There’s another problem with the, “Golden ages is 12,” set:
Think about the kids who were reading Tarzan, Conan, and Frodo at the age of 12. Those are some ludicrously high achievers. (For the record, I’m a pretty smrt dude who was hella precocious at 12, and I tried and bailed on all three of those at that age. I needed another five years if seasoning before I could appreciate them.) It’s like saying the golden age of smoking or drag racing is 12. Sure, some kids get into it that early, but those are outliers.
Taking that into consideration, there’s room for some intersting psycho-analysis of what typically happens to brilliant 12 year olds as they age. They have disdain for adults who enjoy material they have ‘outgrown’, they never really get that intelligence and wisdom are two different things, and tend to embrace the mindset of, ‘if it’s popular it’s crap’, too. Combine that with a deep rooted desire to have their ‘secret kingship’ acknowledged by the masses and you get a group that is really susceptible to the idea that their vision of sf/f is so much better than than that of the old masters.
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When you say “old masters” do you mean the pulp masters? So, the idea is that adolescent rebellion can lead to adopting more,um, experimental literature rather than the old pulp? I think the attitude you describe of precocious 12 year olds can push away from the old masters as you describe but, the same impulse can push toward old masters depending of the social circumstances and nature of the child (or, both). For example, I think the trope of the adolescent nerd in love with Russian Lit is well established. That kid is precocious but, also wants to appear more adult. Another similar child without the need to be seen as adult but, still seeking “secret kingship” might well choose the pulps as their otaku focus. Myself, at 12 was grinding through both tons of pulp and stuff I viewed as edgy and avant garde. The key, as you point out is secret knowledge rather than particular type of secret knowledge.
Adventure (at least in the Pulp sense) is intrinsically about morality: Good vs. Evil.
“Plausible science is the most important thing about Science Fiction” is inherently non-moral, morally inert, because science and technology are mere tools. The morality of technology lies in how it is used.*
Intentional or not, Campbell’s push for SCIENCE opened the door for the non-Christian and anti-Christian elements of Fandom, but also the Bohemian and libertine factions (the New York clique, who became the core of WorldCon). The inherent morality of Good vs Evil was swept away and replaced with moral relativism (something Leftists and libertines both needed before they could sell their belief systems).
As well, the lie of Leftism, as formulated by Marx, was that Leftism Is Science and Science is Leftism. Leftists pushed the veneration of science because they truly believed that proposition.
Libertines had, in certain areas of psychology and sociology, explicit support for the notion that libertinism and sexual license were scientific and ethical, and so pushed the veneration of science because that supported their propaganda efforts.
The push to sideline Adventure and focus on Science may not have been begun by those two factions, but they certainly aided it and coopted it for their own purposes.
*99.999% of the time. There are, as always, exceptions.
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“As well, the lie of Leftism, as formulated by Marx, was that Leftism Is Science and Science is Leftism.”
Pascal, Newton and Decartes were the inventors of our understanding of modern science and all were deeply faithful.
This isn’t an argument against your comments, which strike to the heart of it by the way, but a negative proof against the lie that science is somehow faithless Marxism.
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Not sure you understood the point.
Marx was the man who invented (and popularized) the concept that Leftism was Scientific, and hence inevitable. It is a lie.
I said nothing about the faith of scientists, I’m talking specifically about Marx’s lie, and why that lead Leftists to venerate science itself.
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Well my twitter is forever gone so I may as well shed some of my rules for engaging with whom i see as allies and kind of heroes really.
“Not sure you understood the point.”
I do. I really really do.
“Marx was the man who invented (and popularized) the concept that Leftism was Scientific, and hence inevitable. It is a lie.”
Agreed. Nietzsche is in there as well with Marx, but still totally agree.
“I said nothing about the faith of scientists, I’m talking specifically about Marx’s lie, and why that lead Leftists to venerate science itself.”
No you didn’t. I did, and I did it to illustrate the world of science that existed before Marx did what he did. A world of thought and reason and discovery that allowed for those things to exist in harmony with faith rather then in Marx invented eternal conflict.
Saying that the very inventors and first appliers of the scientific method had no conflict with between faith and science as the Marxists do is important I think.
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It seems I misunderstood your comment, then. Apologies.
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In my opinion, the concept of the Golden Age of Science Fiction is Twelve thing is mostly not about that specific age but, that people’s tastes often solidify at puberty. So, if they aren’t hooked on SF by that age, then it is much harder to hook them on it later. It’s a marketing strategy.
Though, I totally agree, that the pulps were not written for 12 year olds. There is a similar idea that comics where written for kids too but, in the same era as the pulps there were lots of comics written for adults both as strips and books. Heck, the comic code came about for fear that comics written for adults would be read by kids.
“It’s almost like some sort of project was begun some time around 1940”
Asimov was a nihilist.
He was science fiction’s Gmork for The Nothing.
Foundation is a roadmap to the Will to Power that reduces culture and society to a set of levers to be manipulated.
I, Robot reduces morality into three program loops that can be written with 1s and 0s no heart no soul no humanity needed.
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I have to agree with this. Philosophy and treatment of human collection in something like “Blindsight” is almost a natural evolution of Asimov’s outlook.
On some level, I actually understand the “Golden Age is 12” argument: you tend to have fond memories of the stuff from your childhood, so it seems like everything from later is going down the tubes.
However, I ultimately disagree with the “Golden Age is 12” view because it fails to account for changes in culture, which affects the content of the stories. In my view, there is no such thing as a “Golden Age” of sci-fi/fantasy, just different philosophical or cultural milieus (However, I will go on record to say that I dislike the current ultra-left milieu.)
