Traveler of Worlds by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Turning to any random page proves a delicious exercise of artistic degustation, making the book double as coffee-table divertissement.

The editors note that ‘‘the influence of psychedelia, surrealism, and experimentation in general on book cover art during the period can arguably be seen most strongly in the science fiction field,’’ and they have included hundreds of illustrative covers that eloquently make that point.

The editors’ purview is generously scoped, and the detailed treatment of UK phenomena and trends is refreshing.

All of this content, centered sometimes overtly and sometimes peripherally around the aforementioned ‘‘period of trenchant social change,’’ is interesting, and much of it is surely new to this kind of pop culture archival history. In their Introduction they mention ‘‘twenty-four chapters written by contemporary authors and critics.’’ By my reckoning, in addition to the Introduction the book contains 37 chapters, of which 20 are authored externally and 17 – eight by Nette and nine by McIntyre – are sourced in-house. Nette & McIntyre’s approach parallels the editorial directive of Desirina Boskovich’s recent Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2019): a collection of subject-specific essays by a variety of writers and scholars, with additional interstitial entries contributed by the editors themselves.

Readers conversant with genre history will be familiar with the salient movement of this period, called the New Wave, and the forms of expression it helped to usher into the genre, both in terms of content and modernist techniques, but even those readers should find plenty of value here. The Melbourne-based duo of writers/editors Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre follow up their two previous PM Press volumes, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980 (2017) and Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fic tion, 1950 to 1980 (2019), with a brand-new tome on ‘‘radical science fiction’’ published mostly during what, in their Introduction, they term the ‘‘long sixties,’’ a period stretching from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre, eds.

Traveler of Worlds by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro