There have been lots of science fiction authors throughout the ages but who was the first?

Most historians give that credit to a Syrian satirist, Lucian of Samosota. Lucian wrote a tale, A True Story, in which a group of sailors, with Lucian in their number, set sail past the Rock of Gibraltar and out into the Atlantic. They are whisked up into the sky by a freak storm, only to find themselves marooned on the Moon. Alas, there’s a war going on between the King of the Moon and the King of the Sun, who are apparently at odds over the colonisation of the Morning Star. And so on.

Although A True Story is billed as Science Fiction, it would be more correct to call it a satire because, essentially, Lucian is taking a side-swipe at the works of Homer and his Odyssey and the Iliad, and so on.

Lucian’s satyrical work is important today. Primarily, it gives us an insight into the Greeks and their knowledge of the Universe. It tells us that Greek Science sees the Sun, moon and Venus as bodies outside of the Earth’s atmosphere and suggests that these bodies could be inhabited by alien creatures, creatures who were not born on this Earth.


Lucian of Samasota (125 - 180 CE)	Lucian's A True Story	Kepler's Somnium (1635) (1635)

We have to step forwards in time by several hundreds of years to search for perhaps the best known of the early science fiction authors.

Johannes Kepler is a name which is well known to astronomers thanks to Kepler’s three laws of Planetary Motion, which form the bedrock of the of modern celestial dynamics.

Kepler himself led an interesting life. He first came to prominence as the assistant of another equally well known, some might even say notorious, astronomer namely Tycho Brahe, a famously disagreeable chap who was, at one time, the wealthiest man in the whole of Denmark. You could write a whole book on Tycho’s activities, and many have. Suffice to say, Tycho was a colourful character, and if you’re inspired by tales of Tycho loosing part of his nose in a duel, or of lengthy bacchanalian parties, or of his pet Moose then indulge yourself in a spot of trawling on the web.

Bacchanalian orgies aside, one of Tycho’s goals was to accurately map the heaven’s and, in doing so, he required a small army of assistants, one of whom was Johannes Kepler.

Under Tycho’s direction, Kepler dutifully noted down the position of the stars and planets over a number of years and after Tycho’s death (under suspicious circumstances I might add), Kepler returned to his native lands where he set about reducing Tycho’s enormous pile of observations to just a series of simple rules.

Kepler was a brilliant mathematician and he eventually succeeded in discovering the three laws of planetary motion which carry his name to this day just from this body of data.

Now, having come up with these laws, Kepler was soon faced with another problem - one of publicising his work.

Kepler needed to find some kind of vehicle such that he could express his ideas in a simplified form, one that would appeal to many of his fellows, many of whom might not be well versed in the science of astronomy or mathematics. To that end, Kepler hit on the idea of writing a short story to illustrate his concepts.

His story was simple. An explorer wishes to launch himself into space so that he can explore the mysteries of the Universe. However, Kepler, so the tradition goes, was supposedly stuck for a means of taking flight. He hit on the idea that the explorer’s mother, an Icelandic witch by the name of Fiolxhilde, might be able to use her knowledge of the Dark Arts to launch her son into the starry firmament above.

All well and good. Our hero has a fantastic time exploring the Moon before returning safely to Earth.

Kepler had a handful of copies printed up - we’re not sure how many but it wasn’t a lot - and circulated those amongst his close friends and colleagues. The response amongst Kepler’s peers was very positive and so he began expanding upon his ideas, developing the rather basic story into a full length book, which he called “Somnium”, which is Latin for “in Dreams”.

To add substance to his work, Kepler added quotations from the likes of Renaissance Astronomer Galileo Galilee, with whom he corresponded, describing the Moon as “porous, as though dug through with hollows and continuous caves”. Kepler also describes the temperature variations an astronaut might experience on the surface of the Moon :

“The great intemperateness of the climate and the most violent alternation of extreme heat and cold”.

Kepler goes on to describe the ships that might sail between the stars “…

...with sails adapted to the winds of Heaven”, and astronauts “… who would not fear the vastness."

