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If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to borrow the idea of eras from science. These eras are independent of genre as genres are closely tied to the human condition at the time rather than the technology to produce story. I expect that the eras will continue to change faster as we speed toward the Singularity. I offer free a poster of how the seminal work of a new scifi-genre maps into an era.
Although science fiction existed in the 1500s, we don’t get the word “science fiction” until the 1900s, when critic, publisher, and writer Hugo Gernsback came up that compound word along with several other alternatives, most of which didn’t stick. The early 1900s was an era of standardization as critics like Hugo used their critical voices to influence the market to be critical what was science fiction and what was not, as well as complaining about the quality of the science in science fiction. For example, Hugo refused to publish any science fiction that featured people walking or floating in the vacuum of space without a space suit.
Perhaps you’re new to SciFi or perhaps you’ve been reading SciFi for a few decades. Have you wondered when science fiction came about? For example: Did you know that this story telling genre about the future is quite old?
It’s the early 1800s and before Rudolf Diesel and Henry Ford. Electricity is still a lab experiment. But it doesn’t matter. We don’t need any of what those guys were selling. The true motors of Innovation are started with firing up a boiler, copper or brass tubing, and driving pistons of power.
It was the 1960s. Young science fiction readers and writers were tired of the usual space travel and adventure tales. They yearned to read something that used what was happening around them which was too edgy for the earlier fiction which tended to be cleaned up for young adult readers.
