It's certainly an interesting question. When I think about the classic scifi stereotype, the first example that comes to mind is the original Star Trek, but obviously that can't be the referent pre-'60s and it was building on other work in the genre, sometimes by the same writers. (Plus the popular idea of what TOS was like is itself distorted and exaggerated. Kirk shot aliens and flirted with the ladies, but he also liked to debate philosophy and convince robots to kill themselves.)
My guess would be that scifi being pigeonholed as juvenile meant that whichever spaceman adventure serials and early comic book strips little boys were into had outsized influence on the popular perception of the genre compared to work intended for adult readers.
i think your movies hypothesis here is very good but the thing that makes me wonder if there's something else going on alongside that is that the jacked bro saving girls in space sort of has a cousin in the english professor cheating on his wife who as we all know stars in every novel classified under "literary fiction" ever despite the fact that i personally have only encountered him once, in zadie smith's on beauty where he cannot reasonably be called a self-insert and which also is a book that rules... anyway i don't think there are a lot of movies about english professors cheating on their wives but the two phenomena seem similar to me even though as someone who does not read a lot of sci fi the space version hadn't occurred to me to identify as a myth until today so i can't be said to have much expertise here (this is why we comment?).
--brb, drafting the outline for a novel that will REALLY get the discourse gears churning about an english professor cheating on his wife in space....
I can think of two other examples of the English professor cheating microgenre—one is in Stoner (a book I hate) and the other is Other Men’s Daughters (a book I think I hated). It’s also spoofed in the book Straight Man, but you can spoof things without them really existing. (I think you could argue Chip in The Corrections kind of fits here, albeit he’s just sleeping with a student and has no wife, and also The Wonder Boys has a professor who is sleeping with a faculty member’s wife, etc.) But yeah it’s like the “unhappy housewife” that’s also supposed to dominate literary fiction in that if you ask people what they’re talking about they often just don’t know. So you should put an unhappy spacewife in your book…
I agree with the points you make in this essay, up and down the line. BUT -- you can see the sort of covers you are looking for in the true pulp magazines of, mostly, the late '40s and early '50s. Primarily Thrilling Wonder Stories, its companions Startling Stories and Space Stories, and of course Planet Stories. Try the December 1949 issue of Thrilling for example. (Though I should note that while there was a busty woman on all six 1949 covers of Thrilling, in at least half of those cases, the woman is wielding a sword or blaster, and is in fact the human menacing the invading alien.)
I should note that while all those pulps were founded with the intention of appealing to a more juvenile (and definitely male) audience, by the late '40s they were publishing a fair amount of good to very good stuff.
And, boy, is that Atwood quote wrongheaded. I almost wonder if she's actually READ The War of the Worlds.
Oh this makes sense! esp since Weird Tales was also a pulp. See, I knew there would be useful corrections.…
I think people would have ragged on Atwood less (with the original quote, the source of which seems to be lost, or at least, I couldn’t find a version I could watch) if she’d just said she doesn’t write science fiction because she thinks it’s a bit downmarket as terms go and she wants to be taken seriously. At the very least they wouldn’t have ragged on her MORE, since that was what everybody thought she meant. But then the other day on here I saw somebody saying Ted Chiang isn’t science fiction so I guess this kind of conversation never dies.…
I was going to guess movies! But I also once read a short story in one of the magazines where, because of nuclear annihilation, humans have evolved to be covered with thick reptilian hide and then a young couple discovers, via French kissing, that they can fly. And through experimentation they discover that other unshielded parts of them will join together ... it must have been the 70s
I love the type of story that's like women have established a separate highly militaristic civilization and they kill all men on sight but then one day one of them finds a wounded man and he kisses her and she's like "wait omg…" and then betrays her entire civilization because like he has nice arms.
Could one not consider 'Dune' fight-the-bugs adjacent?
You could for sure but I was looking for pre-sixties examples & that’s 1965.
