Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick
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answer the question but it doesn’t obscure it either.) Carnell, however, thought enough of “Unknown Quantity” to anthologize it both in The Best from New Worlds Science Fiction (Boardman, 1955) and No Place Like Earth (Boardman, 1952).25
Phillips (b. 1920) is probably two-thirds of the way towards Little Known Writer status even among SF cognoscenti. His career, boosted early by the immensely popular “Dreams Are Sacred” in Astounding in 1948, comprised 22 stories from 1948 to 1957, all but two appearing by 1954, starting with a couple in Weird Tales. Most of them appeared in the US magazines, and most of those in Astounding, Galaxy, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. “Lost Memory” may be the best of them. “Plagiarist” is the last original Phillips story to appear in New Worlds, though his last story, “Next Stop the Moon,” was reprinted in New Worlds after appearing in 1957 in the London Daily Herald. He never managed a collection, and “Dreams Are Sacred” is the only story of his that has been reprinted since 1990.
The oddest item in these issues is undoubtedly William de Koven’s “Bighead” (8), a definitive send-up of the genre. In the future, the Brooklyn Movement puts mediocrity in the saddle, until there is a counter-revolution based on brain size. Things were crude at first. The founder explains: “I had to go by hat-size and age.... Unfortunately, this eliminated those whose heads were tall but small in circumference.” Later, more refined methods were developed, relying on cranial capacity, ability to hold one’s liquor, and absence of certainty on questions of life, death, and fate. Now the Bigheads lord it over the Pinheads. But Bighead Zircon defies his father Pluton for the love of a Pinhead girl, Threnda. After they are married, Pluton’s agents go after Threnda, who survives a personality-tuned ray-ship attack only by discarding her clothes (“Clothes are part of the personality. Without them we are not the same. The magnetic emanations of an industrialist at a board meeting are not those of the same man in a bath-tub.”) So it’s war.
The Pinheads head to Mars, with Zircon sworn to help them. He learns he’s being used and Threnda is one of the betrayers; but with the help of Melissa, who is undercover as the chief Pinhead’s secretary (“She reached into the roots of her hair, extracted a tiny badge which fastened with a clip. ‘Melissa, Operative Q-47 of the Bighead Secret Police.’”), Zircon wins through. Peace is in sight. This one sat in inventory for several years; it was advertised in 3 in 1947 as coming next issue. The often humorless Carnell apparently did not know quite what to make of it, as witness his solemn blurb (“It was an old problem—a minority with brains and power, against a majority only endowed with numbers—and corruption.”) The readers didn’t either. They voted it into last place. Carnell later wrote that de Koven “was a pseudonym for a then well-known American author but neither my memory nor records throw any light on his true identity.”26
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A. Bertram Chandler, who published 23 stories in New Worlds under his name and the George Whitley pseudonym, has three stories in these issues. The best, as by George Whitley, is “Castaway” (6), reprinted from the November 1947 Weird Tales. The protagonist, on a ship investigating smoke signals from a Pacific island, suddenly finds himself struggling alone in the water, barely makes it to shore, and when he looks for whoever lit the fire, finds a derelict spaceship from the future, complete with Mannschen Drive and its time-distortion properties. He can’t keep his hands off it, and shortly finds himself in the water again. This is one of Chandler’s better stories, tight and nightmarishly vivid.
The other two are less pointed but typically ingratiating. “Position Line” (4) is an agreeable piece of the nautical geekery that Chandler thrived on for years. On Mars, a spaceship crash has taken out the spaceport and power plant and a lot of people need rescuing fast from the other colony town. The only way is a fleet of Diesel sand cats—but how to navigate across the desert, in this yesterday’s tomorrow without GPS? The protagonist, a dissatisfied policeman, formerly an equally dissatisfied mariner who came to Mars because sailing had become so automated, breaks out the bubble sextant he brought along, and it’s George O. Smith in two dimensions for the rest of the story. This is probably the most mundane story in the issue in terms of science fictional ideation and action, and it’s also the one the readers voted best in the issue.
It is followed by “Coefficient X,” in 6, another navigational opus. On Venus, which has lots of oceans, compasses have stopped working reliably, and ships are getting lost. The protagonist is a compass expert from Earth, and he finds the problem. There are creatures called “loofards,” combinations of loofah and lizard (honest), which the Venerians (here called Hesperians) like to take into the bath with them—for exactly what is not explained, though the loofards do like to eat soap. They turn out to have iron in their bones and to generate magnetic fields, a bit like an electric eel. But there is more going on than this rather arid (well, humid too) gimmick. According to Chandler, Venus is multiracial: “Venus was a huge melting pot in which white and yellow, black and brown, were being blended. The results were—pleasing. The ability to live, to play, of some of the coloured folks lost nothing by admixture with the drive—on Earth so often squandered, so often without a worthy objective—of the whites.” Later on, the ship’s Calypso Man, known as Admiral Stormalong and “not overly dark,” sings a song in the compass-mender’s honor, beginning:
“Eber since de worl’ began
De compass am de frien’ of Man...”
There is also gender politics. The ship’s captain already knows it’s the loofards who are causing the compasses to go awry, but they need to get an expert from Earth to say it (and then to leave hastily) because the women are “the inevitable product of a combination of pioneering and all the comforts of civilization. They’re spoiled here, utterly spoiled.... But they’re powerful.” And they like the loofards and oh, by the way, Voodoo has been reestablished, so the protagonist had better get off the planet fast if he knows what’s good for him, and thank you very much.
A couple of other big names make lackluster contributions. John Beynon’s “Time to Rest” (5) is a well written but sentimental story in which not much happens. Earth has blown up, stranding humans on the other planets, and Bert, who sails the Martian canals in his homemade boat, drops in on the Martian family he is friends with; notices that their daughter is getting grown up; gets nervous and leaves. Her mother says he’ll be back. (And he is, in the sequel, a year or so later.) This one is reprinted from the Arkham Sampler of 1949. Beynon a.k.a. John Wyndham was not really a New Worlds mainstay; he published about 10 stories in it over the years, most notably the “Troons of Space” series starting in 1958, which became The Outward Urge.
William F. Temple’s “Martian’s Fancy” (7) is a piece of slapstick, overlong and tiresome, about a space captain who brings his half-breed illegitimate Martian son home to Earth for a visit with the family, wringing yocks from such matters as the housekeeper’s hirsuteness. Temple made only five appearances in New Worlds. Though prolific, he spread his work around.
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One of the pillars holding up these issues is F. G. Rayer, who previously had an archaic but pleasant item in 3 and a story in Gillings’ Fantasy in 1947. He is a Little Known Writer of a peculiar sort, the quintessential New Worlds homeboy, once very well known in the UK but pretty much unheard of in the US. According to Miller/Contento, from 1947 to 1963, Rayer (1921-81) published some 58 stories in the UK magazines under his own name, eight as by George Longdon, and one as by Chester Delray. Over half of these were in New Worlds. After Carnell left New Worlds, that was it for his SF career. Except for the US reprint of New Worlds, he appeared in the US magazines only three times, each time with a story that also appeared in the UK (though one of them made it into print first in the US). His anthology appearances, few and long ago, were in UK books with no US editions, except for one George Longdon story in an old Andre Norton anthology. Rayer also had a few novels published, one of which, Tomorrow Sometimes Comes, actually made a bit of a splash, but none of them had US editions either.
Rayer is profiled in New Worlds 33 (March 1955), and it seems that his SF was only the tip of an iceberg: he had allegedly published over a thousand stories