From time to time, humanity’s powers of kidding itself have produced short-lived crops of deluded optimists. Half a century ago, for example, young people not yet reconciled to grim reality pushed back at society’s constraints… Free love! Communes! Bold hairstyle choices suitable for those who have not yet experienced male pattern baldness!
Unsurprisingly, hippiedom and the counterculture leaked into science fiction, with various degrees of optimism. Here are five examples.
The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson (1967)
This book is set in an imagined futuristic New York, which oddly enough has remained stuck in an eternal 1960s. There’s still a vibrant hippie community in Greenwich Village. Youngsters from across square America travel to New York to discover themselves; there they are mentored (or at least observed) by old hands like Chester Anderson and his close friend Michael Kurland. This Greenwich Village is populated by nonconformists as eccentric as they are kind-hearted—for the most part.
The most notable exception is shameless grifter Laszlo Scott. For once, Scott’s most recent pharmaceutical offering is entirely authentic: his “Reality Pills” can make dreams real. The aliens supplying Scott have a malign intent: they may not want to actively unleash the heat rays, but they are counting on human nightmares to exterminate us all, leaving the world ripe for alien appropriation. Standing between humanity and certain doom: sixteen Greenwich Village potheads and hipsters. Two of whom are missing….
* * *
Gameplayers of Zan by M. A. Foster (1977)
Earth in 2550 is a crowded, highly urbanized world uncongenial to nonconformists. Nevertheless, one small enclave enjoys a rustic life outside the regimented conformity of Shifter Society. The Ler manage this because while derived from humans, they are not human and cannot be integrated into the current human culture. Creations of 21st century hubris, the Ler were grudgingly allotted a small reservation, which they have repaid with ongoing assistance in contriving ways to keep the overcrowded Earth functioning.
The convenient arrangement is unstable; some small event could easily trigger crisis. This comes in the form of a young Ler woman named Maellenkleth, who is caught committing a seemingly pointless act of vandalism. Rather than explain herself, Maellenkleth erases her own mind, thus ensuring that the authorities will be very interested in what was so important a young Ler would commit a form of suicide to conceal it. Questions follow—questions the Ler very much need not to be asked.
* * *
Songs from the Stars by Norman Spinrad (1980)
The Smash was a total stone-cold bummer, man, reducing almost all of the planet to toxic, radioactive wastelands. Spared the worst of the nuclear devastation, West Coast Aquaria turned to pure “White Science”: muscle, sun, wind, and water. Aquarians may have to work harder than their deluded, doomed ancestors, but they take comfort from their karmically pure lives, lives untainted by reliance on the arcane black sciences. Or so they tell themselves.
In fact, the Aquarian economy depends on technology they cannot produce themselves, whose source does not bear close examination. The Aquarians have steadfastly avoided asking questions whose answers might make them unhappy. The truth is that Aquarius survives because for lifetimes it has suited a hidden enclave of practitioners of black science to covertly prop up the coastal nation. Now the bill for that support is due.
* * *
The Armageddon Rag by George R. R. Martin (1983)
Former hippie novelist Sandy Blair has watched with increasing displeasure as bean counters reduce once-beloved icons to crassly commercial products. The sole alternative to assimilation by inexorable capitalism is death; Nazgûl lead singer Patrick Henry “Hobbit” Hobbins, for example, never gave into commercialism’s temptations because he was too murdered to even be tempted.
Rock promoter Jamie Lynch’s brutal murder appears to offer a chance to reverse the tide. Without Lynch as an impediment, the remaining members of Nazgûl are convinced by a shadowy impresario to join a reunion tour. A young look-alike is found to fill in for Hobbit Hobbins, and Blair is convinced to become the band’s press agent. Blair’s angry nostalgia makes him the perfect tool in a supernatural conspiracy determined to punish the world for abandoning Flower Child idealism.
* * *
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (2018)
Fleeing a ruined Earth, the Exodus Fleet survived centuries of interstellar wandering because the inhabitants embraced recycling, strict environmental rules, and sharing rather individual greed. Their journey ends when they encounter the Galactic Commons, a consortium of worlds whose advanced technology recasts the Fleet as a primitive oddity and galactic charity case.
This revelation puts the Fleet in an awkward spot. How can it convince young people not to emigrate in search of the wealth and opportunities the Commons offers? Unless the aging Fleet can somehow persuade its children that its austere, communal way of life is worth preserving, then the only future it has is slow decline and abrupt collapse.
That is, unless folks from the Commons are willing to join the Fleet …
The books previously mentioned were published in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. This book, however, is contemporary. The dream survives.
