If you read speculative fiction stories you are a very special person. You the reader bring these stories to life. The creation of any character is possible even by me, a thirteen year old boy then, now aged into a mature man. In these days of financial and uncertain upheavals do you feel as though you want to escape from life for just a few hours? Escape from this world of disunity and chaos is essential. It is not just today that we need to do this. The turmoil of world events that in turn affect us and the way we live have been here for centuries. In bygone days before books there were story tellers. They told stories passed on by others from their own minds. My own grandfather was a story teller who related stories to me when I was very young นิยายอีโรติก.
The advent of books passed on the stories to thousands more people and gradually a world market emerged. Today, our young are immersed in movie videos and computer games to escape reality, and the best are based on stories from books. The golden creativity of the 1950 decade of my teenage years made a great impact on me. Music changed considerably. From the smooth big band sound and jazz, rock and roll emerged and the creation of what I describe as the emotional big ballad. The music cried out to the teenagers of that era, men and women now in their 60s/70s. Due to the wonderful advance of technology I now sing those songs. As a young boy in Sheffield I would walk miles to different local cinemas to see the movies of the week including Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, George Formby and a great deal of escapist science fiction. Even at a certain Sunday school they showed fifteen episodes, one each week of Flash Gordon.
The decade brought huge change to many markets. In the UK if you failed your eleven plus (an exam taken as an eleven year old) you were placed on the job scrap heap. You were considered inferior by the establishment. It took great personal pain and commitment to fight a way out of it. The schools then had their share of bad academic teachers. Men and women with great qualifications who could not teach! Teaching is not something you can judge by placing ticks on paper. It is a strong quality of interaction between teacher and pupil. The good teacher needs to inform of everything that he or she knows in a way that causes a response to the majority in a classroom, it is a vocation rather than a job. My father was a teacher who I never knew; he disappeared in the war on an aircraft somewhere over the ocean when I was two years old.
My imaginative side propelled me on and stopped me from becoming depressed. It was a great science fiction and speculative fiction era – The Forbidden Planet – The Day the Earth Stood Still, were the classic films of that time. Cinemascope and 3D films came into being with thousands of comics in the shops illustrating strange alien creatures and super heroes. The Eagle comic came into being with the famous character Dan Dare on the front cover. Inside were pages of scientific knowledge of the day, not just written but illustrated in comic form. At 6.45pm on the radio was Dick Barton special agent and switching channels to Radio Luxemburg at 7pm you could then hear Dan Dare pilot of the future. It was rich in the age of illusion and lifted your soul out of the physical drabness around. Television has now taken over that option. In the 1970s and 80s life became more affluent, big money could be earned by hard work. This in a way drove out the escapism and brought in what was called ‘the kitchen sink drama’.
People became immersed in watching others problems. Like the Great Roman Empire where the crowds shouted out to see if a gladiator could survive being killed by another or a lion. The soaps were flourishing and the cinema followed on with a spate of heavy family drama. This has now evolved to reality television where humankind shows all the hate, jealousy, stupidity and tribulations of real life. This is now slowly waning as a financial depression hits the world. Now, Doctor Who is back and flourishing once again and so is the cinema with science fiction and supernatural blockbusters. We have reached an age again where we can all escape from our life and homes for a couple of hours.
Today people buy software and experiment in a ‘self taught’ environment. Hours are spent on word processing, far easier now than the old typewriter, then more hours on PDF to be able to create ebooks. The creation of a website took many hours of labour including the working of HTML. Then you mastered a movie programme and placed several trailers on You Tube. All this happened in the last 8 years, not bad for me at an age of 65 plus.
My first attempts at writing a novel was in longhand and then a typewriter. It was a long process and due to the intense writing there was an indent in my index finger where the pen rested. I do not think that modernism, the use of sex or swearwords is necessary. In a technology based future advanced society there would be no need for foul-mouthed adjectives to issue orders or directions. Therefore, I like to think that books can be read by teenagers upwards. However, the the evil in men will escalate to new boundaries, and that is ugly, as any hero strives to finally defeat them.