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Other reviews:¹
Graham Hall, Vector #34 (August 1965)

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Lone Zone • novelette by Charles Platt ∗∗∗+
The Leveller • short story by Langdon Jones ∗
The Silent Ship • short story by Eric C. Williams ∗
A Funny Thing Happened . . . • short fiction by Dikk Richardson –
A Light in the Sky • short story by Stuart Gordon [as by Richard A. Gordon] ∗
Supercity • reprint short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
The Night of the Gyul • short story by Colin R. Fry ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by James Cawthorn, Maeve Gilmore, uncredited
Does Space Still Come Naturally? • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Story Ratings 150
Cinema: Roger Corman and Edgar Allen Poe • by Al Good
Books: Tomorrow in Retrospect • by George Collyn
Books: Is Blish Over-Rated? • by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Books: Holes in the Sky • by Langdon Jones
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

Lone Zone by Charles Platt² gets off to a rather slow start with of a group of “Loners” beginning their day in the deserted and lawless Linear City Seven (this future world has—somewhat unrealistically—built huge cities ahead of an anticipated population increase only to have fertility rates plummet, leaving them as largely unoccupied “Lone Zones”). After they have eaten their processed breakfasts they leave their temporary accommodation and go to a local meeting spot. Here the foursome (Vincent is the leader, and he travels with Clement and Franklin, and a woman called Kitt) meet a man called Johnson, a “Civic” who says he has left his normal populated city to live more freely in the unoccupied Zone.
They allow Johnson to accompany them (they do not particularly trust him so he is not formally accepted into the group) and go to find lunch, which gives him his first experience of their nomadic, scavenging lifestyle (all the shops in the pre-prepared cities are stocked with food, clothing, etc., which the Loners just help themselves to). Later, while the others have a siesta, Johnson wanders off and finds himself in a Fun Palace. His exploration of the amusements is interrupted when other Loners turn off the lights and try to shoot him (they do not like Civics). He eventually escapes from a room of mirrors, and rejoins his group:

They climbed up to the monorail, but it was too slippery to be safe, so they dragged on at street level through the rain, along the endless roads that served only to separate one Block from the next: roads that were gutters running with dirty water. All around the world was grey and dull, depressing and demoralising. The claustrophobic nature of the giant vertical concrete surfaces was stronger in the dim light that made them dark silhouettes against the cloudy sky. These were the graves of human beings unborn, the men and women and children who had never entered the world to fill their space allocation with a few meagre possessions, who never knew life, never ate a TV breakfast or an instant lunch or a pre-packed supper, never experienced the communal life led when you were within twelve feet of another human being every night and day of your existence, never enjoyed the share-air schemes, the waste-water-is-quite-all-right, CO₂-smells-good advertising campaigns, the public transport problem, the rising food prices and exhausted resources, the wonderful blossoming affluence of galloping inflation . . .
In such a demoralised, disenchanted world was it surprising that men found nothing for the next generation or themselves to live for? That human society lost initiative, lost interest, and just gave up?  p. 22

In this first part the influence of J. G. Ballard is very obvious—not only the apocalyptic setting of the story, but also in some of the writing:

Like every other room in every apartment, in Block Seventy and all the other Blocks in Linear City 7, it was a container of settling, drifting time dust, a terminal cancellation of dying energy differentials.  p. 4-5

The corridor, too, was a stagnant backwater of accumulated time. An estuary off the slowing, thickening time stream where, until the entry of the Loners, all action, all life, all movement, had died.  p. 6

In the second half of the story, the group spot an occupied apartment and investigate: during a subsequent shoot-out, Clement is wounded, and the old woman who lived in the apartment killed. They later find a young woman called Jane hiding in one of the other rooms.
Later, when three of them go out for food, they are shot at by the same people who were after Johnson previously, and flee back to the apartment. They make a perilous escape from the building and escape via an unused sewer. That evening they find food and clothing in a distant supermarket, and spend the night there. The next day Clement is dead.
In this part of the story it develops its own voice, and the action is intercut with scenes that illustrate the clash of cultures between the Loners and Johnson the Civic. One example of this is Johnson’s instance on taking the injured Clement with them when they escaped, even though the others wanted to leave him behind so as not to slow them down. When Johnson talks to Franklin about this later their conversation ends (spoiler) with a dispassionate comment that Clement was Franklin’s brother.
Johnson also grills Kitt after Vincent and Jane supposedly go off to find food, although Johnson thinks Vincent is taking her away to have sex:

[Kitt] looked up at him suddenly with hard eyes.
“You don’t find accepting circumstances easy, do you?”
“All right, I agree to some extent with what you say,” said Johnson. “[But] why do you let Vincent treat you like he does? How can you accept everything so philosophically?”
She seemed to be examining his face.
“You really don’t understand, do you,” she said slowly. “You expect me to fight to keep Vince, or burst into tears, or act like any of your delicately emotional civic women would. Don’t you see, if Vince has found another girl and wants to leave, it’s his decision?”
“So much for the equality of men and women,” Johnson cynically.
“Equality doesn’t come into it. Sex doesn’t come into it. I don’t think I have a right to try to influence another person in the making of a personal decision, that’s all. It’s his private affair.”
“Then don’t you care at all?”
She laughed abruptly.
“You think I don’t care? You think I haven’t been fighting to hold on to him for the past three months? Of course I care. But it’s better that it should happen this way; better this than a parting that would have lasted three months more, a gradual separation that no one could stop.”
[. . .]
“But you’re being used! Don’t you care? Haven’t you ever wondered what will have happened to you in ten years’ time? It can’t last forever, whatever your relationship. Why don’t you get away from this while you can, escape back to civilisation? Get back to where there’s still some decency, some morals, a cultured way of life. You have a chance, now; why not take it?”
She smiled, obviously uncomprehending.
“Because I belong here, it’s my life; I couldn’t exist in your society . . .”
“Yet you live here, a whore who, like all whores, is one day discarded. Don’t you ever want to find a husband, settle down, fall in love?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘whore’. I’m happy here, now. Why should I disturb myself and spoil my happiness, by speculating on what may happen? And why should I tie myself down and stagnate, forfeit my own free will? Why should I find just one man to love, when I have three, here?”
“You have crude sex with them, you don’t love them . . .”
“Have you grown up in intimate contact within a small group of people, devoid of contact with a populated outside world? What you know about our relationships?” She stared at him with cold blue eyes.
“You don’t understand,” said Johnson.
“No,” she said, “it’s you who doesn’t understand . . .”
But before she could continue, she was interrupted by a burst of rapid gunfire from the street below.  p. 26-28

I suspect this and other similar passages mirror the pronounced inter-generational divide that existed in the mid-1960s.
At the end of the story Johnson (spoiler) tells the group that there is a plan for the civics to solve the city’s population problems by coming to the Zones to kill the men and kidnap the woman. As the group argue with Johnson about his deception he falls to the monorail below: they refuse to pull him back up even though there is a train coming. Johnson runs but slips and falls to his death.
Overall, this is an uneven but promising second story from Platt, with a good balance of action and sociological observation that plays out against an interesting dystopian background.

The Leveller by Langdon Jones begins with the intense reflections of a dying man:

And he didn’t want to die. He wanted to stay and carry on in this little play with all the others. He wanted to be down there now, on the sunny pavements watching the children playing, and the people going about their tasks that had now been rendered meaningless. This was what made him most sad. Nothing meant anything any more. The world had been rendered useless by the fact that he was to be removed from it. He wanted it to have meaning again. He wanted to join in. What would happen to him? What would happen? He had felt a desperate tear begin to roll down his cheek, and his wife had leaned over and wiped it away. His wife. She was his wife no longer. She was part of the world that didn’t matter to him any more. In his dying eyes, she was just a woman, just a stranger.
And now here he was with the doctor fussing, doing things to his outstretched useless body that wasn’t part of him any more. He wished that he could have lifted his head from the pillow to tell the doctor to save himself the trouble. “Doctor,” he would like to say, “that little wasted scrap of flesh isn’t me any longer. I am here—here in this gaunt head. Can’t you see the flicker of me behind the eyes? Why won’t you look, doctor? Are you scared of the light that glows in these eyes? Are you afraid to look? Are you frightened of what they would tell you? But it was too much effort, and he only lowered his eyes so that he might get a fuzzy picture of his own body. When he saw it he was shocked. Its thin and ravaged form was nothing to do with him. It was completely alien, and he looked on it with a tired and dispassionate gaze.
His death was so inevitable; that was what he couldn’t accept. Even if he had survived his illness, he would have had to face it sooner or later. This was what he was born for.  p. 49

