The Last Word

Only another editor can appreciate fully the extra-ordinary sense of luxury I enjoy as Consultant Editor. All a consultant editor has to do is to make a few irrelevant observations about how things were when they were still able to read without glasses, murmur a few suggestions about general production and then sit back and enjoy the show. It gives me all the pleasure with none of the responsibility!

It was a very great pleasure to read these latest stories. The distinctive style of editorship we saw in Zenith is now providing us with a steady supply of wonderful fiction. Everyone seems to be working at their best - the well-established writers like Aldiss or Watson, the newer authors like Baxter, Ings, McDonald, Di Filippo, Laidlaw and Hamilton and others of that talented company who, through Interzone, Other Edens and Zenith, have been making names for themselves, and brave new ones like Jack Deighton who makes an impressive debut here. What's more, with the addition of material like David Langford's and the Jim Burns-illustrated Philip K. Dick (thanks to Paul Williams), we're seeing a continuing expansion into less conventional areas.

David Garnett has already noted the disappointed lack of women writers and non-Anglophile writers here. Very few unsolicited manuscripts have been received from readers. Please send your work to NEW WORLDS - the rates are competitive and I speak from personal experience when I guarantee that David Garnett is a helpful and conscientious editor. Even his rejections are swift and relatively painless.

Personally, I'm sorry to see so little non-linear work. Given that non-linearity has never been more respectable in a whole variety of disciplines, it seems strange that New Worlds, which waved the flag of non-linearity for so many years, has acquired a distinctly linear tinge. Where are the authors who will go on doing for fiction what Mandelbrot did for mathematics? New tools are as important as new ideas - in fiction as in the sciences. Moreover, the arts and sciences have never seemed closer, it would be nice to see more recognition - or perhaps even celebration - of this phenomenon.

I have personal reason for welcoming Wick Colvin to these pages. The nephew of my old friend James Colvin, Warwick Colvin Jnr was raised in Tangier. Parts of his uncle's library were shipped to him and Wick grew up reading the complete works of William Burroughs, E. E. 'Doc' Smith, W. Pett Ridge, J. G. Ballard, Frank Richards, Anthony Skene and George Meredith. He also received his uncle's pulp magazine collection and his lifetime subscription to Scientific American. James Colvin died (many say he was murdered) in 1969 when his nephew was two years old. With David Garnett's support I prevailed upon Wick Colvin to let us publish a few extracts from his epic serial Corsairs of the Second Ether, and it's slightly longer sequel Lost Universe Buckaroos, written before Colvin learned of the demise of THRILLING WONDER STORIES, an irony, he told me, of particular poignancy for him.

(Webmaster Note: The Colvin family being a pseudonym used by Moorcock).

On 16^th February 1992 Angela Carter and George MacBeth died. Both were enthusiastic readers of New Worlds and MacBeth published his longer poems regularly here. Both were people of enormous generosity and unique talent; both brought considerable originality to their imaginative fiction and were active in supporting other writers. Angela was fifty-two. George was sixty. Two other generous spirits associated with New Worlds were Sir Angus Wilson (who was our main supporter on the Arts Council) and Jack Trevor Story (who contributed 'The Wind and the Snottygobble Tree' to New Worlds. They died in 1991. A great deal of light has gone out of the lives of their friends.

Michael Moorcock