Rocket Ship Galileo was written in 1947 and yet it spoke to me for many reasons.
The book is about some American kids who, with traditional Yankee know-how, develop a rocketship in their own backyard to travel to the Moon. As astounding as that premise is, Heinlein makes you believe in it and here's why:
The boys are shaped by a defining event that changed their entire worldview. A couple years before, they heard about the atomic weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The boys are "bitten by mathematics, science and engineering like it's a bug," with a rapacious, devouring hunger and greed for knowledge. As a person with a science background I've never heard it put better.
The boys have clueless parents that just don't get it, though. It's not that their parents are stupid, it's that they don't understand how the world changed in 1945 with the power of the atom and still have that old way of thinking that means they just don't "get" the boys.
The book was written in 1947 but it's easy to see how a lot of people today can identify with it. I certainly can. I have absolute genius and brilliant parents with PhDs…but who need help plugging in their wifi network and they think everyone on the internet is some kind of rapist. People that are older and younger than myself probably had and (are having) similar epiphanies about science and technology those more set in their ways don't get.
In fact, when I went to visit older relatives for Thanksgiving, I remembered it's been a while since I've seen anybody with actual DVDs in their home. The technology seems so old fashioned. Not because it's been superseded by some other format like HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, which are just steps sideways and equally old-fashioned. But because of streaming, technology like the iPod, and online software purchases, it seems downright retro to require a physical format at all to "own" some media.
Reading Rocket Ship Galileo, Heinlein's first novel ever, is a little shocking because it's hard to imagine Heinlein as a young person. I'm so used to him being the dignified, classy old man of science fiction not unlike his wise old man characters. For one thing, it's one of the few stories of Heinlein's to show the energetic fan-boy enthusiasm and influence of E. E. Smith, with the plot having some similarities to Smith's Skylark of Space, another novel about All-American amateurs who build their own rocket ship.
Smith had a lot of passion but he was very amateurish – Skylark was an awkwardly written adventure story. "Rocket Ship Galileo," even at that early stage of Heinlein's career, was about something.
(Interesting side note: Smith published "Skylark of Space" in the same issue of Amazing Stories as Phillip Francis Nowlan's "Armageddon 2419," the first Buck Rogers novel. In fact, Buck Rogers even got the cover over Skylark!)
Even Heinlein's usual stock character of the wise old man the hero bonds with and learns from was (are you ready?) a recent college graduate, a cool, hip younger relative who "gets it." You know how they say old age is always 15 years older than you are now?
The main plot comes when arriving on the Moon, where there are Nazis who used advanced rocketry and went to the Moon to plot their return and revenge, which isn't farfetched considering how advanced Nazi rocketry was towards the end.
Recently, I saw the proof-of-concept special effects reel trailer for "Iron Sky," a low budget movie about the Nazis returning from space, a project the creators are trying to get money to fund. This reminds me a little of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, another big budget movie that started as a five minute special effects reel, a film that was tragically overshadowed by the release of Sin City a few months later.
I'm withholding an opinion on Iron Sky because…how can you have an opinion based on nothing? A special effects/proof of concept reel, even a viral one, is just that.
Still, a few warning signs jump out at me from the trailer. One of which is, there aren't any characters in it. Who's the main character, the hero we're supposed to root for? His girlfriend? Is there like a main Nazi leader, like a "Darth Vader" type?
We don't see that, and that tells me the people making this are too much in love with the idea of the story (Nazis from the Moon, an idea which was cribbed from Rocket Ship Galileo anyway) as opposed to the stuff you need when something becomes an actual movie as opposed to a demo reel.
Try to imagine for just one minute that you didn't watch movies at all.
All your friends would drop weird quotes and references you didn't get. Trends would come and go in popular culture, and you don't know where they come from.
Fractured fairy tales with modern references and winking jokes to parents would be the norm in the book publishing world and you wouldn't understand why (thanks to the popularity of Shrek, among others).
One day, everyone would suddenly be into science fiction and aliens out of nowhere and talk about how "science fiction is back" (thanks to Independence Day).
