Darko Suvin and H.G. Wells

Darko Suvin's collection Metamorphoses of Science Fiction includes such classics of his criticism as "Estrangement and Cognition" (available at Strange Horizons).

It also includes a piece dealing with "Wells As the Turning Point of the SF Tradition." In it Suvin remarked that Wells was the "first significant writer who started to write SF from within the world of science, and not merely facing it" (220); whose scientific romances were the "privileged form in which SF was admitted into an official culture that rejected socialist utopianism" (220); and "endowed later SF with a basically materialist look back at human life and a rebelliousness against its entropic closure" (221). "For such reasons," he declares, all subsequent significant SF can be said to have sprung from Wells' Time Machine" (221).

Others are often credited with founding the genre, sometimes Mary Shelley, sometimes Jules Verne, but when one considers science fiction from the standpoint of what made it really unique within twentieth century fiction, from the standpoint of what might be considered its cultural niche or even its special purposes that it alone and not other kinds of fiction could perform, it seems to me inarguable that, as Suvin contends, Wells was by far the most important of these three.