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Other reviews:
Mark Yon, Galactic Journey

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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

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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.  ●

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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.  ●