Cigarett card from 1920.

Science Fiction.     What is Science Fiction and in what way has it influenced us during the last century? If you ask 10 researchers of litterature of the label "Science Fiction" you'll probably get 10 descriptions. If you would ask me (and you do right?!) I think the words says it all: Science - knowledge Fiction - imaginative     To use the very edge of our knowledgeble science and theories, and with its help build stories and adventures that are played out in the future. Piece of pie... cake, I mean.     Please do read my article and study the illustrations along with the Science Fiction-gallery (the illustrations are not placed here as they would slow the pages down).    Then consider - how is it possible that all this was presented over a 100 years ago in fiction as many today belive it is reality?!     Please bare with spelling errors and such. I'm doing the best I can! By: Jorgen Westman.

Illustration from Jules Verne's novel "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865).

Why Science Fiction?     Other descriptions can be found by the Science Fiction-writers themself, where the famous collector Sam Moskowitz's words are the most coloring (interpreted from Swedish text): "Science fiction is a branch of the fanatasy-litterature that are recognized by the fact that it facilitates the readers voluntarily will to put aside its scepsis by placing the stress on a scientific credibility in its vivid speculations of science, space, time, socilology and philosphy.     Fiction has existed since the dawn of our knowledge to write. From Lukianos (aprox. 125 A.D.) and its "Ikaromenippos, or A Trip By Air", till the more familiar example - Gulliver's Travels. Swift's book about the country with its tiny people is definitly not science, just "fiction" and therefor not SF (I will call Science Fiction just SF from now-on). Among other books "on the edge" we can find Sir Francis Bacon's "The New Atlantis" from 1629 and Horace Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" from 1765. But as I said, the list goes on and on.    Jules Verne & H.G. Wells     But the earliest, more genuine prototypes of SF, came around 1728 as Murtagh McDermot (pseudonym) wrote "A trip to the Moon", that was followed by similar stories of baloon-rides to the Moon. Another target, at the time, to popular "expeditions" was the inner Earth which Jules Verne developed further in the 1864 book "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth". And it was around the mid-19th century as the general school-attendance was a fact in the US and in most European countries that the foundation for SF was created. The ability to read, and an allready existing interest in novels, got a new angle as the technical and industrial revolution was knocking on the door.     As Mary Shelley is considered to be the very first to use a vision of science in her book "Frankenstein" where she built a humanoid of dead body parts, Jules Verne is considered to be the writer that set the foundation to this new kind of litterature in his "Voyage-books" till the Moon and the centre of the Earth, that later on got a new uniform with Captain Nemo's travels beneath the worldsea.     Despite that Verne's contradictable claims of shooting a man to the Moon in a canonball, he managed to convince, at least often, the reader of his technical solutions and this is the very core of one of SF's most important points - as Sam Moskowitz earlier on this page described.     Around 1880 pure space-novelettes started to surface. Among the earliest we find Percy Greg's "Across the Zodiac" that is about a rocketride to Mars where an ancient and decadent civilasation is found. Then came books about travels to Jupiter and Saturn in John Jacob Astor's "A Journey in Other Worlds" (1894). Among these stories, which all were in more of a romantic vein rather than technical, we can find George Griffiths "The Angel of the Revolution" which is about a futuristic world-war that isn't interrupted until a passing comet burns most of human kind to ashes. A striking resemblence to the Hale Bop-madness of today...

Herbert George Wells

Herbert George Wells stepped on the stage in 1895 with "The Time Machine". And in opposition to Jules Verne, that gladly dug deep into technical descriptions of his invented machines, that was only a sideline to H.G. Wells who concentrated his stories around communities and the human behaviour, or an idea buildt around moral. If we would make paralells with todays, increasing, vivid, conspracy-theories about "aliens" and military facilities, you will find most of those stories of battles in underground facilities (Dulce etc.) in Wells multiphased stories.     One of those are the story from his debute "The Time Machine". The book is about a man traveling into the future to the year 802.270. There he finds humanity developed into two totally different species: the decadent and mild "Eloi''s" (Eloi is Hebrew for "God"...) and the cruel, stunted, Morlocks. The Eloi's has a good life inside the Morlock's underground factory's, in exchange to be used as food to the Morlocks and pray as they hunt.     In the aristocratic world of H.G. Wells the Eloi's was the slack upper class and the Morlock's was the proletarians. But with the situation of today (and since the 70's) it isn't hard to transfer the idea to humans v/s greys, as described in the vivid stories of Area 51 (Jarod 1 etc.) and the Dulce-base.     Another classic by Wells is "The War of The Worlds", that came in 1898. And we could notice that Wells skills were extremely good by the panic that outburst from Orson Welles radioplay-version in 1938, although the panic mainly developed in the tabloids and not on the street as we've been told.     The fundamental idea of the New Age movement was allreday presented in Wells SF-stories, as "The Food of Gods" (1904), where Wells for the first time tries to describe the futuristic human, developed to a race of higher intellect and moral, that is supposed to take over as the new leaders of the world. Let me clearify this by giving you a quote from the book (translated from Swedish): " - To grow in accordance with Gods will! To grow out of clefts and crevices, out of the shadow and darkness, against greatness and light! Bigger, he said with a slow emphasis, greater my brothers! And then - even bigger. To grow and keep growing. Until growing so far that we reach unity and synchronosity with God. To grow...until Earth is only a step...until our spirit has driven away fear and reached...He raised his arm against the sky - out there!"     This thesis was maintained in "The World Set Free" (1914), "Men Like Gods" (1922) and "The Shape of Things To Come" (1933). His more and more political and deeply pessimistic view on humanitys possibility to get by ended with the 1937 story "Star Begotten". Here he let's an unfamiliar alien creature change the biological nature of humans. Only after it has been fullfilled the utopia can be reached. Recognize the idea?!     Now why all this rambling about H.G. Wells books?     The reason is that H.G. Wells shadow falls heavy on all SF since early 20th century, until today. And the paralells is too much of a coincidance, with todays view of UFO's as a "reality", to be swept under the carpet.