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Those of us who have been reading this "Rockets and Ray Guns" "escapist fiction"
for a while usually have a fair-sized library. Inevitably, we begin to read memoirs
like The Way The Future Was, The Early Asimov, and Wonder's Child
to get a sense of how this whole genre came to be.
If we are really lucky, there is someone older and more experienced to help us
find some of those works which shaped the course of Science fiction. I have chosen
three of these to discuss. These have all been considered great works at one time
or another. One won a Hugo. Another was written before the Hugos existed. All of them
are currently out of print. I sincerely doubt that the English teachers who earnestly
recommended 1984 have even heard of any of them.
The first of these is "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum. A forty-some-odd-page
classic, it first saw the light of day in 1934. The alien creatures were the first "modern"
aliens. Neither utopian nor monstrous, these creatures were much more well-rounded.
They had not only an alien anatomy, but seemingly an alien psychology, as well. If not
for Mr. Weinbaum, we probably would never have heard of Klingons.
In April 1952, Sands of Mars was published. Written by Arthur C. Clarke,
a physicist and former Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, it was extremely
hard-science for its day. In an age where even Robert Heinlein was writing about Martians
in their cities, this book instead required a rational, physical explanation for everything.
If you wanted Martians, then there had to be a way for them to get enough oxygen for the
maintenance of their metabolism. If they couldn't get it by breathing, how else could
they get it? If they had survived the slow leaching away of their atmosphere into space,
how had they managed it? This is why even the silliest of TV shows seem to require some
sort of technical explanation for their spaceships and ray guns.
I hesitate to mention this last one. Back in the 60's, while this author was busy
revolutionizing the genre by pulling together a combination of magic and science,
the more snobbish among our readership denied the worth of his work. But, in 1963,
Jack Vance won the Hugo award for The Dragon Masters. It has been observed
that today's technology would have gotten us burned at the stake a couple of centuries
ago. If this is true, then Mr. Vance's vision of a far-distant future is probably
more accurate than that of many hard-science writers. If not for Mr. Vance, we probably
would never have seen the brilliance of many others whose work we enjoy today. The most
striking example I can think of is the late Roger Zelazny. While Mr. Zelazny's work
was in no way derivative, it is hard to conceive of him writing and publishing much
of his fiction without the ground-breaking efforts of Mr. Vance.
I hope you've enjoyed my little discussion. I'll see you again next month. Until then,
keep on reading!
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