Brace yourselves, it’s a long one. Don’t forget these are all posted to +The History of Science Fiction. The forties were of course dominated by World War II and its after-effects. Perhaps the biggest immediate influence…
There are a lot of very colorful characters from the early days of science fiction. But a handful of them were so influential that they influenced the direction of the whole genre. John W. Campbell undoubtedly falls…
Enter The Golden Age With the genre now defined and growing, the 30s were when it spread across media. Books, magazines, movies, radio and comics, all were fertile ground for science fiction. New authors began…
In the 1920s everything was no set up for science fiction to burst forth as a genre in its own right. Out of the shadow of the great war, literacy was spreading as was science and…
The name of Hugo Gernsback has come up several times already in this series about The History of Science Fiction and his name is going to keep coming up as I get closer to the present…
The period from 1910 to 1919 was dominated by war. The First World War erupted in 1914 and ended in 1918. That would have been enough for one decade but in 1917 the Russian Revolution(s)…
The first decade of the 20th century continued the remarkable scientific progress of the previous century. Two events in particular informed the “scientifiction” writing of this period. In 1903 the Wright Brothers built and flew…
It was the second half of the 19th century when science fiction really began to emerge as a recognizable genre. And very early on it even established two of the cornerstone sub-genres of science fiction in…
About four years ago I wrote a series of blog posts that was intended to explore the whole science fiction genre (including fantasy since I believe they are elements of the same genre) from its beginnings to present…