Charles Platt

(Uncredited cover for the 1968 edition)

3.5/5 (Collated rating: Good)

New Worlds was one of the premier British SF magazines under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. It features some of the most experimental works of the era and was important in the growth of the New Wave movement. Many of the frequent contributors went on to make a name as premier SF authors (Ballard, Aldiss, etc).

This best of collection (1964-1967) is on the whole uneven. Its big name authors—such as Keith Roberts and Moorcock himself under a pseudonym—disappoint. The most evocative stories are by rather lesser known voices, Langdon Jones, Charles Platt, and Pamela Zoline. Zoline’s brilliant entropic vision, “The Heat Death of the Universe” is not to be missed. The second best work in the collection is (surprisingly) an early story by Barrington J. Bayley (as P. F. Woods) whose novels I have reviewed Continue reading →

(Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1972 edition)

1/5 (Terrible)

Charles Platt’s Planet of the Voles (1971) has a similar feel to one of the more atrocious episodes of Stargate SG-1. In place of all the horridly butchered Egyptian mythology is a weird pseudo-mythology about the inevitability of a battle between the sexes uneasily pasted on an archetypal military sci-fi plot. The work is filled with alien landscapes which look like Earth, soldier/scientists who can do anything and everything with anything anywhere, random bits of hokey technology appear as if by magic to facilitate the pedestrian plot (this black box will make alien birds carry us into the fortress!) etc.

Platt’s prose is lacking all ability to convey human emotions. After our Continue reading →