ABSTRACT
The years 1895 and 1926 mark monumental events in the history of sf: the publication of The Time Machine, H.G. Wells’s first important work of fiction, and the inauguration of Amazing Stories (1926–2005), edited by Hugo Gernsback, the first magazine devoted exclusively and explicitly to publishing sf (or “scientifiction,” as Gernsback then called it). But there is no more than a loose connection between the two events, and certainly no developmental or progressive history that leads us from Wells’s artistic achievement to Gernsback’s entrepreneurship. In fact, Gernsback’s pulp milieu bears only a slight resemblance to the publishing context in which Wells worked, and Gernsback’s one novel-length piece of fiction, Ralph 124C 411: a romance of the year 2660 (1911–12), entirely lacks the craft and thoughtfulness that make The Time Machine important. The history of sf in this period is diffuse, even if one simplifies the task by concentrating on English-language fiction, as I will do here. Writing that history involves the retrospective gathering together of scattered materials that find a clearly delineated focus and identity as early sf largely because of Gernsback’s commercial project.
