Compares what writers over the centuries have written about an imaginary future with the reality revealed by time.

This is the first of three volumes that chart the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. This first volume looks at the exuberant years of the pulp magazines. It traces the growth and development of the science fiction magazines from when Hugo Gernsback launched the very first, Amazing Stories, in 1926 through to the birth of the atomic age and the death of the pulps in the early 1950s. These were the days of the youth of science fiction, when it was brash, raw and exciting: the days of the first great space operas by Edward Elmer Smith and Edmond Hamilton, through the cosmic thought variants by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and others to the early 1940s when John W. Campbell at Astounding did his best to nurture the infant genre into adulthood. Under him such major names as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon emerged who, along with other such new talents as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, helped create modern science fiction. For over forty years magazines were at the heart of science fiction and this book considers how the magazines, and their publishers, editors and authors influenced the growth and perception of this fascinating genre.

Journey through time and space with this graphic novel history of the science fiction genre.

This will be the basic tool for researchers studying the 100-year history of science fiction, fantasy, and weird fiction magazines. Reference Books Bulletin

A truly astonishing, illustrated history of Science fiction, covering fantasy, and horror, with forays into crime, mystery and the gothic. Using timelines, online links, illustrations, posters, movie stills, book covers, and more, this amazing new book propels us into the well of modern imagination, from its roots in Frankenstein, through Verne, H.G. Wells, the late gothic and weird horror of Lovecraft to the mass market sensationalism of the Pulp magazines. The Pulps then invoked a new generation of writers (such as Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch) of the Golden Age before many transitioned to screenwriting for the movies and early TV (Psycho, Star Trek, Twilight Zone), inspiring, in turn, the invasion of superheroes, gigantic spaceships, and dystopian landscapes onto our data-streaming tablets and computers. The book explores the interplay between great writers, (Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke) and story-telling directors (Kubrick, James Cameron, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, George Lucas) who create powerful Sci-Fi, reflecting and challenging the developments of technology, science and society. Each have played a major role in this all-consuming, speculative form of world-building, from its early manifestation as a shocking literary event, to the mass market sensation is today.

Presents a chronological survey of this genre from the beginnings of modern science and technology to the present.