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The standard potted history of science fiction begins with Jules Verne (or maybe Mary Shelley), moves on to H.G. Wells, nods at Edgar Rice Burroughs -- all of these in the "forefathers" category -- and then pronounces the birth of the contemporary genre with the advent of Amazing Stories in 1926 when suddenly there was a burst of new writers in the field. After reading Garrett P. Serviss' Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) and the first half, so far, of Edwin L. Arnold's Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation on Mars (1905), I've been reading about SF before 1926 and have discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that there was lot more going on than the thumbnail history indicates.



It seems that the first burst of science fictional novels that talked to each other as genres do happened in the 1870s, and by the mid-1890s there was enough demand for these kinds of stories to see the rise of the early pulp magazines such as Pearson's Weekly and Pearson's Magazine in the UK (which serialized novels by George Griffith, H. Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells, M.P. Shiel, and Cutcliffe Hyne) and Argosy and All-Story in the US. None of these magazines was completely dedicated to SF, which is why Amazing gets place of honor, but the idea that modern science fiction leaped fully blown from Hugo Gernsback's mind (after a brief moment as scientifiction) is quite a distortion.

One result of science fiction's adoption by the academy is that this earlier history is being rooted out, and there are now two American universities with reprint lines of early SF: Bison Frontiers of Imagination from University of Nebraska Press and Early Classics of Science Fiction from Wesleyan University Press. Also of interest is the science fiction line from Apogee Space Books, which has so far published one novel by George Griffith, two by Garrett P. Serviss, and what appears to be the first book publication of Hugo Gernsback's stefnal Baron Münchausen stories, first published in his magazine The Electrical Experimenter in 1915. I'm not sure how many books they've published, but SF fan Marcus Rowland has published at least George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space (1900) as part of his Forgotten Futures gaming project. (That's one I just ordered, since I'm more interested in stories of space travel than I am in the sub-genre of future wars that was Griffith's specialty.)

The more I poke around, the more tantalizing titles from yesteryear I run across. The very strange French Wold Newton Universe webpage points to dozens of early space travel novels by French, German, and English-language writers, and I'm particularly curious about Robert W. Cole's The Struggle for Empire (1900), which is described as an early space opera, and J. Weldon Cobb's To Mars with Tesla (1901), in which the famous scientist travels to Mars much as Edison did in Serviss' novel. Neither of these books is available in any current edition, so I hope one of the above publishers will come through!

Well, I wish I were a faster reader. As usual, I have generated a huge list of interesting books and am in the process of acquiring some of them. Who knows how many of them I'll actually read? But if nothing else, Verne and Wells and Burroughs are looking less lonely to me than they used to.
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