Looking back at old covers of pulps
Today I happened to see on the web a collection of covers from the old science fiction pulp Astounding. The titles on display, as well as the lurid cover illustrations, looked so inviting! That was back in the period between 1931 and 1941 – the golden age of American pulp magazines. In those days, there wasn’t a hard line between science fiction and science fantasy. In the anthology collection The best of Leigh Brackett, Brackett’s husband Edmond Hamilton wrote that in those days when his wife wrote about penal colonies on the planet Mercury, what she wrote wasn’t that far away from what the scientists knew about the planet. Somehow I feel this is stretching the truth just a little bit. But all the same who cares – when the story that comes out of it is as exciting as Brackett stories.
Some of the Astounding covers feature titles written by Robert A. Heinlein. Of course Heinlein didn’t write pulps – at least he didn’t write science fantasy pulps. All the same, there’s his name on the covers, along with E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and H. P. Lovecraft! Robert A. Heinlein, of course along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke during the 1950s changed science fiction forever. After the 1950s only ‘hard’ science fiction was allowed, and even something like Frank Herbert’s Dune was skirting that line.
The problem is that along the way science fiction lost all the fun and the adventure that science fantasy had to offer. Science fantasy, of course, was what Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote when he wrote his stories about the planet Mars. Back in those days you had steel-jawed heroes, quivering damsels in distress, bug eyed monsters, and zap guns. It was all pretty childish – but it was a lot of fun. I suppose that part of what happened after the 1950s is that the science-fiction fans grew older as a group, and they weren’t teenagers anymore. As such these middle-aged man had moved on from their childish fantasies and wanted something more realistic, more intellectual, and more challenging.
But the science fiction pulp magazines lost a lot of readers – most of the science-fiction fans were reading paperback novels at this point, and the whole field kind of contracted. There were a few pulps still being published – and the covers on the pulps were increasingly abstract art, only suggesting what might be going on in the scene. They were certainly not a lot of fun.
I think that one of the signs that the 1930s pulp’s got things right is how nostalgic people are for them, and how publishers are reprinting them. Somehow I don’t think that the 1960s science fiction pulps are going to inspire the same level of nostalgia. At least, they haven’t so far, and the kids who grew up reading them must be middle-aged by now, and if they’re ever going to get nostalgic they would’ve done so already.
It’s sad really.
So my real question is, how do we recapture that sense of adventure? Is there some way to join exciting adventure, lurid action, and hot babes, with science that doesn’t break the laws of physics too extravagantly?
I have a feeling that there have been attempts to revive space opera, and that I just haven’t read any, because I’ve been reading mostly fantasy in the past 30 years outside of the ‘classic’ science fiction of the 30s and 40s and 50s. Most of the space opera that I see right now looks to me (at least from the covers and the blurbs) to be militaristic in nature – there are big battles, but the emphasis is not on individual action so much as the esprit de corps and the rules and regulations of the military institutions – the deep space navy in other words. And somehow, this just wouldn’t do it for me.
(Composed by dictation Thursday 4 September 2008)
