Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America 9780812206678

Table of contents :
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

Citation preview

ASTOUNDING WONDER

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ASTOUNDING WONDER Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

JOHN CHENG

u n i v e r s i t y

o f

p e n n s y l v a n i a

p h i l a d e l p h i a

p r e s s

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 www.pennpress.org Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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 1 PA RT I. C IR C U LATI O N

13

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

17

2 Conversations from the “Backyard”: Reading and Imagining Community

51

PA RT II. RE A D IN G

79

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

83

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

111

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

147

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

179

PA RT III . P RACTI CE

211

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

215

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

251

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

301

List of Abbreviations

315

Notes

317

Index

375

Acknowledgments

389

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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Introduction

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.

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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

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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, newsstands 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

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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

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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,

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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:

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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

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O

nce, 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

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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 Factory 1

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

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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

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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 AllStar, 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

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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.

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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

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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. Part of this story, the emergence of the slicks, is relatively well known and

The Slicks The Slicks The TheQualities Qualities

The ThePulps Pulps

Figure 1. The “Magazine Revolution.”

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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 implicitly to include advertisements. Magazine circulations, verified for both publishers and advertisers by independent industry-established agencies, are measured in number of issues sold, not by number of readers or the import or impact of their ideas. In a less familiar story, the pulps emerged as an indirect consequence of advertising’s arrival in magazine publishing. Early turn-of-the-century pulpwood magazines resembled the slicks with large circulations, low prices,

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and advertising content. Pulpwood popularity, however, derived from interest in the fiction they carried exclusively, not from the variety of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction features of the slicks.28 Progressive reform of postal rates in the 1910s aimed at curbing the growth of advertising in magazines and abuse of second-class postal subsidies transformed these pulpwood magazines.29 The reform’s principal target, the emerging slicks, survived relatively unscathed. Financed by consumer manufacturing, they kept their advertising, indeed expanding it, and absorbed the reform’s additional costs into their industry’s continued growth. With a production quality less appealing to consumer advertising, pulpwood publishers after World War I refined and transformed their industry, becoming what the editor Quentin Reynolds called the “fiction factory.”30 Practice, form, and appearance adapted to meet revised industrial standards. Operating with smaller but still profitable margins, pulp publishers reorganized their business. They minimized production and overhead costs, returned to independent agencies to handle their distribution, and raised their sales prices significantly from five and ten cents an issue to fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five cents each. Their products were similarly rearranged and remade. Pulp publishers cut the number of pages per issue, curtailed advertising dramatically (to avoid costs from the postal reform), and focused marketing on their fiction, increasingly specializing in genre rather than varied general fiction.31 The advertising that remained was divided between the limited space of the pages directly adjacent to its covers—which earned far less in total than a typical slick charged for a single page—and smaller mail-order promotions in its back pages that publishers “sold” for free, receiving payment only if their products generated sufficient sales. With carefully minimized expenses in the thousands of dollars per issue, circulations in the five and low-six figures, and net profits ranging from fifty dollars to one thousand dollars an issue, interwar pulp titles hardly resembled Munsey’s earlier all-fiction Argosy.32 The changes that produced the interwar pulps were the inverse of those that made the slicks. Production quality and, by extension, cultural reputation became increasingly “cheap” even as their prices doubled and tripled. “The pulp differs from other magazines,” Thomas Uzzell observed, “because it prints only one type of story and paradoxically enough, because more than any other type of magazine it succeeds or fails by reason of what it prints.”33 Nevertheless the pulp industry flourished under these changed circumstances, expanding throughout the interwar period and reaching record sales during the Depression. Reading studies in the mid-

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1930s estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the literate American public read pulp magazines.34 The requirements of this restructured industry also redefined authorship, writing, and the production of stories. Ironically, although fiction was the primary content and appeal of the pulps, it was also the most elastic cost in their production and the one most easily reduced. The cost of the fiction in a typical pulp in the 1930s, generally novelettes, serial installments, and other, shorter stories, was less than one-sixth its per-issue costs and less than the cost of paper, shipping, or printing and binding (at 14.9 percent versus 26.1 percent, 20.5 percent, and 29.8 percent of overall costs respectively).35 The industry standard for pulp writing, like that for slick writing, was piece-work, not wage, labor: writers were paid by the word for their stories. These rates varied according to the reputation and negotiating power of writers and to economic conditions. During the relative prosperity of the 1920s, fewer pulp houses published fewer titles, fostering a more hospitable market for stories. Publishers generally paid two to five cents a word, although Max Brand, the enormously popular author of westerns, was widely known for his extraordinary ten-cent-a-word rate. During the harder days of the Depression, even though pulp sales grew, word rates declined. Fiction Magazines, Inc., paid two-fifths to three-fifths of a cent per word. Ace Magazine Publishers offered half a cent to one cent a word. Popular Publications and Standard Publications’ Thrilling Group typically paid one cent a word, with some authors receiving up to five cents a word, and the Spicy magazine chain offered one to one and a half cents a word. Most established writers earned two cents a word, while unknowns usually earned the lower one-half-cent rate.36 Word rates were promises for payment, not payment itself. When and how publishers paid writers depended on the stability and conditions of individual publishing houses, a situation that conferred a measure of respect to some publishers while it contributed to the industry’s overall reputation for cheapness. Schedule and method of payment were systematic, part of the industrial conditions of pulp production. Although established writers maintained constant contact with editors and accumulated reliable records in meeting deadlines and producing appropriate material, they were rarely paid differently than less-known writers. Larger, more secure pulp houses such as Popular, Street & Smith, and Standard paid on acceptance, mailing writers checks as a sign of their good faith.37 Less secure pulp houses paid upon publication, delaying payment to writers for weeks or months if not longer. Even less secure and risky were pulp houses that delayed payment after

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publication and with whom writers had to fight to collect what was owed them.38 Editorial practices exacerbated postpublication payment. Editors commonly stockpiled stories for use in several issues of a magazine, distributing them to balance and maintain consistency. Access to the pulps’ industrial structure helped publishers maintain their demands on writers. Pulp writers’ relationships with publishers and editors depended on networks of informal personal contact, access, and availability. “It was my practice to take an idea or two into an editor’s office to get an okay before writing it, and I often talked shop with editors over lunch,” the veteran pulp writer Frederick Davis recalled. In turn, “editors often phoned me to ask for a story of a certain type and a certain length. Of course, I would immediately oblige.”39 While the bulk of story submissions came from aspiring writers, their variability limited their utility under the constraints of tight budgets and hard deadlines. Instead established, veteran writers, whose work editors were familiar with, produced the majority of actually published material.40 The distribution of the pool and output of pulp writers testified to these conditions. Frank Gruber estimated in 1934 that a total population of approximately twelve hundred to thirteen hundred people made their living writing for the pulps. A quarter resided in the New York area, a few lived overseas, and the rest lived throughout the United States. These writers produced some 90 percent of the material in the pulps. The remainder came from writers still hoping for opportunity. “In the Depression there were literally thousands of people,” he recalled, “who turned to writing in the desperate hope that this might be the means of getting off WPA. Most of these were rank amateurs, but still many, many were gifted enough to sell an occasional story.”41 Industrial production of popular fiction emphasized “quantity writing” over “quality writing,” to use the pulp editor Harold Hersey’s terms. The two were not mutually exclusive, but the distinction marked the priority of the one over the other for pulp writers. Hersey observed two categories of professional writers: divines who wrote with great quality in great quantity; and dependables who wrote in great quantity with sufficient quality.42 The writing still needed to be competent, but speed was a necessity for writers in the pulp market. “Boy, is there a story in that Street & Smith outfit,” recalled Theodore Dreiser of his early experience with the pulps. “Men writing forty to sixty thousand words a week for fifty or sixty dollars. . . . Yes, the story of that firm would make a book.”43 Arthur J. Burks earned the nickname “Speed Merchant of the Pulps” by reputedly aiming for eighteen thousand words a day, and in 1930 he produced one hundred thousand words a month and

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earned over two hundred dollars a week.44 Frank Gruber calculated that between 1934 and 1941 he averaged six hundred thousand words a year, with an average of eight hundred thousand in the last three of those years.45 “I wrote four days a week, 5,000 words a day, for fifty-two weeks a year,” declared Paul Ernst, “a million words a year, from 1934 to 1940.”46 The pace of this work required rigorous and even peculiar work habits beyond the need for speed. “I flogged the typewriter day and night,” Gruber recalled. “I flogged it in the early hours of the morning, I beat at it, late at night. I worked Saturdays and Sundays.”47 Ernst recalled about his writing practice, “I learned to do it on the first draft. It was letter perfect. I got an idea, sat down at the typewriter, numbered page one, and proceeded from there.” The secret to his successful production rate, he added, was his ability to forget what he had written. “I trained myself to forget,” he explained. “You can’t be thinking of an idea you did the day before, when you’re trying to write something new. You’ll ruin what you’re trying to do, otherwise.”48 The rigorous routine of pulp writing disciplined amateur authors to become professional writers.49 Harold Hersey’s managerial perspective divided writers into two classes: professionals and amateurs. Part of their distinction was habit. The professional “learned to take punishment” and “discipline[d] himself to long tedious hours at the ‘mill,’” while the amateur had “yet to go through the heartbreaking process of inuring himself to the grind.” Part of their distinction was productivity. The professional could “turn out a yarn on any subject of any length and at any given time, either woven around his own theme or one suggested by the editor,” while the amateur was “incapable of adapting his talents to a practical purpose.” Yet another part of their distinction was mindset. The professional had an “objective state of mind about his work,” while the amateur “still talk[ed] about that inspiration and individuality in self-expression which are so precious to the serious artist and so utterly worthless to the quantity writer.”50 Use of the term “writer” rather than “author” expressed the priorities within pulp publishing. The product of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary developments, the term “author” maintained class and cultural distinction, suggesting creative artists whose literary publication marked and established their individual merit. The term “writer” referred to tradesmen, cultural workers who produced or, perhaps more appropriately, manufactured stories for publications, work that was nevertheless still distinguished by skill and craftsmanship. These class and cultural dimensions were not lost on pulp writers, some of whom took a workman’s pride in them. “The craftsman who fabricates

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wood-pulp stories differs from the occasional ‘smooth-paper’ writer . . . as a deft and capable bricklayer differs from his unprofessional brethren who slowly achieve a result by trial and error,” wrote Will McMorrow in defense of his trade. “One is an artisan, the other an amateur. Is literature something that is not even read by wood-pulp readers? I don’t know. I am only an artisan, not an artist.” Nonetheless pulp writers were not above working for the slicks, which paid far better. Indeed, while pulp and slick magazines differed in appearance and market, they drew upon a common pool of aspiring writers. Most writers sold their services wherever they were accepted—the pulps, the slicks, or elsewhere. More writers were able to sell to the pulps and, if they were fortunate, establish themselves in that market. Most writers, even established pulp writers, were not able to sell their material to the slicks, much less make writing for the slicks their livelihood. Still, according to McMorrow, nine out of ten slick writers started out in the pulps. “They did not consciously write up to smooth-paper any more than then they consciously wrote down to wood-pulp,” he explained, “The break that woodpulp readers get [was] the first crack at talent.”51 Frank Gruber documented, in exacting detail, his early efforts to earn a living as a writer under these conditions. Self-taught from reading trade publications and experience, he began while based at his wife’s family’s home in Webster’s Grove, Missouri. Between August 1932 and June 1934 he produced a total of 174 pieces totaling roughly 620,000 words and sold 107 of them, the majority only after many attempts. He sold 26 of his 39 Sunday school stories, earning a total of $205.00; 12 of 16 short short stories ($52.50); 16 of 17 military service stories ($83.25); and a variety of articles for sales magazines. Of the 36 pulp stories he wrote, 12 sold for a total of $156.00. Four of the sales went unpaid, and 5 others went to one magazine for a total of $12.50. Of the others, 1 sold for $35.00 and another for $7.50. One 3,500word story, which sold for $3.50 after twenty-two rejections, earned less than the postage paid to send it out. Eventually relocating to New York City and breaking into the established writing market there, he learned from his experiences the quality most important to survive within the pulp jungle: “the will to succeed.”52 If pulp writers saw themselves as skilled tradespeople, the industry adapted authorship to other purposes. When a pulp magazine referred to an “author,” the term distinguished the writer of its main story or serial installment from the short-story writers who filled necessary space toward its back sections. More significantly, in an odd twist, “authors” separated writers from

