Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

ASTOUNDING WONDER

ASTOUNDING WONDER

Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

JOHN CHENG

Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used

for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this

book may be reproduced in any form by any means

without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4383-3

For Larry, Cornelia, and my parents

For it is certainly easier to create without answering for life, and easier to live without any consideration for art. Art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself—in the unity of my answerability.

—M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability

CONTENTS

Introduction. The Hope of Today and the Reality of Tomorrow: Popular Science, Popular Culture, and Science Fiction

PART I. CIRCULATION

1   Magazines for Morons: Pulp Magazines and the Emergence of Science Fiction

2   Conversations from the Backyard: Reading and Imagining Community

PART II. READING

3   Discovering the Freedom of Facts: Fact, Fiction, and the Authority of Science

4   Involving Adventure, Reassuring Romance: Engendering Science Fiction’s Domestic Tranquillity

5   Human Martians and Asian Aliens: The Racial Nature of Wondrous Worlds

6   The Progress of Time: Einstein, History, and the Dimensions of Time Travel

PART III. PRACTICE

7   Fandom Is Just a Goddamn Hobby: The Industry of Fans and Professionals

8   We Want to Play with Spaceships: Popular Rocket Science in Action

Epilogue. Beyond the Gernsback Continuum: Science Fiction’s Community and Social Networks

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

The Hope of Today and the Reality of Tomorrow: Popular Science, Popular Culture, and Science Fiction

Writing a never-completed autobiography in 1927, the physicist and rocket scientist Robert Goddard recalled a pivotal sequence of events earlier in his life. In January 1898 he encountered science fiction stories for the first time when the Boston Post ran serialized adaptations, first of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and then of Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars.¹ Both stories gripped my imagination tremendously, he remembered; Wells’s true psychology made the thing very vivid, and possible ways and means of accomplishing the physical marvels set forth kept me busy thinking. Later in the fall of 1899 he discovered his life’s true calling. I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn, he wrote, recounting the seasonal setting. It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England. He recalled, "I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars and how it would look on a small scale, if sent from the meadow at my feet. I was a different boy when I descended the tree, for existence at last seemed very purposive. Goddard also remembered recognizing the utility of scientific principles. I started making wooden models [that] gave negative results, and I began to think there might be something after all to Newton’s laws, he wrote. [His] third law was accordingly tested and was verified conclusively. If a way to navigate space were to be discovered—or invented, he realized, it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics."²

For Goddard, the events connected fiction and science and gave them direction: possibility’s purpose was its eventual realization. Just as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant safely to pronounce anything impossible, he declared a few years later in his high school graduation oration, so for the individual . . . no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored. One should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition, he explained, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.³ Throughout his life Goddard maintained the faith of this conviction. He read science fiction, rereading War of the Worlds annually at Christmas; he privately observed the Anniversary Day of his interest in spaceflight; and he pursued a career in physics and mathematics to advance its dream and hope. Each and all of these activities were part of his scientific practice; each and all were necessary toward realizing its imagined possibility.⁴

Science in early twentieth-century America, however, was not solely an individual or private affair. Goddard discovered its broader situation in 1919 when reactions to his work transformed him in the public eye from a shy, modest professor of physics to the internationally celebrated inventor of the moon rocket. That year he published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in which he discussed the mathematics and technical requirements to use rockets for what he considered the modest and achievable task of scientifically exploring the upper atmosphere—the extreme altitudes of his title.⁵ What caught public attention, however, was not Goddard’s logic and calculation but his brief speculation that a flash-powder experiment might verify that a rocket had reached such extreme altitudes as to impact the moon.⁶ Newspapers across the country covering his article ran headlines about rockets to the moon ranging from the New York Times’s announcements, Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon and Aim to Reach Moon with New Rocket, to the Boston American’s proclamation, Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon.⁷ The Bronx Exposition, Inc., offered its Starlight Amusement Park to be the special starting point for the moon rocket.⁸ More than a hundred people from around the world offered to undertake the journey, including Capt. Claude R. Collins, a World War I pilot and president of the Aviators’ Club of Pennsylvania; Miss Ruth Phillips from Kansas City, Missouri, who offered to accompany him; and another volunteer team of Capt. Charles N. Fitzgerald and Miss Vanora Guth of New York, who later entered into a partnership with Captain Collins and Miss Phillips.⁹ An enterprising publicity agent at the Mary Pickford Studios pursued a marketing angle: Would Be Grateful for Opportunity to Send Message to Moon from Mary Pickford on Your Torpedo Rocket When It Starts.¹⁰