You'd wonder why, one summer, the big panic, all everybody seems to talk about are asteroids smashing into the earth (thanks to several movies with that topic back in 1990-whenever it was).
In short, you would not be aware of a lot of what's going on around you. You'd be dimly aware there's a subterranean force of great influence but you wouldn't know what it is.
Well, don't imagine any more. That's how I – and a lot of other people - feel about video games.
Until I got a friend that played video games extensively, a lot of things were going on around me that I just didn't understand. The comparison between movies and video games is totally apt because the video game industry reached a tipping point a decade ago where more Americans spent more money on video games than on movies. That statistic shocked me, but all the gamers that heard about it weren't surprised.
For example, it struck me as strange that starting a few years ago, every nerd friend I had started to be a Russophile, admiring Russian culture and the USSR. At first I thought it was because Russians were the last bunch of white people to be really scary and tough, and the USSR was their heyday and high point. And while that speculation may be true, the answer is because a lot of video games were made with Commie and Russian bad guys.
Also, when did zombie apocalypses get so popular, anyway? Suddenly every friend I had started quoting zombie survival manuals. Obviously they were inspired by the anti-consumerist Romero movies and the supercool cult films like Army of Darkness…but those have been around for decades. Why were zombies and end of the world zombie scenarios suddenly the hot property now?
I never understood zombies. They were mindless, dumb and made from boring assholes: former accountants and travel agents. Vampires are also very trendy now, but Vampires I get: Vampire stories are full of cool crumbling castles, fog, and gaslight, Victorian atmosphere. Vampires are aristocratic, sociopathic megalomaniacs with a hefty dose of scary sexuality. The good Vampire baddies have so much personality they totally dominate the stories they're in, compelling and repellant at the same time like good baddies should be.
By contrast, zombies are mindless so they're more a force of nature or inanimate object. The single thing you never want in a story is one where characters are opposed by inanimate objects without personality, like a door lock or a security system, for instance. Conflict is only interesting between people and personalities that want opposing things.
Remember all the sequels to the Mummy back during the Universal days, when the Mummy was basically a mindless, speechless corpse driven like a robot by anyone wearing a certain ring? Wasn't that much less interesting and scary than the original film where Boris Karloff was an evil sorcerer creep who could barely pass for human, but who was driven by lost love?
I don't understand zombies, but I did understand why a zombie apocalypse would be appealing, at least to others. It's for the same reason people love disaster movies. Freud said nobody ever thought about disasters unless they long for them to happen at some level.
It reminds me of the Reagan administration's attitude to nuclear war, Jesus, and the environment. Everyone remembers James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, and how, when asked what his office's strategy was to preserve national parks for future generations, said that as the Rapture and end of the world would come soon there was no need to try to preserve national parks long-term. Thankfully, Reagan's enormous cowardice was greater than his hatred for living things and no war happened, but nonetheless, there is a personality type that looks forward to the end of the world because it means an absolving of adult responsibility.
On the other hand, the very things that bore me about Zombies – the fact they have no personalities and are totally mindless – are the most appealing thing about them to video game designers. One of the greatest problems with video games is how the enemies never act intelligently, never take cover, and just run into gunfire and keep on attacking even when wounded. That may not make sense with human enemies, but with mindless hordes of neverending zombies, it's what makes them scary!
Not just that, but like with movies, if one video game does really well and is a surprise hit, everyone tries to imitate it. So before you know it, there were a billon zombie shooting games and all everybody was talking about were zombies.
As I try not to close an article without a few book reviews, it's interesting to note that the notion of the apocalypse goes before the 20th Century and back into the 19th. The idea that end of the world scenarios were a common theme in the literature of the 19th Century is very surprising to a lot of people, but it just goes to show how nihilistic Western culture actually is.
