# Evolution of Science Fiction: A Comprehensive Report

## Introduction

Science fiction has undergone significant transformation since its early days, evolving from the pioneering works of H.

G.

Wells and Jules Verne to a diverse and inclusive genre that reflects a wide range of voices and perspectives.

This report examines the evolution of science fiction literature, highlighting key influences, changes over time, and the growing impact of underrepresented voices in the genre.

## Early Foundations and Influences

### The Pioneers
Science fiction as a literary genre was largely established by authors like H.

G.

Wells in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Wells' works, including "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine," laid the groundwork for many science fiction themes that persist today - space exploration, time travel, and encounters with the unknown.

### Early 20th Century Development
The genre's early development was influenced by scientific advances and social changes.

The period saw science fiction focusing

# Evolution of Science Fiction: A Comprehensive Report

## Introduction

Science fiction has undergone significant transformation since its early days, evolving from the pioneering works of H.

Title:

Content: Solarpunk – a worldview that imagines hopeful futures of social justice, planet-friendly technologies, decentralisation and harmony – has come quite a long way since its first appearance in an online article in 2008. Today this genre of science fiction is being explored by multiple authors, poets, academics and critics all across the world. The ultimate goal of these stories and the associated politics is to imagine and work towards a future of coexistence, which acknowledges our kinship and interdependence with all beings big and small, as an alternative to wandering about a zombie apocalypse or sinking in dystopian gloominess.

After the publication of the much-acclaimed anthology Multispecies Cities: Solarpunk Urban Futures, the editors decided to publish another anthology focusing on creatures, the more-than-human allies who would live with and among us in a possible future. The editors, Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura, Rajat Chaudhuri and Sarena Ulibarri have collectively brought this second offering, a second anthology titled Solarpunk Creatures, three years after the first.

A multispecies imagination

Explaining the rationale for this collection of stories, the editors write in their introduction, “Where Multispecies Cities sought to broaden the spotlight and highlight the multitude of actors on the stage, Solarpunk Creatures introduces a whole new cast of more-than-human protagonists: organic and digital, alien and fantastic, tiny and boundlessly large.” These creatures are not only restricted to animals and plants but also include AI who take the role of the main protagonist in some of these engaging tales. “The AI characters that made it into the anthology are gentle and loveable – not disturbing and often a malevolent presence that is unsettling the role and value of artists around the globe,” explains the introduction. In these stories, AI creatures do not try to destroy or dominate humankind but often are companions and co-participants in humanity’s engagement with a hopeful and sustainable futures.

Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura and Rajat Chaudhuri have efficiently and strategically framed the “Introduction” by referring to other critics and writers who have discussed multispecies communities such as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s memorable Braiding Sweetgrass. It would also not miss the careful reader’s notice that the team of editors, true to the sense of community harboured by Solarpunk, represent far-flung regions of the world and that the book also includes at least two stories written by collectives. The editors have also provided tasting samples of the stories in the anthology which will intrigue and draw the readers to explore the book.

“Multispecies imagination can heal us from our chronic isolation from nature,” the editors write. The lucid introduction, which will interest academics and genre-readers alike, ends with this possibility of healing, it says, “breath-taking encounters and a sense of wonder, await not only among the stars, but at the end of every one of the countless threads connecting us to the world and its inhabitants.”

Indian writers

Apart from writers from advanced industrialised countries, this anthology, like the one before it, has also featured stories from the Asia-Pacific region among which we have three stories by Indian writers, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Rimi B Chatterjee, and Tashan Mehta. Casting its net wide this anthology has managed to portray multifarious perspectives, problems and ideas of people spread out across the globe, weaving them together into thought-provoking tales.

Tashan Mehta’s “Leaf Whispers, Ocean Song” is a beautiful tale about the influence of Opi, a deep sea creature on the life of humans when it arrives on the coastline of Goa. Opi is showcased as a humongous yet loveable creature who somewhat transforms the lives of humans. Here, this alien creature does not come from the sky but from the ocean and as soon as it reaches the shore, Opi is perceived differently by different people. While the local fishermen call it “a visiting God from the sea”, marine biologists, conservationists and researchers wish to study and understand this creature. On the other hand, the linguists in the story, Jen and Lu are interested in studying Opi’s language and Jem soon admits that the speech of this creature is “too vast. Its sound, scent, song, feeling, thought – just everything…” The presence and effect of this creature are beyond human understanding because Opi somehow seems to unite animals like dogs, crabs and starfish – something unimaginable to humans. This story, rejecting anthropocentric beliefs, reiterates the fact that humans are just a tiny part of the wide unknown world around us. This is best conveyed by Jen when she says, “…[Opi] is a reminder of how insignificant we are, of how life plays out in a magnitude we cannot imagine.”

From a sea creature, we move on to a comet in Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s story “Flyby”. Comet Izumi is the protagonist of this memorable tale which blends poetic language with a capacious imagination, to portray the dynamics of non-human beings which are boundlessly large. Chabria writes, “Unlike planets, beautiful and rounded as melons, with moons circling and circling them, comets are loners, each speaking a unique language of elliptical orbit and ellipses from sight. Pilgrims of the universe, they plunge in and out of the neat orbital paths of the planets, streaking their immense fiery tails over unknown skies”

Readers can also visualise the future of the Earth through the eyes of Comet Izumi, “A series of climatic changes has altered Earth’s topography; begun by Capitalocene greed in the brief human geological epoch…Earth’s invisible armour that protects life, the radiation shield is temporarily ripped.” Though the story may seem to showcase destruction in the beginning, it gradually takes a soothing turn towards hope and most importantly, towards the importance of sound which has the power to regenerate life. The author has beautifully blended the wisdom of ancient texts in this unique solarpunk narrative which will definitely help us think far beyond our limited human and planetary sphere of being.

