When Science Fiction Grew Up - By Ted Gioia

1.

Science fiction finally gave up childish things in the 1960s. But like many adolescents, it only grew up because theugly real world intruded on its immature fantasies.

Let's put a measuring tape to it. In the summer of 1957,just a few weeks before the launch of the first Sputnikspace satellite, some 23 science fiction magazineswere operating in the United States. By the end of 1960,only six remained. During a period of just 28 months,fifteen sci-fi magazines disappeared from the magazineracks.

This truly was an amazing story, astounding even, butdid not get reported in the pages of Amazing Storiesand Astounding Storiestwo of the survivors. (AlthoughAstounding, in a move that now seems especiallywrong-headed, changed its name to Analogclearlymissing out on the coming digital age.) These pulpfiction stragglers were too busy trying to stay alive.Even the survivors in this shakeout were on a flimsyfinancial footing, and many a sci-fi writer rushed to thebank to cash a payment check before another magazine

1 A Case of Conscience (1958)James Blish

One Catholic reader responded to Blish's theologically-infused outer space story by sending him a copy ofChurch doctrine relating to extraterrestrials.

To read more, click here

2 The Sirens of Titan (1959)Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's formative experiences were marked bytragic death, rampant destruction and thwarted ambitions.Later he decided to treat his characters as he was treated.


3 A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)Walter M. Miller

Can epistemology serve as a unifying theme of a sci-finovel? Walter Miller thought so, and proved that genrefiction can also delve into the deepest philosophical issues.


4 Solaris (1961)

Science Fiction in Transition (1958-1975):New Wave & New Directions

A Reading List of 64 Works(with links to individual essays by Ted Gioia)To purchase, click on image

conceptual fictionExploring the Non-Realist Tradition in Fiction

When Science Fiction Grew Up

How renegade sci-fi writers of the 1960s paved theway for today's blending of literary and genre fiction

by Ted Gioia

When Science Fiction Grew Up http://conceptualfiction.com/whenscifigrewup.html

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bit the lunar dust.

So many ironies here. The space age had arrived, andthe rivalry between the US and the USSR promised tovalidate all the outlandish future-tripping forecasts thesepulp magazines had been peddling for the past thirtyyears. It didn't seem fair that workaday journalists shouldnow steal away their readers. But who needed Satellitemagazine (defunct 1959) or Space Travel (defunct 1958),when you could read about actual satellites and spacetravel in your daily newspaper? Who wanted to spendleisure time reading tales aboutthermonuclear destructionwhen the neighbor next doorwas setting up an actualbomb shelter in his basement?But the irony also playedout on a grander karmic level:what cruel deity had decidedthat purveyors of fantasyshould get a dose ofreality therapyforced intoretreat because truth wasstranger than even sciencefiction.

2.

But something far stranger was about to happen. The veryforces that threatened to kill off the sci-fi genre actuallysaved it.

The old formulas didn't work anymore. Stories about rocketships and bug-eyed monsters from outer space would nolonger pay the rent. Tales about nuclear bombs proved tobe duds at the magazine rack. In the new environment,science fiction writers needed new formulasor even better,needed to have the courage to operate without pre-cookedrecipes of any sort. In short, science fiction needed to growup and take on the adult world, in all its messiness anduncertainty.

Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem claimed that science fiction is poorly written,ill conceived and too focused on clichs. That didn't stop himfrom writing one of the finest sci-fi books of the 20th century.


5 Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)Robert Heinlein

Two years after his Starship Troopers incurred charges thathe was a militarist, Heinlein served up Stranger in a StrangeLand, with its paean to free love and 1960s-era self-actualization.

To read more click here

6 The Soft Machine (1961)William Burroughs

Few sci-fi concepts are more used, and abused, than the timetravel meme. But William Burroughs delivered, without question,the oddest time travel novel of them all in this 1961 work.


7 A Clockwork Orange (1962)Anthony Burgess

Long before the rise of the punk ethos, Burgess anticipated itsthemes of violent disenchantment and transformed them intoa magnificent sci-fi-flavored literary symphony.


8 The Drowned World (1962)J.G. Ballard

This book is still the gold standard for global warming fiction.But be forewarned: the really bizarre stuff in a J.G. Ballardstory always takes place inside the characters' heads.


9 Hothouse (1962)Brian Aldiss

Is Brian Aldiss's global warming novel really science fiction?

