Cock stropping retro science fiction is making me gag.

[mrmeval]

I'm having a post gag reaction to some of the more odorous of the 1930-1960s 'science' fiction. Cock stropping young men all ready to poke with fist, gun or penis that which needs poked as long as it's a cardboard villain or moronic bimbo. This is the worst of them I think. The only moral is intelligence is for losers who make the guns for the real

Comments

[jordan179]

Which stories do you have in mind? Not only did one story vary from another very much over the period mentioned, and the general tone of science fiction varied greatly from decade to decade. Almost all the stories I run on my site, Fantastic Worlds (follow the link from my Livejournal page), are from the 1920's through 1950's and hence solidly in your period, and very few of the ones I care to run are just pure shoot-em-ups with moron heroes solving every problem they encounter through direct and thoughtless physical violence. (Some are, of course, quite violent, but involve the intelligent application of force

[mrmeval]

Some stuff from Gutenberg.

[jordan179]

Gutenberg is one of my main sources for out-of-copyright material. I'm impressed both by the high quality of some now-forgotten science fiction (two quick examples: Gallun's "The Eternal Wall" and Clark Ashton Smith's "An Adventure in Futurity") and the low quality of some of what actually got published in some Interwar Era and Golden Age science-fiction magazines.

And this is of course taken from what was published: I must assume that there were many, many, many "Eye of Argon" level stories which have mercifully vanished into oblivion. Makes me feel sorry for the slushpile readers, and also realize just why John W. Campbell, Jr. developed his famous "stable" of talented science-fiction writers (out of whom emerged such authors as Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, to name two of the greatest).

Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing your opinions of some of the classic stuff on my site:

http://fantasticworlds-jordan179.blogspot.com/

[jordan179]

This started to change in the Golden Age, where heroes were more likely to want to "get the girl" as an additional motivation. Starting in the late 1950's to early 1960's you start to see rather sleazy and violent heroes, influenced by the action pulps, and eventually by James Bond (two of the most obvious ones so influenced were Keith Laumer's "James Retief" who is a straight-out Bond expy in terms of his cynicism, and Poul Anderson's "Dominic Flandry" who is Bond if Bond were secretly philosophical while losing none of his violent edge). By 1961 in particular, there was an increasingly bleak and unsentimental approach toward women (which you can see, oddly enough, displayed well on Mad Men which is anything but science fiction), which by the late 1960's had hardened into the blatantly-exploitative misogyny of both Establishment and Counterculture