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.

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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).

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.

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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.

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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.)