Finnegans Wake is aninformation pool based

on computer memorysystems that didn't exist

until centuries afterJames Joyce's era,"

Philip K. Dick declared.Then he added: "I'll be

famous forever."

Follow Ted Gioia on Twitter atwww.twitter.com/tedgioia

Special FeaturesNotes on Conceptual FictionWhen Science Fiction Grew UpRay Bradbury: A TributeThe Year of Magical ReadingRemembering Fritz LeiberA Tribute to Richard MathesonSamuel Delany's 70th birthdayThe Sci-Fi of Kurt VonnegutCurse You, Neil Armstrong!Robert Heinlein at 100A.E, van Vogt TributeThe Puzzling Case of Robert SheckleyThe Avant-Garde Sci-Fi of Brian AldissScience Fiction 1958-1975: A Reading List

Links to related sitesThe New CanonGreat Books GuidePostmodern MysteryFractious FictionTed Gioia's web siteTed Gioia on Twitter

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Everything was now in flux. A few of the old-timers managedto adapt to the new environment. Robert Heinlein had beenpeddling juvenile outer space stories in the 1950s, but inthe 1960s he reinvented himself as a counterculture guruand delivered at least two genuine masterworks, Stranger ina Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. PhilipK. Dick had been publishing sci-fi stories since the early1950s, but his interest in altered states of consciousnessand different spheres of reality made him the perfect story-teller for the psychadelic 60s. Ursula K. Le Guin had firstsubmitted a story to Astounding back before World War IIwhen she was only eleven-years-old, but she only got intoher stride in the 1960s and 1970s when her skill in blendingadvanced sociological themes into genre fiction helped hermove from Amazing Stories to the pages of The New Yorker.Arthur C. Clarke was an old man of sci-fi who had first madehis name back in the mid-1930s, and though he had aharder time adapting to the new zeitgeist, even he managedto shake up the younger generation with 2001: A SpaceOdyssey, his film-and-book collaboration with directorStanley Kubrick.

But these were the exceptions. Most of the excitement camefrom newcomers and outsiders. Kurt Vonnegut had publishedhis first science fiction novel back in 1952, but he tended toavoid writing for the pulp genre magazines. He had no interestin becoming the 'next Isaac Asimov' or the 'next Arthur C.Clarke'. Instead Vonnegut hoped to conquer the world ofmainstream literary fiction with satire, dark humor and asmattering of sci-fi conceptsan almost impossible ambition,it seemed at the time, but the success of Ray Bradbury hadalready proven that a few mortals were equipped (or perhaps'allowed' is the better word) to escape the genre ghetto.With Cats Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegutachieved the highest honors possible for a sci-fi author. No,not a Hugo and Nebulamany a hack has received one ofthosebut rather a place in the literary fiction rack at thebookstore and inclusion on school assigned reading lists.

Yet even more shocking were the renowned literary lionswho embraced science fiction. Why in the world didVladimar Nabokov tell a BBC interviewer in 1968 "I loathe

It unfolds more like a Homeric epic, or a cataclysmic OldTestament story about the wandering exploits of a chosen people.


10 The Man in the High Castle (1962)Philip K. Dick

In this cryptic alternative history, Philip K. Dick explores theunexpected ramifications of a world in which the UnitedStates lost World War II.


11 Cat's Cradle (1963)Kurt Vonnegut

Over the course of 127 miniature chapters, Kurt Vonnegutconstructs a madcap adventure mixing New Age philosophyand end-of-the-world hijinks.


12 Cosmicomics (1965)Italo Calvino

Cosmicomics is my favorite Italo Calvino work, a headymixture of postmodern posturing and science fiction concepts. Think of it as human interest stories, but without the humans.


13 The Genocides (1965)Thomas Disch

Mix together The Grapes of Wrath, The Book of Job and TheWar of the Worlds. Stir it up violently, and wait for it to explode.Such is Disch's The Genocides.


14 Dune (1965)Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert's Dune represents the purest example in sciencefiction of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz described as"thick description" ethnography.


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science fiction," and then publish a sci-fi book, Ada or Ardor,the following year? What motivated Walker Percy, winner ofthe National Book Award for The Moviegoer (1961) to turn tosci-fi with Love in the Ruins a decade later? Why were themost promising experimental American writers of the newgeneration embracing sci-fi plotsfor example John Barthwith Giles Goat-Boy and Thomas Pynchon with Gravity'sRainbow? Why did William Burroughs feel compelled toinsert science fiction concepts into his rambling cut-and-paste novels?

