The History of Science Fiction

by Adam Roberts

The History of Science Fiction traces the origin and development of science fiction from Ancient Greece up to the present day. The author is both an academic literary critic and acclaimed creative writer of the genre. Written in lively, accessible prose it is specifically designed to bridge the worlds of academic criticism and SF fandom.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Literature, Books About Books, Literary Criticism, Essays, Research

368 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2005

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Adam Roberts (born 1965) is an academic, critic and novelist. He also writes parodies under the pseudonyms of A.R.R.R. Roberts, A3R Roberts and Don Brine. He also blogs at The Valve, a group blog devoted to literature and cultural studies.

He has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a PhD from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Adam Roberts has been nominated twice for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001, for his debut novel, Salt, and in 2007, for Gradisil.

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's strange how I love Adam Roberts' non-fiction and his SF novels not; I'm yet to find one I like, but I will try nonetheless because it must be there, somewhere.

This brick here is no exception: I could barely put it down, that's how engaging it's written. By all means it is not exhaustive, no book with such a subject could be, but it is a comprehensive one, with focus on SF trends, reasoning behind its themes, socio-political environment in which it was born.

"The present study has been unable to avoid the, often, tedious debates concerning definition, but my aim is to present a historically determined narrative of the genre’s evolution rather than offering an apothegmatic version of the sentence ‘SF is such-and-such’."

He succeeded. It is one thing to read hundreds of SF works in random chronological order, and an utterly different one to see the big picture - it is eye opening.

His writing is incredibly gripping, witty, with now and then a bit of irony and humor - a delight to read! He tries to be subjective, but personal opinions made their way in this study, and I appreciate it more like this - it differentiate this book from a dull academic ordinary one. One might not agree with all his opinions, but it's refreshing to see how outside the box his thinking and vision are. I believe he's an exceptional professor (he teaches English literature and creative writing at the Royal Holloway, University of London).

There are a lot of SF writers which were not mentioned here, but Roberts tried to mention all those that had an impact on genre, which is what counts, afterall, in the history of this genre.

Moreover, this history wasn't limited to just written texts; religion, movies, games, visual art, music - all are discussed in relation to SF influences.

One of the things I liked most (I'm not saying that I disliked something else, I didn't) is the fact that all books mentioned here have a mini-resume and interpretation, which helped me lots to have a grasp on the beginnings of the genre, because I can't read those books anymore - the writing style, the stories, all seem risible now to me (I know they shouldn't, but that's how I feel).

"Three individuals who never met stand, talismanically, at the gates of the new mode of writing we call science fiction: Copernicus, Bruno and Kepler. Indeed, the thesis of this present study might be articulated in shorthand form by the statement that modern science fiction 'begins' in the year 1600."

I have saved tens of quotes from the book, but there are too many to put here, and I can't make up my mind which ones to choose; therefore, I will just say that it is a must for all SF fans, and not only. Those who dismiss SF as literature will have the surprise of their life reading this book.

[Cláudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

gente, que livro excepcional!
pensa em um livro completo sobre a história da ficção científica. sim, o desafio era esse - e o autor executou de forma espetacular. muito completo, muito ousado, muito arriscado, o que gostei muito! isso sem falar na pesquisa primorosa. gostaria de ter visto mais sobre gênero e narrativas fora do eixo Eua-Inglaterra, mas não deu pra baixar a nota: é espetacular e pronto. um calhamaço de referência pra pesquisadores da fc, na nossa língua, oferecendo perspectivas originais sobre um dos gêneros literários mais legais que existem. sem papas na língua, sem volteios, sem medir palavras: honesto até a raiz. muito, muito bom!

[Johan Haneveld · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to review this work? I had read several novels bij Adam Roberts, and because I as a SF author myself want to know more about the genre I work in, I wanted to read some works about the history of the genre. So when I read that Adam Roberts wrote a book abou the history of Science Fiction, it did not take long for me to order it. And I'm glad I did. Obviously it's about a subject I like and already know a bit about, but Roberts writes with a dry wit and sly asides that make the sometimes hard to grasp academic language (I'm not a native speaker) easy to overlook. Also he diplays an intimate knowledge of the genre, including its roots in deep history and niche books, and of the critical analysis thereof. Finally he's not satisfied with just giving a factual account (those can be found on Wikipedia), he uses this history to defend his views on the nature of the genre, as rooted in discussions between scientists and theologians about the nature of salvation in a Copernican universe. When the universe is filled with planets (possibly with life), what does that mean for the uniqueness of our human species and our salvation? He sees a dichotomy between authors looking at the universe in an 'I-it' dynamic, seeing it as purely material, as somehting to be conquered, exploited and colonized. And authors looking at it in an 'I-thou' dynamic, with a more mystical eye - this does not mean deistic - but authors seeing other worlds and lifeforms as worthy of discovery, to getting to know them and respecting nature. What does salvation mean in both these universes? He also looks at these threads in current literature. Even the rise of superhero fiction seems to be a secular working through of questions about salvation. I thought his insights on this were very enlightening - and to me convincing - and made me look at my own works with new eyes. Roberts is also unflinching in his dissection of the sometims unsavory aspects of the genre, for example the eugenistic views in the works by H.G. Wells, the hidden fascism in the tales of the competent adventurer of the pre war pulps, and other ideological biases. He is not blind (pun intended) to the importance of visual media to the SF imagination, and the latter chapters are as much about movies, comics and artworks, as they are about books (he posits that visuals can convey the poetic moment of wonder maybe better that words can, while words are better in the dissemmination of ideas). There's a great overview of authors and books, not only from the US and the UK, but from Europe and elsewhere too. Even 17th century Dutch author Willem Bilderdijk with his 'Kort verhaal van eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en nieuwe planeetontdekking' is described with the note that because this story wasn't translated it didn't do much to influence the genre. All in all Roberts argues for Science Fiction as an important genre in which our culture works out the ideological consequences of a materialistic or enlightenment philosophy (it's probably why fans regard SF-properties with an almost religious fanatism, as Roberts also notes). It made me enthusiastic to write in this genre, and with more knowledge about the roots and branches of the genre, I think I will be able to develop my own ideas in my own fiction even better. Oh, and my list of books I want to read grew a lot while reading. I've got my work cut out for me!

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is good to wrestle with.

Adam Roberts’ The History of Science Fiction presents a clearly articulated thesis that is provocative and ingenious, even if I think it is often wrong. And he has some very interesting readings of periods, authors, and books, even if they don’t always bear on his thesis.

Roberts claims to have changed his mind about science fiction. Before this book, he thought that science fiction was an invention of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now he thinks it is a branch of fantastic—as opposed to realistic—fiction with roots in Greek romances.

He spends a chapter on definitions—noting that science fiction is about positing some new thing (be it a technological or social invention) that the author works out in narrative form, or, alternatively, a genre that is constructed by a reader who approaches a story with certain expectations—but really wants to sidestep the mind-numbing debates. Instead, he offers something of a historical explanation for science fiction. It is a fantastic genre marked by a tension between sacramental and materialistic explanations of the world.

The wellspring narrative is a voyage to somewhere ‘up there’—a space that has been impossible to explore until very recently. Some narratives switch this around a bit so the new thing is actually a traveling downward or through time. Utopian fiction feeds into later science fiction by positing the new thing as some social development.

Roberts spends a little time looking at Greek romances that he classifies as science fiction, but this part of the argument is less persuasive than the middle. The problem is that, first, he forces himself to argue that these stories were in some sense ‘novels,’ since he wants to claim that the novel is the premiere form of presentation for science fiction. It is also unclear what is meant by science during this period—indeed, the meaning of science presents a big problem for the book.

Roberts argues that, quite apart from theme, science fiction comes in two different flavors. One is the technological tale. By technology Roberts does not mean just tools; rather, he borrows from Heidegger to suggest that technologies are an entire suite of things and behaviors that enflame how we see the world: and so technologies do and can change. The other kind of science fiction tale is Fortean (!) or Feyerabendian—that is to say, these science fiction tales take something speculative about science and work out its implications. This is an excellent and overlooked point: science fiction can be a form of scientific practice.

The problem though is that Roberts has a very static—very philosophical—very transcendent notion of what counts as science, one based on Karl Popper’s writings: science is that which can be falsified. Relying upon this definition, he can project science back in time as far back as he wants. Thus the Greeks practiced science just as Newton did just a a biologist does today. But science is not just a philosophical approach—like technology, it is a form of practice, of engagement with the world. And what we know of as science was created in the nineteenth century.

Roberts was right in his initial assessment about the history of science fiction coming relatively late.

The confusion over science is not clear when he first presents his thesis, but it is when he gets to the Greeks. And then it is hidden again as he jumps to the seventeenth century—at least it seems to be hidden. The reason is that Roberts uses terms that derived from the seventeenth century to make his case, which works when discussing that period, but not nearly as well for the Greeks, nor necessarily later—and so he does tend to abandon the terms of his own argument as the story progresses.

In addition to the different themes that characterize science fiction, and the different ways in which it intervenes in the world—as a tale of technology or a form of speculative science practice—science fiction is also the working out of a particular cultural complex created in the seventeenth century. (It is a credit to Roberts as a writer that though he is examining science fiction along these many axes, his book never becomes overly burdened with theoretical discussion.)

Copernicus and, especially, Bruno presented the Catholic church with a quandary int he seventeenth century by suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe nor necessarily the only inhabited planet. What of Christ, then? Did he visit all the planets? Or were the other planets made without sin? Catholic countries tended to clamp down on these speculations. While there were fantastic writings down in these places, they tended to be sacramental—or magical—what he calls magical pantheism. (Theology also explains why no science fiction was written from the end of the Greek period to the Reformation.) Protestant countries were less concerned with the theological implications of the new astronomy (he claims) and so freer to examine the possible material and rational implications of such speculations. Thus, fantastic writing also became marked by materialism. Science fiction is the genre of fantastic literature that mediates this dilemma, tacking back and forth between transcendental concerns and material ones.

Science fiction is about magic—but not just about magic that can be reduced to science, but also science that is at heart magical.

Without seeming to know it, Roberts has happened upon the Merton thesis.

And it works very well for a discussion of seventeenth century fantastic writings—the chapter that Roberts devotes to the subject is one of the book’s strongest, and there his heuristic is useful in understanding the period.

The method also works well for the eighteenth century as it is presented here, in a separate chapter. Roberts focuses mostly on Swift and Voltaire, one from a Protestant country, the other from a Catholic one. These two rewrote fantastic voyages so that they were no longer necessarily literal, but nor were they theological metaphors—rather they were speculative interventions into the production of knowledge. They inverted some earlier themes, with aliens now coming to earth (and with no concern about whether Christ had gone to other planets). I can accept his claim that these authors engaged with ‘scientific’ knowledge of their period (apparently this is of some dispute in Swiftian studies) without necessarily calling this science fiction and, indeed, he has to make a new definition of science fiction to encompass these works: science fiction is now fictional discourse of science (73). But what is science?

And what is good science fiction? Roberts argues that England stopped producing science fiction because of its enthrallment with Gothic writing, which was overly concerned with the transcendental—but a concern with the transcendental is part of the dynamic of science fiction, as he sees it. France, by contrast, thanks to the Revolution, was in a mood to freely speculate, and so there was a great deal of science fiction coming out of that country.

By the time that Roberts moves into the early nineteenth century—to which he devotes another chapter—he is leaving behind his thesis about the dynamic between materialism and sacrament, more interested in the other, more dominant themes of the period. This chapter focuses mostly on Shelley (Frankenstein) and Poe, neither of whom Roberts likes much: Shelley’s Frankenstein is good—though not what it would become later—but not her other writings, and Poe has a fervid imagination, but his actual literary techniques are poor.

The science fiction writer Brian Aldiss had before argued that Frankenstein is the Ur-text of science fiction, but Roberts disagrees, mostly, it seems, because he is not a fan of the gothic strand of fantastic writing. Thomas Disch argues that Poe is the genre’s progenitor, and Roberts is not keen on this either, but admits he did make one innovation. Poe famously wrote a number of hoaxes—and to make these palatable to the public he wrote the fantastic parts as strictly factual, which hadn’t usually been done in the past but it would become the norm in science fiction henceforth.

There were other science fictional developments in the period, too. For some reason, fictions about the end times—the last time—became popular. The intuition behind science was emphasized—a kind of Feyerabendian intervention influenced, likely, by the Romantic movement, though Roberts has nothing to say on the matter. As well, there is a general drift toward mysticism and theology—which fits uneasily with Roberts’ thesis. Roberts wants to claim that the intent of the Protestant Reformation was to purge magic from theology. But, that never seems to have been the case: Protestant theology, like Catholic theology, involved consideration of demons, and demonology was closely allied with science. (Roberts gives this a short discussion, without integrating it into his overall perspective.) And British science fiction—as well as British science—remained closely tied to some forms of magical (or sacramental) thought in the nineteenth century, what with Theosophy and the rebirth of alchemy.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, science fiction was booming—which doesn’t necessarily make sense given Robert’s thesis, but does if we accept that science fiction was a response not to materialism or Enlightenment rationality but to a thing called science which came of age in the nineteenth century. His chapter on science fiction in the second half of the 1900s notes how scientific metaphors of positivism and entropy informed the burgeoning literature, and that there continued to be a focus on the spiritual. (This was the age of spiritualism, after all.) Voltaire stops looking like a forefather and more like a stepfather, as in “The Anticipation Novelists,” which argues that twentieth-century French science fiction writers borrowed and adapted Voltaire’s interest in the Contes Philosophique.

