Introduction

My first New Worlds editorials of the mid-sixties roughly coincided with the Beatles' first Number One, the assassination Kennedy, the stepping-up of US bombing in Vietnam, Johnson's backing of civil rights and Medicare legislation, the rise of Black Power, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the death of Winston Churchill, the founding of the Kenyan republic, the rise of modern feminism. The only even of the decade that science fiction predicted with any accuracy was the moon landing of 1969. It is probably fair to say that for most of us this was the least relevant event.

Certainly our sixties optimism was invested pretty thoroughly in what the Beatles represented both economically and artistically. Here were artists taking charge of their own destinies, whose work improved with almost every record, who were trying to develop an ethic to go with their power. Considerable power was still in new hands; the flow of wealth was flowing steadily from capital to labour. The power was diverse, mostly benign and hugely inexpert. Within a few years the experts would move in to take over the free wheeling pop corporations and discover the common denominators enabling them to produce a creative package whose progress they could predict.

During those brief years when power was distributed rather more widely than it is today, it seemed that the old vices were mocked into oblivion and an age of virtuous experiment proclaimed. When the power was sucked back so greedily, so ruthlessly and so rapidly it caught most of us unawares; it seemed some Black Hole had formed overnight. We hardly knew what was happening to us. Through this period I think some writers lost confidence while others found unwholesome comfort in that return to old standards. Only in some visionary fiction was there any really coherent response to social change. If you examined the fiction receiving the greatest approval in, say, the Sunday Times, you usually discovered nothing more than a debased vocabulary, borrowed subject matter, a compendia of the century's received ideas.

For people frustrated by the banality and low levels of aspiration of the 'mainstream' it was hard to find alternatives, in English at least. Those of us no longer entertained by the kind of fantasies, SF or otherwise, which filled the bestseller charts, were mostly looking elsewhere and still not finding much. The corporations providing us with bland SF bestsellers as well as bland social fiction and bland mysteries are usually the same offering us bland movies, bland records and bland TV shows. They frequently also produce our newspapers and magazines, which are distributed through wholesaling and reselling monopolies who decide what should or should not sell in the majority of our newsagents and bookshops. This means that small-circulation magazines - even anthologies of original stories published by major firms - can rarely get the distribution which would make them available to their maximum potential audiences and perhaps allow them to exist on something above a break-even level. The chances of a new, idiosyncratic writer being published by one of the corporations also get worse. The monopolies exist to maintain their own power and extend it where they can. By gobbling up their competition as thoroughly as they have done in the past few years they are, if nothing else, reducing our choices and are certainly an anathema to any creative innovation. If eventually these monsters tend to collapse under their own weight it's no great comfort for the reader looking for something a bit more interesting or the writers who often go unpublished while the process is taking place. The few independents, who emerge to meet the demand, struggle to supply their audiences until the corporate people see there's a market to exploit and make an offer for their independence they can rarely afford to refuse. Only a few manage to continue and it's almost always never easy. It feels to me a bit like the fifties.

The majority of us around the so-called underground movement of the sixties were not pie-in-the-sky hippie dreamers or sharp operators in Regency-cut jackets. The publications and the bands I associated with at least were moved not by dope smoke but by frustration with the awful inheritance of the fifties, the oppressive smugness of the previous generation, the grey choice of lamb or mutton, tweed of flannel, Amis or Braine. Most of our available literary models had the manners and opinions of the same seedy misfits in mackintoshes you saw hanging around outside radio shops or dirty bookshops. Pictures from Kingsley Amis's recent memoirs could be of some interminable office outing, of geeky chaps and strangely dressed ladies talking naughty and reaching spasmodically towards their reassuring, importantly mixed tipple while their reported conversation had the same unheroic heartiness, the identical embittered self-referring whine, of a million passed-over Prufrocks. Any reader wishing to get an idea of the awful predicability, boastful pomposity, beery philistinism and unbearable depressiveness of the late fifties and early sixties would do well to read Amis's exemplary book. Thirty years on, too little has changes. Even the names are frequently the same.

Having, by the mid-sixties, at last escaped the bar-room philosophies, the unremarkable ambitions of the Angry Young Men, we became a little euphoric I suppose and thought our choices would naturally continue to expand. Many of us thought that you only had to publish new ideas and original work for people to prefer them. It seemed public taste was improving and that popular art was rising to higher and higher standards, making genuinely original progress in various directions. The political climate seemed to be improving, too…

The seventies had something to do with our discovery that good taste was not universal but that bad taste was. Sadly the corporations discovered the same fact. Scarcely before the Sex Pistols had time to make their first angry response to all this disappointment, they were ruthlessly used by a young corporate challenger in his own bid for power. Within a year, the Pistols went from being the authentic expression of artistic and political frustration to a mere fashion statement. Punk had become not a revolution but a safety valve. Suckered again.