There’s a tale running around the internet that says that a few fellows in the Church felt that Kepler’s story might not be a work of fiction and that it was possibly autobiographical, which meant that the Witch character, Fiolxhilde, was Kepler’s mother, Katharina Kepler. Mrs. Kepler quickly found herself under arrest and facing charges of witch craft.

This is only partially true. Looking back through the court records, which are surprisingly detailed, it turns out that at the time of Somnium’s initial publication, Katharina Kepler had already been held in prison for more than a year and was later tried and acquitted of all charges, thanks in the main to her son’s skill as a public orator.

We do know that Kepler was minded to append the following words to his work: “In a dream, one must be allowed the liberty of imagining occasionally that which never existing the world of sense perception.” That said, the book wasn’t properly published until 1635, after Kepler’s death.

So Johannes Kepler was probably the first true science fiction writer in that he was a genuine scientist / mathematician.

One Giant Leap

The next giant leap in science fiction occurs just a few years later. It’s a book that few know about and even fewer have read but it survives. The book, The Blazing World, was published by Mary Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, in 1666, and it gives an imaginary account of the author’s travels in a distant world. It’s also a romance, an adventure story, and even partly autobiographical. It’s a utopian novel, full of talking animals and submarines, and boasts a multitude of otherworldly marvels. However, it also goes beyond your basic science fiction yarn in that it delves deeper into the author’s political views. Cavendish insists that only an absolute sovereignty can maintain social unity and stability because the reliance on one authority eliminates separations of power. She asserts that a peaceful society can only be attained through the lack of societal divisions. Cavendish is certainly one of the first, more outspoken feminists in history.


Mary Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle	Cavendish's Utopian novel, A Blazing World	Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein and his Monster

No discussion of these early adventures into the world of science fiction would be complete without mention of Mary Shelley’s incredible “Frankenstein”. Few books have had such a lasting impact on our culture, and how we perceive science and scientists.

Challenged to write a ghost story by her friend Lord Byron whilst staying at Byron’s villa in Switzerland during the summer of 1816, Mary wrote that she had a waking dream and that, unable to sleep any further, she penned the first few chapters of this idea. Impressed by the imagination at work, her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, encouraged her to turn the adventure into a full novel.

What’s it about? The story describes the adventures of medical student Victor Frankenstein, who uses the mysterious powers of Galvanism - an early term for electricity - to re-animate a dead body. The resulting Creature is intelligent and humane but also utterly hideous. Victor and the Creature spend the rest of the novel chasing each other around Scotland, Ireland, Europe and eventually the Arctic wastes. The Creature is murderously evil.

The book is wonderful. Read it. End of.

The First Golden Age

Let’s skip forward a few years to the Victorian Era and what many consider to be the First Golden Age of Science Fiction. How many so-called Golden Ages have there been? Well, at least three at the time of writing. And, incidentally, you’re living in one now, just in case you hadn’t realised.

The first author we’re going to talk about is Jules Verne, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the greatest visionaries the world has ever witnessed.

Verne’s journey towards being an acknowledged master of the genre did not begin well. His father did not approve of Jules’ literary ambitions and made it abundantly clear that he would prefer that his son follow a more conventional career path, perhaps as a lawyer. However, young Jules was having none of this and, at a very young age, decided to run away from home and stowaway on a merchant ship. We don’t know how much of this is true but Verne’s biographer states that Jules’ went ahead with his plans, securing a position as a cabin boy on a ship bound for the West Indies. Alas, according to his biographer, Verne didn’t get very far with his plans - he was apprehended by his father as the ship docked at their first port of call.

Verne’s education took him to Saint-Donatien Junior Seminary in Nantes, where he was taught mathematics by Brutus de Villeroi, a mathematician/engineer with a passion for submarines. Villeroi later went on to design and build the USS Alligator, one of the first submarines employed by the United States Navy. It’s very possible that Villeroi’s interest in submarines sparked an idea in Verne’s mind which eventually led to the book Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.

It’s also interesting to note that Verne was, in part, heavily influenced by another French author, Paschal Grousset, who led a very interesting life indeed. Grousset worked under a number of aliases - Andre Laurie, Philippe Daryl, Tiburce Moray, Leopold Virey - are just several of those that we know of. Grousset was something of a revolutionary and spent several years in exile following an illegal duel with Prince Pierre-Napoleon Bonaparte in which Grousset’s second was killed. Exiled and transported to New Caledonia, Grousset was unable to publish under his own name in France, and so he came to an arrangement with Verne’s publisher, Pieree-Jules Hertzel, and several of Grousett’s manuscripts were published under Verne’s name, with Verne often assisting with technical details and fact checking Grousset’s work. Grousset was eventually pardoned and returned to France, where embarked on a career in politics.

H. G. Wells and the War of the Words

Verne’s English counter part was Herbert George Wells, better known as H. G. Wells. Wells shared Verne’s love of science and technology, and took advantage of the very latest scientific developments to add scientific accuracy to his writings.

For instance, consider one of Wells’ best known works, The Time Machine (1896). The book describes the adventures of a scientist who builds a time machine, which he uses to voyage far into Earth’s future. There, he encounters a world very different from his own. I’ll not spoil the story by giving away the plot. What I will say is that our intrepid explorer, fleeing from his enemies, uses his time machine to leap even further into the future, where he witnesses the very end of the Earth as our home planet is slowly eaten up by the Sun in its final death throws.

Wells wanted to make his description of the Sun’s last days as accurate as possible and so he drew upon the very latest in scientific research into stellar evolution. Back then, the nature of stars, how they are born, how they burn and how long they last was a subject of some considerable speculation.

One theory, which is still held in high regard to this day, is that, as a star like the Sun begins the slow, inevitable decline into old age, the outer atmosphere starts to expand, consuming all of the nearby planets. Our traveller goes far enough into the future to witness the Sun’s outer atmosphere envelop and then destroy the Earth so that nothing remains of our traveller’s beloved planet. It’s a somewhat bleak but none-the-less accurate portrayal of what awaits our planet some four or five billion years hence.

Similarly, thanks to the work of astronomers such as Percival Lowell, there was, at that time, considerable speculation regarding the possibility of intelligent life on the planet Mars.

Even to the astronomers of the 19th Century, Mars was, as far as they could tell, a dead and broken world. Wells tried to imagine what those life forms might be like and invented a scenario where the Martians had hidden themselves underground following a major cataclysm. Thereafter, they began to view the Earth as a new home. The only problem was… that pesky third rock from the Sun was already inhabited. And so they went to war.

Once again, Wells used the very latest in scientific advances to develop a story that remains highly convincing to this day. What happens to the invading Martians? I’ll leave that to you to discover for yourself.

To many, the writings of Verne and Wells represent to so-called First Golden Age of Science Fiction. However, all good things must come to an end and…

Pulp Fiction

Verne and Wells did good business. They sold a lot of books and wasn’t long before competition arrived on the scene. Publishers with an interest in selling copy soon began pumping out stories where the adventure and thrills took pride of place. Scientific accuracy wasn’t even in second place. Or even third. Most of the time, these works completely ignored even the most basic of scientific concepts, which is as bad as it sounds.

Why is it bad?

You have to look at where the average man or woman learns about science, astronomy and the Universe around them. There were science primers available at the time. Indeed, many of them were very good but, alas, they weren’t very popular. So where else does Joe Public learn about the Universe? Yes, science fiction.

But what if those publications completely ignore science? Even rudimentary science.

There’s an apocryphal tale which has its origins in the early 1980’s. The story goes that two visitors to the Smithsonian Museum of Aerospace in Washington were examining the Apollo 11 capsule and were left aghast to discover that the capsule, this vehicle which had taken three astronauts to the Moon, didn’t have a simple Star Trek-style Transporter or a Warp Drive. Whether or not this story is true, it does serve to illustrate the problem. Bad science fiction means that you end up with an ill-informed and technologically inept readership.

