I write episode 16 on the heels of two science fiction events, one big and one small, but none the less fun. Last weekend, I attended the Nebula Awards Weekend in Washington, D.C. It was my first time attending that particular event and I had a blast. It was also the first time I was…
Welcome back to this Vacation in the Golden Age on it’s new biweekly schedule. I want to apologize again for the schedule change but two things prompted it: I was really cramming trying to get an issue read and a write-up done each week. Given my other obligations, there was little time for anything else.…
On the plane ride home from L.A. on Saturday I was reading the August issue of Astounding and the woman sitting next to me on the plane said, “I can’t help but notice what a cool cover that is on your magazine.” The cover this month, by Rogers, is for Lester del Rey’s lead novelette,…
Happy new year! I started this Vacation with the July 1939 issue and we have now arrived at the July 1940 issue, making this the first issue of my second year in the Golden Age of science fiction. July brings to mind summer, and today is the first summer-like day here in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area.…
Schedules don’t always cooperate. Although I say that these episodes come out on Mondays, I generally get them out on Sunday afternoons or evenings. But this week, my schedule simply didn’t cooperate with me. I put in a significant amount of extra time at the day job as I am in crunch time on a…
Sometimes, it seems, that a theme develops within an issue. These days, those tend to be called what they are, “themed issues” of one kind or another. But I haven’t run into this explicitly so far in my little Vacation. However, in the May 1940 issue, two themes seemed to emerge, neither of which is…
This week’s episode appeared at 3:15pm Eastern Daylight time. I wrote the episode last night and scheduled it for early release today. I am completely offline today, taking my one opportunity each year to free myself from the bonds of the Internet and give myself 24 hours to not think about it. I’ve done this…
There is a satisfying symmetry, reading the March 1940 issue in the month of March. It makes me feel somehow more connected with a fan who, 71 years ago may not have gotten his or her hands on the issue the instant it hit the newsstands, but may have gotten it in time to read…
Vacations as wonderful as they can be, often seem trivial when held up against world crises. Here I am romping through the Golden Age while the people of Japan are facing a disaster not seen since 1945–the very middle of the Golden Age that I am exploring. I wanted to take a brief moment, therefore,…
History can be brittle. The cover of the January 1940 Astounding shown above is my copy and you can see it is rather worn. It is much worse off now than when I started. Of all of the issues I’ve read so far, this one was in the worst condition with the cover flaking in…
Earlier this week, the space shuttle Discovery made its final launch into space. With 38 missions under its belt and more than a year spent in space, Discovery is indeed the workhorse of the space shuttle fleet, and retirement for that fine steed is well deserved. The launch took place while I was vacationing in…
In many ways, this vacation in the Golden Age is the closest I’m likely to come to time travel. I recall back in my senior year in college at the University of California, Riverside, taking a wonderful class on the history of film with a professor named Carlos Cortes. One of the things that he…