Goddard’s response to the publicity was caution and withdrawal. Too much attention has been concentrated on the proposed flash-powder experiment, he said in a statement to the press, and too little on the exploration of the atmosphere.¹¹ He explained privately in a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, People must . . . realize that real progress is a succession of logical steps and not a leap in the dark.¹² In another public announcement he stressed the point that I have asked for no volunteers. There is, at this moment, no rocket ship contemplated for the moon. If there were less volunteering and more solid support, I could get along much faster. . . . I am beginning to appreciate the difficulty of making oneself understood.¹³ His preferences and priorities clear, Goddard proceeded purposefully. The assistance in the 1920s, first of the Smithsonian and then of Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Lindbergh, secured him not only the resources for his research but also the ability to pursue it privately.¹⁴ By 1930 he had withdrawn to facilities in the solitude of the New Mexico desert near Roswell, refusing volunteers eager to assist and dealing with publicity only when it was required of him. The moon-rocket episode passed into memory and popular cultural reference, providing among other things material for songwriters. The refrain from Roy Turk-Willy White’s I’m Going Way Up to Mars captured the sentiment of other tunes such as Oh, They’re Going to Shoot a Rocket to the Moon, Love! and The Moon Rocket March:¹⁵

I will wander each day,

And see some things I never saw before.

I’ll build a great rocket and I’ll shoot up to the sky,

I might as well go now, I may not when I die;

I’m going way up to Mars in the land of the stars and I’ll never come back anymore.¹⁶

Goddard’s experience and those of his audience spoke to the significance and evolving circumstances for what might be called popular science in the early twentieth century. More than postwar enthusiasm after World War I, the episode demonstrated science’s general popularity and the extent of its public discourse. Aware that science shaped society’s direction and its everyday practice, many ordinary people wanted to understand that relationship and determine their place within its continuing development. Like Goddard, they wanted to imagine science, its possibility, and its realization, and they shared that sentiment when and where they were given the opportunity, in forms of popular culture that industry’s social technologies were also transforming. In that intersection of interwar popular science and popular culture, the stories that inspired Goddard and others gained new significance, becoming a recognizable genre, known as science fiction, and cultivating a social and progressive sensibility among its readers and enthusiasts.

The prestige of science was colossal, the editor, historian, and contemporary observer Frederick Lewis Allen noted about the general public’s exposure to, attitude toward, and knowledge of science in the United States in the 1920s.¹⁷ The word itself had gained so many valences that it could not consistently hold them all without tension. Science was a system of knowledge, a method of reasoning, a mode of experimenting, a way of experiencing. It was engagement with nature’s works and working and the authority to reveal, control, and apply them. Its significance was so great that it incorporated other associated, yet distinct ideas within its common usage.¹⁸ Although many of the interwar period’s celebrated examples of science might more properly be seen as technology, the term was less frequently used and more often subsumed into the other.¹⁹ Technology’s devices were simply manifestations of science’s knowledge applied and its power realized.²⁰ The word science, Allen noted, had become a shibboleth.²¹ It was a slogan, a password to signal several interrelated sensibilities.

Science, in this sense, augured the modern, a momentous—and in the eyes of many, machine-made—break from tradition’s past. Although the interwar period in America is generally noted for its economic rise and subsequent collapse, science (and technology seen as science) played important roles in these developments, innovating social life and practice in the process. New machinery and expansion of networks to provide electricity, water, and sewage powered the nation’s continued long transition from agricultural to industrial production, the majority in the one tipping to the other in 1920. Mass production remade manufacturing, expanding the output and availability of goods, while improved distribution, marketing, and advertising accelerated and accentuated their sale and consumption. In the same vein, machines reconfigured communication and leisure; telephones, phonographs, motion pictures, and radio extended the range and mode of sensory experience while entertaining audiences. Transportation, already transformed by railroads’ and steamships’ industry, similarly promised new, exciting modes of technological mobility in automobiles, airplanes, dirigibles, submersibles, and possibly rockets. Electricity entered homes to provide not only convenience but also, in appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners, powerful comfort. X-rays, psychoanalysis, vitamins, and hormones offered insight into the body, mind, and their growth and regulation as well as avenues for their commercial pursuit.

Science’s modern success, moreover, promised progress. In the hectic and heady heydays of the 1920s, this signified realized potential. The man in the street and the woman in the kitchen, Allen remarked, confronted on every hand with the new machines and devices which they owed to the laboratory, were ready to believe that science could accomplish almost anything.²² Initial postwar euphoria and relaxation of rationing gave way to corporate efforts, and government encouragement of research and development, that expanded commerce, industry, and the economy, revitalizing city and town life in contrast to the slow decline of farms and rural areas. In the starker circumstances of the 1930s, progress maintained possibility. Market speculation and capital overvaluation gave way to economic contraction, deflation, and depression, and millions struggled with loss of income, homes, and livelihood. Nevertheless marketing campaigns advertised the popular ideals of the American Way of Life and the American Dream, optimistic reminders that struggle, effort, and work might still achieve modern life’s promise.²³ Science and progress held such prestige that left- and right-leaning politics rallied to their combined banner and proclaimed their consolidated worth, albeit toward different ends and purposes.²⁴

