Back to the New Wave Future

Rob Latham reviews Harlan Ellison’s anthology “The Last Dangerous Visions” and the 60th anniversary issue of Michael Moorcock’s “New Worlds” magazine.

By Rob LathamNovember 23, 2024

• SF

WHEN I FIRST started reading science fiction in the early 1970s, the field was consumed by an uproar over new works that pushed the genre’s boundaries in both form and content. Old-school hard SF (the kind of stories written by Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein) was being dismissed as passé—or, worse, reactionary—by devotees of the so-called “New Wave,” a sketchy term that came to refer to a loose assortment of talents whose only real commonality was a commitment to their own, sometimes outré, artistic visions. This new SF, according to its champions, was a more capacious “speculative fiction” capable of addressing pressing social issues—gender struggle, neocolonial warfare, ecological destruction—in prose that eschewed linearity and closure in favor of narrative ambiguity and modes of innovation borrowed from the 20th-century avant-garde.

The paperback revolution of the 1960s had broken the hold of the handful of gatekeepers who controlled the SF magazines, liberating the genre from a prevailing self-censorship that largely suppressed politically or sexually controversial material. New Wave writers strode boldly into the breach, capitalizing on the climate of transgressiveness to produce some of the most unique and challenging works ever published as SF: Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968), Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron (1969), J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975). The textures and tones of the controversy had all the resonances of the larger social struggle between the establishment and the youth counterculture, as Old Guard fans dismissively lumped the New Wave with other fashionable provocations of the era while New Wave fans accused the Old Guard of being blinkered dinosaurs. Coming of age as an SF reader amid this conflagration was both exhilarating and not a little mystifying.

It gradually became clear to me that there were in fact two independent, if occasionally overlapping, New Waves: one British, centered on the magazine New Worlds under the editorship of Michael Moorcock (1964–74), and the other American, which, though more decentralized, found its most voluble expression in a pair of hefty all-original anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison: Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972). And now, over half a century later, we have a serendipitous opportunity to reassess these two traditions in publications that appeared within mere days of one another: a fresh issue of New Worlds celebrating the 60th anniversary of Moorcock’s accession to the journal’s editorship, and the long-delayed publication of the third volume in Ellison’s anthology series, The Last Dangerous Visions. It’s a case of back to the future with a vengeance, as these erstwhile enfants terribles have morphed into vehicles of nostalgic reverie.

That description is not entirely fair to either publication, both of which seek to recapture at least some of the febrile energy of bygone apocalypses. The key difference is that Moorcock’s New Worlds does not merely embrace but also critiques the perils of a melancholy wistfulness, while Last Dangerous Visions, in its blatant earnestness, trips and falls into a pit of banality. As a result, the former emerges as a provocative reinvention of a legendary past while the latter seems an exhausted last gasp across a belated finish line.

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The two New Waves never really saw eye to eye—the British variant was more committed to formal experimentation while its American offshoot favored scandalous new kinds of content (e.g., explicit sex, political provocation, unapologetic atheism). When the first Dangerous Visions was published, several of the figures associated with New Worlds dismissed it as a pretentious failure. Author-editor Judith Merril, who had warmly embraced Moorcock’s renovations of the genre, scorned Ellison’s tome for tending to “substitute shock for insight,” while Brian W. Aldiss, who produced some of the bravest of New Worlds’ experiments, opined that, though the stories in the volume might “appear quite shocking,” the effect “was rather like shocking your maiden aunt with ribald limericks.” For his part, Ellison was well aware of these differences, asserting in his introduction that, while the book was meant to advance “‘the new thing’ in speculative fiction,” his version was “neither Judith Merril’s ‘new thing’ nor Michael Moorcock’s ‘new thing.’ Ask for us by our brand names.”

