ISFDB link

Other Reviews:
Mark Yon, Galactic Journey

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Editor, Michael Moorcock

Fiction:
Equinox (Part 1 of 2) • novella serial by J. G. Ballard ∗∗∗+
‘Never Let Go of My Hand!’ • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
The Last Lonely Man • short story by John Brunner ∗
The Star Virus • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Equinox • cover by James Cawthorn
A New Literature for the Space Age • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Books: Myth Maker of the 20th Century • essay by J. G. Ballard
Story Ratings
Letters

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In 1963 the British SF magazine publisher Nova Publications was struggling with poor circulation figures for New Worlds and Science Fantasy (their monthly and bimonthly publications), and  the board of directors eventually decided to cease publication and wind up the company. When a new publisher was found just before the magazine closed down, a new editor was required as John Carnell, the previous editor, was busy with a new quarterly anthology, New Writings in SF, and his literary agency. Michael Moorcock and  Kyril Bonfiglioli had both approached (or had been approached by) David Warburton¹ of publishers Roberts & Vinter about the job, and he ultimately decided to split the titles between the two of them. Given the choice, Moorcock unexpectedly chose to edit New Worlds rather than Science Fantasy.²
So, in mid-1964 the first Moorcock-edited issue of New Worlds appeared from Roberts & Vinter in a new paperback format.³  This had an eye-catching cover design for Equinox by James Cawthorn and, unlike the first Roberts & Vinter issue of its sister magazine Science Fantasy (which would appear a month later) the glossy (but thin) cover of a standard paperback.
There is an introductory editorial by Moorcock, A New Literature for the Space Age, where he raves about William Burroughs and complains about the stagnation of the modern novel. About two paragraphs from the end, to avoid frightening the horses one suspects, he mentions that he appreciates the entertainment value of SF and will publish a variety of stories. The last paragraph is a tribute to the previous editor:

John Carnell, who edited New Worlds and Science Fantasy since their start, is a man who has done most for British SF since the war. He has been responsible for discovering and encouraging many of our most popular modern SF writers. He is a man whom many people, including myself, respect and admire. Of late, the demands on his time have been almost overwhelming and it was with great regret that he decided his other commitments in the field would not allow him to continue as editor. I wish him the very best of success with his new ventures, and look forward to seeing the first issue of New Writing in SF which he is now editing.  p. 3

The fiction leads off with the first part of J. G. Ballard’s two-part novella, Equinox. Expanded and revised from his novelette The Illuminated Man (Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1964), it was written after Moorcock requested a serial from Ballard for the magazine at short notice. Ballard’s wife died around the same time as this novella appeared and the further expansion of it to a novel, The Crystal World, was what he returned to some months afterwards.
The story’s main character is Sanders, a doctor in a leper colony, who travels to find a couple in Africa after the wife, Suzanne, writes a letter describing strange, jewelled visions that cause him concern. It appears that a strange crystallising phenomenon has begun world, even universe wide:

At first Dr Sanders failed to recognise this as the Echo satellite. Its luminosity had increased by at least ten-fold, transforming the thin pin-point of light that had burrowed across the night sky for so many faithful years into a brilliant luminary outshone only by the moon. All over Africa, from the Liberian coast to the shores of the Red Sea, it would now be visible, a vast aerial lantern fired by the same light he had seen in the jewelled flowers that afternoon.  p. 25

The rest of this instalment concerns Sander’s journey through the jungle to the couple:

They were rounding a bend, as the river widened in its approach to Mont Royale, and the water ahead was touched by a curious roseate sheen, as if reflecting a distant sunset or the flames of some silent conflagration. The sky, however, remained a bland limpid blue, devoid of all cloud. Then they passed below a small bridge, where the river opened into a wide basin a quarter of a mile in diameter.
With a gasp of surprise they all craned forward, staring at the line of jungle facing the white-framed buildings of the town. The long arc of trees hanging over the water seemed to drip and glitter with myriads of prisms, the trunks and heavy fronds sheathed by bars of yellow and carmine light that bled away across the surface of the water, as if the whole scene were being reproduced by some over-active technicolour process. The entire length of the opposite shore glittered with this blurred kaleidoscope, the overlapping bands of colour increasing the density of the vegetation, so that it was impossible to see more than a few feet between the front line of trunks.
The sky was clear and motionless, the sunlight shining uninterruptedly upon this magnetic shore, but now and then a stir of wind crossed the water and the scene suddenly erupted into fantastic cascades of colour that rippled away into the air around them. Then, slowly, the coruscation subsided, and the images of the individual trees reappeared, each sheathed in its armour of light, their foliage glowing as if loaded with deliquescing jewels.  p. 36

