I propose that worldbuilding is the primary distinguishing characteristic of SF and fantasy (at least at a superficial level). Get the worldbuilding wrong, and your readers won’t be able to get a grip on the story line or the motivation of your characters. Or worse — they’ll get a grip, and realize that your story is, at best, a western or an age-of-sail yarn with the serial numbers filed off: that the trappings of the fantastic are only there to add a spurious sense of exoticism to an everyday tale.

Charlie Stross via World building 101 – Charlie’s Diary.

Romania has had a long history of science fiction from the end of the 19th century. This article summarises the highlights up to 1990

• Too complex to exist: Why complex systems collapse
• Dymaxion Designs from the Buckminster Fuller Institute
• How Highway Adoption Signs are Repurposed for Political Goals
• Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s expenses-scandal experiment
• A Guide to International Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Recent scenes from the ISS
• A great magazine on particle physics: symmetry Magazine
• The World Simulation Project at Kansas State University

The young science fiction author “wasn’t interested in the far future, spaceships and all that”, he explained; rather he was interested in “the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here”.