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1970s

Knopf’s Borzoi Puppies – An Experiment in Experimental Fiction


The Seventies were weird. A lot of long-established conventions faltered or were kicked over, a lot of idealistic ventures were launched, often fueled more by hope than resources, and many institutions grabbed desperately at innovations they gambled would turn into lifelines. One such experiment was Alfred A. Knopf’s brief series of dust jacketless, shiny-covered hardbacks that championed the work of young American writers playing around with fictional forms and styles — a series referred to as “Borzoi puppies” after Knopf’s legendary Borzoi Books. Knopf launched the series by promising to break new ground between traditional hardbacks and cheap mass market paperbacks, offering “new novels at plausible prices.” The plausible price in 1971 was $3.50. (According to USInflationCalculator.com, this is equivalent to $26.37 today. By comparison, another Knopf title from the same year, Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, sold for $5.95 or $44.82 in 2023. Which goes to show that despite what some folks think, the price of new books today has not remotely kept pace with inflation.)

If you’re a veteran of American used book stores, you may have come across one or more of these. Fifty years later, they still standout on any shelf: such slick spines are more often confined to textbooks and high-end vanity publications. That look was the first thing to attract the interest of people covering the publishing industry. Reporting on the initiative in the New York Times, Joan Baum wrote, “At the risk of emphasizing the container at the expense of the contained, it should be noted at once that these slim volumes are bound in strikingly handsome overboards with back photos of the authors and cover designs that evoke the mood and subject matter within.”

Bill Katz (who later compiled Writer’s Choice, a cornucopia of neglected book recommendations, with his wife Linda Sternberg Katz), introduced the series to his fellow librarians in a piece in Library Journal:

With In the Animal Kingdom and Burnt Toast, Knopf initiates a program of publishing new fiction by young novelists at a reasonable price. The books are just slightly smaller than the ordinary novel, bound in paper over boards, and nicely produced, with attractive covers and good, wide margins. Each of the present works has as its hero a youth engaged in a version of the ancestor quest, familiar through anthropology, by which manhood is achieved. And, though the two books are very different in style and tone, each has a large component of ritual. These initial selections evidently were made with an eye to capturing two segments of the youth market: the English-major set, who may be impressed with Warren Fine’s impacted manipulations of time sequence and narrative voice; and the flower-child communards, to whom Peter Gould’s unremitting ingenuousness may appeal.

The series was short-lived: Knopf published four titles in 1971 and four more in 1972. By 1973, it was dead and forgotten. Dead probably because Knopf lost money on them — or at least (such is the logic of the market), didn’t make enough money. But unjustly forgotten, in my view. So, here is my attempt commemorate this experiment.

Cover of Burnt Toast by Peter Gould

• Burnt Toast, by Peter Gould
Peter Gould’s amiable autobiographical novel about life on a Vermont farm with a sort-of commune of friends was a perfect introduction for the series. “We consulted the oracle when this book was first begun,” read Gould’s dedication. “This is what came up: ‘Innocence (The Unexpected)’.” The optimism of innocence, or maybe the innocence of optimism, was behind both Knopf’s investment and the creative spirit of these writers. Each of these books was an attempt to change the world, or at least evidence that the belief that fiction could change the world was still alive and kicking.
The farm in question had already been celebrated in Raymond Mungo’s nonfiction book of the year before, Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life. As often happens, Gould’s version was more earnest and less commercially successful. His hero, Silent, and a character named V.D.C. (for “Very Decent Citizen”) enter forthrightly and energetically into the task of farming and community building and take each setback with a mixture of wonder and resilience. Joan Baum wrote that rather than trying to turn his work into a book, Gould should have “tacked it up instead on the hardwoods in Vermont and read it aloud to the community for free.”
You can purchase Peter Gould’s more recent nonfictional account of his experiences at Total Loss Farm, Horse-Drawn Yogurt, on his website, PeterGouldVermont.com.

Covers of Their Family and In the Animal Kingdom by Warren Fine, illustrations by James Grashow

• In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family, by Warren Fine
Warren Fine had more ambition that all his series-mates combined, and it shows in these two books, which have accumulated a tiny but loyal following over the years. In the Animal Kingdom and Their Family tell related stories that revolve around Orcus Berrigan and Gerhard Blau, who desert the revolutionary American army and head into the wilderness that is now the Midwest. They become trappers and Berrigan settles with an Indian woman known as Marie or Sawpootway. Their Family is Blau’s fantasy of what happens to Berrigan and Sawpootway in the years after the two men parted. Where In the Animal Kingdom is rhapsodical and profane, Their Family blends realism and visions, particularly as experienced by Sawpootway:

In the dream, her hands covered her ears; if she put her hands upon the sewing in her lap, she’d have to listen to words about Legget. She reached for the sewing, needing its confirmation: a voice spoke of her existence in an old life. The voice said nothing of Legget; her sewing disappeared beneath her fingers, and she didn’t miss it. Dutchess rose out of the water, lake water still and deep. The man, from her first dream, perhaps Legget, perhaps Thurlow, perhaps… The man from her first dream, a shape shifting, threw Dutchess into an oven, where, cooked, she became Sawpootway. In the oven, she bled forever from her womb, and no man would touch her. The man departed, betraying her as if he were one, now laughing at his joke, who’d already died, long before.

Something in Fine’s work set reviewers’ teeth on edge:

Warren Fine is a devotee of the “Faulknerian” school of writing: using endless, snake-like sentences and relying on purple prose to tell poetic rather than objective truth. If you believe that reality is mysteriously subjective and that a tale can never be told simply, then Their Family is your literary cup of commas, diluted with pitchers full of colons and sweetened by tablespoons full of semi-colons.

