New Maps Of Hell

Author: Kingsley Amis

In terms of literary culture, critical accounts of science fiction came rather late. Even so, there are some very early books that, if you can find a secondhand copy, are well worth reading. Voyages to the Moon by Marjorie Hope Nicolson is a delightfully engaging account of early stories of space flight, and Pilgrims Through Space and Time by J.O. Bailey, which gave its name to the annual Pilgrim Award, is one of the founding works of sf study. But one of the first books to deal seriously with contemporary sf was this one. Amis, mainstream author of books like Lucky Jim, was invited to give a series of lectures at Princeton, and chose to talk about science fiction. This book is the collection of those lectures. He presents sf as the ideal medium for satire, and introduces the term "comic inferno" to describe novels like The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, which he particularly valued. New Maps of Hell is partial and idiosyncratic and very much of its time, but it was tremendously important (as well as being often very funny and always very acute), and if you ever want to get an idea of the development of science fiction criticism, this is the place to start.