George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories from 1942–1945 are wonderful—if you like the idea of vacuum tube technology taken to extreme lengths.
Lots of fun in those stories for engineers and hackers: spaceships that can accelerate at six gees but the passengers can't, capacitors charged up in the gigajoule range, walk-in electron guns (why bother with vacuum pumps when you're in space and can just build devices in the "open air"?), stock market manipulation by means of speed-of-light delay, and SLAs.
I’ll piggy back on this and point out H Beam Piper wrote some really great action adventure sci, that although dated is a hell of a lot of fun.
I’d also note how remarkable the cover art on those old publications is. I’m constantly amazed, even the covers in the present article are extraordinary.
Not forgotten, but not well known either, Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction series, the Vorkosigan Saga is one of the best reads I ever found.
The first couple of books, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, are a superb mixture of futuristic technology, society, and humanity. The protagonist, Cordelia deals with a number of situations that would bring the best of us to our knees, with strength and compassion.
Unlike most "aseptic" or cold SciFi out there, including Star Trek, these works put the human element up front. I cannot recommend them highly enough. The rest of the saga follows different characters and is worthy in itself (I'm especially fond of Falling Free and a couple of the later books) but the first two books shine in my opinion.
She won several Nebula and Hugo awards, but she remains not well known. Several sci-fi friends of mine had never heard of her.
This is a modern thing too: current SF also has long-time authors that are completely neglected, who are on a par with the great authors of the past. Case in point: Linda Nagata (https://mythicisland.com), who started in the 80s, but has yet to win a Hugo Award. Her most recent (and arguably finest) novel, 'The Last Good Man', wasn't even nominated.
While she's probably best known for her rolicking military SF 'Red' series, her other novels are astonishingly mature and prescient.
A few of the authors mentioned in some comments here, or in comments on the article, are referenced in Blake Hodgetts song "The Reader" [1]. It's an interesting challenge if you consider yourself a well-read science fiction reader to see how many you can catch.
If you give up annotated lyrics are available [2], but it is more fun to see how many you can figure out without looking.
F/SF, as a publishing field, seem hell-bent on 'forgetting their greats'. Until the excellent Fantasy Masterworks and Science Fiction Masterworks series appeared, it was more or less routine that books considered 'classics' of these genres would be out of print more often than not.
Meanwhile, anyone who can manage the sleight-of-hand will ensure that their F/SF books are filed under 'literature', regardless of how shamelessly they pillage the F/SF world for ideas (looking at you, Atwood).
Have you heard of Sully Prudhomme, Theodore Mommsen, Rudolf Eucken, or Eyvind Johnson? All of them won Nobel Prizes for literature and -- if you're lucky -- you'll find one or two of their books in print.
Years of Grace by Margaret Barnes? Guard of Honor by James Cozzens? Both are Pulitzer Prize winners that are out of print.
The Private Life of Helen of Troy by John Erskine? Sold over 500,000 copies, critically praised, even had a movie made out of it that got some Academy Award nominations. Also out of print.
For noir you've got imprints like Hard Case Crime that have rescued dozens of once well known & regarded books from decades of obscurity.
I dunno, I think that F/SF is probably about the same as anything else when it comes to "forgetting their greats".
I don't understand the hate against Margaret Atwood.
Who cares what shelf her books are on in bookstores. If she makes more money under "Literature", then good for her. She's not "pillaging" anything; she's adding to the established body of published SF/F with her excellent works, regardless of what shelf they're on at the bookstore. You're free to shelve them properly at home.
It's not the fact that she is shelved in fiction. It's the fact that she openly derides SF as “talking squids in outer space” while freely pillaging the SF treasury of ideas for her (imo increasingly schlocky and lurid) writing.
I can’t see a lot of harm in this. Writers talk shit across genre boundaries (in this case, maybe in an attempt to define one!) all the time. The “arguments” they present are almost always terrible.
I can't see that much "harm" in it either. I'm not asking for Atwood to be arrested. I'm just explaining one of the reasons I don't like her (that, and her increasingly schlocky writing, jmo of course).
