Christian

Yeah, F&SF was probably the most literary-oriented genre magazine in the US until Datlow started editing Omni.

F&SF was more interested in stories with a more literary bent (compared to other genre magazines of the time) before the New Wave was even an idea, but they were never particularly concerned with publishing a certain type of story.

Russ did write some stories that would fit the New Wave criteria. And Chaos Died used post-modern writing techniques to describe a dystopian-decaying culture. The Female Man, while concerned with feminism, was very much a literary text that certainly broke with typical sci-fi storytelling and ideas.

Her short fiction was often published in F&SF too.

There were about a thousand clones added in the early-1990s. Oh, and he made a deal with the devil to get out of his marriage.

The title does tend to tread water.

I know Disch was, he was even included in England Swings SF, the only American included in that book.

I believe that Delaney had one story published in New Worlds (“Time Considered...”), the same as Harlan Ellison (“A Boy and His Dog”). So, problem solved. One big happy New Wave family. I imagine them all dressed as Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

By the way, I own the Aye and Gomorrah and other stories collection, published by Vintage Books in 2003. It contains all the stories in Driftglass plus some others.

Yeah, I forgot about Spinrad being published there. He even wrote one of those Jerry Cornelius sharecrops. He wasn’t in it a lot either.

I don’t believe Malzberg ever was though.

No. I went through the copyright’s page in the Best of Barry Malzberg, Final War, and Malzberg at Large, and nope, nothing from New Worlds. Mostly he was published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and random American anthologies.

Joanna Russ is another conspicuous by her absence.

Well, that leaves out most of the American writers. It’d be more appropriate to say that you’re referring to the “New Worlds group” or something, and that most of them tended to write in the style of the New Wave.

That means that Samuel R. Delaney, Norman Spinrad, and Barry Malzberg aren’t New Wave writers either.

Besides, technically, Harlan Ellison was published in New Worlds during that period.

I wouldn’t say that 1966 is missing the bandwagon. They predate Jones, Spinrad, and Delaney’s anthologies; which were all considered seminal spotlights for New Wave science fiction. It’s called expanding a movement in to a wider light than one British specialty magazine market and one Judith Merrill anthology (which was also published after DV anyway).

Disch’s Camp Concentration wasn’t even published until 1968. The New Wave was still flourishing very well post-1966.

Besides, there’s the assumption that Dangerous Visions was meant to be published as part of some “movement”. Ellison was just challenging some genre writers to take more risks an experiment. The term “New Wave”, once again, was never used. Otherwise, the logic is that Pohl or Poul Anderson could be considered “New Wave” writers simply for taking part in DV, which is ludicrous. Both writers spoke out about their dislike for the so-called “New Wave” in science fiction. The anthology just happened to also feature many writers associated with the New Wave because they were the most experimental writers in the genre. There were many non-New Wave writers included. It’s more retroactively that DV is considered one of the hallmarks of the New Wave today.

Most people would define the Cyberpunk sub-genre a bit more broadly than solely the magazine in which most of the earliest practitioners happened to be published. Omni was also publishing a lot of other genre writers other than just Cyberpunks during that time.

Also, I don’t believe Rudy Rucker or John Shirley were published in Omni back then, so that means by your classification, they weren’t among the founders of Cyberpunk.

Pat Cadigan was published in Omni during that time, but the majority of her short stories in Omni tended to be horror. So, that would be kind of misleading too.

Ok, but being born within six months of each other is hardly a big deal. Brunner was also professionally published within the genre before Ellison. Hardly a generation gap between Brunner and Ellison, who were both younger than JG Ballard anyway.

Ellison’s fiction dealt with the same types of themes that were dealt with by other New Wave writers. He was certainly not writing sci-fi in the same tradition as the pulps.

His work can be comfortably grouped amongst other mid-century Existentialist fiction writers.

Your assumption seems to be that there was some clique of genre writers who called themselves the “New Wave” and had a set of standards to be a part of their group, and that’s very simply not the case with the development of New Wave science fiction.

It was more a marketing term used by an editor like Judith Merrill. She called it the “New Thing” at first. Nowhere in other seminal New Wave anthologies did the term get used at all...like Langdon Jones’ The New SF, Norman Spinrad’s The New Tomorrows, or Samuel Delaney’s Quark series.

Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies, which are considered to be a home of American New Wave science fiction, started to be published in 1966 too. So, it’s hard to see how DV can be seen as co-opting anything.

The original usage of the term (predating Merrill and being used in a very literal sense) included writers like EC Tubb and Kenneth Bulmer, who certainly don’t fit the criteria of what is meant by New Wave science fiction today.
It’s a term that has been applied retroactively based in the French New Wave. The idea was that the New Wave science fiction writers were doing the same sorts of things with genre fiction as the French avant-garde had done earlier for the French art world. Most of the work would later be seen within the context of post-modernism.

It basically means a generation of science fiction writers who were more concerned with using techniques and styles of literary fiction instead of applying hard science to their stories, and were more concerned with inner-space than outer space.

No, I’m not saying he’d deliberately publish fiction of a lower-standard. I’m just saying he was trying to showcase the New Wave-style of SF, so I don’t think he’d purposely exclude Moorcock’s work just because it wasn’t “edgy” enough to make the cut. Especially when he was willing to publish fiction from the “old guard” in DV (I mean, Pohl’s contribution wasn’t exactly ground-breaking or shocking, it was just a well-told story). It’s not as if Moorcock was a horrible writer at the time.

Also, thinking about it further, the “Behold the Man” novella (which he then later expanded) was published in 1966. So, that was the time when Moorcock both matured as a writer and became a more important figure in science fiction writing. Something like “Behold the Man” would surely have fit the theme of Dangerous Visions, and more aptly than a huge chunk of the material actually published in the anthology.

Ellison was considered a seminal part of the New Wave, just like Ballard and Aldiss, even though they had all been published earlier.

They were all considered much more literary and hip than the typical stuff from Pohl or Anderson.

Also, Ellison wasn’t older than Brunner. Brunner had been publishing pulp sci-fi much earlier than the New Wave and then changed his style to appeal to the New Wave, just like Ellison. Ellison was just really bad at trying to write “mainstream” sci-fi in the typical 1950s fashion.

Ellison didn’t even have what is widely agreed to be his best collection published until 1975.

I mean, Ballard was older than both Brunner and Ellison. Ballard was still considered part of the hip, edgy, literary scene instead of being considered a washed-up stodgy older guy like Asimov, Clarke, or Heinlein.

I’m especially wondering about all the rallies where Trump said he’d make China pay for the damage of the coronavirus. His fans were chanting, “Make them pay! Make them pay!”. Well, if there is no coronavirus or it is just a type of flu, then what is China to be made to pay? I have to wonder about that.

Plus, Trump’s support for the vaccine. Forcing Pence to get it. “See? I was willing to risk my friend’s life to test this vaccine and he’s still alive. There’s nothing to worry about!”. heh
Although, perhaps he might have a vested interest in a pharmaceutical corporation or two making hefty profits and their stock going through the roof...

While there are certainly elements in Trump’s base who are conspiracy theorists and don’t believe the virus exists, I think his rallies show that there were certainly Republicans who think that Covid is serious.
I’d figure especially among the elderly, among whom a majority support Repubs, and are also at higher risk of dying due to the virus, there are concerns about the virus.

Yeah, that’s the problem though. Moorcock’s science fiction might not have been that strong in 1966, but Ellison published a bunch of writers from the “old guard” like Frederick Pohl, so it’s hard to argue that he wouldn’t make the cut when he was a contemporary of the edgy new generation writers, like Spinrad, Brunner, Ballard, or M. John Harrison.

I think the first Jerry Cornelius novel was published in 1968.

Again, Dangerous Visions was published in the early-1970s it must be remembered. So, he could have certainly made the cut by the time of the sequel at least.

I definitely don’t see England Swings SF being a consideration, since other names like Brunner, Ballard, and Disch were included in both anthologies.

I’m not sure...the conspiracy theorists definitely don’t believe in the virus, but they also still love Trumpy.

The pandemic also heavily hit the economy, and that could factor in too. The approval rating definitely showed that some Republican supporters lost faith in Trump after the pandemic hit, because his ratings stayed strong until that time.

Look at the voting demographics though. Trump was still dominant in rural areas and small towns in almost every state. It’s the cities which effected this election. The cities are harder hit by the virus. So, Republican supporters in places like Atlanta probably wouldn’t be able to doubt the reality as well as someone in Powder Springs, Georgia with a tiny population.

