Science Fiction: A Literary History

by Roger Luckhurst (Editor)

Science fiction (SF) has existed as a popular genre for around 150 years. This book offers a survey of the genre from 19th-century pioneers to contemporary authors, introducing the plural versions of early SF across the world, before examining the emergence of the "scientific romance" in the 1880s and 1890s. The "Golden Age" of writers' expansive SF pulp was concentrated in the 1930s, consolidated by best-selling writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The contributors to this volume also track the increasingly diverse forms SF took from the 1950s onwards. Leading international scholars, writing in an accessible style, consider SF as a world literature, referencing works from diverse traditions in Latin America, Europe, Russia and the Far East. This book combines discussion of central figures of the tradition with a new global reach.

Genres: Science Fiction, Literary Criticism, Reference, Lit Crit

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2018

About the author

Roger Luckhurst is a British writer and academic. He is Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Columbia University in 2016. He works on Victorian literature, contemporary literature, Gothic and weird fiction, trauma studies, and speculative/science fiction.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This whole survey of science fiction is really solid but the last chapter is what really interested me, taking the story from 2001 to 2017. What’s happening now, baby! Yeah! So much stuff is happening these days (“stuff” is a technical term which covers the death of coral reefs, the rise of Isis, the use of drones and the election of Trump and everything in between) that it’s hard to make much sense of it all. Science fiction tries to do just that. It might fail, but it really tries.

SF writers have, according to this chapter, recently become obsessed with one thing above all others:

The dread of climate change and its attendant effects on nature and society permeates SF of the 21st century.

So much so that one wag has called this sub-genre cli-fi. SF writers simply can’t see beyond the looming omni-breakdown, compared to which the world of The Walking Dead is like a stroll in the park on Sunday with a jolly brass band playing and poodles romping amongst the daffodils.

In all this ecocatastrophic horror one novel is singled out, perhaps surprisingly : Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is said to be the best of “this sort of necro-futurological imagining” – even though, as is immediately pointed out, this was

one of the many “literary” novels of the period not treated as SF by the critics despite its narrative situation and themes

Those naughty critics have been up to this particular old trick for donkey’s years. They go by the rule “if I like it, it can’t possibly be science fiction”. But wait – Margaret Atwood wrote a trilogy set in a similarly brutal future (beginning with Oryx and Crake ) and declared it was not science fiction. So even now, when SF is the new mainstream, a whiff of trashiness follows it around.

The impenetrable gloom of contemporary SF is so profound that I took a core sample of page 213 and found the following :

Ruin
Melancholic
Wrecked
Destroyed
Dark
Barren
Forlorn
Sadness

And turning quickly to page 214 we read : “there has been a spate of cataclysmic novels about utterly ruined futures”. The tone of this Beckettian horror is captured by the opening line of Neal Stephenson’s novel Seveneves:

The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

William Gibson injects some humour into all of this – or maybe he isn’t trying to be funny – when he tries to rally the thinkers of the time to a new project : predicting the present.

For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.

Well, at least all this gloom and doom has replaced the space-opera of Star Trek and all those tedious galactic empires of the 40s to the 90s. They’re junk now, and deservedly so. Macho, militaristic, fascistic, crypto-racist (all those inscrutable implacably evil aliens), obsessed with winning big wars with real big guns, that aspect of science fiction always nauseated me. I much prefer to chew on a juicy ecocatastrophe. Global warming has therefore done me a favour. Gerry Canavan, author of this last chapter, has given me whole list of what seems to be utterly depressing novels of despair, and I feel re-energised. Can’t wait – all that misery to read about, and Christmas round the corner.

[Leonard Gaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compendium, published by the British Library, on the history of “science fiction” in literature. It includes essays by a group of Anglo-American academics, each covering a period — the whole book is arranged in chronological order. As an enthusiast of the genre, I found it is an excellent refresher on all the different times and flavours of “science fiction”. Here is, in a nutshell, the main argument:

It starts as early as Cyrano de Bergerac’s Les États et Empires de la Lune — Les États et Empires du Soleil. However, the real kick-off of the genre, according to the authors, was ushered in around the Victorian Gothic movement, namely by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Poe’s Tales, Jules Verne voyages extraordinaires and H. G. Wells “Scientific Romance” novels, especially The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Most of these works were speculations on the scientific and technological progress made during the Industrial Revolution.

