Neuromancer-Part Two

In one way or another, that question--Is science fiction dying?--has come up again and again in the past sixty-six years. The fact that it's still being asked makes the whole thing kind of ridiculous. After all, what else is there that takes sixty-six years--and counting--to die? Science fiction is obviously not dying. It's obviously not in trouble. People keep reading and writing it. I'm sure all of that will go on until there are no more readers in the world, a development that will probably come along at around the same time that the last of the pre-Internet, pre-smartphone generations die out. Science and technology--science-fictional developments manifested in the real world--may finally kill off science fiction.

Science fiction in the classic sense is future-oriented and ascendant. In contrast, weird fiction tends to be decadent and looks to--or obsesses over--the past. The weird-fictional protagonist is bound by the past. His science-fictional counterpart is unbound. There are no limits for him. He may achieve godlike powers. He may jaunt among the stars.

If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then did it afterwards decay, like uranium into lead? In the 1960s there was New Wave science fiction and by the 1980s cyberpunk. There were still hard science fiction and adventure science fiction, but I have the impression that those sub-genres were seen as old-fashioned and possibly looked down upon by the cool people in science fiction. The place to be as a science fiction writer--the leading edge of the whole project--was in a different kind of writing in which elements of weird fiction, horror, Gothics (my new word), and so on were injected into science fiction. I don't say that to state a fact, only to hypothesize or to apply an interpretation.

I have been using examples from the work of J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). We read his stories for our weird fiction/science fiction book club in April of this year (2026). Ballard is supposed to have been an author of the British New Wave. He is in fact considered a science fiction author. But stories such as the Poesque "Now: Zero" (Science Fantasy, Dec. 1959), the romantic/mythological fantasy "The Garden of Time" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Feb. 1962), and the Kafkaesque  story "The Concentration City" (New Worlds Science Fiction, Jan. 1957) are as much--or more--weird-fictional than they are science-fictional. In particular, "The Concentration City" reminds me not only of stories by Franz Kafka (the protagonist is named Franz--ironically "free") but also of 1984 by George Orwell (1949) and the short story "The Hound" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1942), less so "Smoke Ghost" (Unknown Worlds, Oct. 1941), both by Fritz Leiber, Jr.

One of the primary differences between science fiction and weird fiction is that the science-fictional hero is or becomes powerful and triumphant--very often he is nearly perfect--whereas the weird-fictional protagonist is weak, flawed, cursed, insane, or otherwise mortal and human. You can hardly call him a hero. While you might identify with or aspire to be the science-fictional hero, you should be careful about his weird-fictional counterpart, for he often fails and is usually humiliated and defeated. Sometimes he even perishes.

I can think of two obvious examples of American science fiction authors who introduced New Wave or weird-fictional elements into their stories. They are Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) and Barry N. Malzberg (1939-2024). I regret not having observed the passing of Barry Malzberg in 2024, but I didn't know until this year that he had died. By the way, he wrote a book called The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties. Unfortunately, it was published in 1982, before Neuromancer by William Gibson came along in that most appropriate of years, 1984.

To be continued . . .

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley