Good morning everyone. When I first volunteered to give a talk on science fiction, I thought it would be a very easy thing to do.

But when I started to research the topic, just to make sure I didn’t miss out on saying anything important, I realised just what a wide field science fiction covers. I started looking at not just SF itself, but at information ABOUT it. I intend to use the abbreviation SF, sometimes pronounced sef, here, in preference to the sometimes used Sci-Fi. This is a personal preference. I cannot stand the term Sci-Fi. Sounds like Hi Fi, but worse.

Most people know much more about SF than they realise. We have all been exposed to it, and can easily give examples of books and films and TV series. We recognise the characters of Mr Spock, Superman, Doctor Who, Darth Vader and E.T. Many, if not all of us have heard the terms ‘May the Force be with you,’ ‘ET phone home’ and ‘Beam me up Scotty’. SF has even made it to the front cover of TIME magazine – eleven times!

Much of this, of course, will be MY interpretations, ideas and opinions. I have taken information from a variety of sources including many books, both fiction and non fiction, internet websites such as Wikipedia and some of the SF sites. Basically however I intend to concentrate on what I like. I will probably omit mention of many books, stories, films and TV series that other people might consider important. I’d be here for a week, otherwise. SF is such a wide field it’s impossible to cover it all. And science fiction fans vary tremendously in their likes and dislikes.

This talk could also be fairly superficial. Many fans can find a lot of ‘deep and meaningful’ messages in the stories they read, just as meaning can be found in non SF. However, I’m not planning on a really in depth analysis of anything here.

One of my friends once remarked to me, quite a few years ago, that she thought I did not look like a science fiction fan. I’m not quite sure what she meant by that, and whether there is some particular sort of person who likes, or is expected to like, SF. During the 20th century, many fans might have been young males, but many women not only enjoy reading the genre, but are famous authors. I shall be mentioning some of them later.

Even the term – science fiction – is very difficult to pin down.

It is a major literary and entertainment genre and has a long but not always esteemed history. It is related to other genres like fantasy, horror, the supernatural, escapism, fairy tales and mythology.

If you were to ask ten SF fans to give a definition, chances are you'd get ten different definitions, and the ten fans would argue about them.

SF is defined by the Collins Australian pocket dictionary as 'stories making imaginative use of scientific knowledge’. The key words here are: stories, imaginative, and scientific.

The Hutchinson softback encyclopedia tells us SF is a genre of fiction and film with an imaginary scientific, technological or futuristic basis.

Theodore Sturgeon, a SF writer, defines it like this: “A good science-fiction story is a story about human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, that would not have happened at all without its science content."

A good SF story should make one think about the real world as well. Actually, ANY good story should make one think, if it comes to that. Otherwise it becomes what a friend of mine refers to as ‘bubble gum for the mind’.

I personally like the definition that goes along the lines of, ‘If I read something and say it’s SF, then it’s SF!’

SF is - at the very least - a form of entertainment, especially when you consider film and TV. But many authors – and not just of SF - use whatever genre they write in to give us a message about what they think and feel – about people, about science, politics, religion and society, about the way we treat each other and about where we, as humans, are going. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels looked at society, 1984 and Brave New World made political comments upon us and our world, and the book of Jurassic Park deals with the use of technology in the area of cloning and genetic manipulation. HG Wells made comments upon the future of science in his book of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Sometimes we need to look beyond the story for something more to feed our minds. In several episodes of Star Trek observations have been made, not always with a great deal of subtlety, regarding such concepts as slavery and racial prejudice. In one, we even got onto the thorny topic of religion, asking what it is that makes us human – do we have souls? (The Measure of a Man)
C S Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet and two others with a religious theme. Of course, much SF (like any other form of fiction) IS only for entertainment or fun. I don’t think there are too many deep and meaningful messages behind Star Wars perhaps, other than good triumphs in the end. That is however a very positive message. The future CAN be good. It’s not all doom and gloom.

Many modern science-fiction stories are set in the future, but that is not necessary. It’s possible to have books that are classified as SF, but are set in the distant past. Examples of these include The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels, by Jean Auel. Robert Bakker wrote Raptor Red, about dinosaurs.

Many are set in what can be called alternative history. This may be where something has or has not happened in our past, and the time stream has been changed in some way. Kingsley Amis wrote a book called The Alteration, in which the Reformation had never occurred, and the world of 1976 where he set it was not the world as we knew it in 1976. Harry Turtledove set a book that he wrote in collaboration with Richard Dreyfuss - The Two Georges - in a world where the American Revolution had never occurred. I shall mention Harry Turtledove again; he is one of my favourite writers. Many SF writers create their own world for their stories. Anne McCaffrey writes stories set on Pern, Terry Pratchett created the Discoworld, while Dune is set on the planet Arrakis.

