ABSTRACT
The year 1964 signals the advent of Michael Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds (1946–76, 1978–9, 1991–4, 1996–7), the British magazine at the heart of the “New Wave” – a “movement” that dominates most accounts of sf in the 1960s. Perhaps coincidentally, it was also the year that Leigh Brackett became the first female Guest of Honor at the World Science Fiction Convention. In terms of the broader cultural milieu, it is tempting to see sf of this period as overdetermined by the “swinging sixties,” by the ferment of the counterculture, sexual revolution, the radical politics of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, Haight-Ashbury, Carnaby Street, the Beatles, and rock ‘n’ roll. In contrast, the 1970s appears a strangely under-determined decade in many accounts: a stale, holding period until the next new wave, cyberpunk, arrives in the mid-1980s to renew the vigor of sf. And although it has been a recurrent theme since at least the 1950s, the notion that one was “living in science-fictional times” had particular resonance in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of highly visible technological change, a playing out of many science-fictional hopes and fears: from nuclear power to computers, space-flight, moon landings, and the inexorable growth of entertainment technologies fueling the mass media (Levy 1995: 222–4).
