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New Worlds Quarterly #1
The First of the 'New Worlds Quarterly' periodical edited by Michael Moorcock containing cosmic themed stories, poetry, and artwork, a true vintage collectable.
175 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
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About the author
Michael Moorcock
1,209 books3,750 followersMichael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels.
Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.
During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.
Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine.
During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 5, 2025
These New Worlds anthologies do get finer with age.
Angouleme • (1971) • short story by Thomas M. Disch
-From Disch's alternate-future NYC opus, '334', 'Angouleme' is the tale of a rich kid who, with his revivalist intellectual posse of middle school revolutionaries, formulates a plan to murder a homeless man on the battery park waterfront. What ensues is an exploration of playing Godly Judge vs. Mindless Murderer as our adolescent protagonist tests the fates of adulthood with a death wish and a pistol he can barely fit into his hand. A classic of SF American New Wave.
Journey Across a Crater • (1970) • short story by J. G. Ballard
-A cut-up segment about a crash-landed astronaut roaming about a littered earth, a tech-hell wasteland lensed like an advertisement for Chanel directed by Antonioni. Somewhere between 'The Atrocity Exhibition' and 'Crash', one can feel Ballard moving into the diseased contours of both ruined mind and machine. Disjointed is the intention. Lots of beautiful people broken and full of star-damaged dismay.
The Lamia and Lord Cromis • [Viriconium] • (1971) • novelette by M. John Harrison
-Dark Fantasy with the usual rich and evocative prose by Harrison. Fanaticism runs rampant in the sorcery tale where a hunter takes to the wastelands of Viriconium to destroy the viscous Lamia. While not really memorable for its double-sided reveals, this is high-grade fantasy complete with grim swathes of a majestic and haunted mirror-world rivaling Jack Vance in terms of dark opulence.
The Day We Embarked for Cythera • (1970) • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
-Two story threads clash at once. Aldiss crams in a messy travelogue where two stodgy intellectuals walk the countryside discussing nonsense, paired with obtuse images of highway disasters in what feels like an experiment that had been put on pause and left there dense and unfinished.
Pemberly's Start-Afresh Calliope or, The New Proteus • (1971) • John Sladek
-A mockery of the 'proper' English mystery, jokester Sladek does his usual damage to expectation with playful little experiments that beckon Samuel Beckett writing for IF Magazine. While reading Sladek is fun, there is a strange quality to how his stories bead off the brain, amusing and 'nifty' but soon evaporate into the forgotten. I think I remember a surgeon and a calliope organ and that's about it. Oh wait, wasn't there a head in a box somewhere...?
The God House • (1971) • novelette by Keith Roberts
-A young woman is being prepared as the next wife to The God House, a hive-like relic on a hill that is a place of sacrifice and abuse - of course, all in order to keep the crops bountiful and in bloom. While it has all the makings of a rural post-apocalyptic new-folk horror novella, it plays with expectation of revenge and survival through its core. There's two warring villages preparing for an even larger invader, and while our heroine abuses her abusers, it's the God that the villagers make out of mud and shrapnel that will either protect them, or turn them into a suffering mob. The Green Man never quits.
Prisoners of Paradise • (1966) • short story by David Redd
-Far Out short story from a rather elusive New Worlds contributor, David Redd. Spectral spirit beings may just have once been 'human', and one in particular floats along the void of her native planet to find a crashed ship and its lone pilot thinking about 'colors' - the colors in a 'beer mat'!? In a grey world that becomes primitive, color can be seen as a foreign toxin, a deviant. Could have used another draft perhaps, but the imagery is like something Edward Bryant and Pamela Sargent would conjure up. Solid.
The Short, Happy Wife of Mansard Eliot • (1971) • short story by John Sladek
-More of the same from Sladek. Humorous sitcom deviations. This time, a rich eccentric tries to marry a cleaner in the cereal factory that he owns. Only problem is that he has to get rid of her layabout husband first. Silly may be an apt word for this short story, but it still has its irreverent sense of cruel wonder. "People try to harm him. Yesterday i came home and found him sleeping on the couch, and the kids put a plastic bag over his head. He hates their guts. He could have died."
A Place and a Time to Die • (1969) • short story by J. G. Ballard
-Two middle-aged Englishmen protect their seaside village as the invading Vietnamese army arrives in the thousands, shooting fireworks and constantly banging drums. This tale is fed by racism, its bigoted thread necessary for the penultimate moment Ballard builds and then suddenly destroys. A true gut-punch ending that belittles the reader and eventually chokes them with their own expectations. Classic whimpering speculative fiction at its best.
