Announcing . . . The Secret History of Science Fiction

Back in 2015 I published a history of science fiction--Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry--tracing what we commonly discuss as the "main line" of American (and to a lesser extent, Anglo-American) genre science fiction from the moment of its emergence as a genre in the 1920s largely centering on the activities of Hugo Gernsback, through the Golden Age and the New Wave, down into the twenty-first century, trying to explain what has too often been recounted as hazy fan lore in a more rigorous, lucid way.

All these years later I don't feel as if I have much to add to what I presented in that book in regard to the main line of the genre's development. But I have found myself taking an interest in many an aspect of genre history in back of that main line or underneath it--like what really kept science fiction stories selling in the old days, and how fandom has been having the same fights over and over and over again since the 1950s, and how in our time, however much some pretend otherwise, science fiction has become much more a thing that people watch or play than something they read.

The resulting pieces--many of them previously published but many also appearing here for the first time--are gathered together in The Secret History of Science Fiction, available in both paperback and e-book editions.