The trauma of the First World War introduced new concerns however, of a political and sociological nature, within the genre. Utopias had been around for quite some time (think: Plato), but the first great dystopia, Zamyatin’s We was published in the 1920s, followed by Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 a few years later. However, during the same interwar period, a significant movement developed as well in the United States: “pulp” science fiction, published in short form through such periodicals as Amazing Stories, Weird Tales or Astounding Science Fiction. The Tales of H. P. Lovecraft are a canonical product of that period.

The 1950s, 60s and 70s have been coined the “Golden Age” of science fiction, with a new generation of authors who, indeed, reached a significant milestone in the genre. A few examples are Isaac Asimov (Foundation), Robert Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End and 2001: A Space Odyssey), Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, etc.). Suffice it to say that these were both extremely fruitful times as well as a frenzied battlefield between the successful upholders of the “pulp” tradition (say, Frank Herbert and the Dune novels) and a generation of writers, inclined to explore new and bold ways of telling speculative stories (say J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five).

Nothing groundbreaking so far, since the canon of the genre has been well established up until the 1980s and the “cyberpunk” movement led by William Gibson (Neuromancer). The most recent decades are no doubt a bit harder to decipher, to single out the major and possibly canon-worthy pieces of work. The authors distinguish writers still active to this day, and often concerned by topics like the very real climate change and the hypothetical AI singularity. A few examples are: Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake), Kim Stanley Robinson (Red Mars / Green Mars), Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others), Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem), Ernest Cline (Ready Player One), Jeff VanderMeer (Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy), China Miéville (The City & the City). All are outstanding writers indeed, but time is still percolating…

The authors of this book make a few commendable inroads into “minority” authors and concerns within a genre that has been dominated for most of its history (just as any other genre in literature, to be honest) by white male writers and readers. However, they hardly touch, if at all, on major authors that stand on the fringes of science fiction: people like Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace or Michel Houellebecq. Also, it is worth noting that this book’s primary focus is on the Anglo-American literary field. With few exceptions (Jules Verne, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Stanisław Lem, Arkady Strugatsky), little is said of science fiction works written in other languages. For instance, such major contemporary author as Alain Damasio in France (not yet translated into English), is completely skipped.

The British Library has also published a Horror: A Literary History. I guess that a literary history of Fantasy — and perhaps another one on what the French call “littérature fantastique” — would also be welcomed.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spotted Science Fiction: A Literary History in a library display and obviously had to borrow it. Although I enjoy a lot of different genres, sci-fi is my favourite and the one I've read most widely in. Published in 2017, this history is impressively concise and thorough without becoming dense. The structure is akin to an academic book as each chapter has a different author, but it coheres very well and is highly readable. Each of the eight chapters covers a different period of sci-fi, from the 16th to 21st centuries. None of them claim to be definitive and most refer to previous histories of the genre. In 230-odd pages there isn't space for digressions or a lot of detail, so each chapter provides suggestions for further reading. I would have liked it to be at least twice the length, as I found the whole book fascinating and thought-provoking. It definitely invited me to consider my own ideas about sci-fi.

The first chapter includes a taxonomy of early forms of sci-fi, from the 16th century to the mid-19th. The earliest was probably the imaginary voyage to a fanciful place, the characteristics of which satirised, critiqued, or otherwise commented on contemporary society. As the centuries passed, these voyages to undiscovered islands, cut-off communities, or the moon ventured further, to other planets and even the future. Early visions of the future in the 19th century were generally apocalyptic, for example Mary Shelley's The Last Man in 1826. As the chapter comments, it was the Enlightenment and start of the Industrial Revolution that brought about an expectation that the future could differ significantly from the present and past, for better or worse. A 1905 novel quoted in chapter 3 specifically states that, 'the Modern utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage leading to a long ascent of stages'. Conversely, from the 19th century onward non-religious apocalyptic visions proliferated, each reflecting anxiety about humanity's increasing powers of self-destruction.