Exit from City 5 • (1971) • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley [as by Barrington Bayley] *re-read*
-F**k me, this story is so inherently fun. Dome city is a mile-wide abode traveling in a deep space that has no life, no hope, and no dimension. The universe around City 5 is rapidly shrinking and is at the turning point of becoming non-existent, dunzo. While factions split within the dome ship settlement - one for free thought, the other for hard idealism - an attempt is made to breach the void. Has it all come to Destination Null, or will the rebels find a last scrap of solidity to call home?
Be careful what you wish for.
A Literature of Comfort • (1971) • essay by M. John Harrison
-Harrison takes his criticism to recent releases such as LP Davies 'Genesis Two' and Arthur Sellings' 'Junk Day'.
Magnificent.
Angouleme • (1971) • short story by Thomas M. Disch
-From Disch's alternate-future NYC opus, '334', 'Angouleme' is the tale of a rich kid who, with his revivalist intellectual posse of middle school revolutionaries, formulates a plan to murder a homeless man on the battery park waterfront. What ensues is an exploration of playing Godly Judge vs. Mindless Murderer as our adolescent protagonist tests the fates of adulthood with a death wish and a pistol he can barely fit into his hand. A classic of SF American New Wave.
Journey Across a Crater • (1970) • short story by J. G. Ballard
-A cut-up segment about a crash-landed astronaut roaming about a littered earth, a tech-hell wasteland lensed like an advertisement for Chanel directed by Antonioni. Somewhere between 'The Atrocity Exhibition' and 'Crash', one can feel Ballard moving into the diseased contours of both ruined mind and machine. Disjointed is the intention. Lots of beautiful people broken and full of star-damaged dismay.
The Lamia and Lord Cromis • [Viriconium] • (1971) • novelette by M. John Harrison
-Dark Fantasy with the usual rich and evocative prose by Harrison. Fanaticism runs rampant in the sorcery tale where a hunter takes to the wastelands of Viriconium to destroy the viscous Lamia. While not really memorable for its double-sided reveals, this is high-grade fantasy complete with grim swathes of a majestic and haunted mirror-world rivaling Jack Vance in terms of dark opulence.
The Day We Embarked for Cythera • (1970) • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
-Two story threads clash at once. Aldiss crams in a messy travelogue where two stodgy intellectuals walk the countryside discussing nonsense, paired with obtuse images of highway disasters in what feels like an experiment that had been put on pause and left there dense and unfinished.
Pemberly's Start-Afresh Calliope or, The New Proteus • (1971) • John Sladek
-A mockery of the 'proper' English mystery, jokester Sladek does his usual damage to expectation with playful little experiments that beckon Samuel Beckett writing for IF Magazine. While reading Sladek is fun, there is a strange quality to how his stories bead off the brain, amusing and 'nifty' but soon evaporate into the forgotten. I think I remember a surgeon and a calliope organ and that's about it. Oh wait, wasn't there a head in a box somewhere...?
The God House • (1971) • novelette by Keith Roberts
-A young woman is being prepared as the next wife to The God House, a hive-like relic on a hill that is a place of sacrifice and abuse - of course, all in order to keep the crops bountiful and in bloom. While it has all the makings of a rural post-apocalyptic new-folk horror novella, it plays with expectation of revenge and survival through its core. There's two warring villages preparing for an even larger invader, and while our heroine abuses her abusers, it's the God that the villagers make out of mud and shrapnel that will either protect them, or turn them into a suffering mob. The Green Man never quits.
Prisoners of Paradise • (1966) • short story by David Redd
-Far Out short story from a rather elusive New Worlds contributor, David Redd. Spectral spirit beings may just have once been 'human', and one in particular floats along the void of her native planet to find a crashed ship and its lone pilot thinking about 'colors' - the colors in a 'beer mat'!? In a grey world that becomes primitive, color can be seen as a foreign toxin, a deviant. Could have used another draft perhaps, but the imagery is like something Edward Bryant and Pamela Sargent would conjure up. Solid.
The Short, Happy Wife of Mansard Eliot • (1971) • short story by John Sladek
-More of the same from Sladek. Humorous sitcom deviations. This time, a rich eccentric tries to marry a cleaner in the cereal factory that he owns. Only problem is that he has to get rid of her layabout husband first. Silly may be an apt word for this short story, but it still has its irreverent sense of cruel wonder. "People try to harm him. Yesterday i came home and found him sleeping on the couch, and the kids put a plastic bag over his head. He hates their guts. He could have died."
