Ed Speaks

Hey, Watchers;

My Great-Uncle Thom died last year. He was 117 years old. He grew up in the mid Twen-Cen, back before even fission power, when people thought rising sea levels only happened with the tides. If anyone’d said that The Malpensa Incident would have sunk half of Italy, and lowered The Alps by a coupla thousand feet, they’d have been locked up, (they didn’t medicate the behaviourally different then).

He grew up when people read words, rather than Picts. A few cavemen like me still can, but even I don’t find it easy. Donna, you show her a line of “writing”, she wouldn’t know what to do with it – and she’s top ten percentile.

Among the effects he left me were some stasis-sealed copies of books and magazines. They were the mid Twen-Cen’s equivalent of the Frame. These things are brittle and yellowing within their transparent wrap -- your copy of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction would have been printed on pulped wood. Open one up and, the whole thing falls apart in your hands before you can re-seal it and freeze the molecular structure.

I opened one up. Galaxy Magazine for February 1952, features amongst other items, an Editorial by H.L. Gold. Plus there’s Conditionally Human by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a short story, Dr. Kometevsky's Day, by Fritz Leiber, and an article, L. Sprague de Camp’s Where Were We?

Never heard of any of them.

The sad thing is that de Camp and Leiber, were early Grand Masters, but their format was paper, their heyday pre-Trek. Miller was a giant of his time, but passed quickly into obscurity, despite huge contemporary success; he was too much of his time, and reads like a fossil record now.

There was also part 2 of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.

That will be known to Dram-Fans: it was on Channel 9’s Classic Drams a few years ago. I booked myself the part of Ben Reich, and threw myself into it – it was great to completely immerse myself in such a challenging part! I wasn’t sure about the costume, but Eatons Direct were adamant it would’ve been futuristic to the Twen-Cen.

The others who’ve booked parts in it said they enjoyed it much more than last month’s Dune, which in it’s day was much bigger than The Demolished Man, but until now has become a forgotten epic, it’s view out of sorts with this century’s unease (too many public terror releases on Le Metro and the Subway) with hallucinogenic drugs.

It’s interesting, the attitudes in the pages. The old USA was one of two global super-powers, and the stories are products of their time.

Most Science-Fiction (or Sci-Fi) as Trek Fiction was called then (DtVS and Angel would have been classed as Fantasy, which was derided by the laser-spanner brigade) worked on the principle of “extrapolation” which took a trend, and exaggerated it to it’s logical extreme. So consumerism was the subject of The Midas Plague, a couple of years later; the constant terror of Armageddon was mirrored in many stories.

SF was a Caliban’s mirror of it’s time.

A year later, a hundred years ago almost to this day, the first Hugo Award was awarded to The Demolished Man. A dozen or so years after The Demolished Man won it, Dune also won a Hugo, and the first Nebula Award for Best Novel. So it says on the antique cover of the ‘book’.

Hugo? Nebula? Well, they were the Roddenberry’s, Whedon’s, and Greenwalt’s of their day. In fact, the Whedon directly supplanted the Nebula in 2036, when Asimov’s, the last of the hard-copy magazines was absorbed by the Trek Empire (no booing from the back! We’re all big enough for all kinds of Franction to get along – even with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise…).

“So what’s with all this rambling, Ed?” You cry. Well, dear Watcher, the people who wrote for these magazines, thought they’d go on forever.

Tee-Vee, the forerunner of today’s Drams, was still in it’s infancy. The screens were flat, and there was no colour, only monochrome. Tee-Vee was dismissed by one prominent SciFi editor: “It’ll never catch on. It requires too much concentration.”

A few visionaries even dreamt of “mainstream” respectability, perhaps some famous flim or tee-vee director reverently adapting The Left Hand of Darkness (another of Thom’s “paperbacks”) into a serious yet commercially successful epic, or an all-star cast for The Foundation™ Saga. Mainstream was what they called the real world back then.

Of course – with hindsight, it’s always ‘of course’-- when they met the mainstream, it ate them, like the Giants were by the Acacpulco Sharks.

Fantasy, with it’s closer links to the real world, fared much better, as it lined up more closely with the tone of the New Millenium. Fantasy is now The Mainstream.

When Trek, and Star Wars, the other proto franchise, started to eat into their core audience in the last quarter of the Twen-Cen, the Sci-Fi camp split into two groups; those who thought that they would simply continue -- whether as they were, or by moving onto the Web -- and those who saw themselves driven to extinction.

Neither of them foresaw that the most talented of any group always prosper, and would end up working alongside, and within the new formats. So Analog was absorbed by Trek, and we absorbed their long-time competitor, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. We still have many of the features, such as Plumage from Pegasus, from Joss Daniels, Media, and of course Curiosities – which this month is Nick Winterbourne’s neglected 2009 novel, Strange Flesh. Starting in the aftermath of the Malpensa Incident, it traces the rise of the basilisk Malforms, the cannibal zombies who prey on them, as well as the everyman (you and I) who stand by and watch it happen. As well as that, we have a re-run of an early classic by that same, now neglected – wrongly neglected – Fritz Leiber, Four Ghosts in Hamlet even transliterated into Pict! Plus Coming Attractions for your d-light.

The paper dinosaur’s final demise came with the advent of Dram in the early part of this Cen: the main weakness of tee-vee, and even vee-ar (an early attempt at Dram) was that it only appealed to sight and sound. Once Dram could give it’s participants taste, touch and smell, and even a modicum of free will, print was doomed, though they held out almost as long as tee-vee.

By then, Great Uncle Thom had locked himself away in his cubicle hotel for weeks on end, overwhelmed by the pace of change. He would spend days trying to write. No, that’s not fair. He did write.

The trouble was no one wanted to hear what he had to say. He wrote in glorious, antique text, never realizing that fewer than 5% of his potential audience could even understand what he was trying to tell them.

He refused Pict: “If people want pictures, they can buy comags!”

Even if he had tranliterated to Pict, of course, his refusal to embrace The Franchises and their subsidaries would have limited his appeal to a few dozen, maybe a few hundred people at most. He wanted to be an original. So no compromising for him.

Great Uncle Thom had the option to Upload at the end, but life was too different, had changed too much for him to understand, let alone want to stay immortal in hyper-format.

We will survive, because we will embrace change. Even if it means periodic Cortical Hoovers to strip the crap from our memories and create some space, we’ll survive.

We mustn’t make the mistake Great Uncle Thom and his beloved Sci-Fi made.

Ed Speaks yesterday

Ed Speaks last week