A Political History of SF

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Mike Bailey sez:

>I came out as Alfred Bester...
>with whose work I have absolutely no familiarity (yet)

Then you should definitely read this test-result as a sign from above and 
give Alfred Bester a spin. I'd particularly recommend the two brilliant 
novels "The Demolished Man" (1953) and "The Stars My Destination" (1956). I 
have a strong feeling that Pynchon had Bester in mind when he wrote his 
defense of the science fiction genre in the Luddite essay. Pynchon says of 
science fiction, romance novels and whodunits that:

These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious 
enough, and so they get redlined under the label "escapist fare."
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the 
decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary 
talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as 
the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than 
mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by 
the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a 
nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to 
have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite 
persuasion.

That first sentence reads like an apt description of AtD, doesn't it?....
But as I said above, I'm pretty sure Pynchon was thinking of Bester (among 
others) as he wrote those words: We know from his application to the Ford 
Foundation that Pynchon at one point considered adapting Bester's "The 
Demolished Man" into an opera -- which sorta gives the term 'space opera' a 
whole new meaning.

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