Science Fiction Since 1970

SCIENCE FICTION SINCE 1970. Over the course of a half-century, science fiction evolved into five different strands, the New Wave, the neo-Space Opera, Cyberpunk and its various offshoots, postmodernism/magical realism, and Afrofuturism. All shared moments of development and authors, but also grew into distinct, different branches of the genre. Each genre had its share of socialistic creators.

The genre’s more progressive and radical authors had long predicted a possible dark future: capital embracing emerging technologies not in order to better the collective standards of living for humanity, but to generate new, unique and destructive forms of value extraction. Many of the more dystopian authors have long since predicted the current reality: an elite capitalist class ensconced in comfort while the vast majority suffers in the face of economic precarity and ecological calamity.

Literary critic Shannon Davies Mancus thus wrote that “New Wave writers, though they varied in age, were part of a cohort on an ontological precipice. A key part of this shared consciousness shift was the perception that enlightenment era thinking and ‘rational’ politics had failed.” Harlan Ellison, who dedicated his anthology Alone Against Tomorrow (1971) to the students at Kent State shot by National Guard troops the year before, defined the norms of this designation in many ways with his two Dangerous Visions (1967, 1972) anthologies.

Avowed socialist Kim Stanley Robinson, the most important leftwing SciFi writer for a generation, explored topics related to inter-planetary travel and climate change while reintroducing hard science fiction to the genre. Before his literary emergence, Robinson had written a dissertation under the guidance of Marxist critic Fredric Jameson on the writings of Phillip K. Dick. Dick, whose, began his career roughly thirty years earlier, writing for the pulps before branching into novels that were far more innovative and contemplative than the norms of the genre. The Man in the High Castle (1962) envisioned a dystopian nation after a victorious Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan partitioned the United States. A Scanner Darkly (1977) contemplated the carceral and public health methods that a society uses to confront substance abuse.

Ursula K. Le Guin, second only to Robinson, if more anarchist than socialist, had been known for consistent presence in Oregon picket lines and protests for decades, embracing a pacifist-anarchist politics and gender-critical feminism that shone through powerfully in her Hainish (1966-2000) novels. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974) describes the working schematics of an anarcho-communist society. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) broke ground for its manipulation of plastic sex and gender roles. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”(1973) places a critical lens upon the plunder of imperialism and colonialism, offering a reflection upon dissidents from a utopia who abandon their creature comforts upon discovering their joys are dependent upon harming others. The Word for World Is Forest (1972) offers a critique of the US imperial campaigns in Vietnam.

Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, meanwhile, became emblematic of the Afrofuturist project seeking to uphold and celebrate Blackness. Their works also challenged the inherited racist norms of the genre. They brought into the genre an inheritance from antebellum slave narratives as a foundational element of their efforts. By 2020, it was evident that novelist N.K. Jemisin was a prominent, highly regarded heir to these efforts.

Cyberpunk combined a nihilistic critique of neoliberalism, a skeptical moral ambiguity of psychological medication, and the novelty of the world wide web into a potent mix clearly indebted to Old Left detective noir genre conventions. Frederic Jameson described it as “the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.” Over the following decades, cyberpunk (and spin-offs like steampunk, dieselpunk, and biopunk) formed an extremely popular genre world all to itself with a readership and fan base actually creating small-scale model technology.

Science fiction themes and motifs in literature had meanwhile entered the sometimes confused and confusing realms of academic studies. Although Jameson had designated cyberpunk as “the supreme literary expression” of postmodernism, it was impossible to claim that all cyberpunk and its various progeny could be classified as postmodernist. The more they became a mainstream sub-genre, the more the assorted “-punk” projects moved beyond anything resembling postmodernism for the more important goal of commercial appeal. Sci-fi themes themselves also began to migrate into other modes of literature.

