![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI happened to see in my own newspaper's occasional science fiction book column news of a boxed set of SF novels from the 1950s. Remembering the hardcover edition of the Foundation novels I'd bought last year, I did keep my eyes open for the box set, and after a while I also found a bookstore coupon in my newspaper of sufficient magnitude to go to the bookstore and buy the set. Just like with the Foundation novels, I'd long had a good number of the books included in the set as second-hand purchases, and more than that I also happened to think a little about how still this doesn't reconnect me to the modern currents of written science fiction I might have become disconnected from through the crawling suspicion the discussions of others about it will criticise all of my other tastes. Still, the thought of higher-quality editions of novels that were, after all, long and well remembered did continue to appeal to me. Reading through the first volume of the set even left me with a few thoughts about its novels.
It's sort of tempting to look at Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and connect it to a flavour of the present moment, "Mad Men," the past projected into the future; if the comparison with a visual work that "everyone knows" can be stretched a bit further, though, an attempt might be made to describe the novel as "Mad Men meets Soylent Green." Satire is the keyword as advertising agencies control an overpopulated world, selling ersatz products with "habit-forming alkaloids" in them to the consumers, and the people of the World Conservation Authority, or "Consies," are the sole resistance. The small details are easy to pick out as dated (a robot probe to Venus is bogged down by an "automatic pilot" that weighs "four and one half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope," so a rocket is launched with "a sixty-pound midget" on board), but there are certainly things that resonate today.
If the satire of The Space Merchants lifts it above "that pulp stuff," the three novels that follow it in the volume do seem to be taking different "literary" perspectives. Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human involves a group of seemingly damaged youths who all turn out to have psychic powers knitting themselves into a composite organism, and in saying that I'm tempted to see assorted "superhero" stories of the decades that followed. My impression is that "psychic powers" aren't to be found in "serious" written science fiction these days, and I would certainly say honest skepticism has a role in that; at the same time, I do wonder if the apparent "mainstream" making a big deal of them make them less fun for writers to work with. I'm aware that this particular novel began as a short story extended on either end; the introduction on the companion web site happens to disparage the central segment a bit, but to me this just contrasts a comment I saw years ago where the original story was praised as something that didn't need extending, much less how it was extended.
Where More Than Human is kaleidoscopic, Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is lyrical, set eighty years after an atomic war the Mennonites were best suited to survive and reshape America in their own fashion, helped by a constitutional amendment that seems to exist to hold off reconstruction to the point of another war, but with things perhaps not quite as fixed and settled as they seem. A few years after Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz connected Roman Catholicism to after the apocalypse, The Long Tomorrow has its future controlled by a number of Protestant sects, shaping its own take on the catastrophe that lurks in quite a few science fictional futures, driven by a vast variety of fears (nowadays it seems people are most worried about oil running out). With that, though, I could sort of see the point made in this novel's own introduction that its diversity only runs so far.
Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man was the one novel in the volume I hadn't read before. I did, though, know it had been made into a contemporary movie, which perhaps makes me think it was more "mainstream" than the other three. Beyond that, I'd also read Steven King's look at the horror genre Danse Macabre some years ago, which declared that the specific mechanics of Matheson's unfortunate protagonist, who shrinks one inch every week so that one day he'll be one-seventh of an inch tall and the next be "zero," was outside the bounds of science fiction. It was, though, the fault of being exposed not just to a cloud of "radiation" but also to a cloud of pesticides, so perhaps Matheson was both tracking certain contemporary anxieties and a bit ahead of others. This own novel's take on "deeper content" seems linked very much to shrinking packing psychosexual problems as women get larger and larger, but there's also the more primal struggles of the final week of existence threaded in throughout (even if the protagonist has to battle a black widow spider specifically, and not just to protect himself physically...)
It's sort of tempting to look at Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and connect it to a flavour of the present moment, "Mad Men," the past projected into the future; if the comparison with a visual work that "everyone knows" can be stretched a bit further, though, an attempt might be made to describe the novel as "Mad Men meets Soylent Green." Satire is the keyword as advertising agencies control an overpopulated world, selling ersatz products with "habit-forming alkaloids" in them to the consumers, and the people of the World Conservation Authority, or "Consies," are the sole resistance. The small details are easy to pick out as dated (a robot probe to Venus is bogged down by an "automatic pilot" that weighs "four and one half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope," so a rocket is launched with "a sixty-pound midget" on board), but there are certainly things that resonate today.
If the satire of The Space Merchants lifts it above "that pulp stuff," the three novels that follow it in the volume do seem to be taking different "literary" perspectives. Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human involves a group of seemingly damaged youths who all turn out to have psychic powers knitting themselves into a composite organism, and in saying that I'm tempted to see assorted "superhero" stories of the decades that followed. My impression is that "psychic powers" aren't to be found in "serious" written science fiction these days, and I would certainly say honest skepticism has a role in that; at the same time, I do wonder if the apparent "mainstream" making a big deal of them make them less fun for writers to work with. I'm aware that this particular novel began as a short story extended on either end; the introduction on the companion web site happens to disparage the central segment a bit, but to me this just contrasts a comment I saw years ago where the original story was praised as something that didn't need extending, much less how it was extended.
Where More Than Human is kaleidoscopic, Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is lyrical, set eighty years after an atomic war the Mennonites were best suited to survive and reshape America in their own fashion, helped by a constitutional amendment that seems to exist to hold off reconstruction to the point of another war, but with things perhaps not quite as fixed and settled as they seem. A few years after Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz connected Roman Catholicism to after the apocalypse, The Long Tomorrow has its future controlled by a number of Protestant sects, shaping its own take on the catastrophe that lurks in quite a few science fictional futures, driven by a vast variety of fears (nowadays it seems people are most worried about oil running out). With that, though, I could sort of see the point made in this novel's own introduction that its diversity only runs so far.
Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man was the one novel in the volume I hadn't read before. I did, though, know it had been made into a contemporary movie, which perhaps makes me think it was more "mainstream" than the other three. Beyond that, I'd also read Steven King's look at the horror genre Danse Macabre some years ago, which declared that the specific mechanics of Matheson's unfortunate protagonist, who shrinks one inch every week so that one day he'll be one-seventh of an inch tall and the next be "zero," was outside the bounds of science fiction. It was, though, the fault of being exposed not just to a cloud of "radiation" but also to a cloud of pesticides, so perhaps Matheson was both tracking certain contemporary anxieties and a bit ahead of others. This own novel's take on "deeper content" seems linked very much to shrinking packing psychosexual problems as women get larger and larger, but there's also the more primal struggles of the final week of existence threaded in throughout (even if the protagonist has to battle a black widow spider specifically, and not just to protect himself physically...)