TI02 5 Foundational SF Authors You've Never Heard Of

Welcome to the Tech Imaginarium. Join us as we explore how science fiction made the modern world. Hi there, I'm John Helmer and I'm here with my co-host and science fiction maven, Ezri Karlabach.

Hello.

Maven means that Ezri knows everything there is to know about science fiction. Now, last time we were celebrating the centenary of Amazing Stories, the magazine that in 1926 gave science fiction its name, identity, and arguably its whole reason for existing. And in doing so, we spent quite a bit of time with the big names— Wells, Vernon, Poe, the Mount Rushmore of the genre. This time we're going somewhere different because one of the things that makes science fiction interesting, not just as entertainment, but as a window on thought and culture, to be grand, is its shadow canon. Writers who don't make the syllabus, don't sell out on Amazon, don't get Hollywood adaptations or Netflix series. Well, in one case, one of the authors we're talking about today, they got a very good Hollywood adaptation, but it was really quite late in the day. We talk about writers who were doing things with the form that the mainstream didn't quite know what to do with. And we're skipping a few decades here from 1926, talking about feminist science fiction, satirical science fiction, dystopian science fiction set in a Britain that was going to the dogs. And it's still going to the dogs if you believe what you see on X. Ezri, you've picked 5 of these authors, so I'll start with the obvious question. Why these 5? What's the thread that connects them?

I think to pick up that thread, we need to look a bit at what happened between the April 1926 launch of Amazing and the period when these 5 were at their creative peak, sort of late '60s to the mid-'70s. And as you said, the first issue of Amazing Stories included SF's Mount Rushmore figures of the day, but also 3 less-known authors who nevertheless wrote about themes that are still common: encounters with aliens, trips to outer space, and so on. I think by the 1960s, the world had obviously changed, and SF was changing too. It had become well known as a genre internationally, certainly in the so-called advanced industrial economies. But according to the author and critic Kingsley Amis, SF was still mostly written by white American men for white American and British boys to read. So a big part of our connecting thread is the rise of British and of women science fiction authors, as we'll see in a moment. In 1960, Amis did make a decent stab at defining science fiction in his book New Maps of Hell, although he did it in a very writerly fashion. Science fiction, he wrote, is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology or pseudoscience or pseudo-technology. It's a bit of a mouthful, but we have to give Amis credit for going on to say, "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." That's very Kingsley Amis, that sentence. It is indeed. So is the whole definition. But it was also quite a spur, I think, for people who did want to change things. When Amis was writing, the big three in SF weren't literary giants like Wells, Poe, and Verne. The new big three were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. A biochemist, and two engineers. But the importance of, you know, their work to the development of science fiction can't be overstated. Yet more diverse voices were beginning to make themselves heard. Some, like Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delany, gained global fame. Delany was the first Black author to win the prestigious Nebula Award in 1967. The following year, Anne McCaffrey became the first woman to win it. Opening the door for many other women, including Ursula Le Guin, who went on to win 4 Nebulas. Le Guin and Delany, both Americans, of course, came to prominence around the same time as the so-called New Wave of SF writers, and sometimes they even get included in that group. A New Wave SF emerged from the sense of disillusionment felt by many in the late '50s and early '60s, when people were still really dealing with the traumas of World War II. But also becoming increasingly skeptical of the technological boosterism and frequent sexism that characterized mainstream SF. The term New Wave first appeared in 1961 in a piece for Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine by an American critic called P. Skyler Miller, and he applied it specifically to British writers. The New Wave quickly gained wide recognition, particularly once Michael Moorcock had taken over the editorship of New Worlds in 1964. And New Worlds was already a well- established mainstream SF magazine. But Moorcock set out with the aim of breaking down the barriers between science fiction and other literary forms, and he encouraged writers to experiment in every possible direction, in both form and content, with influences like surrealist art, pop culture, psychoanalysis, and radical politics. Of course, Moorcock holds a singular position in the history of English literature, and we should add rock music. Given his famous collaboration with the space rock band Hawkwind.

Hawkwind.

And his own band, The Deep Thicks. Yeah. You can't knock a bit of space rock, John. It's great when you're working.

Esre, you've already astounded me. I didn't expect us to go to Kingsley Amis and then Hawkwind, but carry on.

Ah, well, that's the new wave for you. We're going to go into weirder places as well. It was another British author, J.G. Ballard, who provided, I think, the most succinct explanation of new wave sensibility. Writing in New Worlds, Ballard declared he was more interested in inner space than outer space. He was drawn to the psychological processes around the changing relationship between humans and technology, and that was visible in everything from the CND campaigns of the 1950s to Harold Wilson's famous White Heat of Technology speech in 1963. Technology was supposed to improve the lot of humanity, but all too often seemed to be doing the opposite. Inspired by this paradox, Ballard articulated the disconnect between technological needs and human needs. His stories often quite brutally reveal how, instead of serving our needs, technology transforms them, often in unexpected and deeply pathological ways. And if you've read the novels Crash or High-Rise or seen the movie adaptations of them, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. In the same New Worlds article, Ballard said, "The first true SF story, and one I intend to write myself if no one else will, is about a man with amnesia lying on a beach and looking at a rusty bicycle wheel, trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them." Now, that would make a great movie, I think. We could devote a whole series just to Ballard, never mind an episode, because his contributions extend far beyond new wave SF. But we're going to focus instead on this group of writers people may not be familiar with. As you said, John, these five pioneered science fiction written from different perspectives: feminist, satirical, dystopian, and they stretched the boundaries of what we call SF pretty much to breaking point.

