OK, by 1950, radio transmission of voices was commonplace and trivially easy. I can forgive an author for not correctly predicting the future, but they should at least be able to predict the present. And I get it that they wanted to write a story about a society where communication was difficult, but if that was the goal, then setting it on Mars in 2135 wasn’t the right way to make that happen.
All I can say is that by 1950, extrapolating the future no longer became a dominant goal in sf. The better writers, usually the humanist side of the field, tried to use pieces of familiar tropes - spaceships, robots, aliens, the future - and apply them to character studies, allegories, satires, and social commentaries without any need to create a full-fledged world. Kornbluth himself contributed to this hypertrophy in his collaborations with Frederik Pohl, like the classic The Space Merchants. This may not be the sf people remember today and like 1950s editorial cartoons it may be too agebound to make sense to moderns. Still, this humanist impact in the 1950s was significant and led directly to the New Wave of the 1960s.
True. Agni, like the other “gods” and Sam, was a human being who gained psionic powers (in his case, pyrokinesis) through intentional self-mutation, and the “wand” was designed to enhance his unique inherent abilities. His heirs lacked his abilities and had to settle for conventional ordnance.
Traditionally, psychic powers are considered Science Fiction, and are featured prominently in plenty of works by “pure” SF writers like Asimov and Clarke. It’s all arbitrary, of course, but that’s my point.
Which reminds me that Connie Willis often has futures in which missed calls and other difficulties in communication are frequent in books written in the 90s and beyond.
I read it as “The Silver Locusts” back in the 60s, and enjoyed it. As you say, that didn’t include many of the stories that have evidently been clumsily shoehorned into later editions.
Classic case of remakes never being as good as the original.
It wasn’t just Lancer – they went bankrupt for reasons not connected with the Conan books, which were a huge success. When other publishers saw that, they put our Howard books, too – Dell publushed bran Mac Morn in paperback and Time Lost/Centaur published three volumes of Solomon Kane stories (and the odd Breckenridge Elkins story). Later on in the 1970s Zebra and Berkeley Medallion jumped on the bandwagon. Conan and Howard were HUGE. It didn’t hurt that Marvel started publishing a Conan the Barbarian comic, then Savage Tales as a magazine (later yielding to Savage Sword of Conan).
I have absolutely no doubt that the reprinting of those old Conan stories (and other Hoawardiana, like Lancer’s The Darlk Man and others and Wolfshead) definitely had a huge effect on the heroic fantasy genre.
I see the situation as similar to that after WWII. Rockets and atomic bombs suddenly made science fiction semi-respectable. A dozen small presses jumped in because the mainstream publishers continue to condescend, with maybe a half dozen titles a year.
Most of the small presses reprinted classic fantasy. They all died quickly (except for Arkham House, a prewar outfit that had a different audience). The only long-term survivor was Gnome Press. True, it did reprints, but the vast majority involved reprinting magazine stories that had never previously had a hardback edition. Old magazines were nearly unbuyable, especially since so many had disappeared into wartime paper drives. For most purposes the stories were new to 1950s readers. Thirties’ pulps were even less accessible. That included the Conan stories. Long before Lancer, Gnome reprinted every word about Conan into first hardback publication and had de Camp turn Howard manuscripts about other heroes into new Conan stories.
Newness sold. Doubleday got into the science fiction business in a big way after Gnome made a hit with Asimov’s I, Robot and the Foundation series. The company started printing sf and launched the Science Fiction Book Club. All those books were cheap reprints of Doubleday titles, except for a few Gnomes (and one Shasta, IIRC). There’s no question that Marty Greenberg at Gnome played the part of Judy and Lester, taking a genre with known fans and turning it into a marketing category.
For evidence, I present the New York Times Book Review. The first Gnome title they reviewed, the actual first Gnome title, was the historic fantasy The Carnelian Cube, a new book by the ubiquitous L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Having nowhere to slot such an item, they stuck it into their Criminals at Large mystery column. Within two years, a true science fiction review column appeared irregularly.
That, I contend, is the difference between having genre books be popular as opposed to having genre books be a marketing category for new fiction that people looked for separate from reprinted oldies. The Del Reys followed Greenberg’s example. New fiction, not reprints, to grow and direct a readership.
I just received an announcement about a Heritage auction of the David Aronowitz collection. He was a collector who became a bookdealer when he started The Fine Books Company in Rochester, MI, 50 years ago. Bookstore owners cheat as collectors: they see 100 times what ordinary individuals do and people send them stuff as well. His collection is being billed as “one of – if not the – greatest collection of science fiction books ever to appear at auction.” Not quantity - this first half is only 268 items - but in association value.
So if you’re missing The Martian Chronicles you can buy Robert Heinlein’s copy, for a starting bid of a mere $4,000.
For something more personal to Bradbury, how about “Six inscribed and signed typescripts of short stories published in The Martian Chronicles, including three carbon typescripts and three typescripts.”, starting bid $20,000. (For those watching their budgets, remember that the auction house adds an additional 20% to all bids.)
Other names with many lots are Asimov, Dick, Heinlein, Lovecraft, Tolkien, who commands the highest starting bids, Verne and Wells.
You probably need to sign in to Heritage to view, but they won’t bother you afterward.
Lovers of classic SF, be prepared to have your jaws dropped.