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 Why would a kid buy a 1932 sci-fi novel? Check out what the octopus is holding so tightly! |
HOOKED in the Dawn of the Sci-Fi Age |
Radio, pulp mags, serials,
cheap paperbacks had it all
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
TRY TO IMAGINE what it was like being a sci-fi fan in a small
town in America in 1950--before television, before video cassettes
and DVD's, before "Star Trek" and "Star Wars"
and "Doctor Who."
It wasn't easy, but it wasn't impossible. We had other stuff to get geeky over. I know because I was there, growing up in a sleepy beach resort town on the Northern California coast called Santa Cruz.
I didn't know it then, but I was experiencing the sci-fi revolution in its adolescence, the countdown period just before Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and the rest of those enterprising geniuses blasted off with the projects that would make most young people in America start thinking of sci-fi as a truly respectable genre at last. Until that happened, sci-fi was thought of as "kid stuff" by way too many people.
I've racked my mind trying to figure out what first got me started on sci-fi. It wasn't my Mom, who liked mysteries and soaps, but couldn't tolerate "that space stuff." It wasn't my Dad, who liked westerns and "Grand Ol' Opry." It wasn't my Grandma, who liked wrestling matches and Bing Crosby. My kid brother loved sci-fi, too, but he doesn't count. I'm the one who got him hooked.
Right now I'm thinking it must have been a combination of radio, comic books and sex. Allow me to explain.
In
my boyhood, I listened to 1940s radio shows about "Buck
Rogers," a guy from our time who wakes up in the 25th century,
and "Superman," an extra-terrestrial who happens to
look like one of us. I also devoured comic books about superheroes.
One of my favorites was The Green Lantern, a hero who acquired
his super powers after being exposed to the green radiation from
a meteorite. Another was the wonderful "Planet Comics,"
which ran a strip called The Lost World. It was about future
Earth, after our conquest by the Voltmen, ugly guys who cruised
the skies of our ruined planet and talked backward. They were
always looking for the band led by Hunt Bowman, a sort of Mad
Max who carried a longbow and was hell on wheels. These were
early, profound influences.
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But I'll bet sex played a big part, too. In those days, the pulp magazines were still around and they had notoriously sexy covers. While searching through the stories to find the part about the girl on the cover, I accidentally absorbed quite a bit of sci-fi. I still remember one incredibly sexy character named Bubastis, but couldn't tell you anything else about the story.
A stunning young B-movie leading lady named Jean Rogers also left an indelible impression on me. She played Dale Arden, the love interest in the first two "Flash Gordon" serials starring Larry "Buster" Crabbe. I'll never forget the sequence in Universal's "Flash Gordon," a 1936 serial, where she cowers against a wall, in the flimsiest of garments, while the obese king of the Hawkmen comes after her with definitely dishonorable intentions. I still can't look at her without feeling the stirring of certain familiar impulses.
Before 1950, there just wasn't much science fiction around for young people. The three "Flash Gordon" serials--made from 1936-40--and the 1939 "Buck Rogers" serial, also starring Buster Crabbe, were the "Star Wars" of their day. But you couldn't see them on video because there wasn't such a thing. They showed up on television eventually--they called the "Flash Gordon" serial "Space Soldiers"--but TV didn't get to Santa Cruz until 1952-53. I saw the first two in cut-down versions released as feature films: "Rocketship" and "Mars Attacks the World."
The one sci-fi serial that ran in our local movie theater during that era was a re-release of Republic's "Undersea Kingdom" from 1936. My friends and I spent an entire summer entranced by that serial, re-enacting each chapter in our backyards as soon as we saw it.
During that period, I'm sure it was the adventure that appealed to me most, even more than the sexy girls. But the more I was exposed to science fiction, the more I think I recognized there were other things to take away from it, like, for instance, ideas about serious issues.
In that period I remember being deeply shaken by a story I heard on the radio called "There Will Come Soft Rains." I'm guessing it was on the series called "Dimension X," although I also listened to a program called "2000-Plus." Both were adult-oriented, which in those days meant they were about grown-up ideas and issues. This story was about an automated house of the future that kept preparing meals for the family that lived there, then clearing the uneaten meals away each night. Ultimately, you learned that the family had been killed in a nuclear holocaust that presumably had wiped out everybody else on Earth. It was a quiet, introspective story--with a powerful wallop.
When I was 12 or 13, I was surprised to find that story toward the end of a magical book I read called "The Martian Chronicles" by a man named Ray Bradbury. His name soon began to resonate in my head because I kept seeing his stories everywhere. They were unlike anything I'd ever read up until then. He used words like a poet, but he had marvelous plots and a surpeme sense of irony--something I now realize is catnip for the young.
Bradbury came along just when I was about to exhaust the tiny kernels of science fiction at the Santa Cruz library. I had read all the Jules Verne and H.G. Wells novels on the shelves, which weren't many, and had read Balmer & Wylie's "When Worlds Collide" before the movie came out in 1951. But Bradbury led a whole new pack of sci-fi writers into my world. He changed my whole view of the genre.
Looking back, I now realize the sci-fi boom had begun. It probably started with the signal most important developments to come out of World War II: The atomic bomb and the German rocket research that faintly suggested man might be able to leave this planet someday after all. It was also moved along dramatically by the flying saucer reports that began to hit the media in the late 1940s.
In 1950, George Pal's "Destination Moon" reached our local movie theater neck and neck with Lippert's "Rocketship X-M." These were supposedly "serious" science fiction movies about space exploration. When TV came to town, it brought rudimentary space shows for kids like "Space Patrol," "Captain Video" and "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," along with those old serials and a few early sci-fi films like "Things to Come" (1936). In 1951, RKO's "The Thing From Another World" raced "The Man From Planet X" to local theaters and we began to get our first films about aliens on Earth. One low-budget film that enthralled me that year was Lippert's "Unknown World," in which scientists journey to the Earth's core in a tank-like machine called the Cyclotram.
By the early 1950s, I'd become fully hooked on science fiction as a genre. I'd joined the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club and was building a mighty collection of sci-fi paperback novels. More importantly, I'd begun to absorb the lessons built into the hundreds of sci-fi stories I read each year.
Though my Mom was a Democrat, she wasn't very political. My Dad was a Republican and never was all that keen on liberals. That's why I imagine my lifelong liberalism probably sprang from the sci-fi stories I read as a youngster and not my home environment. I didn't recognize it at the time, but those stories were filled with lessons about the dangers of unrestrained technology, the risks of environmental pollution and the calamities that come with totalitarianism. I learned about the need for racial understanding throughout the universe before I ever thought it related to us here on Earth. I learned some extraordinary things from George Orwell, Karel Capek, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury.
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I think I learned a lot less from A.E. van Vogt and the many techno-scientific writers who would spring up over the years. Like my colleague Chuck McFadden, I liked a good deal of action and adventure along with my philosophy lessons. And I wasn't much interested in physics or high math, particularly since I was having to get after-school tutoring to pass algebra and never made it beyond geometry.
And
I believe I even learned an awful lot from those sexy covers
and fast-paced stories in the pulps and trashy paperbacks. When
I began to get paid for my fiction in the 1960s, the only markets
I seemed able to crash were the so-called "men's magazines,"
which wanted erotica, not space opera. Yet I was able to peddle
quite a few sci-fi stories disguised as erotica, such as "The
Tahoe Marathon," which speculated on a future Olympic Games
in which all the competition involves sex. Cavalier published
it in 1977.
Until "Star Trek" came along and found a way to bind
sci-fi geeks together, it still wasn't a very mainstream genre
for school kids. I remember one seventh grader being dubbed "Moon
Man" because he not only liked sci-fi, but owned a telescope
and wore glasses. I also remember my junior high school science
teacher telling the "rocket boys" in his class to forget
about space travel because it was physically impossible to break
through the gravitational pull of Earth's atmosphere. I'm happy
to report that he quit teaching a few years later and became
a dentist.
Nobody ever called me names for being a sci-fi nut. (They found other reasons, though.) I never felt self-conscious about it either. I think I always knew that this was a noble thing to like. What's more, the smartest person I knew--the older brother of my best friend--was an unabashed sci-fi geek. He was a genius in physics and was stratospherically successful when he entered UC Berkeley. He was so smart that he read books while walking down the street. If they weren't sci-fi books, they were books of math formulas. Nobody ever called him "moon man." I think even savages respect geniuses.
But as grounded in sci-fi as I was, I began to "grow out of it" when I got to college. I still was interested, but girls, drinking, political causes, social issues and homework shoved it onto the back burner.
Then, in my 30s, I came back to it. Then working as a journalist, I discovered I could make use of my great background in sci-fi to write about the subject that now was becoming hotter and hotter in the media.
One by one, I began to meet and chat with some of the idols of my youth: Jack Williamson, a graduate of the pulps whose "The Humanoids" was one of my all-time favorites; Phil Klass, the brilliant scientist whose sense of humor was sensational and, still using his famous pen-name, William Tenn, wrote the classic "Of Men and Monsters"; Frank Herbert, who snared me with his exciting "Dragon in the Sea," then went on to write the immortal "Dune" (I wish I still had the tape of our conversation the day we sat and rapped about the religious symbolism in "Dune"); Curt Siodmak, whose "Donovan's Brain" hooked me in the 1940s; Kurt Vonnegut, whose "Sirens of Titan" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" still haunt me, and the most sublime character of them all, the irrepressible Harlan Ellison, who has done virtually everything there is to do as a writer.
But there's a special place in my heart for the shy, strangely boyish gentleman named Ray Bradbury, who has crossed my path a number of times in my professional career since the days when his stories led me into the world of "serious" science fiction before puberty had finished working me over. The first time I met him, though, was when NBC turned "The Martian Chronicles" into a miniseries and he did some interviews.
"Thank you so much for this. It changed my life," I told him, showing him my copy of the book, folded back to the story "There Will Come Soft Rains."
Bradbury smiled warmly, but I'm sure he didn't have a clue what I meant. Maybe he thought I read his story and decided not to start a nuclear war that day. Works for me.
Anyway, I've continued to read science-fiction from time to time, though not as voraciously as before. I'm more inclined these days to go back and read stories from that earlier time, before 1950. And I'm constantly amazed by two things: How much those writers knew about what might go wrong with our world by the 21st century and how rare it is to ever find any women who look like the ones on the covers of the pulp magazines of my youth.
© 2001 by Ron Miller. The "Dwellers in the Mirage" image is the cover from the 1952 edition of the book and is © by Avon Books.
You can contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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