Episode: 4180
Title: HPR4180: Intro to Science Fiction Series
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4180/hpr4180.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 20:54:15

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,180 for Friday the 9th of August 2024.
Today's show is entitled Intro to Science Fiction Series.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 16 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I'm starting a new series on science fiction and fantasy.
And this introduces it.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in what is going to be a new series.
Just to bring you up to date on where I am at, we have decided to stop traveling via our
RV.
I'm 72 and it's starting to become a little more work than I really am comfortable doing.
And one of the things that happens when you start getting to be about my age is doing
things that you don't want to do is something you just stop doing.
So I just do whatever I want to do now.
And I have certain interests and one of them I'm going to start talking about is science
fiction and fantasy.
I've been a huge fan for a long time.
In fact, I don't even, I can't even remember when it started.
I don't recall a time in my life when I wasn't reading science fiction and fantasy.
It's not to say that I haven't read other things.
As a child, I certainly remember reading the Walter Farley books about horses and some
images from that have stuck in my brain.
But when I think of my early love of here with books, it is about reading science fiction
and fantasy.
I lean more toward science fiction, but I enjoy them both.
Now I was a voracious reader.
I remember living in Buffalo.
I would have been about nine or ten.
And my mother taking me on a weekly trip to the library where I would check out a stack
of books for my weeks reading or rather my mother would check them out.
Kids my age were not allowed to check out so many books and most of the ones I checked
out were considered adult level.
So she had to do it for me.
And while we lived in a suburb of Buffalo called Amherst, I remember taking a trip downtown
to the main Buffalo library and thinking it was the most awesome place I had ever been.
My own private fantasy involves sneaking into a corner, getting locked in for the night
and just spending the whole time reading.
Now I started off with things like the Tom Swift books.
Now that's been going on for a long time.
I've got some links in the show notes if you want to learn more about those.
But they were, you know, they were child books, Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the hardy brothers,
you know, hardy boys, sort of typical juvenile books.
Then I moved to juvenile books by more adult authors.
And they were always called juveniles.
I think today they called them young adult and I'm not sure what the difference means
really.
A high line wrote a number of juveniles that are still excellent, many of which I have
re-read as an adult and still enjoyed.
Asimov did a series called Lucky Star that was a virtual trip through the solar system.
Like Lucky Star and the Pirates of the Asteroids.
Lucky Star and the Moons of Jupiter.
You know, at some point I joined the science fiction book club and I got a copy of the
foundation trilogy by Asimov in a single volume which I kept for years and re-read many
times.
In fact, it was falling apart eventually.
Then I discovered Doc Smith, EE Doc Smith.
Now I think his work would definitely look a little old-fashioned now but remember I'm
72.
So I'm kind of old-fashioned.
It was something I fell in love with.
Now there's a saying in the fandom circles of science fiction that the golden age of science
fiction is 14 because that is approximately the age when so many of us became lifelong
fans.
And still a fan of Doc Smith.
I have a Domain's Will Nick dot com that comes from his Lensman series.
I have the Domain Palain dot com which comes from his Lensman series.
And I think I encountered that by the time I was 14 so that all fits.
I've read everything of his I could get my hands on.
I think a book that is not science fiction called have trench coat will travel.
I would bet very few people have even heard of it and then only the devoted fans of Doc
Smith.
He has two well-known major series, the Lensman series already mentioned and the Skylark
series.
But he has a couple of two book series and a number of standalone science fiction novels.
He also contributed ideas or even an initial piece to two series that were picked up by
other authors.
The Family Dillon Bear series was based on an idea by Smith but mostly written by Stephen
Golden.
Although if you ever get one of the books it's Smith's name is what you see on the cover
and Golden is in small print down at the bottom.
Similarly there was a Lord Tedrick series that was based on a novel act by Smith but mostly
written by Gordon Eklent.
Smith is what people frequently point to as representing classic space opera, meaning
science fiction on a large scale, with lots of action and not too much in the way of
introspection.
You think of it as the print equivalent of Star Wars and you won't go far wrong.
And while I'm at it at this point I've been mentioning a lot of names of things.
The show notes, I've got links to all of these things you can follow up on if anything
catches your eye or ear in this case.
So anyway, in addition to science fiction I also read fantasy, I know I read the Lord
of the Rings trilogy probably several times, the Hobbit several times, another favorite
author was Andre Norton who wrote both fantasy and science fiction.
Now as I said I tended to lean more towards science fiction but the good story is the
most important thing and boundaries can be blurred.
Heinlein for instance wrote a number of pure fantasies but he is usually considered a
science fiction writer.
But novels like Glory Road and Job Accomedy of Justice are pure fantasy.
Sometimes though what looks like fantasy can turn out to be science fiction as with
the classic Dragon Riders of Perns series by Ann McAfry.
Which means it may be a good time to defend my terms.
I could just say I know it when I see it but I'll try to do better.
Science fiction is a story that is based on possible technology even if far in the future.
