The British Science Fiction Boom: Tracking the Currents of the Future between Postimperialism, Postnationalism, and Globalization: Editorial Introduction

It has now been a decade since the British Science Fiction (SF) Boom was first formally hailed in the special issue of Science Fiction Studies. The Boom is predicated on the conjunction of a particular set of political and cultural forces that created both a cultural-economic void and a cultural product to fill it, rather than a purposefully aligned and properly manifestoed movement. In other words, the Boom arrived, it seems, almost accidently, caught unawares by itself to, on one hand, fill a hole in the SF marketplace occasioned by the creative slump in the previously dominant American tradition, while on the other, to challenge the staid literary and political culture of Britain in the 1990s, which entailed countering many of the hegemonic aspects of U.S. SF along the way.