Out to Lurch - Frankenstein.

I was reading something yesterday and I came across the phrase "the Golden Age of Science Fiction". It isn't the first time I've the term but it was the first time I had heard the term while scratching for a blog entry. The Golden Age of Science Fiction lasted from the late 1930s until the 1950s. During this time there was a positive explosion of science fiction (the fact that during the middle of it there was a positive explosion of explosions might have had something to do with it). Such giants as Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein and a bunch of others I have forgotten bestrode the science fiction world like colossi (colossusses?).

The golden age was followed (in an obvious attempt to dispel any suspicions one might have possessed about the imagination of science fiction fans) by the Silver Age of Science Fiction. Currently we are in the Cruddy Amalgam Age of Science Fiction. What's next I don't know but may I be the first to suggest the Oh My God Literacy Has Deteriorated to the Point Whereby the Most Effective Means of Communication is to Smear Ones Own Faeces on a Cave Wall Age of Science Fiction.

The science fiction title I remember most doesn't actually come from the golden age but a decade and a half later. It's Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. In so far as I remember it the story was pretty good (it won a bunch of awards so, you know, it must be good). The title is the thing that gets me though. It sounds like something that Hammer Productions would have made in their prime, probably starring Peter Cushing.

Peter Cushing spent what seems like forever alternately stitching bits of corpse together and ramming pieces of wood into Christopher Lee. Things didn't get any better for Christopher Lee either. While Cushing was gloriously blown up on the Death Star in the best of the Star Wars franchise Christopher Lee had to endure appearing in two of the worst (although that light sabre duel between him and Yoda was awesome).

Before he ascended the giddy heights of Grand Moff Tarkinism, however, Peter Cushing had to go through about eight hundred movies with titles like The Dangling Genitalia of Frankenstein. They all blur together in my mind after a while which is not surprising when you consider that they basically all had the same plot; a brilliant but loony scientist sews pieces of corpse together in an attempt to create new life with distressing consequences for the local villagers. One would have thought that after a while he might have taken the hint or at least that cremation might have become a little more popular as a funeral option in his district. Peter Cushing would have looked pretty silly up to his elbows in ash while Igor shakes his head and thumbs the help wanted ads in the Carlstadt Gazette.

Another question is, since pretty much every movie ended with the put upon peasantry storming the castle where the good doctor was engaged in reverse vivisection and ripping him limb from limb, how on earth did he survive? I think old Victor couldn't see the wood for the hastily stitched together trees. If he had any sense at all he would simply have injected a little of his own blood into the thing on the slab, then it would have been damn near indestructible.

Although usually dubbed as a horror story Frankenstein is really one of the earliest attempts at science fiction. Mary Shelley published it in 1818. Towards the end of that century she would be joined by writers like Jules Verne, HG Wells and Lord Dunsany. Its a pity the Golden Age of Science Fiction wasn't around then really.