But it would be wrong to draw too stark a division between these transatlantic cousins. Some of the stories Ellison published—such as Philip José Farmer’s “Riders of the Purple Wage,” a delirious pun-fest inspired by late Joyce—were genuine literary experiments, while Moorcock’s New Worlds kept stumbling into controversy, including a bookstore ban and threats to cancel its grant from the British Arts Council, not because its fiction was technically innovative but because it was sometimes rather raunchy. It is true that the American New Wave was less stylistically extreme, considered in the mass, but a genre revolution can proceed on two fronts, and attempts to introduce sexually frank and politically forthright content were as important as efforts to disrupt linear narrative and settled point of view. And of course, the beleaguered champions of old-school SF loathed both of these tactics intensely.

Moreover, there can be little doubt that the New Wave changed science fiction irrevocably. After the movement’s decade-long orgy of taboo-shattering, the field has never reverted to its pre-1960s reticence regarding sexual matters, and SF writers now routinely attend to literary structure and style in ways that are generally more sophisticated than at any previous time in the genre’s history. So the question now is whether we really need these two quasi-memorial publications—what do they add to the mix that has not already been thoroughly assimilated over half a century of settled debates and steady work?

It should be said that New Worlds never truly ceased publication, even after Moorcock, exhausted by all the battles, stepped down from the editor’s chair in 1974. By that point, the monthly magazine had been converted into a quarterly book series, which limped on under other editorial hands until 1976. The title would lie dormant for a while before cropping up in fresh guises: as a fanzine, edited by Moorcock and others, from 1978 to 1979, then as a series of anthologies, edited by David Garnett, from 1991 to 1994, and so on. As befits its unconventional contents, the publication itself has been metamorphic: the new version (whole number 224), once again edited by Moorcock in what he has announced as his last hurrah, can best be described as an original anthology issued in saddle-stapled format, with slick, full-color illustrations. (Published in the United Kingdom by Jayde Design, it is available in the United States from Ziesing Books.)

There’s certainly a nostalgic animus behind the project, explicitly affirmed by several of the pieces. An homage to the late J. G. Ballard, whose iconoclastic work came to define the magazine, takes the form of a reminiscence, penned by Pamela Zoline, about the notorious exhibition of crashed cars the author mounted at London’s New Arts Lab in 1970. (Ballard fans might enjoy another recent commemorative volume, Reports from the Deep End: Stories Inspired by J. G. Ballard, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Rick McGrath and published in March by Titan Books.) Zoline is saluted, alongside her New Worlds collaborators (and occasional lovers) Thomas M. Disch and John Sladek, in a charming essay by SF critic John Clute, whose maisonette in Camden Town—“just a bus ride away through ley lines” from Moorcock’s Notting Hill flat, where the magazine was assembled—became a hive of frenzied production. Zoline wrote “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967) there, one of the finest short stories of the decade in (or out of) any genre, while Disch penned his great novel about political prisoners in a near-future US, Camp Concentration (serialized in New Worlds in 1967 and published in book form the next year), and Sladek, one of the best satirical writers SF has ever produced, churned out a raft of indelible stories, including “The Poets of Millgrove, Iowa” (1966)—a scathing takedown of the astronaut as celebrity—which is reprinted here.

Disch, who died by suicide in 2008, is represented by five chapters from an unfinished novel about interspecies miscegenation with sentient elephants; it is difficult to judge the work from this brief fragment except to say that it provides a vivid showcase for the author’s caustic whimsy and mordant taste for the outrageous. Meanwhile, Zoline offers her first new work of fiction in almost two decades—a rich and strange riff on AI-boosted bears, Benthamite utilitarianism versus Randian selfishness, and the history of labor struggles in Telluride, Colorado (where the author lives and works as a visual artist). While the mélange doesn’t quite hang together, it is vivified by righteous rage at the “toxic fantasies” that have “trashed the livable living planet,” reminding us once again that work that is experimental in form (the story is a complex montage of text and illustration) can still be pugnaciously political. A commemorative tone also informs the issue’s capping sonnet sequence by Roz Kaveney, which celebrates the life of the late transgender activist and author Rachel Pollack, whose first short story was published in New Worlds in 1971.

