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Other reviews:¹
Graham Hall, Vector #31 (March 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
All the King’s Men • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ∗∗
Sunjammer • reprint novelette by Arthur C. Clarke ∗∗∗∗
First Dawn • short story by Donald Malcolm ∗∗
Dune Limbo • novel extract by J. G. Ballard —
Escape from Evening • novelette by Michael Moorcock ∗
The Uncivil War • short story by Robert J. Tilley ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by Thomson, uncredited
Symbols for the Sixties • editorial
Voyage to the End of the Universe • film review by Alan Dodd
“That Is Not Oil, Madam. That Is Jellied Consomme” • book reviews by Langdon Jones
Story Ratings No. 146
Letters to the Editor
Amateur Magazines

_____________________

The fiction in this issue leads off with the first of two novelettes. All the King’s Men, by Barrington J. Bayley, takes place on a future Earth where Britain, Brazil and parts of Africa are controlled by alien invaders while the rest of the globe remains unaffected. The story is narrated by Smith, one of the alien King’s advisors, and tells of the events leading to a rebellion, the climax of which occurs in the Atlantic between the opposing alien-directed navies of Britain and Brazil.
The story is principally concerned with describing the intellectual and cultural differences between the aliens and humanity: one example of this is when a human delegation arrives at the court to petition the King for a reduction in the length of the working week (which is sixty hours due to preparations for the looming war). The King listens to their concerns and then deliberates:

He spent a little while in the throne room, peering through thresholds, no doubt, gazing at pools and wondering about the mountainous. Then he returned and offered the petitioners a concession of ten minutes off the working week. This was the greatest check he thought he could allow on his big industrial drive.
They argued angrily about it, until things grew out of hand and the King ordered me to dismiss them. I had to have it done forcibly. Any one of the alien courtiers could have managed it single-handed by mere show of the weapons on his person, but instead I called in a twenty-man human bodyguard, thinking that to be ejected by their own countrymen might reduce their sense of solidarity.
All the humans of the court exuded uneasiness. But they needn’t have worried. To judge by the King and his men, nothing might have happened. They held their positions with that same crystalline intelligence which they had carried through ten years of occupation. I was beginning to learn that this static appearance did not wholly result from unintelligibility, but that they actually maintained a constant internal state irrespective of external conditions. Because of this, they were unaware that the scene that had just been enacted comprised a minor climax. Living in a planar mentality, the very idea of climax was not apparent to them.  p. 15

There are several sections like this which are of interest but the story spends a lot of its time going nowhere, making it slightly dull at times.
Sunjammer by Arthur C. Clarke first appeared in Boy’s Life (March 1964), the magazine of the American Boy Scouts organisation, and it provided a high quality reprint for the New Worlds to use (few if any UK readers would have seen the original publication). There aren’t any illustrations in New Worlds for the story, a tale of interplanetary sailing ships taking part in a race to the Moon and back, but it got the cover on Boy’s Life, and was lavishly illustrated by Robert McCall inside. I’ve included a few of these illustrations below as a respite from my maunderings:

Clarke’s story starts with this:

The enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds. In three minutes the race would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at peace, than at any time for the past year. Whatever happened when the Commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. After a lifetime spent in designing ships for others, now he would sail his own.

The rest of the story is a skilful example of lucid and integrated exposition:

[He] was checking the tension in the rigging. The needles of all the dynamometers were steady; the immense sail was taut, its mirror surface sparkling and glittering gloriously in the sun.
To Merton, floating weightless at the periscope, it seemed to fill the sky. As well it might—for out there were fifty million square feet of sail, linked to his capsule by almost a hundred miles of rigging. All the canvas of all the tea-clippers that had once raced like clouds across the China seas, sewn into one gigantic sheet, could not match the single sail that Diana had spread beneath the sun. Yet it was little more substantial than a soap-bubble; that two square miles of aluminised plastic was only a few millionths of an inch thick.  p. 27

There is more detail in a radio interview with Merton:

