Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow edited by Reginald Bretnor. Harper and Row. 1974.
Well as you probably could have gathered from my last post, I have built up some negative feelings towards this book. I started out reading it because I thought it would be interesting. It is interesting. What I did not anticipate was the dry essay style in which the different pieces are written. This probably should have been expected since the book is a symposium including essays by scholars and such dealing with science and fiction. I have held off these complaints, but I am now nearing the end so I feel free to let them be heard. Anyway. The last essay is by Jack Williamson who I suppose is some sort of writer I should have heard of. He writes about the teaching and criticism of the genre. I hadn't really realized this, but apparently in 1974 there were hundreds of science fiction and fantasy courses being offered at various universities. Williamson is a science fiction teacher himself. He claims that the first science fiction course was taught at Colgate in 1962. Williamson says that academic science fiction is gaining ground and that the "unorthodox innovations" used in the classes make them fun to teach and take. According to Williamson, before WWII science fiction was regarded as "crude pulp stuff." Early searches for scholarly discussions about science fiction were hard to come by. He then goes on to say that the recent abundance of criticism about science fiction is thanks to H.G. Wells-"the chief inventor of the genre." Wells was once misunderstood and seen as a hollow-headed utopian. Eventually critics began to notice the "dark philosophic pessimism beneath the life and wit and rich invention of Wells's great fiction." They realized that his writing was not "crude pulp stuff." Many books were published about his work and the realm of academic science fiction took off. I suspect that even today, 34 years later, there is an even greater abundance of academic science fiction in the world and in America's universities.
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