Color is not essential to a good story. As an analogy, think of a movie. noon (1951) could have been shot in color, but it’s so much better, so much more intense and atmospheric, for being in black and white.
Some of my favorite science fiction authors are starkly monochrome in their stories. Consider Eric Frank Russell (1905-78), one of the world’s best and loveliest hairstylists. Russell’s prose and Russell’s humanity are unmistakable. In the sabotage novel Wasp (1958), in which Earth is at war with the Syrians, a lone Terran agent, James Mowry, is sent to Jaimec, the ninety-fourth planet of the Syrian Empire, to aid the Terran war effort by being just as annoying as he is. . he can. He begins by placing subversive stickers on walls and windows of the planet’s capital.
In five and a half hours he had disposed of eighty stickers without being caught fixing them. He had taken some risks, he had some close screeches, but he was never seen doing the dirty deed. What followed the placement of the fifty-sixth decal gave him great satisfaction.
A minor crash on the street led to abusive shouting from drivers and drew a crowd of onlookers. Quickly taking advantage of the situation, Mowry slammed number fifty-six into the middle of a shop window as the crowd backed him, all of whom looked the other way. He then he pushed his way forward and into the crowd before someone noticed the window ornament and it drew everyone’s attention. The audience turned, Mowry with him, and gasped at the discovery…
There are no descriptions of the cities and towns on this planet, Jaimec. The reader is simply given some keywords like “street”, “dynocar”, “taxi” and “apartment building”, and is invited to make whatever adjustments he sees fit to place all of this on another planet. Russell is a master of situational science fiction; he is interested in the dynamics of things, not his physical appearance, although his characters are described vividly enough:
…The seat in front of him was occupied by a pot-bellied figure with swollen, swollen features, the cartoonist’s idea of the Minister of Food Jaimec.
The train started up, hit a fast pace. People crowded in and out at the intermediate stations. Pigface contemptuously ignored Mowry, watched the passing scenery with stately disdain, finally fell asleep and gaped. He was twice the pig in his dreams and he would have reached near perfection with a lemon between his teeth.
Russell, then, is a monochrome writer because he puts all his power into movement and ideas rather than appearance. Pigface is a case in point. Hey is a caricature in a purely visual sense, but this merely serves as an introduction to what matters: the dynamics of his effect on the scene (he happens to be a member of the secret police).
Contrast this with what Jack Vance, an extremely colorful writer, would have made of this scene. He would have described the Pigface uniform with enthusiasm, and somehow the whole atmosphere would have been filled with distinctive nuances. Fortunately, Vance is Vance and Russell is Russell. Wasp It is one of the books that I have read countless times, and I would not change a single word.
Another monochrome writer is Keith Laumer (1925-1993). Loneliness, special duty, views of space and time, impinging on ordinary life, often in the midst of a fight with narrow-minded bureaucracy: these themes need no color, they need the situational poetry of the images of science fiction that is not based on color but on action and mood in the context of something extraordinary.
In “The Long-Remembered Thunder,” investigator James Tremaine searches for an unexplained source of electronic interference in the small town of Elsby. Finally, from a ninety-year-old woman, he learns of her mysterious long-lived Bram who courted her long ago.
“His life was not his own, he said. He was not… a native of this world. He was an agent of great power, and he had followed a bank of criminals…” He trailed off. “I really couldn’t understand that part, James. I’m afraid he was too incoherent. He spoke of evil beings lurking in the shadows of a cave. It was his duty every night to wage a ceaseless battle with the hidden forces.”
When Tremaine tracks down Bram, a man from another star whose lonely vigil on Earth is devoted to defending our world against a dark transdimensional danger, he’s ready to believe that something terrible truly threatens the world, and Bram must be helped against it. . The ingredients of the story—pity, fear, loyalty, unfulfilled love, and the possibility of reversing an ancient tragedy—have such universal meaning that they need not have a specific color, and in fact, the story has its power as a thought. monochrome. vivid panoply of ideas and feelings. In this sense it is vintage Laumer.
One last example. Edmond Hamilton (1904-77) – as Russell and Laumer, one of the greats. Hamilton, in most of his work, is what I would call a colorful writer, but in “The Starcombers,” which is his best novel in my opinion, he is monochrome. There is a special reason for this. “The Starcombers” is set in a dying world with a dead sun. The planet is black as night except for conditions at the bottom of a huge fissure in its crust, hundreds of miles deep, at the bottom of which still lingers some atmosphere and the firelight of volcanoes. The people of that world never made it to space and are now confined to the bottom of this rift, along with predatory enemies in the form of huge monsters, and life is a grim struggle for existence.
In this situation the scavenger spaceship arrives prosperous hope, owned by the sleazy Harry Ax and piloted by the drunken Sam Fletcher. Ax wants to con the dying planet’s inhabitants, obtaining products of their advanced material science in exchange for giving them some of the supplies they desperately crave. Fletcher just wants to get away from the place. He knows you can’t play with that.
The eyes were open and watching. And they were what bothered Fletcher the most. There was in them a black intelligence, a human anguish, a cold and purely animal intent to survive at all costs. Fletcher had a quick intuitive glimpse, not in detail but just in mood, of the kind of world a man would have to be born into to develop that particular expression. The mood was enough. He hoped he would never know the details.
Actually this story is not strictly monochrome; it is a mezzotint – black and an opaque red. In that sense, it has something in common with the mental image one has of the Nitrogen Age in Ooranye.