Chapter 6 - The Third Rebellion: The SF Underground

Summary

SF Renegades

Although we have seen that Omni, Asimov's and Interzone were breaking new territory, it was not enough for some. There was a rebellious underground that strove to ring the changes and provide a greater scope for artistic freedom and a wider interpretation of science fiction or, as many preferred, speculative fiction.

Among the first to rebel was Scott Edelman with Last Wave, started in October 1983. He called it ‘The Last Best Hope of Speculative Fiction’. It was well titled because it was intended to be the last hurrah for the New Wave of the 1960s and early 1970s. Edelman had enjoyed the science fiction being produced at that time because, as he wrote, ‘Writers were pushing the science fiction short story to its limits, and were embroiled in a constant debate over the content of their fiction, over what science fiction was and could become.’

He felt that since then writers had retrenched. He questioned where such challenging work could now appear. New Worlds had ceased, as had the anthology series Orbit and QUARK/, and the remaining magazines were resorting to traditional science fiction. Though Edelman was writing this before the revolution in Asimov's under Shawna McCarthy and Gardner Dozois, even that would not have fully satisfied the extremes to which Edelman wanted to go. He did recognize that Interzone was seeking to keep the revolution alive, but argued that one quarterly magazine was not enough. There was, of course, Something Else, of which Edelman may not have been aware, but by the same token these were magazines of limited circulation and appearance.

It was also interesting that Edelman used the term ‘speculative fiction’ in his motto but only used it once in his editorial, whereas he used ‘science fiction’ several times. The phrase ‘speculative fiction’ has never been consistently defined but in its original usage, by Robert A. Heinlein, it was to identify an extrapolative aspect of science fiction as distinct from adventurous ‘pulp’ fiction. In other words speculative fiction was a more serious, rigorous and, hopefully, acceptable form of science fiction. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, Michael Moorcock, Judith Merril and Samuel Delany broadened the phrase to mean any form of fiction that ‘speculated’ about what might exist beyond present-day normality.