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This commentary on the `Encyclopedia Of SF' has turned into quite a project. I suppose, since I find myself writing an extended critique that goes beyond simple factual correction, that some presentation of my credentials and explanation of my background and viewpoint is in order.
I am a college-educated American white male bormn in 1957, a computer programmer and Internet expert with a high IQ and an extensive knowledge base in the sciences and technology. I am a libertarian, a neopagan materialist, an unabashed Heinleinophile, and I like my SF with rivets on. All these are thoroughly typical attributes for an American SF fan, and a great deal of the stuff is and has always been obviously written for people like me.
I have been reading SF omnivorously for over 35 years, ever since I was six years old. My personal library of SF and related literature includes over 3,000 volumes (still including the first SF book I ever owned, and including almost every major work uttered in the genre between 1938 and 1979), and I estimate that this represents approximately one eighth of my total reading in the field. I have been going to SF conventions regularly for two decades, am fairly well known in American fandom, and count many contemporary SF authors among my friends and acquaintances.
I have some other credentials which are less typical but quite relevant to the job of critiquing this work. I have more than the average fannish knowledge of cultural history and "great literature", having read quite a bit of both. I have been a moderately successful poet and songwriter and quite a successful writer for an amateur, with authorial credits on four books (one of those was a successful work of specialist lexicography involving challenges not unlike the SF Encyclopedia). I have read a lot of pre-Campbellian SF and many of the standard histories and critical works on the SF field.
Finally, it is not irrelevant that I spent many of my formative years overseas in South America, continental Europe, and Great Britain (where, in fact, I acquired my first SF book). I am accordingly much better equipped to understand the British and other international perspectives on SF than most Americans can be.
Many of my comments in what follows will be critical and therefore negative-sounding. I therefore wish to emphasize that I think the Encyclopedia as a whole is a remarkably fine and able piece of work.
I began reading with well-defined expectations about where and in what ways it would be weak, based on my knowledge of the editors' backgrounds. Although these expectations were in some ways fulfilled, I found in nearly every case that the Encyclopedia actually does a significantly better job than I had initially expected.
I do, however, see systematic errors of interpretation (and in a few cases of fact) in the following areas. I list them in order of increasing severity.
(1) Thematic and terminological entries touching on actual science and technical disciplines are often skimpy, erroneous, superficial, or out of date. None of the mistakes are really major (they're the sort of glitches and omissions I'd expect from editors with little science or technical background) but in a reference of this nature they are definitely embarrassing.
Some of the superficialities I have let pass without comment, as I judge they would probably only offend specialists. I have supplied factual corrections for a number of entries including ANTIMATTER, UNIVERSE, and GENERAL SEMANTICS. I have supplied additions for several author and theme entries including FASTER THAN LIGHT, ANTHROPOLOGY, CRAMER JOHN G(LEASON), ENTROPY, HYPERSPACE, SPACE WARP, etc.
(2) Misinterpretations and and misunderstandings of the political context and subtexts of American SF. ``Political'' here needs to be interpreted in a broad sense that includes elements of moral philosophy (the traditions of New England transcendentalism a la Emerson and Thoreau, for example) and American folk psychology (the editors' weaknesses in understanding the latter are unfortunate but hardly surprising!).
The Encyclopedia's coverage of these aspects was a very great deal better than I had initially expected, but a few serious errors and misconceptions remain which I have endeavored to correct (cf. my notes on LIBERTARIANISM, ECONOMICS and related topics).
(3) Even granting that certain earlier treatments of the history of SF were overly exclusive and overly focused on the American magazine tradition, the Encyclopedia appears to me to represent a critical overreaction which drags into the SF field everything but the kitchen sink, and then the sink itself with all attached plumbing.
The most obvious and tiresome symptom of this problem is the boatloads of entries on obscure pre-20th-century eccentrics included for their authorship of some tendentious piece of fictionalized crackpottery. But it ramifies elsewhere in more serious ways; see point (4).
A bit more discrimination, please! An annoyingly large percentage of the Encyclopedia's content is simply irrelevant to modern SF, having no tenable connection to the genre as it is today understood by readers and writers, and none of the fundamental structural features or aims of SF.
The effect of this overkill is to make the Encyclopedia at points appear padded, strained, and precious -- as though the editors thought a crushing weight of obscurity would demonstrate their seriousness and erudition (and by extension the seriousness of SF scholarship).
No such maneuver is necessary -- the quality of the relevant parts is quite high enough, and would only be improved by discarding a lot of the extraneous junk.
(4) Finally, and most seriously, I think the Encyclopedia's kitchen-sink approach to SF history combines with certain (perhaps excusable) parochialisms of some contributors to produce a muddled structural view of SF and its relation to other genres.
When I say ``muddled'', I mean that -- it's not a euphemism for ``completely bogus''. At some points (notably in the entries on FANTASY, CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH, and SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE) the Encyclopedia's analysis is sufficiently excellent and incisive to re-form some of my own carefully-considered ideas about the genre. But other entries disregard the implications of that best analysis and wander off into what I cannot but see as dense thickets of error and self-contradiction.
I will get very specific about this in my entry notes.
Finally, before launching into an entry-by-entry critique, I'm going to try to give you necessary background on point (3), the political context of American genre SF, which the Encyclopedia frustratingly gets almost but not quite right. The material in the following mini-essay was originally part of topic-entry critiques; I have collected it here in order to organize the exposition better. It might be regarded as a candidate entry.
Libertarianism is discussed here because various forms of implicit and explicit libertarianism have been the most characteristic political stance of the SF genre since its Campbellian reinvention at the beginnings of GOLDEN AGE SF.
Libertarianism has roots in the individualist, limited-government classical-liberal tradition that sprang from the ``natural rights'' theories of John Locke in Great Britain and included many of the U.S.'s founding fathers (most notably Thomas Jefferson and his Anti-Federalists). Until its disintegration under pressure from Marxism at the end of the 19th century, classical liberalism dominated the ``left'' end of the political spectrum in the English-speaking world, opposing itself to an authoritarian conservative ``right''.
After 1900, classical liberals in the U.S. made alliance with the conservative right against the new socialist/centralizing left. The marriage was uneasy from the beginning; as early as the 1930s, ``right-wing'' classical-liberal thinkers like H.L. Mencken were labeling themselves ``libertarian'' in distinction from authoritarian conservatives. But to the political left, and in the popular mind, classical-liberal ideas became entangled with conservatism in ways libertarians would later find difficult to escape.
