SF Commentary 93

SSFF CCoommmmeennttaarryy 9933 111122 ppaaggeess DDeecceemmbbeerr 22001166 JJOOHHNN LLIITTCCHHEENN FASCINATING MARS: 120 years of fiction about Mars CCOOLLIINN SSTTEEEELLEE THE FIELD: all the books you’d like to read but haven’t got around to BRUCE GILLESPIE JAMES ‘‘JOCKO’’ ALLEN Life, science fiction, and the world of fanzines Cover: Ditmar (Dick Jenssen): ‘Mars Attacks!’ S F Commentary 93 December 2016 112 pages SF COMMENTARY No. 93, December 2016, is edited and published by Bruce Gillespie, 5 Howard Street, Greensborough, VIC 3088, Australia. Phone: 61-3-9435 7786. First edition and primary publication is electronic. All material in this publication was contributed for one-time use only, and copyrights belong to the contributors. Print edition available only to subscribers ($A100) and substantial contributors. Preferred means of distribution .PDF file: Landscape edition (widescreen edition): http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC93L.pdf or Portrait edition (magazine edition): http://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC93P.pdf All correspondence: [email protected]. Member fwa. Print edition available only to subscribers ($A100) and substantial contributors. Front cover: Ditmar (Dick Jenssen): ‘Mars Attacks!’. Back cover: Elaine Cochrane using DJFractals: ‘Colony’ Photographs: Gary Mason (p. 5); Dick Jenssen (p. 11); Gary Hoff (p. 13); Elaine Cochrane (p. 14); James Allen (p. 28). Artwork: Irene Pagram (p. 19); Richard Bergeron (p. 19); Ditmar (Dick Jenssen) (pp. 20, 22); Keith McLelland (p. 22); Phil Wlodarczyk (pp. 31, 33). 2 Contents 4 I MUST BE TALKING TO MY FRIENDS 89 British alternative history 91 British fantasy 4 REVELATIONS: 94 American science fiction MY LIFE, SCIENCE FICTION, AND FANZINES 99 American fantasy Bruce Gillespie 103 Australian science fiction 103 Australian fantasy 27 MY LIFE IN FANZINES 106 James ‘Jocko’ Allen Australian young adult fiction 107 French fantasy 108 34 FASCINATING MARS: Norwegian science fiction 120 YEARS OF FICTION ABOUT MARS: 108 German fantasy Part 1 108 Chinese science fiction John Litchen 109 Jamaican fantasy 109 Irish fantasy 75 THE FIELD 109 Dutch fantasy Colin Steele 110 Media tie-in books 75 Books about SF and fantasy 111 Graphic novels 84 British science fiction 3 I must be talking to my friends Revelations: My life, science fiction, and fanzines by Bruce Gillespie A talk delivered to the Book Collectors Society of Australia, Victorian branch, Hawthorn Library, 15 September 2016. Parts of this talk were based on a presentation to the Melbourne Science Fiction Club, 15 April 2016, or generated in answer to questions posed by David McDonald for the Snapshots Project, and Van Ikin for a future issue of Science Fiction. When Michel Faber, the Dutch–Australian–English writer, was in who travels to a far planet at the request of its native inhabitants, Melbourne in early 2015 in order to promote his novel The Book and what happens to him and them in this very strange environ- of Strange New Things, he was asked by a member of the ment. Why would readers have found this novel more intimidating audience, ‘Why didn’t you publish your book as a science fiction if the science fiction label had been attached to it? novel?’ He replied, ‘Because the publisher believed that the science fiction label would frighten away the readers.’ While My favourite definition of science fiction is ‘realistic fiction that Faber’s novel is a very literary meditation about many matters, takes place in the future, or an alternative past or present, rather including the death of one’s loved one and indeed one’s whole than in the past or present’. Nothing threatening in that definition. world, it is certainly a science fiction novel. It tells of a missionary We are all used to the idea of writing historical novels based on 4 present a future scenario is Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, first published in 1930. It tells of the future of the human race during the next two million years. It carries such a weight of seeming documentary truth that, when first published in paperback, it was released by Penguin Books under its Pelican imprint — as a work of non-fiction. It has no specific characters, but offers a panoramic history of future events. So it is more accurate to say that science fiction books offer propositions about possible futures, rather than scenarios of ordinary human experience (although there are plenty of excep- tions to that observation). Every science fiction novel or short story springs from a ‘What if?’ proposition. What if the world were invaded by creatures from Mars? H. G. Wells proposes this in The War of the Worlds in the 1890s. What if somebody invented a machine that would allow human beings to explore the far future? That’s also an H. G. Wells proposition, in The Time Machine, his first great success. During