This week I am playing host to a drive to promote vintage science fiction month which celebrates science fiction stories that are older than me. It is my first time participating and I hope to contribute more next year. Other posts in this drive thus far can be viewed here, here, and here. You can also follow VintageSciFiMonth on Twitter here and its founder, Andrea, here and her co-host, Jacob who also moderates the Twitter account, here. You can also visit them on their respective blogs, the Little Red Reviewer and Red Star Reviews.

So without dropping any further links, here is Jacob talking about vintage science fiction and the interminable nature of creativity:

What could we imagine if we didn’t already know it was impossible?

On the surface it seems a silly question, but it is a little like wondering what our dreams of Santa Claus could be like if people hadn’t ruined that childhood story for us! (Wait-you didn’t know that Santa isn’t real? Sorry! Ignore what I said! Santa is still totes real!) That is one of aspects of Vintage SciFi that I love!

Think about it: everyone has ray guns! Aliens live not only on Mars, they’re also on the Moon! Or even the Sun! We can step into a teleportation device and be sent across space and through time. Aliens have left devices all over that we can use. You could make friends with a star! EVERYONE GETS A SPACESHIP!

For Vintage SciFi Month we qualify anything published prior to your birth year as Vintage SciFi, and if that either doesn’t give you as many choices as you’d like or feel vintagey enough then you can go with anything published before 1979. Before 1979 we were still learning a lot about what direction technology would go and what our solar system was truly like. We had only just landed on the Moon in the previous decade! Space was awash with possibilities and the stories of that time showed it.

Oh to be sure not every Vintage SciFi story had outlandish science or tech, some were very prescient in their vision! But enough were way way out there and that gives us a Vintage SciFi Feel to stories that every now and again a modern author can recapture, but it is great going back to the time when that feeling infused all of the work!

Returning to a time when everything seemed possible and the only limitations on the writers was what their minds could encompass helps to stretch our own imaginations. It gives us the chance to step back into that childhood wonder our species got to experience together, and helps us to ask once again: What is truly possible if only what we already knew wasn’t in our way?

Thanks, Jacob. For people interested in reading more and wishing to support this drive, here are the links again for the other posts in this series: here, here, and here. If you want to read more about Jacob or follow his blog, Red Star Reviews, click here.

“Like” and “Share” like the zombie apocalypse is about to hit.

Woelf