Summary:
A much better issue this time around with good stories from Roger Zelazny (Love Is an Imaginary Number is an elegant, telegraphic piece about a man who introduces progress in many alternate worlds, and his escape from the people who would stop him), and David Masson (Mouth of Hell, a well described story about an exploration team investigating a huge hole and their slowly revealed discoveries). There is also a good effort from E. C. Tubb (Anne, ultimately an affecting piece about a space fighter pilot and his sentient ship).
There is also a novelette from Charles Platt, and the conclusion of editor Michael Moorcock’s The Wrecks of Time, which has some good images and scenes but doesn’t save the novel.
The non-fiction includes a ‘How to Write’ article from John Brunner, and an interesting letter from Ivor Latto.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]
Other reviews:1
Christopher Priest, Vector #38 (February 1966), pp. 26-27
_____________________
Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones
Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin] ∗
The Failures • novelette by Charles Platt ∗
Love Is an Imaginary Number • short story by Roger Zelazny ∗∗∗+
Mouth of Hell • short story by David I. Masson ∗∗∗+
Anne • short story by E. C. Tubb ∗∗∗
Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by David Kearn, James Cawthorn
Editorial: The New Prism • by Michael Moorcock
The Case • poem by Peter Redgrove
Next Month
Them As Can, Does • essay by John Brunner
Thot Provoking Belly Laughs • book reviews by James Colvin
Letters to the Editor
_____________________
The third and final part of The Wrecks of Time by Michael Moorcock starts with all of the major characters having newly arrived on E—Zero. There is then an argument between Maggy and Steifflomeis about the “Principals,” and the fact that their presence may affect the activation of this simulation. Later there is a stand-off between Faustaff and Orelli’s men, but Faustaff, Nancy and Ogg eventually leave in an aircar.
During the ensuing journey they travel through a world that appears to still be in process of forming—there are many anachronistic objects that appear, a Baiera tree from the Jurassic period, a brand new 1908 Model T ford, etc. Nancy and Ogg also feel uncomfortable, as if their minds are changing to make them fit this world, but Faustaff remains unaffected.
In the next chapter, Faustaff wanders off on his own to what looks like a vast garbage dump:
All history seemed to have been piled together at random. It was a mountain of treasure, as if some mad museum curator had found a way of up-ending his museum and shaking its contents out on to the ground. Yet the artifacts did not have the look of museum-pieces. Everything looked absolutely new.
Faustaff approached the heap until he stood immediately beneath it. At his feet lay a near-oval shield of wood and leather. It looked as if it belonged to the fourteenth century and the workmanship seemed Italian to Faustaff. It was richly decorated with gold and red paint and its main motif showed an ornate mythical lion; beside it, on its side, was a beautiful clock dating from around 1700. It was of steel and silver filigree and might have been the work of the greatest clockmaker of his time, Thomas Tompion.2 Few other craftsmen, Faustaff thought abstractedly, could have created such a clock. Quite close to the clock he saw a skull of blue crystal. It could only have been fifteenth century Aztec. Faustaff had seen one like it in the British Museum. Half-covering the crystal skull was a grotesque ceremonial mask that looked as if it came from New Guinea, the features painted to represent a devil.
Faustaff felt overwhelmed by the richness and beauty—and the sheer variety—of the jumble of objects. Somehow it represented an aspect of what he had been fighting for since he had taken over the organisation from his father and agreed to try to preserve the worlds of subspace. p. 14
There are more striking images and scenes in the next chapter, when Faustaff passes a column of Orelli’s men, seemingly in a daze, and wearing a variety of costumes: Roman soldiers, priests, women. When he later finds Orelli in the cathedral, he realises why they were dressed the way they were:
[It] was the life-size crucifix behind the altar which drew his attention. Not only was it life-size but peculiarly life-like, also. Faustaff walked rapidly towards it, refusing to believe what he already knew to be true.
