Voodoo Planet
Andre Norton
192 pages
published in 1956
Genre science fiction got its start in the pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties and many of its early writers were just pulp authors writing the same old stories they’d always written, just with some sf flavourings. So instead of the brave sheriff depending on his horse and trusty six gun to fight off the bandits out in the Oklahoma badlands, you got the brave space marshall depending on his trusty rocket and raygun to take out the bandits hiding out in the Martian badlands. It’s this what fans meant when they talked about space opera, before that got co-opted for something more respectable, crappy fake science fiction stories that might just as well have been westerns. As the field matured and new writers moved in actually interested in science fiction as a genre, these stories quickly disappeared.
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