Science Fiction around the World
2010; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 84; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2010.0250
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Digital Games and Media
Resumo25 Ceufs ESSAY .Xpril-J'2*. Science Fiction around the World m James Gunn Each summer, James Gunn teaches a S F writers' workshop and intensive S F teaching institute in Lawrence, Kansas, where he has lived most of his lifeas author, scholar, and English professor. His Damon Knight Grand Master Awardwas givennotjust inrecognition ofhis fiction writingbutalso for hisdeep influence on the genre through essays, editing, and teaching, Gunn's important Road to Science Fiction anthologies expose the context underlying each story and serve as primary texts for SF courses worldwide. To consider science fictionincountries other than theUnited States, onemust startfrom these shores. American science fiction is thebase line against which all the other fantastic literatures in languages other than English must be measured. That is because science fiction, as informed readers recognize it today, began in New York City in 1926. That isn't to say thatauthors didn't write sci ence fictionearlier or thatpeople didn't read and appreciate it,but that it wasn't considered a litera ture apart?a genre. Certainly E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe wrote works about robots and strange events rationalized as being possible through science or technology or the passage of time (in thecase ofPoe's "Mellonta Tauta") in the first half of thenineteenth century,or that,earlier than either,Mary Shelley wrote about a creature put together from human parts and revivified through electricity.Nathaniel Hawthorne includ ed scientific speculations among his stories of Puritan guilt, and, asH. Bruce Franklin illustrated inhis book FuturePerfect, many American writers of the nineteenth century wrote stories and novels identifiable today as science fiction. But before 1926, such works were considered literary adven tures, interesting uses of nonrealistic materials? rather like the works of contemporarymainstream literary figures such as Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, orDoris Lessing. What happened in 1926 is thatLuxembourg expatriate Hugo Gernsback created the firstsci ence-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, and gave science fictionan identityand a characteristic fla vor. The flavor would change as new magazines came along and new editors recruited writers with different ideas and different talents,but the groundwork was laid by Amazing Stories,and sci ence fiction would assume anAmerican identityit retains to thisday. As Borges once observed, every writer creates his own predecessors. The same is true of genres. Historians can look back and iden tifyscience-fiction stories,but only after thegenre had been created. The American character of science fiction occurred in spite of the fact that itsmajor influ ences were European, first Jules Verne, who may have been the greatest force toward an acceptance of this new kind of literature,with his voyages extraordinaires, because he focused his writings almost entirely on the way technology would change humanity's exploration of the earth and the solar system; and thenH. G. Wells, the "Eng lish JulesVerne," who pioneered, inhis "scientific romances," the science-fiction novel of ideas and social concerns, theway technology and science would change humanity. And, at the turnof the twentieth century, the German author Kurd Lass witz created the novel of space exploration. But ittook amagazine devoted to thesekinds of stories (reprinting in its firstissues stories by Poe, Wells, and Verne, "those charming romances of science" bywhich Gernsback described what he was trying topublish) to create a genre, establish a readership, and attract new writers. After World War II, thegenre got exported to Western Europe and then, more slowly, to Eastern Europe and the Far East, generally following the progress of industrialization. The immediate predecessors of science fiction got startedwhen writers noticed May-June 2010 1 27 SCIENCE FICTION James Gunn's career has bridged the gap between the writing and study of science fiction. He has received the major awards of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (the Grand Master), the Science Fiction Research Association (the Pilgrim), and fandom (the Hugo) and has served as president of both organizations. He isthe author or editor of forty-one books, including The Immortals, The Listeners, Alternate Worlds: The IllustratedHistory of Science Fiction, the six-volume Road to Science Fiction anthology, and the most recent Reading Science Fiction (withMarleen Barr and Matthew Candelaria). the social change created by...
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