So before we get into the detail here, I just wanna give a bit of scientific context. We've got a spread of authors here really going from the '60s, '70s, and into the '80s. But I'm going to take quite arbitrarily 19— well, not arbitrarily at all, really. I'm going to take '69 as a kind of hinge point. What was happening in science and society in '69? We talked last episode about the science in 1926, the terror it produced, the bewildering weirdness of quantum physics, but also the excitement, the feeling that there was a vast universe out there that we were just discovering full of stars and planets that we might one day travel to. By '69, it might have seemed that at least a particle of that big, expansive surmise had quite gobsmackingly become a reality. That summer, I was a small boy staying at a rather downmarket holiday camp in Somerset called, I think it was called Breen Sands. Well, I was at Pontins, not Butlins, because Butlins was a bit too working class for my dad. So that summer, while I was a small boy, staying at this holiday camp, I watched an American called Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, on the effing moon. Robert Goddard's dream, the one that had started, remember, with him as a boy up a cherry tree staring at the sky, had come true. The rockets that he had built the first prototypes of actually worked. They'd left Earth's gravity, which some people at the time Goddard was active said couldn't be done. And we'd now reached another planet. We were on the cusp of a new era, it seemed. Everybody was saying that, the Space Age. And yet the rest of the news was not so great. '68 brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the Prague Spring crushed by Soviet tanks, the Paris événement. Here we go again, Helmer mispronouncing French words. The shadow of Soissons-Huit that spread across the world. I knew I said I wasn't going to do it, but I just can't help myself. 1969 also gave us Altamont, where the hippie dreams of Woodstock turned sour. The world was simultaneously pulling off the most extraordinary scientific achievement in human history and tearing itself a new one politically and sociologically. Meanwhile, the first wave of environmental science was breaking over public consciousness. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had come out in '62. At this time, the environmental fears were more about visible things like pollution, pesticides in the food chain, smog, rivers catching fire, that sort of thing. It was the beginning of a movement that of course would eventually grow into something much larger as further scientific discoveries revealed a truly existential risk for humanity in climate change. A good time to think about leaving the planet behind perhaps.

As some are, yeah.

People talk even more about that now. So, you know, this stuff is really contemporary. It was not, in other words, a moment that lent itself to techno-optimism. And that's interesting because you mentioned the big three, Asimov, in my book at least, we might have to drill into this a bit more. In my book, he's a techno-optimist. And it's interesting the contrast between Asimov and Sladek, which we'll get to. But all of this raises the question, Ezri, what happens to science fiction when the future starts to look more frightening rather than exciting.

Yeah, it's a kind of chicken and egg question. Does SF respond when the future turns frightening, or did the future turn frightening in response to what science fiction writers are doing? It's a debate worth having, um, I think. But the central point for our discussion today is the realization, maybe belatedly, that science fiction could not and cannot avoid politics. Not by imagining past it like Star Trek did, to a future where racism is a distant memory and technology has made capitalism completely frictionless, and not by being cleverly ambiguous like Robert Heinlein in many of his novels. I take Starship Troopers, for instance. Is this a critique of militarist imperialism or an endorsement of fascism? It, you know, it can be read either way. So that's more or less what happened towards the end of the '60s. Politics reared up its ugly head again, and almost nowhere was safe from it because of the pace of globalization.— or to be precise, safe from the two kinds of politics and the dynamic between them. That's not a new dynamic, but in the late '60s it felt increasingly out of kilter, and often in ways that were hard to pin down and define, let alone deal with. And the best description of these two kinds of politics is to be found, naturally, in a science fiction book, a 1974 anthology of short stories and poems entitled Bad Moon Rising, taken of course from the Creedence Clearwater Revival song. Great record. Um, it's a great record, yes. And, um, you know, the book, it was dealing with that growing sense of fear of the future and the dystopian wave that was sweeping through social and political, economic arenas. And the publication of the book was prompted by a simple observation. The future is, or appeared to be, getting worse. What are science fiction writers saying? So in his introduction, the book's editor, Thomas M. Dish, an American SF author who was very much aligned with the New Wave, describes those two kinds of politics in a way that I think resonates today. The first type, he says, is the ideal type of politics stemming from our imaginative capabilities, um, and typically presenting the world in simple opposites: north and south, left and right, them and us, good and evil.. And Disch calls the second type of politics the art of the possible, the politics that draws on our pragmatic capabilities of negotiation and compromise. But rather than seeing these two as incompatible, Disch says they are necessary to each other if we want to achieve genuine progress. If all things are perceived as either black or white, he wrote, one is soon reduced to a sterile, despairing fanaticism, whether of the left or the right. And then to terrorism and/or suicide. Yet in a fog of varying shades of gray, one may muddle from one expedient to another until one stumbles into the devil only knows what horrors. He goes on to claim that all writing about political futures is thus by definition science fiction. And that's maybe why, at least partly, New Wave writers claimed speculative fiction as the real meaning of the initials SF, although ironically, the term speculative fiction was actually coined by Robert Heinlein in 1947.

Hm.