The Death of the Earth. J.H. Rosny (1910). The Rosny brothers were the single greatest geniuses of science fiction Belgium ever produced, and they dealt with mankind's beginnings (as in Quest for Fire and the Xipehuz) and mankind's end, as with the Death of the Earth, a future billions of years from now without living things where mankind is aware of their end and resigned to it - it's scary to find a world where the entire "fire" has gone out from mankind. In the moving final pages, the untold billions of generations that passed on the earth end with a single pair of eyes that shut closed. One of Rosny's preoccupations (that of evil living minerals) is on display here, just like his greatest inhuman creations, the Xipehuz.
Beyond Thirty. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1915). See how far you can hear this shlocky premise before you crack a smile: World War I so totally destroyed Europe that hundreds of years later it was a totally unknown bombed out no-man's-land that reverted to stone age savagery filled with escaped zoo animals like lions. An American captain becomes the first to explore unknown Europe and saves a hot cave girl, the last queen of England. The idea World War I would have continued forever is laughable enough (as is the idea America would never get involved), but it's almost shocking to imagine the same ERB who wrote the gung-ho beat-back-the-devil Hun-basher Tarzan the Invincible would also write a story that tsk-tsks Europe for going to war and praises isolationism.
The Last Man. Mary Shelley (1826). When Napoleon was defeated, the bad guys won. The attempts to "franchise out" the French revolution and create a Republican united Europe failed, and the reactionary and aristocratic elements of Europe prospered. This was a lost generation of young geniuses like Byron crushed underfoot by snotty, dull and untalented moralists, and it doesn't surprise me the reaction to this novel about the end of the world would be horror by the Mrs. Lovejoy-types that ruled Europe. Basically, the Last Man ended Mary Shelley's career and remained forgotten until it was rediscovered a couple decades ago. Unlike Frankenstein, which was moody and atmospheric from the get-go, it wasn't immediately obvious the Last Man is about an end of the world scenario (my personal favorite failed prediction is the idea that Greece would still be fighting for independence against the Turks in the 21st Century), which made this story all the more shocking when the premise is revealed.
The Last American. J.A. Mitchell (1889). Some Persian explorers discover the lost city of Noo-Yok in America. Amazing to me how the cheesy conventions of the end of the world story are already here at this early stage: we even get a look at the crumbled Statue of Liberty. America and Western civilization is wrecked and mangled. What happened? The answer is something that would never occur to a 21st Century person: a weakening of the immune system that left us vulnerable to punishing winters. I guess the 19th Century was more rural than we thought. Thankfully, this book is short and its prejudices are innocent unlike the ultra-vile racist fascist Jean Respail's "Camp of the Saints," which has neither of those two virtues.
I was recently reading Edmond Hamilton's "Star Kings," a pulpy novel that is easily one of ol' Planet Smasher's best, when I realized that this story pretty much had the same exact plot as "Prisoner of Zenda."
"Star Kings" made me want to go back and read "Prisoner." What startled me about "Prisoner of Zenda" is that this book was the starting point of cliches, but cliches that are no longer referenced or used today. As surprisingly humorous and complex a book as "Prisoner of Zenda" was, it was oddly melancholic to read now...perhaps because the idea of something as crucial and influential to adventure novels, that spawned so many imitators, has mostly evaporated from the pop culture stage. It goes to show the short lifespan of adventure and escapist fiction.
For every adventure writer like Jules Verne that is constantly discovered by new fans, there are others that have been forgotten: J.H. Rosny, for instance, the pen name of a pair of brothers that were once considered in their native France to be the equal of Verne in the development of science fiction, best known for three books: "The Xipehuz" (which featured some of the most frightening, non-anthropomorphic, incomprehensible and otherworldly aliens ever), "The Death of the Earth" (mostly worth reading only for the moving last three pages, which describe the last being on earth winking out of existence) and "Quest for Fire" (best known for becoming a truly awesome film by a visionary genius director like Jean-Jacques Annaud).
