Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick

Dune by Frank Herbert

The Escape Orbit by James White

The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch

Nova Express by William Burroughs

A Plague of Demons by Keith Laumer

Rogue Dragon by Avram Davidson

The Ship That Sailed the Time Stream by G. C. Edmondson

The Star Fox by Poul Anderson

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick

I love that list. It has so much going on—SF and fantasy of all shapes and sizes, jostling side by side. Traditional and iconoclastic fictions, all up for the same Lucite block.

And if you’re wondering, the 1965 Nebula winners were,

Novel: Dune by Frank Herbert

Novella: He Who Shapes by Roger Zelazny and The Saliva Tree by Brian Aldiss (tie)

Novelette: “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny

Short Story: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” by Harlan Ellison

. . . it was a good year.

Forty years on and we’re now living in a world in which SF has become a default mode. In which the tropes of SF have spread into the world. Fantasy in its many forms has become a staple of the media. And we, as the people who were here first, who built this city on pulp and daydreams and four-color comics, are coming to terms with a world in which we find several things they didn’t have to worry about in 1965.

For a start, today’s contemporary fiction is yesterday’s near-future SF. Only slightly weirder and with no obligation to be in any way convincing or consistent.

It used to be easy to recognize SF written by mainstream authors. The authors always seemed convinced that this was the first novel to tackle faster-than-light travel, or downloadable intelligence, or time paradoxes or whatever. The books were clunky and proud of themselves and they reinvented the wheel and did it very badly, with no awareness of the body of SF that preceded them.

That’s no longer true. Nowadays things that were the most outlandish topics of SF are simply building blocks for stories, and they aren’t necessarily ours. Our worlds have moved from being part of the landscape of the imagination to being part of the wallpaper.

There was a battle for the minds of the world, and we appear to have won it, and now we need to figure out what we’re doing next.

I always liked the idea that SF stood for “speculative fiction,” mostly because it seemed to cover everything, and include the attitude that what we were doing involved speculation. SF was about thinking, about inquiring, about making things up.

The challenge now is to go forward and to keep going forward: to tell stories that have weight and meaning. It’s saying things that mean things, and using the literature of the imagination to do it.

And that’s something that each of us, and the writers who will come afterwards, are going to have to struggle with, to reinvent and make SF say what we need it to say.