Thursday, January 14, 2021

Before Reporters Were Hacks: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

Before Reporters Were Hacks: Golden Age Space Opera Tales

Believe it or not, there was once a time where reporters used to uncover facts about events that actually happened.

These days? Not so much.

Of course, we look to satire, particularly our own space opera tales, to show us the better days of reporting that could happen in our own future.

Does that mean that they didn’t see our current set of Twitter-pated buffoons being formed? Well, you’d have to go back in time to when they were alive and ask them about how they wrote their stories in a future time and on planets we haven’t even visited with our landers yet.

Yes, that’s a mind-wringer. But leave it to these SF authors to set our minds straight. By taking us right into the action thorugh their short stories and novelettes.

Please enjoy. You might even learn something, or get inspired. Or maybe just enjoy a few chuckles…

Space Opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking. Set mainly or entirely in outer space, it usually involves conflict between opponents possessing advanced abilities, futuristic weapons, and other sophisticated technology.

The term has no relation to music, as in a traditional opera, but is instead a play on the terms “soap opera”, a melodramatic television series, and “horse opera”, which was coined during the 1930s to indicate a formulaic Western movie. Space operas emerged in the 1930s and continue to be produced in literature, film, comics, television, and video games.

The Golden Age of Pulp Magazine Fiction derives from pulp magazines (often referred to as “the pulps”) as they were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called “glossies” or “slicks”.

The pulps gave rise to the term pulp fiction. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many writers wrote for pulps, the magazines were proving grounds for those authors like Robert Heinlein, Louis LaMour, “Max Brand”, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and many others. The best writers moved onto longer fiction required by paperback publishers. Many of these authors have never been out of print, even long after their passing.

Anthology containing:

Dateline: Mars by Richard Wilson
What Shall It Profit? by Poul Anderson
A Traveler in Time by August Derleth
Sweet Tooth by Robert F. Young
…So They Baked a Cake by Winston K. Marks
The Scapegoat by Richard Maples
The Push of a Finger by Alfred Bester
Mercy Flight by Mack Reynolds
Exiles of the Three Red Moons by Carl Selwyn
Enter the Nebula by Carl Jacobi
The Delegate from Venus by Henry Slesar
Counterweight by Jerry Sohl
Colony of the Unfit by Manfred A. Carter
By Proxy by Randall Garrett
The 64-Square Madhouse by Fritz Leiber
Mind Stealers of Pluto by Joseph Farrell

Scroll Up and Get Your Copy Now.

The post Before Reporters Were Hacks: Golden Age Space Opera Tales appeared first on Living Sensical.



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