Book Companion:
Chronology for Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction, Fifth Edition
Neil Barron
Chronology
Anatomy of Wonder has always tried to provide a synoptic overview of science fiction, showing both the forest and the trees. Its length makes that difficult. This online chronology provides a more comprehensible, if necessarily a much more sketchy, perspective on many of the most important books, short stories, films, radio and TV over six centuries. Because most SF represents a marriage of imagination and technology, significant scientific and technological developments are also shown, highlighted in boldface. It should be obvious to the reader that the exploration of the implications of scientific and technical developments has occupied fiction writers for far longer than the period since 1929, when science fiction became the increasingly common name for the genre.
The five analytical essays in Part I of the book provide a succinct survey of SF in its historical context. Parts II and III provide more information on individual books. And Chapter 11 explores film, TV, and radio. Illustrators as well as wordsmiths have always attempted to depict the future. Chapter 11 discusses many films and books about them that depict yesterday's tomorrows; see also [10-18/19] for studies of film posters. Clute's Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia [720] also provides useful and colorful historic perspectives.
My thanks to Albert Berger, James Gunn, Bill Contento, and Michael Levy, who provided many valuable suggestions for improving this chronology.
| 1450s | Gutenberg invents the type mold, which made printing from movable metallic type possible; see also 1846 |
| 1516 | More's Utopia gives its name to a persistent impulse, often blending hope with satire |
| 1543 | Copernicus's Concerning the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres demonstrates how the earth's motions could be used to explain the movements of other heavenly bodies. For the significance of this work, see Owen Gingerich's The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolas Copernicus (Walker, 2004). |
| 1609 | Galileo builds the first of many telescopes, discovers Jupiter's four largest moons in 1610, and argues for the Copernican heliocentric theory |
| 1634 | Kepler's Somnium, an imaginative vision of the Moon, fictionalizes the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler |
| 1650s | Leeuwenhoek develops the microscope and reveals a formerly unseen world, much as Galileo revealed the macroworld of the astronomers |
| 1657 | Cyrano de Bergerac's parody of the cosmic voyage, which influenced Swift |
| 1687 | Newton proposes the three laws of motion, building on Galileo's work, principles underlying space travel and physics generally. Newton also made it conventional wisdom that the universe was rational, and comprehensible to the human intellect. |
| 1719 | Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a template for uncounted stories of humans marooned in alien environments, called robinsonades |
| 1726 | Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which Suvin [9-189] called "the great model for all subsequent SF" |
| 1740s | Benjamin Franklin's analyses of the nature of electricity and identification of lightning with electricity |
| 1750s–1760s | Development of the chronometer makes navigation and timekeeping in general truly scientific. Foundation of precision timekeeping and instrument making for industrial purposes, but also for better research |
| 1752 | Voltaire's Micromégas incorporates extraterrestrial viewpoints, viewpoints echoed in Swift |
| 1771 | Mercier's L'an 2440. Contrast this idealized Paris with Lang's Metropolis (1926) |
| 1775 | James Watt and Matthew Boulton build the first modern steam engine |
| 1783 | The Montgolfier brothers experiment with hot-air balloons |
| 1791 | Luigi Galvani discovers the nervous system's electrical activity |
| 1798 | Eli Whitney, inventor best known for the cotton gin, also invented tools and machines to turn out interchangeable, uniform parts in his musket factory, later leading to the assembly lines in automobile and other plants (see 1901) |
| 1801 | Robert Fulton constructs the first practical submarine in France |
| 1805 | Cousin de Grainville's The Last Man, the first novel to postulate the end of human history and the progenitor of many later despairing (or welcomed) apocalypses |
| 1808 | John Dalton publishes a book explaining atomic theory |
| 1818 | Shelley's Frankenstein, an early example of Aldiss's nemesis clobbering hubris |
| John Symmes, a U.S. Army officer, proposes a hollow habitable Earth, accessible from the poles; The U.S. Congress was lobbied to fund an exploratory ship; Many 19th-century writers colonize Symmes's world; see also 1913 | |
| 1823 | Charles Babbage begins constructing a calculating machine, the "difference engine," which used the principle of computer programming |
| 1830s | Poe's early proto-SF stories published |
| 1834 | Félix Bodin's Le Roman de l'avenir argues for works set in the future |