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the stories they produced. Following in a tradition of commercially produced fiction of a variety of formats—nineteenth-century penny press and dime novels, twentieth-century juvenile books, and paperback fiction after World War II—pulp publishers and editors maintained collections of author pseudonyms. These assorted names associated different authors with different stories, types of stories, and titles to disguise the fact that one person or team of writers produced several, if not all, of them.53 The appearance allowed some writers to write for several titles simultaneously under aliases identified with each. While Max Brand was widely popular as a successful author of western stories, Frederick Schiller Faust, the writer behind the brand name, was popular beyond even its one reputation.54 Perhaps the most successful of pulp writers, Faust wrote a reputed 1.5 million words a year for thirty years under a wide variety of pseudonyms: Frank Austin, George Owen Baxter, Lee Bolt, Max Brand, George Challis, Martin Dexter, Evin Evans, Evan Evans, John Frederick, Frederick Frost, Dennis Lawton, David Manning, Peter Henry Morland, Hugh Owen, Arthur Preston, Nicholas Silver, and Henry Uriel. In addition he wrote serials for slicks such as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post, and among other accomplishments created the popular character Dr. Kildare.55 Faust was so prolific that in one instance all the lead stories in a 1932 issue of Western Story magazine were his, each written under a different pseudonym.56 Writers’ products, their stories, were equally incorporated to the pulps’ industrial conditions. In the interwar period pulp fiction was practically synonymous with formula fiction, even though pulp stories were not alone in being formulaic. “If ever there was a formula-bound lot,” fumed the pulp author Ralph Milne Farley in 1935, “it’s the editors of the slick. You’ll find more variety in the worst pulp magazines than in the best slicks.”57 Still, pulp fiction was edited and often written according to specific formulaic traditions. Editors made their requirements public, publishing them for aspiring writers in trade journals. Standard Publications’ Leo Margulies listed his guidelines for story content for his Thrilling Mystery: “material should be centered around (a) vampires, witches, ghouls, werewolves; (b) strange cults, with demon-god figures; (c) horrible monsters; (d) villains who use horror methods to drive their victims mad.”58 Although formulas facilitated editorial control and oversight, they also helped writers maintain a high quantity of output. In an analysis of western stories, Frank Gruber concluded that there were seven basic types: 1) the Union Pacific story (which have to do with the construction of a railroad, telegraph, or stagecoach line); 2) the ranch story;

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3) the empire story (in which the conflict is between titans of the West, man against man, man against history); 4) the revenge story; 5) Custer’s last stand (cavalry and Indian story); 6) the outlaw story; and 7) the marshal story. “Once I had these classifications worked out thoroughly it was of great help to me,” he explained. “I could go over them, decide I had written stories in one or another of the groups only recently and it might be easier to do one of the others.”59 The historian Robert Kenneth Jones similarly charted eight basic narrative themes used by writers of weird mystery stories: 1) compulsionobsession; 2) resurrection; 3) age vs. youth; 4) weird monsters; 5) evil crones; 6) curses and spells; 7) supernaturalism; and 8) evil temptress.60 While stories fell within generally well-defined thematic categories, the details of their variations, particularly of their plots, remained to be worked out. Centered on the concerns of their heroic protagonists, pulp stories often sent them on adventures with elaborate plot twists and turns. Here again formulas helped writers produce. Two sets of conditions provided the bases from which the writer Wyatt Blassingame derived the hundreds of stories he published. In the one, “a character flees from a menace. He tries in every way possible to escape. But the menace overtakes him. When all seems lost, the hero overcomes his adversary.” In the other, “the hero and heroine are trapped at night in a room. Every side represents some dimly seen, mystifying danger. The walls start to close in. The hero has to find a way out.”61 Although most pulp writers saw themselves writing genre-specific stories, Frederick Faust argued that there were only two basic plot variations for formula writing irrespective of genre. Driven by contrasting moral impulses, his plot structures corresponded to the narrative structures that literary critics and scholars argue for sensational popular fiction. Melodramas oppose good and evil to allow characters to discover the moral nature of both. Sentimental narratives contrast good with its absence in order to reveal its true nature and allow a fallen character’s potential return to grace.62 These dynamics affected pulp fiction and its reputation, but in opposite and contrasting ways. On the one hand, goodness inevitably triumphed in pulp fiction’s morally driven plots. Almost without exception heroes overcame natural and supernatural obstacles and/or human weaknesses and perversions. Studies in the 1930s concluded that, based on their content and outcome, the pulps were the most morally wholesome of all forms of fiction.63 On the other hand, tension, excitement, and development within these same plots depended, ironically, on their fallen or villainous antagonists. “One thing I always wanted to know completely was the villain,” Blassingame

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recalled. “It all turned on him. The hero could make mistakes in trying to find him. He could blunder. The villain knew damn well what he was doing.”64 Gruber concurred: “The ‘heavies’ or villains in my stories have always appealed to me more than the good guys. I have written much about outlaws and gunfighters who are really ‘bad guys.’ They start bad and become good, whereas the ‘good guys,’ the respectable citizens in my stories[,] usually become bad.”65 This dialectic was essential for a story, explained Faust. “The good man becomes bad and the bad man becomes good. That way you have conflict. If the bad man stays bad and the good man stays good you have no conflict.”66 These morally prescribed structures channeled writers’ energies into creating variations on common themes rather than thematic variations. Encouraged to embellish and exaggerate for excitement, authors distinguished themselves with pyrotechnic verbal flair and in the process created vividly memorable characters and cliff-hangers, one after the other. Perceptions and concerns that the pulps were tawdry, risqué, and morally corrosive focused on this part of the pulp dialectic, often missing the rigid moral formulas that were equally part of its dynamic. Embellishment and ornamentation could be equally formulaic. In his quest to be ever more productive, Gruber concluded that stories within specific genres could be built upon basic sets of common constitutive elements. For mystery stories, his elements were: 1) colorful hero; 2) theme; 3) villain; 4) background; 5) murder method; 6) motive; 7) clue; 8) trick; 9) action; 10) climax; and 11) emotion. “Once I had worked out these eleven elements, the job of coming up with plots for mystery stories was greatly simplified,” he explained. “You can write a perfectly salable mystery story with perhaps only seven or eight of these elements, but get them all into a story and you cannot miss.”67 An industry that mass-produced specialized fiction with prepared plot and story components required tools for its tradesmen. “There was a book called Plotto which had been written in old age by a one-time very prolific dime novel writer,” recalled Gruber. “It was supposed to suggest thousands of plots to the current writers who used it.” He also described a writing aid called the “Plot Genie,” a deck of cards with ideas on each. To use it, “you were to shuffle the cards and deal yourself a hand, which hand was supposed to be a plot, each unique, each different.”68 Writers also relied on publications to acquire vocabulary and language, the tropes of their trade. “Since no writer could be expert in all fields, writers exchanged information through a trade journal which printed glossaries of sea terms, airplane nomenclature, prison jargon,

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boxing rules, jockey terms, Hawaiian geography, ranch vocabulary, Spanish phrases (for cowboys), and the like,” noted the cultural historian Russel Nye. “A New York writer who had never been west of Jersey City could therefore write westerns, while a Chicagoan who had never seen the Atlantic could write sea-stories.”69 A 1933 New York Times article entitled “Plots While You Wait” mocked this productive and practical, if not inspired, practice. “Less perspicacious authors,” it suggested, should consult newspapers for ideas “in the unlikeliest items he sees suggestions for a story.” A notice in the society pages, it noted, might be “the beginning of a tale of spies, doped drinks, high naval officers and a revengeful butler.” A “picture of a herring, which dies almost instantly when removed from the water,” could quickly become an “outline of a story about a girl out of her element” called “Fish Out of Water.” Advertisements for “real estate for sale cheap in Panama” might similarly become a story about “a couple of young Americans making their fortune and finding romance with two handsome descendants of a wealthy old Spanish family.”70 Notices of scientific fact could similarly inspire science fiction. While formulaic plots and details aided writers’ production, they also required consistency within their variation. At times stories differed only in the details that writers used to embellish standard plots. Mixing their details or using them inconsistently could lead to generic confusion. While “love is paramount” in a western pulp’s “romantic adventure of the glamorous West” Marcus Duffield observed, the story must still be “packed with cow action.” To make his point he described an inconsistent western tale in which the hero, “after passing through a splendid assortment of perils, was rescued in the end by three airplanes.” He explained, “Now airplanes were strictly taboo in the magazine, so a sub-editor was instructed to eliminate them.” The editor “changed ‘whirring’ to ‘thudding,’ and ‘gleaming wings’ to ‘foam-flecked haunches.’ The three airplanes became six horses and the story went to the printer.”71 Such consistency of detail evokes, if unconventionally, the idea of genre. Literary critics and scholars traditionally use the term “genre” to describe and classify literary texts according to their form. The structures, or lack thereof, of epic, lyric, idyll, haiku, and blank verse define poetic genres. Although in this technical sense most fiction falls in the category of novel, conventionally genre is also used to distinguish different types of fiction, particularly popular fiction, according to its subject and content.72 In the literary scholar John Cawelti’s influential study of popular fiction, genre saw subject and content expressed in formal structure. Paralleling pulp writers’ recollections and

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practices, he defined formulas as figurations, characteristics, or tropes that structured narratives and genres as descriptive classes of fiction based on sets or patterns of such formulas. Genre’s utility, in this sense, depended on social recognition: writers and readers needed to learn to associate westerns, for instance, with “cow action.” Cawelti noted, “A formulaic pattern will be in existence for a considerable period of time before it is conceived of by its audience and creators as a genre.”73 In his study of nineteenth-century dime novels, Michael Denning amended this usage to include the commercialization of cultural forms. A genre, he argued, is a class of narratives “whose producers and audience recognize it self-consciously as such, whether that recognition is aesthetic or commercial.”74 For dime novels and other bookform texts, commercial form was seen as aesthetic form. The correspondence was so close that while dime novels—or rather their narrative texts—can be categorized within literary genres, they were not marketed or recognized within such categories in their time.75 While magazine genres are not genres in a literary sense, interwar pulps were marketed on the genre of fiction they carried. The difference was, in fact, their historical opportunity. The formulas of its fiction also allowed pulp publishing additional flexibility in its other manufactures. In the industry’s postadvertising transformation, the pulps not only published fiction but also produced literary and magazine genres. While removal of advertising to conform to postal regulations reduced individual pulps to “low-budget, small-scale operations,” their publishers’ entrepreneurial adaptation allowed the industry to remain viable, large, and profitable.76 Recognizing that few magazines survive the ebb and flow of the publishing market, even the advertising subsidized slicks, pulp houses capitalized instead on its volatility and fluidity. Concentrating on the continuity of magazine production and sales, they relied on a diversification of titles, not the sustained run of any specific one, for their revenue. They created more and more magazine titles for smaller and smaller segments of the market and quickly discontinued any that became unprofitable.77 “A great deal of money could be made,” reasoned Henry Steeger, the president of Popular Publications. “It was not long before I was at it, inventing one Pulp magazine after another, until my firm . . . had originated over 300 of them.”78 The two-dozen pulpwood magazines prior to World War I increased dramatically after the war into hundreds, with dozens of titles within certain genres.79 Steeger’s Popular Publications was the largest pulp publishing interest in the interwar period, producing forty-two titles per month at its peak.80

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Table 1. Pulp Magazine Publication Runs Years of Publication

Number of Magazines % of Total (N=330)

0 44 13.33 1 62 18.79 2 40 12.12 3 20 6.06 4 15 4.55 5 16 4.85 0–5 197 59.70 6–10 43 13.03 11–15 42 12.73 16–20 26 7.88 21–25 14 4.24 25+ 8 2.42 Source: Publication data for pulp magazine titles in the Pulp Fiction Collection, Library of Congress.

Genre specialization was an important part of this proliferation of titles and of survival within it. Earlier all-fiction pulps such as Argosy continued to exist and retain a loyal but reduced readership, but while the number of these all-fiction pulps remained constant, their proportion relative to the number of genre-specific pulps decreased steadily. Beginning in the 1910s editors encouraged recognition of genre distinctions. “Did it ever occur to you as a reader of fiction that most stories drop naturally into a certain classification— belong more or less to a type?” asked Robert H. Davis, the editor of AllStory, in 1916. “There is the straight love story, for instance; the adventure story, the detective story, the mystery story, the pseudoscientific story, and so forth and so on.”81 Street & Smith introduced the first specialized pulp in 1915 with its all-crime Detective Story, and the detective pulp was eventually joined by a variety of other pulp categories: mystery, western, love, horror, ranch stories, air stories, gangster stories, hero stories, sports stories, true confessions, war stories, and science fiction, among others.82 Genre specialization, with the possibility of further subspecialization, allowed publishers to develop reading preferences into relatively stable niches within the more volatile overall popular fiction market.83 Once established, genres offered stability amid a flow of titles. An unprofitable title could be replaced, rather than discontinued, by another, potentially profitable title in the same genre.

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While some exceptional titles, including science fiction’s Amazing and Astounding, survived over twenty years, the majority of pulp titles ran five years or less, with almost a third lasting less than two years. By contrast, once audiences acknowledged them, genres endured. Beginning in the mid-1920s and proliferating explosively in the 1930s, genre-specific titles all but replaced all-fiction pulps. Complementing genres commercially was the practice of bulking or chaining titles. Publishing several specialized magazines under the aegis of a corporate entity, the pulp chain, publishers consolidated production operations, saved the costs of duplication, and realized increased economies of scale. Their mergers produced magazines with standardized size, format, number of pages, and even names, differing only in their covers and content. The little advertising that pulp chains carried was sold, with identical design, copy, size, and placement, across their various titles.84 In effect pulp chains were the equivalent of a single large all-fiction pulp produced, because of their peculiar commercial and economic circumstances, as several nearly identical magazines. Standard Publications’ Thrilling Group, for instance, included Thrilling Love, Thrilling Detective, Thrilling Western, Thrilling Mystery, Thrilling Adventure, Thrilling Spy Stories, Thrilling Ranch Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories.85 The sum of their parts was a significant whole; the largest pulp chains had combined circulations approaching those of slick magazines.86 The peculiar economy of pulp chains, however, complicated conventional notions of genre. While their publishers and editors sought recognition of, and hopefully attraction to, the stories they published, their primary purpose was to sell magazines, not stories. Fiction genres were used to market magazine genres, but actual pulp fiction was subsumed to their magazines’ generic purposes. Publishers were not above inventing new genres to promote magazines, drawing inspiration from whatever cultural sources they could find: motion pictures, slick magazines, novels, newspaper articles, radio, and even other pulps. Their inventiveness ran beyond Davis’s natural classifications. Publishers parsed generic distinctions to new effect, marketing difference to overlook similarities. Ranch stories were different from westerns because they appeared in magazines proclaiming their difference. Mystery stories might contain elements of horror or weird stories—and vice versa—but they were not the same genre or type of pulp. Occasionally, as Hugo Gernsback did with science fiction, publishers announced genres anew, declaring their difference from all other genres entirely. Aesthetic appearances worked for

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commercial consideration in an environment where magazines were created for their potential savings in production costs. “Astounding was a baby born of a chance contact,” Harry Bates recalled about the creation that became the longest-lived science fiction magazine. Two parties, one acting “solely in lust, not love, and the other solely in repulsion, not desire,” met “in front of a large sheet of glossy paper with thirteen violent, colorful pictures on it.” Bates declared, “Had there been sixteen, there would never have been a Clayton Astounding.” His vivid if apocryphal account is a tale of economic determinism met and mediated by circumstances of cultural self-interest. The one party, William Clayton, was the owner and publisher of Clayton Publications; the other was Bates, editor for Clayton’s adventure title. The thirteen pictures were final cover proofs for the magazines in Clayton’s pulp chain. The issue was the space they occupied on the sheet of paper and its production cost. With only thirteen covers in its four rows of four columns, space for three additional covers remained blank and unused, wasteful and costly. Clayton wanted to create three new magazines simply to eliminate the wasted cost of this expensive paper and was willing to try new pulp specialties only incidentally for their possible profitability. “If the sales of an additional magazine reached only the usual break-even point,” explained Bates, “there would still be a profit from its absorption of its fraction of the general overhead—and for a while, there would not be any editorial cost, for he’d just toss it to Bates, who would merely work double.”87 As Bates’s story demonstrated, editors played different and increased roles in interwar pulp publishing. Most pulp editors occupied assistant, associate, and managing editorial positions and performed a variety of production and editing roles: page editing, feature editing, copyediting, and layout. Mostly young men and women under thirty whose “enthusiasm and ambition compensated for experience, . . . They came and went as often as fast as new pulp titles appeared and disappeared,” observed the pulp historian Robert Kenneth Jones. With salaries ranging from $15 to $40 a week, they “gained little financial satisfaction,” he added, “[and] even less acclaim.”88 David Lasser, who edited Science Wonder Stories from 1929 to 1933 (and Air Wonder Stories until the two merged), earned $65 a week, while his replacement, Charles Hornig, earned only $20 a week.89 Principal editors, however, who managed and edited many titles simultaneously, shaped the character and products of large pulp houses. In 1934 Leo Margulies led all of Standard Publications’ titles, earning a reputed $250 a week. Rogers Terrill managed all

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but one of Popular Publications’ twenty to twenty-five titles. Street & Smith employed about a dozen editors, each managing several titles. They included John Nanovic (whose $65-a-week salary was more typical), Frank Blackwell, Daisy Bacon, and F. Orlin Tremaine.90 In several instances pulp publishers and owners played active editorial roles: A. A. Wyn in Ace Magazine Publishers; W. H. (Billy) and Roscoe Fawcett in Fawcett Publications; William Clayton for Clayton Publications; and Hugo Gernsback, although his publishing ventures, Stellar Publications and Teck Publications, were not exclusively pulp enterprises.91 Both Wyn, a pseudonym for Aaron Weinstein, and Harry Steeger of Popular began as editors for Dell in the 1920s before striking out on their own.92 Pulp editors’ efforts were exercises in public relations. To maintain a chain’s variety of magazines, they managed the various materials at their disposal to leverage the distinction between magazine genres and fiction genres. If conventional magazine editors sought to produce singular issues serially, pulp editors subordinated their creativity to the revised concerns of chains. They coordinated writing, editing, illustrating, design, and layout to develop conventions of design, illustration, rhetoric, and even authorship that marked specific titles and their genres. These conventions served separate but related purposes: linking the appeal of a specific title to what it contained while distinguishing its content from the content of other, similar magazines. Following or copying established conventions maintained a title’s genre and its concomitant market niche for its pulp chain. Innovating conventions allowed editors to claim a new genre and, potentially, an additional segment of the pulp market. The purpose of editorial practice, in this sense, was less to print specific stories and more to manufacture associations that made magazine titles and genres distinct and recognizable. Their success allowed newsstand browsers and passersby to recognize a title and its genre without actually reading it, perhaps purchasing it to read later.93 At the same time pulp public relations were representations in principle, not in practice. They did not characterize magazines’ actual, and more complex, audiences.94 While many pulps were aimed at and assumed to be read by men, and others by women, their gendered publics did not correspond to the sex of their editors and publishers. Men edited and wrote for female pulps, and female editors similarly edited and designed men’s titles. Nevertheless, public recognition promised, even as it postponed, engagement. It also maintained a subtle but significant distinction between a pulp magazine’s public and its genre—between the stories a magazine was

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supposed to contain and what it actually contained. This respite between recognition and reading allowed magazine publics priority over both magazine and fiction genres. Editors often rewrote stories accepted for publication in one magazine to meet the generic standards of another, and they commonly stockpiled stories for this purpose, spreading them across the titles of a chain where needed. Similarly, because pulp chains commonly designed, laid out, and printed their fixed content separately from their variable content, which was inserted later, errors occasionally produced and distributed magazine oddities. Mismatched pulps with covers declaring one genre and stories (and sometimes features) fitting another revealed, inadvertently, editorial management of their magazines’ publics. Changes in pulp covers expressed their commission to these developing efforts. They demonstrated in graphic terms the transformation of the press into the print media; its medium was increasingly part of its message.95 “The one thing that must never be forgotten by the watchful editor,” Harold Hersey cautioned in the 1930s, “is to harmonize the cover concept with the contents.” Most early pulp covers resembled dime novel covers. A background or border indicating title, date, and price, sometimes in separate text plates, framed the illustration of a key moment from its featured story. “The esthetic quality need not be sacrificed for the dramatic element,” Hersey continued, “but if a choice is to be made the latter is the deciding factor.”96 The October 1912 All-Story, which marked the first appearance of Tarzan of the Apes, showed this growing priority in cover design.97 With an emphasis on visual features and the omission of backgrounds and border, the cover had a more plainly typeset title. Interwar cover designs such as that for the August 1928 Amazing continued this trend toward visual effect; publishers accentuated tension and conflict in their artwork and printed them in more vivid colors. As the industry converted its magazines from all-fiction variety to genre specialization, the covers associated magazine titles to magazine publics and title text was stylized for greater visual effect and impact. The covers of Amazing Stories exclaimed the title in all caps across their tops, highlighting it with a separately colored text shadow and reducing the size of its letters from left to right with their bottom edges forming a curvilinear path. Given their greater significance in interwar pulps, cover details mattered. Steeger researched color schemes that sold well (red, yellow, and black for men’s magazines; blue and green for women’s) and applied them in his choice of covers.98 Most editors, however, relied on experience learned on the job. “Gradually I learned a myriad little ways to improve a cover painting,” re-

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Figure 2. Amazing Stories, August 1928, and All-Story, October 1912, covers.

called Hersey. “Never neglecting to show a character’s eye; that full faces are better than profiles; how to concentrate on important detail yet never let any part overshadow the whole; how to arrange the display so that even if only a corner showed it would attract and hold a wavering eye.” Hersey also articulated several basic principles for cover art. Action was best simplified. Using fewer, not more, characters (whose faces should ideally be highlighted) ideally framed a cover’s scene on a single character, “so that the appeal was simplified for moronic minds.” Background was similarly best kept “to the essentials,” suggesting rather than portraying the scene. Liminal spaces were particularly dramatic: doorways “where a figure looms over the threshold, silhouetted against a deep mysterious darkness” or a “face in the window.” If cover art included weapons, attention should be focused on “the weapon, the hand that grips the butt and the expression upon the face of the man who is aiming it.” “Above all, be accurate,” he declared. “Don’t give the public a chance to criticize if it can possibly be avoided.”99 Because covers were what potential readers first saw within a crowd of titles on newsstands, they were vital in proclaiming a pulp’s public. “The cover of an unheralded magazine must be right, or everything else is wrong,”

