1.





Science fiction finally gave up childish things in the 1960s.

But like many adolescents, it only grew up because the

ugly 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 Sputnik

space satellite, some 23 science fiction magazines

were 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 magazine

racks.



This truly was an amazing story, astounding even, but

did not get reported in the pages of

Amazing Stories



and

Astounding Stories

—two of the survivors. (Although



Astounding

, in a move that now seems especially

wrong-headed, changed its name to

Analog

—clearly

missing out on the coming digital age.) These pulp

fiction stragglers were too busy trying to stay alive.

Even the survivors in this shakeout were on a flimsy

financial footing, and many a sci-fi writer rushed to the

bank to cash a payment check before another magazine

bit the lunar dust.



So many ironies here. The space age had arrived, and

the rivalry between the US and the USSR promised to

validate all the outlandish future-tripping forecasts these

pulp magazines had been peddling for the past thirty

years. It didn't seem fair that workaday journalists should

now steal away their readers. But who needed

Satellite



magazine (defunct 1959) or

Space Travel

(defunct 1958),

when you could read about actual satellites and space

travel in your daily newspaper? Who wanted to spend

leisure time reading tales about

thermonuclear destruction

when the neighbor next door

was setting up an actual

bomb shelter in his basement?

But the irony also played

out on a grander karmic level:

what cruel deity had decided

that purveyors of fantasy

should get a dose of

reality therapy—forced into

retreat because truth was

stranger than even

science



fiction.







2.





But something far stranger was about to happen. The very

forces that threatened to kill off the sci-fi genre actually

saved it.



The old formulas didn't work anymore. Stories about rocket

ships and bug-eyed monsters from outer space would no

longer pay the rent. Tales about nuclear bombs proved to

be duds at the magazine rack. In the new environment,

science fiction writers needed new formulas—or even better,

needed to have the courage to operate without pre-cooked

recipes of any sort. In short, science fiction needed to grow

up and take on the adult world, in all its messiness and

uncertainty.



Everything was now in flux. A few of the old-timers managed

to adapt to the new environment. Robert Heinlein had been

peddling juvenile outer space stories in the 1950s, but in

the 1960s he reinvented himself as a counterculture guru

and delivered at least two genuine masterworks,

Stranger in



a Strange Land

and

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

. Philip

K. Dick had been publishing sci-fi stories since the early

1950s, but his interest in altered states of consciousness

and different spheres of reality made him the perfect story-

teller for the psychadelic 60s. Ursula K. Le Guin had first

submitted a story to

Astounding

back before World War II

when she was only eleven-years-old, but she only got into

her stride in the 1960s and 1970s when her skill in blending

advanced sociological themes into genre fiction helped her

move from

Amazing Stories

to the pages of

The New Yorker

.

Arthur C. Clarke was an old man of sci-fi who had first made

his name back in the mid-1930s, and though he had a

harder time adapting to the new zeitgeist, even he managed

to shake up the younger generation with

2001: A Space



Odyssey

, his film-and-book collaboration with director

Stanley Kubrick.



But these were the exceptions. Most of the excitement came

from newcomers and outsiders. Kurt Vonnegut had published

his first science fiction novel back in 1952, but he tended to

avoid writing for the pulp genre magazines. He had no interest

in becoming the 'next Isaac Asimov' or the 'next Arthur C.

Clarke'. Instead Vonnegut hoped to conquer the world of

mainstream literary fiction with satire, dark humor and a

smattering of sci-fi concepts—an almost impossible ambition,

it seemed at the time, but the success of

Ray Bradbury

had

already 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

, Vonnegut

achieved the highest honors possible for a sci-fi author. No,

not a Hugo and Nebula—many a hack has received one of

those—but rather a place in the literary fiction rack at the

bookstore and inclusion on school assigned reading lists.



