ABSTRACT
The genre of science fiction is widely considered to have started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in Great Britain in 1818. However, as Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin note in a brief history of science fiction, “When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, science fiction had neither a name or any recognition as a separate form of literature [and t]his situation lasted for a century” (7). Such generic ambiguity and critical retrospection mark the field of science fiction studies. In a more comprehensive history of science fiction, Edward James highlights the sharp rise in English language texts dealing with the future from the 1850s onward. He states that “[t]hroughout the [19th] century, most of the respected (male) writers of fiction in the United States had dabbled in what we could call science fiction” (Science 33) 1 . However, “[s]f was first named, and first became a genre, in the science fiction magazines published in the United States before the Second World War” (E. James, Science 66). In such a literary context, early writers of science fiction were not consciously writing within the genre. In fact, many wrote with other genres in mind. For example, when Edgar Rice Burroughs began his writing career in the 1910s, he wrote adventure fiction for all-fiction magazines. We simply classify many of his texts as science fiction from a contemporary critical vantage point. ERB merits special attention from Edward James because he is “probably the most influential of the writers who began in the pulps” (Science 45). Given the lack of generic formation before the first decades of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that “[m]any of the important names in the early science fiction magazines had already written science fiction for several years in the general fiction pulps” (ibid). The science fiction texts were simply published alongside other popular adventure 2tales—the westerns of Zane Grey, the African adventures of H. Rider Haggard, and the northern stories of Jack London, for example. 2
