Building New Worlds, 1946-1959. Damien Broderick
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The cover logo is now simple and readable. The subtitle “fiction of the future” remains. With 6, the logo is enclosed in a rectangular box, interrupted on the bottom by the subtitle. The cover of 4, by Dennis, is a bit crude, but it makes a virtue of its crudity, since the picture is purposefully stark and stylized and effective as a result.21 5 is a further improvement, being the first cover by Clothier, whose often busy and always colorful and eye-catching work dominated for the next couple of years. He knew how to be gaudy but not cheesy—not an easy line to walk. (Admittedly some of these covers have become kitsch retroactively simply because their Art-Deco slant has fallen so far out of fashion.)
Clothier, like US favorite Emsh (Ed Emshwiller) in later years, specializes in incorporating his signature into the picture, but even more visibly: 6 includes a map of Venus produced by Clothier Projection; 7 has a vehicle of Clothier Contractors; in 8, the futuristic Clothier Hotel is in the lower right corner. The first Clothier cover is also the first since 1 without a story title over it, which remained the practice for several years. All five of these covers depict spaceships or equally portentous machinery (it’s hard to tell about a couple of them), with human figures at best in a supporting role. There is no statement that the covers illustrate any of the stories, but at least some of them do. The cover of 5, illustrating a spaceship taking off from underwater, is taken from Sydney J. Bounds’ “Too Efficient.” The navigational motif of 6 appears connected with A. Bertram Chandler’s “Coefficient X.” The cover of 8, portraying a giant vessel that looks a little bit like a giant sausage penetrated horizontally by a neon halo and vertically by a body piercing stud, hovering over a futuristic city, seems to illustrate Arthur C. Clarke’s “Guardian Angel.”
Interior illustrations, generally adequate but undistinguished, are by Dennis and White in 4, Clothier and Turner in 5 and 6, Clothier and Hunter in 7 and 8. Carnell says in the editorial in 5 that Clothier is new to SF but Turner is a veteran of 1938-39, and indeed a 1939 issue of Fantasy features illustrations by an H.E. Turner. The strength of Clothier’s covers has a lot to do, both directly and indirectly, with his bold use of color, but his black and white work is fairly nondescript. However, this may be due to limitations in reproduction technology. Comparing these issues with a contemporaneous Astounding (April 1949, illustrations by Cartier, Quackenbush, and Orban), it seems to my amateur’s eye that New Worlds’s printing—not just its artists—is less capable of reproducing fine detail.
Each issue has an editorial and “The Literary Line-Up,” and starting in 5 each has either a book or a film review, one item reviewed per issue. The books covered are William F. Temple’s Four-Sided Triangle (5), Arthur C. Clarke’s Interplanetary Flight (7), and Ley and Bonestell’s The Conquest of Space (8). All the reviews are unsigned except the last, signed “J.C.” The film review is of a documentary called The Wonder Jet, notable for its scene—memorialized here in a still photo—of a man wearing an old-style leather flying helmet with earflaps, rapt in perusal of New Worlds 3. This is signed “W.F.T.,” clearly William F. Temple. The only other non-fiction in these issues is Clarke’s “The Shape of Ships to Come” (4), about what spaceships are likely to look like (maybe like dumbbells with one end larger than the other; spin ’em for gravity and they’ll look like hydrogen atoms). The practice of publishing an article in most issues did not get established until 1951.
Since New Worlds is now its own entity and not the product of a pulp chain, the advertising more or less fits the content and no more jockstraps or gland tonics are on offer. All issues but 4 have ads on back and inside front and back covers (4 has the Table of Contents on the inside front); interior ad pages go from none in 4 to one in 5 to two in 6 and back down to one in 8. Almost all the ads are for books and magazines, mostly SF, though there are exceptions, such as the ad on the inside front cover of 8 for Rider, which sells occult books including Psychic Pitfalls: “An A.B.C. of speaking with the dead, showing us how to avoid mistakes and disillusionments.” Their ad in 7 offers Reincarnation For Everyman by the same author, Shaw Desmond. In several of the issues, Loyal Novelty Supplies, purveyors of Magical Novelties, takes a half-page, complete with cartoon rabbit doing card tricks.
The editorials, formerly crammed in filler-style in small type, are now allocated a full page or two. The two-pager in 4 is titled “Confidence.” Carnell says that the magazine’s existence “calls for a certain amount of justifiable pride,” noting that the previous publisher had ceased business. He says that he first planned the magazine in 1940, now he’s got a team of experts working with him (though as noted none of them are credited), and here’s his manifesto: “I have been certain for a long time that there is a place for British magazine science fiction in this country without the readers having to rely entirely upon the medium of American counterparts (couched, in the main, in a style designed to suit an American reading public and not a British one).”
After noting the history of false starts in British magazine SF, the editorial concludes: “The one vital factor which stands supreme is that this type of literature has been asked for by readers for years, and despite the failures by the wayside, I have every confidence that a good quality magazine such as I hope New Worlds to be, will fill the vital need from an English standpoint.” And there’s a variation or even counterpoint, in “The Literary Line-Up”: “Although we warn you that we shall from time to time experiment with different types of stories, ever pursuing a policy of publishing the best British science fiction available.”
Oddly, Carnell doesn’t say exactly what constitutes this “English standpoint” he’s talking about, nor, by contrast, “a style designed to suit an American reading public and not a British one.” It is noteworthy that there appear to be no US writers in these issues, and only one—Forrest J. Ackerman with his inane vignette and convention report in 2—in the earlier ones. There are a number of reprints from US magazines, but almost no original fiction by US authors, in the magazine’s first decade. There is an Arthur J. Burks story in 10 in 1951; “The Literary Line-Up” in 10 reports that one Hjalmar Boyesen, to appear in the next issue, is an American living in London; and then the next one appears to be Robert Silverberg’s “Critical Threshold” in 66, December 1957. In the magazine’s first years, it seems either that US writers were not even using New Worlds as a salvage market, or Carnell was not allowing them to. The same is not true of Science Fantasy. By the end of 1956, the magazine under Carnell had published five stories, in many fewer issues than New Worlds had published at the time, by the (then) relatively marginal 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