Commerce, History, Art

[womzilla]

avram has been reading Zane Grey, speciifically Riders of the Purple WSage, probably his most important novel. In a comment, kent_allard_jr pointed out that Grey had a lot of influence on popular fiction writing of the 1910s and 1920s both within and without the Western genre.

Recently, I've been dabbling in the history of the science fiction genre; NYRSF ran a very good article by Darrell Schweitzer about Hugo Gernsback and the creation of the science fiction genre. One point that Darrell didn't mention, that I discovered separately in (I believe) a Sam Moskowitz article in an issue of Fantasy Review that I picked up at the ICFA, is worth mentioning. In the 1910s, Zane Grey had the same position in popular literature that Stephen King had in the 1970s and early 1980s, except more so. For several years, he was unquestionably the most popular writer in America. The fiction magazines--the slicks and especially the pulps--were pulled strongly towards Westerns, and by the beginning of the 1920s, "scientific romance" and other proto-sf had been almost completely crowded out of what had been a wide-open market. When Gernsback launched Amazing Stories in 1926, he was less inventing "scientifiction" than rescuing it from oblivion.

So Zane Grey nearly killed the scientific romance, allowing Gernsback to recreate it in his own image. Those who blame Gernsback for the poor reputation of sf in the US should at least take some consideration of the unpleasant interactions of commerce and art.

(Darrell, by the way, has been writing a lot of terrific pieces for us recently, including an occasional series on interesting and completely forgotten pieces from Argosy, one of the major general-interest pulp fiction magazines. A great deal of proto-sf, including the major works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, appeared in Argosy, and continued to appear there when there was no other venue.)