A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
In 1905, a young Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg founded an electrical supply shop in New York. This inventor, writer, and publisher Hugo Gernsback would later become famous for launching the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. But while science fiction’s annual Hugo Awards were named in his honor, there has been surprisingly little understanding of how the genre began among a community of tinkerers all drawn to Gernsback’s vision of comprehending the future of media through making. In The Perversity of Things, Grant Wythoff makes available texts by Hugo Gernsback that were foundational both for science fiction and the emergence of media studies.
Wythoff argues that Gernsback developed a means of describing and assessing the cultural impact of emerging media long before media studies became an academic discipline. From editorials and blueprints to media histories, critical essays, and short fiction, Wythoff has collected a wide range of Gernsback’s writings that have been out of print since their magazine debut in the early 1900s. These articles cover such topics as television; the regulation of wireless/radio; war and technology; speculative futures; media-archaeological curiosities like the dynamophone and hypnobioscope; and more. All together, this collection shows how Gernsback’s publications evolved from an electrical parts catalog to a full-fledged literary genre.
The Perversity of Things aims to reverse the widespread misunderstanding of Gernsback within the history of science fiction criticism. Through painstaking research and extensive annotations and commentary, Wythoff reintroduces us to Gernsback and the origins of science fiction.
How users experience and influence technological change—when so much of that change feels out of our control
Every day, we casually employ one of the most complex tools ever created, using it to read the news, plan our day, and connect with friends. In A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech, Grant Wythoff investigates the process by which now-ubiquitous technologies like our phones become integrated into our lives, showing how the “gadget” stage—before devices are widely adopted—opens the door for users to co-create these technologies and adapt them toward unexpected ends.
In this elegant, approachable work, Wythoff offers a view of how users make new technology their own, subverting dominant power structures and imagining uses never intended by their creators. Rooted in a detailed look into the history of technique (focusing on how we do things with tools rather than the tools themselves), A User’s Guide to the Age of Tech proceeds to complicate, and influence, discussion of subjects like the digital divide and AI.
Drawing on a range of sources, including novels, patents, and newspapers, Wythoff explores the vernacular philosophies that have emerged from users and their diverse, everyday practices, bringing down to earth the conversation about digital titans, away from the abstracted domains of server farms and algorithms. Lodging a passionate argument that we know ourselves better than the data brokers who appear to wield influence over our psyches, Wythoff invites readers (and tech users) to imagine their own digital technique, acknowledge their vast expertise, and see its immense value.
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