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Hersey exclaimed.100 “There was a lot of competition out there,” Harry Steeger agreed. “You had just a few seconds to catch someone’s eye, so the covers had to do an effective job in a hurry.”101 Some covers used simple correspondence to make the association. Ships evoked the nautical adventure of sea story magazines. Running backs, baseball batters, pugilists, and other athletes marked sports story magazines. Western story covers included the lawman’s tin star, the cowboy’s bandanna and broad-brimmed hat, and the gun belt and six-shooter, while their offshoot range story pulps displayed pastoral images with horses roaming free. Other pulp covers used expressive conventions, sometimes in combination. Love and romance story magazines showed women above the waist or in close-ups of their faces to reveal their expressions of contentment, while in contrast, horror and mystery story magazines included full-length displays of women’s scantily clad, full-figured bodies menaced by villains aided by mechanisms of torture. Hero pulps counterposed villains with their title characters. Science fiction pulp covers placed smaller human figures and technological devices within a larger backdrop of machines, creatures, or landscapes that expressed a sublime wonder, evoking both awe and apprehension. As with stories, pulp economics influenced cover art. Although cover art depicted an issue’s feature story, its placement, application, and cost were part of a continuous process of publication, beyond the production of a single issue. Most editors stockpiled illustrations as well as stories, matching and coordinating the purchase of the one to the other. In practice, however, stories were more easily edited to match a scene, rather than scene to story. “It is easy to portray an exciting incident in a yarn scheduled for a later issue,” Hersey observed, “much easier than creating an idea to symbolize the magazine.” Both accumulation and matching methods had advantages and disadvantages. Stockpiling required more capital. “If we illustrate actual fiction incidents, the stories must be in the office safe and the covers ordered far in advance to conform with the cover printing schedule,” Hersey explained. “This entails a heavy investment. It inclines one to buy a little too hastily, so that we may have enough material on hand for any emergency.” Purchasing art when needed was less expensive, presenting “an opportunity to bargain,” but required more creative ingenuity matching stories to available supply. “We are forced,” Hersey said, “to depend upon our own wits.”102 Pulps used their noncontent content in concert with their covers to cultivate public engagement. Features, regular departments, and editorial content

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filled space, pushing the limit of what constituted allowable content—versus regulated advertising—and saving the cost of stories, which were purchased from writers. Some were informational, such as book reviews, listings of noteworthy news, and notices of forthcoming issues. Others, such as advice columns, letters-to-the-editor sections, and editorials, gave the editor “an opportunity to flatter his readers,” according to Hersey. “Printing their letters, answering questions, having heart-to-heart chats with his large family, offering advice on personal and household problems, talking about his editorial policy . . . discussing the current issue or the succeeding one, and taking us behind the scenes to meet his contributors,” he explained, provided pulps a “personal touch.” Such flattery worked with magazine features to promote apparent common cause. Reader reactions to editorial topics, thematic columns by popular writers, and even the serialization of stories over several issues circulated the coordinated details of pulp publics and maintained their centrality and consistency. “Without [them] the editor and the reader would never enjoy that illusory companionship so vital to a magazine’s success, so typically American that it hurts!”103 Reader features encouraged participation, linking magazine publics to publication and activity. The editor Robert Davis introduced letter columns in the early all-fiction pulps with Argosy’s “Log-Book” in 1911 and AllStory’s “All-Story Table-Talk” in August 1912.104 Called reader or discussion columns rather than letter columns, they offered readers forums to engage editors, authors, and other readers about fiction, magazines, and more. The emergence of genre-specific pulps further refined pulp features. Topically focused departments allowed readers not only to voice their opinions but also to demonstrate specific skills or expertise. Their options for activity reinforced their magazines’ associations. Science fiction and aviation magazines ran question-and-answer columns on technical matters, while sports magazines featured departments answering requests for scores, statistics, and personal facts about athletes. Some features reduced discussion to more simple participation. Pulps sponsored contests and created membership clubs for their avid readers. “You could join the Doc Savage Club, the War Birds Flying Club, the Ends-of-the-Earth Club, the Spider League for Crime Prevention, the Friends of the Phantom and dozens more,” recalled the pulp enthusiast and historian Ron Goulart.105 The combination aviation and hero pulp Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds extended the coordination of pulp features beyond theme to content. In November 1934 its principal author, Robert Sidney Brown, announced a new regular feature. Its “Silver Flash”

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column would be converted to “Planes of the Future” and include a monthly contest for the best airplane design submitted by readers. Contest results and finalists’ designs would be published in a subsequent issue for additional reader consideration, and the winning design would be incorporated into its cover art.106 Overseeing the variety of pulp components and reinforcing their messages was editorial writing, what the literary historian Christine Bold called the voice of the fiction factory.107 Titles, in this sense, were editors’ first words and were significant because they signified, connecting magazines, fiction, and publics with a single representative expression. Initially pulp titles were genres were publics. Detective Story Magazine begat detective stories and detective story magazines. Love Story Magazine gave birth to love stories and love story magazines, Western Story to western stories and western story magazines, and so on.108 Pulp chains added their group names to their titles’ genre, and some, such as Popular’s “Dime” group—Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, Dime Sports, and Dime Western—even advertised their prices within their names, later becoming the “Fifteen” group to reflect inflation.109 The common use of the word “title” as a synonym for “magazine” in the interwar era spoke to the effectiveness of these practices. Ideally, once established, titles were not only names but also brands with reputations and associations of their own. They were so significant that some survived the publisher that originated them. When a pulp house failed or decided to stop producing a particular title, other houses occasionally acquired it for themselves. Standard Publications acquired Science/Wonder Stories when Gernsback’s Stellar Publications folded in 1936, converting it to Thrilling Wonder.110 Similarly, Street & Smith assumed publication for Clayton’s Astounding in 1933.111 Popular Publications’ successful rise in the 1930s included the acquisition of the long-running pulp titles Adventure, Black Mask, and Munsey’s original, Argosy.112 Although he had no pulp experience before publishing Amazing, Hugo Gernsback’s editorial practice met industry standards. His titles established a grammar for interwar science fiction titles: a modifying adjective, the word “science” or a variant, followed by the word “stories” or a synonym.113 Astounding Stories of Super-Science, the short-lived Marvel Tales, Startling Stories, and Dynamic Stories, among others, followed the precedents of Amazing Stories and Science Wonder Stories. While some of these titles included the word “science,” it was not always used because it was already implied. Their modifying adjectives were variations on Gernsback’s broader emphasis on scientific possibility more than science itself: amazing, astound-

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ing, wonder. As examples of Astounding’s naming illustrated, imitators relied on his original associations while trying to find a distinctive difference. The publisher Clayton originally favored a period-adventure pulp, tentatively titled Torchlights of History, for his new magazine. Repulsed by both idea and name, Harry Bates searched newsstands for alternatives, coming upon science fiction and Amazing Stories. Having encountered the generic public, he cycled through its name variations. He tried Fantastic, Astonishing, and Future—all used in later science fiction titles—before finally deciding on Astounding and Stories of Super-Science. For Bates, the catchword “Astounding” was “gutsy and would compel attention.” Moreover, because it was similar and yet distinct from Amazing, “it could be counted on to attract the eye of that magazine’s readers while pleasantly promising others that the stories would stun them.” The subordinate term “Super-Science” was also “perfect.” Bates explained, “The word Science was in it, also that great promiser of extras: Super. As a phrase, the flavor was a trifle vulgar, but the meaning was right on the beam. Super-Science means above and more than science.”114 Gernsback’s interests inspired him to speak directly and at length to his readers, through editorials. Although not all pulps included editorials, some used them effectively to maintain and, in the example of science fiction, declare its public. Gernsback’s early editorials explained his magazines and position. His first, “A New Sort of Magazine,” was followed by “Thank you!,” “The Lure of Scientifiction,” “Fiction Versus Facts,” “‘Impossible’ Facts,” “Editorially Speaking,” and “Idle Thoughts of a Busy Editor.”115 Once established, he broadened his subject and perspective, using “we” rather than “I” or “me,” and he began repeating his magazine’s name—or rather its synecdochic modifier—in his editorial titles. His April 1927 contribution, “The Most Amazing Thing (in the Style of Edgar Allan Poe),” was followed by “Amazing Creations,” “Amazing Youth” (October 1927), and “Amazing Thinking” (March 1928) and then consecutively beginning in June 1928 by “Our Amazing Minds,” “Our Amazing Senses,” “The Amazing Unknown,” “Our Amazing Universe,” and “The Amazing Einstein.”116 Where he could, he also repeated “amazing” throughout his magazine: in headings, in departments and features, and in the publication of correspondence that repeated the term. “Wonder” became the word in this established practice after Gernsback moved from Amazing to Science Wonder: “The Wonders of Gravitation,” “The Wonders of Inter­ stellar Flight,” “The Wonders of Creation,” “Wonders of the Machine Age,” “Wonders of Atomic Power,”

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“Wonders of Technocracy,” “Wonders of Mystery Rays.”117 By contrast, his replacement at Amazing, T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., used “amazing” only once in his editorials.118 Relying more on the attraction of his subject, and perhaps his scientific credentials, Sloane contributed editorials that assumed without promoting the excitement of their science and history of science topics: “The Corner-Stones of Chemistry,” “The Early History of the Electric Light,” and “Light Wave Lengths and Light Years.”119 Seeing that titles and stories still sold science fiction, later publishers who were not as interested in promoting science discontinued editorials altogether. Nevertheless, Gernsback’s efforts configured science fiction’s public. Preaching a gospel of wondrous, objective science wedded to limitless imagination, his editorial rhetoric established the tenor and tone for interwar science fiction, both fiction and magazines, and was adopted and imitated by his competitors. His inaugural editorials for Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and Bates’s entry for Astounding spoke to its evocative call.120 Amazing Stories (1926): Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new—entirely different—something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest. There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sexappeal type of magazine, the adventure type and so on, but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America. . . . It must be remembered that we live in an entirely new world. Two hundred years ago, stories of this kind were not possible. Science, through its various branches of mechanics, electricity, astronomy, etc., enters so intimately into our lives today, and we are so much immersed in this science, that we have become rather prone to take new inventions and discoveries for granted. Our entire mode of living has changed with the present progress, and it is little wonder, therefore, that many fantastic situations—impossible 100 years ago—are brought about today. Science Wonder Stories (1929): Science—Mechanics—the Technical Arts—they surround us on every hand, nay enter deeply into our very lives. The telephone, radio, talking motion pictures, television, X-Rays, Radium, super-aircraft and

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dozens of others claim our constant attention. We live and breathe day by day in a Science saturated atmosphere. The wonders of modern science no longer amaze us—we accept each new discovery as a matter of course. We even question why it had not come about sooner. The man in the street no longer recognizes in science the word impossible: “What man wills, man can do” is his belief. . . . If not to-day, well, then, tomorrow. Are they surprises? Not to him; the modern man expects them. . . . Science fiction, as published in Science Wonder Stories, is a tremendous new force in America. . . . Science Wonder Stories are clean, clean from beginning to end. They stimulate only one thing—imagination. Astounding Stories of Super-Science (1930): What are “astounding” stories? . . . if in 1900, they predicted ocean-crossing airplanes and submarines, world-girdling Zeppelins, sixty-story buildings, radio, metal that can be made to resist gravity and float in the air—these would have been other “astounding” stories. To-day, time has gone by, and all these things are commonplace. That is the only real difference between the astounding and the commonplace—Time. Tomorrow . . . astounding things are going to happen. Your children—or their children—are going to take a trip to the moon. They will be able to render themselves invisible—a problem that has already been partly solved. They will be able to disintegrate their bodies in New York and reintegrate them in China—and in a matter of seconds. Astounding? Indeed, yes. Impossible? Well—television would have been impossible, almost unthinkable, ten years ago. . . . Now you will see the kind of magazine that it is our pleasure to offer you beginning with this, the first number of Astounding Stories. It is a magazine whose stories will anticipate the super-scientific achievements of To-morrow–whose stories will not only be strictly accurate in their science but will be vividly, dramatically and thrillingly told.121

