This modernist experimentation and other, more recent evidence suggests that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, science fiction is not uniquely suited to interrogate industrialization or modern tech—many nonspeculative stories and novels have done so quite well—so much as it doesn’t seem as if science fiction could exist or have arisen without the products and inventions particular to industrialization. The physicality of science fiction depends on it in a way that other kinds of fiction do not (for example, historical fiction). Although a spaceship may be more or less a focal point, for example—potentially as unobtrusive as a cab (a ride to a destination)—this is in truth rarely the case. Because spaceships don’t exist yet, at least not in the way they are rendered in science fiction, as a literalization of the future. Even the most “adventure pulp” stories of early science fiction had to take a position: celebrate the extrapolated future of industrialization and ever-more-advanced technology or bemoan it, speak in terms of splendors and a “sense of wonder” or strike at the ideology behind such thinking through dystopia and examination of excesses. (In such a context, science fiction cannot be seen as escapist or nonpolitical so much as conformist when it does not ask “Why this?” in addition to “What if?”)
Still, the pulp tradition as it matured was never as hackneyed or traditional or gee-whiz as it liked to think it was or as twelve-year-old readers fondly remember. It was not nearly as optimistic or crude as the covers that represented it and that science fiction outgrew. In part, this was due to the influx or infusion of a healthy dose of horror from near the start, via Weird Tales and its ilk. Magazines like Unknown also often published fusions of horror and science fiction, and as some of the author/story notes to early stories in this volume indicate, the “rise of the tentacle” associated with twentieth-century weird fiction (à la Lovecraft) first appeared in weird space operas by writers such as Edmond Hamilton. Among stories from this period that have relevance, many have a depth derived from the darkness that drives them—a sense that the underpinnings of the universe are indeed more complex than we know. In short, cosmic horror has been around for longer than Lovecraft and has helped to sustain and lend depth to science fiction as well.
POST–WORLD WAR II: HOW SCIENCE FICTION GREW ALL THE WAY UP THE WALLS OF THE WORLD
Largely because it has no “movement” associated with it, the 1950s are sometimes seen as a transitional period, but Robert Silverberg rightly considered the 1950s the true Golden Age of Science Fiction. The full flowering of science fiction in the US and UK dates from this period, in part because opportunities through magazines, book publication, and anthologies proliferated and in part because new and more inclusive gatekeepers entered the field.
The fiction of such highly literate and sophisticated writers like Fritz Leiber (mostly in fantasy and horror), James Blish, and Frederik Pohl came into its own in the 1950s, not just because these writers were encouraged by a much more vital publishing environment but also because of their background with the Futurians, a science fiction club, which had nurtured interests across a wide range of topics, not just genre fiction.
Blish’s “Surface Tension” (1952) demonstrates the fruits of that sophistication in its exploration of fascinating ideas about terraforming humans. Philip K. Dick started to publish fiction in the early 1950s, too; in his very first story, “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952), he staked a claim to that hallucinatory, absurdist, antiestablishment space in which he would later write classics like Ubik (1969) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974).
Arthur C. Clarke had been a fixture of the Golden Age but transitioned into the 1950s with such classic, dark stories as “The Star”(1955), as did Robert Heinlein. Ray Bradbury continued to write brilliant fiction, coming off his success with The Martian Chronicles, and Robert Silverberg was extremely prolific in the 1950s, although our choice for a reprint from him was published much later.
Several underrated writers published some of their best fiction, too, including James H. Schmitz, William Tenn, and Chad Oliver. Tom Godwin shook things up with his very long “The Cold Equations” (1954), a good story not included herein, which would become an item of debate for Humanist SF writers, some of whom would try to replicate it. Tenn’s “The Liberation of Earth” (1953), a harsh satire of alien invasion inspired by the Korean War, was a touchstone for protesters during the Vietnam War and became a classic. Damon Knight began to establish his legacy with the unusual and strange alien contact story “Stranger Station” (1956). C. M. Kornbluth (another Futurian) published some of his best work during this era, including “The Silly Season” (1950) and “The Marching Morons” (1951), although these tales have not aged well. Other notable writers from the era include Robert Sheckley, Avram Davidson, and Judith Merril (who would achieve lasting fame as an anthology editor).
In hindsight, though, perhaps the most unique and important science fiction writer of the 1950s was Cordwainer Smith, who published most of his science fiction in the mid-1950s. His unique tales set on a far-future Earth and the surrounding universe came seemingly out of nowhere and had no clear antecedent. In “Scanners Live in Vain” (1950) and the story included herein, “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (1955), Smith revitalized space opera just as he remade so much else across an oeuvre as influenced by Jorge Luis Borges and Alfred Jarry as genre science fiction. Even today, Smith’s stories stand alone, as if they came from an alternate reality.
Almost equaling Smith in terms of being sui generis, Theodore Sturgeon brought a willfully literary sensibility to his fiction and an empathy that could at times manifest as sentimentality. But in his best work, like “The Man Who Lost the Sea” (1959), Sturgeon displayed a much-needed pathos to science fiction. Sturgeon was also unafraid to explore horror and to take on controversial topics, and with each new story he published that pushed a boundary, Sturgeon made it easier for others to follow.