A Place and a Time to Die • (1969) • short story by J. G. Ballard
-Two middle-aged Englishmen protect their seaside village as the invading Vietnamese army arrives in the thousands, shooting fireworks and constantly banging drums. This tale is fed by racism, its bigoted thread necessary for the penultimate moment Ballard builds and then suddenly destroys. A true gut-punch ending that belittles the reader and eventually chokes them with their own expectations. Classic whimpering speculative fiction at its best.
Exit from City 5 • (1971) • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley [as by Barrington Bayley] *re-read*
-F**k me, this story is so inherently fun. Dome city is a mile-wide abode traveling in a deep space that has no life, no hope, and no dimension. The universe around City 5 is rapidly shrinking and is at the turning point of becoming non-existent, dunzo. While factions split within the dome ship settlement - one for free thought, the other for hard idealism - an attempt is made to breach the void. Has it all come to Destination Null, or will the rebels find a last scrap of solidity to call home?
Be careful what you wish for.
A Literature of Comfort • (1971) • essay by M. John Harrison
-Harrison takes his criticism to recent releases such as LP Davies 'Genesis Two' and Arthur Sellings' 'Junk Day'.
Magnificent.
December 1, 2011
This, the first issue of the fabled New Worlds series, contains some extremely good short stories. I bought it when it came out and must have read it at least four or five times. Thomas Disch's Angouleme later became the star episode in his novel 334, Keith Roberts's The God House was similarly expanded to the very stylish The Chalk Giants, and John Sladek's Pemberley's Start-Afresh Caliope and The Short, Happy Wife of Mansard Eliot also appeared in his brilliant Steam-Driven Boy.
But, somehow, my favorite was Barrington Bayley's Exit from City 5, an extremely weird piece that could surely only have been written at the end of the 60s. Something has gone wrong with the universe, and it's started to shrink. People decide to build huge mobile cities that can escape to the space outside (I know, I know...) and the only one that succeeded was City 5. The rest of the universe has now disappeared down some kind of cosmic plug-hole, and City 5 is the one thing left in the whole cosmos. Measured in pre-shrinkage units, it's about three centimeters across. Its million or so microscopic inhabitants now have the awesome responsibility of continuing human, and, indeed, all existence.
They have some kind of deal where the rulers of the city are kept in suspended animation and get woken up every decade or so to check how things are going. The ruling council is very into Jungian psychology (this was the first time I'd come across Jung; I was about 12). They've just woken up and are unhappy about all the bad archetypes: lonely towers, heroic acts, that kind of thing. They figure that a revolution is brewing. When the shooting starts, the hero and his girlfriend escape on one of the reserve spaceships and go off to see if there is, indeed, anything else out there.
They travel for some unfathomable distance and discover nothing at all, but do find out that having sex in the ship's observation bubble, surrounded by the void, is a mind-blowing experience. Maybe I liked the story because of the strange, very explicit Jungian sex scene. They head for home, eager to tell everyone about their amazing discovery. When they arrive back, they see to their horror that the civil war has destroyed the city's protective dome and everyone is dead. The last image of the story is the central tower, which has fallen across the main square.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today's time capsule message from the 60s. Peace, man! Make love, not war!
But, somehow, my favorite was Barrington Bayley's Exit from City 5, an extremely weird piece that could surely only have been written at the end of the 60s. Something has gone wrong with the universe, and it's started to shrink. People decide to build huge mobile cities that can escape to the space outside (I know, I know...) and the only one that succeeded was City 5. The rest of the universe has now disappeared down some kind of cosmic plug-hole, and City 5 is the one thing left in the whole cosmos. Measured in pre-shrinkage units, it's about three centimeters across. Its million or so microscopic inhabitants now have the awesome responsibility of continuing human, and, indeed, all existence.
They have some kind of deal where the rulers of the city are kept in suspended animation and get woken up every decade or so to check how things are going. The ruling council is very into Jungian psychology (this was the first time I'd come across Jung; I was about 12). They've just woken up and are unhappy about all the bad archetypes: lonely towers, heroic acts, that kind of thing. They figure that a revolution is brewing. When the shooting starts, the hero and his girlfriend escape on one of the reserve spaceships and go off to see if there is, indeed, anything else out there.
