From the Bookshelf: Before the Golden Age
Oct. 29th, 2024 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerOn the first Saturday in October, I decided to make a second visit to my city library’s used book sale. I’d put together a bag of books during my initial visit after work on the sale’s opening Thursday, but I was curious as to whether the tables had been restocked. As it was a pleasant Saturday, getting there by bicycle seemed that much more a justification.
Taking a familiar back-roads route, I arrived at the library and headed down to the large room the sale is set up in. Regardless of how often I succumb to lamenting I’m not plugged into “written science fiction” the way I once was, I still checked out that genre’s table. Some of the distinctively covered “light novels” I’d cleared out of my cluttered place and donated to the sale were still in evidence. A title on a cover that blended in more managed to catch my eye all the same. It hadn’t been that long since I’d stumbled (in part through a Wikipedia page) onto an awareness of an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov collecting pulp science fiction stories that had built his interest in it in his own formative years; it seemed a stroke of luck to have happened on a copy of Before the Golden Age.
No other title managed to catch my eye that Saturday, but the book by itself seemed to have just about made the return trip worth it. I retraced my route (it’s more “uphill going back”), and was just about at my own place again when I crossed the exit from a shopping plaza parking lot. A car rolled through the stop line and bumped me, and I was thrown to the pavement. When getting back up hurt too much to walk, someone called an ambulance, and I was taken to the city hospital I’d passed behind on the way to and from the library. It turned out I had a broken hip.
I can now report my leg bone was screwed back together in the operating room, I had the great good fortune to have family make the long trip to take care of me on discharge, and I’m getting around better now than I did then even if it’ll still be some time to total recovery. My bicycle was also recovered from the collision with the book I’d bought in its saddlebag. The thought that this was now the book I’d broken my hip for might have helped bend my thoughts towards reading it, but left me that much more uncertain in advance about my reactions.
There’s been criticism for years about the less than literary turn of science fiction in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, to say nothing of aghast takes on ideologies implicit or open in them (and now, of course, that’s carried into “the golden age” itself). What I have to admit, though, is that for all of my general awareness of awkward writing and genuine wincing seemingly any time an author did happen to deal with any human not of European descent (Asimov’s own afterwords to the stories included much the same wincing), I did read through this anthology at a steadier pace than I’ve managed of late with a few other science fiction anthologies. One possibility I can dare to articulate, however arrogant it might be, is that in this case it’s easier to stand in judgement than to feel judged. There’s also the thought, though, that, perhaps, the stories could be summed up as having few conscious pretensions.
There’s a certain mix of out-and-out adventure (for all that characters just happening to carry guns and plenty of ammunition with them can be a wearying recurring theme even when “hostile alien species” might only be argued to pack “implicit” problems) and efforts to invoke then-new ideas in science (which did have me wondering, at least, how much “dark energy” might be showing up these these days). So far as that went, though, there was a certain amount of “what if every atom holds a universe? What if our universe is just an atom? Wild, huh?” There might even have been a little bit of improvement to the writing over the course of the volume, although the very last story (which included a somewhat garbled take on “antimatter”) was a regression of sorts. It did so happen that not only had some of the stories been mentioned in Alexei and Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill as evolutionary steps in science fiction, but I’d actually read two of them anthologized before, Henry Hasse’s “He Who Shrank” and Edmond Hamilton’s “Devolution” (the third story by him in this collection, all of which invoked evolution but packed disdain towards humanity). Happening on Murray Leinster’s “Sideways in Time” managed to remind me that title’s been invoked in more recent takes on “alternative history.” Some stories by Jack Williamson had me thinking of how he’d lived for ninety-eight years and published on this side of the millennium.
It did so happen that the particular edition I found had a lot of proofreading errors in it, which did have me wondering in an idle way about the original magazine printings even as I was aware the edition’s cover was rather less peculiar-yet-amusing than the one thumbnailed on the Wikipedia page. For all that I couldn’t escape recurring thoughts that more time now separates today and Asimov’s production of the anthology than separated him first reading the stories and anthologizing them, and I’m still stuck with the feeling of not being plugged in to recent and actually respectable science fiction, the new historical perspective was interesting in itself.
