I’ve recently come to accept that I’m not really a card carrying
fan of science fiction, nor a true science fiction writer. This
realization has evolved as I’ve read more about
science fiction and its history and it came to a head recently after reading
Astounding: John W Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, L
Robert Hubbard, and the Golden age of Science Fiction by Alec
Nevala-Lee.
However, to begin at
the beginning, for the last year or so I have been a regular reader
of these web sites:
These web sites feature articles and reviews about new science fiction, and discussions about what science fiction is. From their blurbs
and reviews I’ve found few, if any, new books to spark my
interest. This may be as it should be. Science fiction should constantly evolve with the times. It has, but I haven't. Of course
there are readers my age who still enjoy new science
fiction; people who have evolved with it. But it seems that I’ve been drifting
away from it for more than 40 years.
They also run series that revisit books from my prime
science fiction years in the 1960’s. Often, when I read these
reviews, I'm left wondering what it
was that I loved about them. And, with a few exceptions,
when I try rereading books from that era – I still have all of
them – I can’t see past their deficiencies to recapture the
magic. I no longer have the necessary youthful imagination. It seems that I’ve
grown up.
One key thing I have
learned is that I missed the heart
of science fiction. I never read sf magazines and passed on
short story collections. Short
stories are simply not my cup of tea. I like stories about people, not visions, concepts, or gadgets wrapped in a veneer of a story. Plus, even if a short story features characters, the length is too short to do them justice. Still, it is said that the short story is science fiction's true medium with ideas and concepts its defining feature, neither of which I care about.
So, all in all, it seems that a
surprising amount of science fiction never has appeal to me. Indeed,
while writing this blog post I looked up three “100 best science
fiction books” lists. I knew I read only a handful of short stories, but
how about novels? On two of the lists I read 16
of the 100 and on one, just 6. Clearly I have not been doing my
homework.
And finally, we come
back around to Astounding, et al. This book tells the story
of the pulp magazine Astounding under the editorship of John W
Campbell, and his three most important writers, by telling each of their life
stories. It shows them to have been very strange and flawed men.
Writers may often be strange, but what is so sad about these men, for
me, was their delusions of greatness. They were just
pulp writers churning out stories mostly for teenage boys. But they
saw themselves as something far grander; visionary giants who were
leading the world into a bright future with their grand visions and the
strange theories. It makes for an interesting, but
rather sad, story. I'd be embarrassed to call the Campbell's Astounding era the “Golden Age” of science fiction.
So, all in all, I
think that in my old age, I will retire my lifelong goal of writing science fiction. I will continue to write the type of stories I like. I suppose, like it or not, they will still be considered science
fiction, if only because all of them will continue to be set in imaginary worlds. I won’t kick about it, but in my heart,
I’m not writing science fiction anymore. I’m writing old
fashioned adventure romances that are set in imaginary locales only because that allows me to do whatever I like with them, without having
to fit them into real history and real locales. They will be set in imaginary places that I know all about and are all mine.
