1960s: The Moon… for real
As sci-fi moves into the 60s we actually get to see what the futurists and thinkers dreamt up and pondered. And as the decade drew to a close, science fiction became reality, and we managed to get to the Moon.
Okay, there are some skeptics out there saying we didn’t go to the Moon, but the efforts of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins brought the dreams alive for everyone who had ever thought of man venturing into space – Quite an achievement, really, as it was only a little more than half a century before that we learnt to fly.
Now, for any sci-fi fan or future thinker, this was a massive learning curve, and one that got imaginations racing – once we got to the Moon, where then? The era’s big question was ‘what if the space race continued?’ Would the future of 2010 have us living on Mars by now? Would we be in slow, beautiful ships rotating around to the tones of the Blue Danube?
Would we have International Rescue….
and would we ‘boldly go where no man has gone before’?
Originally, Star Trek was designed by Gene Roddenberry in 1964. Beginning with a single pilot episode, ‘The Cage’, filmed in that year, Star Trek was not placed on the schedule of the NBC network until a second pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” which was produced a year later.
Star Trek officially went into production on April 21, 1966 and ran for three seasons until it was canceled in 1969. Four years later, the series returned to NBC as a Saturday morning animated series which ran from 1973 to 1974.
While the world was watching and looking up at the stars, in stuffy labs across America the space race and the consequent growth in computer technology meant the military could start to build robust networks that linked these basic computers together. What was once thought up as fiction by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury was slowly but surely coming to pass with actual machines ‘talking’ to each other.
Recommendations
Books:
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Phillip K Dick)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
The Drowned World (JG Ballard)
A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
Macroscope (Piers Anthony)
Films:
Barbarella (Roger Vadim)
Planet Of The Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner)
2001 – A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrik)
Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise)
TV:
Thunderbirds (ATV)
The Prisoner
Star Trek (Universal)
Doctor Who
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