Mar. 25th, 2009

threemonkeys: (Waxlion)
Ah synchronicity, you provider of blog fodder. Why yesterday my car stereo died and in the post arrived an MTA voucher which could be used towards a new one. It came from the domain name service I use because I filled out a survey form and they drew my response from the metaphorical hat for a thank you reward. I didn't think such things actually happened.

Today I opened at random a freshly arrived copy of Banana Wings from the redoubtable [livejournal.com profile] fishlifters and the first thing I saw was an article about real science in your SF and how your appreciation of the science can affect your enjoyment of the work. Significant because I'd been wondering what approach to take to Golden Age SF - a collection of 1940s novellas edited by Asimov, Waugh and Greenberg. There is so much that can be written about the SF of that period and this collection was supposed to be representative. Or at least as representative as it could be given that they couldn't get the rights to any Heinlein stories. Naturally the intro to this collection went on about John W Campbell jr and his influence on stories. In particular and relating back to the Banana Wings connection is that the stories were supposed to emphasise science - real hard science in particular. Well the stories are about science but most of it isn't real. In isn't even outdated science that the years have disproved. Most of it is technobabble - scientific sounding but meaningless words meant to justify the story. A story that was about the solving a technical problem using that non-science. I found most of it dated and really rather tiring to read actually.

But then near the end, was a story by A Bertram Chandler called Giant Killer. It used a good grasp of evolutionary theory as an underlying but not explicit driver for a story and what is more the characters were not just cyphers there to spout the technobabble. It is a wonderful story which would not be out of place in any modern SF collection. It gave me quite a lift.

Actually, something else gave me a lift. The wonderful illustrations in that Banana Wings from Harry Turner. I'd never noted his work before but it is superb. Sadly my discovery of his art was coincident with the realisation that it was a memorial because he died earlier this year. The art remains to enjoy however.

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