| The
Age of Wells and Burroughs |
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Dominated
by H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, literature in the period between
1890 and 1930 is marked by the urge to escape from urban culture. |
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| H.
G. Wells |
Herbert George Wells
(1866-1946) spanned the great gulf between the mid Victorian period when
he was born (in the year dynamite was invented) and the atomic age which
he predicted and lived to see.
He wrote what he called
"scientific romances."
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Wells can be said
to have invented most categories of science fiction:
- time travel--The
Time Machine (1895)
- interplanetary
travel--The First Men in the Moon (1901)
- alien invasion--The
War of the Worlds (1897)
- future war--The
World Set Free (1914)
- sinister biological
experiments--The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896); The Invisible
Man (1897)
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| Edgar
Rice Burroughs |
Burroughs (1875-1950),
author of some 70 books, was one of the commercially successful authors
of the 20th century.
He wrote what would
today be called science fantasy.
Though probably best
known today as the author of Tarzan of the
Apes (1912), A Princess of
Mars (1912), his first published story, introduced Barsoom
(Mars) and brought interplanetary adventure into science fiction to stay.
At
the Earth's Core (1914) introduced Pellucidar, where the
hollow Earth lit by a miniature sun harbors savage tribes and fantastic
creatures.
Burroughs also wrote:
- Pirates
of Venus (1932) and sequels
- The Moon Maid
(1923) and sequels
- The
Land That Time Forgot (1924) and sequels
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Brian Aldiss describes
Burroughs and Wells as representing the two opposing poles of modern fantasy:
- Wells teaches us
to think--he stands at the thinking pole.
- Burroughs teaches
us to wonder--he stands at the dreaming pole.
- Mary Shelley stands
at the equator between them.
According to Aldiss,
at the thinking pole stand great figures.
There are as yet no great figures operating at the dreaming pole, but
there are good writers.
In science fiction
today the dreaming pole is currently on the ascendent.
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| Contemporaries
include: |
| H.
P. Lovecraft |
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
(1890-1937), a follower of Edgar Allen Poe, wrote mostly short stories.
His work appeared primarily in Weird Tales.
He represents a retreat
into the irrational.
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| Robert
E. Howard |
Howard
(1906-36) a writer of sword and sorcery, published the adventures of Conan
the Barbarian. |
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| H.
Rider Haggard |
Haggard was a practitioner
of the lost race novel:
- King
Solomon's Mines (1885)
- She
(1887)
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| Bram
Stoker |
Stoker's
Dracula (1897), is the inspiration
for vampire novels such as the work of Anne Rice. |
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| Arthur
Conan Doyle |
Though
best known for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries (a concept lifted directly
from the works of Edgar Allen Poe), Doyle also wrote The
Lost World (1912), about stone age tribes living in a crater
of a volcano in the Amazon Basin. |
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| Franz
Kafka |
Kafka
(1883-1924) wrote "The Metamorphosis"
(1916), a surreal novella about a man who wakes up one morning to discover
he has become a dung beetle. |
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Yevgeney
Zamyatin
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The
Russian Zamyatin wrote We (1920),
a dystopia, that is, a work about a society that develops completely opposite
from a utopia. |
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| Charlotte
Perkins Gilman |
Gilman,
best known for her often-anthologized short story "The Yellow Wallpaper,"
wrote Herland (magazine publication,
1915; book 1979), about an island inhabited by a race of parthenogenic (i.e.,
able to reproduce by themselves) females. |
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