Science fiction is not real. The word FICTION tells us that. It is stories about things that have not happened yet - but maybe one day they might.

Many people, if asked what they think SF is about, would mention space travel, aliens, other planets, robots, time travel and so on. These are some of the elements of SF.

Much SF starts with the premise WHAT IF? What if we were invaded by aliens? WHAT IF someone could REALLY read other people’s minds? WHAT IF robots and space travel, genetic engineering and such like were real and a part of everyday life? WHAT IF the Spanish Armada had defeated England? WHAT IF instant travel were real and not a dream? That WHAT IF? bit is very important.

Many British comic books of the 20th century included adventures set in space and on other planets. For example, Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. I used to get a girls’ magazine when I was much younger, and most of the stories concerned girls who were ballet dancers or circus performers. Looking back, I don’t think many of them concerned outer space. This was more the province of magazines and comic books for boys.

The first SF book I ever encountered was David Severn’s The Future Took Us. In the junior section of the library at Claremont I found and read this book. I don't think I would have recognised at the time this was SF. It was simply a story about two boys who somehow were transported into the future, to a time when the wheel was both taboo and revered. I don’t remember it very clearly, but I think in the end they were returned to their own time.

A few years later I found my first adult SF book in the same library. This was called Three To Conquer and was by a British writer, Eric Frank Russell. The story concerned a telepath (a mind reader) and an alien invasion. These aliens had returned to Earth in the minds of three astronauts sent to explore the planet Venus. How they were defeated is the main plot of the story.

This author enjoyed making fun of bureaucracy. He had no time for red tape and fuss and rules. Some of his stories are extremely funny. At the same time he was capable of being extremely serious. His story Somewhere a Voice tells of ordinary people who happen to be the survivors of a space crash. They come down on a most inhospitable planet. The story explores the feelings of one of the survivors and we see how his early prejudices are changed by events and the behaviour of others. It's a sad story, but ends with a flicker of hope because he has learnt his prejudices were just exactly that, and without any foundation in facts. Like some SF stories, it touches on the topic of religion.

Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story entitled The Nine Billion Names of God, which may make you laugh – and then stop and think. In it he has computer engineers who have been helping at a monastery high in the Tibetan mountains. The monks told them that the job of mankind is simply to list the nine billion names of God, and that after that, their purpose will have been fulfilled. We end with our disbelieving computer experts travelling away from the monastery, their job completed, then suddenly noticing that above them, without any fuss, the stars are going out.

Science fiction can also be tragic.

At high school I read a short story called The Cold Equations. This made me cry. A young girl, aged 18, stows away on a tiny space vessel in order to visit her brother on a distant planet. What she does not know is that the vessel carries only enough fuel to reach the planet. With her extra mass on board, it cannot get there safely. The vessel MUST reach the planet because it carries vital medical supplies without which everyone there will die. For their survival she has to die. There is absolutely no way for her to be saved. This was written by Tom Godwin, who produced very little SF other than this one classic tale. It does show the clear bond between SF and real science, in a very vivid way.

Another story by EFR is entitled Tieline. In this one a volunteer is manning an extremely isolated planet, practically all ocean, with a warning beacon for space vessels. He is expected to spend ten years there alone. The powers that be, back home on Earth, keep trying to figure ways to soften his isolation. A female companion is rejected due to all complications 'ranging from babies to murder'. They offer at various times audio tapes, vegetable seeds for a garden, and even a pet - a praying mantis, which gives the fellow the creeps rather than any feeling of companionship. In a final touch of genius, they release thousands of earth seagulls into the atmosphere – and he is no longer alone.

Two famous early writers of SF, Jules Verne and HG Wells, are well known to us all. Some other writers of about the same era can be classified among the authors of adventure tales that are in a way, the ancestors of SF. These include Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe and H Rider Haggard. Here are such stories as The Lost World, by Doyle. On a plateau concealed deep in the Amazon jungle, there are dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, even a tribe of primitive people. It is interesting just how popular dinosaurs are with the writers of science fiction. Even in modern day movies such as Jurassic Park we are fascinated by them.

ER Burroughs contributed to the scientific or planetary romance tales with stories of Barsoom, aka Mars, and of lost races inhabiting almost inaccessible areas of earth. Burroughs, as well as being the creator of Tarzan, wrote several stories about an expedition to an island named Caprona. The first of these was The Land that Time Forgot. Dinosaurs again!

Romance here, I must say, refers to adventure, not love. But it’s not unknown for a love story as such to have a SF setting. Tanith Lee wrote a beautiful tale called The Silver Metal Lover. This explores ideas about what it is to be, or not to be, human. A truly delightful story which doesn’t even seem to be SF is Bellwether, by Connie Willis. And if you wish to consider sex rather than love, there’s always Barbarella.

