A couple of posts back, I discussed some of the fantasy works which had a major impact on my embryonic reading/writing tastes, way back at the Dawn of Time (well, dawn of my time, anyway). The other genre I steered to very early on was science fiction (SF). Why? Well, partly because I was a youngling in the 1960s, at the height of the moon race between the Muricans and the Russians, and was swept up by the technology and excitement. One of my very first exposures to science fiction wasn’t between the pages of a book, but rather the idiot box i.e. the TV: Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Fireball XL-5, filmed in Supermarionation, dontcha know. Go ahead, Gen Xers, look up clips on YouTube. Revel at the simplicity, the laughable plots, the obvious practical effects. But I thought it was pretty damned cool. Then I discovered people actually wrote books about this stuff, and as Will says, thereby hangs a tale. So today, I propose to go back and revisit a few examples of those seminal SF works which had major impacts on me…
The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures (putatively by “Victor Appleton II, really by a host of ghostwriters). Wikipedia informs me Tom Swift has been with us in one incarnation or another since 1910. The series I was exposed to was written between 1954 and 1966, so… yeah, in the depths of the Cold War (the series villains were “Brungarians,” which even I could figure were really Soviets). Looking back now at the dozen or so I owned, I’m kinda embarrassed to include them here --- even where I purchased them: the hardcovers were 88 cents at K-Mart. Talk about simplistic writing, all wrapped up in truth, justice and the Murican way. But Tom was always also coming up with some new piece of shiny technology to foil the bad guys with, and eight-year-old me wasn’t quite as discerning as --- ahem --- much-older-me is, so… yeah. Loved ‘em, corny as they were.
The City and the Stars and 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Okay, my first ‘real’ science fiction. Artie was a scientist before he was a writer --- and while nowadays, I think most of us would agree his writing style was pretty stilted, he came up with some really interesting concepts. If Tolkien is my literary daddy for fantasy, I’d say Clarke was my SF literary parent. I thought 2001, book and film, was just about the coolest thing ever, and because I’d read the book first, which is what everyone should do, I wasn’t baffled by the film --- which, admittedly, Stanley Kubrick made pretty confusing at times.
The White Mountains (and numerous others) by John Christopher. Hot on the heels of Artie, The White Mountains trilogy showed up on my radar. My first dystopian SF, oh my! Set in the far future when the human race has been conquered by an alien race which rides around in enormous Tripods and lives in domed cities, this trilogy also helped awaken my precocious, pre-pubescent mind to SF’s amazing possibilities. Christopher’s SF (including his Sword of the Spirits trilogy) was clearly aimed at children, and therefore much more simply written than Clarke’s. But it was an enormous influence on me.
The Space Merchants (also numerous others), by Frederik Pohl. Another gritty, dystopian tale dealing with the triumph of advertising turning us all into mindless consumers (and presciently written in 1952, if you can believe it). But the big thing I loved about Fred Pohl’s writing, in this and many other works of his, was his breezy, chatty writing style, which I found, and continue to find, endlessly absorbing and entertaining.
Citizen of the Galaxy (AND numerous others) by Robert A. Heinlein. I think Bob Heinlein has gotten something of a bum rap in recent years, with the revisionists accusing him of being a fascist, a misogynist, and other heinous things. But I’ve pointed it out before: authors write of, and for, their times. Is there casual misogyny in Heinlein’s writing? Yes. Is his treatment of women frequently two-dimensional and patronizing? Also yes. But he wrote in the 1950s and 60s, when such things were lamentably common. (His Starship Troopers gave ammunition to people accusing him of fascism, though I don’t agree he was a proponent.) But he was a damn fine writer, and his stories were engaging --- Citizen of the Galaxy is a classic rags-to-riches story as we discover a young male slave happens to be one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy. And reading Heinlein was rather like the Wile E. Coyote cartoons I watched as a kid: he didn’t turn me into a fascist or misogynist, any more than the cartoons made me want to drop anvils on people or blow them up with dynamite.
Tarnsman of Gor (and others) by John Norman. I hesitate a little to include this, because let’s face it, anyone familiar with his work knows John Norman had some VERY peculiar ideas --- I mean, aside from the fact he was often overly didactic, extremely fond of what we today term ‘information dumps,’ all women want to be slaves, according to him, and sometimes his books tend to become little more than BDSM manuals --- much more so after the first six or so. But the basic story premise, of a man taken from this world to the ‘Counter-Earth’ which revolves in Earth’s orbit but on the other side of the sun, to live where human technology has been deliberately limited in some ways by an alien race… well, it’s not uninteresting. Kinda like Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, except updated and a helluva lot more fixated on kinky sex. By the way, the Wile E. Coyote metaphor applies here, too. I read them for the SF, was mildly baffled by the BDSM.
