OnlineScifi

What this site will cover

Online Scifi is being built from scratch on a domain that previously ran an abandoned installation. Five strands are planned, and each one goes live as soon as it has enough finished work behind it to be worth reading.

• Film and television

  Reviews, re-readings and production histories, from the silent era through to whatever opened last Friday. Longer pieces on the directors, effects crews and writers who shaped how the future looks on screen.

• Books and publishing

  Novels, novellas and short fiction, plus the pulp magazines and small presses that carried the genre before anyone took it seriously. Reading paths for people who want a way in without starting at 1818.

• Space and science

  Missions, telescopes and published research, written for readers who arrived for the fiction and stayed for the orbital mechanics. Where a film gets the physics right, we say so; where it does not, that is usually the more interesting story.

• Archive and research

  Dated, sourced reference pages on films, authors, awards and the ideas the genre returns to every decade: first contact, artificial minds, generation ships, time that refuses to behave.

• Design and artwork

  Poster art, title sequences, costume and production design, concept illustration. The visual language of science fiction is half the reason anyone remembers it.

A short log of things worth knowing

The kind of material the archive will be built from. Every entry below is a documented fact, not a legend the internet repeats.

1. 1818

   Frankenstein was published anonymously in January 1818. Mary Shelley began it at eighteen, during the cold, sunless summer of 1816 caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora on the other side of the world. The first science fiction novel owes its existence to a volcano.

2. 1920

   The word robot comes from Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., published in 1920 and first staged in Prague in 1921. Čapek credited his brother Josef with the coinage, built on the Czech robota, meaning forced labour. The robots in the play are not machines at all — they are grown.

3. 1926

   Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted entirely to the genre. He called it "scientifiction". The name did not stick; the Hugo Awards are named after him anyway.

4. 1927

   Fritz Lang's Metropolis was cut heavily after its Berlin premiere and circulated incomplete for eighty years. In 2008 a near-complete print turned up in a film museum in Buenos Aires, restoring roughly half an hour that almost nobody alive had seen.

5. 1945

   Arthur C. Clarke published a paper in Wireless World describing how three satellites in a 36,000 km orbit could relay signals to the whole planet. He never patented it. The orbit now carries his name.

6. 1963

   Doctor Who first aired on 23 November 1963, the day after the Kennedy assassination. The audience was distracted enough that the BBC repeated the episode the following week.

7. 1965

   Dune grew out of a research trip Frank Herbert took to the shifting sand dunes near Florence, Oregon, for an article about a government programme to stabilise them with grass. The article went nowhere. The ecology stayed.

8. 1968

   2001: A Space Odyssey earned Stanley Kubrick the only competitive Oscar of his career, for visual effects. Its rotating centrifuge set cost more than many complete features of the period.

9. 1973

   Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call in April 1973. He has repeatedly credited the communicator in Star Trek as the thing that made a pocket-sized phone seem obvious.

10. 1977

    Both Voyager probes carry a gold-plated record of greetings in 55 languages, whale song, Bach and Chuck Berry. Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012 and is still transmitting, from more than 24 billion kilometres away.

11. 1979

    Alien's tagline — no one can hear you scream in space — is literally correct. Sound needs a medium, and a vacuum is not one. Almost every space film since has ignored this, including some very good ones.

12. 1984

    William Gibson coined cyberspace in a 1982 short story and made it famous in Neuromancer two years later. He wrote the novel on a manual typewriter and had barely used a computer at the time.

13. 1997

    Men in Black began as a six-issue comic by Lowell Cunningham, published by a small press in 1990. The black suits, the silver device and the galaxy on a cat's collar did the rest.

14. 2021

    The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day and now orbits a gravitational balance point 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, far beyond the Moon. It is too distant to service. Every one of its 344 single-point failure mechanisms had to work first time, and did.

Questions we are already getting