SF does not require an alien setting; Earth will do. The Time Machine never leaves earth, it travels into the future. The travellers in Verne's classic tale journey, if not to the true centre of the earth, at least some considerable distance beneath its surface. Dr Moreau is the progenitor of today's genetic engineers and earth itself is invaded in The War of the Worlds.

SF has been around longer than many people realise. Back in the second century AD a Greek writer, Lucian of Samosata wrote a satirical story called A True History. This tale contains the first account of an interplanetary voyage, presented in fiction. Thomas More wrote about Utopia – a perfect world. Mary Shelley created Dr Frankenstein’s monster and Jonathan Swift had his explorer Gulliver encounter some very strange people, of varying sizes and shapes.

In the seventeenth century Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne wrote a book called The Blazing World. This is a fanciful depiction of a utopian society which can be reached via the North Pole. I know nothing about this one but found mention of it when looking into the history of SF.

In 1938 the American public was terrified by the radio broadcast of H G Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. This created mass hysteria on a scale seldom seen - and it was just science fiction.

There are many authors who have produced SF and fantasy and some you might not have suspected of dabbling in the genre. Nevil Shute, Erle Stanley Gardner and Agatha Christie to name a just a few. Jack London, who wrote stories such as White Fang and Call of the Wild, also wrote SF. I recently read his long story entitled The Scarlet Plague, a post cataclysmic tale. EM Forster, who is far better known for his Passage to India, wrote a classic short SF tale named The Machine Stops.

This is a quite horrifying story set in the distant future when the lives of all are controlled by The Machine. It provides them with everything they need, and they live in tiny rooms below the surface of the earth. The people come to worship The Machine, which is central to their existence. But in the end, even The Machine is fallible and when it breaks down and stops, so does civilisation. Rather scary. I wonder what its author was trying to tell us about the dangers of trusting technology too much?

Nevil Shute’s well known novel On the Beach is SF. His novel What Happened to the Corbetts also has elements of SF in that it deals with future history, in fact that of a possible war which came true in the manifestation of World War ll.

Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, wrote a collection of SF stories which appears under the title of The Human Zero.

SF doesn’t appear only in novels and short stories. Let’s consider the movies. Many of the top movies of the twentieth century were science fiction. Some SF movies tend to have lots of special effects, sometimes at the cost of character and plot development and logic.

I remember seeing the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man at the local theatre when I was quite young. This was adapted from the book by Richard Matheson and is considered a classic.

The film genre of science fiction has existed since the early years of silent cinema, when, in 1902, Georges Melies' A Trip to the Moon amazed audiences with its trick photography effects. Several films merged the science-fiction and horror genres, such as Frankenstein in 1920, and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde in 1912. A longer science fiction film, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea was made in 1916. Many of you here may remember the 1951 black and white movie of The Day the Earth Stood Still, with the robot Gort and his master Klaatu.

Star Wars which blended SF and adventure and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were released in 1977 and were box-office hits that brought about a huge increase in science fiction films.

Milestones include 2001, the Star Trek collection, running at the moment I think at about ten or so, the Back to the Future movies, Terminator, and so on. And let’s not forget Mad Max, made in Australia and with a younger and sexier Mel Gibson.

Currently the big hit is Transformers, with giant robots. The Back to the Future movies were actually a great series and dealt with time travel and its problems in not just a funny way, but a thoughtful one. Another considerably older movie dealing with time travel is Portrait of Jennie, starring Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. This, I believe, was made in about 1948.

Independence Day was one of those that I found so bad it was funny. Nonethless, it was a great hit. I think lots of people just enjoyed watching the alien ships trashing the White House and so on.

One truly dreadful (imho) movie was The Day of the Triffids. This was based on a much better novel by John Wyndham, who specialised in stories about the end of civilization, as we know it. A BBC series was made during the 1980s and this was much truer to the book. Similarly bad is a recent (American) version of The Midwich Cuckoos (Village of the Damned) although the early b/w version was pretty good. I have to say it, a bad SF film can be really bad. And there have been plenty of them through the years.

Quite often a short story has been adapted for the screen. Frequently the film and the story source have very little in common. Examples here include

2001: A Space Odyssey which was based on Arthur C Clarke’s story The Sentinel,

Blade Runner, based on Philip Dick’s novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and

Total Recall, based on another of Philip Dick’s stories – We Can Remember it for you Wholesale.

Farewell to the Master became The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Enemy Mine was based on a novella by Barry Longyear. Quite often the story is superior to the film.

The recently released I, Robot, is based EXTREMELY loosely on Asimov’s collection of short stories. I shall come back to Asimov and robots later on.

I have watched a lot of SF on TV and have some favourites here. In 1964, we produced an Australian SF series called The Stranger, starring Ron Haddrick. A number of early Australian TV productions were science fiction, often aimed at a juvenile audience. More recently the SF series Farscape was produced in Australia with a mixed American and Australian cast.