Proto-libertarian ideas took root and and grew in the SF genre after 1938 as the implicit political face of a linked cluster of values central to Golden Age SF and hard SF, including the veneration of competence, moral individualism, and rational skepticism. These values, in turn, grew from the the American folk version of classical liberalism, as influenced by the frontier experience and 19th-century indigenous movements such as the Transcendentalist tradition in New England.
At first, genre proto-libertarianism merely took the primitive form of gut resistance to collectivist and paternalistic social philosophies (a stance certainly congenial to the SF pulps' largely adolescent audience). Typical of this early phase is Van Vogt's ``The Weapon Shops Of Isher'' (1941) in which the eponymous shops sell guns which (rather magically) can only be used for the libertarian purpose of self-defense.
A more reasoned and adult strain became discernable in much genre SF of the 1950s and early 1960s; consider Eric Frank Russell's ``...And Then There Were None'' (1951), Cyril Kornbluth's ``The Syndic'' (1953), H. Beam Piper's 1958 ``A Planet For Texans'' (vt ``Lone Star Planet") and Poul Anderson's ``No Truce With Kings'' (1963). But libertarian speculations in the genre SF of that period cannot fruitfully be analyzed as the working-out of an ideology; rather, they were parallel, independent thought experiments asking what political consequences one might draw from more basic axioms in the shared worldview of the genre.
In the post-1900 political environment, however, the exploration of proto-libertarian ideas had the side-effect of pulling the Campbellian tradition of genre SF into the arms of the American political right. Indeed, John W. Campbell's personal combination of classical-liberal freethinking with occasional outbreaks of crusty, reactionary conservatism was a perfect mirror and model of the ideological confusion which would dog genre SF for years after his great period.
At the same time genre SF was groping towards libertarian conclusions, proto-libertarian thinkers in the 1950s and 60s were developing a distinct and radical take on classical-liberal conclusions (AYN RAND was a key though controversial figure in the latter development). At the same time, serious cracks were beginning to form in the right wing of the American political establishment. The libertarian faction of the U.S. Republican Party had been discredited after Barry Goldwater's failure in the 1964 presidential elections, and many Republican libertarians subsequently defected over the Vietnam War and counterculture-related issues.
However, libertarianism did not begin to resemble a separate political ideology until the late 1960s. When the U.S. Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 it explicitly repudiated the conservative right, and modern libertarian thinking rejects the ``left-right'' axis as essentially meaningless. Accordingly, Robert Heinlein's ``The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress'' (1966) epitomized the genre's receptivity to Randite and proto-libertarian radicalism, but it was not until after 1971 that Heinlein would begin to call himself a libertarian and attempt to reject the authoritarian/conservative strain in genre SF's "right-wing'' legacy. Even his fans admit that Heinlein, by then in his 60s, was not entirely successful in the attempt.
Many genre readers and writers with political interests either paralleled or followed Heinlein's evolution by 1975, leading to [what you have elsewhere described as] the dominance of libertarian polemic -- albeit a libertarianism compromised in many cases by conservative reflex. The range of James P. Hogan's work, from the conservative chuntering of ``Inherit The Stars'' (1977) to the anti-militarism of "The Genesis Machine'' (1978) and the outright libertarian anarchism of ``Voyage From Yesteryear'' (1982) perfectly illustrates this trend.
[I first described myself as a libertarian around 1980.]
Around 1980 explicitly libertarian SF began to appear in the works of new authors L. NEIL SMITH, J. NEIL SCHULMAN, BRAD LINAWEAVER, VICTOR KOMAN, MELINDA SNODGRASS and others. Libertarianism also gained more explicit and respectful treatment in the works of established genre authors not previously noted for sympathy to it; the anarchic asteroid habitat depicted in JOE HALDEMAN's ``Buying Time'' (1989) stands out as an example. The 1980s saw a growing and sometimes acrimonious breach between libertarians and genuine conservative right-wingers like JERRY POURNELLE who in previous decades might have been or at least seemed like allies against socialism. By the time Robert Heinlein died in 1987, about all both camps could agree on was their enormous respect for him.
These 1980s developments within the genre anticipated by a few years post-Cold-War changes in the larger American and world political scene which are still being played out at time of writing. While there are good structural reasons (as discussed above) to expect the genre's implicit pro-libertarian bias to continue, we may expect their explicit role to increasingly reflect the success or failure or libertarian ideas in the real world.
Editorial point: the term ``libertarian'' as an ideological tag should not be capitalized. The capitalized ``Libertarian'' should be reserved for members of the various Libertarian political parties (the U.S.'s, Great Britain's, and Norway's are the three I know about). Compare "democrat'' vs. ``Democrat", ``tory'' vs. ``Tory", ``socialist" vs. ``Socialist".
This would be less disturbing in a novice writer. But these are marketed as serious modern genre SF, and Aldiss has been around and knows what the implied contract is. His failure to honor it is egregious and offensive. As such, he is a terrible model to emulate and critical praise for these novels is inappropriate.
It would certainly be critically useful to divagate on the ways in which AIs in science fiction have come to implicitly resemble (and sometimes be explicitly related to) the disembodied spirits, djinns, gods, angels, and devils of mythology (William Gibson's voodoo-god AIs, which quickly became cliches in derivative cyberpunk, beg for mention here).
It might also be useful to observe that these SFnal images have helped shape AI research's view of itself in subtle ways (most AI researchers read the genre).
A survey or listing of the key AI-is-born books would be apposite here, including ``The Adolescence Of P-1'', ``When Harlie Was One'', ``Colossus: The Forbin Project'', and ``Valentina". As a group these stories have thematic characteristics differing interestingly from the early ROBOT stories, which might be seen as their predecessors in an ongoing discussion of the nature of humanity and consciousness itself.
Want me to rewrite this entry?
Also, ``Scottie'' -> ``Scotty". He's a human, not a dog. :-)
The impact on me and many other fans of my approximate age (I had started reading SF as a small child in the 1960s and was 23 that year) was electric. With ``Sundiver'' and ``Startide Rising'' we finally got what we barely knew we'd been missing -- intelligent new SF in the epic, rational, optimistic, technophilic Campbellian mode, a commodity depressingly absent in a previous fifteen years which (in retrospect) seemed to have been drearily dominated by bad science-fantasy, New Wave navel-gazing, faddish pessimism, and nervous polemics either for or against a '60s counterculture not very relevant to our experience of life. Brin's work was a revelation -- ``sense of wonder'' was back, and it kicked ass.
I know I'm far from the only fan to have been affected this way.
This novel may not have been JKB's best (I would rank it below ``Stand On Zanzibar'' and possibly ``The Jagged Orbit'') but it has certainly been his most influential.
(I wrote this before J.K. Roeling's "Harry Potter" sequence, which is a noble exception in the fantasy genre.)
Though it was released in 1986, I have it from Williams that the novel was actually written before ``Neuromancer'' was released. Williams later grew into one of the best genre writers of the 1990s with novels like ``Angel Station'', ``Metropolitan'' and especially ``Aristoi'', while Gibson and Sterling and that ilk dwindled into cliche and self-repetition.
``Hardwired'' is thus not derivative of Gibson, but represents genre SF's internal development of the themes the self-conscious "cyberpunks'' later appropriated as their own. It is continuous with earlier works of non-cyberpunk cyberpunk by Vernor Vinge, John Brunner, and others. (Frederik Pohl's 1966 short ``Day Million" deserves a mention.) Also with later works exploring similar ideas, such as David ZINDELL's epic ``Neverness'' and Greg BEAR's ``Eon'' sequence.
In fact much of what was represented as ``cyberpunk'' in the 1980s and early 1990s was connected to the cyberpunks' self-aggrandizing propaganda only by the marketing label. Neal Stephenson wrote finis to the ``cyberpunk'' genre in his epic and comic masterwork ``Snow Crash'' (1992); all that's left of it today is the cliched backgrounds of a hundred interchangeable carnographic computer games.
This is not to denigrate his work -- he was a minor but very original figure, and I think the genre would have been poorer without him. But let's not overinflate the man's importance for the sake of rounded rhetoric!
The paragraph ending ``tended to undercut those definitions that appear to fit most closely an idea of sf as a genre first cultured in US magazines'' rather gives the game away. That was clearly the aim of Aldiss and his ilk, not a mere side effect. Their scholarly divagations have had little or nothing to do with the reality, evolution, or internal dynamics of contemporary SF. They were, rather, a move in a game of cultural politics reflecting resentment against U.S. cultural hegemony and the Campbellian, anti-socialist political bent of the American genre.
This fact is obvious to most American fans and scholars and has led to widespread U.S. dismissal of Aldiss's definition(s) of SF as piffle, a judgement in while I must admit (for different reasons) I concur.
I agree with Peter Nicholls in regarding SF's respect for natural law as structurally central to SF in a way that distinguishes it both from fantasy and fabulation (and in particular from horror and gothic literature). I would go further and say that the distinguishing feature of SF is its embrace of the central faith of ``post-scientific consciousness'' -- that the Universe is knowable, that humans (or quasihumans or superhumans or machines or aliens who are idealized authorial versions of ourselves) are capable of learning from and adapting to any challenge we are posed. All SF either acts out or reacts consciously against that belief. Nothing that is indifferent to that belief can be SF.
I agree with Greg Bear that hard SF, which repeatedly seeks to use the tools and metaphors of science to evoke the splendor of conceptual breakthrough in the reader's mind, is the vital core of SF. And I submit that any definition which fails to admit and entail the centrality of hard SF dooms itself to irrelevance. Scholes, Fiedler, Robinson and others have merely concocted elaborate was of missing this point.
After writing the above, I found a very similar analysis implied in your SENSE OF WONDER entry; see my comment on it for further development.
In fact, Dick's influence on SF seems to me to have been minimal, because his particular mix of talent, theme and obsession was not imitable. The few writers who have attempted to follow in his footsteps have found themselves writing muddled anti-SF or pretentious fabulations with an early sell-by date. The surrealistic craziness of much of his oeuvre has come to seem less attractive in light of the literal craziness of his final years.
Ironically enough, it is probably through the movie ``Bladerunner" and its cyberpunk imitators that Dick exerted the most influence on SF, by visually inventing the cliches of cyberpunk.
In the 1990s I believe he has earned a place in the first rank of contemporary fantasists.
One of the SF genre's more curious flaws is the frequency with which SF writers have constructed idealized futures in which there is no money and no markets, with production planned by vast calculating engines. The model for all such utopias has presumably been Butler's "Erewhon", but the same trope shows up popular SF such as Roddenbery's "Star Trek" universe and more recently in Iain Banks's "Culture" stories.
In truth, there has been as little excuse for this sort of thing as there is for Martian canals or a wet Venus since F.A. Hayek's description of the "calculation problem" in 1936. Without price signals to reveal preferences and markets to clear them, economies simply clog up with malinvestment until they collapse.
Furthermore, I'm not impressed by (and actually feel kind of sorry for) anyone who uses ``entrepreneur'' as a term of insult. It smacks of the sort of elitist disdain for commerce and leveller's mistrust of wealth-creation that has relegated Great Britain to the economic minor leagues. Most Americans would think that kind of chuntering defines JC not as a sharp critic but as a blinkered and resentful loser representing a culture of losers (most would also be too diplomatic to say so, but JC is owed honesty on this point).
In fact, JC's attitude towards the self-aware competent man is so completely out of skew with the central gut assumptions of American genre SF that it calls his ability to understand the genre even on its own terms into question, let alone his standing to criticize it intelligently from outside.
I'm not propagandizing anyone to believe everything Americans archetypally believe about the relation between virtue, competence and economic success (I don't myself). But until JC overcomes his end-of-Empire imprints enough to understand that attitude a damn sight better than he gives evidence for here, his vision of genre SF (especially hard SF) will suffer from some very serious moral cataracts.
Everything from, ``For, the moment the frank lad of the primitive Edisonade...'' to the end of the entry should be scrapped. It reveals nothing about SF. And (sorry) nothing very flattering about its author.
This gross failure of critical vision pushes me into semi-seriously proposing the following entry:
It is a commonplace among fans on both sides of the Atlantic that bad American SF is about power fantasies, while bad British SF is about powerlessness fantasies. This is cruelly put, but has more than a grain of truth in it. An important signifier of the difference can be seen (for example) in the difference between archetypal American and British versions of the DISASTER NOVEL. In America the end of the world is frequently a stage-clearing device for a romantic drama in which the post-apocalyptic landscape becomes a new frontier. In Great Britain the process of ending is just as typically a metaphor for the psychological disintegration of its viewpoint characters.
American genre SF has classically been a literature of grand visions, individualistic larger-than-life heroes and Promethean accomplishment. The important early EDISONADE and SPACE OPERA forms set a pattern which still resonates in American SF, even in self-conscious reactions against the form. American SF cherishes its roots in the magazines, adventure fiction, and the ``scientific romance''. American SF's relation to its cultural surround has been correspondingly defiant; American fans and writers have not been shy about their disdain for the literary academy.
