"Grokking" Science Fiction

Walter E. Meyers. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. 257 pp. Patricia S. Warrick. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980. 282 + xvii pp. Gary K. Wolfe. The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. 250 + xvii pp. There are many good reasons why students of American literature and culture should take note of science fiction. In the present context I need simply point out that not only is genre science fiction essentially an American inven- tion (whatever illustrious antecedents might be adduced) but it is an invention which has made a considerable impact on the world at large. Although there is a "respectable" British and European tradition of "mainstream" "science fiction" which predated or arose in blissful ignorance of the various American pulp magazines which fostered genre science fiction (such as Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories and John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction), that tradition consists of only a handful of texts. Science fiction as we know it today (that is to say, basically American and British science fiction) was shaped, directly or indirectly, by those tawdry American magazines. It is this body of work, which appeared from roughly 1930 onwards, that forms the subject matter of the three books under review. Walter E. Meyers speaks for all three authors when he observes that "The material surveyed here is chiefly American, with a large helping of British fiction, a blend typical of the genre as a whole" (p. 3)

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