ISFDB link

Other reviews¹:
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog (January 1967)
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #144 (September-October 1964)
Various, Goodreads
Roddy Williams, SF to Read Before You Die
Charles Winstone, Vector #28 (September 1964)

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:
Key to Chaos • novelette by Edward Mackin –
Two’s Company • short story by Douglas R. Mason [as by John Rankine] ∗∗
Man on Bridge • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗
Haggard Honeymoon • novelette by Joseph Green and James Webbert –
The Sea’s Furthest End • novelette by Damien Broderick ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Foreword • essay by John Carnell

The third leg of the stool for British SF magazine readers in 1964 (New Worlds and Science Fantasy being the other two) wasn’t another magazine but a new original anthology series by John Carnell. Although there had been earlier SF anthologies containing new fiction, they were not common, and NWISF was unique—it had initial hardcover publication by Dobson Books², followed a few months later by the paperback from Corgi Books³.

The anthology was initially quarterly in frequency but this publication schedule would not be maintained for long. However, the series lasted thirty volumes, and to 1977. Beyond John Carnell’s death in 1972 it was edited by Kenneth Bulmer.
The interior format stayed remarkably consistent throughout its run: there would be an editorial or foreword by the editor, and each story would have a short introduction, followed by a blank page, followed by the story itself.⁴

The Foreword by John Carnell starts with this:

New Writings in S-F is a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story. As its name implies, not only new stories written specially for the series as well as s-f stories which would not normally be seen by the vast majority of readers, will appear in future editions, but new styles, ideas, and even new writers who have something worth contributing to the genre, will be presented. p. 7

He then mentions short fiction and the SF magazines, and how anthologies have until now presented already published material. He goes on to say:

Now the time has come to take this development one natural stage further—and introduce new material specially written and selected for the new market. p. 7

He briefly trails the contents before finishing with:

Science fiction (an unwieldy and unattractive title which should more aptly be called “Speculative fiction”) is now expanding into the field of general literature and has largely outstripped the western romance in popularity and is fast catching up with the thriller. New Writings in S-F will, in future volumes, form a bridgehead between the old and new versions of speculative fiction. p. 9

Given this editorial pitch, it is surprising that the volume opens with Key to Chaos, a long novelette by Edward Mackin⁵ which reads like an overly padded, single-draft story from the 1940s. It is one of Mackin’s series about the cyberneticist and all-round chancer Hek Belov. It starts intriguingly enough:

The first time I met Frank Tetchum he was hammering on the front door of an apartment house block on East Third Level. Beside him was a chair, a small table, and a plastic bowl with some cutlery in it. Evicted tenants are not an uncommon sight in these parts, and I was about to walk on when he spoke to me.
“It’s one thing being slung out,” he said heatedly, “but it’s a bit thick when they slap an order on your furniture and you don’t even owe any rent. The scoundrels have got my id-scope in there, too, and they’re hanging on to it.” He recommenced his hammering on the door, using the chair this time.
I looked at him, curiously. He was slimly built, perhaps thirty years old, and badly in need of a shave. “What’s an id-scope?” I asked.
He put the chair down, and frowned at me. “It’s a thought visualizer,” he said. “I invented it.” Then he went back to his frenzied assault on the door, and smashed the chair without eliciting any response. p. 13

The story then details how the two of them obtain the device under false pretences from the businessman who has repossessed the flat. They hide away in a nearby deserted building, and Belov gets Tetchum to demonstrate the device. He sees (lascivious) visions from his own id, and then sees Tetchum’s. The latter involves a nightmarish machine making all sorts of devices, including what would seem to be killer robots.
The two are soon found by Benson, the businessman that appropriated Tetchum’s flat, and they are both pressured into working for him.
Long story short, the machine they build produces a small globe that is a rejuvenation device. There is some attempted double-dealing after this, and then the discovery that the machine is actually some sort of chaos device. If it sounds like I am struggling to synopsise this story it is because I am. The story wanders all over the place, and my comprehension was not aided by all the scientific gobbledygook. Take this far from atypical example:

