Gernsbackian adj.

I say ‘grudgingly’ becoz I have such admiration for Schneeman—& his work. He has done mediocre, & even poor work, but at his best he really deserves that favorite Gernsbackian adjective, ‘inimitable’.

The first of the fan organizations….was a counterpart to the Gernsbackian philosophy of science fiction. Gernsback believed…that science fiction existed as a new and powerful medium for teaching the facts, theories, and understanding of science…. The stories of this formative era considered the description of a flight through weightlessness, the surface of the Moon or Mars, or an exposition of some of the quirks and paradoxes of relativity ample justification for using up several thousand words in which very little might happen.

Astounding, because of its bent towards science fiction in the pure or Gernsbackian sense as well as its high literary quality, is particularly attractive to professional scientists.

Short stories ceased to be Gernsbackian and became (for them) more imaginative—space opera. Some few stories of alien exploration did continue to be written, but they became more and more tenuous, more and more private, sillier and sillier.

Reacting against the Gernsbackian tradition in which characters routinely lectured one another in stupefying detail about the wonders of the future (and the editor added footnotes to explain the science even further, usually incorrectly), Campbell wanted lived-in futures, in which people got on with their lives, taking everything in their world for granted, just like we do.

As John Taine, [Eric Temple] Bell was one of the pioneers of science fiction. His first published work The Purple Sapphire (1924) appeared before the advent of the sf magazines, but he was an ideal Gernsbackian writer, capable of blending scientific extrapolation with a stimulating narrative.

The small wry ‘Ouroboros’ does take an ancient Gernsbackian concept, but makes it eerily real by applying modern but mundane computer technology to it.

It could be that Gernsbackian space opera and Campbellian hard sf do not actually define sf, but are rather aberrations, distortions, meanderings away from the true path.