A question

[james_davis_nicoll]

Two generations ago did SF authors turn into painful self-parodies with the same frequency that they do now? Or hadn't SF been around long enough for that process to occur?

Comments

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Assuming the current gen is X, then two back we had Heinlein, Bradbury and Dick. Or do you mean the Lovecraft/Howard generation? Or Burroughs and Dunsany?

And do you mean in terms of writing or personal behavior? If the latter, I note that M.P. Shiel was plenty skeevy a century ago.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Shiel seems plenty skeevy, but how many SF authors of the Heinlein-reading generation would have ever heard of him, let alone read him?

However, he sounds like possibly-interesting pre-SF, in the vein of John Taine, who I've enjoyed quite a bit.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Well, The Purple Cloud got positive mention in Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature, and according to ISFDB received a magazine reprint in 1949 and was reprinted numerous times in the '60s and '70s.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

The 1959 movie The World, the Flesh and the Devil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World,_the_Flesh_and_the_Devil_%281959_film%29) was partly based on it as well, and the purples cloud is noted as an inspiration by pretty much anyone who did a "Last Man On Earth" story (what with it being to that nano-genre what The Time Machine is to the time travel story).

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

That's not an ending I'd have expected in a 1959 movie released by a major American studio. Did it get a lot of play in the South?

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I would have expected that movie to be about the 1929 book of the same title by J. D. Bernal (of Bernal Sphere fame.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Desmond_Bernal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_sphere

And, of course, the second link there has one of the paintings James recently posted!

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

H*bb*rd went from light, hit-or-miss adventure stories to god-awful horse-choker unreadability. Alfred Bester's fiction after his return to sf often reads like Bester parody. Heinlein certainly got hit by the brain-eater, and Asimov spent the last years of his life undermining the reception of his Golden Age work.

The biggest writers of the pre-Campbellian era mostly either died or retired out of the field never to return.

[andrew barton (from livejournal.com)]

Alternatively, it may be that the evidence of past self-parodying wasn't written down anywhere that we could find it now. I mean, imagine if Usenet had been around in the '50s--perhaps there'd be a post from some particularly strident Cold Warrior about how if there was a magic button in front of him that would kill every leftist in the world, he would push it. Like a shot.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Even if pushing it didn't net him 1 million bucks?

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

If all the leftists are dead, then everyone can make a million bucks before lunch, because the socialists are no longer hindering the makers!

(Sadly, I suspect there are plenty of places I could post the above statement, and Poe's Law would kick in.)

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

Isaac Newton wasted most of his life on alchemy after doing the calculus and physics stuff in his early twenties.

[avram]

That and costumed crime-fighting.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

And going to another world where he tried to create a perfect destiny. Busy guy.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Newton's costumed crime-fighting was well-documented in this world. The other, not so much.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

After doing the calculus and physics stuff, I would have allowed that Newton's remaining years were his to waste.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

He also did two (short) terms as an MP, and served for over two decades as Master of the Mint.

[(Anonymous)]

I believe he spent even more time on religion than on alchemy - he was an Arian.

His alchemical work might have been of value if he had published his results, which were uniformly negative. However, he disliked writing and detested controversy.

William Hyde

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

A couple generations back, the Golden Age authors weren't very old, but I recall that their predecessors Manly Wade Wellman and Jack Willamson had reached the status of elders with considerable dignity, and were well-respected.

[(Anonymous)]

OK, so maybe the counterhypothesis, is that we[*] have gotten more disrespectful?

[*]: - for any of various possible values of "we".

TSM_in_Toronto

[(Anonymous)]

Superficially, your post here is about The Brain-Eater, right?

But maybe the reason for the mystery of it, isn't that it's SF-literary, but rather is that
you aren't trying to find its larger context, within all of culture / history.

Plenty of things become their opposites, given enough time: a USAnian political party that
was founded primarily on expressly anti-slavery, "am I not a man and a brother" grounds,
becomes over time the (cough) racism-free Republican Party we all know & love today; or,
as was pointed out elsewhere in this forum just a few hours ago, Newton over time changes
from "Founder of Science", to delusional apocalypse-predicting alchemist crank; or, say,
"Communist" China eventually evolves the point where (earlier this year IIRC) one of its
spokescreatures criticises the USA for the latter's socialist welfare statism.

Maybe The Brain-Eater is just Time?

Maybe it's just that The Gods of Irony[*] are always taking inventory?

TSM_in_Toronto

[*]: The Gods of Irony only exist if you do not Believe in Them.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I have been wondering how the Greek pantheon somehow fails to include a deity of irony. Hubris and Nemesis and Ate kind of edge up to the idea, but don't really pin it down. (I may just be ignorant enough not to be spotting the obvious one, but at least one friend with reasonable qualifications in the Greco-Roman mythology said he couldn't find one that quite got Irony down.)

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Momus comes kind of close.