My name is Brian Stableford. This is a lecture on science fiction before 1900.
In order to understand the gradual emergence of text that might be called science fiction,
by which I mean speculative fiction based on or reacting to the advancement of scientific
knowledge, it's useful to bear in mind certain features of the environment preceding and
surrounding that emergence. The environment of literary text is inevitably composed largely of
other literary texts, but there are other circumstantial factors that are not to be neglected.
In terms of the literary environment, several genres existed before the advent of science
fiction, into which texts of that sort might be slotted. By far and away the most important of
them was utopian fiction, defined in the widest possible sense as fiction's set in imaginary
places. Such fiction's anti-date writing, featuring extensively in myth, legend and folklore,
as well as in anecdotal traveler's tales. Utopian fiction in that broad sense is a useful genre for
accommodating pure flights of the imagination, satirical transfigurations of society and models
of improved societies, sometimes in combination, but it suffers inevitably not only from an
implication of unreality, but of exaggeration and incipient absurdity. The taint of the tall tail
constituted an obstacle to plausibility that serious science fiction would be forced to struggle to
overcome. The ultimate in flagrant absurdity, where traveler's tales was concerned, was
constituted even in antiquity by accounts of trips to the moon, a location that became a
depository for all kinds of deliberate nonsense. This tradition posed particular problems for
writers who became interested in representing the moon as the kind of world that astronomers had
discovered it to be, and considering seriously the idea that humans might one day be able to
transport themselves there. Even without the latter consideration, the notion that the moon
was a world and the nature of its relationship to the earth became an important topic of controversy.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, when Copernicus' heliocentric model of the solar system came into
conflict with the Aristotelian model that had been accepted into the doctrine of the Catholic
Church via Thomas Aquinas, when the sophistication of astronomy by new mathematical and obstacle
instruments began to accumulate evidence in favor of the Copernican model, it brought scientists
like Galileo into conflict with the papacy. The astronomer John Kepler attempted to make
the Copernican theory more easily graspable by reporting astronomical events as they would be
observed by an observer on the moon, adding an ingenious passage on the manner in which
life on the moon might be adapted to a very long diurnal cycle. The manuscript in question was
published posthumously as Somnium. In order to relocate the observer in question, Kepler had
him dream that he was carried to the moon by a demon, by which he meant a spirit of knowledge,
not a minion or the devil. That was perhaps a slightly unfortunate choice in that the other
major environmental factor producing an important and difficult obstacle for would-be science
fiction writers to overcome was a subtle implication of diabolism that had harmed
many scientific pioneers during the Renaissance. Having lost much of the legacy of classical
knowledge and philosophy during the Middle Ages, Western Europe was able to embark upon a process
of rediscovery following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the importation of many
works that had been preserved by Copius there, which were naturally of great interest to Western
scholars. The potential for such rediscovered ideas and their possible further extension
to come into conflict with religious dogma was, however, considerable, so the entire process
seemed to the devout to be a flirtation with heresy, and a distinct tendency developed for
ambitious scholars to acquire a reputation posthumously, if not while they were alive,
as diabolists, sometimes supported by apocryphal attribution of books of black magic.
Examples include Roger Baker, Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee and Michael Scott,
all of whose reputations were tainted with wizardry after they were dead and gone.
The tradition produced a highly influential literary text in the Faust book,
published in 1587, and the iconic figure of Faust overshadowed all scholars thereafter,
a haunting that eventually came to seem even more pertinent in the case of scientists.
All three of the principal threads of utopian fiction are cleverly entwined in Jonathan
Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a text that devotes particular attention to parody in
the endeavors of scientists, especially astronomers, and thus instituting a tradition of anti-science
fiction, whose reliance on similar motifs and narrative strategies has always resulted in
its confusion with, and perhaps its subsumption within, the genre whose ambitions it opposes.
Given the importance of skepticism and theoretical descent to the advancement of science, however,
the confusion is not entirely inappropriate. Unfortunately, scientists seemed very vulnerable
to this kind of satirisation, and the cost of shaking off the taint of diabolism from their
viewpoint was often a simple displacement into slightly sinister absurdity. The gradual
replacement of the popular assumption that scientists might be bad, by the assumption
that they might be mad, did them no favors. Another relevant subgenre pioneered by classical
philosophers, the Kant Philosophique, was revived in the 18th century as a sceptical and satirical
medium, and it played host to a number of significant ancestors of science fiction.
