In thehistory of science fiction, theGolden Age is a period in which the genre is considered to have matured in Americanscience fiction magazines, in particularAstounding Science Fiction—the period is usually referred to as the Golden Age ofscience fiction as a whole, though sometimes more specifically the Golden Age ofAstounding. Its beginning is marked byJohn W. Campbell's assumption of the editorship ofAstounding in the late 1930s. The end date is less agreed upon; it is often placed in the mid-1940s, though different definitions use dates ranging from 1941 to the early 1960s. Historiographically, the Golden Age follows thepulp era and precedes theNew Wave.
Other eras have also been referred to as golden ages of science fiction in specific contexts. For instance, the 1950s are considered to be the golden age ofscience fiction cinema. A common humorous statement is that "The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve" years old, or thereabouts.
Science fiction magazines first appeared in 1926 with the launch ofHugo Gernsback'sAmazing Stories.[1]: 23 This is usually considered to be the beginning of thepulp era of science fiction, though definitions vary.[2]: 109 [3]: 45 Several additional magazines by Gernsback and others appeared, and in some cases disappeared again, in the years that followed;[4][5]: xiii in 1937, there were seven science fiction pulp magazines in publication.[6]: 98 In October 1937,John W. Campbell became editor ofAstounding Stories. He finished the already in-progress December 1937 issue and started exercising direct editorial control from the January 1938 issue onwards alongside outgoing editorF. Orlin Tremaine, changing the title toAstounding Science Fiction starting with the March 1938 issue when he gained full editorial control.[7][8][9]: 150 Campbell's editorship ofAstounding is generally held to mark the beginning of the Golden Age,[7][10]: 80 though the precise starting point varies slightly depending on definition—from 1937 at the earliest to 1940 at the latest.[11]: 288 [12]: 288 [13]: 128 [14]: 64
Alva Rogers [Wikidata], in the 1964 bookA Requiem for Astounding, writes that the period was both the Golden Age ofscience fiction as a whole and ofAstounding in particular, and identifies the July 1939 issue as "the first real harbinger ofAstounding's Golden Age".[15]: 59, 68 The July 1939 issue ofAstounding has been adopted by others as the starting point of the Golden Age,[16]: 5 [17]: 79 [18]: 66 [19]: 300 andThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes that "The beginning of Campbell's particular Golden Age of SF can be pinpointed as the summer of 1939" more broadly.[8] The July issue included "Black Destroyer", the first published story byA. E. van Vogt, as well as the first appearance byIsaac Asimov in the magazine with the story "Trends"; the August issue contained the first published story byRobert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line"; and the September issue had the first story byTheodore Sturgeon, "Ether Breather".[8][16]: 5 [17]: 79 Rogers nevertheless holds that, despite the appearance of these early stories, "it wasn't until 1940 that the Golden Age came into full being".[20]: 75 Mike Ashley—who comments that the Golden Age of science fiction may be more appropriately referred to as the Golden Age ofAstounding—similarly finds the July 1939 date arbitrary, viewing the change that happened as occurring gradually during 1938–1939 with each successive issue ofAstounding contributing.[18]: 66 [21]: 111
Campbell's instruction to his writers was refreshing: Write a story that could be published as a contemporary tale in a magazine published in the 25th century.
He also told them he wanted stories about aliens who could think as well as humans, but notlike humans.
