I still read science fiction, just not as much as I did when I was young. Science fiction and fantasy books were what kept me distracted in my early years. I don’t know what started me on that track – maybe it was Star Trek, or the pulp anthologies my dad had around the house, but by the time I was in fourth or fifth grade I’d been through a few of the Dune novels and the Foundation trilogy.

Today, those titles are making it big on the big screens and big streams. I might get to see those at some point, though reluctantly. The sci-fi of my youth never translated well to anything on a screen, at least as far as I’ve ever been concerned. (It is an ages-old complaint when any printed works get adapted for a screen…)

Science fiction as a “thing” has been in the news in the past few years, as billionaires have raced to reach space fifty years after we put a man on the moon. For whatever reason, we’re heard a lot about how Musk and Bezos and even the dread Zuckerberg have been at times “inspired” by the science fiction they read in their youth. How we’ve evolved with science fiction: fantastic gadgets from Star Trek become real inventions, like the imagined communicator to the actual flip phone and now to the pocket computer. And how our tech billionaires are continuing that wave of inspired innovations.

But what science fiction were they reading?

Heinlen, Herbert, Asimov, Bradbury, Pohl…I chewed ’em up, burning through the stacks in the “Browse” section of the library. I especially loved anthologies of short science fiction stories. In, out, move on to the next fantastic idea. As a child in the middle of the cold war, the escapism that many of these authors gave us came straight from the nuclear scares of the 1950’s. Who cared about plot development, when you can recycle the same story over an over again on a strange new world?

During the past year or so I dusted off the spines of a few of the anthologies I, for whatever reason I can’t recall, kept on the shelf all these years. In particular, it’s been interesting to re-read a series entitled The Early Asimov (vols. 1 & 2) in which the prolific author regaled the reader with an almost encyclopedic recitation of what he was doing in his life when he wrote his first works and cashed his first checks as a writer. Reading his earliest stories is almost grimace-inducing, but in a sweet way. Perhaps it’s in the prose he prefaces each story with, something to soften the blow – I imagine if I found any copies of the early pulpers John Campbell filled with those and similar stories, I’d be…underwhelmed.

(Full disclosure: I’ve yet to be published, having not even finished a work, so I suppose, perhaps, I could just sit down and shut up!)

What was fascinating to me, though, in re-reading my post-war sci-fi collections to keep the pandemic at bay, was not the curious contraptions and pseudo-science brought to bear on alien worlds, but the curious portraiture of society these stories gave us. Not very many writers would qualify as “woke” these days; then again, consider their audience, and pulp editors like John Campbell shepherded their writers to feed that particular appetite.

I was thinking about this just the other day, and what happened next was kind of bizarre: our good friends at On The Media just ran a lovely story about this very topic. So rather than follow this little rabbit hole of my own commentary, I’ll suggest instead that you take off from here and give their story a listen.