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Considering then the optimism which has permeated science fiction for so long, what is really remarkable is that during the last twelve years many science-fiction writers have turned about and attacked their own cherished vision of the future, have attacked the Childhood's End kind of faith that science and technology will inevitably better the human condition.

And they have done this on a very large scale, with a veritable flood of novels and stories which are either dystopias or narratives of adventure with dystopian elements.

Because of the means of publication -- science-fiction magazines and cheap paperbacks -- and because dystopian science fiction is still appearing in quantity the full range and extent of this phenomenon can hardly be known, though one fact is evident: the science-fiction imagination has been immensely fertile in its extrapolations.

Among the dystopias, for example, Isaac Asimov's The Caves Of Steel ( 1954 ) portrays the deadly effects on human life of the super-city of the future ; ;

James Blish's A Case Of Conscience ( 1958 ) describes a world hiding from its own weapons of destruction in underground shelters ; ;

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 ( 1954 ) presents a book-burning society in which wall television and hearing-aid radios enslave men's minds ; ;

Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s, A Canticle For Leibowitz ( 1959 ) finds men, after the great atomic disaster, stumbling back to their previous level of civilization and another catastrophe ; ;

Frederick Pohl's `` The Midas Touch '' ( 1954 ) predicts an economy of abundance which, in order to remain prosperous, must set its robots to consuming surplus production ; ;

Clifford D. Simak's `` How-2 '' ( 1954 ) tells of a future when robots have taken over, leaving men nothing to do ; ;

and Robert Sheckley's The Status Civilization ( 1960 ) describes a world which, frightened by the powers of destruction science has given it, becomes static and conformist.

A more complete list would also include Bradbury's `` The Pedestrian '' ( 1951 ), Philip K. Dick's Solar Lottery ( 1955 ), David Karp's One ( 1953 ), Wilson Tucker's The Long Loud Silence ( 1952 ), Jack Vance's To Live Forever ( 1956 ), Gore Vidal's Messiah ( 1954 ), and Bernard Wolfe's Limbo ( 1952 ), as well as the three perhaps most outstanding dystopias, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants ( 1953 ), Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano ( 1952 ), and John Wyndham's Re-Birth ( 1953 ), works which we will later examine in detail.

The novels and stories like Pohl's Drunkard's Walk ( 1960 ), with the focus on adventure and with the dystopian elements only a dim background -- in this case an uneasy, overpopulated world in which the mass of people do uninteresting routine jobs while a carefully selected, university-trained elite runs everything -- are in all likelihood as numerous as dystopias.