Saturday, July 19, 2008

Eoghann Irving recommends some online classics

Eoghann Irving's post titled "The History of Science Fiction: 1900 - 1909" at Solar Flare does a round up of some important classics from the period, along with short commentary & online story links.

I first learned of H G Wells' "The First Men in the Moon" when I read a short remark about it in Arthur Clarke's "Earthlight". But it has been lying around unread. Blame my growing impatience with novel-length stories!

I've already posted on E M Forster's "The Machine Stops" & Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail". Former is an important story in that its tropes are still around & because of some of its prophetic technology; but it's generally a dark story about machine dystopia. Kipling's is now only of historical interest - an early hard sf story that I won't call important.

Incidentally, Ashley Arnold wrote up a satire on Hugo Gernsback in the flash fiction piece titled "Gernsback's Monkeys" some months back - basically about his supposed stinginess towards authors (also commented upon by ... was it Arthur Clark? don't recollect). Hugo Gernsback is a very important figure in the field. Also, Hugo Awards are named after him.

Credits: I found Irving's post via SF Signal.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'll be writing more about Hugo Gernsback a little later in my series. I'm still trying to decide if I just need to devote a whole article to him.

I'm learning a lot from the research I'm doing for these early years.

I'm also toying with the idea of gathering all those stories and formatting them into something more friendly for downloading and reading. A basic HTML template of some sort.

Anonymous said...

Well - my knowledge of Gernsback is sketchy - bits & pieces that keep coming up. Collecting it in a place should be useful. Other important figure is John Campbell - but he's from a far future (compared to the period you are currently into).

I guess a single page to download major classics will be handy.