* * *
No doubt those of you who are not now hitting search engines to determine what exactly a “hippie” or a “counterculture” might be have your own favourites I did not mention. Comments are below. Can you dig it?
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
I totally could have mentioned that one Star Trek episode where the space hippies don’t really do any worse than any given group of red shirts accompanying the main cast to the surface of this week’s planetary death-trap.
It seems worth mentioning John Brunner’s four near-future (now recent past) doorstops, especially Stand on Zanzibar, whose protagonist is a counter-culture hero and author of a book called The Hipcrime Vocab
I would have picked Spinrad’s Child of Fortune for this topic, but a lot of his stuff would fit when you get down to it.
Armageddon Rag almost derailed GRRM’s career as an author. I enjoyed it a lot, but it bombed. That’s how he wound up in Hollywood for a while.
@3:
I enjoyed Armageddon Rag too.
James should read a little story called “Generation Gaps” by Clancy O’Brien for a differently-facted look at the hippies.
I always loved that Armageddon rag was loosely based on the dead. The dead’s main lyricist actually started work on a song cycle related to it (and i loved his poetry even before i knew who grrm was!)
Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny is marred by gratuitous intrusions of hippiedom.
Pat Murphy’s The City, Not Long After is at least hippie-adjacent, with postapocalyptic San Franciscans trying to stop a warlord with art.
@3 Child of Fortune was also my first thought for Spinrad.
I would have included Summer of Love: A Time Travel by Lisa Mason.
Stardance by Spider Robinson always struck me as having the hippie-ish vibe.
@5 I saw that band more as The Doors.
Illuminatus!
I have not read the Mason. Should I?
Would Peter Beagle’s The Folk of the Air count? It’s sort of post-hippie, but calls on a lot of hippie values. Still a favorite book.
@5/10: I saw them more as one of those psychedelic proto-metal bands like T. Rex or HP Lovecraft. T. Rex is a good fit, from the front man dying in a car accident to a band member being named for a hobbit.
@9 I was going to mention Spider Robinson also, but give the Callahan stories as an example. Pretty much everything Spider wrote was infused with his hippie-ish personal philosophy.
Would Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren count?
@11 it’s hard to get more counterculture than a book whose main protagonists live in a yellow submarine.
While the Paris of 1968 wasn’t the same counter-culture as America of 1968, I think there’s at least some hippie-ish there. That would qualify Lisa Goldstein’s The Dream Years, about a surrealist from the ’20s (no, the 1920s) time-traveling to the Paris riots of 1968.
@1, Herbert!
@15, Yes, keeping it to one was a challenge. I was also thinking Telempath.
Where would Stranger in a Strange Land fit into the discussion?
@8, 12:
I enjoyed Summer of Love when it came out. I re-read it about a year ago. The suck fairy made an appearance, but not too bad of one.
I see I’m not the first (or second) to mention it; but I am deeply offended (offended I say!) to find that the official hippie of the SFWA, Spider Robinson, is missing from this list. I’d inform him, but I can’t bring myself to break that sweet old man’s heart.
You children, I swear.
:D
If Nazgul isn’t a real band, were they a fictional band that the X-Men like, or am I dreaming that, too?
And did Gorge have a long exchange of letters with the estate of Professor Tolkien?
Pretty much everything Mick Farren wrote. Starting with The Texts of Festival.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mick_Farren
I enjoyed the Lisa Mason.
The one time I met GRRM the one thing I said to him was (truthfully) “I’m a big fan of The Armageddon Rag!” He paused, peered at me suspiciously, then said, mordantly. “Oh. You’re that guy.”
Matt Ruff’s “Fool on the Hill” is hippy-tinged…
Robert Carnegie@23: Yes, Chris Claremont did a few Armageddon Rag references. He also put in some references to Cats Laughing, but they actually were a real band.
And then there’s the book version of Logan’s Run. Which is very anti-hippie.
Oh, if you want anti-hippy, try this venerable Poul Anderson novel:
James, I am always blown away by the depth and breadth of your reading of the stuff I saw in bookstores in the 70s and 80s but didn’t pick up (and also the stuff I did pick up, but this time around it’s the other…). I love reading these pieces and imagining that I actually had walked away with The Butterfly Kid or the Foster book instead of The Chessmen of Mars or an Ursula Le Guin. Please keep writing these!
#11/#27: Heh. And Ruff’s second novel, Sewer, Gas & Electric, also features characters living in a yellow submarine. And a self-aware bomb that thinks it’s Ayn Rand….