The most notable example is Voltaire's Micromagas, published in 1752, which brought
visitors to Earth from Sirius and Saturn in order to laugh at human narcissism.
Defame de la Roche's Amulek, published a year later, was a bold attempt to include an earnest
theory of reproduction and embryology, within a broader satirical account of the transmission
of life through the universe by means of spores. Unfortunately, working without the aid of powerful
microscopes, Defame lacked essential data regarding the process of reproduction,
and his theory turned out to be wrong. In general, the satirical aspect of Kant Philosophique,
which were mostly sceptical, tended to be directed at adversaries of science rather
than against scientists, and they helped to begin a slow process of redress.
Many French utopian fantasies and Kant Philosophique, along with several translations from
the English, were reprinted in a 36-volume series of Voyage Imagineers, Produced by Charles
Garnier in 1787-89. That attempt to define and exemplify an interesting genre might have been
much more influential had it not been interrupted by the French Revolution. Even so, it provided
a vital landmark for later writers in helping to give them consciousness of a useful generic
framework and some primitive methods of handling such narrations. Camille for Marianne included
many of the series' constituent works in the pioneering history of cosmological speculative
fiction that he constructed in a book called Les Mands des Maginaires and Les Mands Reales,
published in 1864. And the precedent set by the series probably encouraged Jules Verne's
publisher P.J. Hetzel to market the writers' works collectively under the heading of Voyage
Extraordinary Voyages. The problems of adapting traditional narrative frameworks to the work
of serious speculations became more obvious when the philosophy of progress developed in Friends
Before the Revolution and supposedly illustrated by the Revolution made the future an imaginative
realm ripe for exploration and perhaps for literary exploitation. Louis-Abastion Mercier's
pioneering account of a future Paris transformed by a crucial alliance of scientific advancement
and social reform, L'Andre-Mille-Cattressant-Carrant, the year 2440. The book was first published in
1771. It was unfortunately weakened by Mercier's obligation to represent the vision as a dream,
there being no other way to get access to the future for literary frameworks.
The problem of designing and developing appropriate narrative frames for scientific
conflicts and speculations about the possible shape of the future inevitably became increasingly
acute thereafter throughout the 19th century and was not easily solved. The production of
more adventurous literary works in a general sense was greatly enhanced by the spread of
romantic movements throughout Europe which celebrated the creative power of the imagination
in all its aspects. The sequence of such movements began in Germany where one of its primary products
was a new version of Faust published in two parts in 1808 and 1832 by J. W. Goethe which
by opposing the identification of science with diabolism unfortunately also served to reemphasize
it. That lingering hint of diabolism is powerfully displayed in E.T.A. Hoffman's The Sandman
published in 1816 which became one of the most widely reprinted and most influential texts of
the period in its portrayal of the mechanician Capelius and his construction of a lifelike
automaton that rather sinister portrayal outshone less melodramatic works produced by the German
romantics such as Julius von Voss's Futuristic Fantasy E.N.I. published in 1810 and it helped
to add a sinister note to the idea of human automaton whose echoes extended well into the 20th
century. The Gothic elements of The Sandman are closely akin to those of the even more influential
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley the wife of one of the leaders of the British romantic movement.
Frankenstein became the most influential of all early works of science fiction
and made a highly significant contribution along with The Sandman to the ongoing shift of perspective
in which the suspicion of diabolism attached to scientists was slowly giving way to the suspicion
of madness. The concept of madness had itself been undergoing a gradual evolution no longer seen as
a matter of divine affliction or demonic possession. Insanity was increasingly coming
to be viewed as a medical problem amenable to clinical analysis and potential treatment.
The scientist Tacit Faustian packed with the devil thus became entirely metaphorical
but without losing its sinister aspect became a matter of unhealthy obsession rather than
unholy ambition but it was considered no less dangerous for that by its detractors.
