Crucifer wrote:I think that's what I really meant when I said 'visionary', Vison. Looking at contemporaneous sci-fi, it was as much fantasy as it was sci-fi. There was as much of the mythical and legendary in it as of the scientific. Clarke's science fiction, however, was about scientific theory. Obviously, Bowman and Poole are embarking on an epic quest, but it is a quest for knowledge and enlightenment. The grounds for everything that happens in his work is science, and that was unique for the time.
I don't recall that scifi in the 50's was "fantasy", myself. It was generally "hard science" stuff, and very male-oriented, full of guns and rocket ships with pointy ends, etc.
The fantasy and mythical stuff crept in later, I don't really know when. It ruined scifi as far as I was concerned. I couldn't read it, not having been weaned on Pohl and Asimov and Clarke, etc. Ray Bradbury was always a hop out of kin, so to speak, he writes very beautifully. His stories are scifi in one sense but not in all senses, they are "fantasies" in one way as well, but never of the idiotic kind.