(3 of 3)
Like most science fiction, Stranger and Dune are conceptually rich. This is especially true of Dune, which has 541 pages crammed with the canned fruits of Herbert's researches into ecology, desert cultures and history. There are even extensive appendices outlining the soil growth and planting schedules that Atreides projected for his centuries-long ecological project to make Arrakis bloom.
Heinlein, 63, is generally acknowledged to have revolutionized American SF more than 30 years ago, by raising both its idea quotient and its writing level. At the time, the field was mainly influenced by the hard-core gadget stories made popular in Hugo Gernsback's magazine Amazing Stories. In 1956, Heinlein suggested that the term science fiction should be changed to speculative fiction in order to include its new dimensions. Today, though, a growing number of younger SF writers are insisting that a post-Heinlein period is long overdue.
One of the best of the younger SF writers is Samuel R. Delany, a 28-year-old New Yorker whose novels, The Einstein Intersection and Babel-17 won Science Fiction Writers awards in 1966 and 1967. Together with last year's Nova, a space saga that suggests Moby Dick at a strobe-light show, they are not only admired by his professional peers but are also popular successes. Delany has a grasp of the evolutionary nature of mythology, a subtle comic touch and a lyric sense of the outsider making his unorthodox way in the world—or worlds—that give his work a dimension unusual in science fiction.
Comparable qualities can be found in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration, James Blish's A Case of Conscience and Robert Silverberg's Night Wings, as well as Joanna Russ's And Chaos Died, an amusing tour de force about a sophisticated homosexual encounter with a telepathic civilization. Miss Russ, incidentally, teaches science-fiction writing at Cornell University, one of the 70 colleges across the country that now offer such courses.
The upswing of academic interest in the subject has lately tended to give science fiction a new "literary" class in much the same way that the movies became cinema and jazz graduated from speakeasies to the Philharmonic, where it is now parsed by critics. In theory, this development should delight SF writers. But Judy-Lynn Benjamin, managing editor of Galaxy, an SF monthly, sees a certain resultant deterioration in the tools of the SF trade. "Young writers," she says, "are often more interested in symbols than in stories. Plot is out. Characters are out. All they want is the Big Experience."
Still, the demand for science fiction is creating a sellers' market and attracting more and more young talent. By the law of averages, some of these new writers will be good enough to make the terms science fiction and speculative fiction irrelevant.