Dear people
I’ve got mildly good news! I was looking up a book on amazon and ran into mention of a book in the Winston sf series from the ’50s: Danger: Dinosaurs. I had read and liked a number of books on the Winston list but not that one.
They were all YAs, mostly by new writers in the field. Sometimes by old pros who for one reason or another couldn’t turn in an adult work. Danger: Dinosaurs was by Sal Lombino who was at the time writing as Hunt Collins. He later changed his name to one of his mystery pen names, Ed McBain. He was very good.
Thinking about Danger: Dinosaurs, I remembered writing a YA after I got back to the world in 1971. I had graduated from Duke law school. I took the bar view course but didn’t have a job, so I had a lot of time. I had written short stories and even sold two of them, but I wanted to write a novel–a YA because it was shorter than an adult novel and I thought the literary standards might be lower. I had brought a portable typewriter back from Nam. I got to work with it, typing on whatever scrap paper I could find.
I finished it but I had no idea of what to do with it then. There were two professional writers living nearby: Karl Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman. Karl was my age and had recently started writing himself whereas Manly had been selling fiction since the Twenties. I didn’t think I should bother Manly with something as trivial as my first novel, so I didn’t even bother to ask him to read it. (This was my assessment. In fact, Manly was a teacher and loved teaching.)
Anyway, I asked Karl to read it. He was extremely negative. Utterly dismissive. A bad idea, worse handled. I didn’t even bother typing up a clean copy to submit. I didn’t doubt that the book was bad or that Karl had given me an honest appraisal because I would have done that for somebody else.
I came to appreciate that Karl was very envious of me. In later years, there was something to envy, but not in 1972.
I decided to take another look at my novel draft if I could find it. At first I couldn’t, but my wife Jo dug through a file drawer and found the novel.
I’ve read it now. It has real problems but I had succeeded in my intention: to write a book which could fit in 1950’s juvenile SF line. Could it be rewritten for modern audiences? I’ll have to think.
We know a great deal more about dinosaurs now than we did in 1972 when I wrote the draft. Knowledge about dinosaurs has changed fast but society has changed even faster. The book was written with no reference to sex or drugs. That was believable with 17-year olds in the ’50s, at least with dorks like me, but it isn’t now.
Finding the draft made me feel positive for the first time in a long while. Even if I decide there’s nothing useful to be done with it. There’s a project I think I should be able to handle and I plan to try.
***
Still on the subject of life for an SF fan in the 50s:
My dad usually took his two-week annual vacation at the end of the year, pairing it with next year’s vacation into four weeks by car, generally into the west. In 1958/9 we did that.
On the way out we passed south of Wichita which was a major SAC base. We passed close enough to the base to see the parked B-47 jets. There was one B-52–the tail was too tall to fit into the hangars.
On the way home to Clinton, Iowa, we followed the same route through northern Missouri. Two lane roads through narrow valleys. Reception on the car radio was very bad, and finally dad shut off the radio entirely.
The sky overhead was crossed with very many contrails. This was before commercial jets became common, so we were seeing jet bombers.
I was an SF reader and had recently read Alas, Babylon about the long-feared nuclear war devastating the US. I realized as we drove though Missouri that the war had broken out. That explained the lack of radio reception and the sky full of bombers. I was terrified but said nothing to my parents or sister. There was nothing to talk about that would do any good. Within ten minutes dad found a radio station and there was nothing unusual about the news. I guess there had just been a SAC drill.
Boy, people generally, not just me, were sure worried about nuclear war back then. I don’t think Joe Biden is a great president, but in all the Ukraine crisis I’ve never feared we were as close to nuclear war as I did then–and as I would have been if Hilary Clinton were president. I was sure that the woman who got us into a war with Libya while she was Secretary of State would have responded forcibly to Putin.
One crazy macho world leader is more than enough.
***
Be peaceful to other folks, people. The Fifties weren’t a good time to live.
–Dave Drake
Please use the contact form to send email to Dave