Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The quest to locate the origins of SF begins as a search to trace back the name that has genre recognition for the reader of today: science fiction. Hugo Gernsback, in the inaugural issues of Amazing Stories (1926), let readers give a name to the stories they were reading – Verne, Wells, and Poe primarily. The name they came up with was “scientifiction.” Wells earlier referred to what he was writing as “scientific romance.” His contemporary, also a man with strong scientific background, J.H. Rosny aîné, described his fiction as “le merveilleux scientifique.” Beyond this, the thread between science and fiction becomes tenuous. Verne placed his work under the rubric of “Voyages extraordinaires.” Poe wrote tales of “ratiocination,” but did Mary Shelley even have a specific name for the kind of literature she was writing in Frankenstein (1818), the work consensually seen as the “first” SF novel? At this point, the question of origins becomes one of defining the form. Brian Aldiss (1986) names the form Mary Shelley was writing – the Gothic – and argues that it is transformations of this genre that define the nature of SF. Mark Rose (1981) sees SF developing the structures of a less culture-specific form – the romance. Though for Rose SF is a specifically modern form of romance (it begins with Verne and Wells), romance as form reaches far back in Western culture – to Spenser and The Tempest ... log in or subscribe to read full text