Word: fictioners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...into Space (CBS, Wed. 8:30-9:30 p.m., E.D.T.) is made up of the best kind of science fiction: stories that come as close as careful research can bring them to becoming documentaries of tomorrow. The adventures of Colonel Edward McCauley, U.S.A.F. (William Lundigan), sometimes seem tailored to the familiar serial formula: Will the expedition land successfully on the moon? Will the space tanker explode? Will the colonel get lost among the stars? But the action is always trimmed closely to expert predictions. The show should spin into orbit...
...spite of its glamorous mission, J.P.L. has no science-fiction atmosphere. Its researchers do not talk lightly about bases on the moon or armed satellites keeping watch on the earth. J.P.L.'s emphasis is on reliability, but sometimes one of its shots misbehaves. Then it issues no cheer ful announcement explaining how the failure was really a useful success. "It didn't work," say J.P.L. men, candidly. "We are upset about...
Hersey's least satisfying piece of fiction. Rigged to the intellectual fashions of the day and noticeably unballasted with solid thought, the Herseyan exposé of war as psychoneurosis is about on a par with the fond illusion of the '30s that wars were made by munitions merchants. Whenever his story of a U.S. Flying Fortress crew in World War II does get fleetingly aloft, it is thanks to John Hersey's reportorial reflexes, which are as crisply functional as propeller blades...
...however to draw some intriguing but quite probably specious conclusions about the mental state of today's American youth, its confusion over a double moral standard: the hedonistic view of the individual versus the Victorian ethos of the community. The essayist exhorts all future writers of Harvard Square sex-fiction to probe more deeply into the unhappiness which is the apparent outcome in most of the stories under discussion, and come up with a moral framework which is bigger, better and all in all more valid than that which exists or is in the process of ceasing to exist...
This impassioned and vague plea has its interesting aspects, but seems fatuous. It implies, or rather assumes, the existence of a determined and self-conscious attitude among the writers of post-adolescent love fiction. These tales are obviously intensely personal things and their authors doubtless believe that they are probing the situation to the very limit, which they very well might be doing. It seems a bit ludicrous to hope that a new moral framework (if indeed the whole idea has any meaning), will come from the pens of a group of writers whose entire effect comes from the charm...