In his 1964 story, The Crime and the Glory of Commander Susdall,
Cordwainer Smith provides a bleak vision of what he calls the instrumentality of mankind.
Commander Susdall is a far stretch from the confident and effective Golden Age protagonists of Robert A. Heinlein's Space Cadet or Isaac Asimov's Foundation.
Susdall is a lone representative of the instrumentality, given extraordinary freedom to do whatever he needs to do in order to accomplish his mission.
Nevertheless, he is punished by the instrumentality for what the instrumentality thinks is his crime.
While under attack, Susdall has modified a temporal device to send cat embryos two million years into the past.
Their instructions are that they should not breed true. Instead, they should breed new chemistry and become civilized.
They should learn speech and wait to serve man.
These instructions change the biology of the cats, and they evolve for two million years before coming right at the moment when Susdall needs them.
The cats came, the narrator tells us, their ships glittered in the naked sky above Arachosia, their little combat craft attacked.
The cats, who had not existed a moment before, but who had then, two million years in which to develop,
followed a destiny printed right into their brains, printed down to their spinal cords, etched into the chemistry of their bodies and personalities.
This is the day of the year of the promised age, the cats proclaim. And now come cats.
This absurd and somewhat wistful vision of a decrepit federation and a failed astronaut at the story's center is a far cry from the logical and righteous American science fiction of the pulp magazines 40 years earlier.
The crime and the glory of Commander Susdall represents a distinct shift toward the irrational in the aesthetic of science fiction that occurs in the 1960s.
Authors are extorted to turn away from definitive technology-rich visions of a future that rely on confidence and big science, and instead try their hand at what comes known as interspace.
British authors such as Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard are often associated with this so-called new wave of science fiction,
and from America, Barry Mallsburg, Jack Vance, and Harriet Harrison, along with Cordwainer Smith, can be seen joining the shift.
Their impact has a lasting impact in the United States, not only in the aesthetic, but also in the academic discourse about science fiction.
After the 1960s, critics like Brian Aldis, for example, prefer science fiction that embraces the indefinite and avoids grand narratives about progress to authors of the golden age of science fiction.
By 1971, Thomas Clarison has declared that writers of the golden age are too closely tied to the technocracy movement and need to be dismissed.
Before this new wave of science fiction, writers of the golden age had been seen as representing an appropriate ethic for scientists.
Hard science fiction and social science fiction had been previously considered to be a fiction that best represented American culture and values in the years after World War II,
and in fact were proclaimed as the antidote to engineers who did not have enough moral sense.
Even though they had this reputation, some of the most famous authors like Robert A. Heinlein, John Campbell, and Isaac Asimov became representatives of a supposedly totalitarian fiction.
To replace them, the new wave's aesthetic of personal, fragmentary, and surreal fiction gained prominence.
This shift in the fortune of the writers of the golden age is then somewhat curious.
Someone familiar with the history of science fiction promoted by new wave critics would be startled to read some of the science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s.
Fiction from the early years of the golden age embraces the principle of cultural relativism and frequently makes anti-imperial and anti-colonial statements.
E.E. Smith, who honestly makes plenty of fiction from the Gernsbach era that involves slaughtering alien people, nevertheless also does interesting work to promote intercultural understanding.
The 1934 pulp story Triplanetary is remarkable for how it attempts to promote cultural relativism.
The Nevians are said by the narrator to be disgusting by the humans, but only because of their preconceived notions of what beauty is.
The story comes to climax when the less advanced humans of the Triplanetary Council demonstrate their intellect to the Nevians, causing peace in a growing interspecies collaboration.
The world-smashing tales of Smith are not the only place to find ethical stances in golden age science fiction.
The setting for Edmund Hellermann's 1933 story The Island of Unreason is a fantastic society in which characters are held accountable for their personal actions.
One character refuses to share his intellectual property, and another character refuses to mate with the individual chosen for her, and they are thus sent to this island of unreason.
The story makes contemporary issues involving industrial research and the current craze for eugenics to an extreme.
The characters are punished by being removed from civilization, but the story honors them.
They decide to stay on the island, they fall in love, and they represent the future of humanity.
In a time preoccupied with maintaining the supposed purity of races, Isaac Asimov writes a story called Halfbreed,
in which the narrator dares to suggest that the mix between a human and a Venetian has advantages over purebred individuals in the 1940s issue of Astounding Stories.
Even John Campbell and Robert Heinlein, both who have been accused of being crypto-fascists, have fiction in this vein.
Campbell's story Rebellion concerns a subjugated race that has supposedly been bred to be docile laborers.
The human genome, however, has asserted itself.
Producing a curious scientist who comprehends the situation, reaches out to other people who tell him about the lost greatness of his people, and mounts an intergenerational program to overthrow his oppressors.
Heinlein's 1941 story, Logic of the Empire, compellingly connects the impressment of semen, indentured servitude, slavery, and the enlistment of army volunteers,
all part of evils demanded by the expansion of the capital, and bringing this story to the colonization of Venus.
However, Heinlein initiates a critique of the popular vision of space exploration.
While authors of Space Opera have suggested something exciting and glorious about the expansion of space,
Heinlein reminds his readers that earlier episodes of human expansion have not been so exciting for everyone involved.
It is not surprising, then, that the period after World War II, this Golden Age science fiction, is thought to be the best literature for creating a critique of the technological society.
The first anthologies about science fiction after World War II praise the so-called Golden Age writers.
Conklin's 1946 anthology has a preface by Campbell.
Campbell tries to achieve a split between the public perception of science fictions as the Buck Rogers stories in Sunday newspapers,
reminding his stories that the character from the Phil Nolan stories are much more complicated.
Science fiction of a serious type, the type in Conklin's anthology, is best it can be done to imagine what will happen to the political, economic, and cultural structures of human society when confronted by new technologies.
Healy and McComas' 1946 anthology, Adventures in Time and Space, includes Requiem by Heinlein and Campbell's Forgetfulness.
The editors can proclaim the importance of Golden Age science fiction.
The quiet men in scientific laboratories are challenging our time.
The Atomic Age has demonstrated that, quote,
God is no longer on the side of the heaviest battalions, but that on the heaviest slinkers.
These moderns are now classics. They challenge both the imagination and the intelligence.
A 1947 study by Bailey's Pilgrims Through Space and Time proclaims that the U.S.'s use of atomic weapons at the close of World War II announced that we stand on a threshold of a science fiction age.
Statesmen of the world need new inspiration for understanding human problems, and science fiction of the Golden Age can be one of these sources of inspiration.
Quote, this function is to serve as a permanent brain trust for mankind by collecting, assimilating, analyzing, understanding, and providing the data and the conclusions necessary for the wise guidance of all governmental, social, cultural, and scientific policies.
The extent to which science fiction is thought to be an important part of the project of freedom is demonstrated by what is known as the Overseas Edition coordinated by the Office of War Information and the Armed Services Edition produced by the Council of Books and Wartime.
These programs produce several million copies of American and English titles among three other languages for commercial channels, bringing novels to the hands of servicemen in other countries by the means of information centers.
Science fiction was prominent among this collection. Among the classics like Dracula, War of the Worlds, and Frankenstein, these editions produced a copy of Asimov's I, Robot, which is, of course, Asimov's Golden Age robot stories, as well as Clifford C. Mack's 1939 Cosmic Engineer.
We also see, in this period, the United States facilitating translation projects. After helping the publishing house, Karl Rauch, moved to West Germany, the publisher started a hardcover science fiction series with four volumes in German, Jack Williamson's 1940 novel, The Humanoids, Campbell's The Incredible Planet, which is a fix-up of some of his unpublished fiction, The I Robot from Asimov, and the anthology, Uberwindung von Raum and Zeit, which includes many of these Golden Age writers,
all edited with prefaces by Gotthard Gunter. As can be seen in peacetime, the fiction of the Golden Age is an appropriate way to deal with the ethical conflicts posed by World War II.
Science fiction, however, is going to have to change. The Soviet Union beats the United States into space, launching its satellite Sputnik in 1957. Before then, no one had doubted the United States' superiority with the launch of the Soviet satellite and further successes in space.
The Soviet space program was creating an attraction for technological and cultural exports. With the space program becoming an overt aspect of the Cold War, it would become increasingly difficult for fiction that promoted the exploration space to be neutral.
