"From Wells's War of the Worlds to Kubrick's 2001, science fiction has become one of the great popular media of our time. It is denounced as inhuman; it is praised as the apocalyptic literature of our century. Science fiction is all things to all men: prediction, power-fantasy, escapism, popularisation of science, satire, social fiction, surrealism, symbolism, propoganda for and against technology. Aldis, himself a past master at the genre, shows how sf was born in 1818, in the very heart of the English Romantic movement, when Mary Godwin Shelley wrote Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus. The novel was immediately successful, and the germ of its fearsome idea - of a man-made man - has flourished ever since. Before the days of H.G. Wells there were remarkable star turns by Edgar Allan Poe, R.L. Stevenson, Jules Verne, Samuel Butler and others. In the 1930s the American pulps such as Amazing and Astounding brought a strong injection of fantasy and adventure, strongly influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Barsoom. Sf was created as a genre. From then it divided into two streams: the kind of social sf written by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, and the almost underground world of masters such as Robert Heinlein, John Wyndham, Frank Herbert, Arthur Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut have grown to eminence. Today the two streams have joined; sf words have become a part of the language, the private fantasy of moon-shot has beome reality, and reality has often become horrifingly close to sf. While sf is a joyride through time and space - a billion year spree - it is also a rich and diverse fiction with acute revelance for our present." - Dust jacket.