Indeed, science fiction is becoming so crowded that Roberts has to have a whole other separate chapter on the two acknowledged greats of science fiction—compared to the single chapter he gave to the Greeks, another single chapter to the 17th century, and a third to the 18th. He acknowledges that H.G. Wells was probably the greatest science fiction writer ever. And his own language—‘technology fiction,’ voyage fantastique—is developed from Verne. This period, then, was the birth of science fiction. And Roberts’ thesis is inadequate to discuss it.

Though he has a writer from a Protestant country and another from a Catholic one, though he roots both of their works in their biographies, he never really brings his thesis to bear on the subjects. Rather, he offers close readings, arguing that Verne was more than a pure entertainer and that Wells was at his best from 1895 to 1905 when he was precise in his language, and less so later one when he became more abstract and cranky. To the extent that he brings a critical apparatus into the investigation, it is to call the two writers bourgeois, which is based—in a hard to specify way—on his view of technology as enflaming reality. This is the first time that enflaming really becomes an issue, so while it was a nice set up there is not much of a pay off.

The book becomes increasingly confused in regards to its thesis, even as it offers some interesting insights. Roberts spends a chapter on the high modernists—Pound, etc.—who were influenced by the science fiction dynamic. He argues that the distinction between elite and popular writing not in the subject matter—both were influenced by science—but in their approach to ‘the machine’: with the modernists fracturing narrative styles to find a new kind of transcendence, while popular authors looked to a technological sublime. This is suggestive, but probably wrong in detail, based on his general disdain for pulp writing and the ‘Golden Age’ of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s.

Certainly by the time that he gets to the middle of the 20th century, he can find examples of the tension between magic and science, or sacrament and science—but the connection to 17th century dynamics seem lost—with the exception of James Blish, who explicitly references the exact dynamic of a Catholic confronting an alien race that did not know Christ. By this point, the transcendental—or sacramental—aspects of the stories are a long way from 17th century Catholicism, and invoking that period no longer seems necessary.

Another way to make this point is to say that there is something to the dynamic that Roberts identifies, even if the historical genealogy is not necessary—and strains for effect. Roberts does not make the point, but the Shaver mystery, which split science fiction fans in the middle of the 20th century, clearly hit at this cleavage. As well, thinking of the dynamic as recurring, rather than a progressive unfolding of the paranormal—as, say, Kripal does—is better history. But it sill makes little sense to say that science fiction was a product of the 17th century anymore than saying science was a product of the seventeenth century: both built on trends that came out of that era, but required more to become themselves.

Mostly, though, Roberts is unimpressed by the mid-20th century products of science fiction. He thinks the pulps were intentionally bad, and any breakthroughs they made, even as the stories were put into novels, were accidental. John W. Campbell’s influence was baleful, forcing science fiction into a narrow materialistic straight jacket. Roberts tips his hats to Asimov and Heinlein and some of the other big names, but his heart clearly isn’t in it.

Rather, he prefers the New Wave writers—Moorcock and Dick and Herbert—who brought in sex and drugs and Messiah figures. (Lots of Messiah figures). He does not note the influence of Burroughs, but it was there, too. Nor does he really do much with his thesis, beyond saying that these writers were more inclined to the sacramental. One reason was a reaction to Campbell’s narrowing of science fiction’s possibilities. Another reason is that the novel, as a form, is possibly exhausted—though this strand of Roberts’ argument never impressed me. The real reason offers the real end to the (real) book.

Roberts started with the Greeks saying that the story of science fiction was a voyage upwards (though sometimes down or through time) to somewhere impossible. At the time, the moon and the sun were parts of the sky—the starts were part of the divine world—and so could be voyaged to, at least in the imagination. By the 1960s, the moon was clearly in space—but it had been reached. And it was boring. Mundane. There was nothing on the moon. Science fiction’s impetus—to imagine a way into space—had come true, and it was a let down. The world ended not with a bang but a whimper.

The rest of the book is an extended conclusion making this point—and an interesting, point. There is still a great deal of science fiction being published, Roberts acknowledges, much of it excellent—more than any one person could read. But there are no more formal innovations in prose science fiction. It has reached its dead end. Instead, science fiction has become primarily a visual medium, with stories in comics, graphic novels, movies, and games. Roberts spends some time going through these developments. But it is never clear how these fit into his overall story, given his early on commitment to arguing that science fiction was wedded to the novel.

That’s just another ragged end to a book full of very many wonderful ragged ends and thoughtful ideas. I don’t always agree wight he book, but I found it incredibly stimulating.

[Katie Murphy · Rating 1 out of 5]

History?

Incredibly hard to get through because of the self agg r of the immodest author. Don't bother with this book because the only one who could possibly love it is Adam Roberts himself. What a waste!

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Now you’re going to talk theology again, aren’t you?”

– Brian Aldiss, Cryptozoic!

All my adult life I’ve considered that a man without religion was like a fish without a bicycle, and I’ve looked to science, and by extension, science fiction, as a way of exploring truth without theology, which always seemed to me the most useless of the “ologies”, at least in so far as it claimed any relevance to the real world. Nevertheless, in science fiction at least, Messiahs keep barging their way in, variously called Valentine Michael Smith, Paul Atreides, Severian, Karl Glogauer, and many other names beyond recall. Adam Roberts thinks he knows why.

Although Roberts believes that SF was written in the ancient world, most famously in Lucian’s True History, he dates the birth of modern science fiction to 1600, specifically the trial and execution of Giordano Bruno. Roberts considers that Bruno was burned at stake for, in effect, writing SF by “arguing in favor of the notion that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds.” Roberts details how this idea caused serious doubts about the dogma of man’s fall and redemption, considered to be events with universal significance, but that apparently required a very limited idea of the concept of “universe”. As a result of dating SF from Bruno’s heresy, one of Roberts’ favorite polarities when discussing SF is the dialectic between “Catholicism” and “Protestantism”. As stated above, I have not delved much into theology, but I do not understand, and Roberts never satisfactorily explains, why Protestantism, having the same fall and redemption basis for its belief system (as far as I can see), should be any more accepting of innumerable worlds than Catholicism. In fact Roberts’ “Protestantism” and “Catholicism” are largely nonsectarian labels, and he characterizes the dialectic in a variety of ways throughout the book: Protestant/Catholic, SF/Fantasy, Materialism/Mysticism. Nevertheless, the author describes himself as “atheist and non-spiritualist” so I am left puzzled why his primary way of referring to this dialectic should invoke supernatural belief systems on both sides of the slash. I would have expected some sort of Enlightenment/Theist duality to better characterize the spectrum he is attempting to define.

