A Biased History of Sci-Fi

I love science fiction, but I’m a terrible fan of it. I love spaceships and technology and new ideas and robots and aliens, but I could not save a conversation by talking with any kind of fluency about representations in books about any of them. I’ve always been better at being excited about science fiction than actually being, like into science fiction.

Always, until this past year. I don’t know how anyone else makes themselves more fun at parties, but my approach is a time-honored one: thorough research.

I don’t have time to just suddenly become fluent in science fiction. It is a big genre, containing multitudes. It explores many themes, and your representative piece of science fiction may or may not be an ept exploration of those themes. I didn’t want to just start reading science fiction. What if I started with a crappy book and turned myself off the genre? That would be unforgivable.

I wanted a more systematic approach. I wanted to know the highlights of the various movements in science fiction from someone who’s been there and compared books within the groups. I wanted that ultimate tool in becoming cool: an academic approach.

Fortunately, the internet has my back.

There’s a college professor named Gary K. Wolfe. He’s basically made a career out of reading and knowing about science fiction. He has won a couple of Hugo awards, for example, for producing stuff where he just talks about science fiction in a fun and academic way.

The Great Courses, therefore, made a clever choice by hiring Mr. Wolfe to do a series of lectures called How Great Science Fiction Works. It’s really good. I recommend it. Mr. Wolfe describes it as a course about the movements in science fiction, then says that, by a convenient ordering in the universe, that mostly ended up being a survey of science fiction’s history at the same time.

That was pretty much exactly what I wanted. I wanted a systematic, academic approach to gaining a conversational fluency in science fiction. Because I want to be cool.

The course is good. Mr. Wolfe made a lot of reading recommendations throughout it.

And here is that reading list. It is, in a sense, a (Biased) History of Science Fiction by Way of a Reading List.

It is super bloody long! And definitely biased. I showed it to some writer friends, and they questioned some of Mr. Wolfe’s omissions and inclusions.

It’s biased. But it ain’t bad.

I’d sort of like to start a reading group to work on it with me. Any youse guys interested in reading along?

Here’s a link to the spreadsheet version, in case you’d like to check your own progress with it.

Oliver Blakemore

Meant to land in the metalhead box. Took a wrong turn.