It’s hard to see what the fuss was about. “Faulknerian” is actually off the mark, in my view. The real tip-off to Fine’s creative inspiration is in his dedication in In the Animal Kingdom: “For John Hawkes.” Fine was probably the closest any writer came to following in “the school of Hawkes” (or is it “Hawkesian”?), with its mixture of mystical eroticism and precise, at times painful, concrete details.

And, it must be said, a clear invocation of the spirit of Walt Whitman in the opening to In the Animal Kingdom:

In America, I throw my single voice about like a ventriloquist; like an evangelist—ox, eagle, ass, or winged man, play my various tongues, both intimate and distant voices cast from my mouth, as if fishlines spread to flickering sheets, become so much like fish themselves, like blades and flames, to catch my experience in the animal kingdom, to come into my story, feeling as if with my tongue, to know again, and know mostly now, the process of my adventure in the flesh, as all tongues, like castaways returning through my mouth, reenter and descend into my present body.

Warren Fine never managed to publish another book after these two novels. He taught at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, often holding class in the Zoo Bar off campus, then moved to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he was found dead in his apartment in 1987 at the age of 44. His passing was marked by his favorite bartender in the Lincoln Star: “He drank, he gambled, he was lax about his health and his taxes. He hurt some wonderful women and they left him. They had no choice. He was desperately self-destructive… I know he believed the first rule of being a writer: write an awful lot.” Fine’s papers at the UNL archives include the manuscripts of dozens of stories and at least one unpublished novel.

The two striking cover illustrations are by James Grashow.

cover of Arkansas Adios by Earl Mac Rauch

• Arkansas Adios, by Earl Mac Rauch
I’ve got to be honest about this one. There was a period, maybe from the early 1960s into the early 1980s, when Playboy magazine used to publish serious fiction in between the ads and nudes. Serious, often innovative, but also tending to fall into a certain rut that was even narrower and more identifiable than the supposed New Yorker school of spare short stories in which nothing happens (I’m citing the stereotype here). That rut was usually comic, often ribald, and pretty much always confined to male authors.,/dd>

I don’t know if Earl Mac Rauch ever published in Playboy, but if you wanted to get a good sense of what the Playboy school (or perhaps, playground) of fiction was like, give Arkansas Adios a read. It’s about a precocious eleven-year-old boy growing up in Red Mound, Arkansas and his picaresque adventures — at least, as picaresque as you can get on a fat-tired bicycle. One of his adventures involves playing a trick on the town’s prostitute. If that sounds like comic gold to you, you’ll probably love this book. Bearing in mind that Rauch published his first novel, Dirty Pictures from the Prom, while an undergraduate at Darmouth, I can be excused for describing the humor as sophmoric.
Reviewing the book for the Boston Globe, Richard Pearce wrote, “More than anything else, Rauch leads us from one episode to the next in anticipation of some mind-blowing joke that lies just beyond the novel’s reach.” Pearce rated the book “a minor by singular accomplishment like that of a Pogo or Snoopy cartoon,” which in my opinion is an insult to Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.
Rauch does play around with fictional conventions, giving his characters dialogue balloons at one point, but I’m stretching to class this with the other books on the list as experimental fiction. His main claim to fame is his screenplay and novelization of the cult movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.

Cover of Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense by Kathy Black

• Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense, by Kathy Black
Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense is about a Barnard graduate named Betty who’s trying to get a book called Riches and Fame and the Pleasures of Sense published — that is, once she’s written in. In search of material, she interviews friends and old classmates and spends time in Paris with her boyfriend Arnold.
The book is filled with snippets. Snippets of the interviews, of Betty’s notebooks, of a play she wrote in elementary school, of letters to editors, of thoughts on such topics as “Modern Youth Searches for an Identity.” Even a snippet of an author’s apology to the reader:

“I started writing this book because I wanted to write something and because I needed something to write about so K said “Why not ask girls about their future plans” said K. In college you never think about the distant future said Arnold. So here it is, the distant future.

All this would quickly grow insufferable were it not for Kathy Black’s winning acknowledgement that since we’re following along with her wanderings, she owes the reader a chuckle or accurate insight every page or so. As the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Lask, wrote, Black manages to capture the spirit of a certain segment of American youth on the cusp of a new decade: “The goodwill of these young people, their desire to redress injustice, to make the world better, to do something about the deep stores of guilt that lie in their hearts all shine through their immaturity, their quixotic and sometimes dangerous behavior.”

As far as I can tell, this was Kathy Black’s only book.

