The Golden Age of science fiction is considered the birth of the modern era. It is the Campbell Years, the era when
John W. Campbell took young writers like
Robert Heinlein,
Arthur C. Clarke, and
Isaac Asimov under his wing, the years seeing the publication of
Who Goes There?,
All You Zombies,
He Who Shrank, the creation of
The Three Laws Of Robotics, the
Foundation, the birth of the
Future History as a framework for an entire
body of work, the birth of
Space Operas like
the Skylark of Space, the
Lensman series, everything, in fact, that makes SF SF.
Campbell insisted that the stories he published be scientifically accurate. His writers blossomed under this restriction. Like haiku, what appear at first to be limits are actually the very things that nurture creativity. Good science fiction was born then, in the 1930's and 1940's.