| 1836 | Samuel Morse builds his first telegraph |
| 1846 | Emile Souvestre's Le monde tel qu'il sera, an early satiric warning against the dangers of mechanization, frequently repeated since |
| Richard Roe invents the rotary press, permitting rapid printing, increased still further by William Bullock in 1865 by use of a continuous roll of paper | |
| 1859 | Darwin's Origin of Species lays the foundations of evolutionary biology; Proto-SF writers of prehistoric romances embraced Lamarckian notions that children could somehow inherit their parents' achievements; Wells knew better |
| 1865 | Verne's From the Earth to the Moon via a shell-like capsule that would have reduced its occupants to a bloody smear |
| 1866 | Alfred Nobel invents dynamite |
| 1868 | Ellis's The Steam Man of the Prairies, which introduced SF to the dime novel |
| 1870 | Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the best known of his many voyages extraordinaires; the Nautilus submarine was one of Verne's machines designed to subdue the unknown, but his later works partially repudiated his youthful optimistic views |
| 1871 | Chesney's The Battle of Dorking founded the subgenre of the future war story |
| 1876 | Josiah Willard Gibbs publishes on the phase rule and applies the laws of thermodynamics to physical chemistry |
| Thomas Edison opens the first American industrial research laboratory | |
| 1878 | Albert A. Michelson first measures the speed of light |
| 1880 | Electric lighting developed by Thomas Edison and J.W. Swan |
| 1883 | Albert Robida's Le vingtième siècle, one of the first of his books, which mix parody and satire, accompanied by his brilliant illustrations |
| 1884 | Abbott's Flatland, a math-geek classic in the Swiftian tradition of altered perspective, a variation of the modern cliché, "thinking outside the box" |
| 1886 | Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, far less popular than Treasure Island until "the dark star of psychoanalysis rose over the horizon" (Aldiss) |
| C. H. Hinton's Scientific Romances popularizes a new term, superseded in 1929 by science fiction, Hugo Gernsback's term in the first issue of his Science Wonder Stories | |
| 1887 | Heinrich Hertz demonstrates the propagation of radio waves |
| 1888 | Nikola Tesla invents alternating current electric motor |
| Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000–1887, the most famous of American utopias, is infatuated with technology and spawned more than 50 concurring and dissenting utopias | |
| Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the first story of travel to and from the past, which mirrors Twain's confusion and despair; contrast the confident Martin Padway in de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall (1939) | |
| 1889 | William Morris's News from Nowhere, the most famous response to Bellamy, proposing a more pastoral future |
| 1895 | Roentgen discovers X-rays |
| Marconi invents wireless telegraphy | |
| Astronomer Percival Lowell publishes Mars, source of (sometimes incorrect) data used by many 20th-century SF writers as background to life on Mars | |
| Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, whose protagonist has no sense of guilt (although the story's narrator does), unlike Faust or Dr. Frankenstein | |
| Wells's The Time Machine, the first novel to use a machine to travel through time; skeptical of the present, despairing of the future. | |
| 1896 | Wells's The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents was the first collection of his many influential stories. |
| Henri Becquerel discovers uranium radioactivity | |
| J. J. Thomson discovers the electron | |
| 1897 | Ferdinand von Zeppelin builds an airship |
| 1898 | Wells's The War of the Worlds dramatizes humankind's fragile place in the universe, subject to "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic," much as were England's colonies; see also 1938 |
| Marie Curie discovers polonium and radium and coins the term radioactivity | |
| 1900 | Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams |
| Max Planck, German physicist, first proposes the quantum theory | |
| Niels Bohr proposes solar system model of atomic structure | |
| 1901 | Assembly line introduced in Oldsmobile automobile plant, later improved by Henry Ford, which soon became the basis for all mass production |
| 1902 | Ernest Rutherford discovers the proton's positive electrical charge and determines that radioactivity is the process of one element decomposing into another |
| Le voyage dans la lune, produced and directed by Georges Méliès, was the first SF film of importance, running 21 minutes when most films were 1 to 2 minutes | |
| 1903 | Wilbur and Orville Wright complete the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air flying machine |
| Rutherford identifies the properties of alpha rays | |
| 1904 | Rutherford and Frederick Soddy advance a theory of radioactivity |
| 1905 | Einstein proposes the special theory of relativity; the general theory of relativity is introduced in 1915 |
| 1907 | London's The Iron Heel, a futuristic dystopia that anticipates Orwell |
