Absolutely brilliant video! I came to Burroughs and Ballard by way of bands such as Ultravox in the late 70s and never looked back. You’ve done an amazing job putting this era of such energy and experiment in perfect context.
Wow! Fantastic video! This exceeded even my high expectations. I really enjoy learning about the history of SF and Steve is the best tour guide to the cosmos. This video has really whetted my appetite for when he gets around to the US new wave. Bravo, Steve, bravo!
Oh wow! I listened to an audiobook production of JG ballards “The Terminal Beach” on UA-cam in 2020 before UA-cam took down the production and the channel who posted it. I forgot the name of the short story until I watched your video and saw the cover art! Thanks!
Wow. Nobody could riff like that for over an hour (with or without crib notes, I'm sure) other than the distinguished Stephen Andrews! Great points on this era in SF, ones I'd never contemplated. Kudos to you for sharing your enviable insight old chap. Yet another posh post! Love the vibe here. Cheers.
Thank you so much for these New Wave posts. These have been so interesting, so informative. I've been a fan of New Wave for year's but never knew 'about'/New Wave but your posts have opened up this subject and given me a new passion for New Wave fiction. Thank you for all the hard work that goes into these type of posts. I am really looking forward to the Jerry Cornelius posts. This character has been my favorite anti-hero and my first introduction into the New Wave movement but it was Behold the Man that sealed my love of Moorcock's works. Thanks again and I hope you feel better soon
Thanks Mike. This was actually filmed about six weeks ago apart from a few inserts, so I'm ok now- or I was, until my good lady decided to get up a 5am this morning to go out for a day with a friend, so here I am before 7am, wired again...LOL
Ah, New Worlds, my period! I had all the Quarterly paperbacks until I lost them in a flood. Would look forward to them being published and was distraught when a deadline was missed ... looked forward to stories by Barrington Bayley, because I knew I wouldn't understand them ... (there was one about the 4 Colour Problem ...?). Tom Disch was probably my favourite and I've recently re-read Echo Round his Bones and bought a copy of Camp Concentration, which was *definitely* my favourite of his. I seem to have read or owned practically all of the books you mentioned, often in the same editions you showed us ... now they're gone, all gone ... ! Nice to see your love for Pavane, though, which I always thought was criminally under-rated - I had what I think was the original British paperback edition but that's vanished now. I console myself with the fact that my first published story was rejected by Michael Moorcock for New Worlds - with a very nice note - but then published later by a short-lived magazine, Vortex, which also featured 'The End of All Songs'. a Jerry Cornelius story by Moorcock. A brush with greatness!
Good for you getting something published in Vortex! I have all the NWQs and will feature them in a future video. Like yourself, these are among my favourite SF books and writers ever.
Thanks mate. What a gripping overview! I've been reading this stuff for 40 for years and you summed it up so well. Plenty of new stuff to press on with now I'm reinspired! I agree with your conclusions especially re Langdon Jones and trb although I never made that connection. I am a bookseller by profession and I do believe that we make the best critics! Cheers mate from Oz and keep on chooglin! Love your work.
Thanks for your crash course into the New Wave. I now know how influential it was as a literary movement. You have made me want to dip into the New Wave. I have a copy of Thomas M Disch's adaptation of the tv series, The Prisoner. Sage advice at the end.
Thank you for another wonderful video. I am chuffed that I am aware of the majority of writers you have praised and recommended. Speaking on race and ethnicity it should be noted that according to science fiction writer Tade Thompson African science fiction writers were suppressed by gatekeepers to African fiction. China Achebe has been named as one of the gatekeepers. He felt that African writers should talk about colonialism and that science fiction wasn't the literary form to talk about it. Anybody who has read Warlord of the Air will know how ridiculous that is. There may be many unpublished science fiction in Africa waiting to be published. I am sure you are aware of THE COMET by W.E.B. DuBois published in 1920 or Black No More by George S Schuyler ( about Black Americans having a technology that can change them into Europeans) published in 1931. Black people have always played a part in SF. Yes ,the population in Britain is extremely small so there will be less SF writers in general. I am a person of colour ( utterly ridiculous label) and I have always loved SF and now seems to be a very good time for Black science fiction authors. I thoroughly enjoyed the Afro SF anthology from a few years ago edited by Ivor W Hartmann. Can't wait to see your Jerry Cornelius video. Please keep on putting out great educational and informative content. You are needed on youtube. Take care. Love your work.
