Wednesday, November 05, 2014

When Science Fiction Grew Up

When Science Fiction Grew Up  

Includes an impressive reading list.
Link via SF Signal.

8 comments:

Matthew said...

I always considered the New Wave the adolescent stage of science fiction. It was part of a natural growth of science fiction, but it wasn't all the way to be a grown up.

Norman Spinrad in his book reviews in Asimov's always complained about how science fiction wasn't as "cutting edge" as it was in the sixties. I think that in reality he was the one who had not moved on while the rest of the field had.

Todd Mason said...

Gioa, who should know better as an old hand at this kind of thing, needn't have skiffy'd all through the article...but one could just as easily started in the 1950s, when newsstand sf and sf from other sources were essentially reunited in sophistication and literary ambition. Sam Merwin at the Thrilling Group and Jerome Bixby guiding Malcolm Reiss at PLANET and its siblings started joining the usually underfunded Futurian magazines in providing secure markets for ambitious work aside from Campbell's (while fantasy is continuing to become thoroughly modern in McIlwraith's WEIRD TALES). (Still a lot of bubble gum, but that's true everywhere. Sturgeon's educated estimate.) And Then F&SF and GALAXY and WORLDS BEYOND (however briefly) and IF (however spottily) and, and, and blow the game open.

Spinrad might not be writing his best fiction these days, but I'm not sure his crit is off base. The New Wave was simply the artistic impulse in sf exploring other modes. Not, on balance, a Genuinely new development in newsstand sf, as we passed from the Gernsback lecture (which isn't too far from a Michener lecture, only more stiff), the superscience slam-bang, the Don A. Stuart mood-rumination, etc.

Matthew said...

What I meant was that Spinrad ended up like many old science fiction fans who complained that New Wave fiction was different than the stuff Campbell published. It's like how parents complain about their kids music and then the kids grow up to complain their kids ad infinitum.

The New Wave was very important to SF and a lot of it's work are classics, but a lot were not. Which makes it like every other literary movement in history.

Todd Mason said...

Yes.

And Spinrad's criticism isn't usually restricted to The Kids Don't Take Risks...which among the mainline publishers, they often don't. Happily, those aren't the only publishers or outlets.

And, of course, Thomas Disch, who bristled (for example) at the treatment of his work by Algis Budrys, turned around and wrote "The Labor Day Group" for F&SF about how bland and safe so much of the 1970s writers were. Etc. Get off my hydroponic pond.

Deb said...

I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable about Science Fiction as you two and I'd never heard of Giao until I clicked on the link, but I enjoyed the essay and thought it had some good points. I also clicked on his links to some of his other sites and he has some interesting essays on post-modern mysteries and novels published in the last 25 years. For someone who often complains that nothing good has been written since D.H. Lawrence died (I keed, I keed), I liked reading someone who wholeheartedly supports the "moderns".

/w.v.: Gothic. A reminder, I suppose!

Todd Mason said...

Well, I've read Gioia mostly on jazz before (even if I can misspell his name), but I was aware that he was another guy who, like Kingsley Amis (or, I guess, me, or for that matter Richard Robinson) who was willing to write about sf and jazz in comparable measure, among other popcult issues (this is what I've read rather than ever looking into the Yeats poem where the Center Can Not Hold). He does have some good points, but as often the case with this kind of writing, he could use a bit more scholarship...a passage like this:

Even the survivors in this shakeout [of sf magazines] 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.

...is almost accurate but not quite, as well as too cute beyond the use of the sigh-fie thing. AMAZING (and FANTASTIC) were given low budgets, but were, like ANALOG, the property of Major League magazine publishers (Ziff-Davis and Conde Nast, respectively); F&SF was in 1960 the flagship of a solid second-line publisher of magazines, having just sold its biggest cash cow ELLERY QUEEN'S to B. G. Davis and his new Davis Publications a couple of years before, as Davis left ZD perhaps in part because he had more interest in fiction magazines than the other ZD bigwigs did (Cele Goldsmith seems to suggest as much). GALAXY and IF were the property of the small Galaxy Publishing Co., which was the closest to being in real trouble, but its magazines were doing OK enough (and had a track record of solid sales, so their distributor might be willing to cut them a little more slack than some of the more bootstrapping publishers who saw their titles fold in the wake of the huge American News Company distributor liquidation...and market oversaturation. No one had to run to the bank to cash their checks from these six magazines, and a penny a word from the ZD and Galaxy Pub markets for most work purchased in the early '60s probably wasn't going to break much of anyone.

So, there's that sort of thing. But, yeah, not terrible, by any means.

Todd Mason said...

But, then again, looking at it more closely, further really easily avoidable mistakes leap out:

"Arthur C. Clarke was an old man of sci-fi who had first made
his name back in the mid-1930s,"

Well, no. He had one story with Robert Lowndes's FUTURE in 1942, then another in ASTOUNDING in 1946, which were his first not in fanzines and not really making a pro rep for him...which would basically flourish in the latter '40s.

Todd Mason said...

Damn, though, the more I don't skim this, the more it falls apart.

"Burgess followed up with another dystopian novel (The
Wanting Seed), but mostly avoided sci-fi concepts in later
years."

Um, no, he didn't. The ENDERBY series alone, leaving aside the one-offs such as 1985...