“Hold your hands out to the Sun,” he’d said. “What do you feel? Heat, of course. But there’s pressure as well—though you’ve never noticed it, because it’s so tiny. Over the area of your hands, it only comes to about a millionth of an ounce.
“But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be important—for it’s acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. Unlike rocket fuel, it’s free and unlimited. If we want to, we can use it; we can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the Sun.”
[. . .]
“Of course, its acceleration will be tiny—about a thousandth of a g. That doesn’t seem much, but let’s see what it means. “It means that in the first second, we’ll move about a fifth of an inch. I suppose a healthy snail could do better than that. But after a minute, we’ve covered sixty feet, and will be doing just over a mile an hour. That’s not bad, for something driven by pure sunlight! After an hour, we’re forty miles from our starting point, and will be moving at eighty miles an hour. Please remember that in space there’s no friction, so once you start anything moving, it will keep going forever. You’ll be surprised when I tell you what our thousandth-of-a-g sailing boat will be doing at the end of a day’s run. Almost two thousand miles an hour!  p. 28

The rest of the story details the various incidents that occur during the race (some sailships manoeuvre to put others in the shade, an updated equivalent of old ocean-going ships becalming each other; other sailships fail due to design problems, etc.). Then, before the race can be completed there is the warning of a potentially fatal solar storm, which means the competitors must be rescued by the escort rockets. This sets the scene for a sense of wonder ending (spoiler): rather than jettisoning the sail to avoid fouling the approaching rescue craft, Merton dons his space suit and abandons ship. Diana, with its sail still deployed, will continue to accelerate past the Moon and out of the solar system.
A very good piece of modern SF.

Regardless of how good or otherwise First Dawn by Donald Malcolm is it was almost inevitably going to be becalmed by the Clarke. In Malcolm’s story, a mole-like alien on a non-rotating planet watches humans build massive rocket engines on its world. Once they are finished building them they start the engines, and the mole’s dark world begins turning towards its first dawn. I wasn’t entirely convinced about the mechanics of this, or the speed with which the world starts turning, but the ending is okay in a poetical sense of wonder way.

Dune Limbo by J. G. Ballard is an extract from his new novel The Drought. It has a very long and quite boring synopsis (see above) that eventually places its protagonist at a series of immense salt drifts beside the coast. After a couple more dull descriptive pages from the extract itself, it finally gets going with scene where Ransom and his tribe steal tidal water (and the associated fish) from another group.
There are some striking passages in this, such as the description of Ransom’s home, a beached ship:

Overhead the sunlight shone on the curving stemplates of the wrecked lightship, giving the portholes a glassy opaque look like the eyes of dead fish. In fact, this stranded leviathan, submerged beyond sight of the sea in this concentration of its most destructive element, had rotted as much as any whale would have done in ten years. Often Ransom entered the hulk, searching for pieces of piping or valve gear, but the engine room and gangways had rusted into grotesque hanging gardens of corroded metal.
Below the stern, partly sheltered from the prevailing easterly winds by the flat blade of the rudder, was Ransom’s shack. He had built it from the rusty motorcar bodies he had hauled down from the shore and piled on top of one another. Its bulging shell, puffed out here and there by a car’s bulbous nose or trunk, resembled the carapace of a cancerous turtle.  p. 60-61

Or this one, which limns the mental space these post-apocalyptic survivors inhabit:

Ransom gazed around the drab interior of the shack. The decline in his life in the five years since Judith had come to live with him needed no underlining, but he realized that this was part of the continuous decline of all the beach settlements. It was true that he now had the task of feeding them both, and that Judith made little contribution to their survival, but she did at least guard their meagre fish and water stocks while he was away. Raids on the isolated outcasts had now become more frequent.
However, it was not this that held them together, but their awareness that only with each other could they keep alive some faint shadow of their former personalities, whatever their defects, and arrest the gradual numbing of sense and identity that was the unseen gradient of the dune limbo. Like all purgatories, the beach was a waiting ground, the endless stretches of wet salt sucking away from them all but the hardest core of themselves. These tiny nodes of identity glimmered faintly in the grey light of the limbo, as this zone of nothingness waited for them to dissolve and deliquesce like the few crystals dried by the sun.  p. 64

In the latter part of this you almost feel the language (“unseen gradient of the dune limbo”, etc.) forcing you into the same mental space as the characters.
After the first couple of pages I rather liked this, and am surprised that Moorcock didn’t serialise the whole novel (I assume that Moorcock would rather have used this than Tubb’s novel which starts next issue).² I’ll have to reread it.

