Friday, August 17, 2007

The Lighter Side of Sci-Fi

Might as well put my money where my mouth is and kick this at-least-one-post-a-day program off right...

So, I've been reading a lot of Keith Laumer's work of late, and I see a lot of similarities between his style and my own, nascent though mine might be thus far.

One problem I have seen with a lot of science-fiction writers over the past decade or two is that they all seem to take it all so very seriously. There have been one or two novels which shan't be named here that left me seriously wondering whether or not anyone has any fun in the future, whether fun is even legal. Perhaps it is some forbidden pleasure, best savored in the dark valleys between towering glass and durasteel monoliths, away from the ever-seeing eyes of the omni-cams and the probing thoughts of the government and corporate psyker legions.

Laumer's style was different, though. Much "pulpier" than your typical sci-fi, even among the sci-fi of the time, but he did it without being campy and hokey... and he wasn't afraid to use the odd literary device to keep things moving along when it looked like things were going to get dull. Time-honored things like having a female protagonist pull the hapless hero out of the fire, or "look what Widget X can do!" or the venerable, "If the story starts to slow down, have a man kick in the door with a gun in his hand," were favorite tools of his.

He also wasn't afraid to throw some of the absurd in, from time to time, and had a fine sense of irony, which showed in tales ranging from someone waiting in a government bureaucratic line for most of his life, to interstellar filmmakers whose idea of Academy Award-winning material is natural disasters to aliens stealing the brains of men and putting them into battle tanks.

Baen Books has a bunch of Laumer's works as part of their free library. You can find his stuff here, edited by Eric Flint. It's good stuff, from a time when science fiction didn't take itself so damn seriously.

Check it out.

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