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.

For my first set of words, I chose to look at two names connected to a major 19^th century event: Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth. Today, Booth’s name seems to be known almost equally as well as Lincoln’s, for it is impossible to know about Lincoln without knowing about his public assassination. I felt it would be interesting to look at the names comparatively during the century of the assassination and see how well the names were known in their time. Looking at the Ngram graph, I was largely unsurprised by the popularity of Lincoln throughout the century. I found it incredibly interesting that the largest spike occurred in 1865, the year of his assassination. Booth also spiked in 1865 from almost no popularity, but I was incredibly surprised by how unpopular his name seemed to be compared to current standards. It seems like the 19^th century did not have the fascination or the focus on Booth’s crime that we do today.

For my second set of words, I looked at another popular 19^th century debate: slavery and abolition. In America, slavery vs. abolition is a major theme in 19^th century history. Like Lincoln and Booth, both are taught fairly equally in schools today so I had expectations that they would be fairly close together on the graph. I was slightly shocked to find that they were not at all! Slavery dominated, peaking in 1863, the middle of the Civil War. Abolition remains fairly consisted throughout the century. This suggests to me that either the Abolitionists were a smaller group that the pro-slavery folks, that slavery was being used in a wider array of situations and/or perhaps abolition was termed or described differently in the 19^th century.

Recently we’ve discussed looking at books in a historical context. As we read in Underwood’s blog, just collecting data on word quantities is useless. There is no way to relate today’s understanding of certain concepts to historical understanding of the same concepts without meticulous research. So having said that, I’m going to make a brief examination on two different pairings of words, the analysis of which is surely to be arbitrary at best.

The first set of words I’ll discuss are “face” and “hands” from books ranging from 1800 to 1900. Over that period of time the word “hands” has a minor increase but mostly stays level throughout. “Face” on the other hand, starts in 1800 well below where “hands” falls, appearing only half as much in that time. But the popularity of that word will come to increase in the century, eventually surpassing “hands” in quantity by the mid 1890’s. Unfortunately, I have no real way to interpret or understand why the word increases so much during that time, but it’s trajectory interests me nonetheless.

The next set of words I looked at were “thin” and “fat”, also in the 1800-1900 range. I originally used the word “skinny” in lieu of “thin”, but it ran entirely along the bottom with the x-axis, suggesting that the word may not have even existed yet, or at least was a word rarely used by writers of the 19th century. The word “thin” is ultimately more popular than the word “fat” throughout this period. They follow a similar trajectory, starting off high and lulling into the 1810’s, then to rise back up through the end of the century. Perhaps this suggests a shift in attitudes of that time about body image and appearance, that those things lost importance to writers, however briefly. Of course there is likely a better explanation and the word selection also leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps instead of “fat” writers of the time preferred the word “obese”, “rotund”, or any other synonym used at that time. Not to mention the likely possibility that this data is skewed by inclusion of things like the fat on a cut of meat and not solely as a weight description.

There are some things of mild interest I can examine here, but without the proper historical context I’m lost in the woods. That doesn’t make it not worth doing of course, it just requires a larger amount of effort from scholars around the world to understand literary history.

Until next time, Kevin Finer.

For my first graph, I chose the words “education” and “labor.” Throughout the 19^th century, many young people faced the decision of either going to school and receiving an education or heading straight to work. There were pros and cons of both, as is the case today. Some people studied and worked at the same time, and some people used their education to get better jobs. Others were forced to work by their parents because they were poor while some were forced to go to school because they were upper class. Either way, these two concepts were an essential part of people’s lives as they had to choose which life path they most desired. The rise of labor and decline of education from 1840 to 1870 was due to the Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, as demand for labor increased (ushistoryscene.com). Education appeared more then labor during this time.For my second graph, I chose the words “alcohol” and “tobacco.” These were common parts of people’s lives in the 19^th century, as they are today. The minor increases and decreases of alcohol can be the result of the many different alcohol taxes imposed and then repealed during the 19^th century, such as the Whiskey tax being repealed in 1802 (alcohol-facts.net). I believe the spike of tobacco around 1815 was due to the introduction and extreme popularity of the cigar. The sudden drop right after that is most likely due to the first anti-tobacco movements (tobacco.org). Tobacco appeared more than alcohol before they crossed paths around 1870 in which alcohol then overtook tobacco.