While this undercurrent of nostalgia is entirely justified given the momentous achievements of the magazine and its core stable of authors, the issue also features two long pieces that push back against a tide of homesickness for avant-gardes past. The first is by Iain Sinclair, an author who published little in the magazine but whose capacious and multifarious work—fiction, travelogue, polemic, memoir, and cultural criticism—captures the synergy of New Worlds at its best. A hybrid story-essay, Sinclair’s “Under the Flyover” celebrates the journal’s legacy—along with its “whisky-sipping Prospero,” Ballard—and tartly observes that, while New Worlds was indeed transformative, “you can’t fall into the same multiverse twice: that would be greedy.” Following the peregrinations, through a decaying near-future London, of an autobiographical surrogate named Norton (“elective vagrant, bibliomaniac”), the piece turns on the unearthing, at a bookseller’s stall, of a tattered issue of New Worlds, which Norton pores over with an obsessive relish before abandoning it “in one of those book swap bird boxes that had appeared overnight across the most unlikely of edgelands.” Meanwhile, the sardonic narrator cheekily debunks the pretensions of a long-lost counterculture: “That New Worlds era […] reeked as much of damp wallpaper, launderette soap powder, fags and chips, as of patchouli and cannabis.” Sinclair’s bottom line, announced in his first sentence, is that England “never ‘got’ surrealism,” despite the best efforts of Ballard and Moorcock (and, here, of John Coulthart, who offers a salute to that artistic movement via a celebration of the centennial of André Breton’s first manifesto). Sinclair’s acerbic piece is the best sort of tribute to Moorcock’s editorship, showing his willingness to embrace a deflation and demystification of his own accomplishments.

But the finest piece in the issue, written by Moorcock himself, is the second one that takes an ambiguously (anti-)nostalgic tone. On one hand, it’s a Jerry Cornelius story—meaning it continues the picaresque adventures of the magazine’s mascot, a polymathic, shape-shifting libertine, part Bob Dylan, part James Bond, who has featured in countless Moorcock stories and novels, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under multiversal aliases. And so, of course, there is an inevitably nostalgic charge to the proceedings, especially since the story also draws together other prominent Moorcock characters, including Colonel Pyat, protagonist of the author’s most brilliant work, the “Between the Wars” tetralogy (1981–2006). But the energy of the story is dissipative, entropic—an end-of-times (re)cycling, through a ceaseless, blistering rain, of an exhausted, bickering troupe of traveling artists and mercenaries. Russia’s war in Ukraine hovers vaguely in the background, as does a general sense of post–Cold War malaise and retrenchment, highlighted by epigraphic citations of an Amazon commentary on an obscure memoir by an Italian Marxist artist. It is clear from the story that Moorcock, at 84, has lost none of his quicksilver verve and elusiveness, and it is puckishly illustrated with drawings by Coulthart, Mark Reeve, and Allan Kausch. (Kausch, who is also represented here with a superb portfolio of surrealist-inspired collages, maintains an online “annex” to the issue that includes fiction and nonfiction pieces excluded from the print version.)

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If the 60th anniversary issue of Moorcock’s New Worlds is an impressively vigorous paean to one branch of the genre’s midcentury avant-garde, The Last Dangerous Visions is another kettle of fish entirely. In the first place, its nominal editor is no longer with us; in 2018, Harlan Ellison died in his sleep at the age of 84. It was a peaceful end for a notoriously combative personality, whose willingness to stake out controversial positions won him numerous enemies and a small cohort of deeply devoted friends. Of the latter group, none has been more faithful to his life and legacy than his literary executor—and the true editor of this volume—J. Michael Straczynski, best known as the creator of Babylon 5 (1993–98), one of the finest SF television series, as well as the writer of several well-received graphic novels. As Ellison’s executor, he inherited some enormous—and largely thankless—tasks, such as preserving Ellison Wonderland, the late author’s legendary Sherman Oaks residence, as a museum and archive, against a host of creditors hungry for a chunk of the impecunious author’s remains. He also inherited this long-simmering anthology, which was first announced for imminent publication in 1973, and then repeatedly, with decreasing levels of credibility, over the decades thereafter.

