 |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Re: I'm not really sure why so much science fiction is terrible these days. by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 12/29/2013, 12:52pm PST | ||||
 |
 |
|||
| L. Ron Hubbard (yeah, the one who created Scientology) wrote in the preface to Battlefield Earth (trust me, the book is much better than the movie, and it showed that Hubbard should have stuck to writing fiction. Then again, maybe with Scientology's principal tenets, he did!) that during the Great Depression of the 1930s either you were a great writer or you starved; there was no WPA (a work program introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression) for writers.
So basically those who were able to make a living writing during the 1930s were not good writers, they were goddam great writers. A lot of these same people were still writing during the golden age of the 1950s, having learned their craft when being a science fiction writer meant making a living on a penny a word, that being what pulp magazines could afford. They also couldn't pay much because it was the depression, to sell a magazine for 10c or 25c, which was a lot of money, meant you had to give the customer the equivalent of about a short novel. That also meant sometimes they had to buy some not-very-good pieces because they had space to fill, but even then the stories usually were at least passable. A more important issue was the really good magazines had editors who were first and foremost writers before they became editors. The biggest editor of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, John W. Campbell, was a good writer long before he became an editor. His Lensman series of books still stand up well, more than 80 years after he wrote them. Stan Lee was writing comics long before he became an editor. Having written this, it kind of occurred to me that maybe that's the problem. George Lucas was a screenwriter long before he became a director. So was James Cameron, who also is a top-notch painter and sketch artist; he learned his craft at the "Roger Corman Film School" as they called the studio that he worked at as an artist and learning everything about the requirements of making films. Gene Roddenberry was a Los Angeles Police officer writing scripts in his spare time - and selling them - long before he got the opportunity to produce Star Trek:TOS. So maybe that might be part of it. The people who are directors don't have that perspective as a writer first, maybe they came out of film school and went straight into cinematography and so they don't have that "writer's voice" and understanding of the background of how a story works on paper before putting it on video. |
||||
 |
 |
|||
|
lost room by 12/28/2013, 10:00pm PST  Well,it's kind of obvious why by 12/28/2013, 11:26pm PST I'm not really sure why so much science fiction is terrible these days. by 12/29/2013, 2:27am PST People were always that fucking stupid in large groups by 12/29/2013, 3:50am PST Re: I'm not really sure why so much science fiction is terrible these days. by 12/29/2013, 9:17am PST Re: I'm not really sure why so much science fiction is terrible these days. by 12/29/2013, 12:52pm PST |