It would be wrong to single out just one writer as a bogeyman amongst so many science bogeymen but there is, I feel, one individual who deserves special mention, namely Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This is the era of the so-called Pulp Fiction and whilst science fiction stories by noted authors like Wells, Verne and Poe did use the so-called Penny Dreadfuls to reach wider and wider audiences, and so did a lot of utter rubbish.

Rice-Burroughs was a newspaper man. He knew what sold - big adventures with strapping, muscle-bound heroes doing daring deeds in service of their country, their President and their Woman. Or Women. The men were always clad in rough, tough, super strong and highly functional space suits. The women were left to run around and scream a lot, usually wearing nothing more than skimpy, revealing frequently translucent outfits utterly unsuited to exploring the rigours of space. A sign of the times, I’m afraid.

To my mind, and this is purely a personal view, this is where the rot began to set in as far as mainstream acceptance of science fiction is concerned, a rot from which it never fully recovered.


Aldous Huxley's Brave New World predicted the onset of test-tube Babies and Genetic Engineering	George Orwell's visionary novel of Super States and Thought Crime	War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Pulp wasn’t the only form of science fiction doing the rounds. Alas, there were relatively few quality releases. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World became a genuine phenomena, predicting as it did, a nightmare world of genetically engineered humans and test tube babies. Likewise, George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a future Britain, 1984 brought us terms such as Big Brother, Newspeak and Thought Crime, terms which have since become thoroughly entrenched in our modern language and culture.

The Race into Space

The tide began to turn again in the years following the Second World War. With the collapse of Germany and the rise of the super-powers - Russia, China and the United States - science fiction, with its dire predictions of post-atomic calamities, became a lens through which the entire world could see how our planet had changed and was changing.

The advent of huge, military rockets equipped with nuclear warheads, meant that, once again, the ‘mad scientist’ became a sinister bogey man and another of those despotic bad guys intent on world domination. Those beloved tropes of trashy cinema favourites Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had started to look a little too real for comfort.

However, out of this Cold War fever, something remarkable was happening. The Space Race was born.

History tells us that it was the Russians and their Sputnik satellite who won the race for space in 1957. However, this isn’t strictly true. That accolade should rightly go to the Americans. Science Fact always trumps Science Fiction.

At the end of the Second World War, both the USSR and the Americans were able to capture and later resettle a significant number of German scientists, many of whom had been involved with the Nazi regime’s desperate quest for ever more powerful rockets and missiles. When Allied Forces captured the Nazi rocket launch facilities at Peenemünde in Northern France, they managed to secure several working V2 rockets of the type that the German’s had been lobbing at London during the last few years of the war. Those rockets were taken to America and, in 1946, the United States successfully launched a modified V2 rocket into a sub-orbital flight from their White Sands Missile testing facility. Some might say that this was only a suborbital flight and therefore it doesn’t qualify but the records clearly show that their rocket successfully crossed the so called Karman Line, at a height of 100 km or 62 miles, which is the internationally defined boundary for the top of Earth’s atmosphere. In other words, Space.

At this moment in time, the optimism which followed the end of the war had evaporated as the super powers jostled each other for supremacy right across the Globe. Humanity’s future looked bleak.

However, out of this gloom, a certain optimism began to develop and whilst books and newspapers were certainly important, there was a new medium emerging - cinema - and film makers suddenly became very keen to show this brave new world in a more positive light.


Destination Moon (1950) Perhaps the first attempt at a realistic depiction of landing on the lunar surface.	Werner Von Braun - Hitler's rocket engineer, relocated to the United States at the end of WWII, later ran NASA's Moon shot programme.

The movie Destination Moon was perhaps the first attempt by filmmakers to accurately portray the exploration of space. With spaceships designed by none other than the head of Germany’s war time rocket programme, Werner Von Braun, and artwork by space visualiser, Chesley Bonestell, the film was an exceptional hit with audiences worldwide. Indeed, Bonestell’s renditions of the lunar surface were incredibly accurate for the time, especially since nobody had actually seen the surface of the moon close up, not even space probes.

This, we could say, is the start of the Second Golden Age of Science Fiction.

When I first delivered this talk, nearly ten years ago, I hadn’t considered the Soviet cinema from this period. This was a mistake. I later discovered that Russian cinema was years ahead of its Hollywood counterparts.

Forbidden Planet

Hollywood in the fifties produced an astonishing number of classics of the genre. This Island Earth is a fine example, as is War of the Wolds but pride of place has to go to Forbidden Planet.

Why? Because it’s original author is of major significance to the world of literature, none other than William Shakespeare.

Okay, so it’s fair to say that Master Shakespeare probably never envisaged that his play The Tempest would be transposed to another planet in the far off future but this certainly the case with Forbidden Planet.

The basic plot goes something like this - a group of explorers set foot on a strange and mysterious planet, Altair 4, in an effort to determine what became of a previous exploratory mission, long considered lost. They encounter an intelligent, taciturn, mercurial robot, Robbie, essentially a reframed version of the spirit Aerial. Robbie the Robot is in the service of a scientist, Morbius aka Prospero, who is the sole survivor of the earlier expedition. Mobius shares this planet with his daughter, Altaira, the Miranda figure.

As the film progresses, Morbius tells the explorers of the wonders he has discovered, and of the original inhabitants of Altair 4, who died out long ago. However, Mobius does not tell the whole truth. There are some nasty surprises lurking in the city beneath the surface.

And if you know anything about Shakespeare’s The Tempest then you’ll almost certainly remember the beast, Caliban. Well, Forbidden Planet is not without its own Caliban although I’ll leave you to find that out for yourself. No spoilers here.

As a film, it stands up remarkably well. On the surface, it’s a rather straightforward adventure flick coupled with some interesting twists and turns, and it isn’t without a sense of humour either. Aside from the rather good story, what makes Forbidden Planet truly standout from the rest of the pack through its soundtrack, which was produced entirely with the aid of electronic musical instruments by pioneers Bebe and Louis Barron. This was first truly electronic movie soundtrack.

Alas, as the fifties moved on, the number of science fiction films increased, with a corresponding decrease in their quality. The genre’s nadir has to be the truly risible Plan Nine from Outer Space. You need to see this film for yourself if only to see how bad things got. Actually, don’t bother. Trust me. It’s dreadful. I’ve seen it once and... It’s just not worth wasting two hours of your precious life on this garbage. Save it for a time when you have a really bad case of toothache. Trust me. You’ll feel better about the toothache.

Science Fiction, the genre, certainly wasn’t dead at the end of the fifties. There were still a few high points in the cinema but they were few and far between. One particular area which did begin to emerge again was in the written form with a new breed of writers coming to prominence.

Arthur C. Clarke was perhaps the foremost British Science Fiction author of the day. Already a talented technical writer, Clarke was well known in scientific circles, having penned an article outlining his ideas for a satellite communication system way back in the forties. Clarke can, in some ways, be celebrated as the founding father of the Communications age.

Without a shadow of a doubt, Clarke’s best known work is 2001: A Space Odyssey, famously made into perhaps the best and certainly the most perplexing science fiction movie of all time.

This millennium-hopping epic centres around a series of strange monoliths of alien origin. We first encounter the Monolith many eons ago, with a tribe of apes battling for survival on the African Savannah. They’re facing extinction both from predation and through competition with a rival group of apes who have claimed dominion over a nearby water hole. Without access to fresh water, they’ll die. But what to do? One of their number encounters a strange black object, the Monolith, and everything changes. I won’t give away the plot but something wonderful happens and …

… In perhaps once of cinemas most celebrated jump cuts, we’re instantly transported to the twenty first century and that famous dancing space shuttle sequence. I can’t listen to the Blue Danube without this set of images getting jammed in my head. Later on, we encounter a Moon base and then a voyage to Jupiter on board the spaceship Discovery.

