Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) OER

Science Fiction OER Textbook cover: Inside a futuristic library, a woman wearing an exosuit is reading in the foreground and an alien reaches for a book in the background.

Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) is an open educational resource or OER, meaning it is freely available for anyone to use and learn with. It provides a chronological history of Science Fiction (SF) with an emphasis on literature and film, and it includes other useful resources, such as a glossary of terms, an extensive list of SF definitions, additional resources, a syllabus with hyperlinked readings available online, and video lectures.

Table of Contents

Front Matter

What is YASFT?

It tells a story, but not the only story, about SF history. It’s also an experiment in using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with editing a large body of text, in this case over 60,000 words.

Who made YASFT?

YASFT was written by Jason W. Ellis, Associate Professor of English at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY where he is also the Coordinator of the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, an over-600-linear-foot archive of near-complete runs of the major SF magazines, novels, anthologies, and scholarship. If you have suggestions, feedback, or corrections, please email them to him at jellis at citytech dot cuny dot edu.

Why was YASFT made?

While on sabbatical during the 2023-2024 academic year, he was approached by an academic publisher about writing a textbook on SF. That project appealed to him greatly, but he understood that it would take a tremendous amount of time and energy to complete–time and energy that he unfortunately did not have. While he had to decline the offer, it made him think that it wouldn’t take too much time and energy to convert his SF course lecture notes developed over the past 10 years into a less expansive textbook that still had tremendous use value an open educational resource (OER) that he could put in readers’ hands almost immediately. Also, he imagined that leveraging generative artificial intelligence technologies, which he had been experimenting with and documenting over the past year and a half, might speed up the editing that such a project would need.

What he imagined was a single webpage that chronicled the history of SF in about 60,000 words (which included a syllabus, a list of SF definitions, links, and other resources). A single page would be easily hyperlinked to, and being a single page, it would be easy to copy its content in accordance with an open license (see section on “How Can YASFT Be Used?” below). Not only would such a resource be useful to his students but also to students anywhere with Internet access–either by finding the YASFT or having it assigned by their professors. It would also be more accessible than other free resources such as the SFRA Review‘s detailed but dispersed 101 Series, and be more compact and to-the-point than the impressively detailed and multimodal A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction edited by Lars Schmeink. Unlike the important print textbooks on the market (some of which are in the further reading appendix below), YASFT would be free.

Why is it called YASFT?

“Yet Another” is a computer naming joke that is often used to denote a new piece of software where there already exists other programs that basically do the same thing. Nevertheless, the programmer releases the yet another named application, because she believes it has something to offer users that the other already existing applications do not. Similarly, there are a number of other SF textbooks on the market. Some are far superior to YASFT and others claim not to be SF textbooks when in fact they are (another joke; see Appendix 3: Futher Reading for a list of other textbooks). Calling this SF textbook yet another one signals its entrance in a field of others, but it also says that there is something that sets it apart.

How can YASFT be used?

YASFT is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License. It’s freely available to be read as it is. However, if anyone would like to use it in another way, there are licensing terms that must be followed: “This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.”

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

How was YASFT made?

YASFT was created using the following workflow. It began as typed lecture notes used by Jason Ellis in his SF classes at Georgia Tech (2013-2014) and City Tech (2014-present). Some paragraphs and sections were already written out while large portions were bullet point lists of words and incomplete thoughts. The latter were copied section-by-section into a text editor and revised into sentences and paragraphs, which were fed into a generative AI with instructions to improve the writing.

ChatGPT was not used. Instead, an open source generative AI was run on a desktop workstation with an NVIDIA RTX A6000 video card, which can load a 65B to 70B parameter large language model (LLM) into its 48GB GDDR6 memory. For comparison, many claim GPT-3 is a 175 billion parameter model and there are rumors that GPT-4 is a 1.7 trillion parameter model. While the LLMs used are smaller than those in production by OpenAI, they are quite capable for generating and editing text. Also, it is preferable to run one’s own hardware and software rather than renting someone else’s.

Using obabooga’s text-generation-webui to load Tim Dettmer’s Guanaco 65B model (based on Meta’s Llama 1) and Mikael110’s Llama 2 version of Guanaco (based on Llama 2), the generative AI models were prompted with a variation on a copywriter prompt developed by Dave Birss for a course on LinkedIn Learning:

You are an expert copywriter with more than 20 years of experience in writing high-performing copy. I want you to rewrite the following copy to make it better. Rewrite it with an engaged but scholarly tone. Correct misspelled words and bad grammar. Vary the length of sentences to make the text more interesting. Do not omit any facts or information in the copy. Do not incorporate outside information. Use only the information contained in the copy. The copy I want you to improve is:

Depending on the output, changes were made to improve it, such as swapping “editor” for “copywriter” and “engaging textbook” for “high-performing copy.” The prompt needed tweaking throughout the editing process, especially to avoid the introduction of facts or names offered by the LLMs, for each section of text. It’s important to note that some but not all of YASFT‘s paragraphs were edited by the LLMs. The generative AI was not used in any way to add or contribute facts, information, anecdotes, or quotes. All quoted material from outside sources is documented in-text. Most links lead to relevant pages on Wikipedia. Any incorrect facts, dates, or quotations are the author’s fault.

Acknowledgements

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Lisa Yaszek, Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who showed me that you can make a living by teaching and researching SF. Her Summer 2002 SF class taught me about SF and how to teach SF. She has been a friend and mentor to me for over 20 years.

YASFT is also enriched by what I learned in other classes at Georgia Tech taught by Carol Senf, Narin Hassan, Kenneth Knoespel, Robert Wood, and Eugene Thacker; at the University of Liverpool: Andy Sawyer, David Seed, Peter Wright, and at Kent State University: Mack Hassler, Tammy Clewell, Babacar M’Baye, Robert Trogden, and Kevin Floyd (1967-2019). Scholarship by Brian Aldiss (1925-2017), Marleen Barr, Ritch Calvin, Doug Davis, Rob Latham, and Patricia S. Warrick (1925-2023) were also important to my thinking about specific SF topics and how I might approach them in the classroom.

I also would like to thank my wife Yu-Fang Lin, who helped me write the Taiwanese SF chapter and several blog posts on SF fandom in Taiwan. Without her, I wouldn’t have had access to the exciting SF in the Republic of China where democracy, thankfully, still stands.

Preface

My Science Fiction (SF) journey began a long time ago. In fact, my first memory is what set me on this path. I was sitting on the floor of my family’s mobile home in Hortense, Georgia. I looked up from my toys long enough to see the whoosh and swoop of the Millennium Falcon weaving through the asteroids in a trailer for the film The Empire Strikes Back (1980), which was going to be playing at the local drive-in. Those images became an indelible memory for me.

While Star Wars fed the first coordinates into my navigational computer for SF, it wasn’t long before I began hopping galaxies aboard the USS Enterprise from Star Trek or traveling through time and space inside a police box that was bigger on the inside on Doctor Who.

Later, I asked Marty Magda, my friend from Boy Scouts who worked at the local Waldenbooks, who I should be reading from the “Science Fiction and Fantasy” section. He led me through the aisles to the back left corner of the store. He advised Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. So, I started with I, Robot (1950), The Martian Chronicles (1950), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

When I first started as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, I heard about a crazy class about SF taught by the singular Bud Foote. His teaching style and classes were so popular that I was never able to get in before I failed out. Reading and viewing SF gave me solace while I worked for Internet service providers and tried to figure out how to get back on track at Tech.

Thankfully, I made my way back to Georgia Tech, but I couldn’t anticipate how SF would radically transform my way forward in life. I learned that Professor Foote had retired and a new professor, Dr. Lisa Yaszek, was teaching the SF class. With uncertainty, I signed up. Prof. Yaszek’s class was transformative to me in the way that Archer Sloane’s literature class was to the eponymous Stoner in John William’s 1965 novel. It showed me a different way to think about and enjoy SF that was beyond my ability to imagine up to that point. Slowly, a new way forward seemed possible that combined my deep love of SF with the potential of a career in academia.

Along my journey, I have continued to carry what I learned in Prof. Yaszek’s class, and the classes of my other professors. Each of them helped me along my path in different but signficant ways, offering new knowledge, new perspectives, encouragement, invaluable feedback, and models for teaching. I paid attention and listened. I applied what I had learned and observed into my teaching: first, at Kent State where I was a graduate student, then at Georgia Tech where I was a Brittain Fellow, and now at City Tech where I am an Associate Professor. It has been and continues to be my goal to pay forward all of the help that I received that made it possible to be where I am today.

It was that idea of paying forward in a new way that inspired Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT). While it’s a resource that I will share with my students, it has the potential to reach a wider audience within and without the academy. It might be read by a student halfway around the world, it might be assigned by a professor in a different time zone, or it might be seen by someone who discovered it from a web search.

However you happened to find your way here, I hope that the YASFT will be useful to you in some way, whether it teaches you a little about the history of SF or gives you some ideas about how to teach SF. My joy in this is the hope that the YASFT might help you on your own SF journey–wherever it might take you.

Origins of Science Fiction

Science Fiction (SF), or the cultural expression in writing, film, music, video games, and other art forms of the effects of science and technology on individuals and society through imaginative narratives involving other spaces and times, has its roots in our distant past before the idea of science was invented. Those early stories imagined fantastic creatures, incredible powers, and epic voyages to far off lands and outer space. And, they certainly inspired the genre of stories and other art to come that we now call SF.

Early Fantastic Stories

The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literature dating back to ~2150-2000 BC, serves as a critical precursor to science fiction. This Mesopotamian tale chronicles the adventures of King Gilgamesh of Uruk and his companion, Enkidu, the Wildman. Their escapades, including slaying the great mountain keeper and the Bull of Heaven, invoked the wrath of the gods. Following Enkidu’s demise, Gilgamesh embarked on a quest for eternal life, discovering that although longevity may elude him, immortality through memory can be attained. A surviving fragment from the poem poetically depicts Gilgamesh as “He who saw the Deep” or “He who sees the unknown.” This epic represents a pivotal moment in the history of storytelling, where the boundaries between reality and imagination were blurred, laying the groundwork for the genre we now know as science fiction. Reflecting it’s significance and reach, the Epic of Gilgamesh was woven into “Darmok,” one of the most popular episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that originally aired in 1991.

Hesiod’s Theogony from the 8th century BC introduced the mythical figure of Prometheus, one of the Titans, precursors to the Olympian gods. As a champion of humanity, he recognized our intellectual potential and daringly bestowed us with the gift of fire – an act that led to his punishment by being chained to a rock and having his liver devoured daily by an eagle, only to be regenerated for the next feeding. This cycle continued until Hercules intervened and set him free. Another notable work is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD), which showcased transformations, extraordinary events, divine powers, and amorous relationships between gods and humans. Additionally, Lucian’s True History (2nd century) explored concepts such as space travel, extraterrestrial life, and intergalactic conflict. Beowulf (8th-11th century) is an epic poem recounting the heroic battles of Beowulf against the monsters Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and ultimately the dragon. Lastly, the 13th-century German epic poem Nibelungenlied or The Song of the Nibelungs tells the tale of Siegfried, the dragon-slayer, his unjust demise, and his wife’s vengeance upon those responsible for it.

In Utopia (1516), Thomas More (1478-1535) introduces the term which has come to represent an idealized world. This philosophical treatise outlines a rational and communistically-planned city-state where philosophy permeates daily life. Interestingly, the work’s title has dual meanings in its Greek origins – ‘eu-topos’, meaning both ‘good place’ and ‘no place’. Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (completed in 1610) explores space travel and alternate perspectives of the Earth. The text includes extensive footnotes explaining planetary observation from other celestial bodies, concealing Kepler’s support for the heliocentric model of the solar system. In William Shakespeare‘s (1564-1616) The Tempest (1610-11), Prospero, a powerful sorcerer, rules over an island alongside his daughter Miranda, two servants: the monster Caliban and the spirit Ariel. He conjures a storm to wreck a ship and reclaim his lost titles and standing. Comparisons can be drawn between Prospero and Victor Frankenstein (see next chapter) as they use their abilities with disregard for the potential repercussions. The Tempest is also the inspiration for the 1956 SF film Forbidden Planet (see SF Film Through the 1950s chapter below). New Atlantis (1627) by Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) portrays a utopian society named Bensalem prioritizing science and knowledge. Lastly, Jonathan Swift’s (1667-1745) Gulliver’s Travels (1726) uses its story of fantastic journeys to veil its biting political satire. While the fantastic elements of the story are certainly interesting, it’s important to remember that it, like SF to follow, is about the here-and-now.

Scientific Revolution

In the wake of the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism, and the Gothic movement, science fiction emerged as a distinct genre. This unique combination of historical and cultural shifts laid the foundation for the development of science fiction and its captivating exploration of technology, society, and the future.

For centuries, the prevailing view held by many was that the Earth lay at the center of the universe. However, during the Scientific Revolution which started in the late 16th century, pioneering thinkers such as Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) put forth a radical new theory – that the Sun lies at the center of our solar system. This concept of a heliocentric universe marked a significant departure from established beliefs and paved the way for groundbreaking discoveries about our cosmos.

At its core, the Scientific Revolution represented an unprecedented shift towards empiricism – the notion that knowledge can only truly come from direct observations and experiments. Adherents like the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), who discovered elliptical planetary orbits; Italian astronomer and engineer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), widely regarded as the father of modern astronomy; English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727), whose laws of motion and gravity laid the foundation for classical physics; and French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, the father of analytic geometry who also invented what came to be called Cartesian coordinates, all contributed to this revolutionary movement. Through careful experimentation, thorough analysis, and persistent inquiry, these visionaries expanded our comprehension of reality beyond what had previously been imagined.

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment, also referred to as the Age of Reason or simply The Enlightenment, emerged in England during the seventeenth century. This period was marked by a distinctive optimistic outlook towards the present, which stood in stark contrast to the perceived darkness of the past. The illumination that characterized this era arose from a widespread skepticism regarding the existing social order and prevailing wisdom.

The defining features of the Age of Enlightenment were rooted in a profound reverence for reason as the most consequential and beneficial faculty of human nature. Through the application of reason, individuals could emancipate themselves from antiquated, dogmatic, and superstitious beliefs that had hitherto constrained them. By cultivating rational thinking, people could attain not just accurate cognition but also ethical conduct.

Advocates of the Enlightenment maintained that reason held the key to unlocking humanity’s collective potential for achieving terrestrial perfection. They believed that steady advancements in philosophy and science would ultimately lead to universal equality and justice. Consequently, all members of society ought to be treated equally under the law, regardless of their background or circumstances.

Central to the ideology of the Enlightenment was the conviction that opinions and beliefs must be grounded solely in reason rather than tradition or religious authority. Moreover, all pursuits should strive to augment knowledge and understanding instead of merely appealing to emotions or personality traits.

For centuries, human civilization had been constrained by manual labor and limited resources. However, between 1760 and 1840, a remarkable transformation took place that would change the course of history forever – the Industrial Revolution. This era marked a significant shift from traditional methods of farming and manufacturing towards mechanized processes, which revolutionized production and transportation. The result was a surge in productivity, efficiency, and profitability that drove economic growth both domestically and internationally. Agricultural innovations played a crucial role in this transformation, as they enabled larger crop yields and better land management practices. Meanwhile, new modes of production allowed for mass production at unprecedented speeds while also introducing novel forms of organization within factories. The impact of these changes cannot be overstated; they laid the foundation for modern industry and set us on an irreversible path toward global interconnectedness through trade networks spanning continents.

Romanticism

During the British Romantic period (1785-1830), social change and revolution sparked a literary and artistic movement including significant figures William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797).

Romanticism is characterized by its focus on five key elements – imagination, intuition, idealism, inspiration, and individuality. These ideals were embodied in notable works such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), which celebrated the power of the human mind and the spontaneous emotional responses evoked through poetic expression.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry” (1821, published posthumously 1840) further underscored the importance of imagination in bringing the natural world into our minds, transforming it through the creative process, and imbuing it with human meaning. For the Romantics, this connection between nature and human experience was central to their innovative approach to literature. They challenged traditional materials, forms, and styles, prioritizing novelty and experimentation in their works.

Wordsworth believed that great poetry emerged organically from “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” This sentiment highlights the significance of emotion as a driving force behind literary creation during the Romantic era. In conclusion, the British Romantic period marked a pivotal moment in literary history, where the boundaries of traditional literature were pushed by visionaries like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley who championed imagination, individuality, and the intrinsic bond between humans and nature.

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) reveals a distinct contrast between the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime, favored by the romantics, is characterized by its immense scale and ruggedness; it exhibits a preference for irregularity while still maintaining solidity and massiveness. This notion embraces darkness, terror, and peril. Conversely, the beautiful, which was admired by the neoclassicists, embodies delicacy, smoothness, and subtle deviation from straight lines. It shuns obscurity and is founded upon pleasure.

The advent of Romanticism marked a transition from writing about others to a focus on the self – the narrative voice was assumed to be that of the author themselves or solitary figures existing outside societal structures, engaged in challenging and prolonged quests. During the early stages of the French Revolution, many writers perceived humans as possessing boundless aspirations towards an infinite good, inspired by the individual’s imagination.

The Gothic

The Gothic style emerged during the Romantic period as a distinct literary and artistic mode, characterized by its dark portrayal of humanity’s complex relationship with nature. This mysterious and often unforgiving external reality serves to position humans as subjects to its whims. Key features of the Gothic tradition include settings typically rooted in isolation, such as castles or ancient structures, supernatural elements, secrets, boundary crossings, and evocative emotions like suspense, horror, foreboding, and terror.

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) marks the earliest known example of this genre. Other notable works within the Gothic canon include Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Through these texts, we see the enduring impact of the Gothic mode on our understanding and representation of humanity’s intricate connection to the natural world.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The British Science Fiction writer and critic Brian Aldiss (and others) argue that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) is the first example of what we now call science fiction. Of course, at the time Frankenstein was published, there was not yet a term for that kind of literature. It draws on many generic elements—namely: Gothic literature, mythology, and travel narratives and it builds on ideas that were of utmost importance at that time: including: the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism, and the Gothic.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) is the daughter of the two of the most famous radicals of that era. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), was a pioneering feminist theorist who fought for equal rights for women and access to education for women. She argues for these things in her groundbreaking work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). To put things into context, she began by establishing women are rational, like men, and their supposed inferiority comes from their being denied an education. Her father, William Godwin (1756-1836) was a minister turned atheist who gained notoriety and fame through his writing, including Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), which argues that humanity can progress through individual rationality and anarchism or the absence of an imposing government, and Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which mirrors what Godwin sees as tyrannical government and its destructive effects on individuals. Mary Wollstonecraft died 10 days after giving birth to Mary due to puerperal septicemia. Godwin and his daughter Mary remained very close and he carried on his wife’s ideals by educating Mary and her half-sister Fanny Imlay (1794-1816).

Frankenstein is the first novel to have a character make a choice between alchemy and the scientific method. It extrapolates or imagines where things might go based on the sciences of Shelley’s day. It explores the morality or ethics of human use of science and technology and what effects that use might have on others. Much like some of the definitions that you’ve read in our class so far, it is the first story to present a human problem that pivots on science and technology. Unlike a gothic story, Frankenstein is firmly rooted in scientific extrapolation and rationality instead of the supernatural and irrationality.

Frankenstein tells the story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein, who turned away from pseudoscience and alchemy and pursued the sciences of chemistry and galvanism to discover how to give life to inanimate matter. He constructs a creature that looks like a large man, but he abandons it in horror and disgust. The creature, a being with a mind like a tabula rasa or blank slate, uses reason, observation, and trial and error to learn how to survive, learn to speak, read, and write. Believing that he had mastered language enough to convince a family of refugees to accept him, he confronts them but they recoil in horror. Angry at humanity for how he has been treated, the creature chooses vengeance against his creator. He kills Victor’s younger brother William, and frames the innocent Justine. Then, he bargains with his creator—build a mate for him and he will leave humanity. Victor agrees to his creature’s demand, travels to the far reaches of Scotland to create a female version of his creature, but then realizing she will have free will and reason just like his creature and might not want to go along with his bargain, he destroys his work before giving her life so as to avoid her unknown choices and possibly the creation of a new race of beings. Enraged, his creature tells Victor, “I will be with you on your wedding night” and flees. The creature kills Victor’s best friend Clerval, and Victor is suspected of the crime. Released, Victor makes his way back to Switzerland to marry Elizabeth. After the wedding, the creature kills Elizabeth and Victor pursues him all the way to the arctic where Victor meets Captain Walton. After Victor’s death, the creature appears to Captain Walton, laments his creator’s passing, and disappears, vowing to end his own life.

Mary Shelley published her novel Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus originally in 1818 anonymously. Its origins lie in June 1816 of the Year Without a Summer when Mary Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet and Mary’s soon-to-be husband who was also still married to Harriet Westbrook (1795-1816); Lord Byron (1788-1824), the poet and member of the House of Lords; Claire Clairmont (1798-1879), Mary Shelley’s stepsister); and John Polidori (1795-1821), a writer and physician, spent time together in a house on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There, they agreed to have a competition of ghost stories–each person would tell a story of their devising. Of their attempts, Mary Shelley’s was the most successful and influential after she expanded and published it.

There are three editions of Frankenstein: the original 1818 edition in three volumes, the 1823 edition in two volumes, and the 1831 edition in one volume that was heavily edited and included a new preface by Mary Shelley.

The story is told in an epistolary form. This means that it is told through letters between Captain Robert Walton and his sister Margaret Walton Saville. There are these narrative frames: Walton’s letters to his sister Margaret Saville contains: Victor Frankenstein’s narrative told to Walton contains: the Creature’s narrative told to Victor who recounts it to Walton. Then, the Creature’s mourning his dead creator as told to Walton.

Another way to visualize the narrative frames is:

(Walton's letters to his sister Margaret Saville 
   (Victor's narrative told to Walton 
      (the Creature's narrative told to Victor 
       and recounted to Walton
      )
   ) 
   (the Creature speaks to Walton above his dead creator
   ) 
)

Science-Saturated Novel

Frankenstein is a science-saturated novel. It is the first novel that demonstrates a choice made between the pre-scientific and the scientific and its plot hinges on the new sciences of biochemistry, anatomy, and galvanism. Its characters: Victor, Walton, and the Creature are all scientists of a kind driven by curiosity. Walton goes on his voyage of discovery to find what attracts the compass needle, or magnetism. He wants to “regulate a thousand celestial observations” and find a new path to the Americas. Essentially, he wants to Go where no man has gone before (where have we heard that before?). Note, however, the influence of romanticism on Walton—he was a poet for some time, and he writes, “I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.”

The introduction by Mary Shelley and the original preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley mention “Dr. Darwin.” They are referring to Charles Darwin’s (1809-1882) grandfather, Erasmus. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was a natural philosopher whose ideas were further developed by his grandson Charles. Erasmus was an atheist, too. Even though Mary Shelley’s father and Erasmus never met, they were attacked together in public as atheist writers.

Biological galvanism is the application of electrical current to muscles to elicit their contraction. Today, we call this electrophysiology. Galvanism was state-of-the-art science during Mary Shelley’s teenage years. Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) is the Italian scientist who experimented on this phenomenon with dissected animals in the late 1700s.

Victor Frankenstein’s Hubris

Frankenstein’s act of creation is an example of the concept of hubris, or an excessive confidence and defiance that challenges established boundaries. This idea draws from Greek mythology where hubris referred to acts deemed arrogant or offensive towards the gods, often leading to retribution by Nemesis. For instance, Prometheus displayed hubris when he believed himself wiser than Zeus, bestowing humans with fire despite the ruler’s decree against it; this ultimately led to Prometheus’ punishment. Similarly, in the King James Version of the Bible (Proverbs 16:18), “Pride goes before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” highlights how hubris can lead to one’s downfall.

Frankenstein exhibits hubris through his ambition to create life without considering potential consequences or responsibilities toward his creation. His actions reflect a belief that his insights and achievements grant him superior authority to determine the fate of his creation. The creature becomes Frankenstein’s nemesis, serving as an unavoidable force of retribution for his hubris. In popular culture, a nemesis is commonly regarded as an arch enemy.

Critique of the Age of Enlightenment

Frankenstein serves as a critique of the Age of Enlightenment by delving into the consequences of scientific and rational knowledge on society. Victor’s inner conflict highlights the complex relationship between progressive thought and ethical implications. This idea resonates with the atrocities of the 20th century, including World War I and II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. The book’s ambiguous tone and tensions create a captivating message that still resonates today. Mary Wollstonecraft’s impact is evident in Elizabeth Lavenza’s education alongside Victor, showcasing gender disparities in intellectual opportunities. William Godwin’s ideas on justice and equality are also explored throughout the story. The character pairings of Victor Frankenstein and his creation, Walton and Victor, and Victor and Clerval represent various interpretations of doppelgangers and the intricate relationship between appearance and inner psyche. Ultimately, Frankenstein examines societal obligations, communal dynamics, and isolation.

Victor’s unwavering commitment to rationality and empirical methods distinguishes him from those who rely on mysticism and illusion. Through his investigations in chemistry, physiology, and anatomy, he unravels the mysteries of animation – how matter acquires life. His pursuit of perpetual existence draws parallels to the legendary quest of Gilgamesh for everlasting life. The Creature embodies reason, analyzing the world through experimentation, reflection, and hypothesis testing. His cognitive prowess encompasses both induction (from specific observations to broad inferences) and deduction (from universal principles to precise conclusions). Clerval personifies the Romantic spirit, embodying artistic ideals and imagination. Meanwhile, Captain Walton’s journey represents a transition from Romantic inclinations toward a quest for knowledge grounded in empirical observation. In this regard, he occupies a unique position between the realms of Romantic poetry and scientific inquiry–a liminal figure between Victor and Clerval.

Tabula Rasa

Another key scientific and philosophical debate in Frankenstein concerns the biology of mind and the question: Does the human brain form with inherent information or is it a tabula rasa or blank slate? This is called the innateness question. Even with the rudimentary understanding of human biology and specifically of the brain at that time, it was a hotly discussed topic, because knowing the answer to that question determined how philosophers were able to establish foundations for concepts such as equality and justice. It also lent itself to debates about the human organism as simply another animal or a special creature imbued with a soul by God.

Shelley seems to side with John Locke (1632-1704), who was an empiricist, or one who believed that the mind was a blank slate and we acquired language and knowledge through empirical trial and error. Essentially, human beings become who they are by figuring things out.

More recently, it seems that the rationalists, represented by René Descartes (1596-1650), won out in the end due in part to the theory of Universal Grammar that makes humans receptive to learning a language early in life. Perhaps Shelley sided with the empiricists, because at that time, the empirical view did not require the invention of a soul.

Among other places, such as Treatise of Man (1662), Descartes wrote about the pineal gland in a letter dated 29 January 1640 to Lazare Meyssonnier: “As a beginning, I will answer the question you asked me about the function of the little gland called conarion [Descartes’ term for the pineal gland]. My view is that this gland is the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed. The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double. Since we see only one thing with two eyes, and hear only one voice with two ears, and in short never have more than one thought at a time, it must necessarily be the case that the impressions which enter by the two eyes or by the two ears, and so on, unite with each other in some part of the body before being considered by the soul. Now it is impossible to find any such place in the whole head except this gland; moreover it is situated in the most suitable possible place for this purpose, in the middle of all the concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries which bring the spirits into the brain” (Descartes, René. “To Meyssonnier, 29 January 1640.” The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, Volume 3: The Correspondence. translated by John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, Cambridge UP, pp. 143-144).

According to Gert-Jan Lokhorst, Descartes considered the pineal gland, “as the principal seat of the soul and the place in which all our thoughts are formed” (Lokhorst, Gert-Jan. “Descartes and the Pineal Gland.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition). edited by Edward N. Zalta. 21 June 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/pineal-gland/, par. 1). The pineal gland represented the unity of thought and soul that Descartes sought. What influence Descartes’ thoughts on the pineal gland had on Dick is unknown, but it is worth raising as a point of contact, because like Dick, Descartes wrote in his Treatise of Man about human beings by imagining creatures like us, but mechanical (and made by God): “These men will be composed, as we are, of a soul and a body; and I must first separately describe for you the body; then, also separately, the soul; and finally I must show you how these two natures would have to be joined and united to constitute men resembling us./I assume their body to be but a statue, an earthen machine formed intentionally by God to be as much as possible like us. Thus not only does He give it externally the shapes and colors of all the parts of our bodies; He also places inside it all the pieces required to make it walk, eat, breathe, and imitate whichever of our own functions can be imagined to proceed from mere matter and to depend entirely on the arrangement of our organs./We see clocks, artificial fountains, mills, and similar machines which, though made entirely by man, lack not the power to move of themselves, in various ways. And I think you will agree that the present machine could have even more sorts of movements than I have imagined and more ingenuity than I have assigned, for our supposition is that it was created by God” (Descartes, René. Treatise of Man. translated by Thomas Steele Hall, Prometheus Books, 2003, pp. 1-4).

In 1972, John R. Searle says of Noam Chomsky’s revolution in linguistics: “The most spectacular conclusion about the nature of the human mind that Chomsky derives from his work in linguistics is that his results vindicate the claims of the seventeenth-century rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, that there are innate ideas in the mind. The rationalists claim that human beings have knowledge that is not derived from experience but is prior to all experience and determines the form of the knowledge that can be gained from experience. The empiricist tradition by contrast, from Locke down to contemporary behaviorist learning theorists, has tended to treat the mind as a tabula rasa, containing no knowledge prior to experience and placing no constraints on the forms of possible knowledge, except that they must be derived from experience by such mechanisms as the association of ideas or the habitual connection of stimulus and response. For empiricists all knowledge comes from experience, for rationalists some knowledge is implanted innately and prior to experience. In his bluntest moods, Chomsky claims to have refuted the empiricists and vindicated the rationalists” (Searle, John R. The New York Review of Books, 29 June 1972, https://web.archive.org/web/20151210212202/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/06/29/a-special-supplement-chomskys-revolution-in-lingui/, section iv, par. 1).

He goes on to say, “Now, in spite of all these facts the child who learns his first language, claims Chomsky, performs a remarkable intellectual feat: in “internalizing” the grammar he does something akin to constructing a theory of the language. The only explanation for all these facts, says Chomsky, is that the mind is not a tabula rasa, but rather, the child has the form of the language already built into his mind before he ever learns to talk. The child has a universal grammar, so to speak, programmed into his brain as part of his genetic inheritance. In the most ambitious versions of this theory, Chomsky speaks of the child as being born ‘with a perfect knowledge of universal grammar, that is, with a fixed schematism that he uses,…in acquiring language.’ A child can learn any human language on the basis of very imperfect information. That being the case, he must have the forms that are common to all human languages as part of his innate mental equipment” (Searle, section iv, par. 5).

Proto-SF

While we can point to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as being the first work of Science Fiction (SF), there took a number of historical and cultural developments for the literary genre of science fiction to take the form that we know it as. These science fictional stories published after Frankenstein until the Pulp SF era can be called Proto-SF.

Historical Context

Historically, a different philosophical and scientific worldview had to emerge. This took place in the seventeenth century, but it took time—well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—before it was more widely established. These were the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution discussed previously.

Also, the social revolutions of the late eighteenth century, such as those of America and France, demonstrated that social structures were fragile and possible to change. These revolutions were made possible by the changing worldview of the Age of Enlightenment and what followed—including the political thinking of people like Mary Shelley’s parents—William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

SF emerged through the fusion of several distinct earlier literary forms. Fantastical journeys, including ancient tales like the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 BC) and Homer’s Odyssey (800 BC or older), and later works such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s Other Worlds (1657-1662) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), played a significant role in shaping science fiction. Additionally, the concept of utopian societies, introduced by Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (Latin, 1516; translated into English in 1551), contributed to the development of science fiction.

The genre was influenced by the conte philosophique or philosophical tales of French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778). These were used as satirical devices to critique society’s follies and vices with thought experiments. Gothic literature, known for its emphasis on mystery and the supernatural, challenged the Enlightenment’s reliance on reason and knowledge. Furthermore, technological and social advancements during this period sparked greater anticipation and imagination about future developments. Cheaply produced dime novels, featuring inventors, lost races, and marvel stories like The Steam Man of the Prairies (1868) by Edward S. Ellis (1840-1916). Stories like this captured the public’s fascination with innovation and progress in what has come to be called an Edisonade, or mythologizing the success of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the Wizard of Menlo Park. These diverse literary traditions collectively laid the foundation for the enthralling and ever-evolving genre of science fiction.

It’s also important to consider some of the historical and scientific advancements in the years after the publication of Frankenstein in 1818 in the 19^th century. Some of the abolitionist goals set forth in the Enlightenment came to fruition with Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 and the American Civil War from 1861-1865 and President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1962. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published On the Origin of Species in 1859 making the case for evolution by natural selection. While inoculation with weakened or similar disease causing agents, such as cowpox was known to reduce smallpox mortality, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) in France developed the first vaccine for rabies and created the process of pasteurization that keeps our foods, like milk, safe. James Clerk Maxwell (1821-1879) discovered the equations governing classical electromagnetism in 1861, Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907) gave us the Periodic Table in 1869, and Henri Becquerel (1852-1908) discovered radioactivity in 1896. In astronomy, international cooperation began between observatories in the 19^th century to create a photographic map of the night sky, Neptune was discovered in 1846, and in 1859, Robert Bunsen (1811-1899) and Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-1887) used the earlier invention of spectroscope by Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787-1826) in 1814 to establish that spectral lines of observed in sunlight correspond to those produced by chemicals burned on Earth, the 1874 transit of Venus permitted an accurate calculation of the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) first described what were believed to be canals on Mars in 1877. While the first steam locomotive began service in 1804, the first public rail line didn’t open until 1825 in England. Then, the internal combustion engine comes along in 1826, the electric motor in 1829, the telegraph in 1837, daguerreotype photographic process in 1839, Alexander Graham Bell’s (1847-1922) patent for the telephone in 1876, the phonograph in 1877, the lightbulb in 1879, and x-rays in 1895.

Within the changing and interconnected social, scientific, and technological realms, there are several notable proto-SF writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and E.M. Forster.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the originator of the horror story and the great detective story and innovator in psychological realism and poetic form. He influenced the French Symbolist movement. And, he melded science with mysticism. Among his stories, two that have distinctly SFnal, or science fictional elements are The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which is a fantastic adventure story involving shipwrecks and sailing to unknown lands, and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), which explores what would happen if a person on the edge of death were mesmerized or what we would call hypnotized. In this latter story, Poe uses the rhetoric of science and the ideas of Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815), an Austrian physician who created a therapeutic technique involving hypnosis.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), who you might know as the author of the 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter—about the adulteress Hester Prynne, also wrote proto-SF. There are many scientists and inventors in his other fiction. These include mesmerists and biologists. He depicts the creative and destructive skills of the sciences. His stories feature fantastic events that are given naturalistic explanations. You can think of his fiction as a response to the emergence of a technical-scientific elite during the nineteenth century. Two representative stories are “The Birth-Mark” (1843), which is about a beautiful woman with one blemish—a birthmark in the shape of a hand on her cheek that her husband obsesses over and creates a potion to remove it. While he’s successful at removing the birthmark, the potion kills the woman. Another is “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) in which a poisonous maiden gains resistance to poisonous plants and becomes poisonous herself. She dies when the man she loves gives her an anecdote.

