“In the early 1930s, readers of science fiction magazines such as Wonder Stories, in which [Leslie F. Stone’s] “The Conquest of Gola” first appeared, would have recognized several elements of its basic plot. The early magazines functioned as a sort of discussion group or pre-Internet bulletin board for writers. One writer would publish a story; another would find an intriguing detail in that story and develop it; a third would write a story that reversed everything in the first piece; a fourth would find a way to turn the whole thing into comedy. Robots are a good example: introduced as a metaphor for oppressed workers in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (1921), the robot evolved into a potential threat in stories like Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!” (1941) and then into a comic foil in Henry Kuttner’s “The Proud Robot” (1943).
Like jazz, SF is a collaborative art. Together, the pulp magazine writers and editors of the 1920s through the 1940s created not only a genre but also a consensus about what sorts of settings, objects, stories, and characters belonged in that genre. Writers still make use of that collective future, though sometimes the use they make is to contradict or critique it.”
