Michael Moorcock edited and produced the magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1973. Within its pages he encouraged the development of new kinds of popular writing out of the genre of science fiction, energetically reworking traditional themes, images and styles as a radical response to the crisis of modern fiction. The essential paradox of the new writing lay in its fascination with 'entropy' - the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key both to the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The fiction of the New Worlds writers, who included Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Moorcock himself, was not concerned with the far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world. As Ballard put it: 'The only truly alien planet is Earth.' The Entropy Exhibition is the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as 'New Wave' science fiction. It examines the history of the magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses development in stylistic theory and practice. Detailed attention is given to each of the three principal contributors to New Worlds - Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock. Moorcock himself is most commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels instead of by the magazine he supported with them, but here the balance is at last redressed: New Worlds emerges as nothing less than a focus and a metaphor for many of the transformations of English and American literature in the past two decades.
Release date:
May 27, 2013
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
249
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New Worlds was always the foremost British science fiction magazine, from its first issue in 1946. When Michael Moorcock took over the editorship in 1964, it became something more: the locus of a vigorous literary movement, organised almost single-handedly by Moorcock himself. His purpose was firstly to publish a more ambitious and flexible kind of science fiction which would no longer subscribe to the narrative conventions established in American ‘pulp’ magazines. When this policy met with hostility from science fiction fans and professionals who preferred to stick with what they knew, Moorcock opened the magazine to new kinds of imaginative writing beyond the categories of genre fiction. Most prominent in New Worlds were the works of Brian W. Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, and Moorcock himself; other major contributors included M. John Harrison, D.M. Thomas, and Langdon Jones, and the Americans, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Norman Spinrad, and James Sallis. The inspirational effect of the magazine can be seen in the large proportion of new young writers whose work it stimulated and published.
Despite the commercial crises which continually threatened New Worlds, including censorship by its own printers and distributors, Moorcock and his colleagues never lost sight of their principles and ideals. New Worlds was very much a magazine of the 1960s in its commitment to the popular arts, to freedom of imagination, to the original and unconventional, but it remained sceptical about other ‘revolutionary’ novelties of the period – prophetically, as it turned out. The anarchic movement it generated, called ‘New Wave science fiction’ by friends and enemies alike, spreads much further than that label indicates. It has helped to make the elements of science fiction more important to contemporary fiction in general and to the popular imagination at large. The Entropy Exhibition is a critical examination of New Worlds as a singular literary phenomenon, and an insight into how science fiction can articulate some of the elusive, often ambiguous ideas and problems of modernity.
This book is the product of several years of research, aided in part by finance from the Arts Council of Great Britain for a Writing Fellowship at NE London Polytechnic. NELP houses the library of the Science Fiction Foundation, the largest and best specialist collection on this side of the Atlantic, invaluable to any scholar of sf. The basis for The Entropy Exhibition, however, was a thesis of the same title accepted in 1980 for a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Those who are surprised to see work of such brash modernity proceeding from that citadel of tradition and antiquity should know that the papers of both Brian Aldiss and Michael Moorcock are held on deposit by the Bodleian Library. All unpublished sources cited here may be found in those collections, which are unfortunately not yet catalogued: I am extremely grateful to Margaret Aldiss and Brian Hinton for their labours in arranging the collections.
The greatest advantage of studying living writers is that they are often available for consultation. When the idea of this research was little more than a pipe-dream, Brian Aldiss encouraged me, and introduced me to Tom Shippey, then Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, who agreed to supervise my work and was particularly influential on its organisation, and in modulating the rhetoric of enthusiasm to the more sober tones of critical analysis. Michael Moorcock gave me considerable help in the form of discussion, and access to his own bookshelves. Aldiss, Ballard and Moorcock all read some of my earliest drafts and offered useful comments, and many other improvements were suggested by my eagle-eyed examiners, Professor I.F. Clarke, formerly of the University of Strathclyde, and Dr Peter Hoy of Merton College, Oxford. For support and assistance of a less official kind I am indebted to Keith Bowden, Nick Pratt, and other friends too numerous to mention, and especially to Joyce Day, good spirit of the SFF.
Text of David Bowie, ‘Space Oddity’ (1969) used by kind permission of Westminster Music Limited.
Unpublished material by Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock used by kind permission of the authors.
