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New Worlds 4
Ed by David Garnett
No copyright 2011 by MadMaxAU eBooks
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Contents
Introduction
David Garnett
Harringay
Graham Charnock
And the Poor Get Children
Lisa Tuttle
Legitimate Targets
Ian McDonald
Nerves of Steel
Garry Kilworth
Love in Backspace
Barrington J. Bayley
The Last Phallic Symbol
Elizabeth Sourbut
The Fleshpots of Luna
Matthew Dickens
Starlight Dreamer
Peter F. Hamilton
Free States
Michael Moorcock
The Charisma Trees
Robert Holdstock
Inside Outside
David Langford
The Final Word
Michael Moorcock
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Introduction
David Garnett
‘I don’t have time to read short stories.’
It’s a phrase I’ve heard a number of times, often from people who are quite willing to read a 500 page novel. Or a trilogy which adds up to 2000 pages. Or a series with a page count approaching infinity.
They do have the ‘time’ to read short stories, but they don’t want to read something which is different. They like what they know. They don’t like change, they don’t like anything new.
And every short story is different. With an anthology such as New Worlds, every story is new.
Different and new are not the route to commercial success. For example: every high street and shopping precinct in Britain is becoming like every other one. The same shops can be found in every town, and each one will carry the same line of products. Go into any franchised restaurant and you can eat the same hamburger, drink the same cola, and they will taste equally the same - equally tasteless. People don’t want to risk trying anything new in case they won’t like it. Or even worse. They might like it.
When it comes to records, films, television, books, it’s exactly the same.
Because that’s what the majority of the public wants: familiarity, recognition, reassurance.
Give them more of the same. No surprises. Repeat the formula. Over and over.
Geriatric rock bands go on annual ‘reunion’ tours, and their ‘greatest hits’ albums shift countless units. Some radio stations play nothing but ‘golden oldies’. Old records are re-recorded, remixed, sampled. You’ve heard it all before, and you’ll hear it all again. And again.
Hollywood exists to make money, not movies. And the way to do that is by making films which are like previous money-making films. If a new film becomes a hit, there will almost inevitably be a sequel. Old films are remade with a new ‘all star’ cast, but without a spark of inspiration. French films become American movies, because the audience can’t possibly watch anything with sub-titles.
Countless books have become film scripts and there are also films based on comics, on video games, on dimly remembered ancient television series. If viewers saw it on TV, they’ll want to see it again. Something which may once have been original is given the big screen gloss, polished and polished until it slips down smoothly and easily. There’s no danger of viewers being surprised by anything new or of not understanding what they see.
The most popular television programmes are soap operas. Three times a week, the same familiar characters live out their ‘normal’ lives. Even if there’s a murder or a kidnapping or an outbreak of rabies, it’s all part of ‘everyday’ life. Nothing original will ever happen, and there certainly won’t be any surprises. Viewers know every major event long before it’s screened because they’ve read about it in the tabloid press, who treat the soaps as news. TV listing magazines and papers give programme times for each episode - and also print exactly what will happen during that half hour.
Films attract similar media attention, with newspaper reviews which reveal the whole plot, cinema trailers which show key scenes, and television presenters who tell you how if all ends. As with the soaps, the majority of a film audience know in some detail what they are about to watch.
It’s becoming like that with books. Originality is a liability. I’ve written about this elsewhere, including previous New Worlds editorials, and there’s no point going on again about series and trilogies, novelizations and franchising, novels which are as heavy (and as readable) as bricks, books attributed to long-dead authors - and books by authors who write as if they were long dead.
At one time, I wondered if people only bought such books because it was what publishers offered to them. Now I realize it’s what they prefer. Readers want what they know, something like they’ve read before, even something exactly like they’ve read before.
Which is not what they get with short stories. Every short story has different characters, an original background, a fresh plot, new themes and ideas.
If this was what readers really wanted, it’s what they would buy. It isn’t, because short stories don’t sell.
And New Worlds hasn’t sold.
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Readers who have seen any of the three previous volumes in this, the latest series of New Worlds, will notice that NW4 is slightly different. There are no illustrations, no photographs. The reason is simple: lack of space. There is more fiction and non-fiction in this volume than in the other three, and so everything else had to go. This introduction is shorter than the others, and there isn’t even enough room for the usual three or four pages of authors’ biographies.
So I’ll mention the writers here ...
