![]() ![]() ![]() Isaac Asimov might be his protege, and one of Astounding‘s leading lights, but that didn’t matter, not this time. Robert Heinlein, Ray Guns and Rocket Ships, 1952Įditor John Campbell would not have it. ![]() “Granted that not all stories need to be morally edifying, nevertheless I would demand of science fiction writers as much exercise of moral sense as I would other writers… In my opinion, such abstractions as honor, loyalty, fortitude, self-sacrifice, bravery, honesty, and integrity will be as important in the far reaches of the Galaxy as they are in Iowa or Korea.” ![]() This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity. The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.” Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.īut space captains are heroic sorts. The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. The pilot finds a stowaway a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother. Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.” I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. ![]()
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