While the first two installments in the series had been sizable tomes, LDV promised to be positively gargantuan, containing (according to a prospective table of contents published in Locus magazine in 1979) well over 100 stories, some of them quite lengthy. Straczynski’s afterword to the book reproduces an alternative table of contents from roughly the same period, full of Ellison’s penciled emendations, that lists 120 stories by 108 different authors, amounting to almost 700,000 words of original fiction. Since the first two volumes had also featured the editor’s sprawling introductions and headnotes, plus afterwords penned by the individual authors, the published version would likely have been closer to 800,000 words, half again as long as War and Peace. By this point, Ellison was promising a three-volume set that, he kept announcing well into the 1980s, would be forthcoming in short order—first from Doubleday, then from Harper & Row, then from Berkley/Putnam. By this point, the whole project had become a running joke within the field, and those interested in the sorry history are referred to Christopher Priest’s exhaustive chronicle, The Book on the Edge of Forever, first published as a fanzine in 1987 and then as a pamphlet-sized book from Fantagraphics in 1994.

One chapter of Priest’s booklet—entitled “How Will It End?”—offered three possible outcomes to the whole affair: the “Steady State Theory” (i.e., LDV would be forever promised but never released), the “Big Bang Theory” (i.e., the project would simply be abandoned, the stories scattered), and the “White Dwarf Theory” (i.e., some truncated version would eventually appear, possibly midwifed by somebody else). This last theory turned out to be the correct one, as Straczynski has ultimately offered a fairly modest-sized rendition containing 24 stories. Two other chapters in Priest’s booklet—“Why Does The Last Dangerous Visions Remain Unpublished?” and “Why Have So Many Promises Been Broken?”—posed questions that could not be definitively answered before now. In a 60-page foreword, however, Straczynski gives the putative explanation: Ellison had long been suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which grew progressively worse starting in the mid-1970s. During his manic phases, he continued to acquire stories, constructing ever more grandiose versions of the project, only to crash into depression when the scope of the job ran up against his diminishing energies. It’s an entirely plausible account, informed by a deep friendship with Ellison and articulated with tough-love empathy, but it’s also an evasion of the rigorous case Priest makes—that the editor’s behavior was “an inexcusable mess,” irresponsible, unprofessional, and damaging to the authors caught up in his flamboyant web of showboating and (self-)deceit.

Straczynski presents his own account as a corrective to all “the mythology, the rumors, […] the backroom assassinations” (this last perhaps a veiled whack at Priest, whose book is never mentioned), but all he really has to offer in reply are special pleading and prevarication. Take, for example, his discussion of what happened “[a]s years dragged on into decades” and “writers began asking for their stories back in order to sell them elsewhere.” Straczynski gives a single example—when a representative for the estates of Clifford D. Simak and Gordon R. Dickson requested the reversion of rights to those authors’ stories after their deaths—and he reproduces Ellison’s generous letter in reply. But this was written in 2013, by which point Ellison had essentially abandoned the project. Straczynski does not mention the way the editor treated several authors who, in earlier decades, had made similar requests. Priest’s book includes letters from some of these writers, with Ian Watson vaguely bemoaning the “untruths and bullying and braggadocio” and Michael Bishop frankly stating that Ellison berated him as a traitor to the cause, motivated by “money-grubbing” and “self-righteous hypocrisy.” It deserves to be pointed out that the story Bishop successfully pried from Ellison’s clutches, “Dogs’ Lives,” was eventually published in a 1984 issue of The Missouri Review and included in The Best American Short Stories 1985, edited by Gail Godwin. If Bishop (who died last year) had let matters rest to avoid wounding Ellison’s ego or inflaming his temper, as many other writers likely did, that manuscript would have been moldering in a file folder at Ellison Wonderland for another four decades.

