The evolution of science fiction

Publishing trends brought about an important shift in the development of the genre. The most crucial change in Britain was a decline in the publication of “three-decker” Victorian novels and an accompanying expansion of magazine publication. This adjustment proved highly advantageous to shorter works of science fiction. It brought about a new subgenre, as seen, for example, in George Chesney’s short story The Battle of Dorking (1871). First published in Blackwood’s Magazine, The Battle of Dorking darkly postulated a Prussian defeat of a poorly armed, weak, and unwary Britain and established the military techno-thriller. Chesney used his urgent narrative of the near future to warn against what he perceived as symptoms of Britain’s decline.

Magazine publication was encouraged by an even more pronounced publishing trend that began in the early 1880s. With the development of a cheap process for converting wood pulp into paper and the increasing mechanization of the printing process, inexpensive “pulp” magazines began to deliver stories to a mass audience. During this period in the United States, “dime novels” (shoddily produced pamphlets that usually sold for a nickel) and boys’ adventure magazines proliferated. The stories distributed in these books and magazines, such as Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder (1884), often boasted SF elements that appealed to the young reader’s sense of wonder and adventure. While Verne’s influence is evident in them, dime novels lacked both Verne’s knowledge of technology and his literary skill. Senarens’s work, for example, epitomizes the worst aspects of the type: they are poorly written and filled with sadistic racism directed toward Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Mexicans, and Jews.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his serialized story “Under the Moons of Mars” (1912; novelized as A Princess of Mars, 1917; adapted for film as John Carter, 2012), transformed European-style “literary” science fiction into a distinctly American genre directed at a juvenile audience. Combining European elements of fantasy and horror with the naive expansionist style of early American westerns, Burroughs had his hero John Carter outwit various inferior green, yellow, and black Martians. He also marries a red Martian and has a child by her, despite the fact that she reproduces by laying eggs. Burroughs’s hero remained an SF archetype, especially for “space operas,” through the 1950s.

The success of juvenile SF stories inculcated a love of science fiction that culminated in the founding of adult-oriented SF pulp magazines in the 1920s, a circumstance that moved the center of the genre decisively into American hands.

The “golden age” of science fiction

The previously mentioned Hugo Gernsback, an emigrant from Luxembourg based in New York City, made a living publishing technical magazines for radio and electrical enthusiasts. Noting the growing fondness of his youthful audience for fictional accounts of thrilling technical wonders, Gernsback began to republish the works of Verne and Poe and the early writings of H.G. Wells in great profusion.

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Gernsback’s magazine Amazing Stories (founded 1926) broke ground for many imitators and successors, including his own later periodicals Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly (later known as Amazing Detective Tales), and a torrent of other pulp publications. This practice soon yielded so much fruit that many people, especially Americans, falsely assumed that Americans had created science fiction.

By 1934 SF readership in the United States was large enough to support the establishment of the Science Fiction League, Gernsback’s professionally sponsored fan organization (with local chapters in the United Kingdom and Australia). Like a kind of freemasonry, SF fandom spread across the United States. Eager young devotees soon had their own stories published, and, as time passed, they became the hardened, canny professionals of the SF pulp world. Literary groups such as New York’s Futurians, Milwaukee’s Fictioneers, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction League argued ideology in amateur presses. Conventions were held, feuds and friendships flourished, and science fiction began its long climb, never to respectability but rather toward mass acceptance.

Another influential figure was John W. Campbell, Jr., who from 1937 to 1971 edited Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell’s insistence on accurate scientific research (he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his B.S. in physics from Duke University) and some sense of literary style shaped the career of almost every major American science fiction writer from the period. As a writer, Campbell is noteworthy for his story Who Goes There? (1938) and its film versions (The Thing from Another World [1951] and The Thing [1982] and [2011]), but he is best remembered as an editor. Many fans refer to Campbell’s early years at Astounding, roughly 1938–46, with its frequent publication of stories by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, and Theodore Sturgeon, as SF’s golden age.

Certain literary critics countered wittily that the “golden age” of science fiction is the chronological age of 14—the reputed age at which many fans become hooked on science fiction and the all-too-typical literary level of a genre relished far more for its new scientific “ideas” than its literary merits. Nevertheless, even the sharpest critic would have to admit that for all its often juvenile nature—particularly as conceived in the United States—science fiction was a singular source of scientific wonder and discovery that inspired generations of scientists and engineers to pursue in reality what they had dreamed about in their youth.