After Mehta’s sea creature and Chhabria’s comet, we travel to the land of our four-legged friends, in Rimi B Chatterjee’s “Hopdog” which is reminiscent of her “Arfabad” in the previous volume. The story begins with “Dog number 834” who is rescued from a dogfighting ring where “her masters would watch as she and her competitors tore the prey to shred and wolfed down whatever they could snatch from each other’s jaws.” Dog number 834 is finally rescued from a place that smelt of fear, trouble and death by the survivors of Zigsa’s Nest, referring back to Chatterjee’s “Arfabad”. Arfabad is a land inhabited by dogs and everything is dog-sized there, which is where the central character, Zigsa had created a survivarium where dogs could be protected.

The dog of the present story, after trials and tribulations, arrives in this gentler, kinder place of love and happiness. Here, “…for the first time since she could remember, Peaches was sharing space with other breathing creatures that manifestly did not want to kill her.” But can she continue to live there and be protected from all dangers lurking outside? You have to read the story to find out.

AI and other friends

Apart from these engaging and thought-provoking stories by the three Indian writers, Solarpunk Creatures includes a wealth of tales from other parts of the world. “An Inconvenient Unicorn” by Geraldine Briony Hunt is a Solarpunk fantasy set in a distant corner of Arcadia where nothing had grown in the last twenty years due to war: “It was not the sort of war where soldiers take up arms and march against one another, but a war waged in peoples’ kitchens, local pubs and schoolyards.” This land had faced a lot of adversities until a magical creature, a unicorn arrives to rejuvenate the land, bless it with harmony and greenery. “An Inconvenient Unicorn” evokes hope, telling us the importance of preserving the wild and being wary about the false dreams of ecomodernism.

Lyndsey Croal’s “Hunting for Rain”, is written from the perspective of a robotic dog who hunts for rain in a world affected by drought. This AI-guided creature has the ability to geolocate an area even before it begins to rain, hence it can signal people to head for those areas. Here, a robot has not been projected as something alien, industrial or dangerous, instead, it behaves like kin, fulfilling the common responsibility of sustaining life by pointing out where it will rain. When it finally begins to pour, the drought-stricken people give credit to this mechanised dog by patting its head and scratching behind its ears and it absorbs all the love from its beloved humans and wags its mechanical tail. This beautiful tale gives us hope that AI and robots can also be kin and can join with us in more-than-human connections of life-giving, reciprocal care.

Another story, “The Business of Bees” by Andrew Knighton is simple, funny, and memorable. Told from the perspective of the cat, Luna, who is frustrated about the fact that her human hosts don’t seem to notice some weirdness about the bees. Luna gets so curious that she leaves home to find out what the bees are up to. This will definitely be a memorable journey for the curious cat.

This is a necessary collection for a time in the planet’s history when shifts in collective imagination are the need of the hour. In these times of climate doom, growing inequity and injustice, books like Solarpunk Creatures help us think and imagine differently, beyond our insular selves, together and in community with others, human and non-human, visible, invisible or fathomless.

Sayantani Sengupta is a PhD student at St Xavier’s University, Kolkata. She is researching Solarpunk literature and movement.

Solarpunk Creatures, edited by Christoph Rupprecht, Deborah Cleland, Rajat Chaudhuri, Sarena Ulibarri, Melissa Ingaruca Moreno, Norie Tamura, World Weaver Press.

G.

Title:

Content: 056surah
(1)
Tip: Try to navigate with ctrlK
1 The opening
2 Cows
3Al Omran
4 Women
5 The Table
6 The Cattle
7 The Norms
8 Anfal
9 Repentance
10 Yunus
11 hud.
12 Yusuf
13 Thunder
14 Ibrahim
15 stone
16 Bees
17 of the Isra
18 The Cave
19 Mary.
20 of them.
21 The Prophets
22 hajj
23 The Believers
24 The Light
25 teams
26 Poets
27 Ants
28 stories
29 The Spider.
30 rum
31 Luqman
32 The Prophets
33 parties
34 SBA
Thirty-five fater.
Thirty-six.
37 Rangers
38p
39 groups.
40 forgivers.
41 fired.
42 Shura
43 Ornamentation
44 Smoke
45 of them.
46.AlAhqaf
47 Muhammad.
48th Conquest
49 rooms.
50 BCE
51DATARIANS
52 phase
53 The Star
54 The Moon
55 The Merciful
56 The Incident
57 Iron
58 The Controversy
59 the crowd.
60 The Examiner
61 grade.
Friday, 26.
63 The Hypocrites
64 Taghaben
65 Divorce
66 Prohibition
The King 67
68 PEN
69 Attachment
70 Ladders
71 NOAH
72 gin.
73.Muzmil
74 Mudathir
75 of the day.
76 The Human
77 Transmitters
78 News
79 The conflicts
80 Abs
81 The Cupping
28 The Breakdown
Thirty-eight of them.
84 The Dissension
85 The Tower
86 The Raider
Top 87
88 Gashya
89 Fajr
90 Country
91 The Sun
92 nights.
93 The Sacrifice
94 Explanation
Ninety-five.
96 leeches.
97. Destiny.
98 evidence.
99 earthquake
100 Regular
101The Struggle
102 Reproduction
103 Afternoon
104Hamza
105 Elephant
106 Quraysh
107 Ma 'un
108 Kawthar
109 The Unbelievers
110 Victory
111 Almsad
112 Faithfulness
113-FALAK
114 people
Notes placeholders

