The pulps didn't just usher in the mass appeal of science-fiction,
They also changed detective stories forever,
and in turn,
detective stories changed science-fiction.
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Many of the writers who wrote for Astounding Stories, Weird Tales, or Amazing Stories,
also wrote non-sci-fi stories for other pulps
just to make a living,
and many of the great writers of the following generation devoured all of it,
sci-fi or no.
Thus the great transition occurring in the detective pulps of the time began to exert its influence on sci-fi.
For you see: detective fiction, too, was rebelling against its European roots.
Detective stories had been dominated by European – and especially English – writers.
People like Agatha Christie,
Arthur Conan Doyle,
Wilkie Collins,
and, later, Dorothy Sayers.
And while all of them turned out excellent work,
much of it had this Victorian sensibility to it:
Murders were puzzles not tragedies,
and they were to be solved by people of good breeding in their spare time.
They weren't sordid affairs.
Rarely did we travel to the seedy underworld.
Rather, murder was mostly committed by individuals with no background in crime at all!
But pulps were American,
so American writers decided to bring an American flavour to the detective novel,
to take it out of the English countryside,
and put it down right in the steaming heart of the American city.
They put the sex and the drugs and the violence back into murder.
they changed the heroes
from being a effete dilettantes to being people down on their luck,
getting by solving crime because they had closed all other paths off to themselves.
They brought in self-destructive heroes,
heroes who drank too much,
who gambled,
who were motivated as much by money and sex
as they were by solving the case.
They brought us men of action.
Men who could think,
but would as readily solve their problems with their fists as with their brains.
Men who wouldn't hesitate;
who would trust their guts
and then just do.
It was this revolution that came thundering full force into science-fiction.
As we move on to the Golden Age of sci-fi, we are gonna see much less of the scientist,
the emotional romantic hero, or the reserved gentleman,
and much more of the man of action.
Between [Robert E.] Howard and the hard-boiled stories of detective pulp,
the hero who drives the action and propels the plot by instant decision-making
became the norm for science fiction.
At least, they did until a few decades later, when people looked back and realized that,
though sci-fi had successfully lifted the action-oriented hero from detective pulps,
many of these sci-fi stories had missed the important element –
the piece that Raymond Chandler felt made hard-boiled fiction –
The realism.
It's from wrestling with this
that we will get one of the biggest questions in science-fiction:
Does human nature change?
And I don't mean that that's just one of the big questions that a science fiction book might explore.
I mean it's one of the fundamental questions that any science-fiction author HAS to answer
when writing works that take place more than a few years into the future.
Because it determines so much about the books we write.
Writers like Asimov, or creators like Gene Roddenberry, decided that Humankind would grow!
That we would be able to put aside much of our animal-like nature and form societies much less motivated by petty things
like greed, sloth, pride, or fleshly desire!
But, when you look at the weird, damaged worlds of Frank Herbert or Cordwainer Smith,
you see authors making the opposite determination:
That tens of thousands of years into the future,
we are still going to be driven by the same things that drive us today.
How an author wrestles with that question,
how they answer it for themselves, will determine the societies they create,
and thus the actions that can take place within their work.
It's what separates [Herbert's] Dune from [Asimov's] Foundation,
even though the two – when you boil them down – actually have so much in common.
Hard-boiled Noir was about the here-and-now; the gritty present
It was about returning realism to stories that were supposed to be contemporary,
stories that were about a world that the author at least THOUGHT they knew.
But it left sci-fi to ask:
How much of the present is who we are innately,
and how much of it is the society we've created?
A question which still echoes through our science-fiction.
But we also need to talk about the other thing that cheap paper and mechanical printing brought to the world,
and that is: comics!
We'll talk about them at length when we come back to our deeper dive on all these topics,
but science-fiction and early comics have a weird symbiotic relationship.
Two of the most successful early comics were Buck Rogers, and Flash Gordon.
Buck Rogers literally came out of the pages of Amazing Stories to be licensed for a comic,
which in turn bred its competitor: Flash Gordon.
These comics lifted the exotic locales, the neat gadgets, and the extended action sequences of pulp sci-fi
without concerning themselves too much with the bigger questions that science-fiction raised.
They did however do one thing: They cemented the look of sci-fi.
They took the Art Deco aesthetic that Hugo Gernsback loved so much and just ran with it.
Everything in them had giant flanges and swooping curves, and no concern whatsoever, given to practicality.
In turn, this look and feel has influenced mainstream comics for generations.
Wacky costumes, tights, capes, bright colours – these were all a staple of the early science-fiction comics.
Coming out years before Superman – or even The Shadow – Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon,
along with swashbuckling heroes of early cinema,
helped to define costumed heroes, some of whom will later inspire some of our sci-fi authors in turn.
But now we must return from our digression and get back to science-fiction itself.
Join us next time as we move on to the final discussion of the pulps,
and talk about the most titanic, most dominating voice in science-fiction for decades.
A man who ushered in the likes of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke.
Next time: We talk about John W. Campbell.
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