Other Reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1960-1964¹

Fiction:
O’Mara’s Orphan • novelette by James White ♥♥♥
Under an English Heaven • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ♥
Mumbo-Jumbo Man • novelette by Philip E. High ♥
Time Out of Joint (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Philip K. Dick ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Time Out of Joint • cover by Brian Lewis
New Worlds Profiles: Kenneth Johns • essay by John Carnell
Plot Nots • editorial by John Carnell
The Literary Line-up • coming soon
Postmortem • reader’s letters

This issue’s cover is almost identical to last issue’s, although the background colour of the grid is different and there is some variation in the images. I would have thought that similar covers could lead to issue confusion amongst prospective purchasers.
On the inside cover there is a New Worlds Profile of two writers, Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman (who make up the occasional science columnist ‘Kenneth Johns’). Like most of the writers in these profile photos, they wear a jacket, shirt, tie and glasses, and look very serious.
John Carnell’s short editorial Plot Nots is directed at wannabe writers, instructing them what plots not to use in their stories.

O’Mara’s Orphan is a ‘Sector General’ novelette by James White, and the sixth he had published in that series. However, chronologically this is the first episode and occurs at the construction phase of the vast multi-section space hospital staffed by, and with patients from, all galactic species. The first paragraph sets up the story:

The alien occupying O’Mara’s sleeping compartment weighed roughly half a ton, possessed six short, thick appendages which served both as arms or legs and had a hide like flexible armour plate. Coming as it did from Hudlar, a four-G world with an atmospheric pressure nearly seven times Earth normal, such ruggedness of physique was to be expected. But despite its enormous strength the being was helpless, O’Mara knew, because it was barely six months old, it had just seen its parents die in a construction accident, and its brain was sufficiently well developed for the sight to have frightened it badly.

O’Mara is a labourer involved in the construction of Sector General who has been involved in the accident, and, because of this, he has been tasked to look after the orphan—a child he can’t communicate with. The first few chapters where O’Mara works out the feeding and care of the child with, latterly, only a book to help are pretty good, and it has the feel of any good problem-solving story that could have appeared in, say, Astounding.
Where it falls down is in the section (which starts at the end of chapter 4) where the Monitor, who is investigating the accident, interrogates him. This is done over a radio link while O’Mara tries to treat the child (by increasing the gravity and pressure) for lesions that have appeared on its skin. This section doesn’t convince and it is not helped by the bits of cod-psychology that are thrown around (O’Mara has been atypically acting like a jerk to help a man traumatised by a radiation accident). There is also some clunky dialog to contend with, but the story resolves not too badly.
Overall, a fairly good read I guess, but my hopes had been raised higher by the first two-thirds of the story.

Under an English Heaven by Brian W. Aldiss tells of an alien ship arriving on Earth and a newspaperman attempting to take his brother and wife and baby to see it. This is told with light, dry, English humour, e.g. they take ages to get going from the brother’s house because of domestic concerns, the baby needing fed, children packed off wherever; they are then charged to enter the field on arrival at the ship and there is an argument about over-charging—you get the idea. This is OK as far as it goes, but it fizzles out. This is Brian W. Aldiss post Non-Stop, pre-Hothouse: it would still be a few years before he became a writer of more consistent quality.

In Philip E. High’s novelette Mumbo-Jumbo Man warring Earthmen² are surrounded by aliens on another planet and appear to be doomed. Their commander therefore decides to let an officer from The Corps of Magicians take over their defence. There is a lot of patter about the ‘magic’ being lost technology and there is some attempt to show that, even if what the officer is doing is rather vaguely explained. The problem is I wasn’t convinced about the science and whether or not it would work on the aliens.

The Literary Line-Up fills in the half-page after the Philip High novelette. This is a ‘coming soon’ filler that uses half its length saying as the next issue is going away to the printer early because of the Christmas holidays, and they are a bit unsure what is going to be included. Oh, apart from the final part of the Philip K. Dick serial, and definitely a Colin Kapp novelette and come to think about it an E. C. Tubb short story. Not much left to be unsure about after that, is there?

The back end of the magazine contains the next part of the Philip K. Dick novel Time Out of Joint. In this second instalment the strangeness intensifies. Sammy—Vic and Junie’s son—builds a crystal radio set and the whole family start listening to strange transmissions, some of which mention Ragle Gumm! At this point Gumm flees to the bus station but ends up stuck in a permanent queue and never gets any closer to the counter. By now the Kafkaesque paranoia and sense of skewed reality that are motifs of Dick’s later fiction are pronounced and quite engrossing.
Ragle decides to hitch a ride with two soldiers but they subsequently end up borrowing a truck and having to evade the police. After a long drive he ends up alone in the truck down a long track that looks like it is running out. He comes upon what he thinks is an uninhabited house but finds a woman and her son there—both identical to people he knows in his hometown. After a stand-off with the woman and son, a group of men come to collect him and he wakes up at home with no memory of what has happened.
As I said last issue this is engaging stuff, but I have a nagging feeling that the last section won’t be able to pull all of this together.

Postmortem, the letter column, is very short this month containing only a couple of letters replying to previous comments about not publishing psi-power stories. After the letters is half a page of Sales and Wants, where Stourbridge and District Science Fiction Circle are advertising their existence. That sounds like a good night out…

Not a bad issue I guess, what with the Dick serial and the flawed but interesting novelette from James White.

1. This volume does not lend itself easily to issue by issue examination so here are some Kindle locations for the fiction above, bar the Dick novel which was given in the previous review, (searching for (90) worked best): James White (823/13%), Brian W. Aldiss (794/13%), Philip E. High (942/15%). Again, there may other commentary on the non-fiction, etc.
2. For some irritating reason, New Worlds SF writers (and probably their American cousins) frequently used ‘Terrans’ when referring to Earthmen. I have no idea what was wrong with the latter; just part of the lazy shorthand that built up within the genre walls I guess.

