Science fiction, also known as SF, speculative fiction, or, informally, sci-fi, is a genre of literature, television, and movies that deals with the effects of science on humanity. One of the only genres to develop and thrive in the 20th century, its so-called Golden Age flourished in the 1940s and 1950s.
Science fiction had its origins in 19th-century literature such as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and War of the Worlds (1898). By the 1920s, the “space opera” featuring a male hero who must travel into space to save the Earth (and usually a girl) became popular in books such as
E. E. Doc Smith’s The Skylark of Space (1928). Magazines such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, founded in the 1920s and 1930s, published science fiction stories for a niche audience. These publications did not have a large effect on mainstream American culture, but the creativity and diverse storylines encouraged by Astounding Stories editor John W. Campbell influenced writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.
During the 1950s, amid COLD war tensions and an emerging space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, science fiction crossed over into mainstream literature. Heinlein and Asimov helped popularize the science fiction novel. Heinlein, who came to prominence beginning in the 1940s, was the first science fiction author to publish in nongenre magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, and many of his novels became American best sellers. Heinlein’s thematic emphasis on SPACE exploration has been credited with creating a desire for it in the American psyche. His wildly popular Starship Troopers (1959) broke new ground in science fiction, casting a person of color as the protagonist and giving women a greater role as characters than as the stereotyped damsels in distress seen in early science fiction. It also touched on political conflicts of the time: Starship Troopers portrayed a militarist culture as the good society, reminding readers of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, defeated just 14 years prior, and leading to charges that Heinlein was a fascist.
Isaac Asimov, a Russian-American science fiction writer, broke ground in his treatment of robots in his stories, particularly in his Robot series, which includes the short story anthology I, Robot (1950). In these novels and stories Asimov theorized the design of robots, including a built-in system of ethics known as the Three Laws of Robotics. This influenced later science fiction: the character of Data in the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) was based explicitly on Asimov’s concept. While some robotics experts do not believe this type of robot to be possible, they at times cite Asimov in their papers, at least in passing.
Science fiction proliferated in films and on television in the context of the cold war and the U. S.-Soviet space race. While it may have been unintentional, the famous final line from The Thing from Another World (1951), “Watch the Skies,” summarized the feelings of Americans fearful of nuclear war at any moment. Arthur C. Clarke’s collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) showed that this feeling did not ebb throughout the cold war era. The film explored the complicated relationship between progress and violence. Despite the progress in space travel that both the novel and the movie predicted by the beginning of the next century, the United States and the Soviet Union still had nuclear weapons pointed at each other.
On television Flash Gordon (1954-55), a series based on earlier graphic stories, had more in common with 1920s space opera than with real science, but it has fans to this day. In the decade when the American space program aimed for the moon, space exploration proved to be one of the main themes of science fiction on film and TV. In Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966-69), the five-year-mission to explore the galaxy was reminiscent of the exploration of the West so popular in American fiction.
Developments in technology in the middle 20th century, combined with the era’s political conflict, brought science fiction into the mainstream of American popular culture.
Further reading: Carl Abbott, Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press); Brooks Landon, Science Fiction after 1900: From Steam Man to the Stars (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997).
—C. D. Beard
World History
