The Heat-death Of The Universe

Author: Pamela Zoline

Inner space, that touchstone idea of the British New Wave, was not about the psychology of the characters so much as it was contrasting the vastness of the human imagination with the narrowness of the world that imagination must engage with. As a consequence, a favourite metaphor of new wave writers was entropy, the running down of everything within a closed system, the heat-death of the universe. Pamela Zoline's first published story virtually defines the new wave. In 54 numbered paragraphs that recall the chill intellectualism of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she recounts one typical day in the life of a suburban housewife. But as the day's events are dotted with references to Dadaism and entropy, we begin to see her life as a closed system, a system that is itself doomed to run down into the heat-death of the universe. Why it's on the list: It's hard to know what to make of this story. Is it actually science fiction? Could it be anything but science fiction? The one thing that is certain is that, ever since its first appearance in New Worlds in 1967, it has been the story most closely identified with the entire enterprise of the British New Wave.