A History of Science Fiction, Tied With Our Societal Fears

Today on the League blog, I write about the history of science fiction, and the way it's tied to xenophobia. I don't always link back between blogs, but I particularly like this post, and wanted to point my readers there today as well.

In it, I compare two charts. The first is a chart made by Google which shows the use of the word "xenophobia."

And then I compared it to a chart that shows the number of science fiction novels published in the past century.

To read the entire article and see how I compare a word to a genre, please click here.

I noted in my original article that I had to make the second chart myself, and I wanted to take the time to explain how I made it. There wasn't really room in the original article to discuss it, so here's my methodology.

First, I went to Wikipedia, looking up the number of science fiction novels published in each decade, tracking that in the chart. It was a bit difficult to find reliable data, and I fully admit that the data I ultimately used was not conclusive. As I was trying to show simply a general trend in numbers, I felt that using one source of data was acceptable.