Fantastic Fiction: Early Science Fiction Meets Proto-Steampunk: The Time Machine

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

In many ways, the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow blog is a time machine, taking us back into the history of the genre and showing how that past is connected to the present and future. In 1960, a movie adaptation of H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine brought the story out of the past and into the present of that decade with aesthetics that looked both back to the Victorian era and forward to the turn of the millennium.

Fantastic Fiction: Knights versus Aliens: The High Crusade by Poul Anderson

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

Science fiction often begins with a question of “what if”? And in 1960, Poul Anderson asked just such a question: What if aliens attempting to invade the Earth encountered a troop of medieval knights? And what if the knights won the ensuing struggle and took to the stars? This is the premise of The High Crusade, one of the most offbeat and entertaining science fiction novels of the early 1960s…

Fantastic Fiction: The Amazing and Fantastic Cele Goldsmith

The text Fantastic Fiction against a retrofuturistic design of a rounded triangle shape with a gold swirl pattern.

By the 1950s, Amazing Stories and its sister magazine Fantastic were deep in the doldrums. But all that changed when a young Vassar graduate named Cele Goldsmith found herself at the helm of both magazines and turned their fortunes around. In only seven years, she discovered many new writers who went on to great careers, helped to revive the all-but dead Sword and Sorcery genre, and won a Hugo, too.