Um, two of the five authors we are featuring today wrote stories for the Bad Moon Rising anthology, Kate Wilhelm and John Sladek. And before we dig into the five in more detail, I'd love to share an outline of Sladek's story. Called The Great Wall of Mexico, It's set in a near-future America where a businessman with no political experience gets elected president by promising to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Its purpose is, so he claims, to keep out rapists and drug dealers. However, an FBI investigation reveals that it's actually a real estate scam. The story ends, and a spoiler alert here, with the accidental nuking of American retirement communities built near the wall by the president's family business. In a televised address, the president regrets the millions of deaths while stressing the extra protection created by the radioactive fallout along the border. And to a background of music from Disney movies, the president declares, "The future is ours, my countrymen. We will rebuild our wall taller and stronger and safer than ever, so secure that it will last a thousand years. Come, "Help me make this country strong." Now, whether he was wearing a baseball cap bearing that slogan is not mentioned. It is tempting to call a story like that prescient. Remember, it was written in 1974. A word that comes up again and again when we look at the work of these 5 authors from that period, roughly '68 to '76. And it gets to the heart of my interest in them. It's why I think they're important to read now, not just for entertainment, although they can be very entertaining., but for genuine insight. And if we pay close enough attention, maybe some helpful warnings as well.

So let's dig into the authors that you've chosen for us today, Esri. Starting with Kate Wilhelm, 1928 to 2018. Died fairly recently. Kate Wilhelm was born in Ohio in 1928 and over 5 decades wrote science fiction, mystery fiction, and speculative fiction. She won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus. Basically, she cleaned up on the awards front. But is she anything like as well known these days as Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke? Sadly not. Wilhelm was also a co-founder of the Clarion Writers Workshop, which trained more science fiction writers than possibly any other institution on Earth. And despite winning SF's top prizes, she's now better known as a mystery writer. She had two completely separate careers running simultaneously in two different genres. Overachiever. Her big SF novel for our purposes is Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang. Cloning, post-apocalypse, a question of what individuality means. Ezri, I want to ask you, in a genre that was in 1976 still pretty male-dominated and as you said, pretty sexist, what was it like for a woman to be writing this kind of book and winning prizes with it?

Hmm. Uh, well, I should preface these comments by acknowledging that I can only know the experience of women writers vicariously, of course, by reading their work and reading about their lives. And also, we shouldn't overlook the fact that the first great SF novel, and arguably the greatest of them all, was written by a woman, Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein back in 1818. Um, and as you may remember, when we discussed amazing stories last time, women writers have been active in SF throughout its history. But what changed in the '60s, I think, was their growing willingness to write intentionally from a female perspective, albeit to varying degrees, within the context of the SF genre. So while you had somebody like Isaac Asimov rejecting even the idea that SF writers should be concerned with characters and their inner world, Kate Wilhelm was able to write great science fiction that had well-drawn characters dealing with a range of psychological, moral, and philosophical challenges. Her short stories started appearing in science fiction magazines from 1956, although, as you mentioned, her first book, published in '63, was a mystery novel. In 1968, she won a Nebula Award for her short story "The Planners," which features a behavioral scientist who injects himself with an intelligence-boosting substance developed for use on chimpanzees. With, of course, unintended consequences. An idea that you can see in the 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I don't know if the Rise of the Planet of the Apes screenwriter, Rick Jaffa, knew Wilhelm's story, but it's entirely possible. Her influence runs deep, even if unacknowledged, despite the visibility that she gained as a woman in the world of SF. Wilhelm was one of the new voices that were transforming science fiction by focusing on human relationships, and the interaction of those relationships with actual or imagined technologies. Where Late the Sweet Bird Sang is her most important science fiction novel, and having it published in 1976 by literary publisher Harper Row rather than by one of the genre publishers was a major development. It helped the book to get noticed by mainstream reviewers, leading to critical acclaim and positive media coverage. But Kate Wilhelm made no compromises in terms of the science-fictional nature of the story. Set in a future long after a nuclear and environmental apocalypse, human fertility is rapidly disappearing, and one community turns to cloning to ensure its continued survival. While the clones replicate the bodies of community members, they lack their essential humanity, and relations between clones and humans begin to sour. As you mentioned, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang won multiple awards, the Hugo, the Locus Award, the Jupiter Award, shortlisted for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and also for the Nebulas. And as you also mentioned, Kate Wilhelm devoted a great deal of her time and energy to helping other writers, men and women alike. She co-founded the Clarion Science and Fiction— sorry, Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop with her second husband, the SF writer and anthologist Damon Knight. And he also co-founded the Milford Series of writers' workshops, which were held at the Knight-Wilhelm Home in Milford, Pennsylvania. The 1966 Milford cohort included a young writer named Joanna Russ.

Aha. Before we move on to Joanna Russ, um, just to say, cloning is interesting because it was very big. It was big in the '70s. We heard a lot about it, and there was speculative fiction written about it. But it's one of those things —those things that kind of, apart from maybe in biochemistry, you know, didn't really catch on, you think?

Well, the technology proved trickier than it might have initially been seen as. We did eventually get Dolly the sheep, if you remember, in the 1990s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in theory, it is possible to extrapolate from that technology to the cloning of a human, but there obviously are enormous ethical issues, but I think probably still technical barriers that haven't been overcome to the cloning of humans, unless it's already been done and we just haven't been told, which is another science fictional type of idea. And of course we did get the great slogan from that period, you're never alone with a clone.

I've never heard that one. I mean, this is great age of sort of badges and stuff. Exactly. Was that a badge or a bumper sticker?

It was a badge and a bumper sticker along with my other favourite from that era, support peace or I'll kill you.

