[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

About Pern, however--I have to disagree with that one. Actually, she did NOT interject genetic engineering until WELL into the series. If you read the series, as it was originally published, they were pretty damn magical for hell...7, 8 books?

I began reading the Pern stories when the earliest ones got serialized in Analog Magazine back when John W. Campbell was still the editor. Analog is the bastion of "hard" science fiction. Campbell had edited fantasy, producing the short-lived Unknown Worlds magazine as a companion to Astounding in the 40's, but that wasn't what Analog published.

You may be right about the sequence, which makes Anne's whapping of anyone who called it fantasy even more curious. How were the readers to know better, if she didn't get around to explaining how Pern came about till that late in the process?

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

(Mind you, Anne's "science" usually consisted of hand waving and talking fast. Anne was essentially a romance writer, but dressed her work in SF and fantasy trappings.)

a la Rex Stout's "Watson was a woman" address. ha!

Want a better one? Lester Del Rey presented a paper at a Tolkien Society conference on Lord of the Rings, where he said that history was written by the victors, Merry and Pippin had edited the Red Book of Westmarch, and Gollum had not died in Mount Doom when the ring was destroyed, but had instead survived and passed into the Wast, as the last of the Ringbearers.

You may imagine the response.

Yeah, I confess that typically, I'm not wild about dystopian fiction. I think I'm cynical enough, thanks.

It wasn't as dystopian as might be. The neat bit about it was what Gibson didn't say. Like we don't discover for a while that the political entities known as the United States of America and the Soviet Union no longer exist as such, and other things have filled the vacuum left behind.

A bit more dystopian take is Walter John William's Hardwired, in which Earth has lost a conflict with orbital habitats and the former United States is balkanized and mostly under external control. (Note to all: he who holds the high ground wins. Local opposition was shot out of the sky before it could reach orbital height to shoot back.)

Is it me, or is that utterly moronic?

Not really. Silverberg accepted a challenge to portray a world in which in which population growth was encouraged no matter what, and depicted a possible society that might result. (I don't recall who else also got the challenge.)

The publishing sequence was fascinating. The novelettes that became The World Inside were published in Galaxy Magazine when Eljer Jacobsen was editor. Galaxy serialized two of Silverberg's novels (Nightwings and Downward to the Earth) back to back and ran the novelettes at the same time. I got a chance to ask him about the "All Silverberg, all the time" sequence, and he explained that Eljer was supposed to buy another novel to run between the pair of his. But Robert A. Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil" became available for serialization, and had to be run before the impending Putnam hardcover release, so...

(Heinlein had come to a dramatic parting of the ways with John W. Campbell, and would no longer submit to him.)

A different take was Lester Del Rey's The Eleventh Commandment, in which a researcher from a human Mars colony comes to Earth, and discovers a hideously over populated world ruled by a descendant of the Catholic Church. Despite the problems, the Church still encourages people to be fruitful and multiply. At the end of the book, we discover the Church has an actual good reason for doing so.

To me, it seems rather sad, really. I mean...think of Verne. Surely, he patently wrote science fiction. Not fantasy as we think of it now. Today, he is simply Fantasy. Of course, this is surely true of much fiction, pulp or otherwise; the passage of time (and acquisition of knowledge) jettisons much of the value of the piece--in terms of the delight of fresh eyes to it, I mean. I'm pretty sure that young men today aren't reveling in Journey to the Center of the Earth, eh? Now it's hardly even fantasy. Sad.

Verne thought he was writing adventure stories for boys. What we think of as SF didn't even have a name then. And Verne was careful to limit himself to one wonder per story, and make his science something theoretical doable by the standards of his day. (Which is why the travelers in "From the Earth to the Moon" are shot out of a giant cannon to make the rip.)

Verne was contemporaneous with H. G. Wells, and commented on Well's lack of scientific rigor. "An anti-gravity paint? Where is this marvelous material? Let him produce it!"

And has migrated over to Romance, god help us all. I bought a book that I mistakenly thought was Steampunk--well, it was, inarguably, but then it turned into Romance. Who knew?

Everything has migrated to Romance. You name it, and there's a Romance crossover featuring it.

There you go, an official rant. Ladies of a certain disposition, keep your romance outta my damn Steampunk!

Good luck with that.
______
Dennis