Before the Golden Age
Part one 1920 to 1930 Part two 1931 The man who evolved / Edmond Hamilton The Jameson Satellite / Neil R. Jones Submicroscopic / Capt. S.P. Meek Awlo of Ulm / Capt. S.P. Meek Tetrahedra of space / P. Schuyler Miller The world of the red Sun / Clifford D. Simak Part three 1932 Tumithak of the corridors / Charles R. Tanner The Moon era / Jack Williamson Part four 1933 The man who awoke / Laurence Manning Tumithak in Shawm / Capt. Charles R. Tanner Part five 1934 Colossus / Donald Wandrei Born of the Sun / Jack Williamson Sidewise in time / Murray Leinster Old Faithful / Raymond Z. Gallun Part six 1935 The parasite planet / Stanley G. Weinbaum Proxima Centauri / Murray Leinster The accursed galaxy / Edmond Hamilton Part seven 1936 He who shrank / Henry Hasse The human pets of Mars / Leslie Frances Stone The brain stealers of Mars / John W. Campbell, Jr. Devolution / Edmond Hamilton Big game / Isaac Asimov Part eight 1937 Other eyes watching / John W. Campbell, Jr. Minus planet / John D. Clark Past, present, and future / Nat Schachner Part nine 1938 The men and the mirror / Ross Rocklynne
Stats for nerds
0recommend
2mentions
2people
2022–2026years
100% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Back in the day (before 1970 or so?) short stories and serialization were the bread-and-butter of science fiction. I have a huge number of paperback and hardcover anthologies of sci-fi stories, sometimes by a single author (say Element 79 by Fred Hoyle) and others by many authors (say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Golden_Age) and given that many of them were reprinted many times I can't believe they didn't make money.
Interesting directions are:
- Maybe literary fiction is trash and genre fiction is treasure. I mean, there are readers for genre fiction which is more than you can say for literary fiction. I spent enough time going through the remainder racks at bookstores to be convinced that "A NOVEL" is a curse you can write on the front of a book to make sure it will never sell, and if I ever do publish a novel I am going to put it in my contract that the publisher owes me $20B if they ever write "A NOVEL" on the cover.
- I used to think serialization was for the birds. Like it was something that hypnotized Victorians to think slow-paced novels by the likes of Dickens and the Bronte sisters were interesting. Lately though I've gotten deeper into the pipeline that puts anime stories on television which involves serialization of light novels and manga and it does have me thinking that bringing back serialization might wake the culture industry in the US up from the failing business of nostalgia.
- Having read Asimov's autobiographical inserts in anthologies such as Before the Golden Age and The Early Asimov, I get the idea that young (as in prior to the age of 30) Asimov suffered from a problem similar to many male mangakas: their exposure to girls/women is so minimal as to be almost non-existent (in the case of mangakas, of course, this comes primarily from the work schedule), and with such a paucity of experience, they flounder to construct such characters except within the bounds of extreme stereotype.