Escape from Evening by Michael Moorcock is either the second and last ‘Scar-Faced Brooder’ story, or the sequel to The Time Dweller (New Worlds #139, February 1964), depending on your point of view. It starts on the Moon with Pepin Hunchback, a malcontent unsuited to the artificial environment of lunar society, boarding a rocket to the dying Earth so he can live a natural existence.
When he arrives at the Earth city of Barbart he tells the natives that he wants to settle there. However, he cannot fit in and, before long, becomes restless once more. When he hears tantalising hints that the citizens of another city called Lanjis Liho can time travel he decides to go there, hoping he will be able to return to a more suitable Golden Age.
He rather foolishly elects to journey alone to Lanjis Lho—there are blood sucking oozers to contend with, as well as other perils—and, sure enough, has to be saved by the Wanderer (a character from the previous story). Pepin later encounters Tall Laughter, Scarface Brooder’s sister (Brooder was also a  character in the last story, and is now the Chronarch of Lanjis Lho).
Once they arrive at the city, Tall Laughter takes Pepin to see Scarface Brooder so he can ask him about time travel. Brooder tells Pepin it is impossible for him to go back in time, and Pepin leaves, frustrated. Later, in Tall Laughter’s house, she tells Pepin that even if it was possible for him to travel in time he would not be satisfied:

“Your yearning, Pepin Hunchback, is not for the past as it was,” she was saying softly. “It is for a world that never existed—a Paradise, a Golden Age. Men have always spoken of such a time in history—but such an idyllic world is a yearning for childhood, not the past, for lost innocence. It is childhood we wish to return to.”
He looked up and smiled bitterly. “My childhood was not idyllic,” he said. “I was a mistake. My birth was an accident. I had no friends, no peace of mind.”
“You had your wonderment, your illusion, your hopes. Even if you could return to Earth’s past—you would not be happy.”
“Earth’s present is decadent. Here the decadence is part of the process of evolution, on Moon it is artificial, that is all. Earth’s past was never truly decadent.”
“One cannot recapture the past.”
“An old saying—yet your ability disproves that.”
“You do not know, Pepin Hunchback,” she said almost sadly.  p. 90

Tall Laughter goes on to reveal the existence of a disused Time Ship, which Pepin later steals. He finds (spoiler) that the past is a formless limbo and the future an acid trip.
After he is rescued by Tall Laughter and Scar Faced Brooder, there is an explanation of the structure of time that is little better than gobbledygook:

[Tall Laughter said,] “Tell him why he found only limbo in the past.”
“Yes,” said Pepin, turning to stare at the Chronarch. “Tell me.”
“I’ll try. Imagine Time as a straight line along which the physical universe is moving. At a certain point on that line the physical universe exists. But if we move away from the present, backward or forward, what do we find?”
Again Pepin shook his head.
“We find what you found—for by leaving the present, we also leave the physical universe. You see, Pepin, when we leave our native Time stream, we move into others which are, in relation to us, above Time. There is a central stream along which our universe moves—we call this the Megaflow. As it moves it absorbs the stuff of Time—absorbs the chronons, as we call them, but leaves nothing behind. Chronons constitute the future—they are infinite. The reason you found nothing in the past is because, in a sense, space eats the chronons but cannot replace them.”
“You mean Earth absorbs this—this temporal energy but emits none herself—like a beast prowling through Time gobbling it up but excreting nothing.” Pepin spoke with a faint return of interest. “Yes, I understand.”  p. 97

I wish I did.
This story is all over the place. It rambles in multiple directions for thirty or so pages, trots out the above and then sputters to a stop. Having enjoyed its predecessor, I was a bit disappointed with this one.³
The Uncivil War by Robert J. Tilley (the cover designer for a couple of recent issues) is back with a short story that has what I have come to describe as a ‘Big Sigh’ beginning:

“There’s nothing in the star-littered universe,” said the old space-dog, genially, “that sets a body up like a dram of gleeb-juice. True, eh, lad?”  p. 99

It continues in this vein with the man’s pirate/sailor speech contrasting with the mannered tone of the narrator, who is interviewing him. The interviewee tells the reporter about a spaceship on which he served and, in particular, of one journey that involved ferrying diplomats to trade talks.
During this trip an unplanned landing on an unknown planet to effect repairs saw the diplomats going off in an air car, and they stumble upon the planets’ inhabitants. The latter are engaged in conflict with others of their kind, and want to know what side the diplomats are on:

“They are at present waiting for us to identify ourselves as the emissaries of either Mif, the God-of-Strength-through-Deadly-Insult, come to teach them the ultimate insult that will strike the enemy a mortal blow, or those of his opposite number, Fungoo, the dreaded God-of-Treachery-and-Deceit, come to destroy them from within. It seems—”  p. 108

The story then turns into a quest for the greatest insult (spoiler: it is to be ignored).
This is all played for laughs but suffers from several deficiencies in this respect. First, and key, is it is not that funny; second, it isn’t apparent it is a comedy (as opposed to badly written) until a couple of pages in; third, it is too long; and, finally, the comedy is draped over a story that is weak and, in places, confusing (I’m thinking here of when they communicate with the missing diplomats, and how they get back to the ship—but maybe I was skimming by this point). It does, in its defence, raise the odd smile (the last line, etc.) but this doesn’t entirely compensate.

There is an uncredited Cover for this issue and little in the way of Interior artwork (perhaps a result of the change of publishing schedule to monthly). The Thomson piece for the Bayley story is one of his better efforts. The other piece looks like it may be by Gilmore.
Symbols for the Sixties, an uncredited editorial, though probably by Moorcock, starts with this:

In this issue you will find perhaps the widest variety of stories we have published at one time. They are stories representative of most of the forms taken by present-day SF—Clarke’s clear, factual speculation on a possible development in space-travel, Ballard’s fascinating surrealistic allegory, Bayley’s abstract and philosophical view of an alternative system of thought, the baroque Escape from Evening, and good variations on the conventional space story by Malcolm and Tilley. The first four are set on or near our own planet, yet they are all undoubtedly SF. They illustrate an increasing tendency in modern SF to stick close to home and deal with aspects of human life set against humanity’s natural background. The day of the space-story in serious SF seems all but over, the day of planetary exploration is waning and writers appear to be deciding that exploration of the human mind, its capacities and defects, is more rewarding.  p. 2

The beginning of ‘Inner Space’?
The rest of this editorial, a ‘manifesto’ one, has some interesting passages:

[SF] must be reshaped and new symbols found to reflect the mood of the sixties [. . .] too many of today’s stories are using the terms of the thirties, forties and fifties, terms which are becoming increasingly unrelated to present-day society. They feel that a good story, no matter what form it takes, is best when it applies to Now and that a story intended to apply to Now cannot do its job if written in terms applying to Then.
Part of the trouble could be that the young writer studies the work of a past generation and concludes that this is how to write a story. It was; it isn’t now.  p. 2-3

We need more writers who reflect the pragmatic mood of today, who use images apt for today, who employ symbols gathered from the world of today, who use sophisticated writing techniques that can match the other techniques of today, who employ characters fitted for the society of today. Like all good writing, good SF must relate primarily to the time in which it is written; a writer must write primarily for his own generation.
[. . .]
He can learn from his predecessors, but he should not imitate them.  p. 3

We feel that, in many ways, the image of North Country born Fred Hoyle driving a huge Buick convertible through a Californian summer, talking of the significance of quasars, is much more up-to-date that an image of a space-ship bearing a military-technician bending over a bench on which reposes a new secret electronic device for foxing the alien invaders.  p. 3

It ends with a comment about the “sense of wonder” controversy that “occasionally rages in the Guest Editorials and the letter columns”. Whether this refers the absence of a sense of wonder in the reiteration of earlier work, or whether it is absent in new work because of its content, I am not sure.
Voyage to the End of the Universe is a positive film review by Alan Dodd about a film that does not sound at all promising.
“That Is Not Oil, Madam. That Is Jellied Consomme” by Langdon Jones is a three page review of the collection The Weird Ones (Dobson, 1965).⁴ He reviews each story in some depth, apart from one or two (irritating) examples:

Sentiment, Inc. by Poul Anderson has much the same fault [“There were many interesting ethical problems and emotional situations that are merely skirted round, when they should have been gone into much more fully.”]. This seems a characteristic of a lot of American SF. The really interesting ideas that come out of a situation are often referred to obliquely, if at all. In this story the ‘villain’ turns out—almost predictably—to be a Russian spy. Still, the Soviets are not called ‘Reds,’ which I guess is something.  p. 118-119