Some of them still are, though sussing out the situation is all but impossible given that Straczynski’s afterword, which lays out his rationale for inclusion of the 24 stories, never provides a full accounting. We are simply told that some stories Ellison retained were omitted from the book because they had “become outdated, or were too much of the period in which they had been written,” while others had been “bought out of friendship” and simply weren’t very good (he doesn’t consider the unflattering light this latter judgment casts on his mentor’s editorial acumen). What remains, he claims, “are as challenging, fresh, and entertaining now as when they were first typed”—though they were not, apparently, enough, since Straczynski proceeded to commission new stories for the book, in part to ensure wider “diversity in the range of writers here” (by which he means more work by authors who were not white males) and in part to feature dangerous visions by a fresh generation of SF talents. “Some writers,” he says, “declined to participate,” then he names David Brin, Max Brooks, Cecil Castellucci, Cory Doctorow, James S. A. Corey, and Adrian Tchaikovsky as those who produced new work, along with an “up-and-coming genderqueer author,” Kayo Hartenbaum, whose first professional sale is included in the volume. Since these account for about one-third of the book’s authors, and their output for around 115 of its 429 pages (another 75 are taken up by Straczynski’s foreword and afterword), it’s hard to know what he means when he says that “90 percent of the contents” are composed of fiction Ellison acquired. This makes as little sense as the identification of Ellison as the book’s nominal editor.

What can we say about the stories that have fallen by the wayside—i.e., that do not appear between these covers but were also never reclaimed by their authors and published elsewhere? You will have to take Straczynski’s word for it that they are outdated or not up to snuff—which is hard to do considering that they were produced by the likes of Jack Dann, Gordon Eklund, Charles Platt, Bruce Sterling, Lisa Tuttle, and Pamela Zoline. And while the book does feature what are essentially the last stories of Edward Bryant, Howard Fast, John Morressy, Ward Moore, Robert Sheckley, and A. E. van Vogt, we have no idea what has become of the final manuscripts of Alfred Bester, Anthony Boucher, George Alec Effinger, Daniel Keyes, Edgar Pangborn, Doris Piserchia, Mack Reynolds, Thomas N. Scortia, and Wilson Tucker. Presumably, this work is gone forever, which would be a shame. (To be fully accurate, the Keyes story was published in Japanese translation but never in its original form.)

But this is all bloody water under the bridge. The only remaining question, now that the book has finally appeared, is what actually has been presented to us and whether the long wait was worth it. In this context, it’s valuable to recall Ellison’s own rationale for starting the series in the first place: to make space for pathbreaking work that could not be published elsewhere due to widespread editorial taboos. The goal, as Ellison put it in his introduction to Dangerous Visions, was “to shake things up,” to stake out “new horizons and styles and forms and challenges,” and thus to combat the “constricting narrowness of mind” of most of the genre’s key editors. Given this ambition, not a single story in LDV measures up because none would be viewed as out of bounds today due to their form or content (their aesthetic quality is another matter). To be fair, this is in part due to the success of Ellison’s first two anthologies, which certainly did shake the genre up in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But that kaleidoscope has long since settled, and there really is no need for a fresh commotion since the “revolution” Ellison sought to launch has basically conquered the field. The book doesn’t even function as a monument to the late author-editor, as such a volume has already appeared in the form of Preston Grassmann’s The Unquiet Dreamer: A Tribute to Harlan Ellison (2019). Simply put, LDV principally exists as yet another outstanding debt that Straczynski, as Ellison’s literary executor, felt compelled to pay.

There are a few excellent stories—to be precise, four—plus many mediocre-to-adequate ones, and a handful of genuine stinkers. It seems almost cruel to enumerate the faults of the latter two factions since many of the authors are dead, as are the motives that animated their writing, and they had probably given up on ever seeing this work in print after decades of broken promises. It isn’t a blotch on their substantial legacies to say that van Vogt’s final offering is clunky and dull, or Sheckley’s a bit of negligible whimsy, though it is rather crushing to learn that the great Ward Moore, who was mortally ailing when his story was purchased by Ellison, “felt that having a story in The Last Dangerous Visions would be the crowning achievement of his career,” because, well, it is not. And while it’s nice to have Ed Bryant’s “War Stories” in print at last, it’s sad to observe that it was clearly an unpolished section of a never-completed novel, set in the same near-future world as his Nebula-nominated story “Shark” (1973), in which a global war has conscripted brain-boosted sea life as weapons. (It’s even sadder that the only headnote for LDV that Ellison ever got around to writing was for this story.) If “War Stories” had appeared when originally planned, during a time when the New Wave was infusing the genre with a fresh, bracing energy, maybe Bryant would have been inspired to finish the novel. Instead, this section sat on a shelf for 50 years.

