New Worlds Profiles: Eric Frank Russell

This issue of New Worlds (March 1958, Volume 23, No. 69) features the opening installment of Eric Frank Russell's three-part serial "Wasp," in which protagonist James Mowry is recruited by government official William Wolf for a covert operation against the Sirian Empire. Wolf demonstrates through historical examples—a Romanian prankster causing mass panic, escaped killers tying up vast resources, and a wasp killing four men in a car crash—that insignificant actions in proper circumstances yield disproportionate consequences. Wolf recruits Mowry to become a "wasp": an agent who creates disruption. The issue also contains short stories by John Boland ("Secret Weapon"), Harry Harrison ("Captain Bedlam"), Robert Presslie ("Next of Kin"), Francis G. Rayer ("Painters of Narve"), and Robert Silverberg ("The Lonely One"), plus Kenneth Johns's article "Outward Bound" and reader letters in the "Postmortem" section. Editor John Carnell discusses science fiction magazine sales in relation to the recent Sputnik launches.