Astounding: a look at the past of the future

My Dad was a prolific reader of science fiction. At one time he had a large collection of back issues of Astounding, Amazing, as well as odd issues of less well known pulp science fiction from the 1920s through to the 1950s, but mostly from the 20s and 30s. Some he had bought new as a boy in the 1920s and 30s, some he purchased new and used as an adult in a bookstore in Rochester, New York (where he was courting my mother). He had a box constructed to hold his treasure trove, which moved with him from Montréal to Toronto to Windsor. In Windsor, my parents rented for three years, then at last bought a new house about a half mile or so from the rented place. That first year, we discovered that the lot was not properly drained or levelled and in the first big rain storm of 1962, the basement flooded – about three feet of water. Well, pulp is pulp and his precious collection became pulp indeed. Only a few issues he had upstairs survived, including two or three copies of the above, containing his own fiction. Years later after both my parents had died, and we went to clear the house for sale, the issues had vanished. More years passed, and I didn’t think a lot about them. One day I was browsing around on Ottawa Street in Hamilton, Ontario when I came across a used bookshop. I could not just pass by and stepped inside. They had a large selection of pulp fiction. Prominently displayed, in plastic, was an issue I knew my Dad had owned in pre-pulpification days. I don’t know what my Dad had paid back in the 1930s, but this copy had a price tag of $600 on it. This lead me to think about my Dad’s story in Astounding. I searched for copies on the net and found this, which I keep on the top floor, away from floods, I hope! No floods please! (and it wasn’t $600)

Science fiction in those days was indeed fiction about science.  But Astounding also included articles on science itself, the state of the ‘art’ so to speak, as well as intelligent guesses about where developments might lead. Other features included book reviews, and a letters to the editor section – where the longest serving editor, John W. Campbell would answer personally.  Campbell is remembered for introducing the reading world to authors who became great names: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Lester del Rey, even L. Ron Hubbard (later of Scientology fame).  The cover story in this is by Isaac Asimov and illustrated also by Kelly Freas who did work for my father’s story too. I recall my Dad had full scale copies of those, given him by the illustrator, also lost in the flood.  What interests me here though, is the cover illustration. This is early 1954 and no doubt the illustration was done in 1953. Behind the man pictured are coloured lights that suggest a computer. This surprised me until I did a quick Google search on the history of computers and found that science fiction would have been well aware of this new technology in 1953/54.  The first computer came in 1937 and the first really usable computer, ENIAC dates to 1946. Desktop machines appeared first in a $20,000 version sold only by Nieman-Marcus. The 1970s was the era when they came down from the stratosphere in price.

Oddly, computers didn’t figure much in the science fiction I remember. You see, I read through all my Dad’s pulp magazines. The oldest was, if I recall rightly, from 1923, an issue of Amazing Stories.  I am resisting the urge to google this, but I believe that was the first year of publication. Astounding began much later, in 1930.

Ok, here goes Prof. Google as I check my facts: Nope, I’m wrong!  Amazing began in 1926 and is still published today. Wikipedia gives a very detailed history of its various owners and editors. I recall my Dad subscribed to it in the 1960s, where I learned the joy of reading a novel in serial form. Keith Laumer’s A Trace of Memory. Finishing each of the first two installments caused a delicious agony as I waited for the next issue to arrive in the mail.

Astounding began in 1930 and changed its name to Analog in 1960, and it is still being published. John W. Campbell, who began as a sci-fi writer himself, took over as editor in 1938 and continued until his death in 1971. He was the editor who accepted my Dad’s story.

That was the only story my Dad had published. He told me once that he received $500 for it – quite  a bit of money in 1954, which he used to pay for the medical expenses of my younger sister Sarah’s birth. That was the year my family moved to Toronto from Montréal, so I can date the writing and publication to Montréal as that is where my sister was born.

A trip down memory lane, indeed but one where the historian in my present iteration as a human kicked into gear also. 35 cents for an issue! It is filled with ads too: for the Science-Fiction Book Club, “Enjoy Fame and Fortune as a WRITER”, Millions Speak another LANGUAGE so can you with LINGUAPHONE, WHY CAN’T YOU WRITE? It’s much simpler than you think!

Well.

Enough.

 

Solitary but not Alone

These are my two favourite books

(Pretend you can’t see the other books in the second image, said the man behind the curtain)

They are vastly different books. Kathleen Norris is a poet who is only about 3 1/2 years older than I, but very successful, unlike Simon (aka me). This is the only book of hers I have read and it has resonated in my heart since the late 90s when I bought this copy. I discovered what it was like to read prose written by a poet and non-fiction that ignores the tight rules of reality reading. Yes, the book has chapters but some chapters are only two pages. Always she paints pictures in your mind but mostly in your heart which knows a different truth than analytical knowing. She writes about solitude and the pursuit of solitude without loneliness. She is a Presybterian who moved from New York City to live in South Dakota. She also spent years as a lay member of two Catholic monasteries in the mid West. The book has the unusual categorization of Literature/Religion. Probably they could not find a neat slot. That appeals to me greatly. The book presents interior balance in an always and ever troubled  chaotic disordered world where we search for that underlying and overarching order and rightness we know exists. We just cannot pin it down using the scientific method and defnitely not by using Science. I highlighted and ‘bolded’ (not, embolded I hope as Science is already too puffed up and arrogant) the word ‘science’ to show how the scientific method of late has taken a turn towards preaching and such anti-scientific phrases as ‘the science is settled’. Any ‘science’ that claims to be settled is no longer science, but Science,  a new quasi-religion.