Other Reviews:
John Boston & Damien Broderick: Building New Worlds, 1946-1959: The Carnell Era¹

Fiction:
Time Out of Joint (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Philip K. Dick ♥♥♥+
Breaking Point • novelette by Colin Kapp
Appropriation • reprint short story by Robert Silverberg ♥♥
Peace on Earth • short story by Michael Moorcock and Barrington J. Bayley [as by Michael Barrington] ♥
Nearly Extinct • short story by Alan Barclay ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Time Out of Joint • cover by Brian Lewis
New Worlds Profiles: Philip K. Dick • essay by John Carnell
Two In… One Out • editorial by John Carnell
Outward Bound 6: Project Mercury • essay by Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman [as by Kenneth Johns]
Postmortem • reader’s letters

This is the first early issue here of one of the stalwarts of British SF magazine publishing. First published in 1946, it has, in various incarnations, been in and out of existence till almost the present day—if you count a recent online version. One of the two main editors was John Carnell (Michael Moorcock being the other), who helmed the magazine from its first issue to #161 in 1964. This issue was from the middle of a period where the magazine had settled into regular monthly publication with a regular stable of authors.

As to this issue’s cover, I have never been that much of a fan of Brian Lewis’s colour work in New Worlds and this one is poorer than most. I’m not any more a fan of this ‘individual elements against a grid’ style than I was of the various floating heads you used to get on old Astounding covers. I’d also add that the cover layout doesn’t make matters any better: the ‘Time Out of Joint’ title is barely legible against the grid of the painting, and the other material on the cover is far more cluttered than it needs to be.² All in all, the whole thing looks like some badly executed attempt to copy the cover layout of Galaxy magazine.
While I’m talking about layout I’d also add that the typography inside the magazine is peculiar. Nearly every open quote mark is followed by a space but there isn’t one at the closing quote. Also, before the start of every sentence there are two spaces rather than one, and there are other peccadilloes as well.

Anyway, the contents. This issue starts the serialisation of what was probably the first noteworthy Philip K. Dick novel: Time Out of Joint.³ This was an unusual novel for New Worlds to serialise. It starts, for instance, in quite a low-key manner with Vic Nielson at his daily job at a grocery store and, indeed, the first part of the serial turns out to be almost entirely like a mainstream 1950s novel. However, towards the end there are a number of slightly unusual occurrences. It must have been quite odd for all those 1950s SF readers well into the first part with very little sign of it being a SF novel.
As it turns out, Vic isn’t really the main character—that turns out to be Ragle Gumm, his brother-in-law. Ragle has an odd occupation in that he spends all day scrutinising the paper to complete a ‘Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next’ competition, at which he is very successful.
The odd things that happen to these two, and also Vic’s wife Junie, are: Vic lifts his hand in the bathroom to try and pull a light switch that isn’t there; Junie tries to go three steps up where there are only two; most significantly, Ragle sees a drinks-stand disappear leaving only a slip of paper with printing on it. There are other inexplicable events as well, e.g. Marilyn Munroe is unknown in this world, etc. The plot thickens at the very end of this first part when Bill Black, a close neighbour of the Gumm’s, telephones a work colleague and wonders whether Ragle is becoming sane again…
This is actually a lot more engaging than is sounds and I found it an intriguing read, and I look forward to the next part.
By the by, it is worth noting that this serial is edited not only for length but for content: a certain amount of bowdlerisation is evident, albeit not all this material has been removed—some has been left where required for narrative reasons.⁴

Colin Kapp wasn’t a particularly fashionable writer to like in the mid-seventies when I first discovered his work but I liked some of it (The ‘Unorthodox Engineers’ for instance) while realising that he could also be pretty bad at times. Breaking Point is one of those stories and does not match up to Editor Carnell’s introduction:

…a breakaway from the traditional approach to a psychological story. Colin Kapp now joins Brian Aldiss and Jim Ballard as British writers who are pioneering the new type of science fiction which is rapidly replacing the old.

This is a pretty dreadful novelette from Kapp. It opens with a military unit running the gauntlet of a mob in a world that seems to have gone mad. At some point a ‘giant’ spouting gibberish and laying about the mob with an iron bar appears. There are other periodic bouts of action throughout the story which helps drive it forward. In between this the characters talk incessantly about the fact the world has gone to hell and the contribution of the ‘Beats’. Oh, and a conspiracy involving a couple of the army personnel and the ‘giant’ develops. At one point the unit commander chirps up:

“I think,” said Foresyte dangerously, “you’d better start talking sense.”

I wish they had as I would have had some idea of what this was supposed to be about.

There are three short stories. Appropriation by Robert Silverberg (Satellite Science Fiction, May 1959) is an OK story about Earthmen on an alien planet populated with empaths. When they are ordered to leave they fear it will cause irreparable damage to the aliens. Matters, it turns out, are not as simple as they seem.
Peace on Earth, a collaboration between Michael Moorcock and Barrington J. Bayley, concerns two immortal Men visiting Earth in the far future looking for a solution to the ennui they feel. After wandering about for a while they come across a deserted ship. Having discussed this they decide they should explore Earth further and they go out into the desert where (spoiler) they find the skeleton of the occupant of the ship. They then run out of air (Earth’s atmosphere has changed) and die, but before their end they find their ‘[final] few seconds of his life were charged with meaning.’ This kind of tosh could only be written by young men (20 and 22 respectively). I don’t know what Carnell’s (47) excuse was for publishing it.
The best short fiction of the issue is Nearly Extinct by Alan Barclay. In this a man helps a woman who is pursued by aliens on a future occupied Earth. After killing a couple of these ‘Frogs’ he meets up with the woman and takes her to his family group in a cave in the hills. It turns out that the man, his children and father can teleport, which is why they have survived. The rest of the story details their lifestyle and further skirmishes with the aliens. I liked the low-key feeling of realism about this, even though we have both aliens and teleporting in the one story.

The non-fiction starts on the inner front cover with New Worlds Profiles: Philip K. Dick. This has a photo of a very young Phil Dick⁵ with no beard and, among other material, a quote:

Of science fiction he says, “Without being art, it does what art does, since as Schopenhauer pointed out, art tends to break free of the reality around us and reach a new level of gestalting. The virtue of its approach, too, is that it can reach persons who do not have a developed aesthetic sense, which means that it has a higher degree of sheer communicability than great art.”

So there you have another definition of SF: ersatz art for the great unwashed.

