Clarke Arthur Conan Doyle Arthur Machen August Derleth Barry Malzberg Brian Aldiss Brian Stableford C. van Vogt Alexander Jablokov Alfred Bester Alternate History Ambrose Bierce Arthur C.
World War One fantastic fiction - secondary.World War One fantastic fiction - primary.World War One in Fan… on The Handbook of French Science… World War One in Fan… on World War One in Fantastic Fic… The Marne – Ma… on World War One in Fantastic Fic… World War One in Fantastic Fiction: The Napus.He ends the piece by generally recommending the two anthologies and not just as period pieces but on their own merits. Stableford seems to think less of pulp sf here than he does in Scientific Romance in Britain 1890 – 1950, and he also seems to sort of put Hamilton and Brackett as outside that tradition, writers marked by skill and themes not found in other pulp writers. Brackett may have looked back to the pulp works of the past and the need for escapism they represented. Brackett made Martians older and more decadent. Stableford sees Brackett’s sf work as often being about the pursuit of romantic dreams and the ultimate pointless of that pursuit. Even when the beautiful dream is grasped, it is an illusion. Hamilton adopted the later strategy hence his emphasis on mood. He presented his ideas starkly without “pause or apology”. For Stableford, the persistent theme in Hamilton’s work is a “concern with morality and the vanity of human wishes”. His romantic themes and ideas hide a disappointment and distaste “for the immediate and ordinary”.īrackett, along with Ray Bradbury, made the elements of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars even more extreme. But the most exciting possibilities and imaginative concepts undercut the masquerade of plausibility an author has to create.Ī writer has two ways around this: stay with core ideas that can be most effectively disguised or “exchange subtlety for deliberate and flamboyant overstatement” – adopt a moody, token disguise that serves the purpose of the moment. On the one hand, it pretends to believe the worlds it depicts could or might happen in a natural world. Stableford addresses the central problem that sf has in its fantasies. Stableford notes they were the last of the writers who got their start in pulp science fiction, a tradition distinct from the one fostered by John W. Hamilton died in 1977 and Brackett died in 1978, and the occasion of this appreciation was the publication, by Del Rey, of best-of collections for both.
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