In general, this is naturally extrapolated to the point where whatever society was like in our teenage years is our view of what society ought to be like. Every change since then is viewed as a deterioration, a degeneration, an abomination.
Then, too, there are the falsities of memory, which cast a delicious haze over the past, eliminating the annoyances and frustrations and magnifying the joys. Add to that the falsities of history which inevitably produce a greater emphasis on heroism, on dogged determination, on civic virtue, while overlooking squalor, corruption, and injustice.
And in the sub-universe of science fiction, isn’t this also true? Doesn’t every reader who has been reading for a decade or two remember a “golden age”? Doesn’t he complain that science fiction stories aren’t as good as they used to be? Doesn’t he dream of the classics of the past?
Of course. We all do that. I do it, too. There is one “Golden Age of Science Fiction” that has actually been institutionalized and frozen in place, and that is the period between 1938 and 1950, with its peak years from 1939 to 1942.
John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding Stories in 1938, changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction, changed its style, and found new writers or encouraged older writers to expand their horizons. He helped develop me, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Eric Frank Russell, Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others; and all produced stories that are among the great all-time classics of the genre. In particular, in 1939 Robert A. Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt both burst on the scene with crackerjack stories.
Let’s, however, take a closer and unimpassioned look at the Golden Age.
To begin with, how was it viewed in its own time? Did all the readers sit around, saying, “Golly, gee, wow, I’m living through a Golden Age!”?
You’d better not believe it. Sure, the young readers who had just come into the field were fascinated, but the older readers who had been reading since the late 1920s were not. Instead, they frequently talked of the “good old days” and longed for their golden age of the Tremaine Astounding, which ran from 1933 to 1938.
I was one of the old fossils, as a matter of fact. Much as I liked the stories of the Campbell era and much as I enjoyed contributing to them myself, it was of the earlier 1930s that I dreamed. It wasn’t Heinlein that was the epitome to me of science fiction (though I recognized his worth)-it was Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space”; it was E. E. Smith’s “Galactic Patrol”; it was Nat Schachner’s “Past, Present, and Future”; it was Charles R. Tanner’s “Tumithak of the Corridors.”
Even at this very day there is an organization called “First Fandom” (to which I belong), and only those can belong to it who were science fiction fans before 1938.
And if there were golden ages before the Golden Age, there were also golden ages to still-younger readers after the Golden Age. Indeed, Terry Carr has just published an excellent anthology of stories from 1939 through 1942 entitled Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.
How many more have there been? I should guess that there has been one for every three-year interval since the first-to one group of readers or another.
Think again? Were the stories of your golden age really golden? Have you reread them lately?
I have reread the stories of my own golden age and found the results spotty indeed. Some of the stories I slavered over as a teenager turned out to be impenetrable and embarrassing when I tackled them again. A few (“Tumithak of the Corridors” for one) held up very well, in my opinion.
It was clear to me, though, that the general average of writing forty years ago was much lower than the general average later. That, in fact, seems to me to have been a general rule. Magazine science fiction over the last half-century has steadily risen above and away from its pulpish origins.
That means me, too. I imagine that many people who drooled over “Nightfall,” The Foundation Trilogy, and I, Robot in their teens find some of the gloss gone when they reread them in their thirties.
(Fortunately for myself, a substantial number do not-and there are always new teenagers entering the field and ready to be dazzled.)
Why has the quality of writing gone up?
For one thing, the competition to science fiction has gone. The pulp magazines are gone. The slick magazines scarcely publish fiction. Whereas, some decades back, science fiction magazines-with their small circulation and even smaller financial rewards-could not compete in the marketplace and could gain only raw enthusiasts, there is now comparatively little else for a beginning writer to do, few other places for him to go.
The competition for space in the science fiction magazines is therefore keener, so that better natural talents reach their pages-and set higher standards for other novices to shoot at.
I doubt, for instance, that I could possibly have broken into science fiction in 1979 with nothing more than the talent I had when I broke into the field in 1939. (Nor need this discourage new writers-they are learning in a better school in 1979 than I did in 1939.) There is also greater knowledge of science today.
The writers of my own golden age knew very little science that they didn’t pick up from the lurid newspaper stories of the day (equivalent to learning about sex in the gutter).
Nowadays, on the other hand, even those science fiction writers who are not particularly educated in science and who don’t particularly use science in their stories nevertheless know much more about science and use it far more skillfully (when they do) than did the creaky old giants of the past. The new writers can’t help it. We now live in a society in which science saturates every medium of communication and the very air we breathe-and the growing ranks of capable science writers see to it that the communications are of high quality.
What do we face then?
We will have stories by better writers, dealing with more exciting and more subtle themes in a more intelligently scientific manner.
Need we worry that it will all come to an end, that science is outpacing science fiction and putting us all out of a job?
No! What the scientists are doing is exactly the reverse. They are providing us with fresh, new gimmicks daily: new ideas, new possibilities.
In just the last few days, I have read about the discovery of gases in Venus’s atmosphere which seem to show that Venus could not have been formed in the same way Earth was. I have read about the possibility of setting up a modulated beam of neutrinos that could allow communication through the Earth instead of around it. I have read that the Sun may have a steadily ticking internal clock with the irregularities of the sunspots a superficial modification-but what the clock is and why the modification, we do not know.
Each of these items can serve as the starting point for a story that might not have been possible to write last year, let alone thirty years ago. And they will be written with the skill and expertise of today.
These are exciting times for society, for science, for science fiction, for science fiction writers, for science fiction readers. George, Joel, and I are having more fun putting this magazine together all the time; and, we hope, you are having more fun reading it all the time.
Why not? There’s a Golden Age ahead!
The All-Human Galaxy
In I928, “The Skylark Of Space” by Edward E. Smith appeared in Amazing Stories, and was instantly recognized as an important milestone in science fiction.
Until then, stories involving space travel dealt almost exclusively with the solar system. Trips to the Moon and to Mars were the staples. Visitors from other stellar systems may have been mentioned (as in the case of the visitor from Sirius in Voltaire’s “ Micromegas“) but these were trivial instances.