[Ads-l] Has the Earliest Modern Usage of the Term "Science Fiction" Gotten Any Attention from Science Fiction Historians?

[Shapiro, Fred]

I am just curious about something.  Maybe Jeffrey Prucher or someone else can help me.  It seems to me that an 1897 citation in the OED is the earliest known example of the modern usage of the term "science fiction," 30 years before Gernsback:

1897   H. B. Mason in Pharmaceut. World 20 May 592/1   My last remembrance had been of reading Mr. [J. U.] Lloyd's Etidorhpa... The complete arrest of bodily function and tissue waste which the central figure of that remarkable science-fiction achieved at the point where gravitation ceases, somewhere between here and China, impressed me deeply.

Have science fiction historians or scholars picked up on this important citation?  It is referring to an individual instance of science fiction writing rather than the genre as a whole, but the usage is essentially the same as the modern one.

Fred Shapiro

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