His most famous creation is the fantasy character Elric of Melniboné, a kind of anti-Conan: a frail albino sorceror born into his position as the last emperor of a mighty island empire. Elric is full of self-loathing for what his empire has done, and the other Melnibonéans can’t understand this. Nothing to see here…

Moorcock infamously described Tolkien’s work as Epic Pooh, for its conservatism, and similarly attacked Robert A. Heinlein and H. P. Lovecraft in his essay “Starship Stormtroopers” in the Anarchist Review.

I remember reading “Can the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” by Andrei Amalrik sometime in the late 70s.

The man made a good case from his perspective, and I wondered why more intelligent futurists and SF writers seemed unable to take basic economics and human nature based sociology to weave such plausible — but anti-mainstream — scenarios.

Not to say that some authors that I enjoyed in those years didn’t get some things wrong. Niven and Pournelle were great on science but missed the coming collapse of the Soviets, David Drake is a bit weak on economics (again, my opinion), but these and similar were strong enough in all the other aspects to make reading their books fun. But the New Wave seemed to miss on science, economics, understanding human nature, and even good characters and plot can’t make up for the rest in my case. Maybe if they wrote their story as fantasy, with non-humans, and magical stuff-making devices, it might work. Or not.

It was during a binge-reading of the Nebula Award anthologies in high school that it finally clicked, thanks to the multiply-awarded work of James Tiptree Jr. Her (the name was a pseudonym) work was very well written with fine characterization, and was almost without exception violently misandristic.

I’m not kidding when I say violently misandristic. One of the stories involved aliens wanting to clear humans off the Earth. They do so by releasing a gas that exaggerates the “naturally violent nature of the male sex drive” or some such. Result: whenever a man sees a pretty woman, instead of becoming horny he violently murders her. There wasn’t any analysis or questioning of this premise, that the heterosexual male sex-drive was fundamentally about violence, it was just baked in.

That isn’t to say the new-wave didn’t have its bright spots. Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’ remains high on my list, mainly because it is willing to pointedly examine the precepts of its proposed society rather than just propagandize them.

Anyone have any other favorites (positive or negative) they’d care to share?

By the latter 1970s, smarter persons were predicting the USSR would collapse sometime in the 1980s. SF writers such as Brin, Sterling, KS Robinson etc. were beginning to get wrapped up in the anthropogenic carbon climate doom apocalypse delusion.

Doom was a strong and strange attractor for that set.