On my vacation this year, I pulled a few old paperbacks off the shelves to take along. It was sort of eye-opening to read stories from 80 years ago and see how they did it in the beginning of modern SF. The two books I’ve finished so far are Jirel of Joiry by C. L. Moore (1930s) and The Book of Ptath by A. E. VanVogt (1947). What’s the deal with the initials, you might wonder. I know Catherine Moore may have needed to conceal being a woman if she wanted to be taken seriously. Maybe VanVogt just thought the initials looked more classy.
Characters. By current standards, the characters are really sparse. Good or Evil are practically branded on their foreheads. They have just one or two defining traits. Jirel has red hair and incredible pride. Ptath, a reincarnated god, has an overwhelming self-esteem and I couldn’t really tell you what he looked like. Also, everyone is gorgeous.
Landscapes. The authors made a lot more effort at creating fantastic landscapes and creatures. Maybe they were still closer to the age of discovery in the 1920s and the readers valued that.
Magic. There is generally a sense that mages are evil, or at least sketchy. They seek power by meddling with forces beyond their ken. Also, the magic often overlaps what you could think of as mental powers. There’s a lot of astral projection and dimensional travel rather than fireballs and such. In Ptath, they take over people’s bodies a lot.
Endings. As with the characters, the endings are very chopped off. They solve the story problem and two sentences later the story is over. Modern endings seem to have a lot more reflection on how things have changed during the story, or in the case of a series, they think about what problems are left in the series.
Problematic material. There’s a lot of fat shaming in the VanVogt. Interestingly, the evil woman was still gorgeous. It was the merchants and politicians who were grotesquely fat. I also thought it was questionable how they possessed people without asking. In the Moore, there was sexual assault all over the place. No matter how fierce and strong Jirel was, men kept grabbing her and kissing her. I wondered if this was something Moore herself experienced, or if the social mores of the 30s required an independent woman to have some sort of cautionary experience.
Those are a few of my observations. What have you been reading lately?
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Wyrmflight 
With a few notable exceptions (*Brave New World, Out of the Silent Planet, The Shape of Things to Come* among them), science fiction of the 1930s and a good while after was largely considered to be adventure stories for adolescent males. Older men might admit to reading them; women would not (for an exception, keep reading).
So the emphasis was generally on the adventure and the “strange new world,” not on character development. I remember reading that it was generally thought character development was largely not possible in science fiction because you had to get the reader used to the world and how things worked there. Later, once readers got used to quickly adapting to new worlds and societies, things changed.
In my life, I was introduced to science fiction literature by an very unexpected source. She was much older than me, and seemed to be a traditional grandmotherly sort. She seldom left her home, she cooked and cleaned for her husband and visiting relatives, and was quiet and respectful. For a hobby, she painted pastoral nature scenes. But she completely broke the stereotype by subscribing to a science fiction magazine. I sometimes wonder what she would have been like had she felt free to express her true inner self.
I have read science fiction from the 1930s-1950s. The storytelling style doesn’t appeal to me (chopped endings, either irrelevantly described or under described characters, as you mentioned), but I love the grand imagination and the brave characters. Well, mostly only the men were brave and the women whimpered, but I see it as more of a snapshot in time of our society, not a reflection of any particular author author’s views.
Just the different expectation of what was considered good writing was really interesting to me.
I’ve been reading L. Frank Baum’s original Oz noels and sharing my thoughts over at my blog. I’m taking a bit of a break this month while I share my books from the Smashwords Summer/Winter sale.
Anyway, these are fantasy and predate the SF you’re reading by 15 years give or take. Interestingly, the Oz books actually do a pretty good job of character development. I’ve found a couple of instances where Baum has demonstrated the casual racism of his time period, but even then, he tends to steer clear of it. Every now and then, he describes someone as “fat” but it’s so matter-of-fact, I don’t feel like he’s making a value judgement. Like the novels you’re reading, they do tend to wrap up real soon after the quest of the novel has ended.