Usually first published in cheaply printed
dime novels, most such stories were written to appeal to young boys. The edisonade formula was an outgrowth of the fascination with engineering and technology that arose near the end of the 1800s, and a derivative of the existing Robinsonade formula.
Clute defines the word in his book:
As used here the term "edisonade"—derived from Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) in the same way that "Robinsonade" is derived from Robinson Crusoe—can be understood to describe any story which features a young US male inventor hero who uses his ingenuity to extricate himself from tight spots and who, by so doing, saves himself from foreign oppressors.[2]
and he defines it again in a column referring to "The Plutonian Terror" by
Jack Williamson written in 1933:
It is an Edisonade, a paradigm kind of science fiction in which a brave young inventor creates a tool or a weapon (or both) that enables him to save the girl and his nation (America) and the world from some menace, whether it be foreigners or evil scientists or aliens; and gets the girl; and gets rich.[3]
One frequent theme in edisonades was the exploration of little-known, "untamed" parts of the world. To that degree, the stories reflected the contemporaneous era of large-scale
colonization and exploration.
The
Frank Reade series first appeared in 1876, written by Harold Cohen (1854–1927) under the
pseudonyms Harry Enton and "Noname." The first was "Frank Reade and His Steam Man of the Plains". After four titles, the series was continued as the adventures of
Frank Reade, Jr., written by ultra-prolific boys' fiction author
Luis Senarens as "Noname".[5]
A series of stories featuring "Tom Edison, Jr." by Philip Reade were published between 1891 and 1892. The story "Tom Edison's Electric Mule, or, The Snorting Wonder of the Plains" (1892) is a parody of the earlier Frank Reade series.[6]
The
Jack Wright series was created and written by
Luis Senarens. The character first appeared in 1891, and was the subject of 121 stories.[5]
Thomas Edison himself was the main character in Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss (1898), a sequel to Fighters from Mars (in the form of a revenge fantasy) an unauthorized and altered adaptation of Wells's The War of the Worlds. Another real and famous inventor to appear in one of the stories was
Nikola Tesla in To Mars With Tesla; or, the Mystery of the Hidden World.
[1]
Five stories about the edisonade character named Electric Bob were published in 1893, written by Robert T. Toombs,[7] which added a touch of wittiness and oddity to the genre.[8]
The original
Tom Swift series of juvenile books are a continuation of the genre in the juveniles that followed dime novels.[citation needed]
The Skylark of Space, considered to be the first
space opera, begins as an edisonade before transitioning to the novel genre.
A Pause in Space-Time by science fiction author Laurence Dahners is a modern edisonade about an impoverished but mathematically brilliant college student who invents a way to stop time in small, portable bits of space.