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Chapter 3 - The 1960s

New Wave, New Worlds

from Part I - The Dream of Imperial Ruins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2025

Caroline Edwards
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

This chapter explores the cultural obsession with entropy in the London-based magazine, New Worlds. Associated with the 1960s New Wave, New Worlds was instrumental in bringing an experimental literary sensibility to the genre of science fiction. Writing against the grain of prevailing academic criticism, the chapter unearths a latent utopian impulse within the metaphor of entropy. Artists, writers, and critics associated with New Worlds considered the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, to be a fitting image for the dystopian mood of post-war British literature and culture. The chapter argues that their obsession with the disintegration of society at a time of post-imperial decline reveals, rather, hope among the ruins. It offers a close reading of British-based artist and writer Pamela Zoline’s short story “Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), in which the boredom of a Californian housewife stretches into a Dadaist utopian daydream about the heat death of the universe, the theoretical endpoint of entropy. By situating fictions published in New Worlds within the wider political contexts of anti-colonial resistance, the New Left, Second Wave Feminism, and Gay Liberation, the chapter uncovers a persistent strain of utopian possibility through Britain’s cultural obsession with entropy in the 1960s.

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  • The 1960s
  • Edited by Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Online publication: 18 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009690485.003
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  • The 1960s
  • Edited by Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Online publication: 18 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009690485.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The 1960s
  • Edited by Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
  • Online publication: 18 December 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009690485.003
Available formats
×