Science Fiction is a book by Roger Luckhurst.

“Plot:”
In Science Fiction, Roger Luckhurst explores the history of USAmerican and British Science Fiction from the end of the 19th century to the 1990s, though he focusses on the first half of the 20th century. He looks at literary influences as much as political influences, trying to examine where SciFi literature came from.

I enjoyed the book. Especially the parts Luckhurst obviously specializes on and spends most time with are really interesting and he manages to create a very succinct and pretty enlightening historical context for the rise of SciFi. When he starts talking about the more modern SciFi, it stays rather superficial though.

I totally get that Luckhurst kept the modern things shorter: you can’t cover everything in one book, you gotta focus on something and it’s always harder to write about the recent stuff because there’s just not that much distance and historical perspective yet. But I felt like the 80s and 90s would have deserved more in this book. These two chapters were pretty weak – the 90s basically only consist of Ken MacLeod and The X Files (and the lengthy X-Files desciriptions were weird in themselves as the book otherwise only talks about literature and barely mentions other media).

But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t end up with an almost endless to read list after this book. It’s almost embarassing how little classic (and not-classic) SciFi I’ve read and I would want to read almost everything. (Not that my list wouldn’t have been long enough without this book.)

And as I said, Luckhurst does a wonderful job tracing the beginnings of SciFi in the US and Britain, sketching the political situation and tracing the surprisingly different development in those two countries.

Luckhurst also takes a short but interesting look at the feminist SciFi of the 70s which felt like a good starting point for further exploration of the topic, if you are so inclined.

Summarising: a good read, especially for fans of early SciFi.