Science Fiction The Early Years

In this volume the author describes more than 3000 short stories, novels, and plays with science fiction elements, from earliest times to 1930. He includes imaginary voyages, utopias, Victorian boys' books, dime novels, pulp magazine stories, British scientific romances and mainstream work with science fiction elements. Many of these publications are extremely rare, surviving in only a handful of copies, and most of them have never been described before.

Complementing Science-Fiction: The Early Years, which surveys science-fiction published in book form from its beginnings through 1930, the present volume covers all the science-fiction printed in the genre magazines--Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder, along with offshoots and minor magazines--from 1926 through 1936. This is the first time this historically important literary phenomenon, which stands behind the enormous modern development of science-fiction, has been studied thoroughly and accurately. The heart of the book is a series of descriptions of all 1,835 stories published during this period, plus bibliographic information. Supplementing this are many useful features: detailed histories of each of the magazines, an issue by issue roster of contents, a technical analysis of the art work, brief authors' biographies, poetry and letter indexes, a theme and motif index of approximately 30,0000 entries, and general indexes. Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years is not only indispensable for reference librarians, collectors, readers, and scholars interested in science-fiction, it is also of importance to the study of popular culture during the Great Depression in the United States. Most of its data, which are largely based on rare and almost unobtainable sources, are not available elsewhere.

Science fiction legend Jack Williamson's classic autobiography is much more than the story of a single man's life and work; it is an amazing look at the entire 20th century from the perspective of a man on a "long search for endurable compromise with society." Born in 1908, Williamson often felt at odds with the world around him and began writing science fiction as a method of escape. His tentative entrance into the field - his first story was published in 1928 in Hugo Gernsbach's legendary Amazing Stories - soon transformed him from a pulp writer into one of the Grand Masters of science fiction.

This book is the definitive critical history of science fiction. The 2006 first edition of this work traced the development of the genre from Ancient Greece and the European Reformation through to the end of the 20th century. This new 2nd edition has been revised thoroughly and very significantly expanded. An all-new final chapter discusses 21st-century science fiction, and there is new material in every chapter: a wealth of new readings and original research. The author’s groundbreaking thesis that science fiction is born out of the 17th-century Reformation is here bolstered with a wide range of new supporting material and many hundreds of 17th- and 18th-century science fiction texts, some of which have never been discussed before. The account of 19th-century science fiction has been expanded, and the various chapters tracing the twentieth-century bring in more writing by women, and science fiction in other media including cinema, TV, comics, fan-culture and other modes.

The first science fiction course in the American academy was held in the early 1950s. In the sixty years since, science fiction has become a recognized and established literary genre with a significant and growing body of scholarship. The Cambridge History of Science Fiction is a landmark volume as the first authoritative history of the genre. Over forty contributors with diverse and complementary specialties present a history of science fiction across national and genre boundaries, and trace its intellectual and creative roots in the philosophical and fantastic narratives of the ancient past. Science fiction as a literary genre is the central focus of the volume, but fundamental to its story is its non-literary cultural manifestations and influence. Coverage thus includes transmedia manifestations as an integral part of the genre's history, including not only short stories and novels, but also film, art, architecture, music, comics, and interactive media.

Journey through time and space with this graphic novel history of the science fiction genre.

Discusses the works of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Lucian, H.G. Wells, John W. Campbell, and others from Victorian times to the present.

The highly prolific and influential science fiction author Philip K. Dick published 44 novels and more than 120 brief works during his lifetime. This anthology presents his finest short stories and novellas that originally appeared in pulp magazines of the early 1950s. Contents include "The Variable Man," "Second Variety," "Beyond the Door," "The Defenders," and more.