull review of C. Maxwell Cade’s Other Wolds than Ours, and quotes extensively from it. I liked James Cawthorn’s review column To the Past—But Fast, where he shows the same even handedness as Bailey and Moorcock in the last issue. He, too, is capable of the odd barbed comment:

Possibly to stimulate the reader’s imagination, Ace have scattered typographical errors liberally throughout the above three titles; p. 41 of The Dream Master appears to have been proof-read from the back of a galloping horse. p.155

A worthwhile issue for the Graham M. Hall and the Keith Roberts stories.

  1. Another reprint from The Impossible Man and other Stories, a US collection of stories (the first was Storm Bird, Storm Dreamer in New Worlds #168). The UK edition that printed this story, The Day of Forever, did not appear until September 1967.
  2. When I tried to find out more about Graham Hall I was informed he died in Los Angeles of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 32. This would have been a tragic in any circumstances but particularly so given the talent displayed above. You can find this story in the Judith Merril anthology, England Swings SF (both editions) if you can’t find a copy of the magazine (although it has been scanned and may be on Archive.org).
  3. Roberts would write another ‘Ice Schooner’ story a few years later. The Wreck of the ‘Kissing Bitch’ would appear in Warlocks and Warriors, edited by Douglas Hill (1971) and also F&SF, December 1971.

rssrss

New Worlds #169, December 1966

NW169x600

Fiction:
Echo Round His Bones (Part 1 of 2) • serial by Thomas M. Disch ♥♥
Conjugation • short story by Christopher Priest
The White Boat • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥
Lost Ground • novelette by David I. Masson ♥
The Total Experience Kick • short story by Charles Platt ♥♥
Tomorrow is a Million Years • reprint short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥

Non-fiction:
Cover • G. Price Sims
Interior Artwork • James Cawthorn, uncredited
Editorial: Death of Cordwainer Smith • by Michael Moorcock and Langdon Jones
Up the Flagpole • book reviews by Hilary Bailey
Brief Reviews • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by WEB (William E. Barclay)]

One of the things that cursed SF covers of the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies was the psychedelic image. I suspect that the reason these were used was partially to do with the zeitgeist but more likely was predominantly economic: it is cheaper to pay a photographer who had accidentally put his coffee mug1 down on a photographic image (see the cover above) than a real life artist. Coming late to these I generally found them ugly and dated (all this hippy stuff was in its death throes by the time I was a teen, with punk shortly to put it out of its misery).

Around half of the fiction wordage in this issue is provided by the first half of Echo Round His Bones by Thomas M. Disch. This story doesn’t do itself any favours in the first couple of chapters, where it introduces Captain Hansard and his platoon as they prepare for a matter transmitter (‘manmitter’) jump to a base on Mars. Apart from instilling a general lack of arousal in the reader, Disch keeps on butting in with a ponderous authorial presence:

This captain, who will be the hero of our history, was a man of the future—that is to say, of what would seem futurity to us, for to the captain it seemed the most commonplace present. Yet there are degrees of living in the future, of being contemporary there, and it must be admitted that in many ways the captain was more a man of the past (of his past, and even perhaps of ours) than of the future. p.6

In witnessing the foregoing remarkable events, it may have occurred to the reader to wonder how he would himself have reacted in Hansard’s circumstances, and if this reader were of a sceptical temperament he might very well question the plausibility of Hansard’s so-sudden and so-apt adjustment to the enormous changes in the world about him. p.33

The story finally gets going in chapter three where we find the manmitter jump has created a doppelganger of Hansard and his men in a sub-reality on Earth. Hansard barely manages to escape ambush by the doppelgangers that have been created by previous manmitter jumps. He flees the transmission facility.
Most of the rest of this part is given over to Hansard’s struggle to survive, alone and without water or food. With its sub-reality that mostly doesn’t interact with ours, and its domed cities and imminent nuclear war, most of this has the feel of an OK early Philip K. Dick novel.
At the end, having managed to obtain food and water and information with some degree of difficulty, he is rescued by Bridgetta. She is the wife of the inventor of the manmitter, Dr Panofsky…

Conjugation by Christopher Priest seems to be a copy of one of J. G. Ballard’s concentrated stories and is full of fragments like this:

TRANSCRIPTION (exp.) OF VIDEOTAPED NETWORK PLAY EARLY ON THE EVENING OF 17th SEPTEMBER.
End of sponsor’s announcement. Fade.
Fade-in credits, (“mescaline passionate” Pt. III). Theme music. Fade-out music and credits.
Scene: Hotel bedroom. Mescaline in bed, her back to the camera. Door (r.) and Francesca entrance. Bathrobe loose across her breasts.

       MESCALINE (appreciative glance at F.)
This heat . . . intolerable.