Most of Discovery’s crew are asleep - held in suspended animation to avoid consuming essential resources. Only two astronauts are awake and active, and have been charged with the routine upkeep of the space vehicle. They’re not alone. The entire mission is supervised by an artificial intelligence, a HAL 9000 computer. HAL is infallible. Or is he? What happens next has been the subject of many, many writings and has been the subject of many interesting and thought-provoking ideas. Kubrick wasn’t just making a film. It’s been suggested he was working at a far, far deeper level, perhaps even re-defining the whole cinema experience. Not convinced?

As stated, the movie centres around a mysterious Monolith, which has some interesting dimensions, which are in the ratio 3 to 4 to 5. But those are just its physical dimensions in our world. Clarke and Kubrick both allude to the possibility that the Monolith has other higher dimensions. Where did the Monolith come from? Who made the Monolith? What’s its function?

Despite the complexity and far-reaching philosophical intrigues, Odyssey did not have an easy ride. Clarke apparently submitted the basic plot to the BBC as The Sentinel only to be told that it was too cerebral. They wanted something closer to Buck Rogers. Sometime later, Clarke was approached by iconic film maker, Stanley Kubrick, who had in his head the idea of making the ultimate science fiction movie. He asked Clarke if he had any ideas up his sleeve and thus, Odyssey was born.

The literary form takes flight

The list of noteworthy sci-fi authors is extensive and includes but is not limited to Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers), Isaac Asimov (Foundation series), Larry Niven (Tales of Known Space) and William Gibson (Cyberpunk), Ursula Le Guin (DragonRiders of Pern), Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale). [I have based this list purely on the limited subset which I have read and enjoyed].

All of these authors were at the vanguard of what you might call hard line speculative fiction - Asimov gave us the Three Laws of Robotics, which have become the genuine landmark developments in the new technology. William Gibson was predicting the rise and rise of the information society long before there was even the idea of the Information Superhighway, which we take for granted these days.

Rise of Television

Also worthy of mention in the history of science fiction is the Rise of Television as a medium. The early sixties saw the arrival of several TV series which have stood the test of time, for better for for worse, you decide. Doctor Who is one. Star Trek is another. Lost in Space has enjoyed a modern reboot but is essentially the same concept - a family of astronauts lost amongst the stars and attempting to get back to the home planet. Star Trek is still with us in numerous different guises but is still utterly dependent upon technologies - time travel and faster than light drives - which are, even now, still in the realm of pipe dreams.


The Six Million Dollar Man : "Better, stronger, faster!"	2020's state-of-the-art prosthetic arm

However, there’s one series which I’ve picked out because we’re seeing its predictions on a daily basis and that’s The Six Million Dollar Man. The premise, which is based on real life events, goes like this. An astronaut is seriously injured when a test flight crashes to earth. Steve Austin is spirited away to a secret government lab where his broken body is retrofitted with various high tech implants - a bionic eye, an ear, both legs and his right arm. In short, he becomes a fusion of man and machine, a prototype cyborg.

Whilst we haven’t quite managed to fuse the human body with technology, we’re getting close. Embedded pacemakers have been with us for a while. Similarly, cochlear implants for the hearing impaired are also fairly commonplace. However, smart prosthetic limbs are becoming more and more sophisticated with delicate feedback loops to control and register form and touch. Such devices are uncannily real and becoming more sophisticated all the time.

Science Fiction writers may be pretty good at predicting the future but are, similarly, notoriously poor at predicting when their new wondrous technologies will become a reality. I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest that the next big thing will be Augmented humans, with integrated computers and smart chips embedded into their bodies.


Star Wars : "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."	Darth Vader, perhaps cinema's biggest most bad-ass villain ever...

Star Wars and Beyond

To my mind, Science fiction doesn’t really feature much in the cinema of the early 70’s. Gritty cops films and giant fish became the norm. However, one film changed all that and you’ve probably been living on Mars for the last forty years if you haven’t heard of it.

