#23 = Volume 8, Part 1 = March 1981
Editorial Introduction
The title of this special issue is deliberately ambiguous. Under the heading
"Science Fiction Through H.G. Wells," we have gathered pieces on or by Wells
together with various others that deal in significant part with SF or SF-related materials
antedating the period in which he began publishing his "scientific romances." To
the latter category belong the reviews of books on utopian fiction and on Verne as well as
Michael Tritt's comparison of Byron and Asimov, Manfred Nagl's argument for recognizing
"national peculiarities" in (for his example) German SF of the 19th century and
afterwards, and Marc Angenot and Nadia Khouri's formidable bibliography of fictions about
human prehistory.
Complementing articles that have appeared hitherto in the pages of SFS--especially
Carlo Pagetti's on The First Men in the Moon (in No. 21) and David Lake's on The
Time Machine (in No. 17), the three lead-off essays in this special issue open new
approaches to, and provide relatively novel readings of, Wells's SF. They emphasize his
revisionary process, color imagery, and synoptic tendency, respectively.
The analysis of Star Begotten signals a growing interest in Wells's later
fiction, an interest which Scheick has been largely instrumental in fostering. "Woman
in Primitive Culture," by contrast, is approximately equidistant from the
chronological midpoint of Wells's literary career in the opposite direction (as it were).
That review-article, which had never hitherto been attributed to Wells, is reprinted here
for the first time where it may serve as a kind of introductory illustration to the
prefatory comments on the "prehistoric tale" that immediately follow it.
Aside from the items more or less directly pertinent to SF through Wells, two other
contributions of major importance will be found in these pages. The first is a translation
of the last chapter of Stanislaw Lem's Fantastyka i Futurologia (1970), a
treatise long regarded (by those with the linguistic capabilities to have access to it) as
the most weighty and significant theoretical discussion of SF there is. The reader should
find its concluding chapter illuminative not only on matters pertinent to the philosophy
of science and to SF generally, but also in respect to what is going on in the worlds of
Lem's own fictions. The second essay to which we would call particular attention, on the
Brauns of Magdeburg, represents Darko Suvin's debut in a new SFS role. Apropos of it, we
wish to express our regret that Darko has felt compelled to resign his editorship of this
journal. At the same time, we voice our grateful pleasure at his having agreed to stay on
as a Contributing Editor, in which capacity he will, we hope, continue to make available
to us his comprehensive and perspicacious expertise in all things relevant to SF.
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