Sci-fi and the West

The wise direct marketers at Amazon sent me an email about the new book called Frontiers Past And Future: Science Fiction And the American West. The book is a literary study of science fiction and how science fiction writers have used narratives of the European settling of the American West as a basis for their space exploration stories. As the review notes, this helps make the strange more easy to digest as there are elements we can recognize. Looking at the future requires some investigation of the past if only to see the trend lines. The past can also be a source for the story itself. Issac Asimov's classic Foundation Trilogy is explictly based on the Fall of Rome. Asimov even wrote a brief poem explaining how he converted the story of Rome into Foundation, which I cannot find online. As an example of how nerds can have fun in English classes, take a look at this essay (written by a Swedish student) comparing Foundation to the Fall of the Roman and British empires. There are other examples of course. David Weber's Honor Harrington books are essentially Hornblower or Aubrey and Maturin in space.

Hard sci-fi can be different as it focuses more on the problems that surround coping with the scientific realities of space exploration. A great example is Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity which is about a human dealing with a society on a planet with gravity many times greater than Earth's. Donovan Hall links to a site where you can read excerpts from some new hard sci-fi books.