Frankenstein had the additional advantage in providing a model for future writers of employing
a basic story arc that was both convenient and endlessly repeatable. In the formula a scientist
makes a discovery or creates an invention which produces unforeseen horrible consequences thus
requiring both the innovation and its author to be destroyed providing in the process a satisfactory
sense of narrative closure. That formula remains so tempting in its simplicity and neatness
that it remains commonplace even today in spite of the fact that its generalisation implies that all
innovation is implicitly evil thus providing yet another ideological obstacle for literary
champions of science to overcome or at least a challenge. The British romantic movement which
produced Frankenstein also produced a handful of other pioneering works although perhaps fewer
than might have been expected given the personal relationship between some of the leading British
scientists and some of the leading romantic poets. The scientist Humphry Davy produced a remarkable
cosmic vision in the course of his last book The Consolations of a Philosopher sorry Consolations
in Travel published in 1830 which attempted to envisage life adapted to the conditions of
existence on other worlds in the solar system. The poet turned scientist Robert Hunt included
a similarly extravagant but entirely earthbound vision in his novel Panthea which is almost
certainly written before his more famous book Propagandist Appeal for More Celebration of the
Poetry of Science. The latter book has the distinction of having prompted the poet William
Wilson to call for the development of a new genre which he actually called science fiction
in a book called A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject called the 1851
but there was no significant response to its appeal at all. The French romantic movement was
only slightly more productive of proto-science fiction at least to begin with although its first
leader Charles Nodier did produce a short series of futuristic fantasies satirising the idea of
perfectibility at the heart of the philosophy of progress by means of images of a technologically
advanced future. The principal components of the series are Herloblu and Leviathan Long both
published in 1833. Nodier's friend Felix Bodin whose opinion of the philosophy of progress is
much less jaundiced produced a manifesto of his own for Le Romain de Lavenir the novel of the
future the year after the publication of Herloblu and Leviathan Long and he attempted to lay the
groundwork for a new genre of futuristic novels partly by providing an exemplar of his own but he
was unable to finish his own novel as it fell prey to all the traps afflicting the possibility
of making that kind of fiction viable. Nodier's efforts were however extrapolated in a different
direction by Émile Sousvestre in a sceptical account of Le Romain Delquille-Sarrat the world
as it will be. Sousvestre flatly contradicted the idea that technological progress facilitated
social progress and argued that the reverse is the case thus producing the first of many works in
which the future seems oblique hostile and direly uncomfortable locale because of the use of new
technologies to serve the age-old vices of greed and political oppression. Other environmental
factors came into play in this period however most importantly the spread of literacy which
not only increased the size of the polental literary audience but also broadened it out in social terms
the 1840s became the first great era of popular literature at least in those countries that were
quickest off the mark in trying to promote universal literacy France being the the leader
that period saw a boom in the production of new periodicals in France which opened up a vast new
marketplace for writers of all kinds including such soldiers of the Romantic movement as Joseph
Merry who was one of the first writers to produce a range of stories distributed across the spectrum
of what would later become the science fiction genre. He wrote lunar fantasies futuristic fantasies
including post-catastrophe story and produced an early exercise in alternative history
unfortunately for Merry and many others the development of the new marketplace suffered
a drastic interruption in 1848 because of the revolution of that year the interruption was
then further complicated in 1851 by Louis Napoleon's coup d'état and the subsequent introduction of
rigid censorship the combined economic and political effects more or less paid to adventurous
writing for a period of at least five years. In the meantime however the other nation that
was quick to launch a crusade for universal literacy was the USA where periodical publications
similarly boomed and opened up an inviting marketplace in spite of the geographical
difficulties inhibiting distribution in America the USA had not had much of a romantic movement
at least by comparison with the major European nations but it did have two writers of considerable
individual significance in that respect in Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne both writers
had strong gothic tendencies which are very evident in Hawthorne's most important science fiction
story Rappaccini's Daughter which contains significant echoes of The Sandman but Poe was
much more versatile producing exemplars over an even wider range than Merry including the
significant interplanetary fantasy Hans Fahl first published in 1835 but revised in 1840 as
the unparalleled adventure of one Hans Fahl also the apocalyptic fantasy The Conversation of
Iris and the Charmian the extravagant visionary fantasy The Mesmeric Revelation which provided