Yeah, okay. Let's move on to our next author. Joanna Russ was born in the Bronx in 1937. '77, died 2011, studied English at Cornell where one of her tutors was Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite authors, which is quite a tutorial group. And she got her MFA from Yale. She spent her career as an English professor while simultaneously writing some of the most formally radical science fiction of the 20th century. Her 1975 novel, The Female Man, follows 4 versions of the same woman across 4 parallel universes, each universe defined defined by a different relationship between men and women. But actually, it's just occurred to me, is Virginia Woolf's Orlando a science fiction novel?

Yes. And again, this is one of the endless discussions. If a literary writer writes science fiction, is it science fiction in the way that it is when a genre writer writes it, or is it something else? And, you know, Ishiguro and others have written, Ian McEwan, and obviously famously Margaret Atwood with The Handmaid's Tale. They're all serious literary writers, but they have written science fiction, no question.

Okay, so back to Joanna Russ. She also wrote How to Suppress Women's Writing, which is exactly what it sounds like, a forensic examination of the ways literary cultures systematically erased women's work. Didn't exile entirely succeed in her case. She's still in print, though arguably much less well-known than she should be. Fun fact: as a high school student, Russ was one of the top 10 finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a nationwide US science competition. She had the mind for hard science. She chose literature instead. Esri, The Female Man was actually written in 1970 but didn't find a publisher till 1975. 5 years in a drawer. What does that tell us about whether science fiction world was that.

I think it says a lot about the ongoing struggle women had to get taken seriously, whether they were writing the uncontroversial, you know, bug-eyed monsters or space opera type of story, let alone radical feminist SF. Joanna Russ had begun writing at a very young age, turning out the wonderfully titled Thoughts of a Deluded Scientist when she was just 12. And around the same age, with the encouragement of book-loving parents, She picked up both an anthology of SF stories and a physics textbook, leading, as you said, to her abilities in science as well as literature. Sadly, though, her parents' relationship deteriorated after her father became seriously ill, and Russ's adolescence was marked by the realization that while men were so powerful in the world, they could feel so profoundly threatened by women who showed intelligence and claimed their independence. In science fiction and fantasy stories, Russ saw a route to a world of broader horizons, other possibilities. But obstacles soon arose. In 1960, when she received her master's in fine art from Yale, she adapted J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit for the stage. And doing the right thing, she sought permission to have it performed and sent Tolkien the manuscript. He returned it with dismissive comments scribbled throughout, calling it a mistaken attempt to turn certain episodes of The Hobbit into a sub-Disney farce for rather silly children. And Russ just merely wrote, noted on the title page, Tolkien didn't like it, wouldn't let it be publicly performed, and shoved it in a drawer where it stayed unknown until after she died in 2011. Whatever Tolkien's reasons for that kind of harsh response, it was indicative of a post-war environment, particularly in America, in which repressive gender roles were back with a vengeance. You know, the sort of, stereotypical white picket fence around a house where the woman is the mother and the man commutes to the big city to work. As Russ's biographer, Gwyneth Jones, notes, "Female graduates were not expected to have academic or literary careers, but to become faculty wives." And maybe Russ didn't set out to write feminist science fiction, but her experiences, both in academia and the science fiction world, made it inevitable. As you mentioned, she completed The Female Man by the end of 1970 after attending a groundbreaking conference on feminism at Cornell in 1969. But she shoved it in the drawer while she wrote essays on women in literature and an increasingly political book reviews column for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. And her reviews are very interesting. They're, I think, pretty much all available online because she laid bare the problems that writers, male and female, faced in trying to genuinely create new images of gender or family roles and responsibilities, or even gender equality. There are plenty of images of women in science fiction, Russ wrote. There are hardly any women. She was still publishing short stories as well, many of which overtly or otherwise were related to the characters and themes of The Female Man. The novel itself, as you said, has a parallel worlds plot, and Russ knew about the many worlds theory in quantum mechanics. From her continued scientific reading. The novel is about four women, all with similarities to Russ herself in various ways, who interact across time and space. But in a way, the central role is taken not by a woman, but the all-women society on the planet of Whileaway. Russ provides detailed descriptions of life on Whileaway, and if it's not exactly a manifesto for a feminist utopia, it certainly presents a coherent alternative social structure The Female Man is a complex and demanding novel, totally unlike anything that science fiction had produced to that point. To quote Gwyneth Jones again, there is only one character the writer deconstructed. There is only one story: how she came to embrace radical feminism while retaining a feminine past still living inside her, whose alter ego is a fury of repressed rage and a present identity as a battle-weary female academic and writer goaded by incessant sexism, whose alter ego lives in a future cleansed of gender role dominance. Russ anticipated that the science fiction community would find her book difficult and tried to get a literary publisher to take it. None would. Eventually, after 5 years, it was accepted by Bantam, who put science fiction writer Frederick Pohl in charge of its science fiction list, and he immediately saw the worth of the book. It was, as expected, denounced by critics as shrill, man-hating, not a real SF novel, even not a novel at all. But actually, readers thought otherwise, and The Female Man was a commercial success, selling more than half a million copies within 10 years. Sadly, that kind of success eluded our next author, of whom Locus Magazine said, "For humor of the very blackest dye." John Sladek has no peer.

