Publishing and the Science Fiction Canon
The Case of Scientific Romance

Re-appraises 'scientific romance', from which science fiction has grown, situating it in the material culture it was produced in.

Adam Roberts (Author)

9781108708890, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 November 2018

75 pages
17.6 x 12.3 x 0.4 cm, 0.097 kg

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.

Introduction
Notes on the concept of a canon
Scientific romance
The nineteenth-century book market
The conditions of development 1880–1910
The extraordinisation of ordinary voyages
Science fiction's visual cultures
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Classic science fiction [FLC], Science fiction [FL], Fiction & related items [F], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]