The narrative then moves on to a middle section that has what I can only imagine is a delusion or pre-death vision where he sees a giant toad. After it disappears he has a sword fight with a flamboyantly dressed man. He then finds the doctor standing over him pronouncing his death.
The last section has him leave his body. As he looks down on his corpse he starts ascending, and eventually leaves the Earth behind, travelling further and further out of the universe until he is looking back down on the whole of existence. This (spoiler) has a pinkish colour and eventually resolves into an image of his face.
This is just a daft ending, and doesn’t work at all. That said, the first third of this is well worth reading for its emotional and descriptive prose.
The Silent Ship by Eric C. Williams has a prospecting spaceman who is either mad or sick coming back to Earth. A company investigator goes to examine the ship, and when he finds the cargo is only silica rock he orders it destroyed.
The investigator then goes to see the dying man in hospital and, when the latter experiences a period of lucidity, listens to his account of the discovery of a miniature civilisation in the rock of the asteroid he was exploring, and how the microscopic beings later invaded his body and started warring there.
There is some interesting Fantastic Voyage-type imagery here but the premise is largely unconvincing.
A Funny Thing Happened . . . by Dikk Richardson is a one-page slush pile escapee about aliens who sleep for aeons at a time, and who only occasionally wake. They are (spoiler) are Easter Island statues.

A Light in the Sky is the debut of future novelist Stuart Gordon,³ and it concerns a Durbanian prince on a once-in-a-decade trip to the city of Tarstar, where he will meet his arranged bride. Along the way we learn two important pieces of information: (a) the human civilisation of this time is in a gentle decline, a result of laws prohibiting investigation and (b) that there are strange flashing lights on the Moon.
After the caravan arrives at Tarstar, and the formalities have been observed, the prince meets his bride and everyone attends a banquet. Later, the couple slip away to a balcony and discuss the lights on the moon.
The woman tells him that she has discovered that the lights are a message that she has managed to decipher. She then takes him to a disused room containing futuristic devices. Long story short: humankind had previously spread throughout the solar system and fought a war destroying the colonies on Venus and Mars; a moon colony was left to survive on its own, and the lights are an ancient distress message that has been transmitted for many years.
The prince and the woman decide nothing can be done and that they will not be so curious in the future.
This is an overlong and slow-moving story, and it switches unevenly two-thirds of the way through from something that feels like a Weird Tales desert fantasy to an SF tale. Further, the ending is exasperating: they discover something momentous, then shrug their shoulders and move on. You can see, however, as with a lot of the stories that Moorcock bought from beginning writers around this time, glimmerings of better things to come.
Supercity by Brian W. Aldiss (Space, Time and Nathaniel, 1957) is a story told to “Nanthiel” about a man banished to a backward planet in Smith’s Burst for his romantic indiscretions. There he sets about transforming a singularly unprepossessing planet into a vibrant colony by using Earth government’s own bureaucracy against itself:

He began making official reports home. New York, which was at that time the hub of World Administration, was gratified. Generally, it was an impossible task to induce reports (which also mean returns) from anywhere but the major worlds; since all communications travelled via ship, the smaller galactic fry could always claim ‘Lost in Transit’ to any unpleasant referendums, a claim which might take years to refute conclusively.
New York responded with true bureaucratic fervour to Alastair’s tentative advances. Department upon department despatched sheafs of every imaginable type of form and questionnaire, and filed with glee the mocked-up statistics or nil returns which Alastair sent back.
What percentages of female colonist underwent marriage at the following age groups…………? What was the average yield per acre of the following types of wheat…………? What species of Earth cattle flourished best under Acrostic conditions…………? What were conditions on Acrostic in terms of annual rainfall, monthly rainfall, annual sunshine, monthly sunshine, isobars, isotherms…………? Etc.
It seemed as if the vast ledgers of Earth would absorb for ever the flow of information.
The space ships, which had never called more than twice in a decade, began to make monthly visits to All Saints. They brought with them, besides paper, wealth; they took back with them, besides paper, rumour of a growing city.  p. 95

