Hugo Gernsback and the Invention of the Science Fiction Megatext

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Hugo Gernsback and the Invention of the Science Fiction Megatext
January 13, 2011
Robert Bee
Republibot.com

Hugo Gernsback is simultaneously one of the most revered and despised figures in the history of science fiction. He has been called "the father of science fiction" and the Hugos, the genre's most prestigious awards, are named after him. He was the guest of honor at the 1952 Worldcon. Gernsback’s achievements include founding the first SF magazine, Amazing Stories, naming the genre “scientifiction” (missing the eventual term by a syllable), starting the first reader letter columns, and organizing the first fan organization, the Science Fiction League, which encouraged the spread of fandom and eventually led to fanzines and webzines like Republibot.

Gernsback wanted scientifiction to be a forward thinking genre that educated the public in the tremendous future promised by science and technology. For Gernsback, SF contained a message that taught us that science and technology could create a glorious future and allow problem-solving humans to ameliorate the ills of existence. In the first issue of Amazing Stories, Gernsback defined scientifiction as “a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” Gernsback wanted writers to pad their stories with extensive scientific fact to educate as well entertain their readers. Gernsback believed SF would become the most important genre of modern literature because it was best able to predict and understand scientific and technological change. He even argued for decades that SF writers should be able to patent the gadgets they describe in their stories. Gernsback’s optimistic theories about SF and his faith in science and reason remain a common approach to SF even today, even if many of his ideas, particularly the patent notion, would be considered naïve or quaint.

Yet many histories of the genre portray him as the villain in SF history, the man who dragged the genre into the ghetto and turned it into a subliterate pulp enterprise, published within the pages of crumbling magazines with embarrassing covers of tentacled aliens carrying off beautiful screaming women in torn dresses. When SF became a pulp genre, literary critics refused to take it seriously, and even some fans found it embarrassing to read the pulps with the gaudy covers in public. If only Hugo had not published Amazing Stories, a critical account might read, SF would have just been part of the literary mainstream; after all, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville wrote fantastic fiction without losing their literary credentials. Furthermore, Gernsback was a thief just interested in money; he either ripped off his writers or refused to pay them on time. For a good example of these critical accounts one can read the attacks on Gernsback by the prominent critics Brian Stableford and John Clute.Part of the reason for these critical accounts seems to be a desire to rewrite history and forget the distasteful pulp roots of SF. The British Stableford and the Canadian Clute both dislike the strongly American accounts of SF that trace the genre through the pulps; Stableford in particular likes to point to the British Scientific Romances of Olaf Stapleton, H.G. Wells, and John Gloag as sources for early SF (see Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950).

Alas, these critical historical accounts, partly motivated by nationalism, neglect to consider the enormous benefits the genre has received from the largely American invention of specialized magazines, writers, readers, and conventions. Every generation of writer, American and otherwise, has learned from the previous generation until the genre spawned an immensely complicated specialized vocabulary as well as writing techniques about the future and technology. The genre’s vocabulary has become so sophisticated and extensive that the Oxford Press published Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary that defined and provided the history of words coined within SF. Many writers who grew up reading SF and thinking of it as a separate form of writing would never have published, or at least would have published something vastly different if there were not separate magazines and a section of the bookstore dedicated to the genre. Without a separate science fictional genre there would still be magic realists like Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar; there would even be dystopias and utopias as well as an occasional mainstream novel like The Time Traveler's Wife, but there wouldn’t be a genre dedicated to a sustained discourse about the future with its own vocabulary and tropes worked out by thousands of writers and readers over the course of decades. Heinlein would not have produced his future history; Asimov would not have “fixed-up” the Foundation Trilogy from magazine short stories; and