There was an excellent British series in about 1961 called A for Andromeda which was followed by Andromeda Breakthrough. Julie Christie, later to be seen in Dr Zhivago, had a large role in this series.

Of course, when we think of SF on TV we cannot go past two classics – Dr Who in the UK and Star Trek in its several manifestations from the USA. So far we have had Star Trek the original series, STTNG, Voyager, Enterprise and DS9. The ST concept came originally from Gene Roddenberry. Dr Who, of course, has been shown on and off since 1963, with the good doctor undergoing any number of regenerations. Dr Who’s first appearance, late in November 1963, was rather overshadowed by a REAL and disastrous world event.

Other SF TV series include The Twilight Zone, V, Thunderbirds, Space 1999, Alien Nation, Buck Rogers, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, Stargate, Andromeda and so on. I think I would classify the TV series Lost as SF. The list is almost endless.

In the UK, one very good series in the late 70s and early 80s was Blake’s 7, a sort of a cross between Robin Hood and Star Trek. I might sound as if I’m making fun of it, but I am actually a long time fan of this series and it is what introduced me to the concept of SF fandom. Blake’s 7 was the brainchild of Terry Nation, who also produced Survivors, a post apocalypse story. He is famed more for his metal monsters of Dr Who – the Daleks.

No talk on SF would be complete without mention of some of the great writers such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and so on. Isaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books during his life and they range over an enormous number of topics. His is one of the great names of SF. According to the information I found, his books can be found in nine of the ten classifications in the Dewey system in libraries. Not bad.

Asimov died in 1992. Isaac Asimov’s story Nightfall is considered by many people to be the greatest SF short story ever written. The planet concerned in this story has six suns, and only once in every two thousand and fifty years is it in total darkness. They do not ever experience darkness. And that is of course the only time that the people of this planet are able to see the stars around them. Until nightfall, they are totally unaware of these millions upon millions of other suns in the cosmos. They do not even know what ‘the stars’ are. It comes as a real shock to them, and generally the result is that they burn everything possible to provide light and civilisation falls. Of course, after the brief period without their suns is over, they rebuild their civilisation … until the next nightfall.

Arthur C Clarke is pushing 90 and lives in Sri Lanka. One very well known story of his is The Star. In this story a future space expedition discovers the remains of a civilisation comparable to ours on a far distant planet. It had been destroyed by a super nova – the star at the centre of its solar system had exploded and destroyed all of the planets. The science officer, a Jesuit priest, does calculations and discovers that the light from the massive supernova that destroyed this wonderful civilisation reached the earth in around about the year in which Christ was born. It was the Star of Bethlehem.

Clarke is not only an author, but a scientist as well. Many SF authors have a scientific background. There are so many science fiction writers around today that I have no way of even hearing of all of them. The list is endless. Like anyone else, I have my favourites. They include Lois McMaster Bujold, Turtledove and EFR, as well as H Beam Piper, Clifford Simak, Stephen Baxter, Zenna Henderson and Anne McCaffrey.

Then we have the fantasy writers, too – JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Tad Williams, HP Lovecraft, Kim Wilkins, Tanith Lee, Terry Brooks, and Tanya Huff to mention just a few.

The science fiction of the past has a habit of being the science fact of today. We have space travel, albeit very limited. We have computers and instant communication if not instant travel. We have mapped the human genome and are on the steps of making cloning a reality, whether one approves or not of it.

Time travel is still however beyond our reach, and maybe this contributes to our fascination with the concept. Consider the well known novels of HG Wells, the three Back to the Future movies, the Terminator movies, numerous episodes of such series as Star Trek and of course our old friend Doctor Who. There are many others.

I really enjoyed reading the novel Elleander Morning, written by Jerry Yulsman. I’m not sure however whether it’s science fiction, fantasy or just wishful thinking. Here the female protagonist, on her death bed, sends her mind far into her past – through a sheer effort of will - to improve what she has lived through. Her husband died in a tragic car crash, her two best friends went down on the Titanic and her only son died in World War 2.

Back in 1912 and living her life again, she decides to travel to Europe and shoot dead one young man - Adolph Hitler! She succeeds and sets up an entirely new future, one in which World War ll never happened.

However, books about the war have come with her into the past and they are a puzzle to later historians of this new time line which she has set up. Unlike the majority of traditional SF – or at least the majority I have read, this does contain a considerable amount of what I’d describe as explicit sex, and a sprinkling of four letter words. Elleander Morning, as we find out in this story, is also a love child of H G Wells, and she talks with him about the future she had lived through, but had come back to change.

The Time Traveller’s Wife is a recently written book and I think is as much of a romance as a science fiction story. It is excellent. Audrey Niffenegger is the writer. Michael Crichton, creator of the Jurassic Park series among others, wrote a book called Timeline and Robert Heinlein wrote The Door Into Summer, which is a very enjoyable tale with a cat lover as the hero.

