Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Golden Age of Short Science Fiction - John Huntington (essay date 1989)

Golden Age of Short Science Fiction - John Huntington (essay date 1989)

John Huntington (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: Huntington, John. “The Myth of Genius: The Fantasy of Unpolitical Power.” In Rationalizing Genius: Ideological Strategies in the Classic American Science Fiction Short Story, pp. 44-68. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Huntington views the identification with power as a central theme in science fiction literature.]

At the core of much SF fantasy is an identification with power. We see it rendered in recent SF by an exaltation in sheer size: empires war with ships the size of planets. A student once explained to me that SF was interesting and important because the weapons it imagined were capable of destroying a planet, even a universe. How trivial the cowboy's six-shooter was by comparison. Such an observation is not entirely naive. In this [essay] I explore how the genre indulges just such fantasies of giganticism. What I will primarily deal with,...

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