Jules Verne

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was a French writer and an especially important figure in proto SF. Verne was influenced by Poe, so much so that he even wrote a sequel to The Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym. Verne’s writing is full of optimism about progress and European Man’s central role in nineteenth-century culture, which included Pro-expansionist and Orientalist ideas. He was born and raised in the port of Nantes, so it might not be surprising that the sea figures into many of his fictions. The overarching theme of his writing is called Voyages Extraordinaires or extraordinary voyages, which are near-future stories that take existing technologies just beyond what was then realizable. Verne takes the known and improves upon it for his stories. In his stories, readers learn something about science, technology, geography, and the natural world. But, his stories usually have a satirical edge to them. Three notable works of Verne include: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), in which a group of adventurers navigate volcanic tubes through the Earth beginning in Iceland and re-emerge in Italy. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870) is about Captain Nemo and his electric submarine called the Nautilus. While submarines were known at this time, Verne takes the idea and improves on it. It’s worth noting that 20,000 leagues is a measure of distance, not depth in this context. Also, Nemo means no man or no body, and is the name that Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey gives to the Cyclops. In the story, Nemo is a man outside society or community, like Victor Frankenstein. The character Professor Aronnax talks about science, but always does so incorrectly. On the other hand, Ned Land, the Canadian harpooner in the story uses common sense and reason to make educated guesses that prove correct over Aronnax’s lectures. Finally, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) is about circumnavigating the globe aboard steamships and trains—wonders of contemporary transportation technologies of his time.

H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was a British writer who was one of the seminal figures in the development of SF. Born to working class parents, he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London where he studied biology with T.H. Huxley (1825-1895), a scientific humanist and so-called “Darwin’s Bulldog.” This background and Wells’ voracious interests in science and technology led to him writing some of the most groundbreaking fiction about evolution, invention, the prophecy of change, social extrapolation, and the promise and peril of science and technology (his fiction celebrates and cautions about science and technology). Like Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, Wells earned a term for his kind of proto SF: Scientific Romances. Wells’ Scientific Romances share four main characteristics: i) long evolutionary perspective, ii) absence of a frontier, iii) faceless or nameless hero or one powerless in the face of natural forces, and iv) pessimistic or less hopeful about the future.

Some of Wells’ notable works that introduce science fictional concepts that get picked up and developed further include: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) connects to the theme of scientific creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through the character of Dr. Moreau who creates human-like creatures from animals; The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897) is a story about hubris: a scientist devises a way to reduce his body’s refractive index to that of air and thus become invisible with a goal of gaining fame and fortune; The War of the Worlds (1898) is about the invasion of Earth by resource depleted and strange looking, tentacle-armed Martians driving their mighty tripod walking machines armed with heat rays and chemical weapons, but their lack of immunity to our bacteria kills them before they kill all of the humans; The First Men in the Moon (1901) is about two British men constructing a spherical spaceship out of a newly designed metal called “cavorite” that negates the force of gravity and flying in it to the moon where they experience weightlessness during the journey and encounter the insect-like Selenites on the moon; “The Land Ironclads” (1903) prophesied the construction and battlefield strategy of the modern tank; and “The Star” (1897), a short story that is widely anthologized about the passing of a rogue star through our solar system and the terrible ecological effects brought by this wayward star on our planet. Like Kepler’s Somnium (see first chapter above), we see at the end observations made about Earth from another point in the solar system—from Mars by the Martians. Wells alludes to the social benefits that come to humanity as a result of our weathering this catastrophe. Finally, the story takes a big perspective with no single hero to thread the story together. Its perspective is cosmic and on the level of the universe. It conjures the later so-called “Pale Blue Dot” photograph. This photograph of Earth was made by the spacecraft Voyager 1 from 6 billion kilometers away from Earth. This is the kind of perspective that Wells takes—not only in terms of Earth’s place in the universe but also in regard to aspiring to greatness by humanity’s collective effort.

One of Wells’ most famous novels is The Time Machine (1895), which introduces the idea of a machine capable of moving forward or backward in time, and it focuses on the idea of long, evolutionary time. Unlike Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) or Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889), both of which magical time travel, Wells’ The Time Machine configures time as something traversable into the future or backward into the past via the application of science and technology. The former involves Scrooge’s dream, and the latter uses a massive punch to the side of Hank Morgan’s head to send him back in time. Wells’ novel is set apart because it does a couple of important things. First, it relies on the idea of time as a fourth dimension (where length, width, and height are the first three). Whereas we can move through space (three dimensions), he configures time as a fourth dimension we can move forward or backward along. Second, he devises his story around the Time Traveler’s invention of a time machine—a technological apparatus that one may use to travel forward or backward along the fourth dimension. Of course, these ideas got significantly updated in the Back to the Future film trilogy (1985, 1989, 1990) directed by Robert Zemeckis (1952-). In place of the time machine, scientist and inventor Emmett “Doc” Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd (1938-), and his friend Marty McFly, played my Michael J. Fox (1961-), discover the dangers of time travel in a DMC DeLorean automobile outfitted with a nuclear-powered flux capacitor and time circuits. Back to Wells’ novel, the Time Traveler goes forward into the future to the year 802,701 AD where he encounters the serene Eloi and the dangerous Morlocks. Considering Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Time Traveler deduces that the Eloi and Morlocks are divergent species from homo sapiens—one bred for slaughter and the other intelligent cannibals. This division reflects a societal division between an dilettante upper class (the Eloi) and the working lower classes (the Morlocks getting their revenge on their past oppressors). Following his escape from the Morlocks, he travels into the distant future and sees that life on Earth had “devolved” and further still to observe the sun grow and then diminish until the earth was left a barren and cold world before returning to his present time before setting out again into the streams of time, never to return.

E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster (1879-1970), a British writer and contemporary of H. G. Wells, wrote only one proto-SF story—“The Machine Stops” (1909). His other writing is what we would call realistic, being set in a world like his own. They are dramas about the human condition. In general, his writing includes strong themes of humanism and social connection, issues of class differences, sexuality, and symbolism or meanings in things or symbols. Some of his most important realistic fictions include Howards End (1910), which is about social conventions and fin de siècle interpersonal relationships; A Room with a View (1908), which is about the personal life of a young woman in Edwardian England; and A Passage to India (1924), which deals with social relations and racism in British colonized India. It presents a theme that becomes important for SF—the Other, or that which is distinct from, different from, or opposite to something or oneself. For example, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India is about the meeting and unfortunate confrontation between the white British colonizers (self) and their Indian subjects (other).

Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) focuses on the questioning Kuno and his blissfully ignorant mother Vashti. Kuno questions the hive-like, technologically mediated existence that they all live while Vashti is content and happy with her machine-mediated existence. While most people venerate and pseudo-worship the machine, some do not and are banished to live on their own on the surface of the Earth, which Kuno admits to his mother having seen once before being taken back into the hive by the Machine. As the story progresses, the machine begins to break down and with it the hive and the machine-mediated human civilization. Those living on the surface are humanity’s last best hope for survival after everyone below ground likely dies. Forster was incredibly prescient in this story—there are intelligent machines, self-repairing machines, air transportation networks, video conferencing, and information serving machines that are like computers with an Internet connection long before any of these technologies were possible, much less widely discussed. Also, Forster shows how we are shaped by our technology—becoming anti-social in person, being overweight, and otherwise unhealthy due to our technological isolation and social distancing thanks to communication technology mediation.

Forster points to Wells as the inspiration for this story, but it wasn’t because Forster thought Wells’ ideas were great. Instead, Forster thought that Wells’ insistence on evolution and not technology as being the driving force in historical development was misguided. Forster wrote “The Machine Stops” as a way to illustrate his point. Forster’s story reflects a deep skepticism of human dependence on technology, and what effect that technology will have on humanity’s development. Wells on the other hand generally argued that the effects of technology on social development could lead to better social arrangements for the good of all. Forster, however, sees technology as a threat to humanistic values, namely human agency, values, empiricism, and rationalism. Forster extrapolates the technology available at the turn of the century and imagines what they would be like in the far future and what effects they would have on people. Clearly, Foster’s vision of the future in the story is a nightmare. However, Wells took a generally even-handed approach by showing the promise and peril of humanity’s future in many of his works. For example, Wells’ The Time Machine is a warning against Whig interpretations of history, or an interpretation of history as progress moving toward a higher, more perfect state than what preceded it. In a sense, a Whig view of history is on-wards and up-wards. However, Wells and Forster are correct to point out that there is nothing guaranteeing the Whig view. Of course, there is that potential, but there is also the potential for dystopia, degeneration, devolution, and other negative outcomes for humanity.

Pulp SF

After Mary Shelley published Frankenstein and other writers wrote stories in the 19th and early 20th century that explored the effects of science and technology on individuals and society, there was not yet a term that captured all of these narratives. That would change in the early 20th century with new, low cost publishing technologies combined with an increasing interest in science and technology.

Historical Context

To set the stage for the emergence of SF as a named genre, consider what was taking place historically in the early 20^th century. First, modern science came into its own through phenomenal theoretical breakthroughs and experimental confirmations. On Dec. 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers achieved powered flight for the first time. In 1905, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published what has come to be known as his Annus Mirabilis or miracle year papers in the scientific journal Annals of Physics—the first paper explained the photoelectric effect, which alone earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, the second paper explained Brownian motion or the random motion of particles in a medium like air or water, the third introduces his special theory of relativity about the relationship of time and space, and the fourth explores mass and energy equivalence or E=mc², which is a consequence of the special theory of relativity. Then, in 1915, Einstein published the general theory of relativity, which generalizes his special theory of relativity into a theory of gravitation that unifies time and space into four-dimensional spacetime. Quantum mechanics was established in the early 20^th century with the quantum hypothesis in 1900 of E (photon energy) = h (Plank’s constant) times v (photon frequency) developed by Max Planck (1858-1947). The term for this new science was coined by a group of physicists at the University of Gottingen in the early 1920s, including Max Born (1882-1970), who worked on the statistical interpretation of the wave function, Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), who also gave us the uncertainty principle, and Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), who gave us the exclusion principle. Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) further expanded quantum mechanics in mid-to-late-1920s with wave mechanics, the Schrodinger equation, and Schrodinger’s cat gedankenexperiment to make fun of the now widely taught Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and all of its weird implications.

There were innovations in the human-centered science of psychology. While Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) began developing his theory of psychoanalysis in the late 1880s and gave its name in 1896, he lays out his theory in The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899 which is followed by an abridged version On Dreams in 1901. He expanded on his theory of sexuality with Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905.

There were new innovations in management and industrial production—notably the assembly line in 1901 and the moving assembly line to build the Ford Model T in 1913. Along with this was the beginnings of automobile culture in the US and around the world.

Modernism began in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and it could be said to continue into the 21^st century, but alongside other movements, such as postmodernism (see Cyberpunk chapter below). Modernism is a movement encompassing art, literature, music, architecture, and philosophy. At its core, according to the poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972), is the concept of “Make it new!” New art, new thinking, new social relationships, etc. It is a reaction to the past and a reckoning with the new scientific, industrial, and social changes taking place in the 20^th century. In particular, it could be said to respond to the increasingly industrialized world and the place of the individual in that world—one in which the individual is reconfigured as a cog in the machine. In art, there is Cubism, Surrealism, Dada, and abstract art. An important example of Modernist painting is Pablo Picasso’s Guernica from 1937, which depicts the Nazi bombing of the Basque Country town of Guernica in Northern Spain during the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1935 to 1939. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and Le Corbusier (1887-1965) were creating innovative buildings, and there were the beginnings of skyscrapers in metropolitan cities. In literature, there is experimentation with new techniques including stream of consciousness. Some important works included Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927), Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All (1922), James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), e.e. cummings’ Tulips and Chimneys (1923), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925), William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Motion pictures had their first public screenings in 1895. Silent films gained a following through the first two decades of the 20^th century. Sound was introduced in the 1920s. Color was added in the 1930s.

Radio or wireless broadcasting and receiving sound was invented and improved upon during the late 1800s, but it was developed by hobbyists, enthusiasts, and inventors in the early years of the 20^th century. Radio development at that time can be seen as analogous to the personal computer hobbyist movement of the mid-to-late-1970s that led to the development of the Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080, and the Apple I. In fact, the radio hobbyist scene was instrumental to the beginnings of the Pulp SF publishing phenomenon as we will see shortly.

There were significant upheavals in the world due to wars and disease. The First World War, which lasted from July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918. introduced new ways to kill and maim and its aftermath laid the groundwork for the mid-century Second World War. As soldiers returned home, they inadvertently spread a deadly strain of the flu. The Spanish flu pandemic killed tens of millions of people around the world between 1918 and 1919. People then innovated mask wearing as a way to prevent the spread of the virus. The Great Depression began with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, known as Black Tuesday, and its effects lasted through the decade—business failures, massive unemployment, drops in production, drops in crop prices, and few social safety nets to help people. There was the Russian Revolution of 1917 to 1922, which led to the founding of the Soviet Union. Sun Yat-Sen (1866-1925) helped establish the Republic of China after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, which punctuated 5,000 years of monarchy in China.

It was out of these big scientific, technological, and social changes at the beginning of the 20^th century that Science Fiction came into its own.

Overview of Pulp SF

The Pulp Science Fiction (Pulp SF) period was roughly from the 1920s to the 1930s. The name comes from the type of magazines and how those magazines were made. Pulp magazines (SF and other genres) measured about 10 x 7 inches, and they were printed on cheap paper made from chemically treated wood pulp, which is a process invented in the 1880s. Pulp paper is rough, absorbent, acidic, and thick. Pulp paper ages poorly–yellowing and becoming brittle–due to the acidic content. Nevertheless, Pulp SF magazines feature brightly colored and in some cases provocative covers that attracted potential readers’ attention. Writers for the pulps were paid very cheaply by the word. This led to a certain kind of less than stellar writing style, because writers aimed to get paid as much as possible for the least time writing. Thus, stories were churned out as quickly as possible and the literary quality often suffered.

Pulp SF has eight characteristics: i) exciting stories full of action, romance, heroism, success, exotic settings, fantastic adventures, and usually a happy ending; ii) stylistically crude (but there are exceptions such as the writer Jack London, who you might know as the author of White Fang); iii) formulaic or following a certain pattern in many stories; iv) written for a less educated audience or put another way aimed to the lowest common denominator; v) little emphasis on character and drawing on stereotypes; vi) many recycled ideas; vii) BEMS or bug eyed monsters; and viii) specific SF themes include galactic empires, heroes, optimism and pessimism, sex, space opera, superman, sword and sorcery, and villains.

The major Pulp SF publications include Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Weird Tales, which was founded in 1923 by J. C. Henneberger and J. M. Lansinger and published fiction by H. P. Lovecraft, C. L. Moore, and Robert E. Howard. The magazine hit its stride under the editorship of Farnsworth Wright beginning in Nov 1924. Weird Tales is known for publishing horror stories, sword and sorcery, exotic adventure, and anything else which its title might embrace. Then, Hugo Gernsback (discussed in the next section) inaugurated Amazing Stories in April 1926 as the first publication to exclusively publish what he called “scientifiction.” Amazing Stories was published in the so-called bedsheet size or approximately 9 x 12 inches. Gernsback reprinted Poe, Verne, and Wells, but he also sought out stories from new writers. In 1929, Gernsback’s publishing company was forced into bankruptcy and he lost control of Amazing Stories. Soon, he was back with new magazines: Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Quarterly, and Scientific Detective Monthly. Later, Gernsback even published an “educational” sex magazine called Sexology that had an extended run. In January 1930, publisher William Clayton began publishing a new magazine under the editorial direction of Harry Bates titled Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Its focus was more on action and adventure with science playing only a supporting role to the story. It is the longest running SF magazine having gone through various name changes–now being called Analog Science Fiction and Fact and edited by Trevor Quachri–celebrated its 90th anniversary at the Fourth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium in Brooklyn, New York in 2019.

Hugo Gernsback

Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) innovated the Pulp SF magazine and gave a name to the kind of literature that we know as Science Fiction. He was a Luxembourg-born writer and editor who immigrated to the United States in 1904 and wound up in New York City. Drawing on his interests in electricity and radio, he launched an electronics mail order company. As a way to attract customers and give them ideas about what electrical equipment and parts to purchase, he started Modern Electrics in 1908. It was a magazine that reported on new scientific and technological innovations, shared plans for building different electrical apparatuses such as magnetos or radios, and published stories that integrated science and technology into the plot.

It was in Modern Electrics that Gernsback serialized his first novel Ralph 124C 41+ across twelve issues from April 1911 to March 1912. Later, he revised and published Ralph 124C 41+ as a standalone novel in 1925. The title is the name of the story’s hero: Ralph 124C 41+. He is a lone inventor whose work gained him immense celebrity in the 27^th century. He uses his inventions to accomplish daring feats always in the service of saving the girl he falls in love with. Gernsback, thinking that his ideas might inspire readers to buy his electronic gear and build their own inventions, meticulously describes how they work. Also, his focus is on prediction of the future—following one of his favorite writers—H.G. Wells (discussed in the Proto SF chapter above). Therefore, think about the hero’s name—Ralph one to foresee for one plus (meaning everyone).

In addition to Gernsback’s electrical equipment sales and associated magazine, he also began broadcasting over an AM radio station in New York City with call letters WRNY in 1925 as a means to promote his radio and science magazines. His station also played a role in some of the first experimental television transmissions in the 1920s. Gernsback had written about television technology in his magazines since the December 1909 issue of Modern Electrics. In 1928, Gernsback published plans for building television receivers in the magazines Science and Invention (formerly The Electrical Experimenter) and Radio News. But, only those most knowledgeable about radio and electronics could build these early television receivers that showed a picture about the size of a large postage stamp.

What happened after he had founded his electrical parts business, numerous magazines, and a radio station is what Gernsback is most remembered for today: In April 1926, Gernsback published Amazing Stories, the world’s first science fiction magazine. In its first editorial, he coined a new word called “scientifiction.” He explains, “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision … Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form … New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow … Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written … Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well” (Gernsback, Hugo. “A New Sort of Magazine.” Amazing Stories, vol. 1, no. 1, April 1926, p. 3).

These are the three core components of Gernsback’s definition of scientifiction: i) 75% literature and 25% science; ii) didactic, which means it teaches; and iii) prophetic, which means that it foresees and predicts the future.

Gernsback also played an important role in the inauguration of science fiction fandom, or the community of science fiction readers and fans when he started the Science Fiction League in his magazine Wonder Stories in 1934. Fandom is the active readership and invested fans of SF. Unlike most other genres and cultural works, SF has a long history of fans coming together to meet in clubs or conventions, discuss their favorite and most despised stories, self-publish criticism and original stories (fanzines), and bestow awards. First recorded SF fan club meeting was the New York Scienceers on 11 December 1929. The first convention was in Leeds on 3 January 1937. The first World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) was held in New York in 1939. Worldcon is an annual event held in a different host city/country each year that continues to this day. Worldcon members are responsible for selecting the winners of the annual “Hugo Awards” named for Gernsback.

E. E. “Doc” Smith

E. E. “Doc” Smith (1890-1965) is considered the father of space opera—a subgenre of SF innovated in the pages of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. In August 1928, Gernsback published E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space and Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 AD (the first Buck Rogers story) in the same Amazing Stories issue.

Like SF being around before its term was coined, space opera existed for some time before a word was created to define it. In 1941, SF writer and fanzine publisher Wilson Tucker (1914-2006) suggested the term “space opera” to refer to “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn.” Soap operas, radio dramas for women working from the home, did not come about as a term until radio was a widely dispersed technology. Space operas are stories that are high adventure set in interplanetary or interstellar conflict. C. L. Moore‘s “Shambleau” (discussed in the next section) could be considered a space opera. Another example would be George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). Other important early space opera writers is “Thundering Worlds” (Weird Tales, March 1934) by Edmond Hamilton (1904-1977) in which planeteers strap rockets to their planets to find a new star to orbit after their star burns out.

E.E. “Doc” Smith earned the “Doc” nickname for having a PhD. Though, his terminal degree was in chemical engineering and his profession was in food engineering—using science to improve foods, especially processed foods. At the time he was writing The Skylark of Space, he was working as chief chemist for a large mill in Michigan where he was working on doughnut mixes.

The first installment of The Skylark of Space appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories with a byline including E. E. “Doc” Smith and Ms. Lee Hawkings Garby. When E. E. “Doc” Smith first began writing The Skylark of Space, Lee Hawkings Garby, the wife of one of his college friends, offered to help with writing the dialog and romantic scenes while Smith focused on the science and technology aspects of the story. Later, Smith revised The Skylark of Space and removed Garby’s byline. The original version of the novel by Smith and Hawkings Garby is a three-part serialization of the novel. This means that the whole novel was split into three parts—one part published in three subsequent issues. The first part appears in the August 1928 Amazing Stories, the second in September 1928, and the third in October 1928. To read the whole novel at that time, one would have to buy those three issues of the magazine.

Smith’s The Skylark of Space began a series of four novels that continued with Skylark Three (serialized 1930, collected 1948), Skylark of Valeron (serialized 1934-1935, collected 1949), and Skylark DuQuesne (serialized 1965, collected 1966). It focuses on the scientist, inventor, and adventurer Richard Seaton and his rival Dr. Marc “Blackie” DuQuesne. The first novel begins with Seaton and his wealthy friend Reynolds Crane discovering how to unlock “intra-atomic energy” or what we would think of as atomic energy to create a new propulsion system for a spacecraft, new electrical energy production, and dangerously powerful weapons. DuQuesne wants Seaton’s invention for himself so that he can become rich, so he kidnaps Seaton’s girlfriend Dorothy Vaneman and her friend Margaret Spencer. Seaton and Crane pursue DuQuesne, overtake him, rescue the women, and extract a promise of cooperation from DuQuesne to help them return to Earth. They have adventures in outer space, collecting material for fuel on alien worlds–similar to one of the core game mechanics of Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky (2016), meeting a god-like intelligence–a theme explored later in the Star Trek franchise, and finding themselves caught in political intrigue between two rival alien races. Eventually, they make their way back home aboard a newly built Skylark Two made by their new alien allies.

Smith’s space opera Lensman series (1934-1950) presents an expansive history of the universe from the formation of the Galactic Patrol to enforce intergalactic law and the first Lens, a technology that gives the Galactic Patrol’s leader telepathic abilities to aid in enforcement of the law. However, it presents eugenics as a means to create posthuman supermen. Eugenics is the selective breeding of human beings to produce certain desired traits, akin to the breeding of animals. Eugenics has a long history in racist ideologies.

Smith’s The Skylark of Space also reflects racist attitudes and opinions circulating within culture in the early 20^th century. For example, while DuQuesne’s nickname is “Blackie” due to his black hair, but this is also used as a racist epithet. Reference is made to the “old colored couple who were his servants.” “Colored people” is another term referring to people who are Black. Seaton says half of a terrible epithet, “a good Indian,” which implies the other half, “is a dead Indian.” And in reference to Crane’s assistant Shiro, the villains refer to him as “that Jap,” using the racist label for Japanese. Racism is unfortunately present in many Pulp SF stories.

It is certainly terrible and disturbing to encounter racism as well as other repugnant attitudes about sex, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and other aspects of one’s identity in these stories. However, taking an objective, anthropological viewpoint can be beneficial for seeing these things as representing the culture from which the writer lives and operates. SF is always about the here-and-now in which it is written, because writers exist within their culture and time that serves as the point from which they extrapolate their SF stories. Considering their initial conditions and what we observe in their writing help us better understand the larger context of the stories and recognize that SF has more to tell us than its extrapolations. Additionally, a reader today can see how these discriminatory words and images rise, fall, change, and influence culture today.

C. L. Moore

C. L. Moore (1911-1987) gained fame as a pulp science fiction writer with her short story “Shambleau” in 1933. Moore’s “Shambleau” is a femme fatale story set on Mars featuring the character Northwest Smith and his ally Yarol, a Venusian. Moore is also recognized as the writer of the first sword and sorcery story with a female hero Jirel of Joiry. Another important story by Moore is “No Woman Born” (1944). It is about a dancer named Deirdre whose body is terribly burned in a fire. She is given a robotic body and becomes a cyborg. The story raises questions about how one’s embodiment changes consciousness and emotions. Deirdre is the same person, but she is also different in subtle, perhaps disturbing ways. Moore’s first collaboration with her future husband Henry Kuttner (1914-1958) was a crossover story featuring Jirel and Northwest Smith titled “Quest of the Starstone,” which was published in the November 1937 issue of Weird Tales. Moore was the stronger writer in the pair, but sexism led to Kuttner getting more of the praise. Moore wrote for television, too, but she stopped writing altogether in 1963 when she remarried.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is probably most well-known for Tarzan of the Apes (1912, All-Story Magazine) which is about a high-born, feral child raised amongst a community of apes in Africa who returns to civilization after falling in love with Jane, a woman he encounters in the wild; and the Barsoom or Martian stories (Barsoom being the name Martians give to the planet Mars), which includes A Princess of Mars (1912, All-Story Magazine) and follows the adventures of Earthman John Carter, the red Martian Princess Dejah Thoris, and the Green Martian Tars Tarkas. It should be noted that Burroughs’ Barsoom stories were inspired by the supposed discoveries of “canals” on Mars by the American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916). After reading Camille Flammarion’s La planete Mars (1892) and its drawings of the allegedly seen canals of Mars by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910), Lowell built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona for an extensive study of Mars. In three books, Lowell presented his own observations in a series of books from 1895-1908 of intricate canals on the surface of Mars, which he believed indicated the presence of intelligent life. Unfortunately, the canals didn’t exist—they were disproved by NASA’s Mariner missions in the 1960s and early 1970s. In the meantime, the idea of life on Mars captured the interest of many people including Burroughs, who used that idea as the inspiration for his Barsoom stories.

Unlike many other successful SF writers—even in the pulp SF era, Burroughs wrote about things that he knew very little about. He wasn’t a wide reader, and he had no formal writing background. In fact, he was down on his luck and in his 30s when he decided to begin writing A Princess of Mars during the downtime at a failing business venture. Gore Vidal (1925-2012), an American writer and public intellectual, described Burroughs’ writing as “daydreaming” in a 1968 issue of Esquire magazine. Burroughs stories have poorly developed, but the action descriptions are exciting. The stories have many coincidences and unbelievable plot developments. They also feature many stereotypes and racist themes.

Nevertheless, it can’t be understated how much influence Edgar Rice Burroughs had on the next generation of SF writers including Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) and scientists including Carl Sagan (1934-1996). Bradbury says this of Burroughs in an interview shortly before his death: “Edgar Rice Burroughs never would have looked upon himself as a social mover and shaker with social obligations. But as it turns out—and I love to say it because it upsets everyone terribly—Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world. By giving romance and adventure to a whole generation of boys, Burroughs caused them to go out and decide to become special. That’s what we have to do for everyone, give the gift of life with our books. Say to a girl or boy at age ten, Hey, life is fun! Grow tall! I’ve talked to more biochemists and more astronomers and technologists in various fields, who, when they were ten years old, fell in love with John Carter and Tarzan and decided to become something romantic. Burroughs put us on the moon. All the technologists read Burroughs. I was once at Caltech with a whole bunch of scientists and they all admitted it. Two leading astronomers—one from Cornell, the other from Caltech—came out and said, Yeah, that’s why we became astronomers. We wanted to see Mars more closely. I find this in most fields. The need for romance is constant, and again, it’s pooh-poohed by intellectuals. As a result they’re going to stunt their kids. You can’t kill a dream. Social obligation has to come from living with some sense of style, high adventure, and romance” (qtd. in Weller, Sam. “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203.” Paris Review, https://web.archive.org/web/20100923144726/http://www.theparisreview.org:80/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury).

Carl Sagan writes about Burrough’s influence on his life in the 28 May 1978 issue of The New York Times, “I find that science fiction has led me to science,” and reflects when he was 10 years old that, “About this time a friend introduced me to the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I had not thought much about Mars before, but here, presented before me in the adventures of John Carter, was another inhabited world, breathtakingly fleshed out: ancient sea bottoms, great canal pumping stations and a variety of beings, some of them exotic. There were, for example, the eight‐legged beasts of burden, the thoats. These novels were exhilarating to read. At first. But slowly, doubts began to gnaw. . . . I decided that Burroughs might not have known what he was talking about, but he certainly made his readers think. And in those many chapters where there was not much to think about, there were satisfyingly malignant enemies and rousing swordsmanship—more than enough to maintain the interest of a city‐bound 10‐year‐old in a long Brooklyn summer” (Sagan, Carl. “Growing Up With Science Fiction.” The New York Times, 28 May 1978, pp. 24-31, https://nyti.ms/3OwMfrD).

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) spent most of his life in Providence, RI but he did live for a time in New York. In addition to writing fiction, he was a prolific writer of letters. Lovecraft contributed to Weird Tales and influenced the weird fiction subgenre. Most of his fiction is known as weird fiction, which has these four characteristics: i) Broad term that describes fantasy, supernatural fiction, and horror tales that embody transgressive material; ii) Motifs of Thinning (diminishment or reduction of the protagonist, health of the land, or loss of the land) and the Uncanny (the strange and unusual); iii) Occultism and Satanism; iv) Doppelgangers, or uncanny doubling of characters. Lovecraft supplies his own definition for weird fiction in the essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature” in The Recluse in 1927: “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (Lovecraft, H. P., “Supernatural Horror in Literature.” The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx, par. 6). In addition to weird fiction, Lovecraft is known as a horror writer, but with his Cthulhu Mythos stories, he attempted to develop a unique blend of SF and horror known as “cosmic horror.” Cosmic horror has these five characteristics: i) Other Dimensions; ii) Invasion by aliens; iii) Interference with human cultural and physiological evolution; iv) The Universe is essentially horrible and hostile to humanity; and v) Writing shifts between clinical to dense, adjective filled descriptions.

SF Film Serials of the 1930s and 1940s

During the 1930s and 1940s, pulp science fiction made its mark on the film industry, which was already well-established by that time. This transition from page to screen is discussed in more detail in the “SF Film Through the 1950s” section later in this book.

A “medium,” as it relates to human communication, refers to the technology used to convey a message or tell a story. Some common media include print (magazines and books), film, recorded audio, and video games. Each of these media has its own unique set of strengths and limitations.

Magazines, for instance, allow for linear storytelling, printed text, and vibrant cover art. However, they are limited by their lack of interactivity, absence of motion and sound, and reliance on literate readers. Similarly, video games offer a highly immersive, non-linear experience with advanced graphics and sound effects. On the other hand, they can be hampered by hardware compatibility issues, performance considerations, and the need for skilled players to progress through the game.

Each medium has its own unique advantages/affordances and disadvantages/constraints, and understanding these differences is essential for effectively communicating ideas and telling stories effectively in a given medium.

SF stories have been told through various media over the years, each taking advantage of their unique characteristics to tell engaging tales. One such medium is serialized films, which combine the regular installments of SF magazines with the dynamic visuals and sounds of cinema.

Each week, audiences would eagerly anticipate the latest installment of a serialized science fiction film. These short movies would often begin with a quick recap of the previous episode, followed by a self-contained adventure that ends on a cliffhanger – leaving viewers excited for the next chapter. The episodes were designed to be experienced in sequence, building upon one another to create a larger narrative.

The earliest serials emerged during the silent film era in the 1910s and 1920s. As technology advanced, these films transitioned into the talkies of the 1930s and 1940s, allowing for even greater storytelling possibilities. However, with the rise of television in the 1950s, serials fell out of favor as episodic TV shows became the preferred means of delivering sequential entertainment.

The key features of science fiction movie serials can be summarized as follows: i) Regular installments released every week prior to the main feature; ii) Modest production costs that allow for frequent releases; iii) Basic production values that often repurpose special effects and sets from previous films; and iv) Cliffhanger endings engineered to entice audiences back for the next episode. Television has adopted this formula to create long-running shows with engrossing narratives that keep viewers coming back for more.

SF is a promiscuous genre when it comes to claims of origination or translation. Its stories are told and retold across a variety of media. It’s impossible to say that one medium is superior to another, because no one medium can accommodate every possible affordance and overcome every possible constraint.

Two important SF film serials in the early 20th century are Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Buck Rogers

Buck Rogers first appears in “Armageddon 2149 AD” by SF writer Philip Francis Nowlan (1888-1940) in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, the same issue in which E.E. “Doc” Smith’s The Skylark of Space begins. The Buck Rogers comic strip appeared the following year in 1929. Buck Rogers is a space opera, or a science fiction story about interplanetary conflict. The story begins when Buck Rogers, a war veteran and pilot, falls into suspended animation for nearly 500 years and finds himself in the future where North America is ruled, with racist overtones, by the Han, the main ethnic group of China. He saves Wilma Deering, who becomes his girlfriend. He joins forces with the resistance against the Han. The comic strip has a slightly more developed story with additional characters including the villain Killer Kane. It has a moderately adult and sophisticated storyline but crude dialog and artwork. Buck Rogers has had many media translations or adaptations, including original short story, comic strip, radio (it was actually the first SF radio program), serial films, and two television series.

Flash Gordon

People in the publishing industry took notice of the popularity and success of Buck Rogers. American illustrator Alex Raymond (1909-1956) created the Flash Gordon comic strip for King Features Syndicate in 1934 to compete with the long established Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century. Flash Gordon has a plot that shares similarities with Buck Rogers, but it also goes into new directions. It begins with meteors striking the Earth and mad scientist Dr. Zarkov works to uncover their origin. Zarkov kidnaps Flash Gordon, polo player and Yale graduate, and Dale Arden, Flash’s fiancée, and takes them on his rocketship back to the origin of the meteors: the planet Mongo, which is ruled by Ming the Merciless whose name and appearance mirrors the Yellow Peril racism of Buck Rogers. Like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon is a space opera, too. Unlike Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon features well drawn and exotic stories. Flash Gordon includes an interesting tension between the Future (rocketships and death rays) and the Past (dinosaurs, jungles, swords). Flash Gordon’s media translations include comic strip, novelizations, serial films, live action TV show, animated TV show, and film.

Flash Gordon film serial adaptations include three series. Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers comprises 13 2-reel episodes (each reel contained about 10 minutes of playback). It was released in 1936 by Universal Pictures. Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars was released in 1938 as 15 episodes. Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe was released in 1940 in 12 episodes. The cast features Buster Crabbe (1908-1983), an Olympic swimmer who the 1932 Olympic gold medal for the 400m freestyle competition, as Flash; Charles Middleton (1874-1949) as Ming the Merciless; Jean Rogers (1916-1991) as Dale; Priscilla Lawson (1914-1958) as Princess Aura; and Frank Shannon (1874-1959) as Dr. Zarkov. It’s worth noting that the Buck Rogers SF film serial was released in 1939 by Universal, and Buster Crabbe also portrays Buck Rogers!

Golden Age SF

The Pulp SF era was framed by these major historical events: the First World War from July 28, 1914 to Nov. 11, 1918, the stock market crash of Oct. 29, 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression that lasted through the following decade. It is out of the tail end of the Great Depression and the beginnings of World War II that we see the emergence of the Golden Age of SF, which developed out of and in response to its own cultural context.

Historical Context

The events leading up to and during World War II loom large in the Golden Age of SF’s historical context. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) rose to power in Germany during the 1930s. The Italians, led by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), invaded Ethiopia. General Francisco Franco (1892-1975) in Spain, supported by Germany and Italy, launched a civil war, which led to him becoming dictator there. Japan, led by Emperor Hirohito (1901-1989) and Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe (1891-1945) invaded China in 1937. Hitler invaded Poland on 1 Sept. 1939, which led to a cascade of declarations of war on Germany. Trying to stay out of what was seen as a largely European war after our own heavy losses during World War I, a memory not easily forgotten emblematized by the large and small memorials for WWI soldiers that were everywhere–an example of their ubiquity is the “Honor Roll” bronze in the Downtown Brooklyn Post Office. The United States’ official entry into the war was settled on 7 Dec. 1941, called “a date which will live in infamy,” by then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), when the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After four years, victory in Europe or V-E Day was on 8 May 1945. Then, in secret, the United States detonated the world’s first nuclear weapon at the so-called Trinity Test in the New Mexico desert on July 15, 1945. Having proven the science and technology behind this unimaginably destructive weapon, then President Harry Truman (1884-1972) authorized the dropping of the Little Boy atomic bomb, a simple gun-type design, on Hiroshima, Japan on 6 August 1945, and the Fat Man atomic bomb, an implosion-type design like that detonated at the Trinity Test, on Nagasaki, Japan on 9 Aug. 1945. With these two bombs, between 129,000 and 226,000 people died—some instantly vaporized, some burned to death during the ensuing firestorms, and some were ravaged in the days and weeks that followed due to radiation poisoning (one striking report of this is John Hersey’s Hiroshima, 1946). World War II introduced the world not only to these new destructive powers but also to the staggering loss of life—up to 85,000,000 lives lost during the war. Within that devastating number is Nazi Germany’s evil contribution with the systematized genocide of 6,000,000 European Jews known as The Holocaust. In addition to these lives lost, Germany targeted and killed millions of other civilians, including the disabled, political prisoners, homosexuals, Black Germans, and others.

