Search Worlds Without End

When first published in 1983 The Entropy Exhibition was the first critical assessment of the literary movement known as 'New Wave' science fiction. It examines the history of the New Worlds magazine and its background in the popular imagination of the 1960s, traces the strange history of sex in science fiction and analyses developments in stylistic theory and practice.

Michael Moorcock edited and produced the magazine New Worlds from 1964 to 1973. Within its pages he encouraged the development of new kinds of popular writing out of the genre of science fiction, energetically reworking traditional themes, images and styles as a radical response to the crisis of modern fiction. The essential paradox of the writing lay in its fascination with the concept of 'entropy'--the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. Entropy provides the key to both the anarchic vitality of the magazine and to its neglect by critics and academics, as well as its connection with other cultural experiments of the 1960s. The Fiction of the New Worlds writers was not concerned with far future and outer space, but with the ambiguous and unstable conditions of the modern world.

Detailed attention is given to each of the three main contributors to the New Worlds magazine--Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss and J.G. Ballard. Moorcock himself is more commonly judged by his commercial fantasy novels than by the magazine he supported with them, but here at last the balance is redressed: New Worlds emerges as nothing less than a focus and a metaphor for many of the transformations of English and American literature in the past two decades.

Sophie Farthing, an orphan who grew up on a space station, emerges from her repressed upbringing to embark on a perilous journey from Earth to the Moon and across Mars searching for the origin of her birth.

It is carnival time on Mars, but Tabitha Jute isn't partying. She is in hiding from the law, penniless and about to lose her livelihood and her best friend, the space barge "Alice Liddell". Then, the intriguing Marco Metz offers her some money to take him to Plenty, and the adventure begins.

Space Captain Tabitha Jute is the hero of the solar system. She has defeated the Capellan overlords and liberated the gigantic alien spaceship known as Plenty. Now begins the first human voyage to another star - a journey that will take the strange ship and her motley complement of passengers and crew far into unknown reaches of time and space.

Captain Tabitha Jute is past the point of no return. Stripped of her command and her dignity, she has lost control of the huge alien starship called Plenty, and forefeited the devotion of the myriad lifeforms traveling with her in its dingy caverns and labyrinthine corridors. Now they all lie captive beneath the glowering red twin stars of Capella, awaiting the pleasure of the parasitic Guardinas.

For the Guardians, who once gave Plenty to humanity, are now scheming with high-tech tyrants called the Seraphim. And Captain Jute and her followers are caught in the middle of a terrifying experiment in which the human race is the raw material. Her only option is to risk it all on one last headlong flight into the heart of a dying star system in a desperate attempt to uncover the final secrets of the Capellans.

And as the Guardians will soon learn, Tabitha Jute doesnt want mauch... she only wants Plenty.