The Way We Were

Friends (Romans, Countrymen, Dragon otherkin!) I’ve found Antro the Lifegiver by John Degan, but I haven’t finished it.

Partly it’s going slow because of my not seeing as well as I did in the eighties, and having trouble reading the teeny print of a 60s paperback. (I have new glasses on order. They haven’t arrived yet. And my astigmatism is way off.) I prefer books on the kindle, because they allow me to lie to myself about being older than dirt, I guess. I can put the print at six or seven and never tell anyone (except you guys now.) I mean, eventually it will be at nine and I’ll get a word per page. Maybe they’ll make massive kindles then. Or maybe there will be robotic eyes or something.

Anyway, there might also be the slight thing of the new Dresden files having dropped today, and — um… — anyway, so….

One thing that has occurred to me while reading the beginning is that the science fiction of the mid century is almost all infused with a heavy military subtext. Even when they are not strictly military — like Star Trek — the structure is military and there is a bearing and a behavior to the people that are more military than not.

What do I mean they’re not military in Star Trek? Well, it’s not Starship Troopers style mil sf.

Like most mid-century sf, it’s exploration, but the exploration corps has a military structure.

In that sense, it’s actually pretty interesting, because the earliest, pre or just after WWI sf pulp is the individual genius or group of them, or the lone scientist having a breakthrough. But by the mid century is exploration groups in military format, with ranks…

And there’s something about the way people interact that bespeak military experience.

Oh, I don’t mean there aren’t exceptions. Of course there are. But the basic, most generic, pulp sf is people in vaguely military arrangements.

And it occurred to me this made perfect sense. Most of the authors writing in the fifties and sixties were in fact veterans and likely WWII veterans.

But even those who hadn’t fought for whatever reason, had probably grown up watching World War II movies. As did I, btw, and reading WWII biographies and analysis.

This is because — even though to me at the time it seemed like ancient history, since most of the movies were from when the world was in black and white — I was born less than twenty years after the end of World War Two. This, of course, affected the generation before me.

Not just the various analysis of the war and the embrace or repulsion of war as a method, but the discipline, structure and experience of the war itself.

So the default, low effort writing had military or quasi-military groups.

Equally logically, that is no longer true, unless you’re specifically writing mil sf.

What do I mean by this?

Well, I was thinking there are many things a generation — or two, or three — think it’s “natural” but it’s not. It’s the result of when the genre took off. Or of what was happening in the world at the time.

Now that we live more than say four to five decades, at least a substantial portion of us, and the cultural influence of generations is taking way longer to clear from the culture, it’s important to remember this. It’s important to remember that the circumstances of our childhood are not necessarily more “real” or better than today’s.

We were born in a particular place in history. And it came freighted with baggage of — for it — recent events.

Very different, yes, but then our generation was very different in upbringing from the previous.

It’s important to step back and look at things with a curious eye. Not all difference is wrong. And things change with time. Right now it seems very likely that whoever lands on Mars will be a civilian employee of a privately held corporation. And heaven only knows who the first colonists will be.

None of that matters. Those are details. It’s the will to go, to reach ever farther, to take humanity out of the one single place where we exist and to the stars, so we won’t go extinct by accident or due to the vagaries of climate and circumstance that matters.

Whatever form that pushing forward takes.

Jeff Greason once told he always wondered if the form the expeditions to Mars took was the result of German influence on the space program. And that’s likely true. But it was also a quintessential midcentury project. “If we can defeat the Nazis, we can put a man on the moon.” — Note this was later weaponized into “if we put a man on the moon we can defeat poverty.” None of which made sense. — and the idea that big government and its projection of force were the way to accomplish big things.

In a way this was also the result of the concentration of industry and news and… well, everything that reached its apex mid century.

We live in different times now. In fact so different it’s shocking how far we came in such a relatively short time.

And it doesn’t matter. In the end what matters is getting off this rock. By any means necessary.