Indeed science was popular in part because its progress was peculiarly incomplete. Its potential was proclaimed but, in many cases, not yet fulfilled or, when realized, superseded. Its exemplars abounded, but people experienced many of them indirectly, through reports from the press, wires, and airwaves. Ordinary men and women, Allen declared, were being deluged with scientific information and theory. The newspapers were giving columns of space to inform (or misinform) them of the latest discoveries. A new dictum from Albert Einstein was now front-page stuff even though practically nobody could understand it. Outlines of knowledge poured from the presses to tell people about the planetesimal hypothesis and the constitution of the atom, to describe for them in unwarranted detail the daily life of the cave-man, and to acquaint them with electrons, endocrines, hormones, vitamins, reflexes, and psychoses.²⁵ Minimally or self-educated in science, many people still openly discussed and often debated its subjects and implication even if they did not fully appreciate either. While newspapers and other press sources reported the latest details and developments, they were insufficient outlets for the interest they generated. The screening of a film discussing Einstein’s theory of relativity in 1929 overflowed the capacity of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, and the lines for a subsequent rescreening in January the next year resulted in a riot involving forty-five hundred people.²⁶

Not satisfied with information, popular science enthusiasm required expression and action. Signature devices and ideas allowed celebration and acclaim, excitement and attachment. Interwar Americans found a romance for aviation, a craze for cars, a passion for motion pictures—and their stars—and a fervor for phonographs and radio, among other emerging technological cultures, the energy of their cross-currents powering the era’s jazz, swing, and blues.²⁷ Moreover, while the proper practice of science was rooted in the certainty of empirical experience, popular celebrations of science also asked people to consider experience they had not yet had. Imagination—conceiving what was not yet realized or realizable—connected inspiration and available information in the pursuit of that possibility.²⁸ The potential of travel to Mars inspired the young Robert Goddard to seek additional knowledge and pursue a scientific career, and the possibility of a similar trip to the moon inspired readers of his later research. The rage and fashion in the United States for relativity in the 1920s was driven not only by Einstein’s postwar popularity but also by relativity’s potential extension to areas beyond physics. Imagining science and imagining it passionately were part and parcel of popular science’s practice.

Amid this burst of scientific enthusiasm, in the spring of 1926 a new magazine appeared on newsstands and in the many other places where magazines then entered American culture. In drugstores, cigar stores, barbershops, corner groceries, bus stations, train stations, and virtually any other spot where it might catch a glance amid the bustle of people’s lives, its title shouted, Amazing Stories. The scene on its bright yellow cover signaled the same sentiment: tall-masted ships grounded amid mountains of snow while warmly clad figures skated on an ocean of ice declared a suddenly frozen world’s extraordinary circumstances, while an enormous ringed planet rising over the horizon announced its revolutionary nature. Both title and scene claimed the new magazine’s contribution to the interwar period’s culture of popular science. Its stories promised not only the prestige of science but also the power of science’s unrealized and amazing potential. Nevertheless, while the stories it carried resembled those that Goddard read and would continue to read for inspiration, the magazine and others that followed its calling enabled new and broader changes within popular imaginings of science. Together they fostered the emergence of what would come to be called, a few years later, science fiction.

Science fiction, in this sense, was and is more than fiction with a scientific theme or basis. While it is recognized as a literary genre and cultural category today, science fiction’s present acceptance works against appreciating the contingency of its emergence and the circumstances that established its early culture. Perhaps it is a product of our living in an age of consumption and mass media that when thinking about literary culture we tend to focus on its objects: books, magazines, and the stories, texts, and messages they contain.²⁹ Too often historians think this way, writing histories of books and magazines as analyses of their literary content and seeing their social function as the transmission of that content.³⁰ What occurs as an afterthought are the people who created them, the people who read them, and the ways their interests shaped understanding, theirs and ours, of cultural form.³¹ What is often missing in the study of mass-mediated culture is the very culture within them.³² As the mid-twentieth-century cultural critic Walter Benjamin observed, although mechanical reproduction had transformed traditional expressive culture, its changed culture still involved more than the passive reception of ideas. With the extension of the modern press, reading, writing, and the continued desire for expression became linked in the production, distribution, and circulation of ideas within its new industrial and cultural economy.³³

Certainly science fiction emerged within the commercial transformation not only of the press and publishing but also of popular culture.³⁴ Increasingly many of the places and forms where people sought cultural experience and expression were created, produced, and distributed by commercial industry. Social and cultural historians have charted the geography of these changing conditions: in department stores, in amusement parks, in public parks, and in a variety of other public and private places and spaces.³⁵ Advertising’s subsidy transformed newspapers regionally, magazines nationally, and radio generally into mediums not only for expressive content but also for mass-marketing and sales, spurring the development of what some historians have called a culture of consumption.³⁶ Encouraging new concerns for taste, style, appeal, and their distinctions within a growing professional middle class, this consumer ethos was so successful that popular culture and mass culture were increasingly synonymous in meaning and use, particularly among critics concerned about their deleterious effect.³⁷ Within these interrelated developments, mass-mediated commercial culture gave new form and expression to popular imaginings of science.

