The Shirley Maclaine interview in another comment touches on this! It is probably worth saying that it’s not like the writing for women characters was so great before in science fiction. It just stood out in the collection.
I feel like romantic comedies get really insufferable in the fifties and sixties...very knowing and sophisticated about sex and very kittenish and prim about gender.....actually by "the fifties and sixties" I think I am just trying to disguise a personal fatwa against Doris day
I mean my real problem with the Sturgeon story is that I don't really buy that planet would be made so taboo that nobody would even trade with it _or acknowledge its existence_ for practicing incest. It just did not ring true to me at all!
Re the loosening of sexual standards and women- Shirley Maclaine made a similar point about women in Hollywood and the Hayes code, which has always stuck with me:
oh this is interesting! I was also thinking last night about the way roles for women in the forties tended to be richer and wondering if it was a similar thing.
I started reading SF in the '70s, and my perception at the time was there was a difference between "traditional" SF (mainly Asimov and Heinlein for me) and "contemporary" SF (Delaney and Le Guin above all). I had no way of articulating the difference, but it sort of felt like the training wheels had come off in the '60s - the "traditional" stories always felt like the narrator was an engineer discussing issues arising from some new technology, while the "contemporary" stories felt like being dumped in the deep end and needing to figure out the rules of a new world.
The practical struggle in my life at the time was finding stories (in library books if possible) that gave me the same buzz as Delaney and Le Guin. Zelazny was pretty good in this regard, as was Dune. Larry Niven fit in this camp, more or less. I always wanted Ellison to be better than he was - I responded to his reputation, but his stories didn't really stick with me. When I finally got a copy of "Dangerous Visions", I found it kind of underwhelming. PKD and JG Ballard are two authors whose reputation I didn't understand at the time, at all. When I had money to spend on paperbacks, it tended to go to my compulsive reading, which was Edgar Rice Burroughs and Michael Moorcock - those screamed PULP in a way that any self-respecting librarian could recognize.
I got back into SF in a big way when I discovered William Gibson in the late '80s, and discovered two authors around that time that I would have loved if I had read their works in the '70s, C.J. Cherryh and Barrington Bayley. I have a pretty big collection of Cherryh if I get the urge to reread them, but if I really want to satisfy my 14-year-old self, I'm going to plow through all of the Bayley books I've accumulated.
Anyway, as a matter of literary history, the transition happened in the early '60s, with stories published by Moorcock in "New Worlds" in the UK, the Judith Merrill collections in the US, and the longer works getting published by Ace, especially in their double-books, edited by Donald Wollheim. It strikes me that the stuff that Ace published in the '50s might be pretty interesting in terms of a transition, as there were some very clever people cranking stuff out as fast as they could.
This particular period came to an end in 1977, when Star Wars and Sword of Shannara proved that the big money was going to be in space opera and Tolkien-style fantasy. People wrote plenty of good stuff after this, but it was always going to have a different feel given that you knew that Star Wars was out there.
ha yes both Star Wars and Shannara have come up crankily in some of the letters I've been reading in the archive. While I've never loved Star Wars, I did read a ton of Shannara books as a kid, so I always feel a little guilty. Like… sorry guys, for ruining the field… But actually Shannara was already pretty old by the time I got to it in the aughts, so I guess they can't really blame me.…
Well, it's not like writers in the field weren't trying to come up with its own formulaic franchises in order to pull themselves into the middle class. Tolkien was hard, so they went after Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian, with imitation barbarians showing up in the SF mags in the '60s. The best-known writer to take this strategy was John Jakes, who became famous writing a novel series set in the Revolutionary War while the bicentennial celebrations were taking place in the mid-'70s. I only found out about his earlier SF writing because his daughter was my science teacher in 8th grade, and she would mention when she had met some writer whose books she saw me reading. Anyway, Brak the Barbarian never took off like Shannara.
There was a lot of fantasy in the '60s and '70s where writers were doing similar world-building to Tolkien, but using other mythologies rather than the Germanic myths that Tolkien used. Everyone seemed to be trying to see what the formula for imitating Tolkien's success was. Even Ursula Le Guin did a version of this with "Rocannon's World", where the premise was that Tolkien's canonical races of men, elves, dwarves, and orcs were various species on another planet, engaged on a quest with an interplanetary ethnographer. That was published in '66, and then her Earthsea books started coming out in '68.