You can imagine Moorcock’s delight at the publishing this well written literary work as the lead piece in the first issue of his editorship. Given the transformative magazine that New Worlds would become in the middle and late sixties it is rather fitting that it is a work about the mundane transmogrifying into something jewelled and complex . . . .
Brian W. Aldiss’s ‘Never Let Go of My Hand!’ starts rather datedly with a mother and son in a cold house providing Bovril to a visiting neighbour. They are watched, and eventually abducted, by clunkily named aliens (e.g. Ret-Thlat).
The story continues when they arrive on the alien planet, and the mother and son realise that time runs backward in this universe and they are becoming younger. Matters end on a rather bleak note when the resentful twenty-seven year old mother meets her six-year-old child for the last time.
This piece appears to show Aldiss in transition, exhibiting elements that typified his older work (the dated domestic circumstances and the pulp aliens) and that which was coming (the bitter mother-son relationship and temporal reversal). Man in his Time, a good example of his later work, would be published in Science Fantasy #65 a year later.
John Brunner’s story The Last Lonely Man has very little going for it.⁴ The story gimmick is a process known as Contact where people, when they die, go on to cohabit in another person’s mind and eventually become blended in—so most people have several contacts who might host them when they die. Cut to our protagonist, who meets a man in a bar who has no contacts at all, and upon whom he takes pity, agreeing to become a temporary host, if required.
This unconvincing idea has an equally unconvincing development: at one point in the story the protagonist and his wife leave him—a man they have just met—to babysit their eleven-month-old twins: I realise that there was not the same paedophile panic in the mid-sixties, but give me a break. Needless to say (spoiler) by the end of the story our protagonist has come to regret his altruism.
By the way, this is written in that lame American voice that far too many UK writers have used: essentially British English but with the odd “gimme”, “rye” (whisky), “La Guardia”, etc. thrown in. I understand why writers did this if they were selling to a US market—but not when selling to a UK one (I note that Ballard always used his own voice and managed to sell frequently to the likes of F&SF and Fantastic). I wonder why this was left as it is here—did the story come from Brunner’s trunk to satisfy the same type of material shortage that Kyril Bonfiglioli suffered in the early issues of his editorship of Science Fantasy, New Worlds’ sister magazine?⁵
Barrington J. Bayley’s The Star Virus is a little disappointing. His stories are more often than not unusual, original and philosophical stories, but there is little of that present in this novelette. Rodrone has a device called the Lens that an alien race called the Streall want. After fleeing a planet whose government want him to hand it over and experiencing a rather strange journey through space (the crew play a card game that may result in their reactor going critical) he eventually ends up in a struggle with a Streall called The Philosopher for control of the galaxy. Ninety five percent pulp space opera versus five per cent of Bayley’s sometime originality I am afraid.⁶

There is a limited amount of non-fiction. Apart from Moorcock’s editorial, J. G. Ballard contributes a review column, Books: Myth Maker of the 20th Century, that rather boringly discusses three novels by William Burroughs. The excerpts provided do not make me want to rush upstairs to grab my copy of The Naked Lunch off the bookshelves; Moorcock makes a better case in the first part of his editorial.
There are Story Ratings from two of Carnell’s earlier issues:

I doubt there will be many of those old-school SF names in future issues.⁷
The Letters column is only a single page with two brief notes offering congratulations on the continuation of the magazine.

So, in conclusion, an average start to Moorcock’s editorship, with the fiction not quite matching the rallying cry in his editorial.  ●

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1. According to Mike Ashley’s Transformations, p. 236-237 (Amazon.co.uk) the reason that Roberts & Vinter first got involved was because New Worlds’ old printer was looking for work to fill the gap left by the magazines and was having a chat with Warburton in a pub. They later decided the magazines would give their current pin-up publications a respectable front.

2. Moorcock had been a frequent contributor to Science Fantasy in the early sixties, not least with his ‘Elric’ series of stories, and so seemed a natural fit for that magazine.

3. Moorcock wanted the magazine to be a large-format magazine like Playboy, on art paper with good quality illustrations. (Ibid. p. 236-237)

4. I am utterly perplexed as to how Brunner’s story (ISFDB link) ended up in no less than three of the ‘Years Best’ anthologies, one a retrospective. I know tastes vary, but this one struck me as an example of a story that is demonstrably poor.
An episode of the TV series Out of the Unknown was made out of The Last Lonely Man. The seventies bad acting, affected speech and décor actually make it worse, but you can give Amazon £1.89 and make up your own mind.

5. Bonfiglioli relied heavily on “bottom drawer material” from Brian W. Aldiss for his first couple of issues of Science Fantasy after being appalled at the poor quality of the quarter a million words of mss that he had read on assuming the editorship. (Ibid. p. 243)

6. The Star Virus was considerably expanded to become a 45,000 word Ace Double novel in 1970:

Wikipedia reports that “William S. Burroughs used the concept of “deadliners” from the novel in his own Nova Express, quoting Bayley’s story in its New Worlds appearance.”

7. Perhaps of more interest are the story ratings for this issue (from New Worlds #144):

I have my doubts about Ballard’s The Terminal Beach being the readers’ choice in #140. Apart from the fact that (in Astounding/Analog, anyway) the serial or long novelette nearly always tops the poll, I suspect it was quite a divisive story at the time and drew as much hostility from the traditionalists as it did praise from the progressives.  ●

First posted on website 15^th December 2015.
Edited on 2^nd March 2018 to add a historical introduction; a longer quoted passage for the Ballard story; story ratings, back cover, and The Star Virus images; and numerous other formatting and text changes.
Edited on 5^th March 2018 to add story ratings from New Worlds #144.
Edited on 13^th June 2018 to revise Brunner story text and make minor formatting changes.
Edited on 21^st July 2019 to add review link.