At the extreme of the “Catholic” end of this dialectic is Fantasy which Roberts appropriately does not discuss in a work devoted to SF. At the other, “Protestant”, extreme is, I imagine, though Roberts isn’t explicit about this, “Hard SF”, the Gernsbackian ideal of “scientifiction”. Though Roberts does offer a full and interesting chapter devoted to Verne and Wells, who I would argue fall at the “hard” end of the spectrum, he seems to be more interested in the middle part of the range, where technology meets mysticism. Once he gets into the cornucopia of SF offered by the 20th century, he has little to say about writers of hard SF, and devotes his time to more hybrid works; he does defend this concentration by noting that almost all of the consensus classics of 20th century SF fall into this category. Roberts allows a non-theistic element to the “Catholic” side of the dialectic by including in it philosophical theories. Thus, a discussion of Asimov’s robot stories offers a description of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and many unscientific phenomena found in SF, such as faster than light travel or “jaunting” from The Stars My Destination are seen as manifestations of a Schopenhaurean or Nietzschean Will which, in however unlikely a manner, changes reality by its sheer force. Though an occasional interpretation seems forced, on the whole Roberts illuminates the works he discusses, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, I was impressed in how his ideas about the development of SF and his reading of Huxley’s oeuvre leads to his explaining, “The unrelenting happiness of Brave New World is dystopic not because it excludes suffering, but because it excludes this ‘numinous’ element.”

Compared to other SF histories I’ve read, this book gives more space to pre-Frankenstein works and discusses more works of foreign language SF. Although this is listed as part of the “Palgrave History of Literature” series, Adams goes well beyond the written word, discussing SF illustrators, graphic novels, most of the significant films in the genre, SF TV and radio, performance art, rock albums, computer and video games, and “real world” manifestations of SF in Scientology and UFOs.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a serious discussion of the themes and development of SF; you may find much to disagree with, but will almost certainly find at least a few undiscovered works and new light on a number of classics.

[Stephanie Hiddleston · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dude, get your facts straight. If you don't even know Star Trek: Enterprise has 4 seasons and not 2, how am I supposed to trust the other facts in your book?

[Sol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giordano Bruno died for your scifi

"There have been a clutch of video games set in the Dune universe (the best is probably the 2001 EA Games Emperor: Battle for Dune)"

^Five star book right here.

The second edition, which I read, is expanded and partially rewritten from the first.

A history with many, many differences from Aldiss' Trillion Year Spree. More thematic, more academic. The difference between the two is obvious as early as the table of contents: Aldiss covers everything before the 20th century in the first quarter, whereas Roberts takes until the halfway point to get there. When Roberts writes "I think truncations of the historical narrative to a 'back catalogue' of still-readable works palatable to modern fandom does a violence to the mode" it's hard not think that that's almost exactly what Spree is.

Roberts takes a very broad of what qualifies as science fiction, essentially any fiction that is even tangentially related to science. Definitional arguments are by far the most tedious element of this field, so I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized his definitions chapter is more about what we mean by "science", "technology" and "novel" (he takes a broad view of each). Here he pulls out the works of Popper, Feyerabend and Heidegger to work through things. My position on these arguments is that they merely serve to identify which portion of the field a critic wants to talk about. When Aldiss says that science fiction begins with Frankenstein, it really means that he doesn't want to deal with pre-19th century writing any more than absolutely necessary. Even more ludicrous definitions that limit it to post-Wells, or post-Gernsback fiction are more obviously fig leafs.

The thesis the book is built around, is that our current science fiction emerged in the 17th century, via the Copernican revolution and Protestant reformation. Copernicus shifted conception of the heavens from purely theological to (also) material, the opening act of a broader scientific revolution, while the Protestant reformation provided a social environment which was not as strongly repressive as the Catholic (c.f. the execution of Giordano Bruno) and styled itself as rational, providing a cradle for fiction related to science. He sees in this origin an indelible mark, an irresolvable not-quite-conflict between the material/natural/scientific ("Protestant") and the spiritual/supernatural/religious ("Catholic"). Individual works may achieve a resolution between the two to the satisfaction of their authors, but the field as a whole is never able to move past it, and it recurs again and again in different forms until the present day. The question of whether aliens imply alien Jesuses is no longer very interesting to most, but works of science fiction are still concerned with future religions (Dune), aliens and Christian religion (Eifelheim), immaterial realms beyond scientific explanation (The Culture), Jesus (Behold the Man), parapsychology/psychic powers (The Demolished Man), Biblical stories retold in science fictional idiom (Shikasta). As much as some might wish, we can't quite shed religion.

Roberts' exposition of this theory has real verve, of someone convinced they have not only a new idea, but a good one. The slower pace of scientific and cultural change in centuries past combined with a lower overall literary production means he can trace out the growth and evolution of the field in fairly broad strokes, and the material is very amenable to his thesis. The pre-19th century sections are arranged in chronological chapters, themselves subdivided by common motifs like utopias, fantastic voyages, moon travel, and the hollow Earth. Along the way he sprinkles in hot takes like Micromégas and Gulliver's Travels being fully science fiction, and corrects or qualifies historical claims made by previous scholars. This section, while sometimes a little dry, is the best part of the book, both because the historical analysis and the thesis fit best here, and because there's a sense of unearthing strange things which have hidden by time and changing tastes. These are works which are hard to read, and harder to enjoy, yet in some way lead to where we are as readers, so it's nice to know that there's someone out there reading them for us.

The book pivots once we get to the 19th century. In a humorous move, after objecting to the tendency to group Wells and Verne together, seeing as they are of different generations, social classes, languages, and fictional subject matters, he groups them in a separate chapter anyway. From there, the book begins to fracture. Motifs are no longer a sufficient organizing scheme. The early 20th century is divided into two chapters covering the modernists and the pulps, parallel streams with little cross-pollination. A chapter on visual arts must cover so much ground the succeeding chapter on print fiction must go back in time. The applicability of the thesis begins to slip a little. While not totally invalid, it begins to feel a little trying when he brings it up repeatedly. The point has been made and begins to insist on itself. It doesn't help that this material is obviously much, much more heavily written about. It's harder to make an original point here, leading to a slight feeling of desperation, slightly alleviated once we get to very recent material.

The treatment of visual material is again contra Aldiss, who dedicates little attention to it and is largely dismissive. Where Aldiss dismisses Blade Runner as a butchering of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Roberts analyzes it as a visual artifact expressing a postmodern urban mystique. Unlike Aldiss who sees movies as inferior renderings of novels, Roberts sees movies as movies. A movie may make a poor novel, but a novel makes a poor ballet. Roberts declares the movie, and visual media broadly, as having become the primary vehicle of the field. Written science fiction, if not actually moribund, is no longer quite vital. And it's via the image that science fiction conquered culture: the top grossing movies are mainly science fictional or fantastic, as are video games, a juggernaut that was barely off the ground when Trillion Year Spree was written. Nowadays even "mainstream" writers find themselves breaking the cordon sanitaire and writing science fiction and fantasy, whether they admit it or not. Realism has been defeated, at the cost of the primacy of the medium its ardent champions held most dear. What a story, Mark!

