And it's not like I didn't tell them.

We're millions of miles from Earth inside a giant white face. What's impossible?

Gary Sinise, Mission to Mars

Showing science fiction movies on the Space channel, that's what. Yes, they did it again - another Sunday night of non-genre films! This time it was FX and FX II, which at best are action films and at worst are the inverse of fantasy in that they're about the false physical creation of an illusion. And the other, non-science fiction channels? Mission to Mars, An American Werewolf in London and Armageddon. Now I grant you that neither Mission to Mars nor Armageddon are GREAT science fiction films, although I seem to recall that American Werewolf was well received when it premiered, but, as with the joke about the dancing bear, it's not a question of quality. Sigh...they're just not getting it.

- Sid

There's one in every crowd.

As the loyal reader (there's just one, as far as I know) may or may not recall, my first post made some critical comments regarding Chapters' policy of splitting science fiction and fantasy into separate sections. 

I was chatting with Keith, the excruciatingly knowledgeable counter person at Pulp Fiction West, my local used book store here in Vancouver, and I mentioned my conversation at the Chapters checkout desk regarding the spaceships/dragons rule of thumb for dividing SF from fantasy. 

Instantly he darted off into the stacks and pulled out a slightly battered copy of The Elfin Ship, by James P. Blaylock. Well, in my defense, I did say that categorizing the ones with spaceships on the covers as science fiction was "not a hard distinction, but a useful filter for the uninitiated".

- Sid

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.