"The Ballad of Lost C'Mell" had an enormous effect on me as a teenager. I still have the October 1962 copy of Galaxy Magazine with C'Mell on the cover.
Likewise I loved the tales of Old Norstrillia.
And of course Cordwainer Smith was actually Paul Linebarger.
Agreed, Cordwainer Smith made quite the impression on me, not only for the ideas, but for his writing style.
Cordwainer Smith is mentioned in the article: "The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award was founded in 2001 to draw attention to unjustly forgotten SF authors."
Like the article says, I wish they collected the award winners in an anthology.
Unfortunately Gardner Dozois died recently -- he would have been the ideal person to put together such an anthology (given his background of already having produced dozens of SFF anthologies).
An article about Murray Leinster came up on HN a few days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17882571), which, sadly, passed everyone by. Another great author who deserves rediscovery.
Older sci-fi can be great until it starts being laughably anachronistic. I'm re-reading the Foundation series and there are some howlers. From a hologram continually insisting that his viewers can go ahead a smoke cigarettes (as he won't mind), to a breathless description of what is just an automatic train ticket kiosk, to a machine that 'types' by translating voice into neatly hand-written words on a page (where if you misspoke, you need to start from scratch again like a typewriter.)
I think it's hard for many modern readers to digest science fiction that was written before the transistor was invented. Some things just seem ridiculous.
Science fiction futures exist in a two-dimensional space; one axis is the time the story is set in, and the other axis is the time the story is written. You just have to get used to the fact that "2000 as written in 1950" is different from "2000 as written in 1990".
There's an xkcd (sorry, but I promise it's relevant) that graphs something similar to this[0] but using 'number of years from the time the story was written' as the second axis. If you look at it you can see a line indicating 'stories set in 2015' at the top of the graph - it would be interesting to plot a series of these isochronology lines and compare the stories that lie on them, although for SF you probably need more detail at the top right...
Honestly, I find it very refreshing to read SF from different decades — if only to occasionally get away from the dystopias of today's tomorrow.
Sure, space rockets with paper printouts (Heinlein's juvenile bildungsroman Starman Jones) may seem silly today, but I find that it adds to the flavor of yesterday's tomorrows.
And there is still a lot of paper used on the space station in the form of manuals. You need documentation that you absolutely, positively can always read, regardless of whether your computers go down from cosmic rays, electricity goes out, etc.
John Clute calls the "as written in" year the Real Year of a science fiction book. It's quite an interesting concept when you start thinking in terms of it.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees. The main subject of the Foundation Series was an imaginary science that could predict future developments in human society. The technology items you discuss are just filler, secondary details that serve to flesh out the world of the novels. Just like "psychohistory" itself, they're not supposed to be accurate predictions of future tech.
I don't know why we're supposed to find them laughable. Is it because we are so much smarter than Asimov so we can all have a good laugh at his naive imaginings of then-future technology (never mind our ~50 years of hindsight)?
I don't think Asimov was that great on human society and psychology aspects of writing. His characters are not realistic/complex enough for that kind of analysis. They tend toward simple.
He was good at drama, detective story, adventure aspects in cool environment. Those work very well.
Yes, I for one find it hard to relate to his stories about how maths, psychology and technology could be used in targeted ways to affect the broad sweep of history.
Maybe this is just me, but I read science fiction specifically because its one of the few genres (when written well, as opposed to the "sturgeons-law" filler based on "tech/fantasy gimmick of the week") that expands themes and ideas above and beyond the themes, ideas and perspectives available in "everyday" literature.
Even in your example, i'm not sure what it is that is laughable or anachronistic.
Perhaps this is just me coming at it from the anthropology/sociological perspective, but since i find so much about our current society and beliefs (including perspectives, beliefs and behaviours of those in the tech sector and those talking about tech) as so comically insane, reading about these alternative technological visions seems like passing the lowest barrier of "suspension of disbelief" necessary.
And since its science-fiction, that's a barrier I thought most people would have passed by the time they've decided they're going to pick up a science-fiction book...
"I read books about (maybe even believe in) strong-AI, but reading a book where a hologram tells humans they can smoke or drink (given that humans are illogical creatures often needing to be pointed out simple logical inductions and that they CURRENTLY smoke and take drugs and have done so for most of human history) is just so laughably anachronistic!"
But you know, I like things like "I, Pencil" so breathless descriptions of automatic train ticket kiosks might just be my thing.
Indeed. I'll continue to enjoy George Pal's 'Time Machine' film, despite the fact that I haven't seen any store-window mannikins for a couple of decades.
A great story is great despite its setting, not because of it. 'Moby Dick' will continue to be powerful despite the expiry of whale-hunting; 'Sherlock' still spellbinding despite the extinction of persian slippers, pleasant landladies and street-cabs. Quite sure there'll never be an AI character quite as interesting.
This is especially weird in the Perry Rhodan series. Written since the 60s it might now be the longest scifi series ever.
So there they have spaceships of 2.5 km diameter that can fly faster than 100 million times the speed of light shooting bombs of teratons of TNT each and have force fields that can withstand those bombs, but when they want to bring data from one computer to another, they put holes in a punchcard and have someone carry the punchcard
Don't forget the Directrix in the Lensman series, where as the space battle approaches, the crew rush to hand out huge binders of pre-calculated possible maneuvers... done by hand with some help from slide rules.
Although the Lens must have enormous computation power, since it can crack any encryption instantaneously. I have always wondered what happens if the Lensman tries to read an one-time-pad
I think it's Arthur C Clarke who's short stories have a bit of this. They have a man going off in his incredible spaceship to discover the universe ... and keenly recording the data on his tape computer.
I found a set of English translations of those back in the late 80s but only bought the first 10 or so iirc, you’re saying it’s still on going? That’s remarkable!
I wonder what parts of modern sci-fi we will regard as hopelessly outdated in a hundred years, as we might view many elements of the Foundation series?
Perhaps we'll achieve Ghost in the Shell-style brain encapsulation, and so view any sci-fi story that doesn't feature people trivially swapping bodies as needed - despite having FTL and laser guns - as hopelessly outdated and silly.
Perhaps we'll become increasingly invested in our digital lives and robot servants, to the point we view old sci-fi that involved physically sending humans to other worlds just to stand around on them as extremely dangerous and wasteful?
Though on a somewhat different angle, I've quite enjoyed watching many fantasy stories "update" themselves to be more amenable to a modern audience. For example magic powers have slowly morphed from Gandalf style vague mutterings and the occasional flashlight to basically being programs that a wizard can download, swap, upgrade, etc. It makes me wonder if one day when humanity has achieved immortality, if we'll "backport" it to our fantasy stories and suddenly every human kingdom has some magical doodad that makes them live forever?
> For example magic powers have slowly morphed from Gandalf style vague mutterings and the occasional flashlight to basically being programs that a wizard can download, swap, upgrade, etc.
That's a poor example, though, because that's closer to the classical depiction of magic than the "vague mutterings" type. The ancient Greeks and Romans had pretty firm rules on how to conduct prayers and ceremonies, how to handle certain mystical phenomena, etc., for example. In Western pop culture, magic being all about unexplainable forces was an invention of Victorian romanticism.
> magic powers have slowly morphed from Gandalf style vague mutterings and the occasional flashlight to basically being programs that a wizard can download, swap, upgrade, etc.
There's a (not particularly good) Russian fantasy book series where the premise is literally that - it's the usual "regular guy ends up in a magic world" kind of set-up, except that the guy is a software developer, and he discovers that magic is a great deal like OOP, and that his skills translate remarkably well. Of course, it's mostly just a Mary Sue story - the author being a Java developer, so far as I can tell - but it's interesting that someone else came up with this metaphor and developed it to that extent.
There is a current series by Scott Meyer that is similar, where engineers occasionally discover the world they live in is a simulation, and they can manipulate it like magic through programming.
In the series the characters are also simulations. They can modify themselves by tweaking the "file", and spells are just little programs they write against it. There isn't any other reality they have access to.
What gets me are the psychic powers -- Sci-Fi's weird obsession with mumbo-jumbo parapsychology such as ESP which ran I think roughly from 1955 to 1980. In the Foundation series it manifests as the mental powers of the Second Foundationers (their ability to directly seize control of other people's minds, above and beyond their mathematical skill and knowledge of 'psychohistory').
This was due to John W Campbell, editor of Analog Science Fiction (which he renamed from Astounding SF), the premier hard SF magazine of the time (and now too?).
Campbell was one of the most influential figures in science fiction history who cultivated a 'stable' of authors; Asimov was his most famous protégé. Campbell's interest in psi was inflamed further by SF luminaries H Ron Hubbard and A E Van Vogt, who started the Dianetic movement a while before Scientology became a 'thing'. (Since Scientology turned into such a cult, it must be pointed out that Van Vogt had nothing to do with its development).
But I'm counter-intrigued: why are so many people in this discussion (and in the article's comments) so vehemently opposed to psi? It's been comprehensively debunked, but Campbell had a neat (and plausible) explanation for that, which no one ever addresses. And many of the most striking anecdotes of psi phenomena have never been adequately explained. This is reminiscent of a consensus reality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_reality), which SF readers in particular should be less susceptible to...
Being a big fan of Aldous Huxley I was pretty astonished but none the less entertained by his apparent believe in the supernatural which might have been due to him having lost most of his eyesight when he was in his teens.
In case you are interested, there is a lecture where he talks about this stuff over at the psychedelic salon:
Campbell said that psi powers (which are natural, and inherent in everyone), can be nullified by another party's strongly opposed belief in their non-existence.
Thus in any demonstration, there's usually someone in the audience who is more than a 'non-believer': strongly opposed to psi, who has the effect of damping or negating the demonstrator.
The other thing that's rarely mentioned is that most psi phenomena manifest themselves in moments of extreme peril or emotion, which (by their very nature) cannot be replicated in a laboratory situation.
Campbell also pointed out that, throughout human history, psi has been misunderstood, and ultimately maligned by religion, that most contagious of memes. So it's a subconsciously suppressed ability, and its suppression (and repression) is the cause of many human ills...
He believed that psi is an emergent phenomenon (like consciousness and intelligence), and - foreshadowing Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" - that the explanation for psionic phenomena lay in quantum physics and information theory. I've highlighted those last few words, because current information theory does not adequately cover phenomena such as complexity, synergetics and emergence. For a taster of what a new extended information physics should look like, check out Tom Stonier's "Information And The Internal Structure Of The Universe".
If you remove the requirement for "strongly opposed belief", this explanation neatly dodges the standard objection to psi that if something so obviously evolutionarily adaptive is possible, why doesn't everyone have it? In this explanation everybody does have psychic power, it's just that some are aimed purely at shutting down other powers. In a zero sum competition, preventing your opponent from gaining an advantage is the same as gaining an advantage for yourself. Does anybody know of any fiction where humanity is split into a stable equilibrium of psi and anti-psi?
That sounds like something Phillip Dick would write. Closest that I can think of off the top of my head is Ubik, where the protagonist runs an anti-psychic agency that companies hire for security purposes.
That's about as boring arguments as I expected. You're giving a standard way out that religions use, which is to base your claim on an unfalsifiable mechanism: if you believe it unconditionally it'll work, if you don't it won't, etc. I could replace your instances of "psi powers" with "Gnomic magic", "fairy dust", or the most absurd thing you could come up with, and you likewise couldn't prove me wrong. Nevermind that there are literally billions of cameras and microphones around the world those days waiting to capture something like this.
> He believed that psi is an emergent phenomenon (like consciousness and intelligence)
I find usually those people tend to avoid the actually really weird/provoking questions staring right at us -- like how does a bunch of neurons firing electrical signals produce our consciousness and all personal experiences, why is our universe and lives like this in particular, or how to reconcile with death and finiteness -- in favor of comfortable wishful thinking, mysticisms and obscurantism (Penrose lately seems to have fallen into this modus).
In the context of SF, Philip K. Dick's claim "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane" comes to mind (which I deeply disagree with, but understand).
the ESP that you're talking about might have been a response to broadcast (color) television, which has always been about controlling public psychology and behavior. the classic text on propaganda was written in 1928, it would be a bit strange if anxiety about secular religion (i.e. politics) didn't ramp up during the decades that followed.
with arguably the biggest scandal of this year being Cambridge Analytica/Emerdata, seizing control of other people's minds was correct in its precociousness.
more broadly, sci-fi inherits from religion (really religious fantasy), which has always been about control of group behavior and group think, power and identity, the relationship between creator and creation, etc. "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us" was said by mcluhan, but it may as well have been said by victor frankenstein or any other critic of science and industry.
For this reason hard science novels are among my favorite.
The uplift cycle by David Brin is amazing.
The comment about Asimov misses reminds of another brin novel, Earth, that is known for envisioning several events and technology that appeared after its publication.
Need magic but audience is a crew of logical positivists - let's call it psi, apply some handwaving, and slip it in under the radar. Sounds awful but it's exactly the same as every other "advanced technology" in the genre really.
Books with psi by forgotten writers that are interesting (to me): Stapleton's 'Odd John' and May's 'Intervention'.
>From a hologram continually insisting that his viewers can go ahead a smoke cigarettes (as he won't mind)
What exactly is anachronistic about it? Modern society might be full of health freaks, but one hopes that future societies will have gotten over this. Besides, future medical technology might cure cancer and find ways to keep vital organs in great shape whatever you drink/eat/smoke, in which case smoking might see a resurgence.
It's from a time when it was common for people to just light up wherever they wanted. It wasn't too long ago this ended (at least in California), so it jumped out at me. I probably didn't even notice when I first read the series in the 1980s.
Yeah, my response was tongue in cheek, but I think such habits can come and go. It's not so much about learning "hey, it's bad for you", but about a social trend. People know alcohol is bad, but they still drink as much as in the 60s...
That reminds me of a story which I read in Ray Bradbury's collection, _The Illustrated Man_.
The captain of a rocketship (that's the word used) is obsessed with finding a supposed miracle-worker. They land on a planet where the locals tell them of a man who healed a child's broken arm with just a touch. The captain demands evidence and is presented with a painting of the child with a cast around his arm. The captain derides the painting, saying that it could be fake, whereupon his next-in-command points out "Photography is an unknown art on this world."
That's right. They have faster-than-light space travel, but image manipulation is unthinkable.
>They have faster-than-light space travel, but image manipulation is unthinkable.
See "The Road Not Taken" by Harry Turtledove, where the idea is that humans developed advanced technology only because they failed to figure out the trick for easy FTL travel.
That story's a bit "ehh" for me, not least of which in the way that it posits war of any sort without corresponding technological improvement. The opportunity to shoot new and exotic people has never stopped people from inventing new and exotic ways to shoot those new and exotic people.
Wait, who said the locals have "faster-than-light space travel"?
We only know that the visitors on the rocket-ship have it.
It could very well be that the visitors have a rocketship (ie. faster-than-light space travel) and "Photography" (since the next-in-command mentioned it), but the locals don't have either.
I think the parent meant that the visitors think that a photograph can't be manipulated and is thus a perfect record. Today of course editing photos is commonplace.
But they are shown a painting which is pretty obviously just whatever the person creating it wanted it to be, nobody would ever accept it as a perfect record of reality. I don't understand how photography comes into things?
I'm not familiar with the story, but this is what I take from the comment above:
* captain arrives in FTL ship looking for evidence of a thing
* captain isn't satisfied with a painting offered as evidence, because it could be fake
* aide says that photography is unknown to the natives, implying that the production of a photograph would be taken by the captain as having more evidentiary value
=> captain knows about FTL but is unfamiliar with the technology required to produce false but convincing photographic images
Ah, makes more sense. Of course, 'captain knows about FTL' is not necessarily a given, much like 'driver knows about internal combustion engine' for cars - he may just be pressing buttons randomly (cf. the Heechee series by Frederick Pohl[0]) for instance.
Can you travel faster than a photon without knowing how to capture a photon? I love the idea. Maybe CCDs just have a different cultural significance for them.
Honestly the anachronistic technology is cute in a sort of steampunk/cyberpunk way, I don't think it detracts from the story. It's also not hard to imagine it's all taking place in a parallel universe that diverged down a different path of technological development.
A couple of years ago I wrote a lengthy deconstruction of a Heinlein story[1], and had to note a number of unfortunate anachronisms that result from the basic fact that this future world had no computers, none. Their absence shows up in so many subtle ways! So often you say, "wait, why don't they just look it up? ...check an app? ...ask Siri?" When Heinlein wrote that particular story there was no such thing as a graphics terminal, or a computer smaller than a refrigerator, and he didn't make the imaginative leap.
It's funny that you say this, because one of my favourite Heinlein stories entirely revolves around the tricks you can pull with a super computer. In _Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, you see examples of deep fakes, real time statistical analysis, subversion of encryption/secure communications by getting the co-operation of central telecoms, all of which are things that are just now becoming possible with computers. To your point about graphics terminals and the like, you're correct that Heinlein didn't foresee the use of screens the way we use them, but then again, he also predicts that the best way to talk to an AI is to talk to it ("Ho there Mike" as opposed to "Ok Google"...).
Access to Mike is a very limited resource in that book, though - it's not on the equivalent of the local Internet (indeed, there doesn't seem to be one). The only reason why the protagonists succeed with their plans is because they manage to secure that access without any of the opposition aware of it.
Another example that's strangely funny in retrospect because of how far it is off the mark despite simultaneously predicting actual advances: the Sector General series (started in 1962, last book published 1999) starts out with universal translator earbuds that are remotely driven by a central computer system, but the characters have to go to a wall phone to contact someone.
The series also has some unfortunate anachronism in treatment of gender (a future galactic society, but of course women can't be doctors, only nurses), though the author did piece-by-piece retcon that out into more egalitarian social standards as he wrote the sequel books.
I don't consider the items you mention as "laughably anachronistic". Many of the things you mention can be social items that come and go with the times.
One example is my visits to Mystic Seaport, specifically the whaling ship Charles W. Morgan. Inside the museum, you could type in your name and receive a printout of the ship's crew manifest with your name included, all the names written in cursive as if you were there 150 years ago. "But computers murder cursive!" ... well maybe, but I was still there enjoying the experience. "But computers have nothing to do with connecting humans with there past!" ... and yet there I was tapping on a touchscreen and receiving a printout of a "150 year old manifest" of the ship I just walked through with my name on it.
Yes that smoking in a spaceship while you hunch over your portable typewriter the size of a suitcase is outdated, but people still have flexible imaginations which accommodate such things. I don't see the problem.
My favourite example of this is Arthur C Clarke seemingly failing to pick up on robots. He was the first to realise that geo-stationary satellites would be great for broadcasting media (I think that's the exact distinction?) but, for example, he has a short story where whole space stations of crews of men are working away, just to relay and broadcast TV to the planet below. Robots, dude. It's all robots.
Tho I disagree that it ruins the story. You have to take any story on it's own terms, and accept it to a certain degree. There is plenty of other stuff in his short stories to enjoy.
I really enjoy that a lot of the time, and also love alternative histories.
So much of what we have is a combination of effort, a personality, a huge dose of luck, and being at the right time. So much is simply fashion. Almost none is inevitable.
A few chance changes and there's no internet, or Babbage completed his Analytical Engine, or the early electric vehicles are the type the world settles on to develop instead of internal combustion. Or a different set of changes and we get Man in the High Castle or Rocket Ship Galileo.
I am not sure I care the details that much. Foundation is like HK 2 China and hence I always imagine that angle. Each reader may have a different angle. But the SF can you a virtual world to conceptualise.
Unlike movie a book let you to do so.
From time to time I read something in bed, I still recall there is a paragraph in H G Well story (a man from mars) which has a television on his watch. Given only then 1 out of 100 has television in my block, it is a shocking future ...
I have similar issues with cyberpunk novels. Telling me how the internet is supposed to work is not a fun time for me.
Though, for foundation they do have other cool tech that is definitely still completely futuristic. (i'm thinking about personal shields, psycohistory and shiny spacecraft like int he starwars prequels)
Although my heavy scifi reading occurred many years ago, during the 60s and 70s, I must admit I've never heard of any of those authors. Granted, I focused on a smallish group of the more well-known authors, its still a bit surprising that I'd never come across at least some of these people.
After reading Last and First Men (1930), many news stories seem familiar.
> as time passed the mental difference between the two classes increased. Superior intelligence became rarer and rarer among the proletariat; the governors were recruited more and more from their own offspring, until finally they became an hereditary caste. The gulf widened. The governors began to lose all mental contact with the governed. They made a mistake which could never have been committed had their psychology kept pace with their other sciences. Ever confronted with the workers' lack of intelligence, they came to treat them more and more as children, and forgot that, though simple, they were grown men and women who needed to feel themselves as free partners in a great human enterprise.
> Formerly this illusion of responsibility had been sedulously encouraged. But as the gulf widened the proletarians were treated rather as infants than as adolescents, rather as well-cared-for domestic animals than as human beings. Their lives became more and more minutely, though benevolently, systematized for them. At the same time less care was taken to educate them up to an understanding and appreciation of the common human enterprise. Under these circumstances the temper of the people changed. Though their material condition was better than had ever been known before, save under the First World State, they became listless, discontented, mischievous, ungrateful to their superiors.
Olaf Stapledon is amazing but he isn't writing adventures or even narrative in the traditional sense. He is very well known among science fiction authors because they use his material heavily [0]. I often wonder if there is some secret argument among some scifi authors never to speak of Stapledon. For instance one interesting line was that C.S. Lewis was inspired heavily by Stapledon to write "That Hideous Strength" which in turn inspired George Orwell's 1984.
If in one thousand years one science fiction author will be remembered from our time there is a decent chance it will be Olaf Stapledon.
In the book: African scientists were experts in breeding humans and apes. The Jews were responsible themselves for being hated. And in the long run both groups didn't make it into the next round, the next mankinds. So you can be sure all the following humans had no black or Jewish blood.
I've read it twice and I didn't remember any of that, however I looked it up and you are correct the book does use antisemitic tropes.
>And in the long run both groups didn't make it into the next round, the next mankinds. So you can be sure all the following humans had no black or Jewish blood.
I'm not sure what you are referring to. Do you mean at the end of World State? I don't see any specific exclusion of African or Jewish people from the next chapter of history but the book covers so much I may be missing something. In the long run no present racial groups make it into the next round.
I'm rereading the first few chapters and I can't find it. After the fall of the world state it it is said that the next civilization comes from the indigenous Peruvian. Pretty much every group but Peruvians is excluded.
"It happened also that in South America the racial conditions were more favourable than elsewhere. After the fall of the First World State the European element in this region had dwindled, and the ancient "Indian" and Peruvian stock had come into dominance. Many thousands of years earlier, this race had achieved a primitive civilization of its own. After its ruin at the hands of the Spaniards, it had seemed a broken and negligible thing; yet it had ever kept itself curiously aloof in spirit from its conquerors. Though the two stocks had mingled inextricably, there remained ever in the remoter parts of this continent a way of life which was foreign to the dominant Americanism. Superficially Americanized, it remained fundamentally "Indian" and unintelligible to the rest of the world. Throughout the former civilization this spirit had lain dormant like a seed in winter; but with the return of barbarism it had sprouted, and quietly spread in all directions. From the interaction of this ancient primitive culture and the many other racial elements left over in the continent from the old cosmopolitan civilization, civil life was to begin once more. Thus in a manner the Incas were at last to triumph over their conquerors. Various causes, then, combined in South America, and especially in the new and virgin plains of Patagonia, to bring the First Dark Age to an end." -Last and First Men
"Dancing was especially associated with the Negro race, which occupied a very peculiar position in the world at this time. As a matter of fact the great colour distinctions of mankind were now beginning to fade. Increased aerial communication had caused the black, brown, yellow and white stocks so to mingle that everywhere there was by now a large majority of the racially indistinguishable. …"
Hmm. Strange. But I'm sure there was something in the later chapters about the later mankinds. I've only read it on paper but I see no indications that the Project Gutenberg version is different from the printed book.
