Brian W. Aldiss, The Long Afternoon of Earth (Hothouse)
Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
J. G. Ballard, The Best of J. G. Ballard
Gregory Benford, Timescape
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
Michael Bishop, Ancient of Days
James Blish, A Case of Conscience
Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
John Crowley, Great Work of Time
Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Thomas M. Disch, 334 and Camp Concentration
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Gwyneth Jones, White Queen
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz
Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers and Davy
Joanna Russ, The Female Man
Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (4 volumes)
Roger Zelazny, The Dream Master and Four for Tomorrow
This list is by no means exhaustive, nor do I think that, unless your reading tastes are particularly catholic, you would enjoy all these books. However, you would find strong literary talents, highly developed personal styles, character, thematic complexity—something to admire—in every work. Most of these works are held in high regard within the field, although several of the authors are more popular outside the field than within it (Delany, Ballard, Keyes).
By now you should recognize that there are extraliterary virtues in much of the best science fiction that give those works strong and enduring appeal within the field, although the works themselves may not communicate these pleasures effectively to outsiders, due to literary fashion both outside the science fiction field and within it. And you should be aware, although the fact has rarely been recognized outside the field, that there exist certain works of the very highest quality according to the standards of accepted literary taste. That these works have gone so long unrecognized is not a failure of the science fiction field but reflects an unwillingness on the part of outsiders to believe that searching for these works will repay the effort. Now you know more than they do.
9
NEW WAVE: THE GREAT WAR OF THE 1960s
Cele Goldsmith is … with Judith Merril, god-mother to the American New Wave of the 1960s. She published all the Young Turks, most of them for the first time, in the magazines she edited.… As Merril did with her opinion-moulding Year’s Best SF Stories, Goldsmith had to create a climate for the kind of fiction she enjoyed.
—Michael Moorcock (Introduction to Fritz Leiber’s Ill Met in Lankhmar [Clarkston, GA: White Wolf, Inc., 1995])
CONFLICT AND ARGUMENT are an enduring presence in the SF world, but literary politics has yielded to open warfare on the largest scale only once. And the woman who launched a thousand polemics was Judith Merril, author, reviewer, and anthologist. A charismatic personality in SF since the late 1940s, Merril was an active social figure in the SF world and a bearer of higher literary standards in her reviews. But it was in her anthologies that her crusading spirit was most evident.
Merril produced the annual Year’s Best SF volumes from 1956 until 1968, the most important “books of record” in the field in those years. In them, she made it her personal crusade to break down the growing proliferation of artificial categories in the field (hard SF, science fantasy, fantastic fiction, and many others) by calling everything by the letters “SF.” But this was only the beginning of her mission. In the late fifties and early sixties, she began to discover and identify instances of good SF writing outside the field, not merely in an attempt to bring writers like Jorge Luis Borges and George P. Elliott and Robert Nathan to the attention of the science fiction world but quite intentionally to blur and ultimately obliterate the distinctions between science fiction and the rest of contemporary literature, to bring science fiction back into the mainstream. In this she was opposed by the prestigious John W. Campbell, who claimed that science fiction is so comprehensive in its conception, possibilities, settings, etc., that all the rest of literature is just a special case, and a limited one at that, of science fiction.
Merril, no whit deterred, proposed in the early sixties that the field change its name to speculative fiction, redefining SF (ess eff) to be equal to and congruent with spec fic (speculative fiction, that term introduced by Heinlein in his 1941 Denvention—Denver Worldcon—speech). She had a point, in that no one could deny that SF had never been defined. But as it turned out, the field wasn’t going to accept her as its “onlie definer.” What followed was the greatest battle in modern SF history, the New Wave controversy.
To summarize six years of battle in a couple of paragraphs: Two groups of writers, almost all young and new to SF, took up Merril’s rallying cry and revolutionized science fiction by infusing into the field the entire range of literary techniques available to the contemporary writer of the avant-garde. One group was loosely centered around Merril and the Milford, Pennsylvania, annual SF writers conference (Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Virginia Kidd, James Blish, Gordon R. Dickson, Theodore Sturgeon and others) in the U.S., and to a lesser but significant extent around Cele Goldsmith’s Amazing and Fantastic in the early 1960s. The other (larger, more coherent, and more radical) was centered around the British magazine New Worlds (1964–1970), and its editor, Michael Moorcock. New Worlds had reached the extreme point, just before the end in 1970 or so, where it was hard to tell the fiction from the paid advertising, it was so experimental.
For five or six years, New Wave and speculative fiction were au courant in the science fiction world, but by the end of the sixties, Merril was a political refugee living in Canada, New Worlds’s British Arts Council grants had run out and the magazine folded, and young writers were beginning to admit in public to being science fiction writers again. The science fiction world settled back to digest and incorporate an enormous transfusion of literary technique, the new blood of a whole generation of diverse talents such as Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, and a host of others who would be writers by damn, not just science fiction writers. Poof! No more strict stylistic limitations on how a science fiction story is told.
