If anyone needed a
demonstration of how technology was changing the world then World War
Two was surely it. The Great War was the first time that the new toys got a
proper outing – mass transit, telecommunications, air power, chemical weapons,
high-powered explosives – but the technology was still in its infancy. Meanwhile, military thinking hadn’t really
caught up with the possibilities - leading to massacres like Gallipoli and the agonising stalemate of the western front - and the military structures of the main participants were
still based on obsolete aristocratic models.
Frighteningly, it was the bad guys who figured it out first: if anyone truly foresaw the potential of the sorts of
ideas bandied around by Gersnback and his associates it was the
freshly minted tyrannies of Europe and Western Asia.
By the time World War
two came along, the military powers had had time to develop a solid
theory of warfare based aroundnew technology, mass production and relatively egalitarian corporate
management structures. Suddenly, science
fiction leapt from the pages of the pulps and into the real world in
the most dramatic way, climaxing in a moment of cataclysmic
destruction that brought home humanity’s new found powers over the
material world. The apocalypse that had previously been the domain of
gods was now well within the grasp of humanity.
I don’t think it’s
a coincidence that this era brought science
fiction to maturity. SF had been exploring the effects of technology and
radically re-shaped societies since the time of H G Wells. The
science fiction writers were the ones that recognised the truth in
these prophetic visions and ran with them.
Ashley highlights a
boom in SF publications in about 1939. This is the era that saw the
débuts of the great ABC of SF – Asimov, Bradbury and Clarke – as
well as genre-defining authors like Pohl & Kornbluth, Heinlein,
A E van Vogt, L Sprague de Camp, John Wyndham (under various versions
of his real name) and a host of others.
As it grew more popular, it seemed to change, as well. Ashley says, 'It was no longer the Gernsbackian purveyor of sience taught through fiction. Instead it was essentially the scientific adventure, ranging from the juvenilistic adventures of Planet Stories and Amazing, to the scientific and political prognostications of Astounding.' I would also detect a decline in the influence of the gothic and melodrama in favour of a dryer, more detached and contemporary feel. Similarly fantasy of the Weird Tales type was being replaced with a more urbane style in Unknown.
As it grew more popular, it seemed to change, as well. Ashley says, 'It was no longer the Gernsbackian purveyor of sience taught through fiction. Instead it was essentially the scientific adventure, ranging from the juvenilistic adventures of Planet Stories and Amazing, to the scientific and political prognostications of Astounding.' I would also detect a decline in the influence of the gothic and melodrama in favour of a dryer, more detached and contemporary feel. Similarly fantasy of the Weird Tales type was being replaced with a more urbane style in Unknown.
What’s very striking
in both the previous volume and this one is how much a youth cult
science fiction was. Many of the authors represented in the first volume were prodigiously young: G Peyton Wertenbaker was 19 when he wrote TheComing fo the Ice, Lloyd Arthur Eschbach 21 when he wrote The Voice From the Ether,
Raymond Z Gallum a relative veteran at 24 when he wrote Davy Jones' Ambassador. In this
volume we see magazine being taken over by the first generation of
fans: John Campbell sold his first story at 19 and took the reigns of
Astounding at 26, Frederick Pohl took over editorial duties on Super
Science Stories and Astonishing at 19, while Charles Hornig was given
the editor’s job at Wonder Stories when he was just 17.
In his introduction,
Ashley also notes the high proportion of magazines aimed at a
younger readership. Young readers were hungry for the new ideas
offered by SF. It offered change, novelty, a world unlike the staid
world of their parents and grandparents. Even today, SF (and to a larger extent fantasy) thrives on
the young adult readership, and the commercial revival of the genre
in recent years owes a huge favour to readers in the teens.
Those European tyrannies were based on offering a new way of life
that broke with the past and offered new ways of living. It was a
curious mix of influences, like SF itself: the socially radical
futurists and the common-sense sobriety of the protestant capitalist
class, even if the latter was expressed through Marxist ideals. It
added in the lingering echoes of the romantic and Gothic traditions
and on occasion a hefty dose of mad science to justify their actions.
What sort of brave new world can we imagine today? Google Glass and a new type of iPhone? In an age where youth unemployment in the Eurozone tops 25 per cent, where are the ideologies that offer the chance to topple the satus quo? Not in the techno libertarianism of sci fi: that IS the status quo of venture capitalists, dotcom millionaires, software giants and big pharma. Is it any surprise that the boom in young adult SF seems to be largely composed of dystopia like The Hunger Games or Feed (by M T Anderson) and the melodramatic teen angst of the 'urban fantasy'.
What sort of brave new world can we imagine today? Google Glass and a new type of iPhone? In an age where youth unemployment in the Eurozone tops 25 per cent, where are the ideologies that offer the chance to topple the satus quo? Not in the techno libertarianism of sci fi: that IS the status quo of venture capitalists, dotcom millionaires, software giants and big pharma. Is it any surprise that the boom in young adult SF seems to be largely composed of dystopia like The Hunger Games or Feed (by M T Anderson) and the melodramatic teen angst of the 'urban fantasy'.
Science fiction went to
war in the years covered in this volume, fighting over how the future would look. I’ll be interested to see
how (or indeed whether) this idea is reflected in the stories coming
up.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.