My Personal Golden Age: Part III - The Men With the Golden Slide Rules

Someone once said that Science Fiction was the poetry of the Engineer(1) and these men express that muse. When they dreamt of rocket ships they dreamt of the mass ratios and specific impulses that would take them to the stars.

As a writer Robert Heinlein was the least limited of our group. Whatever you think of his politics, and I suspect most people misunderstand his politics, he was the one that consistently wrote rounded and diverse characters. I use 'rounded' advisedly, they're not always three dimensional but you certainly don't cut your fingers on them when you pick them up. He also pioneered the use of the 'surprise ethnic' to get non-white characters past his editors. This technique relies on the sad fact that even the most conscientiously racist editor tends to be, shall we say, keen to finish once he's three quarters of the way through a novel. He's therefore likely to miss the fact that the protagonist is from the Philippines and fall down in his sacred task of ensuring that delicate white sensibilities are untroubled by the notion that the human race comes in more than one colour.

Fortunately I don't have to resort to these measures and so what I take from Heinlein is the 'breezy exposition' technique.This where you take some technical detail that you need for your plot, adopt a jokey, folksy style, stir in a couple of humorous similes and, metaphorically, put your arm around the reader's shoulders and explain just how the universe works. If you do it right then the reader can get all the way to the end of the book before going - 'Hold on a minute!'

Arthur C. Clarke was another engineer with a taste for free love but a love of really big ideas. I've always felt that Clarke's reiterated belief that we would evolve to let slip our mortal forms and become one with the cosmos was a yearning to escape the class and sexual restrictions of 1940s Britain.

His prose is what critics call 'workmanlike' meaning that it gets you from point A to point B without trying flash you some leg or sell you a bridge. A style ideally suited to the 'fuck-me' concepts of Childhood's End, The City and the Stars and and Rendezvous with Rama.

In my opinion 2001 is not a significant work and without the vast gravitational attraction of Kubrick's film it would be lost amongst the intellectual grandeur of Clarke's other work. Strangely what I always take away from Clarke is an immense sense of sadness and loss in the face of eternity.

Isaac Azimov makes Arthur C. Clarke's prose style appear positively chatty and verbose. He was the master of the puzzle, the howdunnit and the shaggy dog story. Ironically, given that he seemed to regard characterisation as something that happened to other people, he is the most sociological of the men with the slide rules. Azimov often looked at the impact the choices made by a society would have on the individual, the culturally induced agoraphobia of the Terrans in The Caves of Steel or its mirror counterpart in The Naked Sun are good examples.

It took me a while to determine what Azimov's influence on me might be, largely because it was such a huge but nebulous influence that I almost overlooked it. Azimov's big lesson for me was how maintaining internal consistency, even if it is just for a span of a short story, is the key to keeping the extraordinary narrative afloat - even if it is a shaggy dog story based on an excruciating pun(2).

(1) Actually that someone was me, just now, for this blog but you got to admit it sounds like the sort of thing someone might say.
(2) Shah Guido G - the horror, the horror!

My Own Personal Golden Age: Part II - The Old Guys

Since the Peter Grant books hit big people have often asked me about the author's that influenced me. These days I pay attention to authors but back in the Golden Age I thought in terms of individual books or series. These books were all enormously influential and looking back I can put some names to titles. I've divided them up into roughly historic waves but I certainly didn't read them in this order.

On a side note; I've tried as much as possible to show the covers of the editions that I first read the book in.

The Old Guys
These were the guys who were in on the start of the 20th Century who were writing science fiction and fantasy when nobody really knew what science fiction was or how they were going to market it.
 

I've always had a soft spot for the term Scientific Romance which were was often used to describe the works of H.G. Wells. You can make an argument that even today you can still divide science fiction writers into the followers of Wells or his near contemporary Jules Verne. One, internationalist, progressive, more concerned with the implications of technology than the technology itself, the other; nationalistic, conservative, interested in how technology works and the things that it might make possible. Certainly British Science Fiction has always favoured, I put it no stronger than that, the Wellsian side while American writers favoured Verne(1).

Even a partial list of his books is almost a list of the origin stories of the genre; The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau(2), The War of the Worlds and the Food of the Gods - a novel that prefigures our fears that we might be supplanted by a superior race of our own making.  Given that he built most of the engine parts that drive Science Fiction to this very day I'm glad that I read him first when both me and the tropes were fresh and raw. Nowadays he reads like steampunk but back when the world was new so was he.

So too were the interplanetary stylings of Edgar Rice Burroughs who if he didn't invent it certainly perfected the Planetary Romance which has informed everything from Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and James Cameron's Avatar(3).

I remember his work in fragments like scraps of brilliantly coloured wrapping paper found in a draw years after a birthday. I remember having to look up the word 'sward', upon which my memory insists our hero was swooning. I remember the nudity, the dangerously egg laying women and head shaped creatures with their detachable bodies. I remember a tremendous amount of sword play, shouts of despair and agonising last minute reversals. These books did seem archaic when back in the Golden Age - both the language and the breezy racism marking them as being from an earlier age.

After HGW and ERB comes EES. I sometimes wonder whether Iain M.Banks, Ken Macleod and the rest of the Scottish Space Opera renaissance how directly their work is linked to that of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Ironic post-modernist deconstruction, my arse, big technology doing hugely awesome things to illustrate your utopianism - that's what it's all about.

As with Burroughs I remember his books as isolated fragments; the lightning rod at the start of Masters of the Vortex, the parachute infiltration of Atlantis and the idea that two entire Galaxies were colliding in both a physical and a political sense.

As to the influence these authors had on my writing? I'd have to say that their influence is felt, ironically, through their influence on the writers who came after them. In this I suspect I'm typical of your late twentieth century SF writer.

So I think we'd better move onto the next wave of the Golden Age - The Men With The Golden Slide Rules.

(1) Obviously there are many, many exceptions to this. If you're wondering why Verne isn't in this list it's because I manage to miss reading his books until after the Golden Age was over.
(2) I love the way you can draw a direct line between this book at Jurassic Park.
(3) Which explains all the mighty whitey stuff.

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.