What Moorcock and Ballard and Brian Aldiss in England, and Merril and Delany and Russ and Disch and Harlan Ellison in the U.S., stood for—now that we have the advantage of historical perspective—was that SF is a special case of that category, literature, and as such may have as its goal the achievement of “high art” (the literary level of Joyce, Proust, Pound, Eliot). To the extent that, before the sixties, SF did not aim for this level of achievement, we can perceive a failure of nerve in the field as a whole, traceable to the famous argument between Henry James and H. G. Wells. A good capsule discussion of how the James versus Wells bout influenced the development of SF is presented in the important and generally neglected essay introduction to the anthology In Dreams Awake, by Leslie Fiedler (New York: Dell, 1975, p. 16). The situation, complicated by a growing split between British and American SF according to which aesthetic dominated locally, is one of the unexamined roots of the present state of SF that future literary historians will have to untangle and examine. For present purposes only the surface situation applies to our considerations.
At the end of years of ever more serious disagreement between Wells and James, Wells finally was understood to stand for communicating ideas to a large audience through journalistic (unornamented) prose, and James for a complex prose art that would stand for eternity like a cathedral, whole and entire, regardless of the size of the congregation. The Jamesian aesthetic became a pillar of literary Modernism.
Gernsback and, later, Campbell were prophets
of the Wellsian aesthetic—as was Robert A. Heinlein. The first significant challenge to this was the Merril/Moorcock effort. And to make the matter more pleasingly ironic, we might note that it was not until later in Wells’s career that he solidified into his aesthetic position, particularly in the teens and twenties. In the 1890s, as the radical, pessimistic young writer of The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Island of Dr. Moreau (enthusiastically praised by Henry James and Joseph Conrad, among others), and just after the turn of the century, as the author of utopian fictions based on technological progress, Wells was in no fashion the prophet of popular optimism he later became. It was as he moved further in the direction of optimism and popularity, as his position in society became more and more that of cultural guru, that Wells became James’s enemy, evidently to James’s dismay.
Robert A. Heinlein, of all the famous authors of SF between Wells and the present, most clearly and effectively caught the optimistic and technological problem-solving mode of the later Wells and adapted it in a body of work unparalleled in its popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. And Heinlein himself was a dominating personality in the SF field, perhaps second in influence only to John Campbell during those two great decades. But not only was Robert A. Heinlein changing in the 1960s (starting with Stranger in a Strange Land, which became a well-known underground classic); a new writer, J. G. Ballard, whose stories began appearing in England in the late 1950s, had become a focus of controversy.
The first work of Ballard’s to appear in the U.S. was “Prima Belladonna,” a sensitive, intense story of love and bizarre emotional states (more than vaguely reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter”) set in Vermilion Sands, a surreal science fictional version of decadent future America. It was Ballard’s first published work in Britain and was reprinted in Judith Merril’s second annual Year’s Best anthology (1957). Even in this first story, the kernel of what became Ballard’s characteristic auctorial tone was present—a kind of tortured clinical detachment, raked into the surreal.
Most of the readership of science fiction (oh well, why not admit it—most readers) are style deaf, can make only such gross distinctions as easy-to-read and hard-to-read, normal prose and complicated stuff, Hemingway and Joyce, Wells and James, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. Science fiction, with a few notable but acceptable exceptions, remained until the early sixties firmly entrenched in the Campbellian (in the footsteps of the later Wells) aesthetic of clean, precise, naturalistic writing for every situation. (The three stylistic mavericks of most high repute—Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Ray Bradbury—never repudiated the general standards and coexisted peacefully.)
Here is a piece of exemplary writing within a science fiction story, from the famous “Helen O’Loy” by Lester del Rey (a 1938 piece from Campbell’s Astounding), quoted from In Dreams Awake (p. 147):
She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.
“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen.… Mmmm … Helen of Alloy.”
“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”
And a better than average example from “The Other Man” by Theodore Sturgeon, the man regarded as perhaps the best stylist of the day, which was included in Merril’s 1957 The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy anthology (New York: Dell, 1957, p. 236):
He might have imagined her in old clothes, or in cheap clothes. Here she was in clothes which were both. He had allowed, in his thoughts of her, for change, but he had not thought her nose might have been broken, nor that she might be so frighteningly thin. He had thought she would always walk like something wild … free, rather … but with stateliness, too, balanced and fine.
And here is a paragraph from Ballard’s “Prima Belladonna,” in the same anthology (p. 221):
Harry groaned. “Don’t you realize, this one is poetic, emergent, something straight out of the primal apocalyptic sea. She’s probably divine.”