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All three editorials asked and answered the same rhetorical questions. All three magazines located their fiction within a distinctively modern articulation of a science, linking knowledge, change, and progress.122 All three celebrated inventions and scientific exemplars within a chronology that declared they were products not of history’s contingency but of its inevitability. Impossibility was impossible, they suggested, if time allowed all possibilities eventually to be realized. Imagination contained those possibilities and connected them both to science and to the enabling fiction that editors proclaimed. At the same time differences in their editorials marked science fiction’s specific emergence. If the phrase eventually carried many associations— fiction, magazines, cultural genre—it and they were necessary products of the interwar pulps. The reverse chronology of Gernsback’s inventions is peculiar only outside the priorities of science fiction’s development as a pulp public. With Amazing, he straightforwardly proclaimed a public for a “new kind of magazine,” assuming the genre of its stories from their previous inclusion in his radio magazines. His claims for Science Wonder were more complicated. Gernsback could not announce Science Wonder Stories to be a new kind of magazine because he wanted to appeal to the public he had already proclaimed. Instead he used the overlap of genre and public to finesse the situation, declaring “science fiction” to be a new kind of fiction that his new magazine only coincidentally carried. His exclamation that “science fiction, as published in Science Wonder Stories, is a tremendous new force in America” left ambiguous what that “tremendous new force” was: “science fiction” itself or “science fiction, as published in Science Wonder Stories”? The ambiguity allowed “science fiction” to realign associations between magazine, fiction, and public. The new phrase directed an established public for the fiction genre away from magazines that carried it, such as Amazing, toward Science Wonder. Although his tactic did not ultimately claim Amazing’s audience, his phrase quickly gained almost universal currency. Some readers switched to Science Wonder, others remained loyal to Amazing’s original, and some read both. When Astounding and other later titles entered the scene, their respective readerships reshuffled again. “Science fiction,” however, named evermore the public within which all appealed and for which they competed—and relegated the cumbersome “scientifiction” to the footnotes of history. Yet, despite the success of their rhetoric, editors could only manage, not contain, the tensions within pulp production. With Amazing, Gernsback discovered that publishing a fiction magazine was not the same enterprise as

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publishing fiction occasionally in radio magazines. The difference was not in the type of magazine or its fiction but between publishing stories and publishing magazines. The one focused, or could afford to focus, on individual stories; the other required a continuous flow and supply of them. Needing more content to fill his pages, he turned initially to a tactic that other pulps used and reprinted previously published stories.123 Acclaiming the reprints as reintroductions to audiences who previously had no access to them and reidentifying them with his new pulp public and its genre, he deflected and disguised his shortage of original material. Gernsback’s inaugural editorial for Amazing announced the “exclusive arrangements” he had made for “the entire voluminous works of all of Jules Verne’s immortal stories.” He explained, “Many of these stories are not known to the American public.” Now, “for the first time they will be within easy reach of every reader through Amazing Stories.” Other European imports were forthcoming as well, he added.124 In its first two years of publication, all but one of Amazing’s serials were reprints and included five stories each by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.125 Gernsback called on pulp contests to find additional stories and, perhaps more important, widen his network of writers, established and potential. An early Amazing issue asked readers to compose a story to fit its cover illustration, announcing, “Here, then, is a great chance for you to become an author.” The maneuver garnered over 360 manuscripts in response and attracted stories and authors later published in Amazing.126 The same tactic was repeated, when needed, in Science Wonder Stories. While Gernsback constantly solicited stories from readers, he always maintained that he had material in abundance. “We are receiving a great many fine short stories,” he declared. “As time goes on we will publish more and more new material besides the classics which we are publishing now, and for which we have many requests from readers.”127 The same shortages dogged Harry Bates while he was editing Astounding. “My biggest difficulty, and a never-ending one,” he explained, “was the obtaining of suitable stories.” His strategy was to draw on the available pool of established pulp writers. Although he and his publisher could come up with “fewer than half a dozen fair-to-good writers who had ever written stories of the kind we wanted,” he recalled, “we never doubted that some of my adventure writers could produce them.” The problem was the actual process of getting writers to produce them. “I . . . found myself locked in a continuing struggle with nearly every one I induced to try,” he said. The point of

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resistance was the science in the fiction. Most of them were “almost wholly ignorant of science and technology, so much of what eventually got into their stories had in one way or another to be put there by myself. . . . The time all this took! And the little return!” He complained about the effort required to send “long letters of detailed instructions” and produce “brief lectures on some aspect of science, or saving ideas, invented at the moment.” Since nearly all of the writers he enlisted tried to desert, Bates had to “watch like a hen with ducklings, near a puddle—explaining, encouraging, mollifying, and helping—alert for incipient defections, intent first on holding them.”128 Although Bates, Gernsback, and other editors bemoaned these difficulties, science fiction and other pulp publics and products benefited from them. As much as editors tried to order pulp publishing, the tensions they sought to manage ultimately produced the pulps’ distinctiveness. The fiction factory’s manufactures emerged not only from its linked systems of practice, production, and publication but also from the exchange between them. In the differences between the work of writers, illustrators, and editors lay the fertile possibilities for new combinations, permutations, and mutations of pulp publishing’s generic formulas. Frequently writing within several genres, sometimes simultaneously, writers adapted and experimented with strict generic formulas, perhaps unintentionally or unconsciously, given the required speed of their writing. Trade tools and conventions that allowed editors the flexibility to transform genres also allowed writers to experiment generically. Applying one genre’s formulas to another, they produced variants within them and on occasion a recognizably different hybrid such as Ranch Romances or Scientific Detective Monthly. Magazine publics contained stories resulting from this cross-fertilization as well as stories that more strictly matched generic conventions. It was not uncommon in the interwar pulps to encounter the occasional space cowboy, scientific detective, futuristic gangster, or interplanetary romance. One issue of Top-Notch magazine even offered “Tangled Battle,” a tale of automobile polo.129 With its emphasis on flow and continuous production, the pulp industry’s most enduring products were neither stories nor magazines but what might more appropriately be called cultural manufactures. Manufacturing dozens of genres, hundreds of titles, and millions of magazines, the pulps incorporated any and all material to create characters and publics that gained recognition beyond specific stories or magazines. Zorro and Buck Rogers became more well known than “The Curse of Capistrano,” “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” All-Story, or Amazing, the stories and pulps, respectively, where the figures

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first appeared.130 Nor would recognition of either pulp have brought corresponding recognition and identification of those specific figures. Formulaic character types such as the hard-boiled detective, the “G-man,” the evil Oriental villain, the menacing robot, and specific characters ranging from Tarzan, Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Conan the Barbarian to many others were similar products of the pulps’ fiction factory. Indeed in the mid-1930s recognizing characters’ ability to link publics, stories, and magazines without overly contriving their generic consistency, pulp publishers introduced titles based on heroes (and on rare occasions villains). These hero pulps prefigured superhero comics; comic book publishing, a rival to the pulp industry, also emerged in the mid-1930s.131 More abstract and yet equally industrially produced concepts such as genre publics were as significant, but in a different fashion. In an ironic twist, pulp practices promoting magazine genres crystallized public sensibilities about fiction genres. While dime novel and all-fiction pulp readers occasionally described the stories they read in generic terms, they did not actively categorize popular fiction by genre. Genres entered public discourse as a consequence of pulp publishing. Where Jules Verne’s and H. G. Wells’s stories when originally published were “scientific romance” or “scientific adventure,” after their republication in Amazing and other pulps they were seen as and considered “science fiction.” Moreover, conceived to market pulp magazines and popular fiction, generic publics circulated beyond them. Used after their establishment also to identify, describe, and classify fiction in books and magazines, they were adapted, in turn, to characterize and categorize, however problematically, expressive forms in other, emergent media—film, radio, comic strips, and television. The term “science fiction” was and continues to be used to describe popular culture that is neither fiction, in its conventional literary sense, nor print.132 The cultural manufactures of the fiction factory configured the contours of twentieth-century popular culture. Despite his claims to the contrary, Hugo Gernsback was the catalyst for, not the creator of, science fiction. While he sought to foster a progressive, visionary role for science fiction as the extrapolation and imagination of current science and technology, the cultural economics of pulp publishing compromised his intentions. Despite his interests and his editing, he had little choice but to accept writers’ pursuit of their own ideas and interests in the science fiction they wrote and their variations to the genre. His science fiction pulps, like others, published stories approaching scientific and technological themes from several perspectives. The science fiction historian Mike Ashley

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identified three different classes of science fiction in Gernsback’s Amazing: his particular brand of scientific extrapolation; the scientific romances that A. A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote for the earlier all-fiction pulps; and the weird and bizarre stories of Amazing’s more supernaturally oriented cousin Weird Tales.133 While this taxonomy reveals the limits of Gernsback’s efforts to invent science fiction, like any taxonomy of genre it also misses the larger point that literature does not contain culture. Bates’s on-the-spot letters and lectures, formulaic plot devices that Gruber and others devised, trade publications, news of scientific discovery and technological invention, and other assorted fragments of scientific discourse were unwanted obstacles to the efficient production of stories and manufacture of magazine publics. At the same time their bric-a-brac allowed early twentieth-century interest, fascination, and concern with science—already present in popular social discourse—expression in pulp fiction. Their bricolage enabled its popular culture of science to produce science fiction. By its nature this culture was interactive, dialogic. It required circulation. While Gernsback and other pulp editors manufactured science fiction’s public to invite prospective readers to join its audience and buy their magazines, they also invited the scrutiny of those readers. Readers considered for themselves the content of pulp magazines and the many interests—those of editors, writers, and artists—represented within them. They also brought their own interests to be represented. Without readers’ recognition, the words “amazing,” “astounding,” and “wonder” did not, in and of themselves, represent science fiction or science fiction magazines. With that recognition Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder could represent either or both.

2 Conversations from the “Backyard”: Reading and Imagining Community

It was impossible to suspend one’s disbelief—and what with the audience jeering and throwing peanuts, the whole thing was a disaster! . . . Audiences know what to expect, and that is all that they are prepared to believe in. —Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead1

“What chance of happiness will the young people of today stand if they have no mental armor but such notions against a world where life is more highly complex and more utterly unpredictable than ever?” asked Miss Anita P. Forbes of Hartford, Connecticut, speaking about the threat of pulp magazines to the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers in 1936. “There are three reasons for the appeal of cheap magazines,” she observed. “They afford thrills, they help while away idle minutes and they require no mental effort from the reader. The third fact is of most concern, for good books demand the cooperation of the reader. How is that habit of active perception and appreciation to be formed in minds accustomed to finding entertainment without exercise?”2 Miss Forbes’s argument that cheap magazines endangered the pupil’s morals, his English, and his mind—in that order—was convincing enough to make the lead for the coverage of the teachers’ council meeting by the New York Times: “Pulp Magazines Called a Menace,” its headline announced. The headline, the article, and Miss Forbes’s remarks indicated the level to which the pulps’ reputation had sunk by the mid-1930s. Her concern and the concern of other critics, however, were not to reform pulp magazines

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themselves but to reform their reading publics. Although she may not have given pulp readers enough credit for their mental effort in reading by assuming that their entertainment did not require exercise, she was aware of the distinction between manufactured cultural form and culture itself.3 For interwar America, the pulp magazine scene was more than a display hawking the wares of corporate mass production; it was also a place for cultural expression, activity, and exchange. The networks that publishers used to distribute magazines were also networks for the distribution and circulation of culture. The literally hundreds of titles on newsstands, in drugstores, in convenience stores, in cigar stores, in railroad and bus stations, and at many other sites across the urban and rural landscape represented the many and multiple places where the culture of popular culture existed, and in the case of science fiction, where science was popularly imagined. Publishers advertised the manufactured appeal of their magazines, and readers read appeal and magazine and replied with their time, effort, and occasionally their money. What appeared to Forbes and others to be an impoverished medium requiring no part from its participants actually required their significant attention and effort in sorting out what associations and which affiliations they wanted to make in the midst of a magazine scene awash in a sea of commercial and cultural meaning. The dynamic pulp scene that gave rise to science fiction also gave rise to a particular culture for its readers. Science fiction’s appearance in magazine and not book form was vital to this emergence. Although stories were a significant part of their magazines’ appeal, pulp departments also attracted readers’ attention, and some, particularly letters-to-the-editor columns, provided means for readers to communicate with editors and writers and with each other.4 Science fiction’s “backyard”—the resonant phrase editors used for that part of the magazine where these letters columns were found— became a place where readers discussed not only their fiction and science but also other, broader cultural concerns.5 At the same time the actual availability of pulps influenced these exchanges and their circulation. Because most readers had uneven and unequal access to magazines and stories, backyard letters columns also became places to track, sort, and locate them within the circumstances of readers’ lives. The social technology, in the broad sense of the term, of the pulps changed how they were read and revealed the material and collective character of reading, or more specifically the practice of reading. To read these conversations from the backyard is to recognize that reading was a dialogic process of production and reception and that it was a