The cross was of plain wood, though well-finished.
The figure nailed to it was alive.
It was Orelli, naked and bleeding from wounds in his hands and feet, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his head hanging on his chest.
Now Faustaff realised what Orelli’s men had represented—the people of Calvary. They must certainly have been the ones who had crucified him.
With a grunt of horror Faustaff ran forward and climbed on the altar reaching up to see how he could get Orelli down. The ex-cardinal smelled of sweat and his body was lacerated. On his head was a thorn garland.
What had caused Orelli’s men to do this to him? It was surely no conscious perversion of Christianity; no deliberate blasphemy. Faustaff doubted that Orelli’s brigands cared enough for religion to do what they had done.
He would need something to lever the nails out.
Then Orelli raised his head and opened his eyes.
Faustaff was shocked by the tranquillity he saw in those eyes. Orelli’s whole face seemed transformed not into a travesty of Christ but into a living representation of Christ.
Orelli smiled sweetly at Faustaff. “Can I help you, my son?” he said calmly.
“Orelli?” Faustaff was unable to say anything else for a moment. He paused. “How did this happen?” he asked eventually.
“It was my destiny,” Orelli replied. “I knew it and they understood what they must do. I must die, you see.”
“This is insane!” Faustaff began trying to tug at one of the nails. “You aren’t Christ! What’s happening?”
“What must happen,” Orelli said in the same even tone. “Go away, my son. Do not question this. Leave me.”
“But you’re Orelli—a traitor, murderer, renegade. You—you don’t deserve this! You’ve no right—” Faustaff was an atheist and to him Christianity was one of many religions that had ceased to serve any purpose, but something in the spectacle before him disturbed him. “The Christ in the Bible was an idea, not a man!” he shouted. “You’ve turned it inside out! p. 20
Moorcock would return to this idea in his Nebula Award winning novella, Behold the Man, in New Worlds #166 (September 1966).
These two chapters are, however, the peak point of the novel, and it returns to its previous level after this, with Faustaff spending the remainder of the time seeing or intervening in various other surreal scenes that resemble magical or mythical performances (he saves a naked blonde woman from a Black magic ritual and sees Ogg, dressed as a white knight, fight with Steifflomeis). Eventually, Maggy takes Faustaff to see the Principals:
They stood on a vast plateau roofed by a huge, dark dome. Light came from all sides, the colours merging to become a white that was not really white, but a visible combination of all colours.
And giants looked down on them. They were human, with calm, ascetic features, completely naked and hairless.
They were seated in simple chairs that did not appear to have any real substance and yet supported them perfectly. They were about thirty feet high, Faustaff judged.
“My principals,” Maggy White said.
“I’m glad to meet you at last,” Faustaff told them. “You seem to be in some sort of dilemma.”
“Why have you come here?” One of the giants spoke. His voice did not seem in proportion to his size. It was quiet and well-modulated, without emotion.
“To make a complaint, among other things,” said Faustaff. He felt that he should be overawed by the giants, but perhaps all the experiences that had led up to this meeting had destroyed any sense of wonder he might have had otherwise. And he felt the giants had bungled too much to deserve a great deal of respect from him. p. 40
I suspect by now many readers will feel the same way about the novel. Anyway, the Principals shuffle off to deliberate and, when they come back they tell Faustaff that their ancestors left Earth millions of years ago to travel the universe. When they came back to Earth they found a decayed society, and so created the simulations in an attempt to reproduce the civilization that produced them.
Faustaff then gives them a lecture on their failed experiment, comments on their morality, and suggests that they should develop their own pleasures (art, entertainments, etc.). They readily agree to move all the simulated worlds out of the sub-spatial bubble and into real space (and interconnect them).
This is completely unconvincing, but it does produce a good final image of all the other worlds appearing in the sky of E-Zero, their atmospheres merging to form an envelope around all the planets (apart from the nuked E3), and golden bridges of light forming between them.
