New Worlds and the New Wave in Fandom: Fan Culture and the Reshaping of Science Fiction in the Sixties‪.‬

In the August 1970 issue of the SFWA Forum, a publication circulated to members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Harlan Ellison remarked that the contoversy over the New Wave, which had consumed the field during the late 1960s, seemed to have been "blissfully laid to rest." There never was, he claimed, Leaving aside the fact that this analysis obscures Ellison's own prominent role--and that of other professional authors and editors such as Judith Merril, Michael Moorcock, Lester Del Rey, Frederik Pohl, and Donald A. Wollheim--in fomenting the conflict, it does raise the interesting question of precisely how fan culture was implicated in the furious debates of the period, a question virtually ignored in most scholarly writing on the New Wave. If we cannot agree with Ellison's indictment of SF fans as clueless trouble-makers avid for unearned egoboo, (2) the onus is on us to produce a more compelling narrative of contemporary fandom's participation in perhaps the most significant, and certainly the most rancorous, dispute in SF history. This is the task I have set myself here. (3)