       FRANCESCA
Drink? Only cold thing here, water. Wonder-worker on whisky.
(Her hand at her robe. Slow movement of release.)
       MESCALINE (movement from bed to F.)
Frank.
p.71

I have no idea what this is about but at least it is mercifully short.

The White Boat by Keith Roberts is the sixth ‘Pavane’ story, one that was written a few months after the others. I suspect the reason it ended up here in New Worlds rather than in SF Impulse was that Roberts was by now the full-time Associate Editor of that latter title and presumably thought it inappropriate to publish his own work.
Although this is, I think, the weakest of the ‘Pavane’ cycle it is still a fairly good story of Becky, an adolescent fisher girl who watches the White Boat from the shore, a ship that symbolises to her an escape from her drab village life. At one point she swims out to it and is rescued from drowning. She ends up staying on the ship and goes on a roundtrip to France. There is some evocative description of life afloat:

A dozen times she moved desperately as the crew ran to handle the complication of ropes. The calls reached her dimly, stand by to go about, let the sheets fly; then the thundering of the jib, scuffle of feet on planking as White Boat surged onto each new tack. Changed the angle of her decking and the flying sun and cloud shadows, the stinging attack of the spray. The horizon became a new hill, slanting away and up; Becky looked into racing water where before she had seen the sky. p.85

There was a little sea toilet, in a place too low to stand. She closed the lid and pumped, saw the contents flash past through the curving glass tube. The sea opened her stomach, brought up first food then chyme then glistening transparent sticky stuff that bearded her chin. She wiped and spat and worked the pump and sicked over again till the sides of her chest were a dull pain and her head throbbed in time it seemed with the thumping of the waves. p.85-86

Back in her village, after having been put ashore, she (spoiler) eventually reveals a heretical electronic item stolen while onboard the White Boat to the village Priest. A trap is set for the ship.
If I have a minor criticism it is that I found a couple of Becky’s actions quite stupid and irritating and, even though they are consistent with those of an adolescent, it blights the tale a little. That said, still the best story in the issue.

The other novelette is Lost Ground by David I. Masson. This story starts off with a married couple and their two kids at breakfast. In the background is a weather report on the radio:

“A system of depressions and associated troughs will follow one another in quick succession over Scotland and the north,” it said. “Insecure, rather sad feeling today and tomorrow, followed by short-lived griefs, some heavy, some stormy, with cheerful intervals. By midweek the griefs will be dying out, rather sooner in the south.” p.96-97

The story proceeds for the next few pages with this idea of mood weather and the associated pharma that people in this world take to counter the phenomenon. A short while later one of the children is involved in a car accident and dies, and the couple go away on a trip.
At this point it becomes a completely different story as the couple go to a bar and overhear stories about dogs and the like going missing in a specific location. As the husband works for the BBC they decide to visit and the same happens to them but they are separated. The rest of the story involves the husband in the future with a team that investigates what they call the ‘poikilochronism’. This phenomenon involves several time zones all intersecting in one area. Parts of this, such as the interface between the different time zones, aren’t that well-explained but the story moves along well enough.
This one is a bit of a disappointment as the separate parts of the story are interesting and original but they don’t cohere into a unified piece.

The first of the two short stories is The Total Experience Kick by Charles Platt. This is about the near-future music industry and a machine that is able to amplify and feedback emotion at concerts. This idea is unpacked against the background of a not entirely convincing story about the inventor’s unrequited love for the daughter of his boss. The other short story is a reprint, Tomorrow is a Million Years by J. G. Ballard (Argosy, October 1966). This tells of Glanville and his wife Judith who have escaped to an alien planet. They have landed at the edge of a lake where ‘time-winds’ blow and bring strange visions:

Rolling slowly, the great ship crested silently through the sand, its hull towering above them as if they had been watching from a skiff twenty yards off its starboard bow. As it swept by with a faint sigh of sand, the whisper of the time-winds, Glanville pointed to the three men looking down at them from the quarter-rail, the tallest with stern eyes and a face like a biscuit, the second jaunty, the third ruddy and pipe-smoking.
“Can you see them?” Glanville shouted. “Starbuck, Stubb and Flask, the mates of the ‘Pequod’ Glanville pointed to the helm, where a wild-eyed old man gazed at the edge of the reef on which he seemed collision-bent. “Ahab…!” he cried in warning. But the ship had reached the reef, and then in an instant faded across the clinker-like rocks, its mizzen-sail lit for a last moment by the dying light.
p.139-140

The above gives us some idea what a story by Ballard set in the world of Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner would have read like…
Later, a policeman called Thornwald turns up to arrest Glanville but the latter temporarily escapes. Interesting writing and imagery but the resolution doesn’t entirely satisfy.