Covering a wider range of time and material than Aldiss, naturally Roberts is choosier about what he talks about, and mostly covers the major figures of each period. Even so, if he mentions someone, it's for a reason, unlike Aldiss who often brings up some minor figure for a line or two then moves on to the next. Roberts even manages to cover some writers who were overlooked by Aldiss, like René Barjavel and Franz Werfel. The anglophone/rest of the world balance is slightly more reasonable with Roberts. If you're a compulsive TBR-adder this will probably be a safer book to read.

Roberts has a real talent for brief but striking interpretations. Take his conclusion on 1984:

Orwell’s fantasy here is science fiction. The model is less the technological SF of 1920s and 1930s pulps, and more the theoretical and subtle SF of Stapledon. We start to have a sense of this in the final section, during the detailed interrogation of Smith by O’Brien. These pages are unlike a conventional interrogation in one sense. Smith has little to say, for there is little he can say—the Party knows everything before the interrogation starts. Instead O’Brien talks at eloquent and chilling length. Some critics see this as a flaw in the book, and admittedly it is not obvious, at first reading, why O’Brien takes such extraordinary pains over Smith. What makes Smith, a wholly insignificant individual, worthy of this special treatment? But in an important sense this novel cannot be read according to the logic of a character-novel in the 19th-century manner. The SF-ness of the book is not its purported future setting. Rather it is a world in which the individual has been wholly superseded by the corporate identity of (in this case) The Party. The Party is disillusioned Marxist Orwell’s grim satire on the very notion of a homo superior; ‘it’ is what humanity becomes. Accordingly we can read the book as a dark evolutionary romance. O’Brien himself is straightforward in regarding The Party as a new form of immortal being. ‘Can you not understand that the death of the individual,’ he tells Smith, ‘is not death? The Party is immortal’ [Nineteen Eighty-Four, 216]. It is also all-powerful, all-knowing, a form of secular God that has grown out of humanity. This is what makes Nineteen Eighty-Four so important for the development of the 20th-century novel, the way it gestures towards a novel without ‘character’ at all. It is a much more avant-garde work than most people realise.

I do have some issues with the book. While in general there is in-text citation for other works of criticism and history, some historical claims go frustratingly uncited. He writes, for example, "in general it was believed that too sudden an acceleration would kill human passengers. Indeed, this danger was more often over-estimated than under-; in the early years of the [19th] century some people believed that even steam trains, travelling too rapidly, could prove fatal for their passengers." That's fascinating, so where could I learn more? This must be common knowledge in whatever circles Roberts travels. Some sections of the book function like independent essays, while others seem like they are building up to something, only to fray apart or anti-climax. While I can't really fault him for it, the act of summarizing the plot of Star Wars in the year of our Lord 2016 is more than faintly comical. Imagine if some medieval writer felt compelled to summarize the tale of Adam and Eve as if someone could possibly be unfamiliar with it. It's almost as bad as that. He uses the word misprision more than is ever warranted, and uses "derationated" which I'm not sure actually is a word. Did he mean deracinated? There are a few factual errors, like missing that the first Fainaru Fantajii (his rendering) was already science fictional, with its mech-ridden space station "flying fortress". They don't really detract from any important points, but they do mar it slightly. He also said that Dr. Strangelove had a mechanical hand, which I thought was an error, but it's apparently a reference to the inventor from Metropolis, who did have a mechanical hand, so maybe it's wikipedia that's wrong?

Most painful is the coda, which brings up...gamergate. Way too topical, and I read print books as antidote to internet slapfights, not to investigate them further. At least the Sad Puppies were science fiction-related. He thankfully avoids saying anything too hyperbolic, and he does have a point to make about it, and other internet holy wars, being a product of our changing communications technology, though he doesn't specifically cite the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. He ends off with...oh man...an optimistic look at The Force Awakens and an increasing acceptance of non-white male heroes in popular culture. I'm in a bit of a weird place here, being an OG Force Awakens hater, so I never even watched The Last Jedi, but it hasn't exactly united people. I've read people half-jokingly trace the re-election of Trump to the downstream effects of TLJ's release, and I have to wonder if there's something to it. I remember in the mists of 2016, seeing a twitch stream of the Republican National Convention, with someone spamming A VOTE FOR TRUMP IS A VOTE FOR MEMES in the chat every few seconds. I had a feeling then that something strange was happening. That feeling hasn't exactly gone away.

[Eva Assunção · Rating 5 out of 5]

O título da obra, sugere, mais do que aparenta "A Verdadeira História da Ficção Científica", não é sobre ditar uma única abordagem histórica absoluta do gênero, mas apresentar, de modo profundo, as nuances tão únicas dessa Literatura tão diferenciada. Do preconceito à conquista das massas, é uma referência de como a Ficção Científica, outrora tratada com desdém por muitos críticos, ao longo dos anos é a forma de narrativa que mais domina o mainstream. Adam Roberts adentra profundamente na história do gênero FC, e remonta sua origem a novela antiga, mais precisamente no contexto da Reforma Protestante. O caráter protestante da FC ainda perdura, nesse sentido ele defende que a narrativa de FC não é de fato ao todo materialista. Mas é marcada por uma dialética entre religião X ciência e misticismo (magia) X materialismo. Prova disso é o sentimento de elevação e sublimidade frente ao novum. Outro ponto relevante, é que o autor demonstra que a FC é um conjunto de obras muito maior que os aficionados, como ele diz, “consideram o maior escrito de FC”. Para além de Asimov, Heinlein, etc., o universo de obras e criações é quase infinito. Muitos autores são marginalizados, por muitas vezes, certos fanatismos de algumas bases de fãs. O fato é que Roberts é claramente versado e conhece profundamente o universo plural da FC. Outrora tão inferiorizada, é a Literatura que domina o cinema (esse que moldou e materializou as especulações imaginativas da FC), a TV, o rádio, a música, os quadrinhos, os jogos, dentre outros tipos de linguagem.
Viajando pelas viagens cósmicas do século XVIII, em seguida pela Ficção Científica do Século XIX, dedicando um capítulo a dois nomes imprescindíveis para o desenvolvimento da Ficção Científica, o francês Jules Verne e o inglês H.G Wells. Depois, o século XX com o alto modernismo e a influência das vanguardas na FC, principalmente o Futurismo, ele também traz discussões relevantes acerca das revistas Pulps. Adam discorda do termo Era de ouro para designar as obras de FC escritas entre 1940 e 1960 (ainda assim usa o termo no título do capítulo), além disso discute o impacto da New Wave no final do século XX. E por fim, apresenta as FCs do começo século XXI, que trouxe um protagonismo dominante de um subgênero da FC: a distopia. Principalmente, após o sucesso de The Hunger Games.
Uma leitura que todos os fãs, pesquisadores e escritores de Ficção Científica devem fazer.

