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Fan, whole no. 4, September 1945
Page 6
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SCIENCE-FICTION IN BOOKS By - Samuel D. Russell- Science-fiction, that branch of fantasy dealing with the future and/or with extrapolations of scientific facts or theories, is rather poorly represented in book form, partly because it came into being only recently as a distinct literary form and partly because it demands of its authors a fortuitous combination of scientific and literary aptitude that seldom occurs, though it is becoming more frequent nowadays. England has long produced many more science-fiction books per year than America, which concentrates more on magazines; but at present British books are so difficult to obtain that little mention of them will be made here, despite their generally high quality. The father of modern science-fiction is, of course, H. G. Wells, whose earliest and best work will be found in his collections, Seven Famous Novels(or Scientific Romances) and The Famous Short Stories of H. G. Wells; later novels by the man who introduced all the basic science-fictional ideas in use today are When the Sleeper Wakes, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, The Shape of Things to Come, Star-Begotten, and The Holy Terror. His successor today, inferior in literary ability but more advanced in philosophical depth, is William Olaf Stapledon, whose novels of mutations and the far future of our race, though mostly very hard to obtain in this country, are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in science-fiction; they are Last and First Men, Last Men in London, Odd John, Star Maker, Darkness and the Light, Sirius, and Old Man in New World. And, of course, for those who do not mind a 19th century leisureliness of style, there is the famous and prolific Jules Verne, some of whose more fantastic works are From the Earth to the Moon, Hector Servadac, and A Journey Into the Interior of the Earth. The subject of the next human mutation, best treated by Stapledon in Odd John, has alos been gone over from wholly different angles by J.D. Beresford in The Hampdenshire Wonder and by Stanley G. Weinbaum in The New Adam. With the increasing destructiveness of modern wars has come concern over the possibility of a New Dark Ages, depicted graphically in John Collier's Full Circle, Edward Shank's The People of the Ruins, Richard Jefferies, AFter London, and Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die; and the related theme of a great natural catastrophe, End of All Men, R.C. Sherriff's The Hopkins Manuscript, George Allan Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, Jack London's The Scarlet Plague, F. Wright Moxley's Red Snow, Susan Ertz's Woman Alive, M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, and D.E. Stevenson's A World in Spell. The problem of the totalitarian state is posed in Jospeh O'Neill's Land Under England, London's The Iron Heel, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Milo Hastings' City of Endless Night. Karel Capek, Czechoslovak leading writer, has an undertone of social satire running through each of his novels and plays: War With the Newts(intelleigent newts as slaves), Krakatit(powerful explosive), The Absolute at Large(atomic power), R.U.R.(revolt of android robots), and The Makropoulos Secret(elixir of immortality). Visions of the wonders of future scientific civilizations are provided in Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality, E.V. Odle's The Clockwork Man, Granville Hicks' The First to Awaken, and H.P. Trevarthan's World D, while more idealistic utopias are presented in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, W.H. Hudson's A crystal Age, and Vachel Lindsay's The Golden Book of Springfield. Erle Cox's Out of the Silence and Pierrepont Noyes' The Pallid Giant deal with the forgotten civilizations.
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SCIENCE-FICTION IN BOOKS By - Samuel D. Russell- Science-fiction, that branch of fantasy dealing with the future and/or with extrapolations of scientific facts or theories, is rather poorly represented in book form, partly because it came into being only recently as a distinct literary form and partly because it demands of its authors a fortuitous combination of scientific and literary aptitude that seldom occurs, though it is becoming more frequent nowadays. England has long produced many more science-fiction books per year than America, which concentrates more on magazines; but at present British books are so difficult to obtain that little mention of them will be made here, despite their generally high quality. The father of modern science-fiction is, of course, H. G. Wells, whose earliest and best work will be found in his collections, Seven Famous Novels(or Scientific Romances) and The Famous Short Stories of H. G. Wells; later novels by the man who introduced all the basic science-fictional ideas in use today are When the Sleeper Wakes, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, The Shape of Things to Come, Star-Begotten, and The Holy Terror. His successor today, inferior in literary ability but more advanced in philosophical depth, is William Olaf Stapledon, whose novels of mutations and the far future of our race, though mostly very hard to obtain in this country, are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in science-fiction; they are Last and First Men, Last Men in London, Odd John, Star Maker, Darkness and the Light, Sirius, and Old Man in New World. And, of course, for those who do not mind a 19th century leisureliness of style, there is the famous and prolific Jules Verne, some of whose more fantastic works are From the Earth to the Moon, Hector Servadac, and A Journey Into the Interior of the Earth. The subject of the next human mutation, best treated by Stapledon in Odd John, has alos been gone over from wholly different angles by J.D. Beresford in The Hampdenshire Wonder and by Stanley G. Weinbaum in The New Adam. With the increasing destructiveness of modern wars has come concern over the possibility of a New Dark Ages, depicted graphically in John Collier's Full Circle, Edward Shank's The People of the Ruins, Richard Jefferies, AFter London, and Cicely Hamilton's Lest Ye Die; and the related theme of a great natural catastrophe, End of All Men, R.C. Sherriff's The Hopkins Manuscript, George Allan Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, Jack London's The Scarlet Plague, F. Wright Moxley's Red Snow, Susan Ertz's Woman Alive, M.P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud, and D.E. Stevenson's A World in Spell. The problem of the totalitarian state is posed in Jospeh O'Neill's Land Under England, London's The Iron Heel, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Milo Hastings' City of Endless Night. Karel Capek, Czechoslovak leading writer, has an undertone of social satire running through each of his novels and plays: War With the Newts(intelleigent newts as slaves), Krakatit(powerful explosive), The Absolute at Large(atomic power), R.U.R.(revolt of android robots), and The Makropoulos Secret(elixir of immortality). Visions of the wonders of future scientific civilizations are provided in Michael Arlen's Man's Mortality, E.V. Odle's The Clockwork Man, Granville Hicks' The First to Awaken, and H.P. Trevarthan's World D, while more idealistic utopias are presented in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, W.H. Hudson's A crystal Age, and Vachel Lindsay's The Golden Book of Springfield. Erle Cox's Out of the Silence and Pierrepont Noyes' The Pallid Giant deal with the forgotten civilizations.
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