Explorers of the Infinite Shapers of SC

by Sam Moskowitz

1963 Meridian/World

Genres: Science Fiction

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1974

About the author

Sam Moskowitz (June 30, 1920-April 15, 1997) was an early fan and organizer of interest in science fiction and, later, a writer, critic, and historian of the field. As a child, Moskowitz greatly enjoyed reading science fiction pulp magazines. As a teenager, he organized a branch of the Science Fiction League. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wollheim helped organize the Futurians, a rival club with Marxist sympathies. While still in his teens, Moskowitz became chairman of the first World Science Fiction Convention held in New York City in 1939. He barred several Futurians from the convention because they threatened to disrupt it. This event is referred to by historians of fandom as the "Great Exclusion Act."

Moskowitz later worked professionally in the science fiction field. He edited Science-Fiction Plus, a short-lived genre magazine owned by Hugo Gernsback, in 1953. He compiled about two dozen anthologies, and a few single-author collections, most published in the 1960s and early 1970s. Moskowitz also wrote a handful of short stories (three published in 1941, one in 1953, three in 1956). His most enduring work is likely to be his writing on the history of science fiction, in particular two collections of short author biographies, Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow, as well as the highly regarded Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of “The Scientific Romance” in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920. Moskowitz has been criticized for eccentrically assigning priorities and tracing influences regarding particular themes and ideas based principally on publication dates, as well as for some supposed inaccuracies. His exhaustive cataloguing of early sf magazine stories by important genre authors remains the best resource for nonspecialists.

Moskowitz's most popular work may be The Immortal Storm, a historical review of internecine strife within fandom. Moskowitz wrote it in a bombastic style that made the events he described seem so important that, as fan historian Harry Warner, Jr. quipped, "If read directly after a history of World War II, it does not seem like an anticlimax."
Moskowitz was also renowned as a science fiction book collector, with a tremendous number of important early works and rarities. His book collection was auctioned off after his death.

As "Sam Martin", he was also editor of the trade publications Quick Frozen Foods and Quick Frozen Foods International for many years.

First Fandom, an organization of science fiction fans active before 1940, gives an award in Moskowitz' memory each year at the World Science Fiction Convention.

Moskowitz smoked cigarettes frequently throughout his adult life. A few years before his death, throat cancer required the surgical removal of his larynx. He continued to speak at science fiction conventions, using an electronic voice-box held against his throat. Throughout his later years, although his controversial opinions were often disputed by others, he was indisputably recognized as the leading authority on the history of science fiction.

Reviews

[Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite my interest in the serious study of literature, and a sense of its history and traditions, on the whole I read far less secondary books about literature than I do literature itself. (I'm conscious of having so much of the latter still to read that time taken to read the former sometimes feels almost stolen!) But this is a book that caught my attention in the BC library; and prompted by my liking for speculative fiction, I decided to indulge my curiosity. I'd recently taken a correspondence course in the history of science fiction from the Univ. of Iowa, and for several years around this time was toying with the idea of developing a college-level course in it myself (though that idea fell through eventually), so this reading followed along very much with that interest. (The date I assigned for finishing this book --1997-- is a rough guess, but it was before the autumn of 1998.)

Author Sam Moskowitz (1920-97) was, like his friend and contemporary Isaac Asimov, an avid teenage fan of SF in the days when its American scene was a tiny and insular literary ghetto of sorts, centered around a handful of pulp magazines (book publishers weren't interested back then), and comprised mostly of passionate and defensive readers who formed a conscious fan community, and mostly shared the ethos of secular humanist, technophilic optimism. Moskowitz was one of the leading lights of this little world --he chaired the first World Science Fiction Convention, while still in his teens!-- and went on to make the genre basically his career; but unlike Asimov, his interest in SF wasn't so much in writing it (though he dabbled a bit) as in studying it, writing about it, and promoting it. Not a trained literary scholar, he nonetheless built up an impressive knowledge of the field that commanded considerable respect (in later life, he was sometimes asked to teach college courses on it), though his interpretations were sometimes questioned by others. He wrote a number of serious books covering the whole development of the SF tradition, as well as editing several anthologies and single-author collections (one I can personally recommend is Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911).