Cover of Saw by Steve Katz

• Saw, by Steve Katz
Of all the authors represented in the Borzoi puppies, Steve Katz was the most committed to experimental fiction as both cause and form. He founded the Fiction Collective (still going strong, yay!) with fellow experimentalists Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, et al., and never lost his love of play in every aspect of writing and publishing. His first novel, The Exagggerations of Peter Prince includes photos, illustrations, one-, two-, and four-column texts, and even a full-page set of exit doors in case the reader feels like quitting. His short story collection Creamy and Delicious (recently republished by Tough Poets Press) has been called the best embodiment of Pop Art in fictional form (and, I’m happy to note, is currently ranked as the 2506th greatest fiction book of all time according to TheGreatestBooks.org).
Saw could be seen as Steve Katz’s riff on J. G. Ballard, at least J. G. Ballard’s disaster novels of an Earth subject to relentless heat, rising sea levels, crystalization, and blistering winds. In this case, the disaster is garbage. It’s set in a New York City swimming in garbage: “Garbage heaps. Garbagy air, people wander around in the garbage, kicking it up underfoot, sucking it into their lungs, kissing it into each other’s mouth. The Garbage Age, not the Space Age or the Computer Age.” And when a couple manage begin enjoying a gourmet meal of asparus and veal Milanese, their apartment is invaded by “the fetid grimy rabble of the streets nobody loves. They drag with them some garbage cans full of steamy putrid stuff, and plastic bages full of sodden trash.”
So … how does this relate to the astronaut on the cover? Well, the Astronaut is Steve Katz, who is watching the garbage-piled world and us the reader and reserving his right to remain the impassive observer — or to descend and reorganize the world as a new Creator. If you have any familiarity with fragmentary fiction, you will be able to enjoy Saw. If not, you may feel like the New York Times reviewer, who claimed his ARC fell apart and left him with scattered pages and Chapter 7 following Chapter 17. Which I suspect Steve Katz would have told him was a darned good novel, too. Kirkus Reviews took a more tolerant view, saying it was “simply a charming book that amuses the reader as it gently deposits him from one place to another, with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of pleasure if you’re so minded.”
Saw is in print, at least according to the website of the University of Alabama Press.

Cover of The Log of the S. S. Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford

• Log of the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine, by Stanley Crawford
Stanley Crawford’s first novel, Gascoyne was a broad-brush satire of the American way of enterprise, something not too dissimilar from Stanley Elkin’s early novels or Max Apple’s wonderful collection The Oranging of America. His second — let’s call it The Log for short — represents the fabulist strain of 1970s American experimentalism. Mrs. Unguentine spends forty years as the partner and shipmate of Unguentine, the captain of barge full of plants, odd machines, and miscellaneous junk. They wander the sea aimlessly — literally: Unguentine “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards.”
Eventually the S. S. The Mrs. Unguentine becomes something of an ecosystem onto itself — a state both cozy and comforting and profoundly isolating. Until one day when Unguentine falls overboard. Though this comes to seem to Mrs. Unguentine as less an event then a condition, a state that may or may not persist: “[T]here seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”
The Log was the beloved secret book of a handful of readers for years, but now it’s back in print and available from the Dalkey Archive.

Cover of Motorman by David Ohle

• Motorman, by David Ohle
People who wax about how weird and unsettling Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood is need to read Motorman. The short novel has enough strangeness to fill a 400-page novel. The Motorman is Moldenke, who is kept alive by the transplanted hearts of several sheep and spends much of his days feeling guilt for having killed some jellyheads (who are people … maybe … sort of) and resisting the competing influence of Bunce, the “Bust’em or Burn’em Big Brother,” and Burnheart, the Organ Transplant King.
In his introduction to the Calamari Archives reissue of Motorman, Ben Marcus writes of the awe with which the few people he knew who were aware of the book — let alone had read it — spoke of it: “For a long time I was scared to read Motorman. It had come recommended to me in such hushed tones that it sounded disruptively incendiary and illegal. Not only would the reader of this crazed novel burn to ashes, apparently, but he might be posthumously imprisoned for reading the book—a jar of cinder resting in a jail cell.”
One of the striking aspects about Knopf’s backing this series is that they were able to get a book like Motorman reviewed in dozens of newspaper book sections around the country — even papers like the Fresno Bee. The downside, however, was that they couldn’t prevent reactions like this: “This particular book, a first novel, is a bummer. It is not good writing by any standard. There is no real creativity and certainly no redeeming social value. Is Ohle’s purpose to put a copy of Motorman into every spaced-out acid-head’s hands?” Well, Motorman did get into the hands of some spaced-out acid-heads as well as into the hands of a few lovers of envelope- and mind-expanding fiction who carried a torch for David Ohle’s odd book until, within the last decade or so, it’s begun to be recognized as a significant and complex work.

Having read half of them, I must say upfront that I don’t think any of them, with the possible exception of David Ohle’s Motorman, can be considered a classic. But neither are these complacent books. For literature to remain vital, it has to keep changing, and part of that change depends on writers who are willing to take risks and try things without the guarantee of success. While Knopf’s venture was probably a commercial failure, it would be a mistake to consider any of these books a critical failure. Not everything works. But there is something good in each of them and something for other writers to learn from. And for that alone, these puppies deserve to be remembered.

Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai (1974)

cover of Mundome by A. G. Mojtabai

When you reach the end of Mundome, you may think you’ve misunderstood it completely and need to go back and read it again. That’s not only the sign of a great book about insanity but exactly what A. G. Mojtabai had in mind.

Mundome is about Richard, a sane, sober, faithful brother, and Meg, his sister trapped in some form of madness that leaves her in a near-catatonic state. Released after twelve years in an institution, Meg is now living with Richard. Each day, he struggles to pull Meg out of her fugue. He sits her at their dinner table despite the fact that her hands are bunched into fists so tightly that she cannot even hold a fork, let alone bring it to her mouth. He tries to engage her in conversation about the events of his day even though she stares ahead blankly. He sits Meg in their living room as if the two of them were an ordinary couple reading quietly after dinner, though they’re clearly not:

That evening Meg sat in the green armchair, the lamplight flaking round her shoulders. On her lap I placed the latest copy of Life magazine, open. On the page facing the story of interest was a luscious lobster dinner, a mayonnaise advertisement, complete with potato salad and pickle. Meg stared at the ad with some fixity, pursing her lips and raising the page closer to her eyes. Then she began to help herself, diving into the salad, tearing it to bits and stuffing her mouth with it. Clacking, chewing, coughing and spitting followed. I forced my hand into her mouth and cleared it, then ripped the magazine from her hands.

