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In reply to the discussion: We should have been colonizing the solar system by now. [View all]klook
(12,151 posts)Um, yes -- it's a whole lot more complicated than that.
The point of my post was that I found it amusing that you chose to single out the so-called "New Wave" (or "New Thing," as some called it at the time) movement within science fiction as directly responsible for the lack of interstellar colonization. Those authors' effect on public policy is apparently overrated in some circles.
Before I go further, let me clarify that I am a huge supporter of NASA, of science, and of space travel. Have been since I stood in the back yard as a little kid and saw Sputnik overhead. OK?
I'm aware of the internecine warfare in the SF community over "hard science" fiction vs. "speculative" fiction. At the heart of this conflict was between old-line conservatives and newer experimentalists. Zealots on either side depicted the other as either BEMs, damsels in distress, and cowboys with rayguns; or navel-gazing hippies who couldn't put a coherent plot together to save their life and disdained anything remotely scientific. Again, the reality was slightly more complicated.
Sure, 90 percent of the sub-genre represented by Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard was crap, just as 90 percent of the John W. Campbell school of science fiction was crap. You're aware of Sturgeon's Revelation, I imagine? (More important is Sturgeon's Law as originally stated: "Nothing is always absolutely so."
So, sorry pal, no screed from me. I fly no literary flag and have read widely and enjoyed many types of imaginative fiction.