He wondered suddenly: Is it just that I am, happily, reasonable?Īnd wondered how different that made him from those around. If, after all this, you’re not satisfied with the few laws that do exist, each city has a sector where none of them apply (realizing such places develop anyway). Want to see what attraction to a whole different spectrum of people feels like? There’s a machine for that too. Hell, it’s not even unusual (more like a surgical oil change). If you’re unhappy with your flesh, your sex, your body in any way, the technology exists to change it. Any lifestyle goes and all basic needs are provided. There are no such things as alternate cultures on the future society of Triton, ensconced in its domes, because there’s no such thing as a mainstream to begin with. Now, as for Triton, it struck me upon second glance that it describes a world that for many of us would be close to paradise. There’s an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, in the first issue of Coilhouse. Delany and “groundbreaking” go hand in hand, as any perusal of the man’s formidable body of work will reveal. Delany’s 1976 “ambiguous heterotopia” Trouble on Triton (just Triton in my ragtag version). This time, we have the legendary Samuel R. Everything featured here isn’t just thought provoking, but damn fine reading as well. All Tomorrows will be a weekly feature taking a look at one of these works and the possibilities it raises. Most of it was contained in dusty volumes, worth seeking out and taking home when you found them. Thanks to an unusually well-stocked used bookstore in my hometown, this is the stuff I grew up on. Today, we face some eerily similar questions – and would do well to delve into their possible answers.
However, in this period sci-fi considered tomorrows that involved far more than just bigger machinery. Some of the writers went on to fame (if rarely fortune), while others remain obscure.
The resulting works tackled issues of culture, society, ethics and sex in ways that make them still fresh today. To the new breed it was now a vehicle to explore endless possible societies, to consider and endless array of tomorrows: weird, wonderful or horrible.ĭuring this period, lasting roughly from the mid-60s to the early ’80s, science fiction went through a sea change like no other.
Old barriers fell, including in the very writing invented to consider the future. It was a time when society seemed both crumbling and poised for something new.
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