"Donald A. Wollheim - European Science Fiction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wollheim Donald A)

another fairy tale, that these tales, too, are merely part of some parallel mainstream of which the
workaday world is not perceptive.
Science fiction has always been with us---writers have always speculated on the horizons of the
not-yet-proven--and examples can be culled from the dawn of written lore and are to be found in all
periods of storytelling. To some extent this is a type of escapism and to some extent it is a form of genetic
curiosity: people always want to know what is over the next hill and beyond the farthest horizon and at
the end of the rainbow. When tellers of tall tales could no longer convince an audience not quite as
gullible as our less informed ancestors, the art of science fiction came into being. Extend what we know a
little further, advance the line of what could be, bring in the "if this goes on" factor--and we have science
fiction. Fantasy designed as reality.
The roots of modem science fiction, which some trace to GulU-
 Introduction
xii
ver's Travels, some to Frankenstein, some to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, came to mature growth in the
nineteenth century, the century of innovative science and the Industrial Age. This growth con-
into our century and assumed flexibility, full color, and tinued variety in the constantly refertilized soil
of our science-
infinite
oriented and invention-infiltrated world.
At first, science fiction was shared by all the countries of the Western world, those who were the
pioneers in the advance of technology and education. Before World War I, the highest quantity and
quality of science fiction was to be found in Great Britain and in France. America had its share but not its
giants . ├║ ├║ and it was from overseas that what science fiction was published or written in America
received its primary derivation and ideas. After World War I, American science fiction began to grow
strong, mainly through the medium of the pulp magazines, which were a particularly American
phenomenon of the 20s and 30s and which allowed--through their lack of "literary establishment"
dignity--the widest latitude of imagination in its writers just as long as their stories were entertaining.
Because the language of the United States was English, the British were able to share in this and to
develop their own writers alongside it and within it.
The Germans, recovering from World War I, began to achieve eminence in science fiction, and some
of their writers were translated into English, and their names became known, often without great
familiarity with the bulk of their production. Names like Otfrid yon Hanstein, Otto Willy Gail, and Hans
Dominik became familiar-authors distinguished by their meticulous attention to technological detail, whose
spaceships had nuts and bolts much more convincingly substantial than the backyard constructs of
American pulp adventure writers. But, alas for Germany--and for the world--the rise of the Nazi regime
put an effective end to German imaginative horizons and to German influence in science fiction.
In France, a steady growth of science fiction was continuing as it had since the days of Jules Verne,
but contact had diminished almost to the vanishing point. French science fiction went untranslated, save
for some social speculations by Andr6 Maurois, and nobody heard of Jacques Spitz and R6gls Messac.
In France itself, science fiction from the English consisted of H. G. Wells and no one else.
After World War II, science fiction became English-language based. All the great writers of the
forties, fifties, and sixties were American and British. In Europe, very little science fiction was being
published and what there was turned out to be translations from the English-American.
 Introduction xiii
When I first investigated the subject of European science fiction, scarcely more than ten years ago, it
was clear that just about anything I was likely to find would turn out to be an author with whose work I
was familiar--just an American or Briton whose originals I knew. But during the past decade the scene
has been changing. European science fiction, written by Europeans in their own languages, has been
coming back.
True, the field is still dominated by translations . . . perhaps as high as ninety per cent or more in some