Notes
A general study of science fiction.

Also published by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1958.

Publisher’s Blurb – Dust Jacket Flap
In this book, the author traces science fiction from its earliest beginnings, and draws many interesting conclusions about present and future trends. Mainly concerned with stories having an interplanetary background, he examines books, plays, films, and magazines, naming Lucian's True History (A.D. 150) as the first real science fiction story, followed by Johann Kepler's Somnium in 1634, and Godwin's Man in the Moone shortly afterwards. Few science fiction works appeared during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but later there came Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon, Achille Eyarand’s Voyage to Venus, H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds.

It was in the middle 1920's that the 'big-eyed monster' type of story acquired for science fiction the evil name that still clings. The revival in well written science fiction dates from immediately after the last war. The author examines Juvenile books, magazines, and Horror Comics devoted to science fiction, and analyses and classifies the plots of their stories. Finally, he gives his views for thinking that science fiction is here to stay, and why he believes it can play a real part in spreading true knowledge and enriching literature.

** Patrick Moore, aged 33, is a full-time writer with some twenty-four books to his credit. Interested in astronomy all his life, he is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a Fellow and Council Member of the Interplanetary Society.