In seeking to answer the question ‘Who Speaks Science Fiction?’, we should make some attempt at least to define this most knotty of categories and the assumptions underlying its usage.

As is well known, the ‘Father of Scientifiction’, Hugo Gernsback, envisioned his Amazing Stories publication in the 1920s as an outlet for ‘charming romance[s] intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision’. The emphasis on science (or at least, the illusion of science) and a shared set of assumptions surrounding this type of knowledge endured, crystallizing into a genre with its own codes and precepts for operation. For that initial heady mixture—the privileged will-to-knowledge previously unavailable, white-hot heat sandwiched between the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution and the imaginary landscapes beyond—seems to persist at the heart of much subsequent genre sf. This Golden Age represents an eternal adolescence, a bygone era when increased leisure was channelled into a few outlets, gleaming and magnificent in their singular devotion to a new evolution in thought. Its allure is understandable, perhaps even necessary, to our postmodern age, in which nostalgia and traditional values are pre-packaged as marks of authenticity in a secret-less world, a world without depth.