The Road to Science Fiction by James Gunn

Author:James Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 1977-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

Anticipations of the Future

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was a major figure in American (and European) literature, and a major figure, as well, in the developing literature of science fiction. Neurotic, tragic, alcoholic, he was also a genius who excelled in poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism. Some critics say that Poe founded science fiction.

Sam Moskowitz, who gives the credit for the founding of science fiction to Mary Shelley, wrote in Explorers of the Infinite (1963): “The full range of Poe’s influence upon science fiction is incalculable, but his greatest contribution to the advancement of the genre was the precept that every departure from norm must be explained scientifically.”

Poe was one of the three writers Hugo Gernsback pointed to when he tried to describe what he was going to publish in the first science-fiction magazine, his Amazing Stories (1926).

Poe tried to live by his pen, and much of what he wrote was hasty or commercial. Critics of our technological age who recommend a return to simpler, more congenial times might reflect upon the experience of authors throughout the greater part of man’s history: in most periods authors have been imprisoned because of their writing or had to be cautious of what they wrote or published for fear of prison, or were unable to support themselves by their art because few could read and fewer yet had the money to spend for literature.

Seldom, until the middle of the nineteenth century, was it possible for a person to find financial success in writing who did not have an independent income or the support of a patron.

Poe, the orphaned son of actors, became the ward of a Richmond merchant, John Allan. Their relationship was troubled by Poe’s dissipation and gambling debts at college, and Allan’s lack of sympathy for Poe’s ambitions. They quarreled, Poe left home, and the rest of his career was a story of struggle, jobs lost or abandoned, a tragic marriage, and at last, literary success. He served some time in the army, tried to get through West Point and lasted less than a year, published three youthful volumes of poetry, and tried to live by hack writing.

His first short stories were published in 1832, his first pseudoscientific story, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” in 1833, winning a prize offered by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor.

He found various editorial positions with the small-circulation literary journals of his day, performed brilliantly as an editor, but lost each job through drinking and personal problems. In 1836 he married a fourteen-year-old tubercular cousin, Virginia Clemm; she died in 1847.

Finally he achieved recognition with the publication of “The Gold Bug” in 1843, another prize-winning story, and “The Raven” and a major volume of poetry in 1845. Collections of his stories were published beginning in 1840. His critical articles and reviews, including a major statement in his review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, were beginning to shape a new theory of poetry and of short-story writing that would be a significant contribution to the history of literature.

In 1849 he

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