ABSTRACT
Despite John Keat’s opinion that ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’, most science-fiction writers have managed to combine the qualities of the poet and the propagandist. Often they have felt, with H.G. Wells, that art that does not dirty itself with contemporary ideas and opinions is art condemned to triviality. Critics who see science fiction as an essentially didactic genre (as Joanna Russ, for example, has notably done) 1 may be closer to the truth than those who see it as irresponsible popular entertainment.
