<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

New Maps of Hell, by Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), may have been the first serious academic study of science fiction. Amis was a successful novelist, known as one of the "Angry Young Men." His first and best-known novel, Lucky Jim, was a satire of the academic scene, and he was known for his irreverence to sacred literary cows. For instance, he once referred to "Geoffrey 'Smoking Turd' Chaucer." Curiously enough, he had an early and unsatisfactory encounter with a well-known f/sf personage; he studied Old English at Oxford under J. R. R. Tolkien and found Tolkien's mumbling intolerable.

He took pleasure in championing marginal writings, such as the James Bond books, and when Princeton invited him to deliver the Christian Gauss lectures in 1959, he chose the topic of science fiction. In the lectures, published as New Maps in Hell, Amis treated the genre as an underappreciated American art form, like jazz. He was particularly enthusiastic about social satire, such as that published in Galaxy, and he singled out The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, and Pohl's work in general, for particular praise. He is believed to have coined the term comic inferno for this sort of work.

New Maps of Hell led to the creation of four reprint anthologies, Spectrum I-IV, edited with Robert Conquest, and he eventually wrote an sf novel of his own, The Alteration, an alternate history with references to Brian W. Aldiss and Philip K. Dick.

Amis's praise of sf was daring for its time, but like that of Leslie Fiedler, it now seems a bit condescending. There was a certain amount of glorying in the trashiness of the field, he had low expectations for prose and characterization, and he found the possibility of a science fiction love story implausible. When New Worlds took a more experimental turn a few years after New Maps of Hell, Amis condemned it. Later in his life, his own politics turned right and he backed away from his support of more liberal sf writers.