Building Yesterday’s Future–For Everyone
In the Fantastic Fiction column, a distinguished cadre of fan writers will take you back to the 1961-1962 era of the first Seattle Worldcon and Century 21 Exposition, also known as the Seattle World’s Fair, events that cemented Seattle’s position as a global center for futurism and technological innovation. We hope immersion in the speculative fiction dreams and influences of the era will inspire you to make something—a story, costume, poem, argument, essay, panel idea, heart wish, or short film—to bring to our Worldcon.
Visitors to Seattle’s first Worldcon, in 1961, would have been voting in one of six Hugo Award categories for the best dramatic presentation of 1960. With Halloween on the way, why not get in the mood with one of the year’s strong contenders: Village of the Damned, an adaptation of John Wyndham’s chilling novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The movie brings the story to cinematic life through believable performances and clever special effects.
Polish author Stanisław Lem, one of the greatest science fiction writers of the 20th and possibly any other century, wrote three important novels in 1961: Solaris, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, and Return from the Stars.
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…
In 2005 I was scrambling to find new—never mind excellent—science fiction titles for young adults. In 2010 my book The Inter-Galactic Playground was nominated for a Hugo. It was already out of date. In 2024 I can’t keep up.
Where is young adult science fiction? Is science fiction doomed to gradual extinction as its writers and readers age and die without replacement? Or is there a simple, easily implemented solution?
The early years of the 1960s brought a number of French science fiction stories into English, thanks in a big way to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. This kicked off decades of French science fiction in English, including several Pierre Boulle novels (like Planet of the Apes), that in turn inspired major films, introducing American readers to a more expansive view of SF.
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.
2024 is a golden age of science fiction in all media. In 1960, matters appeared very different, as Earl Kemp’s Hugo Award-winning study of the state of science fiction made clear.
With Seattle Worldcon 2025 coming up, let’s take a look back at a couple of films that attendees at Seattle’s first Worldcon, way back in 1961, might have seen at their local theaters and drive-ins. Grab some popcorn and settle back for a pair of surprisingly good low budget movies from the king of B films, Roger Corman.
Seattle’s first Worldcon was held on the cusp of humanity’s self-destruction. We dodged the nuclear bullet in 1962, but the atomic genie is restless in the bottle. And with war on Russia’s doorstep edging the cork ever further toward the lip, Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, hailed as the best SF novel of 1961, remains today as compelling and relevant as ever…