Tell me about the 50's... what do you wish fallout included?

T

Thrawn

It Wandered In From the Wastes
I consider myself a sort of student of history, but I really don't know that much about the 50's. I like the 30's alot better myself but I degress.

What were the 50's like? Was the cold war allready in full swing? Were people scared half to death of a nuclear holocaust? I think the answer is yes but at the same time I think alot of people were looking forward to wounders inventions that would be theirs before the end of the mulinieam (yea, I can't spell).

So tell me what you think, someone describe the 50's to me and tell me how IPLY should have incorporated it into the feeling of Fallout.
 
Wow, what a question!

When was Korea? Late 1950s?

I watched a couple of movies recently, on Cinemax I think. One was called "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" which was fantastic, from 1963 I think and all his equipment was analog, and one more mainstream called "When Worlds Collide," about America trying to build a rocket ship that will carry fourty individuals to safety on a new planet when Earth collides with a careening planet from another system. Or something.

There should be tupperware in Fallout? There are already TV dinners...
 
Sy said:
Wow, what a question!

one more mainstream called "When Worlds Collide," about America trying to build a rocket ship that will carry fourty individuals to safety on a new planet when Earth collides with a careening planet from another system. Or something.
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lol, I have been wondering what that movie was called forever! I might have to find it again.

Sy said:
There should be tupperware in Fallout? There are already TV dinners...
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It would have been a really funny random encounter to see a bunch of female enclave having a tupperware party. At least I think so.
 
I would have to pose a correction. Fallout's universe isn't "50's style" or elements from the 50's. It's pretty much how someone would depict the future in sci-fi pulp form from that time. Therefore it uses different styles, and has elements from pulp, radio, television, and movie sci-fi, but mostly from the pulps.

The difficult part is where exactly to pinpoint what kind of sci-fi Fallout uses most. It has plenty of the aspects of the New Wave of science fiction, starting in the 60's, but it has strong undercurrents of the Golden Age of sci-fi, yet doesn't quite fit into the culmination that is today's sci-fi. It still has the absurd, raw, horrific edge to it.

I'd also suggest you find some copies of If and Galaxy magazines.
 
There was no missile scare in the 1950's, the delivery method was still long range bombers. In the US all major cities were protected by entrenched Nike missile systems which were tied in with a national early warning radar system. Once bombers were detected coming then the Nikes were on alert to shoot them down before they delivered their payload. Once missiles became the preferred delivery method of choice in the late 50's and into the 60's the Nikes became obsolete and all have since been torn down. There still exists a museum out in California which is a restoration of the system replete with the remaining missiles.
 
Roshambo said:
I would have to pose a correction. Fallout's universe isn't "50's style" or elements from the 50's. It's pretty much how someone would depict the future in sci-fi pulp form from that time. Therefore it uses different styles, and has elements from pulp, radio, television, and movie sci-fi, but mostly from the pulps.

The difficult part is where exactly to pinpoint what kind of sci-fi Fallout uses most. It has plenty of the aspects of the New Wave of science fiction, starting in the 60's, but it has strong undercurrents of the Golden Age of sci-fi, yet doesn't quite fit into the culmination that is today's sci-fi. It still has the absurd, raw, horrific edge to it.

I'd also suggest you find some copies of If and Galaxy magazines.
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Very interesting. I wonder if I could locate some "Popular Science" or other sort of technology magizine of the time.

How do you think fallout2 could have done a better job modeling this? I think making the enclave was a big mistake and so was changing the look of power armor in FOT.
 
Thrawn said:
I wonder if I could locate some "Popular Science" or other sort of technology magizine of the time.
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Not how the scientists thought it would be, how sci-fi/comicbook writers did. The latter are likely to be a bit more fantastic than the former.
How do you think fallout2 could have done a better job modeling this?
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I've not seen/read many 40/50(/60?)'s sci-fi books/comicbooks/films, so I couldn't really answer this.
 
Thrawn said:
Very interesting. I wonder if I could locate some "Popular Science" or other sort of technology magizine of the time.
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Odd as it sounds, I can't recall any like Popular Science. It seemed that people concentrated upon two things when it came to science - commercial science and fictional science. Until recently, it was nowhere as common for the average layman to be tech savvy, and science-fiction was considered still a fringe audience. Computers and most advanced electronics existed still mainly in sci-fi at that time. Good examples of this include Asimov's and other authots' works in the 30's and 40's, where computers had a presence of sorts, but they wouldn't see anything near reality for years to come.

How do you think fallout2 could have done a better job modeling this? I think making the enclave was a big mistake and so was changing the look of power armor in FOT.
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Quite easily enough, they should have stuck to the themes that gave Fallout its unique setting. When they went into the million and one easter eggs, most of them involving modern pop-culture rather than science-fiction "nods" like most of those found in Fallout 1 (TARDIS, alien spaceship), it shot the setting to hell.
 
If you don't mind reading rather depressing stories, try Japanese Science Fiction. It has quite the edge, quite a few end-of-the-world stories, but more of a focus on how people react. Very psychological, it is very interesting reading, and has a bleak sort of "Fallout" feeling (the worst of human nature, and so on). Of course, Japan has been the only country to have had cities leveled by nuclear bombs, so perhaps it only makes sense they think about it more.
 
Kotario said:
(Snip.)
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For instance, Akira, the movies and manga both. It's perhaps the easiest for people to get ahold of and understand without either the plot being heavily lobotomized for translation/dubbing or having to understand Japanese. It's fairly post-apocalyptic but on a micro scale (Japan, not world), if you count a small event horizon swallowing much of Tokyo (and that would be a staggering blow to them).

While it's really not befitting of the Fallout setting, it is good for seeing more ideas and thoughts about the subject.
 
For those interested, it is possible to get your hands on the pulps of the 50s. Quite a few of the books have been found or can be found in library collections. If you look hard enough you can actually get the comic books.

A lot of this also developed from the pulps of years past. Back in the 1930s and 40s you saw some great publishing of pulp fiction in sci-fi and there has been some interest in re-releasing that fiction. Some has never been out of print- Lovecraft's horror or the Conan stories. The pulps had a significant following, but it was the TV that probably killed them off.
 
Roshambo said:
Kotario said:
(Snip.)
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For instance, Akira, the movies and manga both. It's perhaps the easiest for people to get ahold of and understand without either the plot being heavily lobotomized for translation/dubbing or having to understand Japanese. It's fairly post-apocalyptic but on a micro scale (Japan, not world), if you count a small event horizon swallowing much of Tokyo (and that would be a staggering blow to them).

While it's really not befitting of the Fallout setting, it is good for seeing more ideas and thoughts about the subject.
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i've seen akira and im reading manga :ok:
 
Big_T_UK said:
Not how the scientists thought it would be, how sci-fi/comicbook writers did. The latter are likely to be a bit more fantastic than the former.
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Actually, Popular Science magazine has been around for around 100 years now, and they've been speculating on where consumer science will go in TEH FEWTURE since the beginning - and often been pulpishly wrong about it. Almost as bad as the World's Fair exhibits on the future were bad.

Oh yeah, and to all you people who've replied since Kotario posted.. Anime will make you gay.
 
Hm. Lovecraft wasn't really a Sci-Fi author, he's better known for more or less inventing the 'gothic horror' genre. I think the only Sci-Fi story he actually wrote was "The Walls of Eryx" (which was still a great story). Burroughs wrote the Tarzan stuff at around the same time (20's/30's?), but he had a bunch of Sci-Fi out as well. I honestly don't remember Bloch writing sci-fi; he was a collaborator with Lovecraft (when he was 11 years old, as I recall) and all I remember from him was the Lovecraftian gothic-horror stuff. Original and interesting, though.

I'd recommend checking around for Fritz Lieber (the guy who did Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) - he had a lot of that Heinlin-style ultra-depressing Sci-Fi, short stories he wrote in the 40's and 50's. Great stuff, and you can usually find anthologies of his at book sales for under a dollar. He's got quite a few post-apoc shorts, now that I'm thinking about it. Really sets the mood for Fallout in a lot of ways, since you can friggin' imagine all the goofy analog equipment in use, back to back with fusion rifles and superintelligent robots.

Bradbury had some great stuff - Farenheit 451. Asimov was in that era but I'm not really a fan of his stuff, and the only good thing deCamp ever accomplished, to my mind, was the widespread publication of Howard's Conan and Kull stories (the guy's as bad a writer as Lin Carter :P)

Harry Harrison had some great sci-fi in the 50's and 60's, though I'll have a hard time remembering anything other than the Stainless Steel Rat.

Popular Mechanics runs a "Remember When" section - sometimes they show a lot of the goofy speculations they made decades ago. It really is like a cross between pulp sci-fi and wild speculative reasoning. The steam-powered U-boat description they had in some ancient issue was.. different. :>
 
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