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

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Life Buyer (Part 1 of 3) • serial by E. C. Tubb ∗∗
The Changing Shape of Charlie Snuff • short story by R. W. Mackelworth ∗∗
In One Sad Day • short story by George Collyn –
Death of an Earthman • short story by George Locke [as by Gordon Walters] ∗∗
Third Party • short story by Dan Morgan ∗
What Next? • novelette by Edward Mackin –
The Flowers of the Valley • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗
Reactionary • short story by Barrington J. Bayley [as by P. F. Woods] ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Robert Fuqua [as by Joe Tillotson]
Interior artwork • by Arthur Thomson, Maeve Gilmore (?)
Broadening the Scope • editorial
Microcosms and Macrocosms • book reviews by Langdon Jones
Story Ratings 147
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

The first part of The Life Buyer by E. C. Tubb has a decent hook to start the serial:

Marcus Edward King, eighty-seven years old, rich as Croesus, devoid of faith, sat up in bed and screamed into the darkness.
“No!”
Glass crashed as he fumbled at a bedside table, water gurgling, phials rattling, a book thudding softly to the floor. A button sank beneath a searching finger and soft rose-light flooded the room.
“No!”
The light brightened, comforting him with the revelation of familiar things; the statuette carved from Luna stone, the snowflake from Mars, the flask of turgid slime from the ebon depths of Venus. Trapped in a block of waterclear plastic an insect-thing from Ganymede stared at him with blind, iridescent eyes, wings a shimmering skein of colour. A solar clock rested diamond glitters on the hour of four.
“No,” he said for the third time. “Damn it, no!”  p. 4

His guard is quick to appear, and is quickly dismissed. King goes into the toilet:

A wall-mirror reflected his image for critical inspection.
He bared his teeth at what he saw.
The teeth were natural growths; fresh buds transplanted into his gums from the jaws of a child at a basic cost of five thousand to the mother. The hair was growing from the scalp of a twenty-year-old man who had sold it for three thousand and a dozen wigs. The heart had cost much more; bought from a spacefield worker cursed with cancerous lungs, a sense of responsibility and a beautiful young wife. The stomach had been relatively cheap, the kidneys had come from a voluntary donor, the varicosed veins which had once mottled his legs had been replaced by plastic surrogates.
For its age it was a good body. It had cost him over a quarter of a million.  p. 6

King’s psychologist is waiting for him when he gets out of the shower, and we find out that the former was dreaming about the death of his father (which he had a hand in) just before he woke. The pair talk for a while and then the psychologist leaves, leaving King to watch an aircraft flying on a collision course towards his tower block. King narrowly escapes before the crash.
The next chapter cuts to Dale Markham, a police detective, and Steve Delamonte, a security official, at the scene of the crash/assassination attempt. They discover the pilot was wearing an explosive “krown”, and we learn later that King’s company produces this headwear, which is used for inducing emotion, or sleep, in the wearer. If they are illegally modified and paired with another device, it can be used in master-slave mode. These krowns are the plot-device that drives what is essentially a detective story from this point on.
The rest of this instalment has Delamonte (referred to throughout, puzzlingly, as “Steve”, where Markham is called “Markham”) investigate various leads, culminating in the discovery of the body of a hotel security official. He, unknown to Steve Delamonte, was trying to blackmail King’s organisation after the death of a krown user at his hotel.
There is also one further chapter with King in his hideout, where we learn his research scientists are developing krowns which can receive a broadcast signal from a central source.
Although this is all readable enough, and (as I’ve said) has a good first chapter, it is quite difficult to engage with this story: the characters are little more than ciphers, the future is standard dystopia-lite, and the central conceit of the krown is too obviously just a hardware gimmick thrown in to drive the plot. The overall impression is one of a competent and professional writer going through the motions. As I said last issue: I wish Moorcock had managed to serialise Ballard’s The Drought instead.
The Changing Shape of Charlie Snuff by R. W. Mackelworth is about an alien that is forced to take the form wished upon it by other creatures. At the beginning of the story it has the appearance of a movie star and is lodging with a young woman. Matters are complicated when the alien senses a potentially lethal visitor—a scientist who was previously involved in bomb making, but never made the perfect bomb. . . .
For the most part I didn’t like this story: it takes too long to get going, has an unlikely concept, and suffers from some odd phrasing:

A last, desperate buzz on the bell was accompanied by a devastating insight into the very eye of the storm which had propelled the scientist to his door.  p. 44-45

The hopeful question hovered between them like a sparrow hawk over a mouse or a pregnant accident looking for somewhere to happen.  p. 52

Despite these irritations it has a final scene that is quite good, and which involves (spoiler) both the scientist and the alien getting their wish (returning home in the latter’s case).
In One Sad Day by George Collyn is his third story for the magazine but, judging by the quality, it reads like a first submission or sale. It takes place on a future twilight Earth and involves a man:

A naked, matchstick figure with arms and legs atrophied through non-use and a cranium over-developed because it had no activity save cerebration. It bore a body as unrecognisable to us, its ancestors, as would we be to the first amoeba to creep from the sea but it had the rough configuration which branded it as human and the organs which classified him male.  p. 54

After sitting about and thinking for a while he receives a female visitor (he was previously unaware that any other humans survived on Earth). They talk for a time before getting it on, or as the story explains:

Untold ages of mutation had made the bodies of this latter-day male and female mutually inconvenient for juxtaposition but in some way under that dying sun the last man and the last woman made ready to commit the act of love.  p. 57

Sadly (spoiler), the shock of orgasm is too much for their weakened bodies and they both die.
This is simultaneously both portentous and ridiculous, and should have been left in the slush pile.

Death of an Earthman by George Locke gets off to a slightly confusing start with an autobiographical data-dump from the narrator about his work as a “trace assessor” amongst aliens (a crime scene investigator, basically). Then, during his four months’ compulsory leave he is on a spaceship, The Seas of Deimos, when someone strangles the co-pilot, Harold Anderson. Also on the ship is Paul Gerrare, a former captain of the ship who lost his arms, and command, in a previous accident. Before Anderson’s death, we learn of the ill-feeling between Anderson and Gerrare during an unusual poker dice game where the co-pilot throws five aces several times in succession. . . .
The narrator examines the corpse and the cabin. Eventually, after discounting other leads, he focuses on Gerrare, despite the fact he has no arms to commit such a crime.
When the captain later falls ill, and there is no one able to pilot the ship through the asteroid belt, the narrator (spoiler) tricks Gerrare into using his telekinetic “ghost” arms to steer the ship to safety.
This isn’t entirely convincing, but this is a considerably better written story than usual—the author keeps your attention despite a pretty obvious ending.
Third Party by Dan Morgan is set in the near-future and starts with a population explosion infodump:

The World Council decided the only answer lay in a compulsory re-introduction of the outmoded social custom of monogamous marriage.
[. . .]
All marriages were under the strictest supervision at all stages, and only those which offered eugenically favourable environments were allowed to become fruitful.
[. . .]
MID [Marriage Integration Department] introduced a number of measures to improve the viability of marriage as an institution; including compulsory sterilisation as a penalty for adultery.  p. 79

The story itself starts with Harry, a father whose marriage is on the rocks, at the park with his son. While sitting on a bench and reflecting on his troubled relationship, he argues with a woman who sits nearby when her Modog (a modified dog that can talk) misbehaves and she blames Harry’s son. Harry tells her if she was fit to have children of her own then she wouldn’t be making a fool of herself over the dog.
This comment (spoiler) comes back to haunt Harry when he and his wife go for their compulsory counselling. Not only are they not permitted to patch up their relationship themselves, but Harry is refused re-conditioning, and their son is taken into care. The final scene has his reconditioned wife arriving home with a Modog. . . .
This is not only unconvincing but it is also difficult to feel any sympathy for the ill-tempered, stubborn, and over-emotional Harry. It struck me that this would have worked better if he had been a likeable but flawed character.