There are other examples of cliches that were once exasperatingly universal but now are nowhere to be seen:
The Small European Country Adventure Story
In this story, typically identified with "Prisoner of Zenda," a tiny postage stamp sized central European country is under threat, and there is usually a problem with succession to the throne, a position that is offered to a foreign adventurer (who usually looks like one of the royals). There are lots of picturesque Disney castles and gallant fencing duels. One of the best such "Zenda" imitators is "The King Maker," one of the greatest of the Doc Savage novels, where Doc is offered the biggest bribe of his entire career: the throne of a tiny country. One can even argue that Doctor Doom's tiny nation of Latveria owes a lot to this now-forgotten subgenre.
It's not particularly hard to understand why this genre isn't seen much anymore. There aren't any more tiny European nations with royalty.
The Evil Chinaman
The mystery and crime novel market was once so utterly and totally choked with Fu Manchu imitators that by 1929, a prominent mystery guide wrote that "in a mystery, no Chinaman should be involved." It's not hard to understand why this cliche went by the wayside: it was mean-spirited and racist, paranoid about an immigrant ethnic group. It's hard to understand how hysterically paranoid white people were in the early 20th Century about an impotent non-power like the Chinese, surrounded on all sides by colonial rulers. Typically, the evil Fu Manchu character was such a genius, with such great planning ability and Oriental style, that he totally dominated the books that were written about them. Typically, the Fu Manchu genius had a sexy daughter, who was usually implied as promiscuous and sexually perverse, as warped and evil as Dad himself. One can even see Ming the Merciless as a sort of Evil Chinaman, in a sense: he certainly had the facial hair for it.
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed
Like Fu Manchu, an entire library could be filled with nothing but books that are inferior imitators of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, the title character that was the beautiful, brainy and hypnotic sorceress of H. Rider Haggard's jungle adventure novel She (incidentally, Sigmund Freud's favorite novel). The beautiful, immortal, intelligent Ayesha was a white queen that ruled over an African tribe. She inspired a diversity of characters including Tarzan's archnemesis, La, High Priestess of Opar.
Startlingly, the evil, forbidding native queen has mostly vanished off the radar of pop culture. Perhaps she went offstage, hand in hand, along with the only man truly worthy of her: Fu Manchu.
The Stone Age Regression Novel
The best known example to modern audiences may be Jack London's "Before Adam. " The essence of this sort of book is one where a modern person, typically through the dubious mechanism of past-life regression or the collective unconscious, re-experiences the experiences and memories of a person alive in the Stone Age. Professor Challenger did this as well in one of the more ugh-inducing of the Lost World sequels - a series that jumped the shark pretty laughably when Arthur Conan Doyle converted to spiritualism. A better known example may be "Allan and the Ice Gods," featuring Allan Quartermain...incidentally, it was this book''s use of the past-life regressive hallucinogen Tanduki that suggested to Allan Moore that Quartermain might become a drug addict, a big plot point in "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."
The Lost Race Yarn
This one took quite a bit to die out, but the Lost Race Yarn typically featured protagonists that discovered a hidden or secret society or civilization that is long thought extinct in a distant, unexplored region of the world: the Himalayas, the African Congo, the Antarctic, etc. The civilization that is most commonly found in Lost World yarns are almost always Ancient Roman, to the point that a lost city of Ancient Romans that survive to modern times is practically a sub-sub-genre in and of itself.
The best written book of this type, though not the most famous, is easily A. Merritt's "The Moon Pool," which I wholeheartedly recommended for its horror and humor.
Sometimes, though, the Lost Races aren't even human. Inspired by crackpot beliefs in cosmic evolution like Theosophy, many stories feature a hidden or underground cavern world. The most famous of these is Edward Bulwer-Lytton's "The Coming Race," about a blond race of superpowerful giants. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, incidentally, is best known as the writer who actually invented the cliche opening line, "It was a dark and stormy night."
What happened to the Lost Race Yarn? Well, the world became so well explored that the belief in a lost race or two became downright implausible to people in the later years of the 20th Century. So much is the pity. Of all the reasons for a story to go out of style, this troubles me the most: a story type that died because our world is mapped, explored and understood totally and completely.
