In 1928, in particular, Gernsback had published a novel that opened up the genre overnight to a vaster sense of scale than it had ever known before, with an atomic spacecraft that one character casually estimates as capable of “a velocity of something like seven billion four hundred thirteen million miles per second.” Campbell was fascinated by The Skylark of Space. The serial by E. E. “Doc” Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby—with a dashing villain who steals the hero’s ship and leads him on a chase six quadrillion miles from home—inaugurated the field of superscience, or space opera. It inspired
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