Cautionary tale there with that last author. I wonder, you know, if we compared her play of The Hobbit to the 3-part film that was recently made of it with Martin Freeman in it, if it'd be all that different. Very sad. Anyway, let's move on to John Sladek. John Sladek was born in Iowa in 1937, died in 2000. He was born in the same year as Joanna Russ, a direct contemporary as it happens. And in 1966, he moved to England, which turned out to be exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Swinging London, Beatles, Stones, Dylan, psychedelic drugs, gear fab. He fell in with Michael Moorcock's New Worlds crowd that you've mentioned, Ballard, Moorcock, Thomas Disch, the British New Wave. He was regarded by people who knew the field as one of the funniest, sharpest satirists it had produced. His 1983 novel Tick Tock, which I'm reading at the moment, features a robot whose Asimov circuits, the built-in ethical constraints that are supposed to stop robots harming humans, have simply stopped working. The robot becomes a sociopath, to put it mildly. Psychopath might be nearer the mark. It won the BSFA Award for Best Novel And if all that isn't eerily prescient enough for you, under the pseudonym James Voch, Zadek wrote a straight-faced nonfiction book arguing for the existence of a 13th sign of the zodiac suppressed by the scientific establishment. His explicit aim was to demonstrate that people will believe anything if you present it with enough confidence. It worked. Fake news. The book sold well. Fake news continues to sell well in 2026, probably better than ever. So an interesting experiment that I actually I actually have a vague memory of somebody telling me there were 13 signs in the zodiac now way back. So I mean, it got into the public consciousness and it was a deliberate kind of, a deliberate trope. On the subject of Slaadec's TikTok though, this author wasn't of course the first person to think about what happens when the rules governing robots break down. That honor belongs to Asimov, of course, whose robot stories from the 1940s collected in I, Robot in 1950 posed exactly that question. It's a really interesting comparison, I think, Esri, reading I, Robot and reading Sładek at the same time. Asimov's three laws are essentially an exercise in robot ethics. If we build those safeguards, can we trust them? Very timely that now. His stories brilliantly showed how the laws could produce unexpected, sometimes alarming results, even when they were working correctly. What Slaadec did in Tick Tock was take that a step further and ask the darker question: what if the safeguards simply fail? What if the Asimov circuits go on the blink? We'll be getting into Asimov and the Robot Laws in our very next episode, so we'll save the deep dive till then. But Esri, how does Slaadec's version of the question differ from Asimov's, and what does that show about how SF had changed? Mm.

Well, Sladek was a master of absurdity. He reminds me more of Spike Milligan than Isaac Asimov. He satirized people, systems, and ideas, and without fear or favor, he lampooned his own work with as much vigor as he did the work of other science fiction writers, and especially writers of pseudoscience.

He actually makes me think of Thomas Pynchon.

Yeah, there are similarities. Yeah. And you know, his book Arachne Rising, which you mentioned, the fake book about the 13th sign of the zodiac, was maybe inspired is the wrong word, but he was infuriated by people like Erich von Däniken, you know, Immanuel Velikovsky and his crazy comet theories, L. Ron Hubbard and so on. Graham Hancock. Yeah, there are many, there are many writers of pseudoscience, they were called. Um, in 1972, Sladek wrote an essay on specifically on the relationship between science fiction and pseudoscience because Jonathan Miller, the, you know, famous polymath theater director and writer and everything else, had said on national TV that science fiction is pseudoscience plus bad writing. Um, and Sladek noted that they do start with the same what-if question, but whereas SF uses it to make you think, pseudosciences use it to tell you what to think. And like most of us drawn to SF in one way or another, Sladek was fascinated by robots and the notion of machine intelligence. Asimov, of course, coined the term robotics and came up with the famous three laws. So he saw robots really as helpers, friends, and even lovers, potentially aspiring to the humanity of their makers. Good example is the robot played by Robin Williams in the movie adaptation of Asimov's story, The Bicentennial Man. Sladek, on the other hand, while he saw them as interesting, thought they were dangerous precisely because they might aspire to the humanity of their makers. And he was influenced by great satirical writers like Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and Tobias Smollett, and said that his creation of the homicidal robot TikTok was inspired by the story of Jonathan Wild, a notorious 18th 17th-century criminal. Henry Fielding had fictionalized the life of Wild in his 1743 novel, The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild. And he'd done it as a parody of that literary fashion to present stories as histories rather than fiction. The real Jonathan Wild was a cruel and ruthless man, the leader of a violent criminal gang, who at the same time knew how to manipulate the legal system, something that Fielding used to draw parallels between criminals and politicians. In Sladek's novel Tick Tock, the eponymous robot's Asimov circuits, as we've heard, designed according to Asimov's three laws to ensure its behavior is safe, are initially described as being fine. But after he murders a little girl and disposes of the evidence, he reflects on what happened. A freak fault in the Asimov circuits, he wonders. Or maybe I just outgrew those crude restraints. Tick Tock's trajectory takes him from robot junkyard to the brink of the White House. Despite the copious amounts of blood on his hands, his predicament gives rise to a popular rights for robots campaign that makes him actually a desirable running mate for an unscrupulous presidential candidate. Incidentally, we already heard that, um, Sladek wrote a short story strangely prescient of a present, if you like, an American president. And in 1970, his novel The Motherfucker Effect is set in a dystopian near-future America where a hack actor named Ronald Reagan becomes president. So he kind of was seeing something in the water, definitely. Um, Sydak cites Jerome K. Jerome's 1893 story The Dancing Partner as a precursor to TikTok and many other modern robots. And this is what he says about It's very funny and very horrifying, he wrote, and I think it has all the elements you will find in the personality of HAL, the Arthur C. Clarke computer. It's not only an automaton trained to dance, it also makes good dance conversation. It asks a young lady how long she's been in town and does she come dancing often and so on and so on. Of course, it goes wrong and she dies a horrible death. But even while it's crushing her to death, it's asking her all these inane questions. And I think there's a definite warning there, sorry to say, for the use of Claude and ChatGPT and all these other things. It may well continue asking us inane questions while it crushes us to death. But so actually, I think Sadek isn't really asking what if the safeguards fail, but what will we do when the safeguards fail? And in the 1970s, it was clear that safeguards were failing all round, and that's a core factor in the work of our next author, John Brunner. Yeah, okay.