So, that could be where you see some Republican voters deciding they were sick of Trump.

Another thing to consider is that more Democrats and swing voters were out voting in this election as compared with Republican voters.

Poorer people might not have bothered to do research on all the issues, and were only concerned with voting against Trump.

It might not be the case that Republican voters decided to vote against Trump, at all.
It might be that they voted for Trump AND the Republican Congresspeople in the election. 
Meanwhile, those who voted against Trump didn’t vote on anything other than for president.

After all, Michael Flynn’s lawyer was going on about how many ballots solely voted for Biden and didn’t vote for any other catergory. She was trying to say this proved that fake ballots were being stuffed in the boxes in support of Biden.

Well, no. A more likely explanation was that there were people who hated Trump and voted for his opponent, and had no idea about any of the other catergories on the ballot, so they ignored them.

In summation, the idea that Republican voters had started to turn on Trump might not even be valid. There just might have been a lot more Democrats and swing voters who used the availability of mail-in ballots in this election for places like Georgia, especially in the cities.

Maybe. The edition I own does have the Moorcock introduction included.

Still, Moorcock was a bigger name as a sci-fi writer than, say, Kris Neville ever was considered. Although, I know Ellison was a fan of Neville and felt he was very underrated (which is true).

Maybe Moorcock felt he was too busy at that time to contribute a worthy new story by the deadline.

True. It shows that a lot of people were sick of Trump, even though they are Republican supporters.

I think a lot of that is based on the pandemic though.

Trump’s approval rating was still hovering close to 50% among Republican voters until the pandemic. Then, his approval rating took a big hit.

The Republicans are between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, a genuine popular fascist movement isn’t something that would be in the Republicans’ interests either.

On the other, the rise of a major far Right political party at the national level would split the vote, almost assuring Democrats’ keeping more power election after election. So, they have to try to appease that part of their base the best they can now.

Oh yeah, Moorcock was scheduled for the final volumn. Ellison’s standard was to only publish an author once, so Moorcock wouldn’t have made the first two. Funny, I remembered him having a story included in a published volumn. Weird that Ellison wouldn’t have gotten a story from him for DV or Again, considering that he was a big name in sci-fi when the original DV was published and Ellison reached out to most of his contemporaries.

I don’t see that being the case. Trump created a cult of personality. It’s not going to go away.

People are going to continue to claim that their saviour, The Donald, was taken away from them in a stolen election.

The thing is now, just like when Trump was running for president, is that you’re going to see all sorts of things making the rounds on internet forums. Just like when he was first running, because he’d never been in politics before, so people just put whatever hopes they had on Trump. Something Trump and the alt-Right encouraged. You heard all sorts of speculation about what he would do, like that he was going to break up the big banks, even though he never said he supported that.
Now, the Right on the internet will be speculating why they were so afraid of Trump getting re-elected. Whatever their own hopes were, they’ll say that Trump was going to do that in his second term, and that’s why the liberal elites had to steal the election.

Republicans and FOX News are going to feed on this, irregardless of how much their Party truly represents the vision of Bannon and Trump, and use it for their own gain.

You’ll probably see movements in Texas to rewrite history school textbooks with Trump proclaimed as the greatest president ever.

I’d like to say that the Republicans have learned and will now move beyond the hypocrisy, but we all should know by now that this isn’t the way partisan politics works.

We saw the historical revisionism of Conservatives with the George W. Bush administration.
The economy was doing great until Obama took office, right? Obama single-handedly passed the bank bailout, didn’t he? Obama increased the national budget more than any other president in history. You know, unlike the reality that Obama made the budget deficit somewhat less insane compared to what came prior to and after his presidency. 
They just keep repeating the lies over and over until their supporters believe that it is true.

Obama’s sixteen years in office were the worst presidential term ever...George W. Bush who?

Within a month, I’m sure FOX News will be raging at something Biden does, only to have liberals remind everyone that Trump just did the exact same thing only three months prior and the Repubs didn’t make a peep. Only to hear from the Conservative noise machine that no president in history has ever done anything as heinous as what Biden just did. And, we’ll be off.

I think I’ve only read one story by Daniel Abraham. It was included in the Jeff Vandermeer The Weird anthology.

