Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone
Science fiction has many long-running science fiction series. However, there is no series longer running than Perry Rhodan, which as of this writing has racked up a staggering 3,312 volumes since 1961. But who is Perry Rhodan and what makes his adventures so unique?
If you’re of a certain age, the phrase “sword and sorcery” conjures up visions of muscular barbarians and busty damsels fighting monsters or evil wizards on paperback covers illustrated by Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, or Jeffrey Catherine Jones. But did you know that the subgenre had no name for the first 30 years of its existence? And do you know how the term for the genre of “sword and sorcery” came to be?
In many ways, the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow blog is a time machine, taking us back into the history of the genre and showing how that past is connected to the present and future. In 1960, a movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine brought the story out of the past and into the present of that decade with aesthetics that looked both back to the Victorian era and forward to the turn of the millennium.
Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle and took to the stars? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s…
By the 1950s, Amazing Stories and its sister magazine Fantastic were deep in the doldrums. But all that changed when a young Vassar graduate named Cele Goldsmith found herself at the helm of both magazines and turned their fortunes around. In only seven years, she discovered many new writers who went on to great careers, helped to revive the all-but dead Sword and Sorcery genre, and won a Hugo, too.