There is a kind of promotional copy for anything science fiction related that’s aiming at a slightly bigger audience and it goes like this: science fiction used to be about muscle-bound heroes shooting bug-eyed aliens and rescuing half-naked babes on war-torn moons in far-flung space, but no more! Or, if you are Margaret Atwood, in an infamous interview that will no doubt show up in at least one obituary, you say, well, I don’t write science fiction, that’s all space squids.1 Often the satirized era here is “Golden Age” science fiction—a stretch we’ll say goes from sometime in the 1930s to sometime in the 1950s2—but in general there is an idea that science fiction was always stupid adventure stories about blasting aliens and scooping up dames right until… well… yesterday.
I date this line to the sixties, though I went hunting for examples to cite to explain why and all the ones I’ve seen have melted into some soup to which I take objection but for which it’s hard to find specific citati…