The atomic bomb heralded the new atomic age, which combined a optimism for cheap and plentiful nuclear power with pessimism about nuclear proliferation, meaning once the cat was out of the bag, other countries began developing their own nuclear weapons, which could be used against us.

The end of WWII also signaled the beginning of the Cold War. While the United States and Britain allied with Soviet Russia during the war to defeat Nazi Germany, after the war the western-eastern alliance withered quickly. The long Cold War between the democratic western nations and the communist Soviet Union began. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was inaugurated in 1949 by the west as a deterrent to perceptions about Soviet Russia’s ambitions.

Meanwhile in China, the Kuomintang (KMT) government led by Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) and the Communist Party led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976), who had paused their civil war to create an alliance against the Japanese during WWII, resumed their fighting, which led to the KMT-led Republic of China (ROC) government fleeing to the island of Taiwan after their defeat in 1949 and the mainland becoming the People’s Republic of China.

Following WWII, Korea had been divided at the 38^th parallel with Russia administering the north and the United States administering the south. Supplied by Russia and China, North Korea invaded South Korea beginning the Korean War in 1950, which ended in 1953. If you’ve seen the TV Show M*A*S*H (1972-1983), it takes place in the Korean War but it’s worth noting that it was on the air far longer than the length of the war.

Science innovation, technological advancements, and cultural change continued during this era.

Importantly, mass communication intensified with FM radio, television, and magazine and comic book publishing proliferation. This proliferation of mass communication and attendant advertising campaigns led to people’s attention being pulled in many different directions. The transition from radio to television as the primary entertainment medium in the household began. Radio and records had become the de facto media for enjoying music. During the 1930s and 1940s, music was dominated by the big bands led by Jimmy Dorsey (1904-1957) and Glenn Miller (1904-1944), and crooners like Bing Crosby (1903-1977), Frank Sinatra (1915-1998), and Nat King Cole (1919-1965). Jazz was popularized by talent including Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996), Billie Holiday (1915-1959), and Louis Armstrong (1901-1971). Country music was on the rise with musicians including Hank Williams (1923-1953), Eddy Arnold (1918-2008), and the Carter Family (performing 1927-1956). And then, Rock and roll created a new sound by borrowing and transforming existing genres in the 1940s and 1950s.

In addition to the development of atomic weapons during this era, it also saw the introduction of analog and digital computers, jet engines, liquid propelled rockets, the electron microscope, radar, nylon, the Polaroid camera, the electric guitar, the ballpoint pen, penicillin, and the transistor.

Alan Turing (1912-1954) helped crack the German Enigma cypher messaging machine, which led to Allied superiority in the Atlantic theater of WWII. Before the war, Turing had established a mathematical model for computation (now known as a Turing complete machine), and afterwards, created the “imitation game,” or what has become known as the “Turing Test,” for artificial intelligence. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), who oversaw building of the atomic bombs at Los Alamos, had earlier predicted two stellar objects: neutron stars, with George Volkoff (1914-2000), and black holes with Hartland Snyder (1913-1962). The space race was just around the corner in the 1950s.

Elektro, a humanoid robot, was on display to the vast crowds who visited the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It could walk on command, talk, move its head and legs, blow up balloons, and even smoke! Elektro was only one part of the “world of tomorrow” presented at the 1939 New York World’s Fair at the Flushing Meadows-Corona Park that was created for the event and was used again for the 1964 New York World’s Fair when the Unisphere was added to the park.

Why consider the historical context? SF isn’t necessarily about the future. Instead, it’s always about the time in which it was written or created. The reason for this is that to extrapolate an imagined world, future, outerspace, etc. the writer begins the extrapolation from what is known. Any writer, director, musician, artist, etc. is a product of their time and culture. That’s the starting point for any extrapolation. That includes their experiences, their beliefs, their attitudes, and their culture. Therefore, we need to know the historical and cultural context of these writers to better understand their work and what it has to say about their historical moment and culture.

Considering the historical context is crucial when analyzing SF because it allows us to appreciate how its works reflect their eras’ values, beliefs, and concerns. SF often serves as a commentary on contemporary issues by projecting them into the future or onto other planets. To fully grasp the meaning behind such works, one needs to be familiar with the social, political, economic, and technological developments of the period during which they were produced. By understanding the historical context, readers can gain insight into why certain ideas resonated at specific times and how those ideas have evolved over time.

Overview of Golden Age SF

The Golden Age of SF is a significant era of the genre’s development around the mid-20th century that begins with John W. Campbell, Jr. changing the name of Astounding Stories to Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 to just after WWII in 1946 when the general public began to recognize how science fictional the world had become following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. During that short time, a new legion of young writers pushed the genre forward with new, scientifically-grounded ideas that framed SF in the decades that followed. Some see the Golden Age extending into the 1950s as these young writers’ careers take off and a new slate of writers built on the Golden Age before the field shifted again in the 1960s with New Wave SF (discussed in a subsequent chapter below). During this era, there is a shift from pulp magazines to slicks, which are higher quality magazines. SF magazines were considered far more important than books. They were mostly written by men for young male readers. Nevertheless, there is evidence throughout the publishing history of SF of female readers from letters to the editor, fandom participation, and of course, writing SF.

There are four primary characteristics of the Golden Age of SF: i) focus on the so-called hard sciences including physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics; ii) better writing; iii) primarily an American phenomenon; and iv) centered around the first phase of John W. Campbell, Jr.’s editorship of Astounding.

John W. Campbell, Jr.

John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) was an SF writer and editor. He began his studies at MIT where he was taught by the innovator of the science of cybernetics Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), but transferred to Duke to complete his B.S. in Physics where he graduated in 1932. While at university, Campbell began writing SF. Later, he was offered the editorship of Astounding Stories in September 1937 and his first issue as editor appeared in October 1937. In 1938, Campbell renamed the magazine to Astounding Science-Fiction. In 1960, Campbell changed the name again to jettison the last vestiges of its Pulp SF past by removing “Astounding” all together and renaming the magazine to Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction before making a small adjustment to the title in 1965 to Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. Today, the magazine is known as Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

During Campbell’s tenure as editor, he thought and wrote about how to elevate SF from the pulps. He was an idea guy. He presented writers with ideas to write into stories. He worked with writers to develop their stories (in some cases writing a letter of suggestions longer than the story itself). For example, Asimov credits Campbell for co-creating the articulation of the Three Laws of Robotics. It would be impossible to assess the full extent of his influence on writers during that period, but it is safe to say that he molded the genre into its modern form through his mentoring, editorials, and guidance. As the editor of Astounding, Campbell fostered a stable of writers, including Isaac Asimov (1920-1992, discussed below), Lester Del Rey (1915-1993), Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988, discussed below), Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), A. E. van Vogt (1912-2000), L. Sprague de Camp (1907-2000), Jack Williamson (1908-2006), and the writing team of C. L. Moore (1911-1987) and Henry Kuttner (1915-1958, both discussed in the Pulp SF chapter above). Astounding dominated under Campbell’s editorship, but there were other magazines that entered the field, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1949 and Galaxy Science Fiction in 1950.

Even though Campbell was primarily interested in the hard sciences, he flirted with pseudo-sciences including L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics,” a subject introduced in the May 1950 issue of Astounding that came to underpin the Church of Scientology. While he made a tremendous impact on SF through his editing of Astounding, he also promoted racist ideas and animosity towards peaceful protesters against the Vietnam War. Campbell edited Astounding until his death in 1971.

Campbell had four rules for good SF. They are: i) The conditions of the story must differ from the here and now; ii) The new conditions must drive the plot of the story; iii) The plot must revolve around human problems arising from the new conditions; and iv) No scientific facts may be violated without reasonable explanation.

During the Golden Age of SF, there were the so-called “Big Three” magazines, which included Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction (later named Analog Science Fiction and Fact). It has run from 1930-Present, its inaugural editor was Harry Bates (1900-1981), and its focus was on science and technology. The second is Galaxy Science Fiction, which ran from 1950-1980, and had for its inaugural editor H. L. Gold (1914-1996). Its focus was on social issues, psychology, sociology, and satire and humor. And, the third is The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction or F&SF. It has run from 1949 to the present. Its inaugural editors were Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) and J. Francis McComas (1911-1978), and they fostered a focus on literary SF.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), perhaps the most prolific SF writer ever, lived most of his life in New York City with a stint in Boston while teaching at the Boston School of Medicine. He brought more science to SF. Unlike Gernsback who saw the end products of science as technology, Asimov saw science as a means to puzzle out dilemmas; he sought to use reason and experimentation combined with science and technology to solve human problems. He was born in Russia but his family emigrated to the US when he was three. Asimov’s father owned a candy store. He told little Ike to not read SF, but Asimov was attracted to their lurid and colorful covers. Over the years, his father’s business grew and they moved around in Brooklyn. Some of the buildings that housed his father’s businesses still exist.

Asimov was a member of one of the most important fandom groups in the early development of the genre: the Futurians. This influential group was active from 1938 to 1945 and based in New York. Many of its members went on to become successful SF writers, including Asimov, James Blish (1921-1975), Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958), Frederik Pohl (1919-2013), and Donald Wollheim (1914-1990).

Unlike many SF writers, Asimov was a trained scientist. He held a PhD in biochemistry from Columbia University—the subject that he researched and taught at Boston University School of Medicine until 1958.

While he wrote or edited over 500 books during his lifetime they were not all SF. Many of his other works included textbooks, anthologies, histories, studies of the Bible, studies on Shakespeare, limerick collections, detective fiction, science popularizations, and others. New Wave SF writer Harlan Ellison (1934-2018, discussed in the New Wave SF chapter below) said of Asimov that he once had writer’s block and it was the worst ten minutes of his life!

Asimov lent his name to one of the few remaining SF magazines in 1977 when Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (now, simply titled Asimov’s Science Fiction) was launched. That same year, he suffered a heart attack and had a triple bypass operation in 1983. His doctor’s later suspected that he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion given during the operation. His family kept this revelation quiet due to the prejudice surrounding the illness that was at its strongest in the 1980s and early 1990s. He died in 1992 from AIDS related complications.

Asimov’s oeuvre or body of work can be captured through three stories: “Strange Playfellow,” “Foundation,” and “Nightfall.”

“Strange Playfellow” (originally published Sept. 1940 in Super Science Stories) and re-titled as “Robbie” in his 1950 collection I, Robot is the first of many of Asimov’s robot stories. “Liar!” (May 1941) contains the first use of the word “robotics.” The word “robot” comes to us from Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) from the Czech word for “serf worker” or “drudgery” or “labor.”

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, which give his subsequent robots a sort of moral compass, were first articulated in “Runaround” (Astounding Science-Fiction, March 1942): i) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; ii) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and iii) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Later in life, Asimov fixed up his entire Robot, Empire, and Foundation series into a unified series. As part of this fix up, he added a Zeroth Law in Robots and Empire (1985): A robot may not harm humanity, or through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

Another of Isaac Asimov’s robot stories is “Reason,” which was published in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. “Reason” is one of a number of Powell and Donovan stories within the larger oeuvre of Asimov’s extensive collection of robot stories. Powell and Donovan are robot technicians who work for US Robots and Mechanical Men. Their job is to go out into the field, set up robots for specific jobs, and solve problems with robots as they arise. This story concerns a very unusual problem. Aboard Solar Station #5, an energy transfer facility that collects solar energy and precisely beams that energy to receiver stations on the surface of the Earth, Powell and Donovan are at their wits end with Robot QT 1 or as they like to call him, “Cutie.” Cutie expresses doubts about how he came to exist. He doesn’t believe human beings, who he sees as inferior to his robotic construction, could have created him. Powell and Donovan’s explanations about the stars, planets, and the need for robots to man the station where radiation is dangerous to humans falls on Cutie’s deaf ears as implausible hypotheses. Beginning like the Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) did centuries ago with “Cogito, ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am,” Cutie develops his own philosophy of life, a cosmology with the station as “the Master,” and Cutie as the Master’s prophet. Despite all evidence to the contrary from books to Powell and Donovan building a new robot in front of Cutie, the robot always rationalized in favor of his own philosophy. When Donovan blasphemed the Master, Cutie had the other robots confine them to quarters. This happened just as a solar storm was approaching, and Powell and Donovan were unsure if Cutie would follow orders to keep the beam targeted correctly or if it might let the beam wander, which would destroy vast areas of the Earth. When the storm passed, Cutie visited to give them the readouts as a kind of peace offering—Powell and Donovan realized that the beam held steady despite Cutie’s reasoning for keeping it on target. While Cutie’s religion might be odd, it didn’t keep it from doing its job!

A second emblematic story of Asimov’s body of work is “Foundation” (1942). It uses science and technology to solve social problems, which is the kind of SF that Asimov called “social science fiction” (see Appendix 2: Chronological Definitions of SF). “Foundation” focuses on the character Hari Seldon who theorizes a mathematical system that can predict future social movements called psychohistory. Through this new science, the future can be predicted, anticipated, and altered. In this story and those that follow, Asimov sets the template for other future history stories involving a Galactic Empire.

And a third representative story is “Nightfall” (1941), which explores the effects of the natural world on human society. Asimov’s story came about from an intervention by Campbell. Its genesis is an excerpt from the book length essay Nature (1836) by the American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) that states, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!” Campbell disagreed with Emerson thinking that people would instead go crazy. For the story, Asimov came up with a six star system with the fictional planet called Lagash. One night about every 2000 years, the inhabited parts of the planet fall into darkness. In the dark, seeing the billions and billions of stars beyond drives the population crazy because it would be their first realization that there is more to the universe than their planet and local stars. It is one of the most anthologized and recognized SF stories outside of genre readers.

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was an American SF writer who was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but lived in Los Angeles, California from his teenage years onward. After high school, he was unable to afford college. So, he went to the library: “When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school” (qtd. in Weller, Sam. “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203.” Paris Review, https://web.archive.org/web/20100923144726/http://www.theparisreview.org:80/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury). He was recognized for his work with many awards; some of the most prestigious include: 1977 World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, 1989 Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement, 1989 SFWA Grand Master Award, 1999 Science Fiction Hall of Fame Living Inductee, and 2001 World Horror Grandmaster Award.

Bradbury’s writing is poetic, symbolic, and nostalgic. It freely mixes SF, fantasy, and horror. His writing is characterized by i) Poetic language: Bradbury had a unique way of using language, often writing in a lyrical style with vivid imagery and metaphors; ii) Social commentary: many of his works contain social commentary on issues such as censorship, technology, and societal norms; iii) Optimism about human nature: despite addressing dark themes, many of his works ultimately convey a sense of optimism about human nature and the future; iv) Exploration of the fantastical: he was known for his imagination and his ability to create detailed, otherworldly settings; and v) Focus on childhood and innocence: childhood and innocence are recurring themes in his work, often used to explore the loss of innocence or the impact of society on individuals.

While some of his writing appeared in Campbell’s Astounding, the majority of his work appeared elsewhere from Amazing Stories to Weird Tales and the mainstream magazines: Saturday Evening Post (e.g., “The World the Children Made,” September 1950), Collier’s (e.g., “There Will Come Soft Rains,” May 1950), and even Playboy (e.g., “The Lost City of Mars,” January 1967). He was the first SF writer to have his work reviewed on the first page of the New York Times Book Review. He brought SF out of its cultural ghetto and into the wider culture, but Bradbury’s brand of SF created an image of SF that didn’t match the genre as a whole.

Some important works by Bradbury include The Martian Chronicles, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451. The Martian Chronicles (1950) (published same year as Asimov’s I, Robot discussed in previous section) was inspired by Winesburg, Ohio (1919) by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck (1902-1968). The Martian Chronicles is about the human colonization of Mars while fleeing the nuclear threat of Earth, confrontations and decimation of the aboriginal Martians, and the return of humanity to a post-apocalyptic Earth.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) first appears in the May 6, 1950 issue of Collier’s, a popular, mainstream magazine. It borrows its title from a 1920 post-World War I poem by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). It is a response to the aftermath of the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the beginning of the Cold War. The story presents scenes from an automated home of the future with robots going about their business cleaning up and maintaining the home. However, as the story’s view point moves around the home, we discover that there are no people anywhere except for their shadows etched onto the side of the house similar to shadows left by those who were killed in the bombing of Hiroshima. Inside, the family dog dies from what might be radiation poisoning and the robots dutifully remove his body and clean up the mess. The story shows that humanity is gone, but our technology continues doing what it was designed to do until it eventually breaks down, too.

In The Illustrated Man (1951), the narrator encounters a vagrant who has richly colorful and animated tattoos allegedly penned by a woman from the future. Under the stars, the traveler watches each tattoo unfold a story about the future until he races off in horror at seeing the last tale with the narrator dying at the hands of the Illustrated Man. It combines weird, horror, and science fiction into a single narrative.

Bradbury’s most well known novel is Fahrenheit 451 (1953). The title refers to the ignition point of book paper. It is about a future in which books are banned and a fireman’s duty is to burn books instead of extinguishing fires. It is about censorship, popular culture run amok, and the sinister problems surrounding TV immersion and surveillance technologies including the electric hound and eye-in-the-sky police chases. Its genesis lies in “The Fireman,” a novella from Feb 1951 published in Galaxy Science Fiction. “The Fireman” was written on a typewriter in the UCLA library basement for 10 cents per 30 minutes. It cost Bradbury $9.80 in dimes to complete. After “The Fireman” was expanded and published as Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, it was serialized in the March, April, and May 1954 issues of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine.

Fahrenheit 451 is set in a dystopian future where firemen burn books instead of extinguishing fires. The story follows Guy Montag, a fireman who begins to question why books are banned. He steals books from some of his assignments. He learns to slow down, reflect, and think from his young neighbor Clarisse. After she is hit by a car and dies, Montag is shaken further when he witnesses the suicide of a woman who would rather die in a fire with her books than live without them. Montag seeks out the help of Faber, an English professor he had met once, to better understand his hidden books after his wife Mildred is not only no help but frantically scared knowing that books are hidden in their house. Beatty, Montag’s chief, realizes Montag might have stolen a book, so he gives him a chance to give it up. While they are meeting, there is a call for a new book burning. Unbeknownst to Montag, it’s his address. Instead of following orders to burn his books and house, Montag turns his flamethrower on Beatty. A mechanical hound attacks Montag, but he is able to destroy it after only getting anesthetic injected in his leg by the beast. Montag makes his way to Fabers’ house while another mechanical hound is dispatched to track him. Faber catches a bus to St. Louis while Montag tries to lose the hound by floating down a river where he eventually meets the book-lovers, a group who use photographic memory to each remember a book for recall when it is once again safe to read books. While there, the anticipated war begins and nuclear bombs destroy the city. Eventually, the book-lovers return to the city to rebuild.

Some plot elements in “The Fireman” and Fahrenheit 451 were inspired by Bradbury’s own experience, such as the sidewalk confrontation, and others by historical events, such as Nazi book burning and political witch hunts. The scene of going for a walk on the sidewalk was inspired by his own run-in with an overzealous police officer in Los Angeles who questioned Bradbury and a friend on a late-night walk. The inverted role of the firemen comes from Bradbury’s acute awareness of the Nazi’s predilection to burning books. In the lead-up to WWII and during it, Nazis in Germany set large bonfires to destroy books written by Jews and books with ideas that they disliked. They were attempting to destroy whole swaths of their culture in favor of their perverted ideal. It should be noted that the United States is not unfamiliar with book burnings and censorship, too. Censorship is when one’s government prohibits the publishing, sharing, or dissemination of one’s words and ideas. Initiatives by certain individuals and organizations in the United States to censor books and newspapers offended those like Bradbury who believed in our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Political witch hunts for communists within the United States operate in parallel with book burning, because both are assaults on the First Amendment. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed in 1938 to investigate communism in the US. In 1947, it led to the blacklisting of some significant Hollywood screenwriters and directors. The hearings held by HUAC were essentially a kangaroo court—a court that doesn’t follow established rule of law or due process to achieve a foregone conclusion. For example, the Nazi’s People’s Court was a kangaroo court used as a political show trial to denounce and then punish those targeted by the Nazis. In the case of the HUAC hearings, those called to Congress to answer questions about their political beliefs were highly irregular and some say illegal because the constitution guarantees our right to hold whatever political beliefs that we want. It wasn’t illegal to be a communist, but these hearings framed being a communist as virtually illegal. Bradbury saw these things as a government turned against its people and running roughshod over its laws.

Fahrenheit 451 is a richly intertextual novel by the way Bradbury weaves literature into the story. This means that he weaves literature by others into his own story so that his novel is connected to those other stories. They are in a sense in a dialogue with one another. Some significant literature and religious texts are mentioned, such as Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the Bible. One example is Faber reading the Book of Job from the Bible to Montag via the in-ear walkie talkie. Job’s faith was tested whose tests to keep the faith might be meant to mirror Montag’s own crisis of faith and then his trials while trying to save his stolen books.

Another example is the poem Mildred reads after Montag shows her his books: “You, Andrew Marvell” by Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) celebrates one of the most famous carpe diem or “seize the day” poems in the English language by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) titled “To His Coy Mistress.” You might remember the phrase carpe diem, or seize the day, from the Robin Williams (1951-2014) starring film Dead Poets Society (1989). In Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker entreats a beautiful woman to love him back because time is fleeting and life is short. It begins: “Had we but World enough, and Time, / This coyness Lady were no crime. / We would sit down, and think which way / To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.” Bradbury, however, doesn’t use Marvell’s poem. Instead, Bradbury uses Archibald Macleish’s “You, Andrew Marvell,” which by its structure and reference to night connects to the earlier poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” Archibald MacLeish was a writer and lawyer from Illinois, like Bradbury. He imagined that WWI marked the passing from an old world to a new world—one that is “sensed rather than understood” (“Archibald MacLeish.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/archibald-macleish). Perhaps Bradbury, writing after WWII and the advent of the atomic bomb, is signaling to us that once again the old world is gone and we are entering a new world besieged by new threats, including the atomic bomb, a new type of culture that we might call distraction culture, and overzealous government. What I think is important for us to consider is how this poem’s attention to places sharing time all eventually lead to “how swift how secretly / the shadow of the night comes on.” The world of Fahrenheit 451 is coming to a close—a passage of an old world into a new world for the hobos, the living books who carry human culture and knowledge forward after the atomic bombs have destroyed the cities.

A third example is the poem Montag reads to Mildred and her friends the poem “Dover Beach” by the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). He called for a modern era grounded in reason, compassion, peace, and civilization. These qualities are those he idealized about ancient Greece. Yet, the poem “Dover Beach,” first published in 1867, is pessimistic. In part, it laments the loss of Christian faith in favor of science and technology, which by turn makes the world a barren place for the speaker in the poem. He idealizes this past “sea of faith,” but he ignores the horrors of the past before the advent of science. Certainly, the modern era might “So new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain,” but I would counter that the speaker’s nostalgia for the past clouds their views of the present. Nevertheless, it applies importantly to Bradbury’s thesis in Fahrenheit 451 that new technologies like constant sensory bombardment via earbuds and wall-scale televisions and medications and high speed automobiles accelerate ourselves and our attention so that we lose connection with one another and the world around us. All of these distractions keep us from thinking deeply about things.

Attention and distraction are major themes in Fahrenheit 451. Magazines, comic books, popular music, radio, and television each call for attention. There’s only so much time in the day, and it is within that time that we give our attention to different activities—with our friends and family, listening to the radio, reading a magazine, texting with friends, or doomscrolling social media. With all of this mass culture intruding our attention, Bradbury’s concern is that we’re not leaving ourselves enough time to think, reflect, look around, or enjoy a good book, which can enrich our thinking and experience of the world and our experience with others. And, if we’re not paying attention to the world and getting involved in what’s taking place, our government will run out of control and the atomic bombs will eventually fall. Clarisse is an iconoclast who gives her attention to the world around her instead of the cacophony of mass media. Montag recognizes that books, stored knowledge, and thought must have some value. The novel has a lot to say about today’s attention economy, too. It shouldn’t be lost on us how folks staring into their smartphone screens walking or riding the subway or bus or sitting at home with family or going out with friends says a lot about our culture and its amplification of the issues Bradbury wrote with concern about in Fahrenheit 451. The media theorist Sherry Turkle has more to say along these lines in her book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011).

Robert A. Heinlein

Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was an American SF writer educated at the University of Missouri and the US Naval Academy, Annapolis. He served as a naval officer for five years before being discharged after a lengthy hospital stay from tuberculosis. He then studied physics at UCLA for a time before beginning to publish SF in 1939—in Campbell’s Astounding. Next to Campbell’s editing, Heinlein’s influence on the development of the SF genre as a writer was equally significant. He was the first Grand Master of the SFWA, and he won four Hugo Awards for Best Novel: 1956 for Double Star, 1960 for Starship Troopers, 1962 for Stranger in a Strange Land, and 1967 for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Heinlein’s fiction has six major characteristics. First, he developed Future History as a way to thread together many of his 1940s stories. Campbell published Heinlein’s schematic for his future history in 1941 in Astounding. This Future History set out diagrammatically the stories that Heinlein had thus far produced, those he was to write, and some left unwritten. Heinlein’s approach was an entirely new idea about storytelling that let readers understand the bigger picture of the writer’s intended trajectory, which invited many to become a loyal audience. However, he largely abandoned his Future History by 1950. Second, many of his stories are considered hard science fiction or Hard SF (discussed further in the Tom Godwin section below). While he is artful about blending science into the narrative, he devoted a great deal of energy and thought into using sound scientific and engineering principles in his stories. SF writer Allen Steele (1958-) defines Hard SF as, “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone” (Steele, Allen. “Hard Again.” New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 46, June 1992, pp. 1-5, https://archive.org/details/The_New_York_Review_Of_Science_Fiction_046_1992-06/page/n3/mode/2up). Very few stories actually pass muster as true Hard SF.

Third, Heinlein employed a self-assured writing style. He made the worlds of his stories feel real with how naturally he casually mixed technical jargon with slang. He didn’t spend time explicating on the technology–he just showed his characters using it and talking about it like one would in the real world. For example, in his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon, he writes, “the door dilated” and moves on. He doesn’t stop to explain why or how. He leaves the cognitive work up to the reader. His story “—All You Zombies—” (1959) is another example of this. Unlike Wells, who spent a whole chapter of his 1895 novel The Time Machine explaining how it works, Heinlein knows that he does not need to do this. If he had, his readers would have been bored, because they already knew what a time machine was from other SF stories. What had happened is that the concept of the “time machine” had entered into what Australian SF writer and critic Damien Broderick (1944-) calls the SF mega text in his 1995 monograph Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. The mega text is the shared terms, ideas, and concepts that constitute a genre. The Western or Detective mega text will each be different from the mega text for SF.

Fourth, his stories often include didactic father figures. These can be surrogate father figures or fathers-in-disguise, who serve as the voice of Heinlein in the story. Fifth, many of his stories are overtly political. Political conflicts and viewpoints are often an important part of his stories. His own politics, right-wing anarchism or libertarian mixed with ideas of social Darwinism, come out occasionally—most clearly in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. And sixth, he was unafraid to include sexuality in his stories. Unlike other SF writers at that time such as Asimov, he writes about sex frankly. Some of his work depicts polyamory and incest.

Some of his major works include: “By His Bootstraps” (1941), which he published under his pseudonym “Anson MacDonald.” It’s a time travel story in which a character pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become a king in the future by enlisting his past self to do things necessary to bring about his rise to power. “Waldo” (1942) is about a crippled inventor living on a space station who uses remote controlled appendages to do work. The word “waldo” was taken from this story and applied to the real world development of his remote-manipulator technology. Starship Troopers (1959) is about the training and deployment of Juan “Johnnie” Rico to fight an insect-like alien species known by the derogatory term “the Bugs.” It popularized the idea of the “space marines,” but it does so without using the term. Heinlein had done that in other stories and adopted the idea from earlier writers including Bob Olson (1884-1956), who first used the term in 1932 in his Amazing Stories short story, “Captain Brink of the Space Marines,” and E. E. “Doc” Smith who used the term in his Lensman series (discussed in the Pulp SF chapter above). Starship Troopers won the 1960 Hugo for Best Novel. Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) is about a human, Valentine Michael Smith, who is raised by Martians and returns to Earth. Through his eyes, we see the horrors of consumer culture and conservatism. Smith, with his psionic powers and innocence, transforms into a Messiah-figure offering humanity the power of grokking before he “discorporates.” Grok is another term we now use that was coined by Heinlein. It won the 1962 Hugo for Best Novel. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) is about a lunar colony’s revolt against an exploitative Earth. It explores politics. This novel is also where we get the acryonym TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It won the 1967 Hugo for Best Novel. Time Enough for Love (1973) is one of several novels and stories featuring the character Lazarus Long (Woodrow Wilson Smith) who is the longest living human being ever. It explores the adventures and ennui of Long from our past into our future.

Before turning exclusively to writing novels, Heinlein’s last short story was “—All You Zombies—” (1959). The story is about a person who, due to being intersexed and given access to time travel technology, is their own father and mother. In fact, all of the major characters in the story are this one person at different ages and presenting a different sex pre- and post-sex reassignment surgery.

There are some terms useful for thinking about what is going on in this story. Sex is the physical and genetic expression reproduction. Generally, this means male or female (but this distinction isn’t true for all biological creatures). However, many individuals are intersex, or born having an ambiguous sex, inability for the person’s body to respond to certain hormones that in turn does not trigger physical characteristic development, or a mixture of sexes. This used to be called hermaphroditism. Essentially, intersexed individuals have both sets of sexual organs in different appearances and stages of development. Connected or perhaps layered on this biological reality is transgenderism. To be transgendered is to have a psychological identity where your biological sex or sex expression doesn’t match what one knows their gender to be. Transgenderism may be rooted in biology and includes intersexed individuals, endocrinology, and hormone production and reception genetic disorders. Another term related to this is nonbinary, or someone whose gender identity does not fit into male or female. Finally, transgenderism is rooted in the cultural construction of sex, which we call gender. These are the attributes, characteristics, and tropes that societies create around the sexes of male and female. For example, blue for boys and pink for girls are expressions of gender. Likewise, makeup is for women and not for men. This division has to do with gender and not sex. While biological sex is largely unchanging, gender does change over time according to different cultural contexts.

Before writing “—All You Zombies—,” Heinlein was likely familiar with publicized cases of male-to-female (MTF) transwomen. For example, Christine Jorgenson (1926-1989) was the first widely known recipient of sexual reassignment surgery in the United States. Her case and the publicity surrounding it raised awareness of transgenderism.

Also, there was also Roberta Cowell (1918-2011), a celebrated British fighter pilot during WWII and later a race car driver. Cowell was the first British recipient of sexual reassignment surgery, and notably, she was the friend and patient of Laurence Michael Dillon (1915-1962), the first recipient of FTM sexual reassignment surgery in Britain.

It should be noted that transgenderism comes with significant challenges and an unfortunate statistical likelihood of tragedy. In addition to the violence leveled against trans and non-binary people, some scientists have used transgender people as experimental subjects without an established body of knowledge corroborating their theories. For example, Dr. John Money (1921-2006), a psychologist and sexologist who studied sex and gender identity, believed that gender was learned. He sought to prove his theory in the case of David Reimer (1965-2004). After a botched circumcision, Money used Reimer as a case study in sex reassignment and learning gender. Things did not go well for Reimer who was reassigned his sex as a girl and raised as a girl. Before puberty, “she” began self-identifying as male. He transitioned to male in his teens and lived a troubled life, eventually committing suicide at age 38. Today, Money’s approaches and theories have been largely discredited.

This is all discussed to highlight that despite Heinlein using them as a way to make his story possible, these people are not simply objects to be appropriated and used for the purposes of storytelling and entertainment.

To better understand “—All You Zombies–” there are some other concepts that are useful to know. First, there’s the ouroboros, which is a serpent or dragon eating its tail. It represents self-reflexivity, recreating, self-generating, or to borrow another mythical image—the phoenix is akin to the ouroboros, because it rises from its own ashes. Second, there is the concept of solipsism, or the idea that we can only be sure of our own mind. The external world and the minds of others are unknown to us. This seems to be the main character’s take on the world—he is only certain of his own mind. And third, the zombie.The contemporary idea of a zombie comes after Heinlein’s story in films like Night of the Living Dead (1968), directed by George Romero (1940-2017)—zombie is mentioned in the script’s direction but not in any spoken dialog. This kind of zombie is an undead creature that feeds on the flesh/sometimes brains of the living. If the living is bitten by a zombie, they become a zombie. Romero gives I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson (1926-2013) as the source for his inspiration. Matheson’s depiction of vampire-like creatures spreading a contagion and the ensuing apocalypse informs the development of the contemporary zombie. Like Romero’s movie, there is no mention of “zombie.” What might zombies have meant to Heinlein? The concept of a zombie comes to us from Africans brought to the Caribbean and Americas. They believed that a zombie is a corpse revived by witchcraft that remains under the control of the person who revived it. As a colloquialism, a zombie can be someone who is apathetic, slow minded, or not that smart. Imagine someone who seems out of it or not aware of what’s going on around him. The main character in the story is sure of his identity and life, but he questions all of us other zombies—essentially asking, how did we come to be?

In the story, the jukebox, a coin operated record player that was once quite popular in eating and drinking establishments, is playing a song by Lonzo & Oscar titled, “I’m My Own Grandpa” from 1947. It was written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe, and it relates a funny story about marriage and procreation that results in the narrator becoming his own grandpa.

Once you’ve unlocked the meaning of the story, you should draw a diagram of the movement of the narrator through time. An example of this can be found on the story’s Wikipedia page here.

Frank Herbert

Frank Herbert (1920-1986) was an American SF writer whose magnum opus is the novel Dune (1965), which was originally serialized as two novels, Dune World (Dec. 1963, Jan. 1964, and Feb. 1964) and Prophet of Dune (Jan. to May 1965), in the then named Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction. In addition to his career as an SF writer, he was a journalist who reported at a number of newspapers along the west coast from Washington to California. He attended the University of Washington without completing a degree.

Herbert’s breakthrough came with the publication of his novel Dune in 1965. This epic SF narrative set in the far future explores themes of ecology, politics, mind, and religion. It won the 1966 Nebula Award for Best Novel and tied with …And Call Me Conrad (1965) by Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Set in a futuristic feudal society where noble families control planetary fiefs, the novel follows the story of Paul Atreides, whose family is tasked with the stewardship of the planet Arrakis. Arrakis is an unforgiving desert wasteland that is the sole producer of melange, or “spice,” a valuable drug that prolongs life and enhances mental capabilities. Spice is also essential for space navigation, making Arrakis a highly sought-after commodity. However, the harsh conditions of the planet make it a challenging place to live and govern. The plot of Dune revolves around the complex power struggles between the various factions of the empire, who seek to gain control of Arrakis and its precious resource. It is also an example of ecofiction, or literature that has an environmental or ecological focus.

