'If I Forget Thee, O Earth . . .'

Science fiction is a genre of fiction that includes settings and events that are based on speculation and imagination rather than on familiar everyday reality. It differs from fantasy in that it speculates about possible realities related to scientific discoveries such as advanced technology and space travel. Although there are some earlier examples, including the famous novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, science fiction is largely a 20th-century development. Authors such as H. G. Wells produced works such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in the late 19th century, but the genre wasn’t known by the term “science fiction” until the 1920s.

In the early 20th century, a publishing format called pulp fiction became popular. These were cheaply produced magazines that contained stories from various “low” genres, such as adventure, romance, and fantasy; the term came from the cheap wood pulp paper used for the magazines. In the 1920s, a pulp magazine publisher named Hugo Gernsback became interested in using pulp fiction to promote the development of science and coined the term “scientifiction” to describe the kind of fiction he had in mind. He founded a magazine called Amazing Stories that quickly became popular and attracted submissions from aspiring writers in the genre, which soon became known as science fiction, although the subject matter was not always as serious about the science as Gernsback had originally intended. By the 1950s, when “If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth” was published, science fiction was a well-established genre within English-language fiction, and the stories produced were more sophisticated than the space opera yarns that had been popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

“If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth” uses some familiar elements of science fiction writing, such as a futuristic setting and advanced technology, but avoids some of the more fantastic elements of science fiction, such as aliens and sophisticated spaceships (although Clarke did write about these in other works). Instead, it focuses on an entirely plausible and entirely human future based on a projection of how current technology (as of the 1950s) might develop in the future. This puts the story into the category of hard science fiction, which is science fiction that is strongly based on realistic science. For instance, although the story was published almost two decades before humans actually landed on the Moon, Clarke describes the use of a vehicle that is not greatly different from what real astronauts eventually used.

Tropes related to hard science fiction would in fact number among the genre elements that Clarke helped pioneer. This is not surprising given Clarke’s background: As a youth, he was deeply interested in science—particularly astronomy and the possibility of space travel. His interest in technology resulted in his working on the radar program in the Royal Air Force during World War II. After the war, he graduated from King’s College in London with a degree in physics and mathematics, which suited him well for the science-related writing he would soon begin to publish. He became known not only as one of the major science fiction authors but also as an authority on futurism, which is the study of how human technology will impact human life, and he maintained an interest in space travel. His greatest fame came after the release of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which he wrote the screenplay and which was based loosely on another of his short stories, “The Sentinel.” By the time of his death in 2008, Clarke had published dozens of books containing both science fiction and popular science.