In Time After Time, the hero is HG Wells, who actually travels in his time machine, in search of Jack the Ripper, who has fled into the latter part of the twentieth century.

L. Sprague de Camp wrote a time travel story in which his hero was transported (no method or reason given) back into the Roman Empire just prior to its fall. He is, fortuitously, a scholar who has studied this era, and proceeds to bring his knowledge into play. He introduces distilled liquor, book keeping and a type of telegraph system, managing to prevent the fall of the empire and the beginning of the Dark Ages. It is called – rather fittingly - Lest Darkness Fall.

In Ray Bradbury’s short story A Sound of Thunder a hunter travels back to the age of dinosaurs. However, while there he treads on a butterfly, with disastrous consequences for his own time.

While I’m talking about Ray Bradbury, he also wrote a novel called Fahrenheit 451, about a future in which books are forbidden. What a horrible thought! This was made into a quite excellent film starring Julie Christie and Oskar Werner. He played the role of a fireman – except that in this tale firemen are people who start fires. They burn books.

Less serious, in fact much less serious, is a romance novel of the M&B variety, The Wings of the Storm. It’s better than you would imagine. I loved the first line:

‘Step into my time machine,” said the drunken young man.

Ruth Park, who also wrote such non SF stories as Poor Man’s Orange, The Harp in the South and so on, wrote a delightful story for teenagers called Playing Beattie Bow, about a girl in Sydney who travels back into the early days of the city.

Connie Willis wrote at least two books touching on time travel: Doomsday Book and To say Nothing of the Dog. The first is tragic and the second very very funny.

Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. And in A Traveller in Time by Allison Uttley a young woman goes back to the time of Mary Queen of Scots and finds out about 'the letters in the casket'.

I have heard the light hearted comment that the hardest thing about writing time travel stories is managing the tense in which they’re written.

Along with space travel and time travel I must also mention instant travel. This is the sort of thing you get in Star Trek and Blake’s 7. (as in ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’) Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about a future in which instant travel was used so often people forgot about the pleasure of walking places. In a longer story by Clifford Simak, The Big Front Yard, it was possible to step through a doorway from Earth onto another planet.

Our fascination with history also contributes to another variation, that of alternative history.

One excellent example is the novel by Harry Turtledove entitled The Guns of the South. As a matter of fact, this is one of my favourites. In this story, time travellers from the future travel to visit General Robert E Lee during the American Civil War. They bring him sufficient modern 20th century weapons - AK 47s - to equip his army and defeat the North. Of course, they are not altruistic; they are white supremacists who wish to see black people remain slaves for ever.

BUT ... after Lee wins the war and becomes the South's new president, he realises that he has been deceived by his benefactors. He become aware that slavery is evil and works against what his visitors from the future had planned, bringing him into conflict with them. Naturally, they are not happy about the situation.

Turtledove is well known as a master of the alternative history genre and has written a series entitled World War - complete with unfortunately lurid covers. This has the embattled nations of the early 1940s being invaded by reptilian aliens. The up until then enemies find it necessary to work together to fight a common enemy, at the same time still distrusting each other. Into his novel Turtledove weaves real and fictional characters, and the effect is brilliant.

He also wrote a novel in which the Spanish Armada defeated England. Spain promptly occupied the country and put Elizabeth in the Tower. It’s called Ruled Britannia. The hero is this tale is a little known play writer by the name of Will Shakespeare and it’s a true delight, especially for those more familiar than I am with his plays.

In another tale, Germany won the war and we follow the story of a Jewish person who is forced to live a lie. This is called In the Presence of Mine Enemies. More than a few stories have been written on this theme – and other one I have been unable to get hold of is called The Man in the High Castle. In this also, the Allies were defeated. Heaven forbid – but in SF anything can happen!

In a series of three books, The Neanderthal Parallax by Robert Sawyer, it was the Neanderthals who developed intelligence and become modern day humans.

Roger Zelazny, as well as writing a lot of SF and fantasy, wrote a series blending SF and fantasy, as his hero, Prince Corwin of Amber, moves through a series of imaginary worlds which are all shadows of the original Amber. Our Earth is one of theses shadows. The series starts with Nine Princes in Amber.

Tanith Lee also blended SF and fantasy in her novel The Birthgrave, and Narrelle Harris, author of Witch Honor, is known to me personally as we met many years ago due to our interest in SF and the TV series Blake’s 7.

Another often used theme in SF is the end-of-the-world. Sometimes these are known as cataclysm stories or post-cataclysm stories, if the story concerns what has happened AFTER a major disaster. We saw this in On the Beach, in which, eventually, everyone died. Very sad. It’s been filmed at least twice that I know of. The older version starred Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Anthony Perkins. More recently another version was produced and personally I hated it.