Wells and Jules Verne to a diverse and inclusive genre that reflects a wide range of voices and perspectives.

Title:

Content: The Future Is Here
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Martha Wells on Her Return to Fantasy—and What Murderbot Is Up To

io9 talks to the prolific author about The Murderbot Diaries, Witch King, how to start a story, and what it means to explore one point of view.

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Let’s start here: Martha Wells doesn’t have to prove anything. Her storied career, and her novels’ many, many deserved accolades, speak for themselves. Her first book, The Element of Fire, 1993, kickstarted her Ile-Rien series, the first two books of which will get repackaged and republished in 2024. If you don’t recognize her from her various prolific fantasy series, you might recognize her name from The Murderbot Diaries. Yes, the far-future novella series might be a far cry from Ile-Rien, but Wells has the range, and is ready to get back to making people second-guess what her next move is.

We sat down with Wells to chat about Witch King, what it was like returning to epic fantasy, and, of course, Murderbot. In May, Witch King was released. This novel marks Wells’ return to fantasy after nearly a decade. The main character, Kai, a demon and a witch, was trapped in a water prison for over a year. When he wakes up the politics of his world have shifted, and not in the way he likes. Both a travelog and a recollection of a rise to power, Witch King is remarkable for many reasons, and not just because of Wells’ reputation. More on this later.

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Her return to fantasy novels isn’t all Wells has for us. She’s also releasing System Collapse in November—the seventh installment in The Murderbot Diaries, a series which has won the Hugo and the Nebula awards multiple times. Each of these delightful tales follows an unnamed, nongendered, not-person Security Unit as it attempts to deal with noisy humans. While the first four diaries were novellas, Network Effect and System Collapse are both full-length novels. “Stystem Collapse takes place a few days after Network Effect,” Wells said. “And Murderbot is dealing with a lot of the repercussions of that novel, emotionally and, to some extent, physically.”

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She said that this book was exceptionally hard to write. “I was supposed to be writing Network Effect in 2019, and I could not get started on it. And that’s when I got the idea for Fugitive Telemetry, a straightforward murder-mystery. And I started writing a scene with Murderbot looking at a body and started writing, and realized, you know, this is really fun and it’s going really well, so maybe we’ll just write this instead.”

When the pandemic hit, Wells had writer’s block. “There were six months that I was supposed to work on System Collapse,” she said, and it just never happened. Much like with Fugitive Telemetry, Wells started on a new book (Witch King), and then went back to System Collapse. “It hit me, finally, what the missing piece was. This book is really about Murderbot dealing with the really traumatic experience of Network Effect… It seems like I always start in the wrong place and then kind of have to work my way back through it.”

Wells is no stranger to struggling to write. She’s written so much, and so consistently that it seems strange to type that out, but Wells truly struggled to start System Collapse. “There’s always a point where you know what you want to say but knowing where to start and finding that story… it’s a process to get there.” One of the parts of the process is about medium; writing fiction vs. nonfiction, original fiction vs. fanfiction, a first novel vs. the seventh in a series. “It’s always a different process… I try to stick with the rule of just telling the audience enough of what they need to know to understand what’s going on in the moment.”

Witch King was a “liberating” experience for Wells. Murderbot is a character who can access so many different perspectives, so Wells really enjoyed sticking to Kai’s POV. The Murderbot Diaries are also restrained in the way they describe the world, and with Witch King, she had a lot of opportunity for her to create a lived-in world and culture around Kai. “I was able to open up and describe and talk more about the different ways the cultures handled gender, for example, and the different ways people dressed and the art. And that’s because fully organic people are interested in that!”

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With regards to gender in Witch King (as much has been made of gender in The Murderbot Diaries), “one of the things I wanted to get into with it is that gender is very cultural, and the way people understand it is cultural in the way it’s expressed is cultural.” Wells describes two cultures in the book: one that uses gendered clothing to express gender, and another that doesn’t express gender much at all. As time passes in the book, the cultures blend, and clothing is used by both cultures to designate gender or non-gendered expressions. “And so you can tell that both cultures have changed from impact with the other culture and their views on it have evolved in a natural way as the two cultures who have become really close allies have worked with each other over time.”

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Kai’s gender, which is male, is also a little variable. He ends up in a variety of bodies over the course of the book, and by the end of it (and really, even starting with his introduction), it’s hard to know exactly what gender means to him, if it means much at all.

Wells mentioned fanfic and I asked: what was her relationship with fanfic? “I first wrote fanfic before the internet, in Star Wars fanzines. I found fanzines not very long after the Empire Strikes Back came out. I was really involved with fandom for a while. I haven’t really been recently. I still read fanfic because there’s some shows you just want to go back to.” She would love for online fanzines to be a thing again, but in the meantime she’s keeping fanfic tabs open for Chinese dramas, Star Wars, The Avengers, Dorothy Sayers’ murder mysteries, and Galaxy Quest. “It’s kind of nice to be able to dip back into something. You finish the book you’re reading and you’re able to kind of peek in and look for a story that’s going to be fairly short and engaging.”

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But right now Wells is taking care of herself while she working on a sequel to Witch King. She started writing it in December, and is—as she said to me, in a way that was far too self-deprecating for an author who published two books this year—that she was “very far behind.” She says said that “I think I’ve finally gotten back on track. I’ve told people I have like 30,000 words, but none of it’s connected.”

Beginnings, as we mentioned earlier in the interview, are very hard. “I think once I get the beginning pulled together, I can get it done, hopefully by the deadline,” Wells said, laughing a little. “Beginings can be rough. Sometimes they come very naturally and you can just go from there. You get that first sentence that’s perfect, and you go on and can do the whole draft. And then other times it’s like I’m wandering around the set. I need to go back. I need to go forward, I have to do another take. Beginnings can be a lot harder than endings.”

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Witch King is available for purchase now. System Collapse will releases on November 14.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

This report examines the evolution of science fiction literature, highlighting key influences, changes over time, and the growing impact of underrepresented voices in the genre.

Title:

Content: Pixel Scroll 2/10/23 Jetpack Failing, Must Attempt To Pixel To A Safe Scrolling

(1) VINTAGE OR VINEGAR? At Young People Read Old SFF, James Davis Nicoll tasked the panel to read Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. Click through to hear what they thought about it.

Young People Read Old Hugo Finalists focuses on Spider Robinson’s 1982 Hugo-winning “Melancholy Elephants”. Readers of my vintage might remember Robinson as the author of the once-popular Callahan’s stories (to which series “Melancholy Elephants” does not belong) as well as a prolific reviewer whose pieces appeared in Galaxy, Analog, and Destinies Magazine and no doubt elsewhere. “Melancholy Elephants” is a stand-alone focusing on the issue of perpetual copyright. It’s a subject still relevant today. I am curious what the Young People make of Robinson’s story….

(2) IT’S A RISKY BUSINESS. And at Tor.com, James Davis Nicoll picks out “Five SF Stories About Space Scouts and Cosmic Exploration”.

Of all the career paths offered to player characters in the venerable tabletop roleplaying game Traveller, few were as memorable as that of the scout. Stalwart explorers of empire’s hinterlands, scouts could expect a charmingly informal command structure, a good chance of a loaner starship on retirement, and, oh yes, the life expectancy of a newborn puppy in a crocodile-filled swamp. Classic Traveller was notorious for its character generation system: player characters could and often did expire during the process. Few careers offered the harrowing mortality rate of the scout class.

Traveller author Marc Miller drew inspiration from classic science fiction, whose authors delighted in dropping explorers into situations for which the explorers soon discovered they were insufficiently prepared. Here are five tales of the sort  that inspired Traveller….

(3) UNION AND HARPERCOLLINS ANNOUNCE AGREEMENT. Vox’s overview “What the hard-won HarperCollins union contract means for the future of books” actually does little to answer its own question. But it does supply this snapshot of how the strike ended.

…On January 26, HarperCollins management agreed to enter federal mediation with the union. Five days later, it announced that it would be laying off 5 percent of its workforce. A HarperCollins spokesperson attributed the layoffs to supply chain pressures and declining revenue, saying, “The timing had nothing to do with mediation.”

Because HarperCollins is the only union shop among the Big Five, the stakes here are high. It is pushed by necessity to set the labor standards for the rest of the industry: when it raises its wages, Penguin Random House raises its wages too. The hope among supporters both in and out of the union was that the new agreement would spark similar structural changes at the other Big Five houses, and maybe even inspire other houses to unionize.

Finally, at 8 pm on February 9, the union and HarperCollins together announced they had reached a tentative agreement. “The tentative agreement includes increases to minimum salaries across levels throughout the term of the agreement, as well as a one-time $1,500 lump sum bonus to be paid to bargaining unit employees following ratification,” said HarperCollins in a statement. Currently, there’s no word on whether the union also succeeded in bringing in new diversity initiatives or in getting a union security clause. The contract doesn’t become official until it’s ratified….

Publishers Weekly’s coverage put the agreement in perspective with HarperCollins’ recent business reverses: “Deal Reached in HarperCollins Strike as Publisher Has Another Bad Quarter”.

…News of the tentative agreement came shortly after HC parent company News Corp. released financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2022. The company reported that earnings tumbled 52% at HC, falling to $51 million, from $107 million in the comparable quarter a year ago. Sales dropped 14%, to $531 million.

News Corp. attributed the revenue decline to slowing consumer demand for books, difficult comparisons to a strong frontlist performance a year ago, and “some logistical constraints at Amazon.” In the first quarter of the 2023 fiscal year, HC attributed the decline in sales and earnings largely to a steep drop in orders from Amazon, and in a conference call, News Corp. executives said the negative impact of Amazon on second quarter sales was less than in the first quarter. Sales were down in both print and digital formats.

