Science & Nature SpecialScience fiction

I’m rather hoping that some of the stories which appeared in Science Fiction Adventures during the early 1960s don’t come true. Though its title suggests otherwise, SFA was actually quite an intellectual magazine. There, many of J.G. Ballard’s stories first appeared, including his brilliant The Drowned World, which predicted global warming and seriously rising sea levels. My own The Sundered Worlds foresaw the discovery of black holes and first offered the term ‘multiverse’ to describe an infinity of alternate versions of our own universe, nesting side by side but unaware of the others’ presence. In New Worlds, SFA’s sister magazine, we – I edited the magazine from 1963 to 1980 – would debate the morality of cloning, of visceral art, computer pornography or TV pseudo-news shows. Writers such as Brian Aldiss and Tom Disch not only predicted our problems, but also looked hard at their moral implications 40 years before Melvyn Bragg raised the same questions on our late-night screens.

By the late 19th century, popular magazines were packed with tales of aerial pirates, moon voyagers and giant submarines, but it took H.G. Wells to combine sophisticated scientific reasoning with sharp social observation. His rationalist themes weren’t always at odds with the fascism he came to loathe. Otherwise his predictions of tanks, ‘space guns’ and atom bombs weren’t actually very different from those appearing in Modern Boy or Sexton Blake thrillers.

Though hosts of snappy pulp writers filled our magazines with vaguely described rocket ships, televisions, super-bombs, robot cops, electronic brains and the ubiquitous deathray, it wasn’t until the early 1940s that sf began to get on the scientific money when the FBI turned up at the New York offices of Astounding SF grimly demanding to know how the editor, John W. Campbell, had discovered that Uranium 235 was the crucial element in manufacturing a practical atomic bomb.