“What’s this?” I asked him.
“A simple K-type amplifier.”
I shook my head. “As far as the machine, or I should say the computer, is concerned that’s a key. A key to Chaos. My guess is that this is anything but a simple K-amp. The bit about youthfulness was the barb. I programmed that as part of an explanation; but the computer has referred to its standard banks, and got some other answers, which it chewed over in that decision box, the homeostatic part of the set-up. The result was that the computer was faced with something of an insoluble problem. It knew what to produce; but the materials weren’t available, not all the materials, that is.
“Now this is where we have to make a leap in the dark. Here we are, a speck in the cosmic eye. The tiniest of tiny islands, where two and two make four, and logic—our peculiar brand of logic—holds sway. Outside, and everywhere, the primal stuff of the universe patterns itself crazily on stray thoughts escaping from the odd, alien, organism in its midst, because Chaos has its own logic. The logic of perfect illogicality. The infinite patterning that both is and isn’t, now and forever, in the shifting nevernever land of everything and everywhere and nothing anywhere. That’s what lies outside the mind; but it doesn’t lie outside the mental scope of a machine. A machine has no fear, and only the mental reservations with which man, in his wisdom, endows it. . . .”
“Cut the prologue and get to the explanations,” said Tetchum impatiently. “I still think you’re waffling.”

Quite.
I presume the random plot and gibberish explanations are meant to be overlooked as the piece is allegedly a ‘humorous’ one, but this appears to consist largely of Belov calling people names (one extended example is a two page diversion where Belov goes for a meal in a restaurant and the owner attempts to get Belov to pay an outstanding bill, p. 36-38). Now name-calling can be funny (e.g. John Cleese in Fawlty Towers) but it isn’t here. This is an awful start to the anthology.
Two’s Company by Douglas R. Mason is the first of his pseudonymous ‘Dag Fletcher, Womaniser in Space’ stories (although that description is accurate, it’s really the ‘Dag Fletcher’ series). In this one he is on an alien world, the Controller on a terraforming project, and his new colleague is a reserved female mathematician, Meryl Winguard. When I say reserved, I mean she pays no attention to Fletcher.
They go to one of the distant stations to rectify a computer fault and, when they are finished, leave in time to get back to base before the planet’s freezing night begins. En route they crash. They have to spend the night cuddled together in a makeshift sleeping bag, and then have work together to traverse rocky terrain and a cliff edge to get home before the next nightfall. During this they establish a bond.
This is an economically told story that is okay I guess—if you can ignore the period sexism, and that the story is essentially an adolescent sexual fantasy. Fletcher is almost constantly aware of Meryl’s model looks and figure—even when he is about to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation on her after the crash there is this:

He registered the light strength she had, the perfectly modelled knees and ankles and high round breasts. p. 82

And, of course, after they are safely back to base, and Fletcher has showered and dressed, he comes out of his room to find Meryl has made dinner and slipped into something more comfortable.
In the introduction to Man on Bridge by Brian W. Aldiss, Carnell says it has “overtones of 1984,” something repeated in other reviews. Personally, I don’t really think the story is more than tangentially about totalitarianism, but is perhaps more an examination of human consciousness. That said, you can see why some would make the comparison, given the story takes place in an unspecified Eastern European country where proles keep the intellectuals, called ‘Cerebrals,’ in camps under armed guard. This is from later in the story:

The common people had often revolted against the rich—but the rich were not identifiable once shorn of their money; then the tide of anger turned against the intelligent. You can always tell an intellectual, even when he cowers naked and bruised before you with his spectacles squashed in the muck; you only have to get him to talk. So the intellectuals had elected to live in camps, behind wire, for their own safety. Things were better now— because we were fewer and they infinitely more; but the situation had changed again: the stay was no longer voluntary, for we had lost our place in the world. We had even lost our standing in the camps. Throughout the more than-mediaeval darkness that had fallen over Europe, our cerebral monasteries were ruled over by the pistol and whip; and the flagellation of the new order of monks was never self-inflicted. p. 109