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social as well as an individual practice. Between their own efforts to locate science fiction and the voices of editors and other readers, each encouraging them to make it their own, science fiction readers established a sense of community in the public space of its backyard. Understanding the dynamics of this popular culture is necessary before considering the content of their conversations, their imagining of science through science fiction. Wanting to promote a participatory vision of democratic science as well as his magazines’ sales, Hugo Gernsback was doubly inclined to include readers in his presentation of science fiction’s public. “One of our great surprises since we started publishing Amazing Stories,” he noted in an early editorial, “is the tremendous amount of mail we receive from—shall we call them Scientifiction Fans?—who seem to be pretty well orientated in this sort of literature.” Although he suggested surprise, Gernsback’s strategy to increase and maintain his readership involved fostering a sense of participation and affiliation among his readers. Another early editorial asked readers directly to help increase Amazing’s circulation. “We have more good stories to publish than we have space in which to publish them,” he remarked, explaining that an increased circulation would benefit readers because it would allow him to publish a larger magazine with more stories. Notwithstanding the creditability of Gernsback’s claims for additional material, his editorial rhetoric included readers by negotiating their responsibility for the magazine. While Gernsback and Amazing pledged to “do our part,” he argued that the success of the magazine depended ultimately on readers doing theirs. If they continued to buy magazines and encouraged their friends to buy them too, they would be the ones to gain with a larger magazine and more material to read. Left unspoken were any benefits that the editorial “we” addressing readers might gain. Similarly, a few issues later, Gernsback’s aptly titled editorial, “Editorially Speaking” informed readers that “this is your magazine in all respects.” Editors, he said, “will always be guided by the wishes of the majority.”6 In appealing to and using readers’ responses, Gernsback drew upon a previously established resource. In the early twentieth century when consumer industries were first discovering the value of surveying consumer preferences, readers’ letters provided an invaluable form of feedback to editors tailoring magazine appeal to their tastes. The pulp editor Robert Davis, who first introduced letters columns in his pre–World War I all-fiction pulps, also polled his readers about their tastes in fiction. The tactic benefited both

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editors and readers. Changes made to magazines following reader preferences, particularly if not capitally intensive such as publishing one genre of fiction more than another, led potentially to increased sales and circulation. In turn, readers received the results they expressed and felt that editors genuinely cared about their opinions. Gernsback used similar reader surveys in his radio magazines to gain information about improving them and their sales. Before creating Amazing, he surveyed them about their interest in a magazine devoted to the fiction he had introduced to them, and once the magazine was created, he adapted the same tactics in his new science fiction pulp. “We will publish from time to time,” he explained, “a sort of voting blank in which you may show your preference as to the type of stories published in the various issues.”7 As evidence of his sincerity, he announced the results of an earlier reader poll asking how often the magazine should appear; 498 preferred that it remain a monthly, while 32,644 preferred that it become a semimonthly. Gernsback also printed letters he had received from readers. Initially he incorporated them within the text of his editorials. The same editorial encouraging readers to take up their responsibility to participate also included excerpts from several readers’ letters about Amazing’s first issue. “Amazing Stories is entertaining and has food for thought that no other fiction work could begin to compete with,” wrote A. Lee Gladwin of Ames, Iowa.8 “I can read these stories over several times and each time get something new from them,” declared Raymond E. Dickens, Air Mail Radio Station, Iowa City, Iowa. “You will generally find that when one has read your magazine he will become so enthusiastic, so elated over his discovery that he will deem it a pleasure to extol its virtues to his friends. Even now my wife is anxiously waiting for me to finish this first issue so that she may read it herself,” testified Michael H. Kay, Brooklyn, New York. “Lack of space,” Gernsback added, “precludes adding to the list indefinitely.”9 Readers’ responses prompted the development of science fiction letters columns. In January 1927 Gernsback gave them space of their own, creating Amazing’s “Discussions” department, where he printed a selection of letters each month. When he created Amazing’s competitor, Science Wonder Stories, a few years later, he included a letters column from the start. The evocatively titled “The Reader Speaks” made clear who was in charge. “After all, this is your magazine and it is edited for you,” the department reminded readers every month. “If we fall down on the choice of our stories, or if the editorial board slips up occasionally, it is up to you to voice your opinion.” Although

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Clayton Publishing discontinued editorials and other more science-oriented features immediately after Astounding’s inaugural issue in 1930, the publisher illustrated the importance of readers’ letters to science fiction by maintaining the magazine’s correspondence column, originally called “The Reader’s Corner,” but later renamed “Brass Tacks.” At first glance the science fiction letters columns may not have appeared particularly important. They and other magazine departments were tossed in back sections of pulp magazines after the serials and featured stories and amid a variety of mail-order promotions and classified advertising.10 There they competed for attention against a visual cacophony of appeals for men’s rupture-erasers, Anita brand nose adjusters, job opportunities, home-study correspondence courses, get-rich-quick plans, weight loss plans, muscular development plans, radios and radio parts, and lessons for banjo and Hawai’ian guitar playing, among others. The coarseness of these advertisements’ appearance and appeal reflected the cultural economics of interwar pulp publishing, however, not the seriousness of their intent. Lacking the higher revenue and refinement attained by their cousins, the slicks, pulp stories, features, and advertising maintained their appeal through their directness. They were designed to shout and to shout loudly to be heard. Science fiction pulps, in particular, devoted significant space to their correspondence columns. While other pulps also incorporated readers’ input into their magazines’ appeal, many of their reader columns consisted of a single page listing the names of readers and the places they wrote from and only occasionally addresses and excerpts from a few letters. In contrast, science fiction readers’ columns ran several pages of readers’ letter texts, complete with editorial headlines and occasional editorial comment, and included readers’ names, identifying place names, and often full postal addresses. Between January 1927 and April 1938 Amazing Stories and its shortlived companion, Amazing Stories Quarterly, printed a total of 2,114 letters written by 1,592 different readers worldwide. Within the United States 1,277 letter writers contributed 1,714 letters. Amazing’s mean average number of letters printed per issue was just over 16.5, with lows of 4 in the May 1927 issue and 7 in the March and April 1927 issues, and highs of 27 in the May 1933 and January 1934 issues and 25 in the July 1928, July 1930, and February 1938 issues. Only 7 of the 117 issues of Amazing published in the period included fewer than 10 letters, and 4 of those 7 were in the first six months of 1927, the first year Amazing ran “Discussions.”11 Readers’ letters in magazines complicate conventional literary notions of

Figure 3. Pulp discussion columns became a place for readers’ “backyard” conversations.

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reading. Literary scholars and critics developed the idea of the implied reader, and more generally reader response criticism, as a method to understand the process of reading and the relation of author, reader, and literary text within that process. A text’s reader is a structuring role or convention representing its implicitly understood audience, which the text’s narrator, also a role, addressed. Both reader and narrator differed from a text’s creator or author; indeed they were ways to understand authorship. In a sense the reader represented authorial assumption and intent, but it also situated—and, more extremely, dissipated to the point of eliminating—the act and authority of authorship within broader social conventions, contexts, and uses of language. The notion of an implied reader usefully clarifies the nature and necessity of editorial appeals to readers and, more broadly, the cultural manufactures of pulp publishers and editors. Editors, in a narrating role, cultivated relationships with imagined, ideal readers that minimized the paramount interest of the pulps’ publisher/creators, commercial viability, and profitability while emphasizing cultural and stylistic issues. Reader letters, however, while they had their own textual implied readers, were also expressions of actual readers who did not think of themselves as only readers. In their letters readers represented themselves as distinct individuals, and the letters columns allowed other readers to see them as such. In the process reading and writing and all their important cultural associations became integral parts of their experience of science fiction. While readers adopted much of the populist and enthusiastic style and language in their letters that Gernsback and other editors had established for science fiction, they also introduced themselves into the conversation. Publication carried particular cultural significance in an interwar era fascinated with culture and personality. As the anthropologist Richard Handler observed, publication represented “the idea that anonymous and indistinguishable individuals must struggle to raise themselves above the crowd, to forge a personal identity.” It was also contained within its mass-cultural circumstances. Authors, Handler observed, “construct their ‘unique’ identity out of symbols readily comprehensible to the mass public.” Readers’ letters were testimonials equally to their magazines and to their own personalities, interests, and concerns. “A plain, ordinary farmer like myself is very likely to be taken up with his every day affairs and lose his imagination unless he has some inspiring force to lift him out of the rut and urge him on to greater accomplishments,” wrote Nyle L. Katz of Marshall, Michigan. “Such a force is embodied in science fiction stories of the type contained in your maga-

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zine.” G. M. Pendy of Davis, California, wrote, “I am passing through that physical change known as adolescence,” echoing the feelings of many young fans. “At this time I am knowingly and unknowingly picking out the objects and habits which are to remain with me the remainder of my life. And I am knowingly picking out Wonder Stories. . . . May I say that it is a positive fact that your magazine lends inspiration to a young fellow.” Professor Albert B. Tondra, Teacher of Music and Organist, found Wonder Stories “a tonic to quiet the nerves after a strenuous day,” commenting wistfully, “if the multitude would only realize the real good that is contained in these stories and others of a like nature.”12 Given the opportunity, readers presented their opinions on a number of subjects, most often about stories, magazines, or both. Most followed a format that developed during the course of the conversations in the letters columns. Letter writers tossed positive “bouquets” and negative “brickbats” to indicate their likes and dislikes, offering analyses and suggestions following both. A letter from Vernon Wilfred Harvey of 3806 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California, in the October 1936 Amazing provided an example of this common pattern. He listed the four stories in the issue in the order of his reading and preference: “Uncertainty” by John W. Campbell, Jr., was unrated because Harvey “always save[d] my serials until they are complete”; “The Human Pets of Mars” by Leslie F. Stone was “very good”; “Six Who Were Masked” by Henry J. Koskos was “next best”; “The Council of Drones” by W. K. Sonnemann “wasn’t so very good.” Having described the issue overall, he focused his criticism on Sonnemann’s story, arguing against its implausible premise of a “Queen Bee” exercising mind control over people and then offering his opinions about the differences between animal and human intelligences.13 The point was not whether or not his criticisms were insightful, much less relevant or valid; readers’ letters varied depending on the abilities of their writers. Rather readers’ willingness to write expressed their belief that their opinions mattered. Their discussions about the proper nature of their magazines and stories represented a subtle shift in the significance of their reading public. Readers read not for its intended meaning but for what it meant to them. An important part and indicator of this shift was readers’ expression not only of individual but also of collective interests. The extent that correspondence columns allowed readers to read or imagine what other readers thought helped to foster a sense of common interest, of community, among them. Many first-time letter writers prefaced their comments with statements

