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2
The Foundations of Science Fiction |
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The foundations of science fiction were constructed in the science-fiction magazines created by various entrepreneurs from the mid-1920s to 1950. Today the influence of those magazines has been diminished by alternative methods of publication: hardcover and paperback books, original anthologies, films and television, comic magazines, even comic strips, which seem to be making a comeback after the original Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon days. |
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Even contemporary writers who are scornful of the magazines, of the Gernsback ghetto and the Campbell cabal, are writing fiction influenced by the concepts created in the magazines and by the conversations carried on by means of stories and letters and articles that led to a kind of consensus view of the future and the conventions by which it could be described. Reaction has developed, but reaction itself is a kind of tribute to the power of earlier visions. |
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Science fiction was built on individual works as well: on E.E. "Doc" Smith's galaxy-spanning spaceships and John W. Campbell's mightiest machines, on Murray Leinster's first contacts with the unknown and Robert Heinlein's future history, on A.E. van Vogt's supermen and Isaac Asimov's robots. And on Asimov's Galactic Empire. |
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The Foundation Trilogy is a basic work upon which a vast structure of stories has been built. Its assumptions provided a solid footing for a whole city of fictional constructions. The way in which it was created, then, and the way in which it came to prominence may be useful examples of the process by which science fiction was shaped in the magazines. |
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The Trilogy, which actually consists of five novelettes and four novellas, has received many tributes to its importance. The 1966 World Science Fiction Convention awarded it a Hugo as "the greatest all-time science fiction series." Donald Wollheim, in his The Universe Makers, |
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