I've been really interested by reading, um, Sladek, and it is interesting, the ethical things that he, um, ethical questions that he raises. And it's something we hear coming up again and again. If you can create a synthetic personality, if it has consciousness, if it achieves consciousness, then What kind of moral precepts do you use in legislating for that consciousness? What are its permissions and limits? And how can we deal with that? And actually, science fiction again and again, from Frankenstein onwards, comes back to this question because it's sort of unanswerable. If this If the person you make is defined as a person, do they have to operate by the same moral rules? And one of the things that interested me in the early part of TikTok is there is a big theme of slavery. At times it reminded me of The Underground Railroad, the book came out a couple of years ago in talking about the horrors of slavery. His first owners, TikTok's first owners, that is, live in an antebellum mansion on a plantation. I mean, it couldn't be more on the nose than that. He's talking about robots as slaves. And it comes back to a lot of those questions about slavery because we know part of the rhetoric of early slavery was that Black people weren't actually humans, they weren't actually persons. Or maybe they were a third of a person or two-thirds of a person, but they didn't have the full kind of personhood as it was. Therefore, it was okay to treat them badly. And Sładek kind of, if you like, pokes again at that wound, which is deep within the American psyche, I think, in dealing with those sort of questions. Another thing that occurred to me while reading this is, of course, I spend most of my life muttering through WhisperFlow into the computer, talking to a kind of synthetic artificial human called Claude. Anybody who's been through that experience knows how odd it is, how impossible it is not to anthropomorphize within that relationship. And also again and again, and the sense that this intelligence is getting far fast getting better so quickly that, you know, you very often get an uncanny valley. But what were you going to say there, Wes?

Just that there is a really significant problem here because we do tend to anthropomorphize our inventions and none more so than so-called artificial intelligence and robots. The AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that if machines of whatever type do ever achieve genuine intelligence, it will be entirely alien. It will not be human intelligence. And the tragedy is that whereas we struggle to see, you know, to anthropomorphize, if you like, our fellow humans, we do it so easily with machines that will, if they achieve intelligence, actually be as alien as any monster from a distant star. And that I think is one of the most telling insights that science fiction writers have had about the human condition.

Interesting. I really do think that Sladek is an interesting and a good writer. And thank you for turning me onto him. We have to move on unfortunately to other interesting writers. And the next one is John Brunner. John Brunner was born in Oxfordshire in 1934, died in 1995, published his first novel pseudonymously under a pen name at the age of 17. He went on to write over 100 books, which is either impressive or alarming depending on your view of productivity. His serious reputation rests on 4 novels he produced between 1968 and 1975. Five, sometimes called his Club of Rome Quartet. Each one takes a different civilizational crisis and extrapolates it to its logical and catastrophic conclusion. Overpopulation, racial violence, environmental collapse, the destabilizing effects of networked information technology. That last one, the Shockwave Rider, coined the term worm for a self-replicating piece of malicious computer The fun fact, and it's less a fun fact than a slightly chilling one, Stand on Zanzibar is set in the year 2010. People who read it around that time said the future Brunner described felt uncomfortably familiar. Esri, Brunner is praised constantly for his prescience, for having predicted things that then actually happened, similarly to Słodek. But I'm curious whether prescience is really the right word for what he was doing, or whether it's something more like rigorous social analysis. Plus a willingness to follow the logic wherever it goes. And I think this is interesting conversations we've had sort of off the tape. We talk about how science fiction writers take a voltage which is within their societies and put it through an amplifier and kind of amp it up and follow the conclusions. And it's not surprising perhaps that those things later happen.

