Most people rate the Golden Age of Science Fiction as the thirties and forties. But this was mainly the age of the pulps - magazines with names like Startling Stories, Astounding Stories, Amazing Stories and so on. They were still alive just after the war, and could be seen hanging up in newsagent's windows glowing in the electric lights of a damp November evening in the South London I remember. They often involved pictures of beautiful girls in close proximity to disgusting looking aliens. But the girls were of no interest to me - in fact they were a distinct hindrance, since my mother would have objected to them had I taken a magazine home. I remember being desperately keen to buy one with a cover showing an invading army of half-men half rockets - from Venus, I think they were. Inside to my fascinated horror, was a picture of an absolutely bare woman falling into some kind of pit - no rocket men whatsoever. She was beautifully drawn, and her pose very tasteful - but I knew it wouldn't do. I've never seen that magazine since, but I bet the art was by either Virgil Finlay or Henry Sharp. On the right you can see a typical Sharp effort, illustrating "Empire of Evil", by Robert Arnette. It appeared in a pulp in 1951. The poor girl is about to be flogged into submission by a subhuman lackey for his master - a four-armed gorilla.

As you might note from the above, though the magazines had a sort of glamour, they weren't always very good inside. Often they reproduced stories from way back. H. G. Wells and H. P. Lovecraft were reprinted in the absence of brave new writers. Otherwise they were often what I heard Brian Aldiss call "Cowboys and Indians on Mars". As boys we, in common with a lot of others, read such tales - it was the Mars bit that made them good, I heard Aldiss say, and I agree. But when I grew up I wanted more than Mars, and more than cowboys and Indians.

I think that the late fifties to the mid-seventies was the real Golden Age of Science Fiction. The pulps were on the way out, and the paperbacks were on the way in. Excellent writers like Thomas Disch, Phillip K Dick, Norman Spinrad, Ursula LeGuin and Jack Vance were in their most fertile periods, and older stalwarts like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Harry Harrison were still very active. Of course many stories from the pulps of the forties and fifties found their way into paperback, and the whole scene was buzzing, with SF conventions becoming huge affairs, and courses and learned journals about the genre were common. Numerous imprints of paperbacks appeared, but chief amongst them for the true fan, were ACE books - which seemed to publish all that was best. Close behind came DAW books, which were founded by Donald A Wollheim, a former ACE editor, and Ballantyne Books. In England, New English Library, Sphere and Panther were amongst the main suppliers of SF and Fantasy.

Why did it come up so suddenly? And why did it go down, even more suddenly? Or is it still with us in some sense?

An Exciting Age One reason for its popularity was the popularity of science itself. People generally believed science was good. The environmentalist bandwagon had not really begun rolling, and science had had some big successes. The availability of antibiotics and drugs which could cure terrible diseases like syphilis and TB were greatly appreciated by a generation who had known the world without these things. Spaceflight was becoming real for the first time. And the world was an optimistic place - we thought it would be good to discover new life. Another reason was that it sort of replaced the action adventures of people like Rider Haggard, and Abe Merrit. Many people, especially men, find long descriptions of the ups and downs of human relationships less stimulating than action. And what better action than battling aliens, discovering new worlds, and roaring off around the universe in a loud conspicuous rocket, like a cosmic MG? In an earlier age it had all been too unbelievable - in a later age it was all old hat. Stories too, had got better. Space ships and robots were no longer the beginning and the end. The stories stimulated thoughts about many things - our attitudes to aliens bore on our attitudes to other cultures on earth. Our attitudes to robots bore on our attitude to science as a whole - would it turn on us and kill us? And we eternally wondered whether aliens would be nasty or nice. Might they look nice, and be nasty, or look nasty and be nice? The illustration on the left, by Leo Summers, illustrating Per Stratagem by Robert Chilson gives us exactly the right confrontation. The insect-like being is intelligent - we see that from its belt. But even if it was well disposed, could one really form  a  lasting relationship with it? Wouldn't its mind be as alien and disturbing as its body? These were the questions that interested us.

So what happened to this Golden Age? In the late seventies and early eighties things started to go wrong. Sales dropped dramatically, and established authors began to find their books being rejected. I remember talking to one who had been an up and coming star only a year before, who told me that all of a sudden he couldn't find a publisher for his latest book. People went grovelling back to their old day employers - what a horror! I think there were many reasons why it all went phut. Firstly there was a disappointment with the results of the exploration of the solar system. So we'd been to the moon - but what was it? Not even green cheese - just an airless lump of black rock! Venus was not - as previously hoped - a steamy hothouse of water and jungle. Mars was an icy desert, without even any ice. There weren't any easily accessible aliens. People stopped believing in humanoid monsters stealing earthwomen. Secondly new vehicles for that kind of armchair adventurous urge were appearing. SF was still around, but in the form of big films, like Star Wars, and Close Encounters. Computer adventure games were appearing - remember the Spectrum? (Even now SF lives on more strongly than ever in the form of expensively produced computer games which entrap boys at about aged eleven, making them into red-eyed screen addicts). Another factor is that science itself lost its charm. People couldn't understand the latest theories - quantum mechanics and pompous statements about what happened in the first nanosecond after the big bang (Oh yeah!). Relativity had been the last chance saloon for lay science enthusiasts. And science had also started to appear as a villain as the green bandwagon got under way. But perhaps worst of all SF got too big for its boots. It began to believe its own propaganda - that it was a significant new literary form. All sorts of pretentious rubbish began to clog the bookstalls. Called new wave it became a vehicle for quirky literary experiment. Incomprehensibility became a sort of badge of literary merit, and for a time SF conventions became a battleground between the old science fiction community, and the new wave, who commandeered the SF to stand for speculative fiction. I remember either K Bulmer or E C Tubb - stalwarts of the old school - saying to a young lion of the new wave: "Whilst ever you're out to impress you will never express." How right he was! Whatever the merits of the argument, the scene was doomed. People didn't buy new wave, and it made them wary of SF books with exciting covers in case they cloaked a turgid ragout of plotless fragments presented as if it was literary caviar. And an author's name was no help - some of the old favourites got swept along in the lemming-like rush, and produced new wave books that stank even more than those by the new men.

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