| Baum's Ozma of Oz introduces Tik-Tok, one of the first fully developed robots in children's literature | |
| 1908 | Forster's "The Machine Stops" repudiates the world state advocated in Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905) |
| Henry Ford markets the Model T | |
| 1911 | Gernsback's Ralph 124C41+, a hardware catalog masquerading as a novel, the quintessential example of the author's coinage, "scientifiction" |
| Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder, one of the earliest "superman" novels | |
| 1912 | Doyle's The Lost World, adventure SF in a prehistoric setting, the same year in which Tarzan of the Apes, jungle adventures, was serialized, as was Burroughs's A Princess of Mars, first of the Barsoom series |
| 1913 | Burroughs's At the Earth's Core, first of the hollow Earth tales of Pellucidar |
| 1914 | World War I begins; first use of tanks, aircraft and chemical weapons in war |
| Sir Arthur Eddington first suggests that spiral nebulae are actually galaxies | |
| Gilman's Herland, an early feminist utopia, first reprinted in 1979 | |
| 1919 | Robert H. Goddard publishes A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, first suggesting rockets to reach the moon |
| 1920 | Shanks's The People of the Ruins, a despairing scientific romance inspired by World War I |
| &##x010C;apek's R.U.R., a play that popularized the word robot (but an organic, not a mechanical creature in the play, what today we call an android) | |
| 1922 | Hermannn Oberth publishes The Rocket Into Interplanetary Space, introducing the concept of escape velocity |
| 1923 | Weird Tales begins publication, includes some SF in its early years |
| 1924 | Zamiatin's We, one of the most powerful and influential dystopias, not published in the USSR until 1988; the author died in exile |
| Astronomer Edwin Hubble determines that stars in the Andromeda nebula are far outside our Milky Way galaxy, establishes conclusively that galaxies other than ours exist | |
| 1925 | Werner Heisenberg develops theory of quantum mechanics |
| 1926 | Amazing Stories begins publication, the first magazine to publish exclusively what its founding editor, Hugo Gernsback, originally called scientifiction, by 1929 science fiction |
| Metropolis, Fritz Lang's masterful if ponderous exploration of the city's dehumanization of its inhabitants | |
| Edwin Hubble determines that the universe is expanding | |
| Robert Goddard launches first liquid fuel rocket, technology used in the V-2 rockets of World War II | |
| 1928 | Smith's The Skylark of Space serialized in Amazing, an archetypal pulp space opera |
| Philip Nowlan's first two stories of Anthony "Buck" Rogers also published in Amazing, morphing to a popular and long-running comic strip in 1929, followed in 1934 by the Flash Gordon strip | |
| 1930 | Vannevar Bush invents the first analog computer |
| Astounding Stories of Super-Science begins publication. First fanzines appear. | |
| Stapledon's Last and First Men transcends its dated parts in a panoramic history of humanity from today to the 18th man 2 billion years hence | |
| Star Maker (1937) presents a history of life to the end of time | |
| Ernest O. Lawrence invents the cyclotron, the first particle accelerator | |
| 1931 | Frankenstein, archetype of all "mad scientist" movies, which made a star of Boris Karloff and a model for uncounted numbers of shambling descendents |
| 1932 | James Chadwick discovers the neutron |
| Huxley's Brave New World views genetic engineering with alarm in one of the 20th century's most acclaimed dystopias | |
| 1934 | Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time" introduces the idea of alternate histories to genre SF |
| 1936 | Experimental TV broadcasts by BBC; NBC begins regular TV broadcasts following NY World's Fair in 1939 |
| Leo Szilard awarded British patent for an atomic bomb utilizing fission and a chain reaction | |
| 1937 | Astronomer Grote Reber builds the first radio telescope |
| 1938 | John W. Campbell, Jr., becomes editor of Astounding; the so-called "golden age of SF" begins |
| Enrico Fermi receives Nobel Prize for creating radioactive elements by neutron bombardment, flees Italy for U.S. after accepting award | |
| Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann create world's first fission by bombarding uranium with neutrons; Lise Meitner realizes experiment has released energy in accordance with Einstein's E=mc2 formula | |
| The Orson Welles Mercury Theater radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds was listened to by approximately 6 million Americans, of whom about a million were frightened to varying degrees | |
| 1939 | de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, one of the finest and most rigorous of alternate histories and perhaps the first SF pulp novel to be issued in hardcover (1941) |
| First "world" SF convention, the worldcon, held in New York | |
| Heinlein's "future history" stories, later collected as The Past Through Tomorrow, starts publication in Astounding and introduce a new sense of realism into SF; see the useful comparative chart of future histories by five SF writers in Clute [7-20] | |
