SOURCE: Attebery, Brian. “Animating the Inert: Gender and Science in the Pulps.” In Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, pp. 39-61. New York: Routledge, 2002.

In the following essay, Attebery considers the treatment of sexuality and gender in science fiction literature.

Many of SF's essential tropes—from robots to time travel—were dreamed up by nineteenth-century writers such as Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, Jack London, and H. G. Wells. Yet not until Hugo Gernsback named and tamed it in the 1920s did SF consolidate into a popular genre commanding a loyal and insatiable audience. Gernsback started the first English-language all-SF magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926 and coined the term science fiction three years later.

The taming of the mode was a result of the popular marketplace converging with Gernsback's enthusiasms. Nineteenth-century SF was a set of wild mutations from such stock as the gothic novel, the...