When reading a summary of sci-fi over hundreds of years, there's a sort of cyclical tendency, which you could call dialectic. From its earliest beginnings, sci-fi used fantastical concepts both to entertain & astonish and to critique & analyse. Utopias and dystopias are hard to distinguish as they are generally attempting the same things from different directions: displaying a better or a worse society by exaggerating or modifying the flaws in the current one and transposing them elsewhere (and/or elsewhen). Such visions can warn or inspire or do both at the same time, as perceptions of utopian or dystopian characteristics are mediated by time and place. I find a certain wry amusement in reading once-dystopian novels that depict futures more stable, safe, and just than the actual present. Should we re-designate them utopian? I don't believe so. I always find it interesting deciding whether to tag novels as utopia or dystopia - a revealing and somewhat arbitrary choice. I was pleased to learn this term that applies to both:

It was exactly the kind of inversion Wells would use in The War of the Worlds, dethroning the arrogance of an imperial metropole that considered its population to be the most advanced beings on the planet. Allen called these romances 'hill-top novels', rising above the cesspool of the Thames Valley, to observe and critique the mores of London society.

The fantastical elements and settings of sci-fi provide a distance from which to reflect upon the absurdities of reality; this seems to me both a defining feature and a great pleasure of the genre. Returning to its characteristics as entertainment and social critique, obviously much of the best sci-fi does both at the same time. However, there does appear to be tension in the 20th century about what the main purpose of the genre should be. This has a correlation with format: sci-fi magazine serials became popular in the early 20th century and were predominantly written rapidly for entertainment. Sci-fi began in novels and returned to them in the latter half of the 20th century. Although sci-fi short stories can and do include thoughtful social critique, the role of magazine editors in imposing limits on topics and style was more significant than I'd realised:

By the end of the [1950s], writers could begin to imagine careers that were not beholden to the small handful of editors - Campbell at Astounding, Horace Gold at Galaxy, Anthony Boucher at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - who had once controlled the flow of output into the marketplace. Maverick talents such as Philip José Farmer and Theodore Sturgeon had long chafed at the constraints imposed by these gatekeepers, in particular their routine excision of hot-button content, especially politically controversial or sexually suggestive material. According to Farmer, Campbell and Gold invariably rejected 'any story which contains a society based on different sexual mores' because they found the topic 'personally disgusting and disturbing'.

The novel as a form seems to allow more experiments in style and topic, both pre-20th century and in the 'New Wave' of the 1960s and 70s. The tropes popularised by sci-fi magazines also expanded from short stories into novels (and films and video games, although the book doesn't cover these). I found chapter six's account of the resulting philosophical clash striking. Clearly there was a disagreement about appropriate topics for sci-fi, as the more conservative authors and critics objected to transgressive treatment of sex, drugs, religion, etc. Yet there also seems to have been a fundamental difference in views on how the future should be portrayed. The example quoted in the chapter is Algis Budrys condemning a Thomas M. Disch novel for bleak pessimistic fatalism and defending 'the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man'. Ironically, I remember the one Budrys novel I've read, Rogue Moon, as very bleak! This is surely not a debate about sci-fi so much as a facet of the wider reaction against technological utopianism in the 1960s. Once again, it acts as a 'hill-top' from which to consider the present - different generations and groups viewed the world very differently in the shadow of the Cold War.

The book reaches recent decades in the last two chapters, considering cyberpunk quite briefly and observing a weird feeling I expect many sci-fi readers share with me:

A century of science fiction predicted space missions, first contact, robot uprisings, and nuclear wars that were all dated before now. To live in the twenty-first century is thus in a very real sense to live after the future - after the future we invented together, the one that never happened.

I started reading the sci-fi masterworks series around 1999 and have spent my adult life with this vertiginous sensation. The twenty-first century has not proved quite as advertised, although snippets of accurate predictions and unsettling relevance keep turning up in older sci-fi (and critical theory). I last read Nineteen Eighty-Four many years ago, but this comment made me realise it has unpleasant new resonance for a UK rife with surveillance capitalism, wealth inequality, and public sector austerity:

What is so striking about Orwell's dystopian vision is the combination of high-tech surveillance with the low-tech setting of decaying Victorian architecture, electricity shortages, and impoverished, rat-infested slums.

The final chapter also acknowledges that climate change now hangs over the genre, from Kim Stanley Robinson's determined hopefulness to the proliferation of apocalyptic literary novels like The Road, Under the Blue, Alexandria, My Name is Monster, and Severance. This was, I admit, an area where I felt I had better examples than the chapter's author, as I wasn't impressed by the treatment of ecological themes in Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America or The Windup Girl. I felt similarly about the non-fiction Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, which was also mentioned. Nonetheless, I appreciated that this and other chapters included non-anglophone sci-fi and addressed the increasing diversity of the genre.

Somehow I've got more than a thousand words in without mentioning space opera and hard sci-fi. The overlap of these with dystopian and utopian social critiques isn't huge, which could be a residual effect of the schisms of the 1960s, but it appears to be growing. The far future does enable an escape from the immediate anxieties of today, while also offering an opportunity to imagine creative ways of dealing with them. In my view, the best hard sci-fi tackles fundamental questions of what humanity is and what we should become, by deploying advanced technologies indistinguishable from magic. While such hard sci-fi generally has less immediate social relevance than some utopian or dystopian sci-fi set on a still-recognisable Earth, I still consider it more of an interesting social critique than most of the literary apocalypses I cited previously. These have, I notice, a tendency to narrow the point of view to a family or single person, as if to focus on the individual psychological implications of extreme disaster. I find this less interesting than fiction that brings in the source of the disaster and considers ways to recover from it - a personal preference, but also a historical characteristic of the genre.

Sci-fi is all about exploring our present via alternatives to it, be they near or far, terrible or glorious. I love it for its interest in settings, as well as or over and above characters. If a novel's setting is an unspecified catastrophe that has no bearing upon the narrative, which focuses almost entirely on the emotional state of the protagonist(s), I'd classify it as apocalyptic but not sci-fi. Science Fiction: A Literary History definitely helped me to distil my own personal definition of sci-fi, as follows: fiction set in imagined other (often future) worlds with a connection to our own, and concerned with how these other worlds work differently to our own. To my mind that draws a line between Thomas Moore's 1516 Utopia and Adam Robert's 2022 The This, as well as offering some way of distinguishing fantasy (other worlds unconnected to our own). While this is undoubtedly a flawed and partial definition, it encapsulates for me what I love most about sci-fi and what has kept me reading it avidly for more than twenty years. Sci-fi of the past helps me to understand history, while sci-fi written recently helps me to parse the present, and both inspire me to contemplate the future. I also find it the most imaginative, dynamic, and mind-expanding of genres. I recommend this literary history to any sci-fi reader. While I would like to read a longer and more detailed book on the topic, I found it an excellent synthesis. It may even inspire me to finally finish a book I've ostensibly been reading since 2012: Frederick Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

So to start with a book which by its very nature - as soon as its published it starts to become obsolete - okay that is a little harsh - it starts to date.

Any book which tries and charts a history - one that by its nature is constantly evolving and changing, but which has its very roots challenged ( as it seems various commentators constantly appear to disagree and challenge each other ) and various definitions means that its an almost impossible task to complete

So how did the author (and editor) of this book achieve this - simply by acknowledging those flaws (if they are even considered flaws) and by asking different writers to talk about different ages in the genre.

This for me creates not only a more balanced but also plausible history - after all you cannot have 8 different writers all get it wrong. But there is more to this - what you have is at least to me, a discussion yes there are some obvious and irrefutable facts but there are also opinions but their logic is discussed and the reasoning explained - which to me makes them all the more plausible.

I have read a number of literary histories of Science Fiction and some to be honest are almost impossible to read, being a mixture of arrogant superiority and narcissistic self indulgence (honestly one felt little more than a boast about how many authors they were personal friends with). This book is far from this - it is a frank discussion both good and bad about the genre and for me that is only a good thing, like so many things today we need to accept our flaws, correct out faults and move forward which for me is what modern day science fiction is trying to do.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good starting point for someone interested in gaining a historical overview of the development of this genre we call Science Fiction.