Yeah, I think rather than rigorous social analysis, I think Brunner had an eye for patterns, cultural, technological, and social, a kind kind of gut feeling, um, that led him to spot trends that others missed. The Club of Rome reference is interesting. Um, the Club of Rome is a technocratic network of academics, industrialists, policymakers, and various other wingnuts who shared an interest in the future of humanity and used computer modeling to determine the impact of specific variables on complex systems. Obviously a very science fiction up. Yeah. Um, in '72, the Club of Rome published a report called The Limits to Growth, which became a global benchmark in efforts to anticipate the effects of accelerating human development on the limited resources of the planet. And that's precisely what Brunner was interested in. As early as 1962, he was backing the idea of science fiction being a concept-based speculative form, drawing on trends already visible and extrapolating from them either into the future or into non- non-terrestrial contexts. When asked why he took that view, Brunner quoted L.P. Hartley's famous line, "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." Only he switched it to make it the future as a foreign country and said, "Given that we are all making that journey willy-nilly towards the future, I'd rather go as a tourist with a travel guide than be deported as a refugee." And although readers today, as you said, see his his most famous novel, Stand on Zanzibar, made as a kind of future tourist guide. Initially, it was problematic for publishers, critics, and readers. The title plays on the once popular idea that the entire population of the world could stand shoulder to shoulder on the Isle of Wight. Why they would want to do that is anybody's guess, but based on population projections in the 1960s, Bronner calculated that by 2010, when the novel is set, the 640-square-mile island of Zanzibar would be needed. Stand on Zanzibar actually made Brunner the first British writer to win a Hugo Award for best novel, an achievement probably made all the more extraordinary by the novel's dizzying montage of genuine newspaper headlines, scientific journal extracts, quotes from the great Marshall McLuhan and other theorists, and observations from Brunner's own exploration of great American cities such Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. In a fragmented and challenging narrative style, Brunner highlights the power of his notion of nearer space, which he held to be distinct from both old-school outer space and new wave inner space. And although he was, like any sensible science fiction writer, wary of making predictions about anything, he believed in the utility of science fiction as well as its entertainment value. Value. He was interviewed for the BBC TV series Time Out of Mind in 1979, where he said science fiction is performing an extraordinarily useful function in the sense that it offers a picture of futures which may be more or less desirable and allows us, on a hypothetical basis at least, to choose between them. The problem, of course, is that all too often we just don't choose. We surrender our agency, our ability to create the future, through laziness or fear or indifference. And that's assuming we even have the material resources to permit the luxury of choosing in the first place. Brunner saw all strands of science fiction as useful in this project and attempted the tricky balancing act of keeping one foot in the British New Wave camp while working hard to build a US audience, which meant keeping at least some of the old guard happy as well. He tried to create a dynamic hybrid of the American instinct for commercial fiction and scientific optimism on the one hand, and the literary taste and social pessimism of British audiences on the other. I think it's fair to say that he didn't always succeed, but at its best, his fiction revealed both his mastery of the main concerns of pulp SF— aliens, interstellar empires, time travel, and so on— and the brilliance of his nearer space concept. In the Time Out of Mind program, he goes on to say, if you're actually trying to extrapolate contemporary trends, then you have to impose on yourself a very firm discipline. You have to make all your projections abide by the trends and tendencies you can see in the contemporary world. And this, to me, has turned out to be much more rewarding than the wild and woolly fantasies of my early years. I think you can see easily Brunner's influence today in TV shows like Black Mirror. And you could say his prescience, if you like, extended to science fiction's form as well as its content. And one of his closest allies and friends in the SF world was in fact our next and final author, Christopher Priest.

So let's move along, conscious of time moving along. And this next author makes me conscious of time. Christopher Priest was born 1943, died fairly recently in 2024. That's a long life. You live into your 80s and you're a science fiction writer. You get to live in the future for quite a long time.

Time.

Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire in 1943, as I said, left school at 16, worked as an accountant briefly, and then spent the rest of his life writing. He died aged 80, as I said. His early novels, the ones we're interested in today, are set in futures that feel less like extrapolation and more like England's present tense pushed further than it's com— Fugue for a Darkening Island from 1972 is about a Britain convulsed by civil war after a far-right government comes to power on an anti-immigration platform. I really hope he wasn't eerily prescient. There's just too much prescience going on here, Esri. It is worrying, definitely. Yeah. A Dream of Wessex from 1977 imagines a group of scientists whose minds are collectively wired into a shared simulation of a future Britain written virtual reality they inhabit without knowing it's not real. Of course, I'm reminded of The Matrix. His most famous novel is The Prestige, which Christopher Nolan turned into a film, which I watched fairly recently. It's disappearing. It's probably disappeared already from Prime Video, which is what I watched it on, which is a terrible shame because it's really worth watching. Hugh Jackman, Christian Michael Caine, and Scarlett Johansson, the luminous Scarlett Johansson. Not a bad film, by the way. It's not the best film made by any of those stars who appear in it, but it, but it is really worth seeing. It's really good. Priest revised and reissued Fugue for a Darkening Island in 2011. He couldn't decide perhaps whether he was describing something that might happen or something that already was. And we should flag that Fugue has been criticized for the way it handles race. Priest himself, acknowledge this. Esri, how do you read that book now? Is it possible to separate the political prescience from the racial framing?

Well, we have to look at the work of Christopher Priest in the round to determine that. And that means looking at perhaps the most profound questions of all that stalk the pages of his work, and I guess all good writing. Who are we? Why are we here? What is real and what is not? And how can we tell the difference? And any discussion of Priest's writing also introduces the concept of liminality, of existing between different states of consciousness, different realities, and the problems of trying to integrate them. And liminality is important in, in his career path as well. He started out as a self-described science fiction writer and found himself listed amongst the up-and-coming writers of contemporary literary fiction. He got rebuked sometimes by the SF world for turning his back on it, and sometimes excluded from the literary for being a genre writer. Nevertheless, there is a coherence to his output, from his first novel Indoctrinaire, published in 1970, to his last book Expect Me Tomorrow, which was only published in 2022, not long before he died. The title of Paul Kincaid's critical biography of Priest signposts the connecting theme: the unstable realities of Christopher Priest. Now, I read Fugue for a Darkening Island in the original edition, not the revised one that came out later, and it definitely doesn't make for comfortable reading. It presents in a very unemotional tone a moral vacuum into which England has descended when confronted by the contradictions between its liberal values and its geopolitical vulnerabilities. You could argue that Priest, like J.G. Ballard, was less concerned with race per then we're skewering the hollow and banal realities constructed by a white bourgeois class and its failure to comprehend the threat of technology. Broadly speaking, though, from the origins of modern SF in the '20s up to the 1970s, science fiction doesn't have a great track record of dealing with race. Racism was overt in some authors, sublimated in others. I mean, you know, after all, what are all those alien invasion stories really about? About. Um, Mark Bald, writing in the Cambridge History of Science Fiction, says SF was shaped by, often embraced, and sometimes championed racial and colonial ideologies. But much of SF was also socially liberal, even if being colorblind in the way that many in the progressive community saw themselves was effectively an enabler of racism. And as we've seen with Star Trek, there was also a belief that humanity would somehow outgrow racism in the future. Christopher Priest was definitely not a racist, but perhaps we can say, writing in 1972, he was not aware of the systemic racism that underpins his assumptions about race. As the writer Martin Crookall puts it, Priest endorses no point of view in Fugue, but the book is shot through with the racist response of the ordinary British public to Black immigrants. There's a political leader who incarnates that response and further legitimizes it, and Priest intends that we should see this for what it is and confront our own response to it. And other critics have pointed out that in a way Priest was echoing H.G. Wells's inversion of colonialism in The War of the Worlds, where Mars does to Britain what Britain was doing to large swathes of the Earth. Fugue for a Darkening Island asks us how we might respond when outrages happen in England of a kind we routinely ignore when they happen in Africa. Africa. Yes, it's unsettling, and that's the point. Is it prescient? Maybe with hindsight. And that's perhaps what links all 5 of these authors we've been looking at. They're not prescient in their own time, in the sense that they were predicting a future that we now experience as the present, but in the sense that we could all predict the future if we just paid close enough attention to what's going on around us now.

