Science Fiction Osgiliation

[vison]

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.

[Primula Baggins]

A lot of science fiction of that era is fantasy only in retrospect: a habitable Venus and Mars with native intelligent life, etc. At the time it was, if not absolutely scientific, at least plausible.

Definitely male-oriented, definitely "hard." What survives to this time from the 1940s and 50s is the best of what was often a pretty bad lot. It wasn't until the 1960s that literary value started to weigh as much as "sense of wonder" with a significant number of readers and writers, and I think that shifted the balance; it wasn't enough to be a scientist or engineer to write an SF story and sell it to a magazine; you also had to be able to rub two sentences together.

But there were plenty of contemporaries of Clarke who wrote "hard" SF. They just aren't all remembered as well. He certainly wasn't unique.

[Crucifer]

Fair enough! I wasn't around then, so I can only do my best with what modern editions I can afford.

[Primula Baggins]

As opposed to those of us who cut our teeth on Leigh Brackett and C. L. Moore and Andre Norton.

[yovargas]

Wasn't that pulpy "Attack of the giant space lizard of death!!" type stuff in sci-fi pretty much from the get go?

[vison]

Wasn't that pulpy "Attack of the giant space lizard of death!!" type stuff in sci-fi pretty much from the get go?

Not so much in books, as far as I can recall. Movies, yes. But I saw very few scifi movies in my youth.

Leigh Brackett. A blast from teh past!!!

[Primula Baggins]

Yep.

Covers of SF magazines were gorgeously pulpy, and so was a lot of the stuff inside; but more rockets and aliens, fewer giant lizards eating the high school.

Most of that was actually before my time, or vison's. SF's id phase. Around 1950 it got all self-conscious.

[yovargas]

Neat.

[Primula Baggins]

I don't think I've ever read that Leigh Brackett novelette, but I've always loved the title.

ETA: Wait, I do have it, in the anthology More Women of Wonder, edited by Pamela Sargent. Which I bought in 1976, so I can't remember the story.

Leigh Brackett, like the other two I listed a couple of posts ago, was a female pioneer of SF writing, back when it was coldly and unapologetically a man's game.

[vison]

Andre Norton. I knew her housekeeper. Virtually. Strange, the whole thing. I loved some of Norton's books. "Forerunner Foray" is one of my absolute favourites. And, of course, the Witch World Saga.

That wonderful cover art posted by yovargas was probably misleading as far as the story goes. Guys would buy the magazine with a cover pic like that, and never notice that the story didn't even have a woman in it.

[Maria]

A really intricate illustration called "The History of Science Fiction"
http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digita ... 024_LG.jpg

[Primula Baggins]

Mr. Prim sent me this yesterday. I haven't had time to do more than scan it yet. But I love the Miriam Allen de Ford quote at the bottom:

Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities.

[yovargas]

Buy me a 40 inch monitor and I might try making sense of that pic.

[Primula Baggins]

A 40-incher might be almost big enough.

I have a 27-inch monitor and the full-sized JPEG nearly fills it. But I still have to zoom in to read it all.

It's actually a fun reader's tool: find the title of an SF work you like, and the titles in the immediate vicinity will probably also be of books you'll like.

[Griffon64]

Neat picture!

[yovargas]

I couldn't find Hidden Worlds so it is useless to me.

[Alatar]

I CALL SHENANIGANS!

How do Andromeda and Earth Final Conflict make the TV list when Firefly doesn't?

[Primula Baggins]

yov,

Alatar, I hadn't gotten to the TV part yet, but Firefly is a serious omission.

Unless the artist is one of the people who consider it fantasy. Its cosmology is more than a little on the improbable side.

[axordil]

There's a roleplaying game for Firefly that explains the background conceits they never really went into. It makes more sense than I thought: a huge, spread out multiple star system with a buttload of planets and satellites, most of which are at least partially terraformed and some of which seem to have artificially enhanced gravity. The ships have the ability to temporarily reduce their inertia using technology related to said gravity control (the "Firefly" drive).

I guess Whedon thought all that was easier to swallow than FTL. Who knows? He may be right.

[Primula Baggins]

It's all handwaving in any case. I'm suspicious of the stability of planetary orbits in multiple-star systems, but if there's some alien technology involved or if the whole thing is an artificial construct or artifact, then I can buy it.

At least with FTL there's only one camel to swallow.