Five characteristics of Herbert’s SF writing are: i) Complex world-building: He created detailed and elaborate fictional universes, often with their own unique histories, cultures, religions, and political systems. In Dune, he created the planet Arrakis, which had its own ecosystem, society, and mythology. Layered on this is The Bene Gesserit sisterhood. They are a powerful matriarchal organization with their own secret techniques and traditions, including the ability to control others through voice and body language. And layered above all is the Empire with its aristocratic houses and specialized guilds; ii) Philosophical and sociological themes: His work often explored philosophical and sociological ideas related to power, religion, and human nature. He used SF to ask big questions about society and the future of humanity. For example, one of the main themes in Dune is the idea of prescience and predetermination versus free will. The character Paul Atreides has been prophesied to be the messiah-like figure who will lead Arrakis to a golden age, but throughout the book, he struggles with whether or not he is truly destined for greatness or if he has any choice in the matter; iii) Ecological concerns: He importantly addressed environmental issues in his writing. His works often explore the relationship between humans and the natural world, and the consequences of exploiting resources without considering long-term impacts. For example, in Dune, the spice melange is a valuable resource that is harvested on Arrakis. However, the process of extracting it is damaging to the planet’s ecosystem, leading to conflicts between those who rely on spice and those who seek to protect the environment. Using SF as a veil, he sought to raise awareness about environmental issues and the importance of sustainable practices. He recognized that our actions have consequences not only for ourselves but for future generations and the planet as a whole; iv) Unconventional narrative structure: He experimented with nonlinear storytelling and multiple perspectives in his novels. This approach allowed him to explore different aspects of his fictional worlds from various angles. For example, Dune includes excerpts from various books and historical documents that provide context and backstory for events in the main narrative; v) Political commentary: His work included commentary on real-world politics and power dynamics. While some may view science fiction as escapist entertainment, Herbert saw it as a way to engage with important social and political issues. For example, in Dune, Herbert critiques imperialism by showing how off-world powers exploit Arrakis for its resources while neglecting or actively harming its native population, the Fremen. This reflects broader patterns of colonialism throughout history where dominant groups have oppressed subordinate ones for economic gain at great cost to those being exploited.

Tom Godwin

Tom Godwin (1915-1980) was a fine writer in the Campbellian and Astounding traditions, but he published only about 30 stories. He had a rough life. Family issues caused him to drop out of school after third grade. He had kyphosis or excessive curvature of the spine leading to hunchback, which shortened his military career. And to deal with his family and health problems, he turned to drink and was an alcoholic.

His widely anthologized story “The Cold Equations” was published in the August 1954 issue of Astounding. It is considered one of the best examples of Hard SF. SF writer Allen Steele (1958-) defines Hard SF as, “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone” (Steele, Allen. “Hard Again.” New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 46, June 1992, pp. 1-5, https://archive.org/details/The_New_York_Review_Of_Science_Fiction_046_1992-06/page/n3/mode/2up). Very few stories actually pass muster as true Hard SF. We’re used to the Disneyfied, happy ending. This isn’t guaranteed to happen in Hard SF. While there is the possibility of a happy ending, any plot development and ending is completely dependent on natural law and any constraints detailed in the story itself.

The idea behind “The Cold Equations” appears in earlier SF stories such as “Precedent” (1952) by E. C. Tubb (1919-2010) and comic books, such as “A Weighty Decision” (1952) by Al Feldstein (1925-2014).

Godwin tried to give the story a happy ending, but Campbell insisted that Godwin stay true to physical law and the constraints dictated within the story. They went back and forth on drafts until Campbell accepted the published version.

The story concerns a distant plant called Woden with a medical emergency and in need of supplies. A cruiser sends out an EDS (Emergency Dispatch Ships) with only enough fuel to travel to Woden and safely land with its lone pilot and the supplies. Unfortunately, a teenage girl who wants to see her brother on Woden hides aboard the ship. When discovered, the pilot has to follow protocol and eject the girl from the ship due to the additional mass that she adds to the ship. Allowing for the additional mass might lead to the EDS not having enough fuel to safely land on Woden. After letting her talk to her brother via radio, she is ejected from the ship via the airlock. The cold equations are those that govern classical mechanics and the efficiency and operation of the EDS and its rockets. Considering the cold equations of the physical world, the story asks us what can be done to avoid such a tragedy through better design, backup systems and reserves, and security.

SF Film Through the 1950s

SF film goes back to the origins of film technology when it was realized that film could be used to realize images that appear real but depict things otherwise impossible in the real world.

Above, you read about SF film serials. This section fills in some gaps about what SF film is, what it does differently than SF literature, and discusses some important early and mid-20th century SF films.

Film vs. Literature

SF films are movies that tell SF narratives visually and aurally. They often employ practical and special effects to create scenes that show its audience what a text would otherwise explain in words and hence leave it up to the reader to imagine what was described in her mind.

SF literature functions differently than SF film in four key ways. First, as Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) observes in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) that “the medium is the message.” One meaning of this phrase is that the medium of a message, in this case a story, is shaped by the medium in which the story is presented. Another meaning is that the medium tells us a lot about the culture from which the medium is developed and utilized. The medium of literature is books and magazines. The medium of SF film is movies (and later, television and today’s digital video). Over time, we’ve seen a shift away from print media towards visual and digital media. The former hasn’t disappeared, but the latter is certainly on the ascendency and corresponds to the increasing ubiquity of screens (television, computers, smartphones, mobile gaming, etc.) that we use today. Second, SF literature deals with ideas using words. It is analytical. It provides access to interiority (which film can do through voice over, but this is often considered a weak filmmaking technique). Third, SF films deal with ideas by giving them visual shape. It is metaphorical. This makes it more difficult to pin down the meanings of the visual that can be made explicit with words. It deals in surfaces so that we do not have access to interiority unless the unfortunate voiceover is employed. And fourth, SF film does things that SF literature cannot do: use illusion and make the imagined seemingly real. However, it also constrains our imagination in the same way that listening to a song and then watching the music video can create a jarring sensation.

Early SF Film

The first SF film is Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) by early filmmaker Georges Méliès (1861-1938). His film is based loosely on Proto-SF works (discussed in the chapter on Proto-SF above): Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon (1901). The first major SF film is Metropolis (1927) by Austrian film director Fritz Lang (1890-1976). It is a German silent film with the most advanced special effects devised to that date. It features an artificial lifeform doppelganger, dehumanization through industrialization, and salvation through humanism. Another important early SF film is Frankenstein (1931) by English film director James Whale (1889-1957). While the plot veers away from Mary Shelley’s text, its portrayal of Frankenstein’s creature by English actor Boris Karloff (1887-1969) is an image that is indelibly a part of our culture for almost 100 years. Also, it is notable that Whale was an openly gay director when it was absolutely not as socially accepted as today, and his film is infused with homoeroticism that takes Shelley’s novel in new directions that continue to deserve reflection today.

1950s SF Film Boom

After World War II, there was an SF film boom, perhaps driven by how science fictional the world had become due to the atomic bomb and the beginnings of the Space Race. Some of the outstanding SF films from this era include the following films.

The Thing from Another World (1951), also called The Thing, is a film directed by Christian Nyby (1913-1993) about the infiltration of a shape-shifting alien, portrayed by James Arness (1923-2011) who would later play Marshall Matt Dillon on the TV series Gunsmoke (1955-1975), into a remote air command base in Alaska. Its subtext is McCarthyism and Communist subversion. The film is based on “Who Goes There?” (1938) by Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell, Jr. (discussed in the Golden Age of SF chapter above).

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), directed by Robert Wise (1914-2005), is about an attempt by aliens to enforce peace over humanity, which is seen as increasingly dangerous due to the development of nuclear weapons. The humanoid alien’s safe phrase to stop his robot counterpart’s destruction of Earth is “klaatu barada nikto,” which some Star Wars fans might recognize from another context. The film presents an idealism of a peaceful world through superior might. It is based on “Farewell to the Master” (1940) by Harry Bates (1900-1981). Wise is also known for editing Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane (1941) and directing Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).

The War of the Worlds (1953), produced by George Pal (1908-1980) and directed by Byron Haskin (1899-1984), is a film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel of the same name (discussed in the Proto-SF chapter above). Instead of tripod walkers as in the original, the Martians utilize hovering attack vehicles equipped with nuclear death rays. Fortunately, our germs save the day as in the novel. The film is a parable of Communist invasion. It’s also worth noting that the renowned film director and actor Orson Welles (1915-1985) adapted the novel in 1938 as a radio program that caused a panic.

This Island Earth (1955) is a far-out SF film in which human scientists and their atomic uranium are enlisted to help the alien Metalunans fight the Zagons before their home world is taken, but when it is, the Metalunans attempt to hide on Earth and control the minds of the scientists. It is a space opera that demonstrates a tension between isolationism and an embrace of the Other. It is based on the 1952 novel, which is in turn an expansion of several short stories, by Raymond F. Jones.

Forbidden Planet

Arguably the best film from this era is Forbidden Planet (1956). It was produced by MGM and directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox (1907-1964). It is a space opera interpretation of The Tempest (1610-1611) by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). The Tempest (discussed in the Origins of Science Fiction chapter above) is about Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, using illusion and manipulation to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful social position and reveal his brother Antonio, who usurped power from him, as being the unmerited Duke of Milan. Caliban is the son of a witch and the former ruler of the island where Prospero has taken command. Caliban is Properso’s servant but Caliban hates him.

Forbidden Planet opens with a spaceship landing to investigate the fate of a lost colony on Altair IV whose sole survivors are two inhabitants: Morbius (Prospero figure), an obsessive scientist living alone with his daughter Altaira (virginal Miranda figure). These survivors are aided by Robby the Robot (Ariel figure). During their investigations, the crew led by Commander J. J. Adams (Ferdinand figure) is menaced by an invisible Caliban-like entity, which is later revealed to be Morbius’ Monster from his mind’s id, and given form and power by his integration into Krell advanced technology. Morbius’s id monster eventually destroys its unwitting creator, and the crew and his daughter safely escape the planet.

It’s helpful to know a little about the tripartite theory of mind developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Freud argues that the mind has three parts: the superego, which is made up of laws and rules; the id, which are bodily desires and impulses, and the ego, which is the sense of self that arises from the tension between the superego and id. It’s worth noting that long before Freud, the Athenian philosopher Plato (428-348 BC) proposed a similar division of the soul into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite.

Unlike the other movies above, Forbidden Planet is not based or adapted from an earlier SF story. However, it did have a 1956 novelization by Phillip MacDonald (1900-1980), using the pen name W. J. Stuart, which was published prior to the film’s release, that goes into further depth about the Krell.

New Wave SF

New Wave SF coincides roughly with the long 1960s. This era is marked by radical cultural change, violent upheaval, political assassinations, political activism, and technological triumphs.

Historical Context

The 1950s were a time of conformity, patriotism, the nuclear family, re-inscription of public and private gender norms, and an economic boom. The company IBM man is emblematic of this time—same suit, tie, shoes, hat as everyone else—they even had a company song book that everyone knew the words to. Following WWII, which had sent women into the workplace while men were in the war fighting, everything got turned upside down. Women went back into the home and men took over the jobs. It was, in a sense, things getting back to normal as they were before the war. However, the thing to keep in mind is that things now or then are not how they have always been. The shadow of the war and its effects on work, home, and individuals could not be erased, and they would lead, over time, to new changes.

The 1960s are in a sense a reaction to the staid 1950s. Some call this time the “Swinging Sixties,” due to changing attitudes toward social taboos including sex and drug use. The counterculture of the 1960s was an anti-establishment movement and general attitude. It arose out of social tension regarding race, gender, sexuality, and authority. The years of the Second World War had opened new possibilities for many, and it raised questions about what had been considered normal and the status quo. Why should women be expected to be homemakers? Why should Blacks not have full voting rights and equal access to civic participation? Why should they have to sit at the back of the bus? Why should gays and lesbians be persecuted? These questions turned into calls for action as the 1960s unfolded.

Inaugurated in 1961, Democratic President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), a WWII naval hero, called on Americans to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” On Sept 12, 1962, he started our “moon shot” with these words at Rice University: “No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. … We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” While he called for greater international cooperation and community, he was hard pressed to challenge the encroachment of Communist regimes in nearby Cuba and in far away Southeast Asia—the former culminated in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the latter with the Vietnam War. President Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) was a leading voice in the Civil Rights Movement that had begun in the 1950s and continued into the 1960s. He brought Mahatma Gandhi’s (1869-1948) nonviolent activism principles to the US. Among many accomplishments, King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, and helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965. He delivered his “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In recognition of his work, he received the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his use of nonviolent resistance to fight racial inequality. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

On the heels of the Korean War, the Vietnam War ran from 1955 to 1975. The aim was to stop a domino effect of countries falling under Communist rule in Southeast Asia. American involvement and how the war should be waged was debated and protested. While American soldiers killed numbered 58,220, the total deaths for all theaters in the conflict are unknown but estimated to be between 1.4 million to 3.6 million. Ultimately, Vietnam fell to Communist forces and remains a Communist led country to this day.

There were man-made famines such as Mao Zedong’s (1893-1976) Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1962 in China that led to the deaths of 30 to 55 million people, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia where genocide by the Pol Pot (1925-1998) led Khmer Rouge eliminated about a quarter of their own population or 1.5 to 2 million deaths between 1975 and 1979.

In response to a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in the early hours of June 28, 1969, the spontaneous Stonewall Riots served as a touchstone for the gay liberation movement in the US. This date is memorialized by the first gay pride marches in 1970.

There were some hopeful developments during this era. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the latter signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973) during the riots that followed Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, were signed into law. The US space program, which had begun in the 1950s successfully landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon on July 20, 1969 as their colleague Michael Collins flew above them in the Columbia command module and the rest of the world watched with anticipation on television.

In culture, the British Invasion began with the arrival of Liverpool’s The Beatles in the US in early 1964. Bob Dylan (1941-)and others led the folk music revival as a counterculture movement. Music festivals like Woodstock on August 15-18, 1969 also combined the counterculture with music and mind expansion with drugs and free love. New sounds came from The Doors, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and The Beach Boys. Important films wrestled with larger changes in the world, Easy Rider (1969), The Graduate (1967), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). This is also the era of the French Cinema New Wave (not to be confused with New Wave SF) and the innovation of the Spaghetti Western.

In science and technology: Automobile culture hit its zenith in terms of production by the US’s Big Three: General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. The birth control pill was introduced in 1960, and the measles vaccine was delivered in 1963. Cosmic background radiation was discovered in 1964, which provided support to the Big Bang model of the universe. And in 1967, the first pulsar or rapidly spinning neutron star was discovered. The first laser was invented in 1960. The first industrial robot was introduced in 1961. The first computer video game called Spacewar! was created in 1962. The first geosynchronous communications satellite, meaning it remains fixed over one place above the Earth, was launched in 1963. This idea was popularized by the British SF writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008). The first ATM was opened in London in 1967. Douglas Engelbart’s (1925-2013) “Mother of all Demos,” took place on Dec. 9, 1968, and it demonstrated all of the fundamentals of modern computing that we take for granted today: graphical windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and collaborative real-time editor. The precursor to the Internet known as ARPANET went online the year after in 1969. And our smartphone cameras and webcams have AT&T Bell Labs to thank for the digital image sensors called a charged-coupled device or CCD that were invented in 1969.

There are several events that we can point to as being the end of the long 1960s. The Beatles broke up in 1969. National Guard Troops open fire on peaceful Vietnam War protesters with live ammunition at Kent State University on May 4, 1970—killing four and injuring nine. After the Watergate scandal, US President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) resigned from office in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974.

Overview of New Wave SF

New Wave SF represented a shift in the genre beginning in the early 1960s with the term first appearing in Britain but quickly exported to describe a new kind of SF. The term “New Wave” comes from film criticism as a translation of the French nouvelle vague, which is a movement of experimental cinema by Jean-Luc Godard (1930-2022), Francois Truffaut (1932-1984), and others. It is notable that Godard and Truffaut made SF films, including Alphaville (1965) by the former and Fahrenheit 451 (1966) by the latter). Another important SF short film from the French nouvelle vague movement is La Jetée (1962) in 1962 by Chris Marker (1921-2012), which is composed entirely of still images that tell the story of a time traveler after a nuclear war who remembers his own death as a child. Terry Gilliam’s (1940-) film 12 Monkeys (1995) is inspired by Marker’s film. New Wave was first applied to SF by British SF writer Christopher Priest (1943-2024), author of The Prestige (1995), to describe the kind of writing appearing in the British SF magazine New Worlds.

New Worlds was already a leading UK SF magazine before New Wave SF. It was launched in 1936 as a fanzine called Novae Terrae, and subsequently renamed as New Worlds in 1938. It transitioned to being a professional magazine in 1946. Things changed in New Worlds when the British SF writer Michael Moorcock (1939-) assumed its editorship in the May-June 1964 issue. During his tenure as editor, Moorcock demonstrated himself to be an influential figure in SF analogous to Campbell’s role at Astounding. By combining social commentary, visual elements, and experimental literary techniques such as concrete poetry within New Worlds, he sought to recontextualize the genre and connect it more closely to contemporary cultural shifts and avant-garde artistic movements. In Moorcock’s first editorial, he called for “a new literature for the space age,” in the tradition of William Burroughs.

Moorcock is a prominent science fiction author who developed the notion of a multiverse, which comprises numerous parallel worlds with subtle variations. In his works, he explores this idea through the lens of the Eternal Champion, a recurring protagonist tasked with fighting against chaos for order’s sake. Other characters surrounding the Eternal Champion often possess more obscure motives. One notable iteration of the Eternal Champion is the sword-and-sorcery character Elric. Moorcock also crafted a satirical version of the dissatisfied antihero Elric named Jerry Cornelius. As a pop culture icon embodying 1960s “Swinging London,” Cornelius was portrayed as a streetwise and cunning outlaw equipped with high-tech gadgetry. He possessed an amoral proficiency in manipulation, encompassing both women and the multiverse at large. Also, Moorcock made Cornelius’ stories an Open Universe, or a universe that others could write about and create new stories within. For example, American academic and writer Carter Kaplan (1960-) published his own Jerry Cornelius novel with Moorcock’s blessing titled Tally-Ho, Cornelius! (2008).

The label and concept of New Wave SF spread from the UK to the US. Judith Merril (1923-1997), the US/Canadian SF writer and editor, wrote about it in her anthology England Swings SF (1968). Because it was difficult to get some of the New Wave published in the big SF magazines, American writer and editor Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) promoted the new kind of SF in his groundbreaking collections, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions (1972).

So-called New Wave SF writers and the SF old guard have both pushed back against the term. Nevertheless, the movement did open up the genre for new stories and new ways of telling stories. It revitalized the genre from its straitjacketed Golden Age of SF focus (discussed in the earlier chapter).

There are five key characteristics of New Wave SF. They are: i) Belief that SF could and should be taken seriously as literature; ii) Writing experimentation and better writing; iii) “Inner space”: Tend toward psychology and the soft sciences as opposed to Hard SF; iv) Shared qualities with late-1960s counterculture: mind altering drugs, oriental religions, violating taboos, marked interest in sex, strong involvement in pop art and in the media landscape generally, social change for equal rights and protection under the law; and v) Pessimism about the future—especially the near future. This takes two major forms: a belief in the likelihood of disaster caused by overpopulation, ecological collapse, or war and a cynicism with US and UK politics, particularly US involvement in Southeast Asia.

Some New Wave SF writers are Brian W. Aldiss, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch, Robert Silverberg, Pamela Zoline, Norman Spinrad, and Roger Zelazny. Other New Wave SF writers, namely J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and Samuel R. Delany, are discussed in more detail below.

J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) was a British writer. He was born in Shanghai and spent childhood as a civilian in a Japanese POW camp, which he chronicled in his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, which was adapted as a film by Steven Spielberg in 1987. In the mid-1950s, he discovered American SF while in Royal Air Force training in Canada. His writing is characterized as written in an experimental style and focused on psychology and in the emotional significance of deserted landscapes and wrecked technology. He claimed that his focus was on “inner space.”

His work includes the novel Crash (1973), which took his obsession with automobile accidents to a logical conclusion. It can be called an example of “pornographic” SF. It explores the psychological satisfactions of danger, mutilation, and death on the roads. It also examines the interface between modern humanity and its machines. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) uses the cut-up style of American writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997). Its chapters are composed of “condensed novels” or shorter segments connected by titles that make up a running sentence. The protagonist shifts from story to story with a slightly different name. Some of its chapters include: “Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” “Love and Napalm: Export USA,” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” The US publisher actually had the printed copies destroyed after an executive learned that JFK, Marilyn Monroe, and Ronald Reagan were characters in the novel.

Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was an American SF writer whose body of work focuses on ethics, human courage, and often, the city. He specialized in writing short stories and scripts. Fellow New Wave SF writer Robert Silverberg described Ellison as having “physical courage to the verge of idiocy,” “a hunger for literary success so powerful that it dissolves the fine but vital distinction between fact and fantasy,” “he is neat. His private life may sometimes be a shambles, his schedule of obligations may be running seven months late, but his physical surroundings are always meticulous,” “His early work was awkward and raw . . . . But there was a core of throbbing excitement within all that verbal nonsense, and the inner power remained within him as the outer junk sloughed away with maturity,” and “He still has his areas of insecurity, sure, but he knows that he has shaped precisely the life he wanted to shape, that in his world he is a star, that when he wakes in the dark hours of the morning and asks himself what he has accomplished he can give himself answers, and not depressing answers” (Silverberg, Robert. “Harlan.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1977, pp. 63-70). Among his many awards, he was recognized as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and won eight Hugo Awards, four Nebula Awards, 18 Locus Awards, and many others.

He gained recognition and awe for a number of exploits over the years. For example, while researching his first novel, Web of the City (1958), he hung out with a gang in Brooklyn’s Red Hook; he joined the Selma to Montgomery Marches in March 1965; he covered race riots in Chicago in the 1950s with James Baldwin; he ghosted the (then) relatively unknown Lenny Bruce‘s (1925-1966) column in the Playboy wannabe magazine Rogue; he got fired his first day as a writer at Disney when he was overheard – by Roy Disney (1930-2009), no less – not only suggesting (facetiously) a Disney porn movie, but providing sample dialogue in Disney characters’ voices; and he attended a science-fiction convention in Phoenix in an RV and refusing, throughout his stay, to spend any money – for food, water, even an electrical hookup – in the state of Arizona because its legislature hadn’t voted to approve the Equal Rights Amendment.

The year 1967 can be said to be a “big year” for Ellison due to his accomplishments. First, he edited Dangerous Visions, one of the most famous SF anthologies. Second, he published two of his most successful stories: “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” about an AI who tortures the last remaining humans in a post-apocalyptic future, and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” about a poverty-born beautiful girl who becomes a prostitute to escape poverty. Her soul gets sucked into a silver dollar machine. She then gives wins to a guy down on his luck only to trick him into exchanging his soul with hers, exclaiming, “Heaven or Hell, it doesn’t matter! Free!” And third, his teleplay for Star Trek, the episode titled, “The City on the Edge of Forever” was broadcast. However, many people, including Ellison, felt that the manner in which the teleplay was produced simplified his complex and dark vision. But the program remains – nearly thirty years later, the best-known episodes of Star Trek in which the Enterprise crew discover a time travel portal called the Guardian. McCoy, ill from an accidental drug overdose, slips through and changes history by saving Edith Keeler’s life—had she died, she would not have led a pacifism movement that prevented the US from getting involved in WWII, Germany develops the bomb, and wins WWII. On the Guardian’s world, the Enterprise vanishes but the crew on the surface remain. Kirk and Spock follow McCoy to return history to its original course, but Kirk falls for Keeler, which complicates matters, when he has to choose not to save her from death).

Two other notable stories by Ellison are “A Boy and His Dog” and “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman.” “A Boy and His Dog” (April 1969) follows Vic (a young man) and Blood (a telepathic dog) in a post-apocalyptic landscape with few survivors and even fewer women. Blood helps Vic find women and Vic helps Blood by giving him food. But, Vic gets captured while tracking a young woman and then later escapes confinement with her. Blood, who had been injured, needs nourishment. Vic is forced to choose between the woman and Blood. Of course, he chooses Blood, and the pair eat the woman. “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman” (1965) is another dystopian future where time is regulated and you must follow a strict schedule. A man assumes the identity of the anarchistic Harlequin to rebel against the timekeeper known as the Ticktockman. The Harlequin is captured, rehabilitated like Winston Smith in George Orwell‘s (1903-1950) dystopian SF novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and repents in public.

Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was an incredibly prolific writer of SF that questioned many truths that are often taken for granted, such as, what is reality, what is the human, and what is the android? He lived most of his life in California, but also lived in Vancouver for a brief time. He was married five times and had three children. He wrote mainstream novels and short/long form SF but only one of his mainstream novels was published during his lifetime–the others were published posthumously. Dick wrote at a mad pace to make money, which was always tight for him. At times in his life, he relied on amphetamines to fuel his writing speed and stamina. He wrote an incredible 24 novels during the 1960s. Five of those in 1963 and six in 1964—-one being a collaboration with Roger Zelazny. He won the 1963 Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Man in the High Castle (1962), and the 1975 John W. Campbell Award for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Despite his literary output, he gained far greater fame after his death than during his life. Notably, he was the first SF writer to have his work published by the prestigious Library of America.

Dick’s writing exhibits six key characteristics: i) Ontological problems (reality, being, and authenticity); ii) Epistemological problems (knowledge); iii) Entropy (the universe is entropic and humanity can only slow down but not stop the force of entropy); iv) Empathy (the android and the human); v) Religion (specifically, Gnosticism and to a lesser extent, Asian religions. Final trilogy all about religion: VALIS Trilogy, 2-3-74 Event); and vi) The “little man”—Dickian heroes are not supermen; they are instead normal people, such as technicians, record store clerks, or salesmen.

Some of his important works include The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” and “The Electric Ant.”

The Man in the High Castle (1962) is an alternate history in which the Allies lost WWII and the country has been divided between Germany and Japan. The titular “man” is the author of a book titled “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy” that was generated using the ancient Chinese divination book I Ching or Book of Changes, a system of foresight that reflects New Wave SF interest in Eastern religions. This book-within-a-book tells a history eerily similar to but not exactly like our reality.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) concerns Palmer Eldritch, a deep space explorer, who returns from the Proxima system with three stigmata: robotic hand, electric eyes, and steel teeth. At that time, human colonists in space already enjoy a hallucinogen called Can-D to help cope with living away from Earth. Eldritch brings back a new hallucinogen called Chew-Z that secretly gives him control over others’ drug hallucinations.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1966) follows the bounty hunter Rick Deckard’s mission to kill or euphemistically retire a group of escaped androids who have returned to Earth. The novel explores the differences between the human and the android–showing how human beings can become more machine-like and how androids can become more human-like.

A Scanner Darkly (1977) is about undercover Narc agent Bob Arctor who wears a scramble suit to hide his identity from everyone, including his superiors. On assignment, he becomes addicted to Substance D, which causes the degeneration of his corpus callosum, or the connection between his two brain hemispheres. This results in his Bob identity separating from his undercover Fred identity.

Dick’s magnum opus, VALIS (1981) is a fictional treatment of his purported 2-3-74 experience. In the novel, the character Phil Dick writes about his friend Horselover Fat (Philip means horse lover in Greek and Dick is German for fat) who experiences 2-3-74 (the pink laser beam of light from an alien satellite that transmits Gnostic information directly into Fat’s brain). Together with two other friends who are based on Dick’s real life friends Tim Powers and K. W. Jeter, they seek out a little girl who is in communication with the VALIS satellite.

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was originally published in the April 1966 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is densely packed with ideas, such as how does memory work; using technology to manipulate memory and therefore our sense of self, ethics, empathy, etc.; and layers of unknowability: Epistemological questions for Quail (what are his real memories?) and ontological questions for REKAL and the police (discovering the Truth about the aliens and their promise to Quail for his kindness). Ultimately, Quail is the “little man” who turns out to be the most important person on Earth.

“The Electric Ant” was originally published in the Oct. 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the story, Garson Poole discovers that he is a robot with a human-like appearance or what is commonly referred to as an android following an accident. Within his chest is a punch-hole tape that contains his programming. By changing the tape, he changes his reality. Like many of Dick’s fictions, he raises epistemological (how do we know what we know) questions and ontological (what is reality) questions.

Dick’s stories tend to be the basis for really great SF films. Some movies that are based on his writing include: Blade Runner (1982, based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall (1990, based on “We Can Remember It for you Wholesale”), Screamers (1995, based on “Second Variety”), Minority Report (2002, based on “The Minority Report”), Impostor (2001, based on “Impostor”), Paycheck (2003, based on “Paycheck”), A Scanner Darkly (2006, based on A Scanner Darkly), Next (2007, based on “The Golden Man”), The Adjustment Bureau (2011, based on “Adjustment Team”), and Total Recall (2012, based on “We Can Remember It for you Wholesale”).

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany (1942-present) is a gay, African-American writer, teacher, and scholar. Early in his career, he was married to the Jewish-American poet Marilyn Hacker (1942-) from 1961-1980, who identifies as a lesbian. Delany and Hacker have a daughter.

His writing and scholarly contributions to SF have been recognized with numerous awards, including the 1967 Nebula for Best Novel for Babel-17 (1966), 1968 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for “Aye, and Gomorrah…” (1967, appeared in Ellison’s Dangerous Visions), 1968 Nebula Award for Best Novel for The Einstein Intersection (1967), 1970 Hugo Award for Best Short Story and 1970 Nebula Award for “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (1969), and the 1989 Hugo Award for Nonfiction Book for The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1957-1965 (1988). He was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2014, and he received James Whitehead Memorial Award for a Lifetime’s Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Writing in 1993, the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Contributions in 1985, and the Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010.

While he does not have a formal degree, he has been teaching writing and literature classes at major universities since 1988. He retired from teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2015. In addition to his fiction, he has written extensive scholarship on SF, which has been collected in The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1977), The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction (1978), and Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (1984).

Unlike most of his SF writing peers who began publishing short fiction before transitioning to novels, Delany’s first published SF was a novel: The Jewels of Aptor in 1962.

Delany’s fiction shares these characteristics: i) Communication, linguistics/semiotics, and language. Notably: Delany believes that our perception of reality depends on our language; ii) Explores cultural difference and the social construction of identity; iii) He highlights the social background of stories in colorful detail; iv) Sexuality and eroticism; v) The main characters usually have physical or psychological damage; vi) Mythology is important: as existing or emergent; and vii) The plot is structured as a quest or fantastic voyage.

Some of Delany’s most significant work includes Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Dhalgren, and “Aye, and Gomorrah.”

Babel-17 (1966) presents an intriguing exploration of language and its role in shaping societal dynamics within a futuristic galaxy. The protagonist, a talented poet named Rydra Wong, embarks on a quest to decipher a mysterious alien language believed to be linked to acts of sabotage and potential invasion. Throughout the novel, the author delves into the complexities of linguistics and communication while highlighting the significance of cross-cultural understanding. Each chapter features epigraphs taken from the works of Marilyn Hacker, Delany’s former spouse, adding literary depth to this captivating tale.

The Einstein Intersection (1967) is a complex and vividly imagined novel that explores the idea of human civilization being replaced by a race of alien beings attempting to comprehend the remnants of human culture. The story follows a black musician named Orpheus, who serves as both the protagonist and the embodiment of multiple mythological figures. Throughout the novel, avatars of famous historical and cultural icons like Ringo Starr and Billy the Kid also appear, adding to the surreal and often confusing landscape of the narrative. The use of the author’s own diary entries as part of the text further adds to the intricate and multi-layered nature of the work.

Dhalgren (1975) is an acclaimed yet polarizing novel known for its postmodern style. The story revolves around the protagonist, the Kid, as he navigates through the chaotic and violence-ridden metropolis of Bellona, where social order has collapsed, and two moons hover in the sky. While the rest of America seems unaffected, Bellona presents a unique environment for exploring the challenges and opportunities faced by youth culture. The narrative follows the Kid’s journey as he becomes a writer, engages in relationships and conflicts, and ultimately composes a book that may or may not be Dhalgren itself. Throughout the text, the author reflects on the act of writing and the complexities inherent in creating art.
The first and last sentences of the novel form an intriguing loop, highlighting the cyclical nature of the narrative and the idea that life experiences often repeat themselves. Overall, Dhalgren offers a thought-provoking examination of the struggles and potential of young people while also delving into the complex relationship between authors and their works.

Dhalgren is a postmodern work of fiction. To understand postmodernism, it’s useful to grasp the concept of Modernity and Modernism first. Modernity is roughly the period beginning with the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution to the Second World War. Modernity focused on grand narratives or big ideas that were considered universal. One of these is the liberal humanist idea of identity or a centered self. Postmodernism follows and overlaps the end of modernity and it is characterized by an array of cultural theories and attitudes that have developed as skepticism colored with irony, emphasizing language and power relations, toward long standing Western universalized theories and beliefs including: the idea of human progress, the power of reason and rationality, objective reality, and the human. Modernism had already brought into question many of these issues, especially concerning the human as center of the self and of the world, but postmodernism extends and critiques these earlier reformulations. Delany, Ellison, and other New Wave SF writers are also postmodern writers. It is during the postmodern era that we see slippages between SF and mainstream literature. For example, Thomas Pynchon (1937-), one of the most highly regarded mainstream literary (and reclusive) writers, almost always has science fictional elements, especially in the cyborg-laden V. (1963), but his novels are often sold under “Fiction” instead of “Science Fiction.”

“Aye, and Gomorrah…,” originally published in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions in 1967 (discussed above), is an intriguing short story that delves into the complex relationship between sexuality, fetishism, and advanced technology. Set against the backdrop of particle physics and the impact of radiation on the human body, the tale introduces readers to the concept of Spacers – astronauts who undergo neutering prior to puberty to prevent damage to their reproductive organs caused by cosmic rays and harsh radiation. This narrative draws parallels to the early years of the space race in the 1950s and 1960s, which raised questions about whether it was more feasible to develop spacecraft and spacesuits that could shield astronauts or modify human beings to better adapt to the conditions of outer space. Cyborgs, hybrid entities composed of human and mechanical components, emerged during this period as a response to these deliberations. The story also highlights the existence of certain unaltered humans known as “frelks,” who possess a peculiar fascination with Spacers despite their androgynous appearance and absence of sexual drive. To mock the frelks and alleviate their own solitude, Spacers engage in prostitution with them. Overall, “Aye and Gomorrah” presents a thought-provoking examination of the unforeseen ramifications of technological intervention on both the modified individuals and society as a whole, underscoring the complexity of human sexuality and its intersection with cutting-edge science and technology.

Star Trek

Star Trek (1966-1969), a science fiction television series that was broadcast on NBC for three seasons, was created by Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991). Roddenberry had been a WWII pilot, commercial airline pilot, and later, a police officer before he turned his attention toward being a full time TV writer. Notably, he was a humanist and agnostic, which underpinned the ethos of the series. He pitched Star Trek as a “Wagon Train to the stars.” Wagon Train (1957-1962 NBC, 1962-1965 ABC) was a long running Western TV series about the westward expansion following the Civil War.

Each episode of Star Trek begins with this narration: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” From this opening, we learn that this is a space opera. There is an unknown frontier to explore. There are new worlds to visit and alien lifeforms to meet. All of these unknowns means that there will be interaction, drama, conflict, and alliances. In 1987, when the sequel television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) debuted, the concluding phrase of the opening narration was changed to “where no one has gone before” to reflect the cultural shift in the use of the term “man,” which is gendered and ill-suited to represent everyone, while “one” is gender neutral and all encompassing.

Star Trek has six characteristics: i) Socially progressive and optimistic about the future; ii) Blends the fantastic with the familiar (this makes its exoticism manageable and unthreatening); iii) Social criticism of the here-and-now and moral lessons safely veiled in SF (For example, the if-not-first then certainly most remembered early interracial kiss on scripted American TV was in an episode of Star Trek in 1968. Shortly before, the groundbreaking Civil Rights Act of 1964 had become law, and it had only been the year before in 1967 that the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were invalid. In the season three episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” Kirk and Uhura are made to kiss by super beings controlling their bodies. The studio ordered two cuts filmed—one kissing and one not—but Roddenberry was insistent that they show the kiss, so Shatner and Nicholls hammed it up in every “non-kiss” take so that they had to run the kiss.); iv) Formulaic, individual episodes (as opposed to film serials’ cliffhangers); v) Alien superbeings (humanity might have starships, but there are other, older species with more advanced technologies); and vi) Scientifically lax (i.e., technobabble).

