The Triumph of the Big Three.

Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
-Arthur Koestler

I was born in 1961, and my mother's science fiction library provided my initiation into the genre. Her collection was heavily based in the early days of science fiction - the Golden Age if you're so inclined, the 1930's through the 50's, with bits and pieces from even earlier. As a fan of the field, I think of the authors of this period as the people who laid the foundations (no pun intended) of the genre as it exists today. Sadly, fame has proven fleeting, and few of the stars from the early days of science fiction have kept their place in the heavens.

As an example, I recently re-read Doomstar, by Edmond Hamilton, who is almost the poster boy of the Golden Age. With his first publication in Weird Tales in 1926, Hamilton's career spans half a century until his death in 1977, a career which combines classics of science fiction with authorship of the early Superman and Batman comics in the 1940's. Known as "World Saver" Hamilton because of his penchant for space-opera stories with a last-minute solution to menaces on a planetary scale, in his later work he displays a grasp of compassion and emotion that holds its own against anyone else in the field, then or now.

Thinking of running down to the local book store to pick up some Hamilton? Sorry, don't waste bus fare. A recent impromptu survey at Chapters revealed that almost no one from the Golden Age era has survived the test of time to remain accessible to the general public. Hamilton? Not on the shelf. His wife, Leigh Brackett, whose Martian settings have never failed to stir me - gone. E. E. "Doc" Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, R. A. Lafferty, Clifford D. Simak, Lester Del Rey, Lewis Padgett, C. L. Moore, Damon Knight, John W. Campbell - and I'm pretty sure that James Blish didn't make the cut, either. (My god, I have to go back - was Edgar Rice Burroughs gone?!)

Not surprisingly, the Big Three of the Golden Age are still represented: Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein. I was surprised to see that Andre Norton still has a meager foothold on the shelves, albeit in the form of collaborations rather than reprints of any of her early material. Robert Silverberg is still there, and to my complete astonishment there was a slim volume of Lord Dunsany holding a spot in the fantasy section.

To be honest I can't say that I'm terribly shocked by the dearth of early SF on the shelves of a non-genre bookstore - after all, HMV probably doesn't have that many of the contemporaries of the early Beatles on display, either - but it did sadden me a little. I realize that Doc Smith or John W. Campbell's approach to prose might not be to everyone's taste, but the same could easily be said about Henry Fielding, Thomas Hardy, or Jane Austen: classics are classics regardless of whether their milieu is English hedgerows or the asteroid belt.

- Sid

Photo credit: 1954 Worldcon, photo by Margaret Ford Kiefer.

Not that I have anything against Nicole Kidman.

I haven't purchased TV Guide for decades, so when I tuned into Space ("The Imagination Station") tonight it was purely on spec. Now, for a relatively small Canadian channel, Space generally does an acceptable job of keeping on top of things: both Battlestar Galacticas, SG1 and Atlantis, the inevitable Star Trek reruns and so forth, and generally they display a healthy respect for the science fiction and fantasy fan base. However, for no good reason that I can figure out, on a far too frequent basis they show movies that have NO science fiction or fantasy elements that I'm aware of. Tonight, it was Dead Calm, and I knocked off the following gently critical e-mail.

Date: Sun, 08 Jul 2007 21:12:43 -0700
To: space@spacecast.com
Subject: "Dead Calm"?

I realize that the mandate from the Space FAQ is a broad one (“Science Fiction, Science Fact, Speculation and Fantasy”, but I have to say that I don’t think that Dead Calm, currently showing on Space, really fits any of those categories.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot of other channels that are showing things that fit in perfectly with your mandate – CBC is showing Sliding Doors, a parallel universe story, YTV has Lost in Space, Innerspace showed up while I was channel hopping, and Spike is showing Kung Fu Hustle, which is arguably a fantasy film. One of the Seattle affiliates – I’m in Vancouver – is showing The Fisher King, which is only fantasy at the widest definition – but it’s certainly closer to the mandate than Dead Calm!!! I’ve also seen Daylight (with Sylvester Stallone) and Backdraft show up on the playlist, and I think it would require a spirited defense to fit either one of those into your mandate.

You know what I haven’t seen for years? The Quiet Earth. Marvellous odd little movie. Lessee...The Rocketeer - fine, it’s a Walt Disney movie, I’m not sure about distribution on those, but a fun little sort-of-superhero film. Time Bandits, The Abyss, Outland, Swamp Thing, The Terminal Man, Andromeda Strain, the original War of the Worlds movie, Day of the Triffids, either the movie or either of the BBC adaptations – hey, speaking of John Wyndham books, there was a 1960 movie adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos called Village of the Damned that I’ve NEVER seen. (I’ve never seen the 1995 version either, not sure I’m desperate to, actually.) Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, currently remade with Will Smith, Silent Running - there’s a French film called Le Dernier Combat, Luc Besson’s first film, no need for subtitles because there’s only one word of dialogue (“Bonjour”, if I remember correctly) in the whole movie. Runaway, with Tom Selleck...okay, maybe I don’t need to see that one again.

Fantasy films are harder to come by, but I haven’t seen Willow anywhere for a while, Jason and the Argonauts is probably one of the best Ray Harryhausen films, The Beastmaster, Legend, The Sword and the Sorcerer, which couldn’t be funnier if they’d tried – ha, Michael, with John Travolta.

I realize that there are financial issues as well as issues of availability, and I don’t claim that the movies I’ve listed were all Academy Award nominees, but I think that it demonstrates that there’s a lot of lesser-known SF and fantasy movies that would be a better fit for Space than Dead Calm.

Sincerely yours,
Sid

Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose?

A student at MIT is hosting a Time Traveler Party this week with the hope that people from the future will show up...too bad people from the future already know the party sucked!

- Tina Fey, Saturday Night Live

More on time travel - in the past couple of years there have been a couple of unsuccessful time travel experiments, one in Australia and one at MIT in the States, both of which were done in the simplest and cheapest way possible: advertise that you would like time travellers to show up at a specific place at a specific time. (As experiments go, this is pretty cost effective, since all you need is a little advertising and an empty piece of ground.)

Sadly, in neither case did the experiment result in a flash of light and the appearance of a modified Delorean, a blue police box, or a Victorian steampunk time chair. However, organizers were oddly unconcerned by this, since it was their contention that time travellers could easily be attending incognito. Sigh...guys, if the purpose of the experiment was to prove that time travel existed, what kind of cruel and unusual punishment would it be for a time traveller to show up and hide in the crowd? And even then, it would be surprising to have a small group of people attend. My god, if time travel were possible and even the smallest fraction of a nearly infinite future population of time travellers hears about one of the parties...actually, come to think of it they're lucky that some comedian didn't make an appearance disguised as a giant mutant ant or something similar.

However, all of this silliness addresses the one of the basic questions of time travel: if it were going to become possible, why aren't we knee-deep in visitors from the future? Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine ran a story in 1979 entitled The Merchant of Stratford by Frank Ramirez, wherein the first time traveller goes back to visit Shakespeare, only to discover that time travellers have been visiting Shakespeare for his entire life:

"I've been getting visitors from the future as far back as I can remember. My mother, being a good Christian woman, had the hardest time giving me suck, because the documentary team from the thirty-third century wanted to film it all. I barely survived childhood."

The punchline is that the first time traveller begins to receive a similar treatment from other time travellers because he's the FIRST time traveller, and as such an historical figure.

Presumably, if time travel were possible, then history would be full of visits from time travellers. (In Robert Silverberg's The Time Hoppers, a future police department is charged with ensuring that time travellers leave on schedule in order to conform with historical records.) Does this take us to the conclusion that time travel is not going to happen? Ah, this takes us to the Doctor Who quote that starts the last entry - only from the linear viewpoint is that the case. If time is in fact "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff", then it's equally possible that once time travel is invented, then historical documents will obligingly change themselves in order to conform to the new state of affairs, and that will be the way that things have always been...and this post will never have existed.

- Sid