A few months ago, Jason and I watched The Terror on AMC. It's a show based on a novel that speculates what might have happened to a British voyage to the Arctic in the 1840's. The two ships, The Terror and The Erebus, become trapped in the ice while trying to find a navigable passage through the Arctic ocean. At first, no one is really concerned. They have planned for this possibility. They have enough supplies for a journey of several years, and many of the officers have been on other arctic expeditions. The time between episodes of the show can be months, in universe.
In one episode, the captain's wife and niece are concerned because no one has heard from the ships in a year. The powers that be brush it off. This is a journey that was likely to last 2-3 years, best case scenario. Remember, we're talking about a journey of thousands of miles (traveling from England to Asia over the Arctic and then back by way of more southerly routes) during a time when a fast ship traveled at about 11 mph.
This was also a time when communication traveled no faster than a ship or a train could travel; the telegraph was a relatively new invention and, just like cell reception today, you can bet that the remote arctic islands the ship was passing would not have had telegraphs or telegraph operators. News of the expedition would have been along the lines of a ship returning to port and reporting that they had encountered the other ship months before.
We have gotten to where we are so used to instant communication - phone calls, emails, texts - that it's baffling and mind-blowing to think about having to wait so long for news.
But, this setting of being so isolated, so lost, of taking years to get to your destination, and of news and updates taking months or years to get back home, got me thinking about science fiction. And when I say science fiction, I mean a certain type of science fiction. I don't mean that in the far distant future, or the far distant pass sci-fi where we have faster than light travel and instant communication. I mean the "near" future science fiction, the science "fiction" that we are almost (or even already) capable of.
I'm talking about The Martian, where if you get stuck on a planet, it is months or years until help can get to you. I'm talking about Contact, where it takes 27 years for a message to travel from one planet to another. That idea of being out by yourself on the frontier, with only what you have with you to get by if there's an emergency, fascinates me.
I write historical fiction. But I also itch to write frontier sci-fi. I need to read more sci-fi, and more science, before I do. But I do think it's interesting how certain historical periods can lend themselves so well to a genre that a lot of people would think are on the opposite end of the scale.