In John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos extra-terrestrial aliens visit a dull little English village and leave behind an embassy of their own seed implanted in human host-mothers. Though human enough in appearance, the offspring grow at an accelerated pace and soon began to exercise extraordinary mental powers, with violent effect. Gordon Zellaby, who has observed their upbringing, remarks,1
We are presented with a moral dilemma of some niceness. On the one hand, it is our duty to our race and culture to liquidate the Children, for it is clear that if we do not we shall, at best, be completely dominated by them, and their culture, whatever it may turn out to be, will extinguish ours.
On the other hand, it is our culture that gives us scruples about the ruthless liquidation of unarmed minorities, not to mention the practical obstacles to such a solution ….
It makes one long for H.G.’s straightforward Martians.
Alien visitors to Earth in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, though less straightforward than Wells’s, are more benevolent than Wyndham’s. They have been sent to prepare for the emergence of a new species out of the human race. Again it is the children that threaten humanity with extinction, but these are not of alien stock; their superhuman mental capacities are the result of an evolutionary jump. George Greggson, father of the first mutant, consults one of the alien supervisors.2
‘I’ve only one more question,’ he said, ‘What shall we do about our children?’
‘Enjoy them while you may,’ answered Rashaverak gently. ‘They will not be yours for long.’
It was advice that might have been given to any parent in any age: but now it contained a threat and a terror it had never held before.
In an essay first presented at a 1965 conference on ‘The Idea of the Future’, Leslie Fiedler referred to Clarke’s novel,3
at the conclusion of which the mutated offspring of parents much like us are about to take off under their own power into outer space. Mr. Clarke believes that he is talking about a time still to come because he takes metaphor for fact; though simply translating ‘outer space’ into ‘inner space’ reveals that what he is up to is less prediction than description; since the post-human future is now, and if not we, at least our children, are what it would be comfortable to pretend we still only foresee.
Fiedler’s justification of science fiction is not by any count of correct predictions, but by its subtext, its inner meaning, what he calls the ‘myth’ of science fiction:4
quite simply the myth of the end of man, of the transcendence or … transformation (under the impact of advanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions to machines) of homo sapiens into something else: the emergence –to use the language of Science Fiction itself–of ‘mutants’ among us.
The ‘mutants’ Fiedler identifies are his own children, his students, and their contemporaries: ‘Beatniks or hipsters, layabouts and drop-outs we are likely to call them with corresponding hostility.’ One adolescent is a misfit; a village-full is an invasion; an international host of them is a new species.
Fiedler’s proposition, that ‘the post-human future is now’ and that the Western younger generation in the mid-1960s intentionally made a cultural disconnection equivalent to an evolutionary mutation, however biologically unsound, is a prominent image of its time. He was by no means alone in his claims, nor in his rhetoric; and least of all in assigning a new importance to science fiction.5
Surely, there has never been a moment in which the most naïve as well as the most sophisticated have been so acutely aware of how the past threatens momentarily to disappear from the present, which itself seems on the verge of disappearing into the future.
And this awareness functions, therefore, on the level of art as well as entertainment, persuading quite serious writers to emulate the modes of Science Fiction. The novel is most amenable to this sort of adaptation, whose traces we can find in writers as various as William Golding and Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harry Matthews [sic] and John Barth – to all of whom young readers tend to respond with a sympathy they do not feel even toward such forerunners of the mode … as Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and George Orwell.
Fiedler observes that the evolutionary ‘moment’ is expressed in fiction that anticipated it, like Vonnegut’s, and fiction that followed it, like Barth’s. He recognises semi-conscious premonitions in earlier science fiction like Clarke’s, and deliberate adjustments in later ‘quite serious’ fiction, that bracket the moment. This book will look between those brackets to examine the fiction of the moment itself, the work of a group of writers dedicated to the ‘awareness’ and ‘seriousness’ of science fiction, and to doing away with naivete forever.
In The Midwich Cuckoos the Children represent a race with a very strong survival imperative which is a certain threat to mankind. In the end, however, they are destroyed by Zellaby in an exercise of a human (and characteristically British) impulse which they could not have foreseen: heroic self-sacrifice. In the terms of his own society Zellaby plays a moral trump, reasserting the endangered culture and so preserving it. In Childhood’s End the Children are not hostile to Terran life and culture but effectively outgrow it. Their parents accept obsolescence and watch their evolution open-mouthed. As the Children’s departure for outer space burns up the old planet behind them the last adult human survivor gives a commentary of approval.
