1956: A Year of Wonder in Science Fiction and Beyond - Paperback

by Stephen Webb (Author)

Back Jacket

1956 was a momentous year for science fiction, with the release of timeless films and the publication of classic novels and stories. It was also a pivotal year for the world at large, with events producing ripples we still feel seven decades later.

This book explores how the year's landmark works - films such as Forbidden Planet and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and stories such as Asimov's The Last Question and Clarke's The City and the Stars - emerged from their cultural context. Writers, artists, and film directors reflected the era's tension between optimism and anxiety, between the promise and peril of progress.

The book traces, month-by-month, events in five themes: science and technology; politics and the economy; entertainment and arts; celebrity culture; and competitive sport. This was a climate defined by rapid change - from the Suez Crisis to Elvis Presley's meteoric rise; from early computers to space race dreams. The science fiction emerging from this turbulent year helped form our collective imagination of tomorrow.

Author Biography

Following a first-class honours degree in Physics from the University of Bristol and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Manchester Stephen Webb has worked at a number of UK universities. In addition to shorter works, he has published twelve books - one of which won the SETI League award and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize (now Royal Society Winton Prize) for best science book. He is active in outreach activities, having spoken at numerous international conferences, podcasts and radio shows, and his 2018 TED Talk has been viewed over 6 million times. He has published an undergraduate textbook Measuring the Universe (Springer, 1999) as well as several popular science books, among them New Eyes on the Universe (Springer, 2012) and the second edition of If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY? (Springer, 2015).