Thanks for your comments as ever, my friend. Yes, I've read the DuBois and the Schulyer is a really famous book, almost never out of print and currently in Penguin Classic Science Fiction in the UK and Penguin Classics in the USA. Delany makes the point that we don't really know the gender/ethnic identities of the vast majority of writers from the pulp magazine era as in many cases all we have are names and many of these could be house names. In my first book I mention the following: Steven Barnes, Tobias S Buckell, Octavia Butler, Tanarive Due, Buchi Emechta (whose work is now in Penguin Modern Classics, though I don't think any of her small output of SF is), Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley & John Ridley. My comment -which wasn't very well articulated, I felt - was that the black population of Britain was very small indeed until very, very recently and is still only around 3.5%, with the commensurately small proportion of black genre writers in the UK as a result. Given that in the 'Windrush' period there were even fewer black British people, it's no surprise we have very few examples of genre writers of colour in the UK until recently. However, at the moment, Identity Politics is popular with British publishers- often for quite cynical, commercial reasons in my opinion (though not always) and the result is that many different ethnicities are being represented in genre publishing. It would be interesting to know a lot more about black genre writers from the US in the early to mid 20th century. In this respect, I'll admit to knowing more about writers in the crime genre- Chester Himes, for example (and of course Mosley broke through as a crime writer back in the 1980s).
In an older comment I mentioned I was reading a bunch of the books you've recommended and you said you wanted to know what I thought. So, in brief: 1) The Magus - absolutely engrossing. I can't remember the last time I've been so engaged with prose. I learned a lot about myself while reading it. E.g. I think years ago it would have depressed the hell out of me as I saw a lot of myself in the main character, but now I could distance myself from those similarities, which seems to me an indicator that I've grown a lot since then. 2) Interesting structure and twists, intriguing ultimate conclusion, but unlike the Magus I thought the prose was quite staid and I actually sped-read quite a lot of it. While it had plenty of insight, it lacked beauty and evocation. 3) The Pastel Towers: great characters in a macabre world descending. The descriptions of swamps and wastelands reminded me of William Gibson and the cyberpunk penchant for advanced vocab/layered description. Many of its elements were very predictable, though. Eager to read the sequels. What do those stars say!? 4) The Broken Sword: Anderson is a master of pacing. Scenes like navigating the storms to reach Jotunland were invigorating and then he would point out the serenity of the goddess depicted on the bowsprit to tell you there is still hope in this maelstrom. He left much to the imagination in a very saga-esque way, but I didn't feel like it was neglected, just the style of writing about heroes who would have been involved in adventures their whole lives. I liked how much mirroring there was in theme, character, structure, and narrative arcs. Liked the menacing figure of the Christian god only ever mentioned, and the small moment where the main female protagonist reveals herself to not be so pious as she thinks. Beautiful prose. Also an absolute master of irony. Some of the dialogue between the doomed lovers is bittersweet but also funny! 5) The Tartar Steppe: I love it. I love the episodic, drifting nature of it. The way it moves away from the ostensible protagonist and returns a couple chapters later. Pretty heavy on allegory I felt, but I don't mind that. Also had this unique tension throughout. I was waiting for SOMETHING to HAPPEN. And I realized I was experiencing what the characters themselves were experiencing. Lovely prose and very interesting dialogue which I imagine is somewhat a product of the translation. Very good book. 6) A Boy and His Dog: I can't truck with rape scenes so I stopped reading after that and skipped to the end. Funny twist there but a bit to "old-fashioned" for me. Al in all, I feel greatly enriched by these recommendations and will continue to read ones you suggest. I think I'll read Nifft the Lean next. Thanks for your work!
I think you mean 'The Pastel City' but your slip re 'Tower' shows how the character of Cromis- less interested in swordplay and than reverie, is an indicator of where Viriconium goes. Stick with it and the full meat is in volumes three and four- you see MJH working through his SFF 'issues' in the 70s to get to his later point by the end of the decade. Fowles, Anderson, Buzzati, all excellent in different ways. I'll be filming something about 'The Tartar Step' soon.
Thanks, for great video! I have several ways forward from here, probably through Ballard the Brunner. I have them in my - rather substantial - to read pile. Must get hold of Pavane.
You never mentioned that Ballard is the little kid in the Spielberg movie, Empire of The Sun. I bought a Penguin box edition with all his 'disaster' books(with the cool covers). For some reason, never got around to reading them--- I was too much of a space travel junkie at the time, I guess. Read Crystal World recently; didn't love ir, I'm afraid, but I might give those disaster books another try. We may not see eye to eye on Ballard, but we definitely do about The Beatles! Never cared for them. Grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Santana, Jethro Tull...post Beatles, I suppose.
