Old School Science Fiction

Happy birthday to the late, great Frankie Thomas who played the title role on “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet”.

Thomas was part of that somewhat transitional “adolescence” of science fiction that took place in the middle of the 20th century. Coming after such legendary characters as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, coming before cultural icons like Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker, Tom Corbett inhabits the same cultural space as Captain Video of the TV show of the same name, Commander Buzz Corry of “Space Patrol” and, perhaps, Commander J.J. Adams of “Forbidden Planet”.

The movie serial sci fi heroes were in a past that World War II made feel quite a bit longer ago than the calendar indicated. The science fiction titans who would arrive by police box and starship and x-wing fighter lay in the future. Characters like Frankie Thomas’ Tom Corbett were popular but ephemeral, the product of a mainstream culture that viewed speculative fiction as much more disposable than our present one in which geek culture has become ascendant.

We never would have gotten here without those little remembered but nonetheless influential characters like Tom Corbett.

Frankie Thomas, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 85 and was buried in his space cadet uniform, was born today in 1921.

Pulp Sci Fi Tech: The gravity equalizer belts of the Captain Future universe. This is both a cool idea and a notable concession to the real world issue of travel to planets, moons, and asteroids with substantially different surface gravities. It also served as a useful plot device.

From “Captain Future’s Challenge” (Summer 1940):

Gravium was the very life-blood of interplanetary civilization. For without it, gravitation-equalizers could not be made. And without equalizers, men didn’t dare visit other planets of greater or lesser gravitation than their own. The first space explorers, back in 1971, had found that out. Landing on worlds of lesser gravitation than Earth, their circulation, internal organs, their whole anatomy, were damaged. All were sickened, many crippled and killed. It seemed at first that it would be impossible for men ever to live on other worlds. Then Mark Carew, one of those first explorers, had discovered on Mercury a queer metal unknown on Earth. He called it gravium, for an electric current sent through a coil of this metal would decrease or increase the weight of any matter immediately around the coil, according to the current’s polarity and strength. Carew invented a gravitation equalizer, whose core was a gravium coil. The equalizer, worn in a flat case on the body, could be set to compensate automatically for any difference in gravitation. The wearer of the equalizer always felt the same weight, no matter how strong or weak was the gravitation of the world he visited. The gravitation equalizers had made widespread interplanetary traffic possible! Every interplanetary traveler wore one. Because of them, Earthmen could visit Jupiter and the other giant planets without ill-effects, and similarly Jovians and other planetary races could visit Earth. Without equalizers, space-travel would stop. And it was only the precious metal gravium that made the equalizers possible. Small wonder that gravium was the most valuable metal in the System! The companies which mined the gravium were required to sell all of it to the System Government, which supervised the manufacture of the all-important equalizers.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.