Theme: British fantasy fiction in the 20th century.(J. K. Rowling) Contents: Introduction

Chapter I. Analysis and development of fantasy fiction in the works of British writers at the turn of the 20th century
1.1. British fantasy fiction at the turn of the 20th century
²In 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley took the next major step in the evolution of science fiction when she published Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Champions of Shelley as the “mother of science fiction” emphasize her innovative fictional scheme. Abandoning the occult folderol of the conventional Gothic novel, she made her protagonist a practicing “scientist”—though the term scientist was not actually coined until 1834—and gave him an interest in galvanic electricity and vivisection, two of the advanced technologies of the early 1800s. Even though reanimated corpses remain fantastic today, Shelley gave her story an air of scientific plausibility. This masterly manipulation of her readers established a powerful new approach to creating thrilling sensations of wonder and fear. Frankenstein has remained in print since its first publication, and it has been adapted for film repeatedly since the first silent version in 1910. Frankenstein’s monster likewise remained a potent metaphor at the turn of the 21st century, when opponents of genetically engineered food coined the term Frankenfood to express their concern over the unknown effects of the human manipulation of foodstuffs.
Another significant 19th-century forerunner was Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote many works loosely classifiable as science fiction. The Balloon Hoax of 1844, originally published in the New York Sun, is but one example of Poe’s ability to provide meticulous technical descriptions intended to mislead and impress the gullible.
More significant to the genre’s formation than Poe was Jules Verne, who counted Poe among his influences and was arguably the inventor of science fiction. Verne’s first novel, Paris au XXième siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century)—written in 1863 but not published until 1994—is set in the distant 1960s and contains some of his most accurate prognostications: elevated trains, automobiles, facsimile machines, and computer-like banking machines. Nevertheless, the book’s depiction of a dark and bitter dystopian world without art was too radical for Jules Hetzel, Verne’s publisher.
Hetzel, who published a popular-science magazine for young people, the Magasin illustré d’éducation et de récréation, was a shrewder judge of public taste than Verne. With Hetzel’s editorial guidance, Verne abandoned his far-fetched futurism and set to work on the first of his Voyages extraordinaires—Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; Five Weeks in a Balloon). In this series of contemporary techno-thrillers, the reader learns of balloons, submarines, trains, mechanical elephants, and many other engineering marvels, all described with unmatchable technical accuracy and droll humour.
Verne’s novels achieved remarkable international success, and he became a legend in his own time. His major works, which were adapted for film many times, remained popular into the 21st century, and the “scientific romance” became a permanent fixture of Western popular entertainment.
Another uncannily prescient figure was the French illustrator Albert Robida. His graphic cartoons (see the figure) and essays appeared in Le Vingtième Siècle (1882; The 20th Century), La Vie électrique (1883; “The Electric Life”), and the particularly ominous and impressive La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887; “War in the 20th Century”). Although Robida’s shrewd extrapolations were created for comic effect, they proved remarkably akin to the 20th century’s reality. In fact, since Robida’s time, science fiction has often proved most prophetic not at its magisterial heights of moral sobriety but at its most louche and peculiar.
Mass markets and juvenile science fiction
Publishing trends brought about an important shift in the development of the genre. The most crucial change in Britain was a decline in the publication of “three-decker” Victorian novels and an accompanying expansion of magazine publication. This adjustment proved highly advantageous to shorter works of science fiction. It brought about a new subgenre, as seen, for example, in George Chesney’s short story The Battle of Dorking (1871). First published in Blackwood’s Magazine, The Battle of Dorking darkly postulated a Prussian defeat of a poorly armed, weak, and unwary Britain and established the military techno-thriller. Chesney used his urgent narrative of the near future to warn against what he perceived as symptoms of Britain’s decline.

Magazine publication was encouraged by an even more pronounced publishing trend that began in the early 1880s. With the development of a cheap process for converting wood pulp into paper and the increasing mechanization of the printing process, inexpensive “pulp” magazines began to deliver stories to a mass audience. During this period in the United States, “dime novels” (shoddily produced pamphlets that usually sold for a nickel) and boys’ adventure magazines proliferated. The stories distributed in these books and magazines, such as Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade, Jr., and His Steam Wonder (1884), often boasted SF elements that appealed to the young reader’s sense of wonder and adventure. While Verne’s influence is evident in them, dime novels lacked both Verne’s knowledge of technology and his literary skill. Senarens’s work, for example, epitomizes the worst aspects of the type: they are poorly written and filled with sadistic racism directed toward Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Mexicans, and Jews.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his serialized story “Under the Moons of Mars” (1912; novelized as A Princess of Mars, 1917; adapted for film as John Carter, 2012), transformed European-style “literary” science fiction into a distinctly American genre directed at a juvenile audience. Combining European elements of fantasy and horror with the naive expansionist style of early American westerns, Burroughs had his hero John Carter outwit various inferior green, yellow, and black Martians. He also marries a red Martian and has a child by her, despite the fact that she reproduces by laying eggs. Burroughs’s hero remained an SF archetype, especially for “space operas,” through the 1950s.

The success of juvenile SF stories inculcated a love of science fiction that culminated in the founding of adult-oriented SF pulp magazines in the 1920s, a circumstance that moved the centre of the genre decisively into American hands.