The attempt to tie science to the prestige of the country became part of the 1960 presidential election. President Eisenhower attempted to defend the US space program, partly in response to the pressure from the director of the US information agency, which had been sponsoring these book programs.
George Allen, in testimony before the House and Science and Astronomic Committee on January 1960, warns that the United States is losing prestige because of the success in space.
He said that the US must accept the fact that the space exploration represents a race that this country must win. In this election year, Allen mentions opinion polls that show that the US prestige is on the decline.
These polls are released by President Kennedy in 1961, demonstrating that the Soviet Union has become the world's hope for a present and dynamic country.
To add to the worries about the space program, the US was worried that it was not producing enough nuclear weapons to counter the Soviet stockpile, adding the arms race to the space race.
From the point of view of the United States Information Agency, along with this space race and missile race, we saw what they were calling a book gap.
The Soviet Union was exporting 11.5 million books per year in 1958, in English, and sending them to what they called uncommitted countries.
The Seven Seas Books, a publishing effort in East Berlin, sent out 80% of its titles in English, many of them by English and American authors who promoted the communistic side of capitalism.
To combat this tide of books, the US increases its sponsorship of book programs. The translation program peaks in 1965 with a production of 10.2 million volumes.
Fiction books of typical science fiction writers, such as Asimov and Heinlein, are published by these programs, along with a much larger number of science non-fiction titles.
Another reason why the taste in American science fiction would have to change from the rational fiction of the Golden Age to the rational, dreamlike fiction of the New Wave was that the Soviet Union itself became officially interested in an aesthetic that resembled American science fiction.
The program, known as Soviet Social Realism, dates back to the age of Golden Age science fiction. At the first Soviet Writers' Congress, Carl Radick says in his 1935 speech that realism is not just the depiction of the decay of capitalist culture, but also the depiction of a new class that will create a new society.
It's not just an arbitrary depiction of a revolution, but the depiction of the complexity and contradictions of socialism.
Quote, the artist should show how socialism is built out of the bricks of the past, out of the material which the past has left us, out of the material which we ourselves create in the sweat of our brow, in the blood of ours toil and struggle, in the hard battles of classes, and the hard toil of man to remold himself.
At first, according to the Soviet guidelines, science fiction could not be part of this program. However, as noticed by Sonia Fritscha, the death of Stalin in 1953 opens a little space for science fiction.
Johann Beecher becomes head of the Ministry of Culture and restates his support for a popular culture like the one of the West that can be used as a political tool. In this program, the Soviet Writers Guild should admit that it cannot combat the taste for popular literature and instead create a Soviet-made popular culture because otherwise people will get it from the other side, i.e. U.S. popular culture.
As described by Fritscha, Johann's view of the ultra-simet, Blybed Geheiman, from 1955, demonstrates how science fiction adheres to this social realism. A new element, ultra-simet, in Algeria is discovered and that will be used to defeat the North European Steel Trust's attempt.
In fact, it's an attempt to control the market. In fact, it makes a ray gun with ultra-simet to peacefully eradicate any attackers. According to a Soviet critic, ultra-simet is bad because it's not a known fact, so it's irrational.
But nevertheless, it is acceptable because it's not delivered by aliens and is developed according to what we know about science and industry.
And therefore, this typical mining operation described within the bounds of known technology and science fiction is an acceptable way for producing Soviet science fiction.
Western capitalists, of course, are portrayed as devious and working out of self-interest, which also makes the novel popular.
Strangely enough, of course, this story is not that much different from Golden Age science fiction in its attempts to maintain the realistic standards except for changing one element, the development of this technology, and also this idea of the capitalist infrastructure kind of encasing innovation.
I'm reminded of E.E. Smith's Golden Age novel The Skylocker Space, serialized in 1928, about a scientist who finds a new form of energy and pursued by the evil energy conglomerates that attempt to sabotage his invention.
Given that the two countries are fighting a war of ideology through publishing, it is not surprising that the West would try to differentiate itself, and so with the increasing use of science fiction as a cultural weapon and the increased tie of space exploration to the war for the hearts and minds of the world citizens,
one then sees the emergence of the New Wave in the 1960s.
It is at this time that the critical opinion begins to turn against the writers of the Golden Age.