In conclusion, this final part of the novel is probably worth reading for a few striking images and scenes, but the plot is as silly as in the first two instalments.
If I wasn’t droning on at great length in these reviews, and was writing waspish one-liners instead, then “A failure” would be the short review of The Failures by Charles Platt.3 Although this is supposedly set in the future, it is essentially about swinging 1960s London’s social and sexual mores.
The story begins with the protagonist Greg, a member of a successful beat group, The Ephemerals, picking up a woman called Cathy Grant, who he gives a lift home (while driving fast and recklessly). After she turns down the offer of dinner (a previous engagement) we join her in her flat (which she shares with a pet monkey) for some ennui:
That was when one tired of it all; when the novelty had gone, when each sophisticated, well-dressed, successful man said the same things in the same boring way, no matter how polished a conversationalist. p. 61
Greg performs with his band that night, and the next day phones Cathy to arrange to take her out that afternoon. First though, he has lunch at “a small Greek café near Kilburn”:
He liked to eat there, because he could usually escape recognition, and because the food was good: real meat, home-baked bread. It was a small place, not very clean, and the workers from that area were usually the only people there. Tough, leathery old men, sitting over a sandwich and cup of tea; women, plump from too many children, waiting to buy take-away bags of food from the counter: pies, sandwiches, anything cheap. These were the people left behind by the affluence spiral; unskilled, often of sub-normal intelligence. In spite of their poverty, though, they possessed a certain natural assurance and equanimity that Greg almost envied. They came from a rigid, unchanging society; people who had never known any state other than poverty and who accepted it as being their only way of life. p. 64
Sociology 101.
The story continues with the couple going to Greg’s houseboat and then spending the afternoon water skiing in the estuary. When Cathy says she needs to be back be nine, Greg is annoyed and, after he drops her off, waits outside her flat.
When a man arrives and, an hour later, leaves, Greg follows him to a pub and finds out, when he confronts him, that the man, Jamieson (a) is a “good friend” of Cathy’s, (b) is a Thalidomide sufferer (he has two prosthetics over his foreshortened arms), and (c) was a one-time post-doc Sociology student. After this latter revelation, Jamieson delivers a one-page data-dump about overpopulation, the space race, resources and expansionary capitalism before he eventually leaves.
The rest of the story has Greg take Cathy out again, this time to a dive/squat in Notting Hill, where they meet an unwashed and aggressive marijuana user called Tony. Cathy gets a high before she leaves with Greg, but (spoiler) later on in the story, after dodging an invitation to see Greg play, she returns to the area, bumps into Tony, and sleeps with him. Cue the bad sex writing awards:
She looked into his eyes and felt weakened, the tiny pupils in the ghostly pale irises boring into her, unblinking. She let herself go down into his arms and the odour of his body seemed to close around her. He circled his arms over her and she felt the tense, strong muscles; he rolled on to her and kissed her roughly, and it was as if she was falling backwards, losing touch with the world. With a sudden cry she gave way to him and clutched at his hard, tanned body, needing him and what he stood for, opening herself to him, losing a reserve that she suddenly realised she had never lost before. p. 77
Later on there is a argument between Cathy and Greg about what is going on, a melodramatic encounter where she says that she makes wealthy men happy, self-identifies as a “whore” and a “slut,” and invites Greg to call her a bitch or slap her, before he finally leaves. Later on, when Greg gets a telephone call from Cathy saying their relationship is over (I wasn’t aware it had started), he jumps in his car to drive to her flat, but his reckless driving catches up with him this time around and he crashes the car, breaking another motorist’s arm. Greg then flees into the crowd, where he sees Jamieson, who wails that Cathy has gone to live with Tony (Jamieson has lost his prosthetics at this point and is waving his stubby arms/hands around). Greg continues on to Cathy’s flat, kicking a blind beggar on the way and, when he gets there, he finds a party in progress. Greg briefly talks to an out if work astronaut before going up to the party that’s happening in her (looted) flat. Cathy isn’t there and, after passing a woman holding a dwarf, he ends up in a room where Cathy’s pet monkey is sitting on its own:
It had no way of understanding what had happened; it only knew that somehow Cathy had gone away and left it. Without her to provide for it, it would soon sicken and die.
