A few radical opinions:

First: Hugo Gernsback was not the “father of science fiction.” In fact, he was as much a negative influence on the field as he was a positive force. When he founded AMAZING STORIES, genre fiction was on the verge of breaking out of the general fiction magazines. Mystery zines, sports zines, westerns, war stories, fantastic fiction (such as WEIRD TALES) were all appearing for the first time. If Gernsback did not publish the first magazine devoted exclusively to what would later be called science fiction, somebody else definitely would have.

What made Gernsback a negative influence was his “vision” for science fiction. He was not a storyteller, nor was he interested in literary values. What he actually did was bring sf down to the lowest pulp level, crudely-written stories aimed almost exclusively at teenaged boys fascinated with science, which in effect drained away whatever respect sf might have earned from the general reading public had its “founder” had somewhat loftier goals. It took decades of editors such as John W. Campbell, Anthony Boucher, J. Francis McComas, H.G. Gold, Ian Ballantine and Donald A. Wollheim to erase the stigma that Gernsback placed indelibly on American science fiction.

Second: Science is not the core of science fiction. That is a remnant of Gernsback’s belief that the science fiction published in his magazines should have a primary goal of teaching science to young boys. In fact, as science fiction spread to other zines, the scientific aspect became incidental to most stories. Read any issue of GALAXY or FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION in the 1950s to see evidence of this. But the name stuck even when those stories were concerned with many other types of speculation and future history. Science is definitely one aspect of science fiction, but a quick look at the top fifty novels of all time (as voted in LOCUS MAGAZINE a few years ago) reveals that only a small minority of them really revolve around science. Science has no more claim to being the core of science fiction than any other single aspect of a misnamed genre.

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