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By Root 466 0

as in his The Old Men at the Zoo) Angus Wilson had recommended that Sidgwick & Jackson in the UK publish Tiger! Tiger!, the original title of The Stars My Destination. Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen and an increasing number of writers of social fiction, as well as a surprising bunch of well-known philosophers, were discriminating readers of SF and other kinds of imaginative fiction. They sometimes even wrote it. Although the Amis camp demanded that SF remain a kind of literary ghetto, the rest of us wondered if it was possible, through the genre, for popular fiction and literary fiction to find common ground. At some point in the nineteenth century, perhaps even the early twentieth century, fiction had become the victim of a random kind of snobbery which denied a public to many highly accessible writers of equal ambition and artistic success and thus also discouraged a popular public from reading the established canon (“too highbrow”). My friends—Ballard, Bayley and Aldiss especially—believed much as I did. Quite a bit of our late-1950s and early-1960s conversation envisaged a magazine that would combine the values of the best SF and the best contemporary literature as well as features about what was happening in the arts and sciences.

You can imagine—with all these glorious ideas of reuniting the values of popular and literary fiction, which we shared with composers and visual artists as well as film-makers—the last kind of fiction I imagined myself writing was what Leiber had christened both heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery but which I had, it appeared, already termed epic fantasy (see “Putting a Tag on It”). By some strange twist of fate I was telling tales that had more in common with the nineteenth century than the twentieth in order to help support an avant-garde movement which looked forward to the twenty-first.

Though Tolkien had been published, he was still relatively obscure, and his kind of fantasy fiction was never published in the mainstream (Tolkien’s primarily academic publisher, George Allen & Unwin, was better known as Jung’s). Hard as it is to believe now, The Lord of the Rings was considered as some kind of post-nuclear allegory, too risky to chance in a paperback edition (which Tolkien, anyway, regarded as a bit vulgar). Both Burroughs and Howard were thoroughly out of fashion in the United States (though not so much in Britain), and there was no longer any kind of market for supernatural adventure fiction. The eagerness with which the public embraced the fantasts when they were finally released, an uncaged flock, upon the world, is a good lesson for publishers and for politicians.

I mention elsewhere how E. J. Carnell, editor of the three surviving British SF magazines, commissioned the first Elric stories. It was in Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures and New Worlds that the likes of Clarke, Aldiss, Ballard, Brunner and even Terry Pratchett published their early work. Philip K. Dick’s first significant novel, Time Out of Joint, was serialized in New Worlds. Carnell’s taste was broader than that of his American contemporaries. Although unintentionally, he was without doubt the father of what became a significant literary renaissance whose influence would spread throughout Anglophone fiction. In our different ways, he and I were as much an instrument of the Zeitgeist as anyone. By the time I took over the magazine (see my introduction to New Worlds: An Anthology, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004) I had a clear agenda: to merge generic SF and literary fiction. New Worlds not only ran an exclusive interview with Tolkien, when he was refusing everyone else but also was the first to judge Philip K. Dick as an important writer, and I was able to persuade Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape to publish his best work in hardback simply as literary fiction. Meanwhile we ran work by Disch, Pynchon, Zoline, D. M. Thomas, Peake and a good many other ambitious writers, artists and scientists, until we at last began to see our hopes fulfilled. Now some of our finest living writers turn increasingly to the methods of