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For new readers of science-fiction these have the stuff that laid the groundwork of today's work, they're the stories that were meant for young imaginations, for people who wanted to think about the world they had to build in the years to come. Along about sixteen to nineteen, a young man has to decide what is, for him, the Job That Needs Doing and get ready to get in and pitch.
Read the standard boy's literature of forty years ago; tales of Crusaders who were always right, and Saracens who were always wrong. Life's much simpler in a thatched cottage than in a dome on the airless Moon, easier to understand when the Villains are all pure black-hearted villains, and the Heroes are all pure White Souled Heroes. Just look how simple history is compared with science-fiction!
Here is a science-fiction classic, as exciting and ingenious as only a master of super-science could write. When RAY CUMMINGS took leave of this planet early in 1957, the world of modern science-fiction lost one of its genuine founding fathers.
It's simple but is it good? These early science-fiction tales explored the Universe; they were probings, speculations, as to where we could go. What we could do. They had a sweep and reach and exuberance that belonged. They were fun, too.... John W. Campbell, Jr. Mountainside, N.J. April, 1953
At the end of the room, lighted by the wide windows, was a long desk which was really a writer's assembly line, with typewriter, reference-books, stacks of notes and manuscripts, and a big dictionary on a stand beside a comfortable swivel-chair. "What are you writing?" Rand asked. "Science-fiction. I do a lot of stories for the pulps," Pierre told him.
He's better and better able to do the important work the world needs done, but in learning to do it, he's necessarily lost some of the broad and enthusiastic scope he once had. These are early stories of the early days of science-fiction. Radar hadn't been invented; we missed that idea.
Following the lead of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, Cummings successfully bridged the gap between the early dawning of science-fiction in the last decades of the Nineteenth Century and the full flowering of the field in these middle decades of the Twentieth. Born in 1887, Cummings acquired insight into the vast possibilities of future science by a personal association with Thomas Alva Edison.
Pierre was a Marine captain, invalided home after being wounded on Peleliu; he writes science-fiction for the pulps. Karen has a little general-antique business in Rosemont.
In 1930, the only audience for science-fiction was among those who were still young enough in spirit to be willing to hope and speculate on a new and wider future and in 1930 that meant almost nothing but teen-agers.
So science-fiction has a very real function to the teen-agers; it presents varying ideas of what the world in which he will live his adult life will be interested in. This is 1953. My son will graduate in 1955. The period of his peak earning power should be when he's about forty to sixty about 1970, say, to 1990.
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