There is an unusual editorial, Two In… One Out, where Carnell talks about the competition. He mentions the demise of Nebula (concentrated too much on the American market apparently, rather than consolidating during the British printing strike of 1959 with its Dublin printed edition). He also mentions a couple of new US reprint mags and wonders whether the recent end of import controls will affect them now that the originals can be imported.
Outward Bound 6: Project Mercury by Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman is about the early days of space exploration. This article covers the animals that have been shot into space—I note that no-one ever voices any concern that they must have been terrified—and the recruitment of the first batch of astronauts and what their training will involve. The authors are going for the gritty hard-work approach to space travel and not the sense of wonder one:

But space is a merciless taskmaster, and no one is going to remain alive out there without long training and superb physical fitness; things which come from study and hard work and are not to be found in dance halls and billiard saloons. p.107

Pass the hair shirt.
Finally we have Postmortem, the reader’s letters. There are four correspondents in this column, including James White, all replying to an earlier letter from a Mr Haller who disliked psi stories and didn’t want any more. Most of the replies are reasonable but one is a bit barking:

Over many years I have proved to my own satisfaction that not only is telepathy a fact beyond doubt, but also that the “materialisation” of a physical substance outside the body of the medium must be admitted. p.124

Overall, a disappointing issue, with the exception of the Dick serial and the Barclay story. Some of the rest of the fiction is so poor it makes it something of a slog reading this issue.

1. This volume does not lend itself easily to issue by issue examination but here are some Kindle locations for the fiction above (searching on (89) worked best): Philip K. Dick (4719), Colin Kapp (5070), Robert Silverberg (?), ‘Michael Barrington’ (5545), Alan Barclay (5218). There may be other matter about the non-fiction, etc.
2. What do I mean by clutter? Well, there is far more information there than needs be for a start. ‘Volume 30’? ‘14th year of publication’? Who cares? Also, do we really need the story titles of every item in the issue? I can see why you might want to display the author names as there may be reader recognition, but who cares about the titles, with maybe the exception of the cover story?
   If you are going to copy the Galaxy cover why not do the below:
   That font for the type isn’t the best but it gives you an idea. If you want to keep the odd New Worlds design:
   
   Yes, I know: way too much time on my hands.
3. Science Fiction Encyclopaedia describe it as a ‘bridge’ novel.
4. I read the SF Masterworks edition as I suspected the serial version may be abridged. An example of one of the kind of things that is missing (at the bottom of p.5 of the serial version) is an encounter between Vic and one of the other store workers in the first chapter:
   “I have the sweetest little old dentist I go to,” Liz chirruped. “Must be nearly a hundred years old. He don’t hurt me a bit; he just scrapes away and it’s done.” Holding aside her lip with her red-enameled thumbnail, she showed him a gold inlay in one of her upper molars. A breath of cigarette smoke and cinnamon whisked around him as he leaned to see. “See?” she said. “Big as all get out, and it didn’t hurt! No, it never did!”
   I wonder what Margo would say, he wondered. If she walked in here through the magic-eye glass door that swings open when you approach it and saw me gazing into Liz’s mouth. Caught in some fashionable new eroticism not yet recorded in the Kinsey reports.”
   There are several other missing sections that I noticed and there may be more:
   p.15: a section that concerns the sexual dynamics between Vic, his brother Ragle and Junie Black, the neighbour.
   p.16: almost a page missing where Junie asks Ragle whether he is lonely not being married, and his mention of being divorced from a Polish girl.
   p.28: three paragraphs cut.
   p.29: several paragraphs cut.
5. The photo of Philip Dick:
   

Other Reviews:
Charlie Brown, Locus #106, February 4^th 1972

Fiction:
Angouleme • short story by Thomas M. Disch ♥♥
Prisoners of Paradise • reprint short story by David Redd ♥♥
Journey Across a Crater • reprint short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥
The Lamia and Lord Cromis • novelette by M. John Harrison ♥♥♥♥
Pemberly’s Start-Afresh Calliope or, The New Proteus • short story by John Sladek ♥♥♥
The God House • novelette by Keith Roberts ♥♥♥♥
The Day We Embarked for Cythera • reprint short story by Brian W. Aldiss ♥
The Short, Happy Wife of Mansard Eliot • short story by John Sladek ♥
A Place and a Time to Die • reprint short story by J. G. Ballard ♥♥
Exit from City 5 • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ♥♥♥+

Non-Fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • Richard Glyn Jones, Mal Dean, Mervyn Peake, Keith Roberts, Brian Vickers
Introduction • editorial/introduction by Michael Moorcock
A Literature of Comfort • review essay by M. John Harrison
The Authors

New Worlds #202, more commonly known as New Worlds Quarterly #1, was the first of the Sphere Books paperback anthologies published after the large-size magazine incarnation.¹ This latter format had suffered from poor distribution, bans and other financial problems, eventually limping to a halt with a special subscribers only issue in early 1970. This history is briefly discussed by Moorcock in the editorial.

The series made a big impression on me when I read it in my late teens, so I wanted to have another look at it to see how the individual volumes held up. One thing that struck me straight away is how the magazine managed to transform itself from an avant-garde large-size magazine containing all sorts of poetry, graphics, articles and fiction to a more sober publication almost without breaking step.

I know some will think it a stretch calling it a ‘magazine’ but that is what Moorcock describes it as in his editorial, and its mix of stories, art, editorial material and book reviews gives this claim substance. Moorcock states in his editorial that he is interested in publishing all kinds of fiction using the contents as examples. In some respects this sounds very similar to his editorial in New Worlds #142, where he is appealing to a broad church. Perhaps he had managed to get matters out of his system with the large size issues? What perplexes me is why he bothered to continue the New Worlds series with these anthologies: was it just survival instinct at work?

The first two stories between them certainly support the claim to a broad church: Angouleme by Thomas Disch is a future slice of life that tells of a group of youths (called ‘tweeters’!) planning to kill a man. This plot rather fizzles out at the end, and I always thought it one of the weaker parts of the fix-up novel 334 (Bodies and the novella 334 were a lot better in my opinion). This reread didn’t change my mind. Also, not that it bothers me, but the story is barely SF; there is one line that places it in the future.² SF or not, this may be one of the victories of the New Wave, in that tangential material could be more easily incorporated into a SF magazine.³

The second story is Prisoners of Paradise by David Redd (New Worlds #167, October 1966). This story is a complete contrast in that it could have appeared in any Golden Age SF magazine. This story of a spaceman crashing onto an alien planet has a deux ex machina ending in that (spoiler) the alien hive-mind pops up at the end, undoes the problem and then disappears.⁴

Journey Across A Crater by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #198, February 1970) is one of his concentrated stories. These used to completely perplex me when I first read them in my late teens. If they were a puzzle I couldn’t figure them out. They still puzzle me but I find it easier to get a little enjoyment from the prose and the imagery. Some of the images in this one seem to presage his later novel Crash. He has another story in this volume, A Place and a Time to Die (New Worlds #194, September-October 1969), an OK modern fantasy about an American town being overrun by Chinese hordes. The payoff line makes a political point about the times (which I only just got three months after a second reading).⁵

M. John Harrison’s The Lamia and Lord Cromis is one of the three novelettes in the collection and was a favourite of mine the first time round. I still think so: Harrison’s descriptive prose is a delight:

An ancient round tower reared above the trees. Built of fawn stone at some time when the earth was firmer, it stood crookedly, weathered like an old bone. Filaments of dead ivy crawled over it; blackthorn and alder hid its base; a withered bullace grew from an upper window, its rattling branches inhabited by small, stealthy birds. p.65

In this bleak sword and sorcery tale Lord tegus Cromis hunts down a monster. If there is one downside to this story it is that some of the characters are badly used.