This is where my two books meet. Way back in the early years of the 20th century a different approach to knowing, to understanding, that is to wisdom as opposed to knowledge, began percolating (now there’s a newly archaic word/coffee brewing technique!) in the mind of a fellow named J.R.R. Tolkien. He too was a poet, but of a very different kind. The final and best fruit of this mind is the book, The Lord of the Rings. I must add here that although published in three volumes, it is one book. The three were artificial divisons made because of the scarcity and expense of paper in impoverished post-war England. The volumes came out at intervals in the 1950s. I read them in intervals in the very early 1960s. They were in the Carnegie library in Windsor, Ontario. First my Dad read the first of the three, which he passed on to my elder brother, and when my brother finished, then at last was my turn. So, eventually I had read the whole book oddly enough in roughly the same way original readers did. Tolkien’s imaginary world was a real world of  balance flowing from the underlying and overarching order we know exists. It is a story in the old sense, a tale, that is. But tales tell truths of a different order.  That is, we live in a real story told by Science which presents a false view of reality, or rather a partial and skewed view that emphasizes the secondary  and denies the primary.

The primary exists in the sense of the holistic reality  of nature, of which humanity is a part. Reality is integral and foundational. It is not a series of laws, hypotheses, rules, causes and effects, but a whole. I won’t go all religious on you, other than to note that Kathleen Norris was a Christian Protestant who did not fear or revile Catholicism, and J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout and very conservative Catholic, who shared ale and good conversation with his Protestant friends. I am a Christian too. I am not necessarily suggesting here that Christianity is the only true faith (though I might suggest it elsewhere), but I am saying that the religious mindset – the truly religious as found in these two books and found in most religions,  knows reality in a way Science cannot and perhaps will not see, being blind to poetry.

A new book!

This time I am posting a book I have not read as yet. I received it in the mail today. I was asked to write a review for a scholarly journal, and as an historian who specializes in that very narrow field ‘Anglican history’, I agreed. Writing reviews is often something done by junior scholars fighting to be noticed. This is not the case for me as long ago  I became resigned to the world of the part time university lecturer, with an income slightly less than that of a city bus driver. I accepted it because I have a genuine interest in the history of religion and in Anglican history in particular.

My interest was sparked because I want to read this book. I want to think about it. I want to write about it. I will write a review but also I will think about it in my religion blog/book to be. Unlike the growing numbers of scholars who have become politicized (usually to the Left) I delight in study, thought, debate, all unhindered by poltical (aka political – I have left the error in to remind myself about editing) correctness.

Ooops. Where did this last side issue come from?  Well, today I had a debate with a tenured prof working in the same history department where I soldier on part time. I mentioned something I have noticed for a very long time, but which is not politically correct to say. Another facebook friend, also a History PhD but one who never found regular work in acadaemia, posted a CBC story about a clash between Left wing protesters and neo Nazis. I wondered out loud who were the Nazis as the only violence was a punch thrown by a Left winger, connecting with the face of a neo Nazi (well, at least I think it was the face, though it could well have been a shoulder, I suppose). I noted how street violence, even riot was a common technique of the Left these days, but the Right less commonly. I am thinking here about the inevitable violence accompanying  meetings of the WTO dating back to the 1999 Seattle riot, and more recently the protests after the election of Donald Trump to the U.S presidency.  Trump, it might be added, is hardly right wing, in fact he seems to have no wings, yet still jumps off tall buildings. Then I went on to note that the real Nazis were socialists in that they closely controlled the German economy much as liberals today control western economies. My debating opponent noted correctly that economies have always been controlled. I assented to this, but on third thought, I would not now agree with always, and I would provide further nuance by noting that it is the degree of control that is new. Well, new in that it began with the Nazis and the Soviets in the 1930s and the Chinese ersatz Marxists in the late 1940s. This large and intricate degree of control has been happily taken up by Western governments. This is a largely popular move because most of the populations of these lands of milk and honey want government intervention – at least since the dreadful collapse of the 1930s. But there it is, a similarity invented by the socialism of the 1930s.  I also noted that the real Nazis controlled speech as now the modern Left does. The only difference I could see was technique. The real Nazis and the Soviets used fear and violence to control the economy and speech, while modern liberals do it with a smile.

The reaction from the tenured prof was appalling. He decided that equating economic policy and control over speech between Nazis and the modern Left meant I supported Naziism in all its vile goals.  I hope this was just a clever misdirection technique to score a point in this debate, and not a considered opinion. But I was appalled because I didn’t expect a scholar to use a politician’s methodology.  I teach students to use evidence and reason based on evidence.

Sigh.

I mentioned too that I had said the modern left is similar to the Nazis and Soviet socialists, not the same. I was then further appalled when my esteemed opponent openly claimed that the words similar and same had identical meanings. So I posted the definitions of the two words from the Concise Oxford – thinking that a nice irony as my esteemed opponent is a product of that famed and venerable institution.  I was not sure what to say here. I am a member of the Facebook group called The Apostrophe Police. Is there a similar venting place for imprecise use of words?  I am not a product of such an august metropolis of learning and thought, but of much more ordinary places. Yet, I wrote my first essay when I was 13 years old on a subject that Interested me: religion & science. I wrote it because I delight in thinking and in thinking from all angles and I further delight in seeing my thoughts transcribed into words, where later I can revise, or just see errors in my reasoning and use of evidence. Much like this little perambulation in the vagaries of my mind, which I have altered and honed a few times now.

Anyway, this wasn’t what this post was supposed to be about. I was going to write about the joy of getting a new book, unread and pregnant with ideas, stories, new worlds. But, sadly what is the point if the finest minds begin with conclusions rather than with hypotheses, and only use the evidence that supports their pre-conclusion and ascribe ideas falsley to their debate opponent? What indeed. Back to poetry for me, until the Left decides to tell me which poems I am allowed to write. And I will read this book and write about it, despite the predilection of some to replace thought with emotion.