It does not involve anything magical or anything flat out impossible.
It may be far fetched in some ways such as involving time travel or faster than light
travel.
These are considered to be unlikely but are still being plausibly discussed by real scientists
as something we may be able to do in some future time.
Science in a science fiction novel may not age particularly well.
Doc Smith for instance in the Lensman series had this whole thing about an inertialist
drive which was his way of getting around faster than light.
You know that if some of you got rid of inertia you could travel infinitely fast.
It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense but you know in his day he could get away
with it.
Now fantasy on the other hand has no rules.
Magic is just fine, ghosts are great, the only real requirement is that your story finds
an audience that likes it.
Even things that look like science fiction can turn out to be fantasy when looked at this
way.
A classic example for me is Star Wars.
Yeah it's got spaceships and technology in it but when you bring in the force you're
talking fantasy now.
In the other direction the dragonwriters of Perne that I mentioned previously initially
presents itself as high fantasy with people in a medieval like setting riding dragons
that fly through the air and breathe fire.
But then later in the series McCaffrey retcons this by having the people be descendants
of folks who came here on spaceships and they bred the dragons using genetic engineering
from native life forms and so on.
Now I use the term retcon.
That's a term you often hear in science fiction fandom circles and it stands for Retroactive
Continuity.
Here's the definition from the dictionary.
This is Miriam Webster again link in the show notes.
Retcon is a shortened form of retroactive continuity and refers to a literary device
in which the form or content of a previously established narrative is changed.
So in Dallas when you know someone wakes up and it was all a dream that's retcon.
Now up until now I've just been discussing the print written science fiction you know
I also enjoy the visual.
I think probably my first exposure would have been the twilight zone in 1959 1959 I turned
to eight so it was a long time ago and I was a lot younger and then there was the outer
limits in 1963.
I certainly remember lost in space that was in 1965 but the real breakthrough for me and
for a lot of people was Star Trek which hit the television sets in 1966.
Now I still love it.
I have a DVD box set of the original three season series, TOS the original series with
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, all of the original gang at the Enterprise and so I've got the
whole Shabang and it's great I love watching it.
I watched it when it first came on.
I watched it over and over and syndicated reruns and it never gruelled.
Now I can't say that I've kept up with all of the spin-offs because there's only so
many hours in the day but I have watched the first two seasons of Picard and have the
third one waiting as a DVD set.
I purchased all of them as DVD sets.
One of the all-time great science fiction movies came out in 1968 that's 2001 a Space
Odyssey.
It's based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick and it felt
like the first time that a serious science fiction movie for adults had been made and presented
real turning point.
Now in the early 70s in Boston I ran across a program, a strange program on a UHF channel.
This program was something called Doctor Who.
Now it was clearly a British program with a fellow called the Doctor.
He had on evening clothes and a cape and he drove around in a yellow classic car he called
Bessie.
I fell in love with the program and started to tune in regularly.
Then one day I tuned in and instead of the Doctor there was some goofy looking guy in
a floppy hat and a long scarf who claimed to be the Doctor but I wasn't having any of
it.
I knew better.
Some years later I got a clue and have become a dedicated fan of the show and we'll definitely
talk about that in this series.
It's still going on and in 2023 it celebrated its 60th anniversary having first aired on
November 23rd in 1963.
Now later in the 1970s movies also started to get interesting again.
In 1977 I saw Star Wars which was very exciting and then I saw the two subsequent ones
Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
In 1979 Star Trek the motion picture definitely had to watch that.
That was the original Star Trek team now in a big screen movie production.
Now after those first three Star Wars movies my interest started to fall off.
I think I've seen maybe two of the others.
I've seen most of the Star Trek movies probably missed a few of them.
Now right now for my fiction reading I'm in the middle of reading the Amber series by
Roger Zalasni who is a wonderful writer.
This is a purely fantasy series about the true world amber of which our earth is only
a shadow.
And I got to hear him read from his book A Night in the Lonesome October which is another
fantasy novel at a science fiction convention.
As for what I am watching right now I am mostly watching Doctor Who.
At 60 years of material I still haven't seen all of it yet.
And I recently started under British TV show called Sapphire and Steel from 1979 which
I would classify as probably fantasy.
Now while I have ongoing technical and academic interests for interest for for example I'm
currently and currently being 2024 reading Thomas Piketty's excellent book Capital
in the 21st century.
I used to be a professor of economics.
But when I read fiction it is almost always science fiction or fantasy.
So I'm going to be discussing many of the things we've just talked about in this introductory
episode but going into more depth about it and I'll probably bring in some other things.
And I'd also like to encourage anyone else at Hacker Public Radio that wants to talk
about science fiction and fantasy to come join the series and make your own contributions.
So this I hope maybe opens up some possibilities for additional and particularly for new contributors
to jump in and start offering some shows.
So this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio and signing off and is always encouraging
you to support free software.
Bye bye.
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