To distract himself from Meg’s stony isolation, Richard takes up writing, but he never gets past the beginning of stories that seem really to be about himself: “I am living at the bottom of a well. It is really very comfortable here and I see no point in moving.”

His job is another daily battle with insanity. Richard is an archivist at a city library. The library itself is stuck in limbo:

The acquisitions department continues to select books, to fill in the myriad order blanks, white, pink, green and yellow, to make out the invoices; they are as busy as spiders spinning, but the orders are never sent, the invoices are only filed away.

“This place is a warehouse, cold storage,” one of Richard’s colleagues tells him. “No action, nothing moves. It’s dead. Unreal.” Patrons die as they sit looking emptily at books and are only discovered at closing time. Answering reference desk requests, Richard finds himself going down endless threads of cross-references:

… see Marianna, an Idyll. Formed by an English Hand.
Marianna: see An English Hand.
An English Hand: see An Hue and Cry after the Funda mental Rights and Duties of Englishmen.
An Hue and Cry: see Hymn to Wealth, a Satyr.
Hymn to Wealth: see….

He chronicles the histories of the librarians before him who sat at the desk he now occupies: “Ada Nog. December 1958-May 1959…. After an uneventful day at work, Miss Nog put on her wrap, said goodnight, went home and put her head in the oven. No explanation offered or sought.”
Yet despite this atmosphere of ennui, the library staff is taut with anxiety at the rumor of a visit from an efficiency expert, a ruthless streamliner who will cut through their ranks like a man with a scythe.

All this is driving Richard to his own form of breakdown. One night, as he looks at himself in the mirror, he makes hopeless attempts to restore his connection with his emotions: “I spent the better part of an hour making faces at myself, practicing love, hatred, anger, fear, envy, lust, grief, feeling none of them but giving a careful rendition just the same.” Meg’s psychiatrist becomes concerned with Richard’s mental state, hints at the possible need for hospitalization.

All along, your heart goes out to Richard. He’s a decent, serious individual fighting to overcome powerful forces of madness and chaos.

Or is he?

As one account of Mundome puts it, “The novel has two settings — inner and outer — which fuse at the end, and only one main character, or perhaps two main characters who fuse at the end.” Are Richard and Meg, in fact, two sides of the same person? Mojtabai later said that she meant all along to leave the reader in doubt, yet until the last few pages, we accept the explanation that most fits with our sense of what’s normal. Her design becomes more obvious when we know how Mojtabai approached writing her novels: “I work backwards from the ending,” she told an interviewer. “I usually begin with a haunting final image — a recognition scene — and proceed by unpacking the implications of that image as I go.”

Mojtabai came up with her title by fusing together two words from a Latin saying: In hoc mundo me extra me nihil agere posse, which she translated as “In this world I can affect nothing outside myself.” As she notes in an introductory comment, “Mundome is a deliberately ungrammatical construction, a forced juxtaposition of words that cannot fuse without some connective of action or relation.” Which is not unlike what she does with Richard and Meg, two characters who appear polar opposites until Mojtabai forces us to see the possibility that they might actually be the same person.

The Washington Post’s reviewer Jonathan Yardley, who called Mundome one of the best novels of 1974, described the book as “an intelligent whodunit,” but admitted that was a misleading label: “One is left in the end not with the answer to whodunit, but with a complex of questions that linger in the mind.” Even if some reviewers were irritated at the book’s lingering ambiguity, most saw Mundome as an exceptionally well-constructed and written first novel. Margaret Atwood called it “an extraordinarily pure novel, pure as the contained landscapes inside glass paperweights in which the snow falls endlessly on minute figures, preserved from dust and decay by the absence of air.” Time’s reviewer said the book “erupts with dramatic clues that flare backward and forward through the narrative like thin, ignited trains of gunpowder,” and the Antioch Review called it “The most remarkable first novel published in America during the past several years.” (Mojtabai was, for the record, an Antioch alumna.)

A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.
A. G. Mojtabai, 1976.

Mojtabai drew inspiration for the novel from two sources. While an undergraduate at Antioch, she worked one summer as an intern at the Chestnut Lodge Sanatarium in Rockville, Maryland. There, she dealt with a woman diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia who’d been a patient at the clinic for over twelve years. Mojtabai found her sense of the woman transformed over the weeks of dealing with her. Shocked by her condition, she then began to think her more sane than the clinic’s staff, capable of moments of striking clarity. But later, Mojtabai came to distrust her own impressions. “Again and again,” she later wrote, “I had to confront the fact that my attempt to understand her condition was a devious way of probing my own condition. When I left the job, I was in a very shaky state and my patient was no better.”

Mojtabai was also a veteran of the strange world of a large metropolitan library. After her divorce from an Iranian man she met at Antioch, she returned with her daughter to New York City, where she taught at Hunter College before taking a job as a librarian at Columbia, where she earned her MLS in library science in 1970. She was working at the library of the City College of New York when she wrote Mundome, her first novel. As she told UC Irvine professor Dr. Carol Booth Olson, Mojtabai based her descriptions of Richard’s library and its patrons on her observation of the daily activities of the main branch of the New York Public Library.

A. G. (for Ann Grace) Mojtabai went on to write eight more novels after Mundome. Her most recent, Thirst was published by Slant Books in February 2021. It draws upon material from both her 1994 novel Called Out, about a Catholic priest dealing with the aftermath of an airliner crash outside a small West Texas town, and Soon, a collection of sketches based on Mojtabai’s own work in a hospice.

Mundome is available on the Internet Archive: Link.