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that they would not have thought to write until they saw others write opinions similar or contrary to their own. “I have been a steady reader of Amazing Stories for four years,” wrote Stanley Wolf of Brooklyn, New York. “I also have been interested in the various letters which readers have sent to ‘Discussions’ but I, myself, have not had sufficient courage to pick up a pen and paper and write to you. While reading ‘Discussions’ in the August edition, I noticed that you were being overwhelmed by the number of unfair criticisms. Therefore in an attempt to rescue you, I am writing to criticize the critics.” Given the space and the inclination to represent their own voices, readers wrote letters that drew responses. Almost from the first appearance of the discussions columns, readers began to address some of their comments, indeed entire letters, to the issues raised by other readers. Response invoked further response, and in the process statements of individual opinion became the currency of collective exchange. “The discussions department of the magazine is to my mind as interesting as the stories,” Clyde F. Beck of Lakeport, California, wrote of Amazing. “Many of the letters show intelligent thinking; most of them show thought of some kind; all of them are interesting.” J. G. Strong of 5 Barston Road, West Norwood, London, England, agreed: “One of the most interesting parts of your magazine is the ‘Discussions’ portion.” He argued against the suggestion of some readers to trim it: “The varying criticisms which people put forward, for and against your stories, prove that they are interested in its welfare and their excellent scientific arguments in some cases have amazed me, to say the least.” “The Reader” spoke, “Discussions” sparked discussions, and their conversations formed community.14 Science fiction letters columns became so important to readers that many of them turned first to the backyard to read what letter writers had said before reading what either story writers or editors had written. “One of the first things I read when I get the magazine is the ‘Discussions’ corner,” reported George Baskin, 2909 Tenth Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota, “because I like to see what the opinions of other readers are.” The practice of reading and writing through correspondence columns became such an important tradition to the science fiction community that when Amazing, in its slow decline from its preeminence in the 1920s, slimmed down its “Discussions” columns in the late 1930s, readers protested. “Why did you cut down on Discussions?” Leslie A. Croutch of Perry Sound, Ontario, Canada, wrote angrily. “It’s the corner where we all get together and chew the rag. A great majority of the readers turn to Discussions before they read the stories.”15 Invited by the pulps’ rhetoric, readers settled into the comfortable space

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of their backyard. There readers felt they could freely contest the authority of science fiction’s other voices, arguing editorial choices and designs, and sometimes winning reversals. Building on the notion of a participatory, democratic science, they used the authority of its objectivity as a source for external adjudication to level authorial distinctions, debating and discussing scientific and technological details and minutiae, even on purely subjective matters. In addition to writing to the editor and to other readers, some readers also addressed their letters to writers. Their full expectation that they would receive replies and the fact that they received them added to the sense of community that science fiction letters departments fostered. James K. Smith of 3907 East Lake Road, Erie, Pennsylvania, wrote to the author David H. Keller, M.D., to ask Keller’s opinion about whether to attend Cornell University or enter a trade school such as Coyne Electrical in Chicago. His letter was published along with Keller’s reply that “every man is better for being a muscle man in addition to a brain man.” Writers too wrote letters in the correspondence columns. The authors Miles J. Breuer, M.D., Clare Winger Harris, and Capt. S. P. Meek were among the guests regularly entertained in Amazing’s backyard in its early years. When story writers chatted with letter writers, they were greeted and challenged as easily as editors and other readers were. “Remember, science fiction is one of the few places in popular fiction, perhaps the only one,” P. Schuyler Miller of Scotia, New York, reminded other readers, “where reader and writer are on a par and can fight it out, man to man, possible vs. impossible.”16 One particularly notable exchange between Miss Olive Robb of England and the popular writer Edward E. “Doc” Smith, Ph.D., in Amazing Stories illustrated the playful and exuberant extent of these backyard dynamics. Although she admired and liked his stories, Robb criticized Smith for his use of slang terms such as “wow,” “zowie,” “yeah,” “dope,” “’smatter,” “ace,” “chief,” and most egregiously, “that most loathsome of love terms, ‘Cuddle-pup.’” Dr. Smith appeared in his own defense, and the series of their exchanges, lengthened by Amazing’s monthly publication cycle, occupied “Discussions” space and readers for almost a year from March 1932 to January 1933.17 Their exchange was lengthy enough for Robb to move during its course from her original address of 80 Winstanley Road, Waterloo, Liverpool, to 29 Manor Row in Bradford. The “Robb-Smith Controversy,” as editors and readers came to call it, was notable not only for its duration but also because the exchange became the subject of discussions. Readers wrote letters taking sides in the matter, and with each successive month, the controversy involved more and more readers and letters.18

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What seemed a small and trivial issue became significant because it drew the collective attention of letters column readers. Readers continued to discuss the issue for several months after Robb and Smith ended their portion of the conversation. “I wish to advance one more criticism,” wrote Bill Bailey. “I believe you should not publish any more letters from Dr. Smith or Miss Robb concerning the foolish argument over slang. They take up much unnecessary space in the ‘Discussions.’ Besides, what difference does it make to us whether the people of the future use our slang or not,” he asked about its original issue. “That would not affect the story in any way.” He concluded, “Miss Robb does not know what to criticize in a story, and Dr. Smith only is wasting his time answering her letters.” That Bailey still took the time to write what a waste the whole affair was illustrated readers’ attention and their feelings of propriety over their common space. This point was not lost on Robb. “Whatever the consensus of opinion,” she wrote, concluding her part in the affair, “you can, I think, thank me for initiating a series of highly diverting and humorous letters from the worthy Doctor.” Nor was it lost on Amazing’s editors. “We are very proud of the Discussions Columns of our magazine,” they wrote, taking advantage of the opportunity to advance their own interests. “You and Doctor Smith have made us prouder of it than ever,” they remarked, “for on both sides there was real true matter in every word that was written. You have our sincere congratulations on what you have done. We shall hope for more letters for our Discussions from you.”19 The pulps’ commercial nature and interests led to skepticism about readers’ letters. Because they relied on direct appeal in their marketing and were not above incorporating letters and letters columns to that appeal, the sincerity and genuine authorship of letters remained open to question. Certainly science fiction editors used the same practices that other interwar pulp editors developed to their advantage. “The earnest soul who finds a flaw in a magazine is the editor’s meat,” the veteran editor Harold Hersey recalled. “The more the merrier. The critic usually closes his letter by saying, ‘And I dare you to publish this,’ as though any intelligent editor would neglect any opportunity to prove that his magazine welcomes criticism and that he is broad-minded to a fault.” “The letter immediately attracts the eye,” he declared, “whether it’s one that the mailman brought, or one the editor has written himself over a fake signature and address.” Editors selected letters to their advantage, pitting readers of differing opinions against each other and letting those differences generate interest and sales over several issues. They were also not beyond helping those debates by writing one or even both sides

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of them. “Many an editor has waged a furious battle with himself,” Hersey explained, “until there were enough bona fide communications on hand to keep the pot boiling over its own fire.”20 The situation, however, was different for science fiction, recalled Howard Brown, another veteran editor. Inspired by both participatory rhetoric and science, readers generated a sufficient volume and variety of letters to give editors more than enough material to serve their purposes.21 Editors did not disclose how letters were selected for publication, although it was apparent to all that not all letters received were published or printed in their entirety. Magazine editorial staffs did respond directly to readers who took the time to write. One interwar science fiction fan, T. Bruce Yerke, for example, received thankful, individually written, and detailed replies to all the letters to the editor he wrote, including several that were not printed.22 Readers’ responses could foil the best editorial intentions for pulp features and lead to unintended and undesired consequences. Hersey recalled his experience developing a reader-oriented feature, “Fitting the Man to the Job.” His idea was to hire a columnist to advise readers on economic issues, but despite explicit announcements to the contrary, readers—perhaps understandably in the context of a worldwide economic depression—thought that the department was an employment agency. “We had to install a card system to handle the applications for positions sent to us from the four corners of the earth,” Hersey recalled. “Many a long month elapsed before the impatient readers stopped hounding me with their urgent requests to be placed in jobs at once,” he said, describing the far greater difficulty in ending a department than in starting one. “It is not at all extraordinary to hear from people in Australia, Alaska and British South Africa, not to mention points nearer home, who have just finished reading a number more than a year old and who are excited about it.” Hersey had “committed the unforgivable sin of launching a department that did not have any connection with the magazine itself. . . . There is such a thing as stimulating the readers without increasing circulation,” he lamented.23 Readers were not naive about letters columns. Some readers questioned the validity and representative character of published exchanges. “I hardly think that the small cross-section of the Science Fiction readers as represented by your Discussions is quite a fair example of the readers as a whole,” wrote Fred Anger, 2700 Webster Street, Berkeley, California. “It is inclined to be prejudiced and it is not a customary editorial policy to print letters which really express opinions.” While pulp editors printed correspondents’ home-

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towns and addresses with their letters to lend them specificity and realism, readers asked that publishing complete addresses become regular practice. “Why did you leave off the addresses?” Leslie Croutch complained about the attempt to trim Amazing’s letters column in the late 1930s. “That’s another boner on your part. Don’t you know Discussions has been the means of many, many penpalships being formed?” he asked indignantly. “That was one sure means of getting in touch with other fans. Are you going to scotch the great national pastime of writing to kindred souls by omitting the addresses from letters? Thanks for editorial comments on letters, but remember now—full addresses.” Earle B. Browne of Newburyport, Massachusetts, argued similarly: “Because of the impossibility of printing all the arguments you receive, I see no objection to publishing the full addresses of all correspondents so that they may carry on their arguments outside the magazine.” Such practice benefited all members of the science fiction community and indeed served the commercial interests of science fiction publishers. “Besides giving real personal enjoyment to the readers,” he explained, “this should prove to be an advertising scheme of no mean import.” Community was the key to this success. “With a friendly group of readers, bound to each other, personally,” Browne exclaimed, “what better advertisement can you wish?”24 While Browne’s suggestion was motivated by a conservative impulse to preserve community, it still represented a significant change for science fiction. Expanding “backyard” conversations to direct correspondence between readers moved science fiction’s community beyond the immediate bounds of its originating magazine pages, and in directions its editors and publishers did not intend and could not control. The push to develop community—and readers’ enthusiasm for science fiction letters columns generally—was part of a larger, emerging cultural pattern in interwar America. In their well-known studies of “Middletown,” the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd noted the emergence and growth of civic and community organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. Community, they argued, was a response to the social effects of the industrialization and modernization that transformed much of the United States in the early twentieth century. “It was characteristic,” the cultural historian Warren Susman observed of the 1930s, “for the idea of commitment to merge with some idea of culture and to produce, at least for a time, participation in some group, community or movement.” This cultural impulse, he argued further, was linked in many ways to an ongoing communications revolution that transformed the ways people perceived themselves, others, and relations of space and time.25 Through interwar science fiction

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pulps the reader, fan, and later writer Jack Williamson, living and working in a rural area in a New Mexico only recently granted statehood, could find and share common interests with readers, fans, and writers such as Jerome Siegel in the settled “Middletowns” of the American Midwest and the readers, fans, and future writers who were members of the Futurians group in a New York that was heavily urbanized and had long been a part of the nation.26 Already inclined and attracted to imagining technology’s implications for society, science fiction readers adapted to and developed—although not necessarily with conscious intent—new social relations within the changed reading environment of the interwar pulps. Reading was changed not only in the conventional and familiar sense of interpreting and understanding texts but also in the social conditions that allowed for such reading. The emergence of a national popular culture in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was the result not only of commercial and industrial developments such as mass-produced and distributed magazines but also of social developments such as increased education and the achievement of near universal literacy. Already high at 87 percent in 1890, the literacy rate in the United States rose to 94 percent in 1920 and 95.7 percent in 1930.27 Not as newly technological as other, emerging forms of mass media—film, telephone, radio, and television—reading and print were nevertheless part of discussions and studies about the implications of these developments, particularly the nature of mass communications and public opinion and their role within democratic societies.28 Reflecting their sociological perspective, these studies were concerned not only with the production and content of various media forms but also with the range and extent of their distribution and their use in practice. How and where did people find the information necessary to lead their lives? Was access to information reading’s primary social function and role? Was there a difference between reading books, reading magazines, and reading newspapers? In one synthetic study from the early 1950s, researchers found that a large number of books were being read but that a minority (48 percent) of people read them. Larger segments of the population read magazines and newspapers regularly (69 percent and 82 percent respectively), activities more closely related in practice to radio listening than reading books.29 Like these other forms of media, changes in popular fiction resulted from changes in its distribution as much as in its production. The shift from dime novels to magazines, slicks as well as pulps, at the turn of the twentieth century as the major source of this fiction brought several concomitant changes