It's certainly an interesting question. When I think about the classic scifi stereotype, the first example that comes to mind is the original Star Trek, but obviously that can't be the referent pre-'60s and it was building on other work in the genre, sometimes by the same writers. (Plus the popular idea of what TOS was like is itself distorted and exaggerated. Kirk shot aliens and flirted with the ladies, but he also liked to debate philosophy and convince robots to kill themselves.)
My guess would be that scifi being pigeonholed as juvenile meant that whichever spaceman adventure serials and early comic book strips little boys were into had outsized influence on the popular perception of the genre compared to work intended for adult readers.
i think your movies hypothesis here is very good but the thing that makes me wonder if there's something else going on alongside that is that the jacked bro saving girls in space sort of has a cousin in the english professor cheating on his wife who as we all know stars in every novel classified under "literary fiction" ever despite the fact that i personally have only encountered him once, in zadie smith's on beauty where he cannot reasonably be called a self-insert and which also is a book that rules... anyway i don't think there are a lot of movies about english professors cheating on their wives but the two phenomena seem similar to me even though as someone who does not read a lot of sci fi the space version hadn't occurred to me to identify as a myth until today so i can't be said to have much expertise here (this is why we comment?).
--brb, drafting the outline for a novel that will REALLY get the discourse gears churning about an english professor cheating on his wife in space....
I can think of two other examples of the English professor cheating microgenre—one is in Stoner (a book I hate) and the other is Other Men’s Daughters (a book I think I hated). It’s also spoofed in the book Straight Man, but you can spoof things without them really existing. (I think you could argue Chip in The Corrections kind of fits here, albeit he’s just sleeping with a student and has no wife, and also The Wonder Boys has a professor who is sleeping with a faculty member’s wife, etc.) But yeah it’s like the “unhappy housewife” that’s also supposed to dominate literary fiction in that if you ask people what they’re talking about they often just don’t know. So you should put an unhappy spacewife in your book…
This wound up reminding me of an old essay on Strange Horizons (https://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/) that argued Captain Kirk was never really the insatiable horndog he's often portrayed as.
(though I always thought the author's arguments on Zapp Brannigan were a huge stretch)
I’ll have to read this… I do think Kirk was inarguably a big ol flirt but that’s different from being a horndog!
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series starting with a “Princess of Mars” might be the start of this.
First published in 1912.
You can’t have a Prince of Mars… because of Woke 😔
I agree with the points you make in this essay, up and down the line. BUT -- you can see the sort of covers you are looking for in the true pulp magazines of, mostly, the late '40s and early '50s. Primarily Thrilling Wonder Stories, its companions Startling Stories and Space Stories, and of course Planet Stories. Try the December 1949 issue of Thrilling for example. (Though I should note that while there was a busty woman on all six 1949 covers of Thrilling, in at least half of those cases, the woman is wielding a sword or blaster, and is in fact the human menacing the invading alien.)
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?61700
I should note that while all those pulps were founded with the intention of appealing to a more juvenile (and definitely male) audience, by the late '40s they were publishing a fair amount of good to very good stuff.
And, boy, is that Atwood quote wrongheaded. I almost wonder if she's actually READ The War of the Worlds.
Oh this makes sense! esp since Weird Tales was also a pulp. See, I knew there would be useful corrections.…
I think people would have ragged on Atwood less (with the original quote, the source of which seems to be lost, or at least, I couldn’t find a version I could watch) if she’d just said she doesn’t write science fiction because she thinks it’s a bit downmarket as terms go and she wants to be taken seriously. At the very least they wouldn’t have ragged on her MORE, since that was what everybody thought she meant. But then the other day on here I saw somebody saying Ted Chiang isn’t science fiction so I guess this kind of conversation never dies.…
I was going to guess movies! But I also once read a short story in one of the magazines where, because of nuclear annihilation, humans have evolved to be covered with thick reptilian hide and then a young couple discovers, via French kissing, that they can fly. And through experimentation they discover that other unshielded parts of them will join together ... it must have been the 70s
I love the type of story that's like women have established a separate highly militaristic civilization and they kill all men on sight but then one day one of them finds a wounded man and he kisses her and she's like "wait omg…" and then betrays her entire civilization because like he has nice arms.