It should come as no surprise that only a small minority of the SF field recognized Ballard as a revolutionary talent. To most of the field, he was an incursion of white noise. In the paragraphs above, del Rey’s, Sturgeon’s, and Ballard’s characters are observing an attractive woman, but there the similarity ends. While both del Rey’s and Sturgeon’s prose is recognizably in the Campbellian tradition, neither Ballard’s prose nor his characters relate to this tradition. Ballard’s characters live in a world where the inmost emotional states and the most complex intellectualizations are the surreal surfaces of their lives. They speak, act, and think abnormally. Ballard’s stories are juxtaposed to reality in order to embody certain artistic insights which cannot be manifest within the confines of Campbellian SF.
Ballard continued to produce such stories into the early 1960s and then emerged as a novelist with four disaster novels, The Wind from Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World. These and subsequent fictions made him the most controversial SF writer of the time. The novels were just as rich and strange as the stories; and, in an era when SF readers could still read every single work published, since there were still only about ten new SF books (at most) in any given month, and often less, the novels began to be talked about.
They were against the grain of SF, even called anti-SF by some, while hotly defended by others. In December of 1966, Algis Budrys launched a full-scale attack in the review column of Galaxy magazine against Ballard and his influence on SF, to which we will return. In 1968, Merril edited England Swings SF, a concentrated dose of the new British fiction, widely reviewed in the U.S.; Michael Moorcock had already taken over the editorship of the magazine New Worlds in 1964. They raised the works of Ballard as the standard of the “new thing” in SF. Ballard was the avatar of change in SF, and Merril and Moorcock were his prophets. Excitement gripped the SF world as open conflict raged, and confusion reigned for years. It was the battle of the New Wave.
From the standpoint of the present, the whole great battle is best illuminated in the U.S. through the writings of the forces who summarized the opposition. (Everything went differently in England, where the controversy resulted in a serious aesthetic gap between British and American SF that persists to this day.) At the end, the opposition succeeded in turning attention away from style (and letting stylistic freedoms gained in the 1960s persist) toward an opposition between optimism and pessimism in SF.
In 1971, John J. Pierce (later to become editor of Galaxy) published “Towards a Theory of Science Fiction,” a rewrite of his 1968 paper “Science Fiction and the Romantic Tradition” (self-published as an issue of his fanzine Renaissance). This was nothing less than an attempt to save SF by starting a “back to roots” movement. Pierce invoked Wells’s film Things to Come, which ends with a great optimistic rallying cry, as an antidote to the pessimistic likes of Dostoyevsky, Sartre, and Beckett in the contemporary world; he quoted at length from Robert A. Heinlein’s essay on the science fiction novel in The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism, ed. Basil Davenport (Chicago: Advent, 1959) which attacks “sick” contemporary fiction and proposes SF as a countervailing force; he marshals the forces of C. S. Lewis and Ayn Rand, Lester del Rey and Colin Wilson, James Branch Cabell and Donald A. Wollheim. Pierce’s message was that true science fiction is in deadly danger. After nearly a decade of battle, true SF lies wounded and bleeding on the battlefield (p. 31):
The influence of the New Wave has led to a general collapse of critical standards for science fiction. Mrs. Merril may have dropped out of sight, Ballard may be having trouble turning out any more of his “condensed novels” (verbal montages that have succeeded his catatonic disaster novels), New Worlds may barely manage to survive from on
e issue to the next … but the damage has been done. There is a mystique among critics and editors to the effect that science fiction cannot have any standards of its own, but must be used only as a “vehicle” or even as a “vocabulary” for some other art form.
There had been anti-SF before the advent of the New Wave, said Pierce, but never before had the critical establishment in science fiction embraced it. Even Damon Knight and James Blish, the paragons of criticism in SF, “eagerly curried favor” with the New Wave, and Knight used his influence as president of the Science Fiction Writers of America to promote the movement. Pierce stated (p. 30):
“New Wave” [is] an effort to bring science fiction to the mainstream by sacrificing its values and traditions and substituting those of the mainstream.
“New Wave” writers pretend to be breaking “conventions,” but in fact they merely ape mainstream conventions. Ballard apes Dadaism, and surrealism. Disch imitates social realism, symbolism, Sartrean nausea and other clichés. Brian Aldiss, a convert to the “New Wave,” imitated Robbe-Grillet in one novel [Report on Probability A] and Joyce in another [Barefoot in the Head]. New Worlds is full of pastiches of Kafka and Beckett. Ellison and some of his followers even incorporate the elements of supernatural horror. True, science fiction writers have borrowed styles before—but their plots and ideas were their own.
In “New Wave” fiction, science always leads only to disastrous results; humanity is always presented as evil, helpless and insignificant; the universe is always a nightmare beyond rational comprehension; and the philosophy is always nihilistic or deterministic. The “New Wave” writers claim to be individualistic but this is merely a question of style and approach; the followers of Ballard take a cold and detached view towards their subject matter.…
Meanwhile, “New Wave” advocates deliberately misrepresent the history and traditions of science fiction: to read some of their arguments, one would believe nothing existed before 1964 but gadget stories and pulp adventure with cardboard characters, naive utopianism and the like—that science fiction was devoid of serious ideas and problems. Science fiction has become a genre without honor in its own house.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 17