Andrew Adams: (To Lynne and Michael Damian Thomas) "A Brief Summary of Science Fiction Publication History, or Why I Feel Connected to Radical Feminists, Incendiary Racists, and People Not Even Born Yet"

A Brief Summary of Science Fiction Publication History, or Why I feel Connected to Radical Feminists, Incendiary Racists, and People Not Even Born Yet

By Andrew Adams

                Short science fiction and fantasy is a form of media that is inherently entrenched in a metacognitive discussion of the community that publishes it. This may seem self-evident. You could easily claim that all media is tied to the community that publishes it. You’d be right! That said, short science fiction is uniquely involved simply because there is a higher magnitude of genre-specific discussion surrounding and involving short science fiction.

                This trend is easy to understand when you take a historical perspective. While science fiction has had a long and varied history — see Verne, Wells, and Shelley — it experienced a clear boom in 20th century America. This could be explained by a number of competing and intertwined hypotheses, but whatever the cause, two major eras arose that helped drive science fiction to become the powerhouse of literature that it is: the Pulp Era, beginning in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, and transitioning into the Golden Age of Science Fiction in 1937 when John Campbell gained control over Astounding Science Fiction and Fact. For more about the actual history of these eras, check out this super detailed entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

                There is something very important about these two transition dates: they are linked to magazines. Early science fiction was built on the backs of a dozen or so magazines that published science fiction. This was not a particularly innovative business model. There was a particular trait, though, about these science fiction magazines that was new. Gernsback, unlike any other American editor, began to publish in only one genre — science fiction. James Gunn, in his seminal anthology The Road to Science Fiction, called the fanbase that arose around Amazing an "enthusiastic ghetto." (You can totally read parts of it on Google Books, by the way. All hail Alphabet!) By engaging in this group through features like “Letters to the Editor,” Gernsback created a cohesive community of readers that were as engaged in the content of their stories as they were in the discussion of their stories. Perhaps most amazing of all is that this community never went away.

                This is the part of the grand story of science fiction where I come in. This is not to say that I come in when Gernsback first published Amazing, but that would be cool. No, this is where I come in because I am the beneficiary of this history of metastory analysis. My first exposure to science fiction was an old red book called “Hugo Winners.” It was (and still is?) a collection of short stories and novelletes, all of which won the Hugo Award. There are some really good stories in that book, ranging from the immensely soft science fiction of Daniel Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon” to the complicated and rarely questioned physics of Larry Niven’s “Neutron Star.” Perhaps my favorite part of that book, though, are the two introductions written by Isaac Asimov. In it, he up the context in which these stories were written. Without that background, there are so many elements likely to slip under the nose of the reader. Why did a story reference a character or species that was tangential at best? Oh, easy. It was published in a different issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Nods like that, necessary in periodical publications, make readers – myself no exception – feel at home in a community of similarly interested people. We get to be in an in-crowd that simply isn’t possible with novels published independently of other writers.

                So I’ve covered how short stories in sf originated as a necessary form of publication, how the community formed around that medium, and how I got hooked into that club of readers. That, though, is just the beginning. Science fiction publication continues in this wonderful tradition with magazines that are keeping up with changing media trends like Apex, Uncanny, and Tor.com. The tradition of making short science fiction more than just stories – I think the cornerstone of the sf community – is also being upheld. Uncanny, for example, publishes nonfiction on the subject of sf almost as frequently as they publish actual sf stories! What’s even better is that many of these nonfiction pieces (like this, this, this, and this) are dedicated to opening the doors to the sf community even wider. It’s this rich culture of inclusivity, history, and community that’s the reason I read short sf and honestly, why I think more people need to.