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.
I am partial. I truly believe that Joanna Russ is one of the greatest writers that the science fiction field has ever produced, and from 1977–1991 she was a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The early 1960s were a fascinating time for science fiction cinema, blending Cold War anxieties, space-age optimism, and philosophical explorations of technology and humanity. Five standout sci-fi films from 1960 to 1965 left a lasting impact on the genre: The Time Machine (1960), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), The Day of the Triffids (1962), The First Men in the Moon (1964), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), and La Jetée (1962).
The flood of Russian-to-English translations of science fiction in the 1960s and 70s can be explained by the USSR’s political and social liberalization at that time, as well as the rise in English-to-Russian translations of Anglo-American science fiction.
H. Beam Piper’s popular and beloved Little Fuzzy, published in 1962, still has a lot to say about how we measure the intelligence of the animals we share our planet with, while it also takes us on a rollicking good adventure.
American astronaut Alan Shepard could have become the first person in space, but NASA’s desire for just one more test flight delayed his launch, and he lost that historic position to Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Discover how NASA’s Project Mercury helped to turn the age-old dream of human spaceflight into reality in 1961 as the Cold War Space Race started to heat up.
What is the longest running SFF series written by a single author? If you answered “Elric of Melniboné” by Michael Moorcock, congratulations, you’re right. Spanning a whopping 62 years from the first Elric story, The Dreaming City, in 1961 to the last story to date, The Folk of the Forest (2023), no other series written by a single author has run longer. But who is Elric of Melniboné, and what makes him so special?
We live in worrying times. Fascism is on the rise across Europe and America, according to the consensus of many commentators. In this post, I will highlight SF that has speculated on the rise and activities of fascism. In a later blog post, I’ll discuss science fiction that has thought about ways to resist.
Four authors dominated SFT in 20th century Italy: Buzzati, Landolfi, Calvino, and Levi. The first three wrote what most would call “fantastic” literature, while Levi wrote more allegorical and historical science fiction. Referred to as fantascienza (a fusion of fantasy and science) in Italian, the speculative fiction coming out of that country following World War Two was influenced by the political and social upheavals of that war and the fascism that had dominated Italian politics.
Zenna Henderson’s first six stories featuring the People—immigrant aliens who’ve escaped the destruction of the home planet and come to the American Southwest—were published as a fix-up, Pilgrimage, in 1961. Through these curiously gifted aliens Henderson explored themes of difference and belonging that still have relevance today.
One of my favorite novels when I was a teen science fiction reader was Andre Norton’s Catseye. In the 1960s, Andre Norton, better known for adult science fiction, was also one of the most important writers of science fiction for teens.