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.  ●