British SF, on the whole, has always been more conscious of limits -- more inclined towards the dystopian, more self-aware, more ironic, more stylish, darker. It has also sought, and found, a much easier accommodation with British ``high culture'', and sturdily asserts its continuity with earlier modes of fantasy and fabulation.
It would be easy to overstate or caricature these differences, but it is equally hard to deny they exist. Correlations with the differing 20th-century historical experiences of the U.S. and Great Britain are not hard to find.
Correspondingly, there are characteristic differences in how American and British observers decode the texts of SF (some of which affect this encyclopedia). The American SF dream of techno-apotheosis and its ultra-competent heroes tend to seem to Britishers at best faintly adolescent and puerile, at worst crass and threatening -- in either case a guilty escapist pleasure to be poor-mouthed, satirized, or deconstructed as a way of establishing one's maturity. Americans, on the other hand see themselves as the heroes and are prone to dismiss the British style as decadent, defeatist, and irrelevant -- why bother writing SF at all, an American might archetypally ask, if all you're going to do is lose?
This divergence extends to critical perspective. If Americans (still naive about the price of empire) have a tendency too glibly to project ``manifest destiny'' onto every kind of frontier, the British (heirs to a failed empire) tend to confuse a desire to know and understand with a desire to dominate. Thus the tendency of British critics to read American hard-SF and competent-man stories as a kind of imperialism, a misinterpretation Americans as a rule find genuinely baffling.
American critics, on the other hand, often find it difficult to understand the ways in which the relatively mannered and claustrophilic style of British SF reflects necessary adaptations to living on a small island with a relatively static society and a lot of history -- heroism is hard to tolerate where there's little elbow room.
Comparisons between recent major new writers in the U.S. and Great Britain (say, Neal Stephenson vs. Stephen Baxter) do not suggest that this divide is narrowing. Perhaps it will as mass communications continue to improve. Whether the U.S. will enter an era of limits that makes its SF more ``British'', or British SF will be subsumed into an ebullient Americanized pop culture, remains to be seen.
The term was already current and symbolicly potent in mid-1950s genre SF, before Dick was more than a blip on the radar. Cf. Willamson & Gunn's ``Star Bridge'' (1955) which features a nihilistic secret society called the ``Entropy Cult". That's the earliest reference I can think of offhand, but I'm certain research would reveal others -- metaphoric extension of such scientific terms of art was an important thematic device in Campbellian SF from 1938 on.
This entry should also discuss the growing impact on SF of Ilya Prigogine's nonlinear thermodynamics (for which he won a 1974 Nobel). Prigogine's demonstrations that non-equilbrium thermodynamic systems often maximize entropy by spontaneous ordering turns both the literal and metaphoric implications of entropy on their heads, suggesting a universe in which life and macroscopic order are not doomed by entropy but perpetually re-created by it. Bruce Sterling used this idea centrally in his Shaper/Mech stories; similar insights had previously appeared in James Hogan's 1982 ``Voyage From Yesteryear'', and have since begun to broadly shape genre speculations.
See also my comments on the Darwinian ``functionalist anthropology'' strain under ANTHROPOLOGY -- and be careful not to confuse it with SOCIAL DARWINISM.
Is this British fans JC is talking about? In the U.S., the prevailing view among fans of my acquaintance who know any literary history at all is much closer to his -- i.e. that one of genre SF's signal virtues is precisely that it is a continuation of the classical mimetic novel.
Indeed, many American fans (including myself) will go further than you do here and argue that SF is no bastard stepchild but the true heir of the mimetic tradition, having through various circumstances escaped the decadence and exhaustion of the 20th-century ``lit-fic" (modern and postmodern) novel. JC's own discussion of fabulation suggests theoretical grounding for this conviction; hard SF's faith that the universe is knowable can be seen as an extension and objectification of the mimetic belief that the ``world does, in the end, have a story that can be told''.
(Interestingly, this same appraisal that ``SF in strict classical epic form'' is the true contemporary heir to Western literature's humanist tradition has since been made from outside the field, notably in Frederick Turner's provocative 1995 Wilson Quarterly essay ``The Birth of Natural Classicism'' on post-postmodern art.)
Accordingly, many American fans share an implicit conviction that when the belles-lettrists of the year 2200 look back, they will regard SF and its sibling mystery, western, adventure-story, romance and other genres as the true ``mainstream''), and lit-fic as a parochial dead end.
(A substantial part of the American resistance to the New Wave derived, in fact, from a conviction that the New Wave authors were bent on importing into SF the same kinds of preciousness that sterilized and devastated ``serious'' mainstream literature to the point that today only academics and their imitators can stand to read it.)
Rogow's ``Futurespeak'' is not merely ``erratic'', it is wretchedly, horribly awful. The stuff relating to computers is particularly bogus.
Needs editing down, though. I think much of the early protest about the impossibility of distinguishing SF from fantasy can be dropped, since the entry later describes exactly how to do so ("narrative voice implies a post-scientific consciousness'' etc.)
The map of concentric circles begs for yet another one: ``hard SF" with SF, which not only assumes that the universe is knowable ("post-scientific consciousness") but insists that it is rationally knowable. Cf. my comments re DEFINITIONS OF SF.
Perhaps more should have been made of the implications of "technology-of-magic'' stories for your categories. But this is a minor point.
I rather think this entry is the best single piece of sustained structural analysis in the Encyclopedia.
``Self-deluding imperialisms of knowledge'', eh? I suppose it's a collegial privilege of critics to occasionally utter such pomposities. But I'd respect JC more if he refrained.
The archetypal ``Galactic Empire'' extends from Asimov's to the cod-medievalism of numerous space operas up to and including ``Star Wars'' (Edmond Hamilton's 1949 ``The Star Kings'' is a good early example). It is emphatically not the U.S.'s political system writ large. As a setting, it is designed for retakes of the Fall of Rome or Meiji Restoration, potboilers of RURITANIAN intrigue, and sheer science-fantasy swashbuckling. No democrats or moderns need apply.
The archetypal ``Galactic Federation'' is arguably the U.S. writ large. It is more typically the setting or offstage furniture for HARD SF, FIRST CONTACT stories, and the like. The whole point of the Galactic Federation is that it has modern culture and politics, rather than archaized and imperialist ones. Nobody in Galactic Federations wears swords.
The difference between ``Star Trek'' and ``Star Wars'' is diagnostic. The two settings carry vastly different freight and deserve separate and fuller entries.