[Gary Reger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This sprawling history, an updated and radically expanded new edition of the book Roberts published in 2006, starts with Homer, Pythagoras, and Aristotle and ends with "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" (2015), released just as Roberts was putting the final touches on his manuscript. In between Roberts hits virtually every book, film, comic, or game ever produced that can be argued contains elements of SF or is purely and simply SF. The scope is breathtaking, and if Roberts misses a few candidates here and there, or, like Homer, sometimes nods (he mislocates the Isle of Pines in Henry Neville's 1668 tale and grossly multiples the protagonist's descendants into 12,000 instead of 1789, p. 72), such slips are few and far between and do nothing to undermine either the book's magisterial scope or its value as a guide to a vast literature. There are lots and lots of excellent histories and critical studies of SF out there, but Roberts's book deserves a place on every SF reader's bookshelf.

What makes Roberts's history more than a mere romp through 4000 years of fantastic writing, however, is a core argument that sustains and undergirds the whole. This argument is presented in two framing sections, the first chapter, "Definitions" (pp. 1-23), and the final pages (503-511) of the last. It's too complex and subtle to summarize without some caricature, but simply put Roberts detects the origins of SF in the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment move from magic to science that accompanied religious transformation. The Reformation, he says, put into play a dialogue between a magical understanding of the world and an empirical, science- and experiment-based one. European understanding of the nature of Jesus, the meaning of salvation, the roles of institutions (like the Catholic Church) and individuals (the isolated Protestant reading his Bible on his own) in shaping religious belief and world-views. The resulting tensions -- which sometimes exploded into vicious warfare, and which the founders of the US hoped to avoid by separating church and state -- animate SF to this day. His is a bold and surprising thesis, which reassigns the emergence of SF from individual genius, be that Mary Shelley or Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, to a much broader, social, economic, and cultural historical turn.

Roberts expresses this causality quite clearly in a couple of sentences embedded in a critique of steampunk: "Things like technological advance are not random events. They are, on the contrary, specifically determined by their historical circumstances" (p. 502). Replace "technological" with "cultural" or "literary" and you have his argument in a nutshell.

Readers of SF and critics will have much to mull over here. Many may find his argument strained, or simply nonsense. That's not how it strikes me. Some of the foundations on which he's built may be shaky -- he accepts a Weberian connection of Protestantism and capitalism that has been challenged by recent historians -- but on the whole I think he makes a very good case for explaining the abiding elements of SF (which he brings out very clearly in analysis after analysis of individual works) as fundamentally emergent from those great sixteenth and seventeenth revolutions.

Roberts is perfectly aware that the growing globalization of SF poses a challenge to this argument, and he addresses it, suggesting that non-European and -American writers have taken up the genre with its baggage even as they work to make it, say, African or Asian. He might usefully have nodded toward non-Western and pre-sixteenth century literature that deploys some of the tropes he sees as science fictional, at least in the magical mode: for instance, the stories in "1000 and One Nights" or even the human figure with a bird's head in the Upper Paleolithic cave painting at Lascaux (which would take the whole project way back in human history). I'd love to know how Roberts would read such texts.

It's also important to stress Roberts's tone. He is generally a very generous critic. He finds something of value in most of what he's studied (only steampunk comes in for a devastating critique) and credits predecessors like Brian Aldiss who have expressed interpretative views different from his. He often writes, "but I may be wrong." Such modesty is rare, I reckon. It also welcomes divergent views and discussion.

Roberts has simply produced a splendid book, which can be mined for fresh reading (I now have enough to last me a couple of years) or studied as cultural history. I hope it is taken up outside the circles of the genre, for historians and literary critics doing "mainstream" work will find much in it to stimulate thought. It's a model of deeply engaged and meaningful humanities scholarship.

[Joe Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Working on your masters or already have one and you want an academic history of science fiction that makes it palatable as literature through the use of words few out side academia focused on literature have ever heard of? This is your book.
Want something readable that doesn't spend the first third of the book writing about authors before Verne and Wells and trying to convince both the author and the reader that these works have any bearing on science fiction, trying to convince both that science fiction is protestant and that white guys dominate because evil capitalist protestant American film companies surprisingly want to make money? Then this may not be your book.
Want to have more than a cursory overview of Asimov, Heinlein, comics and films? Then this definitely isn't your book.
Still I have to admire the immense amount of research that went into this book and the vast amount of education wasted on learning a vast vocabulary to back wrong premises. Here is truth, science fiction is science fun, it started with Verne and Wells and it is no more Protestant, because the Catholic Church burned someone at the stake, than R rated movies are Protestant because they couldn't be made until after the Catholic Legion of Decency lost its stranglehold on Hollywood.

[Jordi · Rating 5 out of 5]

”I am going to stick my neck out and just say it: science fiction will never be Literature with a capital ‘L’, because it inevitably proceeds from premise rather than character. It sacrifices moral and psychological nuance in favor of more conceptual matters, and elevates scenario over sensibility.” [Sven Birkerts in a review refusing to accept Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as an example of science fiction, because it is too good]

SF is one of the most peculiar and fascinating literary genres - one can find readers that almost read SF exclusively, and readers that either can’t really *get* SF language, or just dismiss it as childish. Also, even if SF as a cultural idiom has become predominant in the media (one just had to look at the latest blockbusters), long time SF readers may tend to say that this universalized SF is not the true SF, just a visual exploit lacking the complexities of the good SF, that you can only find in books. But, what makes us point to something as specifically SF?

This critical history from Adam Roberts (Nineteeth-Century Literature professor and SF writer and hardcore fan) tries to desentagle some of these knots using a rather unusual cultural thesis to interpret the history of the genre: “that science fiction begins not with Gernsback, Wells, Verne or Shelley, but rather with the Protestant Reformation, when science as we now understand the term began to separate itself from magic as the idiom for fantastic voyages, utopias, future speculation and technological extrapolation.” [p. 503]. This does not mean that there was not speculative fiction before: this history dedicates two chapters to “SF and the ancient novel” and the fantastic on the Medieval and Renaissance periods, before delving into the Seventeeth-Century, where the SF mode is properly born according to Roberts, within a much wider cultural process triggered by Protestantism (Modernity).

