In honor of Banned Books Week, we'll be publishing our original reviews of frequently banned books. In 1969, a then relatively unknown Michael Crichton—who would go on to write some of the best-selling science fiction of all time—reviewed Kurt Vonnegut's latest novel, Slaughterhouse Five. In an ambivalent take, Crichton called it "hideous, ghastly, murderous—and calm."

A look at the bookstore shelves will prove it: science fiction is coming back. After a dry period in the early sixties, people are beginning to read it again, and write it. The renewed interest has carried into other fields as well, particularly television and films: "Star Trek" gathered a vociferous and cultish following; a paperback version of Fantastic Voyage sold more than a million copies; Stanley Kubrick's "2001" was the most expensive science fiction film ever made.

The diehard sci-fi addict will view all this with pleasure and a grim sense of vindication, for it has traditionally been true that one cannot acceptably admit to a taste for science fiction, except among scientists or teenagers. And these two groups share a strikingly low standard of literary attainment, and a correspondingly high tolerance for mangled prose.

Certainly the new ventures in films and television represent improvements over, say, Steve McQueen fighting “The Blob” or Buzz Corry of the "Spa-a-a-ace Patrol!" But this is not to say that science fiction is any better now, as literature, than it ever was. A look at the bookstore shelves will prove this, too: The vast majority of science fiction writing is abysmal. It is perhaps paradoxical that our most technologically advanced fiction should also be the most technically inadequate. Most science fiction writers cannot put together a literate sentence; only a handful can create a reasonable character; perhaps a dozen, at most, can sustain a simple plot.

There is no good explanation for the ineptitude of science fiction, as fiction. There is a commercial explanation (that the readers will put up with this stuff); there is a historical one (that science fiction has its origins in pulp fiction). And there is another: that science fiction represents, as a form, a subordination of all fictional elements to an idea—just as detective fiction represents a subordination of all elements to plot.