Happy Birthday Sci Fi

It’s hard to believe it’s the 200th birthday of science fiction.

We tend to think of Sci Fi as something modern, up to date, cutting edge. But of course with a little thought you realize that it dates back to Regency England.

It was the era of Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, the Romantic Poets. It was also the start — with a single publication in 1818 — of a monster of a genre that we now call science fiction.

It is a genre that can produce a galvanic response in its readers, a genre that has the ability to take parts from various other genres and assemble them in new ways, to reanimate ideas once thought long dead.

Together let us celebrate this 200th birthday of science fiction. For better or for worse, it is a magnificent and ungainly creature that we have birthed in our collective laboratory of ideas.

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