It's unfortunate that BS chose Iain Banks as ``refreshingly alien'', because his ``Culture'' is impossible. The abundance and techno-exuberance is fun and believable but the economics aren't -- centrally-planned resource allocation is bound to run afoul of a F.A. Hayek ``calculation problem'' no matter how much computing power the Culture Minds bring to bear (and this is no longer just a theoretical prediction; Hayekian accumulation of malinvestment was a major factor in the economic collapse of the Soviet Union). BS would be better off citing William Barton, who has invented novel and disturbing Empires in ``Dark Sky Legion'' and ``When Heaven Fell".
Piers Anthony's Phaze/Proton books deserve a mention for their portrayal of a society in which serfs can gain status only by gaming. The ``game grid'' and the structure of Proton's ludi is by far the most interesting conceit in these otherwise routine novels.
Sadly, the AH ``Starship Troopers'' was not actually a very good game. The ideas were clever, but the mechanics tended to lead to static and unsatisfying play.
The entry traces ``Traveller'' to Anderson and Pournelle; I fear this is well off the mark. Early editions of the game (which I played) made clear that it was basically set in the galaxy of E.C. Tubb's ``Dumarest" sequence. This changed later when the game was reinvented to include aliens.
Steve Jackson's ``Car Wars'', acknowledgedly derived from Ellison's "Along the Scenic Route'' deserves a mention as one of the most successful and wittiest SF games. Indeed, Jackson's record of successfully translating a knowledgeable SF sensibility and love of the genre into games and game-renderings of classic works of SF is impressive and unmatched. (This is the U.S. Steve Jackson.)
The 'graph on live-action games describes only what aficionados call ``boffer'' games such as those run by Xanadria or various collegiate ``Assassin's Guilds''. These were a late-80s development by D&D fans. There's another subtype (which I play regularly) that's actually a few years older and more closely associated with SF fandom; they were originally just called LARPs (Live Action RPGs) and are now distinguished as "theater games". These often follow the first one (``Rekon'', held in Baltimore in 1983) in having SF settings, sometimes of almost novelistic richness. Since then LARP enthusiasts have developed a small but vigorous subculture of their own semi-detached from SF FANDOM.
It may be worth noting that ADVENT and Zork became important in the folk tradition of the Internet culture.
Though non-Aristotelianism is an important idea in GS and received the most play in SF, it is not primary but rather a consequence of the central GS insight, best expressed by Koryzybski's dictum ``The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing defined". That is, all linguistic representations discard most of reality. Aristotelianism is merely one (though an important one) of the limiting representations reinforced by natural language. Others include Euclideanism and the assumption that object identity is a testable relation (of these two, the latter is more important, and may do more mischief than Aristotelianism).
Describing ``Science And Sanity'' as a ``handbook'' is funny on a couple of levels. Firstly, it's physically a massive, hernia-inducing tome; secondly, it is very difficult (though also quite rewarding) to read. The ``handbooks'' of GS are accordingly secondary sources like Stuart Chase's ``The Tyranny of Words'' and Hayakawa's ``Language in Thought and Action''.
PN is to be commended for noticing the connection with Wittgenstein and the Vienna school. In fact, the original edition of "Science and Sanity'' actually pre-dated the ``language game'' analysis of Wittgenstein by some years.
GS is not and never has been a ``psychotherapeutic system'' though calling it one is a historically understandable mistake from anyone not familiar with its practices and primary texts. It has been interpreted therapeutically and has strongly influenced at least one successful contemporary therapeutic system, Grinder & Bandler's Neuro-Linguistic Programming; but GS itself rejects some of the basic premises about mental function suggested by the ``psychotherapeutic'' label. For one thing, it has little use for Freudian or quasi- Freudian theorizing about the ``unconscious mind"; for another it is more interested in improving the functioning of already relatively well-adusted individuals than in tackling outright pathology. ``Unsanity'' is not insanity.
PN correctly cites Van Vogt (everyone does) but his use of GS was intellectually superficial and was never much respected by practioners. You miss a more important fact; GS ideas strongly influenced Robert Heinlein and are pervasive in his fictional backgrounds, especially from 1940 to 1960. In ``Gulf'', 1941, the description of ``Newspeak'' is particularly telling. Explicit and approving references to Korzybski can be found in his later writings. Detailed cites on request (which means I don't have them at the tip of my brain but will dig them up if you tell me you don't believe the general thesis). Other writers were similarly interested -- Blish's 1952 ``Jack Of Eagles'' leans heavily on Korzybski.
The influence of GS on Dianetics is not probable but certain. My grandfather was an early student of GS who flirted with Dianetics and knew L. Ron Hubbard slightly. What he told me is backed up by documentary evidence; Hubbard latched onto some GS ideas during the '40s and folded them into Dianetics and what became later Scientology. The GS content had been entirely discarded from Scientology by 1960; my personal suspicion is that Hubbard didn't want anything in the system that might actually teach his victims how to think effectively.
The factual corrections suggest a number of corrections and additions to the entry. Here is my proposed text for an amended entry. You'll note that it rearranges the original a lot but tracks it pretty closely except where necessary for corrections and additions.
Gothic tropes are now almost never used seriously in genre SF. They may be used in a conventional, almost formal way to set up problems which are resolved in an SFnal manner, but they are no longer integral to genre SF. The gothic hero has become a B-movie joke, the gothic cautionary tale a hoary cliche.
It is certainly true that SF still evokes hair-raising experiences of confrontation with a terrifying unknown. But to call it ``gothic" on these grounds does violence both to the basic dynamics of both truly gothic fiction and SF, because the gothic response to terrifying mysterium is completely different from SF's.
Whether in coping with supernatural malignity or a psychological return of the repressed, the gothic response is ecstatic surrender, an invitation to identify and even become one with the anarchic power of the dark. When Miss Lucy's casement flies open, the true frisson in our terror comes from our identification with Dracula.
In SF, on the other hand, the gothic eruption of primal threat is archetypally treated as a challenge, a problem to be solved, a datum to be re-integrated into a stable scientific world-view. The climax of the story is the re-assertion of rationality. In gothic fiction, on the other hand, any ``solution'' to the eruption would be transient, shadowed, left deliberately ambiguous by an author who knows deep down that the reader wants the monster to win.
In fact, one can readily distinguish SF from gothic horror by the following test: who, over the bulk of the novel, is the focus of reader identification? Is it the van-Helsing figure or the Dracula? Is the Dracula's comeuppance a true resolution or a formalized coda subverted by hints that the monster and its kin will in the end prove victorious?
