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.
Today superhero multiverses are everywhere, but back in 1961 we didn’t even have the concept. That is until one strange little tale changed everything: Flash #123, entitled The Flash of Two Worlds.
One of the most interesting phenomena to emerge from the German-language speculative fiction universe is the internationally popular Perry Rhodan space opera series. Created in 1961 by Walter Ernsting and Karl-Herbert Scheer, this ongoing saga of a spaceman continues into the present day, in much the same manner as Doctor Who in the Anglophone world.
The Russian-born French author Nathalie Henneberg collaborated with her husband Charles for years on works of fantasy and science fiction, but after his death in 1959, Nathalie continued to write and make a name for herself. Her 1960 story, “The Blind Pilot,” included in David G. Hartwell’s wide-ranging anthology The World Treasury of Science Fiction, is a prime example of the author’s extraordinary prose.
Depressed because your favorite genre has vanished from the shelves? There is room for hope… as long as you are patient.
In 1961, Clifford Simak published his sixth novel, Time is the Simplest Thing. When mankind reaches for space and misses, humans instead discover within themselves a paranormal alternative to the science that failed them. But when left to contend with the implications of that alternative, it leaves their society a frightened, stratified mirror of our own.
Good ideas can persist in science fiction for generations. Take, for example, Judith Merril’s approach to anthologies of the best science fiction, which has inspired at least one modern descendant, anthologies by Rich Horton, and may have inspired two other anthology series as well, those by Lester del Rey and Gardner Dozois.
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.
In 1960 we were still three years away from Doctor Who’s premiere—however, producer Sydney Newman was already hard at work creating family-oriented science fiction television at the independent network Associated British Corporation (ABC Television). Between 1960–1961, U.K.’s ABC ran four serials, Target Luna, Pathfinders in Space, Pathfinders to Mars, and Pathfinders to Venus, and the U.K. was enchanted with journeys to Earth’s nearest neighbors.
The year 1961 brought Anglophonic readers three fascinating works of speculative fiction in translation, two of which were by Jewish authors. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Spinoza of Market Street, and Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke are concerned with the world lurking beneath what we see as reality. Dark fantasy, the occult, magic, and the grotesque come together to make these texts unsettling forays into an alternate way of seeing the world.
On October 2, 1959, television entered the science fiction age with the debut of The Twilight Zone. From Jordan Peele’s revival to SF anthology shows like Black Mirror and Love, Death, and Robots, Rod Serling’s creation still leaves a heavy footprint. What keys to the imagination unlocked the door to the fifth dimension? Read on!