A History of Science Fiction:
The Age of Wells and Burroughs
The Age of Wells and Burroughs (c. 1890-1930): dominated by
the scientific romances of H.G. Wells and the prodigious output
of Edgar Rice Burroughs
* H.G. Wells
* Edgar Rice Burroughs
* Contemporaries of Wells and Burroughs
The Age of Wells and Burroughs
Dominated by H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, literature
in the period between 1890 and 1930 is marked by the urge to
escape from urban culture.
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) spanned the great gulf
between the mid Victorian period when he was born (in the year
dynamite was invented) and the atomic age which he predicted
and lived to see.
He wrote what he called "scientific romances."
Wells can be said to have invented most categories of science
fiction:
* time travel--The Time Machine (1895)
* interplanetary travel--The First Men in the Moon (1901)
* alien invasion--The War of the Worlds (1897)
* future war--The World Set Free (1914)
* sinister biological experiments--The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896); The Invisible Man (1897)
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Burroughs (1875-1950), author of some 70 books, was one of
the commercially successful authors of the 20th century.
He wrote what would today be called science fantasy.
Though probably best known today as the author of Tarzan of
the Apes (1912), A Princess of Mars (1912), his first published
story, introduced Barsoom (Mars) and brought interplanetary
adventure into science fiction to stay.
At the Earth's Core (1914) introduced Pellucidar, where the
hollow Earth lit by a miniature sun harbors savage tribes and
fantastic creatures.
Burroughs also wrote:
* Pirates of Venus (1932) and sequels
* The Moon Maid (1923) and sequels
* The Land That Time Forgot (1924) and sequels
Brian Aldiss describes Burroughs and Wells as representing
the two opposing poles of modern fantasy:
* Wells teaches us to think--he stands at the thinking pole
* Burroughs teaches us to wonder--he stands at the dreaming
pole
* Mary Shelley stands at the equator between them.
According to Aldiss, at the thinking pole stand great
figures.
There are as yet no great figures operating at the dreaming
pole, but there are good writers.
In science fiction today the dreaming pole is currently on
the ascendent.
Contemporaries include:
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). a follower of Edgar
Allen Poe, wrote mostly short stories. His work appeared
primarily in Weird Tales.
He represents a retreat into the irrational
Robert E. Howard
Howard (1906-36) a writer of sword and sorcery, published
the adventures of Conan the Barbarian
H. Rider Haggard
Haggard was a practitioner of the lost race novel:
* King Solomon's Mines (1885)
* She (1887)
Bram Stoker
Stoker's Dracula (1897), is the inspiration for vampire
novels such as the work of Anne Rice
Arthur Conan Doyle
Though best known for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries (a
concept lifted directly from the works of Edgar Allen Poe) Doyle
also wrote The Lost World (1912), about stone age tribes living
in a crater of a volcano in the Amazon Basin
Franz Kafka
Kafka (1883-1924) wrote "The Metamorphosis" (1916), a
surreal novella about a man who wakes up one morning to discover
he has become a dung beetle.
Yevgeney Zamyatin
The Russian Zamyatin wrote We (1920), a dystopia, that is,
a work about a society that develops completely opposite from
a utopia
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman, best known for her often-anthologized short story
"The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote Herland (magazine publication,
1915; book 1979), about an island inhabited by a race of
parthenogenic (i.e., able to reproduce by themselves) females
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