Sci Fi Facts
Sci Fi Facts

28 Stellar Science Fiction Facts

James Israelsen
By James Israelsen, Associate Writer
Published September 23, 2025
  • Early science fiction writers as various as Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.S. Lewis, and Henry Kuttner envisioned a fantastical Venus, perhaps capable of sustaining human life, and the best bet for life on other planets.[1]
  • The early atmospheric probes sent to Venus in the late 1960s revealed the planet to be uninhabitable, and science fiction writers sadly waved the planet goodbye when SF writers Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison released Farewell, Fantastic Venus!, a collection of tales about the planet by various writers.[1]
  • Perhaps the most coveted literary award in science fiction, the Hugo Awards are named for Hugo Gernsbeck, the founder of the wildly popular and influential Amazing Stories magazine.[18]
  • Anglo-American SF authors are among the most well-known and prolific; notable early contributors from other nations include such luminaries as Jules Verne in France, and Fritz Lang in Germany.[6]
  • in the 1950s, American sci-fi writer Alfred Bester anticipated themes such as transhumanism and body modification in his masterpiece, The Stars My Destination that would not be widely explored again until the cyberpunk stylings of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson.[2]
  • In The Big Time, Fritz Leiber presents a sprawling war carried out in time, with various armies raiding past and future time periods in an attempt to change historical outcomes. They come to the scene of the novel, "the big time," to relax  and unwind from their constant temporal battles.[14]
  • Early Hugo award winners include such giants of the field as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Frank Herbert.[18]
  • Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous With Rama tells the story of a crew of astronauts who discover an unfathomably large cylinder flying through space. They enter, to find an entire civilaztion living inside its walls.[3]
  • In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov presents a thousands-year long epic, with events unfolding according to the plan of "psychohistorian" Hari Seldon, who lays out a predictive plan of human development for the upcoming millenia.[3]
  • Robert A. Heinlein has the most Hugo Awards, with four Hugos for best novel, and two "retro-Hugos" (awarded for works published before the creation of the award).[18]
  • Many leading 20th-century writers and artists made forays into science fiction (or something peripheral to it) in their works. Writers like Stanisław Lem, Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino; directors such as Fritz Lang and Andrey Tarkovsky, and futurist painters like Umberto Boccioni.[6]
    • Futurist Architecture
    The Futurist architecture of Antonio Sant'Elia exemplifies the spirit of science fiction: the melding of human will and technological ability
  • With over 20 million copies sold, Frank Herbert's sprawling masterpiece Dune is likely the best-selling science fiction novel of all time. The utterly original tale of the messianic rise of young Paul Atreides in the desert world of Arrakis has spawned numerous film attempts, with varying degrees of success.[9][11]
  • While works throughout history have featured elements such as space travel, automata, and alien beings, Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is arguably the first modern work of science fiction.[5]
  • British writer Arthur C. Clarke, best known for his science fiction works such as Rendezvous With Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, was the first person to conceive of a network of communications satellites orbiting Earth. He published his theory in a 1945 article entitled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays."[8]
  • On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles and his radio show, Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast a version of H.G. Welles' novel The War of the Worlds, with news bulletins depicting the aliens invading New Jersey. The show created a minor panic; concerned citizens barricaded themselves inside, or called the police.[17]


    • Influential Works of Science Fiction 
    TextText
    Mary ShelleyFrankenstein (1818)
    Jules Verne20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
    H.G. Wells
    		War of the Worlds (1895-97)
    William Hope HodgsonThe Night Land (1912)
    H.P. LovecraftAt the Mountains of Madness (1931)
    Isaac AsimovFoundation Series (1942-1993)
    George Orwell1984 (1949)
    Arthur C. ClarkeChildhood's End (1953)
    Ray BradburyFarenheit 451 (1953)
    Alfred BesterThe Stars My Destination (1956)
    Leigh BrackettThe Long Tomorrow (1956)
    Fritz LeiberThe Big Time (1958)
    Robert A. HeinleinStarship Troopers (1959)
    Walter M. Miller, JrA Canticle for Leibowitz (1961)
    Philip K. DickThe Man in the High Castle (1963)
    Frank HerbertDune (1965)
    Ursula K. LeGuinThe Left Hand of Darkness (1970)
    Kurt VonnegutSlaughterhouse-Five (1970)
    Gene WolfeBook of the New Sun (1980-83)
    TextText
  • American sci-fi master Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific writers in history. He wrote or edited over 500 books, both fiction and non-fiction. His topics ranged from science fiction to chemistry to Biblical analysis.[10]
  • Larry Niven's 1970 masterpiece, Ringworld envisions a giant ring-shaped world constructed around a sun. The novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and became a fixture in the sci-fi world, appearing in the Halo series, among others.[16]
  • In his 1912 masterpiece of imagination, The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson presents a  the last vestiges of humanity in a world of the far future in which the sun had gone dark, concentrated in a single gigantic metal pyramid, and besieged on all sides by creatures of unfathomable evil.[12]
  • Walter Miller Jr's novel A Canticle for Leibowitz tells the story of a Catholic monastery in the deserts of the American Southwest, centuries after a nuclear apocalypse, or "flame deluge," destroyed civilization.[15]
  • Author Alice B. Sheldon (1915-1987) secretly published science fiction novels and short stories under the male pseudonym of James Triptee Jr.[19]
  • In 1964, SF master Isaac Asimov predicted what the technology of 2014 would be like, predicting, with impressive accuracy, innovations as far-ranging as flat-screen televisions and the internet to artificial meat and plant-based proteins.[4]
  • Science fiction writers anticipated much of our current technology, including satellite communications, the internet, mobile phones, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, earbuds, self-driving cars, virtual reality, drones, and video calls, to name a few.[7][8][10][11]
  • In his book The Dreams our Stuff is Made of, SF author Thomas Disch details the numerous ways, from inventions to fashion sense, that science fiction has taken root in human thought and helped to steer culture and technological development.[6]
  • German director Fritz Lang's 1927 science-fiction film Metropolis features a humanoid female robot and wall-mounted videophones.[13]
  • Jack Vance's series Dying Earth series of stories shares its name with a subgenre of SF that pictures a fading world; examples include Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, and Philip Jose Farmer's Dark is the Sun.[6]
  • A relatively obscure and forgotten author, Tulsa native R.A. Lafferty penned tales of supreme strangeness, presenting a world of demons and angels battling as if in a world of funhouse mirrors.[6]
  • Cyberpunk SF features body enhancements, net-diving and hacking, and a general merging of the physical and the digital. The rain-streaked LA streets of Blade Runner, and the battles of Hiro Protagonist, the Samurai-hacker in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash exemplify the aesthetic.[6]
  • H.P. Lovecraft, and a close circle of literary friends such as C.A. Smith, developed a form of fantastical and frightening literature that they termed "Weird Fiction." Themes include cosmic alienation, meaninglessness, primordial fear, and things of the void that cannot be written of.[6]
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