As to the non-fiction, the editorial starts with comments about the death of Paul Linebarger (Cordwainer Smith) and also on an upcoming article by Brian W. Aldiss on Wells. The rest is about the recent reader survey which found that the readership was an unexpectedly diverse group, with nearly all commenting on J. G. Ballard:

The most contradictory response of all was that to the work of J. G. Ballard. Ballard is at the same time the most popular and the most unpopular writer in British science fiction. In the survey he received sympathetic insight and misunderstanding. It can be seen that an appreciation of Ballard is connected in no way with educational qualifications, but appears to take place entirely on an emotional level. p.3

The commentary on the survey finishes with:

This survey, too, has made it clear that there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with the current condition of science fiction. Lack of ideas, poor writing, cliché thinking and lack of real imagination, are all charges that have been levelled at certain kinds of modern science fiction.
Our readers, clearly, have very strong ideas on science fiction, and have felt the need to express them. Often, the forms returned were filled out in remarkable detail, and we have received many long letters expanding on the answers. We should like to extend our thanks to all those who have expressed their interest in New Worlds. We feel that any form of literature that can evoke such a detailed and enthusiastic response is in a very healthy state of growth and development. p.138

I suspect that the dialogue between the editors of New Worlds and its readership that played out in its pages over many issues is one of the (many) reasons why this phase of the magazine was so well remembered years later.

Hilary Bailey’s Up the Flagpole is less a review column and more a group of capsule reviews. I like the reviews by both her and the Brief Reviews by Michael Moorcock: they are frank about the shortcomings they see but measured with it—unless they feel the need to put the boot in as in this one by Bailey:

Shepheard Mead’s The Carefully Considered Rape of the World (Macdonald, 25s.) has a plot obviously based on that of The Midwich Cuckoos—i.e., in it, men from space impregnate simultaneously every woman in the world (short on ovarian biology here). The result is unamazing from start to maternity ward. Enjoyable whimsies about convents full of pregnant nuns and secluded girls’ schools full of expectant adolescents—haven’t laughed so much since the last lynch-party. The book was recently printed in condensed form in a saucy man’s mag. Mead is the author of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Good luck to him in his new venture. p.155

Moorcock has his moments as well:

Nebula Award Stories 1965 (Doubleday, $4.95). Frothy stories voted best and runners up by Science Fiction Writers of America. The emphasis is on style rather than subject matter or quality of idea. Toughest and most original, containing the best but least pyrotechnical writing is The Drowned Giant by Ballard. Frothiest is prize-sweeping Repent Harlequin, Said the Ticktock Man by Ellison. The Saliva Tree is Aldiss at play, lacking the quality of Aldiss at thought. Zelazny’s two pieces are He Who Shapes and The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth, with well-sustained mood and lots of atmosphere but saying very little. Computers Don’t Argue by Dickson says “look out, the machines may control us one day”—weary, but well done and almost a relief to find something to bite on however stale. American critics, it seems, are concentrating too much on style—not enough on subject matter and form. One is reminded of the worst of fin de siecle work. Is this the way U.S. sf will end?
When will the richly decorated balloon pop? Bah! p.156

A strange line of attack from an editor who was promoting J. G. Ballard’s concentrated stories, which were a more extreme experiment with form that any of the above were with style.

Overall a fairly middling issue.

  1. On second examination that coffee-mug ring may be an exhaust gasket.

rssrss

New Worlds #91, February 1960

NW091x600

Other Reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1960-19641

Fiction:
Enigma • novelette by Colin Kapp ♥♥
The Destiny Show • short story by Derek Lane ♥
Survival Demands • short story by E. C. Tubb ♥♥
Static Trouble • short story by Francis G. Rayer ♥♥
The Shrine • short story by E. C. Tubb [as by Alan Guthrie] ♥
Time Out of Joint (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Philip K. Dick ♥

Non-fiction:
Time Out of Joint • cover by Brian Lewis
New Worlds Profiles: E.C. Tubb • essay by John Carnell
My Own Petard? • essay by John Carnell

The fiction in this issue leads off with Colin Kapp’s Enigma. Just like his novelette from #89, Breaking Point, this is dated, clunky stuff but it makes considerably more sense than that previous work and is quite a readable piece.
It is set in a near-future Britain, and concerns a ‘Ne’, a booby trapped nuclear bomb that has been fired at the country. The dubious premise as to why the enemy are sending booby trapped nukes rather than ones that just explode is that it denies the UK territory that the enemy may later want, and also avoids generally increasing the level of radiation (some nukes have exploded—indeed if the enemy detect any tampering with, or human activity in the proximity of these multi-sensor devices, they will detonate them).
The story is centred on a bomb disposal team who are sent to defuse the device. On the debit side this involves a lot of problem solving involving signals that are sent and received from the bomb, phase differences, time delays etc. , and generally this material sounds like an extract from Radio Ham Monthly. On the other hand, there is a sense of humour present: the initial briefing given to the officer in charge of the bomb disposal unit ends like this:

“Major Gruman, it’s your pigeon. Disarm that bomb and we’ll name a day of the week after you.”
“Nobody’s ever succeeded in disarming a Ne before.” Gruman slyly glanced at his watch. “We’d better get moving, it’s nearly Grunday morning.”

