I knew I’d picked a doozy when the Aldebaran transport docked thirty minutes late and a batch of slakers went missing from my cargo of Venusian scintle-feeders. I’d been banking on them to shift enough creds through my dinky little bank on Phobos - but no dice.
Okay I could have slipped
a few protoblanks on the blind side but I’d done that before and the Bleak Ones
were catching up with me. Must have been my age. I had to find Jorasta – and
fast. She’d know what to do, or she’d know how to make things a little better
before the bad times came rolling in again.
Maybe Jorasta would
even sympathize a little after bawling me out like a berserk flame weaver over
a few gourds of xlith – eventually...
I just made that guff up of course. To a science fiction
reader of the old school it slips through the fingers and onto the keyboard
like a Venusian silthstopper making hay before the dwindle bugs get too
jittery.
Crikey... I can’t stop... It’s a disease!
Actually I’ve been reading fifties and sixties science
fiction on my Kindle, the stuff churned out before everybody and his
slughound knew about the searing heat of Venus, the lifeless wastelands of Mars
and the world became just that little less imaginative.
The stories are a trip down memory lane for me and some of them
haven’t worn too well, but they stir some nostalgic reminders of how optimistic
and outward looking we once were even when a little obsessed with the
possibility of endless war or nuclear annihilation.
I’m sure we’ve lost something since those days, apart from a
pile of made up words, impossible technologies and a style of writing we’ll
probably never revisit. Not this side of a Slivonian eon at any rate.
5 comments:
Perhaps it was the nuclear threat that contributed to the satisfying clarity of 'golden age' science fiction - a young population with an unprecedented grasp of science and a need for escapism formed a market in which amateur writers with a scientific background - and mindset - could flourish in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation before.
Yes, I read tons of that stuff through my school years. But although the language makes you cringe nowadays and the people are cardboard cutouts and the technology is often dated a few of those stories have very astute ideas of the future of society - what might happen if...
Mac - I'm sure you are right. In spite of the threats, the stories are often curiously optimistic too.
Woodsy - the technological assumptions are interesting - lots of dials to convey information and massive computers for example.
What happened was that the space adventurers with their computers and apparatus went into financial services. This is why so much in that field now is incredible fiction.
Demetrius - a convincing theory. A Silurian spattergun is at least credible.
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