Scifi Thoughts

CONNECT Welcome to SciFi thoughts where for a few short minutes I’ll  tease and tantalize your mind with this genre from the future. Register your email address at LancerKind.com and you'll get cool extras about science fiction such as convention schedules and other nifty stuff. ==>Lancer--- Kind 005 Science Fiction becomes a word ​Although science fiction existed in the 1500s, we don't get the word "science fiction" until the 1900s, when critic, publisher, and writer Hugo Gernsback came up that compound word along with several other alternatives, most of which didn't stick. The early 1900s was an era of standardization as critics like Hugo used their critical voices to influence the market to be critical what was science fiction and what was not, as well as complaining about the quality of the science in science fiction. For example, Hugo refused to publish any science fiction that featured people walking or floating in the vacuum of space without a space suit. Printing continuous to improve in efficie

CONNECT Welcome to SciFi thoughts where for a few short minutes I’ll  tease and tantalize your mind with this genre from the future. Register your email address at LancerKind.com <http://lancerkind.com> and you'll get cool extras about science fiction such as convention schedules and other nifty stuff. ==>Lancer--- Kind 004 SciFi Genesis Perhaps you're new to SciFi or perhaps you've been reading SciFi for a few decades. Have you wondered when science fiction came about? For example: Did you know that this story telling genre about the future is quite old? <needle scratch> Take a moment and form a guess in your mind. How old do YOU think science fiction is? You have that number in your mind? Let me give you some clues: it was before there were airplanes, gas burning cars, or even steel railroads. Have you adjusted that number? Did you know that the science fiction genre is 500 years old? That the first science fiction book came off a printing press in the 1500s? It turns out, the idea of wri

​It's the early 1800s and before Rudolf Diesel and Henry Ford. Electricity is still a lab experiment. But it doesn't matter. We don't need any of what those guys were selling. The true motors of Innovation are started with firing up a boiler, copper or brass tubing, and driving pistons of power. Your clockwork butler is powered with a small coal boiler. Your self driving carriage is steam powered. You need to leave London and go visit the colonies? The first class traveler travels on airship powered with steam generators and handled with pneumatic control systems. Steampunk-- It's a big and visual movement at the conventions: ladies in corsets trimmed with copper tubing, men in shin high-boots and victorian jackets but a steam powered blunderbuss at his side. Steampunk is about fashion, high adventure, and genteel conduct. (Tone change) It probably shouldn't contain the term punk. Unlike it's cousin, Cyberpunk, steampunk isn't focused on high-tech lowlifes but instead the characters are well educated and sa

It was the 1960s.  Young science fiction readers and writers were tired of the usual space travel and adventure tales.  They yearned to read something that used what was happening around them which was too edgy for the earlier fiction which tended to be cleaned up for young adult readers.  The fiction of the New Wave incorporated and even focused on the gritty parts of humanity that most people never saw or only read about in the scandal sheets--drugs, crime, casual sex, corporate malfescience, dishonest governments.  If it was bad and dirty, it'd show up in one of these science fiction novels.  Many of them incorporated the promises of new computer technologies and how they would be used to improve the human condition, make it faster, smarter, more acute.  Then how these cybernetic tools would be used for abuse and for retaliation to abuse.  These high tech low lines, these punks were put into enough stories that a new genre emerged, called cyberpunk.  These stories more frequently took place on Earth and wi

Welcome to SciFi thoughts where for a few short minutes I’ll  tease and tantalize your mind with this genre from the future.  SciFi has many dozens of sub genres with different story telling styles which attempt to bring new possibilities into how you see the world.  Our mission is to expand what science fiction means to you by exploring this genre that is diverse as the stars in the sky.  SciFi thoughts will, like the James Web Telescope, will draw focus on a discovery and tantalize you with thoughts on movies and literature through intelligent and engaging discussion. I hope you enjoy the show, Lancer Kind