As editor ofAstounding, Campbell took a proactive role.[11]: 287 Even before he assumed the editorship, it had become the best-selling science fiction magazine and paid authors higher rates than its competitors did.[8][23]: 19–20 This madeAstounding a popular market and made it possible for Campbell to be selective.[23]: 20 Campbell, who had been a science fiction writer before he became editor, had a strong sense of what made for good science fiction, and he would frequently demand revisions, revise himself, or outright reject stories that did not meet his exacting standards.[11]: 287 [24]: 2 One of his convictions was that the maturity of sf readership was greater than had previously been believed.[24]: 2 He demanded that stories be logically sound,[23]: 20 [25]: 14 [26]: 217 required greater scientific accuracy than had previously been the norm,[23]: 20 [27]: 32 [28]: 56 and asked authors to consider what the effects of their ideas upon society and the individual would be.[6]: 98 [25]: 14 [29]: 487 More broadly, he was not content with the prevailing literary quality that appeared in magazines at the time but insisted upon more proficient writing.[22]: 46 [23]: 20 [27]: 32 [30] In the words of Asimov, who started writing for Campbell around this time, "he found magazine science fiction childish, and he made it adult".[16]: 4
Campbell attracted some established writers such asJack Williamson,Murray Leinster, andClifford D. Simak; mainly, he discovered new ones like van Vogt, Asimov, Heinlein, and Sturgeon.[7][16]: 5 [30] He thus developed a stable of writers who were able to produce the kind of science fiction he wanted; authors who could not or would not write in Campbell's preferred style—the most high-profile example beingRay Bradbury—turned to his competitors instead.[16]: 5 [23]: 20 [28]: 56 Campbell largely stopped writing himself,[28]: 56 [30] and instead frequently came up with ideas that he would have his writers turn into stories;[22]: 47 [23]: 20 [24]: 2 for instance, Asimov credited Campbell with originating the plot for the 1941 short story "Nightfall", the underlying premise of theFoundation series, and the formulation of theThree Laws of Robotics.[23]: 20 [30]Lester del Rey later recalled a group of writers attempting to estimate the proportion of stories inAstounding that were based on Campbell's ideas, concluding that it must have exceeded half.[24]: 2 Unlike many of his competitors at the time, Campbell was not expected by the publisher to write stories himself and was paid enough that it was not necessary for him to do so to supplement his income.[24]: 13–14 He also only served as editor forAstounding (and, between 1939 and 1943, its fantasy companionUnknown), rather than needing to divide attention between multiple publications as several of his contemporaries did;Donald A. Wollheim credits Campbell's success as an editor in part to thus having time available to do the job with greater care.[8][24]: 14 [31]: 76 Michael R. Page, inThe Cambridge History of Science Fiction, further points to Campbell being interested in science fiction for its own sake, rather than treating it solely as a business as the mainscience fiction editors before him (except Gernsback) had done.[9]: 149
By the late 1940sAstounding's dominance in the field was slowly beginning to be rivalled byStartling Stories, and the launch ofThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1949 andGalaxy Science Fiction in 1950 ended it definitively.[7][8][30] The 1950s saw the magazine market dominated by a triumvirate ofAstounding,F&SF, andGalaxy.[23]: 23 At the same time, the emergence of a new market for science fiction—books, especiallypaperbacks—shifted the genre's centre of gravity away from the magazines.[23]: 23 [27]: 32 [32]: 124 Campbell's personal standing in the field also diminished. One reason was his increasing interest in variouspseudoscientific concepts such aspsionics andL. Ron Hubbard'sDianetics (a precursor toScientology); Hubbard was one of Campbell's frequent contributors of fiction to bothAstounding andUnknown, and in a controversial move, Campbell published his non-fiction article on Dianetics in the May 1950 issue ofAstounding. Another was his hands-on editorial approach that many writers came to see as increasingly controlling rather than inspiring, leading them to publish elsewhere. A third was his political views, which grew increasingly overt,right-wing, andauthoritarian—expressed in editorials thatThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction suggests detracted his attention from collaborating with his writers—alienating a significant proportion of readers and writers alike.[8][9]: 159–160, 164 [22]: 55 [27]: 32 [28]: 57 [30]
Opinions differ on when, exactly, the Golden Age ended.[10]: 80 [11]: 288 [23]: 22 At the earliest, it is sometimes considered to have ended in 1941 when the United States enteredWorld War II;[32]: 124 at the latest, in the early 1960s with the advent of theNew Wave of science fiction.[33]: 326
A common perspective is that it ended at the end of World War II or shortly thereafter.[11]: 288 [22]: 46 [32]: 124 Paul A. Carter [Wikidata], in the 2004 edition ofAnatomy of Wonder, attributes this in part to theatomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 resulting in aloss of innocence for the field of science fiction;nuclear weapons had by then been anticipated in science fiction for a number of years, and Carter comments onthese stories that "the boy cried wolf, and the wolf came".[22]: 46, 50–51 Rogers comments that it is much more difficult to put a date on the end of the Golden Age than on its beginning,[34]: 128 noting that is often thought of as having lasted for the duration of the 1940s by those who did not experience it firsthand, whereas those who lived through it—and scholars—more typically view it as having ended around 1945.[35]: 155 Rogers personally favours an end date of 1943, while acknowledging that many would consider this overly restrictive and granting that 1944–1945 "could be considered a Final Phase of the Golden Age".[34]: 128 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes that the Golden Age is often considered to have ended in 1946, but that this is difficult to justify in light of the writing talents emerging as important contributors to the field in the late 1940s and early 1950s, includingArthur C. Clarke andFrederik Pohl—commenting that it may be more apt to say that it ended forAstounding than for science fiction as a whole.[7]
