Saturday Is National Science Fiction Day

Pretty much everyone knows that January 1st is New Year's Day. It's also National Hangover Day. That's not too surprising considering how many of us behave on December 31st.

But did you realize that January 2nd is National Science Fiction Day? Now that's my kind of day.

From H.G. Wells and Jules Verne in the 1800s on up to Star Wars, E.T., Doctor Who and any other modern science fiction book, series, or film, most of us have enjoyed the medium. There's even a cable TV channel dedicated to science fiction.

One of my favorite sources of reading material is mid 20th century science fiction. It's fascinating to read what the writers expected to happen by the year 2000. What they got right and what they got wrong and what they didn't see coming at all. Honestly, if any of them had put the events we lived through in 2020 into a novel or movie it would have been laughed out of existence.

Mary Shelly's Frankenstein from 1818 is often cited as the first science fiction novel, and the first claimed science fiction movie was A Trip To The Moon by Georges Melies in 1902.

Film making has come a long way over the last 100 plus years.

Rolling Stone Magazine even produced a list of the top 40 science fiction movies of the 21st century.

Interestingly, the term Sci-Fi wasn't used until 1954. That was the same year that High Fidelity audio components began to be referred to as Hi-Fi.

So, once you get over Friday's hangover you can start picking out the Sci-Fi movies to binge watch on Saturday.