Why was The Golden Age of Science Fiction called a Golden Age ?

The Scribbling Man said:
It's always bothered me a bit that Bradbury gets lumped in with SF "greats". The Martian Chronicles is more like fantasy, and Fahrenheit is only sci-fi in the same way Orwell's 1984 is - it's dystopian. Sure, some of Bradbury's short fiction treads that ground, but more often than not it's just fantastical. Nothing warranting the titles he gets IMO.
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Bradbury admitted that he was not a science fiction writer but many people insist that he was.
The term "speculative fiction" as it is used today is worthless in my opinion. The way Heinlein defined it is meaningful.

Since Star Wars and cheap computers making word processing easy lots of people consider SF to be an easy way to try to make a buck. Lots of readers are not sufficiently discriminating.

In the 90s William Gibson called SF the Golden Ghetto.
 
psikeyhackr said:
Bradbury admitted that he was not a science fiction writer but many people insist that he was.
The term "speculative fiction" as it is used today is worthless in my opinion. The way Heinlein defined it is meaningful.

Since Star Wars and cheap computers making word processing easy lots of people consider SF to be an easy way to try to make a buck. Lots of readers are not sufficiently discriminating.

In the 90s William Gibson called SF the Golden Ghetto.
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Sturgeon's Law.
 
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I think it stems from the fact that the dedicated magazines were publishing stories of quality, from genre authors. Prior to that I imagine that pulp magazine stories were quite low brow, action stories.
 
AE35Unit said:
I think it stems from the fact that the dedicated magazines were publishing stories of quality, from genre authors. Prior to that I imagine that pulp magazine stories were quite low brow, action stories.
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Even in the prior era there were some good writers.
 
I find I can re-read and enjoy Lord of Thousand Suns and The Star Plunderers by Poul Anderson:cool:
 
Something to do with the Soviet’s and also the fashionable novelty of the MMPB novel.
 
Ray guns, Rockets and slobbering alien monsters.:D
 
All the Way Back by Michael Shaara Classic stufff and this one would made an intriguing Twilight Zone episode.
 
psikeyhackr said:
Actually I did not recognize the name. I just checked to see if he was in Project Gutenberg.
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He largely quit science fiction , and began writing historical fiction notably the Civil War novels . I think he wrote a science scion novel 1980's though im not sure.
 
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