Science fiction, moreover, was a specific, albeit peripheral, product of interwar pulp publishing. Arising amid the commercial consolidation and differentiation of magazines, their revenues, and potential audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the pulps—so called because they were printed on inexpensive pulpwood paper—had largely replaced dime novels and cheap libraries as the primary vehicles for popular fiction in the United States. Relying on sales, not advertising revenue, after World War I their industry shifted from publishing general all-fiction magazines to producing chains of genre-specific fiction titles, relying on specialization and diversity to attract readers. Searching for additional material to market, pulp editors seized upon science’s popularity and proclaimed its representative fiction. Promoting the genre’s distinction, they encouraged an ethos of democratic, participatory science within its magazines, included certifiable scientific content within its stories, and asked readers to imagine both science and fiction within its inclusive sensibility. In the process they produced a popularity that, while not widespread, nevertheless fueled the passions of science fiction’s readers.³⁸ Those stories were dear to me because they roused my enthusiasm, gave me the joy of life at a time and in a place and under conditions when not terribly many joys existed, recalled Isaac Asimov, an interwar reader who was inspired later to become a scientist and a science fiction writer. They helped shape me and even educate me, and I am filled with gratitude to those stories and to the men who wrote them.³⁹

Despite configuring its emergence, however, pulp publishing did not determine science fiction’s culture.⁴⁰ Together commerce, science, and the interests of participants combined to create in it a new means for popular science’s expression. Given the circumstances of pulp marketing and appeal, news-stands and other everyday places that displayed and sold magazines across America were sites not only for commercial transaction but also for cultural exchange.⁴¹ Readers brought their own interests, motives, and reasoning to the pulps and adapted them to purposes beyond the concerns of their medium and industry.⁴² For its readers, most of them amateur enthusiasts and not scientists, science fiction became a means to imagine science, society, and readers’ place within them.⁴³ Interwar science fiction pulps created a vital, thriving, and outspoken subculture for popular science that within a few years outpaced the original intentions of editors, writers, and indeed most readers.

Within these conditions science fiction was an especially social fiction. Its magazine format, which included editorials, feature articles, departments, and letters to the editors, made it additionally involving. Drawing from a multitude of sources, writers, editors, and readers brought a wide array of subjects beyond fiction to science fiction’s discourse and introduced their social concerns to its dynamics. In this sense pulp science fiction was both intertextual and extraliterary in the full range of its expression and activity.⁴⁴ Readers read and discussed more than the stories within magazines, and their participation, particularly writing letters, involved more than reading. Their additional social exchange multiplied the circuits within, and the circulation of, science fiction pulps beyond commercial measures of their numbers’ sales.⁴⁵ At the same time, between editors’, writers’, and readers’ competing motives, concerns, and activities, interwar science fiction had no one singly consistent subject, theme, or style for science.

Nevertheless it gave voice to the interwar period’s concerns, not just about science, modernity, and progress but also about ordinary people’s relationships to them. In their expression, figures and ideas that have come to characterize the genre as we know it today emerged slowly, partially, and haphazardly. Recognizable but not yet fully realized—and separate from their modern significance—these tropes organized both science fiction’s literary tradition and its larger social discourse.⁴⁶ Facts inserted into stories, evoked by heroes and villains, and objectively verifiable anchored fiction’s speculation within science’s credibility and allowed writers and readers to demonstrate their ability and authority. Robots, which were originally biological if not human, became emblematic, often mechanical, threats to labor and domestic tranquillity within early twentieth-century concerns about gender, family, technology, and work. Aliens were not yet creatures from outer space but rather Asian villains, whose interwar racial difference expressed concerns about life’s other forms without examining its fundamental basis. Time travel finessed history, its contingency, and causality and substituted extrapolation for explanation, projecting social concern forward through time’s dimension to a realized, natural outcome.

These figurative dynamics defined the scope of interwar science fiction’s stories. Science, in the form of a hypothesized device or theory, enabled exciting adventures for common-man heroes, heroines, and the occasional scientist within myriad other worlds, dimensions, and times, many expressing diverse and dire social implications. Their victories over these representative circumstances reassured both science’s use and its imagined situation—for readers as well as heroic characters—and justified their manifest destiny. At the same time these dynamics also limited the extent of what most interwar science fiction stories actually imagined. Adventures out there, while thrilling, were often also perilous and required returning to the safety of where they began, to a reassuring here. In this sense, beneath and beyond their specific concern, to ensure science fiction’s premise of progressive possibility, stories did not disturb their original present. Their assurance of science’s fiction relied on a present that balanced natural and social change, evoking and exploring potential without actually affecting it.

