When Science Fiction Grew Up.docx

WHEN SCIENCE FICTION GREW UP How renegade sci-fi writers of the 1960s paved the way for today's blending of literary and genre fiction

by Ted Gioia

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 storyteller 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-andpaste 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 selfcanceling 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 newsstand. 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-ofconsciousness 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 streamof-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: September 29, 2014