REVIEW: _The Entropy Exhibition_, Colin Greenland
Martin Wisse
Colin Greenland
244 pages, including notes and index
published in 1983
As somebody who started to read science fiction long after the New Wave
had been and gone, it always surprises me how controversial it still can
be even today. I have had several discussions with people who still
reject it out of hand and think science fiction has never been the same
since. I have some sympathy for this point of view, but on the whole I
think the New Wave helped open science fiction up and break out of the
pulp "ghetto". Even if the ghetto was pretty comfortable for a long
time.
The New Wave started in 1964 with Michael Moorcock and New Worlds, when
the former became the editor of the latter. Young, brash and talented,
he wanted to do Everything Different and succeeded, with the help of two
other maverick British sf writers, J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. All
three were unnsatisfied with the state of science fiction as it then
existed. It wasn't relevant, it was stodgy and unambitious. What they
injected into science fiction was a mixture of Literacy, Sex and
Relevance.
Of course, as with all revolutions it wasn't long before their original
vision degenerated into shock for shock's sake and a backlash appeared.
As such it made it difficult to evaluate the New Wave while it was
happening, and it is no wonder that The Entropy Exhibition, the first
thorough examination of the New Wave, was only published some twenty
years after the fact.
Colin Greenland is these days better known as a science fiction
novelist, but based on this book, he apparantely started out as a sf
critic. The Entropy Exhibition is his attempt at writing a critical
appreciation of the British New Wave, as it formed around New Worlds
magazine. This was not attempted as a general history of the New Wave,
but deliberately limited its scope to New Worlds and its core writers
according to Greenland: Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard and Michael
Moorcock. The American New Wave is only mentioned in passing.
Greenland starts by putting the New Wave in context, dedicating one
short chapter each to the social landscape of England in the early
sixties and the history of New Worlds before Moorcock became its editor.
He then spends three chapters detailing the central obsessions of at
least the British New Wave: Sex (or taboo), the rejection of traditional
sf concerns, especially space travel and "innerspace". Each chapter is
richly illustrated with extracts from New Worlds stories of various
writers.
After this general overview, Greenland then focuses on what he argues
are the three core writers of the New Wave: Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard
and Michael Moorcock himself. Each in their own way were misfits within
science fiction before the wave struck: Aldiss came from a traditional
literary background, Moorcock had been an editor at age 16 and had
written more stories before his 20th than a lot of people do in their
whole life and Ballard always had done his own thing. It's typical that
none of them stayed "just" science fiction writers, but branched out (or
in the case of Aldiss returned) to more mainstream literature. Each of
them started out influenced by post-modernism as it was in the early
sixties, by writers like William Burroughs, who showed them that they
didn't have to adhere to outmoded conventions, but could use avant garde
tehcniques in science fiction.
Finally, in the third and most difficult part of the book, Greenland
lets loose a hefty dose of literary theory on the whole New Wave. It is
in these chapters that Greenland puts together his theory of the New
Wave: that, as the title of the book shows, it is all about coming to
terms with Entropy. This is the central paradox of the British new Wave
movement:
"the conviction that form is degenerating and energy dissipating,
asserted with remarkable formal resourcefulness and an energy of
expression so compelling we may well call it exhibitionist".
Freed from the rigeurs of genre, authors still need to struggle with the
fact that everything can and will decay. But even this decay, as
Moorcock has shown in his Jerry Cornelius can be exhilarating,
liberating.
In all, The Entropy Exhibition made for an interesting read, which I can
recommend to anyone interested in science fiction as a literary genre,
even if you do not agree about its conclusions or even the importance of
the New Wave. The Entropy Exhibition is surprisingly relevant even now,
some twenty years after first publication and some forty years after the
New Wave first started. It seems in some ways science fiction has ever
since tried to refute its central message.
One minor annoyance with this book was the way quotes were being
presented, just by slightly indenting the lines, leaving no whitespace
between quotes and the rest of the text. This made it harder to read
then it needed to be. Greenland's writing in itself is fairly dense at
times as well.
From my booklog, at <http://www.cloggie.org/books/>
Martin Wisse
--
-We- don't flirt with Death. She runs up and sticks
her tongue in our ears.
James Nicoll, rasseff