The same is true for what were either the first or almost-first sales by a number of writers who have since abandoned the field entirely. It makes no sense really to list their names here—any seasoned SF reader will recognize them (or, rather, won’t) when scanning the table of contents—and even less to critique the artistic value of their work, produced for a project that, for all intents and purposes, perished long ago. There is no way to know whether such a prominent publication, had it occurred when originally promised, would have had a propulsive effect on building careers in the field—careers that never happened, for whatever reason. Those who are still alive, working in some other endeavor (or more likely retired), must be bemused at the thought of what might have been. But these are speculations—ruminations about a book that never came into being, save in this belated and meager form. So, in what follows, I will focus on the high points from the Ellison era and conclude with some observations about the state of the field today based on the seven wholly new stories in the book.

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Of the 17 stories that have survived from the 120 Ellison originally purchased, only three are memorable, only two are really successful as stories, and only one is a truly dangerous vision, in the terms Ellison set for the project. As mentioned above, Bryant’s work is not so much a story as a collation of fragments of an unfinished novel; if you’ve read “Shark,” which actually works as a freestanding tale, you have the basic world-building idea. The late Steven Utley’s “Goodbye” offers a poignant take on the theme of “those who get left behind” by time travelers (as Straczynski puts it in his headnote), but there’s nothing truly dangerous about it; it could easily have been published in the 1950s. This is true of the more undistinguished efforts as well: their ideas are fairly tame, their modes of telling far from radical. Straczynski tries to spice things up by gratuitously chopping one of them into seven segments, dispersed throughout the book as “intermezzos,” but this only serves to underline the general dreariness.

The only story that leaps off the page and grabs you by the throat, as so many from the first two volumes did decades ago, is one Ellison acquired rather late, sometime in the 1980s: Dan Simmons’s “The Final Pogrom.” Set in a near future where a global wave of antisemitism has led to a project to exterminate the Jews on a planetary scale, the tale follows the work of an underground virologist, a Holocaust survivor and former head of the CDC, who is trying to develop a cure for what he believes to be as much a biological as an ideological pandemic. Scenes of his laborious experiments are interspersed with a smug narrative by some bean-counting American Eichmann outlining the extermination program, including its ingenious technological infrastructure, and offering a statistical analysis of its scope and success. The slogan of the antisemitic movement is chillingly prescient, especially in the wake of a recent restaging of the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden: “Let’s Make America Strong Again.” Simmons’s is the only story in the book, including the seven new ones solicited by Straczynski, that conforms with the series’ original goal of shaking up the reader. It lingered uneasily in my mind for days.

After reading through these 17 tales, it’s understandable why the editor felt the need to commission new material to augment the project. Absent his additions, we’d have around 250 pages of largely pallid and uninspiring dross. The stories Straczynski has added to the mix, while certainly more competent in the main, are no more “dangerous” than the rest, though the one that tries hardest to be—Cecil Castellucci’s “After Taste,” an outlandish farrago of interspecies queer cannibalism—comes off almost as a satire of a Dangerous Visions story. The rest could easily make up the contents of an average installment of a contemporary SF magazine or all-original anthology. Which is to say, in short, that the field is now much more commodious than it was when Ellison first launched his polemical salvos. It is very hard to imagine—despite Straczynski’s odd comment, in his afterword, that we live in politically “perilous times” causing writers to pull their ideological punches—that any major SF editor, of any of the many outlets that now exist in print and online, would reject a story because it was deemed too “shocking.” They might very well reject it because it was bad or boring, which too many of the stories in this volume are.