This particular book is a collection of 18 chronologically arranged biocritical studies of major writers in the historical development of the genre, from Cyrano de Bergerac in the late 1600s to 1930s luminary Stanley G. Weinbaum. It's rounded out by a chapter on how the term "science fiction" came into use (the genre itself, of course, is much older than the modern term), which also gives a thumbnail history of the genre from Wells' "scientific romances" up to the pulp "Golden Age," and a final chapter that continues the story of the trends up to the time of the book's writing, around 1963. The author also provides a short (about 4 pages) introduction that traces elements of SF back to the Odyssey and sketches developments up into the Romantic period and talks about the significance of the genre, as well as briefly introducing the book. It's written for serious lay fans, not scholars; there are no footnotes, though there is a three-page index of people referred to, and no high-faluting literary-critical jargon.

My four-star rating reflects the fact that I found this absolutely fascinating, and totally readable! I learned an enormous lot about the lives and work of some writers I was already aware of, which really fleshed them out for me; and I was introduced to several authors I'd never heard of before, a few of whom whose work I went on to read later, notably Fitz-James O'Brien, Abraham Merritt (The Ship of Ishtar) and Karel Capek (R.U.R.). And in some cases, while I knew about the writer, I was ignorant of his contribution to SF; for instance, I knew Edward Everett Hale as the author of "The Man Without a Country," but had no idea he was the first fiction writer to treat the idea of a man-made orbiting satellite (in The Brick Moon, 1869). Almost all of the writers treated are male, reflecting the male dominance of the genre up to and beyond the mid-20th century; but the author deserves credit for including Mary Shelley as one of his 18 "shapers" of the tradition.

There are quibbles that could be noted here. Apparently, Moskowitz didn't know about the conventional use of italics for the titles of full-length works, but quotation marks for those of shorter works; he tends to italicize every title, a quirk that can be irritating and confusing. Some critics have accused him of exaggerating the rivalry between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Otis Adelbert Kline. And he has his personal fondness for the more gadget-oriented and "hard" brand of SF, and for tropes involving outer space, rather than for "soft" SF and for the strand that's more concerned with sociology than technology. That influences his selection of writers (though the "soft" school isn't ignored), and his discussion in the last chapter. He also doesn't set the historical development of the genre in the context of the history of literature as a whole, though I had enough general knowledge to make those connections for myself.

None of these criticisms, though, takes away from the four-star quality of this work. It's one I highly recommend for any reader who wants an introduction to the genre's history --though it isn't the only work worth reading on the subject, and not the only one I've read. Another very worthwhile source is Anatomy of Wonder: A Critical Guide to Science Fiction --I personally recommend the 3rd edition, as having more detailed treatment of the early period than the current edition. (Even though this is a reference book, I've pretty much read the third edition cover to cover!)

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Explorers of the Infinite (and its companion volume, Seekers of Tomorrow, which examined modern science fiction writers), was an important early work that looked at early science fiction writers in a scholarly and serious fashion. Moskowitz was a long time fan and student of the field, and did as much to found sf fandom as anyone else, establishing one of the first clubs and chairing the first science fiction convention. Most of the essays in this book were first published in digest-sized genre magazines in the late 1950s, and many of the authors he discussed had never received any serious academic attention. The authors he writes about include Cyrano de Bergerac, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Fitz-James O'Brien, Jules Verne, Everett Hale, Edward F. Ellis, Luis Philip Senarens, H.G. Wells, M.P. Shiel, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Karel Capek, Hugo Gernsback, H.P. Lovecraft, Olaf Stapledon, Philip Wylie, and Stanley G. Weinbaum. Moskowitz was often opinionated, but does a very good job of providing details about the authors and their place in literature and the their times. It's a little dry at times, but it's a very informative history of the beginnings of the field.

[Norm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sam Moskowitz - tireless defender of his beloved Science Fiction - has written an indispensable guide to the early masters of the genre.
This book is divided into 20 chapters, most of which are devoted to a single author and his works, including Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Sam's enthusiasm for his subjects is infectious. I've read most of these chapters many times over and will probably read them many times more. Each chapter offers a thumbnail sketch of the author's life and brief overviews of his works in the SF -and related -genres.
A fascinating and invaluable effort.

NOTE: This book, published in 1963, is a "companion" volume to "Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction".