Science fiction writers from Doc Smith to Robert Heinlein had their lone inventors hop into spaceships they built in their back yards. NASA had no such luxury. Space was the absolute unknown in the 1950s. A few rockets and satellites had poked their noses into the vacuum, but piloted craft were on the horizon and next to nothing was understood about how the rigors of space would affect human bodies. NASA had to worry about a million small details, using…
I started reading comics in about 1958, or at least those are the oldest ones I still have, mostly bedraggled, torn, or coverless from hundreds of readings. They were age-appropriate Disney comics, from Dell Comics. (Gold Key wouldn’t take over until the 1960s.) I was indiscriminate, of course, having no idea which were good or even what good meant, so I had piles of Mickey Mouse and Chip ‘n’ Dale. I soon realized why I was drawn to those titles….
Those of us on the inside, the fans steeped in the history of science fiction and fantasy, mark the beginning of modern science fiction with Hugo Gernsback’s launching of Amazing Stories in August 1926. A thousand historians, critics, and commentators use that date as a dividing line between the proto-fictions of Verne and Wells and the lesser-known William Wallace Cook and George England and the Frank Reade Jr. series of boy’s adventures and Gernsback’s own favorite, Clement Fezandié. The outside…
Hugo Gernsback, the self-proclaimed “Father of Science Fiction,” has been lauded a thousand times for publishing the first all science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. Rightly so, for modern science fiction as a genre starts there. Amazing was launched in 1926, when Gernsback was 42. Gernsback lived another forty-one years and continued to throw off ideas as dervishly as in the first half of his life. Could it be that he has other, perhaps lesser-known, firsts to celebrate? Could it be…
“Machine Walks on Moon” doesn’t have nearly the headline power as “Man Walks on Moon,” but for a short time in the early 1960s the U.S. Army funded a project for a moon walker. The “Pedipulator,” as General Electric’s ordnance department in Pittsfield, MA, called it, was a concept vehicle. The concept, all but admitted in so many words by ordnance GM Gene R. Peterson, was to pump money into GE. Cold war spending in the US/USSR missile race had…
Who was the first to land on the moon? A man? How could he? Even the most “steel-like sinews” would shrink before the magnitude of the task. Only a robot, whose “sinews” were literal steel, could stand up to the crush of 50G’s during acceleration. Only a robot could stand up to the moon’s harshness. That was the idea of moon-obsessed Emil Peters, confined to a wheelchair after a childhood injury, for whom “standing up” by proxy was a lifelong…
Cover by Michael Whelan If you want to get permanent editions of the brilliant short fiction of Fritz Leiber, these days your best bet may be the Centipede Press hardcovers like Swords in the Mist. These are gorgeous books, but they’re also a little out of my price range ($75 for the unsigned editions). Still, if there’s someone who deserves editions this beautiful, it’s Leiber. Or you could do what I do: happily buy one of Leiber’s many vintage paperback…
Arok the robot first hit the national news in June 1975 when it married Linda Hoffman, the president of the Allan Kemp Fan Club, at the annual convention of fan club presidents in Chicago. I’ve long ago concluded that the modern world is one long real-time game of MadLibs. Even so, if that sentence doesn’t make you sit bolt upright in front of your screen then my whole career as a chronicler of robot history is a failure.
In the 1980s, science fiction, the red-headed stepchild of literature, the field that had been declared dead in 1960, the genre that Kurt Vonnegut decried because serious critics kept mistaking it for a urinal, became the hot new thing. As we now know, a rising tide may lift all boats, but the few superyachts get raised to previously unimaginable heights. The corporate buyout of old-line publishing houses created the blockbuster mentality, wherein the few Big Names could be paid supermoney…
Don Wiggins was one of the charmed young men who became college legends back in the days when just being a college student came with a halo of prestige. A native of nearby Jacksonville, he entered the University of Florida in the late 1940s and in 1951 was named to UF’s Hall of Fame. He graduated in 1952 with an Electrical Engineering degree and was immediately hired as an Assistant in Research before rapidly rising to the professorial ranks. His…