While gothic and SFnal modes were often mingled in early SF, such crossover within a single work is now rare. Trends in the evolution and marketing of SF are making it more so. Granted we get an occasional Tim Powers (and I'm a huge fan of his work), but most of the authors you list as strongly gothic are second-rankers that SF fans at least in the U.S. see as fringy and dubious (Ray Bradbury being an excellent example).
The fundamental antigothicity of SF is nowhere more clearly seen than in the technology-of-magic story, which is now far more central to the SF genre than its purely historical links with gothic fiction.
There the editors go again (in the discussion of Poul Anderson), confusing entrepreneurialism with militarism! This is a serious, glaring error -- dammit, trade is not war and the market is not politics. Anderson himself knows better -- in fact, one of the central tragedies in his future is the inevitability with which the mode of war and empire seems to destroy the more benign comity of trade and laissez-faire. You will miss one of the central points of his future history (and of American SF in general) until you get this.
I think it best to label these early works ``scientifiction'' after Gernsback's term or else ``proto-SF'', rather than terminologically forcing them into the mold of modern SF.
PN's claim that until the 1960s, Huxley/Orwell/Stewart et al. were thought of as ``respectable'' SF, and the genre magazines ``not respectable'', must reflect British or Australian conditions. Accounts from American fans of the period make it clear that the picture was very different here.
American non-fans before 1960 had no concept of SF at all, and fans quickly learned a genre-centric view of it which defied any mainstream view of what was respectable or not. Your speculation that early U.S. scholarship in the field concentrated on the genre in order to ``rectify such prejudice'' is accordingly mistaken. The concentration developed instead because, to Americans, nothing outside the genre could properly be thought of as ``SF'' at all.
Whether concentration on ``the genre'' distorts history is by no means as clear as PN says. It depends on the degree of continuity between non-genre writers and genre ones -- that is, the unsettled question of to what extent the ideas of stf and scientific-romance writers later became part of the corporate knowledge of the SF genre.
On these ground we may certainly admit Huxley, Orwell, Verne, and Wells to be retrospectively SF. But in general, I have found the efforts of Aldiss, Knight and others to argue for broad and important continuities unconvincing both in particular and in general. Most of the hundreds of minor writers of utopias, dystopias, edisonades and lost-race novels that rather clog the Encyclopedia's pages had no traceable influence on the living tradition of SF as it is written today. To include them in the history of SF is, therefore, arguably just a distraction from the really important issues.
What appears to be a lack of American perspective seriously damages the entry's recent history of the genre as well.
PN misses the pivotal importance of ``Star Wars'' in the U.S. It was only after the success of that film in 1977 that chain bookstores began stocking whole bookshelves-full of new SF, as opposed to the handful of titles (often ``safe'' reprints of Asimov or Bradbury) that had been the rule up into my teens. The change was rather sudden and dramatic. I remember it very well.
As a particular fan of the stuff, I must strenuously disagree with your assessment that hard SF is in decline or that CYBERPUNK ``came close to ... revitalizing'' it. Perhaps this is so in Great Britain or Australia, but not in the U.S. Hard SF, after a rough period between about 1965 and 1980, was doing quite well through the whole cyberpunk period of 1984-1992, thank you.
There are probably more fine writers of hard SF now than at any time in genre history, with good new ones like Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter popping up all the time. Nor does it exhibit any of the signs of exhaustion you aver. Go ahead, show me any recursivity or nostalgia in Vinge's ``A Fire Upon The Deep'', or Baxter's ``Raft'', or Egan's ``Permutation City''. No decadence here!
``The most exciting event of the 1980s'' was not, after all, the birth of cyberpunk -- it was the nearly simultaneous rediscovery of Golden Age flair by David Brin, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, and others. The most heartening thing about the 1990s to me as a fan is that it proved no transitory phenomenon, that a new generation of sharp young writers as good as any since the early days of Campbell's Astounding is carrying the tradition forward today.
The separation of horror from SF as a marketing category tells me that publishers (who, unlike critics, bet real money on their judgements) know that SF and horror are read by distinct populations and address different needs.
The premise that ``anti-scientific'' SF represents an important persistence of gothic/horror elements in the genre ignores two problems. One is that, almost without exception, anti-science SF is bad SF (either in the sense of being poorly and polemically written, or in the sense of violating or ignoring SF's contract with the reader, or both -- usually both). There are so few counter-examples that, while I grant they occasionally exist, I'm actually unable to think of one.
Another problem is that ``anti-scientific'' is, in this context, a dangerously misleading term. To fear harm from misjudgements or hubristic errors involving technology is, in the post A-bomb world, quite rational. The catharsis of such fears (even if they involve the destruction of some technological artifact) is in fact the re-assertion of a stable, knowable order, not gothic surrender to the unknown. Don't mistake the stage furniture for the moral!
Then, too, much of what passes for horror/SF crossover is stories in which horror tropes are used to set up an SFnal problem, and the true interest of the story is precisely in the SFnal reconciliation of the problem -- the victory (or at least persistence) of knowable order against the dark. I think it quite significant that the article goes for two pages and three-quarters of its length before mentioning a work of print rather than cinema, and that the first one you cite (Richard Matheson's ``I Am Legend") is clearly in this category. Granting that the plot tension in this story is set up by a gothic/horror trope, the story's interest lies in its fundamentally SFnal suggestion of vampirism as a communicable disease. Once this premise is revealed, we are no longer in the gothic darkness -- we are in SF's universe of knowable order. The story as a whole becomes SF in spite of its gothic elements, highlighting the fundamental opposition between the mode of horror and the mode of SF.
The list of SF authors who regularly use horror themes is no better argument. With only one possible exception, they are second-rankers considered fringy and dubious by serious SF fans (I would say that applies even to Ray Bradbury). And Dan Simmons is a ringer -- though he operates comfortably in SF and horror modes, he does not (at least to my knowledge) mix them.
It also depends on the assumption that no natural phenomenon acts to exclude superluminal trajectories which imply causality violation. Interestingly, the physicist Lance Visser has found a natural causality protection effect involving virtual photon feedback loops while studying the theoretical behavior of dirigible wormholes.
See my comments under ROTHMAN, TONY.
This development was to be carried much further in the 1970s and 1980s by other hands. The sense that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reinvented superhero comics in a way quite comparable to the Campbellian reinvention of genre SF remains, however, almost universal in the comics field.
One fruitful analysis would relate this attitude to America's Puritan/Calvinist heritage, specifically the persistent notion that Earthly life is a grim testing ground in which virtue is demonstrated by hard work and self-sacrifice, and confirmed by a stern God's gift prosperity and temporal success. A long line of cultural historians beginning with Max Weber has seen this Protestant ethic as one of the key ideologies of the Industrial revolution, and found both its purest and most secularized forms in the U.S.
