SciFi and Fantasy

Why They Matter

Science Fiction came into existence as we know it in the 1930s with a plethora of science-focused magazines publishing short stories. It really came into its own in the 1950s, with seminal works such as Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, both published in 1951. Fantasy evolved in tandem, as exemplified by the publication of Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1937 and the follow up, The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1954 and 1955.

Elements of both fantastical worlds and science fiction clearly predate those decades. Penny dreadfuls in the late 1800s are a clear predecessor to modern horror, focusing on the macabre and crime, and the original home of the well-known story Sweeney Todd. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus, was published in 1818, while Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870.

One could argue that fantastical elements have been part of story telling as long as humans have shared stories. We used fantastical elements to explain things we didn’t understand like eclipses, comets, weather, earthquakes, death, birth. We still use speculative fiction to grapple with how we interact with our world.

One my earliest exposures to speculative fiction was through the works of John Wyndham and he remains a favorite of mine. The first book I read of his was The Trouble with Lichen, in which a pair of researchers both make the same accidental discovery of a specific type of lichen that delays the aging process. The book…