The very existence of such books represented a slap inthe face to the core sci-fi marketnamely, adolescentsand teens. Asimov did not prepare them for Ada. Gernsbackdid not pave the path to Giles Goat-Boy. Frankly, manyof these books would have been confiscated by teachersand parents during that period of literary ferment. I stillrecall the day my fourth grade teacher at St. Joseph'sElementary School seized my cousin's copy of a JamesBond novel (Moonraker) and denounced it as inappropriatereading, even as I breathed a sigh of relief that she had notseen my copy of Live and Let Die. I don't even want toimagine what would have happened if a book by VladimirNabokov or William Burroughs had been found at my desk.The Naked Lunch might have spurred a school lockdown,and intervention by the local bishop.

3.

Yes, this was an unlikely revolution in the sci-fi field. Butnothing seemed capable of stopping the trend once it wasset in motion, and it clearly respected no geographicalborders. Even as the US emerged as the winner in thespace race, it faced increasingly intense competition inthe sci-fi racket. In the early sixties, Britain seemed on thebrink of eclipsing the US as the center of experimentalscience fiction. In continental Europe, leading writers ofthe new generation, such as Italo Calvino and StanisawLem, inserted science fiction concepts into ambitiousworks of literary fiction.


15 Mindswap (1965)Robert Sheckley

Is Robert Sheckley's 1965 novel Mindswap a rambling anddisjointed disaster or a virtuosos postmodern pastiche? Orperhaps a bit of both?


16 This Immortal (1965)Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny found inexhaustible inspiration for sciencefiction adventure stories in the oldest myths, legends andreligious belief systems.


17 Babel-17 (1966)Samuel R. Delany

Rydra Wong, the protagonist of Samuel Delany's Babel-17is a poet, skilled linguist and intergalactic literary celebrityand, yes, a starship captain in her spare time.


18 Giles Goat-Boy (1966)John Barth

Think of John Barth's oddball novel as a cross betweenTarzan of the Apes and the Holy Bible. It's almost as longas the King James Version, and roughly follows the same plot.


19 The Crystal World (1966)J.G. Ballard

Few authors found more ways of destroying planet Earththan J.G. Ballard. In The Crystal World, he turned to the killingproperties of ice, and found that it, too, will suffice.



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The globalization of sci-fi as a trendy artistic construct wasalso evident beyond the world of books. Certainly no onewas surprised when Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 gotmade into a movie, but who expected that the director wouldbe hipper-than-hip French filmmaker Franois Truffaut?Almost at that same moment, Truffaut's illustrious rival incutting edge French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard was alsopushing ahead with his sci-fi film Alphaville (1965). For betteror worse, sci-fi was moving beyond stale Hollywood formulasand entering the realm of avant-garde art. When FedericoFellini released his ancient Rome movie Satyricon (1969) atthe close of the decade, he made the puzzling pronouncementthat it represented "science fiction of the past"a bizarrenotion, but very much aligned with the spirit of the age.

The subject of fantasy is beyond the scope of this essay, butI must note in passing that down in Latin America at this samejuncture, a whole generation of world-beating writers wereinserting magic (heaven forbid!) into their most audaciousbooks. These authors must have perceived the risk of taintingtheir serious novels with genre concepts, but they understoodlong before most readers and critics even noticed!thatgenre fiction wasn't what it used to be.

Today, we are very familiar with highbrow literary writersincorporating fantasy and science fiction into their works.Many of the most admired writers of our dayHarukiMurakami, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem, JenniferEgan, J.K. Rowling, David Mitchell, and othersdo this withimpunity. (Well, almost with impunityJames Wood still triesto knock 'em down a peg for their bad taste in pursuing, in hiswords "the demented intricacy of science fiction.") But thisfertile marriage between highbrow and lowbrow could hardlyhave happened without the pioneering efforts of Pynchon,Vonnegut, Dick, Nabokov,Le Guin and others renegadesback in that crucial period from the late 1950s to the early1970sthat glorious moment when science fiction grew up.

4.

20 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)Robert Heinlein

Heinlein never wrote with more panache or intensity than in this1966 story of rebellious lunar settlers demanding theirindependence from Mother Earth.