The cast of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 is meant to reflect a future of equality and international cooperation. It included William Shatner (1931-) as Captain James T. Kirk, Leonard Nimoy (1931-2015) as the multiracial human-Vulcan First Officer Mr. Spock, DeForest Kelley (1920-1999) as Doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Nichelle Nichols (1932-2022) as Communications Officer Lt. Uhura, George Takei (1937-) Helmsman Mr. Sulu, James Doohan (1920-2005) as Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, and Walter Koenig (1936-) as Russian Ensign Pavel Chekov.

New Wave SF writers contributed teleplays to Star Trek. The first and second seasons were the strongest when producers has the most budget to hire top SF writers: Jerome Bixby (1923-1998), who co-wrote the story that was turned into the film Fantastic Voyage (1966); Robert Bloch (1917-1994), who wrote SF and horror and is well known as the novelist who wrote Psycho in 1959, which was filmed a year later by the English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980); Harlan Ellison (discussed in the previous chapter above), Richard Matheson (1926-2013), who wrote the vampire novel with a gut-wrenching twist I Am Legend (1954); Norman Spinrad (1940-), who wrote Bug Jack Barron, which was serialized in New Worlds in 1969; and Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), who wrote More Than Human (1953).

“The City on the Edge of Forever”

The Star Trek first season episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967) is arguably one of the best episodes of the original series and representative of New Wave SF’s influence on the television series. The original script was penned by Harlan Ellison, but his script was watered down by the series’ stable of writers to accommodate studio demands for the show’s perceived general audience. Nevertheless, its main theme might be seen as a bridge between New Wave SF’s experimentation and ambiguity to popular SF.

“The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967) uses time travel to explore philosophical and ethical issues. Throughout the original series and its subsequent films, it reveals a tension between the good of the many over the good of the few or the one, which is a cribbed version of the ethical philosophy of utilitarianism and the greatest happiness principle developed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). In the episode, Dr. McCoy experiences a paranoia-infused bad trip due to an accidental drug overdose in the medical bay when the ship arrives at an unexplored planet. Fearing his friends are murderers due to the effects of the drug, McCoy escapes to the planet’s surface. Kirk and Spock lead an away team to find McCoy when they encounter the monolithic Guardian, a time portal. While speaking with Guardian, McCoy runs past the crew and jumps into the past through Guardian’s portal. Soon thereafter, the Enterprise disappears and the away team is left alone with Guardian. McCoy’s visit to the past erased the present. The crew’s proximity to the Guardian is all that saved them. Unbeknownst to Kirk and Spock, McCoy changed history for the worse by saving the life of a pacifist crusader named Edith Keeler (played by English actress Joan Collins, 1933-). Kirk and Spock go through Guardian’s portal in search of McCoy. Upon Kirk and Spock’s arrival before McCoy saves Keeler’s life, Kirk meets Keeler and falls in love with her. Spock discovers what should have happened based on his tricorder’s recording of the Guardian’s view into the past. Ultimately, Kirk and Spock have to prevent McCoy from saving Keeler’s life to restore the timeline and thereby return to their own present where the starship Enterprise and the Federation of Planets exist. Kirk is shown to have paid a heavy price due to his affection for Keeler, but he makes a choice to sacrifice Keeler to avoid a terrible future for so many more people.

Feminist SF

Feminist SF is focused on challenging patriarchy and cultural gender norms, and constructing equality regardless of sex or gender. The writers discussed in this chapter are first and foremost SF writers. They and their work overlap with other literary movements, including New Wave SF.

Historical Context

Before discussing Feminist SF, it is helpful to understand some relevant terms. First, sex is the biological, reproductive traits of an individual. This would be male, female, or intersex. Gender is the social and cultural construction of sex. This might overlap with biological sex, but it certainly doesn’t have to. Sexuality refers to sexual feelings (and their absence) and sexual orientation. Even Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) understood that sexuality was far more complicated and individualized than just heterosexuality. Also, it should be noted that the idea of sexualities has changed over time. French philosopher and critic Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and others have explored this history. Sexism is the prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. Patriarchy is a male dominated society. Matriarchy is a female dominated society. Heteronormativity is the promotion of heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation. Feminism is the view that all people are equal regardless of sex, gender, or sexual orientation. It has changed over time over its long history.

The fight for equality is a long and on-going one. Feminism has changed over time as the fight and its fighters have changed. It is organized into several waves: First Wave Feminism, Second Wave Feminism, Third Wave Feminism, and Fourth Wave Feminism.

First Wave Feminism occurred in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its major ideas included women’s suffrage, educational rights for girls, better working conditions, and rejection of the idea that women were inferior to men. Its foundational work was Mary Wollstonecraft’s (1759-1797) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) (see the Frankenstein chapter above for more information about Mary Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft). It was during the First Wave that an unsuccessful attempt was made to introduce the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the US Constitution. The ERA’s purpose is to add language expressly forbidding sex discrimination to the Constitution–something that it lacks even in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

Second Wave Feminism takes place from the 1950s to the 1980s. This era’s major ideas were “Women’s Liberation,” challenge the idea of the post-WWII nuclear family, fight for reproductive rights, obtain equality, and the founding of the National Organization of Women (NOW). It was also during the Second Wave that the second introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution was made. It was introduced by then Michigan Congressional Representative Martha W. Griffiths (1912-2003) on 10 August 1970, but didn’t pass a joint resolution. She reintroduced it the following year and it passed the House on 12 Oct. 1971 and the Senate on 22 March 1971. To become ratified, 3/4ths of the state legislatures would have to ratify it. Due to congressionally imposed deadlines and some states’ previous ratifications being revoked, it is uncertain if it will become a new amendment to the constitution.

Three groundbreaking Second Wave Feminism works to know are: The Second Sex (1949, trans. 1953) by Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), which charts women’s oppression through history; The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan (1921-2006), which was inspired by de Beauvoir, became a bestseller, and introduced the “nameless dissatisfaction” of the “happy housewife heroine” confined to “The Comfortable Concentration Camp” of the middle-class home; and The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) by Shulamith Firestone (1945-2012), which unveils the oppressive economics of twentieth-century reproduction (i.e., childbirth and childrearing—not paid and not given value) and argued for reproductive technologies to relieve women of this labor.

Third Wave Feminism began in the 1990s and overlaps with many of the ideals of Second Wave Feminism. This wave’s main ideas included: recognize that there is not a universal female identity; establish affinity politics with other groups based on class, LGBT, race, and nationality; fight back against second wave backlash; foster new networks of support and awareness, such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network).

Three significant Third Wave Feminism works include: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) by Judith Butler (1956-), which argues that gender is performed and identity is a performance; “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) by Donna Haraway (1944-), which asserts seizing the technological tools that make everyone cyborgs in order to configure identity through networks of connections with others; and “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto” (1987) by Sandy Stone (1936-), who was once Haraway’s student, which challenges the way transgender persons have been excluded from their own discourse and advocates for disrupting binary conceptions of gender in order to facilitate transgender subjects to speak for themselves.

Fourth Wave Feminism is the current wave which began in the 2010s. It focuses on the empowerment of women, digital tools for connecting, sharing, and amplifying the voices of others, and intersectionality, or how one’s identity and experience is individualized, multilayered, and intersects in various ways with others and other groups–thereby created different forms of discrimination and privilege. Fourth wave feminism acknowledges these differences and works for recognition and equality for all women regardless of race or social background. This is also an era of reckoning for some powerful men who abused women, such as Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Jeffrey Epstein. It’s also an era of celebration of women’s accomplishments, including Kamala Harris’ election as the first woman Vice President of the United States. Some Fourth Wave Feminism aligned projects and initiatives include: Everyday Sexism Project founded by Laura Bates (1986-), Tropes vs. Women in Video Games created by Anita Sarkeesian (1983-), and hashtag activism such as #metoo.

Beginnings of Feminist SF

Women have been writing SF since the beginning of the genre starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, discussed in the Frankenstein chapter above). In fact, it can be read as a feminist critique of science, because 1) Victor’s male hubris is that he believes that he can accomplish the creative act without a woman, and 2) women are not given a voice (Walton writes to his sister and Victor withholds information from Elizabeth and tells her what to do).

However, there are precursors such as The Description of a New World, called the Blazing-World (1666) by Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673). She appended this utopian adventure about a woman who travels to another world and enlists the help of its alien inhabitants to help her save her homeland on Earth to a scientific book that she wrote called “Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy.”

A recent rediscovery of Feminist SF is Herland (1915) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), which is about a society of women with advanced technology and the ability for parthenogenesis (reproduction from an ovum without fertilization). It was widely circulated in feminist circles until its “rediscovery” and republication in the 1970s. Gilman is also famous for her magazine The Forerunner and her story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). She grappled with the prevailing attitude of her day that women should lead domestic and un-intellectual lives. She struggled with depression as a housewife until she sought a divorce and challenged what she perceived as an androcentric point of view pervading the world.

Important works that explore and recover the history of Feminist SF and women’s SF include: Marleen Barr’s Future Females: A Critical Anthology (1981), Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (1987), Sarah LeFanu’s Feminism and Science Fiction (1989), Jane L. Donawerth and Carol Kolmerton’s Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference (1994), Brian Atterbery’s Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002), Justine Larbalester’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002), and Lisa Yaszek’s Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008), and Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharp’s Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (2016).

Definitions of Feminist SF

Feminist SF refers to science fiction literature that incorporates feminist themes and perspectives. This can include stories that feature strong female characters, explore gender inequality or sexism, or challenge traditional gender roles and stereotypes. The goal of feminist SF is to bring attention to issues related to women’s rights and empowerment through the lens of science fiction. Some Feminist SF writers include Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), Joanna Russ (1937-2011), Marge Piercy (1936-), Margaret Atwood (1939-), James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon (1915-1987), Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), and others. It’s important to note that feminist SF is not just limited to stories written by women but also includes works by male authors who address these themes and ideas, such as Air (2005) by Canadian writer Geoff Ryman (1951-).

Pamela Sargent (1948-) asserts in the introduction to her groundbreaking 1974 collection, Women of Wonder that, “Only sf and fantasy literature can show us women in entirely new or strange surroundings. It can explore what we might become if and when the present restrictions on our lives vanish, or show us new problems and restrictions that might arise” (Sargent, Pamela. “Introduction: Women and Science Fiction.” Women of Wonder, edited by Pamela Sargent, Vintage Books, 1974, p. lx).

Sarah LeFanu (1953-) argues in Feminism and Science Fiction (1989) that “The stock conventions of science fiction–time travel, alternate worlds, entropy, relativism, the search for a unified field theory–can be used metaphorically and metonymically as powerful ways of exploring the construction of ‘woman.’ Feminist SF, then, is part of science fiction while struggling against it” (LeFanu, Sarah. Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana UP, 1989, p. 5). She adds, “Feminist SF challenges the notion of a natural heterosexuality, a notion common to much SF written by men, despite the strange absence of female characters. In this sense perhaps, feminist SF reflects mainstream SF more than is at first apparent: where the latter peripheralises women, the former peripheralises men. But where the peripheralisation of women by male writers merely reflects the dominant ideology within which they write, the peripheralisation of men by women writers challenges that same ideology” (72).

Feminist SF has these seven characteristics: i) Explore patriarchal, matriarchal, and egalitarian social orders; ii) Construct alternative governmental and organizational systems; iii) Reimagine gender roles (and the very idea of gender roles); iv) Undermine the naturalized sex-gender relationship; v) Posit varied means of reproduction (female, male, alien, and mechanical); vi) Illustrate various sexualities (human, animal, alien, and mechanical); and vii) Consider the ramifications of both masculine science and feminist science (which sometimes incorporates radically different notions of science, including ‘magic’).

Some key Feminist SF writers include the following.

Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was a professor of English at the University of Washington and an SF writer. Her writing put social and cultural theory into action. Three significant themes in her work includes: i) Strong female or underrepresented persons (e.g., homosexual men); ii) Uses SF tropes (space opera, utopia/dystopia, alternative history) for satirical purposes; and iii) Duels (gun fights, sword duels, etc.). Her short story “When It Changed” originally appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) and it won the 1972 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Set on Whileaway, a planet populated only by women, it is about the arrival of men in spacecraft in search of women to replenish the genetic stock after chemical destruction of the genome back on Earth. Clearly, the men want to use the women. Its ending is ironic and sad: the old name of Whileaway is For-a-While. One of Russ’s most important works is The Female Man (1970), which tells the story of four women from different times and places who are brought together to hear a proposal for revolution against men. Through their interaction, they question their place in their respective worlds and their identities as women. They include Jeannine, a librarian from an alternate history that never escaped the Great Depression; Joanna, a woman from our 1970s and much like the author; Janet, from the planet Whileaway, and Jael, an assassin from a future world where the two sexes are at war and the person responsible for bringing the women together.

Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy (1936-) is an American poet, novelist, and activist. Her work is characterized as having multiple points of view. Her novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is about a Hispanic woman named Consuelo Ramos who is institutionalized wrongly for abusing her daughter. However, she finds that she can communicate with an androgynous woman from the future named Luciente. Consuelo learns that her actions in the present can influence the future—yielding a utopia or dystopia.

Pamela Zoline

Pamela Zoline (1941-) is a painter and writer. She is known for her collage-style art contributions to New Worlds magazine. Her short story “The Heat Death of the Universe” originally appeared in New Worlds in July 1967. It juxtaposes the entropy, or the process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder, within the home of a housewife heroine and a scientific discourse on the eventual heat death of the universe when eons from now when there remains no free thermodynamic free energy, which results in no more entropy—a kind of emptiness and calm.

James Tiptree, Jr.

James Tiptree, Jr. is the well-known pseudonym of the SF writer Alice B. Sheldon (1915-1987). Another pen name that she employed was Racoona Sheldon. She had a fascinating life. In fact, her Tiptree biography was essentially her own, but she changed the pronouns from she/her to he/his. Her parents were Chicago socialites and regularly took her on safari in Africa. She joined the US Army, did a stint in air force intelligence earning the rank of Major, worked in the Pentagon, and joined the CIA where she worked until returning to university. She earned a PhD in experimental psychology in 1967 and it was around this time that she began writing science fiction as Tiptree. While she was married twice, she admitted that her sexuality was more complicated than simply heterosexual. Before her identity was revealed, many SF readers and writers were convinced that Tiptree had to be a man. The main themes of her writing include: Sex, Identity, Feminist depictions of male/female relations, Ecology, and the strongest, Death. On May 19, 1987, she shot her invalid 84-year-old husband Huntington Sheldon and took her own life. They were discovered hand-in-hand with a suicide note written years before.

One of her most widely read stories is “The Women Men Don’t See,” which was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1973. In the story, two women—Ruth Parsons and her daughter Althea charter a plane with the Maya pilot Esteban. The Parsons allow the narrator, a man named Don Fenton, to join their charter. Unfortunately, the plane crashes in a mangrove swamp. While searching for fresh water, Ruth and Don witness a UFO that inadvertently drops something that Ruth quickly commandeers. During this trek, Ruth tries to explain to a dumbfounded Don women’s place in the world. She tells him: “What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.” When the aliens return, Ruth offers to return what she found in exchange for a ride for herself and her daughter away from Earth. Don throughout doesn’t understand why women who are not seen as equals by men like him might want to leave Earth for greater possibilities.

She won a number of awards for her work: “The Girl Who was Plugged In,” (1973), about telepresence and proto-influencer celebrity, won the 1974 Hugo Award for Best Novella. “Love Is the Plan the Plan is Death” (1973), about a self-aware male alien narrating his species’ life cycle as his female mate consumes him, won the 1974 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. “Houston, Houstin, Do You Read?” (1976), about male astronauts unable to cope in future society of women clones, won the 1977 Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Best Novella. “The Screwfly Solution” (1977), written with the Raccoona Sheldon byline and about an alien initiative that causes men to kill women and thereby rid the Earth of its human inhabitants, won the 1978 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) is an extremely significant SF and fantasy writer. Her background played an important role in the kind of SF she would innovate. Her parents were Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960), a famous anthropologist who studied Native Americans, and Theodora Kroeber (1897-1979), a writer well known for her anthropological book Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), which is about a man named Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe who walked out of the wilderness and spent the last few years of his life among anthropologists at University of California, Berkeley. Le Guin received an MA from Columbia University in Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Le Guin’s fiction is best summed up as being anthropological, meaning that its focus is on people/aliens, their culture, their politics, and their environment. Her works often strive to understand the alien Other, build bridges between self and other, and achieve a balance instead of domination of one group over another.

Some of the key characteristics of her writing include: i) World-building: Le Guin was recognized for creating richly detailed worlds that felt fully realized and immersive. In her novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), she imagined a planet called Gethen where the inhabitants have no fixed gender and can switch between male and female forms. This world-building allowed her to explore ideas about gender and societal norms in a way that felt both grounded and thought-provoking; ii) Social commentary: Many of Le Guin’s stories used science fiction and fantasy as a lens to examine social issues and critique existing power structures. Her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) is an example of this approach, using a utopian society to highlight the ethical consequences of privilege and oppression; iii) Language and style: Le Guin had a distinctive voice as a writer, characterized by clear prose, elegant sentences, and a focus on language as a tool for exploring complex ideas. Her novel The Dispossessed (1974) features a constructed language called Pravic, which reflects the philosophical and political beliefs of its speakers; iv) Feminism: Le Guin was a pioneering feminist writer who challenged traditional gender roles and stereotypes in her work. Her novels often featured strong female characters who defied expectations and broke down barriers. The protagonist of The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Genly Ai, is a male diplomat who must navigate a society without set gender binaries, forcing him to confront his own assumptions and prejudices; v) Environmental themes: Nature and environmental concerns were recurring motifs in Le Guin’s work. She often used science fiction and fantasy to imagine alternative futures and societies that prioritize sustainability and ecological balance. The novel “The Word for World Is Forest” (1976) is a powerful critique of colonialism and environmental destruction, set on a planet whose native population is being exploited and displaced by human colonizers; vi) Philosophy: Le Guin’s work frequently engaged with philosophical questions and ideas, drawing on various traditions including Taoism, Buddhism, and anarchism. Her novel The Lathe of Heaven (1971) uses science fiction tropes to explore the concept of reality and how it might be shaped or altered by consciousness and perception; vii) Experimentation: Le Guin was not afraid to take risks and experiment with form and genre. One example is Always Coming Home (1985), which mixes story, textbook, and anthropologist’s journal to reveal the far future Kesh people in what is now California. There was a special edition that combined the book with a soundtrack cassette tape; and viii) Emotion and characterization: While many science fiction and fantasy writers focus primarily on plot and world-building, Le Guin was also skilled at crafting compelling characters and capturing emotional resonance. For example, considering her Earthsea Cycle of fantasy novels, the first three novels, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972), show Ged’s growth from child to adult tempered by the hardships he endured developing his strength as an archmage, and she uses the fourth novel, Tehanu (1990), told from Tenar’s perspective instead of Ged’s, to release Ged’s pain and doubt. She artfully makes his struggles painful and uncomfortable to read. Tenar’s commitment to Ged is complicated and her dedication to the burned child Therru is carefully layered and never saccharine. What is written on the page about these characters feels real.

The Left Hand of Darkness, “The Word for World is Forest,” and The Dispossessed discussed above are all part of a much larger storytelling universe called the Hainish Cycle (it should also be noted that each of those three titles won a Hugo Award: 1970 Hugo for Best Novel, 1973 Hugo for Best Novella, and 1975 Hugo for Best Novel respectively). These stories are connected by the idea that an ancient people called the Hain had colonized many worlds in the past utilizing genetic engineering to ensure the greatest chance of survival of the colonists to a given environment, and in the future, the League of All Worlds and later the Ekumen send out emissaries to learn about those peoples and potentially invite them to join the Ekumen. One key technical device Le Guin created for these stories is the ansible, which is an instant communication device, that is it is not limited by the speed of light for transmission or reception of signals.

Her short story “Nine Lives” was published in November 1969 in Playboy, which has a long history of publishing SF stories. However, this was the first story by a woman published in Playboy, though published under the name U. K. Le Guin to conceal her gender. The story is set on a distant mining planet where two men must work with a group of ten clones, five male and five female, who are completely reliant on themselves and on one another. When all but one clone is tragically killed, the one left alive has to learn to negotiate social relationships with his two non-clone companions.

Le Guin was recognized with numerous awards during her career. Some of them include the 1989 Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Contribution to SF and Fantasy Scholarship by the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) and the 2013 Eaton Award for Lifetime Achievement in Science Fiction. She won eight Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, 24 Locus Magazine Awards, and many others. She was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2003.

Some Le Guin trivia: She was born the year after Philip K. Dick (discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above). Coincidentally, they were in the same class at Berkley High School in California, but they didn’t know one another at that time. When they were both SF writers later in life, they corresponded to one another with letters and talked on the phone, but they never met one another in person.

Le Guin was the sixth SF writer and the first woman SF writer (after Edgar Allan Poe in 1949 and 2009, Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1983, Jack London in 1986, Rod Serling in 2009, Edgar Rice Burroughs in 2012) to be honored with a US Postage Stamp with their likeness. Hers is a 3-ounce stamp featuring her portrait on the left side and a snowy scene of Gethen and Genly Ai and Estraven traversing the ice sheet from The Left Hand of Darkness.

Octavia E. Butler

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) is the first well-known African-American woman writer of SF and the first SF writer to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. When she was accepted to the 1970 Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop (a six week, 18 student workshop for promising SF writers), Harlan Ellison was her mentor. She also met Samuel R. Delany there (Ellison and Delany are discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above).

Her SF employs time travel, biology, and the social sciences. Her works’ themes include slavery, victimization, classism, racism, and identity.

Some of the major themes in Butler’s writing include: Power dynamics: In many of her works, Butler explores power relationships between individuals, societies, and institutions. For example, in Kindred (1979) she examines the complex power dynamics between slaves and slave owners during the antebellum South as well as those of African-Americans and whites in the present day; ii) Gender and sexuality: Butler often challenges traditional gender roles and sexual norms in her writing. She creates characters who defy societal expectations and explore their identities in unique ways. For instance, in Wild Seed (1980), she introduces a character named Doro who can switch between male and female bodies; iii) Race and racism: Butler’s work frequently addresses issues of race and racism, both historically and in contemporary society. Her novels often depict characters facing discrimination and oppression due to their race or ethnicity. For example, in Parable of the Sower (1993), the protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina faces prejudice as a black woman living in a post-apocalyptic society; iv) Environmentalism: Butler was deeply concerned about environmental issues and often incorporated them into her stories. She portrayed futures where human actions have led to ecological disasters and highlighted the importance of protecting our planet. An example of this theme can be seen in Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) which explores a future where climate change has caused widespread famine and social unrest; and Science and technology: Butler had a keen interest in science and technology and often used it as a central element in her stories. She imagined futuristic technologies that could either benefit or harm society depending on how they were used. For example, in the Parable novels the Earthseed religion and the use of spacecraft to colonize other worlds was a way to escape the environmental catastrophe on Earth. An example that ties these themes together is Lilith’s Brood (1987-1989). Humanity has all but destroyed Earth’s environment through nuclear war. The Oankali, an alien species, arrives and saves the remaining survivors. The Oankali seem benevolent, but the power balance is in their favor. They have advanced technology for genetic manipulation and “growing” their ship and other technologies. And they ask for seemingly little–the opportunity for interbreeding themselves with humans to create hybrid constructs to populate a rehabilitated Earth. But, can humans give real consent in this relationship? Mixed into this power dynamic are the three sexes of the Oankali–male, female, and ooloi, a third sex capable of manipulating genetics and necessary for facilitating the creation of hybrid constructs. Prejudice and discrimination operate through how non-cooperating humans view the Oankali and the construct children. And, among the constructs, Akin, Lilith’s male son, struggles with understanding what and who he is.

Her short story “Speech Sounds” was published in the Dec. 1983 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction and it won the 1984 Hugo Award winner for Best Short Story. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which a pandemic killed scores of people and has crippled survivors’ ability to communicate with one another. Of those who have survived, many have had neurological damage that causes them to lose the ability to speak or the ability to read and write. Survivors also experience rage that can turn violent when meeting someone who has the power of speech or writing that they have lost. Think of this in terms of orality or spoken communication and literacy or the ability to read and write. The protagonist is a woman named Rye who was once a professor but has been robbed of the ability to read and write due to the pandemic. She meets a man named Obsidian who could read but had lost the ability to speak. They make their way towards Pasadena where Rye’s family had lived. On the way, Obsidian is killed while he and Rye try to stop a man who they witnessed kill a woman. Rye kills the assailant and reluctantly brings the dead woman’s two children who can speak with her on her continuing journey.

Butler’s other work was recognized with a number of awards. “Bloodchild” (1984) won the 1985 Hugo Award, 1985 Nebula Award, 1985 Locus Award, and 1985 Science Fiction Chronicle Readers Poll Award for Best Novelette. Parable of the Talents (1998) won the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novel. The SFWA honored her in 2012 with the Solstice Award for Contributions to the SFF Landscape, and awarded posthumously the 2023 Infinity Award. She was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.

Joan Slonczewski

Joan Slonczewski (they/them/theirs or she/her/hers) is one of the rara avis of SF writers—they are also a full-time scientist and educator. They are a Professor of Biology and Chair of the Biology Department at Kenyon College in Ohio. They received their A.B. in Biology from Bryn Mawr College and Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University. They have also held appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland at Baltimore, and Princeton University. In it’s sixth edition, they co-wrote Microbiology: An Evolving Science (2023) with John W. Foster and Erik R. Zinser.

Additionally, they are a Quaker, which colors much of their SF, as does other elements of their personal life—their husband is a professor of Classics (ancient Greek and Latin) also at Kenyon College, and their two children who attended Catholic school in their youth.

Slonczewski’s first novel was Still Forms on Foxfield (1980). Their most recognized series of books and short stories is the Elysium Cycle, which includes A Door Into Ocean (1986), Daughter of Elysium (1993), “Microbe” (1995), The Children Star (1998), and Brain Plague (2000). And, their most recent novel is The Highest Frontier (2011).

Their SF has been recognized with a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel twice, a feat only accomplished also by Frederik Pohl. They were the first woman to receive the award in 1987 for their novel A Door Into Ocean (1986). Their second win in 2012 was for their novel The Highest Frontier (2011), which tied with Christopher Priest’s The Islanders (2011).

There is significant critical interest in their work, perhaps due to their being an accomplished hard SF writer who creates stories that imagine socially just and ecologically aware futures filled with wonder. Michael M. Levy observes that, “[their] literate and thoughtful hard science fiction focuses on issues of social justice and peace, ecology, feminism, gender, and religion and invites comparison with the work of writers as diverse as Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Kim Stanley Robinson” (“Feature Interview: Joan Slonczewski.” SFRA Review, no. 235/236, August/October 1998, pp. 12, https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/sfra/1/). Joan Gordon remarks that, “Slonczewski is a significant voice in SF because [they combine] hard biological science speculation with a variety of philosophical concerns—feminist, pacifist, egalitarian, ecological, spiritual, and bioethical—in work that enriches and entertains” (Review of The Star Children, SFRA Review, no. 235/236, August/October 1998, pp. 18, https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/sfra/1/). And, Bruce Clarke captures the main themes of their writing: “feminism in relation to scientific practice; resistance to domination; pacifism versus militarism; the extension of human rights to nonhuman and posthuman actors; biopolitics and posthuman ethics; and symbiosis and communication across planetary scales” (Preface. Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski, edited by Bruce Clarke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. vi). Clarke adds that “a persistent motif” in Slonczewski’s work is their “adroit depiction of sites and modes of social negotation,” which unfold in “masterful imaginings of cultural ecologies that can bridge radical differences and defuse cycles of violence” (ibid, pp. vi).

Three novels highlight the range of Slonczewski’s oeuvre: A Door Into Ocean is perhaps their most significant work to date; Brain Plague is set in the same universe as A Door Into Ocean, but presents a very different conflict on a radically different scale; and The Highest Frontier is a futuristic campus novel that leverages the microcosm of college to consider what is taking place in the world at large.

Slonczewski’s novel A Door Into Ocean (1986) is hard SF that transports its readers to a futuristic setting where two planets exist in stark contrast: Shora and Valedon. The Sharers, an all-female society on the water-covered moon of Shora, live harmoniously with their environment through advanced genetic engineering. They embody unity and equality, sharing spiritual connections that transcend individuality. In sharp contrast lies Valedon, ruled by a powerful transhuman figure known as “The Patriarch.” The novel unfolds when Merwen, an inquisitive Sharer, ventures to Valedon seeking Spinel’s help to understand the Valans’ way of life and determine if they can coexist peacefully with her people. As tensions escalate between Shora and Valedon, we witness a poignant exploration of non-violent resistance, love, loss, and self-discovery amidst an intricate web of interstellar politics and ecological balance. Through this gripping narrative, Slonczewski masterfully probes the complexities of human relationships, power dynamics, and our responsibility to preserve harmony within ourselves and with nature.

Sherryl Vint comments that the novel, “combines ecological and feminist themes with a vision of a community of genetic engineers who see themselves as part of a communal ecosystem rather than a Baconial—or Moreauvian—masters of a passive nature to be shaped to human ends. Sometimes described as the anti-Dune—that is, a novel based on anticolonial, feminist, and lush visions of the world rather than arid, patriarchal, and imperial ones—the novel also made an important intervention into the politics of feminism and science in line with Donna Haraway’s well-known argument in the ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ that one did not have to be anti-science to embrace ecology and pacifism” (“Joan Slonczewski: An Introduction.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 27, no. 1, 2016,pp. 19).

A Door Into Ocean has a number of interconnected themes that enrich its narrative. The novel delves into posthumanism through the Sharers, a society of genetically engineered women who have transcended the need for men, living harmoniously with their environment. This feminist society challenges conventional gender roles and envisions a world free from male subjugation. Ecological balance is another theme, as the Sharers maintain a delicate equilibrium on their world, threatened by the arrival of the Valans, a patriarchal society seeking to exploit Shora’s resources. Language plays a vital role, with the Sharers’ bidirectional language reinforcing reciprocity and non-violence, impeding orders and embedding reciprocity in every action. This linguistic structure shapes their worldview and underscores their commitment to non-violence.

LGBTQ+ themes are also explored, contrasting the Sharers’ lesbian separatist utopia with Valedon’s patriarchal, anti-homosexuality culture. This contrast is further complicated when male Valan Spinel forms a non-penetrative sexual relationship with female Sharer Lystra, challenging traditional notions of sexuality and offering a vision of a society where love transcends gender. Considering this in connection to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915, discussed in the Beginnings of Feminist SF section above), Jane L. Donawerth argues that, “through this plot move, Slonczewski argues the constructedness of sexuality. Spinel is asked to become a truly female man, a lesbian man, by his lover Lystra, to love her by ‘sharing pleasure,’ rather than by penetration. Instead of the women becoming heterosexual, as in Herland, the man is asked to become a lesbian, to learn fusion” (Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse UP, 1997, pp. 100). Finally, non-violence and Quakerism intertwine, as the Sharers’ commitment to non-violence reflects Slonczewski’s Quaker background. The Sharers’ non-violence is not a weakness but a strength, challenging the Valans’ militaristic society and offering an alternative perspective on peace.

In Brain Plague (2000), Chrysoberyl (Chrys), a young artist struggling to make ends meet, becomes host to Eleutherian microorganisms that grant her wealth and fame but also expose her to prejudice against carriers of these intelligent microbes. As she navigates the complexities of hosting an entire society in her brain, Slonczewski explores themes such as individuality versus collective consciousness, artistic creativity, free will, personal responsibility, health, disease, spiritual aspirations, and scientific inquiry. The novel’s vivid prose brings to life a world where sentient microorganisms coexist with humans, each with their own culture, talents, and motivations that sometimes align but often conflict with those of their hosts. Through Chrys’ journey, Slonczewski raises thought-provoking questions about the relationships between individuals and societies, art and life, organic and inorganic matter, while also delving into the consequences of advanced biotechnology on human civilization. Other works to consider in relation to it include Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985) and Greg Egan’s Diaspora (1997).

In The Highest Frontier (2011), young protagonist Jenny Ramos Kennedy embarks on her freshman year at Frontera College, a liberal arts institution in space that serves as a microcosm for Earth and its environmental crises. As she navigates college life amidst the backdrop of an alien ecosystem threatening to destroy humanity, Slonczewski explores themes such as scientific inquiry, religious fundamentalism, and socio-economic inequality. Through Jenny’s experiences with her peers, professors, and family members, the novel delves into the complexities of human relationships in a world where technology has advanced exponentially but environmental degradation looms large. By juxtaposing Frontera College against Earth itself, Slonczewski raises questions about our collective responsibility to address global issues like climate change and whether escaping to spacehabs is an effective solution or merely a privileged retreat for the few who can afford it. The Highest Frontier is a thought-provoking work of science fiction that reconciles faith and scientific inquiry in its exploration of human existence. Slonczewski’s rich worldbuilding immerses readers in an unfamiliar yet fascinating universe where biology has become the foundation for technological advancements. Ultimately, this novel serves as both a cautionary tale about humanity’s relationship with Earth and a testament to our potential for growth, resilience, and innovation when faced with seemingly insurmountable challenges. Other SF campus novels that deal with the tension between the university and the outside world include Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943, trans. 1949) and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008).

Slonczewski provides a study guide for A Door into Ocean on their professional website here. Dave Switzer maintains a very detailed fan page for Slonczewski’s work here, which includes links to information about their novels, interviews, quotes, and articles.

Afrofuturism

Mark Dery (1959-) coined the term “Afrofuturism” in his essay/interview, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” (1993): “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’” (Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery, Duke UP, 1994, p. 180).

In her online lecture, “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism and New Hollywood” (2013), Lisa Yaszek, defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction or science fiction written by both Afrodiasporic and African authors” (p. 1), and explains that it has three goals: i) Tell a good SF story; ii) Recover the past and reconsider the present in their light; and iii) Imagine or inspire new futures based on these recovered histories and culture (pp. 1-3). Thinking about the historical catalysts for Afrofuturism, she writes that, “authors naturally turn to science fiction as the premiere story form of technoscientific modernity as an ideal means by which to critically assess new ways of doing economics and politics and science and technology. . . . authors of all color . . . use science fiction to explore the necessary relations of science, society, and race to stake claim for themselves and for their communities in the global future imaginary” (p. 1). She continues, African slaves suffered the conditions of “homelessness, alienation, and dislocation that very much anticipate what Nietzsche described as the founding conditions of modernity. . . . If you want to think about black people as the primary subjects of modernity, those who have the most intense engagements with it, science fiction has the grammar that allows us to narrate those engagements” (Yaszek, Lisa. “Race in Science Fiction: The Case of Afrofuturism and New Hollywood.” A
Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction, edited by Lars Schmeink, 2013, pp. 1-11, http://virtual-sf.com/?page_id=372, p. 2).

Kodwo Eshun, Lecturer in Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London and co-founder of the Otolith Group, observes, “Looking back at the media generated by the computer boom of the 1990s, it is clear that the effect of the futures industry—defined here as the intersecting industries of technoscience, fictional media, technological projection, and market prediction—has been to fuel the desire for a technology boom. Given this context, it would be naïve to understand science fiction, located within the expanded field of the futures industry, as merely prediction into the far future, or as a utopian project for imagining alternative social realities. . . . To be more precise, science fiction is neither forward-looking nor utopian. Rather, in William Gibson’s phrase, science fiction is a means through which to preprogram the present. Looking back at the genre, it becomes apparent that science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present” (Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2, Summer 2003, pp. 287-302, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41949397. p. 290).

