I’m sure this article was meant as a quick and amusing filler and that you didn’t devote much time to it. That’s too bad, because you could have done something with your contention that SF can be traced back to mythology. Since the line between SF and fantasy is fuzzy at best — both Gene Wolfe and Ray Bradbury are particularly noted for work more easily classified as fantasy — you can make a real case for your myth theory. Yes, I09 is right about the influence of scientific speculation, but if you read a lot of SF, you’ll find that myth and science frequently come together in the stories.

And Mary Shelley is the mother of science fiction. Hugo Gernsback did start the first popular magazine, but of course people had been writing SF for many years before he came along — Jules Verne and H.G. Wells come immediately to mind, but there are others not so well known. Despite the efforts of those wedded to the so-called “Golden Age” to limit SF to the world defined by Gernsback and John Campbell, it’s a broad genre with significant literary roots and an open-ended future.

The manuscript was found while I was in the process of closing down Gernsback Publications Inc. in 2003. It was apparently written some time in the 1950’s. It covers all the areas that Hugo found interesting: wireless communications, science fiction, publishing, patents, foretelling the future, and much more.