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the mutants in van Vogt’s other classic,
Slan
. It seemed that, if you wanted to go mutant, you had to be born into a family of superhumans or join a political group or a religion. And the truth was, I was never much of a joiner.
    2
    In September 1966, when I was a student at Bard College, my formerly tweedy, graying poetry professor, Anthony Hecht, showed up for the new term in gray-and-white-striped Uncle Sam bell-bottoms, a bright paisley shirt, a suede vest and Beatle boots. My friends and I discovered that these, along with a new laid-back, goofy expression, were the souvenirs of a summer spent among the flower children of Haight-Ashbury, a section of San Francisco that was just starting its climb to glory. Of course, we had to check it out as well. So, a few months later, a few of us drove out to the coast.
    The scene, made eerily vivid by the combination of psychedelic drugs and its own outrageous novelty, was pure science fiction: all these dazzling young girls dressed up in homemade outfits inspired by Pocahontas, Maid Marian, Annie Oakley, whoever. Tall, bony drug dealers with ponytails would walkpast you muttering the names of their wares without the vowels, just in case you were a narc:
Hsh!—Grss!—Zd!—Spd!
Blue Cheer, a group that touted itself as the loudest band in the world, was playing down the street at the Straight Theater.
    It was fascinating, for about a week, anyway. Then you started to notice that a lot of the kids looked all waxy and wild-eyed and that they were talking much too slow or much too fast, and then you got that
Oh shit
feeling like Lou Costello thinking he’s talking to Abbott and then realizing he’s talking to the Wolfman. On the corner, you’d spot the hustling predator (whose consciousness hadn’t been raised as yet) looking to score off the middle-class kids who’d walked right onto their turf. It was over, bro, before it even hit
Life
magazine.
    By 1968, the paranoia was thick. The Vietnam War was escalating, Kennedy II and King were assassinated, and both the right and the left were caught in a cycle of fear and fury. Several gruesome murders (the “Groovy” murders, Manson) broke the spirit of the alternative community. Almost immediately, the counterculture, this alliance of aspiring mutants, seemed to have a nervous breakdown and fragmented into claques devoted to one authority figure or another: you could sign up with the Maharishi, Meher Baba, Rajneesh and his Orange People, Sun Myung Moon, the Sufis, the Jesus Freaks, the Hare Krishnas and various sects of Buddhists. In addition, there were the human-potential movements already mentioned, plus EST, Arica, primal therapy and scores of others. In the political sphere, you had the Panthers and the Weathermen. All this provided me and my droll companions with a lot of great material for after-dinner analysis, with or withoutherbal mood augmentation. Not that we all weren’t feeling a little shaky ourselves. Now everyone had a map, but, as the Count liked to say, the map is not the territory. After a while, there wasn’t any territory, either.
    3
    There were a few SF writers, like antiauthoritarian satirists Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, who wouldn’t buy into John Campbell’s dream of a mutant utopia. In the early fifties, when Philip K. Dick tried to sell Campbell a story about a postatomic mutant—a perfect being who turns out to have no use for the human race—Campbell wouldn’t allow it. Dick’s comments:
    Here I am also saying that mutants are dangerous to us ordinaries, a view which John W. Campbell, Jr., deplored. We were supposed to view them as our leaders. But I always felt uneasy as to how they would view us. I mean, maybe they wouldn’t want to lead us. Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we wouldn’t seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt uneasy as to where we would wind up going. It might have