History And Experience Of SF

We can summarize the history of sf by listing who wrote what when. However, each of us experiences sf from an arbitrary point in that history. Thus, in 1956, I was not yet reading about Nicholas van Rijn in "Margin of Profit" or about the Nomads in Star Ways. What I was reading that far back was British comic strips in which Jet Ace Logan explored the Solar System and Dan Dare returned from his first extra-solar expedition. (A colleague said, "I hate to say this, sir, but the whole of Space Fleet thinks Dare's gone too far this time!" but a bus driver said, "I'm betting on Danny Boy!") In 1951, when Captain Flandry began his career, I was not reading anything yet.

In the 1950s, I read a Classics Illustrated comic strip adaptation of HG Wells' The Time Machine and, in the early 1960s, read The Time Machine itself and Poul Anderson's Guardians of Time, a beginning and a culmination of time travel fiction, in my opinion.

In the 1950s, I knew that Superman came from Krypton and that Micky Moran became Marveleman but not that Billy Batson had become Captain Marvel. I was just too young to remember that missing link between Supes and MM. (Which Poul Anderson novel references Superman and why?)

For a long time, our sf writers were alive and we met them at Cons but Wells was from a different era when a publisher's heading above a list of titles beginning with The Time Machine was not "Science Fiction" but "Mr. Wells has also written the following fantastic and imaginative romances:" Now, the generations have moved on and we are in the twenty-first century, the future.