The History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

The later ‘No Woman Born’ (1944) concerns a beautiful actress who dies and is brought back to life in a robotic body. It achieves miracles of real pathos, as the protagonist returns to the stage to try and stem her inevitable sense of loss of her echt humanity. But, to repeat myself, such emotional nuance was not the currency of the vast majority of pulp stories. More typical are exteriorised action-adventures, gnashingly described conflicts with future-humans or alien invaders, such as this climactic battle from Victor Rousseau’s ‘The Messiah of the Cylinder’ (serialised in Everybody’s Magazine in 1917 with, incidentally, the first use in fiction of the term ray gun):Streaks of light, pitiably thin, flashed from their Ray rods, and, with exultant shouts, the Guard sprang forward to meet them. They were dragging lighter Ray guns behind them. For an instant it seemed as if the revolutionists would scale the walls before the heavy Ray artillery could be reaimed at them. The foremost files of the opposing forces clashed and surged and swayed in a rain of meteor flashes. The blackened corpses heaped the bridges, hung, toppled over, and went to swell the heaps below. [Rousseau, 294–5]

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