My Own Personal Golden Age: Part 1

Highgate Library

The Golden Age!
They say the golden age of Science Fiction is 12 which was when I read a book a day and cleaned out my school and public libraries' SF sections in under six months. But my personal Golden Age started a year or two earlier with one particular book plucked almost at random from the children's shelves of the this library here...

Which was located just behind my primary school (Brookfield) so as to be convenient for book procurement after school. Now this was back in the early seventies long before Young Adult fiction had been invented - back then you had an undifferentiated 'children's section' and then everything else. I could have put my hand on Anne of Green Gables but thank the power that puts the universe in motion that it was this book....

Star Rangers by Andre Norton and from that point on nothing else would satisfy that itch than science fiction. From then on I was an omnivorous science fiction and fantasy reading machine - in a fever of completely indiscriminate consumption that didn't abate until my mid-teens. It's only now with the benefit of hindsight and the internet(1) that I can assess the impact this had on my own career.

Lets start with the women!

If you don't already know this: Andre Norton was the pen name of Alice Mary Norton whose prodigious output dominated, along with Robert Heinlein, the children's section(2) of my local library. Thus my golden age started with a woman and was massively influenced by the wave of female pioneers that crashed through science fiction in the late sixties/early seventies. In particular Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Kate Wilhelm and Octavia Butler(3).

I'm hesitant to talk about a female perspective but I do think their work had a greater focus on the social and interpersonal impact of technological change. Long before I had any conception of the plight of refugees in the real world I was haunted by the image of the Dipple that opens Andre Norton's Catseye. Kate Wilhelm did a number of surprisingly gentle post or near-post apocalyptic novels, including Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang and Juniper Summer in which the focus on the network of relationships people build around themselves are more significant than the disaster that enfolds them. A fascination with the way different societies and people would be shaped by their environmental constraints and opportunities informed the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Anne McCaffrey.

None of this impacted on the conscious brain of the teenaged omnivore that was tearing his way through seven books a week except as a vague sense that some books had more 'something' than others. It wasn't until much later that I recognised it for that elusive literary quality 'depth'. When I finally became a writer myself it was the work of these women that became the instinctive benchmark by which I judged my own work.

Later in part 2: more women and some men and some small furry creatures from Alpha Centurai.

(1) Without which I wouldn't be able to name half the authors I read.
(2) at least those bits of the section that were worth reading.
(3) There were plenty more but these were the women whose books I was hoovering up in that period.