Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick

we head out to the Lesser Doriad Cloud, where our boys encounter the remaining Cireesians, who introduce themselves as Gods, having long since disembodied themselves. Big mistake, because now they are helpless: “We are pools of pure thought needing the reviving fibres of crude humans.” But they have a plan: “We will infest your body and then reproduce from you, rapidly and with incredible variation, a new being who will be a biological combination of your two sexes.” They say, “We are entitled to you.” Why? Because their representative stayed on Earth and helped us out hundreds of millions of years ago. But the humans outsmart the Gods and defeat their scheme. Think of it as a cautionary tale about the Singularity. Norman Lazenby (1914-2003), by now a thoroughly Little Known Writer, had appeared a few times in Walter Gillings’ Fantasy in the ’40s, had nothing more in New Worlds, but published a couple of dozen stories, mostly in the (reputedly) really trashy UK magazines like Tales of Tomorrow and Futuristic Science Stories in the 1950s, and contributed such pseudonymous items to the early ’50s downmarket paperback boom as The Brains of Helle, attributed to Bengo Mistral. He had a couple of stragglers in Vision of Tomorrow and Fantasy Booklet much later.

      The bottom of the barrel is shared by W. Moore (not the talented Ward Moore, US author of the celebrated Bring the Jubilee, and this byline does not reappear) and by Francis Ashton. Moore’s “Pool of Infinity” (5) is an inane prepubertal-shaggy-God creation story in which Isosceles and Equilateral fool around with a new mixture Daddy has whipped up, and splash some droplets around. “Jet Landing” by Ashton (6) is a brief and geeky lecture revealing the difficulty of landing a rocket on its tailfins without a stern periscope. That byline appears only in two other stories in Super Science Stories in 1950 and 1951. However, Ashton (1904-94) also produced several novels: The Breaking of the Seals (1946), allegedly a theological fantasy; Alas That Great City (1948), allegedly a sequel, having something to do with Atlantis; and The Wrong Side of the Moon (1952, with Stephen Ashton), an SF novel that Carnell (in 14) found to be of some merit.

19. Carnell recounted that Pendulum’s £80 check to him for the third issue bounced, was reissued, and bounced again, and when Carnell again went to the Pendulum offices, no one was there except Stephen Frances, clearing up for the receiver. All he could offer Carnell was a suitcase full of copies of the magazine, which Carnell later sold on the collectors’ market, recouping his loss more than a decade later. Carnell, “The Birth of New Worlds,” Vision of Tomorrow, October 1970, p. 63.

20. Harbottle, Vultures of the Void: The Legacy, p. 85. See also Frank Arnold’s article “The Circle of the White Horse,” in New Worlds 14.

21. See these covers at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/newworlds.html.

22. Harbottle, Vultures of the Void: The Legacy, p. 85.

23. Except for Carnell’s statement, this is sourced from Neil McAleer’s Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography (Contemporary Books 1992).

24. A parabasis is a point in the play when the actors leave the stage and the chorus addresses the audience directly.

25. No Place Like Earth is an anthology of SF stories by British writers, some reprinted from New Worlds and others from the US magazines.

26. Carnell, “The Birth of New Worlds,” Vision of Tomorrow, September 1970, p. 63.

27. F. G. Rayer, “Science Fiction Personalities,” Space Diversions 6 (April-May 1953), at http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/SpaceDiversions/SpaceDiversions6-04.html (visited 9/8/11).

28. In the Anglo-American legal system, criminal negligence, even resulting in death, is entirely different from murder, so the idea that they would be equated and the former treated as a capital crime in any recognizable future variant on that system is absurd.