In addition to lower sales, News attributed the plunge in profits primarily to “ongoing supply chain, inventory, and inflationary pressures on manufacturing, freight, and distribution costs.” A change in the product mix also depressed earnings, with the share of e-book sales falling in the second quarter as that of the the less-profitable print books rose.

With financial results also down in the first quarter, in the first six months of fiscal 2023, profits declined 53%, to $90 million, and sales fell 12%, to $1.02 billion.

Last month, HC began implementing a program to cut its North American workforce by 5% by the end of the fiscal year ending June 30. In a conference call announcing results, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said News is making a 5% workforce cut in all its businesses, which will result in the elimination of about 1,250 positions….

(4) KGB. Ellen Datlow shared her photos from the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series event on February 8 at Flickr. Jeff Ford and Marie Vibbert were the evening’s readers.

(5) SKY HIGH DINING. The Torrance (CA) Public Library hosts a Zoom presentation by Richard Foss, “Food in Space in Science Fiction and Reality”, on February 15 at 6:30 p.m. Pacific. Email [email protected] for the invitation link.

Early science fiction stories about space travel ignored the most basic need of any pioneer – what did they eat, and how? The science fiction authors did get around to addressing this question, their solutions were sometimes novel but impractical.

How do their fantasies match up with reality, and are authors getting it right now? Join Richard Foss, author, culinary expert and lecturer as we explore this fascinating subject.

Please email [email protected] for the invitation link to join this discussion on Zoom.

(6) START YOUR OWN INKLINGS. “Writers Need Writers: In the Footsteps of the Inklings” at Inspire Christian Writers.

… Writing is a solitary pursuit. Only the writer understands the intent. Hunched alone over our notepads and computers, we snaggle our words and graft them onto the page, prayerfully hopeful they will touch hearts. But we can’t know the true strength of our writing unless we are willing to share those words with another who will render kind and honest feedback. Our mothers don’t count. Neither does a stranger. One lacks honesty, the other an understanding of the writer’s heart.

Twelve members of the Inklings steadfastly met for almost twenty years. Weathering war and broken friendships, they left us with poetry, Christian essays, and stories that delight and instruct to this day. That’s what I want. I want their journey. How? Here’s some gleanings from Bandersnatch.

[Dr. Diana] Glyer believes it’s possible to have what the Inklings had. Start small but keep at it, she says. The Inklings began with just two, Tolkien and Lewis….

(7) MANTELL OBITUARY. The New York Times marks the passing of the co-creator of a spoken word record business: “Marianne Mantell, Who Helped Pave the Way for Audiobooks, Dies at 93”.

Marianne Mantell, who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding a record company [Caedmon] that turned recordings of countless literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, N.J. She was 93….

… In an era when American business was dominated by Fortune 500 companies, it was rare enough for two recent college graduates to create what was in essence a tech start-up aimed at disrupting two industries, book publishing and the record business. And in an era when those corporate giants were run largely by men in Brooks Brothers suits, it was even more unusual for two women to do so.

“Caedmon was the era’s only female-owned record company, and its remarkable success stood out in a male-dominated record industry,” Mr. Rubery said. “At the time, only around 5 percent of record industry employees were women, and those women were almost all in marketing and retail roles. The rise to the top by two female entrepreneurs represented a remarkable exception.”

As Ms. Mantell wrote in a 2004 remembrance for AudioFile magazine, “Although poets had been recorded before as vanity efforts, it was Barbara and I who realized that there was an audience of literate people and made a business out of it.”

… The labels had no interest, so Ms. Mantell and Ms. Holdridge scratched together $1,800 to start a label of their own, which they christened Caedmon after the seventh-century cowherd considered the first recognized English poet. The company’s slogan: A third dimension for the printed page.”

…“We were not just out to preserve celebrity voices (to the extent that a poet is a celebrity),” she wrote. “Our purpose was literary: to capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his head as he wrote.”

(8) MEMORY LANE.

1974[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

I think I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed in University when a classmate recommended it. I had a keen interest in politics, particularly those on the Left, so the politics of the novel interested me.

I think it works much better for its politics than it does for the strength of the character therein. The politics and the set-up of two planets was fascinating though I admit that it’s not a novel by her I’ve re-read, unlike her exemplary Earthsea series.

It won both a Hugo and a Nebula, and deserved them.

And with that, here’s the Beginning…

THERE was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.

[Compiled by Cat Eldridge.]

  • Born February 10, 1904 Lurton Blassingame. Literary agent for Heinlein. He makes the birthday list because Grumbles from the Grave has more letters to Blassingame than to any other correspondent. And even some of Blassingames’s letters to Heinlein are included. (Died 1988.)
  • Born February 10, 1906 Lon Chaney Jr., 1906 – 1973. I certainly best remember him as  playing Larry Talbot in The Wolf Man but he has a lot of other roles as well: The Ghost of Frankenstein as The Monster (hey, correct billing!), The Mummy’s Tomb as The Mummy Kharis or Son of Dracula as Count Dracula, he played all the great monsters, often multiple times. (Died 1973.)
  • Born February 10, 1920 Robert Park Mills. He was the managing editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine beginning in 1948 and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction the following year. He also edited Venture Science Fiction for several years. Under him, F&SF won an impressive three Hugo Awards for best magazine in 1959, 1960 and 1963. (Died 1986.)
  • Born February 10, 1929 Jerry Goldsmith. Composer whose music graces many a genre undertaking including, and this is not complete listing, AlienStar Trek: The Motion PicturePoltergeistPlanet of the ApesThe Man from U.N.C.L.E. series, Star Trek: VoyagerThe MummyThe Twilight Zone (need I say the original series?) and he even did the music for Damnation Alley! (Died 2004.)
  • Born February 10, 1953 John Shirley, 70. I not going to even attempt a complete précis of his career. I read and much enjoyed his first novel City Come A-Walkin and oddly enough his Grimm: The Icy Touch is damn good too in way many of those sharecropped novels aren’t. I see that to my surprise he wrote a episode of Deep Space Nine, “Visionary” and also wrote three episodes of the ‘12 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His latest novel which I’ve not read so do tell me about it is A Sorcerer of Atlantis.
  • Born February 10, 1967 Laura Dern, 56. I’m going to note she’s in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet as Sandy Williams which is not genre but which is one weird film. Jurassic Park where she is Dr. Ellie Sattler is her first SF film followed by Jurassic Park III and a name change to Dr. Ellie Degler.  Such are the things movie trivia is made of. Star Wars: The Last Jedi has her showing as Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo.  I think her first genre appearance was on Shelley Duvall’s Nightmare Classic.
  • Born February 10, 1970 Robert Shearman, 53. He wrote the episode of Who called “Dalek” which was nominated for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form at L.A. Con IV. (There were three Who entries that year and “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances” won.) His first book, a collection of short stories called Tiny Deaths was a World Fantasy Award winner. He’s written a lot of short fiction since then, collected helpfully into two collections, Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman and They Do the Same Things Different There: The Best Weird Fantasy of Robert Shearman. Some, but by no means all, of his works are up at the usual suspects.
  • Born February 10, 1976 Keeley Hawes, 47. Ms Delphox/Madame Karabraxos in my favorite Twelfth Doctor story “Time Heist”.  She also played Zoe Reynolds in MI5 which is at least genre adjacent given where the story went. She has also provided the voice of Lara Croft in a series of Tomb Raider video games.

(10) COMICS SECTION.

  • The Far Side is present at the Creation.
  • Edge City tries to figure out what all the remotes are for.
  • Sheldon predicts who will be AI art’s mortal enemy.
  • Sheldon also illustrates the limits of dog science.

(11) SHORT REVIEWS. Lisa Tuttle supplies “The best recent science fiction and fantasy – reviews roundup” for the Guardian. The four titles covered this time are Hopeland by Ian McDonald; Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera; Observer by Robert Lanza and Nancy Kress; and Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett.

(12) PLAYING GAMES. Them is reporting that “Hogwarts Legacy Features the Harry Potter Franchise’s First Trans Character”.

Now that the review embargo for Hogwarts Legacy is up, more details about the forthcoming Harry Potter role-playing game, set to release on Friday, are surfacing. One particularly noteworthy new fact? The inclusion of a transgender non-playable character (or NPC) named Sirona Ryan, whom players can find at the Three Broomsticks pub.

The news came courtesy of a gameplay clip shared by YouTuber Doctor Gramma, in which Sirona serves a pair of characters Butterbeer and remarks upon a recent, unspecified attack on Hogwarts. Although Sirona was not confirmed as trans in the clip itself, Entertainment Weekly and other outlets have since reported on in-game dialogue referencing her transition. Speaking about her former classmates, the barkeep reportedly says,  “Took them a second to realize I was actually a witch, not a wizard.”

Given Potter author J.K. Rowling’s well-documented transphobia, Sirona’s presence is unexpected, to say the least. Some in the video game world are even claiming the character was included in hopes of quelling a boycott from gamers who have chosen not to play the game based on Rowling’s dangerous anti-trans platform.

“An old acquaintance did some work on that Hogwarts game,” YouTuber Stephanie Sterling tweeted early Monday morning. “I’m told they added a token trans NPC to pivot the conversation away from JKR. They’re barely in it.”

“Did You Know Gaming” contributor and video game historian Liam Robertson backed up Sterling’s account, writing, “I was also told this. There was apparently some trans representation added after some of the initial controversy. I don’t know how it appears in the final product but one of the sources I talked to described it as ‘performative bullshit.’”…

(13) YOU’RE FIRED. While Elon Musk was making news for firing a Twitter engineer, his SpaceX was getting attention for test-firing an engine: “SpaceX Test Fires 31 Engines on the Most Powerful Rocket Ever” in the New York Times.

SpaceX moved one step closer to its future on Thursday with a successful ground test of the engines of the most powerful rocket ever built.

The company, founded by the entrepreneur Elon Musk, conducted what is known as a static fire of Super Heavy, a massive rocket booster. Super Heavy was made to send SpaceX’s next-generation Starship vehicle toward orbit before returning to Earth.

More than 110,000 people watched a livestream broadcast by NASASpaceFlight.com, an independent space media company that has cameras monitoring the Starship test site in Boca Chica, Texas. The video feed showed clouds of vapor enveloping the launch stand when propellants started flowing into the rocket, and rings of frost forming around the rocket as the tanks filled with ultracold propellants.

