Fiction
Gernsback wrote fiction, including the novel Ralph 124C 41+ in 1911; the title is a pun on the phrase "one to foresee for many"("one plus"). Even though Ralph 124C 41+ is one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time, and filled with numerous science fiction ideas, few people still read the story. Brian Aldiss has called the story a "tawdry illiterate tale" and a "sorry concoction" while Lester del Rey called it "simply dreadful." While most other modern critics have little positive to say about the story's writing, Ralph 124C 41+ is still considered an "essential text for all studies of science fiction."
Gernsback's second (and final) novel, written c.1958, was not published until 1971. Lester del Rey described it simply as "a bad book," marked more by routine social commentary than by scientific insight or extrapolation.
Gernsback combined his fiction and science into Everyday Science and Mechanics magazine, serving as the editor in the 1930s.
Read more about this topic: Hugo Gernsback
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today—but the core of science fiction, its essence ... has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”
—Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to the senses with abstractions.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)