LeGuin, Hard SF, The 1960's, Literature

Having recently finished LeGuin's The Dispossesed, alongside her story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," I'm left thinking about the legacy of the 1960's in science fiction. Like much that went on in the sixties, contemporary practice has only fitfully digested it.

The feeling creeps up on me that what I'm reading in LeGuin is literary parable, especially in the story. I don't put that in opposition to science fiction, except to say that it rarely comes up in SF anymore.

Political systems are not often debated these days: they are condemned. Even when debate is tolerated, the open conclusion of the parable is not.

The libertarian twist that runs through SF these days is an offshoot of the triumph of Hard SF attitudes. It is a certain way of confusing the politics of pragmatism with the utilitarian emphasis of the hacker/gearhead. It's interesting to note that in some reprints LeGuin's leading subtitle for the piece was "Variations on a Theme from William James."

With all due respect to LeGuin, I don't think I like parable, either. I'm not even sure on my best days I like literature, or fine intelligences, either. Perhaps I'll take one or the other but not both at the same time. Looking at a recent e-mail exchange with a member of our group, I find this:

Part of the beauty of SF is that it has sometimes been a refuge from the concerns of serious literature. The idea of colonizing SF with mainstream aesthetic concerns (and at this point, Borges, Calvino, Ballard all belong to the mainstream) is something that has been hashed out for a couple decades, now. One of the answers was Gibson: there's a reason why he didn't write like Borges or Calvino, though he was read in them. The previous generation had already done that. His answer was to go deeper into science fiction, to embrace new geekery and to go to darker corners of techspeak and SF neologism. This is an attitude I empathize with, though I'm not sure I'd want to follow him there...I sense a fumbling among the SF community for the
next thing, whether it be Steampunk or the New Weird or Mundane SF. They all seem to be in agreement, though: if SF all became sort of Virginia Wolffish, there's no longer be much interest in keeping the shop open. There would no longer be a refuge to pull from. Opening up SF to Fine Literature is like opening up the City Zoo to the City. All the strange animals would be dead within a week, and the residents of
the City would no longer be able to go see the zebras.

Ack, but I've got to go to work. More on this later.  ¶ 10:52 AM