I didn't feel the 'Empire of the Sun' reveal was necessary, really, given how famous the book is, let alone the film. The thing with Ballard is that he's not about fulfilling expectations of what SF is, he's about upsetting them- and as SF is supposedly imaginative literature, when it gets formulaic, the true SF writer tries to put the bucket of water in the face back into it. As for The Beatles, well, yes, agree on that and then some! Thanks for your comment.
I remember seeing a program on BBC2 in the early 80s featuring him and M John Harrison, " Time Out Of Mind"? It was really exciting to see them, it was so hard to find more information back then.
My favourite Tom Robinson Band song was 'Up Against the Wall', which came out on a single,and was on the pub jukebox. I would always play it to upset the local NF skinhead who used to drink in my local. Happy days!
Re: meeting Delany. Next year will be the third time SF Worldcon has come to Glasgow. The first time was in 1995 - and Delany was the guest of honour! By that time you would have been in the book trade 10yrs;: I'm surprised you didn't come to Glasgow to meet him then. It was held one month before I turned 23 and I got him to sign my unexpurgated 1993 trade paperback edition of the wonderful biography of his youth, "The Motion of Light in Water". Irrespective of whether or not he comes next year, do give serious consideration to coming to the con: I live only a half-hour train journey from the city and would happily put you up in the spare room. If there's a way to PM me on UA-cam then by all means do so and we can discuss it in more detail...
Very kind Paul. I should have attended that con, but by 95 my interest in SF was at a very, very low ebb and my career was going places- but I regret it big time. As for next year, I'm undecided, but you never know...
If I recall correctly, the opposing petitions on the Viet Nam war were published in F&SF. Lafferty and Vance were the only truly first rate writers to favor the war and I suspect there was an element of contrariness involved.
Great video! I am only half an hour in but learned a lot already. Looking forward to the rest of it. I wish there was a new new wave today. I think that the genre needs. Fantasy even more so than science fiction. It feels like today's writers are just endlessly regurgitating the same ideas with very little social or political commentary to be found.
I completely agree. This has been a problem for SF since the late 1980s when the British Space Opera Renaissance began- for which we can blame Iain M Banks and some of the Generats, who basically were too keen to drag literary genre SF back to its 1930s US pulp roots. Also, New Wave writers like Ballard and Priest had broadened the slipstream so much -even Gibson entering it by the turn of the century- that literary SF had few champions commercially successful enough to hold back the tide of spaceships we've endured since. The effect this has had upon more ambitious British SF writers has been massive- writers like Dave Hutchinson and Nina Allan have had to wait until their fifties to get some measure of commercial success and critical acclaim, whereas back in the 70s and 80s, writers like this would have flourished by their thirties. Authors like Simon Ings and T.M. Hill are unknown to most genre readers- thoughw e have seen more and more 'mainstream' writers turning to SF tropes in the last thirty years, with mixed effects. In a way, this shows that New Wave won the battle, but lost the war for SF being recognised as a seminal part of Modernism. I'm divided about how things stand now, but only in the sense that SF, which I believe should always reflect what is happening now in society- politics, for example, as you say- is doing this in some ways, but for the wrong reasons. Contemporary SF & Fantasy publishing is almost completely dominated by Identity Politics, with an over-weighted bias towards female writers, writers of 'minority' ethnic groups, gender-obsessed writers and characaters/settings/scenarios that feature all these issues. While this can be described as 'rebalancing', at time it feels more like vengeance against the 'evils' of white european men- and not all of us are bad of course. It's actually more of an example of Marketing - not the capital M- where publishers, like individuals on social media, are marketing themselves as 'good people' by over-emphasising Identity Politics issues at the expense of if what they are publishing is actually any good in a literary sense. Plus, of course, if their customers buy identity politics focused books, then publishers make more money, so this 'virtue signalling' in publishing is a little cynical. Also, the Identity Politics narrative is now as much about Orthodoxy and imposing uniformity of opinion and undermining of objective facts around history, achievement and real equity as it is about individual rights. It seems to me now, that any New Wave of New Wave would have to skirt into dangerous ground in questioning these narratives. ..which leads me on to Fantasy. Although Fantasy has long (since 1977) been dominated by publishing and writing which is artificially constructed to ignore the aesthetic and favour the commercial above all else (hence endless series), it is now fundamentally the working ground of young female writers penning works for only slightly younger female readers, both parties having emerged from YA as it discovered and covered debased forms of genre fiction (for which we can blame J K Rowling, I guess). Because of the TikTok phenomenon, publishers now, instead of thinking 'Here's a new market emerging, let's exploit it,' instead think 'Let's exploit this new market for SFF and abandon everything else in these genres, forget other readerships,' which is why we see almost no new literary genre SF, just a bit of Space Opera- and even that is limping out. None of this bodes well for the future of SF as art- gloomy, I know, but I can see no way out at the moment...
