
Beginnings of Science Fiction - rberger
http://wewanttolearn.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/beginnings-of-sf/
======
netcan
I always derided art-talk. Art history, movements, art-appreciation. I saw BS
and I assumed it was BS. I now think that art is just hard and part of why
it's hard is that nonsense and sense are hard to tell apart. It's not that
objectivity doesn't play a role, it just requires some work in applying it. In
any case, I missed out on stuff I shouldn't have missed out on. Young me's
loss. Old me's gain.

One idea, that I think could be expressed as one of those movements which
encompass science, art and philosophy starts with the definition of history,
which basically defines history as stuff people wrote about things that
happened. Prehistory is the stuff that happened before with a hundred years of
commentary, nuance, various waves of correctness and such. But, arbitrary
demarkations are uncomfortable. We much prefer a nice definable river or
mountain range to act as our border than a straight line on a map. As
definition go, history's in an interesting one. Someone writes about a guy who
was the king, that's history. Someone finds bones and a fancy hat in a lavish
grave, that's prehistory.

Now, by that definition we're running into some interesting hockey stick
phenomenon. Our accumulation of history, via the digital record is growing
f-ing vast. Vast! Google decided (independently, which is creepy but moving
on) to make me a little album with dates and places of a recent trip I took.
It's choice of photographs was good and so was the labeling.

So, written history with some guy or girl compiling a list of kings and laws
and even daily accounts of wars and politics and money are now superseded.
Written history is giving way to recorded history. Is recorded the right word?
Is history? Post-history?

Back to sci-fi. Sci-fi of the 20th century was about technology. Video phones
and space blimps. Alien invasions and human colonization of new worlds.
Fantasies of mixed specie societies reflecting our struggles to transcend
ethnicity and culture. Today's science fiction is, I believe most enlightening
in describing the human response to technology. What will the world be like
when tinder puts you in a virtual room with a would be friend? How do we react
to real wars (as apposed to a science fiction version of romantic fantasy) in
the communication age. How will it feel to be a 90 year old who can run a half
marathon. What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of
conversations their grandparents had with _their_ parents?

These are interesting questions.

~~~
seanflyon
> What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of
> conversations

Along these lines I highly recommend episode 3 of Black Mirror "The Entire
History of You". It is essentially a British version of The Twilight Zone.

------
RobertKerans
Nice article; I got deeply into science fiction through collections of stories
culled from the magazine. I love earlier stuff - Wells etc, but the pulpy
golden age stuff is just fantastically easy to read.

If anyone is interested, there's a 2 volume set from 1959, A Treasury of Great
Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, copies of which are always dirt
cheap on Amazon; it got a few duds, but it's one of the best collections I've
ever read, and an amazing introduction (has The Stars My Destination [as
Tiger! Tiger!], the Chrysalids, Waldo, the Weapon Shops of Isher, among loads
of other stuff). This site is amazing as well, if you can hack the weird
design: [http://greatsfandf.com/](http://greatsfandf.com/)

~~~
colomon
Recommendation seconded, the Boucher anthology is full of great old stuff.
There's a fuller description of it at
[http://www.philsp.com/articles/anthopology_101_07.html](http://www.philsp.com/articles/anthopology_101_07.html)

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baddox
(Science fiction, not San Francisco.) Having never really experienced the
genre much, I have recently been trying to assemble (and eventually read) a
list of influential and quintessential science fiction books, and while my
informal research into the beginnings of sci-fi as an identifiable genre led
me to earlier authors like Verne and Wells, I had never heard of this fellow
or this magazine.

By the way, if one wants to read a quick standalone sci-fi novel, I just
finished Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I can't recommend it
strongly enough.

~~~
lotsofmangos
I tend to rate Mary Shelley as the earliest sci-fi author. Not just for
'Frankenstein', but also for 'The Last Man'.

I would strongly recommend tackling Issac Asimov's 'Foundation' series as one
of the all time classics.

Another pretty early one to take a look at is 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was
the first book banned by the USSR and was the inspiration for Orwell's 1984.

~~~
baddox
The Foundation series is certainly on my list. I have been giving series lower
priority, simply because I want to go breadth-first, but I'm not confident
this is a reasonable strategy, especially since I could just read the first
entry and decide from there how to proceed.

I had not heard of We, but I will look into it.

~~~
snowwrestler
Some iconic science fiction books that can stand alone:

    
    
        Asimov: The Gods Themselves
        Clarke: Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama
        Herbert: Dune, Whipping Star
        Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
        Bester: The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination (also called "Tiger, Tiger")
        Niven: Ringworld
        Niven and Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye, Footfall
        Gibson: Neuromancer
        Stephenson: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age
        Bear: The Forge of God, Eon
        Sagan: Contact
        van Vogt: The Voyage of the Space Beagle
        Lem: Solaris
        Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
        LeGuin: The Left Hand of Darkness
        Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet
    

Some of these are the beginnings of series or have sequels, or exist in a
larger continuum of stories. But each can be read and appreciated on their
own. If you find one you really like, it's not hard to see if there are more
in a series or sequel.

Edit: formatting

------
Animats
"Ralph 124C 41+" is awful. After that, Gernsback published SF of others,
rather than his own, and as a publisher did much to launch SF as a genre.

Before SF, there were "Edisonades", the classic being "Edison's Conquest of
Mars". That's a milestone in science fiction. It's one of the first space
travel stories, and it's reasonably plausible given scientific knowledge at
the time.

Heinlein is not from the "beginnings" era. Heinlein is from the "golden age"
of SF, when a space-oriented future looked not only technically possible but
close. Watch "Destination Moon". Most of Heinlein's better works predate the
discovery that Mars barely has an atmosphere and Venus is well above the
boiling point of water. Planetary colonization within the solar system looked
possible back then.

~~~
Animats
(Sorry about posting that twice. Hacker News was reporting gateway timeouts.)

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marktangotango
I think short form scifi is where it really shines:

[http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html](http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html)

~~~
throwawayornot
this has been posted on HN before, but it's relevant:
[http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html](http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

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bane
If you're interested in Sci-Fi, especially some of the older stuff, there's an
unbelievable treasure trove of books, short stories, scanned magazines, old
radio dramas and books on tape all for free at archive.org.

Finding stuff there is a mess though, but even just a search for "science
fiction" is like falling into a dragon's hoard of genre pieces.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Also lots of free stuff at Project Gutenberg, including a bunch of Astoundings
(which I believe is what Amazing Stories became?):
[http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%2...](http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%29)

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throwawayornot
Gernsback was the man, but I feel the need to mention: H.G Wells, Jules Verne,
Mary Shelly, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs...

