retrofuturist tuesdays
28 Sep 2021 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneIn addition to the latest couple of lesser-known vintage Golden Age murder mysteries I've started (Crossed Skis by Carol Carnac and Murder of a Lady by Anthony Wynne), I've started rereading Frank Herbert's Dune and Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.
I read Dune for the first and only time at age 20 in the Black Pit of Depression after my dad's car accident when I was alone in my parents' house, and I read Foundation for the first and only time in high school (I think). In both cases, I remember very little after 18+ years: I remember that I liked them both and understood why they were both classics of such stature, and I thought they were both very good but not unflawed; and other than that I basically remember the premises and sort of the mood and style - not even the secondary characters. (The mood and style are like I remembered - a bit thick in Dune and a bit distant in Foundation - the only bit I didn't remember being that the fictional historiography excerpts that head the chapters are irritating in Dune and not, so far, in Foundation.)
They feel extremely nostalgic to be reading now, both because they both have SUCH a strong mid-20th-century ethos and because they both also savor of second-wave sf to me (although in the case of Foundation it's a little inaccurate since it was started in the 1940s... Asimov definitely has the aesthetic though, like those designers who started producing extremely Art Deco looking pieces back when almost everybody else was still doing Art Nouveau. And like Jean Royere and Carlo Bugatti, Asimov stayed active and influential in the field throughout the second wave).
I grew up on second-wave sf because my parents' library was full of it. But I've gotten out of the habit of reading sff in recent years, partly because golden age mysteries were easier to acquire. Speculative fiction is typically about the social issues of the day albeit clothed in fantasy and all kinds of mental experiments, and as time goes on it gets easier and easier to see the imprint of those concerns in older science fiction. The oil crisis, the waning superpowers and the decline of empires, the speed of advancing science and social science, the hilarious 1940s and slightly less hilarious 1960s modernist technology, the colonialism and race, the aftermath of war, the spectre of totalitarianism, the rising cultural importance of spycraft, the bizarrely shared sff naming conventions where everybody can tell what they're actually based on but they swap them out a bit to give a superficial semblance of futureness, the scifi equivalent of the "Ye Olde Time" terrible fake age of chivalry style that emerges from Hollywood and Renfaires.
So many of these issues are relevant now, usually because a lot of people fucked up in the midcentury and created problems that are just now ripening to truly mega-disaster levels. The exact manner of the modern echo is sometimes ironic, like the fact that since 2016 the American judiciary has been publicly shown up as a demented parody of justice and the totalitarianism American writers were thinking about mid-20-c was certainly not American. Adds a layer that wasn't there the first time I read since I probably didn't have a clear an overarching contextual understanding of history.
I read Dune for the first and only time at age 20 in the Black Pit of Depression after my dad's car accident when I was alone in my parents' house, and I read Foundation for the first and only time in high school (I think). In both cases, I remember very little after 18+ years: I remember that I liked them both and understood why they were both classics of such stature, and I thought they were both very good but not unflawed; and other than that I basically remember the premises and sort of the mood and style - not even the secondary characters. (The mood and style are like I remembered - a bit thick in Dune and a bit distant in Foundation - the only bit I didn't remember being that the fictional historiography excerpts that head the chapters are irritating in Dune and not, so far, in Foundation.)
They feel extremely nostalgic to be reading now, both because they both have SUCH a strong mid-20th-century ethos and because they both also savor of second-wave sf to me (although in the case of Foundation it's a little inaccurate since it was started in the 1940s... Asimov definitely has the aesthetic though, like those designers who started producing extremely Art Deco looking pieces back when almost everybody else was still doing Art Nouveau. And like Jean Royere and Carlo Bugatti, Asimov stayed active and influential in the field throughout the second wave).
I grew up on second-wave sf because my parents' library was full of it. But I've gotten out of the habit of reading sff in recent years, partly because golden age mysteries were easier to acquire. Speculative fiction is typically about the social issues of the day albeit clothed in fantasy and all kinds of mental experiments, and as time goes on it gets easier and easier to see the imprint of those concerns in older science fiction. The oil crisis, the waning superpowers and the decline of empires, the speed of advancing science and social science, the hilarious 1940s and slightly less hilarious 1960s modernist technology, the colonialism and race, the aftermath of war, the spectre of totalitarianism, the rising cultural importance of spycraft, the bizarrely shared sff naming conventions where everybody can tell what they're actually based on but they swap them out a bit to give a superficial semblance of futureness, the scifi equivalent of the "Ye Olde Time" terrible fake age of chivalry style that emerges from Hollywood and Renfaires.
So many of these issues are relevant now, usually because a lot of people fucked up in the midcentury and created problems that are just now ripening to truly mega-disaster levels. The exact manner of the modern echo is sometimes ironic, like the fact that since 2016 the American judiciary has been publicly shown up as a demented parody of justice and the totalitarianism American writers were thinking about mid-20-c was certainly not American. Adds a layer that wasn't there the first time I read since I probably didn't have a clear an overarching contextual understanding of history.
(no subject)
Date: 28 Sep 2021 05:50 pm (UTC)Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" was from 1939, I think, which is another classic that looks at social issues then and, inevitably, now.
Actually, I think that SF's fictional-future and fantasy elements allowed the writers to present what they saw as current problems, to a public that was often thinking in the past, in the sense of "solving the *last* war's problems." (And up to at least the 1980s, very few of them had any idea that women were half the population with systemic problems of their own...)