Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 11:57:22 -0500
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: time travel
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

Ted White wrote:

> If you've really read all of Heinlein, *and* you've read his contemporaries,
> you know that *all* SF from the '40s and most of it from the '50s can be
> described as "com[ing] under the category of 'puzzle stories', little
> intellectual pieces like mystery short-stories, with a prize for the winner and
> not a whole lot of characterization."

All?  Even in "Astounding", that citadel of the "puzzle story", there
were quite a lot that didn't come under this heading.  A lot of
Heinlein, for example.  Get out of JW Campbell's orbit, and you find all
sorts of stuff, like "The Martian Chronicles".

The 1940s bad stuff was mostly shoot-em-ups and monsters.  No real
"puzzles" unless you count "tomato surprise" endings, which Kit may
actually be talking about.  The stuff I think of as "puzzles" was mostly
1950s and 1960s, with Christopher Anvil, Hal Clement, and Poul Anderson
doing real "need to solve this" stories, with definite science and math.

I could make a case that "all SF from the 1940s and 1950s was actually
allegories about totalitarianism or nuclear war".  Not a good case, but
a case. ("Everything is related to the numbers 5, 17, or 23, if you
think about it hard enough.")

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."