SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE

   The most common generic term applied to UK sf in the years before the end of WWII, at which time the "science fiction" label became sufficiently commonplace to displace it; for several decades thereafter, the styles and concerns of US GENRE SF dominated. C.H. HINTON issued 2 series of Scientific Romances (colls 1886 and 1898) mixing speculative essays andstories, and the term was widely applied by reviewers and essayists to the early novels of H.G. WELLS, which became the key exemplars of the genre. When listing his titles Wells usually lumped his sf and fantasy novelstogether as "fantastic and imaginative romances"", but he eventually chose to label the collection of his best-known sf novels "The Scientific Romances of H.G. Wells (omni 1933), thus securing the term's definitivestatus. Brian M. STABLEFORD has recently revived the term in order to facilitate the comparison and contrast of the distinct UK and US traditions of speculative fiction; his study of the UK genre's separate evolution before the triumph of genre sf is Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950 (1985). In that book, and in entries throughout thisencyclopedia (see in particular EVOLUTION, RELIGION), the term can be seen as tending to describe works characterized by long evolutionary perspectives; by an absence of much sense of the frontier and a scarcity of the kind of PULP-MAGAZINE-derived HERO who is designed to penetrate any frontier available; and in general by a tone moderately less hopeful about the future than that typical of genre sf until recent decades (OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM).A few modern writers have found the term a convenientrubric for offbeat works; examples include Christopher PRIEST for The Space Machine (1976) and Kim Stanley ROBINSON for The Memory of Whiteness(1985).

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