Aims of New worlds

[Anonymous]

Mike I was reading New Worlds;an anthology the other day & I remembered that when it looked if NW & Science-Fantasy were going to fold, you planned to launch your own magazine. I wondered if you were going for a large circulation or would it have been a small press type of magazine & what the title would have been (surely not Moorcock's Weekly Miscellany!) Did you ever get to publish mainstream literature or did you only ever intend to publish SF. Also will you reprint the DM Thomas poems in the new edition of the anthology.

Sorry if you have got this post before but I'm finding this site as difficult to navigate as the Multiverse!

[Michael Moorcock]

The eighties proved to be a bit bleak for NW, but during the nineties four
volumes of original stories were published in the New Worlds edited by David Garnett. I had stories and guest editorials in those issues. Then
there was the 50th anniversary issue done in 1996 and we are hoping to produce both a 40th anniversary (of my editorship) in 2004, which will be
a limited run and Garnett hopes to have a mass market New Worlds out by
2005, though negotiations are still going on for that. Personally, apart from special 'anniversary' editions, I think the only way of doing New Worlds is in mass market form, since that was always our intention to publish intellectually and artistically demanding work in popular form.
As for DM Thomas, so much of his work turned out to be plagiarism that I'm a little wary of reprinting him, these days. I was horrified by his lifts from Maximof's Baby Yar, for instance, as well as his lifts from various other writers (all unacknowledged) in all his fiction.
The New Worlds: An Anthology edition will be a modified reprint of the Fontana edition and will probably not include the biblioraphical information.

[rk]

I was actually thinking of the period in the early sixties when NW was about to close down & you were thinking of starting your own magazine. You had got as far as producing a dummy before you got the call to edit NW ( as I recall). I just wondered how you would have gone about it in face of opposition, from say the Literary establishment & WH Smith or did you not think about it. 8O