the seed for the much more elaborate book length Eureka and several other unprecedented works
Poe was convinced that Hans Fahl was the inspiration for the most famous hoax of the
19th century when the New York Sun ran a series of articles in 1835 detailing discoveries supposedly
made by the astronomer Sir John Herschel using a new telescope in South Africa the series began
with moderate revisions of lunar geography but eventually featured the supposed discovery of a
civilization of batwing humanoids widely reprinted and widely believed by the credulous
the moon hoax prompted other hoaxes of a similar kind including Poe's own balloon hoax and also
prompted numerous works of fiction all four of Merry's lunar fantasies are effectively supplements
to the moon hoax a corollary of the rapid spread of literacy in France and America was a considerable
enthusiasm for the popularization of science which was seen as an urgent mission in France
because the tradition bound education system focused on the learning of Latin and Greek still
largely dominated by the church of course was very slow to take modern science aboard
and popularizers of science were keen to explore other means other routes of not merely delivering
scientific information to the general public in a palatable fashion but also inspiring young people
with a sense of the potential and poetry of science in that course of that crusade all
the major figures in the popularization of science in France produced some science fiction
most notably the astronomer Camille Flamarian who experimented with numerous narrative methods
in the course of his career. Flamarian's first book of that sort was a collection of journalistic
pieces Reissi de la Infini one of which the cosmic vision Lumen first drafted in the 1860s
but published in its full version in 1887 was gradually further expanded into the most elaborate
and extravagant work of its kind thus far attempted it's a fuss both of its key influences
Davies' Consolations in Travel and Poe's Eureka. Flamarian's foremost rival as a popularizing
journalist Henri de Parville produced a newspaper hoax of his own in a series of articles in the
pie describing the discovery in America of a Martian mummy embedded in a meteorite and
the deliberations of the scientific commission appointed to investigate the find. The series was
represented in book form as an habitant la planet Mars translated into English as an inhabitant of
the planet Mars. A third participant in the French popularization boom Samuel Henri Berto produced a
four volume set of what he called Fanté, Z, C and Tfique but only a handful of them was speculative
and nobody else took up that label. One of the items that Berto reprinted however was the much
earlier story of Y. R. Jocial Voyage to Heaven the most thoughtful account so far produced of the
special mental qualities advantageous to scientific work. The protagonist's qualities
which make him such a great scientist are taken as symptoms of madness by his neighbors and
eventually his the neglect of his neighbors and the cruel neglect of fate eventually drive him
perhaps not to madness but at least to using his discovery of the original airship to try and bid
farewell to the earth forever. It was the fashionability of the popularization of science
in the 1860s in France that launched and shaped Jules Verne's career. Hetzel persuaded Verne to
turn a series of articles on aeronautics into an adventure novel and then offered him a salary to
produce wordage on a regular basis. Hetzel tried to suppress Verne's more adventurous tendencies
not only refusing to publish his futuristic account of Paui Avanti M. Sierkler which he wrote
in probably in 1863 but instructed him to bury it permanently and never to publish it at all.
It was eventually rediscovered and published in 1994. Hetzel did however early in Verne's
career publish Vaiage au Santa de la Terre, Journey to the Central of the Earth, de la Terre
à la Lune, From the Earth to the Moon, and Varnilleur Soulemaire, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea
between 1863 and 1870. After that however Hetzel tightened the reign even further and only allowed
Verne's ever exuberant speculative imagination to break out very occasionally. It's probably largely
due to Hetzel that the genre of Vernean fiction inspired by Verne's success which gave rise to
its own magazine in the Journal de Vaiage found in 1877 remained relatively restrained only making
use of hypothetical technical innovations as means of transport to exotic terrestrial locales
where people could have perfectly conventional adventures. Like France the USA suffered a
significant setback in the development of the periodical medium and in its hospitality to
literary experimentation when the Civil War broke out in 1861 and it wasn't until some years after
the war's end that the publication of popular fiction and at least the generalization of popular
fiction to deal with more imaginative topics picked up again. The major development of that
kind in America in the 1870s was a boom in dime novels aimed at the bottom end of the literary
marketplace and that did take aboard a component of Vernean adventure fiction but it remained
primarily focused on the domestic genres of the western and detective fiction.
The American Civil War also however displayed a number of new military technologies which were
eagerly noted by some European observers and they helped cast a new shadow over images of the future
by making the likelihood that future wars would be much more devastating than wars in the past
seemed not only more plausible but quite inevitable.
