In gym they punch out these kids with the glasses for being wimps. We all want to think we're the first to discover sex and dissolution and good writing. Del Rey grafts the bathetic style of women's magazine fiction onto an SF plot and the fans eat it up because they're used to a diet of E. E. Smith and Harry Bates. The only thing we have to offer new, kids, is our individual selves. The most revolutionary act we can perform, as writers, is to cross genres, graft idioms from other kinds of work onto the SF subject matter.
Style IS content.
Not because he invented it, but because he had the wit to see that an old style could be adapted to our traditional material. More power to him. Yeah, we can talk about the future. Del Rey, all unconscious, tells us everything we need to know about male attitudes toward women in the 1930s. Godwin thinks he's talking about the nature of the universe and gives us instead sentimentalized right-wing political philosophy.