Science fiction at a crossroads?

There is a moment in his foreword to Foundation 1 (1972) when George Brosan, Director of what was then North East London Polytechnic, asserts that The importance of science fiction is the freeing of the mind that occurs which makes many of its readers more willing to accept change.discontinuous or not' (Brosan 1972:2). As I wrote in Solar Flares (2010), the 1970s saw a continuation of the fights for gay, Black and women's rights, with these culture wars being reflected within the science fiction of the era. There was a growing awareness of ecological dangers, the conflict in Vietnam was demonstrating the ongoing problems of competing imperialisms, and the space race was losing public interest after a man had been sent to the Moon. If the sf of what I have dubbed 'the Gernsback-Campbell Continuum' had been largely optimistic about technological solutions to humanity's problems - with the so-called 'Big Three' of Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as not-entirely complicii poster boys - then the American sf of the 1950s, such as Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon, had challenged this around the margins and the New Wave had often embraced pessimism. In the British magazine New Worlds, sf aspired to a literary experimentalism counter to the stereotypes of pulp genre devices and functional prose, whilst in the US Harlan Ellison edited Dangerous Visions (1967), a collection of thirty-three stories breaking taboos around sex, swearing and subject matter. In the same month as Foundation was launched, Ellison produced a follow-up volume, Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), with a further forty-six. I wish to explore three of these stories - Kurt Vonnegut's The Big Space Fuck', Joanna Russ's 'When It Changed' and James Tiptree Jr's The Milk of Paradise' - as touchstones for the crossroads between sf becoming a literary mode or largely remaining a commercial genre.

This item was commissioned and did not go through peer review