{"id":37277,"date":"2017-02-15T02:00:22","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T07:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=37277"},"modified":"2017-02-13T09:58:49","modified_gmt":"2017-02-13T14:58:49","slug":"from-the-golden-age-of-sf-to-the-chalk-age-of-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/02\/15\/from-the-golden-age-of-sf-to-the-chalk-age-of-today\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Golden Age of SF to the Chalk Age of today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an interesting contrarian take on the history of SF: that the &#8220;Golden Age&#8221; of Campbellian SF was actually the end of the true Golden Age &#8230; the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.castaliahouse.com\/the-great-myth-of-the-golden-age-of-science-fiction\/\" target=\"_blank\">era of the pulps<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Here\u2019s the Great Myth of the Golden Age of Science Fiction:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cScience Fiction sucked until the coming of John W. Campbell and the Big Three \u2014 Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Together they swept away the puerile garbage of the Pulps and brought about Science Fiction\u2019s Golden Age.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is, not to put too fine a point on it, utter tosh. Bunk. Hokum.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s horseshit.<\/p>\n<p>The coming of Campbell and co. did not save or elevate the Fantasy and Science Fiction genre. Before them, it was already popular and widely read. In addition to the Pulps, there were novels, radio serials, and (eventually) cinema serials.<\/p>\n<p>Nor was F&#038;SF at that time a literary ghetto, a genre thought fit only for teenage boys and pencil-necked geeks. Men and women, adults and children \u2014 all read the Pulps. Some F&#038;SF magazines were aimed solely at the adult audience.<\/p>\n<p>It took the twin assaults of Campbell and the Socialist-Libertine wing of the Futurians to turn the mainstream off of SF. And, despite periodic attempts to revive SF, it remains a ghetto today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s an interesting contrarian take on the history of SF: that the &#8220;Golden Age&#8221; of Campbellian SF was actually the end of the true Golden Age &#8230; the era of the pulps: Here\u2019s the Great Myth of the Golden Age of Science Fiction: \u201cScience Fiction sucked until the coming of John W. Campbell and the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[86,477,85],"class_list":["post-37277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-criticism","tag-magazines","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Hf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37277"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37277\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37278,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37277\/revisions\/37278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}