Science Fiction

A

The Romance of Science

Science and technology began appearing as a subject of fiction in the 19th century. The popular Gothic novel, which emphasized horror and mystery, led to Frankenstein (1818), an influential novel by British novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley that explored the potential of science for good or evil. Many significant authors of the 19th century—such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain in the United States and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Britain—worked with the themes of science fiction at one time or another. All of them influenced the science-fiction writers who followed.

The first great specialist of science fiction, however, was French author Jules Verne. Verne wrote about a wide variety of subjects, including geology and cave exploration in Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864; translated 1874), space travel in From the Earth to the Moon (1865; translated 1873), and underwater marvels in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870; translated 1873). His adventurous tales were later popular fodder for some of the earliest science-fiction films.

Works by lesser-known authors were also important in shaping what would become science-fiction subgenres. A group of stories about wars of the future—many of which described elaborate weapons—was published in Britain and the United States after 1871, culminating in a vigorous subgenre (usually called future war fiction) between the early 1890s and 1914. Stories of lost cultures and unexplored corners of the world, in which the inhabitants often possessed superior science and technology, were also popular in Britain and America. Two books of this type—sometimes called lost race fiction—by British novelist Sir H. Rider Haggard appeared in 1887: She and Allan Quatermain. A famous work in this category, The Lost World by British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was published in 1912.

B

H. G. Wells and Successors

The first major writer of science fiction in English was H. G. Wells. Wells began to write stories with science themes in 1894, demonstrating more interest in biology and evolution than in other sciences, and more concern about the social consequences of invention than about the accuracy of the invention itself. He called the genre scientific romance. Wells’s reputation grew rapidly after the publication of The Time Machine in 1895. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and several important story collections followed in rapid succession. Wells then turned to other forms of literature during much of the rest of his career.

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A number of other British authors wrote scientific romances during the first half of the 20th century; these books are now considered science fiction. Especially noteworthy are works by Matthew Phipps Shiel (The Purple Cloud, 1901), Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, 1930), and C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, 1938). Among British writers of standard fiction who wrote one or two novels of a socially prophetic nature in the manner of Wells, the most notable are Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949).

C

Writers Outside Britain and America

Many important science-fiction writers wrote in languages other than English between the 1890s and the 1930s. These included Kurd Lasswitz in German, J. H. Rosny-Aine in French, Evgeny Zamiatin in Russian, and Karel Čapek in Czech. All of them were more or less contemporaries of Wells and wrote major works of science fiction before 1926. World War I (1914-1918) brought an end to the development of some European science-fiction literature, and World War II (1939-1945) halted the rest. By the time the genre picked up again, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, American science fiction had become the dominant tradition.

IV

Founding of the Science-Fiction Field

Most early science fiction was published in magazines and aimed at a readership of boys and young men. The authors of magazine science fiction used adventure plots but often emphasized the wonders of science and technology. At the same time, a related genre, invention fiction, flourished in so-called dime novels (cheap books costing 10 cents) of the late 19th century. Invention fiction, featuring the adventures of young male inventors, probably reached the height of its popularity in the Tom Swift series of boys’ books that appeared between 1911 and 1939. The mass circulation magazines that were established in the 1890s published stories of science and adventure, but the fiction magazines after the turn of the century included many more science-fiction stories with added romance and wild adventure, such as those written by Americans Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars, 1912) and Garrett P. Serviss (A Columbus of Space, 1909).

A

Hugo Gernsback and Amazing Stories

The establishment of science fiction as a field separate from other types of fiction dates from April 1926, when American writer and publisher Hugo Gernsback published the initial issue of Amazing Stories, the first English-language science-fiction magazine. Gernsback believed that fiction could be a medium for disseminating scientific information and encouraging young would-be scientists, so he wrote and published stories with this purpose in mind. An early example of his writing, Ralph 124C41+, was serialized in his popular science magazine Modern Electrics in 1911. When Gernsback brought out Amazing Stories in 1926, he named the new genre scientifiction, explaining, 'By ‘scientifiction’ … I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.' Gernsback changed the name to science fiction in 1929, when he founded the magazine Science Wonder Stories.

In the early years of Amazing Stories, Gernsback filled the magazine’s pages with reprints of earlier works—stories by Poe, Verne, Wells, Serviss, Richard Adams Locke, A. Merritt, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Ellis Parker Butler. This practice provided models for this new genre and also gave it a respectable literary tradition. At the same time, Gernsback hired imaginative artist Frank R. Paul to paint extremely lurid back and front covers for the magazine. The effect was garish and striking, and worked against any claim to literary respectability.

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