Today is August 16. This will be a short post because I was in new faculty orientation all day, and my brain is tapioca. I do want to point out the birthdays of two people, Hugo Gernsback and Diana Wynne Jones.
Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) founded the first magazine devoted soley to science fiction, Amazing Stories, in 1926. He had been the editor of Science and Invention and continued to edit it for a few years after he started Amazing.
The fiction he published wasn’t of the highest literary quality. Gernsback favored long descriptions of the science. He was more interested in the technology and gizmos than he was the characters.
That’s not to say he didn’t puiblish some good stories, because from time to time, he did.
But by and large, Gernsback pushed message over entertainment.
But enough of the negative. Let’s focus a bit on the positive.
Hugo Gernsback created the pulp category of science fiction. He called it scientifiction at the time. This soon spawned competitors. That, I think is his true legacy. He opened the door to other editors and other magazines to publish similar stories. Those stories often focused on adventure more than on improving the scientific understanding of the readers.
Until Gernsback published Amazing Stories, science fiction was published in otehr magazines that focused on more general fiction. Often it was called scietific romance. Think Wells, Verne, and Burroughs. There was no publishing category.
We can argue wether this was a good ro bad thing, because science fiction developed bad reputation as being juvennile and unsophisticated. We’ll not get into that here. Entire books have been written on the subject.
Like him or hate him, Hugo Gernsback has cast a long shadow on the field.
I’ve only read one book by Diana Wynne Jones (1935-2011), and that was The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
This was not a novel, nor was it a collection of stories.
Instead, it is written as a travel guide through, you guessed it, Fantasyland.
The book is arranged by topic alphabetically. What the author did was skewer the tropes of fantasy and the (usually) stupid ways authors use them.
The book is hilarious.
It’s also a great writing guide, because it points out things writers do wrong. I would quote fromit, but my copy is, say it with me now, In A Box Somewhere.
Do track down a copy. I have no idea how hard they are to find. But its worth a read just for the laughs. Like I said, the book is arranged alphabetically by topic, so you can pick and choose and read as much or as little as you like at any given time.