2021-11-25 Thu
It occurred to me that you could use Google NGram Viewer to learn
something about production of written SF if you select the
corpus "English Fiction" and plug in words unique to the genre.
Here I have used "planet", " orbit" and "interplanetary":
https://tinyurl.com/375y7f89
Since the chart is interactive, you can try words or phrases
of your choice. Separate them with commas.

I noticed that the surge of production peaking in the late
1970s is consistent with the steep slope 1970-80 in my graph of
cumulative ISFDB titles that I posted back in February:
http://cpacker.org/sf-titles.jpg

I'm curious to know what makes the 1970s surge of
writing different from the one from the 1950s and why the
pause between them even exists.

--http://cpacker.org

Among the things Charles Packer wrote:
> 2021-11-25 Thu
> It occurred to me that you could use Google NGram Viewer to learn
> something about production of written SF if you select the
> corpus "English Fiction" and plug in words unique to the genre.
> Here I have used "planet", " orbit" and "interplanetary":
> https://tinyurl.com/375y7f89
> Since the chart is interactive, you can try words or phrases
> of your choice. Separate them with commas.

Hmm... "robot*3" produces a graph near "planet" from 1940 through the '90s.

I want to check that not every word produces a graph similar to these four. The non-sf word "poison" jitters around a constant for the time in question. "Robot" in the mid '90s and "orbit" around the twenty-teens look to be settling in at about a third the use of "poison." I have no clue about the ratio of the fictional vs. nonfictional use, but I would guess we are seeing an effect of living in a sci-fi world.

--
-Jack

On Thu, 25 Nov 2021 19:16:40 -0800, Jack Bohn wrote:
>
> Hmm... "robot*3" produces a graph near "planet" from 1940 through the
> '90s.
>
> I want to check that not every word produces a graph similar to these
> four. The non-sf word "poison" jitters around a constant for the time
> in question. "Robot" in the mid '90s and "orbit" around the
> twenty-teens look to be settling in at about a third the use of
> "poison." I have no clue about the ratio of the fictional vs.
> nonfictional use, but I would guess we are seeing an effect of living in
> a sci-fi world.

I'm thinking that the third surge of "planet" in the 2000s may
reflect a turn toward eco-fiction rather than sf.
I tried "detective" and "murder" and they seem to identify
the production of the mystery genre. The corpus "English Fiction"
supposedly consists entirely of fiction, but I think Google
relies on meta-information from the publisher to identify a book
as such that may or may not be present in any one particular item.