What Sci Fi novels can teach us about uncertainty

In times of great uncertainty – and Eurovision humiliation aside, 2021 surely qualifies – many are tempted to examine ‘speculative fiction’ from the past, to understand the present. 1984 has had a good year, and seems much less dated than anything actually from 1984, such as Wham!, The Karate Kid or Roland Rat. Huxley’s Brave New World is now the standard rebuttal to Orwell – with Forster’s The Machine Stops, in at least a respectable third place. But what of the pulpier end of the market? Those privately educated literary figures were not the only ones peering into the future before The Last War and it can be illuminating to reflect on what visions were hammered out in the actual brave new world of America, on the production line of science fiction periodicals like Astounding! 

Literature has no single golden age, but some genre fiction does, and Science Fiction had a long one, stretching from the mid-30s all the way up to the mid 50s – up, perhaps, to Crick and Watson and the genuinely astounding discovery of DNA with which it briefly struggled to compete.