Science & Nature SpecialScience fiction

I’m rather hoping that some of the stories which appeared in Science Fiction Adventures during the early 1960s don’t come true. Though its title suggests otherwise, SFA was actually quite an intellectual magazine. There, many of J.G. Ballard’s stories first appeared, including his brilliant The Drowned World, which predicted global warming and seriously rising sea levels. My own The Sundered Worlds foresaw the discovery of black holes and first offered the term ‘multiverse’ to describe an infinity of alternate versions of our own universe, nesting side by side but unaware of the others’ presence. In New Worlds, SFA’s sister magazine, we – I edited the magazine from 1963 to 1980 – would debate the morality of cloning, of visceral art, computer pornography or TV pseudo-news shows. Writers such as Brian Aldiss and Tom Disch not only predicted our problems, but also looked hard at their moral implications 40 years before Melvyn Bragg raised the same questions on our late-night screens.