Harrison summarised the period by saying "old barriers were coming down, pulp taboos were being forgotten, new themes and new manners of writing were being explored". New Wave writers began to use non-science fiction literary themes, such as the example of beat writer William S. Burroughs – New Wave authors Philip José Farmer and Barrington J. Bayley wrote pastiches of his work (The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod and The Four Colour Problem, respectively), while J. G. Ballard published an admiring essay in an issue of New Worlds. Burroughs' use of experimentation such as the cut-up technique and his use of science fiction tropes in new manners proved the extent to which prose fiction could seem revolutionary, and some New Wave writers sought to emulate this style. Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the newer writers to be published during the 1960s, describes the transition to the New Wave era thus: Other writers and works seen as preluding or transitioning to the New Wave include Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Walter M. Miller's 1959 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's anti-hyper-consumerist The Space Merchants (1952), Kurt Vonnegut's mocking Player Piano (1952) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), Theodore Sturgeon's humanist More Than Human (1953) and the hermaphrodite society of Venus Plus X (1960), and Philip José Farmer's human-extraterrestrial sexual encounters in The Lovers (1952) and Strange Relations (1960). Beginnings There is not any consensus about a precise beginning for the New Wave – British author Adam Roberts refers to Alfred Bester as having single-handedly invented the genre, and in the introduction to a collection of Leigh Brackett's short fiction, Michael Moorcock referred to her as one of the genre's "true godmothers". Algis Budrys said that in New Wave writers "there are echoes... of Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, Jr. and, by all odds, Fritz Leiber". However, it is accepted by many critics that the New Wave began in England with the magazine New Worlds and Michael Moorcock. who was appointed editor in 1964 (first issue number 142, May and June); Moorcock was editor until 1973. While the American magazines Amazing Stories and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had from the start printed unusually literary stories, Moorcock made that into a more definite policy, and he sought to use the magazine to "define a new avant-garde role" for science fiction by the use of