It does matter the genré has its own history, its own legends, its own mythology.
Dark Beginnings
While she doesn’t actually tell us how Victor Frankenstein used science to reanimate dead flesh and organs, Shelley wrote one of the stories that would become an archetype in the science fiction field. The same is true for much of Jules Verne’s work and that of H.G. Wells. They were telling stories, so they only used the backdrop of science for them.
As the Industrial Revolution hit the American mainstream in the Civil War and thereafter, more science crept into regular fiction. The genré of science fiction—and, some argue, the ghettoization of it—came into being with the the publication of Hugo Gernsback’s August 1923 issue of Science and Invention magazine. Here, he tested the waters of devoting an entire issue to what he later would call “scientifiction.”
In April 1926, Gernsback launched the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. For nearly four years, this was the only magazine dedicated to the genré. Gernsback published reprints of Verne, Wells, Poe and others from mainstream magazines, but also started to print original stories. He also introduced Frank R. Paul as cover artist whose great, sweeping art deco images of the future would stay around for many years.
Gernsback lost Amazing through bankruptcy in 1929, but immediately started Science Wonder Stories in June, then Air Wonder Stories in July. He also launched Science Wonder Quarterly the same year.
Gernsback had a lot of firsts in SF, but didn’t always produce the best magazine. He was adamant “scientifiction” should teach science through a thin veil of a story. This could get the reader bogged down.
He did introduce the man Isaac Asimov referred to as “the first supernova” of science fiction when he published E.E. “Doc” Smith’ first universe-spanning novel, The Skylark of Space in the August, September and October 1928 issues of Amazing Stories.
We Are Not Alone Part 1
By January 1930, Gernsback no longer was alone. Clayton Publishing started that month its own SF magazine, Astounding Stories of Super-Science. This magazine had some hiccups in 1932-33 in the depths of the Great Depression, but found its footing with a new publisher, Street & Smith, and—with a name change in 1960—still exists today as Analog Science Fiction-Science Fact.
Gernsback merged Science Wonder and Air Wonder stories into Wonder Stories in 1930. This magazine introduced the world to Stanley G. Weinbaum, Asimov’s second supernova of science fiction.
Toward the end of the 1930s, former “super-science” writer John W. Campbell Jr. became editor at Astounding and took it in a new direction. His demand for great stories with reasonable science and valid aliens launched the SF Golden Age. His best writers were Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt and others. He also introduced the world to L. Ron Hubbard.
Campbell’s dictum was that aliens had to be as smart or smarter than a man, but not like a man. Under his editorship, science fiction got real. No longer were aliens only in the stories to be monsters. The Golden Age really took off in 1939 with stories by Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, Don A. Stuart (Campbell, actually, but with more thoughtful stories than those under his own name), van Vogt, Lester del Rey and Theodore Sturgeon. Of special note are Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line” in the August issue and the reintroduction of E.E. “Doc” Smith with the serial “Grey Lensman” in the October issue. Asimov also made his first appearance in the magazine with “Trends” in the July issue.
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