| Einstein writes to President Roosevelt urging the U.S. to develop an atomic bomb | |
| World War II begins, stimulating many technologies | |
| U.S. establishes Office of Scientific Research and Development to supervise war-related research | |
| 1941 | Glenn Seaborg and colleagues discover plutonium |
| Heinlein publishes "Solution Unsatisfactory" and other atomic weapons/atomic energy-related stories in Astounding | |
| First self-sustaining chain reaction in Fermi's University of Chicago reactor | |
| 1942 | U.S. establishes the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb |
| Asimov's first Foundation stories published | |
| 1943 | Manhattan Project to prepare weapons-grade uranium begins at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and atomic bomb design research begins at Los Alamos, N.M. |
| First V-2 rockets launched | |
| Astronomer Harlow Shapley announces that at least 75,000 galaxies exist, each containing more than one billion suns | |
| Wollheim's The Pocket Book of Science Fiction is the first true SF anthology, an original mass market paperback, followed in 1945 by his anthology of four SF novellas, The Portable Novels of Science | |
| 1944 | Cartmill's "Deadline" in Astounding achieves fame for describing the atomic bomb, and the magazine editor is interviewed by Army Counter-Intelligence agents |
| 1945 | Atomic bombs destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki |
| Mind at the End of Its Tether, the despairing last work of H. G. Wells | |
| Wernher von Braun and associates surrender themselves and many V-2 rockets to U.S. military forces | |
| John P. Eckert and John Mauchly complete ENIAC, first computer, with 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing 30 tons | |
| 1946 | Many classic tales are assembled into two lengthy hardcover anthologies: The Best of Science Fiction, ed. by Groff Conklin, and Adventures in Time and Space, ed. by Raymond J. Healy and Francis J. McComas |
| 1947 | Bailey's Pilgrims Through Space and Time, derived from a 1934 doctoral thesis, is the first scholarly history of SF |
| Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo, a pioneering YA novel, one of several such by Heinlein | |
| John von Neumann develops first computer capable of storing programs in its memory | |
| Reports of sightings of flying saucers receive widespread publicity; U.S. Air Force establishes Project Blue Book in 1948 to investigate such reports | |
| 1948 | Transistor invented at Bell Laboratories |
| Oak Ridge Labs begin research on peaceful uses of atomic energy | |
| Norbert Weiner publishes Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, establishing cybernetics as a science and laying a theoretical foundation for future computers | |
| 1949 | First Soviet atomic bomb exploded |
| Orwell's classic dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four | |
| Williamson's The Humanoids is a dark counterpoint to the beneficent robots of Asimov | |
| Stewart's Earth Abides is an elegiac chronicle of civilization's demise | |
| First issue of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published | |
| SF TV show, Captain Video and His Video Rangers, the first of several juvenile space opera series of the 1950s | |
| 1950 | Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles fuses many earlier stories from the pulps and the slicks into one of the all-time best-selling SF books |
| First issue of Galaxy published | |
| Destination Moon is filmed in the tradition of documentary realism, with technical advice provided by Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley | |
| 1951 | First commercially produced computer, UNIVAC-1, acquired by U.S. Census Bureau |
| Contraceptive pill developed by Carl Djerassi; marketing began 1960 | |
| The Thing, an effective though unfaithful dramatization of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s story of a shape-changing alien at a scientific station in the Antarctic. The film is set in the arctic, and the alien is not a shape-changer. The 1982 remake was gorier if more faithful. | |
| The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise, was one of the best SF films of its period; its plot suggested a Christian allegory | |
| 1952 | Simak's popular City, eight stories from Astounding, 1944–1951 |
| Vonnegut's first book, Player Piano, an increasingly prescient view of what was then called automation, resulting in large job losses and social revolution | |
| U.S. tests first hydrogen bomb | |
| Bretnor's Modern Science Fiction provided the first contemporary survey of SF | |
| 1953 | The War of the Worlds transposed the Wells story from London to Los Angeles but remained relatively faithful to the plot. The special effects were well done; the love interest was awkward |
| The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth, whose satire is even more relevant today | |
| Sturgeon melds superchildren into Homo Gestalt in More Than Human | |
| First Hugo award given at 1953 world SF convention | |
