Science fiction (SF) has existed as a popular genre for around 150 years. This book offers a survey of the genre from nineteenth-century pioneers to contemporary authors, introducing the plural versions of early SF across the world, before examining the emergence of the 'scientific romance' in the 1880s and 1890s. The 'Golden Age' of writers' expansive SF pulp was concentrated in the 1930s, consolidated by best-selling writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The contributors to this volume also track the increasingly diverse forms SF took from the 1950s onwards. Leading international scholars, writing in an accessible style, consider SF as a 'world' literature, referencing works from diverse traditions in Latin America, Europe, Russia and the Far East. This book combines discussion of central figures of the tradition with a new global reach.

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature, Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a specialist in science fiction and the Gothic. His many books include The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (1997) and Science Fiction: A Cultural History (2005). He has also edited several of the Oxford World's Classics, including H. G. Wells' The Time Machine (2017), in addition to writing for The Guardian and appearing on Radio 4.