Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Jack London, even Aldous Huxley. They are all degraded, dismissed, nearly forgotten by the literary establishment. These authors have been salvaged only by the fourteen year old boys refusal to let them die. The claim that the literary types are merely rejecting grotesquely awful, soulless junk (and confusing it with science fiction as such) is simply not true.