The book leaves me asking many of the same questions I was asking when I picked it up--I'm fascinated by the interconnectedness/international (global?) space that Science Fiction so often seems to aspire to occupy. This book helped me to see some of these avenues of exchange more clearly (particularly in the USA/Europe/Soviet Union network), but left others (most conspicuously that developed during the colonial/postcolonial periods) less explored.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opplysende og godt skrevet.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adam Roberts’s Preface notes SF’s relative ubiquity in today's world and praises this book as as compact and exhaustive an introduction to the subject as you will find. Roger Luckhurst’s Introduction, by way of reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story The Garden of Forking Paths (which presaged many-worlds theory by a considerable time,) acknowledges the impossibility of summing up SF in such a short space as a single book but hopes it will provide pointers to newcomers to the genre and to old hands alike.


The overall approach is more or less chronological. Chapter 1 sees Arthur B Evans tackle early forms of SF in The Beginnings. Roger Luckhurst himself covers the transition From Scientific Romance to Science Fiction in Chapter 2. The Utopian Prospects of 1900-49 are considered by Caroline Edwards in Chapter 3. There is some overlap in time here with Mark Bould’s Chapter 4, Pulp SF and its Others, 1918-39. Malisa Kurtz examines immediate post-war SF in Chapter 5, After the War. Chapter 6 has Rob Latham look at The New Wave ‘Revolution’. Chapter 7’s voyage From the New Wave into the Twenty-First Century is undertaken by Sherryl Vint. Gerry Canavan brings us up to date with Chapter 8, New Paradigms, After 2001. Each Chapter is repletely referenced and has a list of “What to Read Next” at its end. Imagine my satisfaction when finding I had read most – if not all – of the relevant recommendations. Plus I am in the process of ticking off another right now.

Perhaps the most interesting part (because the most remote) was Chapter 1 wherein Evans identifies many instances of SF or proto-SF from before 1900 and exemplifies two of its fundamental attributes at that time; diversion (imagination) and didacticism (cognition) – or, as Jules Verne’s editor/publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel put it, instruction that entertains and entertainment that instructs. Well before the twentieth century subterranean or interplanetary adventure became well established - along with time travel - and u- and dystopias have always abounded. It is noted that early interplanetary spaces were modelled on colonial spaces – Space Opera and Star Wars your origins lie here. Indeed the colonial adventure (King Solomon’s Mines etc) can be considered as SF. Examples of the genre emanating from outwith the anglo- or francophone spheres are given due note, including SF works from pre-revolutionary Russia, Africa, Asia, Latin America - and also by black US writers - of which I was not previously aware.


The New Wave chapter laments that “unique talents” such as R A Lafferty, D G Compton, David R Bunch and Edgar Pangborn are little read these days. In one of those omissions Luckhurst acknowledged would occur discussion of one of my favourites from the time, Richard Cowper, is absent.

For anyone wishing to acquaint themselves with the genre this is an admirable place to start. It also provides potential new avenues for aficionados to pursue.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

The British Library has long since turned entrepreneurial with extensive and relatively cheap collections of classic British crime novels and collections of weird tales. Its science fiction efforts have not paid off so well, possibly because the genre ages far too fast for the general reader.

The cosy mystery set in a nostalgic English past and the frisson of the weird and the occult still appeal, as we know from re-runs of tales of Hercule Poirot and the fashion for folk horror, but the dystopianism and clunky technologies of British golden age science fiction much less so.

If the Science Fiction Classics series seems to have died a death (I am glad now that I snapped up three of them), the experiment left behind Luckhurst's literary history of the genre (2017) which is very much above the average for this sort of general guide.

Eight relatively short yet full and well written essays take us chronologically from the precursors of the genre through to the current century in an orderly way that is surprisingly seamless albeit with somewhat eclectic further reading suggestions.

The first half of the story through to the American-dominated Golden Age is well known although there are insights that make the tale fresh. It is the second half that adds most value - the curious dialectic between 'conservative' and 'new wave' forms of science fiction and its unfolding.

Luckhurst's own contribution on the late Victorian and Edwardian era manages to introduce H. Rider Haggard without patronising him which is a rare pleasure nowadays. He succinctly contextualises H. G. Wells and explains why he is important.

Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck also gives us a solid presentation of utopianism and dystopianism in the first half of the twentieth century including pre-Soviet and Soviet Russian attempts to imagine the future under communist ideological conditions.

The following chapter on pulp science fiction, mostly in the US, by Mark Bould is precisely how such history should be done, dealing with issues of war, politics, race, feminism and the market on terms that respect the world of the work rather than imposing anything on that world from today.

If there is a fault to the book it is that editorial direction enabled the subsequent story of ideological wars within post war science fiction to be told well but failed to stop those wars infecting some of the contributions, especially towards the end. Some contributors edged into implied polemic.

Given that the worst offenders are American-based contributors (two of them female academics) then, as a British reader, I came away a little depressed at the insistent over-egging of diversity and the obvious preference for progressive examples of science fiction at the expense of its complexity.

Ideology could be seen triumphing over objectivity. Of course, the final contribution must have the completely unnecessary to us (but necessary to our anxious and troubled university elite) reference to Brexit and 2016 as well as the usual over-excitable references to climate change.

We just have to live with this now, much as older wise heads once had to live with the hegemony of the nonsense of Social Darwinism in the late nineteenth century and a pig-headed Marxism in the middle of the last century. But it does become tiresome after a while.

Nevertheless, if Luckhurst is a little lazy in not weeding out these inherent prejudices, and the propensity of one contributor just to list diversity-friendly story lines, he still manages to produce an excellent guide which teaches a lot even while we grit our teeth in places.

Where the book scores is in linking the genre to modes of production - turn of the century periodicals, the fan magazines of the post-war period, the rise of the book and then the blockbuster - as well as to events outside the often closed world of the creators.

Gerry Canavan, who comes under my general definition of 'cause of gritted teeth', nevertheless makes an excellent point in his opening to his contribution that little predicted by science fiction ever actually happened as proposed. Perhaps he should have taken this on board in the rest of his essay.

Science fiction, heavily anglophone in its historical orientation despite attempts to globalise or 'indigenise' it by the diversity crowd, cannot be divorced from its environment. It does not dictate to society but reflects its rebellions, fears and anxieties (liberal) or aspirations (right wing or socialist).

It is also dynamic. Even if it rarely tells us what the world is actually like or going to be like, its attempt to do so can make people behave as if they may have the power to reshape the world on its lines. The cash-fuelled fantasies of Elon Musk can be linked directly to his reading of Heinlein.

Science fiction is thus very important culturally even if it quickly becomes redundant having left behind only a few canonical examples. It is not the truth of the matter but its noble lies and fantasy are culture-shaping. Hence the concern to capture it for any currently prevailing ideology.

The struggles (well explained in this book) between the American version of the 'New Wave' (culturally progressive) and the determined traditionalism of the American Right, economically libertarian and yet militaristic and progressive in a very different sense, are indicative of this.

The British 'New Wave' was more introvert and literary and much less interested in politics but, proportionately, unable to build a large mass base. Here was a common situation where a short period of intense innovation influenced much of what followed but could not sustain itself for long.

At a certain point, we have a synthesis. The passions subside but the struggle meant that, instead of science fiction reflecting a social consensus of reader requirements, it became a matter of self-conscious 'auteurs' and then of attempts to impose an implicit world view that spoke to anxieties.

This has always been a part of science fiction - although Wells became duller the more he became didactic - but the threat of nuclear war and the experience of the individual (which writers tend to accentuate as type) in an age of conformity created the seeds of dissent that became sixties rebellion.

As the decades have rolled on, the politics of identity, especially feminism, and fear of what is now called techno-feudalism and the machines (leading to the hysteria around the coming 'singularity') have driven tales of science fantasy. Eco-fears have now added to the mix.

Cyberpunk remains an excellent case study of a writer with little practical knowledge of what he was writing about (William Gibson) using a fertile imagination to extrapolate reality into a science fantasy that came to define what many people would think was reality or a coming reality.

Still (although you might not know it from this book), not everything is about ideology and anxiety. There are still solid old-fashioned space operas out there as well as thrillers with a strong science fiction coating (Michael Crichton is not mentioned which is odd and yet in character with the book).

