My interest in science owes a lot to a form of literature my brothers introduced me to at a very early age, and which quickly became my favorite: science fiction (SF for short).
Before science fiction was called that there were two writers who nevertheless get included in the genre: France’s Jules Verne and England’s H. G. Wells. The late Victorian era (although somehow I doubt the French called it that) was a time of burgeoning technology and exploration. Verne played on the public’s interest in technology and told stories of fantastic journeys to the moon, beneath the seas, to the centre of the Earth, and even Around the World in 80 Days.
Wells, on the other hand, was far less concerned with technology and more with the problems of society. His famous story The Time Machine was a parable concerning future relations between the working and ruling classes. And The War of the Worlds, while postulating life on Mars (not original with Wells) was actually more of a warning about the true insignificance of man’s existence in an uncaring universe.
Despite their influence, neither Vernes nor Wells is considered the “father of science fiction.” That title belongs to Hugo Gernsback.
Gernsback was a pioneer in the fields of electricity, radio and television. He sold America’s first home radio kit in 1904 ($7.50 at Macy’s, Gimbels and Marshall Field’s). When the government regulated radio, putting him out of business, he repackaged the left-over parts as kids’ electronics kits. He also founded New York radio station WRNY, where some of the world’s first regular TV broadcasts began in 1928.
But most importantly, he moved into publishing, founding the world’s first radio magazine, Modern Electrics, in 1908 — and, in 1911, filling up a few empty pages with a piece of fiction, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660.
His readers loved it so much that he began publishing more such stories, and in 1925 the Ralph 124C 41+ series even appeared as a novel (despite lines such as: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Three shots rang out! Each more horrible than the last!”). The bad prose didn’t matter: Ralph 124C 41+ was just an avenue for Gernsback’s scientific predictions, which he tossed like some of his electrical devices tossed off sparks.
Microfiche, skywriting, solar power, holograms, fax machines and even aluminum foil were all part of Ralph’s daily life — but certainly not yet part of the daily lives of Gernsback’s readers. And then there was the “parabolic wave reflector” that Ralph used to locate a space flyer: today we know it as radar.
The success of Ralph 124C 41+ led Gernsback to found, in 1926, a new magazine devoted exclusively to what he called “scientifiction”: Amazing Stories. Gernsback didn’t care about literary style (as evidenced by “Bang! Bang! Bang!”, etc.); he was interested in scientific accuracy, in prediction, in (to borrow a singularly appropriate phrase from several decades later) “turning people on” to science and technology.
And it worked. Many of the children who read Amazing Stories under the covers late at night went on to become scientists, engineers or science fiction writers. Ray Bradbury says Gernsback “made us fall in love with the future.” The late Isaac Asimov, a scientist, a science fiction writer and the world’s greatest popularizer of science, was the one who called Gernsback “the father of science fiction.”
Amazing Stories remained in existence until just a few years ago. Over the decades, its pages and the pages of many other science fiction magazines and novels have seen stories on everything from the impact of global communication to space travel (of course!), overpopulation, computerization, air pollution, nuclear holocaust, sexual role-playing, censorship, dehumanization in a technological society, and on and on.
Today, science fiction is a huge and hard-to-define genre, with room in it for everything from the “hard” SF, the rigidly scientific, technologically oriented fiction which Hugo Gernsback promoted, to “soft” SF dealing more with characters, relationships and societal concerns — or, if you like, “Vernesian” and “Wellsian” SF.
Overall, though, I’d wager SF is still influencing young people to see science as a playground for the imagination and not just a dry collection of facts. I know it influenced me that way. It’s one reason I’m writing this column.
SF and science owe a lot to Hugo Gernsback, who died in 1967. In their own ways, both have honored him. Science has named a crater on the moon “Gernsback.” Science fiction, meanwhile, hands out awards every year for the best new work in the field.
They’re called Hugos.