Barrington Bayley published his first NW story in 1959, as half of ‘Michael Barrington’; his co-author was Michael Moorcock. Graham Charnock and Robert Holdstock both broke into print in the 1968 ‘New Writers’ issue of NW. Charnock contributed several more stories, was assistant editor for a time, and wrote ‘On the Shores of a Fractal Sea’ in NW3; ‘The Charisma Trees’ is Holdstock’s second NW story. Another second timer is Matthew Dickens, who wrote ‘The Descent of Man’ in NW1. David Langford contributes his second article on books; the first was in NW2. Peter Hamilton makes it three stories in a row, following earlier appearances in NW2 and NW3. Ian McDonald has also had three stories in this new series, with ‘Innocents’ from NW2 winning the British Science Fiction Award in 1993. Garry Kilworth, Elizabeth Sourbut and Lisa Tuttle all make their NW debut in this volume. Whether they will ever make a second NW appearance is anyone’s guess.
Because this is the final volume of New Worlds. For a while at least.
Gollancz contracted to publish a four-book series and, as the title suggests, New Worlds 4 is the fourth and therefore the last. If sales had been higher, the series would have continued. But: short stories don’t sell.
Michael Moorcock published his first NW story in 1959, as half of ‘Michael Barrington’; in 1964 he became the editor, later acquiring rights to the title; since 1991 he has been consultant editor to the current series. He was born in London, originally edited NW from his London flat, is the author of the novel Mother London, and in 1994 he moved to Texas.
Perhaps that’s where the next New Worlds will be edited from.
What form will it take?
And when?
Who knows?
There may even be another volume from Gollancz next year. New Worlds 5. Edited by me.
Keep watching this space.
But at the moment I’m looking forward to a break from wading through the good, the bad and the unreadable: the Mobius strip of manuscripts which every editor has to confront.
I hope to fi
nd time to read some short stories.
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Harringay
Graham Charnock
Woken by gleeful tra-la-lee of phone. My back hurts, my limbs ache, and I can’t see - only a white diffused glow behind my eyelids which suddenly explodes into shooting stars, Catherine wheels of light that sizzle on my retinae.
I feel miserable but I know it’s nothing really significant. Just everyday symptoms of tertiary clonal recovery.
Where am I? Memory is as blind as my eyes for the moment, occluded by the squirts of interference along my optic nerve, but it peers and squints and then everything floods back.
Harringay.
My tongue trips sweetly over the three syllables, teasing the first, tasting the second, sucking hungrily on the third. Harr-in-gay. Light of my loins, fire of my life.
It took me a while to recall the instruction set required to open my eyes. Doctors say responses will become more spontaneous as facial nerves renetwork themselves. It feels to me like a botched job. I would sue if it weren’t for the waivers in the contract.
The truth is that Andy has been dead too long. Clonal tissue sours after a while, the DNA destabilizes or something, molecules migrate from incorporated inert material; the amalgam in fillings, silicon from breast implants, the nylon that welds your heart together.
It was daylight. It was morning. It was bright, cruel, victimizing. Send out for Chano Pozo, the Doctor of Swing, put pennies on my dead eyelids and watch them turn cartwheels when the last kick of the heart tosses them in the air.
Heads or tails.
It was Walter Winchell. On the phone. He wanted to interview me and write it up as a book. I said I’d do it if I could photograph him masturbating, digitize it, and issue it as a limited edition floppy. He said he’d think about it and call back. I felt on safe ground. I don’t believe he can come.
I showered, powered up, kicked in the modem, and after it had run through its regular glitches - calling up NORWEB, NATWEB, The White House Catering Facility, the Walt Disney Interface in Fort Knox - I checked the Bulletin Board. There was more stuff from Hockney. Incoherent as usual. He uses a clinic in Hong Kong these days where a team of acupuncturists trained under Dr Chung Kuo work to locate the monofilament sutures along the median lines. I’ve told him it’s a big mistake. One of these days his face is going to fall apart and he’ll look like W.H. Auden.
Printed out a hard copy of Clone & Mart. Something tells me one day it may be collectable. The big news is that some of JFK’s internal organs have surfaced, supposedly in a laboratory in Tampa Bay. My hunch is that it’s another red herring and it will turn out to be more old, tired material from Rose’s corpse with a bit of genetic tailoring. I know a ten-year-old Puerto Rican kid who bought one of those faces. Now he’s a drag queen with red hair and freckles but not much else, works an Irish bar off Union Square. What a waste.
And some scam-running Zionist claims to have unearthed a cache of Belsen lampshades in a Bavarian wald, but they will probably turn out to be pig-skin like last time.
Not much new on the market. A twenty-year-old Jeremy Bentham from the mummy in the Oxford Union. What kind of investment is that? It’ll be fifty years before you can realize a return - even if the skin-bag survives that long - and who knows what the market in philosophy gurus will be by then?
You remember how they dug up those Romanov scraps and it turned out to be mostly servants and grooms? Well, apparently they did find a bit of cartilage from Tsar Nicholas III in amongst them. He’s seven years old now and a bit prone to puppy fat judging from the digipic. I wouldn’t have put him on the market just yet, but the Imperial Eastern Consolidated is such a volatile exchange, buying Maos one minute and Schwarzeneggers the next. I guess it’s true what they say - you can’t leave the chicken on the rack too long. If only they could find Anastasia. What a Holy Grail that would be. I might even bid for her myself.
