Rambling, offensive and unbeatable: beam me up, old-school sci-fi

Now that science fiction is respectable, it's lost almost all of the conceptual craziness and dubious sexual politics that made it both fanboy bait and of genuine interest

Science-fiction writing used to be the preserve of spotty teenagers and cranks. It was a small, incestuous subculture, regarded by most people with amusement and disdain. Both were sometimes deserved. The culture was plagued by a misogyny so intense it sometimes crossed the line into psychosis. There were many talented authors, but also an abundance of shameless hacks. The quality of the writing varied wildly not only between writers, but in the works of an individual writer often within a single book. Several eminent authors prided themselves on being able to write a novel in a couple of weeks. Samuel R Delany, Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock have all written both unreadable garbage and books regarded as literature even by non-geeks.

In that wild west era, plots could go anywhere or nowhere. A typical plot development, in Philip K Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon, has a hero crushed by divorce and failure, contemplating suicide in his crappy apartment. At the last moment, he's interrupted by his neighbour, a telepathic slime mould. Having rudely flowed under the door, it says, "I couldn't help overhearing " Then it offers the man a job and says it will find him a replacement wife. Off it goes, and soon a teenage girl arrives at the door. She is completely content to be fixed up with a much-older suicidal loser by an alien slime mould. Her breasts are exhaustively described.

Now I feel my special hands, my tender hands I always carry hidden now they come swelling out, come pushing toward my head! What? What?
My secret hands begin to knead and roll the stuff that's dripping from my jaws.
Ah, that arouses you too, my redling, doesn't it?

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