In the early 1950s, some of us liked comic strips with pictures of spaceships, men in spacesuits, aliens and robots. I looked at the pictures before I was able to read or understand the words in the speech balloons. I found that I liked men on horseback (cowboys) but preferred men in spacesuits (spacemen, not yet "astronauts.") Next we noticed paperback novels with similar pictures on their covers. Cover illustrations featuring men and women suggested adult relationships absent from the juvenile comics - although, of course, not necessarily absent from the graphic medium as such. We have since discovered graphic novels. Back in the 1950s, we, or at least I, began to wonder about the contents of the paperback novels. Could juvenile (as I saw them) themes and adult themes be combined? In James Blish's "Bridge," which I read in the early 1960s, a woman member of the Bridge gang on Jupiter V comes to tell the viewpoint character, Helmuth, that she intends to bear a baby on Jupiter V. Adult themes, indeed.
In 1956, Poul Anderson's first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," was published although I knew nothing about it at the time. That story, like Blish's Okie series, lays out an economic basis for an interstellar civilization. Economics was even more beyond my grasp than sex. Adult sf was out there, waiting to be discovered.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
While I have read some Westerns, cowboy stories interested me even less than they did you. I could not articulate such thoughts at age ten or so, but cowboy stories strike me as far too nostalgic, retro, even backwards looking, to appeal to me.
I think Anderson's TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS can be considered science fictional replies to cowboy stories. They did, and do appeal to me because they are forward looking, future oriented, about people seeking to make new lives in new frontiers. And so on for many others of his stories.
I think I was not yet age 14 when I first encountered Anderson in the Chilton Books edition of AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE. That was enough to get me hooked!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
There used to be a lot of Western TV series, far more than sf, obviously.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I saw a lot more Western movies on TV than I ever read! And most TV/movie SF is dreck, IMO. Maybe the new DUNE movie will be an exception.
Ad astra! Sean
Btw,if you want to try a really good Western novel, I recommend LONESOME DOVE by Larry McMurtry.
There are reasons for the elegiac tone of most Westerns; everyone on the frontier knew that it was temporary, and that became more so as time went on - by the time of the open-range ranching frontier, there were people (like Theodore Roosevelt) who made strenuous efforts to get out there before it vanished, because they knew how brief it would be.
And ‘westerns’ were actually read by the people they were supposedly about. Kit Carson, the famous frontier scout of the 1840-1870 period, found a book about him, a ‘dime novel’, on the body of a woman he was trying to rescue.
(Asked if anything in it was true, he said: ‘Bits, but only by accident, like.’)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Note, what you said about Larry McMurtry's novel LONESOME DOVE. Something to remember!
I suppose most people in the US knew the frontier could not last forever. But it seems to still have been a shock to many when the US Gov't formally declared in 1890 there was no more frontier. And I recall you discussing how hard TR strove to get a taste of the Old Frontier in the 1880's.
Amusing, what you said about how bemused Kit Carson was by that book he found about himself!
Ad astra! Sean
TR also had a buckskin outfit made by an expensive New York outfitter, and an engraved bowie knife from Tiffany in NYC.
When he realized how this made him look out in the Dakota Badlands, he had the buckskins replaces by a set from a local woman who specialized in making them for local ranch-hands and hunters.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! Because those fancy "frontier" duds made TR look like a comic opera PARODY of a frontiersman.
At least the swanky bowie knife remained totally functional! It would kill you as efficiently as a plain knife.
Ad astra! Sean
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