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Originally Posted by crich70
I have to agree with you there. The old Science Fiction is still better than a good deal of the modern stuff with some exceptions. I don't know why that is, but there is almost an atmosphere about them for lack of a better word, that a good deal of modern SF seems to lack. Maybe because what was known to be impossible was less set than it is now, I don't know. I've bought a number of collections of classic SF at Amazon for my Kindle, but I imagine what is there is just a tiny fraction of what has been written between the start of modern SF (as a genre) and the early 70's onward.
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The main difference, I think, is that the dominant variant in the 50's and early 60's was adventure SF. Then came the New Wave with darker themes and a deeper focus on wordsmithing, soft SF became trendy for a while, and worst of all SF became respectable.
By now the genre is so mature no single sub-genre dominates, except maybe the more serious idea SF, so its a bit harder to find the freewheeling, anything goes stories of the pre-New Wave. It's out there, but harder to find.
(Except at, ahem, Baen, which set out to "return SF where it belongs: the gutter".
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