Mundome, by A. G. Mojtabai
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974

The 1970s: When Lit Went SF (and Vice Versa)

Cover of the paperback original of The Godwhale

A tweet about T. J. Bass’s wildly ambitious and imaginative Nebula Award-winning novel The Godwhale (1974) triggered a short discussion of favorite novels from the 1970s. I was struck by how many of them were — well, if not science fiction, then at least strongly influenced by SF. I started buying books — almost always cheap used pocket paperbacks — for myself around 1973, and as I began to recall those purchases, I realized that my own favorites were novels that sat on the border between SF and literary fiction.

Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick pioneered this territory in the 1960s, writing books we now recognize as key works of 20th Century literature without any suggestion that they’re somehow lessened through their origin as Ace, Daw, Dell, and Panther paperbacks deliberately packaged to turn off non-SF readers. When Collier released its paperback edition of Italo Calvino’s SF fables Cosmicomics in 1970, the publisher just as deliberately Doris Lessing gave it imprimatur of legitimacy with her dystopian novel The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), then returned to give it a gargantuan world-building embrace with her five-volume Canopus in Argos starting with Shikasta in 1979. (I’m pretty sure I have all five volumes of the Knopf hardbacks somewhere in storage: they quickly became fixtures of remainder tables. Literary appetites were not quite ready to follow Lessing to such lengths.)

Writers who ventured into this territory faced considerable obstacles. SF writers struggled to be taken seriously by critics and readers of mainstream fiction. Straight fiction writers risked being marked forever with the stigmata of the space opera. When one of the toughest of straight fiction writers, Harry Crews, opened William Hjortsberg’s second novel, Gray Matters in 1971 and read the first sentence, he later recalled, “My heart sank. I thought, ‘My God, he’s committed science fiction.'” Crews was willing, at least to state his objections:

Without going into too much detail, I think honor demands that I admit my prejudice against and contempt for most of what is called science fiction. Here is the formula — and therefore much of the reason for my contempt — for successful SciFi: it must have an anonymous ruling force; dehumanized people; totalitarian one?world drive to power; violence of mindnumbing dimensions ( people who have no stomach for the violence of their own everyday lives seem to read the violence of the future as morally instructive); and nuclear warfare.

“Every one of these elements of the SciFi formula are in Hjortsberg’s novel,” Crews acknowledged, the result, in his opinion, was simply “an engrossing fiction informed by an imaginative use of science.”

Here is a survey of 25 novels from the 1970s that looked beyond the labels that booksellers and librarians crave and forced their readers to wonder if they’d stumbled in the wrong section. It’s not a comprehensive list by any means (omitting the significant arrival of feminism to SF that took place at the same time), but I hope it suggests that there are plenty of reasons not to write off the 1970s as just the decade of polyester shirts and leisure suits.

A Very Private Life (US paperback)

• A Very Private Life, by Michael Frayn (1968)

I’m stretching the envelope of “the 1970s” to include this gentle fable. Frayn makes his leap into the future with his usual elegance of phrase: “Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber,” the book begins. He depicts a world where almost everyone is controlled through drugs and isolation has become a prevailing mode of existence. Among other things, its spare prose and pared-back descriptions offer a marked contrast with the next four titles.

 

Barefootin the Head cover

• Barefoot in the Head, by Brian Aldiss (1969)

Perhaps the wildest, druggiest, and word-drunk-est of the orgy of SF novels written by Brits in the midst of the psychedelic era, in Barefoot in the Head Aldiss tosses LSD, James Joyce, fascism, and the Christ myth into the blender and comes up with a perfect cult classic concoction: unreadable to many, a nectar of the gods to a few. Reissued as a Faber Find.

 

The Big Win paperback cover

• The Big Win, by Jimmy Miller (1969)

Jimmy Miller was Jane Miller, known to everyone as Jimmy, and the widow of novelist Warren Miller. This first novel was published by Knopf, which was not known for its SF work at the time. Set in the future — i.e., 2004 — it depicts a world devastated by a combination of a Chinese virus (hmm …) and a nuclear war started by the French. New York City has become the refuge of the Richies, who play a human-hunting game with the Poories. The Big Win makes a Poory a Richy. The Big Lose, as you can imagine, is terminal. It’s a bit of a mess but a crazy sort of fun featuring, as Raymond Sokolov put it in his New York Times review, “plenty of unquotable and impressive lubricity.”

 

Bug Jack Barron cover

• Bug Jack Barron , by Norman Spinrad (1969)

Along with Aldiss, Moorcock, and other veterans of New Worlds, Spinrad, an American, helped bring SF into the age of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In this novel about a talk show host (Barron) stumbling into a massive conspiracy about the means of ensuring immortality, Spinrad also introduced techniques from experimental fiction, such as cut-up (viz. Burroughs, Gysin). Not everyone liked the results. Joanna Russ felt the author had taken on so much in terms of style and content that he ended up being smothered by it.

 

The Final Programme cover

• The Final Programme, by Michael Moorcock (1969)

The first in Moorcock’s four novels starring his anarchic, transmutating, polymorphically gendered superman, Jerry Cornelius. Word of mouth at the time I became aware of them in the mid-1970s was that Cornelius was sort of a drug-taking hipster James Bond, but I now suspect that everyone who said that was going off the covers, not the contents. Some of the books’ sexism has not aged well, but Moorcock’s embrace of body transformations and gender fluidity may resonate better with today’s readers than it did with his largely male audience when the novels first came out.

