Ken MacLeod has written a post about his perceptions of science fiction in the seventies and how wrong they are in hindsight. He also discusses the impact the science fiction of that period, from just after the New Wave movement had collapsed to sometime before Cyberpunk got going. Common wisdom has it this period was something of a wasteland, yet
MacLeod is able to name a long list of classic science fiction novels from that period, which have clearly
influenced modern science fiction as much if not more so as the New Wave and cyberpunk movements did. So what’s going on here? One reason this period is so maligned might have been because the influencial voices of the time were so critical themselves:

They contain some of my favourite stories from the time, and many that I loathed, but the main thing
that has stuck in my mind from them is the criticism, largely by John Clute and M. John Harrison. At
the time I enjoyed it. I still do, in a way. But what strikes me, on re-reading, is how negative it was.
Harrison, in particular, has with very rare exceptions (Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, Arthur Sellings’
Junk Day) not a good word to say about anything published as SF. It’s a tellingly selective range that he targets. Most of the books he notices are now forgotten, and were marginal at the time. (Colin Wilson’s The Black Room, anyone?) Those that weren’t (e.g. Tau Zero) are lined up to have their cardboard characters kicked and their clunky dialogue ridiculed. Their specifically science-fictional strengths – and come on, a competent book about travelling at relativistic velocities to the end of the universe has to have some science-fictional strengths – are passed over with a yawn. It’s like reading SF criticism by someone who despised SF; who just didn’t see the point of SF’s existence in the first place.

I’ve seen that attitude elsewhere as well; in the various anthologies people like Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison put together, a rock hard conviction that the best times for the genre lie in the past. It is even visible in the 1979 edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, where the focus again seems to be on past glories rather than contemporary developments. Compare it with the 1992 edition, which is far more optimistic and much broader.

But what made people so pessimistic? Charlie Stross, in that post of his I refered to earlier, has argued that in the UK at least, this was a period in which the “retreat from empire” as Stross calls it, hit the UK hard and that this worked through in the science fiction of the period. Certainly, much science fiction from that period is extremely gloomy, but then British science fiction has always been more pessimistic than US science fiction; just compare H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds with Garret P. Servis’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

I think there were two developments within the genre itself, that helped caused this impression that nothing good was happening in science fiction. The first and most important development is that this is the exact period where science fiction transformed from a genre based on the short form (short story, novelletes, novellas) to one in which the novel (and ever longer novels) reigned supreme. A side effect of this was the sidelining of the sf magazines (and one of the biggest magazines, Galaxy would not survive the decade).

The people who were influential in the genre at the time were people who grew up with the short story as the heart of science fiction and with less short stories published, with quite a few writers unable to make the jump from short story to novel, with the quality of the short story dropping as writers started to care less about them, no wonder people were so gloomy about the future of the genre.

The second development was the crashing of the New Wave, especially in the US, where it degenerated into decadence for a great part. There was no movement in the seventies on the scale of the New Wave in the sixties and Cyberpunk in the eighties to give form to science fiction, to enthusiase people. The biggest candidate, feminist science fiction, sort of died stillborn for all sorts of reasons (anti-feminist backlash, still inbred sexism of the field, etc.). Without a schema to fit them into, it becomes more difficult for people to see the forest for the trees.

There’s also an element of revisionist history in the common widsom of the seventies as stagnant, dating back to at least the propaganda of the Cyberpunk gurus (Bruce Sterling, I’m looking at you) or even the militant rightwingers of the mid-late seventies (Jerry Pournelle in particular…) The early seventies were an amazing fertile time for alternative science fiction, politicised science fiction, left wing science fiction and modern science fiction, certainly in America, is overwhelmingly rightwing in most of its attitudes.