What Next? by Edward Mackin is another one of his ‘Hek Belov’ stories. I’m beginning to wonder if these all have the same plot: a skint Belov takes a dodgy job that involves him using his cybernetic skills to build a gadget; the gangster or millionaire funding the work turns up and throws his weight around; the machine that Belov creates has an unintended side-effect; Belov exits stage right and falls out with Emilio, the restaurant owner he owes money too.
This one broadly fits that template and starts with Belov meeting a man called Jonas Pinquil, who tells him that he was given Belov’s name by a third-party called Meerschraft. Belov eventually agrees to the job and is soon on his own with Meerschraft, where he learns about the job the client wants done:

[Meerschraft’s] face sagged, and he looked at me in a lugubrious fashion. “I don’t quite know what I’ve got myself into,” he said; “but to put it in a nutshell I thought he was just that, or what goes into it. A genuine, old-fashioned nut with oodles of dough, and completely harmless.”
“He’s not, of course?”
Meerschraft sighed, and pulled open a drawer. “He’s got some plans in here that he says he drew from memory. The originals were destroyed in a fire.”
“That sounds reasonable,” I commented.
“The Great Fire of London?”
“Is that what he says?”
Meerschraft nodded. “It may also interest you to know that he spent some centuries in a tree. You’ll appreciate I’m only roughing it out for you, of course. He goes into detail. I mentioned Merlin just to humour him. He said that Merlin was a distant cousin of his, and that they both came from the same planet, which appears to be slightly to the left of Andromeda, give or take a light year. To cut a long story short he wants to get back there, and the only way is by building a transmatter.” He nodded towards the platform contrivance. “His own transmatter went the same way as the plans.”  p. 95

There then follows the usual nonsense mentioned above, i.e. Hek Belov wires up various bits of cybernetic equipment, then a belligerent millionaire Grosmith shows up to check on the results of the project he is funding. During an argument the latter steps on the platform of the device and is left in a dazed, luminescent state.
There is some handwavium about why this happened but it scarcely matters as (spoiler) Grosmith was never really there: he was a video projection/hologram of a disguised TV presenter called McQuail who is doing a ‘Candid Camera’ type show, and nothing really happened to him. Of course, when this is revealed, Meerschraft steps on the transmatter platform and we find it really works. Belov has to recover him.
Another of the problems with these stories is that they leave little if any coherent memory of what they are about after you finish reading them (it took some effort to reconstruct a synopsis from my notes, written all of two days ago). All froth, no substance.

The Flowers of the Valley by Keith Roberts is set in the near future and has a man taking endless amounts of flowers home to his mentally ill partner. He later uses his influence with the “Director” to take her to see “Mother Nature”, a huge indoor plant factory:

The scent came first, growing from a faint suggestion to a rich, heady perfume that filled the great hall. We waited in silence while the emanation from the millions of blooms below became stronger and stronger; then, with dramatic suddenness, the throats of the delivery chutes were crammed with jostling masses of green flecked over with scarlet and pink, white and violet, blue, yellow and orange; peacock Niagaras that burst from the tunnels to flow in sparkling masses down to the waiting Transports, there to spill in heaps round their wheels. Bluebells and hyacinths, roses and coltsfoot and shy, creeping vetches; early blossoms of apple and pear and plum; all the flowers of all the months ahead in one titanic, unbelievable mass!
They say that in the old times plants actually grew. Grew, with their roots in the stinking, worm-ridden ground, swelling like little green vampires on water and salt and air. And, horror of horrors, in those days before Unifood had laid their continental mains, men actually grabbed the plants, fruit, seeds, everything, and ate them! That was before we built the Roof, when the rain could still fall on a man and soak him. What savages we must have been! I remembered the old stories and was grateful while I stood and watched Mother Nature, the greatest plant factory of them all, making Spring for the homes and gardens of half the world.  p. 119

His partner remains catatonic, of course, but sings under her breath a song that has the line “O there was a woman and she was a widow . . . .” I didn’t see how this ties in to the story (the line is at the start of the piece as well).
This anti-progress message was a recurring, if infrequent, theme in Roberts’ work.

Reactionary by Barrington J. Bayley has an alien scientist at a science society meal noticing that one of his inventor colleagues is impatient to reveal a surprise. After a short set-up conversation/lecture about the law of action and reaction (the “Postulate of the Dynamic Whole” as the aliens would say), the inventor unveils his device:

Silence fell as the guests gathered round it. Quonquo had evidently prepared everything beforehand. On the table stood a large spring balance, its pan holding a bizarre-looking engine comprising a number of fat elliptical rotors and a few cams and drive belts jammed together in a very complicated arrangement. The whole contraption was surrounded by a metal framework.  p. 123

This device (seemingly similar to the Hieronymus Machines that Campbell was writing about in Analog) rises off the pan without showing any downward force.
The story has a twist ending which shows how the Postulate is obeyed. . . .

There is a mediocre Cover for this issue by Robert Fuqua (the artist is not listed in the magazine, and ISFDB doesn’t list the source for the accreditation) and, once again, little in the way of Interior artwork. There is one illustration by Arthur Thomson and the other is probably by Maeve Gilmore (that illustration is uncredited but is similar to previous work by her). I don’t know if the text/illustration page order for the Tubb story is a mistake or intended. Reversing p. 4 & p. 5 would have looked better, and more conventional:

Broadening the Scope is another ‘manifesto’ editorial (by Moorcock, I presume) that states that the times are changing and so is SF. After referring to F&SF and its trail blazing, the writer says that New Worlds, while flattered by the comparison with that magazine, is doing its own thing. It continues:

We would guess that Anthony Boucher, during his career as F&SF’s editor, had the problem which we have. This problem is—should we insist that a story, no matter what its basic theme, should be carried on a ‘standard’ SF vehicle, or should we allow the authors to choose their own vehicles and rely on the readers to see the essential SF-ness of the theme, even though a story may not seem at first sight SF of the sort we’re used to? Naturally we should appreciate hearing from readers on this score. Should we reject an outstanding story simply because the treatment is not evidently an SF treatment? And, it follows, should we take poorer material just because the treatment is evidently SF? We think not, but we should like to hear readers’ opinions.
If the field is to stay fresh and entertain on as many levels as possible, then it must broaden its scope. Therefore while our motto won’t exactly be ‘Anything Goes!’, we should very much like it to be ‘Almost Anything Goes!’.  p. 2-3

I think this is a straw man argument given Carnell was publishing work like J. G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach years before (albeit with some encouragement).
There are a couple of house-keeping matters mentioned after this: Ken Slater (the well-known bookseller) has an order for SF Horizons with money but no address, and there is an editorial plug for next month’s special issue, #150 (there are a couple more fillers advertising this throughout the magazine).
Microcosms and Macrocosms by Langdon Jones begins with this:

In recent years one of the main evolutions of SF has been a certain change of emphasis. Science-fiction has been tending to spread outwards into super-galactic vastness, or inwards into the void of the mind.  p. 125

He reviews books by Sellings (The Silent Speakers), Moorcock (The Sundered Worlds), and Matheson (A Stir of Echoes), before concluding with this:

We see too that the multiverse of Moorcock has much in common with the inner world of Sellings. These books both show that in science fiction, the macrocosm ultimately turns out to be identical to the microcosm. Inner space and outer space are in reality the same.  p. 126

I think I would have liked to hear a bit more detail supporting that. The Matheson book sounds promising though.
I commented on Story Ratings 147 when I reviewed that issue.²
Letters to the Editor has only one letter, and it is split over p. 127, p. 53, and p. 57, which makes the magazine look untidy.
The letter itself is a long and interesting one by Dr Malcolm Burgess replying to points made in an earlier editorial about the difference in function between a magazine and anthology:

As has often been stated, SF, more than any other field, depends on its magazines for finding and encouraging fresh talent and publishing it so that future anthologists can have a wide selection of material from which to choose—and without the magazines we should have far, far fewer hardcover books and paperbacks—whether of short stories or of novels. The highest proportion of material finding its way into book-form had its origin in the magazines. I can think of many books we should very likely not have had if it wasn’t for the magazines—A Canticle For Leibowitz, More Than Human, The Stars My Destination, A Case of Conscience, The Drowned World and virtually all of the early Bradbury collections. The fact that a double-market exists for SF must encourage many to write it who might otherwise have tried more lucrative fields or written nothing at all—John Wyndham, John Christopher, Arthur C. Clarke and others spring immediately to mind as writers of tremendous general appeal who made their first appearances in the SF magazines.

