Every genre has a shadow canon — the writers who don't make the syllabus, don't sell out on Amazon, and rarely get the Netflix series. In science fiction, that shadow canon is where some of the most intellectually adventurous, politically serious and formally daring work of the twentieth century was done.
Having opened the series with the big names — Wells, Verne, Poe, the Mount Rushmore of the genre — John and Ezri jump forward to the late 1960s and 1970s and turn to five authors most listeners won't know: Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, John Sladek, John Brunner and Christopher Priest. Feminist SF, satirical SF, dystopian SF set in a Britain going to the dogs. The thread that connects them is "prescience", a word that keeps coming up. Were these writers really predicting the future – or just paying close enough attention to the present?
In this episode:
Why 1969 makes such a strange hinge point — Apollo 11 and the realisation of Goddard's cherry-tree dream, set against the assassinations of 1968, Vietnam, Prague, Altamont, and the first wave of environmental science
Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell, and the New Wave: Moorcock's New Worlds, Ballard's "inner space", and SF's discovery that it could not avoid politics
Kate Wilhelm — Hugo, Nebula and Locus winner for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, a co-founder of the Clarion Writers' Workshop who is now better known as a mystery writer
Joanna Russ — The Female Man, written in 1970 but unpublished until 1975, and How to Suppress Women's Writing; a Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalist who chose literature as her weapon
John Sladek — the satirist whose robot in Tik-Tok has had its "asimov circuits" go on the blink, and whose hoax book on a thirteenth sign of the zodiac proved people will believe anything stated with enough confidence
John Brunner — the "Club of Rome Quartet", the novel that coined "worm" for self-replicating code, and Stand on Zanzibar, set in 2010 and unsettlingly familiar by the time we got there
Christopher Priest — Fugue for a Darkening Island and A Dream of Wessex, the racial framing Priest himself later grappled with, and The Prestige (with David Bowie as Tesla)
The big question under all of it: what is the difference between prescience and prediction — and is it significant that "prescience" contains the word "science"?
Links and resources:
Website: techimaginarium.co.uk
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Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting
Music by Nick Dwyer recording as Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.
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