31: Not _or_! _And!_
@32: Of course. I should have thought of that…
I remember Fritz Leiber’s short story “The Beat Cluster”, with the orbital space hippies
No doubt those of you who are not now hitting search engines to determine what exactly a “hippie” or a “counterculture” might be have your own favourites I did not mention.
Great. I already do enough angsting over the feeling that I’m not a real hippie, despite clutching the identity and values with all my heart and mind, because I was born and raised to the culture in one of the places where it still thrives but wasn’t there when it was first forged in the fires of miseries I’ve never experienced and shone with joy I can hardly imagine. (Whilst going into a hitting-people-with-plastic-fish fury if anyone else tries to tell me that.) Now I should angst about it more, because I don’t read science fiction even when it’s hippie-inspired and am thus ignorant on the subject?
#30: Is the takeaway from this comment supposed to be that all of Poul Anderson’s novels are, at heart, anti-hippy?
(Edit to add: Ah, it was just that the image was slow — slow-w-w-w — to load.)
@37: Poul’s *Operation Chaos* has hippies as unwitting tools of Satan… (hey, at least it was “unwitting”)
What about Barefoot in the Head?
37: Anderson’s 1971 The Byworlder is at least counter-culture curious.
I was gonna say “What about Spider Robinson?” but all y’all beat me to it. :D
I think that hippie fiction intersects with hopepunk, like, a lot. Robinson will be a good reread this winter.
@36: I have a little bit of that feeling sometimes, because I discovered fandom in the pages of back issues of Analog et al. long before the Intertubes were a thing, and I had nobody fannish to talk to IRL. So I got used to using (to myself) slang that was already going out of date, and even now that I can find anybody to flap with about anything, I feel a bit out of step. But, hey, FIAWOL.
I first encountered Anderson’s “kids are evil because they’re not anti-[my stand-in for communism]” thesis in The Star Fox, pretty early on, so I wasn’t shocked when I encountered his defense of Joseph McCarthy.
As far as actual hippieness in fiction… Wizard of the Pigeons is at least hippie-adjacent, and is a very good book.
One of the more subtle hippy things from Spider Robinson was the story about trying to discover the true nature of humanity by taking abandoned infants and placing them in a sealed environment. That’s an old idea, but in Spider’s version the inhabitants are provided with unlimited resources and never face any kind of threat, which seems to be begging the question. Peace, man.
@35: No, those were orbital space beatniks. Similar, but distinctly different.
@45: And we get more orbital space whatevers from Leiber in “A Specter Is Haunting Texas.”
Chip Delany’s Dhalgren.
Here’s another current one. I don’t know that I’d call it inspired by the 60s counterculture, but I think Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day carries that vibe.
I grew up in sixties california. To say this gave me a jaundiced view of the hippie movement would be a huge understatement. BTW there was nothing original about free love and communes. Those ideals seem to recur regularly in western culture. They were a feature of the 19th century counter culture too.
If you want to believe the Encyclopedia Mettalum there was an Italian metal band under that name that has had an on-and-off (mostly off) existence since the late 1990s.
https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Nazgul/7829
@44: which Spider Robinson story is that? Richard Ashby used that idea in 1953 (“Commencement Night”), except with purpose-born infants rather than abandonees (which I suspect would get the dark side rather than a fair sample — not to mention having no language, which Ashby gimmicked around); I’ve never been sure how much genre history (outside of Heinlein) Robinson actually knows.
@51: “Orphans of Eden” I think. Howard Fast used the idea in his story “The Trap” in 1960, btw.
@53: As the title indicates, this list of only five books is not intended to be exhaustive, or an attempt to highlight “the best” books that fit this description–it’s merely a jumping-off point for discussion, based on what one individual person has read and observed. As always, James invites readers to add their own examples in the comments, with the understanding that there are many other works deserving of discussion, here. You’re encouraged to do so, just please be aware of our commenting guidelines and the importance of keeping the tone of the conversation civil and constructive. Thank you.
49: When my father used his sabbatical year to teach in Brazil, he rented the farm to a very responsible young man whose actual name I never knew. His nickname was “Jesus”, due to his hairstyle and eagerness to shoulder responsibilities. I don’t know if he ever mentioned the term “commune” to my father. I know we were a bit surprised to return home to find a large “To the Commune” sign at the end of our lane and at the number of students who somehow found room to live in our house.
In any case, my impression is Jesus took charge of everything and it all worked just fine until the weight of his obligations broke him, after which he was gone, and other, less diligent and skilled, people took over the administration of the commune. A lot of our stuff got broken and I think it was months and months after we came back that the last hippie moved out of our basement.