In the camp two of the Cerebrals, Grabowicz and Winther, have created a new kind of man, Adam X, by removing half his brain. Adam has no visceral responses at all.
Grabowicz and Winther are summoned by the camp commander, who interrogates them about Adam X, and later sends a report to his superiors. Grabowicz is taken away and punished for his insolence to the commander during their conversation, whereas Winther and Adam X are allowed to temporarily leave the camp to visit Winther’s family in the nearby village.
On the way there Winther, the narrator, talks to Adam X:

I took his arm and led him towards the gates. It was always an ordeal, moving towards those great slab-cheeked guards, so contemptuous of eye, so large in their rough uniforms and boots, as they stood there holding their rifles like paddles. We produced our identity sticks, which were taken from us, and were allowed to pass, and go through the side-gate, between the strands of barbed wire, into the free world outside.
“They enjoy their show of might,” Adam said. “These people have to express their unhappiness by using ugly things like guns and ill-fitting uniforms, and the whole conception of the camp.”
“We are unhappy, but we don’t find that sort of thing necessary.”
“No, Jon, I am not unhappy. I just feel empty and do not wish to live.”
His talk was full of that sort of conversation-stopper.
We strode down the road at increasing pace as the way steepened between cliffs. The ruined spires and roofs of the town were rising out of the dip ahead, and I wanted only to get home; but since I had never caught Adam in so communicative a frame of mind, I felt I had to take advantage of it and find out what I could from him.
“This not wishing to live, Adam—this is just post-operational depression. When it wears off, you will recover your spirits.”
“I think not. I have no spirits. Morgem Grabowicz cut them away. I can only reason, and I see that there is no point to life but death.”
“That I repudiate with all my heart. On the contrary, while there is life, there is no death. Even now, with all my limbs aching from that filthy prole punishment, I rejoice in every breath I take, and in the effect of the light on those houses, and the crunch of this track under our feet.”
“Well, Jon, you must be allowed your simple vegetable responses.” He spoke with such finality that my mouth was stopped. p. 104-105

They arrive at the village, and later socialise with Winther’s family and their neighbours. Later, Adam X disappears and Winther goes to search, finding him walking on the parapet of the bridge above a perilous drop. Adam only just avoids falling to his death and is rescued by Winther and two of the onlookers. On the way home, Winther has another conversation with Adam, and a realisation:

I told him then. “I can’t work on these brain operations any more.”
“Grabowicz can. Grabowicz will. You’re too late to be squeamish, Jon; already there is a new force in the world.”
After what I had seen on the bridge, I felt he might be right. But a new force for good or bad? How would the change come? What would it be? I closed my eyes and saw clearly the sort of world that Grabowicz and I, with the unwitting co-operation of the prole leaders, might have already brought into being. Given enough men and women like Adam, with their visceral brains removed, they would bring up children unswayed and unsoftened by human emotion, whose motives were inscrutable to the rest of mankind. The rulers of our world would find such people very useful at first, and so a place would be made for them.
And from being instruments of power, they would turn into a power in their own right. It was a process often witnessed by history. p. 116

I’m not entirely sure what this story is about, but it is an absorbing, intellectual piece that would have been a good fit for the New Worlds of 1966.
Haggard Honeymoon by Joseph Green and James Webbert is a long novelette in four chapters about an alien planet where a colony is mining uranium: the men do the mining, the women look after the domestic side of life, and the Rilli natives act as servants.
The first part of this story sets up one of many maguffins, which is that the planet causes men to crack up after a few months there. Previously, a young wife had smuggled herself out with her husband and it was found that newly-weds had the best chance of lasting the six months required to make the operation economically viable. The reason newly-weds last longer is never adequately explained.
When the narrator, Carter Mason, is watching an evening film in the rec room with his wife, he sees one of the other men have a breakdown. The next morning, after his mining shift at the lake (second maguffin: this is a weird place, with lumps of uranium at the bottom, and red water that acts as a radiation baffle) he is promoted to major to take the sick man’s place. Soon after this Carter’s wife, atypically, starts having the dreams. The colonel agrees that she and Carter need to go back early.
The third chapter introduces three more elements: one of the other colonists tells Carter he thinks the lake wasn’t made by an asteroid but by a spaceship; there is mention of the native Rilli temple on forbidden ground; and Valle has a waking dream where she is riding a creature between the stars and a Rilli swings a sword at her throat.
In the final act (spoiler) Carter deduces what the problem is: the Rilli are the descendants of the spaceship crew, and their priests are mind broadcasting to their people from the forbidden temple. Their transmissions are driving the humans crazy. Carter takes one of the crawlers to the temple and (after running over one of the defending Rilli) sabotages the coolant system and runs away, leaving the nuclear drive to go critical and explode (no fail-safe then), killing many Rilli and leaving others to die of radiation poisoning. The broadcasting stops.
Back at base he explains himself to the colonel, who is not convinced by Carter’s ‘ends-justify the means’ actions:

“But this doesn’t fully explain why you chose the drastic method of blowing up the tower, killing the broadcasting priests and ruining one valuable crawler, instead of simply telling me about your suspicions and letting us check them out together.”
“Valle couldn’t have lasted the night,” said Carter simply. “And it hadn’t occurred to me those people would be broadcasting on line-of-sight.”
“Well, it’s too late to worry now,” said Simpson with a sigh. “I suppose your contribution to the programme will far outweigh the demerits you’re in line for. You’ll have to go through a formal court-martial when we get back to Earth, of course, but that shouldn’t be for several years now.” p. 149

This is an unconvincingly contrived piece with many plot holes (why are the newlyweds better at surviving, why is Valle the first female affected, why didn’t he put Valle in the crawler and drive her away from the temple?). It also has a morally repugnant ending. (I know it is unwise to view older fiction from a modern perspective but I suspect some of the attitudes here may have been unpalatable even in the mid-sixties. With the excesses of the Vietnam War to come it is, at least, an unsettling ending.)
I’m not sure that The Sea’s Furthest End by Damien Broderick is his first published SF story but it is certainly an early one.⁶ It has a data dump beginning (including an italicised prologue) that describes a collapsed Galactic Empire, and centres around Aylan, the son of a new Emporer who intends to reunify it.
Aylan’s friend Milenn visits, and tells him that rebel forces at the Calais are in danger of being slaughtered. Millen asks Aylan to get the Emperor to give him control of the besieging forces, and suggests that Federation and not Empire is the way forward. When Aylan’s plan is humiliatingly rejected by his father at Council, he challenges him to a duel. Aylan already hates his father because of what happened to a lover of his:

Adriel was the lovely daughter of the ex-Tyrant of Corydon. The scientists of that Rim system had reached their finest achievement in her, for she was genetically, designed for beauty, intelligence, and . . . something else. Geneticists gave her a talent, a wildly improbable gift, and even they did not know what it would be.
She was an Emote.
“Chameleon-like” was the inevitable adjective, but it wasn’t accurate. Adriel could control her Emoting. It was a defence-mechanism, but it was more. It was a talent, and she could use it at will.
Of course, everybody loved her. In a fraternal, helping fashion. Her subconscious knew better than to Emote in a sexually attractive manner. She had no desire to be raped by every male who came within her Emotive range. But for Aylan, the quiet son of her father’s conqueror, she had felt the stirrings of love.
They had been like children, in their new discovery. Their love was sunrise and the scent of roses and the soft breath in the sheets. She drew the beginnings of manhood from the frightened adolescent who was Aylan, and their love was a burgeoning flower.
For Malvara, it was unthinkable that his son should have such a victory. So Adriel became his diplomatic mistress. p. 162

Before the duel Milenn gives Aylan a stasis gun from the old Empire to make sure he wins, which he does. Aylan departs with a small fleet for Calais to take control of the attacking forces. En route he learns of a mutiny by the Duke of Calais. Millen then gives Aylan plans for stasis weapons to fit to their ships (throughout there are a number of short italic passages suggesting an omnipotent ‘Player’ is externally manipulating the events that are unfolding). Aylan arrives at the Centre and puts down the mutiny.
Up until this point the story is a competent enough piece but clichéd and unexceptional. The last chapter’s revelations about Millen, however, lift it to another level:

