New Worlds Order

Eduardo Paolozzi - At New Worlds. Science Fiction And Art In The Sixties
David Brittain 
Savoy Books, 2013

This is a most enlightening and well researched book about New Worlds magazine, the UK's most progressive SF periodical in the 60s and 70s. Under the stewardship of Michael Moorcock, authors such as J.G. Ballard and artists including Eduardo Paolozzi were brought together in a publication with a mission to push SF inspired art and literature into speculative experimental futures.

The book is generously illustrated and benefits from John Coulthard's fine design and layout, but there was one image missing. In Rick Poynor's introduction there is a description of the cover design of a Nebula Short Stories anthology that sounded familiar but was not reproduced, so here is my copy for your entertainment, more than just another example of the questionable genre of fantasy art. 

"It's like a warped dystopian remix of Robbie the Robot tenderly cradling the unconscious woman, except that the woman is wide awake, bleeding and angry. This dark and peculiar fantasy, a kind of sado-erotic space crash, somehow meshes Surrealism, science fiction, the Independent Group, the New Worlds' ethos, Paolozzi's mechanomorphs, the emerging sense of 'crash-culture', and Ballard's soon to be formulated claim that 'Sex times technology equals the future'." 

Cover: Giannetto Coppola

Eduardo Paolozzi, Zero Energy Experimental Pile (Z.E.E.P): Pacific Standard Time (1970)

New Worlds featured artwork by Mal Dean including his cartoon illustrations for the jacket of  Moorcock's 'No Cure for Cancer'

Issues 178 (1967) and 199 (1970): SF smut

Six Polaroids documenting the first meeting of Moorcock, Ballard, Paolozzi (and Ballard's partner Claire Walsh)

Real desktop publishing: the Portobello Road flat where designer Charles Platt laid out issues of New Worlds

Cover design by Mervyn Peake

Eduardo Paolozzi, Zero Energy Experimental Pile (Z.E.E.P.): Hollywood Wax Museum (1970)