Science Fiction Day

What the day is

Science Fiction Day is observed on January 2, the date Isaac Asimov celebrated as his birthday. It is not an official holiday and has no government recognition, which has never stopped anybody marking it.

Origin and background

The date carries a detail that suits the genre. Asimov did not know when he was born. He arrived in a village in what is now Russia at some point between the autumn of 1919 and the start of 1920, his family kept no precise record, and the date was never registered in a way that survived. He settled on January 2, 1920, and used it for the rest of his life. The day honoring science fiction rests on a birthday that is itself an educated guess.

Where the genre begins is a longer argument. A common case puts it at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818, on the grounds that it is the first major novel where the extraordinary event comes from science rather than magic or the supernatural. Verne and Wells built the commercial form through the nineteenth century, working opposite sides of it, one mostly interested in the machine and the other in what the machine does to a society.

The pulp era gave the field its institutions. Hugo Gernsback launched a magazine devoted entirely to the genre in 1926 and coined an early name for it, and the field's main award still carries his first name. Editors of the following decades pushed writers toward internal consistency, and Asimov's rules governing fictional robots came out of that period, along with the word robotics, which he coined without realizing he was inventing a term.

The genre's record as prediction is patchy and mostly beside the point. It has been far better at asking what a technology does to the people living with it.

How to take part

• Read something from before 1960 and something from the last five years, back to back.
• Try short fiction, which is the form the genre was actually built in.
• Read Frankenstein if you only know the films. It is a different story entirely.
• Give a teenager a book rather than recommending one.
• Look past the Anglophone canon, which is where most of the interesting current work is.