Abstract
Despite gains of maturity and stylistics in the 1940s and especially 1950s, with writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, it was not until the 1960s that sf gained its footing as a genuinely literary form of imaginative storytelling, even if it adopted raffish craziness in the oracular work of Philip K. Dick and his peers.
The words we think seem to hover in some insubstantial interface wherein we understand neither the origins of the symbol-signs that seem to express our desires nor the destinations wherein they lead to actions and accomplishments. This is why words and images seem so magical: they work without our knowing how or why.
Marvin Minsky , 1988, p. 196
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Notes
- 1.
Both these stories are collected in Aldiss’s The Airs of Earth, New English Library, 1975, to which the cited page numbers refer.
- 2.
One small defect in this Monty Python merriment is Aldiss’s apparent belief that “nates” rhymes with “mates,” whereas this medical word for “buttocks” is actually pronounced ˈnā-ˌtēz.
- 3.
John Clute, “Josephine Saxton,” Encyclopedia of Fantasy, online at http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=saxton_josephine
- 4.
Stanislaw Lem, “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” trans. Robert Abernathy, “Science Fiction Studies,” # 5 Volume 2, Part 1, March 1975, https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
- 5.
I dealt with the psi component often found in Dick’s fiction in my Psience Fiction (2018, chapter 31), so will not repeat that here.
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Broderick, D. (2018). Entering the Mainstream. In: Consciousness and Science Fiction. Science and Fiction. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00599-3_6
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