Tag: Science Fiction

The Infuriating and Essential Science Fiction of A.E. Van Vogt

vanvogtvoyagespacebeagleIf you like the pulp science fiction of the Campbellian Golden Age from the late 1930’s to the early 1950’s, you’re bound to run across A.E. van Vogt’s name on nearly every must-read list. (Incidentally, not everyone, including me, considers this era to be the real Golden Age of science fiction). For fans of vintage science fiction, van Vogt is essential because his works were crucial in the canalization of many of the core ideas that we now consider essential to science fiction. At the same time, van Vogt is infuriating because his writing is annoyingly juvenile, even when compared against the other writers who shared pages in the same magazines aimed at juveniles.

When you read van Vogt today, it’s hard not to wonder what people saw in this guy when they ranked his works as some of the greatest ever in science fiction. Continue reading “The Infuriating and Essential Science Fiction of A.E. Van Vogt”

Apocalypse 1950: Science will save us from science

Edmond Hamilton’s City at World’s End (1950)

hamiltoncityatworldsendOn March 1st, 1954, on the Bikini atoll of the Marshall Islands, U.S. scientists detonated a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb called Castle Bravo. The expected yield of Bravo was five megatons TNT, but the scientists had missed a crucial fusion reaction that took place in this particular bomb design. As one scientist described it to the historian Richard Rhodes, “They really didn’t know that with lithium7 there was an n, 2n reaction [i.e., one neutron entering a lithium nucleus knocked two neutrons out]. They missed it entirely.” The actual yield of Bravo was three times the expected yield, measuring in at fifteen megatons. The blast blew a 6,500 ft diameter hole through the coral and trapped people in observation bunkers that were supposed to be situated far from the blast zone. Japanese fishermen aboard the vessel Lucky Dragon were exposed to high levels of radioactive fallout, leading to the death of one member of the crew and sparking an international incident between the US and the country that less than nine years before had been the world’s first nation to be attacked with nuclear weapons.

Recent popular fears that physicists would destroy the world through miniature black holes created in the Large Hadron Collider are just the latest manifestation of the difficulty people have long had in deciding whether to view scientists as the sorcerer or the apprentice. Continue reading “Apocalypse 1950: Science will save us from science”

John Brunner’s mediocre Productions of Time

I’ve been drowning in job proposal/manuscript writing this month. I did manage to finish one of the growing stack of vintage science fiction weighing down my shelves: John Brunner’s The Productions of Time (1966), which sounded fun, but ended up disappointing.

Murray Douglas is a famous but washed-up actor, just out of rehab for alcoholism and trying to get back into theater. He gets recruited for an odd play project designed by an enigmatic Latin American playwright Manuel Delgado, whose past works have led to suicides and institutionalizations of the actors involved. Murray and the cast are kept in a lavish country club to work out the play, but Murray soon realizes that the theater project may be secondary. Delgado and his staff have rigged the place up with mysterious electronic devices that may be for eavesdropping, and and Delgado seems to be deliberately stoking to the sexual and narcotic vices of the oddly passive cast. Continue reading “John Brunner’s mediocre Productions of Time”

2012 – Year of Classic Science Fiction Reprints

It’s been a little too busy to do the Sunday Science Poem or finish up the Thomas Kuhn book club (we’ll finish it soon, really). In the mean time, here are some quick sci-fi thoughts: with the recent arrival of an Amazon package at my home, I’ve realized that 2012 has been an awesome year for classic science fiction reprints. Here are my acquisitions:

1) Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley (NYRB classics): Nearly 400 pages, 26 stories, and a useful intro (PDF) by Alex Abramovich – this is essential reading for fans of the SF short story, especially those who like the vintage 50’s stuff. Continue reading “2012 – Year of Classic Science Fiction Reprints”

“The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism”

I’ve been digging into my new Library of America copy of The Space Merchants. The book is an outstanding example of science fiction as social criticism. And so it’s interesting to read C.M. Kornbluth’s thoughts on the failure of the science fiction novel as social criticism:

I suggest from this that there is very little fundamental material in the “Skylark” universe which is congruent with adulthood. I suggest that there is much fundamental material in that universe congruent with the attitudes and emotions of a boy seven or nine years old tearing off down an alley on his bike in search of adventure. The politics of this boy are vague, half-understood, overheard adult dogmatisms. His sex-life is a bashful, inhibited yearning for unspecific contact. His cultural level is low; he has not had time to learn to like anything seriously musical. Around the corner there lurks the impossibly malignant black-haired bully who may be all of twelve, and his smart little toady. But Dicky Seaton has a loyal pal, Marty Crane, and together they will whip the bully and toady in a fair, stand-up fight.

What are these wild adventures of Seaton and Crane, then? These mighty conquests, these vast explorations, these titanic battles? They are boyish daydreams, the power of fantasies which compensate for the inevitable frustrations of childhood in an adult world. They are the weakness of the Smith stories as rational pictures of the universe and society, and they are the strength of the stories as engrossing tales of Never-Never Land. We have all been children.

Continue reading ““The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism””