What killed the pulps

King Solomon said it's foolish to long for the old days, but I say it's doubly foolish to idolize the present. The fact of the matter is we have made mistakes and our world is worse because of them. My running hypothesis is the Boomers were the first generation to be raised in the epistemological shift after the two world wars and the Great Depression. The theology of the reconstructed man spread like a virus in the '60s. By the '70s the foundation was completely unearthed and was beginning to erode. The cultural superstructure that stood upon it would come next.

Not by accident, art was among the first endeavors to experience the decline. (See "Relativism sucks") The effects of this colonization are examined in part by Jeffro Johnson in his terrific book, Appendix N:

Back during World War II, C. S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, "We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." From a cultural standpoint, we've been laughing and sneering for a long time. These now utterly predictable mutilations of classic adventure fiction are a direct result of decades of this sort of mentality. And what are the scriptwriters and directors laughing at when they foist these revisions on us?

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Of course, the best days of this type of story [planetary romance] are long gone by now. It was practically ubiquitous up through the sixties, but today it's shocking to see it delivered with not even a hint of snark or irony. Mentioning the very idea of this sort of thing in mixed company is liable to produce a whole raft of negative responses. We live for the most part in a culture where people are primed to turn up their noses at this sort of thing.

Pulp fiction that comprised the bulk of Gary Gygax's literary influences, no matter how popular, was anathema to the new regime. It could not be published anymore without the publisher paying a steep social cost. New art had to portray man as his own creation, with "modern" values. Old values are unevolved, unrefined, illiberal, and other euphemisms for "bad."

As if trying to prove his point, negative reviewers of Johnson's book predictably attack it on ideological grounds. They're not just "turning up their noses"; they're murdering the past with slander.

To be sure, good science fiction and fantasy stories continued to be written after the '60s, but the tide, as they say, was going out. A big reason Star Wars, released in 1977, was a smash hit was it mimicked popular entertainment that wasn't yet a distant memory for its target audience.

There was another factor in the sharp decline of Burroughs-style planetary romance, and it coincides so well with the '60s revolution that it's easy to miss. I'm talking about the Apollo 11 Moon landing. This moment became so stamped in the public consciousness that people were unwilling to entertain the unrealistic aesthetics of a setting like Barsoom or the planets in Lewis's Space Trilogy.

No two properties illustrate this dichotomy better than the movie adaptations for A Princess of Mars (2012's John Carter) and The Martian 3 years later. The former you know is an epic, swashbuckling adventure where the hero saves the world and gets the girl. The latter is basically Robinson Crusoe on Mars, a nuts and bolts survival story where bagging your poop and counting calories were plot elements. One of these movies flopped. The other was a hit and received Best Picture nominations.

I'm not saying The Martian or its movie adaptation sucks. I liked the book very much. I'm saying it owes its popularity to being a product of its time. It leverages what the audience knows about the limitations of space travel, the forbidding environment of Mars, and man's overreliance on technology. Those things weren't commonly understood a hundred years ago. Alien races, a breathable atmosphere, and jumping around like the Incredible Hulk all seemed plausible.

Which leads me to infer two things about the science fiction market:

1. People's imagination is inversely correlated with their knowledge.
2. People really don't hunger for heroes like they used to.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like sci-fi, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.