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.
In my teens I was profoundly affected by a small number of books that I read. As a result of reading them I became intensely interested in the politics of pacifism and the strategies of conflict resolution and resistance.
In 1960, when the Cold War was at its height, a remarkable science fiction film called The Silent Star was released in East Germany. It not only featured an international and multiracial crew on the first mission to Venus, but it also demonstrated that despite ideological differences, the East and West shared the same fears.
When Anglophone readers think of “magical realism,” they generally think of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and other practitioners of this subgenre in Latin America during the mid-20th century. Borges, known for his brain-twisting, reality-bending stories, published two texts in English in 1962: Ficciones and Labyrinths.
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.