Of the other six new tales, two stand out: Cory Doctorow’s “The Weight of a Feather (The Weight of a Heart)” and James S. A. Corey’s “Judas Iscariot Didn’t Kill Himself: A Story in Fragments,” both of which at least have a pulsing vein of the kind of savagery one expects from a classic Ellison-acquired manuscript. Both are set in cloistered worlds—a think-tank-cum-experimental-outpost in Doctorow, a commune for serially reincarnated (“resheathed”) personalities in Corey. Both address contemporary concerns—the creepy intimacy of digital/robotic assistants, the toxic viciousness of online culture—in a New Wavish way: by showing how, even amid the up-to-date appurtenances of techno-modernity, some basic human verities remain, in particular a visceral impulse to emotional violence. By contrast, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “First Sight” is a capable-enough tale of first contact, Max Brooks’s “Hunger” a heavy-handed geopolitical thriller, Kayo Hartenbaum’s “Binary System” a wispy allegory of the constraints of social codes, and David Brin’s “Men in White” a brief squib on the value of speculative imagination; they could easily be encountered in a current issue of Asimov’s or Fantasy & Science Fiction, quickly read and just as quickly forgotten.

One final observation regarding The Last Dangerous Visions. Part of the problem with the book might simply be that Straczynski has no real experience as an SF writer or editor, which may explain why so much of the new fiction here comes from figures associated with the worlds he knows best: mass media and graphic novels. This is not to disparage his (or anyone else’s) creative work in those domains, which has been considerable. It is simply to observe that, when presented with the impossible task of trying to salvage an epic literary fiasco, an editor more at home in the field might have done a better job cajoling work from the talents who simply “declined to participate.” To his credit, he does acknowledge that the project’s checkered history, and its association with an author-editor whose controversial behavior grew progressively worse as his mental illness advanced, may well have alienated too many key genre figures irrevocably. Which is to say that maybe this whole tragic enterprise should have been left on the shelf where it fitfully lay for half a century, instead of being gathered into this feeble public cenotaph.

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So, what remains to be said about the New Wave after all these years, especially in light of these two publications? On the one hand, the Moorcock-edited New Worlds and the much-delayed release of The Last Dangerous Visions serve as reminders of the fervid energies that fueled this movement to transform a moribund genre, even if that impulse may seem a bit quaint today given the sheer profusion and diversity of SF production across multiple media. The revival of space opera in the wake of Star Wars (1977) has returned a significant segment of the field to its pulp-era roots, but there nonetheless remains a larger market now for “literary” SF than at any time in history. While few of the New Wave titans remain—Moorcock and his erstwhile New Worlds books editor M. John Harrison stand virtually alone as figures still doing crucial work—the revolution they unleashed has made science fiction a vital and mature form of writing, capable of addressing the most complex issues in the most sophisticated ways.

Yet what are we to make of frequent laments about the imminent death of SF, the steady graying and waning of its readership? When we dig down into these eulogies, we generally encounter a concern about the status of work specifically marketed as science fiction—i.e., shelved in separate sections of libraries and bookstores, consumed by avid nerds who largely seek more of the same. But this is precisely the situation most New Wave writers were rebelling against: the ghettoization of the field as merely a publishing niche, rather than as a mode of seeing and critiquing the world. Perhaps the term “speculative fiction,” much bruited at the time as an alternative moniker, is better at capturing the range of work the New Wave helped usher in; after all, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Junot Díaz, among other major writers, have spoken eloquently of the inspiration they channeled from 1960s and ’70s talents such as Moorcock, Philip K. Dick, and Samuel R. Delany, even as these latter-day talents have resisted being pigeonholed into a marketing category. At the same time, those three New Wave authors—along with Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and a few others (including, yes, Harlan Ellison)—have emerged as significant figures of the counterculture era, regardless of genre.

In other words, even as the New Wave revitalized science fiction, it also helped disseminate a speculative worldview across the literary landscape more broadly. And perhaps, rather than taking refuge in hazy nostalgia (or reviving long-dead feuds), the deepest tribute we can offer to the writers and editors of New Worlds magazine and the Dangerous Visions anthologies is a clear-eyed recognition of this pivotal fact.