ISFDB link

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

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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