@@outlawbookselleroriginal Thanks for such an elaborate answer! What I can see in the medium of comics, young readers are increasingly avoiding the identity politics heavy American comics and turning towards Japanese manga. For the future of SF, maybe the change won't come from inside the genre, but from a changing world. The 21st century does not look good. Inequality is strongly on the rise. Fascism stirs. Climate disasters are on the way. Droughts, mass migrations will come. Politicians seemingly only care about themselves and the rich. Maybe all of this will lead to new countercultures, which will give us new Burroughs and Ballards.
@@jeroenadmiraal8714 I agree. I think SF is now actually fiddling while Rome burns- it mentions climate change and so on, but isn't innovating. It may well be that its time is done- and I think there is some evidence to support this. Take a look at my videos on Hauntology and think about what I say about Modernism, the mass media and the borth of the Contemporary. My current belief is that innovation in the arts is over and has been since Modernism ended in the late 1980s- and that this was inevitable. More on this to come in future videos, but placed in SF context.
As a 9 year old who'd been blown away by The Bull and the Spear i asked my father to bring me back some Moorcock novels from London. He knew little of his work and asked a book shop assistant who picked out a selection. As a result that Mayflower edition of Behold the Man found it's way into my (too?)young hands. I read it in an afternoon and can still recall the complex mixture of disquiet and fascination it stirred in me
Thanks for this, Steve, it drove all my angry thoughts about the coronation of BigEars from my mind. But ... I have to disagree with you that Brian Aldiss wasn't central to the British new wave, but more of a precursor. Brian was absolutely central to this non-movement. From many of his 1960s and early 70s short stories, to books such as Report on Probability A (which you fluttered briefly), Barefoot in the Head, The Eighty Minute Hour and Enemies of the System, Brian was there among the best of the new wavers. In fact, he kept the spirit of the new wave alive well into the 1980s with his "three enigmas" sequences of stories and his stories about the Zodiacal Planets. He also helped keep New Worlds afloat, but that's a separate issue to his new wave writings.
I think you make an excellent point and in many ways I don't disagree as I love BA's work - I think I've been influenced by recent conversations with Chris Priest, whose view seems to be that the historical period of New Wave is very short and focused- though to me, it's keen presence continued to swell and eventually dominate British SF publishing (hooray!) until the mid 1980s. I always think of writers like Holdstock, Kilworth and Evans as being 'late' New Wavers, for example.
@outlawbookselleroriginal I think Chris is right, the new wave only lasted for maybe six or seven years before it was subsumed into the wider genre, but as you say, its influence lived on.
Absolutely brilliant video! I came to Burroughs and Ballard by way of bands such as Ultravox in the late 70s and never looked back. You’ve done an amazing job putting this era of such energy and experiment in perfect context.
Thanks!
Wow! Fantastic video! This exceeded even my high expectations. I really enjoy learning about the history of SF and Steve is the best tour guide to the cosmos. This video has really whetted my appetite for when he gets around to the US new wave. Bravo, Steve, bravo!
Thanks CBC- US New Wave will follow in June, probably!
did you know that two British artists _ Malcolm NcNeill and Bob Gale, collaborated with Borroughs when he lived in Britain in the 70’s- early 80’s?
They created Comic art / books that were later published
Yes, read about them in Burroughs biographical studies.
Oh wow! I listened to an audiobook production of JG ballards “The Terminal Beach” on UA-cam in 2020 before UA-cam took down the production and the channel who posted it. I forgot the name of the short story until I watched your video and saw the cover art! Thanks!
It's a great story, though my fave Ballard story of all is "The Drowned Giant", which is in the same collection.
Wow. Nobody could riff like that for over an hour (with or without crib notes, I'm sure) other than the distinguished Stephen Andrews! Great points on this era in SF, ones I'd never contemplated. Kudos to you for sharing your enviable insight old chap. Yet another posh post! Love the vibe here. Cheers.
