Among other certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize - not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells's The Time Machine had no chance against 'literary' authors like Hardy and Conrad. In the twenty-five years it has been running, no SF title, as I recall, has even been shortlisted for Martyn Goff's real thing. In 1940, T.S. Eliot struck the recurrent establishment note when he labelled Wells a 'popular entertainer'.(Dickens was stigmatised with the same term by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition.) Patrick Parrinder has been opposing such anti-Wellsian prejudice for the best part of a quarter of a century. His opposition takes the form of scholarly works which patiently mount the case for critical respect. Parrinder's contributions include the Critical Heritage volume (1972), a study of Wells's composition methods, H.G. Wells under Revision (1990, co-edited with Christopher Rolfe), and the reissue of Wells's scientific romances currently appearing under the World's Classics imprint. (For copyright reasons - Wells having died in 1946 - this series will probably only be available in America.) Parrinder's more theoretical interventions include Science Fiction, Its Criticism and Teaching (1980), a work which places Wells as 'the pivotal figure in the evolution of the scientific romance into modern science fiction'.

LRB 14 December 1995 | PDF Download