Resnick on the Loose by Mike Resnick & Eric Flint

Author:Mike Resnick & Eric Flint
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: essays, interviews, editorials, science fiction, fandom
ISBN: 9781434448293
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2012-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Afterword to Simulacron-3

Daniel F. Galouye was a remarkable writer, a man both behind and ahead of his time. He could write pulp adventures with the best of them, though the time for pulp adventures had pretty much come to an end. (Okay, a temporary end; they’re still with us, they’re just using modern technology.)

But he was also a visionary, dealing—as you can see in this book—with something that, while popular today, almost all other writers would ignore during his lifetime (which ended all too soon in 1976, at the age of 56.)

Dan was born in New Orleans, graduated from Louisiana State University, and then worked as a journalist until he enlisted in the Navy during World War II as an instructor and test pilot. He crashed, was not often in good health thereafter, and retired early, at 47.

His injuries/disabilities didn’t stop him from writing some of the best science fiction around. He wrote for almost all the major digests of the day—Galaxy, Amazing, F&SF, If, Fantastic—and began developing a reputation as a dependable, professional author. But nothing he had done up to 1961 prepared the public for his debut novel, Dark Universe.

Dark Universe was a classic the day it was published, and remains one to this day. The only reason that it hasn’t been turned into a blockbuster movie is because if the adaptation bore any resemblance to the novel, you’d be watching a totally black screen for the first forty minutes.

The book was written during the depths of the Cold War, when every week brought a new threat of nuclear conflict, and the affluent all created bomb shelters to hide in when the nukes began dropping. Dan took a good hard look at the notion that the deeper underground you went, the safer you would be. He postulated an incident that seemed dead certain to lead to a nuclear Armageddon, and had entire segments of the population go deep under the surface in an almost endless series of natural and artificial caves and shelters.

And at the last minute sanity prevailed, there was no war, and everyone returned to the surface of the planet. Except for one group that never got word of it, and spent the next few generations far beneath the surface of the planet, living in total darkness.

How would such a society evolve? How would they find their way around their dark universe? How would their social mores change? And most fascinating of all, when someone finally stumbles across them, how would they react to a noiseless sound that hurts the eyes—light?

How good a book was it? Well, it was a Hugo nominee, which is something that almost no first novels achieve. But it was more than that. Here’s a story I have only told to a few people, but it is absolutely true.

I met Dan at the 1968 Worldcon in Berkeley, California. We’d corresponded some, but the only time we ever met in person was at the convention hotel, the Claremont, which has become known in fannish legend as the Transylvania Hilton.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.