Needless to say, I’ve owned these titles for more years than I’d care to admit --- for proof, all you have to do is look at the prices on the covers in the photo… it’s been a while since people were paying 95 cents, or $1.50, or even $2.95, for a paperback which wasn’t motheaten in some decrepit secondhand bookstore. But I purchased and read these books between the ages of… oh, 10 and 16. They’ve stayed with me, literally and metaphorically, and they’ve had a profound impact on my understanding and appreciation of the science fiction genre --- not to mention influence on my writing style, which continues to this day.
The New Tom Swift Jr. Adventures (putatively by “Victor Appleton II, really by a host of ghostwriters). Wikipedia informs me Tom Swift has been with us in one incarnation or another since 1910. The series I was exposed to was written between 1954 and 1966, so… yeah, in the depths of the Cold War (the series villains were “Brungarians,” which even I could figure were really Soviets). Looking back now at the dozen or so I owned, I’m kinda embarrassed to include them here --- even where I purchased them: the hardcovers were 88 cents at K-Mart. Talk about simplistic writing, all wrapped up in truth, justice and the Murican way. But Tom was always also coming up with some new piece of shiny technology to foil the bad guys with, and eight-year-old me wasn’t quite as discerning as --- ahem --- much-older-me is, so… yeah. Loved ‘em, corny as they were.
The City and the Stars and 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. Okay, my first ‘real’ science fiction. Artie was a scientist before he was a writer --- and while nowadays, I think most of us would agree his writing style was pretty stilted, he came up with some really interesting concepts. If Tolkien is my literary daddy for fantasy, I’d say Clarke was my SF literary parent. I thought 2001, book and film, was just about the coolest thing ever, and because I’d read the book first, which is what everyone should do, I wasn’t baffled by the film --- which, admittedly, Stanley Kubrick made pretty confusing at times.
The White Mountains (and numerous others) by John Christopher. Hot on the heels of Artie, The White Mountains trilogy showed up on my radar. My first dystopian SF, oh my! Set in the far future when the human race has been conquered by an alien race which rides around in enormous Tripods and lives in domed cities, this trilogy also helped awaken my precocious, pre-pubescent mind to SF’s amazing possibilities. Christopher’s SF (including his Sword of the Spirits trilogy) was clearly aimed at children, and therefore much more simply written than Clarke’s. But it was an enormous influence on me.
The Space Merchants (also numerous others), by Frederik Pohl. Another gritty, dystopian tale dealing with the triumph of advertising turning us all into mindless consumers (and presciently written in 1952, if you can believe it). But the big thing I loved about Fred Pohl’s writing, in this and many other works of his, was his breezy, chatty writing style, which I found, and continue to find, endlessly absorbing and entertaining.
Citizen of the Galaxy (AND numerous others) by Robert A. Heinlein. I think Bob Heinlein has gotten something of a bum rap in recent years, with the revisionists accusing him of being a fascist, a misogynist, and other heinous things. But I’ve pointed it out before: authors write of, and for, their times. Is there casual misogyny in Heinlein’s writing? Yes. Is his treatment of women frequently two-dimensional and patronizing? Also yes. But he wrote in the 1950s and 60s, when such things were lamentably common. (His Starship Troopers gave ammunition to people accusing him of fascism, though I don’t agree he was a proponent.) But he was a damn fine writer, and his stories were engaging --- Citizen of the Galaxy is a classic rags-to-riches story as we discover a young male slave happens to be one of the wealthiest people in the galaxy. And reading Heinlein was rather like the Wile E. Coyote cartoons I watched as a kid: he didn’t turn me into a fascist or misogynist, any more than the cartoons made me want to drop anvils on people or blow them up with dynamite.
Tarnsman of Gor (and others) by John Norman. I hesitate a little to include this, because let’s face it, anyone familiar with his work knows John Norman had some VERY peculiar ideas --- I mean, aside from the fact he was often overly didactic, extremely fond of what we today term ‘information dumps,’ all women want to be slaves, according to him, and sometimes his books tend to become little more than BDSM manuals --- much more so after the first six or so. But the basic story premise, of a man taken from this world to the ‘Counter-Earth’ which revolves in Earth’s orbit but on the other side of the sun, to live where human technology has been deliberately limited in some ways by an alien race… well, it’s not uninteresting. Kinda like Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, except updated and a helluva lot more fixated on kinky sex. By the way, the Wile E. Coyote metaphor applies here, too. I read them for the SF, was mildly baffled by the BDSM.
Needless to say, I’ve owned these titles for more years than I’d care to admit --- for proof, all you have to do is look at the prices on the covers in the photo… it’s been a while since people were paying 95 cents, or $1.50, or even $2.95, for a paperback which wasn’t motheaten in some decrepit secondhand bookstore. But I purchased and read these books between the ages of… oh, 10 and 16. They’ve stayed with me, literally and metaphorically, and they’ve had a profound impact on my understanding and appreciation of the science fiction genre --- not to mention influence on my writing style, which continues to this day.
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