US writers E.E. Evans, Les Cole, Charles E. Fritch, Helen Urban, and Harlan Ellison.
On a more mundane level, Carnell says, “The first thing we did was to change the size of the magazine, feeling that it would be far more popular in the handy pocket size than in the larger more cumbersome one.” Here is a subtle piece of cultural history, evoking the bygone era when everybody (men, that is) not engaged in manual labor wore jackets as a daily routine—this large digest magazine wouldn’t fit anybody’s pants pocket.
The editorial in 5, titled “Progress,” says nothing much, but does note that subscriptions are now available. The issue 6 editorial, “No Comparison...,” takes up the transAtlantic anxiety of influence, or of hegemony, again:
It is understandable that New Worlds should be compared with American science-fiction magazines—they have been almost the sole source of reading pleasure to many people in this country for many years. But that New Worlds should be following in American footsteps I disagree most emphatically. Neither is it our aim to imitate any one American publication.
For twenty years now, experts in the fantasy field in this country have been trying to get a truly British science-fiction publication going successfully—it looks as though New Worlds is going to more than fulfill those expectations and ambitions—and already some of the traditions of American publications are beginning to be radically changed to suit our own reading taste.
British authors will almost always produce stories written differently (in style and presentation), from American writers, around plots approached from a different mental angle, a direct result of different environments, customs and conditions, existing in the two countries. It’s hard work for them to write an American story—writing in an English vein comes more naturally!
Therefore I foresee that the gulf between New Worlds and American contemporaries will widen rather than draw closer....
Once more, Carnell says nothing about what this “truly British” approach is. Many issues later, in 29, visiting US writer Alfred Bester does just that, rather well, in the letter column “Postmortem,” to which we shall return.
The editorial in 7, “Good Companions,” announces the launch of Science Fantasy and anticipates the “friendly rivalry” that the two editors (Carnell and Walter Gillings) will develop. That lasted only two issues, and Carnell was editing both magazines starting with Science Fantasy 3. “Conventionally Speaking” in 8 announces the International Science Fiction Convention, to be held in the Bull and Mouth Hotel (not a typo) in May 1951, later shifted to the Royal Hotel because of the large projected attendance; it also mentions the ongoing gatherings of the London SF Group at the White Horse Tavern.
* * * *
Overall, the quality of the fiction improves after the first three issues.
The inane, the archaic, and the bloody awful still make their appearances, but they are a smaller part of the whole (John Russell Fearn is gone), and the median seems comparable to the median in the US pulps of the time, though not much is comparable to the best in those magazines. There are several stories by well-established British writers (Clarke with two stories, Temple and Beynon with one each), and some by newer writers who were flashes in the pan as far as New Worlds goes (John Aiken, Peter Phillips). What is interesting is the emergence of a substantial part of the stable of writers that would carry the magazine through most of the 1950s, including some who were virtually unknown in the US. In these issues the most prolific author is F. G. Rayer, with four short stories. A. Bertram Chandler—already well established, but also to become a New Worlds mainstay—has three, one under the George Whitley pseudonym. Sydney J. Bounds has two, and E. R. James’ first New Worlds story is here. Three of the stories had been previously published in US magazines, but one of them (Clarke’s “Guardian Angel” in 8) is explicitly said by Carnell to have been purchased more or less simultaneously in US and UK.
Issue 4, according to Carnell, contained the same fiction contents as planned for the fourth Pendulum issue.22 It leads off with “World in Shadow,” a novelette by the so-far-undistinguished John Brody. Fortunately, it’s a considerable improvement over his previous stories at the most basic level of readability—fewer malapropisms, overt clichés per square inch, etc. The story proposes that in the future, automation means nobody much needs to work, and more and more people are checking into the Mentasthetic Centres to live in a less boring dream world. What exactly goes on in the dream worlds is not explained—maybe they have dream jobs. Dick Maybach is one of the workhorses; he spends four hours a day running a nuclear power plant. He gets in his copter to hurry home to his bored wife, but:
“Move over, brother!” The voice came from the back of the cabin, a low, soft, voice that held a core of steel. “Don’t look back—and don’t argue. There’s a blaster six inches from your kidneys!”
It’s the Underground, trying to recruit him for their revolutionary scheme, which is to destroy the material basis of society so everybody will have to get off their butts and struggle—and, of course, Man Will Go To The Stars. (They already have all the parts of a spaceship, but in this decadent society nobody remembers how to put them together.) We get several pages of John Galt-ish exposition on how progress requires regress. Dick bites, since he’s afraid his wife, the beautiful Veronica, is about to succumb to the siren call of the Mentasthetic Centres. Conspiracy and hugger-mugger ensue; his wife does succumb, and Dick is presented with the world-historical choice: pull the levers that will blow up the power system and bring a new world into being, and also probably kill most of the millions of people who are jacked in at the Mentasthetic Centres, including his wife. Or not. He pulls the levers—“The Cold Equations,” UK style.
Or so it seems. Unfortunately the author does not quite have the courage of his bloody-mindedness. A few issues later, the lead story in 7 is Brody’s “The Dawn Breaks Red,” and here’s Veronica, big as life, but transformed. After the close of business in “World in Shadow,” Dick went to the local Mentasthetic Centre, where some 50,000 people were at risk of dying. There he found Veronica still alive, and made the doctor on duty, who was trying to save whom he could of the dying thousands, take Veronica out of turn by pointing a gun at him, and then spirited her out, noticing only later that her hair had turned white, and even later that she was demonstrating a remarkable intuition and ingenuity. Now, Veronica thinks it’s dandy that her husband pulled the plug on 50,000 dreamers and killed most of them.
The band of conspirators who brought down civilization have been hanging out in their redoubts Atlas Shrugged-style for a year, and they’re beginning to wonder what’s going on out there, and how all the folks whose lives they wrecked are getting along. So they set out for various destinations, and Dick and company go to his old house and encounter his neighbor. The neighbor is a trifle annoyed at Dick for killing his wife but is willing to let bygones be bygones. He explains that at the Mentasthetic Centres, most everybody died, but there were a few dozen in each whose hair turned white and who developed both enhanced intelligence and a cruel and calculating view of the world—like Veronica. The regular folks are getting ready to have a pogrom against these “whiteheads,” who are also referred to as mutants through the rest of the story.
The folks in the redoubts or “settlements” decide the whiteheads are the hope of humanity, and save them. (An unstated Lamarckian assumption is that people whose heads and follicles have been reorganized by pulling the plug on their artificial dreams will reproduce those characteristics rather than bearing ordinary human children.) However, hostility towards the mutants increases in the settlements, while Veronica has grown completely away from Dick. When the mutants take over, it transpires that they failed in one of the settlements, so the standard humans there are on their way with an aircraft full of atom bombs to wipe out the mutant-dominated settlements. Who ya gonna call? None of the mutants can fly a jet and none of the standard humans wants