We must not make the mistake (as some contributors in this book seem to do) of thinking what science fiction should be and then reading back its story in order to make it what we think it ought to have been. A literary history is useful but science fiction is sociology as much as literature.

Nevertheless this is a worthy and useful addition to the mounting numbers of popular academic books on the genre since Amis and Alldiss had attempted to create the first definitions and canons. There are discoveries and ideas in here. The book is also an easy and relaxed read.

[Aaron Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not agree with every one of the writers assessments in the chapters of this book, but I absolutely appreciated the viewpoints and the articulation of the different periods of science fiction and the breakdown of the genre during those times.

For the science-fiction lover this book will give you a great idea of what is out there, as well as some critical context that will help you approach the science fiction you read with a better understanding of the time that it was written.

For those wanting to delve deeper into the genre and understand it, this book also suggest additional reading, and I found it useful to mark in the margins and add here on goodreads the books mentioned that I felt like were seminal based on descriptions in the book, that I had never heard of.

It is also a great opportunity to look for recommendation on books that maybe you would not have read, because of the self-referential algorithms that suggest things to us. I crushed this book in a heavy reading day, specifically because I am using it for research. I have no less than 30-40 tabbed marks in the book, it is great.

One thing that I didn't know before reading it is that several organizations put out Science Fiction Companions (Routlidge, Cambridge, and Blackstone are all mentioned in this book).

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book.
Each essay in this book covers a significant period in the development of the genre and identifies prevailing themes of the era which it examines.

The extensive references and suggested reading lists are greatly appreciated. In future editions, I would love to see some endnotes listing all the works mentioned in the text. Preferably categorized into the trends identified in the essays: utopias, dystopias, Cli fi, etc.

The text gave me some early works to read for background, reminded me of authors in need of rereading, and exposed me to new works that will expand my exploration.

I highly recommend this book. It would, as expected, form a solid backbone to a course in Science Fiction.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the first few chapters, about the early years of SF, and the differences between European and American practitioners of the form, was a bit dull, but it picked up towards the end. However, I found that (even though the editor warned that it would be impossible for a study like this to address EVERY SF author) many of the essays were rather repetitive in their discussions of certain authors and their works. Also, as a collection of essays by different authors, there was a fair amount of repetition.

[Thomas Norford · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough overview of SF that's given me a lot of pointers about new (to me) authors that I'd like to read.

The contributors were clearly all very knowledgeable and demonstrated the links between SF and society, without simplistically pigeonholing writers and their works.

I found the later sections a little tedious in regards to the obsession with empire, capitalism and other social justice concerns. A lot of SF does indeed focus on these topics but it would have been good to have a more dispassionate survey of them, rather than analysis from within that mindset, and more space given to non-political works. These later sections were also more inclined towards the jargon of academia.

Overall, recommended for anyone who would like an overview of the evolution of SF.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I can't review the whole book, I read through Rob Latham's essay on New Wave SF and really enjoyed it. It's a great resource for finding out more about the period (as any contemporary SF writer should do). I reckon there should be a movie about Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard evading the obscenity censors in the 60s - I'd watch that. Added to that the book is written in an easy-to-read style.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

A didactic book to find out some others new (old) novels to read. Interesting because it gave me a frame where to put the books I already read.

Una specie di libro di testo che mi ha permesso di scoprire nuovi libri da leggere (che in realtà possono essere anche molto vecchi) e che mi ha fornito una cornice adeguata dove inserire quelli che avevo giá letto.

[David Tierney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent introduction to science fiction that has expanded my to-read list far beyond anything I'll ever complete.

[Sophie Squire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my PhD.

[Risteárd Caomhánach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covering the entire history of sci-fiction literature is not an easy task, especially in a book that runs barely more than 200 pages, doubly so in an anthology like this where each chapter is written by a different author. It makes structuring a grand narrative or direction to the history hard, as individual chapters overlap and authors differing opinions clash. For the most part though this anthology handles it admirably, and the superb chapter on New Wave by Rob Latham is almost worth buying the book on its own.

[Mills College Library]

809.38762 S4166 2017