the first ten years of his career Wells invented many of the SF propositions that are still with us today. As someone who has been writing reviews and critical articles about science fiction since the late 1960s, I still find that many people in the literary community automatically reject the idea of reading a science fiction book. When pressed, their prejudices are usually based on inaccurate information. In other words, they don’t like what they’ve never read, and they don’t want to find out about what they are missing. Bruce Gillespie in 1970, the year after launching SF Commentary. (Photo: Gary Mason.) Science fiction is, to me, primarily a genre of books and magazines rather than films or TV series. Some science fiction films have the evidence we have about the past. However, very few science offered intense speculative ideas, but most should more fiction novels are actually realistic novels in the way that, say, Tim accurately be described as horror films. I have never watched Winton’s or Graham Swift’s are. They are realistic in that their SF-based television programs. I see many of them as offering authors try to present future possibilities based upon everything merely pale copies of the ideas that can be found in science fiction they know about the past and present. However, they tend not to books. Very few of the most famous science fiction novels and concentrate on such traditional novelistic elements as character, stories have been made into films or TV shows, because the ideas plot, and setting. Perhaps the most famous SF novel that tries to are too complex for most cinema audiences. 5 Early in its 130-year-old life, the river of SF (as we readers always Age’ of science fiction, much as the same period is usually call it — never ‘sci-fi’) divided into two similar but conflicting regarded as the Golden Age of cinema. streams. Gaudy as the covers were, they disguised the variety of quality in In Britain and Europe, most SF novels were published as part of the stories. Many of the stories that are still regarded as the best general fiction lists until the 1950s. Faber & Faber, for instance, in the field appeared side by side with stories that merely obeyed continued that practice until it almost stopped publishing SF in the the rules of pulp fiction — rapid-fire action and little else. But 1980s. Faber’s list included Brian Aldiss and Christopher Priest, because of the magazines’ covers and pulp paper, the fiction itself both considered as major SF writers by the readers, but also was completely disregarded by critics, and the magazines marketed as major English novelists. It included William Golding, regarded as little better than comic books. People who loved who regarded four of his novels as science fiction, including Lord science fiction, though, would do anything to get hold of the latest of the Flies. issue of Astounding, Startling Stories, or Famous Fantastic Mysteries. They knew that the SF magazines were the only place Victor Gollancz became the main supplier of science fiction hard- they could find the Good Stuff. backs to British and Australian libraries, adopting their familiar yellow jackets. Go to the bookshelf and you could always reach A childhood revelation for a Gollancz yellow jacket for a guaranteed ‘good read’. I was born in 1947, in Oakleigh, a south-eastern suburb of In the US, from the 1890s onward, a stream of science fiction Melbourne. I knew nothing of the world of science fiction that I’ve writers, often trying to imitate H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, wrote just described. for a wide variety of pulp magazines. Almost no SF hardbacks were issued in America until the 1940s, and the paperback industry was I owe my initial revelation about the possibilities of science fiction only just beginning. The pulp magazines, covering every possible to the giant console radio set that sat in the corner in our type of popular fiction, were published from the late 1800s until living-room. My most vivid early SF-related memory is listening 1954. They were called pulps because they were printed on the to an ABC radio serial, The Moon Flower, by G. K. Saunders, in cheapest possible pulp paper. Their covers were usually gaudy, 1952 or 1953, as part of the Children’s Hour. In this serial, the violent, or sexy. In 1926, Hugo Gernsback established Amazing first travellers from the Earth to the Moon find no life on there Stories, the first magazine specifically devoted to what he called until they discover a tiny flower at the bottom of the deepest cave ‘scientifiction’. Other magazines sprang up, often edited by very on the Moon. I was entranced by the idea of escaping from Earth, young people, often budding authors themselves. Frederik Pohl of finding life elsewhere in the universe — the idea that one’s view edited his first SF pulp at the age of nineteen.

Load more