738 The American Century: Literature since 1945books are supposed to burn; and the book is set in a future world where the written
word is banned. A group of rebels resist the ban by memorizing entire works of
literature and philosophy. Here, and in his other books (including numerous
collections of stories like The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)), Bradbury views
technological change with a cautious sympathy. Not against such change in itself,
he is nevertheless alert to possible dangers – above all, the possibilities that the
moral evolution of human beings will not keep pace with their mechanical
development. The use of science fiction or fantasy as a critique and corrective is
just as notable in the work of Ursula Le Guin (1929–). In fact, in her introduction
to her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Le Guin insisted that “science fiction
is not predictive; it is descriptive.” True to that formula, this novel describes and
critically defines sexual prejudice. It is set on an imaginary planet populated by
“androgynes,” people who can at different times be male, female, and neuter. An
ordinary human who falls in love with a member of this trisexual society is forced
to examine the meaning of sexual roles. And the reader, in turn, is invited to
imagine what it may mean to be simply human, living outside the social
determinants of sexual identity. Other books are critical of contemporary American
political and social values. The Word for World Forest (1972) is about Vietnam; The
Dispossessed (1974) is a fantasy set on an anarchist moon colony and its capitalist
mother planet; The New Atlantis (1975) presents a futuristic vision of a totalitarian
United States. Her most ambitious and acclaimed work, though, the Earthsea
trilogy, is more preoccupied with fundamental values: addressing, in terms of
scientific fantasy, the need to face the evil in oneself (A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)),
the need for trust and truth (The Tombs of Atuan (1971)), and the need to accept
the ineluctable fact of death (The Farthest Shore (1972)).
The scope of science fiction, its capacity to explore, not only social and moral
issues, but matters of being and knowledge is nowhere more evident than in the
stories of Philip K. Dick (1928–1982), Samuel R. Delany (1942–), and Octavia Butler
(1947–2006). Preoccupied with problems of perception, Dick returned obsessively
to the permeable boundaries separating the real from the illusory, fact from fiction.
Which is a reason for his interest in hallucinatory drugs and their impact on
consciousness (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), A Scanner Darkly
(1977)). As the title of his most famous novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(1968), indicates, it was also the reason for his imagining of cunning facsimiles of
humanity that call into question all our ideas of what it means to be human. The
work of Delany reflects his own belief that, as he has put it, “the science fictional
enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction.” An African-American,
Delany began by writing relatively traditional science fiction. His first book,
The Jewels of lptor (1962), explores themes of quest, the capabilities of technology,
and the status of the artist, to all of which Delany would later return. The Einstein
Intersection (1967) is an ambitious attempt to satirize forms of human life using a
science fiction frame. Nova (1968) is a dense translation of the myths of Prometheus
and the Holy Grail into futuristic terms. These novels reveal an increasing complexity.
In Nova, for instance, cryptic narrative information alternates with passages ofGGray_c05.indd 738ray_c 05 .indd 738 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM