[This book of critical essays aims to introduce the radical legacy
of science fiction writing to new audiences.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

DANGEROUS VISIONS AND NEW WORLDS: RADICAL SCIENCE FICTION, 1950 TO
1985  
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Paul Buhle
May 1, 2022
Rain Taxi Review of Books
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_ This book of critical essays aims to introduce the radical legacy
of science fiction writing to new audiences. _

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Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to
1985
Andrew Nette & Iain McIntyre, eds.
PM Press
ISBN: 9781629639321

About a half century ago, my grand aspiration was to become a Science
Fiction writer. It wasn’t a bad idea. The half-dozen or more SF or
SF/Fantasy magazines on the newsstands published hundreds of stories
each month, and the paperback market was similarly booming. Some of
the 35-cent paperbacks tackled serious subjects, like the
commercialization of culture; the more avant-garde writers offered
literary polemics against racism and war. And although I couldn’t
see it, the revolution had only begun. PM Press’s recent anthology
_Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985_
covers the field’s early years with wonderfully sweeping essays and
studies of some of the most illuminating authors and editors of the
field in transformation.

From a radical point of view, the “Futurion Club” of Manhattan,
formed during the Popular Front years of the later 1930s, offered a
beginning. Comprised of mostly Jewish writers, it included Isaac
Asimov (the only genre writer, along with Rod Serling, to have a whole
magazine eventually named after him), but also figures like Donald
Wohlheim, destined to become more influential as editors of SF
magazines and of their own paperback imprint series, and Judith
Merrill, the feminist writer who anticipated so much to come.

One of the astounding and revealing documents in _Dangerous Visions
and New Worlds_ is a reprint of two facing pages of writers for and
against the U.S. invasion of Vietnam. This literal face-off is useful
because it stands for so much more. The audience for magazines and
books, until at least 1960, was considered either juvenile or juvenile
in mind, a similar assumption to that made about comic art and
similarly maddening to more mature creators and fans. Bug Eyed Monster
traditions had been nibbled at the edges by writers who managed to
suggest that encounters with aliens might be a lot more complicated,
or that civilization after a widely anticipated nuclear war might not
rebuild by the same rules, or that the State—even the U.S.
State—might be dangerous for individual liberty. That last point cut
across Left and Right, reaching a rapidly expanding fan base and
offering promise to a relative youngster like Philip K. Dick, an
anti-authoritarian who could seemingly be Left and Right at the same
time.

But another issue had more potency for the Science Fiction of the
1960s and after: Sex. One much-remembered writer, Jose Farmer, had a
global impact on SF authors with his daring plots and suggestive
details. Meanwhile, the judicial repeal of censorship laws offered
cash galore for the small-scale producer as well as for the more
daring movie corporations. One of the most intriguing essays in
_Dangerous Visions and New Worlds_ reveals the creation of soft-core
lines of SF books with circulations in the tens and hundreds of
thousands. This was a boon to enterprising authors who could grind out
lascivious wordage at record speed, including prolific gay authors
such as Larry Townsend. Older readers who shunned sexual material
expressed shock at even muted effects on the mainstream writers and
magazines. Those older readers counted for less and less as the
counterculture advanced, however.

_Dangerous Visions and New Worlds_ is unique in presenting an extended
discussion, through several topical essays and extended comments in
many others, of race, gender, sexuality, and ecological subjects in
these works. The role of Harlan Ellison, editor of the totemic 1967
anthology _Dangerous Visions_ and its successors, was surely crucial
as he opened doors and made things possible. So did the only major
figure of this volume still living and writing today, Black and gay
author Samuel R. Delaney. Also mentioned for her contributions is the
late Ursula Le Guin, whose feminist and antiwar breakthroughs made her
internationally famous, and not only to SF readers. Similarly, Octavia
Butler, whose untimely death at 62 deprived readers and the field of a
Black, feminist writer who had already made large waves, is noted for
her anticipation of Afro-Futurism.

But there is much, much more here. Consider the curious life and role
of Alice Sheldon, married to a CIA chief but in her own mind an
unrealized lesbian with a powerful imagination. She wrote as “James
Tiptree, Jr” for more than thirty years and began to win awards in
the 1970s for stories that mixed sex, drugs, and space exploration.
Sometimes in her fiction, thanks to scientific advancements, men
become entirely unnecessary—a far cry from the Space Westerns of
yesteryear or _Star Wars_ et al.

Considered also in the anthology is the changing shape of prose. Fans
of the fantastic who welcomed a break from the old staidness of form
drew back from literary experimentalism in the genre, which first
began in the UK through the magazine New Worlds. Plots could disappear
into prosy explorations of what language might do in untrammeled
worlds. Old time editors complained, this time with a certain
validity, that the result was fascinating, but perhaps not actually
Science Fiction. Mainstream writers like Joanna Russ, a feminist
notable, seemed at times closer to James Joyce than to Ursula Le Guin.

The SF field at large was transformed again a few years later by
blockbuster films, as if nothing could compete with the themes of the
big screen. The pulps had by that time long since dwindled,
anticipating the near-total collapse to come. _Dangerous Visions and
New Worlds_ happily stays away from post-1985 developments but gives
us ample hints of the better energies and directions of the field’s
evolutions and a clear vision of where it came from in closely viewed
literary terms.

There are many more treats to be found in this volume. The essays in
this collection may lead readers to consider African American author
Joseph Denis Jackson’s forgotten 1967 “insurrectionist” novel,
_The Black Commandos_, or Hank Lopez, the leading Latino spirit in SF.
Likewise, readers might be drawn to reconsider household names, such
as leftwing feminist poet and novelist Marge Piercy and her 1976
classic _Woman on the Edge of Time_.

Le Guin and the best of the others elaborated the simple truth that as
things go on changing drastically, present-day organized society
appears in no way ready to understand them, but if they can be seen to
take place on a different planet and/or in the future, they might be
understood more usefully. Basic human understandings of everything
from gender to economics need to change, to be seen differently, or
society will surely perish.

* U.S literature
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* science fiction
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* radical literature
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* the 1960s
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