Thanks Rick. Had I managed to get much sleep before, I'd have needed no notes at all!
Thank you so much for these New Wave posts. These have been so interesting, so informative. I've been a fan of New Wave for year's but never knew 'about'/New Wave but your posts have opened up this subject and given me a new passion for New Wave fiction. Thank you for all the hard work that goes into these type of posts. I am really looking forward to the Jerry Cornelius posts. This character has been my favorite anti-hero and my first introduction into the New Wave movement but it was Behold the Man that sealed my love of Moorcock's works. Thanks again and I hope you feel better soon
Thanks Mike. This was actually filmed about six weeks ago apart from a few inserts, so I'm ok now- or I was, until my good lady decided to get up a 5am this morning to go out for a day with a friend, so here I am before 7am, wired again...LOL
The Electric Prunes - juicy.
Ah, New Worlds, my period! I had all the Quarterly paperbacks until I lost them in a flood. Would look forward to them being published and was distraught when a deadline was missed ... looked forward to stories by Barrington Bayley, because I knew I wouldn't understand them ... (there was one about the 4 Colour Problem ...?). Tom Disch was probably my favourite and I've recently re-read Echo Round his Bones and bought a copy of Camp Concentration, which was *definitely* my favourite of his. I seem to have read or owned practically all of the books you mentioned, often in the same editions you showed us ... now they're gone, all gone ... ! Nice to see your love for Pavane, though, which I always thought was criminally under-rated - I had what I think was the original British paperback edition but that's vanished now. I console myself with the fact that my first published story was rejected by Michael Moorcock for New Worlds - with a very nice note - but then published later by a short-lived magazine, Vortex, which also featured 'The End of All Songs'. a Jerry Cornelius story by Moorcock. A brush with greatness!
Good for you getting something published in Vortex! I have all the NWQs and will feature them in a future video. Like yourself, these are among my favourite SF books and writers ever.
Thanks mate. What a gripping overview! I've been reading this stuff for 40 for years and you summed it up so well. Plenty of new stuff to press on with now I'm reinspired! I agree with your conclusions especially re Langdon Jones and trb although I never made that connection. I am a bookseller by profession and I do believe that we make the best critics! Cheers mate from Oz and keep on chooglin! Love your work.
Booksellers: we spend more time with readers than anyone, so I agree with your thesis!
Thanks for your crash course into the New Wave. I now know how influential it was as a literary movement. You have made me want to dip into the New Wave. I have a copy of Thomas M Disch's adaptation of the tv series, The Prisoner.
Sage advice at the end.
Sadly, I've always bounced off Delaney's Dhalgren but, Triton was an eye-opening novel, loved it.
Thank you for another wonderful video. I am chuffed that I am aware of the majority of writers you have praised and recommended.
Speaking on race and ethnicity it should be noted that according to science fiction writer Tade Thompson African science fiction writers were suppressed by gatekeepers to African fiction. China Achebe has been named as one of the gatekeepers. He felt that African writers should talk about colonialism and that science fiction wasn't the literary form to talk about it. Anybody who has read Warlord of the Air will know how ridiculous that is. There may be many unpublished science fiction in Africa waiting to be published.
I am sure you are aware of THE COMET by W.E.B. DuBois published in 1920 or Black No More by George S Schuyler ( about Black Americans having a technology that can change them into Europeans) published in 1931. Black people have always played a part in SF. Yes ,the population in Britain is extremely small so there will be less SF writers in general. I am a person of colour ( utterly ridiculous label) and I have always loved SF and now seems to be a very good time for Black science fiction authors. I thoroughly enjoyed the Afro SF anthology from a few years ago edited by Ivor W Hartmann.
Can't wait to see your Jerry Cornelius video. Please keep on putting out great educational and informative content. You are needed on youtube. Take care. Love your work.
Thanks for your comments as ever, my friend.
Yes, I've read the DuBois and the Schulyer is a really famous book, almost never out of print and currently in Penguin Classic Science Fiction in the UK and Penguin Classics in the USA. Delany makes the point that we don't really know the gender/ethnic identities of the vast majority of writers from the pulp magazine era as in many cases all we have are names and many of these could be house names. In my first book I mention the following: Steven Barnes, Tobias S Buckell, Octavia Butler, Tanarive Due, Buchi Emechta (whose work is now in Penguin Modern Classics, though I don't think any of her small output of SF is), Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley & John Ridley.
