AG Monday
It’s episode #50!
It’s an arbitrary round number, but it’s a great time to look back on almost a year of the Ancient Geeks podcast! Steven and Tom discuss what we’ve learned, about the evolution of science fiction, fantasy, comics, and games, based on our decades of lived experience. How has geek culture changed, and how have we?
What books, movies, TV shows, and comics do we still love as much, or even more, than we did when we were snot-nosed youngsters? What do we like less? What treasures did we discover that we didn’t know when we were young? How has geek content evolved? What is more popular, and what is less popular? And are the communities of geekdom any better or worse now than they were in decades past?
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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Now it feels like Monday (thanks a lot!).
Happy anniversary, however you reckon it!
Re, cover art. I first noticed a decline in cover art not in books, but in albums. By the 90s music had migrated to CDs, which came in tiny cases. Cover art in some LPs could be epic. Not to mention inside art in double albums, and sometimes on sleeve covers, and inserts now and then. Now it’s happening to books.
I’ve read a few of the classic XIX and early XX century science fiction works, mostly Verne and Welles. I’ve also read a few stories from the “Golden Age” (aka the publishing era dominated by John W. Campbell Jr., editor os Astounding magazine), and some earlier ones. Plus just about all of Asimov’s science fiction.
A lot of it reads as scientifically illiterate. Curiously things like Cavorite feel to me less illiterate as science goes than Verne’s effing big gun to launch a ship to the Moon.
A lot more feels really naive.
Partly this reflects that genres need to develop tropes, conventions, a story language even, that identifies and loosely defines the genre. This makes older SF rather quaint.
Not to mention the tropes and conventions taken from other genres. Remember Roddenberry infamously pitched Star Trek as “a wagon train to the stars”? There’s plenty of racism, sexism, and other objectionable material in a lot of older SF stories, well past the sexism in Trek, or giving the original Klingons an oriental look.
I do often wonder how the people in the future will look at SF written after the inception of the atomic age and the space age.
On merch, I may have mentioned before at one time we had nearly every original 1977 Star Wars plastic dolls, including all droids and many cantina aliens. We played a lot with them, though. Had they survived to this day, they’d be near the bottom as regard monetary value as collectibles.
At one time we had an X-wing, complete with sound effects that sounded nothing like the movie. Luke fit in the cockpit, as did most other dolls. There was an R2 head permanently attached. You pressed it to get the wings to open into the X shape.
I don’t think I kept any of that.
On a bookshelf I’ve dolls of the young Obi Wan, Queen Amidala, and Padme, as in the first prequel movie (out of their packaging). And for some reason a decorative pewter figure of a Romulan Warbird. I think my parents gave it to me, which would fit. They saw “Star Trek” on the box and figured it was all the same. Not SF, I also have two Saturn Vs in different scales, an Apollo command and service module, a Lunar Module, a Lunar Rover, and three astronauts.
I wouldn’t mind a display model of the Enterprise D, or the Defiant. Also a Starfury.
@Kathy: We had all those SW figures as well and the X-Wing you mention.
And I am totally down with the D, the Defiant, and a Starfury!