It pulled and bit at its chain, then crouched back into the corner, chattering senselessly. p. 85
I guess the point of this one (and ignoring the terrible soap opera and melodrama) is that we are living in an overpopulated hell-hole, and that our lives are pointless There was quite a lot of this New Worlds/New Wave miserablism in the sixties and early seventies, and I could never understand why anyone would bother writing this kind of story. Misery likes company, I guess.
•
Love Is an Imaginary Number is the first of a handful of stories4 that Roger Zelazny would contribute to the Moorcock incarnation of New Worlds, and it is a poetic tale told in elegant and telegraphic prose, as can be seen from its opening passage:
They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever. Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.
I lay there staring over at her, arm outstretched above her head, masses of messed blonde hair framing her sleeping face. She was more than wife to me: she was warden.
How blind of me not to have realized it sooner!
But then, what else had they done to me?
They had made me to forget what I was.
Because I was like them but not of them they had bound me to this time and this place.
They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love.
I stood up and the last chains fell away.
A single bar of moonlight lay upon the floor of the bed chamber. I passed through it to where my clothing was hung.
There was a faint music playing in the distance. That was what had done it. It had been so long since I had heard that music. . . .
How had they trapped me?
That little kingdom, ages ago, some Other, where I had introduced gunpowder—Yes! That was the place! They had trapped me there with my Other-made monk’s hood and my classical Latin.
Then brainsmash and binding to this Otherwhen. p. 86
The rest of the tale is kinetic chase sequence that has the narrator flee through many different worlds. During this we find out what his crimes were during a fight he has with one of his pursuers:
I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.
“Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!” he gasped.
“All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you speak, not the final results.”
“Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not change the men themselves?”
“Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly,” I said, and I dismounted and moved to his side. “All that your kind seek is a perpetual Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do.”
I unsheathed the knife at my belt and slipped it through his visor, but the helm was empty. He had escaped into another Place, teaching me once again the futility of arguing with an ethical evolutionary.
I remounted and rode on. p. 89
This is pretty good piece, an accomplished blend of style and story, and I’m puzzled as to why this appeared in New Worlds rather than an issue of F&SF, where it would have earned the author considerably more money and have been a natural cover story.
This is a story that I’d have in my hypothetical Best of the Year collection.
•
David I. Masson returns this issue after his stunning debut in September (Traveller’s Rest) with a story that would be one of five he would publish this year (three of them would appear consecutively in this issue and the next two). Mouth of Hell is, like his first story, set in an unusual world, although it seems similar to ours:
When the expedition reached the plateau, driving by short stages from the northern foothills, they found it devoid of human life, a silent plain variegated by little flowers and garish patches of moss and lichen. Kettass, the leader, called a halt, and surveyed the landscape while the tractors were overhauled. The sun shone brightly out of a clear sky, not far to south for the quasi-arctic ecology was one of height, not latitude. Mosquitoes hovered low down over tussocks below wind-level, beetles and flies crawled over the flowers. Beyond a quarter-metre above the ground, however, a bitter wind from the north flowed steadily. The distance was clear but it was difficult to interpret what one saw, and the treeless waste held no clues to size. Ground undulations were few. There were no signs of permafrost beneath. After a time a fox could be made out trekking southward some way off. Some larger tracks, not hooved, showed by the edge of a bog pool. If one wandered far from the vehicles and men, the silence was broken only by the thin sound of the wind where it combed a grass mound, the zizz and skrittle of insects, the distant yipe of fox or other hunting animal, and the secretive giggle of seeping water. Here and there on the north side of a mound or clump traces of rime showed, and a few of the pool edges were lightly frozen. p. 93
Initially there are only subtle indications of differences (the names of some of the team, the constant wind from the north, the permanent thunderstorm to the south, a herd of “greydeer” that they hunt, etc.) but it eventually becomes apparent that they are on an ever-steepening slope—but are already below sea level. When the gradient increases to the point that they can’t take their tractors any further their leader, Kettass, orders them to make camp.