 

Inter Ice Age 4

• Inter Ice Age 4, by Kobo Abe (1970)

Abe was ahead of trend: he actually wrote this as a serial back in 1958-59. However, it was only published in English in 1970, which is why I’m including it. I turned to it somewhere in late high school after giving up on A Woman in the Dunes as just too abstract for my taste at the time. Inter Ice Age 4 should be a highly relevant book for our time, as it’s set in a world soon to be inundated by the melting of the polar ice caps. But there’s also a murder mystery, conspiracies, malevolent government and business entities, and heavy doses of biology (Abe trained as a physician). I got through it only vaguely understanding what I was reading, but I suspect now that it can hold its own alongside some of the early works of Stanislaw Lem (another writer who trained as a doctor but chose not to practice).

 

Armed Camps by Kit Reed

• Armed Camps, by Kit Reed (1970)

Another vision of a dystopic America, this time told by parallel narrators: Lt Col Danny March, a war-weary veteran (“I’ll tell you something about making dead guys…. You do it often enough and you’ll get used to it.”) and Anne, a woman on the run who finds her way to a pacifist commune called Calabria, isolated deep in a National Forest. Reed referred to it as her Why Are We in Vietnam?: “We were Americans, ergo we must be brash, insensitive, militaristic types. Never mind that Apollo 11 was heading for the Moon, Teddy Kennedy had just walked away from a fatal wreck in Chappaquiddick, leaving behind a drowned girl; less than a month later the Sharon Tate murders would confirm what many would not say but secretly suspected: that Americans were a crude, savage lot.” Though Reed had published some more conventional SF stories, Armed Camps cries out to be seen as serious fiction and not somehow diminished as a work of genre.

 

Going Nowhere paperback cover

• Going Nowhere, by Alvin Greenberg (1971)

There were plenty of novels written about young men running away — from the draft, from the farm, from the Establishment — in the early 1970s. But unlike most of them, Going Nowhere is far more timeless than of its time. Partly this is due to Greenberg’s approach to fiction, which always uses the most concrete details (one of his stories is about a man discovering just how far he can allow his foot to rot before it becomes inedible) to anchor the most abstract conceptions. In this case, it’s also due to the conception at the heart of the story: Unteleology, the philosophy of fundamental purposelessness that one of its characters develops. SF skeptic Harry Crews admitted in his New York Times review that Going Nowhere was the first novel with a spaceship in it he’d been able to finish since he was 10: “Any writer who will begin a novel of only 143 pages with a 400?word sentence, which sentence itself be gins with ‘Once upon a time,’ can’t be all bad. For one thing, you know he’s not playing it safe. He’s a man you can count on to take a chance.” “Alvin Greenberg,” Crews wrote, “is such a man.”

Greenberg, who died in 2015, is one of America’s most neglected metafictionists. One of his early short stories, published in Best SF 1970 (edited by Aldiss and Harry Harrison), was titled “‘Franz Kafka’ by Jorge Luís Borges by Alvin Greenberg.” He would go on to write stories such as “The Beast in the Jungle vs. A Sense of the Comic,” “Not a Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer,” and “The Mind of Emile Zola.” His work — four novels, short story collections, and poetry — is consistently theoretical yet worldly, extreme yet specific, tragic while remaining comic, and always accompanied by a genial narrative voice. You don’t always know where you’ll be going with Greenberg, but you’ll be in good company.

 

Gray Matters paperback

• Gray Matters, by William Hjortsberg (1971)

This is the novel that had Harry Crews reaching for his gun when he suspected Hjortsberg of fomenting SF. And of course, it is SF if we accept that fiction set in the future that involves some extrapolation of existing scientific, cultural, and/or political developments (or degradations) as SF. I think we can all accept that SF does not always equal space opera, and in this case, there is neither space nor opera. Gray Matters is the great brains-in-jars novel. Humans exist as the merest essential vessel to keep a brain functioning. Everything else is accomplished through thought: communication, commerce, and even sex. Gray Matters also has the merit of brevity: no reader of Hjortsberg even set down one of his books because it was too long.

 

Cover of Love in the Ruins US paperback

• Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy (1971)

Subtitled The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, Love in the Ruins, envisions an America where all differences in race, religion, class, etc. have grown to their extremes (kind of like today). A lapsed Catholic scientist develops a machine to detect early signs of mental and spiritual degradation in hopes of bringing people to heal themselves. Instead, it becomes an object of great interest to the government, and soon the inventor finds himself on the run through the crumbling remnants of the United States, accompanied by Moira and her beloved pocket edition of the poems of Rod McKuen, “a minor poet of the old Auto Age.”

 

Cover of US paperback of 334

• 334, by Thomas M. Disch (1972)

Not really a novel but a collection of five novellas about the inhabitants of 334 East 11th Street, a housing project in Manhattan, during the second Roman Empire, which is just a few years after 1972. Samuel R. Delany was so impressed with one of the novella, “Angouleme,” that he wrote a book-length study of it titled The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction. In it, Delany argued, among other things, that 334 was SF not because of any explicit scientific content but by virtue of its imaginative breadth.

 

Cover of UK paperback of A Sweet Sweet Summer

• A Sweet Sweet Summer, by Jane Gaskell (1972)

Set in a Britain cut off from the rest of the world (Brexit foreshadowing, anyone?) and controlled by alien spaceships that hover in the sky, A Sweet Sweet Summer is East Enders dialed up to 11 and projected into the future. The aliens encourage all the fringe factions — fascists, Communists, racists, and even Scientologists — to incite violence and create chaos. “Shooting, pimping, knifing, beating to death, whether of strangers, life-long buddies, close relations, evan cannibalism, these are merely the pattern of life,” as the TLS reviewer summarized it. All narrated by Pelham, whom one Amazon reader described as “possibly the most repellent protagonist I have ever read.”