21 Flowers for Algernon (1966)Daniel Keyes

In a strange twist, Daniel Keyes' career followed the arc of his mostfamous protagonist, marked by a rise to the heights that neither wascapable of sustaining.


22 Report on Probability A (1967)Brian Aldiss

Others write meta-narratives. But Brian Aldiss goes several stepsfurther with this story within a story within a story within a storywithin a story.

To read more click here

23 The Ticket That Exploded (1967)William S. Burroughs

"Anyone with a tape recorder controlling the sound track," WilliamBurroughs insists in these pages, "can influence and create events...This produces a strong erotic reaction."


24 The Einstein Intersection (1967)Samuel R. Delany

"If the Holy Bible were an Ace Double, it would be cut to two20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master ofChaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls'."


25 Dangerous Visions (1967)


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And then there was the New Wave!

Here was a radical movement whoseexponents hoped to reinvent sciencefiction from the inside out. Theseweren't literary lions slumming withthe genre writers for cheap thrills,but sci-fi careerists who wanted tochange the entire landscape of thefield. They knew the science fictiontradition, had grown up on it, butnow aimed to subvert every aspectof this inheritance. The leaders ofthe New Wave violated taboos andtackled subjects that, back in the1950s, would have been too hot to handle. They incorporatedexperimental techniques never before applied to sci-finarratives. The were masters of parody, pastiche and apanoply of postmodern perspectives; yet they also couldsurprise by returning to straight narrative and the classicthemes of the genre tradition.

Britain set off this revolution. Give credit to D.H. Lawrence. No,not for his science fiction books (he didn't write any), but forhis estate's success in winning the 1960 court battle thatallowed London publisher Penguin Books to sell unexpurgatedcopies of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. In the aftermathof this decision, British readers could enjoy previously bannedfiction, provided the publisher could demonstrate "literarymerit." The doors were now open, and in a surprisingdevelopment, the new permissive environment changedthe course of science fiction.

Anthony Burgess was never considered part of the sci-fiNew Wave, and he later tried to disown his now famousdystopian novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). "It becameknown as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorifysex and violence," he later explained."The film made it easy for readers ofthe book to misunderstand what it wasabout. I should not have written thebook because of this danger ofmisinterpretation, and the same may

Harlan Ellison, editor

Harlan Ellison really wanted dangerous visions for his anthology,stories that confronted taboos and themes too hot for the sciencefiction magazines of the day.


26 Lord of Light (1967)Roger Zelazny

Others look to Eastern spirituality for transcendence andenlightenment, but Zelazny sized up the ancient deities andsaw that they had potential as sci-fi superheroes.


27 I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1967)Harlan Ellison

"A special word about the stories in this book," Ellison explains, "they come from someplace special in me. Someplace I don'tcare to visit too frequently."


28 Stand on Zanzibar (1968)John Brunner

John Brunner drew on the techniques of John Dos Passos's USATrilogy in constructing in the prescient work. In fact, o sci-fi work ofits era predicted the future more accurately.


29 Nova (1968)Samuel R. Delany

Delany is up to his usual tricks. Sci-fi plot lines get turbochargedwith archetypes. Astronauts are fetishized beyond recognition.They invariably ally announce they would rather be writers.


30 Camp Concentration (1968)Thomas M. Disch

"I have a class theory of literature," Disch explained. "I come from


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be said of Lawrence and LadyChatterley's Lover." Despite suchprotestations, Burgess's novelremains an impressive achievement,bold in its prose and even bolder inits subject matter. Yet this wasprecisely the kind of book thatcould justify its disturbing contentbecause of its "literary merit." In somedegree, it served as a blueprint for the next decade inscience fiction.

Burgess followed up with another dystopian novel (TheWanting Seed), but mostly avoided sci-fi concepts in lateryears. It would be left to others to build on this achievementand take British science fiction to new levels of rudenessand radness. J.G. Ballard had already published his firstnovel when Burgess released A Clockwork Orange, andthough his early sci-fi workwhich focused on variousecological disaster scenariosis poised and confident, ithardly prepared readers for the outlandish ventures ahead.Even today The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) stands out as themost transgressive science fiction book ever released. Andit was just barely released. Almost a decade after the LadyChatterley's Lover decision, Ballard could still stir upenough controversy to spur the president of his publisher,Nelson Doublday Jr. himself, to order all copies of thebook destroyed! Literary trends have come and gone inthe intervening decades, but this work still shocks on almostevery page. Ballard would go on to write other controversialbooksmost notably Crash (1973), his horrific paean toauto fatalitiesand solidify his reputation as the baddest badboy of British sci-fi. Not all of this writing holds up well today,but sci-fi clearly benefited from the adrenalin jolt of Ballard'sintervention.

