Creators of Science Fiction was a title I first used on an occasional series of articles published in the British magazine Interzone in 1996-98, following a request from the editor, David Pringle, who thought that it might be a good idea to introduce his readers to the history of the genre. His readers were far from unanimous in their response to the series, which was eventually abandoned. Because some of the articles have already been reprinted in earlier Borgo Press collections, or have too considerable an overlap with others that have been reprinted, only four are reproduced here; the article on E. E. “Doc” Smith was number 7 in the series and appeared in issue no. 111 (September 1996); the article on James Blish was number 8 and appeared in issue no. 117 (March 1997); the article on Hugo Gernsback was number 10 and appeared in issue no. 126 (December 1997); and the article on John W. Campbell Jr. was number 11, appearing in issue no. 133 (July 1998).
It was probably not surprising that many of the readers of Interzone in the late 1990s were not much interested in the history of the genre, simply because it had become impractical by that time to take such an interest in any reasonably comprehensive fashion, at least in Britain. It was much easier in the early 1960s, when I began to read sf avidly. At that time the labeled genre had only just reached the end of the phase of its evolution when it was largely contained in magazines; second-hand digest magazines were easy to come by and relatively cheap, and much of the significant work from the pulp magazines was in the process of being reprinted in paperback by such publishers as Ace. The British Science Fiction Association had a postal lending library that included both books and magazines, and Sam Moskowitz had published series of articles in the magazines about the most significant writers within the labeled genre and their most important precursors, which served as an elementary guide to the most interesting materials. Anyone prepared to devote the time could, therefore, familiarize themselves with the entire history of sf, as well as keeping up with newly-published material, within a decade. Thirty years later there was not only twice as much historical material to catch up on, but the availability of the earlier material had been considerably reduced; little of it was being reprinted, second-hand bookshops were in steep decline and the half of the BSFA library that had not been consumed by fire had been removed to the vaults of Liverpool University Library as the nucleus of the Science Fiction Foundation collection, available only on-site to accredited scholars.
Given all that, it is not obvious that this collection, which attempts to put the remaining articles from the original series into a broader context, reaching back to the origins of speculative fiction and forward to more contemporary material, can be of overmuch interest to anyone but earnest academics. Indeed, now that textual science fiction no longer exists as a popular genre—save as a vestigial appendix of a fantasy genre that is itself in terminal decline—it is not obvious that there will be any significant further interest outside the groves of Academe in any of the material covered herein. Even so, I feel entitled to hope that it might qualify as something more than a mere elegy, if only on the grounds that text constains imaginative possibilities that TV and cinema will never be able to duplicate, by virtue of their inability to go beyond appearances, and will therefore always constitute a unique resource for the comprehensively alienated. If the comprehensively alienated are not willing to learn to read, in the full sense of the term, who will be?
“Frankenstein and the Origins of Science Fiction” first appeared in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and its Precursors ed. David Seed, published by Liverpool University Press in 1995. the article on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Sonnet: To Science” is based on an article in Masterplots II: Poetry Series Supplement edited by John Wilson & Philip K. Jason, published by Salem Press in 1998. The article on Camille Flammarion’s Lumen is derived from the introduction to my translation of that work, issued by Wesleyan University Press in 2002. The articles on Verne and Wells both adapt material from other articles, but neither has been published in their present form before, although the Wells aricle was once read at a “conference” accompanying an exhibiton of children’s books in Paris. The remaining articles first appeared in Science Fiction Writers, 2nd Edition edited by Richard Bleiler, published by Scribner’s in 1999.