The papers collected here represent the fallout from a very successful conference held in Liverpool in 1996, under the aegis of the University of Liverpool and the Science Fiction Foundation.

They indicate, I believe, the way in which the science fiction field continues to diversify and departmentalize. This process is not, perhaps, to everyone's taste; but these papers demonstrate encouragingly how intelligence and perception have crept in. In the earlier stages of its growth, the genre or mode of sf was weirdly homogeneous. Brian Attebery puts the matter clearly, when speaking of issues of Amazing Stories or Thrilling Wonder. He says that to scrutinize these magazines ‘from cover to cover, complete with ads, editorials, and letters from readers, reading the hacks along with the more ambitious writers, one gets the sense that it is all one thing. Rather than being self-sufficient objects of art, the individual stories are part of a continuous stream of discourse.’

Of course it is so. And I remember my blessedly naïve days when I liked it that way. Liked it until I came to write myself, and wanted every story to aspire to Attebery's definition, a self-sufficient object of art.

Those old days when Amazing was available and not much else presented the tempting possibility to its adherents of being able to read everything published. Scarcity of material lead to such litanies as I witnessed at the first World SF Convention to leave the shores of North America, held in London in 1957.

A major part of the entertainment consisted of a panel – or perhaps one should say convocation – of people such as Sam Moskowitz, Robert A. Madle and Forrest Ackerman asking each other such questions as ‘Who wrote the lead serial for the first issue of Gernsback's Air Wonder Stories ?’ and, ‘In which issue of Fantastic Adventures did Tarleton Fiske's story “Almost Human” appear?’ coupled with ‘Who wrote under the pen name of Tarleton Fiske?’*

Since those days, sf and its allied fields have become more various and more sophisticated. It is no longer possible to read everything, to see everything. New departments have sprung up.