From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 28 2002 - 20:48:53 MST
Or maybe it was 1952. A spectacular number of pivotal sf stories appeared
in 1953, presumably written in the year before. According to my patented
50-year two-generation recurrence-with-modal-variation theory of cultural
history,* we're due for another gamma burst next year... which implies that
a batch of mindzingers is being created even as we speak.
Of course the objective circumstances of commercial sf differ: half a
century ago, there was an abundance of small specialized sf magazines with
dedicated readers and writers blending for the first time the grand ideas
of the 1930s and after with the comparative realism of Campbell's Golden
Age, plus a dawning ability to *write* with some of the skills of
literature. There were no competitive special FX movies, no routine TV
space opera, although there was radio and comics. Out of that vortex in
1953 came such stuff as dreams are made on: Sturgeon's MORE THAN HUMAN,
Clarke's AGAINST THE FALL OF NIGHT and CHILDHOOD'S END, Ward Moore's BRING
THE JUBILEE, Simak's RING AROUND THE SUN, Clement's MISSION OF GRAVITY,
Pohl and Kornbluth's THE SPACE MERCHANTS, Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451,
Bester's THE DEMOLISHED MAN, Asimov's THE CAVES OF STEEL... Short story
writers bloomed including Phil Dick, and Blish's sublime novella `A Case of
Conscience' appeared, as did Clarke's `The Nine Billion Names of God'. One
could go on and on. The mind boggles.
Next year might be a happy time, two generations on and flowering.
Damien Broderick
[* Really. In THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS.]
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