What are the “interesting ethical problems and emotional situations” that are ignored in this story? What should be done with them? Give us a clue.
He points to the Mack Reynolds story, The Hunted Ones (Science Fiction Stories, November 1959), as the best in the book before ending with:

The general standard of most of the stories in this collection is equivalent to that of an average SF magazine. I don’t think that this justifies the hard covers or the 15s. price tag.  p. 120

Or the three page review in your magazine.
I commented on Story Ratings No. 146 when I recently reviewed that issue.⁵
Letters to the Editor has an interesting batch of correspondence. It leads off with a letter from Edward Mackin (of ‘Hek Belov’ fame) who writes in about Moorcock’s recent serial The Shores of Death: he wonders where the rest of it is and provides a plot skeleton.
The next letter, from A. D. P. Cornelius, Cambridge, makes some interesting points about the difference between British and American SF:

Thank you—and the editor of Science Fantasy—for excellent reviews of Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard. Sadly not everyone has your discrimination. I am thinking particularly of certain reviews that have appeared in the United States—and especially of Ron Goulart’s recent review in Fantasy and Science Fiction. When will these literal-minded dimwits cease reading everything that comes in front of their eyes on the level of a boys’ adventure story? Goulart seemed to see the novel purely as ‘yet another cataclysm-novel of the kind the English specialise in’. Didn’t he realise that, as in certain other British novels that begin with some sort of cataclysm, the cataclysm was simply a starting-point to a book which discusses, among other things, the poignant problem of childless old-age?
This, and other reviews, reminded me that it was high time we in this country stopped looking to America for our SF standards. Apart from a few honourable exceptions, the American scene has become barren in the last few years, whereas the British scene has suddenly become alive and dynamic—leading the field. From Swift onwards it has been a tradition among British writers to make use of imaginative concepts and landscapes in order to discuss whatever point they wish about human behaviour in some form or other. H. G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Angus Wilson—and Brian W. Aldiss—have all written in this tradition. The similarity between their work and the stuff appearing in American pulps for the last forty years is merely superficial. Anyone with the ability to see past the merely superficial must surely accept that?  p. 123

The editor offers a copy of Introducing SF to anyone who “takes up the gauntlet”.
This is followed by another interesting letter from Elizabeth French Biscoe, Dublin, continuing the recent discussion about Langdon Jones’ I Remember Anita (New Worlds #144, September-October 1964):

I suggest that the story cannot be made right because it is based on an unawareness of one of “those solid principles for the criticism of SF” which are mentioned in the Editorial.
The principle in question is defined by Kingsley Amis in his New Maps of Hell. He says that ordinary fiction can be compared with portrait painting, while SF can be compared with landscape painting. This pictorial comparison explains what puzzles many of us—why SF and sex rarely get on together. While no personal experience (portrait) may be complete without sex, in a landscape sex is detectable only as a pair of distant lovers beneath the trees. It is the trees (non-human forces) that are important.
Consider Gainsborough. He kept his portraits and landscapes utterly separate. When he painted a lady in a big hat she filled the whole picture, but in his landscapes human beings are of the same value as bushes or cows: dots to emphasize the height of his spreading trees.
The tremendous (and as yet unlived) imaginary experiences on which SF is based are the trees beneath which man and his sex life are dots, and if an artist (author) makes his dots too big he gets his picture (story) out of proportion. That is what happened in I Remember, Anita.
By contrast, the proportions are right in Tunnel of Love in NWSF 146. The mystery of the tunnel (not love) dominates the story.  p. 124

Thought provoking, but I’m not sure I entirely agree (where does Frederik Pohl’s Gateway fit into this?)
P. Johnson, Kent, comments on the review columns:

Congratulations on the monstrous book reviews plus the superabundance of reviewers! I notice, however, that SF reviewers have to work on two planes. It reminds me of a mainstream review of SF which described the latest Heinlein novel as a rattling good adventure yarn of its kind, and Miller’s Conditionally Human as not up to the standard of A Canticle for Leibowitz which left you guessing where the Miller stood in relation to the Heinlein. I feel you do the same. You describe The Dark Light Years as a failure, and then slip gear and recommend The Paradox Men. This is an admirable ability, and fulfils the spirit of the Aldiss extract from SF Horizons, but am I wrong in thinking that you preferred the Aldiss ‘failure’ to many other less ambitions successes?
James Colvin lets politics intrude into his reviews . . . and I would feel happier about Colvin if he would use adjectives other than ‘reactionary’ to condemn Anderson and Heinlein . . . p. 125-126

