What George Burns once said about the death of Vaudeville is appropriate here: “There’s no place for the kids to be lousy anymore.”

The pulps were the Vaudeville for new writers, and the loss of all those skilled editors who were willing to work with no-name authors and whip bad stories into shape hurts not only science fiction, but writers in all genres.

The days of free (if sometimes harsh) mentoring while earning some encouraging pocket change are nearly gone now, and that’s really too bad.

I’m glad you brought up Campbell’s ‘Mightiest Machine.’ I had totally forgotten about it and will now go back and re-read it with new interest! I loved Forward’s Timemaster and I see that Kare keeps plugging at the sailbeam idea. No shortage of ideas when it comes to the interstellar conundrum.

I had the fortune of being given a bunch of old “Astoundings” probably even the issue with the cover above. Some gems are a 1937 edition with an instalment of Doc Smith’s “Skylark of Valeron”, the issue with Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” (a 1946 prediction of the Internet), and Heinlein’s “Blowups Happen” in its 1940 edition – modern collections have the 1949 version of that story. The poor old pulps are flaking away and I’m not sure how to slow down their decay.

On starflight old Doc Smith began writing “The Skylark of Space” in 1915, before Gernsback published it in 1927 (?) But interstellar travel tales are older than that – Voltaire’s “Micromegas” is about a visit by a gigantic traveller from Sirius.

The first serious interstellar travel proposal was probably some idea dreamt up by Tsiolkovsky since he imagined so much else. Once sub-atomic energy was a physical possibility I think many thinkers and writers imagined interstellar flight. Most were ridiculously naive, usually ignoring Einstein, but John Campbell, for example, was a physicist and in his “The Mightiest Machine” he invoked a kind of hyperdrive to skirt around relativity.

From the 1940s total conversion drives were the usual sub-light concept invoked, especially by Heinlein. Fusion power began to be invoked in the later 1950s, and ramjets appeared after Bussard’s seminal paper in 1960. That idea dominated sub-light stories. In the early 1970s blackhole wormholes became popular as a relativistic lightspeed dodge, while antimatter rockets began appearing. Joe Haldeman invoked both in different tales, for example.

Laser-sails sprang forth in the early 1980s, thanks to Forward, but a whole range of concepts rattled around – amat rockets, ramjets, fusion rockets, vacuum energy ramjets (Sheffield and Clarke both used this one.) Greg Benford’s “Across the Sea of Stars” uses carbon-cycle fusion for its ramjet reactor. Plus all the vague and unphysical “drives” every SF writer has been tempted to invoke. Stable wormholes became HUGE in the late 1980s and early 90s, trailblazed by Sagan’s “Contact” and Kip Thorne’s work. Stephen Baxter’s GUT drive is another quite original drive from the early 1990s and in his recent novel “Exultant” he invokes a different Robert Forward drive, which used special oscillations of crystals to extract virtual photons from the vacuum, as well as a space-flaw concept.

Every new idea from theorists has propelled some story’s starship. Bob Forward’s negative matter drive is one favourite of mine, and his “Timemaster” put it to good use. Whether any of these ideas pans out is another matter entirely.

The most realistic, I think, are beamed mass or energy drives. “Mass beams” have been very well conceptualised in the “Epona” shared-world, and used to good effect in many other stories. Yet to be used in a major way is the related “sail-beam” concept developed by Jordin Kare. This is the most feasible in the short-term, as shown by an analysis by Andrews Aerospace’s Dana Andrews. Whether it inspires notable fiction is a good question: watch this space?

Adam

I tuned in a decade post-pulp, already liking SF by age ten (1960), when my family moved to Manhattan. But it was the second-hand book and magazine shops there — where one week’s allowance could score a stack of 1950s Astoundings and Galaxies, plus some Groff Conklin paperback anthologies with the Good Stuff from the 1940s — that made it a true addiction.

The question I have is, when was the first starship written about in science fiction? And a follow on what was the first feasible (ok ok i’m sure that is a debatle point) startship? And of course the author.

For technical I keep coming to Dr. Forward with his star drive based on a laser that was stationed back in the Earth solar system. At certain times it shot it’s energy to a collector on the ship.

I know there are many earlier books, but I would have to select ‘ee. Doc Smith” for my first introduction to star ship.