This figurative dilemma, however, did not deter science fiction’s enthusiasts from answering its participatory rhetoric. In particular, readers appropriated magazine letters and discussion columns, claiming their pages for a variety of activities, only some related to reading. Writing initially to editors to express their opinions about stories and magazines, they also corresponded with writers and eventually with each other. Readers discussed fiction, science, and other contemporary concerns critically and humorously, accumulating and demonstrating their knowledge and authority of their respective subjects.⁴⁷ Often reading stories, particularly serials and sequels, in a piecemeal, out-of-sequence fashion because they lacked access to specific issues, readers reached out to others to trade what materials they had and reconstruct what they still had to read. Some formed clubs, originally to share resources and camaraderie but turning also to expressive ventures, writing stories and editing and producing their own magazines. Slowly removing their activity and exchange outside the pages of the pulps, over time science fiction enthusiasts established a subculture of amateur fan activity related to but independent of the professional public sphere of their magazines’ commercial culture.⁴⁸

Similarly enthusiasts attracted to science fiction’s participatory rhetoric used its emerging social networks to pursue scientific interests. Beyond the exchange of information and knowledge within pulp features and discussions, many wanted to realize science’s potential in actual practice, tinkering and experimenting privately on their own. Science fiction’s public culture provided a forum for them to contact one another and organize their efforts. Some groups failed, while others succeeded to varying degrees. In the process, these aspiring amateur scientists encountered the changing nature of scientific expertise, research, and practice in the twentieth century. Obtaining knowledge useful toward an imagined purpose such as travel through space and to the moon was individually achievable, but actually achieving that purpose required resources, organization, and recognition that were more easily realized with accepted authority and legitimacy. Lacking formal credentials, practical-minded enthusiasts adopted, if slowly and haphazardly, professional standards for rigor, detail, and method in their experiments and reports. At the same time, they maintained their excitement, hope, and commitment through the social relations and bonds that science fiction helped them form. If in their eventual practice they came to imagine science differently than they did within its fiction, they still envisioned themselves within the larger, collective enterprises of both.

In this sense, on a small scale, science fiction both expressed and transformed the culture for interwar popular science and of popular culture. Robert Goddard’s desire to pursue rocketry in solitude away from his many willing volunteers in 1919 and throughout the period gave way to the desires of others who read and participated in more collaborative scientific adventures. While he maintained the interest he had developed as a young boy at the turn of the century for scientifically themed stories and the inspiration and comfort they gave him, that interest and those stories did not resemble the science fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Not simply fiction but a premise of possible and shared adventure, the difference marked the subtle but significant shift that science fiction brought to popular culture and more generally, if also more indirectly, to science. More than creating a recognizable genre, its collective sensibility answered, without addressing, sociological concerns in the early twentieth century about the impersonal social relationships that people developed—particularly with regard to emerging forms of technology and mass culture—outside of their families and immediate communities.⁴⁹ Within science fiction, readers, writers, editors, fans, and other enthusiasts formed relationships that were personal but not necessarily immediate and established social networks that were familiar, if not quite communities in a conventional sense. They adapted the technology of the pulps’ mass commercial medium to their own use and to imagine science on their own terms. Providing an outlet for their involving participation, interwar science fiction was one answer to the broader issue that popular science raised: for a society fundamentally reliant on and shaped by science, who is able, allowed, and authorized to consider its course and consequence?

In writing about science fiction’s historical emergence, I draw from the historiography in American social and cultural history and the history of science and borrow extensively from other fields and disciplines, particularly literary theory, cultural studies, communications, cultural anthropology, and social studies of science and technology. Although their ideas inform my arguments, in the end my concern is historical and my method genealogical: asking when and why science fiction emerged and what the consequences of its emergence were, I trace the broader cultural and scientific impulse to which it gave expression as it emerged and developed in the 1920s and 1930s without seeking to offer a complete account of science fiction or popular science in those decades. Although cultural expression about science that we now might classify as science fiction appeared in other media and other social/cultural circles in the interwar period and before, I limit my discussion mostly to popular fiction and pulp magazines because the pulps gave rise to science fiction’s name, its recognition as a genre and category, and to the social character of its overlapping reading, writing, and fan communities and their attendant networks. The sources I use—pulp magazines’ features, departments, and letters as well as stories and fan materials—are not largely collected in historical archives because they have not generally, until recently, been seen as worth preserving, which made my research challenging and rewarding. In the historical contours I identify and the connections I make, I seek to open, not close, discussion about science fiction, popular science, and popular culture.

