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No, No! Not Another Project! (Part III)
Of course, I need to be careful, if people are listening in. I will not give away all my secrets as I want there to be some surprises in any article or book that comes from this, but I'll continue to periodically think aloud.
So sf is dead, right, it's in the doldrums by the seventies - after all, we've put a man (two men) on the Moon. (That's where Aldiss and Wingrove begin their account, in Trillion Year Spree, with responses to the moon landing.) Agenda sf, if you will, is dead. But there are those writers of the Gernback-Campbell Continuum who are still writing (Campbell dies in the early 1970s - 1971): Heinlein gets flabby and oversexed, Asimov returns with a singleton before lapsing into silence until the late trilogies, Herbert adds to the Dune mythos, Clarke writes about Rama, one of many Big Dumb Objects of the period, and so on. Business as usual, just less frequently. Even Dick has slowed down.
The British New Wave crowd, faced with the entropy extending even to New Worlds's circulation, have diversified into novels, which sometimes look less and less like sf as they deal with car crashes and traffic islands, and the alien planet is Earth. Even Doctor Who is Earthbound and paralysed. Meanwhile, a bandwagon is creaking into life: as Tolkien dies so the industry takes off, fueled by the growing role playing game craze and the first of many publications of material Tolkien himself would never have published. There is a fantasy boom - the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, Thomas Covenant, a book about rabbits and another about seagulls. Sf is dead, right?
Well, hardly. It's not showing the hard sf concerns it once did to the same extent, but instead it takes on a political edge* as a barometer of the times. So, let's see: the fag end of the Vietnam War, which lurches into genocide in Cambodia. The fall of Nixon. The oil crisis. Carter's single term in the White House and the hostage crisis. In the UK, growing trouble in Northern Ireland and bombing campaign in England. The three day week. The winter of discontent. The election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister - which is followed by Reagan becoming president and a new twist in the Cold War. (I think I'm going to have to limit it to Anglophone sf - so Australia, Canada and New Zealand need a broadstroke history, too.)
The sf of the age will presumably have reflected these issues - somewhere along the line - and other concerns of the age, such as ecology and environmentalism. Also key to the period is the ongoing fight for equality for women, blacks and gays, with Tiptree, Butler and Delany being vital exemplars. Le Guin really comes of age, although Left Hand of Darkness is outside of the period proper, it only just is, and its ruminations on gender signal the confusions of the age. As do Heinlein's genderbendings of I Will Fear No Evil and "The Number of the Breast", for that matter.
At the same time, the iconography of Agenda Sf was being recycled (very green) in the imagery associated with various branches of popular music and, most visibly, the high concept, blockbuster movie of which Star Wars is the most prominent example, and The Empire Strikes Back forms a convenient bookend for the end of the decade (and a contrast with 2001: A Space Odyssey). The pessimism of the second film in the trilogy perhaps finds other echoes in Blake's 7 and Battlestar Galactica. Meanwhile there were a whole raft of respected (and not so respected) raft of mainstream writers who were using sf tropes in their novels - Pynchon, Hoban, Burgess and so forth - leaving a sense that sf was going far beyond its fannish base.
What perhaps is not yet clear is the other bit of teleology: the emergence of cyberpunk. That needs to be a current - but I'm not sure it's a chapter of its own.
* Okay, yes: sf dealt with McCarthyism and the Cold War in the 1950s, and was hardly ignoring politics in the 1960s, but it takes on a more vital role post-1969 I'd argue.
So sf is dead, right, it's in the doldrums by the seventies - after all, we've put a man (two men) on the Moon. (That's where Aldiss and Wingrove begin their account, in Trillion Year Spree, with responses to the moon landing.) Agenda sf, if you will, is dead. But there are those writers of the Gernback-Campbell Continuum who are still writing (Campbell dies in the early 1970s - 1971): Heinlein gets flabby and oversexed, Asimov returns with a singleton before lapsing into silence until the late trilogies, Herbert adds to the Dune mythos, Clarke writes about Rama, one of many Big Dumb Objects of the period, and so on. Business as usual, just less frequently. Even Dick has slowed down.
The British New Wave crowd, faced with the entropy extending even to New Worlds's circulation, have diversified into novels, which sometimes look less and less like sf as they deal with car crashes and traffic islands, and the alien planet is Earth. Even Doctor Who is Earthbound and paralysed. Meanwhile, a bandwagon is creaking into life: as Tolkien dies so the industry takes off, fueled by the growing role playing game craze and the first of many publications of material Tolkien himself would never have published. There is a fantasy boom - the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, Thomas Covenant, a book about rabbits and another about seagulls. Sf is dead, right?
Well, hardly. It's not showing the hard sf concerns it once did to the same extent, but instead it takes on a political edge* as a barometer of the times. So, let's see: the fag end of the Vietnam War, which lurches into genocide in Cambodia. The fall of Nixon. The oil crisis. Carter's single term in the White House and the hostage crisis. In the UK, growing trouble in Northern Ireland and bombing campaign in England. The three day week. The winter of discontent. The election of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister - which is followed by Reagan becoming president and a new twist in the Cold War. (I think I'm going to have to limit it to Anglophone sf - so Australia, Canada and New Zealand need a broadstroke history, too.)
The sf of the age will presumably have reflected these issues - somewhere along the line - and other concerns of the age, such as ecology and environmentalism. Also key to the period is the ongoing fight for equality for women, blacks and gays, with Tiptree, Butler and Delany being vital exemplars. Le Guin really comes of age, although Left Hand of Darkness is outside of the period proper, it only just is, and its ruminations on gender signal the confusions of the age. As do Heinlein's genderbendings of I Will Fear No Evil and "The Number of the B
At the same time, the iconography of Agenda Sf was being recycled (very green) in the imagery associated with various branches of popular music and, most visibly, the high concept, blockbuster movie of which Star Wars is the most prominent example, and The Empire Strikes Back forms a convenient bookend for the end of the decade (and a contrast with 2001: A Space Odyssey). The pessimism of the second film in the trilogy perhaps finds other echoes in Blake's 7 and Battlestar Galactica. Meanwhile there were a whole raft of respected (and not so respected) raft of mainstream writers who were using sf tropes in their novels - Pynchon, Hoban, Burgess and so forth - leaving a sense that sf was going far beyond its fannish base.
What perhaps is not yet clear is the other bit of teleology: the emergence of cyberpunk. That needs to be a current - but I'm not sure it's a chapter of its own.
* Okay, yes: sf dealt with McCarthyism and the Cold War in the 1950s, and was hardly ignoring politics in the 1960s, but it takes on a more vital role post-1969 I'd argue.