The Technology of the Short Story

Shelley Streeby

doi:10.1017/9781009292863.024

Chapter 18 - The Technology of the Short Story

From Sci-Fi to Cli-Fi

from Part IV - Theories

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023

Shelley Streeby

Edited by

Michael J. Collins and

Gavin Jones

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Michael J. Collins: Affiliation:
King's College London
Gavin Jones: Affiliation:
Stanford University

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Summary

This chapter explores the origins of the US science fiction short story in transnational print networks featuring Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Throughout, we highlight the significance of women writers such as Lydia Maria Child, Judith Merril, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler. The chapter examines how struggles over science and technology shape popular turn-of-the-century stories of young white man inventors and the mostly white man-focused twentieth-century pulp magazine Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. We connect W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” to a long genealogy of US science fiction written by Black people, including earlier writers such as Martin Delany as well as later ones such as Samuel Delany. The conclusion considers anthologies and projects such as solarpunk that revitalize the genre by imagining the social effects of changes in science and nature in relation to new forms of technology, collaboration, and social movement activism.

Keywords

technology pulp magazines ecological fiction science studies cli-fi climate social movements science fiction technology

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story , pp. 283 - 297

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009292863.024 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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