What is particular about this new SF mode is not just doing a materialistic/scientific take on the fantastic: part of the core thesis is that this materialistic view gets modulated with secularized religious/metaphysical themes: for instance, the discourse on the future (formerly found in sacred prophetic and apocalyptic texts), the figure of the savior or the theme of atonement become an essential part of the genre. The importance of these secularized religious themes becomes even more significant when one turns to the central SF trait of “sense of wonder”, that can be seen as a materialistic turn of the screw on the traditional concept of the sublime.

There’s two aspects to this whole idea that makes it specially relevant: one, the emphasis that these religious/metaphysical themes are present mainly through the filter of secularization (they don’t need to be explicitly laid out as religious, even to the own author), as they are embedded in the roots of our secularized modern culture; two, that this particular influence from Protestantism pervades the genre still today - just as Capitalism has been theorized to emerge from Protestant ethics, for instance, in the famous argument from Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

It gets really interesting to read through the history of the genre from this point of view. One starts to notice how much religion and metaphysics is as important as science for the genre, even if most of the times this is just a subterranean current.

On the other hand, there’s two additional key ideas in the book to explain the transformation of the genre in the last 40 years or so:

- That SF has largely shifted from a verbal to a visual cultural mode, being Star Wars the Rubicon. Before 1977, SF would have been mainly a “literature of ideas, of extrapolation and transcendence rooted primarily in verbal texts, popular only to a small group of aficionados who called themselves fans. After that, through the 1980s and the 1990s, SF shifted about on its axis to become a mass-culture phenomenon, much more widely consumed, and more likely to be consumed as a visual mode.” [pp.508-509]

- A subsequent tidal shift towards YA idiom in the 21st century, clearly seen in best-selling book series as Harry Potter or The Hunger Games.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that latest adult SF has come to a standstill, it’s just that it largely remains a sub-culture (as it always has been), even if the SF/F idiom has become part of the wider popular culture. The main trait of the adult SF development in the last two decades would be a diffraction of perspective: “a proliferation of queer SFs, postcolonial SFs, postmodern SFs, fanfic SFs, retro SFs, experimental SFs and all manner of other kinds is produced and consumed in a varying genre microclimate. Still, and alas, it is rare for such texts to achieve larger prominence” [p. 494], unless they approximate to the dominant culture, which has become “less exciting and less adventurous”.

If you are interested in SF, this is a very interesting read. Some may want to fast forward the first chapters to get to the more recent periods (traditionally understood as the starting point of the genre) but, as Adam Roberts says, we can’t just dismiss older texts when writing a history of the genre because they have become unpalatable to us. This is an opportunity to get to know better the roots of SF without actually having to read those texts :)

Another interesting point is the treatment of the so-called Golden Age of SF (roughly from 1940 to 1960): “Coined by a partisan fandom, the phrase valorises a particular sort of writing: hard SF, linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-operatic or a technological-adventure idiom” [p. 287]. As Roberts defends, even if this period contains many masterpieces, it is probably less interesting than the 1960s and the 1970s, where the genre really achieves its most accomplished expression.

[Valeria S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only does the book try to cover almost every piece of writing in the history of science fiction, it also tries to help the reader understand what the definition of science fiction is and how it's not completely clear even now.
I loved the passionate way it's written and how it also takes the time to analyze the relevance of the piece and the author to the genre.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this comprehensive, chronological history of the science fiction field, Adam Roberts sets his marker for the start of science fiction all the way back to 1600, with the Copernican revolution and the earliest stories of trips to other worlds (or voyages extraordinaire, in French). He bases this on the premise that science fiction has always had a tension between materialism and mysticism, with the Catholic church resisting the idea of other worlds, and the Protestants more receptive to the idea and to the principles of scientific discovery.

It's a clever premise, and even he admits that not all science fiction is about that, but it serves to explain many of the roots even farther back than Frankenstein in 1818, if you care to go back that far.

The book reads somewhere between a scholarly treatment and a popular exposition, with many philosophers and literary critics cited. Each chapter has a separate bibliography of sources mentioned.

I doubt that someone new to science fiction would be interested in this book. It is of greater interest to the knowledgeable reader, who won't have read all the titles that Roberts mentions (and has apparently read), but will be familiar with the central tenets of the field and be able to follow (and perhaps disagree with) Roberts's arguments.

Although mainly focused on written SF, Roberts deals with the visual media of movies and comics when he gets to those periods. Those sections feel squeezed, though.

The only downside to this comprehensive study is that is was published in 2005 so doesn't deal with the increased explosion of visual SF (in movies and video games), although he anticipates it. What he doesn't really anticipate is the vast expansion of the field by authors from non-Anglophone countries, such as China and Africa. Also, he is too early for the expansion of LGBTQ themes in SF. Although he mentions a few early examples, he doesn't anticipate the explosion of titles we've seen in the last 10-15 years. An updated chapter on these trends would be most welcome, as well as a discussion of the influence of digital reading, both ebooks and online magazines. The publishing field has changed since 2005, largely after the economic crunch of 2007-08 and with the prevalence of reading on smartphones and other devices (including audiobooks).

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Roberts is an academic literary critic who moonlights as a science fiction novelist, short story writer, and parodist. His History of Science Fiction is an academic work with a definite, somewhat restrictive thesis. Science fiction, Roberts argues, reflects a cultural divide that began with the Protestant Reformation. Technological fiction was largely a Protestant interest, while Catholic writers tended to stick with fantasy and mysticism in the Platonic tradition. He sees the evolution of science fiction as a continuing dialogue between these two poles, represented most clearly by H. G. Wells and J. R. R. Tolkien. Roberts is a careful enough scholar to qualify such sweeping generalizations with sometimes maddening frequency. He has translated Jules Verne and written books on Wells and Tolkien. It is no surprise that he offers especially good readings of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From Earth to the Moon, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He gives the pulp era short shrift, and he laments that Gravity’s Rainbow was beaten in the 1973 Nebula Awards by the more traditional Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. With the advent of multimedia science fiction texts like the Star Wars saga, Roberts says that science fiction is a primarily visual genre, not a literary one. He offers an especially good analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a work that fits his thesis perfectly. Roberts’ history lacks the readable snark of Brian W. Aldiss’s The Trillion Year Spree, but it offers a worthwhile, if not always convincing, argument on the cultural meaning of science fiction. 4 stars

[Elvis Rodrigues · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partindo da Antiguidade e chegando ao Século XXI, Adam Roberts faz uma jornada através da Ficção Científica, desde os primeiros focos que a precederam, até os tempos atuais e as novas mídias.

Este é um livro denso, então eu comecei lendo devagar, aos poucos. Mas depois tive que interromper mesmo a leitura, e só mais recentemente retomei, decidido a ir até o final, pouco mais de um ano após o início. Roberts escreve muito bem. Não é exatamente fluido, afinal não é ficção, mas em nenhum momento é uma leitura tediosa. Eu gostei bastante de ter lido.