Light, vaguely amusing stuff.
The Night of the Gyul by Colin R. Fry starts in the house of what turn out to be mutant dogs on an environmentally hostile future Earth:

It was a bad hot rain and a hot wet grey fog the night the Gyul came. At least, I say night, but it is hard to be certain because with the running, drumming, hissing rain we had lost count of time and our waterclock was broken. Ria broke it trying to dance on her hindlimbs. She is the one with the black patch over her left eye; at least, I say black, but it is more a grey discoloration of the facial skin.
“Before long I’ll be able to do it,” she said as she thumped down on her haunches, panting. She looks very sweet when her shoulders heave like that so I affectionately bit a flea out of her hair. Her hair is short white hair running all the way from her head down her back, very fluffy, and very pretty it is too. She takes great care of it. I bit a flea. The fleas are getting bigger and juicier. We must try Cooking them. I have heard of Cooking from the Singer. He knows a lot, that one. Well, he is a humute. It runs in his blood. To Cook, one uses heat. I think we might Boil dead fleas by leaving them out in the rain, in some kind of container. Perhaps we should skin them first. That is how the Ancients used to Cook their animals—skinned.
Mammah is the maternal one. I love to watch our little children clustering round her teats. I am a sentimentalist and very fond of home life, although I am ferocious when I am out hunting. I hunt when it isn’t raining. Then the sun is crimson in the mauve sky and the kangarabbits bounce away before me. But I use my footbow, stringing it with my strong white teeth, and I kill them! Ha!  p. 100-101

Later, a man and woman (referred to by the narrator as a “Boi” and a “Gyul”) appear, and ask for shelter and then for help to cross the water to what I presume is France. Singer the humute arrives then, and when it becomes obvious that the narrator can’t help, the couple go. Later, other men arrive looking for the couple and Singer takes them to the coast.
There is not much of a story here but the setting is intriguing and vivid, and the ending hints at possible sequels where things may change.⁴ Enjoyable.

This month’s uncredited Cover looks like the work of Keith Roberts. Even this average effort from him is better than most of the decidedly lacklustre efforts that have graced the magazine recently.
The first two pieces of Interior artwork are by James Cawthorn and Maeve Gilmore. The last, uncredited, piece may be Cawthorn’s as it uses the same silhouetting and hand lettering used in other illustrations.
Does Space Still Come Naturally? by Michael Moorcock states his previous editorial about space stories has been misinterpreted:

In our editorial in NWSF 148 we mentioned the possibility that the space story was declining. Many readers took this as a statement that New Worlds was not going to contain space stories in future; others thought that we said that good space stories couldn’t be written. We are rarely so dogmatic, as a careful look at that particular editorial will show. What we did say was that there weren’t many good ones being written.  p. 2

There is more on this but essentially Moorcock reiterates his previous assertion that naturalistic/realistic fiction is on the way out.
The next part is about the new writers that Moorcock has brought to the magazine:

Fresh to New Worlds this month are three new, young writers whose average age is eighteen. A lot of hard work has been put in by the editorial staff of this magazine in its attempt to find, encourage and—at last—publish new writers. A year ago we were beginning to wonder if these writers actually existed in any quantity. Now—almost overnight—a lot of the writers we had recognised as potentially worth publishing have come up with stories well-worth publishing. We feel sure that Charles Platt, Richard Gordon, Dikk Richardson and Colin Fry—not to forget Langdon Jones—will be producing a rich variety of stories in the near future. That all the stories published in this issue vary in choice of treatment and subject matter should indicate that our main ambition, to present the widest variety of ideas and treatments possible, is also being realised.  p. 3/123

He finishes with a request for reader’s thoughts about adding more pages to the magazine:

This would still be the best value offered in the SF magazine field. What do you think about it? Most of our “counterparts” are already 3s. 6d. or more for the same amount of reading matter found in NWSF for 2s. 6d. At 3s. 6d. we should be giving much more reading matter with the opportunity of printing short novels complete and still having plenty of room for some short stories. So—opinions please.  p. 123