The “golden age” of science fiction

The previously mentioned Hugo Gernsback, an emigrant from Luxembourg based in New York City, made a living publishing technical magazines for radio and electrical enthusiasts. Noting the growing fondness of his youthful audience for fictional accounts of thrilling technical wonders, Gernsback began to republish the works of Verne and Poe and the early writings of H.G. Wells in great profusion.

Amazing Stories

Gernsback’s magazine Amazing Stories (founded 1926) broke ground for many imitators and successors, including his own later periodicals Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly (later known as Amazing Detective Tales), and a torrent of other pulp publications. This practice soon yielded so much fruit that many people, especially Americans, falsely assumed that Americans had created science fiction.

By 1934 SF readership in the United States was large enough to support the establishment of the Science Fiction League, Gernsback’s professionally sponsored fan organization (with local chapters in the United Kingdom and Australia). Like a kind of freemasonry, SF fandom spread across the United States. Eager young devotees soon had their own stories published, and, as time passed, they became the hardened, canny professionals of the SF pulp world. Literary groups such as New York’s Futurians, Milwaukee’s Fictioneers, and the Los Angeles Science Fiction League argued ideology in amateur presses. Conventions were held, feuds and friendships flourished, and science fiction began its long climb, never to respectability but rather toward mass acceptance.

Another influential figure was John W. Campbell, Jr., who from 1937 to 1971 edited Astounding Science Fiction. Campbell’s insistence on accurate scientific research (he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his B.S. in physics from Duke University) and some sense of literary style shaped the career of almost every major American science fiction writer from the period. As a writer, Campbell is noteworthy for his story Who Goes There? (1938) and its film versions (The Thing from Another World [1951] and The Thing [1982] and [2011]), but he is best remembered as an editor. Many fans refer to Campbell’s early years at Astounding, roughly 1938–46, with its frequent publication of stories by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. Van Vogt, and Theodore Sturgeon, as SF’s golden age.

Certain literary critics countered wittily that the “golden age” of science fiction is the chronological age of 14—the reputed age at which many fans become hooked on science fiction and the all-too-typical literary level of a genre relished far more for its new scientific “ideas” than its literary merits. Nevertheless, even the sharpest critic would have to admit that for all its often juvenile nature—particularly as conceived in the United States—science fiction was a singular source of scientific wonder and discovery that inspired generations of scientists and engineers to pursue in reality what they had dreamed about in their youth.

Only the gargantuan world of Soviet state publishing could match the production of U.S. science fiction. The Soviet promotion of “scientific socialism” created a vital breathing space for science fiction within Soviet society. The genre’s often allegorical nature gave Soviet writers of science fiction many creative opportunities for relatively free expression.

Flash Gordon

Soviet science fiction was broad and deep enough to spawn several subgenres, such as the techno-thriller Red Detective stories of Marxist world revolution and many Cosmonaut space operas. Among its masterpieces were the Constructivist silent film Aelita (1924), based on the 1923 novel of the same title by Aleksey Tolstoy. The film’s imaginative set and costume designs had a strong artistic influence on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). Both Aelita’s design and its scenes of an Earthman leading a Martian proletarian revolt against an oppressive regime were echoed in the 1930s American film serial Flash Gordon. Another notable work of this period was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (written in 1920, circulated in manuscript and not published in Russian until 1952; translated into English as We in 1924), which won a wide readership overseas, though the author’s satiric daring led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin. The book’s depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other two great dystopian novels of the 20th century, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949; films 1956 and 1984).

After World War II, publishers largely abandoned the pulps in favour of paperback books and paperback-like “digests.” By that time, however, science fiction had inspired such passionate devotion that it moved with ease into small specialty presses. Two new digest magazines in particular—The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1949– ) and Galaxy Science Fiction (1950–80)—prospered. Science fiction also grew in popular esteem after the advent of the atomic bomb (1945) and the launch of Sputnik (1957).

Under the editorial guidance of the new SF digests, American science fiction of the 1950s became more sophisticated, urbane, and satiric, with raw technophilia waning in favour of more anthropologically based speculation about societies and cultures. Many books (and film adaptations) from the decade were rife with Cold War-induced fear and paranoia. Perhaps the most representative novel is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960; first serialized, 1955–57), which describes the postnuclear holocaust efforts of a Catholic religious order to preserve knowledge. Another work, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955; films 1956 and 1978), in a clear case of communist paranoia, relates the story of ordinary people being replaced by look-alikes who operate as part of a collective body.

Science fiction films of the period, with a few notable exceptions—such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and Forbidden Planet (1956)—tended to be cheaply produced, juvenile, formulaic films about alien invasions and monstrous mutants. (It was during this era that the Japanese produced numerous Godzilla movies.) In the genre’s fiction, however, the American trio of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury—later joined by Briton Arthur C. Clarke—enjoyed worldwide fame and unmatched popularity during the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. In fact, Anglophone science fiction was dominant during the 1950s and ’60s, though authors from other countries—such as the Polish fantastyka writer Stanisław Lem and the literary Italian Italo Calvino, with his fantascienza—also advanced the genre.

Change was also in the air in Soviet Russia. The political and cultural thaw that occurred during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when restrictions on Russian artists were relaxed, and the Russian-led dawn of the space age caused a dramatic upsurge in Soviet science fiction, including works by Ivan Yefremov, Kir Bulychev, and the renowned doyens of Russian-language science fiction, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A similar surge in Chinese science fiction accompanied the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In fact, at the start of the 21st century, China’s main science fiction magazine claimed a readership of 500,000, dwarfing the circulation of any science fiction publication in the West.