Grand claims have been made for the centrality of the Vietnam War to American science fiction; H. Bruce Franklin argues that ‘America's war in Indochina cannot be dissociated from American SF, which shaped and was reshaped by the nation's encounter with Vietnam’ (1990: 341). America was attempting to make the world safe for its own interests, but this just seemed to raise more doubts, both at home and abroad. Invisible enemies who supposedly threatened the American Dream on an ideological level were also to be confronted, in a series of proxy wars against communism. Vietnam was the site for one such campaign, and it was necessary to introduce a draft to supply the US armed forces. However, the supposedly technologically superior force was unable to achieve victory. In 1975, after years of street protests in America and outside American embassies, the troops made a humiliating withdrawal from the territory. Susan Sontag suggests that the media's coverage of the war did much to turn public opinion against it – not so much the television news as the newspaper photography, especially Nick Ut's famous photograph of Kim Phúc, ‘a naked South Vietnamese child just sprayed by American napalm, running down a highway toward the camera, her arms open, screaming in pain’ (1977: 18).

Alasdair Spark asserts that ‘SF certainly did not split into overt camps’ (1990: 114) over Vietnam, but perhaps the division lines had been drawn already, broadly speaking between New Waves and old guards. Kate Wilhelm and Judith Merril had been drawing up a petition against American involvement in 1968, and this sparked Poul Anderson to collect names for a petition supporting the war. Both lists were published as adverts, first in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (March 1968) and then on facing pages in Galaxy (June 1968) (Franklin 1990: 341, 354). Of the hawks, only three of them published in Dangerous Visions (1967), Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology, whereas sixteen of the doves did (Spark 1990: 115), and there was an old guard/new wave division.