The Golden Age is sometimes considered to have lasted into the 1950s.[11]: 288 Page places the end of the Golden Age in 1950, pointing among other things to the emergence ofAstounding's first serious competitors in the form ofF&SF andGalaxy and Campbell's publication of Hubbard's article on Dianetics.[9]: 164 Amelia Beamer [Wikidata] comments that the end point is often taken to be 1955,[36]: 249 while David M. Higgins and Roby Duncan, inThe Science Fiction Handbook, describe it as encompassing the late 1950s.[13]: 128
Besides the editorial influence of Campbell,George Mann identifies the broader cultural shift brought about byWorld War II as an important factor in determining the trajectory of the genre during this time period.[25]: 13 Increasingscientific literacy among the readership has also been proposed as a contributing factor.[23]: 22 Another aspect is that many of the emerging writers of the time had themselves grown up reading science fiction magazines.[24]: 3 [31]: 74–75 [9]: 149 Carter further points to the rapid expansion of the market in the late 1930s, with a large number of new science fiction magazines going into print (a substantial proportion of which went out of business not long thereafter due to paper shortages during the war) and thus providing opportunities for aspiring writers.[22]: 46–47
According toThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, the Golden Age was "the time when most of the themes and motifs of sf were taking their modern shape",[7] a sentiment echoed by Mann and Page.[9]: 165 [25]: 14
Ashley writes that Campbell's influence on the genre was largely confined toAstounding for several years, and that science fiction as a whole did not mature until the second half of the 1940s after the end of World War II.[18]: 67
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction writes that overall, science fiction has been steadily improving over time, and that the Golden Age thus did not constitute a high-water mark of quality. Furthermore, science fiction works "of real literary quality" unrelated to the shifts occurring inside the magazines associated with the Golden Age were published outside of them both before and during this period. Nevertheless, "there is a residue of truth in the Golden Age myth"—in particular, that the kind of stories that appeared in the magazines seemed entirely unprecedented to most readers at the time, and that the genre saw what may have been the sharpest increase in quality in its entire history.[7]Adam Roberts similarly finds the subsequent New Wave period of the 1960s and 1970s to have been a more fruitful era for the genre as it saw more diverse kinds of stories rather than being constrained by Campbell's dominant vision.[11]: 288
Mann comments that the Golden Age was "arguably the most important period in SF history".[25]: 13 Page similarly writes that "Campbell's Golden Age remains a central locus point in the history of SF and its importance cannot be overestimated".[9]: 165
Golden Age sf was characterized by a faith in the inevitability of dramatic scientific and technological progress, often accompanied by an optimistic belief that this progress would lead to social, political, and economic progress as well.
Roberts argues that the Golden Age was defined by Campbell's personal tastes and the genre dominated by the kinds of stories that met with his approval, identifying four distinct types: (1) "idea-fictions rooted in recognisable science", (2) "can-do stories about heroes solving problems or overcoming enemies", (3) "expansionist humano-centric narratives", and (4) "extrapolations of possible technologies and their social and human impacts".[11]: 287 Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of the 1940s—the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface".[37]
The term "Golden Age of science fiction" was coined byscience fiction fans nostalgic for the period,[11]: 287 [32]: 124 [38]: 139 and the conventional Golden Age concept relates almost exclusively to magazine science fiction in the United States.[7][29]: 487 A number of alternative date ranges have been proposed by other generations of readers or in other contexts.[7][32]: 124 [38]: 139 The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that it often corresponds to the establishment of science fiction magazines in the local market, as in the case ofBulgarian,Hungarian,Japanese, andPolish science fiction.[7] Similarly, the Golden Age ofAustralian science fiction is considered by some to be the 1990s, marked by the rivalry between the magazinesAurealis andEidolon.[7][39] The Golden Age ofFrench science fiction, by contrast, is considered byThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction to be the 1880s through the 1930s, when there were no dedicated science fiction magazines but the genre regularly appeared in nonspecialized magazines.[40] The Golden Age ofscience fiction cinema is generally held to be the 1950s, especially in a US context;[41]: 4 [42]: 64 [43]: 48 [44]: 3 [45]: 92 [46]: 261 a second Golden Age is sometimes considered to have started in 1977 with the releases ofStar Wars andClose Encounters of the Third Kind.[46]: 267 [47]: 10
In the context of English-language science fiction, other periods than the conventional one have also been considered Golden Ages.[7]F. Orlin Tremaine, editor ofAstounding between October 1933 and November 1937,[8] said that "I believe we can safely call the years 1933–37 the first golden age of science fiction".[48]: xvii Alva Rogers similarly deems the period encompassing the early 1940s the second Golden Age ofAstounding, with the first being the first few years following Tremaine's appointment as editor.[34]: 127–128 Some writers, among them Mike Ashley andRobert Silverberg, take the position that the real Golden Age occurred in the 1950s.[7][32]: 124 [38]: 139 Ashley, in the 2005 bookTransformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970, writes that that decade, and its first half in particular, saw an unprecedented outpouring of science fiction by a diverse set of talented writers in a broad variety of magazines withGalaxy Science Fiction chief among them.[7][49]: vii–viii [50]: 138–140, 160 [51]: 301 In Ashley's opinion,Galaxy reached the same heights in the early 1950s asAstounding did in the early 1940s.[52]: 28 Silverberg, in a 2010 essay, similarly points to a diversity of publishing options for writers of serious science fiction. BesidesGalaxy, the other main newcomerThe Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a couple dozen other new or revitalized competitor magazines, Silverberg notes the emergence of a new market for science fiction: books, in bothhardcover andpaperback format, by publishers such asDoubleday andBallantine Books. As a result, Silverberg argues, the financial risk to writers was lessened—if one outlet rejected a story there were plenty of others that might accept it, which had not been the case when the field was largely dominated by a single editor in the form of Campbell—and this made writing science fiction professionally a more attractive prospect, leading to prolific and proficient output from a large number of writers.[53]Peter Nicholls, in the original 1979 edition ofThe Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, wrote that inasmuch as more first-rate science fiction had been written in the preceding decade than in any other ten-year period, one could argue that the Golden Age was then ongoing.[54]: 258
Grown men and women, sixty years old, twenty-five years old, sit around and talk about "the golden age of science fiction", remembering when every story in every magazine was a masterwork of daring, original thought. Some say the golden age was circa 1928; some say 1939; some favor 1953, or 1970, or 1984. The arguments rage till the small of the morning, and nothing is ever resolved.
Because the real golden age of science fiction is twelve.
An oft-repeated humorous remark posits that the "Golden Age" of science fiction is not a period in thehistory of the genre, but rather a nostalgic period in an individual's lifetime.[7][22]: 45–46 [29]: 487 [38]: 139 The aphorism "The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve" was coined by science fiction fan Peter Graham, one of the editors of thefanzineVoid,c. 1960.[7][55]: 13 [56] Many variations exist,[7][56] sometimes giving the age as 13[22]: 45–46 [29]: 487 [38]: 139 [57]: 56 or 14.[29]: 487 [54]: 258 [58]: 55 The reason is often given as this being the age when most start reading science fiction,[22]: 45–46 [57]: 56 first experience asense of wonder,[38]: 139 or both.[29]: 487
Science fiction entered a new phase when, in 1926, Gernsback placed the first issue ofAmazing Stories on the newsstands. [...] WithAmazing Stories the pulp era of science fiction began.
Specific dates vary greatly, but the golden age is most often associated with the period in the 1930s and 1940s shortly after John W. Campbell, Jr. began editingAstounding Stories.
Fans bicker pleasantly amongst themselves over the dates most properly connected with this Age, nominally golden. There is a consensus that it starts in 1938–39, some say it ends when World War II does, some that it lasts into the 1950s, but this need not distract us.
Shortly before the outbreak of war, science fiction was beginning a new phase, one signalled by the appointment of John W. Campbell as editor ofAstounding. This next period, roughly from 1938 to 1950, is referred to by some as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
Golden Age: A term used to refer to the period from 1937 (when John W. Campbell took over as editor ofAmazing [sic]Stories) through the late 1950s in US SF publishing. The Golden Age followed the pulp era of the 1920s and 30s
what many people refer to as the 'Golden Age' of sf (c.1940–60).
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help){{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help){{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help){{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)The "golden age" of pulp science fiction usually refers to John Campbell's tenure atAstounding from 1938 to 1955.
The first major cycle of SF films came from Hollywood in the 1950s. This period is now regarded as a 'golden age' of science fiction cinema
that golden age of science fiction film generally considered to encompass 1950 to 1956
the 1950s, the Golden Age of science fiction film
The economic appeal of genre film production, coupled with rising public interest in both science and space as a result of Cold War technological advances, such as artificial satellites and nuclear weapons, led to the 1950s becoming an American 'Golden Age of science fiction film'.
Thus, if the 1950s represented a sort of golden age of science fiction film, the decade was also the golden age of American homogenization
although historically unique, the SF film's first "Golden Age" (1950–1960) had its origins in the popular culture of earlier decades.
[...]
in 1977 (a year after the American bicentennial), it was precisely space travel and extraterrestrials that marked the inauguration of SF's second "Golden Age"
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