 

Saw by Steve Katz

• Saw, by Steve Katz (1972)

Saw was one of a short-lived series of largely experimental novels published by Knopf around this time. They were all printed in a rare — for Knopf, at least — glossy hardcovers without dust jackets, and on the rare occasions you stumble across them these days, they’re in surprisingly good shape, suggesting that Knopf shold have stuck with it. Steve Katz was the experimental fictionist of his time who most embraced the spirit of Pop Art. Although there isn’t a giant can of Campbell’s Soup in Saw, you wouldn’t be startled if one showed up. There are, however, a woman named Eileen who mates with an orbiting sphere in Central Park, a spaceship named Leroy, and a hidden hippopotamus. As with a number of the books on this list, Saw embraced (or stole) numerous elements from SF but it was never accepted as SF by SF die-hards (or later academics writing about SF in the 1970s).

 

Cover of first edition of Motorman

• Motorman, by David Ohle (1972)

Motorman was the first of a series of four novels that Ohle would write over the course of forty years featuring a character named Moldenke. Moldenke is as a “bloodworker” in a gauze factory in Texaco City outside L.A. (hence the title, perhaps, but there is no Motorman in the book) but also lives in a world with multiple moons, occasional double suns, and cosmic-scale timeshifts. One reader has compared it to a mix of Italo Calvino (in his Cosmicomics stage) and Cormac McCarthy (in his The Road stage). Out of print for decades, Motorman is now available from the Calamari Press (and you have even download a PDF version of it for free). In his introduction to this edition, Ben Marcus adds to the list of comparisons, calling Ohle “the dogsbody that resulted from a glandular mishap between Flann O’Brien, Leonora Carrington, Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler, Borges, and Raymond Roussel.”

 

Cover of Colonel Mint

• Colonel Mint, by Paul West (1972)

In his prolific career, Paul West wandered in and out of just about every genre you could think of, so it wasn’t surprising that his journey eventually led into SF. In Colonel Mint, he takes a top-ranked insider — the astronaut Colonel Mint — and turns into an outsider when he sees an angel through the window of his space capsule — and then makes the mistake of reporting it. Garth Lloyd Evans, writing in The Guardian, argued that West had simply “changed the conventional traditional context for his consciousness of being alive.” Changed it, that is, “from the parochial, the provincial, the national, the routine tick of the clock, into an awareness of eternity as our natural habitat.” Unlike much of the formulaic stuff that cluttered science fiction, however, Lloyd Evans felt that “this shift of vision does not involve a loss of heart or render one invulnerable to this world, now.”

 

Cover of Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer

• Quake, by Rudolph Wurlitzer (1974)

Quake is a dystopia novel after every Los Angeles hater’s heart. Wurlitzer operated in the realm of Pynchon, Vonnegut, and Brautigan, taking American quirks and twisting them into intricate origami. Here, we have Los Angeles after that massive earthquake we all know is coming some day. But instead of a predictable catastrophe novel, this is the story told by a writer who, if you will, inhaled. Like Hjortsberg, Wurlitzer wrote books you don’t have to set aside long weekends for.

 

Cover of The Last Western

• The Last Western, by Thomas S. Klise (1974)

Klise, whose day job was running an educational filmstrip company, wrote this, his only novel, as much as a moral exercise as a fictive one. He takes an innocent — Willie, a truly hybrid American, Irish-Indian-Black-Chinese with “red hair, red-gold-black-brown skin, and blue almond-shaped eyes spangled with brown,” and injects him into a dystopian world full of complex variations on the themes of power and evil. First Willie becomes the greatest pitcher in baseball with his trademark “upcurve” ball. Then he somehow manages to become Pope and the object of nefarious plots by Vatican, government, and media. The Last Western has never been reprinted and goes for a ridiculous amount of money if you can find a copy. But you can also download it for free from the Internet Archive.

 

Cover of paperback original of Dhalgren

• Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany (1975)

Depending on your perspective (or experience of reading it), Dhalgren is either a masterpiece, a gripping vision of America in its end state, or a convoluted and confusing mess. Launched with great noise as a Bantam paperback original when it came out, it may have suffered a fate similar to another thick book from around the same time, John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues. Both books struck many as too full of their own self-importance to get out of the way of their readers. Now, however, when those who read it come to Dhalgren rather than having it thrust upon them, it’s seen for what it is: a challenging, complex, and deeply considered work of modernism that also happens to be SF.

 

Comet by Jane White

• Comet, by Jane White (1975)

Jane White, whose work was first recommended to me by Brooks Peters back in 2008, wrote a number of odd, edgy psychological thrillers starting with Quarry in 1967. Her last book before her death in 1977, Comet was a dystopian novel with an extreme version of life on Earth after a great holocaust — a disaster so great and so long ago that no one knows quite what it was. Life is hardly above the level of the Stone Age now, with the added twist that procreation is essentially impossible. Into one of the tribes scattered over this world come a man and a pregnant woman. Does this all lead to a Second Coming? To be honest, I can’t say, having never read this myself. But it awaits on my shelves.

 

Cover of The Hospital Ship by Martin Bax

• The Hospital Ship, by Martin Bax (1976)

Dr. Martin Bax’s only novel, The Hospital Ship is the story of the Hopeful, an atomic-powered and largely self-contained hospital that sails around a world rapidly breaking down through a mix of disease, autism, and widespread psychosis. The hospital’s director decides that the solution is — you guessed it — breeding. Bax’s subject matter is heavily influenced by J. G. Ballard, so it’s not surprising that Ballard contributed a generous blurb: “the most exciting, stimulating and brilliantly conceived book I have read since Burroughs’ novels.” A number of readers have rated Bax’s technique better than his results, as he employs a variety of documentation, from letters to logs to patient records, to illuminate the story. Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review took the opposite view, however, and I recommend his review for anyone interest in learning more.