They travel for some unfathomable distance and discover nothing at all, but do find out that having sex in the ship's observation bubble, surrounded by the void, is a mind-blowing experience. Maybe I liked the story because of the strange, very explicit Jungian sex scene. They head for home, eager to tell everyone about their amazing discovery. When they arrive back, they see to their horror that the civil war has destroyed the city's protective dome and everyone is dead. The last image of the story is the central tower, which has fallen across the main square.
Well, I hope you enjoyed today's time capsule message from the 60s. Peace, man! Make love, not war!
December 8, 2024
Only a hint of scifi as the stories lean towards fantasy, but I don't mind because of the elevated writing. A variety of subgenres that include medieval myths and space travel, with complex concepts that I don't always grasp well, but the poetic/ethereal storytelling has kept me drawn in. Would gladly re-read! Some faves:
Pemberly's Start-Afresh Calliope (John Sladek): "Like you, I once thought reality to be some rigid isoceles [sic] truth, unchangeable as a spoon. But now, nothing is easier to change than *facts*. Life is plural! Reality is not truth, it is half-truth, a mere epiphany of snort!"
The God House (Keith Roberts): heavy fantastical elements involving blasphemous/sacrilegious innuendos with religion featuring a fleshed out, well done strong female character; inseparable women + sex themes done right i.e. great writing/payoff
Prisoners of Paradise (David Redd): someday I hope to be described as such... "Her towering body had the same indefinable appealing quality as a sparkling jewel... The luminous gauze curtains within her body were in a constant rippling motion, matching the aurorae that shimmered in the dark evening sky. Under a strong light she would have looked no more a work of art than a dusty cobweb, but in eternal twilight she was truly beautiful." 🤭😊 unique alien encounter + telepathy story
Exit From City 5 (Barrington Bayley): The universe is shrinking! Just the material part of the universe though. "It has been known ever since the early formulation of dialectical materialism that motion and tendency, opposing forces and so on, are the very basis of matter whether it takes physical, mental or social forms ...materiality is an extraordinary and temporary occurrence in the space-time frame... Yet space, too, had structure of a kind... Was there... a substratum to the void, a richer reality lying beneath it?" A new wave scifi POV on anti-entropy/anti-space!
And finally, the reason for drifting away from the hyperrationaln precise storytelling of classic scifi "...Perhaps we are too imprecise to survive." (from Brian W. Aldiss' "The Day We Embarked for Cythera"). New Worlds indeed!
Pemberly's Start-Afresh Calliope (John Sladek): "Like you, I once thought reality to be some rigid isoceles [sic] truth, unchangeable as a spoon. But now, nothing is easier to change than *facts*. Life is plural! Reality is not truth, it is half-truth, a mere epiphany of snort!"
The God House (Keith Roberts): heavy fantastical elements involving blasphemous/sacrilegious innuendos with religion featuring a fleshed out, well done strong female character; inseparable women + sex themes done right i.e. great writing/payoff
Prisoners of Paradise (David Redd): someday I hope to be described as such... "Her towering body had the same indefinable appealing quality as a sparkling jewel... The luminous gauze curtains within her body were in a constant rippling motion, matching the aurorae that shimmered in the dark evening sky. Under a strong light she would have looked no more a work of art than a dusty cobweb, but in eternal twilight she was truly beautiful." 🤭😊 unique alien encounter + telepathy story
Exit From City 5 (Barrington Bayley): The universe is shrinking! Just the material part of the universe though. "It has been known ever since the early formulation of dialectical materialism that motion and tendency, opposing forces and so on, are the very basis of matter whether it takes physical, mental or social forms ...materiality is an extraordinary and temporary occurrence in the space-time frame... Yet space, too, had structure of a kind... Was there... a substratum to the void, a richer reality lying beneath it?" A new wave scifi POV on anti-entropy/anti-space!
And finally, the reason for drifting away from the hyperrationaln precise storytelling of classic scifi "...Perhaps we are too imprecise to survive." (from Brian W. Aldiss' "The Day We Embarked for Cythera"). New Worlds indeed!
August 22, 2024
Picked this up at a thrift store up in Hudson, some notable authors (Ballard, Disch) and decent stories, including one of the most mean spirited post apocalyptic regression to prehistory stories I’ve ever read.
Some of the stories have (Posthumous?) illustration from Mervyn Peake as well, which was a nice surprise.
Some of the stories have (Posthumous?) illustration from Mervyn Peake as well, which was a nice surprise.
March 29, 2025
Top stuff. Disch, Aldiss, Roberts, and Bailey's stories were particularly strong. And always up for reading some characteristically antagonistic M John Harrison criticism.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews