Return of the Living Dead. |
Scientists do their best work when they are in their early years. Writers' skills don't necessarily decay; if they can keep their interests and hopes alive (like Jack Williamson), their experience allows them greater depths to explore. |
Sean says he always had a feeling he should remain friends with Jenna and he never knew why. He believes it's because he knew we were meant to be together. |
That certainly is one approach to take. My own is to acknowledge the inner child and try to work with my first fascination with science fiction. I have tried to build on its idea content and narrative drive rather than to discard them. |
The compassion is instigated by the situation, and Godwin, a bit ham-handedly, belabors the situation so that there can be no doubt in the reader's mind, makes Marilyn sweet, young, and innocent (rather than a cold-blooded murderer or serial killer) so that reader will want to save her - and then the realization of "the cold equations" will be more effective. |
The zombie is in a lot of ways the perfect horror movie bad guy. It plays on so many fears all at once. The fear of predators, the fear of disease and the fear of loved ones betraying us -- the ones we care about are turning around and trying to eat us. |
What you call "the Golden Age tradition" of stringing stories together into novels was not so much a tradition as a consequence of the fact that almost no genre SF novels were published between 1926 and 1946. |