The first of John Sladek’s two stories in this volume is Pemberley’s Start Afresh Calliope. This is good fun with its Victorian scientist who invents a machine that produces multiple versions of himself. Related by a surgeon in a Gentleman’s club it isn’t afraid to shoehorn the odd unrelated joke in, either.

My shout awakened Lord Suffield, who launched into his anecdote again: “Sent a servant to the Governor with three jars of jam and a letter, the beggar ate one jar along the way. Explained to him the letter had betrayed him, gave him a damned good thrashing. Next time I sent him with three jars of jam and a letter. This time he hid the letter behind a tree, so it wouldn’t be able to see him eat the jam. Didn’t have the heart to thrash him that time, I was laughing so hard.” p.75

A good payoff line too. His second story is The Short, Happy Wife of Mansard Elliot, in which the verbal stylistics don’t compensate for the lack of anything much else going on in this tale of a man wanting a woman to divorce her husband.

The God House is part of Keith Roberts’s The Chalk Giants, the post-holocaust fix-up novel, and I’d say one of his best dozen short stories (as are another handful that would appear in subsequent volumes of New Worlds: Monkey and Pru and Sal, Weihnachtabend, The Beautiful One and The Ministry of Children; some might add The Grain Kings). The priest of a primitive post-holocaust tribe badly uses a young girl/woman who is chosen as their god-bride. She gets the upper hand eventually, but leads her people to destruction. However, the events in the story could have occurred in many primitive tribes in the past so this, like the Disch, could equally have been a mainstream story with minimal change.

Brian Aldiss’s The Day We Embarked for Cythera (The Moment of Eclipse, 1970) has two threads: the first has three men verbally jousting at a picnic in what appears to be a far-future location; the second section, in italics, has packs of cars hunting down locomotives and humans. I have no idea what this is about; perhaps another case of never mind the story, concentrate on the images.

The final fiction is a novelette by Barrington Bayley, The Exit From City 5. I have always had a soft spot for Bayley, especially when he shows his strength in marrying pulp SF plots with more intellectual material (in this case ideas from astrophysics, sociology and psychology). Set on City 5, which is the sole remaining outpost of humanity in the void beyond a contracting universe, this charts the civil war that develops between those who favour stasis versus change.

As for the non-fiction there is an essay by M. John Harrison, A Literature of Comfort, which seems to be fairly typical of what I remember of a number of New Worlds book reviews in that it spends part of the time taking various SF D-listers apart. I mean, I can see the point of negatively reviewing Anderson’s Tau Zero, but L. P. Davies’ Genesis Two? Who was he? And why would you bother spending your limited space on his book? To support whatever agenda you are pursuing at the time, I suspect. That said, part of the column is given over to a review of J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition:

One of the first science fiction authors to stop saying nice things was J. G. Ballard, and in [this] we find the culmination of his early formal experiments, in which fragmentation and condensation minimise the waste products of the story and leave the image—the essence of the fiction—to stand by itself. p.170

Discuss.

A word about the design in this volume: it is an attractive publication and I like the title page typographies and the artwork that goes with them.⁶ A good range of artists too: Peake, Roberts, Dean, Glynn Jones, etc. The cover disappoints though: a psychedelic blob. These were far too common at the time: probably an attempt to save money and/or be trendy.

Finally, the couple of pages introducing The Authors is scary: Moorcock, Disch and Bayley are in their early thirties, and with the exception of Aldiss, Ballard and Roberts most of the rest of the contributors are in their mid-twenties. Such accomplishment so young.

So how did this compare with my memories of the first time around? Well, I pretty much thought the same as I did then. The stories I liked best I didn’t find as good as I had first time around, but then they didn’t have novelty value on re-reading (and it is probably the third time around for the Disch, Harrison and Roberts at least). On the other hand, I probably got more out of the material I didn’t like or understand the first time around (e.g. the first of the Ballard stories).

To conclude, I enjoyed this volume and would recommend it. Even though I would rate only half the fiction as really worthwhile, some of the material below that level is of interest. It helps that all three novelettes (Harrison, Roberts and Bayley) are good or better, and that there is a wide range of material on offer.
I wish there was a magazine publishing this range and quality of fiction in the UK today, but I suspect those days are long gone. Perhaps I am simply guilty of wanting to be back in my own personal Golden Age but it would be great to have something like this dropping through the letter box every quarter, or even once a year.

1. There was also a US edition of some of the volumes in this series.
2. I believe Samuel Delaney demonstrated Angouleme was SF in his book The American Shore. A whole book of criticism out of a short story…
3. There were a number of this type of near-future works in the late sixties to mid-seventies: 334, The World Inside and The City Dwellers were all worthwhile works, but I remember acres of material in Amazing, Fantastic and various 1970s anthologies where a number of writers shared their miserable, crime-ridden city existences as ‘near-future’ SF.
4. At this point I started wondering what kind of editor Moorcock was. I suspect that once he got behind a writer he would take most if not all their work, and was probably pretty much a ‘hands off’ editor. This presumes of course that you think there is something wrong with some of the stories and that they need to be ‘fixed’.
5. There was no new material from J. G. Ballard in any of the ten volumes of the anthology series: 1971-76. This is very strange given the amount of material that Ballard had been contributing to the magazine since Moorcock took over the editorial reins in 1964.
6. Have a look at the p.78-79 artwork/title for the Roberts and you will see what I mean about the art and design:

Fiction:
Behold the Man • novella by Michael Moorcock ♥♥♥♥
That Evening Sun Go Down • short story by Arthur Sellings ♥
Signals • short story by John Calder ♥♥
A Taste of the Afterlife • short story by Charles Platt and Barrington J. Bayley ♥♥
The Atrocity Exhibition • shortstory by J. G. Ballard
Another Little Boy • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ♥♥♥+
Invaded by Love • novelette by Thomas M. Disch ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Behold the Man • cover by Keith Roberts
Why So Conservative? • essay by Michael Moorcock
Behold the Man, A Taste of the Afterlife • interior artwork by James Cawthorn
The Work of Philip K. Dick • essay by John Brunner
Climate Inclement • essay by James Cawthorn
When It’s Time to Put On the Buckskins a Man Knows What He Has To Do… • essay by Hilary Bailey

By the time New Worlds had got to this point in its run it had grown from a 128pp. bimonthly to a 160pp. monthly magazine and was obviously maturing as a publication.