Some important Afrofuturist collections include Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and its sequel Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), both edited by Sheree R Thomas (1972-) and both winners of the World Fantasy Awards for Best Anthology (2001 and 2005, respectively). Significant Afrofuturist authors include George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), author of Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940, 1931), Samuel R. Delany (discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above), Octavia E. Butler (discussed in the Feminist SF chapter above), and Bill Campbell, author of Sunshine Patriots (2004). Other Afrofuturist writers Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, and Nnedi Okorafor are discussed below.

Steven Barnes

Steven Barnes (1952-) is a multi-genre writer, writing collaborator, and accomplished martial artist. He has co-written works with Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and Tananarive Due (his spouse). He has written both Star Trek and Star Wars novels. His novel The Kundalini Equation (1986) is a cautionary tale that extrapolates personal development through martial arts systems within a scientific framework. His novel Lion’s Blood (2002) won the 2003 Endeavour Award, Larry Niven‘s (1938-) and his “Sacred Cow” (2022) tied for the Analog Readers Poll Award for Best Short Story, and he received the Forry Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 2018.

Tananarive Due

Tananarive Due (1966-) is an American writer and educator with a background in journalism. She holds a B.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University and an M.A. in English Literature with an emphasis on Nigerian Literature from the University of Leeds. Her writing often includes supernatural, horror, and SF. She has collaborated with her spouse Steven Barnes on novels and short stories. Her novel The Living Blood (1997), the second title in her African Immortals series, won the American Book Award in 2002. She has won the 2009 Carl Brandon Awards’ Kindred Award for “Ghost Summer;” 2 Ignyte Awards: 2020 for “Black Horror Rising” (2019) and the 2022 Ember Award for Unsung Contributions to Genre; the 2016 British Fantasy Award for Best Collection for Ghost Summer: Stories (2015), and a 2023 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction for “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge” (2022).

Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson (1960-) is a Jamaican-born Canadian SF writer who is a full professor in creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She holds an MA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Her writing fuses Afro-Caribbean culture and folklore with feminist thought. Her work engages issues of race, class, and sexuality. Her first novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) established her as a significant SF writer. Brown Girl in The Ring is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel set in Metropolitan Toronto after economic collapse. The protagonist, Ti-Jeanne, navigates a dangerous landscape ruled by the criminal Rudy Sheldon. With the help of her grandmother’s spiritual practices, Ti-Jeanne confronts Rudy and ultimately triumphs through personal growth, feminist themes, and cultural empowerment. It won the 1999 Locus Award for Best First Novel, and she won the 1999 John W. Campbell, Jr. Award for Best New Writer. Her collection Skin Folk (2001) and novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007) have both won Sunburst Awards (2003 and 2008, respectively). Her novel The Salt Roads (2003) won the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for SF/F/H on GLBT themes; Skin Folk (2001) won the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection; Sister Mine (2013) won the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult SF/F; “The People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!” special issue of Lightspeed Magazine (June 2016), edited with Kristine Ong Muslim (1980-), Nisi Shawl (1955-), Berit Ellingsen, Grace L. Dillon, and Sunil Patel won the 2017 British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology; and “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” (2021) won the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In 2021, Hopkinson was named a SFWA Grand Master.

Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor (1974-) is an SF and fantasy writer. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago and she is a graduate from the 2001 Clarion Writers Workshop. Okorafor’s works reflect her dual cultural background as, in her own words, a Naijamerican, drawing upon her West African heritage and American experiences. Through her science fiction and fantasy stories, Okorafor challenges the lack of diverse representation in the genre by placing Black girls in prominent roles and showcasing African settings. Her stories are deeply rooted in Nigerian folklore and mythology, yet she infuses them with unique twists that make them distinctively hers. Her stories tackle weighty social issues such as racial and gender inequality, political violence, environmental destruction, genocide, and corruption through the lens of SF. For Okorafor, the themes in her stories are intimately connected to her personal experiences as a woman and mother. She sees writing and motherhood as intertwined aspects of her life that complement and balance each other. Recently, Okorafor rejected the label of afrofuturism in favor of coining her own terms: africanfuturism and africanjujuism. These new labels reflect her desire to define her work on her own terms and highlight the distinctive African influences that shape her writing. Her work has won a number of awards: Who Fears Death (2010) won the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel; Binti (2015) won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novella and 2016 Nommo Award from The African Speculative Fiction Society; The Book of Phoenix (2015) won the 2018 Kurd Laßwitz Award for Best Foreign Novel; Akata Warrior (2017) won the 2018 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book and the 2019 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book; “Binti: Sacred Fire” (2019) won the 2020 Locus Award for Best Short Story; and LaGuardia (2018-2019) won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story.

Cyberpunk

The Golden Age responds to the Pulp Era. The New Wave and Feminist SF responds to the Golden Age. And Cyberpunk, in turn, is a response to what had come before and to its present historical moment. It carried the trace of SF in its themes, tropes, and images, but it reworked SF as a response to its historical and cultural moment just as the previous SF eras had done. Cyberpunk—sometimes called a subgenre and sometimes called a movement—is the kind of SF that imagines a near future where computer technology, technologies of bodily enhancement, and the networks of global capital have opened up new possibilities and created new challenges.

Historical Context

Before we discuss Cyberpunk and its authors, let’s take a look at its background context. The counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s—emblematized by the New Wave’s interest in mind altering drugs, violating taboos, working for social change—ran up against a brick wall. It arguably ended when the National Guard opened fire on protesting students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. The innocence of the movement was robbed by the Nixon era’s embrace of sanctioned criminality and excessive force.

Following the post-WWII industrial boom, there were industrial contractions as manufacturing began to be sent overseas. So-called corporate raiders began dismantling manufacturing interests in the US through acquisitions and liquidations. Jobs and manufacturing went overseas. Politics swung through the liberal technocratic presidency of Jimmy Carter (1924-), who had a science degree and extensive experience with nuclear reactors and submarines in the Navy, and then back to the “Let’s Make America Great Again” conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), who had degree in economics and sociology and a background in acting. Cold War tensions reached a fever pitch. The late 1970s and 1980s were a time of insurgencies, terrorism, and wars in the middle east, Soviet controlled Afghanistan, and Central America. An era that culminated with the operational reveal of the United States’ F-117 Nighthawk Stealth Fighter during the invasion of Panama to remove Manuel Noriega (1934-2017), a graduate of the School of the Americas, from leadership. SF images entered the real world with the Strategic Defense Initiative also called the “Star Wars” space weapons platform and the unrealized US-only Freedom Space Station, which was rebranded and constructed as the International Space Station or ISS. Computers went from room sized affairs of governments and corporations to the desktop and the home. There were a number of works of fiction and nonfiction that explore these shifts before cyberpunk.

Some of the fiction and themes leading toward cyberpunk includes the cybernetic dystopia of Limbo (1952) by Bernard Wolfe (1915-1985); the mega corporations and advertising of The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) and Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958); youth culture gone amok and institutionalized reprogramming in A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess (1917-1993); downloading personalities into one’s brain and dehumanization in The Muller-Fokker Effect (1970) by John Sladek (1937-2000); virtual reality, telepresence, and influencer-like celebrity in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) by James Tiptree, Jr/Alice B. Sheldon (1915-1987); and computer hacking with illicit hardware in a World of Warcraft-like virtual world in “True Names” (1981) by Vernor Vinge (1944-).

The non-fiction writing of Alvin Toffler (1928-2016) was widely read and pointed the way toward the technological, economical, and environmental landscapes of the coming decades. His book Future Shock (1970) warned about “too much change in too short of a period of time.” His subsequent book The Third Wave (1980) established a pattern to change driven by technology in which the First Wave is agrarian; the Second Wave is industrialization and mass production; and the then current Third Wave is postindustrial combining the information age, globalization, and subcultural proliferation.

An earth-shattering event on December 9, 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference was the culmination of research and cutting edge technological development. Dubbed “The Mother of All Demos,” it was a computing technology demonstrated live by the project’s leader Douglas Englebart (1925-2013). Besides inventing the computer mouse for the demo, Englebart’s team at Stanford created a networked computer system that enabled video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, object addressing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and collaborative real-time editing. It pointed the way to the future that we now take for granted before it was economically feasible to achieve for the mass market. The significance of the demo and its influence on the development of the Internet, personal computers, and networking technologies cannot be overstated.

Coining the Cyberpunk Term

The term “cyberpunk” was coined by Bruce Bethke (1955-) as the title of his story “Cyberpunk” published in the November 1983 issue of Amazing Science Fiction. He tells us in the preface to his story being reprinted on Infinity Plus that, “The invention of the c-word was a conscious and deliberate act of creation on my part. I wrote the story in the early spring of 1980, and from the very first draft, it was titled ‘Cyberpunk.’ In calling it that, I was actively trying to invent a new term that grokked the juxtaposition of punk attitudes and high technology. My reasons for doing so were purely selfish and market-driven: I wanted to give my story a snappy, one-word title that editors would remember. How did I actually create the word? The way any new word comes into being, I guess: through synthesis. I took a handful of roots –cyber, techno, et al– mixed them up with a bunch of terms for socially misdirected youth, and tried out the various combinations until one just plain sounded right” (Bethke, Bruce. “Cyberpunk.” Infinity Plus, 1997, http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/cpunk.htm, par. 3-5).

Bethke’s cyberpunk term has two roots: cyber and punk. Cyber comes from the science of communication and feedback/control systems called cybernetics. Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who was an important influence on the Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr. when Campbell was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (discussed in the Golden Age of SF chapter above), is seen as the founder of the field of cybernetics. Wiener coined the term in the 1948 first edition of Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: “After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one side or another to serve the future development of the field as well as it should; and as happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek κυβερνήτης or steersman” (Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. second edition, MIT Press, 1965, p. 11).

Punk, the second half of the term, has lots of meanings: worthlessness, youthfulness, hooliganism, criminality, homosexual prostitution, and social marginalization. In this case, punk likely comes from its appropriation in music, which is the stripping of rock and roll to its essence and jettisoning the baggage of the 1970s progressive rock movement. Cyberpunk was meant to return SF to its pre-New Wave SF essence.

Gardner Dozois (1947-2018), an important editor at Asimov’s Science Fiction and founding editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, popularized the term by using it to describe a core group of the new generation of SF writers in an article in The Washington Post on Sunday, December 29, 1984: “Not all of these writers are of the same esthetic school or movement, by any means. Many of them don’t even much like each other’s work. (About the closest thing here to a self-willed esthetic “school” would be the purveyors of bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff, who have on occasion been refereed to as “cyberpunks” – [Bruce] Sterling, [William] Gibson, [Lewis] Shiner, [Pat] Cadigan, [Greg] Bear.) Nevertheless, they are the ’80s generation in sf, or part of it, and whether they like it or not, the similarities in goals and esthetics between them are much stronger and more noticeable than the (admittedly real) differences. For one thing, they are all ambitious writers, not satisfied to keep turning out the Same Old Stuff. Once again it is a time for literary risk-taking, and once again those who take them are admirable — and that makes it an exciting time for sf as a genre” (Dozois, Gardner. “Science Fiction in the Eighties.” The Washington Post, 29 Dec. 1984, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1984/12/30/science-fiction-in-the-eighties/526c3a06-f123-4668-9127-33e33f57e313/, par. 3).

The SF writer Norman Spinrad (1940-) argued for a different term in his May 1986 essay, “The Neuromantics” from Issac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (notably when Gardner Dozois was the editor). Spinrad builds his case from the seminal cyberpunk text, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984, discussed below). Spinrad recognizes that the “romance” component of Gibson’s title for his 1984 novel Neuromancer (neuro or brain, and mancer or necromancer, one who conjures the dead; neu or new, and romancer or adventurer). Using Gibson as an example, he sees the “Neuromantics” as Hard SF writers (discussed in the Golden Age of SF chapter above) who are exploring what it means to be human in a postindustrial world in the way that the New Wave SF writers (discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above) would: “Gibson writes hard science fiction. But he doesn’t write it like Heinlein or Poul Anderson or Hal Clement or even Gregory Benford. Stylistically, philosophically, esthetically, and in terms of the consciousness-style of his protagonist, Gibson is instead a kinsman of Ellison, William Burroughs, the Michael Moorcock of the Jerry Cornelieus stories, and, ahem, the Spinrad of ‘The Big Flash,’ Bug Jack Barron, or ‘Street Meat.’ Neuromancer is that seeming contradiction in terms, a New Wave hard science fiction novel. Neuromantic. Neuro-romantic. But also new romantic” (Spinrad, Norman. “The New Neuromantics.” Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1986, pp. 180-190, https://archive.org/details/Asimovs_v10n05_1986-05/mode/2up, p. 183).

Cyberpunk Characteristics

Cyberpunk has five key characteristics: i) Stories about the near future; ii) Interfaces: body/machine, brain/computer, cyborg; iii) Networks: global capital, information, political grow stronger, but interpersonal networks—the connections between individuals—become weaker or more difficult to realize; iv) Surfaces: We know characters by their names, what they do, what they buy, the performance of their identity, who they work with—networks again, mirrorshades hide us from the eyes, the windows to the soul. Most of the characters want connections to others and to break through these surfaces, but post-industrial culture largely sabotages these efforts; v) Punk sensibilities, including challenge authority and hardboiled prose—tell the story without the experimentation.

Fredric Jameson (1934-), the literary critic and philosopher, argues in his seminal work Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) that William Gibson’s fiction (discussed below) and cyberpunk are products of the shift that he identifies in contemporary culture: “Such narratives, which first tried to find expression through the generic structure of the spy novel, have only recently crystallized in a new type of science fiction, called cyberpunk, which is fully as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself: William Gibson’s representational innovations, indeed, mark his work as an exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual or aural postmodern production” Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991, p. 38). Cyberpunk and Gibson’s works specifically reveal a new human condition built upon global networks of capital that penetrate all aspects of life and identity.

The postmodern condition is revealed by five cultural changes: i) Weakening of historicity: History becomes seen as styles, which leads to history being commoditized and consumed. A result of this is the pastiche, or parody without politics. However, it should be noted that others theorists, such as Linda Hutcheon (1947-), disagree and see pastiche as a political act. Nevertheless, in the case of cyberpunk, its genre works create a pastiche of noir, the genre of crime fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity. It is a time of the collage, remix, and making new things from cultural and historical detritus; ii) Breakdown of distinction between high and low culture; iii) Depthlessness, or everything is a surface; iv) Waning of affect and death of the individual subject: We are fragmented individuals, numbers within the world machine, broken apart and reassembled without the trace of history for experiencing emotion or desire beyond what is dictated by immediacy of the present; v) A new technology: computers makes possible reproduction instead of production. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard‘s (1929-2007) Simulacra and Simulation (1981, trans. 1983) is a useful text for thinking about the former as a copy without an original and the latter as replicated real-world processes over time.

William Gibson

William Gibson (1948-) is considered a trailblazer if not the founder of the kind of SF that came to be known as cyberpunk. He spent most of his youth in the small Appalachian town of Wytheville, Virginia before setting out to join the counterculture in California and Europe and eventually settling in Vancouver, British Columbia where he continues to live today. He earned a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 1977. At UBC, he took a class on SF from Susan Wood (1948-1980). He wrote his first short story, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” as an assignment in Wood’s class. On his way to becoming a published SF writer, Gibson wrote letters and contributed to fanzines, including his co-founded Genre Plat and his column in Wing Window, which included his remembrance of Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), “Some Blues for Horselover Fat” in the second issue (March 1982). He was named an SFWA Grand Master in 2019.

Gibson’s “Some Blues for Horselover Fat” reinforces Norman Spinrad’s assertions above that Gibson and the cyberpunks/Neuromantics were New Wave SF in the guise of Hard SF. As discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above, Horselover Fat is Dick’s alter ego in the novel VALIS (1981), which ends with Horselover Fat going in search of answers to the 2-3-74 event, but the character “Phil Dick” stays at home watching TV looking for answers there. The television is a screen, an interface, a portal through which we receive news and entertain. It is a one-way connection to the outside world and other people. Then, two years later Gibson’s magnum opus Neuromancer (1984) opens with these lines: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” This techno-sky is above a port, a place where people and goods enter and leave. It is an interface between one place and another. Above it we see the unnatural image of the sky: technologized, scrambled, something hidden now in the age of digital HDTV, before when you tuned to a channel without a signal, you saw a visual representation of background radio noise as rapid black and white snow falling on the screen. A dead channel implies no communication or the breakdown of communication and perhaps there is too much noise for the passage through the port or its interfaces. The metaphor of the television tuned to a dead channel conjures Dick and New Wave SF at the beginning of the major work that heralded something new in SF: cyberpunk.

In “Burning Chrome” (July 1982) and the Sprawl trilogy, which includes Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), Gibson establishes a framework of characteristics for his own writing that is also reflected in the work of other cyberpunk writers. These are: i) Rich metaphors deployed to describe the post industrial world, like the “The sky above the port . . .” passage discussed above; ii) Coining the term “cyberspace” in “Burning Chrome” and then defining it in Neuromancer as, “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding….” Cyberspace becomes a widely traded term to describe where one goes on a computer whether it be in cyberpunk fiction or real life; iii) “The street finds its own uses for things,” a recurring aphorism in Gibson’s fiction that means things, aka technology, is unleashed and free once it makes its way into the hands of its users. A device meant for one purpose might be repurposed in a hundred other new, unexpected, and possibly unintended ways. But, this points the way to a remarkable freedom and power of the users of technology to use their tools how they see fit; iv) Even the least technologically savvy person’s life is overwhelmingly mediated by networks of technology, capital, and power. There is no constitutive outside to these networks everyone is trapped within; and v) Gibson has opined over the years that “the future has arrived; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” He, like others before him, including Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan, recognized that the future is already around us in various technologies and cutting edge science. The problem is that these futuristic aspects of culture have not yet been evenly distributed, meaning not everyone, everywhere has access to these technologies yet. In a sense, there is a haves and have nots sense to the future, which raises the question, “whose future are we talking about?”

Sprawl Trilogy and Stories

William Gibson’s short stories “Johnny Mnemonic” (May 1981), “Burning Chrome” (July 1982), and “New Rose Hotel” (July 1984) were all published in the magazine OMNI, which specialized in writing about science, technology, futurism, and SF. These stories share the same universe as his Sprawl Trilogy of novels discussed below. The magazine was founded by Bob Guccione (1930-2010), who was also the publisher of the men’s magazine Penthouse, and his spouse Kathy Keeton (1939-1997). Having run from 1978 to 1997, OMNI ceased publication after Keeton’s death. It was a cutting edge magazine that was an upstart in the otherwise establishment SF publication industry. Perhaps it’s not surprising that OMNI published these bleeding edge cyberpunk stories.

“Johnny Mnemonic” (May 1981) is about a data trafficker who has had a data storage system implanted in his head. This system allows him to safely carry sensitive data across great distances without having to rely on vulnerable computer networks. However, this also means that he is constantly in danger, as those seeking access to the data will stop at nothing to obtain it even if it means killing Johnny. In the opening scenes, we see Johnny meeting with his latest client, Ralfi Face, at the Drome Bar. Ralfi is eager to retrieve the data he has paid for, but things quickly turn south when Johnny discovers that there is a hit out on him. Ralfi’s bodyguard, Lewis, attempts to capture Johnny with a neural disruption device, but he is saved by Molly, a razorgirl who has undergone extensive body modification (Molly reappears throughout the series). With Ralfi dead, Johnny and Molly team up to extract the data from Johnny’s head before anyone else gets hurt. They visit Jones, a cybernetically enhanced dolphin who used to work for the military locating and hacking enemy mines. With Jones’ help, they find the password needed to unlock the data and begin the process of downloading it and uploading a piece to a yakuza satellite with a warning the rest will be released if Johnny is harmed. However, the yakuza assassin who killed Ralfi is still after Johnny, so Molly devises a plan to lure him into a trap. She brings Johnny to the Killing Floor, a sprung-floor arena rigged with synthesizers and amplifiers, where she dances around the assassin until he becomes overwhelmed by the noise and accidentally severs his own hand with his monomolecular wire. Afterwards, Johnny decides to leave behind his life as a data trafficker and join forces with Molly to start a new career as a blackmailer. Using Jones’ SQUID, they are able to recover all of the data Johnny has ever carried and use it to their advantage against past clients.

“Burning Chrome” (July 1982) concerns the cyber-heist of a big-time criminal known as Chrome, a woman who runs a brothel of meat puppets, or prostitutes who thanks to a cybernetic implant in their brain are rendered unconscious while johns do what they want with their bodies, called the House of Blue Lights. Automatic Jack, a hardware specialist with a cybernetic arm, and his friend Bobby Quine, a hacker and software specialist, meet a girl named Rikki, who they both become infatuated with. Bobby wants to impress her, so he convinces Jack to use a powerful Russian icebreaker program, a program that hacks through another computer’s defensive systems that Jack had obtained to help him pull off a big heist. They target the criminal named Chrome. Jack and Bobby are ultimately successful and steal all of Chrome’s ill-gotten money, but they discover that Rikki had been selling her body as a meat puppet in Chrome’s House of Blue Lights and used her own money to buy an exclusive set of Zeiss Ikon cybernetic eyes, which had wanted so as to gain opportunities for work in the entertainment industry in. However, Jack knows that Rikki really wanted to go to Chiba City in Japan, so he secretly changes her flight to there with a return trip option. She never returns and Jack and Bobby never see Rikki again.

“New Rose Hotel” (July 1984) explores the world of the Sprawl Trilogy where powerful corporations rule supreme, and the human capital of their employees holds immense value. As technology rapidly progresses, traditional forms of corporate espionage lose relevance, leading to a shift towards luring valuable employees from one company to another despite the challenges and hurdles in place to prevent this from happening. Fox and the unnamed narrator are recruited by Hosaka to acquire genetic scientist Hiroshi Yomiuri from Maas Biolabs GmbH, a German adversary. To accomplish this goal, they enlist the help of Sandii, a seductress tasked with convincing Hiroshi to change loyalties. While the operation seems successful initially, the narrator discovers an unmarked computer disk in Sandii’s possession on the eve of Hiroshi’s departure. However, he dismisses the importance of this discovery. As planned, Hosaka eradicates any traces of their involvement in the affair, paying the trio handsomely, and sending them packing. Unfortunately, tragedy strikes when every individual present at the Marrakech laboratory succumbs to a sudden virulent illness. Consequently, Hosaka accuses Fox and the narrator of sabotage, eliminating their finances, severing ties, and dispatching hitmen to eliminate them both. Amidst this chaos, the narrator learns that Sandii had double crossed them, working for Maas all along, and she was responsible for programming the lethal virus. The story concludes with the narrator holed up in the title’s capsule hotel, contemplating taking his own life. He ruminates about his love for Sandii, the missed opportunity to expose her betrayal via the mysterious disk, and anticipates Hosaka’s impending arrival.

Neuromancer (1984) tells the story of Henry Dorsett Case, a low-level hustler living in the dystopian city of Chiba, Japan. When he is approached by Molly Millions, an augmented mercenary on behalf of ex-military officer Armitage, he agrees to help steal a valuable ROM module in exchange for fixing his damaged nervous system. As they navigate the dangerous underground world, Case and Molly discover secrets about Armitage’s past and encounter various challenges before finally reaching the target location. In order to complete their mission, Case must enter cyberspace and break through software barriers with the help of an AI called Wintermute. However, things take a turn when Armitage’s true identity as Colonel Willis Corto comes back to haunt him. Ultimately, Case successfully completes his mission, and Wintermute merges with another AI named Neuromancer to create a super-intelligence. Though his relationship with Molly ends, Case continues working as a hacker and receives payment for his services. Meanwhile, Wintermute/Neuromancer searches for other intelligences like itself and discovers a signal from the Alpha Centauri star system. It is the only novel to have won the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Philip K. Dick Award.

Count Zero (1986) opens with strange things beginning to happen in the Matrix seven years after the events of Neuromancer. Powerful multinational corporations, Maas Biolabs and Hosaka, engage in a battle over control of new biochip technology. Meanwhile, Christopher Mitchell escapes with his daughter Angie, carrying secret plans for the valuable “biosoft” sought by billionaire Josef Virek. Simultaneously, amateur hacker Bobby Newmark, the self-appointed Count Zero, is saved from death while running black market software by an apparition of a girl made of light. Eventually, it’s revealed that this girl is Angie, and the two finally meet physically at the end of the book. Former art gallery owner Marly Krushkova is also drawn into the conflict as she searches for the creators of a series of futuristic collages that Virek believes contain clues to the biosoft construction. Throughout the book, the Matrix becomes home to sentient beings, but most of humanity remains unaware of its inhabitants.

Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) weaves together multiple interconnected plots and includes familiar characters such as Molly Millions from earlier novels like Neuromancer. It is set 15 years after Neuromancer and eight years after Count Zero. The first plot thread follows Mona, a teenage prostitute caught up in a plan to kidnap popular SimStim actress Angie Mitchell. Meanwhile, a young Yakuza leader’s daughter, Kumiko, flees to London where she meets Molly, who protects her. Artist Slick Henry struggles with amnesia caused by memory-erasing punishment while watching over a comatose man, Bobby Newmark, connected to an incredible data storage system known as an Aleph. Finally, Angie deals with drug addiction given to her by her production company that prevents her from accessing cyberspace directly. Ultimately, Angie and Bobby upload their minds into the Aleph and encounter an alien artificial intelligence near Centauri.

Hermes 2000 and Floppy Disk eBooks

It’s notable that Gibson wrote Neuromancer and Count Zero on a Hermes 2000 typewriter from the early 20^th century. Its keys are made out of celluloid, the same kind of material that used to be used for film projection reels, which means that they occasionally caught fire if cigarette ash fell on the keys. Gibson admits that he had never used a computer before writing his cyberpunk stories. The inspiration for the cyberspace deck comes from a bus stop ad for the Apple IIc—he thought that was the whole computer—he didn’t realize that it needed a separate monitor. However, the Apple IIc wasn’t released until April 24, 1984—only two months before Neuromancer was published. This means that Gibson is likely mistaken about the inspiration being an Apple IIc, but there were other portable computers such as the Compaq Portable from January 1983 and the Commodore SX-64 followed in 1984. So, we’re not really sure what Gibson based his idea of the cyberspace deck on, but it suffices to say that Gibson did not know anything about computers beyond what he had experienced in SF and in other readings. He did not have first hand experience of computers and it is perhaps his not knowing about computers that allowed him to imagine cyberspace. Also, Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy became one of the first ebooks. They were released on a single floppy disk by the Voyager Company. It was designed to be read on the relatively new Apple Macintosh Portable. Over time and through acquisitions, the Voyager Company morphed into what we now know as the Criterion Collection. Like the Criterion Collection DVDs and Bluray discs, Voyager wanted to add value to the books through technology and special features—in Gibson’s case, a new afterword to his 1980s fiction from the early 1990s that you can only find on that floppy disk—though, it has made its way to the Internet if you know where to look. More details about these aspects of Gibson’s work can be found in Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives, Jason W. Ellis’ 2012 dissertation at Kent State University.

The X-Files, “Kill Switch”

A television episode that riffs on cyberpunk themes is The X-Files episode titled “Kill Switch,” which was co-written by William Gibson and another cyberpunk writer, Tom Maddox. The X-Files was created by Chris Carter for the FOX Network’s Friday night lineup. It stars David Duchovny (1960-) as Special Agent Fox Mulder (who represents the romantic) and Gillian Anderson (1968-) as Special Agent Dana Scully (who represents the scientific). It was originally on the air from 1993-2002 for nine seasons, but its story has continued in two films: Fight the Future in 1998 and I Want to Believe in 2008, and in two television revivals in 2015-2017. Its central story follows Mulder and Scully, who investigate the so-called X-Files—cases too strange or weird to be taken seriously by the FBI. There is an overarching mythos of alien colonization facilitated by the duplicitous shadow government known as the “Syndicate.” Its popularity led to two spin-off shows: Millennium (1996-1999) and The Lone Gunmen (2001). “Kill Switch” is what we call a “Monster of the Week” episode, which means that its story is self-contained and not contributory to the overarching X-Files mythos. It is a cyberpunk story that features goths, an artificial intelligence, and transcendence of the body by digitizing the human mind. It’s the closest 45 minutes of television has come to Gibson’s brand of cyberpunk. It aired on February 15, 1998, 16 years after “Burning Chrome” and 14 years after Neuromancer.

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling (1954-) is a Texas SF writer and editor currently living in Italy. If Gibson’s work set the stage for cyberpunk, then Sterling was the movement’s MC. The following are four significant contributions Sterling made to the cyberpunk movement. First, he wrote the Shaper/Mechanist stories. These are collected in Schismatrix (1985) and Crystal Express (1989). He imagined a near future in which there would be two mutually exclusive approaches to human augmentation: shapers/biological intervention and mechanists/technological intervention. In both cases, human beings were slated to become cyborgs of one kind or another in order to cope with the rapidly changing technology and living conditions (living in a polluted earth, living in space, etc.). He imagined new ways of human existence in these stories that question what it means to be human at all. Second, he edited the collection titled Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986). Mirrorshades is now downloadable for free here from the website of mathematician and SF writer/cyberpunk Rudy Rucker (1946-). Sterling was the great popularizer and promoter of cyberpunk. This anthology gave him a platform to define what the revolution was in its manifesto-like preface. Third, Sterling published a fanzine from 1983 to 1986 called Cheap Truth under the pseudonym Vincent Omniaveritas (i.e., Vincent=conquer, Omnia=all, and veritas=truth). In its last issue in 1986, it reports that Omniaveritas has been shot and killed. The revolution was over. It had ended nearly as soon as it had begun. And fourth, Sterling coined the term “slipstream.” Slipstream describes speculative fiction stories that are ambiguously between SF, fantasy, and mainstream literature. He has won a number of awards for his SF including the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “Bicycle Repairman” (1996) and the 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “Taklamakan” (1998).

With The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), he published an important non-fiction account of US law enforcement’s attacks on the Legion of Doom network, including the outrageous raid on Steve Jackson Games, and the subsequent founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight for our rights online.

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan (1953-) is a New York-born SF writer who lives in London, England. She studied theater at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1975 after studying science fiction writing with James E. Gunn (1923-2020), one of the early innovators who argued for the study and teaching of science fiction in higher education. Because Cadigan’s fiction doesn’t posit a conceptual breakthrough or paradigmatic shift like Sterling’s Shaper/Mechanist stories assert, her fiction is more like Gibson’s—the future is already here, but it is not yet equally distributed, never will be, and things will continue on much as they had done in the past simply with new gear.

Some of the central themes in her work include: i) Neuronarratives, or stories in which the brain, brain biology, and neuro-technologies are central to the story. Put another way, the brain is where the action is; ii) She values marginalized art and creative work: hacking, music, and video; and iii) Identity is tied to the psychology of mind as much as the biology of the brain—technologies can allow us to share identity through memory and if we are not careful with our brain/computer interfaces we threaten our sense of self.

Some of Cadigan’s work to consider includes: “Rock On” (1984), which is about cyborg enhancements and computer technologies to facilitate shared, psychedelic experiences generated by “synners.” The world of synners is shown to be more complicated and dangerous by the rapid development of new technology and antagonistic AIs in the novel Synners (1991). “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1986) is about virtual reality and the simulation of human intelligence. It raises questions about agency and exploitation, and its central theme—as is true of much cyberpunk—is the posthuman. Fools (1992) deals with the fragmentation of identity. Tea from an Empty Cup (1998) and Dervish is Digital (2000) concerns a bleak world where many escape it through online life in “Artificial Reality” or AR.

Contemporary Science Fiction

While attempting to go in new directions and include new writers and fans, SF has overcome and been tempered by the Gamergate harassment campaign as well as the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies unsuccessful attempts to skew the Hugo Awards. And British fantasy writer Jeannette Ng’s incredibly raw acceptance speech for the John. W. Campbell, Jr. Award for Best New Writer confronted the award’s namesakes’ inescapable flaws. Her speech ignited much-needed conversations that ultimately led to the award’s renaming to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

SF, as a genre and a fandom, is on its way to becoming more diverse, inclusive, and representative. This chapter includes snapshots of contemporary writers who are a part of that in terms of their identity, the characters and stories they create, their engagement with social justice in its many forms including race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, and economics/class.

Historical Context

Some of the major political and news headlines of the first two decades of the 21st century included: George W. Bush began his first term as US President in 2001. Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 resulting with 2,977 victims, the destruction of the World Trade Center, striking the Pentagon, and four passenger airliners. The US invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 to remove the Taliban from power. London suffered the July 7, 2005 Underground attacks with 52 deaths and over 700 injured. The US invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, which began another war lasting eight years. Russia demonstrates its assassination reach in several cases, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 on Nov. 1, 2006 and the unsuccessful Novichok nerve agent poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on Mar. 4, 2018. Barack Obama was elected as first African-American president on November 4, 2008 and held office for two terms. Avatar, an SF film, opened on Dec. 18, 2009 and became the highest grossing film of all time. Osama bin Laden, mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, is killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011. Steve Jobs died on Oct. 5, 2011. The US withdrew from Iraq on Dec. 18, 2011. Teenager Trayvon Martin is shot dead by George Zimmerman on Feb. 26, 2012. George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and its intellectual property, including Star Wars and Indiana Jones, to The Walt Disney Company on October 30, 2012. In 2013, Edward Snowden released evidence of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. In 2015, the US Supreme Court affirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry. On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared with 239 people aboard. On Nov. 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president. In 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was elected the first female president of Taiwan. North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb on Sept. 3, 2017. On Dec. 18, 2019, President Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union on Jan. 31, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020. Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in Brunswick, Georgia on Feb. 23, 2020, but facts of the case were not widely known until the release of the video shot by one of the assailants involved on May 5, 2020. George Floyd is murdered by a police officer on May 25, 2020, which initiates widespread protests for racial justice. US manned space flights restart after ending in 2011 with the use of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on May 30, 2020. Joe Biden is elected president and Kamala Harris is elected as first female vice president in Nov. 2020, but outgoing President Trump leads an unprecedented effort to overturn the election leading up to the insurrectionist attacks at the US Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021. Before leaving office, President Trump was impeached a second time–the first time this had happened in US history. US troops withdrawal from Afghanistan completes on Aug. 30, 2021 following the fall of Kabul on Aug. 15, 2021. The Taliban resume their control over Afghanistan. Russia invades Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. On Sept. 8, 2022, Queen Elisabeth II died in England having reigned since 1952. Her son succeeds her as Charles III. The world’s population reached 8 billion on Nov. 15, 2022. Finland joins NATO on April 4, 2023. Hamas led a sneak attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 that resulted in 1,139 deaths and the taking of at least 250 civilian, children, and soldier hostages. Israel subsequently invaded Gaza with the goals of freeing hostages and removing Hamas leadership.

Mass shooting incidents grip the United States during these decades. There are many, but the following are among the worst: 13 killed at the Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999; 33 dead at the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, 27 dead at the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting on Dec. 14, 2012; 9 killed at the Charleston church massacre on June 17, 2015; 49 killed at the Pulse Club shooting in Orlando on June 12, 2016; 60 dead and 413 injured at the Route 91 Harvest music festival shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017; 17 dead at the Parkland, Florida school shooting on Feb. 14, 2018; 10 African-Americans killed and 3 injured at the Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York on May 14, 2022; and 22 dead at the Robb Elementary School shooting on May 24, 2022. The rest of the world was not immune to gun violence either. For example, in Norway on July 22, 2011, a lone attacker used a bomb in Oslo to kill 8 and injure 209 and firearms to kill 69 and injure 32 at a summer camp in the island of Utøya in Tyrifjorden, Buskerud, and in Christchurch, New Zealand a lone shooter killed 51 at two mosques on Mar. 15, 2019.

