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Despite much misunderstanding over the past half-dozen years, SF has undergone an explosive growth in both production and consumption, particularly among the members of the pot-rock generation. In perspective, the interest in SF can be seen as part of the natural anxiety about the future of the planet, the same concern that is expressed in such popular songs as In the Year 2525, even Bob Dylan's Talking World War III Blues. Yet many of the most popular SF titles were first published before most of their young readers had cracked Dick and Jane. Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy—about the death, rebirth and struggles of a universal civilization—appeared in the early '50s. Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, a finely tuned tale of the mystical reconstitution of the human race, has gone through 18 printings since 1953. Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, an extraordinary novel even by literary standards, has flourished by word of mouth for a dozen years. Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle, and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles continue to lead long lives in their publishers' backlists.
Unlike many bestselling popular novelists who squint at headlines for topical book ideas, SF writers often prove to be commercially farsighted. Two of the most spectacularly successful SF novels of recent years, Frank Herbert's Dune and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, are good examples of how public concerns and infatuations catch up with the science-fiction imagination. Both books have been extremely popular with youth, which is greatly involved with the power of mysticism and the impieties of earthly industrial civilization.
Stranger, first published in 1961, and Dune (1965) both star messianic heroes who are charged with psychic abilities and Christlike symbolism. Heinlein's Valentine Michael Smith is a 22nd century human born on Mars to space-pioneer parents. He descends to earth, where Heinlein puts him through a Voltairian gavotte full of broad satire at the expense of organized religion, and teaches him strychnic cynicism about human nature. But what makes V. Michael so groovy, outasight, oh wow! etc., is his powers of clairvoyance and telekinesis.
Through a Martian form of megaempathy known as "grokking," Smith comprehends people and situations instantly in all their sensuous complexity. It makes for exceptionally intense religious and sexual experiences. One sophisticated though unsuspecting beauty, who is asked why she fainted after kissing Smith, replies, "When Mike kisses you he isn't doing anything else!" Esalen T-groups frequently use the term grokking in their touch therapy, and Charles Manson seems to have based his "family" on Valentine Michael Smith's circle of friends. He even named an illegitimate son after the Heinlein hero.
Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune, is also well equipped. A superior thought-hypnotist, swordsman (of the old school) and ecologist, he is descended from an ancient line of space migrants whose antitechnology religion is summed up in the commandment, "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul." Set on the nearly waterless planet of Arrakis thousands of years in the future, Dune is a swashbuckling account of how human civilization, as it is now known, is reborn in a desert.