The notion of a ‘generation gap’, of historical, social and cultural discontinuity between parents and children since the Second World War, is now extensively familiar. The rise of a ‘counter-culture’ that threatened not just to supplant but to destroy previous forms can be traced back to the 1950s, when England and America attained levels of national prosperity secure and high enough to permit internal diffraction. In Watch Out Kids, his history of the youth revolution, Mick Farren describes the split with characteristic cynicism.6
During the early fifties a new life style began to evolve; previous to this, humanity had passed from childhood to maturity with little comment, a kid put on long pants, he went to the factory with his old man and Pow! he was hooked for life.
The system had produced another one.
This was fine until the post war boom, when Madison Avenue realised that the fourteen to twenty-one age group had a vast consumption potential, particularly for luxury goods. The problem was to give those kids a collective identity and so the phrase teenager appeared in about nineteen forty-nine. Giving an identity to this group was one thing, controlling them was an entirely different matter. This group identity began to lead to something of a group consciousness and this led to a critical appraisal of the world that had been shaped by the previous generation.
Though stimulated and supplied by the commercial establishment, the teenagers rejected its ideology. Seizing what they had been offered and finding it altogether preferable to the prospects adult society held for their future, they began to develop a counterculture, deliberately geared to the present and in defiance of the conventions of their parents. They were energetic, sexual and loud; giving full vent to the normal erratic impulses of adolescence, they inverted them into virtues, to be defined and streamlined by a progression of new heroes – from the sullen menace of Marlon Brando, the Wild One, through the frustrated urgency of James Dean, to the sneering aggression of Elvis Presley. Their access to those rebel heroes was, however, controlled by businessmen, the managers, promoters, and producers; their accessories, an integral part of their new culture, were similarly produced and marketed. The young rebels had not rejected consumerism, but their materialism did not show the spirit of compliant placidity which characterised their parents’ consumption. The teenagers’ taste was for a whole new range of goods, outside the valuation of parental society: leather jackets, jeans, motorbikes, guitars. They conferred their own meanings on them, put them to their own uses, often in opposition to the ideology of their manufacturers. Jerry Rubin, instigator of the anarchist Yippie Party, records this ironic alchemy of wealth, leisure, and technology.7
On the surface the world of the 1950’s was all Eisenhower calm.
A cover story of ‘I Like Ike’ father-figure contentment ….
Dad looked at his house and car and manicured lawn, and he was proud. All of his material possessions justified his life ….
Elvis Presley ripped off Ike Eisenhower by turning our uptight young awakening bodies around. Hard animal rock energy beat surged hot through us, the driving rhythm arousing repressed passions …
Elvis told us to let go!
let go!
let go! …
Affluent culture, by producing a car and car radio for every middle-class home, gave Elvis a base for recruiting.
While a car radio in the front seat rocked with ‘Turn Me Loose’, young kids in the back seat were breaking loose. Many a night was spent on dark and lonely roads, balling to hard rock beat.
The back seat produced the sexual revolution, and the car radio was the medium for subversion.
The next step was obvious. After merely appropriating products of an affluent economy the young began to usurp processes too, to explore and exploit new technology. The Beatles and Bob Dylan used the pop music industry to articulate and amplify the concerns of a section of the human race that had previously lacked a coherent identity, let alone an international voice. Behind the ephemeral and playful facade of Carnaby Street was a radical pragmatism: civilisation was to be redesigned, thoroughly and permanently.
In the mid-1960s a huge populist upheaval, inchoate but for that aim and a broad commitment to the principle of pleasure, spread from the West Coast of America all the way across Europe. Nowadays the hippies are remembered as an anti-materialist movement, devoted to mysticism and puritan agrarian values. They were technophobic: computers, bombs, wrist-watches and domestic appliances were bad; the state itself was ‘The Machine’. Theodore Roszak makes their opposition to ‘the technocracy’ the centre of his analysis of the cultural conflict. What is less obvious and less appreciated is that this rejection was only one face of a technological innocence. There were nice machines as well as nasty ones: motorcycles, vibrators, stereos and offset lithography were good. To the urban radical, automation was liberation. Every job eliminated meant another opportunity to drop out. The young, with the leisure industries coming under their influence, looked forward to an extended lease of childhood, which they idealised. Richard Neville published the Schoolkids’ Oz magazine and a guide to the revolution called Playpower. Farren wrote:8
It is a technical fact that man need no longer be concerned to such an extent (that is, to the extent of eight hours a day plus) with the production of his own life support.