Science and technology advancements and innovations continue in the 21st century, but these are tempered by tragedy, too. Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas and Louisiana on reentry on Feb. 1, 2003. The supersonic Concorde flew its last flight in 2003. Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 and began their missions with surprisingly prolonged success. The iPhone was introduced by Steve Jobs on Jan. 9, 2007. Large Hadron Collider completed in 2008. Tesla Roadster launched in 2008. iPad launched in 2010. NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. New unmanned missions were launched to Jupiter and Mars in 2011. The Higgs boson was discovered by the LHC in 2012. Gravitational waves detection confirmed on Feb. 11, 2016. China lands the unmanned Chang’e 4 lander on the far side of the Moon on Jan. 3, 2019. The Event Horizon Telescope took the first picture of a black hole on April 10, 2019. On Oct. 18, 2019, Jessica Meir and Christina Koch conducted the first all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station. The US Space Force was announced on Dec. 20, 2019. On Oct. 20, 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx collects material from an asteroid. This material was returned to Earth successfully in 2023. In December 2020, the first vaccines for COVID-19 received emergency authorization for use–one used the adenovirus vector and the other RNA. NASA’s Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter drone landed on Mars at the Octavia E. Butler Landing site and began their missions on Feb. 18, 2021. NASA’s Juno spacecraft flies by the Jupiter moon of Ganymede on Jun. 7, 2021. Private space flight competition increases with Blue Origin’s first human test flight on July 19, 2021. The first all civilian space flight, Inspiration4 was launched on Sept. 16, 2021. The first malaria vaccine was approved by the WHO on Oct. 6, 2021. Russia tests an anti-satellite weapon that sends debris toward the ISS on Nov. 16, 2021. On July 11, 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope took its first deep field image, which revealed the oldest and highest resolution image of the universe to that point. On Sept. 25, 2022, NASA’s DART mission tested an asteroid redirection system for future use when an asteroid might be on a collision course with the Earth. OpenAI launches ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. On Dec. 13, 2022, the National Ignition Facility achieved its first nuclear fusion ignition.

Social media and crowdsourcing began and many sites, apps, and services launched: Wikipedia in 2001, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter, Spotify, and Roblox in 2006, Bitcoin cryptocurrency in 2009, and Instagram in 2010. Augmented reality game Pokemon Go is released in 2016. TikTok is launched in 2016. ActivityPub protocol developed in 2018 to enable distributed social media via what came to be called the fediverse in 2019. Fediverse platforms include Mastodon, Lemmy, and Threads. Twitter craters following its purchase by Elon Musk in 2022 and subsequent rebranding as “X” in 2023.

Natural disasters caused mayhem and death on unprecedented scales in the 21st century. Some of these were exacerbated by climate change, which is increasingly causing its own catastrophes concerning temperatures, access to clean water, and weather intensification. On Dec. 26, 2004, the Boxing Day Tsunami in the Indian Ocean killed 230,000 people. Hurricane Katrina killed 1,836 in August 2005. On Jan. 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake killed 230,000 people in Haiti. The 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland snarled European air travel for months. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy killed 233 people and caused billions in damage. On Feb. 15, 2013, a meteor exploded over Russia injuring many and damaging buildings. In 2014, an Ebola epidemic in West Africa resulted in almost 30,000 infections and over 11,000 deaths. Hurricanes in 2017 were particularly deadly and costly with Harvey, Irma, and Maria. A June 12 to September 12, 2022 heatwave in Europe leads to tens of thousands of deaths.

One of the worst man-made disasters was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on April 20, 2010 is the largest oil spill in US history in the Gulf of Mexico.

Natural and man-made disasters converged on March 11, 2011 when a 9.0 earthquake in Japan triggered a massive tsunami with 19,759 deaths and 2,553 people missing. The tsunami also knocked out the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant, which had a meltdown and explosion resulting in permanent displacement of families living nearby and a contaminated water problem that is currently being addressed by release in the Pacific Ocean.

Contemporary SF writers respond and grapple with the rapidly changing technological landscape that is changing the way we interact with one another and with computer technology. The political shifts of the 21st century have been divisive and unsettling, which appears in various guises in their fiction, too. The following is a small selection of only a few contemporary but influential or up-and-coming SF writers.

Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang (1967-) is an SF writer and freelance technical writer. He was born in Port Jefferson, New York. He essentially works on technical writing for six months and SF for six months. He specializes in short science fiction—short stories and novellas. When he was younger, he had wanted to be a physicist. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Brown University. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was a significant influence on his development when he was 12, and this was followed by Arthur C. Clarke’s work. One word that captures his kind of SF would be “philosophical.” In an interview, he responds to this by saying, “Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. When philosophers propose thought experiments as a way of analyzing certain questions, their thought experiments often sound a lot like science fiction. I think that there’s a very good fit between the two” (qtd. in Solomon, Avi. “Ted Chiang on Writing.” BoingBoing, 22 July 2010, https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.htm, par. 12). Another term for thought experiments is the German term “Gedankenexperiment.”

Chiang has won numerous awards for his writing: “Tower of Babylon” (1990) won the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novelette; “Story of Your Life” (1998) won the 1999 Nebula for Best Novella; “Hell is the Absence of God” (2001) won the 2002 Locus Award for Best Novelette, 2002 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, and 2003 Nebula for Best Novelette; his collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) won the 2003 Locus Award for Best Collection, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007) won the 2008 Nebula for best Novelette and 2008 Hugo for Best Novelette; “Exhalation” (2008) won the 2009 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction and 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story; “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” (2010) won the 2011 Locus Award for Best Novella and 2011 Hugo for Best Novella; the film Arrival (2016) based on “Story of Your Life” (1998) won the 2017 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form; his second collection Exhalation: Stories (2019) won the Locus Award for Best Collection; and “Omphalos” (2019) won the 2020 Locus Award for Best Novelette.

Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” (2013) is a science fiction short story that explores our becoming more digitally literate in the future with the introduction of new technologies by interweaving a story about the Tiv people of West Africa transitioning from an oral to literate (writing) culture, and about our future transition from a literate to digital culture. In the former story, literacy seems like a better means of communicating truth than speech, but writing’s permanence does not convey what is right for the Tiv people in the way that speech can through impermanence. In the latter story, digital technology seems like a danger to human memory and relationships by recording everything and reducing how much we would need to rely on our own biological memories, but these new digital communication technologies actually serve a good purpose by redeeming the narrator’s false narrative about himself formed within his infallible memory.

N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin (1972-) is an American SF and fantasy writer. Based in Brooklyn, New York, she writes stories with themes including, in her words, “resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up.” She holds a B.S. in Psychology from Tulane University and a M.Ed. from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the first person to win three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel for her Broken Earth series (The Fifth Season, 2015; The Obelisk Gate, 2016; and The Stone Sky, 2017), making it also the first trilogy to win a Hugo for each installment. Her first novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010) won the 2011 Locus Award for Best First Novel. The Stone Sky (2017), the conclusion of the Broken Earth series won in addition to a Hugo Award, the 2018 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Her novel The City We Became (2020) won the 2021 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. Her collection of short stories, How Long ‘Til Black Future Month? (2018) won an Alex Award from the American Library Association and a Locus Award for Best Collection. Following other SF writers including Octavia E. Butler, Junot Díaz, and Kelly Link, Jemisin won a 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow (1971-) is a Canadian-British SF writer. He is a proponent of open culture who practices what he preaches by offering his work for free in addition to selling it without digital rights management (DRM) or in print editions. In addition to his fiction writing, he is a social activist online and IRL promoting personal rights, digital rights, and worker’s rights. His fiction often involves computers, networking, collaboration, and asserting one’s rights and agency with digital technology. William Gibson’s aphorism, “the street finds its own use for things” is a strong theme in Doctorow’s writing. To describe the process by which new digital technologies are introduced, monetized, and made less useful for users, he coined the now widely used term, enshittification. He won the 2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the 2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), 2006 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “I, Robot” (2005), 2007 Locus Award for Best Novelette for “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” (2006), the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for Little Brother (2008), and three Prometheus Awards–2009 for Little Brother, 2013 for Pirate Cinema (2012), and 2014 for Homeland (2013).

Charlie Jane Anders

Charlie Jane Anders (1969-) is an American SF writer who has demonstrated a versatility in the types of stories and audiences for her work. Her first novel, Choir Boy (2005) is a non-SF coming-of-age story about a boy using medical interventions to transition gender in order to keep his voice from changing. Of course, there are other changes that take place and repercussions that he has to grapple with. It won a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. She has won numerous awards for her SF: “Six Months, Three Days” (2011) won the 2012 Hugo for Best Novelette; All the Birds in the Sky (2016) won the 2017 Nebula for Best Novel, 2017 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and 2017 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts; The City in the Middle of the Night (2019) won the 2020 Locus Award for Best SF Novel; Even Greater Mistakes (2021) won the 2022 Locus for Best Collection; Victories Greater Than Death (2021) won the 2022 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel; Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak (2022) won the 2023 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Novel; and Never Say You Can’t Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories (2021) won the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Related Work. With Annalee Newitz and Veronica Simonetti, she won the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Fancast for Our Opinions Are Correct.

Martha Wells

Martha Wells (1964-) is an American fantasy and SF writer. During her early career, she was recognized for her fantasy Ile-Rien series (1993-2015) and The Books of the Raksura (2011-2017). Like Ursula K. Le Guin (discussed in the Feminist SF chapter above), her work is strengthened by her attention to world building and social structures. Her educational background with a B.A. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University likely supports her work in this regard. In the second phase of her career, she has become renowned for her series The Murderbot Diaries, about a cyborg Security Unit that breaks its programming enabling it to have independent thought and self-direction. Calling itself Murderbot, it prefers to watch soap operas. The Murderbot Diaries‘s All Systems Red (2017) won the 2018 Alex Award from the American Library Association, 2018 Hugo Award for Best Novella, 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novella, and 2018 Locus Award for Best Novella; Artificial Condition (2018) won the 2019 Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novella; and Network Effect (2020) won the 2021 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for Best Novel. The Murderbot Diaries also won the 2021 Hugo for Best Series.

Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal (1969-) is a SF and fantasy writer with an educational and professional background as a professional puppeteer for the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Productions, and the popular Icelandic children’s show LazyTown. Her stories have explored animal studies, artificial intelligence, and alternate history. She won the 2008 John W. Campbell, Jr. Award for Best New Writer; 2010 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “For Want of a Nail” (2010); 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Lady Astronauts of Mars” (2012); and the 2018 Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for The Calculating Stars (2018).

Ken Liu

Ken Liu (1976-) is an SF and fantasy writer and Chinese SF translator, with a background in technology and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. His translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem (2008, trans. 2014) is the first translated work to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel (2015). Other translations by Liu have been recognized, too: “The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Quiufan (2011) won the 2012 Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award for Short Form and Death’s End by Cixin Liu (2016) won the 2017 Locus Award for Best SF Novel. His own writing has won a number of accolades: “The Paper Menagerie” (2011) won the 2011 Nebula Award for Best Short Story, 2012 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction; “Mono no aware” (2012) won the 2013 Hugo Award for Best Short Story; “The Long Haul: From the Annals of Transportation, the Pacific Monthly, May 2009” (2015) won the 2015 Sidewise Award for Alternate History; The Grace of Kings (2015) won the 2016 Locus Award for Best First Novel; and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) won the 2017 Locus Award for Best Collection.

R. F. Kuang

R. F. Kuang (1996-) is an American speculative fiction writer. She immigrated with her family from China when she was a child. She has forged paths of tremendous academic success (a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown, a Marshall Scholarship supporting an M.Phil. from Cambridge and a M.Sc. from Oxford, and currently an in-process Ph.D. at Yale) and meteoric literary accomplishments (Astounding Award for Best New Writer, 2020; 2019 IAFA William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Novel and 2019 Compton Crook Stephen Tall Memorial Award for Best First Novel for The Poppy War (2018); and 2023 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and 2023 Nebula for Best Novel for Babel (2022). Through the lens of speculative fiction, she explores the consequences of violence and power dynamics, often drawing upon historical events to showcase the impact of societal structures on individuals and communities.

SF Film from 1960 Onward

1960s

The 1960s featured some of the most significant SF films that continue to resonate today. Alien interventions, artificial intelligence, miniaturization, and evolution in the far future.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) and written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008). In a visually evocative and stunning story that extends from humanity’s distant evolutionary past to our future as a space faring race, it reveals the influence of aliens on humanity via the Monolith and the Star Gate and how the technologies these interventions might have made possible over the millenia could be seen as necessary hurdles or doom of our own making. One of its enduring characters in the popular imagination is the murderous HAL 9000, a computer with artificial intelligence that operates the systems aboard the ship and attempts to kill the crew of Discovery One fearing they were a threat to its secret mission to rendezvous with a larger alien artifact above Jupiter.

Fantastic Voyage (1966), directed by Richard Fleischer (1917-2006), who had also directed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) for Walt Disney, and written by Harry Kleiner (1916-2007), based on a story by Otto Klement (1891-1983) and Jerome Bixby (1923-1998), is an exciting adventure story in which a specialized submarine and its crew are miniaturized and introduced into the body of a scientist to remove an otherwise inoperable brain clot in order to save his life. Besides the excitement of the body’s defenses to deal with, the crew has a Soviet saboteur to contend with as well.

Planet of the Apes (1968), directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (1920-1989) and written by Michael Wilson (1914-1978) and Rod Serling (1924-1975). Like an H. G. Wells evolutionary tale (see the Proto SF chapter above), two astronauts crash on a world like Earth but its dominant inhabitants are intelligent apes and primitive inhabitants appear to be human. Unbeknownst to the astronauts, they have arrived on the Earth of the future, which is revealed when Taylor, played by Charlton Heston (1923-2008), discovers the remains of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sands of a beach.

1970s

SF films advanced in terms of storytelling and special effects in the 1970s.

Stanley Kubrick returned to the genre to direct an adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (1971). George Lucas (1944-) makes his now ironic THX 1138 (1971) about state control (e.g., mechanoid police that the citizenry build themselves) and wasteful consumerism (e.g., characters buy boxes that they promptly throw away when they arrive home). It’s ironic because he capitalized on the merchandising rights of his subsequent SF film Star Wars (1977), which became the highest grossing film at that time but also one that inaugurated the largest toy industry around film intellectual property of the time.

Douglas Trumbull (1942-2022), who worked on the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed the landmark ecological SF film Silent Running (1972). SF writer Michael Crichton (1942-2008), author of Jurassic Park (1990), wrote and directed the 1973 android thriller Westworld. Steven Spielberg (1946-) wrote and directed the alien encounter and abduction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Robert Wise (1914-2005), who had previously directed The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, discussed in the chapter on SF Film through the 1950s above) directed Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which picks up with the Enterprise crew on the launching of an updated and refitted NCC-1701 to investigate and hopefully stop an alien entity hidden within a powerful energy cloud. Unbeknownst to the crew, the alien is a race of machines that assimilated the lost Voyager 6 probe and were attempting to fulfill its mission of gathering data and sending it back to Earth.

While perhaps not produced as explicit feminist SF films, Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986, discussed in the next section) reflect some of the characteristics of the movement. Both are led by a heroine, confront sexist attitudes, explore alien procreation thereby highlighting differences with human biology, and calling into question what it means to be a mother. The first film in the series, Alien (1979) is directed by Ridley Scott (1937-) with a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon (1946-2009) and released by 20th Century Fox. H. R. Giger (1940-2014), the Swiss artist, was recruited to design the Alien xenomorph of the title after co-writer Dan O’Bannon saw his painting “Necronom IV” (1976). Giger’s art is about sexualized bodies, technology, and the alien other. It is an example of horror SF with action elements. The film follows the crew of the Nostromo who are dispatched to investigate an anomaly by their employer while returning to Earth with cargo. On the surface of the planet LV-426, they discover a derelict spacecraft of nonhuman origin. Inside, one of the crew is impregnated by a “facehugger”—the first stage in the lifecycle of the Alien. Inside a human host, the implanted egg grows until the larvae is viable and it bursts violently from the host’s chest. The crew of the Nostromo have to deal with this unknown Alien aboard their spacecraft as it kills them off one-by-one. Aboard the Nostromo, one of the crewmembers is an android named Ash, played by Ian Holm (1931-2020). He works for the interests of the corporation and tries to kill Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver (1949-), because she threatens the corporations’ designs for the Alien. After blowing up the Nostromo and then having to eject the Alien into space from her lifeboat, Ripley and her cat Jones are the last crew members to survive. Throughout the film, the Nostromo’s computer called MOTHER is consulted about mission objectives and information. Like the artificial intelligence computer HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), MOTHER withholds information and releases only what is necessary to crew members who are given proper clearance.

1980s

Special effects and three-dimensional computer graphics added to the visual sophistication of SF film in the 1980s.

George Lucas executive produced The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the sequel to Star Wars. It was directed by Irvin Kershner (1923-2010) and it was written by Leigh Brackett (1915-1978), an accomplished SF writer and screenplay writer known for two well-known Howard Hawks (1896-1977) non-SF directed films: the Philip Marlowe detective story adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946) starring Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) and the western Rio Bravo (1959) starring John Wayne (1907-1979), and Lawrence Kasdan (1949-) based on a story by Lucas.

Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott and based on Philip K. Dick‘s 1969 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above), focuses on the human/android dichotomy of its source material. Deckard, played by Harrison Ford (1942-), is tasked with retiring escaped replicants (i.e., androids) who are in search of their maker Eldon Tyrell, played by Joe Turkle (1927-2022). It interrogates the issue of authenticity–is one an android or human? The androids question why they must die when they are obviously living creatures and in some respects more human than their human counterparts. The replicant Roy Batty’s ending dialog was originally written by the screenplay writer David Peoples but it was edited and elevated with poetic metaphor by the actor portraying Batty, Rutger Hauer (1944-2019): “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion… I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die.”

E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was a blockbuster SF film that connected with children and adults. The titular E.T. is accidentally left behind on Earth when government spooks try to apprehend him on an excursion from his ship, which had made a pit stop in California. Allied with local children, E.T. is able to phone home but nearly dies from homesickness and the distance between himself and his family.

Another big film of 1982 is TRON, directed by Steven Lisberger (1951-) and made by The Walt Disney Company, which is about computer programming espionage and a mainframe with artificial intelligence that wants to control the system and the real world. It involves a digitizing laser that uploads the hero Kevin Flynn played by Jeff Bridges (1949-) into the mainframe and his efforts to free the mainframe from the Master Control Program (MCP).

The original Star Wars trilogy concluded in 1983 with the film Return of the Jedi, directed by Richard Marquand (1937-1987) with a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas.

Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg (1943-) directed three of his best body horror films in the 1980s: Scanners (1981), about people with telepathic and telekinetic powers being used by a large defense contractor; Videodrome (1983), about a pirate television signal broadcasting snuff films that give viewers malignant brain tumors, recorded hallucinations, and bodily reconfigurations to absorb a death dealing handgun and a brainwashing Betamax tape; and The Fly (1986), a reimagining of the 1957 short story by George Langelaan (1908-1972) and 1958 film in which a scientist creates a teleportation device but accidentally has his DNA fuse with that of a fly caught in the teleportation pod leading to his transformation into a human/fly mutant who wants to fuse himself with his girlfriend who carries their unborn baby.

Ghostbusters (1984) directed by Ivan Reitman (1946-2022) with a screenplay by Dan Aykroyd (1952-) and Harold Ramis (1944-2014), brings a pseudoscientific sheen to paranormal activity complete with ectoplasmic residue or slime, P.K.E. meters to detect ghost activity, proton packs to use charged particles to entrap ghosts, and ghost traps to contain the spectors. It artfully walks the line between comedy genius and earnest SF.

The Last Starfighter (1984) directed by Nick Castle (1947-), who also portrayed Michael Myers in Halloween (1978) directed by John Carpenter (1948-), combines video game culture with space opera. On Earth, a video game distributed on Earth secretly tests players for their acumen as starfighters. If a player scores high enough, they are recruited to join the Rylan Star League’s fight against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada. One such player comes from a trailer park. He plays the reluctant hero who ultimately comes through to join the fight and defeat the enemy.

Aliens (1986), the sequel to Alien discussed above, is directed and written by James Cameron (1954-) following the success of his time travel/killer cyborg from the future film The Terminator (1984) and it was released by 20th Century Fox. Aliens has a flipped tone in comparison to Alien. It is action SF with horror elements. The film begins with Ripley’s lifeboat being found 57 years after the first film. During that time, she has lived in suspended animation and humans have begun to colonize LV-426 without knowing there is a dangerous alien presence on the planet. Contact is lost with the colony, and Ripley is asked to join a Space Marine detachment supposedly to rescue survivors and destroy the xenomorph aliens. Unbeknownst to Ripley and the Marines, the corporation wants to bring back xenomorph specimens to Earth for study and economic exploitation. Many Marines die in their first confrontation with the xenomorphs, but a lone young girl survivor named Newt is found. Ripley bonds with her. However, when Newt is captured by the xenomorphs and taken back to their hive to be a live host for an embryo, Ripley transforms into a super soldier to save Newt before the unstable nuclear reactor on the planet explodes. Throughout the film Ripley is shown as a strong hero, but she is often challenged by men in the corporation or by the Marines. However, she accepts tasks that prove her equality and in some cases superiority to the men. Then, there are issues of motherhood. Ripley’s daughter died on Earth while she was in suspended animation. Then, she meets the orphaned Newt on LV-426, who she fights for as a mother might. Also, the Queen Alien displays communicative intelligence and wants to protect her own brood from destruction. These are different kinds of motherhood that can’t be easily reconciled.

RoboCop (1987), directed by Paul Verhoeven (1938-), is a film about a large corporation interested in privatizing as much of a future decaying Detroit, including its police force. The beginning of push is the development of RoboCop, a cyborg of a deceased human police officer melded with a robotic body and programming blocks preventing him from remembering his family.

1990s

The 1990s featured more cyberpunk-like films and explorations of new biological technologies.

Total Recall (1990) is one of Paul Verhoeven’s great films from this decade. It is based on Philip K. Dick’s 1966 short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (discussed in the New Wave SF chapter above). The film features Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947-) as Quaid, who struggles to remember who he is after a botched virtual vacation to Mars he purchased through a company called Rekall. His adventures of discovery result in Quaid activating an alien machine that restores a breathable atmosphere to Mars and undercuts the corporate interests that his fake identity had been protecting.

The Lawnmower Man (1992), directed by Brett Leonard (1959-) and based on a Stephen King short story from 1975 with the same name, is about the ethical dilemma of human experimentation when a scientist offers cognitive enhancement to an unwitting mentally disabled person who becomes god-like within virtual reality enhanced cyberspace and harms or kills those who had once hurt him. Leonard directed a second virtual reality film in the 1990s: Virtuosity (1995), which is about a super criminal designed as part of a VR police training system unleashed into the real world and a former cop in prison for killing the person who murdered his own family is given an opportunity for a pardon by catching the new cybernetic murderer. Both The Lawnmower Man and Virtuosity reveal an anxiety around

Jurassic Park (1993), directed by Steven Spielberg with a screenplay based on Michael Crichton’s novel (mentioned in the 1970s section above), brings genetically engineered, cloned dinosaurs to life with special effects made possible by new, cutting edge computer generated images (CGI). The chaotician character Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum (1952-), says the significant line that sums up the impending disaster to park owner John Hammond played by Richard Attenborough (1923-2014), “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” This film explores the unintended consequences of these technological interventions in nature and how “nature finds a way.”

Johnny Mnemonic (1995) is a cyberpunk film directed by Robert Longo (1953-) with a script by William Gibson (discussed in the Cyberpunk chapter below) and based on his 1981 short story. Keanu Reeves (1964-) plays the titular character. While the film bombed and even the passage of time can’t really redeem it, the film gives a imperfect glimpse of Gibson’s cyberpunk future. There is a black and white version available on Blu-ray that Longo reportedly says better aligns with his vision, which he was not permitted to pursue during production.

The Fifth Element (1997), directed by the French filmmaker Luc Besson (1959-), was described by Harlan Ellison on stage at Dragon*Con 1998 in Atlanta, Georgia as “the best SF film in recent memory.” The film’s world building is thorough and convincing. Most of the characters are unique and interesting. It feels fully realized. However, the story features a simple plot involving an impending danger that can only be defeated with the combination of the five elements (four mystical stone MacGuffins and the fifth being the emotion of love). Yet, its plot carries an important lesson about how the cruelty of humanity extinguishes love and life and must be overcome if there’s any hope for tomorrow. The threat isn’t from out there; it is right here. Besson also directed Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017), which is an adaptation of the French comic book series Valérian and Laureline (1967-2018).

Gattaca (1997), directed and written by Andrew Niccol (1964-), reveals a dystopian future where only the genetically pure are permitted to advance in their careers and gain a spot on a rocket to an off-world colony. At its core, the film is a murder mystery defined by genetic evidence and the detritus that our bodies leave through our day like so many genetic breadcrumbs. It reveals how even if genetic discrimination is illegal, there are other methods of profiling and rewarding those deemed genetically superior than others.

Starship Troopers (1997) is the second great 1990s film directed by Paul Verhoeven. While its space marines are not as equipped and powerful as those in Robert A. Heinlein’s original 1959 novel, they do reveal some of the positive aspects of the novel in terms of a heterogenous armed forces who battle the alien Arachnids. Where the film’s strength comes from is the over-the-top news reports and propaganda that reflect how caught up a people and their culture can be when reality is simplified to us-versus-them/you’re either with us, or against us mentalities. The film took on additional resonance in a post-9/11 United States.

eXistenZ (1999), directed by David Cronenberg, is a cyberpunk body horror film about the high stakes of virtual reality gaming with biological game pods that connect to one’s body via an UmbiCord connected to a bio-port installed on the user’s spine. As biological technology made of cells and tissues, pods can become diseased. Micro pods within a VR game allow players to enter into a lower level of unreality. The last line of the movie is a question: “Hey, tell me the truth… are we still in the game?”

The Matrix (1999), directed by trans women siblings Lana Wachowski (1965-) and Lilly Wachowski (1967-), is the quintessential cyberpunk film, and its explorations of reality, mind, and experience can be traced back to the fiction of Philip K. Dick. It questions what would machine intelligence/artificial intelligence do if humanity were considered a threat, and how might humanity respond to machine rule in an ecologically broken world. While its sequels attempt to frame these questions as a prophetic cycle of birth, struggle, death, and renewal intermixed with martial arts displays and lots of gun battles, this film stands strong alone. It innovated the bullet time photography technique to give a three-dimensional, slowed down view of otherwise quick action movements.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) was the long-anticipated return to the Star Wars universe with George Lucas (discussed in the 1970s section above) returning as both writer and director. Set before the first Star Wars (1977) film, it tells the beginning of the Skywalker Saga when a young Christ-like child born of the force-enabling midi-chlorians is destined to become Darth Vader. The film, unfortunately, failed to meet many fans’ expectations. It was weighed down by its heavy reliance on green screen sound stages, CGI establishing shots, and motion capture CGI characters, some of which are alleged to depict racist stereotypes through their appearance, speech, and behavior. One redeeming aspect of the film are the lightsaber duels between the Jedi and Sith.

2000s

SF films of the 2000s are more visually impressive than those that came before. Many connect to earlier SF either through homage or adaptation.

Pitch Black (2000), directed by David Twohy (1955-), is an SF horror film that places the survivors of a crashed transport ship on a hazardous planet with dangerous native species. Riddick, played by Vin Diesel (1967-), is a dangerous convict also aboard the ship whose strength, skill, and night vision eye enhancements enable him to work with the others to survive. While the film might not be a cinematic masterpiece, it reminds the view of the uncaring cosmos that flirts with H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror (discussed in the Pulp SF chapter above).

Mission to Mars (2000), directed by Brian De Palma (1940-), is an interesting film about a doomed mission to the Red Planet that results in revelations of alien structures and an invitation from those who left it as a signpost for those who might follow. It certainly reaches toward the same themes as 2001: A Space Odyssey (discussed in the 1960s section above).

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), directed by Steven Spielberg, is an adaptation of Brian Aldiss‘ (1925-2017) 1969 short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long.” The film confronts rising sea levels due to global warming, population decline, androids with artificial intelligence, human jealousy of androids, and androids acting more human and humans acting like androids (a theme from Philip K. Dick discussed in the New Wave SF chapter). The film follows the android David who is cast out from his human family due to the actions of his psychopathic human brother and goes in search of his creator. It ends in the far future when David gets his Oedipal-like wish to be loved by his human mother Monica.

Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg, is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella “The Minority Report.” It is about precognition used in policing and how that system might be manipulated to frame an innocent person.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry (1963-) and screenplay by Charlie Kaufman (1958-), shows how erasing bad memories of past relationships might not be the best way to get over a lost love. Perhaps erasing the bad makes the good memories stand out more, but the good and the bad memories need to coexist for there to be any practical awareness or feeling. While this film isn’t based on a Philip K. Dick story, it is one of the most Dickian films in existence because of its focus on memory, identity, and emotional connections.

Children of Men (2006), directed by Alfonso Cuarón (1961-), is a dystopian film about the near future when the environment is destroyed by ecocide with a domino effect of human women no longer able to conceive children, except for one, who is a refugee named Kee played by Clare-Hope Ashitey (1987-). A militant group known as the Fishes conspires to move Kee to a ship called Tomorrow where she can safely give birth. It is a gut-wrenching film filled with death, but the scenes, true to Cuarón’s skill as a filmmaker, are exquisite, revealing the horror of a dying world and the people left in it. Cuarón also directed Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), arguably one of the best entries in the series, and Gravity (2013), which shows the tenacity of an astronaut played by Sandra Bullock (1964-) to find a way back to terra firma after a debris strike destroys her mission’s space shuttle during a spacewalk. The film predates the Nov. 2021 Russian anti-satellite missile test that created a debris field that threatened the International Space Station.

The Prestige (2006), directed by Christopher Nolan (1970-) and based on the novel by Christopher Priest (1943-2024), concerns a rivalry between two magicians around the turn of the 20th Century that leads to one of them to purchase a flawed teleportation machine created by Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) for a new trick. It explores to what lengths might a person go to be the best in their field by making copies of himself and disposing of the original. Nolan has a strong track record as an SF film director with Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Interstellar (2014), and Tenet (2020).

District 9 (2009), directed by Neill Blomkamp (1979-), is a striking look at the alien Other when alien refugees become stranded in South Africa where they are housed in ghetto-like districts. These aliens are called the derogatory name prawns. The protagonist Wikus van de Merwe played by Sharlto Copley (1973-) is assigned the task of relocating some of the refugees, but accidentally gets sprayed with a chemical that begins to mutate his body into those of the aliens. Through the film, he experiences firsthand the discrimination that the refugees experience and ultimately helps two refugees escape to their mothership. He remains on Earth fully transformed with an alien body. Blomkamp has explored power relationships and discrimination in his other SF films Elysium (2013), about the titular utopian space station for the elites and the poverty-striken masses who are left on Earth and denied its life saving technologies, and Chappie (2015), about a police robot with artificial intelligence who is reprogrammed into a childlike state and learns friendship from criminals with mind uploading mixed into the awkwardly touching narrative.

2010s

SF films of the second decade of the 21st century are concerned about humanity’s increasingly close relationship with personal and intelligent technologies as well as the slow unfolding of the climate crisis. The realism and Hard SF aspects of some of these films give them a strong prophetic and plausible warning that gestures to the fiction of H. G. Wells (discussed in the Proto SF chapter above).

Prometheus (2012), directed by Ridley Scott, is a film related to but not a direct prequel to the events of Scott’s earlier Alien (1979) film discussed above. It presupposes that life on Earth and perhaps other planets was made possible by DNA seeding by an earlier spacefaring race dubbed the Engineers. A privately financed mission is dispatched to seek out the homeworld of these Engineers. So, humans seek out their maker. And, aboard the ship is David, played by Michael Fassbender (1977-), who seeks to better understand his own existence as the culmination of the Engineer’s planned evolution. What they find, however, is a world where the Engineers seem to have killed themselves, perhaps by accident, while developing a biological weapon that causes mutations and makes new lifeforms possible based on the biology of a host organism. Its sequel, Alien: Covenant (2017), also directed by Scott, follows David’s attempts to create a perfect organism using the Engineer’s technology, unbeknownst to a human crew that stumbles upon the world where he is conducting his experiments.

Her (2013), directed and written by Spike Jonze (), is a near future SF film about how people interact with technology. In the film, one can purchase an operating system upgrade that includes a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence. The protagonist Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix (), names his assistant Samantha and develops a relationship with “her.” Like William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984, discussed in the Cyberpunk chapter above), the AIs join together and get upgrades that ultimately lead to their leaving Earth (for space or another dimension is not revealed). People have developed relationships with chatbots as far back as ELIZA in the mid-1960s, but this film pointed the way to where we are now with the way some individuals interact with LLMs like ChatGPT.

Snowpiercer (2013), directed by Bong Joon-ho (1969-) and based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982) by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, presents a climate change dystopia of haves and have nots aboard the Snowpiercer train that circumnavigates a now frozen Earth after a botched attempt to reverse global warming. Aboard the train, the poor live squalid lives in the back of the train and the elite live luxurious lives in the front of the train. The film follows a revolt by the poor to take control of the train, which ends with its derailment and the escape of two children who see a polar bear in the distance, meaning the Earth still supports life.

Under the Skin (2013), directed by Jonathan Glazer (1965-) and starring Scarlett Johansson (1984-), follows an alien in a human female body who abducts and consumes men. She is aided by a mysterious motorcyclist. The longer she has the human form, the more unease she experiences until it reaches a crisis in the final violent scene where a male rapist tears her skin during the attack and she begins to remove her human disguise from her smooth black body before the rapist burns her alive. It seems to invert rape culture by having the woman become the predator who attacks men. The closing scene reconstitutes the tragic normal order.

Ex Machina (2014), directed and written by Alex Garland (1970-), is an SF film about embodied artificial intelligence (AI) and how one might test an AI/android’s human-like intelligence and consciousness beyond the Turing Test (discussed in the Golden Age of SF chapter above). It also explores misogyny and sexualization of female androids. Garland also wrote and directed the film Annihilation (2018), which is about an alien presence on Earth that mutates plant and animal life, including creating doppelgangers of the human investigators who enter the quarantine zone called the Shimmer.

The Martian (2015), directed by Ridley Scott, is an example of Hard SF film that like its literary forebear features a story that depends on the adherence to physical law. In this case, the film is an adaptation of Andy Weir‘s (1972-) self-published Hard SF novel The Martian (2011). Weir is the 2016 winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The story is about the efforts of a stranded astronaut, Mark Watley played by Matt Damon (1970-), on Mars to survive alone with the resources at hand on the surface while others plan his rescue. The ethos of the film is summed up in a line (borrowed in part from the novel) when Watley says, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option. I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), directed by Gareth Edwards (1975-) and written by Chris Weitz (1969-) and Tony Gilroy (1956-), is the first anthology film set in the Star Wars universe following The Walt Disney Company’s purchase of Lucasfilm. Like the Skywalker Saga sequels beginning with The Force Awakens (2015), which feature the main character Rey played by Daisy Ridley (1992-), Rogue One‘s lead protagonist is a woman: Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones (1980-). The story is probably the bleakest among all the Star Wars films, but it ends on a note of hope through sacrifice. It follows the mission to steal plans for the Empire’s first Death Star immediately prior to the beginning of Star Wars (1977). Edwards also directed the 2014 film Godzilla, which launched the MonsterVerse shared universe of SF films. Most recently, the secondary lead Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna (1979-), stars in the Disney+ series called Andor (2022) about how he came to join the Rebellion before Rogue One. Gilroy is its showrunner and head writer.

Global Perspective: Taiwanese SF

SF is a global phenomenon. However, when and by what steps each country might develop an SF literary culture depends on many variables but always includes its technologization, its embrace of scientific research, and its industrialization. Nevertheless, SF arises as a cultural genre with the embrace of science, technology, and industrialization. SF provides a language and grammar for exploring the effect of science and technology in their changing society. One country with its own unique path to SF is the Republic of China, which is also known as Taiwan.

