Science Fiction is nothing new. Brian Aldiss put the starting point at Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while Adam Roberts pushed the date back earlier to Paradise Lost by John Milton. If you squint through the lens of genre labels you can see traces of science fiction going all the way back to the epic of Gilgamesh. For myself, I stand on the hill that while these authors may well have created works that can realistically be called science fiction, they were not setting out to do so. Why? Because the term ‘science fiction’ did not exist as a genre label until the twentieth century.

On March the tenth, 1926, Hugo Gernsback launched a magazine called Amazing Stories. It was the first publication with the explicit intention of publishing a single genre of storytelling. Stories that used science as a basis. Gernsback cited Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe among the existing examples of the genre, which he termed ‘scientifiction’ – a shortening of scientific fiction. When Gernsback lost the legal rights to this label, he began using the modern label of ‘science fiction’ from 1929 onwards.

Amazing Stories ushered in a new age of genre fiction. Many early stories were reprints of the works of Wells, Verne, and others, but very soon original stories began to appear. Stories written specifically to fit the constraints of this newly identified genre. Amazing stories was soon joined by a host of other magazines, among the most famous of which were Astounding and Galaxy. For about two decades, these specialist short story magazines were the best place to find science fiction, and many careers were launched, among them those of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. In the wake of the Second World War, publishing changed gears, and in 1948 A. E. Van Vogt’s The World of Null-A, originally serialised in the magazine Astounding Stories, was rereleased as the first ever science fiction hardback. It was not the first serialised novel or sequence of short stories to be repackaged as a single piece, and it was by no means the last. It is this initial period that many academics believe forms the core of the ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction, and it all follows from Gernsback’s scientifiction.

1926 then, is as good a starting point for a study of science fiction as any other point in time. Prior books can be seen as outliers and precursors, with purposefully written science fiction only possible once the genre had been identified and codified by Gernsback. This is not a perfect argument, but it is as logical a line in the sand as anywhere else.

What this means is that 2026 marks the one hundredth anniversary of science fiction as a recognised genre. As regular readers of this blog will know, one of my ongoing projects is to read a longform piece of science fiction from as many years as possible. A project that involves a spreadsheet currently stretching back to the sixteenth century. As of January 2026, and after eight years of being what Kingsley Amis would call a science fiction addict, there are only six years missing from my collection of a century of science fiction. Those years are:

1929, 1931, 1932, 1940, 1941, 1942

The two limiting factors here are 1) the Second World War using up much of the world’s paper supply, and 2) the tendency in early years to prefer solo short stories over longer works. In all likelihood, I have encountered short stories from these years and not recorded them. However, I am optimistic that I will eventually find novels that were originally serialised during this infant period of the genre. As a note on that, I only count serialisation for a year in which the whole story was available. Therefore a story serialised from July 1941 to March 1942 does not suit my purposes. such a story would be counted for the year it was first available as a single volume. Nevertheless, I remain optimistic about my chances. After all, it wasn’t until last year that I found books for 1960 and 1972.

I hope this has been as interesting for you as it is for me. I’m not planning to end my journey through science fiction anytime soon, and I hope you’ll continue to join me on that journey.