Maybe I'm wrong. But it really doesn't need any more racism than in the first few chapters. The paragraph after the one I've quoted is terrible.
I don't think he was intending to denigrate particular racial groups. For instance he isn't arguing that any particular racial or cultural group is superior and he views the weaknesses that bring about the destruction of the "first men" as encompassing of all of humanity. Unfortunately the racial essentialism that is central to the book builds on racist stereotypes in the first few chapters.
>Hmm. Strange. But I'm sure there was something in the later chapters about the later mankinds. I've only read it on paper but I see no indications that the Project Gutenberg version is different from the printed book.
According to an amazon review some vandals did release a version of the book in which the first few chapters are changed so that they more accurately reflect 20th Century history:
>"I bought this book because I was interested in Stapledon's depiction of the possible future of humanity. I wasn't aware when I bought the 'Millennium Edition' that the entire section on the First Men- Stapledon's prediction of human society's development between 1930 and the eventual collapse into worldwide barbarism- had been completely rewritten to make it 'easier' for modern readers to digest without excessive disbelief. Yes, Stapledon's predictions of a League of Nations world power and the various wars in Europe and the unification of science and religion in the United States have no resemblance to the reality we've lived through so far, but so what." - https://www.amazon.com/First-Dover-Books-Literature-Drama/dp...
Maybe they also increased the racism of the first few chapters?
Stapledon's Sirius, the awakening of a pet dog retrofitted with emerging sentience completely freaked me out when I was tween - brilliant stuff - relevant to the AI debate, but a new angle: enhanced animal minds !
You may have stuck to novels then, Fredric Brown was a big name in SF short stories. Most anthologies of the time have at least one of his stories.
He was one of my favorites as a kid, for his humor and his mastery of the very short format (which is in an art in itself).
Not a single mention of Jack Vance in the article ... disappointing: Jack Vance was one of the most profilic yet under-rated sci-fi author of the so-called "golden age"
This sort of question is hard, because ... is he under-rated (or "forgotten", as the original article had it)? I would have said he was both well-respected and still remembered.
Personally, I don't think I've read more than a novel's worth from any of the authors in the article -- hadn't even heard of half of them -- whereas I've read maybe ten of Vance's? He's maybe more remembered for his fantasy than SF, but I'd say he's frequently mentioned and reprinted.
Vance is found increasingly rarely on shelves since his death, I've noticed. It's easy to find the spot now; look for the enormous Vandermeer section :-) but in my experience there will be a token 1-2 Vance books there if that. Often it begins and ends with the books of his that made the F or SF Masterworks.
Part of the problem is that there's no almost no such thing as a uniformly good Vance book (and I say that with regret, as he is one of my favorites). I love him, but one must navigate past a lot of things that maybe someone who didn't grow up reading JV might be less tolerant about. He is quite frequently lazy about plotting (repeating himself or just chucking the story on the floor), many of his main characters are enjoyable omni-competent ciphers who could easily be mistaken for each other, is a bit prone to using rapes and murders of women as a primary plot driver (Araminta Station!) and there's some weird if lightly-worn race and politics stuff that is best not examined too deeply.
I read "To Live Forever" as a teenager 40 years ago and still find myself thinking about it occasionally. Probably the only SF book I've ever got all the way through! Fantastic book.
Arthur C Clarke's 'Astounding Days' was a nostalgic tour of the 'Golden Age' science fiction world. He mentioned many stories and authors that have been neglected by modern readers. But then, I'm finding that even he's gradually fading from the modern collective memory...
Judith Merril might be familiar to anyone from Toronto. The Toronto Public Library holds the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation & Fantasy
Lots of fun in those stories for engineers and hackers: spaceships that can accelerate at six gees but the passengers can't, capacitors charged up in the gigajoule range, walk-in electron guns (why bother with vacuum pumps when you're in space and can just build devices in the "open air"?), stock market manipulation by means of speed-of-light delay, and SLAs.