PART I

CIRCULATION

ONCE, BEFORE WE imagined space operas, star wars, and aliens from outer space, science fiction did not exist. Like all genres, it has a history and historical origins. Science fiction enthusiasts and scholars have identified imaginative narratives concerned with science dating to the second century.¹ More recently Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others, published popular, and now considered classic, works of scientific fiction in the nineteenth century. Such accounts, however, treat the genre trans-historically, locating texts chronologically to match its type and subject rather than examining the historical conditions of its emergence. The difference is understandable. Genres are established, in part, by managing their original histories. The difference is also ironic. Historically many literary genres—epic, lyric, comedy, and tragedy, for example—were products of cultural traditions whose social processes and details are scantly or speculatively known. As science fiction is a product of recent, modern mass-produced culture, the details of its emergence are more well documented and therefore both more historically knowable and more arguable.

Moreover, science fiction is a cultural as well as a literary genre and both senses of genre were products of the interwar period’s commercial and popular culture. In the 1920s and 1930s the term and the idea came to describe, loosely and inexactly, a type of popular fiction as well as its film, radio, and other media translations. They also, and as significantly, informed the sensibility of the genre’s community of readers and enthusiasts. Science fiction’s particular emergence was accidental, the result of industrial shifts within early twentieth-century magazines that reorganized pulp publishing and, more specifically, of editors’ opportunistic efforts within its revised fiction factory to invent and reinvent magazines and stories featuring scientific fiction. Their successful circulation—of material magazines, textual stories and features, and visual covers and illustrations—tapped into a broader cultural impulse that imagined, celebrated, and considered modern science. Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder not only named the prominent interwar science fiction pulps, they also proclaimed the genre’s welcoming character.² Within their pages editors, writers, and readers—encouraged to write letters to the editors and pursue other related activities—wrote and exchanged their knowledge, perspectives, and opinions about science, society, and their contemporary import and potential consequence.³ While science fiction’s emergence within pulp publishing prefigured its culture, it did not determine it. Conversations that began in its magazines circulated beyond them, informing and spurring readers’ own, often independent, clubs and publications. Selling and marketing magazines and stories that imagined science, pulp publishing enabled a science fiction community within which people entertained and pursued their own sense of its imaginative subject. Reading their expressive content requires, first, understanding the historical circumstances of this community’s emergence.

1

Magazines for Morons: Pulp Magazines and the Emergence of Science Fiction

Art directors say that covers sell magazines; fiction editors insist that people buy magazines for the quality of the short stories and serials; articles editors assert confidently that people today are mainly interested in nonfiction, and the technicians say that typography, make-up and design are important factors in the public’s response to a publication. Experienced editors and publishers who have the responsibility of supervising the overall publication realize that no one feature can be given credit for the sustained success of any given magazine. The risk is naturally minimized by the experience and ability of a good editor and publisher.

—Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory¹

Hugo Gernsback invented both science fiction and the science fiction magazine, but not at the same time. Although the two words science and fiction had probably been used in combination before, it was Gernsback’s use of the phrase that established its popular and sustained presence in public discourse.² The year was 1929; the occasion, the launch of Gernsback’s new magazine Science Wonder Stories. Science fiction, he proclaimed in its inaugural editorial, is a tremendous new force in America. They are the stories that are discussed by inventors, scientists, and in the classroom. Teachers insist that pupils read them, because they widen the young man’s horizon, as nothing can. Wise parents, too, let their children read this type of story because they know that it keeps them abreast of the times, educates them, and supplants the vicious and debasing sex story. SCIENCE WONDER STORIES are clean, CLEAN from beginning to end. They stimulate only one thing—IMAGINATION.³

Gernsback’s invention of the science fiction magazine has a different basis and an earlier chronology. An enthusiast for amateur two-way radio, he began publishing stories of scientific fiction in the 1910s in his radio catalogs and magazines. Following the success in the early 1920s of Science & Invention special issues devoted to what he then called scientifiction, he created a new magazine in 1926, Amazing Stories, dedicated exclusively to it. Addressing in its inaugural editorial those readers who wondered, aren’t there enough [magazines] already, with the several hundreds now being published? he declared that Amazing Stories was not merely another fiction magazine but a new kind of fiction magazine!⁴ Amazing was amazing, initially. Circulation figures shot quickly beyond one hundred thousand for the monthly, and Gernsback quickly added quarterly and annual versions, the appropriately named Amazing Stories Quarterly and Amazing Stories Annual. After several years of success, however, in early 1929 Gernsback lost financial and editorial control of the enterprise, and he left it, its magazines, and scientifiction.⁵ They continued under the management of Teck Publications, and his former assistant, Dr. T. O’Conor Sloane, a chemist by training and a relative by marriage to Thomas Edison, ascended to its editorial mantle. Gernsback returned later that year with Science Wonder Stories and its renamed science fiction to compete with his earlier creations.