@@@@@ 16. ianbanks wrote: “Would Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren count?”
That was my first thought also, but on reconsideration, hippies don’t come across all that well in Dhalgren.
I was a counterculture hippie, and maybe still am. We often referred to Stranger in a Strange Land as our bible, so seeing it ignored in this list puzzles me greatly.
@@@@@20. hoopmanjh, Stranger in a Strange Land was my first thought. Definitely hippie, but kind of weird Libertarian hippie.
I nominate Lew Shiner’s “Glimpses.” As an old hippie myself, I often wish Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, etc., hadn’t left us too soon.
The Fifth Sacred Thing (1993) and its sequel, City of Refuge (2015), by Starhawk.
I don’t think I’ve reread Stranger since this was the cover.
What about the ULTIMATE flower-power scifi novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land”? I spent some time in the 1960s trying to Grok The Fullness.
The best “hippie-ish” books I ever read were Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine. The Jang, hip, young and gender fluid. Don’t like how you look? Get body mods. Don’t like how you feel? Take something to help you feel better. Adults are sober, responsible types, but jang don’t have to care. Want to just die? Ah, no. Not if they bring you back, and they always bring you back. The world is a ruined hellscape, but the domes are wonderful. It’s just not enough, for some…
Nice article!
Songs from the Stars by Norman Spinrad (1980)
Very good. It has a few ideas that hold. The distinction between white, grey and black technology. The dynamic justice system. The idea of… what if interestellar travel was not possible after all? Very, very good.
Many have mentioned Illuminatus and everyone should read it.
I’m surprised @ianbanks didn’t mention Ian Banks’ Culture series.
I’d also add Pratchett’s Discworld which doesn’t focus on hippies but is filled with them.
As I recall, there are no adults as such. There are “Older Persons”, who are provided with occupations by the Quasi-Robots but not with any responsibilities that matter.
New (and wonderful) one I just read: David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue, set in late-60’s London and California, with lots of actual hippie characters, mostly musicians. And it’s David Mitchell!!!
This is the cover on my (well, technically it was Dad’s, but I assimilated all of his Heinlein into my collection when I was still in high school) copy of Stranger:
It came out in 1961, so I think an argument could be made that it actually predates a lot of the counterculture/hippie stuff proper?
@66: Discworld, hippies? No!
There are wizards and witches, and occasionally there are strange potions, but still when those people stare at the pretty lights, or try to ignore the monsters coming through the walls, those things are actually there. Important difference.
And anyway hippies didn’t just do drugs all the time. For that matter, other people do.
Am I the only person who remembers John Crowley’s “Little, Big”? Can’t get much more hippyish than Smokey Barnable, the young man on an epic journey from the City to the off-the-map Edgewood, “—to marry Daily Alice Drinkawater, as was prophesied. It is the story of four generations of a singular family, living in a house that is many houses on the magical border of an otherworld. It is a story of fantastic love and heartrending loss; of impossible things and unshakable destinies; and of the great Tale that envelops us all.” Dig the Orrery of the universe, man.
“Spare change, mister?”
How about Robert Silverberg’s The Book of Skulls?
It feels like there ought to be some hippies in the works of Lucius Shepard. With all the Central America = Vietnam, you’d expect some sort of hippie equivalent, but nothing comes to mind.
Michael Kurland told this tale:
“Chester told me, ‘I’ve written a story with characters based on the people in our crowd. I decided instead of inventing new names, I’d just use their real names. I think they’d get a kick out of it,’
“I said, ‘Okay. A roman à clef with real names. That seems a legitimate stylistic choice.’
“Chester said, ‘Great! You’re the hero.’
“I read The Butterfly Kid and I thought, ‘Two can play at this game.’ So I wrote a sequel, in which Chester was the hero.
“The Unicorn Girl involved Chester and me skipping from one time-line to another. Part way through, I got Chester run over by a tank or something. The story continued, minus its hero.
“I gave Chester the manuscript. He read it and said, ‘Michael, I didn’t do anything like that to you, in my book.’
“Then I gave him the rest of the manuscript. In which I had died and Chester survived. The surviving Michael and the surviving Chester hit the right timeline and are reunited. Then they finished the story.
“Chester liked that better.”
I remember a book seller lamenting that when Little, Big was out of print, they had no trouble selling copies at a hundred bucks a pop but when it got a new mass market edition, the paperbacks just sat there. For some reason, my suggestion that they mark the paperbacks up to a hundred dollars did not go over well.
@74 Fernhunter that’s lovely. Do you have the book or paper title handy?
