Early Twentieth-Century Science Fiction: The Pulps

Abstract

The previous chapter argued that early twentieth-century Literary Modernism was fascinated by the cultural discourse of science and therefore produced a large amount of SF, but tended to dramatise scientific and technical developments as a negative technê rather than an open-ended epistēmē. But at the same time as self-consciously elitist Modernists were yearning for a mystical shibboleth they believed lost, a wholly new mode of literature was flourishing, one that found in technologies a liberating epistemological Will-to-Power: mass culture.