For much of the twentieth century, until television, pulp fiction was a major form of entertainment, offered in pulp magazines that usually bore garish covers, like the one above, to attract attention on the newsstand.
Most pulp fiction magazines focused on a single genre of story, such as Westerns or adventure or detective stories. Science fiction as we know it today was born and nurtured in the pulp magazines.
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Playlist:
Fanfare
Opening War Theme
“Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from The Planets
Composed in 1916 by Gustav Holst. Public domain.
Closing War Theme
Except when otherwise indicated, the contents of this podcast are © and ℗ 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 by Mark Painter, all rights reserved. Some music and sound effects used by arrangement with Pond 5.
Great epsiode as always! I’ve always been a bit shy about writing in, but as a fellow sci-fi fan I figured to give it a go.
It gives me some new perspectives on a question I have been thinking about this year: Why do we write sci-fi? What is the intent of the writer when telling these amazing stories?
This question was prompted when I read the foreword of Ursula K. Le Guin’s foreword to ‘Left Hand of Darkness’. There she posits that sci-fi is merely an anology to the real, current world we live in and serves only to say something about this world. She writes, “All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor […] If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words.”
This got me wondering if all sci-fi is written as metaphor. Luckily my question was answered in the book I read directly afterwards, Liu Cixin’s ‘The Three-body Problem’. In the afterword of the English translation: “I do not use my fiction as a disguised way to critize the reality of the present. I feel that the greatest appeal of science fiction is the creation of numerous imaginary worlds outside of reality.”
So there we have two different views. The podcast gave me one more distinct view: Sci-fi is about science communication and education. The other views outlined in the podcast align quite closely to Liu I think.
This does make me wonder: Why do you write sci-fi? Can you find yourself in one of these views?
(I’m a binge listener so I tend to be a ‘little’ late to the party.)
My answer is: All of the above. 🙂