Less depressing is a book by George Stewart named Earth Abides. This concerns a pandemic rather than a war, which kills of the larger portion of the world’s population. As it’s set in the USA, we hear little if nothing about the rest of the world, but can assume a similar fate overtook everyone else.

Earth Abides is a very positive book, in that the survivors manage to reconstruct some sort of society, with rules for the benefit of the majority. It follows the life of one character and tells how he survives, meets other people and eventually starts anew society, different from our own, but which suits the survivors and those who follow them.

John Wyndham also wrote frequently about world disasters – The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Awakens and The Chrysalids to name just three. The last also concentrates on the society developed after a major world disaster. In this one, there is great fear of those who are different, through birth defects most often. The Kraken Awakens concerns an alien invasion, but one which is not recognised as such until the monsters come crawling out of the deeps and terrorise the humans who live near the ocean.

The end of the world as we know it is a frequently used theme. It appears also in the Planet of the Apes. Interestingly, this book was written by Pierre Boule, the author of The Bridge on the River Kwai.

I suppose I should do as so many other SF fans do, and rave about the brilliance of Asimov’s Foundation series, but to be honest I found it boring. I much prefer his short stories, especially those about robots.

By the way, Asimov is not responsible for coining the word ROBOT. That was done by the writer Karel Capek, who introduced it in 1921 via his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

Asimov however did the SF world a great service by introducing his three Laws about the behaviour of robots. Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics are as follows:

“(1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

(2) a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

(3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” Previously, many stories dealing with robots had seen them as monsters alarmingly prone to turn on their creators.

Associated with robots are androids and cyborgs. Androids are artificial intelligences that look like people. One very well known android is Commander Data, from STTNG. Cyborgs are part human and part machine. Consider the Terminator, played so successfully by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Previously, the Six Million Dollar Man would be considered a cyborg. And the Borg of the STTNG universe are the ultimate nightmare in cybernetics. Their main desire was to absorb every race in the universe.

And then we have computers, of all kinds. There is HAL in the movie 2001, and if you have watched SF on TV you may recall Zen and Slave from Blake’s 7 and Dr Theopolis from Buck Rogers. Back in the time of A for Andromeda computers had buildings to house their workings, nowadays they can be carried in one hand. This is another case of science fiction becoming science fact. Microworld is a collection of short stories containing a quite horrifying tale called Computers Don’t Argue. In Alien the ship’s computer was called Mother – but she wasn’t much help in the end!

Many SF stories deal with experiments upon people. Remember Frankenstein’s monster. This is one of the well known variety of SF tales in which the scientist is destroyed by his creation – a warning tale in fact of the dangers of letting science rule us. Genetic engineering can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how it is used – and by whom!

Dr Moreau, in the story by HG Wells, carries out quite horrendous experiments upon animals, trying to bring them to humanity – and ultimately he pays for this. A warning tale about the perils of meddling with nature.

In Flowers for Algernon we see another effect of experimentation – surgical this time - on a young mentally retarded man - I decline to be politically correct and refer to him as 'intellectually challenged'. In the book the main character, Charlie Gordon, was classified as a moron. However, he aspires to be smart. This was originally a short story and was expanded to a novel and has been filmed at least once. The first version starred Cliff Robertson and he won an Oscar for it. The book is written as a diary by Charlie, and we can see his progress and how he deals with it. I really recommend this story, as a tale about people. In many SF stories it is the people who are more important than the technology.

Many SF stories deal with space travel and space vessels. These can come in all shapes and sizes and designs. The best known is probably the Enterprise from Star Trek, with its captains James T Kirk and Jean Luc Picard. The ST universe has been amazingly successful from its start back in the 60s, when according to rumour, one executive was heard to state that 'the guy with the pointed ears has got to go!' Fortunately he didn't, and Mr Spock lives on.

The first space shuttle, launched in 1977 from the back of a 747, was in fact named the Enterprise.

Arthur Clarke’s book Rendezvous With Rama tells of an alien object that travels into our solar system and is explored by humans. It is massive, a perfect cylinder fifty kilometres long and twenty kilometres across each flat end. Imagine a steel can that size. It would stretch from Busselton to Bunbury. Inside, the human explorers found a fascinating world, but one that appeared to be without life until it approached the sun. Later, Clarke collaborated with other writers to do several sequels, but in my opinion none of them has ever been as good as the original story. I recommend this book wholeheartedly and I hope Hollywood never get their hands on it.

In Anne McCaffrey’s novel The Ship Who Sang, and its sequels, we read about living human beings who have been incorporated into space vessels as their brains. This was done to Helva, a child born so physically deformed she could not have lived. She was however quite intellectually capable. As the brains of a starship, she enjoyed her existence, sharing the running of the vessel with the human pilot – the ‘brawn’.