The biggest change with Shannara, as far as I could tell, was that there was no attempt to give historical cover to why the world was so Tolkienesque, and Shannara proved that the historical cover was not actually an element that the fans cared much about. This fact may have annoyed writers who felt there was some reason their aesthetic was a better one than that of the fans, but that just turns you into a writer of literary fiction. Best of luck in finding an appointment to an MFA program.
In the case of Star Wars, the true accomplishment was the way that Lucas got the amount of money he did out of the studio, and that he knew how to use it in a way that could make the original Flash Gordon story appear real. Before Lucas, SF was a genre that received smaller budget than other movies, because it just had to look weird, not realistic. Lucas did location shoots and really involved work with miniatures and props to make everything look lived in, but still magic. A lot of this turned out to be based on previous work done in the course of Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated attempt to film "Dune", a project whose most creative personnel were recruited to make "Alien". The truly "dangerous visions" of the '60s and early '70s were those of a Chilean poet that were vivid enough to loosen the purse strings of Hollywood.
On the new landscape that this created - I was at the Los Angeles Book Fair in 2000, and happened to overhear a small group of youngish SF authors talking about getting contracts for Star Wars novels to bring up their incomes. My sense was that they considered it the price that you paid to be able to write what you wanted the rest of the time.
Beggars in Spain is one I’ve responded wildly differently to at different times. (I forget where the book and novella diverge). First of all, I loved reading it—it’s one where I read the first few pages in Borders then immediately bought it.
But when I read it originally, I was really entranced by the complex thinking and problem solving of the second gen of Sleepless (particularly the one whose name starts with M on the orbital). I loved the way she thought in strings and connections as Kress narrates it, and I recognized something I didn’t have my own words for.
And then the book turns out to be one where all those smarts don’t matter as much, and it’s people’s willingness to be abject that helps those with the fear virus, not brilliantly developing a cure! Up there with Sondheim’s Passion as a horror story for Nietzscheans.
Then, of course, I became a Christian and felt I had to do more with my horror than be horrified, so the whole thing feels like a personal The Great Divorce challenge
The novella ends with Leisha talking to various people in her mind and making the argument about the ecology of trade. So nothing about the second generation, really.
But I liked it partly bc you see Leisha struggling with a belief system that has worked for her (the contractual understanding of everything) and realizing that it isn't really a sufficient way to understand the world or even her own actions, even as it's been very important to her (and remains important to her). And that partly involves ceasing to deny that some people really do hate her and that she's vulnerable to their hatred.
Love those groovy sixties titles. Mailer does the same thing in Advertisements for Myself; the stories/essays, many of which are really not that good in and of themselves, are made more interesting by his long introductions/postscripts saying here's why I wrote this, here's what I was thinking at the time, I thought it would do x for my career but it did y, it caused a falling out with so-and-so. I would love to see more of that sort of directors' commentary in general.
yeah I love this kind of thing. And honestly it's also nice in a short story collection bc you finish it and you're thinking about it and then there's an afterword either by the author or by a fan of that specific story for you to think with or against.
SO nostalgic, I had a copy of Dangerous Visions on my bookshelf in high school. I recognize some of the titles but don't really remember any of the stories. I recently reread the original Beggars in Spain novella, with some trepidation, because I remember disliking the novel version, but the original was fine, I thought. Very idealistic.
Is Lester Del Rey Lana Del Rey's father
Re loosening standards of sex and depictions of women regressing because of it, I definitely notice this in the movies of the same time period
The Shirley Maclaine interview in another comment touches on this! It is probably worth saying that it’s not like the writing for women characters was so great before in science fiction. It just stood out in the collection.