 

Cover of Plus by Joseph McElroy

• Plus, by Joseph McElroy (1976)

I wrote about Plus back in 2013, when I called it my most neglected book for the simple reason that it took me 36 years to get around to reading my copy. McElroy’s writing is notoriously challenging, but even by that standard, Plus is, at least in the estimation of one Amazon reviewer, not the place to start: “If you haven’t read McElroy, don’t jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers.”

Much of the reason stems from McElroy’s subject, which is a disembodied brain floating in orbit around the Earth as the control system of a satellite. Imp Plus — the brain — has limited understanding of language and even more limited grasp of vocabulary, so McElroy has to tell his story as if manipulating by remote control. As Imp Plus becomes more sentient, his language grows and we see that McElroy is leading us through the brain’s struggle to establish an identity independent of ground control — the other being known to Imp as the Acrid Voice. It’s a bold experiment that ultimately succeeds, but it’s a bit like scaling El Capitan with your bare hands. You will work hard, but if you make it to the top, you may find it one of your most intense reading experiences.

 

Cover of US paperback of Ratner's Star

• Ratner’s Star, by Don DeLillo (1976)

DeLillo wrote SF? He sure ’nuff did. In Ratner’s Star, Little Billy Twillig, a child prodigy, is enlisted by a mysterious military/scientific research institution to help them decode an enigmatic signal from space. “We feel certain it’s a mathematical code of some kind,” the director tells him:

Probably a number code. Mathematics is the one language we might conceivably have in common with other forms of intelligent life in the universe. As I understand it, there is no reality more independent of our perception and more true to itself than mathematical reality.

To which Billy replies, “Did you just fart?” Among DeLillo scholars, Ratner’s Star is considered a work from his formative stage, before the era of his prize-winning/bestselling books. Which means it’s both less effective as a coherent work and full of greater experimentation and risk-taking. DeLillo takes codes, the encapsulation of information in condensed packages, as an overarching metaphor for the obstacles facing all forms of communication, and so plays around with text and dives down rabbit holes like the significance of symbol-based languages like Chinese. But if you’re looking for another fat DeLillo novel to follow up Underworld, this is the natural choice.

 

Cover of Scimitar by Rick DeMarinis

• Scimitar, by Rick DeMarinis (1977)

In this broad satire of the American military-industrial complex, an aging billionaire named Skylor Blue, has himself reconstituted by attaching his head to a mechanical spider run by a computer. The narrator, a failed poet and lowly copywriter in one of Blue’s aerospace companies, travels into the bowels of the Byzantine security mechanisms set up to protect Blue’s new being and comes to face the reality of life as a Six Million Dollar Man:

And my body knew what it was looking at too:It recognized immediately what the head in the mechanical spider meant to it: The body, the mortal coil, the source of despair, the thing that gets sick, manufactures aneurysms, tumors, cataracts, piles, stones in the bladder, limestone in the arteries, the shakes, the drops, the shits, the tears; the thing that hurts you so terribly, the thing that finally betrays the clever, efficient brain by withering like a leaf, is superfluous. (“The body’s only purpose is to carry the brain,” said Edison, and he should have known.)

Perhaps not surprisingly for a book written by an American male in the 1970s, along with robotic life comes new extremes of sexual experience. Comparisons with J. P. Donleavy are not out of order.

 

Cover of Fork River Space Project

• The Fork River Space Project, by Wright Morris (1977)

Despite the title, I may be stretching things to say there’s a real SF element in this novel. Set in Fork River, a nearly-deserted Kansas town near the geographic center of the U.S., The Fork River Space Project is about a collection of oddballs who come together to work on what they hope will be a landing site for UFOs. Even if the guy who came up with the idea isn’t fully convinced that aliens even exist, he sees it as a way to “restore awe.” In the meantime, it’s where folks gather on Sunday, listen to music, and “go into orbit.” This is certainly one of Morris’s lesser books, but in a way it’s significant as perhaps the first mainstream novel to recognize that ever since the first Moon landing in 1969, we’ve been living on a small planet in a very big cosmos.

 

Cover of A Secret History of Time to Come

• A Secret History of Time to Come, by Robie Macauley (1979)

With this novel — which I can well remember buying in hardback for its beautiful cover and opening with anticipation — we see serious fiction approaching the obstacle of the leap into imaginative fiction … and balking. Set in a largely depopulated United States after some unspecified catastrophe, this novel proved that a story about an epic journey (in this case from East to West) is bound to fail without a destination. I recall there was a lot of wandering through the overgrown ruins of cities. Nothing else stuck with me. Thomas M. Disch justly savaged the book in his New York Times review and summed up the challenge of venturing into the No Man’s Land between straight fiction and SF:

A Secret History of Time to Come fails equally at the general task of fiction and at the specific task of science fiction. The special merit of the best SF is not its capacity to predict the future but to analyze and analogize the present. It offers writers an opportunity to make scale models of moral problems that cannot be dealt with — not, at least, with the same clarity and directness — using the conventional devices of the realistic novel. At this essential science fictional task, A Secret History of Time to Come has the moral and intellectual finesse of a World War I poster exposing Hun atrocities.

Have the boundaries between serious literary fiction and SF evaporated since the 1970s? A visit to most libraries and bookstores today would suggest not. But luckily, plenty of writers don’t let that dissuade them.