| 1954 | Clement's Mission of Gravity is a classic example of "hard" SF, a term coined by long-time reviewer P. Schuyler Miller in 1957 |
| USS Nautilus, first nuclear-powered submarine, launched | |
| Jonas Salk develops first vaccine to prevent polio | |
| Bester's The Demolished Man mixes SF and murder and wins the first Hugo for the 1953 magazine novel | |
| 1955 | First experimental use of a nuclear reactor to produce electricity for civilian use |
| 1956 | Forbidden Planet, a film inspired by "The Tempest," with a strong assist from Freud and Robby the Robot playing Ariel |
| 1957 | Sputniks I and II satellites launched by USSR, the first artificial Earth satellites, almost a century after Edward Everett Hale's "The Brick Moon" (1869) first proposed the idea |
| 1958 | U.S. launches its first satellite, Explorer I, whose instruments discover the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the earth |
| NASA established and begins Project Mercury to launch astronauts into space | |
| First integrated circuit built by Jack Kirby of Texas Instruments | |
| The Incredible Shrinking Man follows Matheson's novel and effectively captures the terror of the protagonist as he shrinks to oblivion | |
| 1959 | Shute's On the Beach, grim and effective; the film directed by Stanley Kubrick is the most celebrated anti-nuclear war film of its period |
| Heinlein's Starship Troopers celebrates the martial spirit in a novel that polarized pro- and anti-Vietnam critics | |
| 1960s | New Wave SF becomes prominent by the mid-'60s, introducing new themes (usually downbeat) and narrative techniques drawn from "mainstream" fiction, all founded on the belief that SF deserved to be taken more seriously. Its arguments were soon accepted by most readers, the audience for SF widened and SF matured. |
| 1960 | Astounding loses its pulp title, is stodgily renamed Analog |
| Project Ozma, beginning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) | |
| Amis's New Maps of Hell, the first important study of SF by a "serious" novelist, which gained broader recognition for SF | |
| 1961 | Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land appeal to a flower-power generation and is one of SF's first bestsellers in spite of its tiresome didacticism |
| Solaris by Stanislaw Lem published in Polish (in 1976 in English), the best known of his cerebral, challenging works, some lit with great wit. The lengthy 1971 Russian film has its partisans; an American version was released in 2002 | |
| L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, first of a YA trilogy, wins multiple awards | |
| Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first human in space, orbits Earth for 89 minutes; President Kennedy announces U.S. goal of landing an American on the Moon within the decade | |
| 1962 | Ballard's The Drowned World, one of four disaster novels, whose mood presages New Wave SF |
| First communication satellite, Telstar, launched; John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit Earth, followed by Scott Carpenter and Walter Schirra | |
| Rachel Carson's Silent Spring stimulates environmental awareness | |
| 1963 | Probes of Mars and Venus reveal harsh surface environments |
| Doctor Who begins the first of 26 seasons on British TV | |
| 1964 | IBM markets the first computers with integrated circuits |
| Doctor Strangelove is the blackest of black comedies, brilliantly directed by Kubrick, with three stellar roles played by Peter Sellers | |
| Herbert's Dune, first of a series in which ecology is prominent; the film was expensive and well-intentioned but did poorly at the box office | |
| 1965 | First space walks by U.S. astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts |
| 1966 | First soft landings on the Moon by U.S. and Soviet spacecraft |
| 1966–1969 | Three seasons, 79 episodes of Star Trek, by far the most influential SF TV series |
| 1967 | Dangerous Visions, ed. by Harlan Ellison, showcases mostly American SF in a manifesto of the American New Wave; followed by an equally influential sequel |
| Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare, a pioneering study of the dystopian impulse and its links to SF | |
| 1968 | Charly, based on the sentimental favorite by Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon, is only the second SF film to win an Oscar for its lead actor, Cliff Robertson (the first was Fredric March in 1932's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) |
| Planet of the Apes is great fun, even when it blunts the satiric message of Boulle's novel; followed by several much inferior sequels | |
| 2001—A Space Odyssey blends spectacular if sterile visuals with often murky ideas and opens to mixed reviews before attaining its status as a cult classic | |
| Locus begins publication with issue zero, a single mimeographed sheet | |
| 1969 | Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Jr. set foot on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission |
| Arpanet, predecessor of the Internet, links four computers; see also 1991 | |
| Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, a widely discussed and praised novel of sexual politics | |
