Sixties Science Fiction

Kali Tal (Kali.Tal@yale.edu)
Mon, 16 Sep 1996 09:54:13 -0400

Ron Jacobs mentions a science fiction novel which was one of my favorites at
the time it was written:

>Anderson, Chester; The Butterfly Kid

(Ron, did you know there was a sequel, called _The Unicorn Girl_, written by
Michael Kurland, who was Michael the Theodore Bear in Anderson's text?)

Nobody has been talking at all about Sixties and Seventies science fiction.
Quite a bit of the science/speculative fiction of that period was about the
Viet Nam war and/or the counterculture. Off-hand, I can think of quite a
few SF writers whose work in those decades would be interesting to those of
us who study the Sixties.

In addition to _The Butterfly Kid_ (a Greenwich village extravaganza),
check out Sam Delaney's _Fall of the Towers_, Marge Piercy's _Dance the
Eagle to Sleep_, Joe Haldeman's _The Forever War_, Tom Disch's _Camp
Concentration_, Kit Reed, just about anything by Kate Wilhelm and Ursula K.
LeGuin during that period, *lots* of stuff by Harlan Ellison (who was also
writing "The Glass Teat" column on tv culture for the _Village Voice_ in
those years), Theodore Sturgeon, Cordwainer Smith (whose stuff was *all*
about race), and so on. Sorry I don't have a better list at the moment, but
all my SF books are boxed up right now and I can't go browse and drag out
more examples.

(The Viet Nam war connection in SF continues to the present. Right now I'm
reading a [not very good] book by fantasy writer Mary Gentle called
_Grunts_, which is about orcs with M-16s. Go figure.)

Maybe one day when I can pull my SF books out (about 5,000 of them), and
spend some time going through them, I'll compile a Sixties SF bibliography....

Kali

Kali Tal
Sixties Project & Viet Nam Generation, Inc.
PO Box 13746, Tucson, AZ 85732-3746
kali.tal@yale.edu
Sixties Project: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/sixties/