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“On some level, I actually understand the “Golden Age is 12” argument: you tend to have fond memories of the stuff from your childhood, so it seems like everything from later is going down the tubes.”
This is similar to what I took away from that assertion. It’s probably why the original Star Wars trilogy will always be the peak of the franchise for me.
Diving back into my wordpress account and get a gut punch of…
well
Brackett is twelve
=P
“I’ll assume most of us have read Leigh Brackett, have greatly enjoyed The Long Tomorrow, and are also repelled by the childish pulpiness of most of her short fiction.”
That narrative, they sure love to cling to it.
Just doing a little digging…
“Golden Age of Science Fiction Is 12 …because that’s a particularly great age to encounter the genre.”
http://fancyclopedia.org/golden-age-of-science-fiction-is-12
Peter Graham originally wrote “The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve” in *Void* around 1957.
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.arts.sf.fandom/2006-04/msg02488.html
So the phrase has been around for sixty years or so.
Eh… I think that saying how classic pulp was always about Good vs Evil is oversimplifying it. It was always fashionable to claim that about pulp, and about early SFF in general, from the age of Moorcock to the age of “New Weird”. One new weird author who I actually enjoy, unlike the bulk of them, once wrote this:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/718981-poetry-restores-language-by-breaking-it-and-i-think-that
which encapsulates this attitude and is also utter BS. Nobody who actually read, for example, Zothique tales or even some of Howard tales, could claim that Moorcock was first author who “freed” fantasy from morality and from having struggle of Good vs Evil at its core. It is just their typical ignorance and attempt to make the past look simpler and inferior. (second part of that quote is also pointless and impossibly broadly defined, which is really reflective of how new weird authors define their genre and “importance”)
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Good vs Evil isn’t simplistic, at least in the context of a Christian understanding of it, as it of necessity includes the notion that all men are sinners, all have fallen short and need redemption. Even the greatest paladins have sinned. All people are “grey” in this sense. What matters is the direction you’re headed in and what you fight for.
Conan is a thief, a drunkard, a womanizer, a brawler. Yet he still frequently fights against Evil: an undead lich, monsters from the stars, vile magicians. Unwillingly, inadvertently, yet he fights.
I do not say all pulp is the tale of virtuous Christians against fell Evils, far from it, but ADVENTURE is the tale of struggle, and 99% of the time (there are exceptions) that puts it in the vicinity of Good vs Evil. Adventure demands of its protagonists courage, perseverance, and valor, and those are virtuous virtues, and hence Good. Adventure demands heroes.
It is a subversion, an inversion, to wrote a story where Evil is right and triumphs, and that was not (for the most part) the stories in the pulps. Even today, the pulpiest works are Good vs Evil: Luke Skywalker, Indiana Jones, and John McClane.
Perhaps I have inadvertently overstated the case, but it is clear that stripping Adventure from SF stories lead to (or allowed) the rise of moral relativism and eventually nihilism (and worse). With no need for heroes, SF stories were free to be unheroic.
I think, actually, it’s less about good vs evil as something more fundamentally rooted in the protagonist: heroic protagonists need to have principles, and the nature of heroic tales is that the protagonist’s principles are challenged – there comes (at least one) moment where the hero needs to choose between cleaving to the principle and something else. Choosing to stay true may (almost always does) mean the hero has a harder row to hoe, but in the end “being true” is what saves the day and drives the hero through to victory.
That’s easiest to do with an established and explicit good/evil dichotomy, but I don’t think it’s strictly needed. All that’s needed is something important and fundamental to the character of the protagonist to be presented as virtuous, and for it to be opposed by the antagonist in some way that makes the hero have to *choose* to stay true – preferably at the risk of disastrous consequence.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction is NOT Twelve
Saturday , 7, January 2017 Jeffro Appendix N, Comment 26 CommentsThere you have it, straight from honest to goodness pulp author Hugh B. Cave.
This really does get to the heart of the matter, too. This is the exact point where the scam was played. Because when people look at the Appendix N list this is their first line of attack when they want to disqualify it as having any significance. It’s loaded with pulp stories… therefore… it can only be a list of things that Gygax liked when he was a kid! And it’s just so obvious. Because this line about pulps and twelve year old boys goes back decades. Everyone takes it for granted.
And I mean everyone. I’m not even in the literati set and looking at the tabletop game designers of the seventies blew my mind. Why would a grown man like John Eric Holmes, a professor and designer of the very first role-playing game “basic set”– why would he be so into some weird series by Edgar Rice Burroughs that I’d never heard about…? Why would he take the time to write three Pellucidar pastiche novels…?
If someone had told me that I really should take a look at Tarzan– really go back and read it– I’d have thought they were crazy. If SFFAudio runs a letter from the old Weird Tales by a grandmother raving about how much of a kick she gets from reading their creepy stories… I think man, that’s really weird. People in the seventies simply didn’t behave like I thought they “ought” to behave. People in the twenties and thirties…? Even less so!
It’s almost like some sort of project was begun some time around 1940… and it only really came into its full force around 1980 or so. The details are sketchy and I’m sure that every specific innovation and transition seemed like a good idea at the time and that everyone involved had some combination of good intentions and plausible dependability. But the fact is… a cultural divorce was effected.
And smug rehetoric insinuating that pulp stories are juvenile and that people that like them are weenies is a big part of how it was accomplished.