The robots are coming—make way for the robots.
A second technological feature on the revolutionary programme was further reaching and even more alien to the preceding generation, and that was the issue of psychedelia, the sudden popularity of mind-altering drugs. One way the young proposed to enjoy increased hours of leisure was by consuming cannabis and LSD. Over and above enjoyment, they claimed that these drugs offered philosophical and moral benefits, in the liberation of the senses and imagination from physical and habitual restraints. Anyone who takes LSD undergoes intense reorganisation of his perception of matter, space, time, and identity. He makes a complete reexamination of the foundations of consciousness, not systematically but spontaneously, experientially. This in itself makes him different from someone who does not take LSD. The experience certainly involves confusion and evanescent hallucinatory effects that seem meaningless to him, but it is also characterised by broad and extremely lucid patterns of metaphysical thought which can survive the ‘trip’ and will bear comparison with the reports of visionaries and traditions of mysticism, especially those of the East. The whole experience can be coloured by a profound feeling of revelation and conviction. As Richard Neville put it, ‘Non-acid takers regard the LSD trip as a remarkable flight from reality, whereas cautious devotees feel they’ve flown into reality …. After an acid trip, you can reject everything you have ever been taught.’9 The sensory distortions produced by cannabis are easily assimilated to the loosened frame of reference provided by LSD, mescalin, or psilocybin.
There are the makings here of a complete social division: revolution in the head, along the highways of perception and understanding. The psychedelic experience, being entirely subjective, is self-authenticating. It sweeps away mundane distinctions and criteria and provides an altogether different vision, perfect material for a message. It gave its first advocates an inexorable sense of rightness in opposing their holistic, libertarian ethos to the discriminatory and repressive outlook of their elders. ‘Grass teaches us disrespect for the law and the courts. Which do you trust: Richard Milhous Nixon or your own sense organs?’10 They really were exclusive. In legislating against cannabis and LSD the governments of America and Europe were not only outlawing drugs that encouraged disaffection among the young but making a stand on a crucial problem of phenomenology. They were reaffirming faith in Western materialism and a single objective reality. Anyone who does not act in that faith is mentally unstable; any substance that promotes his disbelief is a poison. Nevertheless, there was no way for them to reconvert the children who had seen reality flicker and melt, could reproduce the experience at will, and felt themselves wiser for it. National economies might compromise with new tastes and demands, but to embrace a resurgence of solipsist philosophies was not in their interest.
Timothy Leary, prophet of psychedelia, preached that hallucinogenic drugs offered the best opportunity for coming to terms with a world transformed by technology.11
Human beings born after the year 1943 belong to a different species from their progenitors. Three new energies, exactly symmetrical and complementary – atomics, electronics, and psychedelics – have produced an evolutionary mutation. The release of atomic energy placed the mysterious basic power of the universe in man’s hands. The frailty of the visible. The power of the invisible. Electronic impulses link the globe in an instantaneous communication network. The circuited unity of man. Psychedelic drugs release internal energy and speed consciousness in the same exponential proportions as nuclear and electronic space-time expansions.
Though coming from a follower of the other camp, Leary’s rhetoric echoes Fiedler’s. (This is not a sociological trend. It’s an evolutionary lurch. The generation gap is a species mutation.’12) He speaks like a comic book professor, borrowing numinous phrases from science and from science fiction, where evolutionary lurches have already been described by Wyndham and Clarke.
Science fiction, essentially the literature of altered circumstances, is the obvious place to seek a language for the unprecedented, especially since it offers as many anxious images as utopian ones. Leary dreads ‘the dead posturing of robot actors on the fake-prop stage that is called American reality.’13 R.D. Laing feels doubtful ‘whether my world is not a five-channel synchronized hallucination.’14 William Burroughs habitually calls reality a movie, and a mediocre one at that. This is the vocabulary of dehumanisation. familiar to psychiatrists from the conversation of schizophrenics. Poets and orators do not always misconstrue their borrowings from the languages of science, or those of insanity. These new metaphors are not altogether arbitrary. Much of their vibrancy in the popular imagination is because they tremble on the edge of becoming literal. The distinction between man and machine is no longer as clear as can be. This fact is attested not only by the fantasies of Leary and Laing or by the sensations of prosthesis patients, but also by the existence of a science of cybernetics. Norbert Wiener founded it precisely in the overlap:15
I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine.