I feel like romantic comedies get really insufferable in the fifties and sixties...very knowing and sophisticated about sex and very kittenish and prim about gender.....actually by "the fifties and sixties" I think I am just trying to disguise a personal fatwa against Doris day
Look, Sturgeon wrote the *best* story you probably *could* write in defense of ... nevermind
also HELL YES sixties Zelazny, what a fucking king
I mean my real problem with the Sturgeon story is that I don't really buy that planet would be made so taboo that nobody would even trade with it _or acknowledge its existence_ for practicing incest. It just did not ring true to me at all!
Re the loosening of sexual standards and women- Shirley Maclaine made a similar point about women in Hollywood and the Hayes code, which has always stuck with me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hao5pimU7ok&t=840s
(It's a wild interview all around, in the style of the time)
oh this is interesting! I was also thinking last night about the way roles for women in the forties tended to be richer and wondering if it was a similar thing.
I started reading SF in the '70s, and my perception at the time was there was a difference between "traditional" SF (mainly Asimov and Heinlein for me) and "contemporary" SF (Delaney and Le Guin above all). I had no way of articulating the difference, but it sort of felt like the training wheels had come off in the '60s - the "traditional" stories always felt like the narrator was an engineer discussing issues arising from some new technology, while the "contemporary" stories felt like being dumped in the deep end and needing to figure out the rules of a new world.
The practical struggle in my life at the time was finding stories (in library books if possible) that gave me the same buzz as Delaney and Le Guin. Zelazny was pretty good in this regard, as was Dune. Larry Niven fit in this camp, more or less. I always wanted Ellison to be better than he was - I responded to his reputation, but his stories didn't really stick with me. When I finally got a copy of "Dangerous Visions", I found it kind of underwhelming. PKD and JG Ballard are two authors whose reputation I didn't understand at the time, at all. When I had money to spend on paperbacks, it tended to go to my compulsive reading, which was Edgar Rice Burroughs and Michael Moorcock - those screamed PULP in a way that any self-respecting librarian could recognize.
I got back into SF in a big way when I discovered William Gibson in the late '80s, and discovered two authors around that time that I would have loved if I had read their works in the '70s, C.J. Cherryh and Barrington Bayley. I have a pretty big collection of Cherryh if I get the urge to reread them, but if I really want to satisfy my 14-year-old self, I'm going to plow through all of the Bayley books I've accumulated.
Anyway, as a matter of literary history, the transition happened in the early '60s, with stories published by Moorcock in "New Worlds" in the UK, the Judith Merrill collections in the US, and the longer works getting published by Ace, especially in their double-books, edited by Donald Wollheim. It strikes me that the stuff that Ace published in the '50s might be pretty interesting in terms of a transition, as there were some very clever people cranking stuff out as fast as they could.
This particular period came to an end in 1977, when Star Wars and Sword of Shannara proved that the big money was going to be in space opera and Tolkien-style fantasy. People wrote plenty of good stuff after this, but it was always going to have a different feel given that you knew that Star Wars was out there.
ha yes both Star Wars and Shannara have come up crankily in some of the letters I've been reading in the archive. While I've never loved Star Wars, I did read a ton of Shannara books as a kid, so I always feel a little guilty. Like… sorry guys, for ruining the field… But actually Shannara was already pretty old by the time I got to it in the aughts, so I guess they can't really blame me.…
Well, it's not like writers in the field weren't trying to come up with its own formulaic franchises in order to pull themselves into the middle class. Tolkien was hard, so they went after Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian, with imitation barbarians showing up in the SF mags in the '60s. The best-known writer to take this strategy was John Jakes, who became famous writing a novel series set in the Revolutionary War while the bicentennial celebrations were taking place in the mid-'70s. I only found out about his earlier SF writing because his daughter was my science teacher in 8th grade, and she would mention when she had met some writer whose books she saw me reading. Anyway, Brak the Barbarian never took off like Shannara.
There was a lot of fantasy in the '60s and '70s where writers were doing similar world-building to Tolkien, but using other mythologies rather than the Germanic myths that Tolkien used. Everyone seemed to be trying to see what the formula for imitating Tolkien's success was. Even Ursula Le Guin did a version of this with "Rocannon's World", where the premise was that Tolkien's canonical races of men, elves, dwarves, and orcs were various species on another planet, engaged on a quest with an interplanetary ethnographer. That was published in '66, and then her Earthsea books started coming out in '68.
