ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I want to thank those generous colleagues who read drafts of sections of this book and made helpful suggestions to me about revision: Cristina Bacchilega, Carl Freedman, Rob Latham, Roger Luckhurst, and Sherryl Vint. Earlier versions of various sections of what ended up being the introduction and the second, fifth, and sixth chapters were presented at the annual Orlando meetings of the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016; at the annual conferences of the Science Fiction Research Association in Lublin, Poland, in 2011 and Madison, Wisconsin, in 2014; at Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville at the University of London in 2012; and at the Historical Materialism Conference at University of London in 2012. Without risking the inevitable omissions that would come with an attempt to list everyone by name, I want to thank all those who participated in and responded to these sessions. Special thanks to Grace Dillon for introducing me to Helen Haig-Brown’s The Cave and for her helpful response to my reading of it. And thanks to Art Evans for last-minute long-distance help on bibliography.

      The students in my graduate seminars on Science Fiction and Genre Theory at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in spring 2011 and fall 2015 sessions helped me think through my positions on genre theory and widened my knowledge of the range and variety of contemporary SF practices. I want to thank especially my dissertation advisee Ida Yoshinaga for many stimulating conversations about contemporary genre production and reception.

      The research on early periodical fiction that I have incorporated into chapter 3 was carried out at the Maison d’Ailleurs in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and at the British Library. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to all those at the Maison d’Ailleurs for their generosity and helpfulness, and to acknowledge my debt to that magnificent and accessible resource, the British Library.

      Thanks to Science Fiction Studies for permission to reuse, with slight revisions, my essay “On Defining Science Fiction, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History” (vol. 37, no. 2, July 2010) as chapter 1. Thank you also to the Dille Family Trust for generously allowing me to use the copyrighted image of the Buck Rogers comic strip reproduced in chapter 3. Finally a major thank you to Elizabeth LaPensée for permission to use her beautiful image, Growth, on the book cover.

      This book is lovingly dedicated to my lifelong partner, Cristina Bacchilega.

      SCIENCE

      FICTION

      AND THE

      MASS

      CULTURAL

      GENRE

      SYSTEM