While the forward-thinking European nations began to rearm in expectation of such a war
a boom began in future war fiction which was spearheaded in Britain by the enormous impact
of George C. Chesney's account of the battle of dorking in which the Prussian war machine
makes mincemeat of England's defenders. Chesney's immediate cue of course was the facile triumph of
exactly that war machine in the Franco-Prussian war which provided yet another interruption to
the development of speculative fiction in France. The idea that Germany might try to do to Britain
what it had done to France obsessed British politics and British futuristic fiction for
the next half century. In Germany itself of course the reaction to the triumph was quite different.
It ushered in a new confidence not only in the might of the newly consolidated nation state
but also in the technology that had facilitated its triumph. It's therefore not surprising that
the most comprehensive manifesto yet for a genre of scientific fiction was produced in Germany in
1878 in the introduction to Kurt Lassrich's Bilder aus der Zukunft. The short stories in the
collection provided far more convincing exemplars of how that genre might be developed than had
Felix Bodin's abortive novel of the future. Lassrich went on to practice what he preached
in a series of further works most notably the massive utopian novel Alves vie Planetin
on two planets but yet again his manifesto for a new genre rallied very little support
from other writers only a handful of others attempted to dabble in it.
The most convincing attempt in France to follow up Bodin's prospectus for futuristic fiction
was Albert Rabeida's highly imaginative account of Levantine M. Sierkla published in 1882.
But the shadow of the Franco-Prussian war still weighed heavily upon France and upon Rabeida
and his brief but heavily illustrated account of Laguerre in Levantine M. Sierkla war in the
20th century overshadowed its companion piece and Rabeida never did manage to liberate his
technological optimism from his anxieties about the destructiveness of new weaponry.
The steady accumulation of examples like Rabeida's particularly in France did help to cement the
idea that there was an hour genre of fiction dedicated to the exploration of technical
possibilities and their possible impact on social life but there was no consensus anyway
as to what it ought to be called. In Britain the mathematician C. Howard Hinton produced two
collections under the label scientific romances the first of 1886 which enjoyed little success
in themselves in their own day but they did help to popularize that term in Britain.
In France the editor of the weekly popular science magazine La Science Illustre Louis Figuier who
had not only inspired Verne's Voyage au Saint de la Terre but had prompted the revision of Verne's
novel when he issued a new and revised edition of the work on which it was based. As editor of
Science Illustre, Figuier introduced a fiaton section to the magazine under the rubric
Roman C. Antifique in 1889. Because of the flexibility of the word Roman that can be
translated into English as scientific romance or as the scientific novel or just as scientific
fiction. Scientific fiction is presumably what Figuier meant. At any rate Figuier actively
promoted the genre of the romance C. Antifique for the next 10 years but never quite managed
to establish the label firmly as a recognized publishing category nobody else took of its use.
In the USA Edgar Fawcett produced a manifesto for a new genre which he called realistic romances
in the preface to his novel The Ghost of Guy Thirl in 1895 but that went completely un-echoed
nobody else ever used it. The last 15 years of the 19th century however witnessed drastic changes
in the literary marketplace which permitted a new boom in literary experimentation. The development
of new technologies of printing and paper manufacture prompted a new surge in periodical
publication and fervent competition between the new magazines founded therein. That experimental
phase didn't last long and science fiction was not in retrospect a particularly successful
experiment in commercial terms but the phase lasted long enough and was successful enough to
provide the genre with a solid platform. In Britain the initial focus of futuristic fiction
in the new periodicals was future war fiction which rapidly expanded from relative sobriety
to the wild extravagance of George Griffith's The Angel of the Revolution published in 1893
a lurid account of the exploits of heroic terrorists abundantly armed with airships,
submarines and high explosives. Where Griffith led many others followed but by far away the
most significant writer to exploit the boom in England was H.G. Wells who replicated and
extrapolated Edgar Allan Poe's determination not only to explore the vast range of possibilities
being opened up by contemporary science but also to investigate the utility of a range of narrative
frameworks by means of which they could best be represented. A series of experiments of that kind
permitted Wells to convert an awkward series of fictionalized essays The Chronic Argonauts first
published in 1888 into the most significant endeavor in the science fiction genre yet attempted
The Time Machine published in 1895 which popularized a new method of opening the future to
serious speculative scrutiny which although not very plausible in itself had the advantage over
dreaming of seeming to be much more solid, much more scientifically plausible. Hardly anyone
new at the time of or for the next hundred years that Wells had been anticipating the literary use
of a time machine by the Spanish diplomat Enrique Gaspar in a novel published in 1887 but Gaspar
had used it only to go back in time to examine history and many of the other people who used
time machines thereafter went back in time rather than into the future. More important than The Time
Machine per se however was the more general strategy that had produced it. Wells took a newly
robust attitude to the business of providing an apologetic jargon to explain the access of narrative
viewpoints to interesting hypothetical scenarios. Similar ingenuity was further deployed in a host
of short stories and four key novels The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the
Worlds and The First Men in the Moon all of which provided crucial reference points and models for
the new genre and mapped out the generic blueprint print eventually taken over and rapidly vulgarized
by American pulp science fiction. The importance of Wells' forceful literary method was immediately
realized by Louis Figuier who made unprecedented lavish provision for Wells' translations of
Wells' short fiction in La Cience Illustre but that didn't unfortunately succeed in giving his
genre label the boost it needed. Partly because the other French publication that gave you more
extravagant hospitality to Wells' translations, the Mercure de France refused to use the label.