@@@@@ 76, John Gamble
Fernhunter that’s lovely. Do you have the book or paper title handy?
Can’t help you, John. It’s strictly oral tradition.
I used to run with a crowd that included Michael Kurland and Chester Anderson. I once told Chester, “It seems to me smoking grass through your wooden flute would be hard on its resonance.” He said, “Michael doesn’t think of things like that.”
It was a mélange of SF fen, SF writers, computer programmers—when home computers came in kits you had to assemble—and SCA types. Poul Anderson was at the first tournament, and became one of the first SCA knights. Randall Garrett’s great helm had a label inscribed: Operor Non Ego Insectum. In English that would be, Don’t Bug Me.
I only met Tom Waters—who wrote the third book, The Probability Pad—once. He was leaving the area when I was arriving.
I heard Michael tell that story at some party. I did my best to reconstruct it from memory.
@76: The book Fernhunter is talking about is The Unicorn Girl. It’s imperfect, but I’m very fond of it.
There’s a third book in that trilogy, The Probability Pad, by Tom Waters. That one used to be exceedingly hard to find, but I see that there’s a new edition with a foreword by Barbara Hambly.
Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius novels are pretty damn hip.
Has anyone mentioned Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction(1990)? One of my favorites and strongly endorsed by none other than Thomas Pynchon.
@@@@@ 78, carborel
@@@@@76: The book Fernhunter is talking about is The Unicorn Girl. It’s imperfect, but I’m very fond of it.
There’s a third book in that trilogy, The Probability Pad, by Tom Waters. That one used to be exceedingly hard to find, but I see that there’s a new edition with a foreword by Barbara Hambly.
I told Michael Kurland’s story of the first two books @@@@@ 74.
The trilogy descends in quality.
The Butterfly Kid is better than The Unicorn Girl.
The Unicorn Girl is much better than The Probability Pad.
The Probability Pad is good for muffled chortles if you read it in public.
Edited to add:
There is nothing wrong with Tom’s writing. I cracked my old copy for an example.
Michael Kurland, former spy, raconteur, bookie, editor, NBC vassal—Michael, currently very freelance writer—Michael the Theodore Bear/MT Bear, the Empty Bear, Michael sat down.
“Hot.” He pronounced.
“Very hot.” He expanded, very understandably for those with a scientific turn of mind.
“Don’t.” he contracted when I brandished a diet tamarind ice in his direction. “I’m giving up everything I can’t stand for Lent.”
I drank it myself, as a penance for failing to foist it on Michael. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I had intended it to be. I felt doubly cheated.
“Chester,” said Michael, eying the glare of spring sunshine beyond the windows as though it were part of a plot against him, “has disappeared.”
“He might have gone above fourteenth street,” I suggested as an alternative. Village types are very provincial.
Michal shook his eyes, apparently because shaking his head was beyond him at the moment. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I mean disappeared disappeared.”
“You mean poof like that disappeared?”
Michael’s eyes nodded.
“Into thin air? Optical wipe? Blip?”
The eyes confirmed this.
“Michael, what’re you on?”
The eyes faced each other to make some sort of agreement, and then reset to triangulate on me. “You know me better than that: I never have anything stronger than Chemex with Jello. Why not ask Chester what he’s on? He’s the one who disappeared.”
I could see that Michael was a bit shook, since logic was usually his strong suit.
[T. A. Waters, The Probability Pad, 1970]
A good take on Kampus. A good author should be able to humanise even the people they don’t like, at least to the extent that The Merchant of Venice does. Anderson’s out in Operation: Chaos is to make his hippies literally demoniac, as if the Devil’s greatest trick weren’t to convince people he mattered.
A good chunk of the awfulness of I Will Fear No Evil is its future being nothing more than everything Heinlein hated about 1970 turned up to 11 with no nuance or thought to how it might mutate over thirty years. Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron is like that as well.
Months late here, but can’t pass up suggesting Rudy Rucker . . . most of his works have a strong hippie vibe.
What about Heinleins “Stranger in a Strange Land”? I found it to be very hippie-ish. Also Norman Spinrads “Child of Fortune” for sure. It’s so hippie it’s torture to read. I wish I could get those hours back.
The Lathe of Heaven (Le Guin) has always seem steeped in 60’s values to me. No hippies, but the whole thing can be seen as a meditation of the dangers of will and attachment.
There is Edmund Cooper’s Kronk [or Son of Kronk in some markets] which is more about what happens when the counterculture runs out of steam and the hippies burn out. It is a very interesting, although not altogether pleasant, book.