And he knows, too, that it's not T.S. Eliot's world any more, if indeed it ever was T.S. Eliot's world. He knows we live in a world that loves to think SF, and has thought SF ever since Hiroshima, which was the ne plus ultra of Millennial Technological Advents, which really and truly did change the world forever.

So Updike has rolled up his pinstriped sleeves and bent his formidable intelligence in our direction, and lo we have a science fiction novel, _Roger's Version_ by John Updike.

Of course it's not *called* a science fiction novel. Updike has seen Le Guin and Lem and Vonnegut crawl through the spacewarp into his world. He's seen them wriggle out, somehow, barely, gasping and stinking of rocket fuel. Updike has no reason to place himself in a position they went to great pains to escape. But _Roger's Version_ does feature a computer on its cover, if not a rocketship or a babe in a bubble helmet, and by heaven it is a science fiction novel--and a very good one.

_Roger's Version_ is Updike's version of what SF should be on about. It deals with SF's native conceptual underpinnings: the impact of technology on society. The book is about technolatry, about millennial visionary thinking. This is SF-think as examined by a classic devotee of lit-think.

It's all there, quite upfront and nakedly science fictional. It puzzles mainstream commentators. "It's as though Updike had challenged himself to convert into the flow of his novel the most resistant stuff he could think of," marvels the _Christian Science Monitor_, alarmed to find a Real Novel that actually deals straightforwardly with real ideas. "The aggressiveness of Updike's imagination is often a marvel," says _People_, a mag whose utter lack of imagination is probably its premier selling point.

And look at this list of author's credits: Fred Hoyle, Martin Gardner, Gerald Feinberg, Robert