Yet others were giving him a run for his money. Some ofBrian Aldiss's work comes across as derivativeyou canalmost chart the various books that influenced him as youread each chapter. But at his best, his reckless audacityjumps off the page. And his range during the 1960s maybe the widest of any sci-fi writer of that period. Itencompassed fabulistic future-tripping (Hot House),

the wrong neighborhood to sell to The New Yorker. No matter howgood I am as an artist, they always can smell where I come from."


31 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)Philip K. Dick

Dick asserted his squatter's rights at the intersection where theunreal crosses the more unreal. He owned this type of story, andfor the worst possible reason: he had to live it.


32 His Master's Voice (1968)Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem once summed up the worldview underpinninghis science fiction in a few choice words: "People are terribleand the future is bleak."


33 The Final Programme (1968)Michael Moorcock

If Nietzsche had collaborated with Eugne Ionesco and Ian Fleming,he might have come up with a character as odd as Moorcock'sJerry Corrnelius.


34 Dimension of Miracles (1968)Robert Sheckley

Dimension of Miracles has no structure, no narrative arc, butSheckley compensates with his deft prose, wild sense of humor,and acute eye for the foibles of his fellow earthlings.


35 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)Arthur C. Clarke

If you understand 2001 on the first viewing, we will have failed,Arthur C. Clarke said in regard to the famous Kubrick film. By allmeans, see it again; even better, read the book.


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psychedelic armageddon (Barefoot in the Head), and even self-canceling meta-narrative (Report on Probability A).Michael Moorcock completes this triumvirate of British NewWave stars. His influence as an editor surpasses hisachievements as a writeras reigning guru overseeingthe periodical New Worlds, he regularly delivered amegadose of dicey sci-fi content for a reasonable twoshillings and six pence. Well, perhaps not so regularly;some months the magazine never appeared on the news-stand. The internal chaos at New Worlds caused a few ofthese interruptions, but censorship by retailers also playeda role. Yet if you did get your hands on a copy, you wouldn'tbe bored. Moorcock's writings are too disorganized for mytaste, but his hubris was off the chart. On any list of"science fiction books not to recommend to a Christianreader," his Behold the Man gets top spot. And his JerryCornelius stories make Nietzsche look like a lukewarmnihilist by comparison. In an age in which success wasoften measured by how many people you could piss off,Moorcock met or exceeded his quota every month.

As the 1960s progressed, US writers began playing a largerrole in this sci-fi revolution. For many readers, HarlanEllison stands out as the most representative figure ofradicalized sci-fi, and like Moorcock he made his markboth as writer and editor. Ellison's anthology DangerousVisions (1967) is a mixed bag, but despite its limitations itmay be the single best starting-point for readers who wantto comprehend the tectonic shift underway in 1960s genrefiction. Yet I like Ellison even better as a memoirist andfiction writerby any measure, he ranks among the leadingshort story authors of his generation. But others were readyto vie with him for preeminence in edgy American sci-fi.Native New Yorker Norman Spinrad enjoyed the distinctionof getting copies of New Worlds pulled off the shelves at thelargest magazine retailers in Britain, when Moorcock serialzedparts of Bug Jack Barron, and his works not only pushedforward the New Wave agenda, but also anticipated elementsof the later cyberpunk movement. Thomas M. Disch also standsout in any survey of US sci-fi experimenters, and not just forhis skill as a storytellerhis work as a historian and critic ofgenre literature are required reading for those seeking an


36 The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin set the standard for the sociological sci-fi of the 1960s,in which gender roles, economics and political institutionsoutrank spaceships and warp drives.


37 Slaughterhouse Five (1969)Kurt Vonnegut

What could be a more fitting symbol of the plight of a prisoner-of-war than a person who no longer has control over his timeor space? Thus was born Vonnegut's sci-fi World War II novel.


38 Ada or Ardor (1969)Vladimir Nabokov

"I loathe science fiction," Vladimir Nabokov declared to aBBC interviewer in 1968. A few months later Nabokovpublished an elaborate sci-fi novel.


