Masters of Pulp Science Fiction - Dark Worlds Quarterly

Science Fiction has suffered under an attitude since the 1940s, mainly that anything written before 1938 is crap. This form of exegenesis may have been necessary eighty years ago to help the genre improve. The unfortunate overspill of this, perpetuated by authors such as Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp (both members of the Golden Age Club), is readers have been missing out on plenty of great stories. The Internet and digital scanning revolution that is now is doing something to change these attitudes. Old pulps have never been more easily accessed since they originally appeared. Damon Knight points out that many felt that everything BC (Before Campbell) was ‘all garbage and you’ll never find it anyway’ is becoming less and less true. Both Isaac Asimov and Damon Knight published collections in the 1970s and 1980s that helped to ferment an interest in older stories (even if they back-handedly said they were inferior to Campbellian SF).

In Before the Golden Age, Isaac Asimov wrote: “The science fiction of the thirties seems, to anyone who has experienced the Campbell Revolution, to be clumsy, primitive, and naive. The stories are old-fashioned and unsophisticated. All right, grant that they are all those things. Nevertheless, there was a rough-hewn vigor about them that sophistication has, to some extent, lost….” This page is dedicated to those authors who came before Campbell, warts and all. For every badly written paragraph there are dozens of pleasures to discover. The first time an author suggested the idea of a ray gun, a space suit, an alien that is made of light, killer robots, miniaturization, etc. But these stories are not simply historical items, they also have a fun and excitement of their own. Some of them may surprise you, as certain authors’ early careers are presented, or others you may think of as writers in other genres.