Of Time,and Gully Foyle by Neil Gaiman

[Swede]

snip

You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.

This was not always true, but somewhere in the last thirty years (somewhere between the beginning of the death of what John Clute and Peter Nicholls termed, in their Encyclopedia of science Fiction, "First SF" in 1957 when Sputnik brought space down to earth and 1984, the year that George Orwell ended and William Gibson started) we lurched into the futures we now try to inhabit, and all the old SF futures found themselves surplus to requirements, standing alone on the sidewalk, pensioned off and abandoned. Or were they?

SF is a difficult and transient literature at the best of times, ultimately problematic. It claims to treat of the future, all the what-ifs and if-this-goes-ons; but the what-ifs and if-this-goes-ons are always founded here and hard in today. Whatever today is.

http://www.american-buddha.com/starsmydestination.oftimegullyfoyle.htm

[cthulu2016]

1. Pert of the reason Stars My Destination isn't dated is

that it's an early instance of a kind of expressionist/absurdist/surreal/satirical modern sort of SF novel... very similar to SIRENS OF TITAN or anything by Phillip K. Dick, etc..

That post-beat genre style has held up very well. I find a lot of genre works from 1955-1965 (including mysteries) as being more modern than much of what followed.

Was noticing how when mad men moved from 1964 to 1965-66 the whole material culture turned from timeless modern to just clownish.