One of the primary detractors of the Golden Age is Michael Moorcock.
Moorcock's 1963 guest editorial play with feeling in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds says that science fiction is missing passion and subtlety and is disconnected from human affairs.
Moorcock continues his attacks on Golden Age authors even after New Worlds ceased his publication in 1971. For instance, he presents his scathing condemnation of the Golden Age in a 1978 essay Starship Stormtroopers using Robert A. Heinlein's infamous novel as a starting point.
Moorcock accuses the writers of the Golden Age for their enthusiastic militarism and ends with a remarkable attack not on the fiction but on his own imagination of Heinlein as a writer.
Quote, next time you pick up a Heinlein book, think of the author as looking a little bit like General Eisenhower.
Or if that image isn't immediate enough, some chap in early middle age, good looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at his temples, a blue tie, a sober three-piece suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in your way.
And then you might have some idea of what you're actually about to read, unquote. Judith Merrill also mounts a critique of the Golden Age, in spite of her Golden Age roots.
In her April 1965 column, for instance, Merrill says that science in science fiction is not about laboratories, but it's about a disciplined way of thinking.
She expands this idea in her September 1968 column, one of her last for this magazine, by saying, science fiction is not science's job as getting the answers but in asking the questions.
This kind of literary and non-scientific writer of science fiction is a kind of writer Merrill suggests can breach the mainstream market.
In a column appearing in the December 1966 issue, Merrill promotes Ballard and William Burroughs, among others, because they represent rather more subjective or thoughtful literary direction of British sci-fi in the 60s.
She only will admire Kurt Vonnegut and Cordwainer Smith in the United States as doing anything similar, and praises any author whose work represents the area where a science fiction thinking and a surrealist writing meet and marry.
The critique of the Golden Age is a lasting legacy, has a lasting legacy in the academic response.
Even though the first chronicles of the Golden Age were positive, after the critique of Moorcock and others, the tide turns against Golden Age writers.
Many standard works about science fiction after the 1970s appear to portray the authors of Golden Age science fiction as an unfortunate low point in the genre.
Thus, critics after the 1970s suggest that The New Wave, inspired by New Worlds, provides us first with a more humanistic, introspective, and socially relevant fiction of the future.
This fiction supposedly fits in better with the longstanding themes of fantasy and utopian literature, providing stories and metaphors that readers can use to fashion their own identities and howl and disgust at the technocratic establishment.
In the wake of this shift, authors began to noticeably embrace the irrational, illogical, and absurd.
In addition to Cordwainer Smith, who I started out this talk with, Harry Harrison writes,
Bill the Galactic Hero, in 1965, combining irreverence of Catch-22 with the ideals of Heinlein's Space Cadet to promote an astronaut as anti-hero.
Barry Melzberg's narrator in his 1972 novel Beyond Apollo is another one of these anti-heroin astronauts.
Thank you. I only have three. I only have one and a half on my clock. I can go back and read the part I skipped.
Jack Vance, likewise, adds his irrelevance to the genre with his 1965 novel Space Opera, which is the story of a humorously failed attempt to use literally opera singers for interstellar cultural diplomacy.
These authors have turned the rational, world-critiquing conventions of Golden Age science fiction on their heads.
In doing so, something might be lost in the translation because the authors of the New Wave do not effectively debate the use of science and technology with the status of the insiders in the same way that the Golden Age writers had done.
Nevertheless, the aesthetic of the Golden Age is no longer able to be read in the new world of the Cold War.
In the context of the Cold War and the space race, the change in fortune of the Golden Age is more than just a simple choice of aesthetic.
The academic community's embrace of popular culture's disruptive potential is concomitant with the Soviet Union's distress of the popular and the Western effort to disseminate popular culture.
The change to the cultural strategy of the New Wave comes at the intersection of two other cultural moments.
One, when the cultural strategy of the Soviet Union became more obviously aligned with socialism, and second, at a time when American scientific and technical programs needed to change.
Even though there have been noticeable recent efforts to recuperate through the reputations of the authors of the Golden Age, it is important that we do not forget how international politics plays a role in the judgments made by critics and scholars.
Thus, the fate of this popular culture is a vibrant example of the interaction between international politics and the entertainment industry.