20th Century Science Fiction

Science fiction is the literature of change. More precisely, science fiction is the kind of literature that most explicitly and self-consciously takes change as its subject and its teleology. This essential presupposition holds as true for the earliest works to explore the new vantage point afforded fiction by scientific and technological developments, works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, as for the genre’s most recent runs through …

…who have more extensive knowledge of the science-fiction megatext, a kind of chicken-and-egg proposition that seems much more obvious and redundant than it really is, since the megatext for science fiction is arguably broader and more varied than for any other literary genre or mode. Science fiction, more than other literary genres, is itself intensely processual; in science-fiction the dynamic interplay among writers, audiences, and conventions have operated at higher and higher rates of change.