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 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: September 29, 2014