this world clinically from the outside, Carter focuses on a single ship and the varied personalities who make up its crew. (The vessel is tunnelling through the continental plate rather than floating on the sea, but in story terms that’s a distinction without a difference.)
Carter is pretty sure that his CO didn’t actually read the story before approving it. My experience with military officers leads me to believe that he’s right, though it’s also possible that his CO simply didn’t understand the story’s horrific implications.
6.
I LOOK ON the immediate Post-World-War-II period as the Golden Age of space opera, but at least in part that may be because I cut my teeth on the SF appearing then. Poul Anderson started out writing ‘lead novels’ for the pulps which were the right length to be reprinted as one half of an Ace Double book; he went on to write serials for the top digest magazines, which then came out as full-length books, sometimes in hardcover. Poul’s later work was more thoughtful and complex than his pulp adventure, but it was still fun.
Keith Laumer, Anderson’s younger contemporary, wrote a different kind of space opera: sometimes broadly humorous, often political (bureaucratic) satire—but occasionally giving the reader an unexpected emotional kick. Keith was less concerned with science and engineering than Poul, but he was more skilled (and enthusiastic) at writing action scenes.
A wide range of people wrote space opera in the ‘50s and ‘60s; Anderson and Laumer weren’t even the ends of the continuum. That said, between them they do illustrate how rich the space opera of the period was.
And to my taste, they were the best of a very good lot.
7.
A PAIR OF EXCELLENT and very influential Military SF novels came out within a few months of one another in 1959: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson, and Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. Both men were skilled, successful writers. (Heinlein had helped editor John W. Campbell to create the Golden Age of SF.) In these novels they were at the top of their game.
Dorsai and Troopers defined the Military SF field when they appeared, and they summed up the thirty-odd years of MSF development that had come before.
8.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING that’s happened to space opera in the ‘70s and later is that non-print media have overwhelmed the field. Even a writer as good and as successful as Dave Weber hasn’t had the impact that Star Wars did in 1977, and earlier yet, Star Trek tie-in novels had begun to glut the market for adventure SF. (Tie-ins to the Dungeons and Dragons game had a huge impact on adventure fantasy at the same time, but that’s outside my present scope.)
Star Wars and Star Trek were both classic space opera milieus. Jack Williamson or Edmond Hamilton could have written either series in the ‘30s, and in fact Hamilton’s wife, Leigh Brackett—who wrote some of the best space opera of the ‘40s—scripted The Empire Strikes Back . The plots weren’t new, but the format was.
9.
IN THE EARLY ‘70s Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle, and I began writing Military SF. We weren’t better than Heinlein and Dickson, but we were combat veterans, something which had been very rare in MSF until we appeared. (The only exception I can think of was Keith Bennett, and that’s my deduction from his story . . . which constitutes circular reasoning.)
Note that there were many SF writers who were combat veterans—C.M. Kornbluth, one of the best SF writers ever, fought in the of the b Battle of the Bulge—but they didn’t write Military SF. Gordy spent his military service mowing lawns in California, and Heinlein’s brief service as a naval officer ended in 1930. (The Navy refused to grant him a security clearance when he wished to return at the beginning of World War II.)
The new thing which I think the three of us brought to Military SF (I’m speaking from the inside now, and that’s harder than you might think) is a view
Carter is pretty sure that his CO didn’t actually read the story before approving it. My experience with military officers leads me to believe that he’s right, though it’s also possible that his CO simply didn’t understand the story’s horrific implications.
6.
I LOOK ON the immediate Post-World-War-II period as the Golden Age of space opera, but at least in part that may be because I cut my teeth on the SF appearing then. Poul Anderson started out writing ‘lead novels’ for the pulps which were the right length to be reprinted as one half of an Ace Double book; he went on to write serials for the top digest magazines, which then came out as full-length books, sometimes in hardcover. Poul’s later work was more thoughtful and complex than his pulp adventure, but it was still fun.
Keith Laumer, Anderson’s younger contemporary, wrote a different kind of space opera: sometimes broadly humorous, often political (bureaucratic) satire—but occasionally giving the reader an unexpected emotional kick. Keith was less concerned with science and engineering than Poul, but he was more skilled (and enthusiastic) at writing action scenes.
A wide range of people wrote space opera in the ‘50s and ‘60s; Anderson and Laumer weren’t even the ends of the continuum. That said, between them they do illustrate how rich the space opera of the period was.
And to my taste, they were the best of a very good lot.
7.
A PAIR OF EXCELLENT and very influential Military SF novels came out within a few months of one another in 1959: Dorsai! by Gordon R. Dickson, and Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. Both men were skilled, successful writers. (Heinlein had helped editor John W. Campbell to create the Golden Age of SF.) In these novels they were at the top of their game.
Dorsai and Troopers defined the Military SF field when they appeared, and they summed up the thirty-odd years of MSF development that had come before.
8.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING that’s happened to space opera in the ‘70s and later is that non-print media have overwhelmed the field. Even a writer as good and as successful as Dave Weber hasn’t had the impact that Star Wars did in 1977, and earlier yet, Star Trek tie-in novels had begun to glut the market for adventure SF. (Tie-ins to the Dungeons and Dragons game had a huge impact on adventure fantasy at the same time, but that’s outside my present scope.)
Star Wars and Star Trek were both classic space opera milieus. Jack Williamson or Edmond Hamilton could have written either series in the ‘30s, and in fact Hamilton’s wife, Leigh Brackett—who wrote some of the best space opera of the ‘40s—scripted The Empire Strikes Back . The plots weren’t new, but the format was.
9.
IN THE EARLY ‘70s Joe Haldeman, Jerry Pournelle, and I began writing Military SF. We weren’t better than Heinlein and Dickson, but we were combat veterans, something which had been very rare in MSF until we appeared. (The only exception I can think of was Keith Bennett, and that’s my deduction from his story . . . which constitutes circular reasoning.)
Note that there were many SF writers who were combat veterans—C.M. Kornbluth, one of the best SF writers ever, fought in the of the b Battle of the Bulge—but they didn’t write Military SF. Gordy spent his military service mowing lawns in California, and Heinlein’s brief service as a naval officer ended in 1930. (The Navy refused to grant him a security clearance when he wished to return at the beginning of World War II.)
The new thing which I think the three of us brought to Military SF (I’m speaking from the inside now, and that’s harder than you might think) is a view
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