Another interesting writer, James White, wrote about a galactic hospital in stories like “Sector General” (1957), which in their reliance on medical mysteries and situations pushed back against the standard conflict plots of the day. In White’s stories there are often no villains and sometimes no heroes, either. This allowed White to create fresh and different plots; one of his best hospital stories involves taking care of an alien child who manifests as a huge living boulder and who has vastly different feeding needs than human children. Neither Smith nor White was as popular as writers like Arthur C. Clarke, but their body of work stands out starkly from the surrounding landscape because it took such a different stance while still being relatable, entertaining, and modern.
The fifties also saw more space made for brilliant woman writers like Katherine MacLean, Margaret St. Clair, and Carol Emshwiller. What MacLean, St. Clair, and Emshwiller all shared in their fiction was a fascination with either speculative sociology or extremes of psychological reality, within a context of writing unique female characters and using story structures that often came from outside the pulp tradition. MacLean in particular championed sociology and so-called soft science, a distinction from “hard” science fiction that would have seemed fairly radical at the time. St. Clair, meanwhile, with her comprehensive knowledge of horror and fantasy fiction as well as science fiction, crafted stories that could be humorous, terrifying, and sharply thought-provoking all at once. In some of her best stories, we can also see an attempt to interrogate our relationship to the animal world. Together, these three writers not only paved the way for the feminist science fiction explosion of the 1970s, they effectively created room for more unusual storytelling.
Elsewhere in the world, Jorge Luis Borges was continuing to write fascinating, unique stories, and the tradition of the science fiction folktale or satire was used by Mexican writer Juan José Arreola to good effect in “Baby HP” (1952) and other flash fictions. Borges’s friend and fellow Argentine Silvina Ocampo even wrote science fiction, not a form of speculation she was known for, with “The Waves” (1959), translated into English herein for
the first time. In France, Gérard Klein was just beginning to publish fiction, with early classic stories like “The Monster” (1958), his emergence presaging a boom in interesting French science fiction. And, even though Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (the Strugatsky brothers) wouldn’t achieve international fame until the 1970s, with the translation of Roadside Picnic (1979) and other books, they were publishing provocative and intelligent work like the alien-contact story “The Visitors” (1958) in the Soviet Union.
That there was no particular unifying mode or theme of science fiction in the 1950s is in some ways a relief and afforded freedom for a number of unique writers. Clearly, the way was clear for science fiction writers to climb even further up the walls of the world.
But, in part, they would have to do it by tearing down what had come before.
THE NEW WAVE AND THE RISE OF FEMINIST SCIENCE FICTION
The overriding story of science fiction in the 1960s would be the rise of the “New Wave,” largely championed at first by the UK magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, and then finding expression in the US through Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) anthologies.
New Wave fiction had many permutations and artistic ideologies associated with it, but at its core it was often formally experimental and sought to bring mainstream literary technique and seriousness to science fiction. In effect, the New Wave wanted to push the boundaries of what was possible while also embodying, in many cases, the counterculture of the 1960s. New Wave fiction tended to be antiestablishment and to look with a cold eye upon the Golden Age and the pulps. Sometimes, too, it turned that cold eye on the 1950s, with New Wave writers finding much of what had gone before too safe.
But this opposition was sometimes forced on the New Wave by its detractors. For the average science fiction writer raised within the tradition of the pulps and existing within an era of plenty in the 1950s, especially with regard to the American book market, it must have been a rude awakening for writers from across the pond to suddenly be calling into question everything about their ecosystem, even if just by implication. The essential opposition also occurred because even though the 1950s had featured breakthroughs for many new voices, it had also solidified the hold upon the collective imagination of many Golden Age icons.
Further, the New Wave writers had been either reading a fundamentally different set of texts or interpreting them far differently—such that the common meeting ground between New Wave and not–New Wave could be like first contact with aliens. Neither group spoke the other’s language or knew all of its customs. Even those who should have made common cause or found common understandings, like Frederik Pohl and James Blish, found themselves in opposition to the New Wave.
In the event, however, the New Wave—whether writers and editors opposed it or lived within it and used it to create interesting work—would prove the single most influential movement within science fiction, with the concurrent and later rise of feminist science fiction a close second (and in some cases closely tied to the New Wave).
Out of the New Wave came countless writers now unjustly forgotten, like Langdon Jones, Barrington Bayley (both reprinted herein), and John Sladek, but also giants of literature, starting with Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard, and including M. John Harrison and Brian Aldiss (actually from an earlier generation, but a hothouse party-crasher). Subversive publishers in the UK like Savoy fanned the flames.
