Colonialism And The Emergence Of Science Fiction

Author: John Rieder

Around 1911, Hugo Gernsback wrote a pretty crappy story called Ralph 124C41+, but the idea obviously stuck with him, because a few years later, when he was editing magazines like Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention, he started including similar stories. Eventually, in 1926, he launched Amazing Stories, a magazine entirely devoted to that sort of fiction which he called "scientifiction". And that, according to Westfahl, was the origin of science fiction as a self-conscious genre. It's not an idea that's widely accepted by anyone other than Westfahl, but in the course of laying out the argument he produced an informative and entertaining book about the early days of magazine sf under Gernsback and John W. Campbell. They were wild days, with writers churning out undemanding fiction to order for a pittance, but this was where space opera and hard sf both came into their own, and a host of authors who are now household names in sf had their start. To be honest, I wouldn't take Westfahl's central argument too seriously, but around that he has created one of the very best accounts of the early days of 20th century sf.