Yet even more shocking were the renowned literary lions

who embraced science fiction. Why in the world did

Vladimar Nabokov tell a BBC interviewer in 1968 "I loathe

science fiction," and then publish a sci-fi book,

Ada or Ardor

,

the following year? What motivated Walker Percy, winner of

the National Book Award for

The Moviegoer

(1961) to turn to

sci-fi with

Love in the Ruins

a decade later? Why were the

most promising experimental American writers of the new

generation embracing sci-fi plots—for example John Barth

with

Giles Goat-Boy

and Thomas Pynchon with

Gravity

'

s



Rainbow

? Why did William Burroughs feel compelled to

insert science fiction concepts into his rambling cut-and-

paste novels?



The very existence of such books represented a slap in

the face to the core sci-fi market—namely, adolescents

and teens. Asimov did not prepare them for

Ada

. Gernsback

did not pave the path to

Giles Goat-Boy

. Frankly, many

of these books would have been confiscated by teachers

and parents during that period of literary ferment. I still

recall the day my fourth grade teacher at St. Joseph's

Elementary School seized my cousin's copy of a James

Bond novel (

Moonraker

) and denounced it as

inappropriate

reading

, even as I breathed a sigh of relief that she had not

seen my copy of

Live and Let Die

. I don't even want to

imagine what would have happened if a book by Vladimir

Nabokov 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. But

nothing seemed capable of stopping the trend once it was

set in motion, and it clearly respected no geographical

borders. Even as the US emerged as the winner in the

space race, it faced increasingly intense competition in

the sci-fi racket. In the early sixties, Britain seemed on the

brink of eclipsing the US as the center of experimental

science fiction. In continental Europe, leading writers of

the new generation, such as

Italo Calvino

and

Stanisław



Lem

, inserted science fiction concepts into ambitious

works of literary fiction.



The globalization of sci-fi as a trendy artistic construct was

also evident beyond the world of books. Certainly no one

was surprised when Ray Bradbury's

Fahrenheit 451

got

made into a movie, but who expected that the director would

be hipper-than-hip French filmmaker François Truffaut?

Almost at that same moment, Truffaut's illustrious rival in

cutting edge French cinema, Jean-Luc Godard was also

pushing ahead with his sci-fi film

Alphaville

(1965). For better

or worse, sci-fi was moving beyond stale Hollywood formulas

and entering the realm of avant-garde art. When Federico

Fellini released his ancient Rome movie

Satyricon

(1969) at

the close of the decade, he made the puzzling pronouncement

that it represented "science fiction of the past"—a bizarre

notion, but very much aligned with the spirit of the age.



The subject of fantasy is beyond the scope of this essay, but

I must note in passing that down in Latin America at this same

juncture, a whole generation of world-beating writers were

inserting magic (heaven forbid!) into their most audacious

books. These authors must have perceived the risk of

tainting



their serious novels with genre concepts, but they understood

—long before most readers and critics even noticed!—that

genre fiction wasn't what it used to be.



Today, we are very familiar with highbrow literary writers

incorporating fantasy and science fiction into their works.

Many of the most admired writers of our day—

Haruki



Murakami

,

Cormac

McCarthy

,

Jonathan Lethem

,

Jennifer



Egan

,

J.K. Rowling

,

David Mitchell

, and others—do this with

impunity. (Well, almost with impunity—

James Wood

still tries

to knock 'em down a peg for their bad taste in pursuing, in his

words "the demented intricacy of science fiction.") But this

fertile marriage between highbrow and lowbrow could hardly

have happened without the pioneering efforts of Pynchon,

Vonnegut, Dick, Nabokov,Le Guin and others renegades

back in that crucial period from the late 1950s to the early

1970s—that glorious moment when science fiction grew up.







4.





And then there was the New Wave!