Then the clouds mostly vanished when the fueling was complete — for the brief test, the tanks were not filled to the brim.

At 4:14 p.m. Eastern time, on a video feed provided by SpaceX, the engines roared to life for a few seconds and shut down, kicking up that rose clouds above the rocket and prompting masses of birds to flee the area. An update on Twitter from SpaceX indicated the test was a success, lasting as long as intended. The booster and launch stand appeared to be in good shape afterward.

(14) APOLOGIES. JUPITER-SIZED ERROR. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] I have to correct a stupid error I made in yesterday’s piece about one of the most distant exo-planet detected and first space-based detection of an exo-planet using gravitational lensing. It was not the close to smallest theoretical-sized Jupiter — close to the host mass threshold below which Jupiters are not expected to form.  Instead, it was somewhat surprising to find a Jupiter-sized exoplanet around such a small star (a little over half the mass of the Sun).  It is thought that the planetary mass around small stars is smaller than the planetary mass around larger stars. So to have a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting such a small star is a little unusual and close to the theoretical limit.

The error came about because I only quickly scan/read the abstracts of papers of interest at a cybercafé and then blat an e-mail off to Mike, and I only subsequently read papers in detail when I get home.  Also, since we (SF2 Concatenation) lost our much missed physics and space science editor, I have taken over that coverage in addition to that of the bio- and geosciences about which I am more sure-footed.

See Specht, D. et al, (2023) “Kepler K2 Campaign 9: II. First space-based discovery of an exoplanet using microlensing”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, stad212.

(15) VIDEO OF THE DAY. Honest Game Trailers gives its brutally frank opinion of “Fire Emblem Engage”.

…Discover yet another fantasy Kingdom on the brink of inevitable War as you take control of a protagonist so anime that they are actually a dragon, an amnesiac, and also a God who looks like a deviantART character where you took two cheesy anime protagonists and smashed them together in a hydraulic press…

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Chris Barkley, Andrew Porter, Ellen Datlow, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Dann, Michael Toman, Cat Eldridge, and Mike Kennedy  for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day by Andrew (not Werdna).]

What is considered a major breakthrough in science fiction publication?

## Early Foundations and Influences

### The Pioneers
Science fiction as a literary genre was largely established by authors like H.

What are the four eras of science fiction according to Du Jian's book?

G.

Wells in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Title:

Content: Unraveling the Mysteries of a True-Life Mystery Story Writer, Carolyn Wells

Rebecca Rego Barry has written what might be called a process biography, one in which she includes us in her search for the life that began in what Wells herself called unremarkable Rahway, New Jersey.

‘The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells’
By Rebecca Rego Barry
Post Hill Press, 256 pages

A student asked William Faulkner at the University of Virginia: “Why is it that Mississippi seems so very active in a literary way, and yet we don’t find the same phenomenon in New Jersey?” Faulkner explained: “That’s because Mississippi is in the South and New Jersey’s in the North.” Defeated in war and needing federal handouts, Southerners had a lot of time to write, he observed.

Behind such questions is the larger query about why certain writers last and others are forgotten almost as soon as they die, vanishing like Carolyn Wells (1862-1942), a New Jersey author who wrote something like 160 books, half of them popular mysteries that rivaled the work of later standouts like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Wells was important enough to be invited to Mark Twain’s 70th birthday celebration, which begins this biography.

Rebecca Rego Barry has written what might be called a process biography, one in which the biographer includes us in her search for the life that began in what Wells herself called unremarkable Rahway, New Jersey, where she worked as a librarian until the age of 40 — when she embarked on a prolific career writing mystery stories, amusing limericks, children’s books, and working in just about every literary genre.

I sampled Ms. Wells’s first Fleming Stone mystery, “The Clue,” set in a wealthy New Jersey mansion. Several amateur detectives in a wedding party are stymied in trying to figure out which one of them murdered an heiress the night before she was to be married. With no evidence of a break-in visible in the well-locked house, the coroner assents to calling in the professional detective, Fleming Stone.

Wells diverted me, managing the plot mechanics masterfully, with believable characters. Fleming Stone’s entrance is delayed so long that the tension mounts, and rather like Sherlock Holmes, one of Wells’s favorites, Stone reads the room and through expertly handled interviews and keen observations deduces how the crime was committed and who did it, and why, by creating a scene in which the murderer feels compelled to confess.

I like to imagine Faulkner, who loved to read cheap paperback mysteries, walking into the drugstore, as he liked to do at Oxford, Mississippi, to pick off the rack the latest Fleming Stone title — except he could not do so, as Wells died in 1942, just before the paperback revolution, and her publishers failed to put her back into print.

Thus Ms. Barry argues that certain writers last not only because their work is of high quality but because of who is paying attention — library archives, publishers, scholars, family members, and literary executors. In Wells’s case, the institutions of literary longevity let her down and fellow authors did little to foster her legacy. She also let herself down by not carefully managing her literary estate.

It is a pleasure to watch Ms. Barry at work, creating her own detective story and much suspense as she writes to booksellers, examines the inscriptions in Wells’s books strewn around the country, draws on the research of scholars like Margaret Stetz at the University of Delaware, and interviews a few Wells family members who have remnants of her possessions and a few dim memories of her.