39 Ubik (1969)Philip K. Dick

"Pop tasty Ubik into your toaster, made only from fresh fruit andhealthful all-vegetable shortening. Ubik makes breakfast a feast,puts zing into your thing."


40 Barefoot in the Head (1969)Brian Aldiss

Aldiss convinces us, in these pages, that if you give people asufficient amount of mind-altering narcotics, they might starttalking like characters in Finnegans Wake.



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insider's perspective on the changes at play.

5.

And how did they do it?

Well, let's ask the class to do a brief exercise. Take a sheetof paper, and make a list of the topics you aren't supposed totalk about in polite company. For example:

- Religion - Politics - Sex - Recreational drug use - The violent death of a loved one in a car crash - Bizarre fantasies about Hollywood celebrities - Etc. etc. etc.

Okay, got the list? The leading sci-fi authors of the 1960sand 1970s probably had a list more or less similar to yours.And then they wrote stories about every subject on the list.Pretty clever, no?

To be honest, the best science fiction writers of the perioddid more than just tweak the sensibilities of the easily outraged.But to some degree, the worst writers in any movement helpyou understand its sources of raw energy. And the hackswere delighted to discover that they could finally write about,say, cannibalism and cannabis in the same story, and noone would slap them on the wrist. I'm reminded of the characterin a Coens brothers film who coyly asks "Are you takingadvantage of the new freedoms?" The writers discussed herecould almost uniformly answer 'yes' to that question, but whilesome were taking advantage of them to good effect, othersmerely sought notoriety and shock value.

The best of this work has held up well over time. But much ofit, in retrospect, seems coldly calculated, or just tooexperimental for its own good. Does anyone nowadays reallyenjoy reading The Soft Machine or The Ticket That Exploded or

41 Behold the Man (1969)Michael Moorcock

Members of a gentle religious community flock around our visitorfrom the future, excited by this mysterious man who has appeared intheir midst. Lets even call them apostles..


42 Emphyrio (1969)Jack Vance

Jack Vance may have been too much of a perfectionist for genrefiction, yet limited by the divided literary culture of his day thatscorned writers who set stories in outer space.


43 The Atrocity Exhibition (1970)J.G. Ballard

When Ballard's lawyer asked the author how he would explain tothe court that his book was not obscene, he responded: "ofcourse it was obscene, and intended to be so."


44 The World Inside (1971)Robert Silverberg

In this dark comic novel about claustrophobia, Robert Silverbergserves up a variant of Winesburg, Ohio set in a 1,000 storyskyscraper with one million residents.


45 The Lathe of Heaven (1971)Ursula K. Le Guin

In this Hugo-winning novel, the "effective dreams" of Le Guin'shero George Orr not only change the future . . . they alsoalter the past.


46 Bug Jack Barron (1969)Norman Spinrad


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Dhalgren or Report on Probability A? I can't imagine suchmasochistic readers, but perhaps they exist. On the otherhand, some genuine classics, multivalent works that are bothsmart and entertaining, are mostly forgotten, and in manyinstances long out-of-print. Readers really ought torediscover John Brunner, R.A. Lafferty, James Tiptree, Jr.,Jack Vance, and (most obscure of allindeed almostobliterated from the memory banks of sci-fi) David R. Bunch.You have been waiting for me to talk about the sexcertainlyit shows up in most of these books. And I will get to it in amoment. But first let me state the less-than-obvious: namelythat the most fertile subject for 1960s sci-fi was religion. Infact, if you consider the novels that won the Hugo from thelate 1950s through the early 1970s, the majority of themdealt with theological issues. Their approaches varieddramatically, but the best of themA Case of Conscience,A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Left Hand of Darkness,Dune, Stranger in a Strange Landrank among the mostinsightful works of spiritual fiction from the mid-20th century.Back in the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs and HugoGernsback, who would have believed that these escapistspace operas would evolve into serious explorations ofspirituality and belief systems? But such was the destinyof sci-fi during the period of its most ardent experimentation.

And, yes, there was sex, lots of it. But not just couplings,triplings and intergalactic miscegenation. In the works ofUrsula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, amongothers, science fiction addressed, for the first time in itshistory, issues of gender roles, sexual orientation andfeminism. At first glance, sci-fi might seem an inhospitableenvironment for such subjectsafter all, the core audiencefor the genre, since timeimmemorial, had beenteenage males, and theirfantasies and interests hadalways unduly influencedwhat got published and read.But the "new freedoms" thatallowed science fiction writersto reimagine social structuresand cultural norms also served,

Norman Spinrad managed to bug just about everybody with BugJack Barron (1969). The book got attacked in Parliament. TheDaily Express branded it as filth. The printers refused to print it.


