The Detached Retina. Brian Aldiss
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the Pill, from heart-transplants to emergent nations. The sixties was the decade in which SF discovered the Present. It is no coincidence that it was also the decade in which the general reading public discovered SF.
A few milestones are in order.
In 1961, Kingsley Amis’s survey of SF, New Maps of Hell, was published in England. It had been condemned in some quarters; Amis wrote lightly and amusingly about a subject on which he felt deeply, and some people understand only the ponderous. But New Maps remains a shrewd, reliable guide to what it’s all about, and certainly paved the way to more general acceptance of the genre. Amis emphasizes the satiric aspects of SF at the expense of the fantastic side; there he was merely being prophetic. As this anthology shows, the decade following his book relied heavily on forms of satire—including satires on prose styles.
Within forty-eight hours of the death of President Kennedy in 1963, two writers died whose names, for all their other achievements, are still closely associated with the upper pastures of the science fiction field: Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has long ranked as SF; so does the neglected but equally penetrating Ape and Essence (1948); while his last novel, Island (1962), is a remarkable utopian novel which repays careful attention. Lewis, a connoisseur of romances and science fiction, wrote the beautiful trilogy which begins with Out of the Silent Planet (1938).
In 1965, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien’s great trilogy The Lord of the Rings was published in paperback; it went on to become the cult book of the sixties. While not in itself SF,[1] its enormous success has directed attention towards the enchantments of alternate worlds to ours. During a period when SF was expanding and becoming increasingly departmentalized, the Tolkien syndrome encouraged alternate-worldery, so that alternate worlds have increasingly become a part of SF. Other cult books included Frank Herbert’s Dune, which began life as a serial in Analog and won the first Nebula Award for the best novel of 1965, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (Hugo award-winner 1962), a campus favourite for some years. Other award-winners of the decade included Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon (Nebula, 1966), Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (Nebula, 1967), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Nebula, 1969), Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (Hugo, 1961), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (Hugo, 1963), Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer (Hugo, 1965), Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (Hugo, 1968) and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (Hugo, 1969).
One interesting thing about this list is that few of the award-winners can be classified as adventure or action novels. Their equivalents only a decade earlier would have been so classifiable. After all, magazine SF largely grew out of men’s adventure fiction. In the sixties, a more meditative mood set in.
Another milestone of the decade was the Stanley Kubrick-Arthur C. Clarke film, 2001: a Space Odyssey, which had its European première in May 1968. Significantly, it is cast as an adventure, but it concludes with a psychedelic trip followed by meditation.
Another comparatively new feature of SF was that it began to stand outside itself and look at itself. ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ is not so much traditional SF as a story which takes SF for granted and uses its vocabulary. Among the great successes of the decade are two novels by my collaborator on this series, Harry Harrison. Both his Bill, the Galactic Hero and The Technicolor Time Machine make ingenious fun of all the clichés of the genre—the former with particular reference to the novels of Heinlein and Asimov.
It was hardly to be expected that changes which infiltrated every facet of life should not have their effect on the way the writers wrote as well as what they wrote about. The mood became dispassionate, hard-hearted at least on the surface. To be ‘cool’ was the height of fashion.
In the mid-sixties, London was the height of fashion. For a few years—which now seems as remote as the Ming Dynasty—London was the place where culture lived and thrived as it had done in Paris in the twenties. An electricity was generated. We all felt it. The time and the place acquired a label which was instantly mocked: Swinging London. But the phenomenon needed a label, however absurd.
Behind the ballyhoo, the hippies, the Flower Power, and the youth cult, many dark things lurked. Writers have always been abnormally aware of dark things. They did not forget them as they made hay with the rest while the sun shone.
This go-where-you-please, do-your-own-thing, turn-on-freak-out mood found particular embodiment in the pages of a British SF magazine, New Worlds.
New Worlds was the oldest-established British magazine. Under its editor E. J. Carnell it had achieved regular publication and modest success but, as the sixties dawned, its sales were dwindling and illness afflicted the dedicated Ted Carnell. Also, it must be said, its formula was growing somewhat threadbare. Although most of its fiction was by British writers, many of them copied American models of some vintage and assumed a Transatlantic tone of voice. Not infrequently, the stories were rejects from the more profitable American market.
It seemed as if only a miracle could save New Worlds and its companion Science Fantasy, also edited by Carnell. He handed over editorships to Michael Moorcock and Kyril Bonfiglioli respectively. Moorcock had already made a name for himself as a writer of fantasy and his hero Elric was well established, although not taken too seriously (least of all by the genial Moorcock himself). Kyril Bonfiglioli was a hitherto semi-respectable antiquarian-book-and art-dealer and bon viveur residing in Oxford.
Bonfiglioli was an important influence in the life of several new authors, among them Johnny Byrne, who went on to write Groupie with Jenny Fabian (a real sixties-flavour book) and to work on the TV series Space 1999; Thom Keyes, who went on to write One Night Stand, which was filmed; and Keith Roberts, who became editor of Science Fantasy when Bonfiglioli changed the name to SF Impulse, and did much of the excellent artwork as well as contributing stories. The best known of these stories were those which formed the novel Pavanne; in that book and others since, Roberts has shown himself master of the alternate-world story, pitching his tone deliberately in a minor key. He is represented by ‘Manscarer’, a story of artists in an over-populated world, which was first published in New Writings in Science Fiction, the paperback magazine started by Carnell when he left New Worlds; NW in SF still continues, with even greater success, edited by Kenneth Bulmer who, like Carnell before him, has shown himself generous, reliable and discerning.
SF Impulse faded out, but New Worlds went from strength to strength. Aided by a dedicated editorial team, including such lively men as Charles Platt, Mike Moorcock kicked out the old gang and installed the new. Galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand.
The revolution was inevitable. The bathwater had become so stale that it was scarcely to be avoided if the baby sometimes went out with it. When an Arts Council grant was secured for New Worlds and it became glossy and filled with illustrations, it was the only SF magazine in the mid-sixties which looked as if it belonged to the mid-sixties. All the others seemed like fossils. Life was where New Worlds was.
Of course, individual issues were often disappointing. But the ritual of a magazine, its layout, its expectations, its continuity, its hazardous pact with readers and authors, elevates it to a sort of protolanguage which speaks as strongly as its actual fiction content. The ritual suggested that the future had arrived with a flutter of colour supplements and mini-skirts and was securely nailed to New Worlds’ editorial desk. The rather twitchy hedonism of New Worlds had no need to look ahead, and the galaxy began in Ladbroke Grove.
In the decidedly more sombre mood of the seventies, all this may sound silly. Naturally, it was easy to hate New Worlds, which often opted for trendiness rather than depth—though trendiness in those days was almost a philosophy in itself. But the feeling that the future has happened is not as perverse as it seems. Our Western culture has in many ways fulfilled the targets established in the early Renaissance: to take control