Adam Roberts is an academic literary critic who moonlights as a science fiction novelist, short story writer, and parodist. His History of Science Fiction is an academic work with a definite, somewhat restrictive thesis. Science fiction, Roberts argues, reflects a cultural divide that began with the Protestant Reformation. Technological fiction was largely a Protestant interest, while Catholic writers tended to stick with fantasy and mysticism in the Platonic tradition. He sees the evolution of science fiction as a continuing dialogue between these two poles, represented most clearly by H. G. Wells and J. R. R. Tolkien. Roberts is a careful enough scholar to qualify such sweeping generalizations with sometimes maddening frequency. He has translated Jules Verne and written books on Wells and Tolkien. It is no surprise that he offers especially good readings of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From Earth to the Moon, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He gives the pulp era short shrift, and he laments that Gravity’s Rainbow was beaten in the 1973 Nebula Awards by the more traditional Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. With the advent of multimedia science fiction texts like the Star Wars saga, Roberts says that science fiction is a primarily visual genre, not a literary one. He offers an especially good analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a work that fits his thesis perfectly. Roberts’ history lacks the readable snark of Brian W. Aldiss’s The Trillion Year Spree, but it offers a worthwhile, if not always convincing, argument on the cultural meaning of science fiction. 4 stars ( )

A well-written, accessible and superbly researched academic survey of science fiction. If you've got a paper to write, this is your first stop.

If you like this book already, I would also recommend Thomas Disch's DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF, and vice versa. ( )