Welcome to This Day In Science Fiction.

Hello, traveler. Welcome to my blog. Sit and rest.

Oh, yeah you are on the Internet. You are probably already sitting and resting.

This is the introductory post to my blog This Day In Science Fiction. Every day there will be an update. It will include birthdays of writers of science fiction - both printed and filmed - as well as directors, actors, illustrators and other artists who have helped to build science fiction and fantasy into the major slice of pop culture that it has become today.

If this was all I wanted to do, I would be carrying coals to Newcastle. There is already an awesome website titled The Interactive Speculative Fiction Database, a wiki project that has a much better claim to being authoritative than I will ever hope to do working on my own. My main goal is to find predictions from science fiction that have dates attached, dates that have already passed or in the very near future, which I currently will cut off at 2020, a number I expect will change depending on how long I continue the project. This means popular series like Star Wars (in the undefined past) and Star Trek (several centuries in the future) will not get any predictions mentioned, except possibly the many trips into the past taken by the various crews of the Enterprise.

For another example, Isaac Asimov and his robot series take place ten thousand years in the future, so no predictions from that. On the other hand, Robert A. Heinlein, Larry Niven and many others give us stories with from the 20th Century or the early 21st, and numerous movies and TV shows set some apocalyptic date less than ten years beyond the release date. While not apocalyptic, Back to the Future II visits 2015 and shows plenty of details, so we will have several weeks to absorb Fifteen Fun Facts From 2015 in the fall.

Predictions can be technological, political, sociological or artistic. Each prediction will also come with a reality check, a quick summary to say if the forecaster was uncannily close or way too crazy off the mark. (Spoiler alert: As the judge of close/crazy on this blog, I'm going to stick my neck out and say people will NOT fire you with a fax coming out of dozens of fax machines in your home in 2015.  It's not environmentally conscious. You'll probably get a text or a tweet instead.)

There will be several features in the side bar, including favorite posts, reader polls, easy to find links to favorite labels and all labels listed alphabetically. The work of researching the blog will be a continuing project, and if my readers have any leads on predictions that can be verified or are in the near future please drop me a line at profhubbard(at)gmail(dot)com.

I hope to make this a fun and informative daily rest stop on the World Wide Web, a place where we can remember some of our favorite books, TV shows and films, as well as some that... let's be honest, are probably not our favorites.

But more importantly, you can join me every day with a look... INTO THE FUTURE!

Live long, never surrender, be seeing you, may the Force be timey wimey wibbly wobbly.