I say go for it.
Story Ratings 150 was discussed in that issue.⁵
There is an extensive non-fiction section at the back of this issue (18 pp.), and it leads off with Cinema: Roger Corman and Edgar Allen Poe by Al Good, an interesting if brief review of Roger Corman’s horror films. There are some interesting snippets that piqued my interest about the films mentioned:

If Corman does not depend on his actors, he certainly owes a debt to his script writers, notable amongst whom is Richard Matheson. Rewriting a short story like Pit and the Pendulum into a film lasting one and a half hours, with the only similarity being the knife-edged pendulum, cannot be called an ‘adaptation’. Yet the film is not completely devoid of Poe’s atmosphere, and the horrific twist that does not come until the last frame of film is masterly.  p. 110

Corman has made intentionally humorous horror films. The Cat, one of the three stories from Tales of Terror and The Raven, both teamed up Peter Lorre and Vincent Price with great success. The talent of both these actors is at its best in their droll wine-tasting duel in The Cat. Lorre plays the part of a drunkard, and tastes his wine by drinking half a bottleful, whilst Price is the recognised master and takes just a sip. Price is highly amused to be challenged by the alcoholic, but needless to say Lorre comes off best, only to lose his wife to Price. For revenge he walls them up in his cellar. The humour of both these films is genuine because it never leaves the context of the film like, say, the infantile Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters. Corman-type humour has been sadly lacking from horror films, yet it would appear to be obvious that films which are so often hilariously funny when intended to be deadly serious, indicate that comic-horror would be a success. Cinemas may now become flooded with this type of film, but few, I fear, will be as good as The Raven or The Cat.  p. 111

Unfortunately this was the only film column to appear from this writer anywhere.
The Books column is split three ways, and begins with Tomorrow in Retrospect by George Collyn, who briefly discusses Aldiss’s Greybeard and Ballard before heralding Journey Beyond Tomorrow by Robert Sheckley as a significant development in the SF field. There are additional comments about Kurt Vonnegut, with whom Sheckley is compared.
Books: Is Blish Over-Rated? by Michael Moorcock is largely taken up by an extended review of the Best SF Stories of James Blish. Moorcock tells us he first encountered Blish in A Case of Conscience, which he thought excellent, but that he didn’t think much of the subsequent work he read (Earthman Come Home, The Night Shapes, Titan’s Daughters, The Star Dwellers, etc.). He continues:

[You] might feel that my faith in the author of A Case of Conscience was shattered. You would be wrong—such is the power of other people’s opinions that I was still convinced that Blish was a giant among SF writers. When Best SF Stories of James Blish turned up on my desk I decided that this was bound to be good and I would make a point of giving it a long review to do it justice.
It should prove how much I admire A Case of Conscience in that I am still not moved to my usual fury having read this collection of seven short stories. The fact is that all these stories are decent, craftsmanlike jobs and therefore stand out from a great many of the collections being produced today, but they are little more than that. Plainly Mr. Blish has been over-rated—not least by Mr. Blish himself, judging by his own introductions to his stories—and his reputation rests on the publication of one excellent novel that deserves all the praise it has received. Without Case of Conscience would Mr. Blish’s reputation be so high? I very much doubt it. It would still be good in SF circles—on the whole his craftsmanship is not in question—on the strength of some very reasonable stuff contributed to magazines and anthologies over the years, but the large proportion of his work is certainly no better than that of other good craftsmen in the field—Kuttner, Kornbluth. Heinlein, Simak, etc.—and does not give him a place beside Aldiss, Bester, Ballard—or even Asimov, in my opinion.  p. 116-117

