space opera started with E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space , published in Amazing Stories in 1928 but written a good decade earlier. The heroes invent a space ship and zoom about the galaxy, meeting and interacting with alien races. There are wars and battles, but the focus isn’t on what war does to individuals or society itself. (Except that if you’re fighting an alien race bent on genocide, it’s better to win. I don’t think Smith considered that a question for debate, any more than I do.)
Further, the only economic point I remember involves the hero bringing back a platinum asteroid—to destroy the market for platinum jewelry. That will free scientists who need non-reactive crucibles from having to bid against wealthy women who want the metal for its scarcity value.
Smith focused on fun and adventure. He was extremely popular in his day, and he created the genre of space opera: adventure on far planets. When I was 13 I loved Skylark and Smith’s later space opera series. The line-by-line writing causes me problems when I reread the books as an adult, but they remain exciting fun.
4.
EARLY SPACE OPERA tended to be multi-cultural and multi-racial. No, it wouldn’t be politically correct today (if only for gender portrayals), but it was written by people who were trying to say something positive about how intelligent people (from Earth, Mars, or wherever) ought to behave toward one another.
Real Military SF appeared in the 1920s also. Here the tone was often quite different—and quite unpleasant, even to a reader as non-PC as I am. One strand of this MSF grows from Turn-of-the-Century Yellow Peril novels; now the Yellow Hordes had airships, and they were frequently led by Bolshevik super-scientists.
At its best, this genre was racist and xenophobic. The stories in which the villains have enlisted Africans as cannon-fodder are like nothing else I’ve seen, apart from some American Nazi publications which I filed when I was a book page at the University of Iowa Library in the 1960s.
5.
THE 1940s brought Military SF stories which focused on how battles were fought, what sort of men became soldiers (pretty universally men, I think), and how soldiers interacted with civilian society. These stories were about war and battle, not about race and ideology. Their appearance was presumably a result of World War II itself.
In part this was because everybody had become interested in war: professional writers choose subjects which interest potential readers. Bluefish chase sardines, and porpoises chase bluefish. 1943’s Clash by Night (by the married couple of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore) is such a story. Neither writer had any military experience at the time (Kuttner was later drafted), but they created a masterpiece of battle and warriors.
A few stories, though, came from the writers’ own experience. I strongly suspect that was the case in 1949 with The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears by Keith Bennett, though I never met him to ask. In form Rocketeers is a standard pulp adventure (a band of soldiers fights its way through murderous jungle and hostile natives) but tiny details and the whole feel of the story convince me that Bennett had been an artilleryman on the jungle islands of the Southwest Pacific.
I can’t think of a story which better shows (not tells) the exhaustion of a long exposure at the sharp end. Notice how the soldiers start out talking about women, but later talk about food. By the end they don’t talk about anything, just scan the terrain with tired eyes as they trudge forward, their guns ready.
The Last Objective by Paul Carter appeared in 1946, but Carter wrote the story while he was still in the Navy; his commanding officer had to approve it before it could be sent to Astounding . It’s just as good as Rocketeers , but it’s different in every other fashion.
Carter describes wholly militarized societies and a war which won’t end until every human being is dead. Rather than viewing
Further, the only economic point I remember involves the hero bringing back a platinum asteroid—to destroy the market for platinum jewelry. That will free scientists who need non-reactive crucibles from having to bid against wealthy women who want the metal for its scarcity value.
Smith focused on fun and adventure. He was extremely popular in his day, and he created the genre of space opera: adventure on far planets. When I was 13 I loved Skylark and Smith’s later space opera series. The line-by-line writing causes me problems when I reread the books as an adult, but they remain exciting fun.
4.
EARLY SPACE OPERA tended to be multi-cultural and multi-racial. No, it wouldn’t be politically correct today (if only for gender portrayals), but it was written by people who were trying to say something positive about how intelligent people (from Earth, Mars, or wherever) ought to behave toward one another.
Real Military SF appeared in the 1920s also. Here the tone was often quite different—and quite unpleasant, even to a reader as non-PC as I am. One strand of this MSF grows from Turn-of-the-Century Yellow Peril novels; now the Yellow Hordes had airships, and they were frequently led by Bolshevik super-scientists.
At its best, this genre was racist and xenophobic. The stories in which the villains have enlisted Africans as cannon-fodder are like nothing else I’ve seen, apart from some American Nazi publications which I filed when I was a book page at the University of Iowa Library in the 1960s.
5.
THE 1940s brought Military SF stories which focused on how battles were fought, what sort of men became soldiers (pretty universally men, I think), and how soldiers interacted with civilian society. These stories were about war and battle, not about race and ideology. Their appearance was presumably a result of World War II itself.
In part this was because everybody had become interested in war: professional writers choose subjects which interest potential readers. Bluefish chase sardines, and porpoises chase bluefish. 1943’s Clash by Night (by the married couple of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore) is such a story. Neither writer had any military experience at the time (Kuttner was later drafted), but they created a masterpiece of battle and warriors.
A few stories, though, came from the writers’ own experience. I strongly suspect that was the case in 1949 with The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears by Keith Bennett, though I never met him to ask. In form Rocketeers is a standard pulp adventure (a band of soldiers fights its way through murderous jungle and hostile natives) but tiny details and the whole feel of the story convince me that Bennett had been an artilleryman on the jungle islands of the Southwest Pacific.
I can’t think of a story which better shows (not tells) the exhaustion of a long exposure at the sharp end. Notice how the soldiers start out talking about women, but later talk about food. By the end they don’t talk about anything, just scan the terrain with tired eyes as they trudge forward, their guns ready.
The Last Objective by Paul Carter appeared in 1946, but Carter wrote the story while he was still in the Navy; his commanding officer had to approve it before it could be sent to Astounding . It’s just as good as Rocketeers , but it’s different in every other fashion.
Carter describes wholly militarized societies and a war which won’t end until every human being is dead. Rather than viewing
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