My comment -which wasn't very well articulated, I felt - was that the black population of Britain was very small indeed until very, very recently and is still only around 3.5%, with the commensurately small proportion of black genre writers in the UK as a result. Given that in the 'Windrush' period there were even fewer black British people, it's no surprise we have very few examples of genre writers of colour in the UK until recently. However, at the moment, Identity Politics is popular with British publishers- often for quite cynical, commercial reasons in my opinion (though not always) and the result is that many different ethnicities are being represented in genre publishing. It would be interesting to know a lot more about black genre writers from the US in the early to mid 20th century. In this respect, I'll admit to knowing more about writers in the crime genre- Chester Himes, for example (and of course Mosley broke through as a crime writer back in the 1980s).
In an older comment I mentioned I was reading a bunch of the books you've recommended and you said you wanted to know what I thought. So, in brief: 1) The Magus - absolutely engrossing. I can't remember the last time I've been so engaged with prose. I learned a lot about myself while reading it. E.g. I think years ago it would have depressed the hell out of me as I saw a lot of myself in the main character, but now I could distance myself from those similarities, which seems to me an indicator that I've grown a lot since then. 2) Interesting structure and twists, intriguing ultimate conclusion, but unlike the Magus I thought the prose was quite staid and I actually sped-read quite a lot of it. While it had plenty of insight, it lacked beauty and evocation. 3) The Pastel Towers: great characters in a macabre world descending. The descriptions of swamps and wastelands reminded me of William Gibson and the cyberpunk penchant for advanced vocab/layered description. Many of its elements were very predictable, though. Eager to read the sequels. What do those stars say!? 4) The Broken Sword: Anderson is a master of pacing. Scenes like navigating the storms to reach Jotunland were invigorating and then he would point out the serenity of the goddess depicted on the bowsprit to tell you there is still hope in this maelstrom. He left much to the imagination in a very saga-esque way, but I didn't feel like it was neglected, just the style of writing about heroes who would have been involved in adventures their whole lives. I liked how much mirroring there was in theme, character, structure, and narrative arcs. Liked the menacing figure of the Christian god only ever mentioned, and the small moment where the main female protagonist reveals herself to not be so pious as she thinks. Beautiful prose. Also an absolute master of irony. Some of the dialogue between the doomed lovers is bittersweet but also funny! 5) The Tartar Steppe: I love it. I love the episodic, drifting nature of it. The way it moves away from the ostensible protagonist and returns a couple chapters later. Pretty heavy on allegory I felt, but I don't mind that. Also had this unique tension throughout. I was waiting for SOMETHING to HAPPEN. And I realized I was experiencing what the characters themselves were experiencing. Lovely prose and very interesting dialogue which I imagine is somewhat a product of the translation. Very good book. 6) A Boy and His Dog: I can't truck with rape scenes so I stopped reading after that and skipped to the end. Funny twist there but a bit to "old-fashioned" for me. Al in all, I feel greatly enriched by these recommendations and will continue to read ones you suggest. I think I'll read Nifft the Lean next. Thanks for your work!
I think you mean 'The Pastel City' but your slip re 'Tower' shows how the character of Cromis- less interested in swordplay and than reverie, is an indicator of where Viriconium goes. Stick with it and the full meat is in volumes three and four- you see MJH working through his SFF 'issues' in the 70s to get to his later point by the end of the decade. Fowles, Anderson, Buzzati, all excellent in different ways. I'll be filming something about 'The Tartar Step' soon.
Thanks, for great video! I have several ways forward from here, probably through Ballard the Brunner. I have them in my - rather substantial - to read pile. Must get hold of Pavane.
All great stuff!
Stand on Zanzibar is an absolute must read. Even today The Shockwave Rider holds up well.
Agreed.
You never mentioned that Ballard is the little kid in the Spielberg movie, Empire of The Sun. I bought a Penguin box edition with all his 'disaster' books(with the cool covers). For some reason, never got around to reading them--- I was too much of a space travel junkie at the time, I guess. Read Crystal World recently; didn't love ir, I'm afraid, but I might give those disaster books another try.
We may not see eye to eye on Ballard, but we definitely do about The Beatles! Never cared for them. Grew up listening to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Santana, Jethro Tull...post Beatles, I suppose.
I didn't feel the 'Empire of the Sun' reveal was necessary, really, given how famous the book is, let alone the film. The thing with Ballard is that he's not about fulfilling expectations of what SF is, he's about upsetting them- and as SF is supposedly imaginative literature, when it gets formulaic, the true SF writer tries to put the bucket of water in the face back into it. As for The Beatles, well, yes, agree on that and then some! Thanks for your comment.
