This post is brought to you by the Space Opera and Space Westerns books at RAGE m a c h i n e. Our reputation in the Sword & Sorcery field is pretty much set but we also publish books about other kinds of fantastic adventures. These include Ships of Steel, an anthology on the Swords of Fire model. Jack Mackenzie has several series that are of note: the Jefferson Odett military SF novels, The Gear Crew, the Solis DeLacey series and a collection of SF stories called The Cryo Game and Other Stories. G. W. Thomas offers the planet Utukku and the Sudana and Zaar stories in Whispers of Ice and Sand.
In the August 1931 issue of Wonder Stories, Clare Winger Harris gave us a parting gift before she left Science Fiction to the boys. In this letter she outlined the sixteen themes she saw possible in modern SF. I was looking through old British story papers for Science Fiction-themed stories and found this batch that follows Winger’s list pretty well. The Brits were influenced by the American Pulps which were used as ballast in ships then sold for a song at Woolworth’s. As John Wyndham tell us as “Yank magazines”. That being said, the themes can all be tracked back to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, so the Pulp influence has more to do with the sensational aspects of the tale. These two giants were the authors that Hugo Gernsback wanted his new writers to copy so the earliest Amazing Stories in the 1920s are largely Verne/Wells reprints.
These story papers include The Skipper, Hotspur, The Triumph and The Rover. The best of them was Scoops, which was a Science Fiction themed paper. It reprinted Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt. The artists and authors are most often not known except in Scoops, which used work by the prolific John Russell Fearn.
The themes Harris chose included:
1. Interplanetary Space Travel. From the Earth to the Moon to The First Men in the Moon, SF loves rocket ships and traveling between the planets and stars.
2. Adventures on Other Worlds. And when those rockets arrive on new worlds, what do they find? Usually dinosaurs.
3. Adventures in Other Dimensions. Sometimes it the dimensions they cross, to find worlds inhabited by spider-squidgies. For more on the Fourth, Fifth, etc. Dimension, go here.
4. Adventures in the micro or macro-cosmos. If you can get shrunk really small, you end up in some other world too. Oddly, they all feel like Edgar Rice Burroughs created them. For more on micro-adventures, go here.
5. Gigantic insects. Gotta have giant bugs. More on Giant ants, go here.More on Giant insects here.
6. Gigantic man-eating plants. Gotta have giant plants. For more on killer plants, go here.
7. Time travel past or future. If you can’t travel to another place, how about another time? Cavemen and dinosaurs to Morlocks and Eloi.
8. Monstrous forms of unusual life. This is a large subgenre that includes strange monsters, space invaders, those dinosaurs that keep coming up to just about anything that is big, ugly and dangerous. Without doubt, my favorite. For more on giant monsters on film, go here.
9. The creation of super-machines. This includes any kind of strange machine, from super-speeding machines to weapons. The effects of these devices is often not good but always interesting.
10. The creation of synthetic life. I threw the robots in here though they could have been int he last one too. The android seems more appropriate. For more Pulp robots, go here.
11. Mental telepathy and mental aberrations. Mind powers, psionics and all things of mind. Comes in handy when you encounter an alien race. For more on mesmerists and mind-controllers, go here.
12. Invisibility. Now you see, now you don’t. For more on invisibility, go here.
13. Ray and vibration stories. Zap-zap. A special machine category that is really about the effects the rays or vibes give you.
14. Unexplored regions of the globe: submarine, subterranean, etc. If you can’t get off the planet you can still have fun. For more fun underground, go here. For polar monsters, go here.
15. Super intelligence. Brainiacs, keen beans and all manner of super-smarties.
16. Natural cataclysms; extraterrestrial or confined to the earth. The disaster sub-genre is a real wreck.
Conclusion
CWH also mentions diabolism and Utopian themes but these can be mixed in with the other sixteen. Such as explorers find a world under the earth that is a Utopia or ruled by a devil. All of these themes can be combined, of course. A world disaster caused by aliens in strange machines 1, 8, 9, and 16 gives you The War of the Worlds.
Clare Winger Harris did a pretty good job of summing up all the kinds of stories she saw in the 1920s and early 1930s Pulps. I’m not sure she got everything, though try to think of one she missed? Some of the later tropes are combinations of these sixteen. And some sound dated, like Man-eating plants, but I saw one last night on Alien: Earth episode 2. And that was the third for 2025 alone. Everything old is new again, of course, but perhaps the collection of ideas and themes that SF uses doesn’t really change a lot. Cyberpunk strikes me as a possible newbie, but it is really more of a dystopian version of modern times. And that’s not new. It’s important not to confuse the style in which a story is told with its theme. Take unusual forms of life. That includes tales as far apart as Alien Resurrection and Alf. How you tell the tale is a whole other thing.
Discover these RAGE m a c h i n e SF books
Fantastic list for writers to generate idea mashups.
I respect your knowledge for what’s come before. Kudos!