In Britain the label Scientific Romance had a greater success in journalistic writings about
Wellsian fiction and among the other writers who rallied to the Wellsian cause but Wells himself
did not like it and his initial rejection of the term scientific romance caused sufficient
confusion to prevent its firm establishment thus leaving the now established genre without a
universally acceptable label until well into the 20th century and leaving the way clear for American
cultural imperialism to impose the ultimate decision as to what science fiction would be called.
As soon as the 20th century had begun, moved by the earnest passion of his strong socialist
convictions, Wells gave up wide-ranging exploration of the infinite range of future
possibility and exploration of new narrative frameworks in favour of much less interesting
quest to discover and comment upon the particular form that the future might actually take if people
were prepared to institute the necessary political reforms. Even so, between 1888 and 1901,
Wells had single-handedly laid the foundations for the distinctive methods of modern science fiction
which nowadays routinely employs the narrative techniques he developed and others developed in
the same way, godly seasoned by melodrama for the most part, to reinvigorate the frameworks
of utopian fiction and the conferless afique far more effectively than anybody had contrived before
Wells. Wells was by no means alone in popularising futuristic and speculative fiction in the last 15
years of the century, even in England, where George Griffith and other future warmongers lent him
useful, if largely, unappreciated support. In the USA, meanwhile, the best-selling book of the period
was Edward Bellamy's Futuristic Utopia, looking backward, 2000 to 1887, which provoked a host
of imitations and ideological replies not only in America but in Europe, the most significant of them,
perhaps being Ignatius Donnerler's extravagant Caesar's Column, which, of course,
flatly contradicts Bellamy's notion of evolution towards socialism by suggesting that in actual
fact the evolution of contemporary society is towards greater inequality, the monopolisation
of technological resources by the rich, which will inevitably lead in the end to a violent revolution
unprecedented in its destructiveness. In France, Camille Flovarian, who was still active, combined
the influence of Wells, which impressed him greatly, with that of Poe in La Fan de Monde,
originally written for Figuet's Féoton in La Cience Illustre, and he was assisted in breaking the
new ground by a number of younger writers, perhaps most importantly, J.H. Rony, author of Les
Zippes-Hus and An Entremand. The cause of the new genre was also assisted, and its future is assured
by some spectacular new discoveries in science, which opened up new imaginative scope, both for
future possibility and for the elaborate development of the kind of facilitating devices whose narrative
use Wells had pioneered, especially the discovery of x-rays by William Runjan in 1895. In that same
year, wireless telegraphy was perfected by Marconi, and in the following year, 1896, Henri Becquerel
discovered radioactivity, JJ Thomson discovered the electron. In consequence of those four are
unexpected, but imaginatively stimulating discoveries, rays and radiations of various kinds
became the favorite devices of science fiction, capable of excusing almost any extravagant
imaginative invention, at least in a tokenistic fashion, kind of tokenistic fashion, that was by
now required or convenient. From that time on, from 1896 onwards, all the environmental and
literary foundations of the genre were solidly in place, and the sky was no longer any kind of
imaginative limit. Thank you.