One of my favourite writers, Lois McMaster Bujold, has peopled her universe with not aliens, but many varieties of humans. In the stories of her Vorkosigan saga, humans had spread out across the galaxy long before. They overcame the distances between planets by the technology of wormhole travel, reducing unimaginable distances to routine trips. Her stories would probably belong to the category of space opera. This is a somewhat derogatory term referring to adventures in space. If it comes to it, Star Trek, Star Wars and a multitude of other stories and movies belong to this category. The science and hardware may be impressive but the stories are about people and their adventures, rather than technology.

This is certainly true of Bujold's stories. She begins with a war between the people from two different planets, Barrayar and beta Colony. She has a member of one fall in love with a member of the other. Rather like Romeo and Juliet, except that these are mature people in their 30s and 40s and overcome the odds to make a life together. Shards of Honor and Barrayar are the first in a series. I would really have to define Shards of Honor as a love story, even if it’s set on other planets. It is not impossible to mix the two. Bujold has continued at a crackling pace for about another dozen novels, concerning Cordelia Naismith and her husband Aral Vorkosigan and their son Miles. He suffers the after effects of an assassination attempt on Aral during Cordelia's pregnancy. He is very short, about up to my shoulder, has fragile bones that require replacement and a large head out of proportion to his body. I think you’d also be fairly accurate to describe him as a hyperactive genius. Miles's adventures across the galaxy, along with his horde of followers, are excellent reading.

There are two significant scientific developments – unfortunately fictional - that I particularly approve of in Bujold's books. Her society is advanced enough to make use of uterine replicators for the safe reproduction of human life. This is of course voluntary and not enforced. People get a choice. They also use a drug called fast penta, under which lying is impossible. This is used routinely in investigations. I often think longingly how it could cut through the red tape and hassle of both our legal system and our political system. Unfortunately, fast penta is a SF dream ... for the moment. Also figuring frequently in the Bujold books are such elements of SF as cloning, genetic engineering and space travel. The inhabitants of Beta colony, for example, come in three genders - male, female and hermaphrodite. There is also a genetically engineered race called Quaddies - they have four arms, rather than two arms and two legs, and were designed for working in zero gravity conditions.

As I have said, SF and fantasy are related. Terry Pratchett, an English writer, has created his own world for story telling. This is the Discworld, a plate shaped planet that is carried on the backs of four elephants who are in turn standing on the back of a great turtle, swimming endlessly through space. (A’Tuin)

The Discworld is populated with witches, wizards, trolls, dwarves and human type people, as well as many others. Pratchett writes comedy, but behind it all he points out a great deal about reality and modern society. He is highly recommended and fun to read. I think making us look at ourselves and how we relate to other people, especially those very different from ourselves, is an important function of any kind of fiction.

Comedy is more frequently found in media SF (TV and movies) than in the written form, although there is a lot of incidental and sometimes unintentional humour to be found in the genre. It’s also found more often in fantasy than straight SF.

EFR's award winning short story Allamagoosa tells of the somewhat panicked reactions of a government spaceship crew when they discover they seem to have mislaid a piece of equipment but are expected to be able to state categorically what happened to it, when, where and why. Anyone who's ever had to account to bureaucracy for every small item lost or damaged can relate to their predicament. The item is an 'offog' and they turn their ship upside down searching for it, followed at every step by their ship's dog. They find and mark off in their inventory the dog’s bowl, his blanket and his collar, as well as every other item on their list, from one end of the spaceship to the other.

But they have no idea what the ‘offog’ can be.

Finally, unable to find or account for the item, they manufacture a gadget and pass it off as the ‘offog’. Later, in space and with bureaucracy safely far, far away, they send a message claiming this gadget fell apart under gravitational stress. However, the 'offog' is a misprint for ‘official dog’ and they find themselves – and every other space vessel in the fleet - grounded while investigations get under way to find out how a dog can come apart under gravitational stress. For if a dog can, surely a human can, too!

As regards humour in SF on TV, we have many examples including The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (by Douglas Adams), Red Dwarf, Alf, Quark, My Favourite Martian, My Living Doll, Third Rock from the Sun and the original Batman series.

There is also a delightfully funny series called The Greatest American Hero, made during the 80s. This is almost a send up of Superman. Our hero receives a special suit from some kindly aliens. Unfortunately, he’s something of a klutz, and promptly loses the instruction manual. This gives rise to some lovely scenes as he finds out some of the properties of the suit he’s been given.

There are many funny moments in such classics as Star Trek and Dr Who. If you’ve ever seen the episode Trouble with Tribbles you’ll know what I mean. And later on those tribbles were involved in a very funny episode of Deep Space 9.

There are many examples of humorous SF films – consider the Back to the Future series, Galaxy Quest, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to name just a few. There are humorous events in the Star Wars movies, ET – and to be honest, just about any movie worth watching.