The biggest change with Shannara, as far as I could tell, was that there was no attempt to give historical cover to why the world was so Tolkienesque, and Shannara proved that the historical cover was not actually an element that the fans cared much about. This fact may have annoyed writers who felt there was some reason their aesthetic was a better one than that of the fans, but that just turns you into a writer of literary fiction. Best of luck in finding an appointment to an MFA program.
In the case of Star Wars, the true accomplishment was the way that Lucas got the amount of money he did out of the studio, and that he knew how to use it in a way that could make the original Flash Gordon story appear real. Before Lucas, SF was a genre that received smaller budget than other movies, because it just had to look weird, not realistic. Lucas did location shoots and really involved work with miniatures and props to make everything look lived in, but still magic. A lot of this turned out to be based on previous work done in the course of Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated attempt to film "Dune", a project whose most creative personnel were recruited to make "Alien". The truly "dangerous visions" of the '60s and early '70s were those of a Chilean poet that were vivid enough to loosen the purse strings of Hollywood.
On the new landscape that this created - I was at the Los Angeles Book Fair in 2000, and happened to overhear a small group of youngish SF authors talking about getting contracts for Star Wars novels to bring up their incomes. My sense was that they considered it the price that you paid to be able to write what you wanted the rest of the time.
It’s striking how different these stories seem now compared to 1973 when I read DV. And I love the ‘60s rankings!
Unclassifiable … that’s Bunch, for sure.
The ending of “Europa” seemed a tacked on trick even back then, and a lame attempt to make an ordinary story “dangerous”.
As for Kress, I like a lot of her work but my clear favorite is “Out of all them Bright Stars”.
I kind of suspected as much for the Poul Anderson story. I mean even put up against the stories in the same collection, it just feels kind of cheap.
Beggars in Spain is one I’ve responded wildly differently to at different times. (I forget where the book and novella diverge). First of all, I loved reading it—it’s one where I read the first few pages in Borders then immediately bought it.
But when I read it originally, I was really entranced by the complex thinking and problem solving of the second gen of Sleepless (particularly the one whose name starts with M on the orbital). I loved the way she thought in strings and connections as Kress narrates it, and I recognized something I didn’t have my own words for.
And then the book turns out to be one where all those smarts don’t matter as much, and it’s people’s willingness to be abject that helps those with the fear virus, not brilliantly developing a cure! Up there with Sondheim’s Passion as a horror story for Nietzscheans.
Then, of course, I became a Christian and felt I had to do more with my horror than be horrified, so the whole thing feels like a personal The Great Divorce challenge
The novella ends with Leisha talking to various people in her mind and making the argument about the ecology of trade. So nothing about the second generation, really.
But I liked it partly bc you see Leisha struggling with a belief system that has worked for her (the contractual understanding of everything) and realizing that it isn't really a sufficient way to understand the world or even her own actions, even as it's been very important to her (and remains important to her). And that partly involves ceasing to deny that some people really do hate her and that she's vulnerable to their hatred.
Love those groovy sixties titles. Mailer does the same thing in Advertisements for Myself; the stories/essays, many of which are really not that good in and of themselves, are made more interesting by his long introductions/postscripts saying here's why I wrote this, here's what I was thinking at the time, I thought it would do x for my career but it did y, it caused a falling out with so-and-so. I would love to see more of that sort of directors' commentary in general.
yeah I love this kind of thing. And honestly it's also nice in a short story collection bc you finish it and you're thinking about it and then there's an afterword either by the author or by a fan of that specific story for you to think with or against.
Not sure how you are with audiobooks, but the Dune on Audible was great. Highly recommended
They don't really work for me, unfortunately ):
SO nostalgic, I had a copy of Dangerous Visions on my bookshelf in high school. I recognize some of the titles but don't really remember any of the stories. I recently reread the original Beggars in Spain novella, with some trepidation, because I remember disliking the novel version, but the original was fine, I thought. Very idealistic.
yeah I liked the novella. I don't know if I'll read the novel.
wow, that is one Substack-ass introduction
I kinda love it tho it's like having walk on music