The pundits who turned to science fiction for a vocabulary did so because their students and children were doing so, though they expressed their alienation by identifying with the aliens, not like Laing with the machines or like Fiedler with the obsolete parents. In one of their songs the San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane quoted lines from Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, while David Bowie seemed to have ‘translated’ Childhood’s End in the way Fiedler recommended:16
Look out at your children,
See their faces in golden rays.
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you—
They’re the start of the coming race.
The Earth is a bitch,
We’ve finished our news;
Homo sapiens have outgrown their use.
All the strangers came today
And it looks as though they’re here to stay.
Neil Young and the Pink Floyd were also to take texts from the book of Clarke. Dressing up as an alien certainly had its glamour, not to say menace, which Bowie later paraded as Ziggy Stardust.17 But the image also covered some more drastic attempts at dissociation from civilisation, as Neville noted.18
‘We want our son to be free, unprogrammed and completely unidentified with the state,’ says one child’s young father, who delivered the baby himself. and told no one except the Underground press. That means no birth certificate, no schooling unless the child wants it, no taxation, no official record of his existence …. And if [he] is ever discovered by the bureaucracy? ‘He will tell them he’s from another planet.’…
And in a sense, he will be.
The sense of fantasy in hippy doctrine, however dynamic and vital, was too large to be manageable. Juvenile egotism, militant against conformity, made the revolutionaries pursue desires rather than possibilities. Their reaffirmation of the force of subjectivity accomplished liberations on the way, but could lead only to division and dissent. After the first joyful fraternity of rebellion they could find no community of cause. Differences of attitude towards established society and its projected replacement were quickly revealed. The extreme, often fantastic solutions offered by instant mystics, acidheads and politicos proved generally incompatible. In the disintegration the number of private worlds multiplied. Confidence in the existence or nature of objective reality has not yet been consolidated again. Technology continues to grow in ambiguity; the future flickers ever more urgently. Science fiction is still very popular and, if the two are not the same thing, highly appropriate to our place and time.
Writing elsewhere, Fiedler suggested what the implications were for science fiction itself.19
Science Fiction … found … its real meaning and scope only after World War II. At that point, two things become clear: first, that the Future was upon us, that the pace of technological advance had become so swift that a distinction between Present and Future would get harder and harder to maintain; and second, that the End of Man, by annihilation or mutation, was a real, even an immediate possibility. But these are the two proper subjects of Science Fiction: the Present Future and the End of Man – not time travel or the penetration of outer space, except as the latter somehow symbolize the former.
This book deals in large part with a science fiction writer and the magazine he edited, into whose pages crowded a large number of writers concerned with those ‘proper subjects’, the end of man – indeed, the end of everything—and the place of the future in the present. While poets and orators were making free with old images of utopia and Metropolis, starmen and robots, these writers were occupied with a newer theme: entropy. They saw the degeneration of energy as a fit image for the disintegration of society and the individual consciousness. Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head, serialised in the magazine between 1967 and 1969, is a perceptive chronicle of the hippies themselves, from the brilliant, ecstatic sunlight of the first Summer of Love to the confused moral chiaroscuro at the end of the decade.
Michael Moorcock and the writers he gathered about him were conscious, even self-conscious, about science fiction, its symbolism. its immediacy, its responsibilities, and above all its possibilities. They were the first generation in science fiction to consider and discuss their work principally as art, not as cult, didactic tradition, intellectual pastime, or anything else. Some of them, including Thomas M. Disch and Charles Platt, contributed to the leading article in issue 173 of New Worlds in July 1967. It was printed as an anonymous editorial statement on ‘The Lessons of the Future’.
Man has changed, and is changing. The process, begun a century ago or more, is still accelerating. He has become, characteristically, an urban dweller who lives out his life in an environment of artifacts and artifices where he cannot avoid a consciousness of his own mutability (a theme of much of the best speculative fiction). The social sciences, imperfect as they still are, indicate this much at least: that a man’s character (and soon, perhaps, his physical person) is as artificial and arbitrary as any accessory of his culture.
The article gives examples of ‘artifacts and artifices’ that alter our relationship to our world. The urban dweller lives in a controlled environment, i. . .
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