Indeed do many things come to pass

Posted by Michael Swanwick

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/03/new-wave-classics-for-chinese-editor.html

 .

The other day, I shared an essay I wrote to explain the New Wave to a Chinese audience. It was never published, but that was okay. I wrote it primarily as a gesture of friendship to an editor and a magazine and a community who had showed me the utmost friendship.

Science Fiction World is not only a magazine but a book publishing company. I once visited their offices on shipping day and since the titles and authors of Western reprints were, as a courtesy, printed in English as well as Chinese, I can testify that they have excellent taste in science fiction.

The editor who solicited my essay also asked if I could recommend New Wave SF they might want to reprint. I have no idea if they used any of them. In any case, here's what I came up with:

This is the list I promised of New Wave books. I’ve tried to exclude those with too much sex in them – which is a problem for many New Wave writers, particularly Ballard and Silverberg, who frequently dealt with sex as a topic. But it’s possible some have slipped past me. I haven’t the time to reread all the books and my memory of many of these is decades old. I have placed them all in rough chronological order.

I omitted several works that I knew had already been published by Science Fiction World, but it’s possible that some of these are already in your line. If so, I apologize.

New Wave Classics

1966:

J. G. Ballard: The Crystal World

Ballard’s earlier books were natural disaster novels. This one morphs the form into something beautiful and threatening – much like the crystallization that transforms the forest, its animals and even human beings into something impossible. The protagonist’s journey to a secluded leper colony is also an interior one into the self.

1967:

Samuel R. Delany: Babel-17

Delany is the second-most influential science fiction writer in modern times, after Robert A. Heinlein. This is one of his most entertaining books, both a space opera and an explication of the (since discredited, alas) Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Crammed with ideas and colorfully written. Linguistics has never been more fun than this.

Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

Long before the beginning of this novel, the crew of the spaceship that colonized its world seized control of all technological assets and set themselves up as gods – specifically, the gods of the Hindu pantheon. One man sets out to overthrow the gods, first with armies and later by assuming the role of the Buddha. Like Delany’s novel, this is wonderfully enjoyable.

1968:

Thomas Disch: Camp Concentration

In a future right-wing America, intellectuals are locked away in concentration camps and given a tailored that turns them into geniuses whose discoveries, made as they’re slowly dying, can be used by the State. The transformation of an ordinary man into one of these geniuses is brilliantly portrayed and a glorious reading experience.

R. A Lafferty: Past Master

Sir Thomas More, martyred by Henry VIII and sainted by the Catholic Church, is resurrected in a future world (not Earth) that has been made into a Utopia. His task is twofold: to discover why people are rejecting Utopia to live in pain and squalor and to avoid being executed a second time for speaking the truth to officials who don’t want to hear it. He succeeds at one of these. Comic, rambling, and profound.

Robert Silverberg: Hawksbill Station

Set in a penal colony in the Precambrian era which has been established by an authoritarian American government. Because time travel is one-way only, the political prisoners receive supplies on a regular basis but can never return to their own era. One day a visitor arrives from a new government that has replaced the old one. They can return home again. But will they want to?

John Sladek: The Reproductive System/Mechasm

Sladek was a comic writer and satirist. Despite the titles (one US, the other UK), this is not a book about human reproduction but about Turing machines that threaten to run out of control. Also a satire on corporate life, science fiction, and pretty much everything else. And very funny. It even has a happy ending!

1969:

Philip K. Dick: Ubik

One of Dick’s best (and best-known) novels and probably the one that challenges reality the most thoroughly.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness

An anthropologist comes to a world where people only have gender for two days out of the month and falls in love with one of its citizens. One of the classic novels of science fiction. A great feminist work and an exploration of what it means to be human.

Michael Moorcock: Behold the Man

An obsessed Christian time-travels two thousand years into the past to meet Jesus – and discovers that his Savior doesn’t exist. In desperation and madness, he becomes the Christ he sought.

Joanna Russ: Picnic on Paradise

A tough female agent is charged with rescuing a group of nuns and rich tourists from a war zone on the planet Paradise. They must cross hundreds of miles of wilderness without any modern technology. The trek is challenging but the greatest danger comes from the people being rescued and their lack of moral character. A serious examination of and challenge to the traditional SF adventure form.

1970:

R. A. Lafferty: Nine Hundred Grandmothers

Lafferty is most famous for his short fiction – clever, witty, full of strange ideas, and like nothing anybody else has ever written. This is his best collection.

1971:

J. G. Ballard: Vermillion Sands

A much-imitated and never-equaled collection of stories all set in a decadent desert resort town fallen on bad times and occupied by aesthetes, and alcoholics. Women walk land-sharks on leashes and buy living clothing that reacts to their moods. Artists sculpt clouds. Eerily affecting.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven

Le Guin’s Taoist/Philip K. Dick novel. A therapist discovers that his patient, suffering from dreams of a nuclear holocaust, has the power to alter reality, and sets out to improve the world. But every “improvement” only makes things worse.

1972:

John Brunner: The Sheep Look Up

Written very much in the same style as Stand on Zanzibar, this is probably the most convincing and terrifying ecological disaster novel ever written.

Michael Moorcock: The Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs)

Despite his championing of the New Wave, Moorcock mostly wrote fantasy at that time. These books are a grand exception. Set not long before the death of the Sun and the extinction of the human race, at a time when want and poverty have been forgotten, and individuals control near-infinite power and have nothing better to do than to indulge their every whim. These are actually very moral books. It’s pleasant to imagine having the power these people have. But they are shallow and idle – you wouldn’t want to be one of them. Each volume functions as a stand-alone novel.

Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Three closely-related novellas, set on an extrasolar colony world that is slowly failing. Since the world is poor in metals, the technology relies heavily on the biological sciences, which is horribly misused. Clones are created as slaves and subhuman watchdogs. Meanwhile, the original inhabitants of the planet may not be as extinct as everyone assumes.

1973:

James Tiptree, Jr.: Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home

A bleak and exhilarating collection. Two of Tiptree’s great themes were biological determinism and cultural imperialism. Her stories appeared at the end of the New Wave and can be seen as both its culmination and its replacement.

1975:

Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories

Harlan Ellison has made a career out of short fiction – save for a couple of early, not very important attempts, he doesn’t write novels – and this is probably his best collection. He uses both fictional and non-fictional introductions to bind his vivid, colorful, emotional stories into a single, coherent narrative and a scream of pain and rage against the universe.

Ellison championed the New Wave with his Dangerous Visions anthologies. These stories are probably the best examples of what he had in mind.

Above: Science Fiction World has, I am told, the largest readership of any SF magazine in the world. When I saw the Western SF books ready to be shipped, I also saw an equal number of original Chinese SF novels. And I so very much wished I could read Chinese!

*

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2026/03/new-wave-classics-for-chinese-editor.html