He finishes by saying they should leave Analog to do the science articles.
There is an editorial response:

About The Paradox Men, we don’t think we slipped gear there—Dark Light Years was a failure (we felt) but Paradox Men fulfilled its author’s intention.  p. 126

The column finishes with an earnest letter from Malcolm E. Wright (14), of Basildon. The editor encourages him to send his short stories in to the magazine.
After the Letters there is a review of Amateur Magazines. Two are from future New Worlds authors, Charles Platt and Graham M. Hall.
There is this comment about Ed Meskys’ Niekas #9:

Much larger and more substantial than most of its British counterparts, Niekas 9 contains some good stuff by Anthony Boucher, Philip K. Dick (on The Man in the High Castle), John Baxter and others.
Tolkien fans will be interested in the long glossary of names, terms, etc. used in Middle Earth. Production is clean and readable—again superior to most of the British SF fan magazines.  p. 127

And this on Peter R. Weston’s Zenith #6:⁶

Still has an excellent standard of production and the material seems to be improving, although the magazine-reviewer appears rooted somewhat in the past. If you’re rooted in the past and proud of it, then you’ll probably enjoy the reviews. This one’s worth watching—it shows promise.

A better issue than usual, thanks to the Clarke and Ballard pieces (not a phrase I expect to be using again).  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall’s review in Vector #31 gives the line-up of authors and then says, “One is tempted to leave the review at that”, but goes on to describe Clarke’s story as “typically excellent”, that Malcolm is “a master of the pen”, and that he finds Ballard’s piece “hard to judge” as he “is an avid Ballard anti-fan”. He adds that “more bumf is written about Ballard than almost anyone else writing SF today”, and that “this piece is easily as good as most of The Drowning World with its unsymbolic symbolism, first-rate imagery and colossal obscurity”. I was a little surprised at these comments as, given the artistic leanings of Hall’s later story Sun Push (New Worlds #170, January 1967), I would have thought he would have been a fan.
He says of the Moorcock story that “it’s hard to say whether it is bad or good” but that he “didn’t like it”. He adds that Moorcock “paints beautiful backgrounds and then neglects his main characters”.
The Tilley “stands on its own feet as a fair yarn”, and ATom’s one illustration is “way above average”.

2. Perhaps the magazine serial rights for The Drought were not available, or perhaps it was something to do with the fact that the first three chapters of the novel were published in Ambit #23, Spring 1965, Ballard’s first publication in Martin Bax’s long running literary magazine.

3. The Time Dweller (New Worlds #139, February 1964) starts with Scar Faced Brooder riding his seal across the surface of an Earth in its twilight years. He has left the city of Lanjis Lho after a disagreement with the ruling Chronach, and is making his way to one of the inland cities. En route he meets another man called the Wanderer. They eat and drink (during which it becomes clear that human body chemistry has changed significantly) and then, after sleeping for a while in the Wanderer’s tent, Scar Faced Brooder moves on to Brabart.
He is taken on a tour of the town by one of the locals:

The Barbartian introduced himself as Mokof, took the Brooder’s arm and led him through the series of squares, triangles and circles formed by the buildings, to come at length to the great central plaza and stare up at the pulsing, monstrous machine of burnished bronze.
“This machine supplies the city with its life,” Mokof informed him. “And also regulates our lives.” He pointed at the disc which the Brooder had noted earlier. “Do you know what that is, my friend ?”
“No. I am afraid I do not. Could you explain ?”
“It’s a clock. It measures the hours of the day,” he broke off, noting the Brooder’s puzzlement. “That is to say it measures time.”
“Ah ! I am with you at last. But a strange device, surely, for it cannot measure a great deal of time with that little circular dial. How does it note the flow . . .?”
“We call a period of sunlight ‘day’ and a period of darkness ‘night.’ We divide each into twelve hours—”
“Then the period of sunlight and the period of darkness are equal ? I had thought . . . ”
“No, we call them equal for convenience, since they vary. The twelve divisions are called hours. When the hands reach twelve, they begin to count around again . . .”
“Fantastic !” the Brooder was astounded. “You mean you recycle the same period of time round and round again. A marvellous idea. Wonderful! I had not thought it possible.”  p. 91-92

This cognitive dissonance forms the crux of the story.
Later, he is arrested for eating at a prohibited time and imprisoned, but is asked the next day to repair their clock. On examining it Scar Faced Brooder realises it will shortly fail in a lethal blast of radiation, and this forces him to learn to time travel, after which he repairs the mechanism. After this he returns home to tell the Chronarch about his ability to time-travel.
The final scene involves another conversation with the Wanderer, where Scar Faced Brooder realises that humankind’s journeys in space are coming to an end and will be replaced with journeys in time.
Although this probably doesn’t sound that attractive a proposition when reduced to its constituent parts, the time concept and exotic far future setting make for an interesting piece.

4. The editorship of The Weird Ones is the subject of some uncertainty according to its ISFDB page.

5. The story ratings for this issue were published in #150:

No great surprises there. The Moorcock presumably did better than it should have because of its length.

6. Niekas #9 is available on Fanac.org here. Unfortunately their page for Zenith/Speculation doesn’t have a copy of #6, just (thanks to John Boston) #9 and #12.
In Zenith #9 there is a response (in the magazine review column Brickbats and Roses) to the New Worlds comments that their magazine reviewer (Terry Jeeves) “appears rooted somewhat in the past”:

Firmly rooted in the past as I am, and needing no acting-assistant-under-paid-deputy to scratch by back when it itches, I am not pandering to the gallery when I say that I welcome ANALOG’s return to the digest size.  p.3

There is more argy-bargy about various subjects in the letter column, Point-Counterpoint, as well as various comments about the magazines of the time, both pro and con. Jim Groves says, “New Worlds and Science Fantasy are now the worst of the magazine crop”.
Ivor Latto gives a considered view of the differences between New Worlds and Science Fantasy:

It isn’t quite fair to say that New Worlds is superior to Science Fantasy; the relative quality of the stories published is much the same. But Moorcock’s crusading zeal has certainly given NW a new lease of life, not entirely because of the stories he publishes, but also because of the way his philosophy is backed up in editorials, articles, and reviews. Either Bonfiglioli has no similar urge to convert, or he has been persuaded to accept NW as the dominant half of the Compact twins.
Maybe the publishers feel that they can’t afford to fund reviews, articles and letters in both mags. Whatever the reason [probably Bonfiglioli’s reportedly relaxed attitude to work] SF certainly suffers for it in a certain purposelessness. It’s always been like that, for some reason, a weak sister to NW in its departments, although usually superior in the stories it prints.  p. 19

There is more about Moorcock and New Worlds and how they are probably, in their own way, seeking after a “Sense of Wonder”.
Peter Weston replies:

The trouble is that science fiction fans are ‘hooked’ on the type of SF current in a particular period, and when the bias of SF storytelling changes, the readers don’t change. This is the reason for the dissatisfaction expressed by some readers because of ‘modern’ SF. They cannot assimilate a diet lacking in the essential vitamins supplied by ‘1950’s SF’.
But there is hope yet….many readers are attracted to the style of ‘action SF’ introduced in such magazines as Space SF, Infinity, and SF Adventures, and they really should try the Galaxy twins Worlds of If & Worlds of Tomorrow. The latter magazine especially is, in the editor’s opinion, the best SF magazine (of its type) on the market today. The January & March 1965 issues are really excellent, introducing also a new writer, Larry Niven, a real ‘find’.  p. 19

Peter Weston also comments more generally about the current magazine scene in his editorial (as part of his argument that the SF field—circa 1965—is in the middle of a “Golden Age”):

Magazines have lost ground in the battle to keep their reader’s interest, but they are to a large extent now on the upswing in readability and science-fictional appeal (even to older fans). Analog, since the reversion to the small size has shown a staggering increase in the quality of material, Galaxy, long much-abused, is now producing roughly one good issue in two, while companion magazines If and Worlds of Tomorrow are producing science fiction that is among the best ever written. There is still rubbish in good measure, but Editor Pohl’s policy of straightforward action with a respectably science fictional treatment, is paying remarkable dividends. The recent trend towards amorphous and meaningless stories may have been greatly overrated; certainly this looks to be one of the ‘blind alleys’ explored by speculative fiction.  p. 2

Worth a look.  ●