King of Science Fiction had grasped the essence of what it meant to be a sci-fi magazine. The soul of this literary vehicle was wonder and alienation, but high-tech fantasies had lost the ability to evoke those feelings. Technological miracles were trite: they happened every day. It was low-tech fantasies that awed and unsettled modern readers. So the editors developed a subgenre known as ‘counter-wave science fiction’ that imagined an unsophisticated future era.
