13.04.2011 um 23:25 Uhr
- Vintage SF is a frustrating passion because ephemerally cheap printing consigned so many treasures to oblivion. Visionary ideas and artwork survive solely through fan devotion. My own dog-eared copy of Murray Leinster’s Black Galaxy was permanently (and stupidly) ‘borrowed” by a then-current-crush.
- Thank goodness for books.Google.com, because Leinster generated a host of ideas that seem to have inspired other authors and filmmakers.
He left both a lengthy bibliography, and inventions, including of a new way of projecting pictures. - In Black Galaxy, character development and political correctness are nil, as was standard for SF, offering a fine help assignment topic for some bright student. However, there is action and imagination enough to populate several novels.
- For example, an alien artifact booby-trapping our Solar system reappears in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In place of Clarke’s beneficent intelligences, however, Leinster’s repellently stinky aliens are genocidally xenophobic. Perhaps most damning, from such a creative writer as Leinster, these aliens lack any inventive spark. Instead, they plunder the innovations, arts, and crafts, of exterminated species. Leinster’s hero, Rod, pneumatic fiancée, Kit, and tradesmen trapped on the ship, apply the aliens own technology (and a parallel ‘black’ universe) to wipe them out and save Earth.
- This novel, and others by Leinster, reveal a man confident in American ingenuity and goodness, but influenced by the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s. The secret signal, the uncreative aliens, their destruction of ancient beauty, all evoke the USSR at its worst. The SF expression of such anti-Communist fears would be a good topic to buy essay cheap.
