Publishing the Science Fiction Canon
Subtitle: The Case of Scientific Romance
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2018
Language: eng
Number of pages: 75
ISBN-13: 9781108708890
Subjects: Science fiction, history and criticism; Publishers and publishing, history
Description: Science fiction was being written throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it underwent a rapid expansion of cultural dissemination and popularity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. This Element explores the ways this explosion in interest in 'scientific romance', that informs today's global science fiction culture, manifests the specific historical exigences of the revolutions in publishing and distribution technology. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and other science fiction writers embody in their art the advances in material culture that mobilize, reproduce and distribute with new rapidity, determining the cultural logic of twentieth-century science fiction in the process.