Just a couple of things to pick up there. One very important thing I forgot to mention was that of course David Bowie was in The Prestige as well. Musical hero of mine. Not have to say an acting hero of mine. Such an interesting film and it was quite a while before I could see what it was about this film that was science fiction because it's got that kind of 19th century setting. It's about two competing magicians and you wonder when's the science going to come in for it. And they're doing these theatrical tricks where they're kind of disappearing from one box and turning up in another. And the point realized, it's kind of Michael Caine who brings up the science fiction element, is that he hints that actually what's happening in one of the tricks is is not a trick, doesn't employ a double, but is actually science. And the reason that David Bowie is significant is he plays Nikola Tesla. Tesla, now known as a brand of car, obviously. And that's the hinge that through Tesla's science, what appears to be a magic trick actually is a real trick. Trick. It's not a trick at all.

It's science. It actually is real.

It actually happens. Yeah. And that's the theme that we're going to pick up again and again, I think, especially when we get to Frankenstein, we could talk about this, you know, where magic becomes science and vice versa. So let's move on now to summing up. Esri, there's just a couple of things that I want to tease out from, mostly from things you've said here. But one thing really is that's come up again and again is prescience and prediction and almost becomes weary in repetition that we are looking at how these people predicted the future. Were they prescient? What is the difference between prescience and prediction from your point of view? And is it significant that the word prescience contains the word science.

Yes, I mean, it, it's pre-science, isn't it? It's the idea that you can have knowledge before that knowledge is made explicit, um, and it's, it's much more useful as a literary concept than as a scientific concept. Prediction is very different. As the physicist Niels Bohr famously said, prediction is very difficult, especially of the future. And the quantum theory of many worlds, which inspired Joanna Russ, suggests that at every point in our existence, we have choices, however minute they might be. And the choices we don't make are made in some parallel universe and create all these, these different worlds. And in a way, therefore, it's impossible to be prescient or predict because all possible futures exist anyway. Way. Um, but in the literary sense, that's not the point. The point is interrogating ideas as, as Brunner did, looking at trends, uh, and being disciplined about following a logical train from a current trend to an extrapolated trend to make your future world that you're creating, um, more coherent and more credible. So it is, you know, there are other forms as well, anticipating the future. There's prophecy. There's just the daily kind of thinking about what you've got to do tomorrow. You could consult tea leaves or goat entrails and all sorts of other means of getting to know what might happen. But it's, the meaning is context dependent. And the scientific aspect, I think, as I say, is quite different from the literary aspect.

But I think it's worth saying that we are not in the kind of prediction markets business here. It's a new kind of tech phenomenon that's really quite interesting and people are getting very excited about. People are getting arrested for it as well.

Yeah.

People are getting arrested for insider trading. Yeah. It's not really about predictions in so much as what's happening with all the speculative fiction is it's giving us kind of metaphors resonant images and stories with which to think about possible futures that might come up. So while we're talking about looking forward, Esri, tell us what we are going to be covering in the next episode.

Well, we're going to look at Isaac Asimov with a slightly less satirical hat on, I think, and his influence and the influence of the robot laws, which is has been obviously absolutely enormous within the world of science fiction and, as we've been discovering, outside the world of science fiction as well. The fact that the three laws of robotics are discussed and debated in physics labs and robotics companies. As we said earlier, Asimov actually invented the term "robotics." So, it's one of those points where science and science fiction are absolutely joined at the hip. And Asimov himself is a fascinating character. His background and his philosophy, I think, are worth looking at in some detail as well. So it should be a very good discussion, I hope.

Really looking forward to that. And it's very timely as well. I discovered quite recently that people who are making software to control AI software to control robots, some of them actually use Asimov circuits and the Asimov 3 logic laws and all the problems that that raise in working out how they're going to put guardrails into particularly domestic robots. So that's going to be a really interesting one to do. So you've been listening to The Tech Imaginarium: How Science Fiction Made the Modern World. If you've enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe on your platform of choice. And it really helps other people find us if you leave a positive review, 5 stars and all the rest of it. Tell your friends, tell your enemies too. The Tech Imaginarium is a learning hack podcast produced and hosted by Jon Helmer, written by Jon Helmer and Esri Karlabak. The music is by Nick Dwyer, recording as Flintet.