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It kinda seems to me that, in terms of the better known authors at least, the overt connections between SF and the 60s/70s counter-culture were more to do with marketing than with the actual influence of the latter on the former.
PK Dick, Sheckley, Delaney, Harlan Ellison, early Vonnegut, early Ballard, Heinlein circa "Stranger in a Strange Land", Theodore Sturgeon... all these guys were writing stuff that chimed with a lot of the ideas of the hippie era from the '50s onwards, and I get the impression that most of them didn't do much more than shrug in vague approval and get on with business as usual when the publishers started putting their books out with whacked out psychedelic cover designs instead of ugly-looking rocket ships.
(And some of those cover designs are absolutely crazed - check out some PKD paperbacks from the 60s/70s - whoa!)
Moorcock is definitely worth noting as someone who tried to establish a direct link between the two worlds, somewhat inevitably I guess given his position as both a heavy-hitter in SF & Fantasy unit-shifting and editing, and also as a champion of the era's fashion/drugs/rock n roll agenda via his participation in the whole London Pink Floyd-via-Hawkwind psychedelic scene.
Doesn’t he say in an introduction to one of his books that his original conception of Jerry Cornelius was as a “James Bond of the counter-culture”?
I gather that thanks to him, New Worlds went out of it’s way to champion new/experimental writers and to cultivate a cooler audience beyond the realms of SF geeks, although I’ve never seen/read any actual issues of it, so who knows.
Kind of ironic seeing how Moorcock was still probably taking speed and staying up all night bashing out Elric novels and the like at the time.
Also, didn’t Harlan Ellison put together a very well received anthology of SF stories by ‘new wave’ writers in the late ‘60s with the deliberate intention of hooking some new readers from the mind-expanding hipster community...? Can’t remember what it was called.
Apparently Ellison wrote an introduction to the Philip K. Dick story in the book that bigged him up as the “acid sage of Berkeley” or somesuch, despite the fact that PKD was leading quite a square and sober life at the time, although the image stuck and he decided to cultivate it, picking up a lot of druggy new friends etc, leading eventually to the ‘Scanner Darkly’ era of his work/life. |
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