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Article: Loving the alien: science fiction. (annual convention held in Glasgow, Scotland)
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- September 2, 1995
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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IF ALEXANDER had not died; if Napoleon had won at Waterloo; if clockwork computers had made Victorian England an information society: what then? How different would the world look if bubonic plague had killed off all of Europe, or the Apollo programme had not happened, or if Hugo Gernsback had never left Luxembourg for the United States, there to found "Amazing Stories" and thus establish science fiction as a mass-market genre? Such alter-native histories make up a respectable sub-genre of science fiction--a sub-genre that leaves room for speculation about science fiction itself.
When some 5,000 gathered in Glasgow for science fiction's annual world convention, such ...