sci-fi | A Gin Soaked Afternoon

Another great Atlantic piece (this one by Scott Meslow) on Richard Matheson (famed script-writer of numerous Twilight Zone, Night Stalker, Night Gallery, and Star Trek episodes as well as a pile of hardboiled and s/f short stories and novels, including the popular I Am Legend) and his deserved place in the history books.

“Steel” may not hold up particularly well, but Matheson’s contributions to The Twilight Zoneshouldn’t be denied: He wrote 14 scripts during the show’s original run, including all-time classic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which starred William Shatner at his hammy best. During the 1960s and 1970s, when the science fiction and horror genres were still in their television infancy, Matheson’s contributions included episodes of Star Trek, Night Gallery, and the first two televised appearances ofKolchak: The Night Stalker.

The rest of the article can be found here.

Over at the Atlantic, Scott Beauchamp has an amazing post detailing changing trends in s/f book covers.

The phrase “pulp sci-fi” conjures images of rockets and men with ray guns landing on distant planets. That wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but the classic images associated with science fiction literature usually refer to the Golden Age of sci-fi: the magazine-dominated epoch lasting roughly from the 1920s until the 1950s, when graphic artists like Frank R. Paul and Hugo Gernsback set the standard for speculative fiction cover art. Fun, simple, and very literal in its connection to the story that it accompanies, that kind of art was generally intended for a younger audience. But sci-fi cover illustrations evolved after the 1950s in near parallel with the other changes that transformed America in that time.

For the rest of the article, click here.