And when the team are talking about their radio conversations being monitored:

“I can imagine them sitting at a receiver and listening to every bloody curse and every prayer. They wouldn’t learn half as much about our methods as they’d learn about blasphemy and Christ.”

So OK, overall.

The Destiny Show by Derek Lane is the first of four short stories and belongs to that highly unlikely sub-genre that involves a profoundly paradigm-changing piece of technology being used to—­yes, you guessed it­—make a TV show. The technology in this case is a future-time viewer that is used to show the ‘guest’ what kind of life they are going to have. After differences between the producer and presenter a normal show is cancelled and that of a hardened criminal scheduled. This is all told and worked out well enough but the central concept is so ludicrous that it undercuts the story. And you can see the end coming from a mile away.

Survival Demands by E. C. Tubb is a story set in a mental health facility that houses people with psi powers. A spaceman goes to visit a telepath and recounts what happened when Earthmen came into contact with the telepathic Frenzha.  Agreeable enough, considering it isn’t much more than an extended anecdote. Tubb also has a pseudonymous second story in this issue, The Shrine.  Earthmen are transported by aliens to a shrine in a distant part of the Galaxy. Before they get there they have no pride, after the visit they are changed in a very positive way. There are one or two hints about what they have seen or who they have spoken to, but this went straight over my head leaving me with no idea of what happened to them.

Static Trouble by Francis G. Rayer is potentially the best story of the issue. It has the novel setting of a planet where the surface dust of silicates, quartz and mica become so electrically charged that they remain suspended in the air. The poor to awful visibility caused by this makes matters very difficult for an Earth expeditionary team. We start with Joe Merity, the captain of the ship, meeting a returning research team in a sandstorm to find that their science officer has been killed by a lightning strike.
This story has a number of things going for it initially: original setting, realistic characters and group dynamics. It is therefore a shame that it is spoilt somewhat (spoiler) when Merity sees an alien and then sets off with another team to find it. With weather and circumstances deteriorating, they are joined by yet another team (due to frictional internal politics). Matters worsen, and they lose yet another crew member. Eventually they stumble onto an alien city in clear air. So, to summarise, the expedition wanders about on the surface getting people killed and then they are saved by dumb luck. If Rayer could have worked out what to do with this premise it could have been a stand-out story. Still, it is of interest for the parts he does get right.

As predicted last issue, this instalment of Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick ends disappointingly. In no particular order (spoiler), Ragle finds that the town he is in is a fake construct built so that the authorities could use him to predict strikes on Earth from Luna colonists who are engaged in a civil war with Earth. Ragle’s allegiances also flip-flop during this period. An awful pulp end to an intriguing novel.2

There is very little non-fiction in this issue. Apart from a rather ‘whither SF’ profile of E. C. Tubb (supposedly back from two years away from writing SF), Carnell gives over his editorial column to a letter from a Dr Arthur Weir, who writes in to challenge the former’s ‘Plot-Nots’ from the last editorial. Well argued too, although, like Carnell, I don’t entirely agree with Weir’s alternative plot-nots, either.

A disappointing issue, with a particularly poor end to the serial and little else of note bar, with some caveats, the Rayer.

  1. This volume does not lend itself easily to issue by issue examination but here are some Kindle locations for the fiction above bar the Dick novel which was given in the review for New Worlds #89 (searching on (91) worked best): Kapp (898/14%), Lane (1572, 25%), Tubb (865/14%), Rayer (1252/20%). Again, there may other commentary on the non-fiction, etc.
  2. Donald Wollheim published many of Dick’s early novels at Ace Books. His reaction to Time Out of Joint is worth noting. This is from the Lou Stathis afterword in the Gollancz SF Masterwork’s 2003 edition of Time Out of Joint, p.216:
    “Wollheim got the novel in the spring of 1958 and, according to Dick, ‘denounced it’ in a letter to him, calling it unpublishable and requiring the deep-sixing of the opening 150 pages and expansion of the final Earth-Luna war section into a standard sf novel. Luckily, Dick had already received word of Lippincott’s acceptance, and thought happily that he’d spewed out his last bit of sci-fi hackwork. Silly boy.
    As disagreeable as Wollheim’s suggestion of editorial ampu­tation might have been, he was right about one thing – those two sections of the novel just don’t fit together.”

rssrss