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Camille Flammarion. Lumen.

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Camille Flammarion. Lumen. Translated with an Introduction by Brian Stableford. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. xxxv + 153 pp. $45.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.

Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville. The Last Man. Translated by I. F. Clarke and M. Clarke; Introduction and Critical Materials by I. F. Clarke. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. xii + 157 pp. $45.00 cloth; $17.95 paper.

What does it mean for a genre to have a history? There are those who argue that a genre is non-existent until by some magically precise act of naming it instantly comes into being. But a more reasonable understanding of genre would see it as an ever-developing and mutating element in the larger literary system, sometimes indistinguishable from adjacent genres and yet at other times fully independent and strongly articulated. One of the great virtues of Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction (1) is its sensitivity to the ways "the novel of the future" appears as isolated spurts until sometime in the later nineteenth century it finally coalesces into a genre with cross allusions and recognized identifying formulas. Like a Lewis and Clark map, Alkon's study gives us a detailed line of amazing sights and peoples and leaves us with a dramatic sense of the continent left to be charted. What is needed now is a broader understanding of how the nineteenth century came to SF. H.G. Wells's accomplishment is magnificent, but only a trivial idea of originality would claim that he created...

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