by Fiona Moore

Hello! I’m taking over the New Worlds reviews from Mark Yon, which is a little intimidating, but I hope I’ll be able to live up to his excellent legacy.

On the UK Star Trek broadcast front, I missed “Mudd’s Women” due to having to take a work trip to Glasgow, but “A Taste of Armageddon” was decent anti-war satire if a bit heavy-handed. Having seen a few episodes in colour on trips to North America, I have to say it works less well in black and white, but at least we do get the idea.

Cover for New Worlds, September 1969

Lead-In (New Worlds 194) by The Publishers

This is brief, without the edge of hysteria from last month, which leads me to hope that they’ve got the financial issues under control. It’s also good to know that JG Ballard has a collection coming out, The Atrocity Exhibition. The lineup this month features regular contributors and well-known people on the New Wave scene, but perhaps it’s a little too conservative as a result. Three stars.

A Place and a Time to Die by JG Ballard

Art by Mal dean

This story is about an implied Chinese Communist takeover of an implied USA, though with a degree of vagueness as to time and place. It follows two men attempting to hold the line as the invaders, or maybe exponents of an internal coup, come into town. This is a bleak description of warfare; no one is heroic and everyone is ugly. It also highlights how ideological takeovers can be more powerful than armed ones. Four stars.

Pictures from an Exhibition 9 and 10 by Giles Gordon

Artist unknown

Two vignettes, inspired by pictures in a Sunday colour supplement, and part of a longer work. The two pictures have little in common apart from featuring in the same publication, and the point seems to be both to draw narratives out of the images and to highlight how newspapers juxtapose unrelated imagery, causing the reader to look for meaning. Three stars.

Transplant by Langdon Jones

The text of Transplant, with concrete effects

A concrete poem about a heart transplant. It’s dramatic and evocative, making one think about how horrific even a life-saving surgical procedure really is. Cutting open humans and sticking new hearts in them is a horrifiying idea, and yet lives are saved. Four stars.

The Incomplete Science by B.J. Bayley

This is a non-fiction piece on economics, a concept SFF writers ignore far too often. The author presents two sets of economic dynamics, one relating to production and the other to land values, and concludes without reconciling them. The subject is very interesting but unfortunately it’s also very dry. Two stars.

The Capitol by George MacBeth

This is a series of sonnets that appear to be found poetry, a set of lines from newspaper stories all thrown together out of context. Like “Pictures at an Exhibition”, the only real meaning I could discern was to point out the absurdity of capitalism and journalism. I’m afraid it left me cold. Two stars.

The Party at Lady Cusp-Canine’s by Mervyn Peake

Art by, of course, Mervyn Peake

This is one of the issue’s highlights, including an essay by Langdon Jones. It seems that the original edition of Peake’s posthumous novel Titus Alone excluded a lot of good material and was poorly edited, and Jones has done a lot of work trying to develop a new edition which is closer to what Peake intended. As a Peake fan I’m thrilled by the news, and hoping that the revived Titus Alone will be something more in the style of the first two Gormenghast novels. The excerpt is certainly in line with Peake’s ascerbic wit, capturing the brittle nastiness of cocktail parties with a plethora of evocative animal names and similies. There is also brief news about another posthumous novel by Peake coming out, Mr Pye, which should be worth comparing to his earlier fiction.  Five stars.

Lines of White on a Sullen Sea by Maxim Jakubowski

Art by Mal Dean

This is the latest in the ongoing shared-author story featuring Jerry Cornelius. It doesn’t make any more sense than the other ones, but making sense is less of a priority than evoking a mood. Jerry is preoccupied with a Chinese rival; a female Cornelius turns up; there are lovely descriptions of clothes, and characters with absurd names like Treblinka Durand. If you liked the previous entries you'll probably like this. Three stars.

Books (New Worlds 194)

This issue contains no less than five full pages of book reviews, making the reviews section longer than any of the stories. This is a bit much, particularly given the magazine’s current reduced page count.

Slum Clearance by John Clute

John Clute's book reviews

Clute reviews Omnivore by Piers Anthony, Let the Fire Fall by Kate Wilhelm, Retief: Ambassador to Space by Keith Laumer, Brother Assassin by Fred Saberhagen, The Mezentian Gate, an unfinished novel by by E.R. Eddison, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. He quite likes the Le Guin, is scathing about the Anthony, Laumer and Saberhagen, and mixed on everything else. Three stars.

Come Alive—You’re in the William Sanson Generation by Joyce Churchill

Churchill reviews Death Goes Better with Coca Cola by Dave Godfrey, Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada by Ray Smith, Galactic Pot-Healer by Philip K. Dick, The Island Under The Earth by Avram Davidson, and Penguin Modern Stories. She doesn’t seem too happy with any of them, and her comments didn’t leave me wanting to read any of them other than out of morbid curiosity. Two and a half stars.

Getting it Out by Norman Spinrad

Spinrad’s book review article, unlike the other two actually has a theme: he focuses on the output of Essex House, a paperback line whose agenda is to be for pornography what the New Wave has been to SF, leading to a subgenre of “speculative erotic fiction”. He reviews Season of the Witch by Hank Stine, Biker by Jane Gallion, the Agency trilogy by David Melzer, Evil Companions by Michael Perkins and A Feast Unknown by Philip Jose Farmer. Spinrad makes some of them, at least, sound intriguing. I’m going to keep an eye out for the Stine, a gender-bending body horror that sounds up my street. Four stars.

While at first glance it looks like the magazine is back on an even keel after last month’s financial woes, I’m still a bit worried. The writers are all White men with one exception (who I suspect is also White). Meanwhile, a recent trip to see Yoko Ono’s latest show has reminded me that London’s art and film and literature scene is simply exploding with talented people from all over the world. If NW wants to survive, simply writing about sex isn’t original enough any more; it needs to bring in some of the new voices on the scene.

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