by Fiona Moore

Greetings from the Island of Formosa, more usually known as the Republic of China! Though the local name for the island is “Taiwan.” I’m here on a visiting fellowship at National Tsinghua University.

The Republic is a hub of electronics and engineering, and so there is a great appetite for SFF here. SF is regarded by the nationalist government as a way of encouraging young people into careers in science, and also SF, of the “if this goes on…” variety, is seen as a vector of “moral teaching”.

Nonetheless, for the past twenty years Taiwan has lagged behind Korea in the production of locally-written SFF. Most what is available is foreign SF works like Asimov and Clarke, in (often not very good, or indeed legal) translation. In fact, some translators leave the author’s name off the novel and pass it off as theirs! The scene is further hampered by restrictions on Japanese cultural products, an understandable reaction to 50 years of Japanese colonisation but nonetheless one which denies Chinese people a wealth of movie and comic-book content.

However, there are signs of change emerging, with the rise of a thriving short SF fiction scene. The appearance of Zhang Xiaofeng’s clone story Pandora in the China Times in 1968 has led to the publication of a lot of stories in mainstream newspapers and magazines, the creation of dedicated SFF magazines, and even an SF short story contest. The government is said to be encouraging the development of a “truly Chinese” SF. Some authors to watch include Chang Shi-Go, an electronics engineer by day and writer by night, Zhang Xiguo, and Huang Hai, who is rumoured to be putting together an anthology of near-future science fiction stories.

Meanwhile, my copy of New Worlds has followed me safely to Asia. It’s the 200th issue: will it mark a new direction for New Worlds, or will it be more of the same old worlds?

You can probably guess.

Cover by Andrew Lanyon

Lead-In

In which Michael Moorcock celebrates New Worlds making it to 200 issues with a rant about how they won’t make it to 300 if the arts council grant doesn’t come through and/or more people don’t buy the magazine. Signs of trouble I fear.

The Dying Castles by Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany and James Sallis

art by Alan Stephanson

A half-page vignette in three sections, I assume written in round-robin style by the authors. It stops just when it seems to get going. Three stars for the prose.

Secret Identity by John Sladek

art by Andrew Lanyon

A modernist spoof of spy fiction. Well written for what it is, but I feel like we’ve been here before: writers have been sending up spy fiction since Ian Fleming got on the bestseller lists. Two stars.

The Floating Nun by M. John Harrison

art by uncredited artist, possibly Andrew Lanyon as he is credited with the rest of the artwork on this story

An excerpt from a longer novel, The Committed Men, yet to be published. It's really quite gripping, featuring a group of travellers trying to cross a post-apocalyptic British landscape, full of mutants and dominated by a sort of perverted cannibalistic folk-horror Christianity. I’m definitely going to look for the full version. Four stars.

The Time Ship by Paul Green

A poem about, well, a time-ship spinning uncontrolled through history. Some good imagery. Three stars.

The Tarot Pack Megadeath by Ian Watson

art by Judy Watson

Of course there’s an Ian Watson story (and there’ll be more Watson content later)—but again, I don’t mind, as he’s the most fresh and original thing in New Worlds at the moment. This is a piece about a US President facing total societal collapse, told through a tarot reading—one suspects that Watson did the tarot reading first and built the story around it, but that’s perfectly legitimate as a tool for inspiration. Sometimes the cards are described and sometimes they’re left for the reader to work out from the content. Four stars.

Two Stories by Gwyneth Cravens

The first is “Abbe Was I Ere I Saw Ebba”, a story having fun with palindromes and etymology. The second is “Literature and the Future of the Obsolete but Perpetual Present by Claude Rene Vague”, a mock essay sending up the more opaque and pretentious forms of literary criticism with a lot of French puns. It’s at least more readable than most experimental stories with a “clever” conceit are. Three stars.

Computer 70: Dreams and Love Poems, Part Two by D.M. Thomas

art by Andrew Lanyon

A continuation of last issue’s poem series. Like last issue’s, there’s some good imagery about machines and loves, but it all goes on a little too long. Two stars.

Gunk Under The Skin by Raymond Johnson

art by R. Glyn Jones

A short piece about a man who gets off on affixing green tape to his secretary’s skin, until she becomes entirely green. A bit creepy and fetishistic. Two stars.

The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod by Philip Jose Farmer

art by Alan Stephanson

The premise for this one is “what if Tarzan was written by William S. Burroughs instead of Edgar Rice Burroughs?” and that’s as far as the joke goes. I got a laugh out of it, particularly its sending up of Tarzan story clichés like Jane seemingly being abducted every five minutes, but it got boring pretty quickly and there was a woman-hating edge to it that I didn’t really get on with. Two stars.

Comic Strip by Judy Watson

art by Judy Watson

Ian Watson’s wife Judy’s previous contribution to the magazine was the surreal cartoon interpretations of Japanese culture from the February issue. I’d thought they were impressive and clearly someone on the editorial staff did too, as she’s back with a visual meditation on women’s anxieties about attractiveness and relationships. Four stars.

Books

Bob Marsden reads the proceedings of the Alpbach Symposium 1968; Joyce (Not A Woman) Churchill thinks that British fantasy is in a dire place because someone is reprinting James Branch Cabell and John Norman has another so-called book out; James Cawthorn quite likes a book by de Camp and Pratt. Note to self: ask campus bookshop to order in the Cabell reprints.

The music review column seems to have been abandoned; on the one hand, this is a shame as it was at least something new for the magazine, but on the other, it wasn’t really contributing anything new to music reviewing.

An advertisement on p. 30 indicates that J.G. Ballard is exhibiting a sculpture called “Crashed Cars” at the Arts Lab. One wonders when he’ll get it all out of his system.

methinks Ballard is getting a bit big for his boots

Overall, this is definitely more a looking-back than looking-forward issue. New Worlds seems to be staying firmly in its wheelhouse for the most part, with the same writers covering the same themes and only the occasional new voice creeping in. Sorry, Michael Moorcock, but I’m afraid at this rate no, we won’t see an Issue 300.

---

---

[New to the Journey?  Read this for a brief introduction!]

Follow on BlueSky