Science fiction novels have made leaps and bounds over the past 65 years.  Just before 1950 was when they really started to take off, as nuclear weapons and the space race were gripping the imaginations of people all over the world.  Having just survived WWII, many were wondering what the future would hold for them.  With barely 20 years separating the first two wars, it was understandable for many to take for granted that a third one would not be far off, and with the next war, a nuclear holocaust.

If one adds that fear to the rivalry of the Cold War, and the race for the two sides of that conflict to be technologically superior to the other, the imaginations of the world turned towards science in a way that it never had before, and thus it was my hypothesis that Science Fiction as a genre would take off around the outset of the Cold War.

To test that, I created a graph of the worlds “science fiction” in Google Ngram.  Here is what I got.

As one can see, the words “science fiction” are almost non existent in literature prior to the mid 1940’s.  At this point, there is a steady rise in the frequency of those words until 1970, where is a sudden spike in frequency.  Since Neil Armstrong famously landed on the moon in 1969, it is very reasonable to assume that the moon landing had an impact on the popularity of science fiction.

One of the more popular science fiction novels of the time period The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, had a notable quote which became quite popular “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

 

The popular on the words “Free Lunch” soars after 1960, which is about the time when the novel was published.  This does not prove that the novel was responsible for the phrase, but it is interesting nonetheless.