The highlight of the issue is Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, a novella that I probably enjoyed more this time around than when I first read it. Its story of Kurt Glogauer travelling back to the time of Christ is probably too well known to require a synopsis, so I’ll limit myself to saying that the two things that I remembered from the first time around were: the striking image of Glogauer immersed in the milky fluid of the time machine and it cracking like an egg, and (spoiler) his discovery at the end of the story that Jesus is a congenital imbecile. The latter seems quite brave given that there would be a blasphemous libel trial a decade later.¹ Certainly one of the best stories in the Moorcock New Worlds and deserving of its Nebula Award.

Arthur Selling’s That Evening Sun Go Down starts with a couple pages of near gibberish before becoming the far-future trial of a man for heresy. A song with the words of the title seem to be significant but this was completely lost on me.

While I was reading John Calder’s Signals I could have sworn it was a pseudonymous work by Barrington Bayley — it concerns a scientist working on radio signals from universes that are contained in atoms, in this case one in a drop of water. This one is intriguing as far as it goes but has a rather arbitrary ending.²

Talking of Barrington Bayley, he has a collaboration with Charles Platt in this issue, A Taste of the Afterlife. I wonder if the reason this novelette became a collaboration is that one of the authors couldn’t get the story to work. As it is, this is quite interesting for the most part. The protagonist is killed to release his electromagnetic ‘afterlife’ and given suitable devices to enable him to travel to a secret weapons factory in Russia to assist with a raid by British forces. This works quite well until the enemy’s ‘afterlife’ troops come for him. The final section is somewhat anticlimactic and open-ended, and gives the impression that there is a longer story or a sequel still to be told.

J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition is another of his concentrated stories, probably the most impenetrable one I can remember reading and I got nothing out of it — unlike, for example, Journey Across A Crater in New Worlds Quarterly #1.

Brian W. Aldiss’s Another Little Boy is a lively and entertaining story about the commemoration a hundred years from now of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima . The problem is that virtually no-one can remember the significance of the date or why it should be important, never mind the best way to commemorate it. Added to that, Aldiss manages to add references to, or scenes including: IUDs, orgasms, orgies and homosexuality. I suspect that would probably have been enough to see off the last of the Carnell’s old guard. One very minor cavil: given the current WW1 commemorations, the 2044 date is a little unconvincing.

The last of the fiction is Thomas Disch’s debut in New Worlds, the novelette Invaded By Love. This is an entertaining story of an alien race trying to subjugate Earth by sending a representative who preaches a religion of love. The ending isn’t as strong as the rest of the story but the best of it is the cat-and-mouse maneuvering between Brother Luster Lovely, a two metre tall alien preacher who glows due to his phosphorescent blood, and the Secretary General of the UN.
It is perhaps worth noting that these last two pieces are both entertaining, occasionally amusing stories, not the obscure and serious stuff that people sometimes think typifies Moorcock-era New Worlds material, or the later period anyway.

As to the non-fiction and artwork, this issue has Keith Roberts’s best cover, probably: three crucifixion crosses, black against a dark blue, darkening sky, each of the men a silhouette. Inaccurate but the better for it (the story states Christ/Glogauer is crucified on his own). There are a couple of internal illustrations by James Cawthorn.³
Moorcock’s editorial discusses controversial stories in SF magazines (although he stretches the point by shoe-horning Langdon Jones’s mawkish I Remember Anita in alongside Farmer’s The Lovers and Harrison’s The Streets of Ashkelon).  Midway through there is also something of a non sequitur:

It is also interesting to note that at least two prominent US SF editors suffered or suffer (a) from agoraphobia and (b) from an obsessive interest in restriction symbols. p.3

The first is presumably Horace Gold but I have no idea who the other is. He ends by saying he hopes the stories in this issue will be accepted on their own merits.

The book reviews comprise a matter of fact listing and description by James Cawthorn and a more opinionated column by Hilary Bailey. The major essay is an overview of Philip K. Dick’s work by John Brunner. An interesting snippet herein:

As far as I can determine, only three of his books (not including the Hugo winner) have been published here, and of these I can only find one currently in print. p.142

Strange that Dick was so poorly published in the UK a handful of years after his Hugo win.

A couple of minor points from the subscriptions page: they are charging 4/- a copy when it cost 3/6 on the newsstand. They would have made more money out of a cover price subscription minus the postage and handling than they would have from the distributors after the latter had taken their cut of newsstand sales. I didn’t understand why they charged more until it was pointed out to me this may have been forced on the UK publishers by the UK distributors. One wonders if these kinds of practices exacerbated the distribution problems that the magazines had. By this I mean every time newsstand distribution was disrupted, for whatever reason, there was no substantial subscription base to fall back on.⁴
Also: Charles Harness, Anne McCaffrey and Meryn Peake are all touted as having stories forthcoming but I’m not sure any of them appeared. Did these get lost in the throes of Robert & Vinter going bust?
Finally, in the small ads, Edwardian postcards are wanted by a Mr Colvin (Michael Moorcock), c/o NWSF…

In conclusion, a particularly noteworthy issue, and I suspect it would be difficult to find a better issue from this era of New Worlds. Apart from Moorcock’s Nebula award winning novella, a fine piece of serious writing, you get good work by Disch and Aldiss and interesting and/or promising material from Calder and Platt/Bayley. Highly recommended.

1. Gay Times trial, 1977.
2. John Calder is a well-known publisher.
3. I have always enjoyed James Cawthorns’ work and think it a pity that there has never been a collection.
4. I’m also looking at the Sol Cohen published 1970’s Amazing and Fantastic here, although the American situation was not the same as the British. Have a look at the circulation figures between F&SF and those two and compare the wildly varying percentages of subscribers.