To this dour Protestant way of thinking, escapists into passive hedonism are not merely weak and lazy, they are committing a moral outrage. By attempting a facile escape from this Earth of trials, they place their souls at risk -- and, not incidently, tempt the virtuous to give up their courage and abandon the struggle for redemption. It would be the duty of any Godly man, on behalf of God the hedonist's own spiritual welfare, to ``rescue'' them from their fecklessness -- and if the means of rescue are a bit painful, that is no more than God's chastisement to these errant tempters.
While the religious force of this argument is no longer significant to most Americans, its essential structure has been replicated in various secularized versions which replace duty to God with duty to society, to the species, to the future, to intelligence, or to any other individual or collective conception of human destiny. The basic line of logic is accordingly still central to the American character.
Some of these secularizations have (unsurprisingly) become important moral axioms of American genre SF. In this context they have commonly been misinterpreted as SOCIAL DARWINISM, but they are different from that doctrine in that they do not intend or imply any apologia for existing politics (or for that matter any politics at all).
Most of the entry is otherwise pretty good -- surprisingly so, given that it was obviously written by a non-libertarian. But see my comments under POLITICS, POURNELLE and WAR. There are three specific problems with the entry text:
1. It's unfair to claim libertarian SF has a ``casual attitude towards violence'' when it would actually proscribe the use of force more strictly than any other political ethic (and this is reflected in libertarian SF, which may dramatically relish individual confrontation but never glorifies warfare or other forms of mass violence). NT's error here may stem from misidentifying Pournelle and other military-SF writers as libertarians. Violence in libertarian SF always has a strong moral subtext -- it's the polar opposite of casual.
2. The association of libertarianism with ``optimism'' rings rather false. Much libertarian thought stems in fact from a deep pessimism about the unintended consequences of collective action, no matter how noble its goals. In this line of development (exemplified in SF by Russell's ``And Then There Were None'' and Kornbluth's ``The Syndic") libertarian decentralism is less a form of optimism than a damage-limitation strategy.
3. To say that libertarianism ``emphasizes competition'' is true but (without elaboration) fatally misleading. In fact, libertarians expect cooperation to be the rule rather than the exception in a libertarian society, just as it is today's market systems in which competitive pressures normally manifest by encouraging cooperation between self-interested allies.
The ``droogspeak'' of Anthony Burgess's ``A Clockwork Orange'' deserves mention. So does the teen slang of Tanith Lee's ``Drinking Sapphire Wine'' (1979).
The assumption that there is no good reason to reject ``outsiders" can only sustained by arguing that genre protocols have only an accidental relationship to doing good SF. But on the Encyclopedia's own best analysis this is not true -- in fact, the protocols constitute a growing body of corporate knowledge that allows SF to be immensely more sophisticated and interesting than it would be otherwise.
On this analysis, fans are no more to be faulted for rejecting the likes of Doris Lessing than a school of oil painters would be in rejecting someone barging around their galleries with spray-paint and crayons.
The entry goes completely off the beam in associating military SF with libertarianism. Libertarianism is consciously and explicitly anti-militarist, and can in fact be analyzed as a sort of muscular pacifism -- it approves the wearing of personal weapons and urges that every adult be morally prepared to use lethal force in self-defence, but stringently rejects militarism, hierarchical command structures and war-making as ``the health of the State''. These traits can be seen in quite fully developed form as early as Piper's 1958 ``A Planet For Texans'' and are well exemplified after 1980 in the writings of L. NEIL SMITH and others.
Military SF appeared as a defined subgenre with its own packaging conventions in the 1970s and early 1980s, at the same time as explicitly libertarian SF. This was not a coincidence but in fact marked an ideological break between libertarian and conservative elements in the SF tradition. Subsequently, genre libertarianism would tend to grow more radical and genre conservatism more crude and regressive (a trend which accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union).
Military-SF yard goods are as a rule the genre face not of libertarianism but of authoritarian cultural conservatism. However, it is interesting in this respect that the best military SF has almost never been written by conservatives! This is a pattern from "Starship Trooper'' through Haldeman's ``Forever War'' and the ``Sten" novels to Lois Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books.
The comment about proto- or quasi-libertarian ideas emerging in the genre from a conviction that governments ``are likely to be manned by corrupt incompetents'', on the other hand, is perceptive and correct (the cite of Eric Frank Russell is especially apt here; were it not present I would have suggested it). Cf. my comments on optimism/pessimism in glossing your LIBERTARIAN SF entry.
Nor can you find libertarian themes in his post-1980 fiction, which worships social order and glorifies men who kill on political command in a way more that (as more critics than just me have observed) is rather classically fascist. (See my comments about libertarianism and militarism above.)
What you detect as ``LIBERTARIAN hopefuleness'' is a function of the mixed heritage of the American right wing, which includes classical-liberal and proto-libertarian strains within a dominant authoritarian/conservative ideology. (See my mini-essay on this topic). But calling Pournelle a ``libertarian'' is wrong, and he would object as strongly to it as any libertarian. Any tendency he may once have shown in that direction is long dead.
Describing ``The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch'' as a ``fantasy about the end of the world'' fails to do justice to it. I would change ``fantasy'' to ``theological fantasy'' and add ``its apparent lightness conceals a genuine satirical bite''.
I think it's worth noting that Pratchett is often compared to Douglas Adams, but is a more able writer and not fundamentally an ABSURDIST as Adams is. I think the extraordinary cleverness of Pratchett's writing is also worth notice -- he can pack three or four good jokes and an equal number of apposite pop-culture references in one paragraph, and often does.
Pratchett started out by being very funny, and hasn't lost that. Books like ``Small Gods'' show that he is beginning to become wise.
It may be worth noting in passing that Pratt was a key figure in the development of recreational wargaming during its immediate pre-modern period in the '40s and '50s.
See also my comment under JUPITER.
Your update note should be modified to read ``artificial POCKET UNIVERSE''.
Perhaps there ought to be a DINOSAURS entry?
I think this is true. I also think it falsifies some lines of analysis which I have criticized in earlier annotations.
It is misleading to describe DuQuesne as ``foreign-hued''. Aside from his Canadian-French name, he is quite thoroughly American, speaking accentless idiomatic American English and working alongside Seaton in the same government lab. In fact DuQuesne is simply the dark side of the American competent man, the moral obverse of Richard Seaton who otherwise differs from him in no significant way (I belabor this point because it is key to understanding the symbolism of these books). The power and ambiguity of DuQuesne's character derives from the fact that he is not a foreigner to Seaton at all -- the kinship betweem then becoming quite obvious during the scenes on Osnome in which the two cooperate (white men against the perfidious wogs) to defeat the treacherous Urvanians.