Há um dissenso sobre o marco inicial da Ficção Científica. Alguns dizem que as primeiras obras de Sci-Fi são as de Julio Verne e H.G. Wells, listando livros como o Frankenstein, de Mary Shelley, na categoria de Proto-Ficção Científica. Já outros defendem que a obra de Shelley seria a inaugural do gênero. Roberts vai bem mais longe: ele data as origens da FC na Reforma Protestante de Martinho Lutero. Que ela possibilitou o Capitalismo, o Iluminismo e outros movimentos que acabaram fazendo o gênero surgir.

Mas longe de mim discutir essa questão aqui, não sou especialista. O que mais me fascinou no livro foi a separação dos períodos, observar os destaques de cada época, etc. Anotei dúzias de dicas de leituras. Nesta segunda edição, escrita em 2015, o autor acrescentou um capítulo sobre o Século XXI, mas não considerei suficiente. Caberia detalhar os novos subgêneros, como Afrofuturismo e Solarpunk, que não são nem mencionados. Quem sabe na próxima edição?

[Captain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully written and filled with inspired, passionate analysis. I truly loved reading this book. There were certainly some points I found myself not entirely aligned with—like the origins of SF or the slight dismissiveness with which Roberts treats the 80s and 90s—but that is what makes this a far more stimulating history of Science Fiction than most other attempts. History can never be objective, and especially when part of the goal is to provide the reader with a sense of literary critique and not just a bland timeline, the best an author can do is clearly state where they stand. And Roberts does this incredibly well. A massive achievement, and one I am so delighted Roberts decided to undertake.

[Özgür Tacer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very comprehensive, thoroughly analytical and insightful science fiction textbook. The narrative is in some parts pedantic and pretentious; some sections are very hard to follow for a mid-level reader with limited fund of knowledge in social sciences and humanities. Yet it approaches science fiction in a very broad view as a cultural phenomenon, with in-depth content analysis on various levels. It was not an easy reading experience for me, but it was rewarding.

It is a must-have reference guide, especially for SF readers with academic interest.

[Richard Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though hard going initially (at points I doubted I would finish) this volume really becomes interesting as it examines the past few decades. Those expecting another 'Trillion Year Spree' may be disappointed, as this is an academic treatise with a lexicon to match. Whether one agrees with Adam Robert's central premise or not his scholarship is both broad and profound. I am particularly thankful for the number of new writers he has introduced me too.

[Gerrold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting thesis involving the role of the protestant reformation in the development of SF (and fantasy). I don't agree with Roberts on every point, but I learned a great deal from this book. Clearly written and well argued, I think this is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of SF.

[Ana Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for my thesis, and it really did help me a lot. The author clearly knows what he's talking about and did his research thoroughly. There are opinions he expresses that I don't particularly agree with, but to enjoy this or take something out of it you don't have to.

[Alan Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very scholarly work on the history of science fiction. A text that can be referred back to for a more comprehensive study beyond the casual reading of a history.

[Francis Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short but thorough. A good read. I like SF and SF criticism, as well as SF studies. Adam Roberts is a SF writer so he (as far as I can tell) knows what he is on about.

[L.Z.X. Maia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"A verdadeira História da Ficção Científica" é uma enciclopédia sobre apenas um gênero literário, algo que você não encontra por aí. Não existe algo assim sobre Realismo Mágico, ou Romance Policial. Ou mesmo Fantasia. O que Adams Robert faz nesse livro é digno de louvor, porque não é apenas sobre definições de gênero, mas sobre gênese, sobre a história do pensamento científico e sobre a evolução das sociedades. É uma obra tão profunda que ela é quase um tratado sociológico sobre o conflito entre o místico e o natural.

A ficção-científica hoje não marca apenas a literatura, mas todas as formas de arte. Todas. Dos poetas aos pintores e desenvolvedores de jogos. E à medida que a tecnologia e ciência avançam, mais o gênero se entranha em nossas vidas. Ninguém está livre de ser influenciado por ela. Nem mesmo seus críticos.

É preciso salientar que esse livro não é para qualquer um. Exige uma bagagem literária impressionante. Às vezes o preciosismo do autor cansa, mas vale a pena sua leitura completa. Recomendo principalmente para aqueles que pretendem escrever no gênero.

[Karl Bunker · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this landmark volume, Adam Roberts has created what will undoubtedly be regarded as the definitive history of science fiction for many years to come.

With hugely impressive scholarship, Roberts covers the great swath of literature that fits under the broad umbrella of "science fiction." The density and quantity of information in this book are staggering, and yet the writing style is friendly and eminently readable. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, the accuracy of that information is excellent. I'm fairly well-read in the field of SF studies, and the only errors I saw in this book were on utterly trivial matters.

Inevitably, some readers will have an argument with the very breadth of this book's coverage. As Roberts notes, various people in the field have argued that SF, properly defined, begins with Edgar Allan Poe, or Shelley's Frankenstein, or Verne and Wells, or even as recently as Hugo Gernsback. Roberts, by contrast, dates the genre back to the "fantastic voyage" novels of ancient Greece (he doesn't attempt to establish any firm date for the "first" example of SF). I disagreed with Roberts' "long history" approach when I began this book, but I was soon won over by his arguments that the roots of the genre can be traced back as far as he says. Not only did I find the chapters covering the early history to be completely engaging and entertaining to read, I came to agree with Roberts that this long history gives a genuinely useful insight into modern SF. (The book arrives at the era of Verne and Wells a little more than one third into its length.) As Roberts' history moves into modern times, the focus remains on SF literature, but the SF of movies, TV, comics, and other media are also discussed.

Roberts is generally even-handed when discussing the range of opinions about such issues as the relative merits of a particular book or author, but at the same time he's not averse to making his own opinion clear (stating, to give just one example, that Dune stands up better to a present-day reading than the Foundation trilogy does). This gives the book a personal feel; you know it was written by a human being with an emotional connection to his subject.

If you have any interest in the history or study of science fiction, this book should be a centerpiece of your SF-studies library.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably the best one that's not just a list of plot synopses. thorough, smart. his overarching theory is a bit wonky (non-realist lit can be divided between 'catholic' and 'protestant,' science fiction operates according to 'russellian' or 'feyerabendian' theories of science) but as far as preliminaries go it works.

[Ralph Palm · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written, accessible and superbly researched academic survey of science fiction. If you've got a paper to write, this is your first stop.

If you like this book already, I would also recommend Thomas Disch's DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF, and vice versa.

[D.]

The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Histories of Literature) by Adam Roberts (2007)

[Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Found this to be really tough going.

[Una · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudīti pamatīgs teksts ar jauku teorijas dimensiju, kurš ir arī saistošs, autoram pamanoties dzīvīgi iekļaut vēsturnieka lomā sevi kā lasītāju, kritiķi un rakstnieku.