Victor called at nine to take me shopping. He had an exhibition later at a gallery in Pont Street and was nervous about it, really on edge. He asked me if I had any acid. I can’t believe Victor does acid, not as it’s presently formatted. I told him, Victor, it’s not good for you. It scrambles the input channels from the genes - you could end up looking and feeling like a turkey. Literally.
He was wearing leather flares and they looked quite cool. They had a Vivienne Westwood label in them. He said he’d got them from BHS. I pointed out the tiny ‘made under licence in Saigon’ notice on the label. It rather clouded his day. ‘It’s the last time I sign any soup cans for you,’ he said.
I hate shopping, unless it’s for clothes, but he’d hired a car, a long-wheel-base Mercedes, which was very comfortable, and the nice looking English boy was driving, so I went along.
Harringay is a bizarre place, like a macho Venice Beach. The first week I arrived I ordered a kebab at the Lamaca Café. It took three hours to arrive and I lost $56.85 at cards while I was waiting. In summer, men sell bags of pistachios from the hoods of cars, and the stench of rotting watermelon is overwhelming.
Can you believe it? I saw somebody I knew who was still alive. It was Marty, who must have come over about the same time as me, after Three Mile Island Mark IV. He was under that big iron railway bridge with all the Turkish graffiti on it, where the pigeons shit. He was giving a tall blond man money, quite a lot of it. I pushed the button that wound down the window and waved and shouted but he pretended not to see me. Then I thought it’s probably for the best. Marty’s always dealing. I don’t mean drugs, he’s too clumsy for that. He just deals - comics, pom postcards of Madonna and Donkey - whatever’s in vogue.
(Madonna, now there’s a woman who actually looks better in the afterlife than in realtime. That Jewish bitch who owns first serial rights has done some serious tweaking.)
Victor was upset about something, but wouldn’t say what. He was wearing a cowboy shirt with embroidered roses and cutaway hearts. I loved it. Very David Byrne. Did David die yet, and, if he did, did anybody buy the rights to the flesh? The last time I saw him he looked like Harry S. Truman - the original, I mean, in that photo by WeeGee, not that hybrid upstart currently peddling his ass round Capitol Hill. I check the AIDS Gazette daily but it’s hard to keep track. So much bad news every day from the dark heart of Africa.
The English kid turned on the radio and it was that terrible salsa music. Apparently it’s very popular in north London, but I can’t believe anybody actually likes it. I think they just play it because it’s Fourth World. It’s boring, but that’s Britain.
For instance: two Nicaraguan restaurants opened up in Crouch End last week. Jimi was playing in one and yesterday I went because someone told me the Germans like him and he’d fucked Fassbinder. He was OK. He looked a bit too old, but that’s the problem with people who die young. But he still had his licks.
I asked him about Fassbinder after the gig and he said he’d never heard of him. We signed each other’s phonecards and swapped them. A girl in black leather who said she was from Time Out tried to come on to me. Would you believe it? She was really spaced. She was telling me they’d found an entirely new dinosaur in Bloemfontein, big and barrel-shaped, apparently with its scalp still intact. Do dinosaurs have scalps? I thought she might have been putting me on. You can’t tell these days. I sent her to the bar to get me a Babycham, but she never came back.
I went back to the Eric Hotel in a genuine black London taxi ($84.00) with a tart from a local radio station who asked me boring questions all the way, like, did Valerie Solanis really kill me? All that old conspiracy shit. I told her no, I converted to Catholicism, married Valerie, and we had ten kids. The truth is what you want to hear.
The bitch in the taxi was wearing leather too - and chains. Why are all the women in the British media industry into bondage? I took a Polaroid of her with her skirt pulled up to her waist, and her thongs down round her knees ($90), and finally pushed her out at Seven Sisters and told the cabbie to drive on. T
he taxi-driver told me how last week he’d been to Wisley to buy a rhododendron, and how he’d almost been run down by wrinklies in their electric wheelchairs. He was very interesting, but he drove very slowly I thought, so I trimmed the tip (8.42%).
I sat up late in the lounge at the Eric Hotel (cheeseplants and IKEA!!!) and talked with the night-staff. They were full of how a local mini-cab driver had been imprisoned for raping a Swedish au-pair up near Manor House station, except that none of the evidence hung together, and the woman couldn’t describe anything about the event the same way twice. But it was their big excitement of the decade. One of them actually knew the man who’d really done it.
The Eric Hotel is gross, but the discomfort of its mattresses is just about made up for by the splendid after-dark infra-red views across Finsbury Park. I saw a dwarf coupling with a leopard once, I swear I did. But I must move on soon. My bones were always the least tolerant of my internal organs.
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