I think he has a point about writers like Bradbury, but I suspect those that were also novelists would just have concentrated on that form. He goes on:

But New Worlds SF goes further—it is a magazine in every way. Its editorials vary from reporting news of importance to the SF reader—new critical journals, conventions, meetings, clubs and so forth—to commenting on modern trends in SF and spurring readers and authors to a more sophisticated appreciation and approach to the field.
Its letter-columns give readers a chance to read the opinions of their fellow enthusiasts and give their own, forming a forum which many would otherwise never have. Its book reviews are extensive and seem to cover the whole British field, allowing us to keep our reading up to date—and your longer reviews, in spite of their sometimes impatient tone, are broadening the potential scope of the field and help to educate readers like myself into a more constructively critical approach to SF. All these ‘personal touches’ have, in my opinion, contributed to the success of the new New Worlds. I, and many of my friends, always turn to the features first. They are always lively, always controversial, always provide material for thought and discussion. This is just what a magazine can and should do.

I think Burgess puts his finger on the success and enduring popularity of Moorcock’s New Worlds here. Science Fantasy probably had fiction that was as good or better than New Worlds, but it had little or no non-fiction content aside from the odd editorial from Bonfiglioli.³
Burgess goes on to suggest an American book news/review column, and gives a hint that he is not keen on science fact articles, pointing to the availability of New Scientist, Discovery and The Scientific American magazines.
He sums up by saying that he thinks the fiction and editorial approach matches F&SF at its best.
Moorcock replies, in part:

You leave us a little breathless, Dr. Burgess, but it is always pleasant to see our efforts appreciated—though we aren’t standing still. We feel that having an enlightened and interested publisher has contributed more than anything else to any improvements you have found.  p. 58

He adds that they have persuaded Judith Merril to send them a regular column on the American scene.

A lacklustre issue.  ●

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1. In Graham Hall’s review in Vector #32 (April 1965), he says “that he has heard that this is the best of Moorcock’s [issues so far] and I’m almost agreed. It is certainly the most well-balanced.”
Despite this he found Tubb’s serial heavily padded, but adds “time will tell”. Collyn’s piece is “rather wistful . . . a queer piece indeed”, and ends with, “Oh my word, this is a saucy one!”
Hall goes on to say that recent stories have not been memorable, but that this does not apply to Death of an Earthman by Gordon Walters: “Gerrare, the armless ex-space-captain-turned-artist and his bitterness will long stay in my Hall of Fame.” Dan Morgan’s piece “doesn’t really stand out”, and Hall likens it to Joey is a Man by Robert Heinlein.
Mackin’s piece appears to be his favourite: “Hek Belov would stand out anywhere—even in the company of SF’s finest characterisations and Ed Mackin has him riding again in his irrepressible, irrelevant and irreverent vein”. Hall also rates the Keith Roberts story, saying that “The Flowers of the Valley shows once again that [he] is a first-rate writer.”
Bayley’s story is “a fine example how just one SF-ish idea can be woven into a fairly memorable story by an experienced writer.” Macklelworth’s story is “yet another of this spate of stories that apparently satirise their own theme [. . .] Apparently Moorcock rather likes these mild unfunny satires. I don’t.”
He concludes with, “Striking cover, adequate book reviews, fair editorial and it’s all over for another month.”

2. The story ratings for this issue appeared in #151:

With a couple of exceptions the stories are pretty much ranked in length order (a common outcome in various magazines’ readers’ ratings).

3. New Worlds’ legacy was also helped by enduring in one form or another for another thirty years. There is nothing like not being dead to improve peoples’ awareness of your existence.