This
has been my week for wild and serendipitous discoveries.
First,
this great SF magazine cover from 1943, which I found in an antique shop in the
little town of Mars Hill, NC, not far from my home of Marshall. I had gone into
the place looking for coffee while my husband had his hair cut at the barber’s
down the street on the recommendation of a third party. The shop was undergoing
renovation, and a bit of soul-searching, too. Seems the owners hadn’t decided
whether they wanted to go all-in on the antiques/junk thing or double-down on a
coffee shop. But they had coffee in a big carafe and some interesting stuff to
look at.
At
the back of the store were these fabulous framed vintage SF magazine covers. I
zeroed in at once on this one. Why? Because the heroine is taking an active
role in engineering the escape from the “Alcatraz of the Starways,” and in a
skirt and sandals, no less! (Of course, the hero’s not faring much better,
fashion-wise, since he appears to be wearing a skirt, also.) Meanwhile, members
of a variety of alien species seem to be trying their best to hinder the
escape, using knives, guns(!) and, in one case, an overgrown crablike claw. (Oh,
for the old days of science fiction, when a writer could do just about anything
and readers ate it up!)
Compare
this cover, though, to one from 1951-52. Here the presumed heroine is in a more
typical faint, being carried off by the evil alien. We can only hope there is a
rugged hero somewhere in her future to rescue her. Of course, by this time in
the history of SF (and SF cover art), real-life heroes had returned from WWII
to resume their peacetime place in American society. By extension, women had to
take up their “proper” roles again, after the independence of the war years, in
which they had served in the place of men in factories, hospitals, farm fields
and offices.
Not
until the New Age revolution of the Sixties would science fiction see a
re-emergence of the strong, independent heroine in SF. By that time, SF cover
art had moved on to a preoccupation with less human themes, the graceful lines
of spaceships or awe-inspiring star-or planetscapes.
A
Message from a Star
The
American Greetings® greeting card company sent me a special message this week
from someone I love. Yes, it was a come-on, but one I just couldn’t resist.
Click on the link below and you’ll see what I mean. Now I have instant
motivation whenever I need it. Maybe you should consider sending yourself a
message like this one, too!
Cheers,
Donna
That greeting card is awesome, Donna! Love it.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Yeah, I couldn't resist it. Now it's my morning motivation every day!
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