One of the darlings of the Gernsback magazines was author, Clare Winger Harris (1891-1968). She may be the first official “fan-girl” of that era. (C. L. Moore was the darling of Weird Tales but SF fans often ignored that magazine to their own peril.) Harris wrote eleven stories beginning with “A Runaway World” (Weird Tales, July 1926) but her Gernsback premiere was the long story “The Fate of the Poseidonia” (Amazing Stories, June 1927). Her last was “The Ape Cycle” (Science Wonder Quarterly, Spring 1930). After 1930 she no longer produced fiction. I’m not sure why. But Clare did leave one last parting gift in 1931, a letter to Wonder Stories that delineated the Science Fiction genre as Harris saw it. Here is that letter:
My first reaction to this list is to ask: how many of these began with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells? Verne gets 3 while Wells gets all 16. So what Harris is discussing is really not new to the 1930s but dates back to 1860-1890s. This shouldn’t be surprising since Hugo Gernsback filled the early pages of Amazing Stories with Verne and Wells reprints, partly to save money and partly to educate new writers what Science Fiction looked like.
But this brings us to the modern question: how many new categories have been invented since this list? Let’s look at the best SF novels of 2017 (according to https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/a26846/best-sci-fi-books-2017/) and see:
New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson – Natural cataclysms, extra-terrestrial or confined to earth.
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer – Natural cataclysms, extra-terrestrial or confined to earth.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow – Natural cataclysms, extra-terrestrial or confined to earth.
The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley – Interplanetary space travel.
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty – cloning – The creation of synthetic life.
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai – Time Travel
Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuval – The creation of super-machines.
The Moon and the Other by John Kessel – Adventures on other worlds.
The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemison – Natural cataclysms, extra-terrestrial or confined to earth.
Amatka by Karin Tidbeck – Adventures on other worlds.
An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King – Dystopia
Sourdough by Robin Sloan – The creation of synthetic life.
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz – The creation of super-machines.
First off, I will be honest, and admit I haven’t read any of these books. I looked at their blurbs and based my categories on these. I will also admit that the style and literary approach of modern novels can’t be compared with most 1930s SF writers. That’s not what I am on about here. What I am looking at is thematically, what have we added? What is new? Not much. The only book that was even a little difficult was An Excess Male, which is a dystopian novel about population. But Harris addresses “diabolism and Utopianism” in her comment below the list. So by her reckoning An Excess Male would fall under “Natural cataclysms, extra-terrestrial or confined to earth”.
So what have we invented since Clare Winger Harris? Since Wells? I can only think of one theme that has been spawned since, and that is what we generically call “CyberPunk”. Stories about computers, the Internet, communications and the culture of that new reality. So kudos to William Gibson. (And Murray Leinster who wrote “A Logic Named Joe” in 1946.) You could lump them into “The creation of super-machines” but I think that may miss some essential elements.
Finally, I have to admit that Science Fiction themes haven’ really changed much at all. But the writing of Science Fiction has. Thanks to eighty years of stories, novels, movies and comic books, the genre (though not adding any new themes) has expanded on those themes. Take “The creation of synthetic life” for instance. This could be clunky Otis Adelbert Kline tale like “The Malignant Entity” from May-June-July 1924’s Weird Tales but it also embraces the works of Philip K. Dick who begged the question: “What is it to be human?” in his stories of simulacra and androids. And all the writers in between. These themes are old, but new writers, including all the authors I mentioned from the 2017 list, breathe freshness into them, explore new angles and make Science Fiction worth reading, whether in 1890, 1930 or 2018.