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Like many boys of my time, I read a lot of science fiction. This was the late Fifties and beyond, so, unlike readers of the Forties, who got their SF from the pulp magazines, I found mine – the same works, but more respectably packaged – in the public library. My mainstay was Robert Heinlein, but I certainly consumed a lot of Asimov and more than a little Clarke – as well as the several dozen writers available in the various anthologies of short stories or in the novels on the shelves. I continued (re)reading those works after I went to college, but for a while my studies took me to other literature and, I suppose, caused me to regard SF as inappropriate for serious academic study. Many scholars regarded it that way. And since German was half of my double major in German and English, and indeed subjectively more than half, I knew nothing of any SF but Anglo-American (with Verne regarded as sort of honorary Anglo-American, since he was there on the shelves of the public library in English translation and with no obvious identification as French).
Throughout my undergraduate years I knew nothing of the small amount of scholarship that was being directed toward SF, and therefore I did not connect with SF those various works of utopian or dystopian literature that were being linked to SF or incorporated into the genre. I knew little of Gulliver and less of More;s Utopia and such. I think I had read 1984 and Brave New World back in high school, on my own, but I did not group them with SF.
My chief academic focus as an undergraduate and in my first few years of graduate study in German was the Age of Goethe and, specifically, Friedrich Hölderlin, about whom I had written my senior thesis – more accurately, I wrote it about a single poem of his, “Brod und Wein” (“Bread and Wein” – Brod was at the time a common spelling of Brot). Three impetuses led me, when it was time to chose a dissertation topic, to switch of Age of Goethe to German SF: 1) I felt that the world did not need yet one more dissertation about, say, Schiller, with the research performed in the dry, dusty books in the Yale library (which, actually, I loved). I was wrong – the world did and does need more books about Schiller, but I guess I wanted to get my academic hands dirty. 2) Early in my graduate study I took a course in 19th Century English literature where, for some reason, I did a paper about utopian literature. 3) I had taken several valuable courses with Peter Demetz, of the Yale German Department, and when he returned from a conference saying that some scholar had said that someone should write a dissertation about German SF, I decided I would do it.
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