Waaay back in the dim reaches of the founding of the science fiction genre, it’s founder, Hugo Gernsback (original editor and publisher of this magazine) suggested in an editorial that the week surrounding the initial release of the first issue of the magazine (the middle week of March) should be designated as Science Fiction Week.
Many many years later, various and sundry people designated January 2nd as Science Fiction Day in honor of Isaac Asimov’s supposed birthday.
And now, we’re advocating that the entire month of April be designated as Science Fiction Month.
It’s not completely historically accurate to do so…that “month” really ought to be the 30 days from March 15th to April 14th, but it has pretty much been universally established at this point that the cover date of the first issue of the magazine is April (not March when it was initially distributed to the newsstands.
Sure, let’s keep Asimov’s (maybe) birthday as a single day at the beginning of the year to commemorate a great author (whose character has come under a bit of scrutiny of late), but lets also give ourselves a week and a month to REALLY celebrate this astounding, fantastic, startling, astonishing, dynamic, super, weird, AMAZING genre!
We’re going to!