These writers were helped in their ascendency by the continued popularity of writers from outside of genre fiction whose work existed in sympathy to the New Wave, like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and William S. Burroughs, and those within the genre who were sympathetic and winning multiple Hugo Awards and Nebula Awards, like Harlan Ellison. Ellison’s own work fit the New Wave aesthetic to a T and his dual devotion to championing edgy work by both new and established writers in his anthologies created an undeniable New Wave beachhead in North America. American writers like Thomas Disch and Philip José Farmer received a clear boost to their careers because of the existence of the New Wave. Others, like Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman, more or less wandered into the verdant (if also sometimes disaster-clogged) meadows of the New Wave by accident—having always done their own thing—and then wandered out again, neither better nor worse off. Unique eccentricists like David R. Bunch, whose Moderan stories only seem more prescient every day, could not have published their work at all if not for the largesse of daring editors and the aegis of the New Wave. (It is worth pointing out that his Moderan stories in this volume are the first reprints allowed in more than two decades.)
As or more important was the emergence of Samuel R. Delany as a major voice in the field, and the emergence of that voice linked to New Wave fiction with bold, unusual stories like “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967). Delany just about matched Ellison Nebula Award for Nebula Award during this period and not only led by example in terms of producing sophisticated speculative fiction that featured diverse characters but also was, quite frankly, one of the only African-American or even nonwhite writers in the field for a very long time. Although the huge success of bestsellers like Dhalgren (1975) helped prolong the New Wave’s moment and furthered the cause of mature (and experimental) fiction within science fiction, it did not seem to help bring representative diversity with it.
By 1972, Terry Carr wrote in his introduction to volume 1 of The Best Science Fiction of the Year,
By now the “new wave” as such has come and gone; those stories that could stand on their merits have…These writers realize a truth basic to all art[:] Innovations are positive to the extent that they open doors, and an avant garde which seems to destroy rather than build will only destroy itself all the faster…Personally, I thought most of the work produced during the height of the “new wave” was just as bad as bad science fiction has always been; if there has been an effective difference to me, it was only that I sometimes had to read a story more carefully to discover I disliked it.
Terry Carr was a good and influential editor (who grew with the times), but wrong in this case, although it seems unlikely anyone could have understood how fundamentally the New Wave had changed the landscape. Despite a certain amount of retrenchment after the mid-1970s—at least in part because of the huge influence of Hollywood SF, like Star Wars, on the genre as a whole—New Wave fiction had enduring effects and created giants of culture and pop culture like J. G. Ballard (the most cited author on a variety of tech and societal topics since the 1970s).
And, in fact, Carr was also wrong because the New Wave overlapped with another significant development, the rise of feminist science fiction, so the revolution was not in fact over. In some ways it was just beginning—and there was much work to do. In addition to conflict in society in general over the issues of women’s rights, the book culture had decided to cynically cater to misogynistic tendencies in readers by publishing whole lines of paperback fiction devoted to novels demonstrating how “women’s lib” would lead to future dystopias.
If it feels like a bit of a misnomer to call this “rise” the “ascendency” of “feminist” SF, it is because to do so creates the danger of simplifying a complex situation. Not only did the fight to create more space for stories with positive and proactive women characters in science fiction need to be refought several times, but the arguments and the energy/impulse involved in “feminist” SF were also about representation: about creating a space for women writers, no matter what they wrote. And they were further complicated by the fact that identification of an author with “feminism” (just as identification with “New Wave”) can create a narrowed focus in how readers encounter and explore that writer’s work. Nor, largely, would this first focus on feminist science fiction address intersectional issues of race or of gender fluidity. (It is worth noting that in the milieu traversed by American surrealists of the 1960s and 1970s, a territory that existed parallel to science fiction, intersectionality appears to have been more central much earlier.)
; Kingsley Amis had pointed out in New Maps of Hell (1960), his influential book on science fiction published on the cusp of the New Wave, that “though it may go against the grain to admit it, [male] science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo.” This in a context where few examples of complex or interesting women characters written by men seemed to exist, beyond a few stories by Theodore Sturgeon and John Wyndham (another one-off, marginally associated with the New Wave but, understandably and blissfully, enthralled by plants, fungi, lichen).
By the 1970s, writers like Joanna Russ were giving bold and explicit voice to the cause of science fiction by featuring women. Russ accused science fiction, in her essay “The Image of Women in Science Fiction” (1970), of “a failure of imagination and ‘social speculation,’ ” making the argument that the paucity of complex female characters derived from accepting societal prejudices and stereotypes without thought or analysis. This echoed sentiments about clichés and stereotypes expressed by Delany with regard to race.
Feminist writers were concerned in part about the peculiar and unuseful way in which writers had for so long literalized archetypes, making women stand-ins and not individualized: Madonna/Whore, Mother Earth, etc. As the forever amazing and incisive Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her essay “American SF and the Other” (1975), “The women’s movement has made most of us conscious of the fact that SF has either totally ignored women, or presented them as squeaking dolls subject to instant rape by monsters—or old-maid scientists desexed by hypertrophy of the intellectual organs—or, at best, loyal little wives or mistresses of accomplished heroes.”
The irony of having to push back against misogynistic portrayals in science fiction should not be lost on anyone. Within a tradition of “what if,” a tradition not of realism but of supposedly dreaming true and of expressing the purest forms of the imagination, science fiction had still chosen in many cases to relegate women to second- or third-rate status. In such an atmosphere, without a revolution, how could anyone, male or female or gender-fluid, see clearly a future in which such prejudices did not exist?
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 3