Great video- needed - 😮thanks for bringing it back
Thanks. The New Wave is the moment for me, when everything began to reach its fullest potential.
Wonderful overview. I'm fascinated by this period, especially New Worlds and Moorcock. Steve, are there any biographies about him?
I remember seeing a program on BBC2 in the early 80s featuring him and M John Harrison, " Time Out Of Mind"? It was really exciting to see them, it was so hard to find more information back then.
No, there is no biography. Biographies of living writers are uncommon generally.
Great video and plenty of interesting options for my tbr list.
Thanks!
Fascinating and informative as always Steve, thanks 👍
My favourite Tom Robinson Band song was 'Up Against the Wall', which came out on a single,and was on the pub jukebox. I would always play it to upset the local NF skinhead who used to drink in my local. Happy days!
I love that song- and the B side, "I'm Alright Jack", just brilliant.
Great video. Lots of great books to look into. Would like a see an introduction to the later writers you mentioned towards the end.
oops just noticed you have already covered most of the later writers
Re: meeting Delany. Next year will be the third time SF Worldcon has come to Glasgow. The first time was in 1995 - and Delany was the guest of honour! By that time you would have been in the book trade 10yrs;: I'm surprised you didn't come to Glasgow to meet him then. It was held one month before I turned 23 and I got him to sign my unexpurgated 1993 trade paperback edition of the wonderful biography of his youth, "The Motion of Light in Water". Irrespective of whether or not he comes next year, do give serious consideration to coming to the con: I live only a half-hour train journey from the city and would happily put you up in the spare room. If there's a way to PM me on UA-cam then by all means do so and we can discuss it in more detail...
Very kind Paul. I should have attended that con, but by 95 my interest in SF was at a very, very low ebb and my career was going places- but I regret it big time. As for next year, I'm undecided, but you never know...
Damn, I had the exact copy of that Ballard book. The one now worth £750, damn. I shed it years ago. Everytime I moved, I would always shed books.
Well, £750 in Very Fine condition. We've all let things go like this, that's the reading life, sadly.
If I recall correctly, the opposing petitions on the Viet Nam war were published in F&SF. Lafferty and Vance were the only truly first rate writers to favor the war and I suspect there was an element of contrariness involved.
Great video! I am only half an hour in but learned a lot already. Looking forward to the rest of it. I wish there was a new new wave today. I think that the genre needs. Fantasy even more so than science fiction. It feels like today's writers are just endlessly regurgitating the same ideas with very little social or political commentary to be found.
I completely agree. This has been a problem for SF since the late 1980s when the British Space Opera Renaissance began- for which we can blame Iain M Banks and some of the Generats, who basically were too keen to drag literary genre SF back to its 1930s US pulp roots. Also, New Wave writers like Ballard and Priest had broadened the slipstream so much -even Gibson entering it by the turn of the century- that literary SF had few champions commercially successful enough to hold back the tide of spaceships we've endured since.
The effect this has had upon more ambitious British SF writers has been massive- writers like Dave Hutchinson and Nina Allan have had to wait until their fifties to get some measure of commercial success and critical acclaim, whereas back in the 70s and 80s, writers like this would have flourished by their thirties. Authors like Simon Ings and T.M. Hill are unknown to most genre readers- thoughw e have seen more and more 'mainstream' writers turning to SF tropes in the last thirty years, with mixed effects. In a way, this shows that New Wave won the battle, but lost the war for SF being recognised as a seminal part of Modernism.
I'm divided about how things stand now, but only in the sense that SF, which I believe should always reflect what is happening now in society- politics, for example, as you say- is doing this in some ways, but for the wrong reasons. Contemporary SF & Fantasy publishing is almost completely dominated by Identity Politics, with an over-weighted bias towards female writers, writers of 'minority' ethnic groups, gender-obsessed writers and characaters/settings/scenarios that feature all these issues. While this can be described as 'rebalancing', at time it feels more like vengeance against the 'evils' of white european men- and not all of us are bad of course. It's actually more of an example of Marketing - not the capital M- where publishers, like individuals on social media, are marketing themselves as 'good people' by over-emphasising Identity Politics issues at the expense of if what they are publishing is actually any good in a literary sense. Plus, of course, if their customers buy identity politics focused books, then publishers make more money, so this 'virtue signalling' in publishing is a little cynical. Also, the Identity Politics narrative is now as much about Orthodoxy and imposing uniformity of opinion and undermining of objective facts around history, achievement and real equity as it is about individual rights. It seems to me now, that any New Wave of New Wave would have to skirt into dangerous ground in questioning these narratives.