The present resurgence in good literary SF, both in short stories and novels, has it's origins chiefly in the semi-professional magazines which, with Interzone, kept things going during the bad years of the eighties. The resurgence owes much to editor-publishers like Chris Reed, whose Back Brain Recluse (BBR) can now, like Interzone, be ordered through newsagents. These magazines encouraged several of the people published here and have supported a growing movement of young writers in England and America.

Literary science fiction remains largely ignored by reviewers who will still announce that J. G. Ballard or Kurt Vonnegut books are too good to be SF, in spite of the writers' claims that they are nothing less. TV critics will still tell us, without a flicker of déjà vu, that literary SF is more about inner space than outer space and proceed to air the same extraordinary prejudices they have been airing for years, based chiefly on the inability of unwillingness to learn an unfamiliar vocabulary, a failure to detect irony, and a presumption that the writers are primitives or näifs. When this kind of SF goes to the reviewer eagerly awaiting the next David Eddings bestseller it is frequently met with straightforward hostility.

The received wisdom from such people (including the grumpy Amis who somehow felt SF, like jazz, had let him down) was that the 'New Wave' was nothing more than a series of airy experiments in style, of grotesque self-indulgence and an unhealthy obsession with sex. I have seen these opinions regurgitated, always unexamined, for more than a quarter of a century and they are especially wearying since any glance at the evidence immediately contradicts them. Novels which first appeared in New Worlds included The Crystal World by Ballard, Camp Concentration by Disch, Bug Jack Barron by Spinrad, An Age by Aldiss, and Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harrison. They might have been dissimilar, but they certainly weren't insubstantial. The same can be said for the bulk of the fiction published in New Worlds, the majority of which was republished elsewhere and continues to be republished (a representative anthology of New Worlds, Fontana, 1983, also contains a complete bibliography of issues). But if a myth can resist the evidence so thoroughly, it's probably no surprise that literary SF is still regarded with suspicion by Star Trek enthusiasts and by people who think of Malcolm Bradbury as both the mouthpiece and master of modern fiction.

Even if Philip K. Dick was right, after all, and Total Recall was his posthumous experience of corporate rape ('We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' with it's tongue torn out), for me the nineties is a period quite as interesting as the sixties, producing a wealth of confidently maturing writers. The sixties was for some of us a marvellous high, a Golden Age. I said so while it was happening and I enjoyed it to the full, but once it was over there seemed no point in trying to recreate it. The times were, indeed, a-changing…

However, the same idealism, the same creative energy, the same anger, frustration and enthusiasm which produced the seminal work of the sixties is now producing the liveliest writing of the nineties. These particular times offer a great deal of optimism for those of us who want to embrace, enjoy and employ change. Even before it became a professional magazine in 1946 New Worlds always embraced and celebrated social, scientific and cultural change, changes in the way we thought and used language, fundamental changes in perception and art that represented these changes.

Because it was clear that so many talented new writers were emerging through new magazines and slightly more visible original anthologies like Holdstock and Evans's Other Edens or Garnett's Zenith, and because none of these publications was getting the kind of support and distribution they deserved, I approached David Garnett to see if he would like to take over the editorship of New Worlds. Richard Evans, always a champion of literary SF, agreed that Gollancz (still one of the very few independents in publishing) would publish it and Ian Craig was eager to design it. David Garnett seemed an ideal person to put his own mark on NW while continuing the tradition of publishing substantial work which characterised the best NW stories even before E. J. Carnell published Ballard's The Drowned World and The Terminal Beach.

The majority of New Worlds stories, whether they were series like Disch's 334, Aldiss's Acid Head Wars or Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, novellas like Sladek's Masterdon and the Clerks, elegies like Zoline's The Heat Death of the Universe and Jones's The Eye of the Lens (many of which were, so to speak, pre-post-modern…), were strong on content and style and tended to look at character and relationships with what could only be called a moral eye.

The NW writers, raised in the years when the information explosion made it impossible for anyone but the most socially isolated to ignore the world and the sins against the human spirit being perpetrated in the name of our old and honourable icons, questioned our traditional enlightenment remedies for the world's ills, values which writers like Heinlein, Clarke and even Wells had carried into the distant future and the depths of space.

Much of this kind of science fiction became, never deliberately, a rather clever means of escaping the uncomfortable realities of the present. At its simplest it creates a never-never land where big men do big things with big machines to grotesque enemies, or young women discover the joys of caring for sentient teddy bears.

The SF blockbuster has become as familiar as the bestselling spy story or any other commercially successful power fantasy which proclaims, to me at any rate, the dull despair of the barely enfranchised. But some writers in the tradition, say, Wylie or Orwell and Dick used their fascination with the marvellous and new to tell sharp and often moving parables of the human condition. Joanna Russ, Harlan Ellison, Kit Reed, Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, Mary Gentle, Lewis Shiner, Charles Harness, Lucius Shepard, Gwyneth Jones, Terry Bisson, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Colin Greenland, Lisa Tuttle, Christopher Evans, Garry Kilworth, Eric Brown, Robert Holdstock, Steve Baxter, Misha, Barrington Bayley are merely a few of those writers I have not previously mentioned. There are many more, not all working in English, who have continued (often with great difficulty since their work rarely fits commercial categories) to give us an extraordinary variety of outstanding fiction. Literary science fiction is being written all over the industrialised world. Publishing it sometimes proves difficult.

For a while there were few places where a literary science fiction story by anyone but an established name would be welcomed. During the mid-eighties semi-professional magazines, not unlike the music fanzines they were frequently combined with, begun to proliferate. They steadily improved both in design and content and are nowadays available by mail and through specialist shops. Many of them publish the same writers you will find in NW or Interzone. They usually publish idiosyncratic talent as a matter of policy. Frequently it is the most daring and curious work around. Some of the TITLEs, more or less at random, are The Scanner, The Edge, Journal Wired, Nova, Works, Xenos and Nova Express. There are also critical magazines like SF Eye, The New York Review of SF, Quantum and Nexus which take a frequently uncompromising look at the imaginative fiction today. SF is a form which can no longer be considered of minority interest. Its vocabularies and references are familiar to the majority of us who read for pleasure. It therefore urgently needs, I think, some rigorous criticism. Very few of these magazines make much distinction between 'mainstream' and 'fantasy' fiction and quite reasonably, since those distinctions no longer exist in any meaningful sense. At the time of writing, Nexus should be available through newsagents. I am looking forward to it. Its editorial policy statement displays a fine impatience with the existing status quo.

In other words, New Worlds doesn't by any means publish all the good work. By ordering Back Brain Recluse and Interzone the interested reader should be able to find a great range of other publications providing a wonderful alternative to the cloned ranks of paperbacks you encounter these days whenever you enter a bookshop. Meanwhile, Britton's and Butterworth's crazed ironies continue to erupt from their Savoy imprint, publishing Lord Horror comics or bizarre P. J. Proby records with a quirky, defiant vulgarity which echoes Smollet and Gillray but which thoroughly (some would say terrifyingly) relate this centuries relate this centuries complex realities. Savoy's constant problems with various authorities tend to make their distribution erratic but for those who find contemporary cyberpunk a little bit tame Lord Horror, Meng & Ecker and the Hitler Youth Orchestra should restore their faith in excess.

The bulk of commercial SF and fantasy is no more 'imaginative' than the bulk of anything else. Even at their best these books prove that Enlightenment idealism, like magic, works best in a sword and sorcery tale.

The stories published here have about as much to do with those mindless exploitation SF sequels to which the famous add their names, as Brighton Rock has to do with Kane and Abel. They also have little to do with most 'hard' SF, which generally lacks the excitement and immediacy of any issue of Nature and is perhaps sf's least accurate method of examining the future. The stories do deal with human relationships, eternal dilemmas, new moralities, today's experience. I don't think it matters what label they get as long as people who want to read them can find them. If they share a generic label with a lot of very bad commercial fiction that is scarcely their fault. If Jane Eyre is Gothic, The Mill on the Floss a romance, Les Misérables a mystery, Chéri Erotica or Victory a Sea Story, then 1984, v, A Clockwork Orange, The Old Men at the Zoo and The Handmaid's Tale are all science fiction while George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, Anthony Burgess, Angus Wilson, Margaret Atwood, Jilian Barnes, Salmon Rushdie, Russel Hobarn, Peter Ackroyd, Doris Lessing, Robert Nye, Jonathan Carroll, Angela Carter, John Barth, William Burroughs, Ian Banks, n'guib Mahfouz, William Golding, Fay Weldon, Herman Hesse, Fawzi Mellah and hundreds more are SF writers. Or you could say that, like the authors here, they chose an appropriate visionary medium for a specific literary purpose. Our judgement of their work becomes a question of preference, not of quality. What unites the writers and what you can fairly judge them on is their level of aspiration, not their choice of medium.

An encouraging sign for me is that only three old NW hands are represented here - Aldiss, Clute and myself - while there is a preponderance of relatively new writers, including an excellent new story. This confirms my own optimism about restarting New Worlds. If this particular collection is predominantly British and predominantly male, future editions should see a wider range of nationalities and genders and I personally hope more non-English-speaking writers will begin submitting translations.

Literary SF has never more central to common experience, never more valid and vary rarely better. I'm sure increasing numbers of readers will find it considerably more satisfying than most of the alternatives. The 'mainstream' is today little more than one exhausted tributary of the literary flood, a wadi full of bleached arcs whose bewildered crews are beginning to ask themselves if the current will ever return. They're a bit like people at a Baghdad bus-stop on 17 January 1991 asking why the Number Seven is so unusually late.

It almost seems a shame to tell them.

Michael Moorcock
London, April 1991