He goes on to discuss the stories in detail: it would be interesting to come back to these comments after reading the volume.
There are short (positive) reviews of John Brunner’s No Future in It (a collection whose stories are “considerably more informative, entertaining and less pretentious than Mr. Blish’s”) and Telepathist (Brunner is “an author who deserves a far higher reputation and list of published novels in this country than he has so far received.”)
Books: Holes in the Sky by Langdon Jones reviews Spectrum IV by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, which includes a “very interesting” discussion between the editors that first appeared in SF Horizons, but is also a collection that is “curious in that it manages to hit such high and low levels in 320 pages.”⁶ Jones goes on to discuss the stories in some detail (Anthony Boucher’s Barrier, “goes on too long”, and Cordwainer Smith’s A Planet Named Shayol is, “an excellent, weird and horrible story”).
Jones then reviews Poul Anderson’s Trader to the Stars, a fix-up of three previously published stories, which he did not like:

The central story could have been called Death Gulch, and with a few changes of name, Anderson could have sold it to Wild West Weekly. The book contains all the points that prevented SF from being accepted by the general public until fairly recently—hackneyed plots, uninspired writing and lack of characterisation. Mind you, van Rijn has plenty of character. He must have, when he says things like “What in the name of ten times ten to the tenth damned souls on a logarithmic spiral to hell is going on here for fumbly-diddles?”  p. 122

Jones’s final comments are on Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky:

The story is a cross between Lord of the Flies and The Swiss Family Robinson, and contains plenty of action. An excellent story for the middle-teens, but adults will find it, although very readable, rather slight. However, I found it worth reading, if just for the memorable line, “My father always said that if the Almighty had intended us to use those gate things instead of rocket ships He would have provided His own holes in the sky.”  p. 122-123

Letters to the Editor is rather dull this time around, although all three correspondents make reasonable points (publish stories that fit in the magazine whether the stories are SF or not; the idioms that SF uses will take time to change; our classics novels are not classics outside the field.)

An issue worth getting for the Platt and Fry stories, and some of the non-fiction.  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall says (Vector #34, August 1965, p. 15-16) that Platt’s Lone Zone is “a particularly memorable piece”, and that is “unusually excellent for a second-published story, and it certainly bodes well for Platt’s writing future”.
The Jones and Williams stories both remind him of other work: Wells’ Under the Knife in Jones’ case, and William W. Stuart’s Inside John Barth (Galaxy, June 1960) in William’s.
He thought Dikk Richardson’s short-short, “better than the usual run of vignettes”.
Richard Gordon’s story “is rather over-written, and one would have guessed that it was by an inexperienced writer. But it, too, bodes quite well.”
He thinks that Aldiss’s work “seems to get slighter and slighter—one day he will just float away. But “Supercity” makes up in amusement for what it loses in substance.” [It appears that Hall doesn’t realise that the story is a reprint that is several years old.]
Colin Fry’s The Night of the Gyul “has nothing new to say and says it quite entertainingly”.
Hall notes the non-fiction contents but offers no comments.
[Thanks to Jo at the British Science Fiction Association’s Vector magazine for providing a scan of the review above. The BSFA’s membership page is here.]

2. Lone Zone was revised and appeared as the third part of Charles Platt’s The City Dwellers (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970). I note (see my “slow-moving” comment above) that this revised section starts with an action scene from the end of the original story and is then told in flashback.

3. Stuart Gordon is perhaps best known for his ‘Eyes’ trilogy. His ISFDB page is here.

4. Unfortunately Colin R. Fry did not write any sequels to this story, and published his fourth and last story (and third for New Worlds) six months later. His ISFDB page is here.

5. The ratings for this issue appeared in #154:

This is more or less the order that I came up with.

6. I’m pretty sure that Amis and Conquest’s Spectrum III was one of the early anthologies I read when I was a teenager:

Introduction (Spectrum III) • (1963) • essay by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest
Killdozer! • (1944) • novella by Theodore Sturgeon
The Voices of Time • (1960) • novelette by J. G. Ballard
Call Me Joe • (1957) • novelette by Poul Anderson
We Would See a Sign • (1963) • short story by Mark Rose
Dreams Are Sacred • (1948) • novelette by Peter Phillips
Exploration Team • [Colonial Survey] • (1956) • novelette by Murray Leinster
Fondly Fahrenheit • (1954) • novelette by Alfred Bester
The Sentinel • [A Space Odyssey] • (1951) • short story by Arthur C. Clarke

Reading Killdozer in this volume rings a bell but I’m drawing blanks on most of the others.  ●