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FUTURE_DECLINE
September 22, 2006
January 16, 2007
The 2006 Burning Man event had
a (largely ignored) theme of Actually, there was a certain
"The Future: Hope and Fear", so amount of prefunctory observance,
I came up with a small bit of mostly in the form of nods to
performance art: the "theme" in artist statements
and so on.
I hung around in different
places, reading the
September 1952 issue of
"FUTURE Science Fiction"
I choose this particular magazine for the
title, of course, but the particular issue
I selected for it's cover, a picture of a
blond woman in a blue and gold bikini-like
outfit, wearing some sort of veil, running The veil, according to
away from an erupting volcano and a flying the story, was a spiffy,
saucer. far-future space helmet,
That was supposed to remind one of
Burning Man fashion and settings. A friend looked at
what I was reading
and commented:
"Is that a real one?!"
He was expecting,
maybe, McSweeny's?
I decided to read this one He was impressed to hear
cover-to-cover (though I that the letters column
didn't finish it off at included a member of a
Burning Man). Theosophical group,
arguing with L. Sprague
I was left with the strong sense that deCamp about Madame
this was a weak issue... or perhaps Blavatsky.
an example of a magazine in decline.
Robert A. Lowndes was a respected
editor, but this is one of the And by then,
second or third rank magazines, _Astounding_
with extremely low pay rates. was established
as the center
Few people would publish here if of the action
they could publish elsewhere, and for more serious
over time the problem becomes work.
more pronounced...
BLACK_MASKS
So this is not just an
example of a reviled genre
magazine, but a minor
example:
This is a look in a
dark corner within DARK_CORNER
a dark corner...
"The Gods Fear Love"
This issue begins and by Gene Hunter (No, I don't believe
ends with stories of that name either.)
sex infecting the
asexual. "Facts of Life"
by Dave Dryfoos (That's a little
The seduction of the innocent, hard, too.)
where the innocent is played
by a humanity evolved into
Spock-like intellectual rigor,
and the seducer is exotic
barbarian "aliens" (of the FORBIDDEN_PLANET
familiar humanoid variety).
Note: Forbidden Planet was not out
until '56, four years later.
My guess: these were all
idealizations of the
plight of US servicemen
during WW II.
The "South Pacific"
scenario (1947 on
None of the stories are Broadway).
anywhere near hard sf.
HARD_PROBLEMS
Most are "translations":
conventional fiction
retold in an invented One of them is clearly
exotic locale on another a version of "The
planet.. Treasure of Sierra Madre"
"Final Barrier by
This issue has a quite long Alan E. Nourse
letter column...
It was free content after all,
though in retrospect we can recognize
that there's a sense of community
there that is probably at the core Return readership.
of what these magazines were really Sticky eyes.
about.
One of the letters complains about a
lack of science, a lack of a focus on
the future in FUTURE -- but the
examples of what he likes are all
movies:
"When Worlds Collide",
"The Day the Earth Stood Still",
"Rocketship XM"...
he even mentions the old 30s Flash
Gordon serials as being far superior
to the science fantasy published in
"Future".
Even as far back as 1952, there
were already people for whom the
printed word was a secondary medium.
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