Claims to original propriety aside, Gernsback’s publishing adventures spoke to the distinction that the French cultural historian Roger Chartier made between text and print. Books, he observed, were the result of two productive processes: writers’ expression produced text, while printers, informed by editorial opinion and publishers’ concerns, manufactured print. The one was distinct from but required the other. "Whatever they may do, authors do not write books, the historian of print Roger Stoddard declared. Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines."⁶ Publishing in this sense not only made books from writing but also mediated their relationship and tension. Publishing’s economic concerns underwrote the work of writers and the marketing and sale of books and complicated purely textual ideas of authorship, reading, and the effort and creativity they involved. Editors’ and publishers’ interests explain how and why books aimed at readers do not necessarily accord with their authors’ intentions.⁷

Publishing’s mediation of text and print also applies, perhaps even more so, to magazines and to science fiction. In the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, magazines were a primary source for reading. Although many fiction and nonfiction works were subsequently published as books, most appeared first as stories and articles in magazines whose various forms circulated both widely and differently. For popular fiction, particularly in the interwar period, their specific medium was more often than not pulp magazines—inexpensively produced periodicals with eye-catching, vividly colored, and highly dramatic covers. Emerging in pulp publishing, science fiction was and meant many things. It referred to a type of magazine and a genre of fiction as well as a number of activities, of which reading was only one, centered on the magazine, fiction, or both. Producing and linking magazine and fiction—print and text—was a publishing industry that manufactured the one to market and sell the other, encouraging reader activity and participation to promote mutually reinforcing enthusiasm for both. The concerns and efforts of writers and editors as well as artists, illustrators, and designers were redefined and incorporated to these common purposes. Within the contentious creative dynamics of these pulp producers, popular imagining of science became science fiction.

While newsstands throughout interwar America sold more copies of magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and the Ladies’ Home Journal, their pulp magazines generally and more often caught the eye of passersby. The large number of pulp titles, their volume of display space, and their particular visual style demanded attention. In the main street alone I found no less than six shops devoted to the sale of nothing else than periodical pulp, Aldous Huxley wrote of his encounter with pulp in an American town. From the brilliantly lighted windows, he recounted, scores and hundreds of highly colored female faces, either floating in the void, or else attached to female figures in a partial state of undress, gazed out from the covers of magazines.⁸ Thrilling Love Story, Ace-High, Black Mask, Clues All-Star, Detective Story, Love Story, Ranch Romances, Rapid-Fire Action Stories, Sport Story, War Aces, pulp titles shouted, and shouted loudly. Their brightly colored, sensationally illustrated covers featured heroes, heroines, villains, creatures, and machines in a seemingly endless arrangement of strangely unsettling and familiarly comforting settings. To this riotous chorus interwar science fiction added Amazing Stories, Science Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories of Super Science, and other, shorter-lived titles.

The name pulp derived from the inexpensive, coarse paper on which these magazines were printed. Its origin has conventionally been dated to 1896, when the publisher Frank Munsey converted his children’s magazine, the Golden Argosy, to an all-fiction weekly called simply Argosy and printed it on pulpwood paper, claiming, The story is more important than the paper it is printed on.⁹ Rough-edged, with standard seven by ten-inch dimensions, and running 96, 128, or more pages an issue, pulps carried the same popular fiction as nineteenth-century dime novels in magazine form and early in the industry’s existence competed with these book-form rivals.¹⁰ With the conversion of Street & Smith, the largest dime novel publisher, to pulp publishing at the turn of the century and the entry of additional publishing concerns, the pulps became the major source and market for inexpensive popular fiction in early twentieth-century America.¹¹ After a brief respite during World War I’s paper rationing, pulp magazines reached the height of their popularity as a form of mass entertainment in America in the 1920s and 1930s.

The pulps had their share of critical and disapproving attention, particularly among segments of society concerned with culture and class. To the New Republic’s Alvin Barclay, pulps were Magazines for Morons.¹² It is not a happy picture, declared Margaret MacMullen about the whole scene, for sharply as these magazines differ in appeal and emphasis, they are all alike in one thing, a denial of reality.¹³ Marcus Duffield expressed similar sentiments in his Vanity Fair piece The Pulps: Day Dreams for the Masses.¹⁴ In Clement Greenberg’s seminal piece on Avant-Garde and Kitsch, pulps won the dubious distinction of being included in his discussion of that thing to which Germans give the wonderful name of Kitsch.¹⁵ Their cacophony of illustrated covers seven times too vivid to be called garish sounded the wood-pulp racket that Henry Morton Robinson described with distaste and disdain in 1928. Wood-pulp is the great unrecorded fact of American literature, he wrote. It is the reading dividend of a democracy; the weekly fiction light that dare not fail. Stylistically it’s awful; structurally it’s carved out of unreality by the flat side of a venal typewriter. You may not like it, and may even despise people who do. But take it or leave it, approve, condemn or patronize—Wood-Pulp, there she stands!¹⁶

