“Adoption” by Don J. Doughty (6), his only appearance in the SF magazines, competently rings a change on a standard plot: Johnny has an imaginary playmate Bugs, but Bugs proves to be real, from a pretty horrible future, so when he comes home with Johnny and then can’t get back to his own time, Johnny’s parents are happy to take him in.
J. W. Groves’ “Robots Don’t Bleed” (8) recapitulates Lester del Rey’s mawkish “Helen O’Loy,” this time as spite. Space pilot meets girl as a result of the lifelike robot rabbits she makes. They want to get married but he needs money, so he spaces out again (as it were) for a year, and when he gets back, there she is to meet him, except he figures out it isn’t really she when a spaceship crash-lands on her and she isn’t hurt. She’s made a lifelike robot of herself to occupy him, and meanwhile she’s married someone else. So he heads back to space with the robot (“If it was good for nothing else, at least it could do the chores.”). But he gets homesick, and returns and drops in on his ex-fiancé, who has grown fat and snobbish and has reduced her formerly spacegoing husband to puttering around making toy model spaceships. So it’s outward bound into the great void again, with his robot, no return planned. Carnell liked this one enough to anthologize it twice, in No Place Like Earth and The Best From New Worlds. Groves (b. 1910) published a dozen stories in the SF magazines in a curiously symmetrical career: one in 1931, 10 from 1950 through 1954 (one in Astounding, the others in the US pulps), and one in 1964. He also published two belated novels in the late 1960s, Shellbreak and The Heels of Achilles.
Ian Williamson’s “Chemical Plant” (8) belongs to a common subgenre in New Worlds and many other SF magazines: send the characters to a newly discovered planet and set them a technical puzzle. See Rayer’s “Necessity,” discussed earlier in this chapter, for another very similar example. Here, a spaceship lands on a planet covered with vegetation, near five lakes all of which have differently colored water, then disappears. Investigation by would-be rescuers reveals that the world-plant was extracting chromium for nourishment. The lakes are different acid baths, and the spaceship is a huge and tasty morsel that the plant humped into one of the lakes by selectively growing. There is a stereotypical clash between the pompous captain who wants to blast everything and the nice captain who gets down on the ground and turns over rocks to find out what is going on. It’s not badly done, and the readers put it first in the issue, ahead of Clarke’s “Guardian Angel.” Carnell anthologized the story in No Place Like Earth, and said: “Ian Williamson denies all credit for the story under his name, stating that it was actually written by a logical-computing machine which is kept in a cellar near Manchester University. As a physicist he stumbled across this ‘captive’ machine quite by accident—it had been built by a scientist who could prove that he was sane and the rest of the world quite mad. As nobody is likely to believe Mr. Williamson’s statement, he is quite happy in the knowledge that he can go on using the machine to further his own literary ideals.” It must have blown a resistor or something; Ian Williamson has no other credits in the SF magazines.
Norman Lazenby’s “The Cireesians” (4) is an amusing if incompetently written tale of transcendence. It seems Earth humans originated in an unauthorized bio-engineering experiment by one of the true humans of Cirees, and they were hastily dumped on the young planet Earth along with a conscience-stricken Cireesian who helps them survive, contemporaneously with dinosaurs. Eventually they evolve into us, and 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.
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