This morning, we woke up to a curious Twitter storm started by an unsuspecting offender: the NYT Time Books section.
Turns out they had gone and decided that none other that H.G. Wells had invented the science fiction genre. Which would be fine… except he published The Time Machine a mere 77 years after Mary Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818.
It could also be argued, relatively easily, that Margaret Cavendish was the first science fiction writer, not Shelley. Her 1666 novel, The Blazing World, centers around science and travel to other worlds. And then there’s all these books.
Either way, it’s not Wells. But, do enjoy the memes and tweets about the whole thing.
With Jules Verne and the publisher Hugo Gernsback, H.G. Wells invented the genre of science fiction. https://t.co/x126fHhDYo
— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) November 20, 2021
1. Do not mess with book people.
2. We give this Tweet an F.
3. Sleep tight!
4. The parties were good… not that good.
5. Well, that‘s not weird at all.
6. While shaking that aforementioned heart, no less.
7. Come on, NYT! You can do it!
8. This is what happens when you use Bing.
9. :Gets more popcorn:
10. AHEM.
11. What were you saying, Byron?
12. Shelley, Frankenstein, and Frankenstein’s Monster would all like a word with you. BRB gonna go get our Ouija board.
Excuse you? pic.twitter.com/asWXMFbMny
— Claudia Lomelí (@TheClauLomeli) November 20, 2021
13. The moment she decided to write her novel.
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Not sure how to find the actual Twitter thread, NYT Books article about the first science fiction being Mary Shelley or Jules Verne, but it was neither. Johannes Kepler invented science fiction with, ” Somnium sive Astronomia lunaris” or “The Dream of Lunar Astronomy” in 1634.
Fair comment, Victor, but no single person ‘invented’ SF. Even experts are still trying to define it. If you want to look at the earliest examples of proto-Sf they are ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and ‘The True History’ by Lucien, which predate Kepler by a long, long time..
Know your SF history in detail before trying to score points with it, I say : Well, Brian Aldiss centred on Mary as the creator of Modern SF by the early 1970s in his book ‘Billion Year Spree’ and it’s widely accepted in SF circles that her novel is the first true SF book, so those in the know have NEVER erased her. There is no ‘tradition’ of erasing her, just ongoing debate about who was the parent of SF, she is just being used as an example of ‘erasure’. It’s a bit like the idea that no-one knew who Mary Anning was until Tracey Chevalier’s novel and the film version, which is nonsense as Anning was in every dinosaur book I owned as a kid in the 1960s and afterward. Also, there is an edition of ‘Frankenstein’ (the original 1818 text- most people only know her later 1831 revision, published after Percy died) that shows which parts of the manuscript were in Percy Shelley’s hand – around 20-25% of it. There seems little doubt that it was a collaboration, like it or not. However, Shelley was preceded in the UK by a long way by Margaret Cavendish (‘The Blazing World’, 1666). As an SF expert, I agree with Aldiss on Shelley’s primacy, but with the caveat that Percy co-wrote it. If you want to talk about originators though, common texts cited from antiquity include The Epic of Gilgamesh and Lucian’s ‘True History’. I’m all for women in SF, but I am fed up with commentators who have not studied the subject continually claiming women are excluded from it as it is not true. Even in the 1930s ( scant years after the genre was named and codified in magazines), C L Moore and Leigh Bracket made major contributions. By the late 1960s, the debate was over with the rise of Ursula K LeGuin and Joanna Russ. Young SF fandom is currently going through a phase of virtue signalling, taking every opportunity to show how PC they are, when the fact is that gender and race were addressed massively in the genre between 1955 and 1975. This tweet is typical of someone who really, really does not know about SF.- Stephen E. Andrews, author ‘100 Must Read Science Fiction Novels’ (2006)