Such appearances could be deceiving. While Munsey’s Argosy sold originally for a nickel, the interwar pulps were cheap by reputation only. At twenty and twenty-five cents an issue, they were not actually cheap at all. The irony spoke to the ambiguity of the actual subjects of criticism against the pulps: the magazines themselves or what they contained. This ambiguity is not specific to pulp magazines but applies to magazines generally, whose relationship between object and content—or print and text, to use Chartier’s distinction again—is particularly fluid. Like novels and films, but unlike newspapers, magazines are generally considered to carry expressive content: poetry magazines for poetry, literary magazines for literature, photography magazines for photography, and fiction magazines for fiction. At the same time, like newspapers, magazines carry ancillary materials that, while expressive in their own right, are not usually considered content: advertising, artwork and illustration, photography, features and opinion columns, editorials, letters to the editor. The term magazine in English differs from one used almost interchangeably, periodical, in precisely this sense of a storehouse or a supply chamber of goods, of having a variety of different departments.¹⁷ How magazines applied and combined these features, how they were formatted, distinguished not only different magazines but also different kinds of magazines.

The pulps constituted one of several magazine forms developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years after the Civil War witnessed a burst of magazine proliferation amid the development of a more regionally-integrated national economy, spurred by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the extension of existing transportation networks. In what one observer described as a mania of magazine-starting, the number of periodicals published in the United States increased more than fourfold over the span of two decades.¹⁸ New technologies such as the mechanical typesetter, the high-speed rotary web press, half-tone photographic screening, and color lithography enabled publishers to produce more, larger, and more visually oriented magazines.¹⁹ Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, entrepreneurial publishers such as Munsey, S. S. McClure, John Brisben Walker, and Cyrus H. K. Curtis combined these technologies with cost-cutting marketing, transportation, and distribution systems to create magazines with circulations far exceeding those of any previously published.²⁰ These new mass-circulation magazines were literally magazines for the millions.

By the 1920s and 1930s these developments had coalesced into three kinds of magazines whose forms were the product and expression of class and cultural considerations: pulps, slicks, and qualities. People with money read the slicks, recalled Jack Williamson, an avid reader. The quality group was for people with brains. Pulp ads were aimed at the ill-educated and poor: muscle building courses, rupture erasers, etc.²¹ The qualities, such as Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Nation, were survivors of the initial post-Civil War expansion of magazine publishing. As their nickname suggested, these plainly designed, text-based magazines were sold to consistent but smaller audiences willing to pay higher prices for the highbrow quality of their fiction and nonfiction content. The pulps and slicks were subsequent products of the encounter between new mass-circulation magazines and advertising.

Figure 1. The Magazine Revolution.

Part of this story, the emergence of the slicks, is relatively well known and familiar. The new magazines’ circulations and geographic scope attracted the attention and revenue of marketing and advertising industries looking to promote manufactured goods to a national market.²² The attraction quickly proved mutually beneficial to both, cementing the ties between them and setting off another burst of imitation and proliferation that the historian William Peterson called the magazine revolution.²³ The linking of advertising rates to circulation figures served to drive both dramatically higher. The Saturday Evening Post’s circulation increased from 2,231 in 1897 to 726,681 in 1907 and to 1,833,070 in 1917, while its advertising revenue grew correspondingly from $6,933 to $1,266,931 to $16,076,562; by 1922 they had nearly doubled again.²⁴ Additional price drops demonstrated the principle behind these modern magazines: sell for less than the cost of production to achieve a large circulation and take profits from the advertising revenue that such a circulation attracted.²⁵

Advertising’s new and developing visual dimension demanded greater attention to appearance. Modern magazines’ look, style, and content evolved to meet the requirements of their equally evolving advertising. Not only did the number and size of their pages grow, but they were increasingly fashioned by the higher-quality production that earned them the nickname slick. Use of glossy laminate paper, vivid illustrations, and eventually photographs and color allowed titles such as the Saturday Evening Post, McClure’s, and the Ladies’ Home Journal to assume the mantle of cultural and class distinction, taking on the values and tastes of the middle-class consumers whom advertisers targeted, specifically women readers who had been identified by analysts as consumer decision-makers.²⁶ Modern advertising’s impact in transforming business practice, social custom, and cultural attitudes beyond the slicks, in turn, gained them influence beyond their number.²⁷ The number of titles achieving both mass circulations and large advertising revenues was small relative to the total number of magazines published. Nevertheless such success became the standard against which all magazines were measured. Although qualities and pulps carried little consumer advertising, magazines came to be—and are still—understood