Old time Sci-Fi

Is something that I just love to read, it’s just so much more fun than what’s written today. Today, Sci-Fi is mostly what’s termed “Military Sci-Fi”, which I don’t enjoy very much at all.

Keep your alien invasions, I doubt many alien races would be stupid enough to want Earth, what with how we’ve polluted it and everything. I really doubt that alien bugs would want it either. Those are the two biggest things I’ve seen in  modern Sci-Fi books I have looked at recently.

Give me that old-time, exploration type, Sci-Fi. Sure, not all of it was like that, there was some violence in it, but most of the time it was… righteous? No… heroic? No… a better way to say it would be fun and not graphic.

That’s the major problem with modern Sci-Fi… and most modern fiction in fact, the violence is graphic, everyone thinks that they have to describe all the blood and guts. It’s not enough to blast a ship into atoms, now you have to describe the people being split into subatomic particles, after all, if you don’t have blood or gore of some kind, you’ve got to have something equally graphic, right?

I’m against this new kind of Sci-Fi, give me the good old Sci-Fi like, oh, Poul Anderson wrote. He could tone down the violence to a tolerable level and still keep you turning the pages. He could create characters good enough to hold ones imagination without resorting to graphic violence or nudity.

There are any number of other old-time Sci-Fi authors  I could mention, but I think you get the idea. It all boils down to one thing, the ‘Golden Age’ of Sci-Fi was in the 30s, 40s, 50s and parts of the following decades when authors that understood how to keep a reader’s attention with low-key approaches, unlike today’s Sci-Fi authors who realize that their story is getting boring and add some blood and death to spice it up.

Can’t we go back to the old-time Sci-Fi? Maybe even throw in a few obsolete technologies for old times sake? Maybe a CRT monitor? Or a computer tape? Or what about Martians?

Thanks for reading this. What do you think? Have times just changed to the point where we need to have all the blood and guts to be entertains? Or have the modern  Sci-Fi writers just let us down?

Story telling

The secret to writing a good story is to keep it interesting. Some stories can become great some are great and some never achieve greatness, to paraphrase a great mind.
There are way too many authors that have no idea how to make a story interesting, they also seem to be able to make a story dull even when they don’t mean to. It’s not that they lack in talent, but that they over edit, they end up taking too long to say just a few words and not long enough to say a great many words. While reading many many books lately I’ve noticed this, they could’ve been good books, but they weren’t. When everything was said and done at the end (if I got that far), they turned out to be dull and even boring.
One thing most authors need to keep in mind is that they need to keep the action moving, plus you need to make sure that the characters stay interesting, then the story moves fast and keeps a reader hooked. I’m sure that most of these books I’ve read could improved with just a little more editing, unfortunately it always boils down to the editing.
On the other hand there are some times we do need a slower part of a story just to add a little more suspense, that’s something most stories need… the extra suspense…  maybe a bit of dullness is what most books need to slow down the plot just enough to where you can get antsy for the rest action to start back up for the rest of the story.
On rare occasions some books do have several dull areas in them so you can get an idea of how the main character or characters feel just waiting… waiting for the next shoe to drop, so to speak,  never knowing when that might happen. In those cases you need fast-paced action interposed between periods of dullness, that allows you to get back into the story again rapidly… at least until next period of dullness arrives.
I feel that most authors do not take enough effort to strive for the balance between too much action and too much dullness in their stories, its that problem that keeps more stories from being excellent, if those authors would just take more time and spend more effort to create a well-balanced story, I really believe that there could be more books worthy of being ranked up there with the All-time best authors such as Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie and other such wonderful authors from the golden ages of writing.
Of course these have just been my opinions and they don’t reflect everyone’s opinion on certain things, I’m very interested in seeing what other people have to say, please comment and tell me what you think about that this and what’s your take on story telling:

Do you enjoy solid fast-paced action Packed stories,? Or do you enjoy stories that have fast-paced action interspersed with periods of slower action?

Thank you For taking the time to read this and comment.