Last month I wrote a short SciFi story on this blog, as a tribute to Mary Shelley’s seminal 1818 masterpiece Frankenstein<\/i> — arguably the first science fiction story. I tried to stay close to the literary conventions of Regency Era prose, while touching upon various science fiction themes from throughout these last 200 years.<\/p>\n
Over the course of that process, I got to thinking about the nature of science fiction. Any SciFi story needs to incorporate science, but aside from that common premise, we see vast differences within the field.<\/p>\n
The science fiction of any given era in history reflects the cultural preoccupations — the hopes and fears, if you will — of that era. Science fiction evolves as culture evolves.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking it would be interesting to pick a different era in history — say, the 1950s — and construct a new science fiction story around the cultural preoccupations of that particular day and age. By taking us back to the mindset of an earlier era, such a story would itself be a kind of time machine.<\/p>\n
And what could be more appropriate than that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last month I wrote a short SciFi story on this blog, as a tribute to Mary Shelley’s seminal 1818 masterpiece Frankenstein — arguably the first science fiction story. I tried to stay close to the literary conventions of Regency Era prose, while touching upon various science fiction themes from throughout these last 200 years. Over … Continue reading “Science fiction as time travel”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20567"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20568,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20567\/revisions\/20568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}