have gone on their own highly individualistic directions. But the key point here is that New Wave SF failed to move people. I'm not sure if this failure was due to its pessimistic themes or to people feeling the stuff was too pretentious. But it never really grabbed hold of people's imaginations. Hartwell observed that "there is something efficacious in sf's marginality and always tenuous self-identity -- its ambiguous generic distinction from other literary categories -- and, perhaps more importantly, in its distinction from what has variously been called realist, mainstream, or mundane fiction." Hartwell maintained that after the New Wave, science fiction had still managed to retain this "marginality and tenuous self-identity": The British and American New Wave in common would have denied the genre status of SF entirely and ended the continual development of new specialized words and phrases common to the body of SF, without which SF would be indistinguishable from mundane fiction in its entirety (rather than only out on the borders of experimental SF, which is properly indistinguishable from any other experimental literature). The denial of special or genre status is ultimately the cause of the failure of the New Wave to achieve popularity, which, if it had become truly dominant, would have destroyed SF as a separate field. Scientific and technological themes were more important than literary trends to Campbell, and some major Astounding contributors Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Sprague de Camp had scientific or engineering educations. Asimov said in 1967 "I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more". Yet, Asimov himself was to illustrate just how that "SF shore" did indeed re-emerge—- but changed. A biographer noted that during the 1960s: ...stories and novels that Asimov must not have liked and must have felt were not part of the science fiction he had helped to shape were winning acclaim and awards. He also must have felt that science fiction no longer needed him. His science fiction writing... became even more desultory and casual. Asimov's return to serious writing in 1972 with The Gods Themselves (when much of the debate about the New Wave had dissipated) was an act of courage... Darren Harris-Fain observed on this resumption of writing SF by Asimov that ...the novel [The Gods Themselves] is noteworthy for how it both