On SF

This collection by the much-loved and lauded science-fiction writer Thomas Disch spans twenty-five years of his career, during which he has supplemented his creative output with reviews and critical essays in publications as diverse as the Nation, the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and Twilight Zone.

Disch's perspectives on his genre are skeptical, novel, and often incendiary. The volume's opening essay, for example, characterizes writers of science fiction as "the provincials of literature." Other essays explore science fiction's roots-Poe, Bradbury, Clarke, Asimov, Vonnegut-as well as modern practitioners such as Stephen King, Philip Dick, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and William Gibson.

Disch entertains and provokes with essays on UFOs, Science Fiction as a Church, and Newt Gingrich's Futurist Brain Trust. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Madame Blavatsky also get the Disch treatment. Throughout, the writing is lively, agile, and irreverent, exhibiting an incisive honesty that is undiluted by Disch's own attachments as a sci-fi practitioner. On SF will appeal equally to lovers of science fiction and connoisseurs of the finest critical prose.

Contents

Part One: The Forest

The Embarrassments of Science Fiction
Ideas: A Popular Misconception
Mythology and Science Fiction
Big Ideas and Dead-End Thrills: The Further Embarrassments of Science Fiction
.Dinosaurs versus New Wave versus Cyberpunk
.Youth, Too Often Callow

Part Two: Forefathers

Poe's Appalling Life
Luncheon in the Sepulcher: Poe in the Gothic Tradition
BRAVE NEW WORLD Revisited Once Again
A Tableful of Twinkies
Sic, Sic, Sic
A Bus Trip to Heaven
The Doldrums of Space
Isaac Asimov (1920�92)
Jokes across the Generation Gap
Time, Space, the Limitlessness of the Imagination–and Abs to Die for

Part Three: The Bully Pulpit

The King and His Minions: Thoughts of a TWILIGHT ZONE Reviewer
Talking with Jesus
The Labor Day Group
1979: Fluff and Fizzles
The Feast of St. Bradbury

Part Four: Selected Larger Trees

A Different Different World
Crowley's Poetry
Wolfe's New Sun
The Champion of Cyberpunk: On Two Works by William Gibson
Queen Victoria's Computers
Dick's First Novel
In the Mold of 1964: An Afterword

Part Five: Crazy Neighbors

The Village Alien
UFOs and the Origins of Christianity
Science Fiction as a Church
The Evidence of Things Not Seen
The Road to Heaven: Science Fiction and the Militarization of Space
Speaker Moonbeam: Newt's Futurist Brain Trust
A Closer Look at CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Primal Hooting

Part Six: After the Future

The Day of the Living Dead
The Fairy Tale Kingdom of Baghdad
SF: Guides to the Ghetto
Over the River and Through the Wood
Measures of Hanging
The Secret Code Language of Bright Kids
Double Talk, Double Dutch, Dutch Chocolate

Acknowledgments
Index