Well, that whole model of the “history of SF” is, I think, ahistorical. More, Kepler, Cyrano, and even Bellamy would be absolutely at sea with the codic conventions by which we make sense of the sentences in a contemporary SF text. Indeed, they would be at sea with most modern and post modern writing. It’s just pedagogic snobbery (or insecurity), constructing these preposterous and historically insensitive genealogies, with Mary Shelley for our grandmother or Lucian of Samosata as our great great grandfather. There’s no reason to run SF too much back before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback coined the ugly and ponderous term, “scientifiction,” which, in the letter columns written by the readers of his magazines, became over the next year or so “science fiction” and finally “SF.” Ten years before or 30 years before is all right, I suppose, if you need an Ur period. It depends on what aspect of it you’re studying, of course. But 50 years is the absolute outside, and that’s only to guess at the faintest rhetorical traces of the vaguest discursive practices. And in practical terms, most people who extend SF too much before 1910 are waffling.
Look. Currently our most historically sensitive literary critics are busily explaining to us that “literature” as we know it, read it, study it, and interpret it today hasn’t existed more than 100 years. Yet somehow there is supposed to be a stable object, SF, that’s endured since the 16th century—though it only got named in 1929…?
That’s preposterous.
Now, there’ve been serious writers of SF ever since SF developed its own publishing outlets among the paraliterary texts that trickled out on their own towards the end of the 19th century and that, thanks to technical developments in printing methods, became a flood by the end of World War I and today are an ocean. Some of those SF writers, like Stanley G. Weinbaum (1900 35), were extraordinarily fine. Some of them, like Captain S.P. Meek (1894 1972), were unbelievably bad. And others, like Edward E. Smith (1890 1965), while bad, still had something going. But what they were all doing, both the bad ones and the good ones, was developing a new way of reading, a new way of making texts make sense—collectively producing a new set of codes. And they did it, in their good, bad, and indifferent ways, by writing new kinds of sentences, and embedding them in contexts in which those sentences were readable. And whether their intentions were serious or not, a new way of reading is serious business.
Between the beginning of the century and the decade after the Second World War—by the end of which we clearly have the set of codes we recognize today as SF—there are things of real historical interest to study in the developing interpretative codes and the texts that both exploited them and revised them in the pulp SF magazines and, later, in the SF book market, hardcover and paperback. But most academic critiques that equate 17th , 18th , and 19th century didactic fables with 20th century pulp texts just mystify history and suppress those historical developments, both in terms of what was seriously intended and what was simply interesting, however flip.
I’ve never proclaimed my work SF, proudly or humbly. I assume most of my published fiction is SF—and I assume most of my readers feel it is, too. But that’s like a poet assuming she writes poems, or a playwright assuming he writes plays.