After a discussion of the situation a team of three volunteers is sent ahead on foot, and the next section of the story follows Mehhtumm, ’Ossnaal and Ghuddup as they continue down the ever increasing slope using their “sucker gloves”:
The tilted horizon terminated in a great roll of clear-edged cloud like a monstrous eel, which extended indefinitely east and west. The ground air, at any rate, was here free of the gale, but the rush of wind could be heard between the thunder. The atmosphere was damp and extremely warm. The rock surface was hot. What looked like dark, richly-coloured polyps and sea-anemones thrust and hung obscenely here and there from crannies. The scene was picked out now and again by shafts of roasting sunlight funnelling down brassily above an occasional cauliflower top or through a chasm in the cloud-curtain. Progress even with suckers was slow. Mehhtumm got them roped together.
An hour later the slope was 70°, with a few ledges bearing thorn bushes, dwarf pines, and peculiar succulents. The torrents had become thin waterfalls, many floating outwards into spray. A scorching breeze was wafting up from below. Two parallel lines of the roller cloud now stretched above them, and the storm seemed far above that. The smooth, brittle rock would take no carabiners. A curious patternless pattern of dull pink, cloudy lemon yellow, and Wedgwood blue could just be discerned through the foggy air between their feet. It conveyed nothing, and the steepening curvature of their perch had no visible relation to it. Altimeters were now impossible to interpret, but they must clearly be several kilometres below sea-level. Crawling sensations possessed their bodies, as though they had been turned to soda-water, as Ghuddup remarked, and their ears thrummed. p. 98
These physiological symptoms (spoiler) are nitrogen narcosis (of which they are unaware) and this eventually leads to disaster: ’Ossnaal has a fit and, when Mehhtumm tries to organise himself and Ghuddup to rescue him, the latter cuts his rope and continues down the hole. After securing ’Ossnaal, Ghuddup starts climbing to get help, only to later hear him fall.
After this attempt Kettass leads another team of three down the hole—this time with oxygen supplies—but another man falls, and the expedition is abandoned.
The story then moves forward five years in time to a point where the “authority” has built two VTOL (vertical take-off or landing) craft to explore the hole, and Kettass is on board to film and commentate. This expedition discovers that the hole is 163km wide and the base is 41km below sea level. They also see glimpses of lava at the bottom. But although the expedition is initially successful, a freak accident causes the loss of one of the craft.
The final section takes place thirty years later, where Kettass, now a septuagenarian, goes with his extended family on the pressurised cable railway that runs down the Terraces (the Western side of the hole) to within 700 metres above the oozing magma at the base.
The story concludes by remarking that Kettass did not live long enough to take the tourist rocket down Jacob’s Ladder (the Eastern side), or the North Wall lift.
I thought this was a pretty good story and, although not as good as his debut, it’s ‘Best of the Year’ worthy. I liked the descriptive writing, the slowly revealed physical environment, and the unconventional arc of the story (the two postscript sections probably shouldn’t work, but they do).
I haven’t been a fan of E. C. Tubb’s work in the Compact Books version of New Worlds so far (which strike me as fairly typical examples of the kind of story that I thought Moorcock was trying to get rid of) but I quite liked Anne. This one opens with a space fighter pilot called Argonne—expected to fight to the death—having fled a battle with the alien Hatachi. His apprentice is dead—his body disrupted in to a red mist inside the craft—and Argonne’s own legs are pulped. His ship is screaming with pain, but he can’t do anything to help as he can’t move.
The next section of the story has him wake in a room with his legs healed, and a woman called Anne standing by his side. After Argonne speaks to Anne for a time they leave the room and find themselves in a garden, seemingly instantaneously. When he thinks of winter, they arrive on a snow world, and then they finally end up on a beach.
There are a couple more dream scenes like this until the one where he has a hand to hand fight with a Hatachi—then his dream merges with the reality of his previous situation on the ship. He wakes up to find himself still badly injured, with a dream cap having slipped off his head. He then realises that the ship had, even though he couldn’t help her, put the cap on his head so he wouldn’t suffer the pain of his injuries. The last section is quite affecting:
But he was not sorry that the ship had failed—that the dream-circuit had been broken. He would not have liked to lie in the safe, snug world of illusion when the ship had nothing of comfort. It is bad to die alone.
Argonne had lived a solitary, dedicated life and it was natural for him to have followed ancient custom. The personalising and naming of weapons is not new. He looked at the four letters mounted above the instrument panel. “Anne,” he murmured. “With an e.”
The girl he had never had, the wife he would never get, the dream he would never know again. The ship he had tried to save by running from those who would hurt her.
Anne!
Who had shown him Heaven.
This time he did not try to blink away his tears. They belonged. For around him something beautiful was dying. p. 112
•••
The Cover, by the look of it, is another piece of eye-catching zeitgeist from the photographic agency.
The Interior Artwork comes from regular James Cawthorn and a new artist David Kearn. Kearn would only appear in the magazine on this one occasion and, initially, I thought that this piece was by Keith Roberts (who contributed covers to the magazine from issue #163) but the signature doesn’t look like his.
The New Prism by Michael Moorcock is a somewhat lofty editorial that discusses how religion is being replaced by science before it moves on to discuss how SF may the tool best suited to view this “new prism”. Personally, I’d argue that most SF has little, if anything, to do with science.
The editorial also has this description of historical SF:
In sf, for nearly two-thirds of a century we have despaired. We have produced a literature of despair. We have produced a literature that might, in itself, be vital, but which has reflected that despair in works of an apparently cynical or hopeless nature and where we have supplied answers they have been confused.
This was natural in a century that has produced world wars, insane political creeds, H-Bombs; but the time has come when we are beginning to stop worrying about it and starting to worry what we’re going to do about it. p. 4
And this of current and/or future SF:
There is an increasing atmosphere of positive and hopeful thinking in the world of art (and even in the political sphere). Young artists, in particular, seem to be fed-up with simply expressing how fed-up they are. They accept, like scientists and politicians, that things are bad, but they’re trying to work out how things can be made better. p. 4
I’d suggest that both those descriptions are highly debateable—in particular the latter, given that future issues of New Worlds had more than their fair share of gloom (for a current example see Platt’s story above).
The Case by Peter Redgrove is a new feature for the magazine, a long poem (seven pages). It has a short introduction that mentions a schizophrenic boy who suffers from hysterical blindness and whose mother is dead, but the rest of it is mystifying. I assume the poem describes his inner vision of a garden, and his relationship to his dead mother, absent father, and God. I wasn’t really sure what this is about.
The usual Next Month filler in this issue has a fairly stellar list of names “due to appear soon,” a mixture of established British names (Aldiss, Ballard, Brunner, Moorcock), established American names (Zelazny, Merril) and a number of up and coming new writers (Masson, Jones, Platt, Collyn). That sounds like the successful mix I remember from my previous fragmentary reading of the magazine.
Them As Can, Does by John Brunner is one of those advice-to-new-writers essays you see every now and then in the SF magazines—when the editors have finally lost their patience with the rubbish they see in their slushpile:
So you had an idea for a science fiction story .
So after considerable effort you got it down on paper.