Star Wars was rejected by nearly every major film studio in Hollywood. When it eventually found a home over at 20th Century Fox, the budget was tiny - just £9 million, which even then put it firmly in the ‘low budget’ and ‘unlike to succeed’ category. But, to everyone’s surprise, it did rather well.

Why?

Director and script writer, George Lucas, borrowed heavily from the Hero’s Journey concept beloved of writers like Joseph Campbell. He also lifted huge sections from various well known Vedic (Indian) folk tales.

One such Vedic folk story goes like this. A Princess is captured by a tyrannical warlord. A down-on-his-luck farm boy is recruited by a strange old wizard to go on a rescue mission. Along the way, they’re accompanied by a scoundrel and his ‘side kick’, and two mercurial assistants. Does this sound familiar? It should. Change the setting from the Indian subcontinent circa 1500 BC and shift it to, say, "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”, and you have the basis for the Star Wars Universe.

In many respects, Star Wars kicked off a resurgence in science fiction and science fantasy that has never, truly gone away in the last forty years. Yes, there were lulls, but all of the major franchises have either been re-imagined or rebooted.

Hot on the heels of Star Wars came Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stephen Spielberg’s dark tale of extraterrestrial meet-ups. It’s worthy of mention because it takes the subject matter seriously and included amongst its advisors none other then Project Blue Book supremo, J. Allen Hynek, a scientist of considerable influence.

You might want to call this the Third Golden Age of Science Fiction. Or is it the fourth? May the fourth be with you?

Maybe not.

Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?

Star Wars and its sequels ushered in a new wave of science fiction films. Star Trek was dragged screaming into the new age of computer generated realism. Space then became a deeply dark, truly scary place thanks to Ridley Scott’s Alien. Scott’s merging of two separate genres, sci-fi and horror, three if you want to include the dark, moody atmospheres of film noir, set a new standard for what audiences had to endure in the name of entertainment. Even today, forty years on, Alien is not a film to watch on your own.

However, it was Scott’s next film, Blade Runner, which appears to have set the standard for how science fiction predicts the future.

Blade Runner is based on Philip K. Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s set in the year 2019, a time when robot slaves, termed Replicants, are utterly commonplace and utterly disposable. They’re used in hazardous manufacturing processes or off-world as cannon fodder. What stops them from rebelling against their human overlords? A limited life-span of just four years. They’re also forbidden to trespass on Earth. If they do then special agents, termed Blade Runners, are given free reign to suppress and eliminate any runaway Replicant.

Scott’s future Los Angeles, with its broken climate and industrial-scale dereliction, near permanent dark skies, seedy and impossible subcultures, all propelled along by flying cars and a dream-like soundtrack, was not a hit with audiences when it was first released. Famously, Scott was removed from the project before it was completed and the edit that was shown in cinemas is not his. The original story worked but was deemed too dark, too cold and too cerebral for an audience more used to steely-eyed space explorers, high tech lasers and bug-eyed monsters.

However, Blade Runner soon acquired a small but loyal fan base, who saw the film for what it was - an eerily prescient tale of the shape of things to come.

A decade later, Scott reworked his film, removing the awful voice over and restoring the original ending. Without giving away the plot, Blade Runner asks important questions about who we are as humans and if we have a right to destroy life without a care to its true nature. It also presents us with the stark reality of climate change. We have to change or those blood-red skies and ash-covered buildings will be our legacy.

Wrapping up...

So, that's a brief history of science fiction up the mid-80's. There have been other perhaps better science fiction films, movies, books and TV shows. In recent years, we've seen the rise and rise of new media types, including Anime, Steampunk and Diesel-punk etc, as well as new media platforms, such as graphic novels and computer games, which permit an amazingly deep experience of this brave new world.

Science fiction, the genre, is perhaps healthier now than at any time in the past.

However, crucially, we now have to address the difference between Good Science Fiction and perhaps the Not-so-good.