Maybe I'm a romantic, but I think in the old days it was done by guys
who couldn't do anything else, guys like Phil Dick. That's all he could
do, sit there and write endless novels. These are the people Bruce
Sterling calls "Paranoid Pervert Saints of Science Fiction." They were
pariahs of literature, whipping these strange ideas around. When I was
a teenager growing up in southwestern Virginia in the 1960s, SF was
absolutely the only source of subversives ideas that I had. I used to
read these books and think, "Wow! No one knows I'm reading this!" It
was below people's attention. Well, that subversive level of science
fiction has fallen off terribly. The bulk of this stuff is consumer
product, dog food, and there's so much of it. When I walk into an SF
bookstore, my head swims. I remember when I could buy every new SF
paperback published in America every month, because there were
two.