Here was a radical movement whose

exponents hoped to reinvent science

fiction from the inside out. These

weren't literary lions slumming with

the genre writers for cheap thrills,

but sci-fi careerists who wanted to

change the entire landscape of the

field. They knew the science fiction

tradition, had grown up on it, but

now aimed to subvert every aspect

of this inheritance. The leaders of

the New Wave violated taboos and

tackled subjects that, back in the

1950s, would have been

too hot to handle

. They incorporated

experimental techniques never before applied to sci-fi

narratives. The were masters of parody, pastiche and a

panoply of postmodern perspectives; yet they also could

surprise by returning to straight narrative and the classic

themes 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 for

his estate's success in winning the 1960 court battle that

allowed London publisher Penguin Books to sell unexpurgated

copies of Lawrence's

Lady Chatterley's Lover

. In the aftermath

of this decision, British readers could enjoy previously banned

fiction, provided the publisher could demonstrate "literary

merit." The doors were now open, and in a surprising

development, the new permissive environment changed

the course of science fiction.



Anthony Burgess was never considered part of the sci-fi

New Wave, and he later tried to disown his now famous

dystopian novel

A Clockwork Orange

(1962). "It became

known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify

sex and violence," he later explained.

"The film made it easy for readers of

the book to misunderstand what it was

about. I should not have written the

book because of this danger of

misinterpretation, and the same may

be said of Lawrence and

Lady

Chatterley's Lover

." Despite such

protestations, Burgess's novel

remains an impressive achievement,

bold in its prose and even bolder in

its subject matter. Yet this was

precisely the kind of book that

could justify its disturbing content

because of its "literary merit." In some

degree, it served as a blueprint for the next decade in

science fiction.



Burgess followed up with another dystopian novel (

The

Wanting Seed

), but mostly avoided sci-fi concepts in later

years. It would be left to others to build on this achievement

and take British science fiction to new levels of rudeness

and radness. J.G. Ballard had already published his first

novel when Burgess released

A Clockwork Orange

, and

though his early sci-fi work—which focused on various

ecological disaster scenarios—is poised and confident, it

hardly prepared readers for the outlandish ventures ahead.

Even today

The Atrocity Exhibition

(1970) stands out as the

most transgressive science fiction book ever released. And

it was just

barely

released. Almost a decade after the

Lady

Chatterley's Lover

decision, Ballard could still stir up

enough controversy to spur the president of his publisher,

Nelson Doublday Jr. himself, to order all copies of the

book destroyed! Literary trends have come and gone in

the intervening decades, but this work still shocks on almost

every page. Ballard would go on to write other controversial

books—most notably

Crash

(1973), his horrific paean to

auto fatalities—and solidify his reputation as the baddest bad

boy of British sci-fi. Not all of this writing holds up well today,

but sci-fi clearly benefited from the adrenalin jolt of Ballard's

intervention.



Yet others were giving him a run for his money. Some of

Brian Aldiss's work comes across as derivative—you can

almost chart the various books that influenced him as you

read each chapter. But at his best, his reckless audacity

jumps off the page. And his range during the 1960s may

be the widest of any sci-fi writer of that period. It

encompassed fabulistic future-tripping (

Hot House

),

psychedelic armageddon (

Barefoot in the Head

), and even self-

canceling meta-narrative (

Report on Probability A

).



Michael Moorcock completes this triumvirate of British New

Wave stars. His influence as an editor surpasses his

achievements as a writer—as reigning guru overseeing

the periodical

New Worlds

, he regularly delivered a

megadose of dicey sci-fi content for a reasonable two

shillings 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 of

these interruptions, but censorship by retailers also played

a role. Yet if you did get your hands on a copy, you wouldn't

be bored. Moorcock's writings are too disorganized for my

taste, but his hubris was off the chart. On any list of

"science fiction books not to recommend to a Christian

reader," his

Behold the Man

gets top spot. And his

Jerry



Cornelius

stories make Nietzsche look like a lukewarm

nihilist by comparison. In an age in which success was

often 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 larger

role in this sci-fi revolution. For many readers, Harlan

Ellison stands out as the most representative figure of

radicalized sci-fi, and like Moorcock he made his mark

both as writer and editor. Ellison's anthology

Dangerous



Visions

(1967) is a mixed bag, but despite its limitations it

may be the single best starting-point for readers who want

to comprehend the tectonic shift underway in 1960s genre

fiction. Yet I like Ellison even better as a memoirist and

fiction writer—by any measure, he ranks among the leading

short story authors of his generation. But others were ready

to vie with him for preeminence in edgy American sci-fi.

Native New Yorker Norman Spinrad enjoyed the distinction

of getting copies of

New Worlds

pulled off the shelves at the

largest magazine retailers in Britain, when Moorcock serialzed

parts of

Bug Jack Barron

, and his works not only pushed

forward the New Wave agenda, but also anticipated elements

of the later cyberpunk movement. Thomas M. Disch also stands

out in any survey of US sci-fi experimenters, and not just for

his skill as a storyteller—his work as a historian and critic of

genre literature are required reading for those seeking an

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 sheet

of paper, and make a list of the topics you aren't supposed to

talk 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 1960s

and 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 period

did more than just tweak the sensibilities of the easily outraged.

But to some degree, the worst writers in any movement help

you understand its sources of raw energy. And the hacks

were delighted to discover that they could finally write about,

say, cannibalism and cannabis in the same story, and no

one would slap them on the wrist. I'm reminded of the character

in a Coens brothers film who coyly asks

"Are you taking



advantage of the

new

freedoms?"

The writers discussed here

could almost uniformly answer 'yes' to that question, but while

some were taking advantage of them to good effect, others

merely sought notoriety and shock value.



The best of this work has held up well over time. But much of

it, in retrospect, seems coldly calculated, or just too

experimental for its own good. Does anyone nowadays really

enjoy reading

The Soft Machine

or

The Ticket That Exploded

or



Dhalgren

or

Report on Probability A

? I can't imagine such

masochistic readers, but perhaps they exist. On the other

hand, some genuine classics, multivalent works that are both

smart and entertaining, are mostly forgotten, and in many

instances long out-of-print. Readers really ought to

rediscover

John Brunner

,

R.A. Lafferty

,

James Tiptree, Jr.

,



Jack Vance

, and (most obscure of all—indeed almost

obliterated from the memory banks of sci-fi)

David R. Bunch

.



You have been waiting for me to talk about the sex—certainly

it shows up in most of these books. And I will get to it in a

moment. But first let me state the less-than-obvious: namely

that the most fertile subject for 1960s sci-fi was religion. In

fact, if you consider the novels that won the Hugo from the

late 1950s through the early 1970s, the majority of them

dealt with theological issues. Their approaches varied

dramatically, but the best of them—

A Case of Conscience

,



A Canticle for Leibowitz

,

The Left Hand of Darkness

,



Dune

,

Stranger in a Strange Land

—rank among the most

insightful works of spiritual fiction from the mid-20th century.

Back in the days of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Hugo

Gernsback, who would have believed that these escapist

space operas would evolve into serious explorations of

spirituality and belief systems? But such was the destiny

of 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 of

Ursula Le Guin, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, among

others, science fiction addressed, for the first time in its

history, issues of gender roles, sexual orientation and

feminism. At first glance, sci-fi might seem an inhospitable

environment for such subjects—after all, the core audience

for the genre, since time

immemorial, had been

teenage males, and their

fantasies and interests had

always unduly influenced

what got published and read.

But the "new freedoms" that

allowed science fiction writers

to reimagine social structures

and cultural norms also served,

in some degree, to compensate

for the biases inherent in this

demographic tilt. For authors

who were prepared to challenge

the status quo, a whole range of options were made available

that were closed off to practitioners of strict realism. Face it,

sex is sex, but when you incorporate alien life forms and

radical technologies, even Masters and Johnson seem prim

by comparison.







6.





But the revolution in 1960s science fiction was more than just

the infusion of new subjects (religion, sex, etc.) to replace

the old ones (robots, space, etc.). Writers were also

experimenting with stream of consciousness techniques,

fragmented narrative structures, cut-and-paste methods

and other different ways of constructing sentences and

paragraphs.