So you mailed it to John W. Campbell and sat back to await the cheque, and no cheque came—just the MS, with a note on the rejection slip informing you of the existence of International Reply Coupons and intimating that if you want the next story returned you’d better enclose some. So you chewed off an eighth of an inch of fingernail and sent it (the MS, not the piece of nail) to Michael Moorcock, and it came home again, and you sent it in desperation to a fanzine and it came back from there, too. p. 113
I’m not sure that any of the advice proffered in this article (ms preparation, plotting, length and structure, characterisation, dialogue, etc.) will make any difference to the standard of submitted material, and it always annoys me a little that editors waste precious magazine space on something that applies to a minority of readers. That said, there are a few interesting snippets, including one about Brunner’s own work:
The first story I ever sold to Astounding stemmed from a single sentence in Cliff Simak’s Time Quarry; much of the material in Telepathist derived from the key element of Peter Phillips’s Dreams are Sacred. p. 114
The first book reviewed by Moorcock (as by James Colvin) in Thot Provoking Belly Laughs is Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison (serialised in New Worlds #153-155), of which he says:
If you didn’t have the pleasure of reading [this recently], it might be enough to tell you that running it did wonders for the magazine’s subscription list. p. 121
After he describes it as “wonderfully vulgar” and “influenced by Catch-22,” he concludes that it is an American novel in the traditions of Mack Sennet (who?), the Marx Brothers, and Mad magazine.
After this Moorcock reviews another of his own novels (there were two or three in the last column), The Fireclown, beginning with some background information:
[This] was written two or three years ago, I believe; around the time he was writing The Sundered Worlds and his Elric stories, yet it is untypical of this period. The first few pages, describing the Fireclown himself in his underground cavern, addressing a Hugo-esque rabble, are written in his familiar style, but then the writing becomes rather dull and both plot and style (though there are one or two other colourful and original scenes scattered here and there) seem vaguely reminiscent of Disraeli’s Coningsby. p. 122
He goes on to say that this “futuristic political novel” is minor Moorcock and not as ambitious as his other work.
The other three books reviewed are anthologies. The first one is Rulers of Men, is edited by Hans Stefan Santesson and, although Moorcock didn’t like all the stories, he found that this was:
A memorable and readable collection with the same distinctive and attractive atmosphere that Fantastic Universe used to have. Winey—mellow—quite clever. Not ‘thot-provoking’, particularly, but not intrusive, either. p. 122
Next up is A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels, edited by Damon Knight. Moorcock says that the Wells (The Time Machine) and the Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) are worth rereading but laments that Knight edited Capek’s The Absolute at Large (although he doesn’t say why).
As for Gulf by Robert Heinlein, we are reminded that Moorcock hasn’t seen a story by this writer that he didn’t dislike at least a little bit:
[This] hasn’t the sense of conviction one receives from the preceding writers, but it is good commercial sf and fluently written, about the first superman and what it means to be a superman in a world of ordinary people. A bit tedious, after a while. If, as the book claims, Heinlein has exerted a revolutionary influence on the field, I don’t know quite what it is, but if it’s what I think it might be I don’t think it’s fair just to blame Heinlein. p. 123
I do wish Moorcock would stop inserting these gnomic observations into his reviews—what do you think the the influence is?; if not him, who?
Also mentioned are Sherred’s E for Effort (“good mood,” “well-written”). McKenna’s Hunter, Come Home (“cardboard characters,” but “one of the best I’ve read in contemporary American science fiction.”).
Moorcock finishes with this about the publisher of the last two books:
Gollancz seem to be improving, judging by the above pair, but they’ll have to make a big effort this year to make up for all the bad, bad books they published last year. p. 123
The final anthology, New Writings in S-F 6, edited by John Carnell, “arrived too late for a proper review” (I think Moorcock covers it in a subsequent column).
Letters to the Editor come from two readers. The first is (future contributor) Michael Butterworth, who wants short fiction and not novels, and suggests that “every form of art” should appear in New Worlds’ pages. His letter then spirals out to “tales” vs. “stories,” and that the former will offer readers a “uniform whole” (no, me neither).
The other letter is a long and interesting one from Ivor Latto, who asks why so many of the stories in New Worlds deal with death (of men, planets or races) and why new writers seem to be the culprits. The whole letter is a worthwhile read so I’ve pasted it in above. If by now you are too bored with this post to read it, the best line in it is:
[If] I felt like being flippant, I would suggest that, as Analog is the engineers’ sf magazine, then New Worlds is the undertakers’ magazine. p. 125
•••
This issue gets off to a lacklustre start, but the rest of the issue has two better than good stories (Zelazny, Masson) and one that isn’t bad (Tubb). The non-fiction material, as ever, picks up some of the slack. ●
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1. Christopher Priest (Vector #38, February 1966) opens his review by saying that Moorcock/Colvin’s serial “concludes on a far stronger note than I would have suspected from the first two episodes.” He adds:
In a way, it typifies the kind of story New Worlds, at its present stage of development, tends to stress. On the surface of the story there is a fairly straightforward plot, which suffers only from an artificiality of construction. The writing is competent, and at times works up some strong images. (The timeless world of E-Zero with its formless agglomeration of ‘new’ history stands out in this context). Beneath the superficial plot the author is implying another kind of image: one of reversal of character and motivation. The story is not totally satisfying in itself, but it will make for unobjectionable reading and, if the reader wishes to seek a meaning which is a little deeper than mere plot, he will find it. p. 27
I think that wildly oversells it.
As for the short stories, Priest recommends Masson’s Mouth of Hell “unhesitatingly,” saying “it is quite unlike anything I have read before”; Zelazny’s Love is an Imaginary Number is “not totally to my own taste”; Tubb’s Anne is “a simple story, very well written”. He appears to like Platt’s story least (for reasons that seem not dissimilar to mine):
The Failures is an extrapolation of a few contemporary trends, but apart from this says very little. The sentiments expressed are naive and clumsy, and the action and locale of the plot are limited by their close resemblance to mainstream writing. p. 27
Moorcock’s editorial is “long and intelligent;” Brunner’s how-to writing guide is “good,” and Priest adds that “this feature alone is worth the half-crown.” (Priest, as a budding writer at the time, would think that wouldn’t he?) He concludes by noting that Moorcock/Colvin seems to be “mellowing.” I can’t say I’ve noticed.
2. Moorcock’s detailed description of the Tompien clock in the scrapyard/dump scene makes me wonder if it’s his advertisement in the “Wanted” section of the classifieds:
3. For those of you who are interested in SF writers as failed futurologists, there is an interesting description of the future Notting Hill in Platt’s The Failures:
The route took them through Notting Hill Gate; it was still a slum area. Everyone knew it, but there was no money to do anything about it, and few people really cared, least of all those who lived there. These were the dregs, the unproductive population: the old, crippled, moronic, criminal, and anyone else who preferred dirt and semi-starvation to work. The advertising campaigns passed them by, the fads and fashions had no appeal. These people were non-consumers, uncared for and forgotten. p. 71
The average Notting Hill house price as of October 2020 is £1.74 million.
4. The five Zelazny stories that were published in New Worlds during the mid-sixties were:
Love Is an Imaginary Number (ss) New Worlds SF #158, Jan 1966.
For a Breath I Tarry (nv) New Worlds SF #160, Mar 1966.
The Keys to December (nv) New Worlds SF #165, Aug 1966.
In the House of the Dead (ex) New Worlds Speculative Fiction #173, Jul 1967; extract from Creatures of Light and Darkness (Doubleday, 1969).
The Last Inn on the Road [with Dannie Plachta] (ss) New Worlds Speculative Fiction #176, Oct 1967. ●
Edited 11th October 2020: rewrote and expanded summary.