Smith in fact took obvious pains to amend his early treatment of the series's women (which was poor only by modern reckoning -- both are presented as quite competent and independent by the standards of 1914). By ``Skylark DuQuesne'' in 1965 Dorothy Seaton is shooting up alien monstrosities right beside her man, and the mother-daughter pair of witches who briefly appear in that novel are tough-minded powerful women who'd fit right in a feminist fantasy today.
I am surprised that JC, evidently determined to do these novels down for political incorrectness, failed to pick on their true and obvious flaw in this regard -- their bloody-minded and rather racist view of right conduct. The ruthlessly eugenic slave society of the Osnomians and the casualness with which Seaton sponsors genocide on the Urvanians just before being declared Overlord of Osnome should make uncomfortable reading for any reader with Nazi Germany in his cultural memory -- the more so since Seaton actually says at one point ``Humanity uber alles!''.
The difference is significant in two ways. First: for the Social Darwinist's world-picture to be validated, selection must occur -- someone must lose. Heinlein would be just as happy if everybody won (everybody was ``saved'' in the original Calvinist motif); his most trenchant scorn is reserved not for those who lose but for those who give up the struggle.
Secondly, Social Darwinism implies an apologia for some existing set of power relationships. But Heinlein's conservatism was never an attachment to existing power relationships but rather to certain traditional American values. The difference is made almost explicit in stories like ``The Long Watch'', in which a hero dies to thwart a conservative military coup and is effectively canonized in one of the most powerful elegiac endings in SF.
As with Heinlein, so with libertarians in general. A central belief of libertarians is that the free market is a positive-sum game -- thus, there don't in principle have to be any losers (though some may not win enough to feel satisfied). And libertarianism, which seeks to abolish almost all power relationships, can hardly be accused of wanting to defend existing ones!
What BS reads in libertarians as echoes of Sumner and Carnegie is accordingly better understood in other ways, most notably as a revulsion against equality-of-results policies and coercive social engineering. The only class war libertarians cheerfully contemplate a la Sumner is of the oppressors against the oppressed -- namely, everybody else against the taxing, coercing, war-making political class.
BS is, on the other hand, quite right to see social Darwinism in the writings of true conservatives like Pournelle. It is explicit in the slogan of the arcologists in ``Oath Of Fealty'' -- ``Think of it as evolution in action."
Nor it is it demonstrably impossible to warp space. See John Cramer's discussion of the Alcubierre warp in the November '96 Analog for refutation.
This line of analysis (which gives due weight to Marx's own consistent advocacy of revolutionary terror) faces up to the necessary role of coercion in socialism. The new Russians would say that Wells's advocacy of elite-led social programs for the transformation of society diverges from Leninism only in that it sweeps the implied means under the rug.
Swanwick has taken some of the same material ``cyberpunks'' use and made it into far sounder and more resonant work. ``Stations Of The Tide'' is particularly telling, one of the very few novels in the history of the genre to fulfill both the 20th century's criteria of "literary excellence'' and SFs own special standards of quality.
Hambly and Gemmell aren't called either ``sword & sorcery'' or ``high fantasy'', and are seen (both in terms of the fantasy field's internal development and of product marketing) to occupy a middle ground in the genre.
The ``unspoken agreement'' not to publish socialist stories was not a taboo, it arose rather from a nearly genre-wide recognition that socialism simply could not be reconciled with the moral premises of SF (see my discussion of the obverse of this point in the mini-essay on libertarianism). Mack Reynolds was the only writer of significance to buck this current, and his efforts (while interesting in their own right) were largely failures with no continuing influence on the genre.
This entry must discuss Tom Clancy, the defining and still-dominant writer of the technothriller, who inaugurated the genre with ``The Hunt For Red October'' (1980). It is possible to retrospectively recruit books going back to 1962's ``Fail-Safe'' into the technothriller genre, but it was Clancy who gave the genre its contemporary form and style in much the same way Heinlein had redefined the rhetoric of SF forty years earlier.
The simile is apt in more than one way, for Clancy has repeatedly averred that he learned how to write by studying Heinlein. Though Clancy's work occasionally verges on SF (notably in ``The Cardinal Of The Kremlin'', 1988) Clancy and his numerous imitators have essentially adopted the expository technique and technophilic aesthetic of hard SF without importing any of SF's urge for CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH or its philosophical curiosity. Occasionally SF writers like Dean ING have crossed successfully over into the technothriller genre with works like ``The Ransom of Black Stealth One'' (1990); nobody but Clancy (a genuinely able writer) has managed the reverse maneuver even by accident.
High quality technothrillers, to an SF fan, often feel entertaining but curiously denatured, like reading competently-crafted SF yard goods written by an author half asleep. At the low end, the technothriller tends to degenerate into a kind of soft-core porn with war machines as the objects of desire and wearyingly simpleminded conservative/militarist politics on constant display. The similarity to bad military SF is not coincidental.
HT also displayed a gift for comic technology-of-magic very much in the ``Unknown Worlds'' mode with ``The Case Of The Toxic Spell Dump" (1993). The ``Worldwar'' books (no bib.; I don't own them) are epic and popular but break no new ground, exploring territory well mapped by Christopher ANVIL (among others) as militaristic aliens invade Earth in an alternate 1942 only to find humans more than they bargained for.
HT is a keenly intelligent, historically aware writer limited by a tendency towards workmanlike but uninspired prose and perhaps a certain lack of ambition. ``Guns'' has shown what he is capable of when passionate about his subject (even the prose improves). Another novel or two of its quality would establish him within the first rank of genre writers.
The North American Confederacy of L. Neil Smith's ``The Probability Broach'' (1980) and sequels is worth mentioning as a libertarian utopia.
Another important early RPG, fantastic in flavor but with a marginally SF backstory, was M.A.R. Barker's ``Empire Of The Petal Throne'', c. 1973. Barker later published two novels, ``The Man Of Gold'' (1984) and ``Flamesong'' (1985), which were among the earliest game-world ties. Barker, a linguist/historian/polymath, created in EPT perhaps the richest and most exotic personal milieu ever to function as a game world, and there remains a small but dedicated EPT fandom active twenty years after its first publication.
[The ``Lawrence Schick'' you cite was during the later 1980s and 1990s one of the most creative and respected designers of live-action role playing games.]
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