47 Nine Hundred Grandmothers (1970)R.A. Lafferty

In Nine Hundred Grandmothers, R.A. Lafferty violates the mostbasic rule of science fiction. Instead of leaping into the future,he descends into the past.


48 Ringworld (1970)Larry Niven

Imagine a very, very large hula hoop in the cosmos. Add floatingbuildings, hostile sunflowers and various fascinating gadgets. Suchis Larry Niven's Ringworld.


49 Moderan (1971)David R. Bunch

David R. Bunch, who passed away in 2000 at age 74, may be thebest kept secret in New Wave sci-fi. Sad to say, almost everythinghe wrote is now out of print.


50 To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971)Philip Jos Farmer

You may be surprised when the hero of this novel dies in the openingparagraph. But you better get used to it, because he will die hundredsof times before you get to the final page.


51 Love in the Ruins (1971)Walker Percy

And why shouldn't Walker Percy, winner of the National BookAward, write a Roman Catholic science-fiction comic existential


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in some degree, to compensatefor the biases inherent in thisdemographic tilt. For authorswho were prepared to challengethe status quo, a whole range of options were made availablethat were closed off to practitioners of strict realism. Face it,sex is sex, but when you incorporate alien life forms andradical technologies, even Masters and Johnson seem primby comparison.

6.

But the revolution in 1960s science fiction was more than justthe infusion of new subjects (religion, sex, etc.) to replacethe old ones (robots, space, etc.). Writers were alsoexperimenting with stream of consciousness techniques,fragmented narrative structures, cut-and-paste methodsand other different ways of constructing sentences andparagraphs.

Unless you have read deeply into 1960s and 1970s sci-fi,you may not realize how much influence James Joyceexerted on the field. But his impact can be seen in many ofthe key works of the era. Philip Jos Farmer won a Hugo forhis 1967 novella "Riders of the Purple Wage," which reachesits climax with a Joycean pun that even Joyce would havefound too extreme. In Barefoot in the Head (1969), BrianAldiss made the bold, albeit implausible, prediction thatfuturistic people drugged out on a sufficient amount ofhallucinogenics would start talking in Joycean stream-of-consciousness sentences. In Dhalgren (1975), Samuel R.Delany even aimed at delivering a sci-fi Finnegans Wakeone that clocked in at almost 900 pages, longer thananything Joyce himself had attempted. We also see stream-of-consciousness in Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration,Philip K. Dick's VALIS, Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron,and in crossover sci-fi works such as Gravity's Rainbow andAda.

And why not? After all, if Joyce heralded the future of fiction,

romance novel?


52 Dying Inside (1972)Robert Silverberg

In his early career, Silverberg wrote a million words per year. But atthe very moment he found he could no longer maintain this pace, hewrote a sci-fi novel about a man whose talents were eroding.


53 Gravity's Rainbow (1973)Thomas Pynchon

Is Gravitys Rainbow a work of science fiction? For my part, I haveno problem acknowledging Pynchon's sci-fi credentials. Then again,almost every other kind of ingredient shows up eventually in this book.


54 Herovit's World (1973)Barry N. Malzberg

Malzberg bites the hand that feeds him, delivering a causticscience fiction novel that savagely critique of sci-fi, heapingscorn on editors, writers, agents and fans.


55 Crash (1973)J.G. Ballard

No author has ever lavished more sensually-charged adjectives onthe various parts that make up a typical car. Even better if they aresmashed to smithereens.


56 The Dispossessed (1974)Ursula K. Le Guin

While others turn to sci-fi to present dystopian nightmares, Le Guinprefers to explore what might happen if a utopian political structurewere realized in an isolated lunar environment.



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sci-fi embraced the fiction of the future. Why shouldn't theygo together? In The Divine Invasion, the second book in theVALIS trilogy, Philip K. Dick captured precisely this meetingpoint, when he announced, "I'm going to prove that FinnegansWake is an information pool based on computer memorysystems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce'sera; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousnessfrom which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpusof work. I'll be famous forever."

But Joyce was hardly the only role model for experimentalsci-fi writers of the period. John Brunner won a Hugo forStand on Zanzibar (1968), which takes the fragmented styleof John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy and applies it to a storyset 40 years in the future.In Slaughterhouse-Five,Kurt Vonnegut realizedthat a time travel angleallowed him to tell hisautobiographical WorldWar II narrative with aquirky non-linear chronology.Calvino mixes the fabulisticand Kafkaesque into hisCosmicomics, even whileincorporating scientificjargon on virtually everypage of the book. Aldiss'sReport on Probability Atakes metanarrative to anextreme I have neverencountered in any other book, whether genre, avant-gardeor mainstream. None of these works could have beenconceived of, let alone published, during the Golden Ageof science fiction back in the 1930s and 1940s. But theyset the tone during the 1960s.

7.

Why does this matter?

57 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)Philip K. Dick

Here are all the classic Dicksian ingredients: sudden alterations in reality, a harassed protagonist, an authoritarian society, high techgadgets and, of course, mind-altering substances.


58 The Forever War (1974)Joe Haldeman

This novel is often viewed as a considered response to RobertHeinlein's Starship Troopers. But The Forever War is more thana polemic; Haldeman is also an impressive storyteller.


59 Dhalgren (1975)Samuel R. Delany

Delany's 800-page novel aimed to do for science fiction whatJoyce had done for literary fiction. A million copies were sold,but how many actually were read to the end?


60 Norstrilia (1975)Cordwainer Smith

Did author Cordwainer Smith really believe he was "Lord of aplanet in an interplanetary empire in a distant universe"? WasNorstrilia a work of fiction, or just an extended hallucination?


61 The Illuminatus Trilogy (1975)Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea

"It is not the intent of this book to confuse fact with fancy," theauthors proclaim on page 760 of this 800-page work. But it'salready too late. They should have put that on page one.



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I focus on this era in the history of sci-fi because it laid thegroundwork for one of the most important developments incurrent-day fiction. Indeed, perhaps the single most significantshift in the literature of our time.

In recent decades, many of the most exciting voices incontemporary fiction have worked to tear down the BerlinWall separating highbrow literature and genre concepts. Ina beautiful twist of fate, we have come full circle, back to theage of bards and oral storytelling, when the fanciful andimaginary were at the core of literary culture.

We learn many things from authors such as Haruki Murakami,J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Lethem, David Mitchell, Jos Saramago,Jennifer Egan, Mo Yan, Margaret Atwood and David FosterWallace, among others practitioners of non-realism (or what Icall 'conceptual fiction')not the least that even in our jadedcurrent day we still crave myth and fantasy. And ourreceptivity to new perspectives might even be heightenedwhen 'serious' subjects are taken outside of the realm ofstrict verisimilitude. A few critics have bemoaned this retreatfrom pure Balzacian and Tolstoyan 'true-to-life' writing,but increasingly they sound like the old Soviet commissarswho demanded socialist realism from the writers theybadgered into submission. If writers are truly freeandshouldn't they be?this freedom must also encompass theright to envision new worlds outside the empirical structure ofthe existing one. After all, storytelling began with just thatkind of imaginative leap.

If this is trueand I believe it iswe ought to celebrate thepioneers of the 1960s and 1970s who blazed the trail. Theypulled conceptual fiction out of the ghetto of escapism andgenre formulas, and turned it into something big and bold,experimental and transgressive. We are still learning fromtheir experiences, and ought to give them a bit of thanks fortheir troubles. Maybe even get their books back into print, readand discussed, assigned and studied. Science fiction did growup and, face it, they were the ones who got us through thegrowing pains.

62 The Female Man (1975)Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ's The Female Man, from 1975, stands out as adefining work of feminist science fiction, and a milestone inmixing polemic and genre literature.


63 The Centauri Device (1975)M. John Harrison

"I once made the mistake of telling Mr. Harrison how muchI was inspired by The Centauri Device. 'Well you shouldn't be,'he said truculently. 'It's a very bad book.'"


64 Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975)James Tiptree, Jr.

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female," RobertSilverberg wrote, "a theory that I find absurd." Nice try! Tiptreeturned out be one of the leading female sci-fi writers of her era.



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Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. Hisnext book, a history of love songs, will be published by OxfordUniversity Press in February.

Publication Date: September 29, 2014


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When Science Fiction Grew Up - By Ted Gioia

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