Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick

4. Passingham was also an SF writer in his own right, having contributed stories with such titles as “Atlantis Returns” and “When London Fell” to the UK magazines Modern Wonder and The Passing Show. Walter Gillings, “The Way of the Prophet,” Vision of Tomorrow, May 1970, p. 63.

5. Carnell’s own, more detailed account of these events appears in John Carnell, “The Magazine That Nearly Was,” Vision of Tomorrow, June 1970, pp. 48-49.

6. This was first published in the Los Angeles SF Society fanzine Voice of the Imagination (familiarly, VoM) and is cited by Hansen in http://www.ansible.co.uk/Then/then_1-2.html (visited 9/8/11).

7. Carnell’s more detailed account of these events appears in John Carnell, “The Birth of New Worlds,” Vision of Tomorrow, September 1970, pp. 61-63.

      1: BIRTH AND NEAR-DEATH (1946-47)

As chronicled by literary historian Mike Ashley and others, New Worlds made its long-delayed debut in 1946 (after its earlier fanzine incarnation) as a more or less pulp-sized magazine from Pendulum Publications Ltd., 64 pages exclusive of covers, price 2 shillings (2/-), down to 1 shilling and sixpence (1s 6d, or 1/6) for the third issue.8 The issues are numbered (hereafter indicated in bold), but 1 and 2 bear only the year, no month; 3 bears no date at all. The Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Weird Fiction Magazine Index, a comprehensive database compiled by Stephen T. Miller and William G. Contento (hereafter Miller/Contento), identifies the dates as July and October 1946 and October 1947.9

      In his editorial in 3, John Carnell says “We apologize most profoundly to all our readers who have been wondering when this issue of New Worlds would appear. Probably no magazine issue has been beset by so many obstacles since it went into production, almost all of them in the technical departments. In the main, we were caught by the power cuts and have only just managed to recover.” Britain had endured its most severe cold weather of the 20th century, and the postwar electricity supplies were overwhelmed.

The cover presentations of these early issues are pretty cheesy, resembling the winners of an art contest among fifth-graders. The cover of 3 rises perhaps to junior high school level.10 The first issue’s cover, by Bob Wilkin, an artist employed by Pendulum, portrayed a mushroom cloud bulging above an ambivalent background, corporate-utopian on the left and ruined debris on the right, and a nude, bombed-looking, rather plastic pink man of the future in the foreground. Sales of that first issue were terrible—3000 of 15,000 copies were sold—and Carnell, who had not approved, or even seen, the cover until it was completed, later described its execution as “flat and two dimensional, dull and uninspiring.” Not surprisingly, then, “One point... I was insistent upon—the second issue, already committed to the printer, needed an eye-catching cover painting.” So he designed it himself, combining a spaceship from the cover of a 1937 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and another from a 1938 Amazing Stories. Victor Caesari worked from Carnell’s sketch, and Carnell said: “While not technically perfect it still had good balance and colour and was a striking improvement over No. 1.” The second issue sold out, though not entirely because of the cover—the publisher mounted an “all out drive” on its behalf. But seeing the results, Pendulum proceeded to reprint the cover, substitute 1 for 2, and re-distribute the unsold copies of the first issue, with great success.11

The interior illustrations in 1 and 2 are about as bad as the covers (by Wilkin, perpetrator of the first version cover of 1). Those in 3, by Dennis and by Slack (responsible for that issue’s cover),12 are only a minor improvement.

      Like American pulp magazines, the Pendulum New Worlds had a fair amount of advertising not exactly tailored to its content. The back covers and inside front and back covers bear ads for baldness cures; a career guide from the British Institute of Engineering Technology; “Attack Your Rheumatism through PURE Natural Stafford Herbs”; British Glandular Products Ltd. (“Glands Control Your Destiny!” For men, “testrones”; for women, “overones”); Charles Atlas, who will use Dynamic Tension to build you a more manly body; the British Institute of Practical Psychology (“Inferiority Complex eradicated for ever”); and (my favorite)—jockstraps.

      This last is headed “Wherever men get together...” and has nice little drawings (much better done than anything illustrating the fiction) of a man getting his petrol tank filled by an attendant, a man reading something off a clipboard to another man wearing an eyeshade and seated at a typewriter, and a man cutting another man’s hair in a barber’s chair. None of these activities ever seemed to me to call for an athletic supporter (though I confess I have never actually cut anyone’s hair—maybe it’s more strenuous than it looks), but the pitch of Fred Hurtley, Ltd., for the Litesome Supporter is quite global: “You can be sure that wherever men get together—there you’ll find ‘Litesome.’ It’s grand to buy something and know you couldn’t have done better. You get that feeling with ‘Litesome’ once you’ve experienced its comfort and protection and the increased stamina and vitality which this essential male underwear gives to every man. Whatever your age or condition, whatever your work or your recreation—‘Litesome’ will help you to feel a different, better man!” There are also interior ads in 2 and 3, some of similar ilk, some for more related items such as Fantasy Review and Outlands.

      From the beginning, New Worlds contained non-fiction and tried to connect with its readership. 1 has an editorial, small print placed filler-style at the end of one of the stories, which is mostly blather:

      The past is fixed and unalterable. Of that there can be no doubt.... But from here on, the future looms ahead as a bewildering Land of If.... The dazzling heights of achievement and the dark depths of failure can all be found in those miriad [sic] possible “tomorrows.” [Etc.]

      Comments are invited, and readers are advised to place an order with their newsdealers for the next issue, due in eight weeks. Interestingly, there is nothing about subscriptions here or anywhere else in the magazine. The word is uttered in the editorial in 2, but no rates are mentioned and there is no subscription information anywhere in 2 or 3, though back issues are for sale.

      Issue 2’s editorial has not much more than 1’s that is concrete: thanks for the letters, keep them coming, we’re going to make things better, tell us what you want (and do you want a letter column?), and something brief about atomic bomb tests and public consciousness of SF. 2 also contains a one-page article by L(eslie) J. Johnson, sometime contributor to Walter H. Gillings’ Tales of Wonder and collaborator with Eric Frank Russell, on how science is catching up with SF (more blather though less vague than Carnell’s), along with Forrest J. Ackerman’s report on the Pacificon science fiction convention, held in 1946 after being delayed by World War II, with an attendance of 125 and “a dynamic hour’s speech entitled ‘Tomorrow on the March’” by guest of honor A. E. van Vogt.

      Also in 2, “The Literary Line-Up” first appears, readers’ story ratings from the first issue, comparable to the US Astounding Science Fiction magazine’s “Analytical Laboratory” (also Astounding’s “In Times to Come,” since it predicts the next issue’s stories), but without the actual numerical averages that gave John W. Campbell’s “AnLab” its air of spurious precision. “The Literary Line-Up” persisted through the Carnell era and even into Michael Moorcock’s editorship after mid-1964, though he retitled it “Story Ratings.” In 3, the submission of ratings is encouraged by offering five guineas to the reader whose ratings anticipate the aggregate ratings or come the closest (one would think there would always be multiple winners any time more than a dozen or so readers responded). Also in 3, “The Literary Line-Up”