Postmodern author Thomas Pynchon’s novels all included sci-fi elements, widely noted in 1973 when his Gravity’s Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award. His Against the Day (2006), a meta-commentary on sci-fi’s history and its intersection with radical politics in America, features pre-World War I anarchists who collaborate with hydrogen airship piloting teams in globe-spanning adventures in formulating an implicitly-contemporary critique of “anti-terrorism” a century later. Among the older writers, Kurt Vonnegut, who began his career in the pulps and graduated into the literary canon with novels such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Cat’s Cradle (1963), found himself a favorite writer of high school and college students by the close of the century. Tony Kushner’s “Gay Fantasia on National Themes” Angels in America (1991), an epic two-part drama about the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, includes angels, psychic journeys, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and a Brechtian script rebutting the neoconservative onslaught. Canadian Margaret Atwood found an unexpected renaissance in the later 2010’s when her feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), about a patriarchal theocracy that relegates women to a feudal procreative utility and a meditation on the Evangelical Christian element of the Reagan coalition, was adapted as a cable television series released shortly after the Presidential inauguration of Donald J. Trump and the historic 2017 Women’s March. Throughout Trump’s four-year term, feminist activists would sport T-shirts and costumes referencing the drama while opposing assaults on reproductive rights and other feminist causes.

Magical realism, which includes fantastic themes and conventions expressed in more subtle, less Romantic methods, had meanwhile emerged as part of the Latin American literary tradition before being absorbed worldwide and in the United States. Writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a close friend of Fidel Castro, and Isabel Allende, niece of slain Chilean president Salvador Allende, became extremely popular in English translation. Toni Morrison, whose first career as an editor at Random House included shepherding the publication of autobiographies by Angela Y. Davis and Muhammad Ali, authored a number of Magical Realist classics that grappled with African American life and politics, including her ghost story Beloved (1987) and the fantastical The Song of Solomon (1977). Other similar instances of this sort of osmosis can be seen in the poetry of Anne Boyer, an adamant Marxist who contemplated the “dismal science” in conjunction with her own health struggles.

The continual growth of the Young Adult subgenre, thanks in no small part to the success of the Harry Potter fantasy series and its imitators, also included a large staple of socially critical science fiction novels, such as the dystopian Hunger Games (2008-2020). An auxiliary took the form of an explosion in popularity of graphic novels, including compendiums of earlier standard comic books as well as newer original narratives, often critical if rarely outright socialistic.

By the twenty-first century’s second decade, multiculturalism and feminist ethics infused the genre with a distinctly new forecast, the impending impacts of cataclysmic global warming. A significant theme not only of outright dystopias but any texts dealing with the future, envisioned a world where coastal flooding, food depletion due to crop loss, and social consequences of these developments play across the screen. Remaining pulp magazines, such as Asimov’s and Analog, regularly featured authors who include these themes in their imaginings. Ecological, quasi-socialistic themes continued to grow in prominence, including pleas for egalitarian principles and radical emancipatory redistribution as the basic resources, while habitable land, potable water, and food supplies decrease exponentially.

The field of Science Fiction meanwhile confronted the digital paradigm and the refoundation of text distribution networks. If the internet was originally formulated in science fiction terms, the systems of publication and distribution, like all text genre, encountered an adaptation challenge, with a large fraction of the industry arrested in analog traditions. The web-based magazine Clarkesworld, founded in 2006, explored a subscription paradigm heavily-dependent upon the e-book format with print issues as an auxiliary functions. Multiple periodicals embraced the free podcasting system as a method of distribution.

Butler, Andrew M. “Riding the New Wave.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 323–337.

Graeber, David. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Melville House Publishing, 2016.

Higgins, David M. “New Wave Science Fiction and the Vietnam War.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 415–433.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.

Konstantinou, Lee. “Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction: Why Can’t We Move Past Cyberpunk?” Slate Magazine, 15 Jan. 2019, slate.com/technology/2019/01/hopepunk-cyberpunk-solarpunk-science-fiction-broken.html.