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278 ] •13• “the JUles verne, h. G. Wells, and edGar allan Poe tyPe oF story” Hugo Gernsback’s History of Science Fiction Gary WestFahl In describing the origins and the evolution of science fiction, a growing number of today’s literary historians view the American pulp magazines of the 1920s and the editorial role of Hugo Gernsback as pivotal. Such was not always the case. Recognition of their importance to the development of the genre is (partly if not largely) due to the efforts of one sf critic, Gary Westfahl. The following is one of Westfahl’s early pioneering essays on Gernsback that sought to identify him as the first to invent and promulgate the idea of science fiction as a separate , independent genre with its own history. This essay originally appeared in SFS 19, no. 3 (November 1992): 340–53. While the importance of Hugo Gernsback in science fiction may be debated, critics of all schools can accept him as the first person to create and announce something resembling a history of sf. Some critics before Gernsback discussed earlier works now seen as sf, but they did not treat sf as a separate category and did not distinguish its texts from other forms of non-mimetic fiction: for example, Julian Hawthorne’s 1891 discussion of “romantic writers” grouped together works by Plato, Sir Philip Sidney, Jonathan Swift, Percy Greg, Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling (9–10). On the other hand, some previous critics seemed aware of science fiction as a separate category, but they spoke mainly in the future tense—calling for a genre of scientific fiction and Hugo Gernsback’s History of Science Fiction [ 279 referring to few if any earlier works: Félix Bodin in 1834 claimed that there existed no example of “the epic of the future” (Alkon 8) and William Wilson in 1851 noted only one text, R. H. Horne’s The Poor Artist, that exemplified “Science-Fiction” (Moskowitz 312). So it was left to Gernsback both to identify sf as a distinct form of literature and to cite a number of its past and present works, establishing in the process three major periods in its history.1 To be sure, the format and style of Gernsback’s presentation did not resemble that of conventional literary history: instead of writing a monograph , he made scattered comments on important texts in editorials, blurbs, and responses to letters in Amazing Stories and other magazines, and implicitly classified other works as science fiction by reprinting them in those magazines. It is true, of course, that he did not approach the subject of sf history with the attitude of a scholar: he was also interested in publishing a magazine and making money. Some works by prominent authors may have been reprinted because they were inexpensive or because Gernsback thought they would be popular with readers; and these and other prominent authors may have been featured or mentioned because he thought their names would add prestige to his undertaking.2 Still, questionable motives do not necessarily produce inferior results, and they certainly provide no reason to leave Gernsback’s achievements unexamined. In presenting the works he chose to include in the history of sf, Gernsback claimed to rely on a formula that modern critics would regard as naive and rigid: the work must be a narrative; it must incorporate passages of scientific explanation; and it must describe an imaginary but scientifically logical new invention or breakthrough. Blurbs to stories reprinted in Amazing Stories impose these odd priorities even when they do not seem to reflect the actual circumstances and purposes of the story’s creation. For example, presenting Verne’s A Trip to the Center of the Earth, he wrote: “Not only was Jules Verne a master of the imaginative type of fiction, but he was a scientist of high caliber. . . . Instead of boring a hole into the bowels of the Earth, Jules Verne was probably the first to think of taking the reader to unexplored depths through the orifice of an extinct volcano. He argues, correctly, that a dead crater would prove . . . perhaps the best route for such exploration” (Amz 1:101, May 1926).3 And he described H. G. Wells’s “The Crystal Egg” in this manner: Mr. Wells’ imagination is not running loose—he knows his science— and while the story at first glance may seem entirely too fantastic, no one knows but that it may, 5,000 years from now be...

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