Back as far as Shakespeare writers knew the value of putting ‘funny bits’ into a drama. Galaxy Quest is particularly funny as it takes the cast of a SF series and puts them into a position of having to BE what they’ve played at being for so long. It’s full of SF in jokes and just plain fun.

There are also many funny cartoons and magazines. One of my favourites concerns the aliens who have parked their ship next to a Dutch windmill. They are shown knocking on the door, saying, ‘You give us a ride in yours and you can try ours.’

And then there’s the delightfully funny Bimbos of the Death Sun, a murder mystery set at a science fiction convention. This pokes fun at not just SF, but at the fans as well. There are people who take their SF far too seriously, and I have met some.

One concept that springs to mind when we mention SF would have to be that of aliens. Some are friendly, others are not. I have a clear and distinct memory of being carried out of the theatre in Claremont, disturbed to the point of tears by an alien in the form of a giant grasshopper. Mind you, I was only a very little girl at the time.

The Alien movies gave us the phrase ‘In space no one can hear you scream’ and also introduced us to a tough female in the form of Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver. There are many aliens in Star Wars, ranging from the cute Ewoks, through the Wookiee Chewbacca to the nauseating JarJar Binks and the incredibly gross Jabba the Hutt. And let’s not forget Yoda. He and Darth Vader have both graced the front cover of TIME magazine.

The character of ET would have to be among the best loved screen creations of the twentieth century, and on TV we had the aliens of V, Mork from the planet Ork, Alf and My Favourite Martian, along with hordes of aliens in series ranging from Dr Who through all the Star Trek series.

There are many aliens also in written SF – among my favourites are the Little Fuzzies of H Beam Piper, who are actually not merely cute but intelligent to the point that they are granted sapient status.

Larry Niven created interesting aliens in the form of the Puppeteers who feature in his Ringworld novels, and the fearsome Kzinti. Picture an aggressive Garfield the cartoon cat on steroids and with a blood lust and you have the Kzinti. The Ringworld is a massive alien artefact. It is in fact a world that is not a globe, but rather resembles a ribbon looped around a star. SHOW PICTURES. In the first Ringworld story a small crew travels to the Ringworld and explores it.

Another fascinating alien race was that of the Dracs. These were hermaphrodites and appeared in Enemy Mine. The novella was by Barry Longyear.

Anne McCaffrey is probably better known for her novels about the planet Pern, where among the inhabitants are a race of dragons. I have not read very many of this series, but am aware how good they are. I did enjoy her book Decision at Doona. This planet was settled by humans from a future time when there was little room left on Earth for them due to its massive population growth.

However, Terrans were strictly forbidden to settle on a planet already populated by intelligent aliens. So when the humans on Doona ran – almost literally – into aliens who were not supposed to be there, both races got a shock. As it happened, these aliens were also colonizing Doona, which they called Rralla. They resembled cats, but were not as fearsome and terrifying as the Kzinti of Larry Niven.

This is a story of contact between two races, and how it develops. It’s a particularly enjoyable read where humans and aliens meet, but don’t immediately proceed to blast each other. They are linked by two children, one of each race, who become firm friends in spite of their differences. This is something that SF can teach us, that different does not automatically mean bad or wrong. There is value in being different, and accepting the variations of life.

Eric Frank Russell wrote a tale about Martians who visited Earth – not to conquer but to explore. They arrived after a devastating war that has left few survivors and those at risk of reverting to savagery. One of the crew volunteers to remain on Earth and see what he can do about the situation. He is described as being particularly ugly and frightening to the human eye, but he befriends some children and gradually saves the human race. It’s called Dear Devil.

SF is a very popular genre and each year there are awards for novels, stories etc. Of course, it’s not only SF that gives out such awards; they are given is the fields of crime and romance writing as well, to name just two.

Among the most respected awards for science fiction are the Hugo Award, named for Hugo Gernsback. This is presented by the World Science Fiction Society at each year’s Worldcon.

Hugo Gernsback founded the first SF pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. About 1930, he became the first person to use the term science fiction, although one source quoted the term as being coined in the nineteenth century but not used widely until Gernsback popularised it.

Another prestigious award for SF is Nebula Award, presented by Science Fiction Writers of America. The Nebula is voted on by the community of authors.

There is a fine line between what is considered SF and what is considered fantasy. The latter includes books such as The Lord of the Rings, the Discworld books of Terry Pratchett, Harry Potter and so on. Magic, witches and wizards, fantastic creatures, lost worlds, vampires, fairyland or a variation of any of these are elements of fantasy.

The three movies, of course, introduced many more people to the worlds of fantasy. The Harry Potter stories are reputed to have drawn many children – and maybe even adults – to the delights of reading.

Over the years SF has developed and changed. It has included pure story telling, social commentary and satire, humour, thought provoking stories, pathos and drama. Everything, in fact, that you could ask for in a form of literature and entertainment. Thank you!

 

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