Brooks Landon's Science Fiction after 1900 samples a wide range of science fiction writing in the United States, England, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, with a special focus on the development of genre SF written explicitly for science fiction markets and science fiction readers.

This study, intended as a point of departure for readers, students, teachers, or scholars interested in exploring science fiction, offers on overview of the broad historical and theoretical concerns that have marked the phenomenal growth of this genre in the twentieth century. Landon analyzes the genre of science fiction not as a set of rules for writers but as a set of expectations for readers - more an epistemology or attitude toward life than a set of formal characteristics.

Landon presents science fiction as a social phenomenon, a set of expectations about the future that moves beyond literary experience through a sense of mission based on the assumption that SF can be a "tool to help you think." He offers a broad overview of the stages through which SF has developed in the twentieth century as well as of the large body of criticism now devoted to this genre.