Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY DAMIEN BRODERICK

      Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories

      Building New Worlds, 1946-1959 (with John Boston)

      Chained to the Alien: The Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]

      Climbing Mount Implausible: The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer

      Embarrass My Dog: The Way We Were, the Things We Thought

      Ferocious Minds: Polymathy and the New Enlightenment

      Human’s Burden: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)

      I’m Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners (with Rory Barnes)

      New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1960-1964 (with John Boston)

      Post Mortal Syndrome: A Science Fiction Novel (with Barbara Lamar)

      Skiffy and Mimesis: More Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]

      Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 (with John Boston)

      Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature

      Warriors of the Tao: The Best of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature [Editor with Van Ikin]

      x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction

      Zones: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)

      Borgo Press Books by John Boston

      Building New Worlds, 1946-1959 (with Damien Broderick)

      New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1960-1964 (with Damien Broderick)

      Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-1967 (with Damien Broderick)

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2013 by John Boston and Damien Broderick

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      As always, for Dori and the guys.

      J.B.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      These books were first aired in more rudimentary form on the Fictionmags Internet discussion group, and benefited greatly from the robust and erudite commentary and correction customary among its members. In particular we thank Fictionmags members Ned Brooks, William G. Contento, Ian Covell, Steve Holland, Frank Hollander, Rich Horton, David Langford, Dennis Lien, Barry Malzberg, Todd Mason, David Pringle, Robert Silverberg, and Phil Stephensen-Payne, as well as David Ketterer, for the encouragement, insight, and information that they respectively provided.

      J.B. and D.B.

      INTRODUCTION

      by Damien Broderick

John Boston is an occasional amateur science fiction critic of long standing, and attorney (Director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project of the New York City Legal Aid Society and co-author of the Prisoners’ Self-Help Litigation Manual).1 Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, as he once remarked wryly, that he’s fond of escape literature.

      Several years ago, Boston read through every issue of the classic British science fiction magazine New Worlds—sometimes with grim disbelief, sometimes with unexpected pleasure, often with gusts of laughter, always with intent interest. That magazine is best remembered today as the fountainhead of the New Wave of audacious experimental SF in the second half of the 1960s, and beyond, under the great helmsman, Michael Moorcock, and his madcap transgressive associates. But these 141 pioneering issues, from 1946 to 1964, were edited by the magazine’s founder, Edward John (Ted, or John) Carnell (1912-72). Not to be confused with the prominent Baptist theologian and apologist of the same name, Ted Carnell was a pillar of the old-style UK SF establishment, but gamely supportive of innovators—most famously, of the brilliant J. G. Ballard, whose first work he nurtured.

Indeed, as Moorcock remarked many decades later: “Ted Carnell always wore sharp suits and I’ll swear he had a camel hair overcoat. He looked like a successful dandified bookie. [He] stood out from the general run of fashion-challenged fans who adopted the universal sports coat and flannels.” It was a distinction in style that catches the difference between the generations of old New Worlds and new. Moorcock added: “Ted would never be caught dead with patches on the elbows of a sports coat. Charles Platt tells me how disgusted he was when he first met me in Carnell’s office and saw that I was wearing Cuban-heeled boots and tight trousers, etc. He didn’t feel anyone could be taken seriously who cared that much for fashion. I didn’t, of course. I was just wearing what my peers were wearing around Ladbroke Grove in those days.” 2

      John Boston, for his own amusement, found himself writing an extensive commentary on those early, foundational years of New Worlds and companion magazine Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures. He posted his ongoing analysis in a long semi-critical series to a closed listserv devoted to enthusiasts of pulp and subsequent popular magazines. The present study, published in three parts (two of them largely focused on New Worlds) due to the length of its exacting but entertaining coverage of these 15 years of publication, is an edited and reorganized version of those electronic posts. This volume covers the early years of New Worlds, from its precarious birth to the point at which it had become solidly established as the UK’s leading SF magazine.

      I found Boston’s issue-by-issue forensic probing of this history enthralling and amusing, and read it sometimes with shudders and grimaces breaking through, and often with a delighted grin at a neatly turned bon mot. Don’t expect a dry, modishly theorized academic analysis, nor a rah-rah handclapping celebration of the “Good Old Days.” This is a candid and astute reader’s response to a magazine that, by today’s standards, was often not very good—but one that was immensely important in its time, and improved, like the Little Engine (or maybe Starship) That Could. The story of how New Worlds got better, achieving and consolidating its position, is an essential piece of the history of the genres of the fantastic in the UK, and indeed the world.

      I had the good fortune, as an SF theorist and writer, to read these chapters as they arrived via email. Greatly entertained, often flushed by nostalgia (for this was the literature of my remembered youth), I insisted to John Boston that his work deserved to be read by as many interested people as possible. He was busy on important legal work in defense of those lost in an overburdened US criminal justice (or “justice”) system, and had no time for such laborious scutwork. I rapped on his internet door from time to time, insisting that it would be a shame—a crime, even—not to allow this material to be read by the world at large.

      At last he buckled, passed me his large files covering all the issues of Carnell’s New Worlds and the short-lived Science Fiction Adventures (some quarter million words), plus another large book’s worth of equivalent reading into Science Fantasy (my favorite as an adolescent, in colonial Australia). All three volumes of reading and commentary really comprise one large book of some 350,000 words—and I can only recommend that after you enjoy this first volume, you’ll hasten to read the other two as well.

      * * * *

The prehistory of New Worlds is well recorded, especially by SF fan historian Rob Hansen.3 “Scientific romances” had a long if patchy history prior to the 20th century, and the names Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are justly famous as the 19th century “fathers of SF”—with Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, arguably the mother. But commercial mass market science fiction (or “scientifiction”) was launched in the USA by Luxembourgian immigrant Hugo Gernsback, an atrocious writer with a zest for wacky ideas (television, for example, and space travel) and a habit of cheating his writers. In August 1926 he brought out Amazing Stories, the first commercial