Modern science fiction has little appeal to me anymore.
There was a time that a major award printed on a book cover almost guaranteed that I would buy and read a novel. Those days are long, long gone.
One can hardly imagine an author that could serve as a more suitable avatar of science fiction and fantasy’s leftward arc over the past 40 years than Mercedes Lackey. The protégé of Marion Zimmer Bradley is largely credited for introducing mainstream fantasy’s first openly gay hero, Vanyel Ashkevron in 1989’s Magic’s Pawn, the first book in her The Last Herald-Mage trilogy.
As we now know, Ms. Bradley and her husband were accused of child abuse by her own daughter. Read more here is you have the stomach:
Marion Zimmer Bradley: It's Worse Than I Knew
The entire book and entertainment scene has passed over into the hands of the devil.
And the SFWA has not been about science fiction for a long time, to their own detriment.
And the SFWA has not been about science fiction for a long time, to their own detriment.
I was a member of the Science Fiction Book Club from my pre-teens until I was in my 20s. They were trending toward "alternative lifestyles," which I didn't understand and therefore ignored.
My recollection is that it was a novel called "The Man Who Folded Himself" (by David Gerrold) that made me actually feel uncomfortable due to sexual matter, and I told my father he could stop paying for my "membership," I didn't like it anymore.
That book came out in 1973, my first year of college.
I read a free verse poem written by Moira Greyland, daughter of Marion Z. Bradlee.
It was titled ‘Mother’s Hands’
It was devastating and terrible.
I won’t print it here. Too sad.
It seems to me that many of them went to California to support themselves as writers or artists in one way or another, got into drugs and "alternative lifestyles" of various types. Due to competitive pressures within the SF publishing marketplaces, they migrated to ever more "sketchy" subject matter ("sketchy" being one of the very few neologisms I like), and pumped it out to their largely youthful audience.
I don't think they necessarily did this because they wanted to "poison young minds," although some of them probably thought they were striking a blow against the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex by doing so, back during the Vietnam-Watergate era.
I think most of them just did it because those lifestyle choices were ones they were making personally, and they were just writing about what they knew.
Some of them (like Philip K. Dick) were actually mentally ill. Dick perhaps made himself mentally ill through massive drug ingestion, I don't know. There were others who went this route.
Some of them were just nasty.
Some of them thought they were experimenting with forces that would unleash the next level of human evolution.
Some of them were just cynical and needed to make their next buck.