| Extrapolation, the first academic journal devoted to SF, begins publication under Thomas Clareson's editorship | |
| Physicist Edward Condon's study of UFOs rejects the possibility that UFOs are vehicles from other planets; U.S. Air Force discontinues Project Blue Book | |
| 1970 | SF Research Association founded, the first academic organization devoted to the study of SF |
| 1971 | David Rorvik popularizes cyborgs in As Man Becomes Machine |
| First microprocessors produced by Intel | |
| A Clockwork Orange celebrates free will but is still pessimistic; Kubrick relies on the incomplete American version of the Burgess novel; he withdrew the film from British distribution | |
| 1972 | Silverberg's Dying Inside, a tragic and moving tale of the fading powers of a telepath; the author's finest, and bleakest, novel |
| 1973 | Science Fiction Studies founded; Billion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss provides the best critical history of SF, written in the author's witty and often barbed prose. The 1986 revision, Trillion Year Spree, updated and expanded the original, but the tart flavor of the original was diluted |
| American biochemists Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer pioneer early experiments in genetic engineering | |
| 1974 | Le Guin's The Dispossessed, a fine example of SF used to explore political and moral issues and winner of SF's most prestigious awards |
| 1975 | Haldeman's The Forever War, a riposte to Heinlein's Starship Troopers by a Vietnam vet |
| Russ's The Female Man provides three alternative scenarios in a well-argued novel of sexual politics | |
| 1976 | Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs start selling their kit computer, the Apple I, followed by a fully assembled upgrade, the Apple II |
| Wolfe's The Known and the Unknown explores the iconic images used by American and British SF writers in an exceptionally perceptive study | |
| 1977 | Suvin's important but dense study, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, defines SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement |
| Paul Carter's The Creation of Tomorrow remains the most balanced and well-written study of SF magazines during their glory years | |
| Star Wars, exhilarating, flashy, silly, mythical, and immensely profitable. A nonstop over-the-top adventure, in sharp contrast to Kubrick's cerebral 2001. Producer George Lucas created two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back, 1980 (regarded by many as the best of the series), and Return of the Jedi, 1983; and two "prequels," The Phantom Menace, 1999, and Attack of the Clones, 2002 | |
| Close Encounters of the Third Kind has awe and wonder at its core, even if derived from spurious UFO sources | |
| First in vitro fertilization of human | |
| 1978 | Near-meltdown at Three Mile Island commercial nuclear power plant generates new concern for the safety of nuclear power; no nuclear power plants have since been built in the U.S. |
| USENET created, establishing special interest Internet newsgroups | |
| 1979 | Alien, an effective haunted house in space film featuring H. R. Giger's nasty creation, which returned in 1986's Aliens, fought by a World War II movie platoon combining minority groups, women and androids |
| 1980 | Benford's Timescape, a time-travel novel written by a physicist, gives its name to a Simon & Schuster imprint |
| Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer begins the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, an ambitious and masterful far future epic | |
| 1981 | First space shuttle, Columbia, launched |
| IBM introduces the IBM PC, running Microsoft's MS-DOS | |
| 1982 | Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's futuristic film noir played out on the anarchic streets of a futuristic Los Angeles, dominated by steel and glass towers and neon signs, but a cesspool for its polyglot population; lacks most of the merits of Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but is visionary and extremely influential in its own way |
| 1983 | President Reagan proposes a Strategic Defense Initiative, largely space-based weapons to shield the U.S. from a nuclear attack by ballistic missiles; the nickname Star Wars, originally used by critics, becomes the system's common name |
| 1984 | Apple Macintosh introduced, the first affordable PC with a GUI (graphical user interface) using a mouse; Microsoft's Windows 1 shipped 1985 |
| Gibson's Neuromancer, winner of several major awards, provides the archetype for cyberpunk, whose manifesto was the 1986 anthology Mirrorshades, ed. by Sterling | |
| The Terminator, James Cameron's relentless action-adventure film with spectacular special effects, followed by two sequels | |
| 1985 | Bear's Blood Music and Sterling's Schismatrix effectively explore aspects of rapidly developing biotechnology |
| Stableford's Scientific Romance in Britain 1890–1950 provides a broad social context in a masterful survey of the distinct British tradition of the scientific romance | |