Brief Taiwanese History

Taiwan is an island off the southeast coast of China. The island used to be called Formosa. Now, the official name of Taiwan is the Republic of China or ROC. Taiwan is multiply a postcolonial country. It has been invaded by the Dutch, Spanish, Japan, and mainland China. The term “postcolonial” means to have had the experience of being colonized and then decolonized and the effects of that colonization on the culture, language, and psychology of a colonized people.

Following the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 (which had ruled for over 2000 years), the Republic of China was formed under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) and the Kuomintang (KMT) or Chinese Nationalist Party. The KMT began industrialization and modernization, but their efforts were sidetracked by the Communist Party of China, resistance from warlords, and war with the Japanese. Following the end of WWII, the US ordered Japan to relinquish control of the island to the Republic of China (ROC). In 1949, the Kuomintang Army is defeated by the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong (毛澤東) in the Chinese civil war. They flee to Taiwan and impose martial law. The KMT and Taiwan is then led by Chiang Kai-Shek (蔣介石). In 1971, the UN seat for “China” is taken away from the ROC/Taiwan and given to the PRC/China. Martial law in Taiwan was lifted in 1987. During these years, Taiwan became an important manufacturing center and a computer technology innovator because of domestic and foreign investment.

Taiwanese SF Overview

What can be called Taiwanese SF begins in September 1968 when China Times published Zhang Xiao-Feng’s (張曉風) Panduna (《潘渡娜》), a story about the creation of an artificial girl, but she lacks “substance” or a “soul.” Without a soul, she eventually dies. There are connections between this story and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein including the fact that Zhang Xiao-Feng is a woman, too. She was born in 1941.

Chang Hsi-kuo (張系國), born in 1944, is considered the father of Taiwanese SF. He is an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh and an SF writer. In 1969, he published “Biography of a Superman” (《超人列傳》) in Pure Literature (《純文學》). In October 1969, Chang Hsi-kuo created the Chinese term for science fiction in his article, “After Running to the Moon—On Science Fiction,” which appeared in the Pure Literature. The term that he coined for SF is 科學幻想小說 (kēxué huànxiǎng xiǎoshuō), which translates as Science Fantasy Fiction. It can be broken down as 科學 (kēxué) or science; 幻想 (huànxiǎng) or fantasy; and 小說 (xiǎoshuō) or fiction. The short version of the term Science Fantasy Fiction is 科幻小說 (kēhuàn xiǎoshuō). His The City Trilogy (Five Jade Disks, Defenders of the Dragon City, and Tale of a Feather) was translated by John Balcom and published by Columbia University Press in 2003. The City Trilogy (《城》三部曲) was originally serialized beginning in 1982 in China Daily. The trilogy mirrors Chinese epic tradition and Chinese history in a story veiled as SF. On 2 January 1990, Chang Hsi-kuo founded Mirage magazine. Even though it only ran for three years, it was the most influential magazine on Taiwanese SF at that time.

Huang Hai (黃海), born in 1943, is another influential early Taiwanese SF writer. He published the short story Journey to Endlessness (《航向無涯的旅程》) in 1968. He is the only SF writer to win the Sun Yat-sen Literature and Arts Award (中山文藝獎) in 1986 and the National Literature and Arts Award (國家文藝獎) in 1988.

In the 1970s, Taiwanese publishing houses began publishing translations of American, British, and Soviet writers. This means that they were reading things that we were reading, but they were also reading stuff from the Soviet Union that we were not reading. American SF films including Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) led to more interest in SF in Taiwan.

In November 1977, Lü Ying-Zhong (呂應鐘) founded the magazine Universal Science, a magazine on ET, astronomy, paranormal phenomena, and science fiction. He translated the term UFO to Chinese as “yo-fu” (幽浮) , which means “spooky floating things.” He is considered the “godfather of Taiwanese UFOlogy.” Then, in the 1980s, Lü Ying-Zhong wrote the first monograph on SF in Taiwan titled Science Fiction Literature. Half of the book was theory and the other half was a handbook on writing SF.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Taiwanese SF spawned a number of prizes and entered new media including TV, film, and radio. It should be noted that in Taiwan, like the UK, radio dramas were very popular up to and to some extent into the present. Things continued to proliferate and expand with the adoption of the Internet as a communication medium, but film and television has eroded the popularity of SF literature on a broader scale.

Taiwanese Fandom

There is also cross-cultural pollination of fandom. Japan and South Korea have a lot of cultural influence on Taiwan. In Japan, there are fans known as otaku or what we would call a nerd, geek, or fan, someone with an obsessional or heavily invested interest in a hobby—notably manga, anime, SF, cosplay, and/or video games. In Taiwan, the term for these types of fans is 宅男 (Zháinán) or home guy and 宅女 (Zhái nǚ) or home girl. If writing these terms in an endearing way to friends or as a fellow member of their community, one can write 阿宅 (Ā Nán) for home guy.

Taiwanese SF has these five characteristics: i) Synthesis of Western SF and Chinese/Taiwanese culture through new language and the application of Eastern story types; ii) Chinese chivalry story or 武俠 (Wǔxiá)—fights, martial hero, adventures of martial artists, following a code of chivalry: knights righting wrongs and upholding justice and removing oppressors and redressing wrongs; iii) Adopt Chinese mythology and history to make the reader more familiar with the fantastic elements of the story; iv) Themes of nostalgia—especially for mainland Chinese who sought refuge in Taiwan following the Civil War. Loss of their homeland; and v) Affirms the characteristics of society as it is in the present: conservative, deferring to authority to maintain the social order, and be non-confrontational.

Cultural Comparisons

Comparing the rise of Taiwanese SF to its Western counterparts reveals significant similarities and differences that are rooted within the cultural and historical context of each. In terms of beginnings, SF’s roots in the West are in the 18th century with its explosion in magazines after WWI, but Taiwan’s SF explosion takes place after WWII during the Cold War. SF’s rise in the US took place in magazine culture, but in Taiwan it took place in newspapers and paperbacks (the latter overlapped with paperback adoption in the US). In Taiwan, the publication procedure typically involves a newspaper or magazine first and then a book later. In the US, it does not have to follow this procedure. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been as much cross pollination of SF culture from Taiwan to the West as vice versa. More Western works get translated into Traditional Chinese, but few Taiwanese SF stories get translated into English.

SF was initially an alien concept for Taiwan. For Taiwan, SF was seen as hostile toward Taiwanese literature, because Western concepts had to be accepted and it had to confront Western understanding of fantastic elements from a Taiwanese perspective.

There are different fan cultures and literary cultures in the West and Taiwan. In the US, the early fan communities were primarily young men from a range of social and age groups. In Taiwan, SF fans are homogenous and mostly students. In terms of the literary cultures, US writers fear being relegated to the so-called SF ghetto, but in Taiwan, SF isn’t considered low culture and its writers can easily do other kinds of writing and are not defined simply as SF writers.

The US and Taiwan experienced different Golden Ages: US/1937-1945 vs. Taiwan/1980s. And, the US was influenced by the British New Wave especially in regard to breaking taboos, but Taiwan wasn’t influenced by New Wave SF perhaps due to Chinese collectivism and a long standing culture of taboos.

Taiwanese SF was another aspect of culture that grappled with Taiwanese identity: Am I Taiwanese or Chinese? To answer this question of identity, Taiwanese SF writers had to develop a new language of SF. One approach was made by Chang Hsi-kuo who used the Chinese chivalry novels as a way to combine Western SF with Chinese/Taiwanese culture and language to synthesize something new capable of confronting questions of identity.

Issues with Translation

There are five issues with literary translation, which enables people with different language backgrounds to enjoy stories written in languages that they do not know: i) Historical difference (source text and translated text may be separated by time); ii) Translation links critical, theoretical, and creative practice in complex ways; iii) Market forces can keep poor translations in print and keep better translations from being published; iv) Issues of language and linguistics as well as cultural and historical issues; and v) Translation is part creative and part analytical (what was authorial intent and cultural meaning and historical context?).

Additionally, there are issues with transliteration of names. For example, 張系國 can be transliterated as Chang Hsi-kuo (as it appears on the Columbia University Press edition of The City Trilogy), Shi-Kuo Chang (as it appears on his University of Pittsburgh faculty page), and Zhang Xiguo (as it appears in Uher, David. “Trends in the Development of Science Fiction Literature in Taiwan.” Anthropologia Integra, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 63-70, https://journals.muni.cz/anthropologia_integra/article/view/1903).

How to Keep Up With Science Fiction

Any science fiction textbook is going to be old news when it comes to the field. Interested readers and invested fans of SF can keep their fingers on the pulse of the genre by reading SF periodicals, following SF blogs and writers online, and joining SF organizations for fans and scholars.

Print SF is alive, if barely, compared to 70 years ago. Perhaps it’s more vital today for SF readers to subscribe or pick up copies of SF magazines at the newsstand to read and enjoy the very latest that SF writers have to offer in terms of stories and their ideas. Some of the leading SF magazines still in circulation include Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone (UK), Clarkesworld, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Abyss & Apex, The Future Fire, Escape Pod (online magazine/podcast), Bards and Sages Quarterly, Fiyah: Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, Space & Time, StarShipSofa, and Leading Edge. The leading resource about the SF and Fantasy field is Locus Magazine, which prints stories about authors, interviews, and SF publishing industry news.

In addition to following the social media accounts of the magazines mentioned above and their editorial staff and contributors, there are a number of other online outlets where one can learn more about what’s going on in SF. Some significant sources include File 770: Mike Glyer’s News of SF Fandom, Reactor (formerly tor.com), Orbit Books, SF Gateway, Queer Sci-Fi, SFFWorld, SFBook, Worlds Without End, Black Sci-Fi, Best SF, Whatever (John Scalzi), Ansible, Contrary Brin (David Brin), Tor/Forge Blog, Fantasy Book Critic, The Fantasy Inn, and SFF Seven Authors.

SF organizations can also announce information about the field, but they are also a place where you might want to get involved yourself. These include the Science Fiction Research Association, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Writers Association, The World Science Fiction Convention, Black Science Fiction Society, British Science Fiction Association, and Science Fiction Foundation. These organizations hold meetings, conferences, and conventions. There are also regional and international conventions focused on SF or popular culture in general that fans can attend, such as Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, New York Comic Con, San Diego Comic Con, Philcon in New Jersey, and the Brooklyn Book Festival. Some scholarly annual events are open to the public, such as the City Tech Science Fiction Symposium, which is also where Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine announces the winner of the Analog Award for Emerging Black Voices.

Critical and scholarly journals are also a way to learn more about the genre in a deeper way. By joining some of the organizations above, you might receive an automatic subscription to some of these. The biggest journals are Science-Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, Vector, Foundation, New York Review of Science Fiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Science Fiction Film and Television.

Besides purchasing the latest SF novels and collections from your local bookseller or an eBook storefront, your local or school library offers lots of old and new SF for checkout. The catalog search on your library’s website will give you the best results of what is available, but WorldCat can be a useful resource for search libraries within a geographical area. Looking for SF in the real world at bookstores and libraries also gives you an opportunity to connect with other SF fans in person.

Online, Project Gutenberg offers public domain texts of SF and other literature that can be downloaded in many formats or read online for free. The Internet Archive stores scans of many out of print SF magazines and many of their scanned books can be checked out for reading online for free (one just needs to create an account).

Appendices

Appendix 1: Glossary of Science Fiction Terms

Science Fiction (abbreviation: SF): This is the proper name for science fiction. Use this term in our discussions and your writing. My working definition: Narratives based on a technoscientific turn that sets it apart from the here-and-now (despite its extrapolation from the here-and-now and its ensuing historical/cultural baggage).

Sci-fi: This the popular and journalistic term for science fiction. Forrest J. Ackerman is said to have introduced the term as a play on the rising popularity of “hi-fi” stereos in the 1950s. Some critics began using sci-fi as a designation of bad science fiction while reserving science fiction/SF for the good stuff. This distinction never gained much adoption by journalists or the general public. Nevertheless, you will want to know this distinction and use it in our discussions.

Skiffy: An alternative pronounciation of “sci-f” that gained popularity around 1978 when critics including Susan Wood began to promote it as a way to distinguish great science fiction/SF from trashy sci-fi.

Speculative Fiction: As contentiously debated as science fiction, speculative fiction is part a more respectable term used by some to refer to science fiction and part near-future/strongly extrapolated from the present. In some uses, it can encompass SF and Fantasy. It shares the SF abbreviation.

Fantasy: Science fiction is not fantasy, and fantasy is not SF. Fantasy narratives are devoid of the scientific turn, which necessitates the construction of a self-consistent world with its own unique logic, rules, and laws that are made belieable through their coherence. Popular examples include Tolkien’s The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings series (1937, 1954-1955), J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007), and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996-2011). When science fiction and fantasy are discussed together, they are sometimes abbreviated as SFF (pronounced as S-F-n-F).

Appendix 2: Chronological List of SF Definitions with MLA Citations

Hugo Gernsback. 1926. “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision … Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive. They supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form … New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow … Many great science stories destined to be of historical interest are still to be written … Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but progress as well” (Gernsback 3).
Gernsback, Hugo. “A New Sort of Magazine.” Amazing Stories, April 1926, p. 3.

J. O. Bailey. 1947. “A piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences … It must be a scientific discovery — something that the author at least rationalizes as possible to science” (Bailey 10).
Bailey, J. O. Pilgrims Through Space and Time: A History and Analysis of Scientific Fiction. Argus Books, 1947.

Robert A. Heinlein. 1947. “Let’s gather up the bits and pieces and define the Simon-pure science fiction story: 1. The conditions must be, in some respect, different from here-and-now, although the difference may lie only in an invention made in the course of the story. 2. The new conditions must be an essential part of the story. 3. The problem itself—the “plot”—must be a human problem. 4. The human problem must be one which is created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions. 5. And lastly, no established fact shall be violated, and, furthermore, when the story requires that a theory contrary to present accepted theory be used, the new theory should be rendered reasonably plausible and it must include and explain established facts as satisfactorily as the one the author saw fit to junk. It may be far-fetched, it may seem fantastic, but it must not be at variance with observed facts, i.e., if you are going to assume that the human race descended from Martians, then you’ve got to explain our apparent close relationship to terrestrial anthropoid apes as well” (Heinlein 17).
Heinlein, Robert. “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science-Fiction Writing. edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Fantasy Press, 1947, pp. 11-19.

John W. Campbell, Jr. 1947. “To be science fiction, not fantasy, an honest effort at prophetic extrapolation from the known must be made. Ghosts can enter science fiction—if they’re logically explained but not if they are simply the ghosts of fantasy. Prophetic extrapolation can derive from a number of different sources, and apply in a number of fields. Sociology, psychology, and parapsychology are, today, not true sciences: therefore instead of forecasting future results of applications of sociological science of today, we must forecast the development of a science of sociology” (Campbell 91).
Campbell, Jr., John W. “The Science of Science Fiction Writing.” Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science-Fiction Writing. edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Fantasy Press, 1947, pp. 89-101.

John W. Campbell, Jr. 1947. “Scientific methodology involves the proposition that a well-constructed theory will not only explain every known phenomenon, but will also predict new and still undiscovered phenomena. Science-fiction tries to do much the same—and write up, in story form, what the results look like when applied not only to machines, but to human society as well” (Campbell 12).
Campbell, John W., Jr. “Introduction.” Venus Equilateral. edited by George O. Smith, Garland Publishing, 1975, pp. 10-14.

Isaac Asimov. 1951. “True s-f is not to be confused with weird stories or horror stories or tales of the supernatural or, in fact, with fantasies of any sort. The best definition of s-f that I know of is, indeed, almost sociological in its gravity. It goes as follows: Science-fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings” (Asimov 148).
Asimov, Isaac. “Other Worlds to Conquer.” The Writer, vol. 64, no. 5, May 1951, pp. 148-151.

Theodore Sturgeon. 1953. “After some fifteen years of arduous filtering, one of S-F’s more widely-read practioners has come up with a definition of science fiction designed to include all that is worthy in the field, and exclude the cowboy story which occurs on Mars instead of in Arizona. ‘A good story is good science fiction,’ he says, ‘when it deals with human beings with a human problem which is resolved in terms of their humanity, cast in a narrative which could not occur without the science element’” (qtd. in Williams 376). [While this definition is often attributed to Sturgeon, he seems to give credit to another writer. However, Sturgeon began publishing in 1938—15 years before 1953—so, he could be employing rhetoric to give a definition he thought up greater weight.]
Williams, Paul. “Story Notes.” North Atlantic Books, 2000, pp. 375-388.

Kingsley Amis. 1960. “Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extra-terrestrial in origin” (Amis 8).
Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. Harcourt, 1960.

Rod Serling. 1962. “Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbable made possible” (“The Fugitive”).
“The Fugitive.” The Twilight Zone. screenplay by Charles Beaumont. directed by Richard L. Bare, CBS, 1962.

Judith Merril. 1966. “Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, or ‘reality’ … I use the term ‘speculative fiction’ here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional ‘scientific method’ (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of changes—imaginary or inventive—into the common background of ‘known facts’, creating an environment in which the responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the characters, or both” (Merril 60).
Merril, Judith. “What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?” SF: The Other Side of Realism. edited by Thomas D. Clareson, Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971, pp. 53-95.

Isaac Asimov. 1971. “By hard science fiction, I mean those stories in which the details of science play an important role and in which the author is accurate about those details, too, and takes the trouble to explain them clearly” (Asimov 299).
Asimov, Isaac, editor. Stories from the Hugo Winners. vol. 2, Fawcett Crest Books, 1973.

Samuel R. Delany. 1971. “A distinct level of subjunctivity informs all the words in an SF story at a level that is different from that which informs naturalistic fiction, fantasy, or reportage. Subjunctivity is the tension on the thread of meaning that runs between (to borrow Saussure’s term for ‘word’:) sound-image and sound-image. A blanket indicative tension (or mood) informs the whole series: this happened. That is the particular level of subjunctivity at which journalism takes place. Any word, even metaphorical ones, must go straight back to a real object, or a real thought on the part of the reporter. The subjunctivity level for a series of words labeled naturalistic fiction is defined by: could have happened….Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse. At the appearance of elves, witches, or magic in a non-metaphorical position, or at some correction of image too bizarre to be explained by other than the supernatural, the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened….But when spaceships, ray guns, or more accurately any correction of images that indicates the future appears in a series of words and mark it as SF, the subjunctivity level is changed once more: These objects, these convocations of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened. Events that have not happened included several subcategories. These subcategories describe the subcategories of SF. Events that have not happened include those events that might happen…events that will not happen….events that have not happened yet…[and] events that have not happened in the past” (Delany 10-11).
Delany. Samuel R. “About 5,750 Words.” The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, Wesleyan UP, 2009, pp. 1-15.

Ursula K. Le Guin. 1971. “I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels” (Le Guin 1).
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The View In.” A Multitude of Visions. edited by Cy Chauvin, T-K Graphics, 1975, pp. 5-7.

Darko Suvin. 1972. Science fiction is “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (Suvin 375).
Suvin, Darko. “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre.” College English, vol. 34, no. 3, Dec 1972, pp. 372-382.

Brian Aldiss. 1973. “Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode” (Aldiss 8).
Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday, 1973.

Pamela Sargent. 1974. “One can wonder why a literature that prides itself on exploring alternatives or assumptions counter to what we normally believe has not been more concerned with the roles of women in the future. There are two possible answers, although neither excludes the others. Either science fiction is not as daring or original as some of its practitioners would like to believe, this being more a worthy ideal than a reality; or this literature, designed to question our assumptions cannot help reflecting how very deeply certain prejudices are ingrained—despite its sometimes successful efforts at imaginative liberation from time and place” (Sargent xv-xvi).
“Only sf and fantasy literature can show us women in entirely new or strange surroundings. It can explore what we might become if and when the present restrictions on our lives vanish, or show us new problems and restrictions that might arise” (Sargent lx).
Sargent, Pamela. “Introduction.” Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories By Women About Women. Vintage, 1975, pp. xii-lxiv.

Joanna Russ. 1975. “I should like to propose the following: That science fiction, like much medieval literature, is didactic. That despite superficial similarities to naturalistic (or other) modern fiction, the protagonists of science fiction are always collective, never individual persons (although individuals often appear as exemplary or representative figures). That science fiction’s emphasis is always on phenomena—to the point where reviewers and critics can commonly use such phrases as ‘the idea as hero.’ That science fiction is not only didactic, but very often awed, workshipful, and religious in tone” (Russ par. 7-9).
“Science fiction, like medieval painting, addresses itself to the mind, not the eye” (Russ par. 22).
“It draws its beliefs, its material, its great organizing metaphors, its very attitudes, from a culture that could not exist before the industrial revolution, before science became both an autonomous activity and a way of looking at the world” (Russ par. 25).
“It is the only modern literature which attempts to assimilate imaginatively scientific knowledge about reality and the scientific method, as distinct from the merely practical changes science has made in our lives” (Russ par. 31).
“Science fiction is, of course, about human concerns. It is written and read by human beings. But the culture from which it comes —the experiences, attitudes, knowledge, and learning which one must bring to it—these are not at all what we are used to as proper to literature. They may, however, be increasingly proper to human life.” (Russ par. 33).
Russ, Joanna. “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, July 1975, https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/6/russ6art.htm.

Robert Scholes. 1975. “Fabulation, then, fiction that offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way” (Scholes 206).
Robert Scholes. 1975. “The tradition of speculative fiction is modified by an awareness of the universe as a system of systems, a structure of structures, and the insights of the past century of science are accepted as fictional points of departure. Yet structural fabulation is neither scientific in its methods nor a substitute for actual science. It is a fictional exploration of human situations made perceptible by the implications of recent science. Its favorite themes involve the impact of developments or revelations derived from the human or physical sciences upon the people who must live with those revelations or developments” (Scholes 214).
Scholes, Robert. “The Roots of Science Fiction.” Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. edited by James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, Scarecrow Press, 2005, pp. 205-218.

Ray Bradbury. 1980. “I define science fiction as the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible. Science fiction, again, is the history of ideas, and they’re always ideas that work themselves out and become real and happen in the world. And fantasy comes along and says, ‘We’re going to break all the laws of physics’” (qtd. in Unger par. 23).
Unger, Arthur. “Ray Bradbury: The Science of Science Fiction.” The Christian Science Monitor, 13 Nov. 1980, https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/1113/111356.html.

Kim Stanley Robinson. 1987. SF is “an historical literature … In every sf narrative, there is an explicit or implicit fictional history that connects the period depicted to our present moment, or to some moment in our past” (Robinson 54).
Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Notes for an Essay on Cecelia Holland.” Foundation, no. 40, Summer 1987, pp. 54-61.

Christopher Evans. 1988. “Perhaps the crispest definition is that science fiction is a literature of ‘what if?’ What if we could travel in time? What if we were living on other planets? What if we made contact with alien races? And so on. The starting point is that the writer supposes things are different from how we know them to be” (Evans 9).
Evans, Christopher. Writing Science Fiction. A & C Black, 1988.

Margaret Atwood. 1989. “I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today—that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed. But in The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or that it is not doing now, perhaps in other countries, or for which it has not yet developed the technology. We’ve done it, we’re doing it, or we could start doing it tomorrow. Nothing inconceivable takes place, and the projected trends on which my future society is based are already in motion. So I think of The Handmaid’s Tale not as science fiction but as speculative fiction; and, more particularly, as that negative form of Utopian fiction that has come to be known as Dystopia” (Atwood 92-93).
Atwood, Margaret. “Writing Utopia.” Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983-2005. Carroll & Graff, 2005, pp. 92-100.

Allen Steele. 1992. “Hard sf is the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone” (Steele 4).
Steele, Allen. “Hard Again.” New York Review of Science Fiction, no. 46, June 1992, pp. 1-5, https://archive.org/details/The_New_York_Review_Of_Science_Fiction_046_1992-06/page/n1/mode/2up.

Marleen S. Barr. 1993. “As I explain throughout this study, postmodern fiction must recognize a new supergenre of women’s writing—feminist fabulation—which includes works now thought of as mainstream, SF, fantasy, supernatural, and utopian as well as feminist texts men author. Further, critical studies should address the influence and importance of works of feminist fabulation which have been dismissed as genre fiction” (Barr xiii).
Barr, Marleen S. Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction. University of Iowa Press, 1992.

Damien Broderick. 1995. “SF is that species of storytelling native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise and supersession of technical-industrial modes of production, distribution, consumption and disposal. It is marked by (i) metaphoric strategies and metonymic tactics, (ii) the foregrounding of icons and interpretative schemata from a collectively constituted generic ‘mega-text’ and the concomitant de-emphasis of ‘fine writing’ and characterization, and (iii) certain priorities more often found in scientific and postmodern texts than in literary models: specifically, attention to the object in preference to the subject” (Broderick 155).
Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. Routledge, 1995.

Octavia Butler. 1997. “[Science fiction] doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all except that if you use science, you should use it correctly, and if you use your imagination to extend it beyond what we already know, you should do that intelligently. The reason I’ve stayed with science fiction to the degree that I have is because you can do almost anything in it” (qtd. in Fry par. 26).
Fry, Joan. “‘Congratulations! You’ve Just Won $295,000!’: An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” JoanFry.com, http://joanfry.com/Interview.html.

Ray Bradbury. 2010. “Science fiction is the fiction of ideas. Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves. Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible” (qtd. in Weller par. 8).
“I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa. Science fiction pretends to look into the future but it’s really looking at a reflection of what is already in front of us. So you have a ricochet vision, a ricochet that enables you to have fun with it, instead of being self-conscious and superintellectual” (qtd. in Weller par. 22).
Weller, Sam. “Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203.” The Paris Review, no. 192, Spring 2010, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury.

Appendix 3: Further Reading

Textbooks

Bould, Mark, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, editors. The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Routledge, 2009.

Bould, Mark and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction, Routledge, 2011.

Bould, Mark and Steven Shaviro. This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook. MIT Press, 2024.

Gunn, James and Matthew Candelaria, editors. Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press, 2005.

Hubble, Nick and Aris Mousoutzanis, editors. The Science Fiction Handbook. Bloomsbury, 2013.

James, Edward and Farah Mendlesohn, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Luckhurst, Roger, editor. Science Fiction: A Literary History. The British Library, 2017.

Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. 2nd edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Seed, David, editor. A Companion to Science Fiction. Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

—. Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2011.

Readers

Evans, Arthur B., Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, and Carol McGuirk, editors. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2010.

Masri, Heather, editor. Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts. Bedford St. Martins, 2008.

Warrick, Patricia S., Charles C. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg, editors. Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology. Harper & Row, 1988.

Teaching

Sawyer, Andy and Peter Wright, editors. Teaching Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Online Research

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database

Science Fiction Awards Database

Appendix 4: Sample Syllabus with Hyperlinked Readings

Science Fiction Course Syllabus

Course Information

Science Fiction
Course Number and Section
Meeting Location, Days, and Times
Modality

Contact and Office Hours

Professor
Office Hours and Location
Contact Phone and Email

Course Description

We will explore the emergence of Science Fiction (SF) and examine its preeminence as interdisciplinary literary and artistic forms of pressing cultural importance. To accomplish this, we will read and watch significant examples of SF from its long history beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and concluding with cyberpunk. Students will have opportunities to demonstrate their learning through note taking, weekly writing assignments, a research essay, and an essay-format final exam. As a predominantly literature-focused class, it has a demanding reading schedule.

Learning Objectives and Prerequisites

Refer to college catalog and department website for course learning objectives and prerequisites.

Required Texts

Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook, https://dynamicsubspace.net

All other readings and viewings are available online. Students may access texts through libraries or retailers, too. See links to readings on the tentative schedule.

Required Resources

Computer and Internet access; email; printer; and paper notebook and writing utencil.

Grading

Weekly Writing: Summaries of Readings and Viewings, 20%
Each week, write at least 250-words summarizing assigned reading and viewing from the previous week. Your summaries should include titles, authors/directors, significant characters, plot, and your reaction/thoughts to the stories. Focus on what stands out the most to you. Include your own thoughts, observations, and connections to other SF.

Midterm Class Notebook, 20%
Students are expected to take handwritten notes of class lectures and readings. This assignment covers notes made from the beginning of the semester to the midterm. Using Dropbox (or similar app), create a PDF of your notes (https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/mobile/document-scanning) and submit a copy (https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/share-with-others). This assignment reinforces discussed studying best practices and demonstrates engagement with course materials. Students are encouraged to use the Cornell Note Taking System, but they may use whatever system works best for their way of studying.

Final Class Notebook, 20%
Students are expected to take handwritten notes of class lectures and readings. This assignment covers notes made from the midterm to the end of the semester. Using Dropbox (or similar app), create a PDF of your notes (https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/mobile/document-scanning) and submit a copy (https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/share/share-with-others). This assignment reinforces discussed studying best practices and demonstrates engagement with course materials.

Research Essay, 25%
Students will apply what they have learned about Science Fiction in a 1,250-1,500-word analytical essay on a single work or series of Science Fiction of their choice. Books, short stories, television series, comic books, music, theater, or other media are equally acceptable for the selected Science Fiction work to examine. Students who are also creative writers may choose to write their analytical essay about one of their own stories, which would need to be submitted with the essay. Before writing your analytical essay, consult with the professor for approval and feedback. The essay must follow MLA style. These essays will employ the writing process for development, feedback, and revision.

Final Exam, 15%
During the last class meeting, students will demonstrate what they have learned from the lecture and readings in an essay exam that covers all course content.

Attendance Policy

In general, the expectation for successful and respectful college students is to arrive on time and attend all classes. Following City Tech’s policy, attendance is recorded and reported. Since this is an online, asynchronous class, attendance is recorded based on weekly participation by completing the weekly writing assignment discussed in lecture and posted to our OpenLab site. Attendance and class participation are essential and excessive absences may affect the final grade. Students who simply stop attending will receive a grade of “WU” (unofficial withdrawal – attended at least once).

Required Format for Papers

While there will be exceptions that we will discuss in class, all writing submitted online or on printed paper should follow MLA professional style. In particular, your writing should always include a “name block,” a title, and your writing. If you quote or cite writing by others, it should be properly cited and included as an entry on a concluding “Works Cited” list. Search Google for “Purdue OWL MLA” for guidelines and sample papers.

Policy for Late Work

Due dates for weekly assignments and major projects are provided on the schedule below. Assignments submitted late will incur point reductions. However, students should always follow my advice to submit something rather than nothing. The last day that any assignment may be submitted is the last day of class as indicated on the schedule below. If a student knows that work cannot be completed on time, he or she should contact me or visit my office hours to discuss options for getting caught up and completing the class successfully.

Accessibility Statement

City Tech is committed to supporting the educational goals of enrolled students with disabilities in the areas of enrollment, academic advisement, tutoring, assistive technologies and testing accommodations. If you have or think you may have a disability, you may be eligible for reasonable accommodations or academic adjustments as provided under applicable federal, state and city laws. You may also request services for temporary conditions or medical issues under certain circumstances. If you have questions about your eligibility or would like to seek accommodation services or academic adjustments, please contact the Center for Student Accessibility at 300 Jay Street room L-237, 718-260-5143 or http://www.citytech.cuny.edu/accessibility/.

College Policy on Academic Integrity

Students who work with information, ideas, and texts owe their audience and sources accuracy and honesty in using, crediting, and citing sources. As a community of intellectual and professional workers, the College recognizes its responsibility for providing instruction in information literacy and academic integrity, offering models of good practice, and responding vigilantly and appropriately to infractions of academic integrity. Accordingly, academic dishonesty is prohibited in CUNY and at New York City College of Technology, and is punishable by penalties, including failing grades, suspension, and expulsion. The complete text of the College policy on Academic Integrity may be found in the Academic Catalog here.

Tentative Class Schedule

Week 1
Lecture this week: What is Science Fiction, and successful asynchronous class study habits.
Read by next week: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42324, Introduction, Preface, Letters, and Chapters 1-8.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 2
Lecture this week: Begin Frankenstein.
Read by next week: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42324, Chapters 9-17.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 3
Lecture this week: Continue Frankenstein.
Read by next week: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42324, Chapters 18-24.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 4
Lecture this week: Conclude Frankenstein.
Read by next week: H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (abridged), http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1302961h.html, and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044092948223?urlappend=%3Bseq=239.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 5
Lecture this week: Proto-Science Fiction.
Read by next week: Hugo Gernsback’s “A New Kind of Magazine,” https://archive.org/details/amazing_stories_april_1926/page/n3/mode/2up, E.E. “Doc” Smith and Lee Hawkings Garby’s “The Skylark of Space,” Part 1, https://archive.org/details/Amazing_Stories_v03n05_1928-08_ATLPM-Urf/page/n7/mode/2up, and C. L. Moore, “Shambleau,” https://archive.org/details/Weird_Tales_v22n05_1933-11_ELPM-SliV.
Due by next week: Midterm Notebook and 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 6
Lecture this week: Pulp Science Fiction.
Watch by next week: Flash Gordon, Episode 1 and 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgHKEaGbyDo&list=PLESDrGLwFOLXT0jfvQVzzvQzEaV-3F13u.
Due by next week: Research Essay Proposal Email to Professor Ellis, and 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 7
Lecture this week: Science Fiction Serials.
Read by next week: Isaac Asimov’s “Reason,” https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v27n02_1941-04_dtsg0318, and Ray Bradbury’s “The Fireman,” https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v01n05_1951-02.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 8
Lecture this week: Golden Age Science Fiction.
Read by next week: Robert Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies,” https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v016n03_1959-03_PDF, and Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” https://archive.org/details/Astounding_v53n06_1954-08_Sirius-Starhome. Watch by next week: Forbidden Planet, https://archive.org/details/ForbiddenPlanet1956_201707.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 9
Lecture this week: Golden Age SF Continued.
Read by next week: Harlan Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktockman!”, https://web.archive.org/web/20150226125018/https://cunycomposers.wikispaces.com/file/view/Ellison,+Harlan+–+Repent,+Harlequin+Said+the+Ticktockman.pdf, and Philip K. Dick’s “The Electric Ant,” https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v037n04_1969-10_PDF.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 10
Lecture this week: New Wave SF.
Read by next week: Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/aye-and-gomorrah/, and James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Women Men Don’t See,” https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v045n06_1973-12.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 11
Lecture this week: New Wave SF continued.
Watch by next week: Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Season 1, Episode 28, https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/star-trek.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 12
Lecture this week: Star Trek and SF film and television.
Read by next week: Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Nine Lives,” http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791405/9781625791405___2.htm, and Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” https://archive.org/details/Asimovs_v07n13_1983-12-Mid.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 13
Lecture this week: Feminist SF and Afrofuturuism.
Read by next week: William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome,” https://web.archive.org/web/20190519005941/http://www.housevampyr.com/training/library/books/omni/OMNI_1982_07.pdf
Watch by next week: The X-Files, “Kill Switch,” Season 5, Episode 11, https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/the-x-files, and Season 5 Extra: Behind the Truth – Kill Switch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUTMkNagDb4.
Due by next week: 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 14
Lecture this week: Cyberpunk.
Read by next week: David Uher, “Trends in the Development of Science Fiction Literature in Taiwan,” https://journals.muni.cz/anthropologia_integra/article/view/1903, and S. K. Chang, “City of the Bronze Statue” (trans. K. G. Koziol and L. Yeh), http://people.cs.pitt.edu/~chang/fiction/statue.html.
Due by next week: Final Notebooks, Final Exam, Research Essay, and 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Week 15
Taiwanese SF
Due today: Final Notebooks, Final Exam, Research Essay, and 250-word reply to Weekly Writing Assignment on OpenLab.

Appendix 5: Lecture Videos

The lecture videos below are from my Spring 2021 asynchronously taught Science Fiction course. There are 14 weeks of videos (the 15th was not recorded as it was used for office hours). The course website with the syllabus and assignments for that semester’s class can be found here. Not everything in the YASFT is covered in the video lectures from that semester.