In a way, my political asides in these post reveal this machine that social media built over the last… uh… twenty years. It went full bore with mailing lists after Dubya’s brownshirts stole the election by shutting down the vote in Florida. (Very few people know that Gore won Florida in the final total recount, very narrowly, by Florida law. He earned fewer votes–but only by interpreting the intent of the voter. Not by the rules. The hanging chads, the spoiled votes, pushed Gore over the top. By modern GOP logic, he won, because those votes were spoiled. By law as well, if you care about law, Gore won. GOP hypocrisy can never be overstated.)
I just did it again.
I should delete that paragraph. Meh, I’ll do better tomorrow.
I’m drawn to the past, still, to the SF my father and I both loved. I think I loved it organically, like he did, but some part of me nervously wonders how much SF I read to have something interesting for him to talk to me about. He was loving, but distant in that very common way for fathers of that era.
I’m currently collecting (and re-collecting) a series of Ballentine Best of Collections which you can read about here:
A Survey of Some of the Best Science Fiction Ever Published (Thanks to Judy-Lynn Del Rey)
DISCLAIMER: There are no BIPOC authors in these collections, and too few women, reflecting the bias SF publishing exhibited at that time. Yesterday I received a mass email from SF legend Steven Barnes about how he was told by SF editors as he grew up that black people simply weren’t interested in SF. How this messed him up, but didn’t stop him.
I embraced the very few BIPOC, openly GLBTQ authors we had, and read the few women. ( recall buying a stack of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself and mailing them out to my friends, something I’ve never done before or since.)
But still. I am a white het cis man of a certain age brought up on the dreams of white het cis men my father’s age, mostly, through science fiction echoing his voice. Echoing our mutual love of the future, of science and technology, of that old school optimism, before the New Wave, before the sixties crashed the SF party and the genre became more literary.
And now, in this void, I find myself trying to immerse myself in dusty paperbacks, remembering the boy who devoured novels in a single evening, who haunted used book stores, and his father’s night stand, reading, reading, reading, dreaming of this future we live in now. A dystopic version of it at any rate.
That kid slept in a room lined with glossy, Camaro Red, hand-painted bookshelves, packed with paperbacks, defined by the stories he’d assembled, blissfully unaware of the 58 year old man staring back at him in wonder.
And envy.
If your tastes were formed by conversation with your father, that might explain why you love Lensman-era sf so much, a taste I’ve never been able to cultivate.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I think a lot of the appeal is the unbridled optimism of a generation that saw the post war boom continuing–forever. We see this in the abundance Utopias (The Midas Plauge, the Humanoids, the deadly paradise that provokes the Rediscovery of Man in the Cordwainer Smith-verse.) and more positive extrapolations; Asimov’s robots and empire and Niven’s known space.
The 60s would infect SF with realism of various stripes. Dystopias that made more sense.
The combination of infinite possibility–without transhumanism sheering away the importance of human-scale, easily empathized with intelligence, is less common after the golden age.
I’m a bit older than you, I caught the last whiffs of that post war boom psychotropic gas. It was comic books and galactic empire. It was the world as extrapolated from monoculture middle class suburbs. This perfect frozen adolescence of rapid technological change, of futurism.