Taking a familiar back-roads route, I arrived at the library and headed down to the large room the sale is set up in. Regardless of how often I succumb to lamenting I’m not plugged into “written science fiction” the way I once was, I still checked out that genre’s table. Some of the distinctively covered “light novels” I’d cleared out of my cluttered place and donated to the sale were still in evidence. A title on a cover that blended in more managed to catch my eye all the same. It hadn’t been that long since I’d stumbled (in part through a Wikipedia page) onto an awareness of an anthology edited by Isaac Asimov collecting pulp science fiction stories that had built his interest in it in his own formative years; it seemed a stroke of luck to have happened on a copy of Before the Golden Age.
No other title managed to catch my eye that Saturday, but the book by itself seemed to have just about made the return trip worth it. I retraced my route (it’s more “uphill going back”), and was just about at my own place again when I crossed the exit from a shopping plaza parking lot. A car rolled through the stop line and bumped me, and I was thrown to the pavement. When getting back up hurt too much to walk, someone called an ambulance, and I was taken to the city hospital I’d passed behind on the way to and from the library. It turned out I had a broken hip.
I can now report my leg bone was screwed back together in the operating room, I had the great good fortune to have family make the long trip to take care of me on discharge, and I’m getting around better now than I did then even if it’ll still be some time to total recovery. My bicycle was also recovered from the collision with the book I’d bought in its saddlebag. The thought that this was now the book I’d broken my hip for might have helped bend my thoughts towards reading it, but left me that much more uncertain in advance about my reactions.
There’s been criticism for years about the less than literary turn of science fiction in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, to say nothing of aghast takes on ideologies implicit or open in them (and now, of course, that’s carried into “the golden age” itself). What I have to admit, though, is that for all of my general awareness of awkward writing and genuine wincing seemingly any time an author did happen to deal with any human not of European descent (Asimov’s own afterwords to the stories included much the same wincing), I did read through this anthology at a steadier pace than I’ve managed of late with a few other science fiction anthologies. One possibility I can dare to articulate, however arrogant it might be, is that in this case it’s easier to stand in judgement than to feel judged. There’s also the thought, though, that, perhaps, the stories could be summed up as having few conscious pretensions.
There’s a certain mix of out-and-out adventure (for all that characters just happening to carry guns and plenty of ammunition with them can be a wearying recurring theme even when “hostile alien species” might only be argued to pack “implicit” problems) and efforts to invoke then-new ideas in science (which did have me wondering, at least, how much “dark energy” might be showing up these these days). So far as that went, though, there was a certain amount of “what if every atom holds a universe? What if our universe is just an atom? Wild, huh?” There might even have been a little bit of improvement to the writing over the course of the volume, although the very last story (which included a somewhat garbled take on “antimatter”) was a regression of sorts. It did so happen that not only had some of the stories been mentioned in Alexei and Cory Panshin’s The World Beyond the Hill as evolutionary steps in science fiction, but I’d actually read two of them anthologized before, Henry Hasse’s “He Who Shrank” and Edmond Hamilton’s “Devolution” (the third story by him in this collection, all of which invoked evolution but packed disdain towards humanity). Happening on Murray Leinster’s “Sideways in Time” managed to remind me that title’s been invoked in more recent takes on “alternative history.” Some stories by Jack Williamson had me thinking of how he’d lived for ninety-eight years and published on this side of the millennium.
It did so happen that the particular edition I found had a lot of proofreading errors in it, which did have me wondering in an idle way about the original magazine printings even as I was aware the edition’s cover was rather less peculiar-yet-amusing than the one thumbnailed on the Wikipedia page. For all that I couldn’t escape recurring thoughts that more time now separates today and Asimov’s production of the anthology than separated him first reading the stories and anthologizing them, and I’m still stuck with the feeling of not being plugged in to recent and actually respectable science fiction, the new historical perspective was interesting in itself.