Infinite Anthologies of Vintage Science Fiction

About this digital scholarly edition of a literary ecosystem.

Professor Katherine Bode in her seminal work A World of Fiction (2018) describes scholarly editions of literary systems that combine all the nuances of literary and historical research in the humanities with the digital and physical infrastructure needed to preserve and disseminate literary works. She also points out that a scholarly edition of a literary system is an argument. “While the curated text of a conventional scholarly edition embodies or models the editor’s argument about a literary work, a scholarly edition of a literary system uses a curated dataset to model the editor’s argument about the nature of and relationships between literary works in the past.”

A ‘system,’ makes it easier to see how literary works are interconnected entities, even if that interconnectedness might be the result of tapping into the contemporary zeitgeist. A literary system is a network, and acknowledges that no work is really in a vacuum, rather there are deep textual relationships, such as cultural and historical contexts, influencing and being influenced by literature.

InfiniteAnthologies.com attempts to reflect this ideal, with thematic, stylistic, historical, cultural and, especially, scientific influences on texts argued and interpreted within scholarly edition pdfs, summarized in Omeka S item and product categories and notes, and the original story made available free of footnotes for the public to re-enjoy and interpret in their own way.

Neil Hogan and his digital humanities project, argues that the genre of science fiction is not a natural development or evolution of the literary landscape but a purposive newspaper spawned-and-driven fiction style written to complement science articles and related advertising such as new inventions sales. He also argues that modern science fiction began in Australia in the early 20^th century and he has curated 50 vintage science fiction stories to prove that Australia’s science fiction scene started a lot earlier than studies of Australian literary history genres might suggest.

In this sense, by providing 50 examples with references, including 10 digital scholarly editions with much deeper critical and comparative analyses, this site encourages new debate on the origins of the modern science fiction genre, generally, and Australia, specifically.

Due to InfiniteAnthologies.com focusing on the science aspect of science fiction, a discipline that reveals new developments every second, details in each newspaper fiction story item will continue to be updated, for example due to new science discoveries coming to light that may give credence to a prediction made by an author 100+ years ago, or more newspapers being scanned revealing further science articles that have influenced particular stories. In this sense, perhaps a better description for this particular digital humanities project is a literary ‘ecosystem,’ one that continues to change, grow, and evolve, revealing new insights over time.

Click on search to begin your exploration of the ever evolving vintage science fiction literary ecosystem at InfiniteAnthologies.com