..which leads me on to Fantasy. Although Fantasy has long (since 1977) been dominated by publishing and writing which is artificially constructed to ignore the aesthetic and favour the commercial above all else (hence endless series), it is now fundamentally the working ground of young female writers penning works for only slightly younger female readers, both parties having emerged from YA as it discovered and covered debased forms of genre fiction (for which we can blame J K Rowling, I guess). Because of the TikTok phenomenon, publishers now, instead of thinking 'Here's a new market emerging, let's exploit it,' instead think 'Let's exploit this new market for SFF and abandon everything else in these genres, forget other readerships,' which is why we see almost no new literary genre SF, just a bit of Space Opera- and even that is limping out.
None of this bodes well for the future of SF as art- gloomy, I know, but I can see no way out at the moment...
@@outlawbookselleroriginal Thanks for such an elaborate answer! What I can see in the medium of comics, young readers are increasingly avoiding the identity politics heavy American comics and turning towards Japanese manga. For the future of SF, maybe the change won't come from inside the genre, but from a changing world. The 21st century does not look good. Inequality is strongly on the rise. Fascism stirs. Climate disasters are on the way. Droughts, mass migrations will come. Politicians seemingly only care about themselves and the rich. Maybe all of this will lead to new countercultures, which will give us new Burroughs and Ballards.
@@jeroenadmiraal8714 I agree. I think SF is now actually fiddling while Rome burns- it mentions climate change and so on, but isn't innovating. It may well be that its time is done- and I think there is some evidence to support this. Take a look at my videos on Hauntology and think about what I say about Modernism, the mass media and the borth of the Contemporary. My current belief is that innovation in the arts is over and has been since Modernism ended in the late 1980s- and that this was inevitable. More on this to come in future videos, but placed in SF context.
I really enjoyed this one ...& learned a lot...
Good. The US New Wave video will follow later this year, do check out the New Wave Anthologies video from a couple of months back too.
What are your thoughts on Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun?'
...will be revealed in a future video
beautiful book that, Sheep Look Up - very prescient to our times today. absolutely gorgeous and essential reading, now more than ever.
Yes, my preferred key Brunner, above 'Zanzibar'.
@@outlawbookselleroriginal ive yet to read Stand on.... I'd like to find the other club of Rome quartet titles first..
As a 9 year old who'd been blown away by The Bull and the Spear i asked my father to bring me back some Moorcock novels from London. He knew little of his work and asked a book shop assistant who picked out a selection. As a result that Mayflower edition of Behold the Man found it's way into my (too?)young hands. I read it in an afternoon and can still recall the complex mixture of disquiet and fascination it stirred in me
Really good video
Thanks Robert. Hope you like the rest of the channel.
Thanks for this, Steve, it drove all my angry thoughts about the coronation of BigEars from my mind. But ...
I have to disagree with you that Brian Aldiss wasn't central to the British new wave, but more of a precursor. Brian was absolutely central to this non-movement. From many of his 1960s and early 70s short stories, to books such as Report on Probability A (which you fluttered briefly), Barefoot in the Head, The Eighty Minute Hour and Enemies of the System, Brian was there among the best of the new wavers. In fact, he kept the spirit of the new wave alive well into the 1980s with his "three enigmas" sequences of stories and his stories about the Zodiacal Planets. He also helped keep New Worlds afloat, but that's a separate issue to his new wave writings.
I think you make an excellent point and in many ways I don't disagree as I love BA's work - I think I've been influenced by recent conversations with Chris Priest, whose view seems to be that the historical period of New Wave is very short and focused- though to me, it's keen presence continued to swell and eventually dominate British SF publishing (hooray!) until the mid 1980s. I always think of writers like Holdstock, Kilworth and Evans as being 'late' New Wavers, for example.
@outlawbookselleroriginal I think Chris is right, the new wave only lasted for maybe six or seven years before it was subsumed into the wider genre, but as you say, its influence lived on.
Have you read The Bridge by D. Keith Mano? If not, check it out.
Can't say I have, thanks.
A litersary outlaw who was litterally an outlaw, after he shot his wife in the head.
Exactly- and in many, many other ways too...
American mobster, William "Willie the Rat" Dominick Cammisano Sr
nice shirt