The Space Race

The year that The Left Hand of Darkness was published, 1969, was the year that the first human, Neil Armstrong, set foot on the moon. The idea had, of course, been present in science fiction for hundreds of years, in books by authors ranging from Daniel Defoe to Edgar Allan Poe. One of the most realistic early works about space travel was Jules Verne's 1865 novel From Earth to the Moon , which was the basis for one of the earliest silent movies made at the beginning of the twentieth century; another was H. G. Wells' The First Men on the Moon ,published in 1901. The first real progress in space exploration came in 1957, when Americans found out with a shock that the Soviet Union, the world's other super power, had put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. Later in 1957, when the Russians put a living being...