So, finally, he became the Civilizer.
He was Gilgamesh, Odin, Ra, Indra, Zeus, Tonactechtli, Moses, Gandhi, Hammarskjold, Holden-Smith, Porter, and Andreas. In the mud of the Nile he trod water and straw; his statue was carried before the tallow candles in Tenochtitlan; he advised the Great One in Tibet while the wind whistled through his thin bones; he thundered in the Terran Planetary Parliament; he laboured on alien worlds, muscles twisting to hammer wood and steel into homes for his fellows. And everywhere, he remembered. Peace was his goal, for no man can go through a million years’ odyssey without learning compassion and humanity. p. 187

Then, during the peace conference on Calais, reality dissolves, and we find events have been controlled by Millen, who is also the Player, to amuse and distract itself. The last lines are pretty corny but still work for the story:

Alone. Darkness, bodiless, infinite. All the questions answered and the tears wept. The Immortal wondered at the memory, and knew the reason. There was no Player. There was only himself, alone, eternally lonely. Infinity is a quiet place, eternity a lonely time. The Immortal remembered himself as Milenn, and forever the memory satisfied him. But forever is a short while, and memory is no cure for loneliness. Only participation, and forgetfulness.
The Tasks had been a good idea, but they had ended. The problem he had set himself: a universe, a race of naturally belligerent sapients, a goal of peace, freely accepted by them. And three times he had succeeded. Planetary government, Galactic empire, Galactic Federation. Himself eternal, not knowing the reason, only aware of the compulsion.
An Immortal Child grows lonely in the dark of eternity, and he knew that there was forgetfulness in the Game. So again in the deep of himself he uttered the Words.
“Let there be light!”
And, yet again, there was light.

This bootstrapping of the story in the final pages really worked for me, and improved my opinion of the story considerably. I was reminded of Charles Harness’s more complex super-science stories of the late 1940s and 50s.

As for the volume as a whole, it is not so much a “bridgehead between old and new SF,” but a better than normal issue of the Carnell New Worlds. ●

_____________________

1. Because NWISF #1 is a book and not a magazine there are three off-line reviews listed on ISFDB. I managed to obtain copies (thanks to Andy Sawyer for his help with the Vector one). James Colvin (Micheal Moorcock) in New Worlds #144 says it is another of Carnell’s “solidly balanced” collections, and adds the Aldiss is “very good,” the Broderick “excellent,” and that he “enjoyed the Belov [Mackin] best.” I don’t think he particularly appreciated the Rankine.
P. Schuyler Miller in the January 1967 Analog says the Aldiss “is bound to get itself reprinted,” and the Mackin “is as close as we’ve come in years to the broad, outrageous comedy of the great “Gallagher” stories that “Lewis Padgett” ([Kuttner/Moore] used to writer for Astounding.” He found the Rankine “trite” and thought the Green/Webbert made the “psychic perils very convincing” despite some “unbelievable chemistry.” He ends on a positive note about the Broderick.
Finally, in Vector #28, Charles Winstone reckons the aim of the anthology , as John Carnell writes in the introduction, to be “a radical departure in the field of the science fiction short story” is “not achieved.” He adds “the stories are new but the plots and characters are not. In only one story did the feeling of ‘I’ve been here before’ leave me.” Winstone liked the Aldiss best, was mystified by the Broderick, and had mixed feelings about the rest.

2. I presume they used the same plates for both editions as the editorial pages (i.e. everything apart from the publisher information at the front and the in-house ads at the back) in the hardback were identical to those in the paperback, except for the larger margins in the former (or at least they are in New Writings in SF #13, the only one I own in both formats). The publisher for both editions was Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd.

3. Those Corgi editions would be very popular—the collection was reprinted in 1965 and again in 1970 (with a different cover):

3. The story introduction and title pages look like this (the story is Keith Roberts’ Manipulation from the third volume in the series):

4. Our Edward Mackin should not be confused with Ralph McInerny, who used “Edward Mackin” as a pseudonym (the latter’s Wikipedia entry shows a huge number of non-SF books).

5. On Broderick’s ISFDB page there are a couple of earlier stories listed but no information as to where or exactly when they were published. It also states that this volume’s story was “rewritten and expanded” to become The Game of Stars and Souls (2009). ●

Revised 7th September 2018 to include disambiguation information for Edward Mackin (footnote 4).