THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF: How Science Fiction Conquered the World.

By Thomas M. Disch. Free Press. 272 pp. $25

In the late 1960s, science fiction was divided into two warring camps. The Old Wave wanted the genre to continue following the traditions established by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, depicting scientific advances and their human consequences. The New Wave, by contrast, wanted SF (which they maintained stood for "speculative fiction") to raise its standards and aspire to become avant-garde literature. The Old Wave stressed science; the New Wave stressed fiction.

Thirty years later, it’s hard to tell who won. The best writers—such as Gregory Benford, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Stephen Baxter—produce high-quality fiction that’s scientifically accurate, satisfying both factions’ criteria. The trouble is, their work has been overwhelmed by a tidal wave of trash: novels based on television shows or games, "sharecropped" books expanded from outlines left by dead or retired giants of the field.

A novelist and literary critic who championed the New Wave in the 1960s, Disch indicts today’s science fiction on a number of counts. It stimulates woolly-minded daydreaming. It drives readers to promote ridiculous or pointless causes, such as the existence of UFOs. As "lumpen-literature," it encourages simplistic fantasies—every woman a warrior queen, every man a starship trooper.

Much of Disch’s critique is accurate. Science fiction attracts its share of obsessives and eccentrics, including some who turn antisocial (the creator of Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult apparently derived his messianic ideas from Asimov’s Foundation series). But most readers choose SF for its entertaining stories and stimulating ideas— and they are just as skeptical of the genre’s occasional mystical nonsense as Disch. The author’s understanding of current SF is spotty, too. His chapter on female writers concentrates on Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, neither of whom has written much science fiction for years, and he devotes a single dismissive line to Lois McMaster Bujold, who has won three Hugos for best novel in the 1990s.

"As to the future of SF," Disch writes, "apart from the fortified suburbs of tenured teaching, the outlook is bleak." He rightly argues that many midlist writers, whose books generate respectable but not spectacular sales, will have trouble getting new contracts (a situation that’s not limited to science fiction, by the way). But SF has survived past predictions of doom. In all likelihood, the genre will continue to account for about 15 percent of all fiction published, Disch’s entertaining but misleading rodomontade notwithstanding.

—Martin Morse Wooster