"In the 1950s Robert Lionel Fanthorpe is said to have written 89 science fiction novels in 3 years (one 158 page book every twelve days). He did this by dictating into a recorder with a blanket pulled over his head."
I've gathered that for all that there were classics written in the fifties it was also a time of massive amounts of mediocre to bad SF. But to take something Gardner Duzois said (at a panel at Arisia; he was quite entertaining) about editing being filtering out the good stuff out of a sewer of submissions a bit sideways, when you have a huge amount of stuff being written by a bunch or writers at least some of it will be good or even great. Hmm, and I'll make a guess that part of the reason for the sheer mass of stuff being written back then was that you could make a living writing for the mags (even novels often first appeared in the magazines; Analog still has 'em occasionally) at a penny a word or whatever. Can't do that these days.
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"In the 1950s Robert Lionel Fanthorpe is said to have written 89 science fiction novels in 3 years (one 158 page book every twelve days). He did this by dictating into a recorder with a blanket pulled over his head."
I've gathered that for all that there were classics written in the fifties it was also a time of massive amounts of mediocre to bad SF. But to take something Gardner Duzois said (at a panel at Arisia; he was quite entertaining) about editing being filtering out the good stuff out of a sewer of submissions a bit sideways, when you have a huge amount of stuff being written by a bunch or writers at least some of it will be good or even great. Hmm, and I'll make a guess that part of the reason for the sheer mass of stuff being written back then was that you could make a living writing for the mags (even novels often first appeared in the magazines; Analog still has 'em occasionally) at a penny a word or whatever. Can't do that these days.