New Worlds: Before the New Wave, 1960-1964. 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

      Borgo Literary Guides

      ISSN 0891-9623

      Number Seventeen

      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.

      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

      Science fiction (SF) is often regarded as one of the new genres created in America, alongside the Western, “mean streets” noir crime fiction, and “chick lit.” By the time SF came close to taking over the blockbuster movie slot in the late twentieth century and the start of the new millennium, it could be seen as the pre-eminent form of storytelling in the voice of the technological West. Yet the names still often blurted out when someone expresses an interest in science fiction are not American. “Oh, you mean that Jules Verne, H. G. Wells stuff?” Leaving aside the antiquity of these fabled names, it’s revealing that one is French and the other British.

      Still, commercial science fiction really did start as a mass commercial genre in the USA. So it can come as some surprise that a parallel universe of SF developed in Britain in the middle of last century, sometimes borrowing stories from the established US writers and magazines but also developing its own distinctive strains of SF narrative. This book looks closely at two magazines that played a key role in this parallel-but-entwined history, the classic British science fiction magazine New Worlds from the start of the Sixties and its younger sibling Science Fiction Adventures, through to their demise or transformation in the mid-1960s. It follows the first volume, Building New Worlds, which carried New Worlds from its founding amid the ruins of war into the post-Sputnik era.

As noted in Volume One, John Boston is an occasional 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 Several years ago, Boston read through every issue of 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.

      John Boston, for his own amusement, found himself writing an extensive commentary on those early, foundational years of New Worlds and companion magazines 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 fifteen years of publication, is an edited and reorganized version of those electronic posts. This volume covers the late years of New Worlds, from the point at which it had become solidly established as the UK’s leading SF magazine to its transformation into a quite new kind of SF.

      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, and 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. This concluding portion carries the saga of New Worlds through to the end of the Carnell era and the birth of its scandalous successor.

1. See “The Long Road Toward Reform,” http://www.wahmee.com/pln_john_boston.pdf (visited 9/9/2011).