When Genres Collide: "The Last Night" As Science Fiction.
“As an editor,” writes Alec Nevala-Lee, “he
wanted good writing, accurate science, believable characters, and stories that
logically accounted for multiple variables” (79). Writers are known to write about stories that have either happened to them personally or stories that have been told from generation to generation. John W. Campbell. Editor Of The Magazine Astounding and Analog, could be said to have the most dominant voice between 1937 and 1971 of science fiction community. Campbell's concern was to ensure the legitimacy of works of science fiction.
Campbell’s defense of science fiction amid critical claims that the genre consisted of little more than escapist imaginings, a common late-1950's perception sustained by the monster-and-space-suit covers of pulps and comic books lining newsstand shelves a decade earlier. The real escapist literature, he maintained in a 1959 editorial, was fiction published in popular, slick-paper magazines and consumed by mainstream readers unaware of the implications of technological advancement. “It happens that science fiction’s core is just about the only non-escape literature available to the general public today,” he maintains, emphasizing that scientists writing reports on manned space stations, bases on the Moon, and antigravity devices have a nearly emotional connection to the social changes ahead. [1]
Now jumping to the Mailer
Mailer began in April 1953 with The Language Of Men of an Amry-based cook publication. Mailer is intentionally vague. When "The Last Night" was published in the December 1963 issue was a result of the experimental nature in science fiction for Mailer.
The plot presents a world nearly uninhabitable due the radioactive fallout from atomic bombs. “[E]ven the apples on the trees turn malignant in the stomach,” he writes. “Life is being burned out by a bleak fire within, a plague upon the secrets of our existence which stultifies the air.” Mailer emphasizes that this dire situation was created by a series of apparently trivial decisions by government officials attempting to conceal the truth of eventual global catastrophe, “ten thousand little abuses of power, ten thousand moments in history when the leaders had decided that the news they held was too unpleasant or too paralyzing for the masses to bear” (151,275) [2]
Mailer was merely the start or the treatment that begin the evolvement of the science fiction genre and fiction. Showcasing authors like Norton, Ballard, Bardbury, and Calrke to combine the myth and fable. Transforming the works of heroism, myth and prophecy as warnings that were written more than fifty years ago of not only the earth itself but also of the current COVID 19. He states that he could be of the earth's way of protection. <blockqoute> increasing the production of white blood cells to combat a life-threatening infection. Rather than bringing individuals closer together while experiencing an event with potentially 39 catastrophic results, this pandemic has forced us apart, preventing the intellectual and emotional connections with our family and friends that, in the past, had been taken for granted
Works Cited
Nevala-Lee, Alec. Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. HarperCollins,
Shuman L, Michael. When Genres Collide; "The Last Night As Science Fiction.