| 1986 | Space shuttle Challenger destroyed by explosion 73 seconds after liftoff; see also 2003 |
| 1987 | Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation popularizes nanotechnology, which many SF writers incorporate into their tales |
| 1987–1994 | Star Trek: The Next Generation, as influential as the original series in some ways, superior in others |
| 1988 | Lefanu's In the Chinks of the World Machine provides both theoretical notes and close individual readings of SF from a feminist perspective |
| 1989 | Simmons' Hyperion begins a four-volume saga, perhaps the finest of contemporary space operas |
| 1990 | Human Genome Project begins; rough draft of the first blueprint of human life completed by 2000 |
| Hubble Space Telescope placed in space; mirror later repaired | |
| 1991 | Bleiler's Science-Fiction: The Early Years is an amazing, astounding and astonishing achievement by one of the SF field's finest scholars |
| Tim Berners-Lee develops the World Wide Web | |
| 1992 | Robinson's Red Mars, first of a trilogy providing the most detailed chronicle of the exploration and colonization of another planet and one of the best examples of hard SF |
| Harry Turtledove insightfully explores an alternative history of the American Civil War in The Guns of the South | |
| 1993 | A second, much enlarged edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by Clute and Nicholls, an essential tool; a companion fantasy encyclopedia was published in 1997 |
| 1994 | Lowry's The Giver, the most distinguished YA SF novel since 1962's A Wrinkle in Time |
| The Norton Book of Science Fiction, a 67-story anthology limited to the 1960–1990 period, provokes much critical controversy over its selection | |
| Scottish writer Iain Banks weaves several fascinating strands to create his complex, challenging novel, Feersum Endjinn | |
| 1994–1998 | Babylon 5, 109 TV episodes over five seasons, does not rely on self-contained episodes, like Star Trek, but instead develops more as a novel, thus requiring sustained viewing and providing a more complex experience |
| 1995 | David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer argue for the centrality of hard SF in the 67-story anthology, The Ascent of Wonder; a 2002 companion, The Hard Science Fiction Renaissance, advances the argument |
| 1996 | Marketed as a mainstream work, the first novel by Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow, was a fine and perceptive treatment of the first contact with aliens theme |
| Dolly the sheep is first cloned animal | |
| 1997 | Gattaca explores the cruel world of genetic engineering ("preemptive plastic surgery" in Roger Ebert's apt phrase) in a film Huxley might have approved |
| 1998 | Viagra licensed for use |
| Dark City has great visual style as it combines film noir and existential dread in a vividly imagined metropolis of night, shadows, and the menacing Strangers | |
| Diaspora by Australian writer Greg Egan is a remarkable exploration of a complex post-human future | |
| International Space Station launched; first crew, one American and two Russians, occupies station in 2000; future doubtful in 2004 | |
| 1999 | The Matrix quickly establishes itself as a thinking man's cyber-adventure and is soon the subject of books and classroom discussion |
| Joel Achenbach's Captured By Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe, a balanced survey that finds little credible evidence for intelligent extraterrestrial life | |
| Richard Rhodes, ed., Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World is a comprehensive, balanced selection of 200+ excerpts. Compare McKibben's 2003 book. | |
| 2001 | Terrorists hijack four U.S. airliners and crash them into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon |
| China Miéville's first novel, Perdido Street Station, vividly explores a complex future, followed by two superior sequels | |
| 2002 | The one billionth PC is shipped |
| A powerful, intelligent exploration of the potential evils of cloning is the subject of Nancy Farmer's award-winning young adult novel, The House of the Scorpion | |
| 2003 | Message picked up by Kitt Peak observatories from surface of Mars at its closest approach in 60,000 years: "klaatu barada nikto," whose meaning has not been deciphered |
| Space shuttle Columbia destroyed on re-entry (see also 1986) | |
| Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age investigates genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics and challenges the bleak visions of the techno-utopians and the technophiliac thrust of most modern SF | |
| 2004 | NASA proposes to decommission the Hubble space telescope and allow it to burn up in the atmosphere when its orbit deteriorates |
| March 2004, Google search engine reports searching 4,285,199,774 Web pages | |
| The Fourth Circle, a novel by Serbian writer Zoran Zivkovic, is a literary tour de force defying easy summary | |
| Aircraft designer Burt Rutan's rocket-propelled SpaceShipOne wins the $10 million Ansari X Prize by flying at a height of 100 km twice within 60 days (see "The X Prize" by Ian Parker, New Yorker, 4 October 2004) |