For almost the entire time I have owned this book (Since it shifted from the book collection of Mark McKeown to my own.)I have been looking at the spine and seeing the title "The Atrocity Exhibition" by JG Ballard. Its a trick of the eye and memory, signifying a short attention span.
This book is a series of essays detailing , as the sub-title explains, the early history of Michael Moorcock and the British "new wave" in science fiction, presenting a critical study of the legendary NEW WORLDS magazine, especially covering the period that Michael Moorcock was the editor, chief contributer and captain of the good ship science fiction anthology, a craft that saled through unchated waters, surving collisions with literary ice-bergs and worse. The Entropy Exhibition is a collection of thoughts and insights which proves to be as dense as you might expect given its detailing of many taboo breaking literary conventions. It was literally game changing, proving an inspirational decade long editorship. Sex, horror, spiritualism, religion and titalation were boldy experimented with along with a dollop of zeitgeist affecting creativity. This period of Michael Moorcock's editorship with an eye for the era in which NEW WORLDS was birthed and took its first foundling journey into the imaginations of a world that had forgotten it was dreaming.
It is interesting to speculate in this era of modern progressive experimentation,such as it is, about the genre busting changes in the traditional precepts science fiction and science fantasy found itself, floating in the horse latitudes of modernity. The radical and almost altogether meta qualities of the sailors on the seas of this particular fate were as ground breaking as they were unsettling, with writing contributions from Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard, Brian Aldiss and many others.They proved themselves the artists possessed with the right tools; Their intellects.T'was a brave NEW WORLD with such creatures in it.
Off course, what was new then is old now. Modern science fiction seems less obssessed with the predictive qualities of this speculative genre mix. looking back was always so much easier than looking forward. Have we all become the watchers at as opposed to the dancers of that imagined destination. One can only imagine how the old gaurd of science fiction writers must have felt when these new barbarians were at the gates of their lovely gleaming retro-futuristic city, like pike carrying soldiers of the witches army in The Wizard Of Oz, stamping up and down on regimented duty, barring the way.And really imagine the shock of how these new barbarians were so much better looking. Oh the sins we forgive those possessed with sartorial elegance. The unstable DNA of the genre was changed forever by an agressive and radical form of re-invention, with such speed and chaotic abandonment of imagined rules and seismic burstsof creativity that still affords a giddiness to those attempting to cross a constantly changing and evolving seas.
Here be monsters, if we are lucky.
