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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

No mention of Ballard? Or any of the New Worlds "New Wave" era writers?

Ballard was primarily an SF author though. His autobiographical Empire of the Sun was an exception as was, arguably Crash. But really, although his later writing got away from the world destroying sub-genre, there were at least science fictional elements throughout.

Who are the new wave writers? I'm looking for some more good authors, and not finding these jump out on Amazon.

Well, on the UK side of things you can probably pick any of the authors published during Michael Moorcock's tenure at New Worlds: so Aldiss, Moorcock, M John Harrison, Hilary Bailey, Ballard, Barrington J Bayley, Disch, Brunner.

You can also probably toss in Delany, Spinrad, much of Dangerous Visions, and then go on from there.

The movement, if there was one, is best characterised by a shift from puzzle stories to more complex fiction, with some authors crossing the divide, like Silverberg and Zelazny in the US.

A volume of Robert Silverberg stories blew me away when I was young and eager for ideas based fiction. I think he might be the under-rated author of that era - talented with characters and narrative, yet provocative and thought provoking in terms of his conceptual exploration.

However - decades (and probably puberty) sit in between me and my last reading of his work so this is probably an unreliable viewpoint.

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