Seattle Worldcon 2025 is just around the corner—T-345 days…and counting! As we ready our jets and look forward to blasting off for the Emerald City’s second Worldcon ever, it’s a great time to blast back to the past, to the time of Seattle’s first Worldcon: 1961.
It was a momentous year, not just for science fiction, but for science fact. In 1957, the Soviet Union orbited Earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, firing the starting gun for the Space Race. Less than four years later the USSR took things to a whole new level.
On April 12, 1961, Major Yuri Alekseyivich Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, rose to the heavens on a pillar of flame to become not just the first person in space, but the first to orbit.
Protected only by steel walls and a space suit, he soared once around the world in his Vostok spacecraft (vostok means “East” in Russian, and it is in that direction that the rocket flew). In doing so, he fulfilled the dreams of theoretician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky–aptly enough, another Russian–who a half century before was the first to dream of sending humans to space on the tips of rockets.
For the Communists, it was yet another victory in a race that as yet had no finish line. A demonstration of superior rocketry, or perhaps a greater willingness to gamble with a person’s life.
For the Americans, moving more slowly with their Mercury program, it was a challenge to meet, not a discouragement. “It doesn’t change our program one bit,” said Marine Colonel John Glenn, who would have to wait nearly a year before his own—America’s first—orbital flight.
For science fiction fans, the impact was tremendous. For decades, we had been writing about space travel like a virgin writes about intercourse: avidly, but without experience. Just prior to Vostok 1, it was commonly predicted that the psychic and physical dangers of space would be too horrible to be withstood—viz. the first episode of The Twilight Zone, “Who Goes There”.
And yet, Gagarin did it. Space might not be safe, but it was survivable, paving the way for stories of long-term spacefarers, like those of Poul Anderson and Larry Niven involving the colonization of the asteroid belt.
This was the air of excitement that accompanied Seattle’s first Worldcon: the sense that our species was on the precipice of something new and glorious. As we look forward to Seattle Worldcon 2025, we are in that new and glorious age.
Since 1961, more than 130 cosmonauts of Soviet and former-Soviet origin have been to space…not to mention 500 space travelers from elsewhere around the globe. As we speak, there are 12 humans living in orbit.
What exciting events lie in our future? We’ll dream them in Seattle next year…and perhaps celebrate them 60 years from now!
https://seattlein2025.org/2024/08/23/fantastic-fiction-per-seattle-ad-astra/
#Sputnik1 #Vostok #YuriGagarin
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Seattle Worldcon 2025
