Michael Newton - The Origins of Science Fiction

When in the 1890s, reviewers considered H. G. Wellss series of scientific romances, at least one critic greeted them with both praise and puzzlement, bewailing the fact that rather than write straight scientific philosophy, he had chosen to tell horrible little stories about monsters . Yet it was clear that Wells was busy perfecting a novel kind of story, one that would combine the fantastic and the scientific, giving us a fairy tale with a plausible scientific justification. This new form of writing would by the 1940s seem a ubiquitous feature of juvenile fiction, purveying visions of the future for the young. In 1940, examining boys weeklies, George Orwell noted:

The one theme that is really new is the scientific one. Death-rays, Martians, invisible men, robots, helicopters and interplanetary rockets figure largely Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of Scientification. Naturally it is the magical, Martian aspect of science that is most exploited.

In a little over forty years, the type of writing that Wells was practising had transformed from being something idiosyncratic and more or less nameless, to being sharply defined, mildly contemptible, and pointedly fathered by the author.

Every writer who discusses science fiction rapidly stumbles into the perilous territory of definition. Despite Orwells claims regarding Wellss paternity, science fiction remains a form with more than one origin story. Some point to Mary Shelley; to others everything flows from the genius of Edgar Allan Poe, or finds its roots in Jules Verne, or in Wells, described in 1906 as that flamingo of letters who for the last decade or so has been a wonder to our island birds. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, rules of play were forming that could be riffed on, subverted, and developed. Particularly in the period from Frankenstein to Jules Vernes Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870), the tropes were still in flux and the conventions unfixed. Hence the tales in this book might seem a disparate bunch, a collection but perhaps not a homogeneity. Then again that is how things should be, for the origins of science fiction were simply not homogeneous. (Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the most telling connection that unites the writers in this anthology is that nearly all endured some form of childhood traumawhether abandonment, the death of one or both parents, or a family bankruptcy.) Otherwise what we find gathered in this book are the fertile grounds out of which science fiction grew, a shared set of subjects and themes, of motifs and figures, with a neighbourly attachment to utopian fiction, to fairy tale and fantasy, to Gothic, to the imperialist yarn, and even to the realist nineteenth-century novel. The themes and subjects of these stories form a recognizable heritage, an array of concerns that would be picked up in twentieth- and twenty-first-century works: mad scientists and overreachers; apocalypses; alien encounters; time-travellers; dystopian and utopian visions; the power of machines and the estrangements of new technologies; the fallible, bewildered self. Up to around 1890, the stories in this collection are perhaps only equivocally categorizable as science fiction, and then suddenly that label does not feel debatable anymore. Something new had come to light.