Science Fiction from Wells to Heinlein

As a publisher's category, science fiction began in the American pulp magazine industry in 1926. But its origins lay in the British tradition of the scientific romance, whose mastery by H.G. Wells in his Victorian youth (1895-1901) makes him the "father of modern SF" (Jules Verne is a more distant ancestor). Wells's most self-conscious descendant is Robert Heinlein, whose rapid rise to fame during the magazine era made him "the dean of American SF." He so succeeded in winning literary recog...