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Originally published in the U.K. in 1983, but released in the U.S. now for the first time, New Worlds: An Anthology "does not seek to be a 'best of' collection," editor Michael Moorcock says. "It is intended as a sampling of the kind of short material we ran when [New Worlds] magazine was on a regularly monthly schedule." This goal makes the book a valuable one to historians of science fiction and literature, but certainly reduces the pleasures available to the average reader, because the stories and articles collected here have not survived the years equally well.

Some of the best science fiction stories of the 60s and early 70s are collected here, among them "Running Down" by M. John Harrison, "Angouleme" by Thomas M. Disch, and "Traveler's Rest" by David I. Masson. For a reader seeking high-quality writing, there's not much else between these covers, though tastes vary, and certainly some readers will be more impressed by a handful of the other pieces than I was.

Read in its entirety, the book seems like a shared-world anthology, one scripted by J.G. Ballard at his most portentous and with a soundtrack by the early Pink Floyd. Vague wars obliterate the edges of these stories, cities are oppressive and monolithic and grey, characters trudge through anomie, reality bends under the weight of the promise of drugs, automobiles carry more symbols than passengers, narratives snub their fragmentary noses at the very hint of "entertainment," and one author after another tries terribly hard to be a medium for the ghost of Marshall McLuhan's messages. Read from the first page to the last, the book is numbing and soporific.

Many of the writers whose work is collected here went on to do great things later. J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Barrington Bayley, James Sallis, John T. Sladek, John Clute, and others all produced work immensely better than what represents them in this anthology.

Which is exactly why the book does hold some interest. It's like peering into the sketchbook of a great painter to see what got left behind in the wake of masterpieces, or searching through dusty archives to see why certain people got sucked into the black hole of history. There is value, too, in negative results from experiments, value in seeing what doesn't work. Any young writer who desires to bust open the gates and locks of SF should pay close attention to this book, because much of the preliminary work has been done here. There is a reason many of these writers later did excellent work: they had to do what was here first. They had to see what would happen.

An essay toward the end of the anthology is illuminating. James Colvin argues against "A Literature of Acceptance" and guesses that "just as a mood of pragmatism followed the mood of paranoia in the nineteenth century... so we are entering a more pragmatic mood, and just as the Gothic literature of fear and reaction developed techniques and subject matter that were used to great effect by serious writers... so science fiction has developed -- or is developing -- techniques and subject matter that are beginning to be used to great effect by serious writers." It was a good guess, although the reality turned out to be more complex than Colvin's schema could have predicted, with literature and life both twisting through permutations rather than dichotomies, ultimately arriving at the point we're at now, where writing is better categorized by styles and inclinations than by strict genre values, and fiction is less a field of monoliths than a tapestry of literatures woven by magpies.

The SF world needed New Worlds and mined riches from its soil. Some of those riches have tarnished over the years, or proved to be fool's gold, but the legacy still glitters, though it is likely that only the most adventurous and curious readers will want to journey back into the mines.

Matthew Cheney teaches at the New Hampton School and has published in English Journal, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, and Locus, among other places. He writes regularly about science fiction on his weblog, The Mumpsimus.