In The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A Journey into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books (2019) John Wade deems the 1950s to be said golden age largely on the grounds that this was the decade in which he grew up and first absorbed the genre, leaving an indelible influence on him. It is far from a comprehensive scrutiny of the field, though Wade specifically says he has produced a personal account, not an encyclopaedia.
As the subtitle indicates there are five sections, addressing radio, television, films, comics and books, but of course these media are far from insular, with frequent migrations of properties between them. The coverage takes in the significant contributions of American producers of SF, which would be hard to ignore, but Wade’s primary interest is on what was happening in Britain. He provides a nicely-illustrated overview of a complex period (politically, socially and scientifically) that produced a lot of gems in addition to much that was less polished.
The sections on films and novels tread familiar ground, but those on radio, television and print offer insights into less familiar aspects of the SF landscape. The radio chapter is particularly useful because of the medium’s ephemerality, and thus the general obscurity of the programmes it carried, but also because of the huge influence it still wielded when television ownership was so small. Wade runs through some of the significant productions, both serials and one-off programmes.
Yet despite TV’s limited penetration it was still able to provide significant moments, such as the Quatermass series (Wade includes excerpts from an interview he did with Nigel Kneale, among others) and Nineteen Eighty-Four, plus miscellaneous programming. American series, such as Superman and the anthologies which became popular – The Twilight Zone being the best-remembered example – are given secondary consideration.
Spoilt for choice, the film section is obliged to compress a large number of films, drawn from all parts of the budgetary and artistic scale, and the marketing efforts that supported them. There is little space for a decent exploration of motifs and their ideological underpinnings, and Wade sticks to describing a few personal favourites. A comprehensive list of relevant films released during the decade makes a handy tick list for further investigation.
Of the novelists, Wade mainly discusses John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke* and Ray Bradbury, plus a handful of others in a cursory manner. The result feels arbitrary when so many had to be omitted, and a few of the accompanying covers date from after the 1950s, presumably because the original ones were rather dull by comparison. There is no mention of Bradbury’s influential short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’.
The major focus of the comics and magazines section is unsurprisingly on the more extensive, and influential, American scene, but Wade does look at British publications, including New Worlds, though its Moorcockian heyday came later. Naturally he particularly lauds the Eagle and Dan Dare, but refers to other British comics, omnibuses and newspaper strips which had an SF theme. The section concludes with an alphabetical list of English-language magazines in existence in the 1950s.
This is a chatty overview of the period, written from a fan rather than an analytical perspective. Wade is a pleasant guide and his enthusiasm is infectious; this will encourage anyone with a casual interest in the subject to delve into the decade’s prodigious output. It provides a balance to the usual American-centric nature of 1950s science fiction studies, though with a subject capable of endless reinvention there may not be universal agreement the 1950s constituted its golden age. What is clear is that a great deal of the SF produced then has worn well. and can still be consumed with pleasure today.
*I’m wondering if it is a coincidence that there is a Martin Gibson in both Clarke’s The Sands of Mars and Radio 4’s The Archers. It probably is.
The Joy of Mere Words 