A bit of poetry and prose shows Wells’s gift for limerick, satire, and parody:

A scholarly person named Finck
Went mad in the effort to think
Which were graver misplaced,
To dip pen in his paste,
Or dip his paste-brush in the ink.

A Henry James translation of the limerick via Carolyn Wells:

She luminously wavered, and I tentatively inferred that she would soon perfectly reconsider her not altogether unobvious course. Furiously, though with a tender, ebbing similitude, across her mental consciousness stole a re-culmination of all the truths she had ever known concerning, or even remotely relating to, the not-easily fathomed qualities of paste and ink. So she stood, focused in an intensity of soul-quivers, and I, all unrelenting, waited, though of a dim uncertainty whether, after all, it might not be only a dubitant problem.

Carolyn Wells is fun to read — even if she is from New Jersey.

Mr. Rollyson is the editor of “Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction,” revised edition in five volumes.

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Wells' works, including "The War of the Worlds" and "The Time Machine," laid the groundwork for many science fiction themes that persist today - space exploration, time travel, and encounters with the unknown.

### Early 20th Century Development
The genre's early development was influenced by scientific advances and social changes.

What time period produced science fiction works that included idealogies such as capitalism, and communism, and also threats of nuclear power, racism, pollution, and more?

The period saw science fiction focusing

Title:

Content: How Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Franchise Is Undermining the Science Fiction Genre

0

The Horizon series of games from Guerrilla has captured the imagination of gamers around the world, partly due to how many unique elements were able to combine at their core. The first game, Horizon Zero Dawn, introduced gamers to a future version of Earth, where life is teetering on the brink of extinction, and ferocious robots known as machines roam the earth. Among the few survivors living in primitive settlements, an outcast warrior named Eloy discovers the epic nature of her origin and realizes that saving the planet may be her destiny. It was followed by Horizon Forbidden West 2022, in which Eloy travels to foreign lands when he discovers new threats to nature.

Horizon Forbidden West and the rest of the Horizon series belong to the genre of soft science fiction, although they differ from the typical sci-fi adventure. In particular, it combines futuristic elements with primitive ones, creating a unique new aesthetic. In addition, instead of looking at the stars and imagining a future in which humanity’s problems are solved by going to the stars, he instead stands firmly on the Ground and imagines a future in which people instead try to solve the environmental problems of the planet.

Science Fiction and the Last Frontier

The genre of science fiction is usually associated with the representation of human capabilities and the mysteries of the universe. Although science fiction works try to explain their worlds to varying degrees using scientific concepts of the real world, the goal is to represent what lies beyond the current reality. One of the most common ways in which science fiction does this is to imagine people going to the stars, colonizing other planets and expanding their influence throughout the cosmos.

The appeal of this dream is easy to understand, because the Earth, no matter how beautiful it is, has limited resources that would seem incapable of constantly supporting a growing population. In addition, the time spent by mankind on Earth has led to environmental disasters due to deforestation, military operations, commercial agriculture and mining, and these are just some of the harmful types of human activity. Consequently, humanity’s home planet is becoming more and more unattractive, and hopes for a brilliant new place to live are much more attractive.

The image of conquering the last frontier can be found throughout science fiction, especially in such space adventures as “Star Trek”, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “WALL-I”. It also appears in sci-fi games like The Outer Worlds, which takes place in the Halcyon system, and in the upcoming Bethesda Starfield game, which takes place in a corner of the Milky Way that people have named The Settled Systems. Instead of following the trend, the Horizon franchise goes in a different direction and thus carries a powerful environmental message.

The Fallen Land of the Horizon

In the Horizon franchise, the Earth is damaged by humans due to greed and wars. When Faro Automated Solutions produces the Chariot line of robots, they are initially popular because they can work together in an unstoppable swarm of chariots. However, when a glitch makes them aware of themselves, they stop reacting to their hosts and instead consume all the biomass they can, and it quickly becomes apparent that they will soon lead to the extinction of all life on Earth.

Fortunately, Dr. Elizabeth Sobek is starting the Zero Dawn project, which involves storing the seeds of life in underground bunkers and entrusting an artificial intelligence system known as GAIA with the work of populating the planet as soon as it becomes safe. This is the world in which Eloy was born. He is fragile, and life has been given a second chance, but even the slightest interruption can lead to everything starting to collapse again. Horizon Zero Dawn warns of the dangers when technology is put above the ecological health of the planet, as the technology of Faro Automated Solutions almost leads to the death of humanity. However, in the sequel, the series suggests that this planet, no matter how battered it may be, is still worth fighting for.

How “Hope Eloy” Subverts Sci-fi Images

In Horizon Forbidden West, some people from outer space visit Eloy. These are the Distant Zeniths, and they left Earth a long time ago when the disasters became too strong. They were also able to extend their lives, and they enjoyed life in their colony on Sirius until it collapsed, prompting them to return to Earth to take GAIA and use her to repair their new home. In many ways, the Distant Zeniths resemble the characters of typical science fiction.

Eloy confronts all the Distant Zeniths except Tilda van der Meer, with whom she is friends at first. Tilda betrays the rest of the Distant Zeniths and helps Eloy and her friends save GAIA. However, she eventually discovers that she has no hope for the future of Earth, and tries to convince Eloy to join her in using GAIA to restore life on Sirius.