A Twitter user chronicles his blocking by author Marko Kloos over a disagreement about the current and former state of science fiction.
Not only was the Golden Age better written, it was not the age Kloos is thinking of.
Kloos has fallen for the post-1980 memory holing of the Pulp Golden Age, which did in fact tend to be apolitical. Science fiction wasn’t overtly politicized until the Campbellian Silver Age. We even know the exact date when the politicization of SF began: October 30, 1937, the date of Donald A. Wollheim’s “Mutation or Death” speech to the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, PA.
Pulp authors’ primary concern was writing entertaining stories that would sell. As a result, pulp masters like Walter Gibson and Edgar Rice Burroughs produced works that dominated popular culture.
It’s no coincidence that science fiction was relegated to a cultural ghetto in the course of Wollheim and Michel’s call for a communist revolution in the genre.
But according to Kloos, this reader is a wrongfan having wrongfun. Par for the course for a writer who turned down his 2015 Hugo nomination because the wrong people voted for him.
There is, however, a happy ending:
I’ll gladly accept the readership of anyone who values story, character, and fun over political lectures.
