edisonade n.

Of course Gypsies is not, in the tinkertoy come of its telling, a family romance at all. It is an American dream. It is an Edisonade.

As used here the term ‘edisonade’—derived from Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) in the same way that ‘robinsonade’ is derived from Robinson Crusoe—can be understood to describe any story which features a young US male inventor hero who uses his ingenuity to extricate himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself from defeat and corruption and his friends and nation from foreign oppressors.

Nor surprisingly, Haynes takes special pleasure in exploring the many sf stories casting Thomas Edison or some other wizard of invention as the hero, a subgenre recently—and most aptly—described by John Clute as the ‘edisonade’.

Lea was followed…by J. U. Giesy, whose xenophobic 1915 potboiler, All for His Country, was an example of an irresistible American genre, the ‘Edisonade’. In this popular story type…a brilliant young inventor is initially spurned until his invention…proves necessary to save the day.

Compared to the instrumental militarism of many 'Edisonades' (as Edison invention-adventures are called) Villiers de l'Isle-Adam’s Symbolist-mystical treatment seems posivitely pacific.

The scientist of late 19th-century London is on the cusp between the Renaissance Man and the Corporation Man—a transformation perhaps best exemplified by Thomas Alva Edison (who lent his name to a sub-genre of his own—the Edisonade—as well as featuring in Powers' novel Expiration Date (1995)).

The Martians first came to New York as early as 1897…. The Journal subsequently published the very first sequel to the novel, Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars…. Harry Kane’s Edisonade, mentioned in these pages, is an affectionate tribute.

The supposed utopia of the scientific government is founded upon an energy source discovered by a female scientist, in what amounts to a re-gendering of the male-dominated trope of the Edisonade.