I always derided art-talk. Art history, movements, art-appreciation. I saw BS and I assumed it was BS. I now think that art is just hard and part of why it's hard is that nonsense and sense are hard to tell apart. It's not that objectivity doesn't play a role, it just requires some work in applying it. In any case, I missed out on stuff I shouldn't have missed out on. Young me's loss. Old me's gain.

One idea, that I think could be expressed as one of those movements which encompass science, art and philosophy starts with the definition of history, which basically defines history as stuff people wrote about things that happened. Prehistory is the stuff that happened before with a hundred years of commentary, nuance, various waves of correctness and such. But, arbitrary demarkations are uncomfortable. We much prefer a nice definable river or mountain range to act as our border than a straight line on a map. As definition go, history's in an interesting one. Someone writes about a guy who was the king, that's history. Someone finds bones and a fancy hat in a lavish grave, that's prehistory.

Now, by that definition we're running into some interesting hockey stick phenomenon. Our accumulation of history, via the digital record is growing f-ing vast. Vast! Google decided (independently, which is creepy but moving on) to make me a little album with dates and places of a recent trip I took. It's choice of photographs was good and so was the labeling.

So, written history with some guy or girl compiling a list of kings and laws and even daily accounts of wars and politics and money are now superseded. Written history is giving way to recorded history. Is recorded the right word? Is history? Post-history?

Back to sci-fi. Sci-fi of the 20th century was about technology. Video phones and space blimps. Alien invasions and human colonization of new worlds. Fantasies of mixed specie societies reflecting our struggles to transcend ethnicity and culture. Today's science fiction is, I believe most enlightening in describing the human response to technology. What will the world be like when tinder puts you in a virtual room with a would be friend? How do we react to real wars (as apposed to a science fiction version of romantic fantasy) in the communication age. How will it feel to be a 90 year old who can run a half marathon. What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of conversations their grandparents had with their parents?

These are interesting questions.

Nice article; I got deeply into science fiction through collections of stories culled from the magazine. I love earlier stuff - Wells etc, but the pulpy golden age stuff is just fantastically easy to read.

If anyone is interested, there's a 2 volume set from 1959, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, copies of which are always dirt cheap on Amazon; it got a few duds, but it's one of the best collections I've ever read, and an amazing introduction (has The Stars My Destination [as Tiger! Tiger!], the Chrysalids, Waldo, the Weapon Shops of Isher, among loads of other stuff). This site is amazing as well, if you can hack the weird design: http://greatsfandf.com/

(Science fiction, not San Francisco.) Having never really experienced the genre much, I have recently been trying to assemble (and eventually read) a list of influential and quintessential science fiction books, and while my informal research into the beginnings of sci-fi as an identifiable genre led me to earlier authors like Verne and Wells, I had never heard of this fellow or this magazine.

By the way, if one wants to read a quick standalone sci-fi novel, I just finished Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I can't recommend it strongly enough.

"Ralph 124C 41+" is awful. After that, Gernsback published SF of others, rather than his own, and as a publisher did much to launch SF as a genre.

Before SF, there were "Edisonades", the classic being "Edison's Conquest of Mars". That's a milestone in science fiction. It's one of the first space travel stories, and it's reasonably plausible given scientific knowledge at the time.

Heinlein is not from the "beginnings" era. Heinlein is from the "golden age" of SF, when a space-oriented future looked not only technically possible but close. Watch "Destination Moon". Most of Heinlein's better works predate the discovery that Mars barely has an atmosphere and Venus is well above the boiling point of water. Planetary colonization within the solar system looked possible back then.

I think short form scifi is where it really shines:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

If you're interested in Sci-Fi, especially some of the older stuff, there's an unbelievable treasure trove of books, short stories, scanned magazines, old radio dramas and books on tape all for free at archive.org.

Finding stuff there is a mess though, but even just a search for "science fiction" is like falling into a dragon's hoard of genre pieces.

Gernsback was the man, but I feel the need to mention: H.G Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelly, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs...

I tend to rate Mary Shelley as the earliest sci-fi author. Not just for 'Frankenstein', but also for 'The Last Man'.

I would strongly recommend tackling Issac Asimov's 'Foundation' series as one of the all time classics.

Another pretty early one to take a look at is 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was the first book banned by the USSR and was the inspiration for Orwell's 1984.

SF is a broader church than you might imagine from the outside, and many people (including me!) will give you a list of "classics" that are actually quite a narrow slice because that's the subgenre they're into. I'd recommend starting from something like the Locus top 100; populism has its problems but will at least ensure you don't completely miss any major areas.

So, because I haven't seen it mentioned, go check out anything by Harlan Ellison. I will strongly suggest the Shatterday or Stalking the Nightmare anthologies. Those stories have some fucking teeth.

Science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you're feeling highbrow) is probably one form where I still regularly buy "Year Best <whatever>" anthologies...it's a form that is benefited heavily from short stories, because scifi is about the ideas, not so much the characters. Good science fiction has both, of course, but must have good ideas--lots of stories happen that have decent character development but the ideas stink.

I also would strongly recommend the Pump Six anthology by Paolo Bacigalupi; it's biopunk, I suppose, but pretty solid and plays well with the ideas of being past Peak Energy.

I'm a big Heinlein Fan. I strongly recommend you read his other big famous works, "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land." After that you can dig deeper into his bibliography, but I'd consider those three to be essential reading.

I recently finished "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and I loved it. Makes me curious to read other sci fi from the Soviet world.

When I was 12 or 13 I discovered E E "Doc" Smith, John W Campbell and Philip Nowlan. I'd been reading more contemporary authors like Heinlein and Andre Norton, and the sheer "noise" of these older books were astonishing. What teenage boy doesn't like antimatter planets being flung at Boskonian space pirate outposts, or spaceships powered by solidified light? For a while I loved them.

I still have fond memories of Smith's galaxy-spanning Skylark series, the planet bashing swagger of the Lensman series, and Campbell's unapologetic "super science", but the prose has not aged well and I find them difficult to read now. I feel a little sad about that.

I can still recommend Smith's The Skylark of Space and Skylark Three, and Campbell's The Moon is Hell, but not much else.

Larry Niven's short story collections are well worth picking up. His first is 'Inconstant Moon' and it's where I first discovered him. Some of the stories later developed into key parts of his Known Space cycle of short stries and novellas. They're all great stuff, but IM is the starting point.

If you like it you can check out the rest, if not then they're only short stories so not too much of an investment in time.

The William Gibson short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a reference to Gernsback. Gibson is probably on a lst of important SF authors.

Here's a (probably pirate?) link: http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt

EDIT: see also the Hugo Awards, which could probably do a better job of publicizing the sorce of their name.

PPS: congrats cstross for best novella! I hadn't noticed that.