IV.

Science-Fiction Magazines

The characteristically American type of science fiction was at first published almost entirely in magazines. The authors of magazine science fiction emphasized technical accuracy and plausibility above literary value and sometimes above characterization. The mass magazines that developed in the 1890s published many stories of science, and the pulp fiction magazines of the turn of the century included many stories of romance and wild adventure, such as those written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Garrett P. Serviss. In 1926 Hugo Gernsback, a Luxembourg emigrant who became an American editor, publisher, inventor, and author, founded the first science-fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He believed that fiction could be a medium for disseminating scientific information and creating scientists; he published and wrote stories with this purpose in mind. An example of his writing is Ralph 124C41+, first serialized in his popular science magazine Modern Electrics in 1911. Gernsback also created a name for the new form, “scientifiction”, which he changed in 1929, with the founding of Science Wonder Stories, to “science fiction”. In 1937, when John Wood Campbell, Jr., became editor of Astounding Stories, the magazine began to feature a new type of science fiction. As an author, especially when writing under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart, Campbell had already added mood and characterization to the technical and prophetic aspect of science fiction. As an editor, Campbell helped to encourage other writers to produce science fiction of literary merit and fostered what has since been called “the golden age” of science fiction.

Later magazines included Fantasy and Science Fiction, founded in 1949 by the American authors and editors Anthony Boucher and Jesse Francis McComas, and Galaxy Science Fiction, founded in 1950 by the American author and editor Horace Leonard Gold. In these magazines, emphasis shifted more towards literary, psychological, and sociological preoccupations, with some loss, however, of scientific content.

Beginning in the mid-1960s a new concern for humanistic values and experimental techniques emerged. Calling itself the “new wave”, it entered science fiction primarily through the English magazine New Worlds and was typified by the British writers Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard and the American writer Harlan Ellison. The new wave preferred to call what it wrote “speculative fiction”, as in, for example, The Infinity Box (1975) by Kate Wilhelm. Much of this type of fiction was published in anthologies of original work, in particular Ellison's anthologies beginning with Dangerous Visions (1967).

In the 1980s a new type of science-fiction writing, called cyberpunk literature, was developed. Cyberpunk authors portrayed decentralized societies dominated by technology and science. Their stories emphasized technological detail, and were characterized by intricate plots and a style that mirrored the confusing and dazzling worlds they represented. Cyberpunk literature first appeared as short stories published in magazines such as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction (founded 1977) and Omni (founded 1978). The first cyberpunk novel is considered to be Neuromancer (1984), by American writer William Gibson, who also wrote the cyberpunk novels Count Zero (1986), Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), and Virtual Light (1993). Other cyberpunk writers include Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix, 1985; Islands in the Net, 1988); John Shirley (Eclipse, 1985); and Pat Cadigan (Fools, 1992).