Why SF emerged in some countries and not in others?

SF and Romanticism

So I found something of a frontier between fairy, mythical worlds and science-fiction imaginary worlds – in all this reasoning, I mean “Hard” SF of course. Then I asked myself, why couldn’t we find more French imaginary worlds? Why literary circles, and especially French ones, despise so much Science Fiction, while American people love it? What amazed me was that despite French people are taken as imaginative and creative and that a lot of French literature is based on imagination, you can’t find more than a handful of works dealing with imaginary worlds. I hadn’t any answer to those questions at the time.

Thinking about that, I found that Brian Aldiss made an interesting assumption: that the SF is a sub-genre of the Gothic mode, itself a branch of the Romantic Movement. Another Gothic sub-genre is the Western, used mainly through another medium, as movies. The two sub-genres are dealing with adventures where the individual is faced to unknown places and beings and where issues like individual freedom vs. law and order are often in the background. But SF adds a new exciting bit of its own: it brings the reader to face fears generated by change and the technological advances, which is not exactly true with the Western movies.

Old and New Countries

This parenthood can help to explain the success of SF in the American literature and also, to a certain extent, in the Russian one. And in the meantime, that could explain also why there would be so few attempts at describing completely new worlds in the Latin countries such as France but also Spain or Italy. In these old countries, all the territory has been known for millenaries and there have been no real pioneers for centuries. People are installed and don’t search for new territories to be explored and conquered.

One day I was jogging in a forest near Paris and I encountered a man who was wandering with a metal detector, searching for metal objects. We discussed a moment, and he told me that everywhere you went in France, the soil was littered by all sorts of objects down to one, two or three meters (ten feet) deep, dating from the last 5,000 years or so… He opened his bag and showed me a coin from the epoch of Napoleon III, 140 years ago, and then a copper pin dating from the Middle-Age: that is nearly 1,000 years ago. He added that this region around Paris had been so much visited that there remained almost nothing, but when he searched deep in the country, far from the big cities, he found a lot more interesting objects, such as Roman coins, more than 2,000 years old... Thus I realized concretely that in the old European countries, there is not any place where you couldn’t trace some occupation which occurred in the past thousands of years.

But that doesn’t explain why there are a lot of good British SF authors, beginning with H.G Wells and even before – the modern ones Iain M. Banks or Peter F. Hamilton are fairly talented – since their land has been occupied for nearly as long as continental Europe? There must be another factor explaining the emergence of SF; so I asked myself: what is this unknown factor? If it works for England, it must work elsewhere also.

Sources: Brian Aldiss & David Wingrove: Trillion Year Spree, The History of Science Fiction, 1973, ed. Grafton Books, coll. Paladin.