The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British "New Wave" in Science Fiction

by Colin Greenland

First published in 1983 The Entropy Exhibition is the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as New Wave science fiction. It examines the history of the New Worlds magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses developments in stylistic theory and practice.

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 writing lay in its fascination with the concept of entropy the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key to both the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The Fiction of the New Worlds writers was not concerned with far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world.

Detailed attention is given to each of the three main contributors to the New Worlds magazine Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard. Moorcock himself is more commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels than by the magazine he supported with them, but here at last the balance is 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Speculative Fiction, Literary Criticism

244 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 1983

About the author

Colin Greenland's fiction and criticism have been translated into a dozen languages and broadcast on BBC national radio. His multiple award-winning science fiction novel Take Back Plenty, long out of print in the UK, is available again in the Orion SF Masterworks series, and for e-readers at SF Gateway.

Colin lives in Cambridge and Foolow with his wife Susanna Clarke, the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and Piranesi . He is sometimes to be found writing something, goodness knows what.

Reviews

[Nader Elhefnawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots has been written about the history of science fiction, but really well-grounded, rigorous, comprehensive coverage of any area in it is tough to find (as I learned when tackling the subject myself). The '60s New Wave (which started as a movement for Modernist science fiction--think what the Eliots and Joyces did for regular fiction--but turned into much else) is a particularly frustrating subject to investigate this way. Fortunately Greenland's Entropy Exhibition is just that sort of rigorous (yet also highly accessible) work, one I would strongly recommend as a starting point for anyone trying to understand what New Wave science fiction was all about, in part because it is insightful into so much else.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 3 out of 5]

As its sub-title implies this is an account of the project Michael Moorcock started when he took over the British Science Fiction magazine New Worlds in 1964. This was to try to inject more literary qualities into SF which up to that point had been largely shunned by the ‘mainstream’ because of its pulp sensibilities as he did not see why SF should be separate from literature in general.
To that end Greenland gives us a history of New Worlds up to that point, considers the introduction of sex to SF stories (hitherto all but absent despite the prominence of the three Bs – Boobs, Babes and Bug-eyed Monsters - on cover illustrations,) the withdrawal from space fiction in favour of ‘inner’ space, questions of style, the salience of the concept of entropy to this mid-sixties endeavour, and offers us critiques of the contributions of the three most prominent figures of the British new wave, Brian W Aldiss, J G Ballard and Moorcock himself. (Though it receives a few mentions considerations of how the new wave played out in the US are beyond the remit of this book.)
Greenland is of the opinion that Aldiss’s books Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Headare the quintessential new wave novels with Moorcock’s Karl Glogauer novels as exemplars of the new wave sensibility dealing as they do with “Time and identity: Moorcock’s two great themes, perhaps the great themes of all New Wave sf.”
Aldiss never really considered himself as part of a wave of any sort; he had in any case been prominent as a writer of SF before the 1960s.
Ballard was always something of an enigma. Whether he can be considered to “belong” to any movement other than his sui generis self is moot but he did contribute a guest editorial to New Worlds in May 1962 asking “Which Way to Inner Space?” an implicit call for a different approach to writing SF. Personally I have always seen in his writing - possibly due to his upbringing as an expatriate - an expression of English reserve taken to the extreme, elevated to an art form even. (His incarceration by the Japanese during World War 2 no doubt also contributed to his take on the world.) Greenland sees Ballard’s principal tool for the disorientating effect of his prose as “unyielding irony.”
The SF New Wave changed everything and nothing. After the 1960s experiment SF by and large returned to its ghetto and continued to be ignored by mainstream fiction. The attitude “if it’s SF it’s not good, if it’s good it’s not SF” still hung around.
Yes, literary qualities did become more common in the genre (and treatment of sex ceased to be shunned) and it is now possible for “proper” writers to dabble in its waters without expressions of horror - from either side - accompanying their efforts.
The Entropy Exhibition is by its nature (and origin as a dissertation for a D Phil) a critical endeavour and now stands as a historical document, and probably one only for those interested in the history of SF.