My taste in genre fiction and Vandermeer’s are usually pretty congruent. If Vandermeer liked Abraham enough to include a story of his in one of his major anthologies, chances are I’d enjoy his fiction. I never bothered to look further in to Abraham’s work yet though.

I’m not sure that you could say he would tower over writers from the original DVs, considering that a lot of the top literary science fiction writers were included in the Dangerous Visions books.

I mean, I have serious doubts he’d be considered a better writer than names like JG Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas M. Disch, Brian W. Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Samuel R. Delaney, Ursula K. LeGuin, or Philip K. Dick; just to mention a few of the very best literary science fiction writers from the Dangerous Visions books that immediately come to mind.

To objectively tower over those level of names you have to have the talent of someone like a F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Mann, Flannery O’Connor, Albert Camus, Thomas Pynchon, Flann O’Brien, Aldous Huxley...well, you get the idea (and even against some of those, you could probably argue the case for some of the DV contributors I listed).

Man, how could I forget Swanwick? Some of his early fiction, “The Feast of Saint Janis” in particular, read like it was directly from one of the Dangerous Visions books.

Then again, he has been writing since the early-1980s.

Julie’s cat, Chilly, wishes everyone a merry Christmas.

I think it’s the same collection as the one you have, just a different edition. The Marvel Trade also collected the first nine issues.

It was the first series I was talking about.

Yeah, the second series wasn’t worth reading. They took away everything that made the first series interesting in order to try to make it appeal to Marvel superhero fans.

That’s the Dan Abnett written series, right?

Yeah, that was a very strong series.

It reminded me more of a comic that DC would publish at that time than a typical Marvel book.

It was published by Marvel UK in North America as standard monthly comics. It lasted for eighteen issues.

I’m surprised it was never fully reprinted. It deserved to be, but chances are slim you’ll get that, as the TPB is listed by Marvel as being released in 2010. There’s been no follow up since.

You could try hunting down the Marvel UK back-issues. I found the entire series cheap.

I think you own the majority of best issues of the series, even though it’s incomplete though. To try to help with sales, there were more crossovers in to the rest of the Marvel Universe after #10. I thought that started to hurt the plot. Iron Man starts showing up, and the FF and Black Panther guest-star.

They mostly did, but comics like ROM and Micronauts were pretty decently written, at least. They sold pretty well and outlasted the toys they were based on by years.

I know that DC got the license for some toy-based titles though. I remember DC publishing a He-Man comic briefly. There was a preview mini-comic included in the Arak series one month.

Then, later, DC got the rights to publish all the Dungeons and Dragons related comic tie-ins, if you count those.

Atari Force was a DC property. As much as we were hoping that Shooter would cancel Atari Force, he simply didn’t have the power.

I think Shogun Warriors was already canned before that point.

Yeah, Shogun Warriors was axed in 1980, it lasted less than two years.

Marvel had the license to the real deal with Transformers by 1984.

Although with Transformers, Marvel didn’t have the freedom to include them in a Fantastic Four comic, like with the Shogun Warriors during the terrible Doug Moench FF run.

Of course that drop in sales on issues of Teen Titans back in the early-1980s would probably still be the equivalent of a year’s cumulative sales on a comic title in 2020.

I remember reading an interview about Marvel’s first Ghost Rider comic getting canceled. Shooter decided to clean out the Marvel line in the mid-1980s by canceling their lowest selling books to make room for new titles. Ghost Rider was Marvel’s lowest selling comic at that time. The then-editor from GR was pointing out in this interview that the abysmal sales that GR was making which caused Shooter to axe the book were sales figures that modern comic publishers would kill to see.

So, Marvel’s lowest-selling comic in 1984 was still selling more copies per month than Marvel or DC’s top-selling comic in 2020.

If it wasn’t for things like movie deals and merchandising, the comic industry would have imploded around 2008.

Way to go, DC! You canceled the best comic of the year.

Fargo was on Saturday night. I haven’t seen that movie since it came out on VHS. It still stands up as an excellent movie.

I think something I missed in my younger days is just how important the snow is to that movie. I believe I watched the movie before solely to follow the main plot. Snow can be considered as very much a character in its own right in that movie.

Outside of the crime narrative, it reminded me quite a lot of exactly what it’s like living here in the Winter, being someone who has always lived in Michigan and Canada. We can definitely relate to the North Dakota/Minnesota setting.

Also, you have to love that soulful theme music.