Unless you have read deeply into 1960s and 1970s sci-fi,

you may not realize how much influence James Joyce

exerted on the field. But his impact can be seen in many of

the key works of the era. Philip José Farmer won a Hugo for

his 1967 novella

"Riders of the Purple Wage,"

which reaches

its climax with a Joycean pun that even Joyce would have

found too extreme. In

Barefoot in the Head

(1969), Brian

Aldiss made the bold, albeit implausible, prediction that

futuristic people drugged out on a sufficient amount of

hallucinogenics would start talking in Joycean stream-of-

consciousness sentences. In

Dhalgren

(1975), Samuel R.

Delany even aimed at delivering a sci-fi

Finnegans Wake



—one that clocked in at almost 900 pages, longer than

anything 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

and



Ada

.



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

sci-fi embraced the fiction of the future. Why shouldn't they

go together? In

The Divine Invasion

, the second book in the



VALIS

trilogy, Philip K. Dick captured precisely this meeting

point, when he announced, "I'm going to prove that

Finnegans

Wake

is an information pool based on computer memory

systems that didn't exist until centuries after James Joyce's

era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness

from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus

of work. I'll be famous forever."



But Joyce was hardly the only role model for experimental

sci-fi writers of the period. John Brunner won a Hugo for



Stand on Zanzibar

(1968), which takes the

fragmented style



of John Dos Passos's

USA Trilogy

and applies it to a story

set 40 years in the future.

In

Slaughterhouse-Five

,

Kurt Vonnegut realized

that a time travel angle

allowed him to tell his

autobiographical World

War II narrative with a

quirky non-linear chronology.

Calvino mixes the fabulistic

and Kafkaesque into his



Cosmicomics

, even while

incorporating scientific

jargon on virtually every

page of the book. Aldiss's



Report on Probability A



takes metanarrative to an

extreme I have never

encountered in any other book, whether genre, avant-garde

or mainstream. None of these works could have been

conceived of, let alone published, during the Golden Age

of science fiction back in the 1930s and 1940s. But they

set the tone during the 1960s.







7.





Why does this matter?



I focus on this era in the history of sci-fi because it laid the

groundwork for one of the most important developments in

current-day fiction. Indeed, perhaps the single most significant

shift in the literature of our time.



In recent decades, many of the most exciting voices in

contemporary fiction have worked to tear down the Berlin

Wall separating highbrow literature and genre concepts. In

a beautiful twist of fate, we have come full circle, back to the

age of bards and oral storytelling, when the fanciful and

imaginary were at the core of literary culture.



We learn many things from authors such as Haruki Murakami,

J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Lethem, David Mitchell, José Saramago,

Jennifer Egan, Mo Yan, Margaret Atwood and David Foster

Wallace, among others practitioners of non-realism (or what I

call

'conceptual fiction'

)—not the least that even in our jaded

current day we still crave myth and fantasy. And our

receptivity to new perspectives might even be heightened

when 'serious' subjects are taken outside of the realm of

strict verisimilitude. A few critics have bemoaned this retreat

from pure Balzacian and Tolstoyan 'true-to-life' writing,

but increasingly they sound like the old Soviet commissars

who demanded socialist realism from the writers they

badgered into submission. If writers are truly free—and

shouldn't they be?—this freedom must also encompass the

right to envision new worlds outside the empirical structure of

the existing one. After all, storytelling began with just that

kind of imaginative leap.



If this is true—and I believe it is—we ought to celebrate the

pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s who blazed the trail. They

pulled conceptual fiction out of the ghetto of escapism and

genre formulas, and turned

it

into something big and bold,

experimental and transgressive. We are still learning from

their experiences, and ought to give them a bit of thanks for

their troubles. Maybe even get their books back into print, read

and discussed, assigned and studied. Science fiction did grow

up and, face it, they were the ones who got us through the

growing pains.









Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His

next book, a history of love songs, will be published by Oxford

University Press in February.







Publication Date: