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:
“If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... all fiction may be autobiography, but all autobiography is of course fiction.”
—Shirley Abbott (b. 1934)
“For if the proper study of mankind is man, it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)