“With Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback, H.G. Wells invented the genre of science fiction.” Tweet by @nytimesbooks, November 2021

A badly worded tweet by the New York Times revealed a deep anger at the false history of science fiction. Written out of that history were hundreds of women writers of the 1800s who created what today we call science fiction.

The true history of science fiction is deeper and richer than many fans and readers know. It reaches back to the Enlightenment and the collapse of belief in the Christian mythos. It is the search for a new mythos for the modern world, that continues into the 21st century.

00:00 The forgotten authors of science fiction

02:30 Welcome to the Science Fiction podcast

07:07 The true history of science fiction...why does it matter?

09:21 Commercial Genre vs Creative Movement

17:12 The Problem : the collapse of the Christian mythos

23:36 All science fiction is myth, not all myth is science fiction

26:38 The seeds of science fiction

29:01 The Novel Experiment

36:20 Birth of Genre

38:41 The ideological capture of science fiction by John W Campbell

43:47 The New Mythic

50:01 The process of genrefication

54:44 Writing the 21st century myth

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Read my top science fiction to rewire your consciousness https://amzn.to/3gQqfGR

Pre-1950 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/_collections/utopias/utopias.html