- Abbreviation:
- SF or sci-fi
- Key People:
- Richard Matheson
- Julius Schwartz
- H.G. Wells
- C.S. Lewis
- Stephen King
Only the gargantuan world of Soviet state publishing could match the production of U.S. science fiction. The Soviet promotion of “scientific socialism” created a vital breathing space for science fiction within Soviet society. The genre’s often allegorical nature gave Soviet writers of science fiction many creative opportunities for relatively free expression.
Soviet science fiction was broad and deep enough to spawn several subgenres, such as the techno-thriller Red Detective stories of Marxist world revolution and many Cosmonaut space operas. Among its masterpieces were the Constructivist silent film Aelita (1924), based on the 1923 novel of the same title by Aleksey Tolstoy. The film’s imaginative set and costume designs had a strong artistic influence on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). Both Aelita’s design and its scenes of an Earthman leading a Martian proletarian revolt against an oppressive regime were echoed in the 1930s American film serial Flash Gordon. Another notable work of this period was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (written in 1920, circulated in manuscript and not published in Russian until 1952; translated into English as We in 1924), which won a wide readership overseas, though the author’s satiric daring led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin. The book’s depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other two great dystopian novels of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949; films 1956 and 1984).
Science fiction after World War II
New directions in fiction
After World War II, publishers largely abandoned the pulps in favour of paperback books and paperback-like “digests.” By that time, however, science fiction had inspired such passionate devotion that it moved with ease into small specialty presses. Two new digest magazines in particular—The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949– ) and Galaxy Science Fiction (1950–80)—prospered. Science fiction also grew in popular esteem after the advent of the atomic bomb (1945) and the launch of Sputnik (1957).
Under the editorial guidance of the new SF digests, American science fiction of the 1950s became more sophisticated, urbane, and satiric, with raw technophilia waning in favour of more anthropologically based speculation about societies and cultures. Many books (and film adaptations) from the decade were rife with Cold War-induced fear and paranoia. Perhaps the most representative novel is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960; first serialized, 1955–57), which describes the postnuclear holocaust efforts of a Catholic religious order to preserve knowledge. Another work, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955; films 1956 and 1978), in a clear case of communist paranoia, relates the story of ordinary people being replaced by look-alikes who operate as part of a collective body.
Science fiction films of the period, with a few notable exceptions—such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Forbidden Planet (1956)—tended to be cheaply produced, juvenile, formulaic films about alien invasions and monstrous mutants. (It was during this era that the Japanese produced numerous Godzilla movies.) In the genre’s fiction, however, the American trio of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury—later joined by Briton Arthur C. Clarke—enjoyed worldwide fame and unmatched popularity during the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. In fact, Anglophone science fiction was dominant during the 1950s and ’60s, though authors from other countries—such as the Polish fantastyka writer Stanisław Lem and the literary Italian Italo Calvino, with his fantascienza—also advanced the genre.
Change was also in the air in Soviet Russia. The political and cultural thaw that occurred during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when restrictions on Russian artists were relaxed, and the Russian-led dawn of the space age caused a dramatic upsurge in Soviet science fiction, including works by Ivan Yefremov, Kir Bulychev, and the renowned doyens of Russian-language science fiction, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A similar surge in Chinese science fiction accompanied the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In fact, at the start of the 21st century, China’s main science fiction magazine claimed a readership of 500,000, dwarfing the circulation of any science fiction publication in the West.
In Britain and the United States, the editorial polemics of Michael Moorcock (associated for many years with New Worlds and its anthologies) and Harlan Ellison (Dangerous Visions [1967] and Again, Dangerous Visions [1972]) led a rebellious New Wave movement that facilitated the genre’s move in fresh directions. Sporting a countercultural disregard of taboos (particularly with regard to morals and sexuality), a fascination with mind-altering drugs and Eastern religions, and an interest in experimental literary styles, the movement pushed the boundaries of traditional science fiction until the genre was almost unrecognizable. Most avant-garde experimentalism had vanished by the late 1970s, but by then the New Wave had vastly expanded the subgenre of “soft” science fiction. (“Soft” SF is typically more concerned with exploring social aspects of the near future and of “inner space,” while “hard” science fiction features technology-for-technology’s-sake.)
SF cinema and TV
In contrast to earlier decades, traditional science fiction of the late 1960s and early ’70s reached unprecedented popularity on television and in film. American SF television series, such as Star Trek (1966–69; founded by Gene Roddenberry), may have primed film producers and audiences alike for cinema adaptations of “serious” science fiction. Fahrenheit 451 (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Charly (1968)—based on works by Bradbury, Clarke, and Daniel Keyes, respectively—earned critical praise and attracted a growing number of directors and actors to the genre. If any doubt remained about the commercial viability of SF cinema, the blockbuster movies Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) proved that science fiction had finally moved beyond its drive-in B-film status. In fact, U.S. box-office receipts for science fiction, fantasy, and horror films jumped from 5 percent in 1971 to nearly 50 percent by 1982; although the share fell somewhat in subsequent years, science fiction continued to be one of the most important Hollywood movie formats.
Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), prefigured the 1980s phenomenon known as cyberpunk. It combined a fascination for cybernetics (the science of communication and control theory, especially with regard to the human nervous system and brain) with a “punk,” or alienated, social consciousness, thus melding elements of soft and hard science fiction. William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984) coined the word cyberspace to describe a computer-mediated virtual world into which humans plugged their brains. Other works of this subgenre include John Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’ (1980), Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985), and Lewis Shiner’s Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988). The explosive growth of the computer industry in the 1990s and the new forums for expressing alienation presented by the Internet gave cyberpunk writing a bracing sense of immediate relevancy.
The spectacular nature of science fiction’s thematics played very strongly to Hollywood’s technical advantages over rival cinemas in Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, and Mumbai (then Bombay). After the 1970s, the American SF film with its state-of-the-art special effects became science fiction’s public face. Science fiction films such as the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003, 2009, 2015), the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997), and the Jurassic Park series (1993, 1997, 2001, 2015) became major money earners worldwide.
Heroic fantasy, which had remained a minority taste in Britain and elsewhere for many decades, captivated a new generation and emerged in the 1990s as a dominant subgenre known to devotees as “sword and sorcery.” One indication of the changing commercial reality was the 1992 reorganization of SF’s largest professional association, the Science Fiction Writers of America, into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. Undreamed-of book sales of such fantasy works as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997; U.S. title Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and succeeding volumes brought wildly successful film adaptations of the Harry Potter books (2001–11) as well as of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (2001–03).
