I have been working with the idea that what I call genrification began at around the time of the Great War, definitely by 1919 when some of the first specialty pulp titles were published. Some other events of that seminal year included the Eddington experiment, which set the stage for moral relativism as the central concept of twentieth-century politics and belief systems, and the arrival of J.C. Henneberger (1890-1969), future co-founder of Weird Tales magazine, in Indianapolis, that magazine's first home.
The first science fiction magazine was Amazing Stories, and it was first published a century ago, in April 1926. The editor and publisher was Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967). I don't think Gernsback was a trained scientist and perhaps not even a trained engineer. He seems to have been "self-taught," a descriptor applied to old-time weird fiction authors by a more recent member and theorist of the so-called "New Weird." (The implication is that writing is better left to academically trained authors.) Gernsback used his own word, Scientifiction, as a label for the kind of fiction that he published. The term science fiction wasn't used in print until 1929.
The Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have lasted from 1938 to 1950 or so. That age began when John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971) assumed the editorship of Astounding Science-Fiction. Campbell and Astounding were known for their so-called hard science fiction. (Say what you will, psychic powers are not science fiction, let alone any hard science fiction.) Gernsback and Amazing were forerunners of Campbell and Astounding, but science fiction wasn't fully formed in the 1920s and probably not in the early 1930s, either.
If the Golden Age of Science Fiction ended in the 1950s, then the British (or Anglo-American) New Wave of the 1960s may have been the first sub-genre of science fiction to come along after the Golden Age. There have since been other sub-genres, including cyberpunk, which is supposed to have grown out of or succeeded New Wave science fiction. The roots (or, to use a mechanistic metaphor, wiring) of cyberpunk can be traced to New Wave. William Gibson (b. 1948) and his novel Neuromancer (1984) are exemplars of cyberpunk. Coincidentally, Mr. Gibson was born in the year in which George Orwell completed 1984 and published his novel in the year in which 1984 is set.
Previous to Neuromancer, Mr. Gibson had a short story, "The Gernsback Continuum" in Universe 11 (1981). It was later reprinted in other magazines and books. "The Gernsback Continuum" is an essential story, at least for my purposes. It's a fascinating meta-science-fictional work, a science fiction story that is fully aware of the history, imagery, and culture of science fiction. The "Gernsback" part of the title refers to the editor of Amazing Stories and--in part--an association that the first-person narrator of the story makes between Gernsbackian science fiction and the historical imagery of Nazis and fascism. He in fact has visions of what are called "semiotic ghosts" caused by his knowledge and acute awareness of American popular culture, art, and design of the past.* The "Continuum" part of the title refers, I assume, to an unbroken link made within the story between fiction and fact, or between the science fiction of the past and the in-story real world of the present. During these past several weeks, I have been using the concepts of continuity and continuums in a different sense, but these are close enough for my purposes.
There's another phrase used in "The Gernsback Continuum." This one is "raygun Gothic." I don't associate the bright, new, shiny, perfect, futuristic or forward-looking imagery of Gernsbackian science fiction with anything at all Gothic. "Raygun Gothic" would appear a non sequitur, an oxymoron, or a self-contradictory phrase. Science fiction and Gothics (my pretty new word) don't seem to go together. The rayguns and rocketships of the science fiction novel would appear anachronisms among the rattling chains and ruined castles of the Gothic romance. And yet here they are together in a single phrase. Now recall that one of its reviewers called Neuromancer "decadent," a descriptor that we would think of as exactly opposite of science fiction. Gernsbackian and Campbellian science fiction are ascendant in our imaginations and not at all decadent. It is in weird fiction, supernatural horror, and related genres or sub-genres that we encounter decadence. If there is decadence--if there is an emphasis on the past--if there are Gothic or Romantic elements in a science fiction story, they would seem out of place in that ascendent genre. So is a Gothic or Romantic science fiction possible?
To be continued . . .
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*Maybe semiotics was in the air: Walker Percy's book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, which includes a lot on semiotics, was published in 1983.
Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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