ISFDB link

Other reviews:
Mark Yon, Galactic Journey

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock

Fiction:
The Fall of Frenchy Steiner • novelette by Hilary Bailey ∗∗∗∗
Stormwater Tunnel • short story by Langdon Jones ∗∗
Goodbye, Miranda • short story by Michael Moorcock ∗
Single Combat • short story by Joseph Green ∗∗∗
The Evidence • short story by Lee Harding ∗∗
Equinox (Part 2 of 2) • novella serial by J. G. Ballard ∗∗∗+

Non-Fiction:
Cover • by James Cawthorn
Letters to the Editor
British Science Fiction Convention—1964 • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Books • essay by James Colvin (Michael Moorcock)
Story Ratings

_____________________

The triangle design appears again on this issue’s Cover, which is a bit of a shame as the James Cawthorn drawing underneath looks quite interesting: I assume that is Big Ben (with the Houses of Parliament out of shot to the right) under the red swastika.
The cover story is Hilary Bailey’s The Fall of Frenchy Steiner. As it is set in mid-1950s Nazi-occupied Britain, I was halfway there before it started; I can’t get enough of this stuff—Weihnachtabend, Fatherland, The Sound of His Horn, I’ve read them all. Even without this advantage it is, for the most part, a very good, gritty shading to grim work about a woman called Frenchy Steiner who is wanted by the German authorities in Britain. Narrated by her friend Lowry, it tells of their escape from London and recapture. It is full of bits of writing you want to quote:

I yawned. Not much to do but go to sleep and try for that erotic dream where I was sinking my fork into a plate of steak and kidney pudding. Or perhaps, if I couldn’t get to sleep, I’d try a nice stroll round the crater where St Paul’s had been . . .  p. 7

A cop passed across the station at a distance. Arthur’s eyes flicked then came back to me.
“Funny the way they left them in their helmets and so on,” he said. “Seems wrong, dunnit”
“They wanted you to think they were the same blokes who used to tell you the time and find old Rover for you when he got lost.”
“Aren’t they?” Arthur said sardonically. “You should have lived round where I lived mate.”  p. 16

She seemed very matter of fact, but her face had the calm of a woman who’s just had a baby, the pain and shock were over, but she knew this was really only the beginning of the trouble.  p. 27

If I have a criticism of this well characterised and striking story, it is of the closing section involving (spoiler) Steiner meeting Hitler. Lowry isn’t there so the narrative changes from the first to third person, which is jarring. Also, the foaming-mouthed Hitler and the subsequent shoot-out in this scene doesn’t totally convince. Nonetheless, I would have thought this would have been one of the notable stories of the year and a definite ‘Best of the Year’ choice.
By the way, in the introduction to the story the blurb writer does the author no favours by talking about Hitler’s clairvoyants and astrologers, and asking “But what if there had been just one person with a genuine psi-talent . . .” First of all, the hackneyed ‘psi’ phrase isn’t found in the story, and the elements concerning her visions and healing power are introduced organically into the narrative.
Alas, the idiot blurb writer strikes again in Langdon Jones’s Stormwater Tunnel by stating this is his first appearance in a professional magazine (spoiler) “with a story on the Mobius-strip theme”, thus gutting the story arc for the reader. No further description required by me as to what it is about. There is, however, one passage at the end which appears to be more about time than space:

It was as if Time were recurring, making him cover the same few paces again and again.
Time, Time, why this constant obsession with Time? He stopped dead in the dark as a blindingly clear thought struck him. He had been here before!
He didn’t know when, it was as if that was hidden below the conscious level of his mind; but he knew that he had been here before as sure as he knew he existed. It was as if the weight of centuries pressed on his mind and body. He had a sensation of terrific stresses and he felt that his body was being pulled this way and that by strange surges and fluxes. His sight was suddenly shot through with fitful flashes, light feathered in his head. The light fell into cubistic shards, then writhed into shape. The feelings of stress reached a climax.
He saw a picture. He saw a gigantic wheel turning slowly, slowly and that wheel turning another wheel, and that wheel was turning another, further away, and that turned another, and so it went on, on to a blue infinity. Stretching into the convoluted continuum of Time, Space and Existence. Wheels turning, turning in to infinity.  p. 41

One wonders to what extent he was already thinking about one of his later stories, The Great Clock.¹ Not a bad first story.
Moorcock’s Goodbye, Miranda is a three page fantasy about a man who levitates over the house of a former lover and her father. It does not end well. I suspect the genesis of this one involved a three page hole close to a print deadline and an editor wondering whether he should write up that strange dream he had last night to fill it . . . .
Joseph Green’s Single Combat gets off to a pedestrian start with its account of an Earthman surgically altered and given paranormal powers so he can rise through battle to become the king of an alien world. Then that world can eventually join an alliance with Earth against the Flish, humanoids which exist as a hive mind. During the annual games he is challenged by a warrior who is revealed as a female Flish agent. At this point the story seriously raises its game and becomes a pyrotechnic account of their physical and mental battle along with null-time effects, molecular level control of biology, etc. Overall, this is quite good.
I note in passing that this has chapter titles in bold:

These chapter titles would soon become ubiquitous in New Worlds (probably after Ballard’s concentrated stories started appearing).²
There are references to Kafka and Peake in the introduction to Lee Harding’s The Evidence, but it is a bit more workmanlike a story than that. A man realises he has his own personal ‘Watcher’. It turns out that (spoiler) the former is involved in the application of game-theory to thermonuclear war, and this in turn leads to some sort of metaphysical trial that the Watcher has been gathering evidence for.

The non-fiction section in the centre of the magazine includes Letters to the Editor. The first letter, from Peter White of Surrey, must have made Moorcock’s day:

Elsewhere, Moorcock replies to a criticism of the cover design by John Brunner (who would prefer something more conventional):

Sales seem to back up our theory that the triangular design has the bookstand appeal. Every paperback issued at the moment seems to have the design you suggest, and we’re trying to get a new approach into the covers as well as the contents of the magazine.  p. 75-76

There are a number of other contributions from current or future SF professionals (all with their addresses published!): James Cawthorn, Edward Mackin (he wonders if the Burroughs material in the last issue is a sign that SF is about to become “beat and intellectual”, noting that there is room in the market for a magazine of this type) and Charles Platt (a long and serious letter about expansion off-planet, and a small ad in the classifieds advertising “Beyond—amateur magazine of serious ideas about SF”). Moorcock doesn’t entirely agree with Platt’s letter but states it is “controversial enough to win the prize—a copy of Brian Aldiss’s The Dark Light Years.”
The (uncredited) editorial this month is titled  British Science Fiction Convention—1964, a quite clubbish account of the recent BSFA Eastercon, to which Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett turned up unexpectedly.
Books, a pseudonymous book review column by the editor, covers (among other items) Gunner Cade by C. M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril, and also a trio of US paperbacks, including a slightly  dismissive look at Budry’s Inferno, and a recommendation of Cordwainer Smith’s You Will Never Be The Same:

Cordwainer Smith is very different. His style is rich and sharp, his moods and images are exciting, and the physical things he describes often seem to take on metaphysical perspective. Smith’s real name is the best kept secret in SF, and rumour has it that he has a Top Job in the White House. If so, then he must be the most imaginative politician in the States. His people are lonely figures, archetypal, who inhabit haunting spacescapes that mingle horror and beauty—Romantic, in the best sense. In style, mood and plot he seems to draw on the myths and legends on the past to create myths and legends of the future.  p. 83-84

The Story Ratings are for issue #139 (James White’s serial Open Prison leads, with Michael Moorcock’s The Time Dweller in second place).³

The issue ends with the second part of Ballard’s novella Equinox. Any summation of the plot is probably rather irrelevant as, unlike most normal disaster novels where the characters strive to find a solution to the cause of the catastrophe or survive it intact, in a Ballard disaster novel the characters mostly run around engaged in their own crazed or obsessive agendas. I don’t mean this as a criticism: I enjoyed the intensity of the characters, the descriptive writing, and the imagery. Hard not to when you come across passages like this one about a crashed helicopter:

The four twisted blades, veined and frosted like the wings of a giant dragonfly, had already been overgrown by the trellises of crystals hanging downwards from the nearby trees. The fuselage of the craft, partly buried in the ground, had blossomed into an enormous translucent jewel, in whose solid depths, like emblematic knights mounted in the base of a medieval ring-stone, the two pilots sat frozen at their controls, their silver helmets giving off an endless fountain of light.  p. 96

A pretty good novella, and one that should have been in the ‘Best of The Year’ anthologies. It was probably ruled out due to its length (no 700 pp. ‘Best’ anthologies in 1966) and subsequent expansion to the novel length The Crystal World.⁴
A good issue.  ●

_____________________

1. The Great Clock by Langdon Jones, New Worlds #160, March 1966.

2. The same kind of bold chapter titles were used by by J. G. Ballard in The Terminal Beach, New Worlds #140, March 1964. There was only four months between Ballard’s story and Green’s however, so I doubt that was the influence.

3. The story ratings that were published in issue #144 have Ballard’s story as the favourite:

4. You would have thought that after this serial Ballard would have gone on to be a regular contributor to Moorcock’s New Worlds but (perhaps due to his wife’s death and novel commitments) he was hardly seen again in 1965. Dune Limbo, an extract from The Drought appeared in #148 (March), and Prisoner of the Coral Deep—a reprint from Argosy, March 1964—appeared in #150 (May). However, in early 1966, around the same time that the magazine increased its size from 128 pp. to 160 pp., he returned as a regular contributor and was in nearly all of the larger issues.

Originally posted 16th December 2015.
Edited 30^th March to include more from the letters column, and the three images, as well as minor format and text changes.
Edited 21^st July 2019 to add review link.  ●

ISFDB link

Other Reviews:
Mark Yon, Galactic Journey

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock

Fiction:
Equinox (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by J. G. Ballard ∗∗∗+
‘Never Let Go of My Hand!’ • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
The Last Lonely Man • short story by John Brunner ∗
The Star Virus • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Equinox • cover by James Cawthorn
A New Literature for the Space Age • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Books: Myth Maker of the 20th Century • essay by J. G. Ballard
Story Ratings
Letters

_____________________

In 1963 the British SF magazine publisher Nova Publications was struggling with poor circulation figures for New Worlds and Science Fantasy (their monthly and bimonthly publications), and  the board of directors eventually decided to cease publication and wind up the company. When a new publisher was found just before the magazine closed down, a new editor was required as John Carnell, the previous editor, was busy with a new quarterly anthology, New Writings in SF, and his literary agency. Michael Moorcock and  Kyril Bonfiglioli had both approached (or had been approached by) David Warburton¹ of publishers Roberts & Vinter about the job, and he ultimately decided to split the titles between the two of them. Given the choice, Moorcock unexpectedly chose to edit New Worlds rather than Science Fantasy.²
So, in mid-1964 the first Moorcock-edited issue of New Worlds appeared from Roberts & Vinter in a new paperback format.³  This had an eye-catching cover design for Equinox by James Cawthorn and, unlike the first Roberts & Vinter issue of its sister magazine Science Fantasy (which would appear a month later) the glossy (but thin) cover of a standard paperback.
There is an introductory editorial by Moorcock, A New Literature for the Space Age, where he raves about William Burroughs and complains about the stagnation of the modern novel. About two paragraphs from the end, to avoid frightening the horses one suspects, he mentions that he appreciates the entertainment value of SF and will publish a variety of stories. The last paragraph is a tribute to the previous editor:

John Carnell, who edited New Worlds and Science Fantasy since their start, is a man who has done most for British SF since the war. He has been responsible for discovering and encouraging many of our most popular modern SF writers. He is a man whom many people, including myself, respect and admire. Of late, the demands on his time have been almost overwhelming and it was with great regret that he decided his other commitments in the field would not allow him to continue as editor. I wish him the very best of success with his new ventures, and look forward to seeing the first issue of New Writing in SF which he is now editing.  p. 3

The fiction leads off with the first part of J. G. Ballard’s two-part novella, Equinox. Expanded and revised from his novelette The Illuminated Man (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1964), it was written after Moorcock requested a serial from Ballard for the magazine at short notice. Ballard’s wife died around the same time as this novella appeared and the further expansion of it to a novel, The Crystal World, was what he returned to some months afterwards.
The story’s main character is Sanders, a doctor in a leper colony, who travels to find a couple in Africa after the wife, Suzanne, writes a letter describing strange, jewelled visions that cause him concern. It appears that a strange crystallising phenomenon has begun world, even universe wide:

At first Dr Sanders failed to recognise this as the Echo satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least ten-fold, transforming the thin pin-point of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jewelled flowers that afternoon.  p. 25

The rest of this instalment concerns Sander’s journey through the jungle to the couple:

They were rounding a bend, as the river widened in its approach to Mont Royale, and the water ahead was touched by a curious roseate sheen, as if reflecting a distant sunset or the flames of some silent conflagration. The sky, however, remained a bland limpid blue, devoid of all cloud. Then they passed below a small bridge, where the river opened into a wide basin a quarter of a mile in diameter.
With a gasp of surprise they all craned forward, staring at the line of jungle facing the white-framed buildings of the town. The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and heavy fronds sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active technicolour process. The entire length of the opposite shore glittered with this blurred kaleidoscope, the overlapping bands of colour increasing the density of the vegetation, so that it was impossible to see more than a few feet between the front line of trunks.
The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight shining uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene suddenly erupted into fantastic cascades of colour that rippled away into the air around them. Then, slowly, the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armour of light, their foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.  p. 36

You can imagine Moorcock’s delight at the publishing this well written literary work as the lead piece in the first issue of his editorship. Given the transformative magazine that New Worlds would become in the middle and late sixties it is rather fitting that it is a work about the mundane transmogrifying into something jewelled and complex . . . .
Brian W. Aldiss’s ‘Never Let Go of My Hand!’ starts rather datedly with a mother and son in a cold house providing Bovril to a visiting neighbour. They are watched, and eventually abducted, by clunkily named aliens (e.g. Ret-Thlat).
The story continues when they arrive on the alien planet, and the mother and son realise that time runs backward in this universe and they are becoming younger. Matters end on a rather bleak note when the resentful twenty-seven year old mother meets her six-year-old child for the last time.
This piece appears to show Aldiss in transition, exhibiting elements that typified his older work (the dated domestic circumstances and the pulp aliens) and that which was coming (the bitter mother-son relationship and temporal reversal). Man in his Time, a good example of his later work, would be published in Science Fantasy #65 a year later.
John Brunner’s story The Last Lonely Man has very little going for it.⁴ The story gimmick is a process known as Contact where people, when they die, go on to cohabit in another person’s mind and eventually become blended in—so most people have several contacts who might host them when they die. Cut to our protagonist, who meets a man in a bar who has no contacts at all, and upon whom he takes pity, agreeing to become a temporary host, if required.
This unconvincing idea has an equally unconvincing development: at one point in the story the protagonist and his wife leave him—a man they have just met—to babysit their eleven-month-old twins: I realise that there was not the same paedophile panic in the mid-sixties, but give me a break. Needless to say (spoiler) by the end of the story our protagonist has come to regret his altruism.
By the way, this is written in that lame American voice that far too many UK writers have used: essentially British English but with the odd “gimme”, “rye” (whisky), “La Guardia”, etc. thrown in. I understand why writers did this if they were selling to a US market—but not when selling to a UK one (I note that Ballard always used his own voice and managed to sell frequently to the likes of F&SF and Fantastic). I wonder why this was left as it is here—did the story come from Brunner’s trunk to satisfy the same type of material shortage that Kyril Bonfiglioli suffered in the early issues of his editorship of Science Fantasy, New Worlds’ sister magazine?⁵
Barrington J. Bayley’s The Star Virus is a little disappointing. His stories are more often than not unusual, original and philosophical stories, but there is little of that present in this novelette. Rodrone has a device called the Lens that an alien race called the Streall want. After fleeing a planet whose government want him to hand it over and experiencing a rather strange journey through space (the crew play a card game that may result in their reactor going critical) he eventually ends up in a struggle with a Streall called The Philosopher for control of the galaxy. Ninety five percent pulp space opera versus five per cent of Bayley’s sometime originality I am afraid.⁶

There is a limited amount of non-fiction. Apart from Moorcock’s editorial, J. G. Ballard contributes a review column, Books: Myth Maker of the 20th Century, that rather boringly discusses three novels by William Burroughs. The excerpts provided do not make me want to rush upstairs to grab my copy of The Naked Lunch off the bookshelves; Moorcock makes a better case in the first part of his editorial.
There are Story Ratings from two of Carnell’s earlier issues:

I doubt there will be many of those old-school SF names in future issues.⁷
The Letters column is only a single page with two brief notes offering congratulations on the continuation of the magazine.

So, in conclusion, an average start to Moorcock’s editorship, with the fiction not quite matching the rallying cry in his editorial.  ●

____________________

1. According to Mike Ashley’s Transformations, p. 236-237 (Amazon.co.uk) the reason that Roberts & Vinter first got involved was because New Worlds’ old printer was looking for work to fill the gap left by the magazines and was having a chat with Warburton in a pub. They later decided the magazines would give their current pin-up publications a respectable front.

2. Moorcock had been a frequent contributor to Science Fantasy in the early sixties, not least with his ‘Elric’ series of stories, and so seemed a natural fit for that magazine.

3. Moorcock wanted the magazine to be a large-format magazine like Playboy, on art paper with good quality illustrations. (Ibid. p. 236-237)

4. I am utterly perplexed as to how Brunner’s story (ISFDB link) ended up in no less than three of the ‘Years Best’ anthologies, one a retrospective. I know tastes vary, but this one struck me as an example of a story that is demonstrably poor.
An episode of the TV series Out of the Unknown was made out of The Last Lonely Man. The seventies bad acting, affected speech and décor actually make it worse, but you can give Amazon £1.89 and make up your own mind.

5. Bonfiglioli relied heavily on “bottom drawer material” from Brian W. Aldiss for his first couple of issues of Science Fantasy after being appalled at the poor quality of the quarter a million words of mss that he had read on assuming the editorship. (Ibid. p. 243)

6. The Star Virus was considerably expanded to become a 45,000 word Ace Double novel in 1970:

Wikipedia reports that “William S. Burroughs used the concept of “deadliners” from the novel in his own Nova Express, quoting Bayley’s story in its New Worlds appearance.”

7. Perhaps of more interest are the story ratings for this issue (from New Worlds #144):

I have my doubts about Ballard’s The Terminal Beach being the readers’ choice in #140. Apart from the fact that (in Astounding/Analog, anyway) the serial or long novelette nearly always tops the poll, I suspect it was quite a divisive story at the time and drew as much hostility from the traditionalists as it did praise from the progressives.  ●

First posted on website 15^th December 2015.
Edited on 2^nd March 2018 to add a historical introduction; a longer quoted passage for the Ballard story; story ratings, back cover, and The Star Virus images; and numerous other formatting and text changes.
Edited on 5^th March 2018 to add story ratings from New Worlds #144.
Edited on 13^th June 2018 to revise Brunner story text and make minor formatting changes.
Edited on 21^st July 2019 to add review link.