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to the fiction and its marketing, sale, and distribution. This altered format hastened a change in commercial emphasis from mass-producing and selling copies of a single book to continuous production and sales. Late nineteenthcentury dime novels were more properly “cheap libraries,” with publishers marketing and selling subscriptions to series of similar books, usually based on the continuing exploits of a main character.30 Magazine publishers refined the strategy further, emphasizing the magazine itself as much as any specific issue and promising indefinite publication. The interchangeable use of the term “number” for a magazine issue in the early twentieth century spoke to the new significance of that continuous publication. Magazine publishers also revived the serialization of stories, a common publishing practice in the nineteenth century, before single-volume dime novels made it obsolete. Routinely practiced among many pulps and slicks in the 1920s and 1930s, serialization changed both the fiction and the magazines that carried it. Breaking longer, novel-length feature stories into sections appearing across several issues, serials complemented and improved the commercial appeal of subscription: purchasing magazines regularly allowed readers to read complete stories. Serials also introduced a new dimension of time to fiction reading. Delaying a story’s internal narrative for a period of the reader’s time displaced the excitement and pleasure of reading for the promise of its—and the story’s and the serializing magazine’s— continuation. The enhanced practice also altered the fiction itself as publishers, editors, and writers edited and wrote for their serial breaks, producing “cliffhanging” moments in a tradition that links Charles Dickens to modern television shows’ narrative awareness of commercial breaks. While serials and subscription represented a new ideal for how fiction might conceivably be read, their combined effect changed actual reading practices in other, different ways. Splitting stories across several magazine issues made reading them more materially difficult than reading books because of differences in their availability.31 Reading serial fiction meant, first, finding the magazines that carried the stories, and in the early twentieth century that depended on readers’ specific locations and circumstances. Despite publishers’ claims to the contrary, the distribution of magazines—their actual availability—was far from ideal. In spite of the scope and range of distribution agencies, publishers could not and did not distribute magazines everywhere, nor did they always distribute them consistently. Sales figures mapped roughly their geographic distribution and availability. Figures for Astounding and Amazing during the 1930s, while differing in many respects, showed

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similar regional differences in their distribution within the continental United States. The Middle Atlantic, East North Central, and Pacific regions had the highest percentage of magazine sales, while the East South Central and Mountain regions had the lowest. Adjusted for regional distribution of the U.S. population in 1930, the Middle Atlantic and the West, joined by the Mountain region, had the highest sales for their respective populations, while the Southern regions and states had the lowest. Although they were not representative of the reading population, the numbers of letters and writers in Amazing Stories in the interwar period, when tallied, showed similar regional distributions. The populations of the places written from—knowledge of which was possible because writers’ addresses were printed—explain, at least partially, the differences. The largest number came from urban readers, with the highest concentrations from the largest cities and the lowest from the smallest towns and rural areas. Although these rough figures of circulations, letters, and writers do not allow correlation with urban population size, the Middle Atlantic, Mountain, and Pacific regions of the country in the interwar period had the highest urban density, while the Southern regions had the lowest.32 The figures suggest that city dwellers, perhaps because of their greater access, bought more science fiction pulps and wrote more letters to their editors. While subscription represented ideal access to magazines, for readers and publishers, it was hardly realized. Most magazines in the early twentieth century were purchased singly, one issue at a time. Specifically designed and marketed to professional and middle-class audiences, the most popular slicks still had subscription rates approaching only a quarter or a third of their overall sales. With extremely low rates, subscription was an insignificant part of pulp sales. Rates for science fiction pulps in the 1930s averaged between half a percent and 1 percent. Instead circulations varied tremendously as readers read pulps when they could or wanted. Circulation figures for the Clayton pulp chain, which included Astounding, over the course of 1931 and 1932, for instance, strongly suggested seasonal variations to pulp reading. While the overall trend for the chain’s circulation was downward, indicating its slow loss of popularity, the up and down variations from that trend corresponded to seasonal changes. Circulations decreased from winter through spring to the summer and increased again through the autumn back to the winter. Sales, the basis for conventional measures of circulation, were not good measures of readers’ access to magazines. In his study of the social aspects of reading during the Depression, the sociologist Douglas Waples sorted and

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categorized where and how people obtained their reading materials. Using a sample of 6,850 Chicago residents selected proportionally according to traits such as sex, age, education, and occupation, he tried to find a representative cross section of people’s reading habits. His taxonomy of reading practices proved surprising in several ways. The variety of ways people used to get what they read defied Waples’s attempt to categorize them. “The fact of most interest in the table,” he concluded, “is that ‘all other sources’ is first in rank and supplies almost one-third of the publications supplied by all sources.” These other sources varied widely, “ranging from books and magazines found in shelters for the unemployed to complimentary copies received by professional men from the publishers,” he observed. The majority, however, were “barber shops, beauty parlors, waiting rooms, neighborhood clubs, cafes, and amusement places.” Newsstands and subscriptions, conventionally seen as sources of magazines, both figured lower than these other sources. Perhaps more surprising, since these other sources were almost all free, when combined with figures for public libraries and friends as sources they showed that “61 per cent of the publications read were secured without cost [italics in original].” Waples’s findings applied particularly to the pulps because the pulps made up a major portion of what people read. “South Chicago in middepression [sic] read mainly the pulp magazines,” he reported in another section of his study, “presumably for what thrills they may have afforded.”33 While Waples was unable to categorize reading distribution, particularly for magazines, some implications of his study were nevertheless clear. Most people read pulp magazines, and most of those readers did not purchase the ones they read. The recollections of science fiction readers bore out Waples’s findings and added a wealth of detailed substance to them. Having first discovered science fiction pulps through an older neighbor and then in a room aptly called the “Dungeon” at Huish’s Grammar School in Taunton, England, a young Arthur C. Clarke eventually discovered that Woolworth’s was the place in England where readers could find science fiction and other pulp magazines. “According to legend,” he recalled, “all these ‘Yank pulps’ invaded the United Kingdom as ballast in returning cargo ships.” He explained, “Presumably it was worth disposing of unsold issues in this way, rather than recycling the paper.” Still worth more than the paper they were printed on, these magazines “eventually wound up in Woolworth’s for three pence a piece.” Clarke recalled, “Every day I would sacrifice part of my lunch hour to sift through the piles of non-sf dross in search of the occasional gem.”34

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Reading was a family affair for Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. His entry into the world of science fiction came initially from reading dime novels he inherited from his older brothers, Walter and Irvin. Finding a more independent source of reading was an improvement. “A few years later, I discovered Kinkaid’s Book Store,” he recalled, “where used dime novels were sold for a nickel—and when I acquired a nickel (this didn’t happen too often), I’d get a book of my own.” He later learned that one of his brothers had developed other means to acquire the books more frequently. “In his early days,” Eshbach explained, his brother “would buy one copy and ‘liberate’ two extras under his shirt.” From dime novels Eshbach graduated to the all-fiction pulps his brothers had saved, and then he discovered science fiction. “I had stopped to look into the window of Kinkaid’s Book Store,” he remembered, setting the scene. “The back wall of the window was covered with magazines. And there it was—a picture of the planet Saturn and above it a comet-tail title, Amazing Stories!” he said, describing the fateful moment. “I had money in my pocket . . . and in moments I was the delighted owner of the first issue of the world’s first science fiction magazine.”35 Finding and reading pulp magazines was additionally pleasurable for Frederik Pohl because of the work he avoided while reading them. He spent summers visiting the farm of his war-wounded Uncle Bill Mason in Harlem, Pennsylvania, despite the fact that he “wasn’t much use as a farmhand.” When forced to, he and his two cousins worked, but they put “much more effort into the avoiding of work than into the doing of it. . . . What we did as much as we could was hide. After some research I found the perfect hiding place in the farmhouse attic.” Hiding in the attic brought an unanticipated bonus. “The truly marvelous thing was that in a corner of the attic,” he remembered, “was a treasure-trove of old pulp magazines, hundreds of them,” and reading became the one activity he enjoyed doing under any permissible conditions. “I read . . . up in that attic, with the temperature a hundred and four under the eaves,” he recalled. “I only stopped when someone dragged me away. Or when the sun went down.” Because his uncle’s farm did not have electricity, “after dark there were only limited options. You could sit in the kitchen by the kerosene lantern and listen to Whisperin’ Jack Smith on the battery radio,” he said. “Or you could go to bed.”36 Roy Lavender’s method for obtaining pulp magazines was less fortunate but a testament to his perseverance and fortitude. “I couldn’t afford new ones,” he recalled, so he scrounged copies from the trash behind the Allen Hotel in town. The task was difficult, “involv[ing] walking two miles to town

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and back,” and it precipitated “family squabbles.” He remembered, “Mother complained about me bringing home ‘that trash.’ ‘What if the neighbors saw you?’” she asked him indignantly, while “Grandma [who] was on my side . . . calmed her down.” Despite possible stigma, Lavender continued to scavenge magazines. “From then on,” he said, “I sneaked magazines home under my shirt.” His new tactic left telltale evidence, however, because ink from the magazines ran onto his belly, and he could not remove it completely. “My secret was revealed when I stripped for my Saturday night bath in a wash tub in the middle of the kitchen floor,” he said. “The bright light of the Aladin [sic] Ray-O kerosene lamp revealed all and I caught it again.”37 As readers’ recollections testified, the practice of reading required effort, if not necessarily work, before the act of reading. Their accounts of creative acquisition and access to science fiction pulps spoke to the complications of reading’s cultural distribution. While publishers maintained a detailed distribution system for their products, readers still had to overcome a variety of circumstances and conditions to gain access to them. Regional and urban/ rural differences, seasonal variation, the individual particulars of the ballast of cargo ships, the assortment at Woolworth’s, the habits of older brothers and secondhand stores, summer farm stays, and scrounging the trash outside hotels all affected that process. The actual distribution of magazines lay in the intersection of publishers’ formal systems and the multiplied circumstances of readers’ individual practices. Similarly the actual circulation of magazines included the efforts of readers beyond the single estimate from sales. The pulp publisher A. A. Wyn estimated that ten million monthly buyers of pulps translated into over thirty million readers.38 “Magazines were a Depression business,” Frederik Pohl recalled. “If you couldn’t afford fifty cents to take the family to the movies,” he explained, “you could probably scrape up a dime or twenty cents to buy a magazine, and then pass the magazine back and forth to multiply the investment.”39 Once they were acquired, by whatever means, reading the magazines required additional effort. If the distribution of magazines challenged readers to find materials to read, the distribution of fiction within those magazines complicated their reading further. The variability of readers’ access to magazines meant that they did not usually read issues in their published order. “I have been reading your magazine for the past five years,” Joseph H. Doerfler, 1020 West Eighth Street, Appleton, Wisconsin, wrote to Amazing, “but have never bought them consecutively.” Arthur C. Clarke recalled that his early reading habits were “what we would now call a ‘random access’ process.”

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Access to magazines was not necessarily access to the stories in them. Shorter stories entirely contained in a particular issue were not a problem, but serialized stories, which were usually featured attractions and extended over several consecutive issues, presented difficulties. “There were entire issues that never reached the shores of the United Kingdom (or at any rate the Taunton Woolworth’s), so there were heartbreaking gaps in my collection,” Clarke explained. “Sometimes it took me years to assemble all the installments of a serial.”40 Pulp reading involved “piece-work” reading: readers read serial installments when they could, sometimes out of order, and pieced them together when they could. “During this five year period [reading Amazing],” Joseph Doerfler wrote, “I have started many serials and finished very few.”41 The same magazine practices that complicated readers’ fiction also offered, at least potentially and partially, a resolution. A magazine’s publication assumed indefinite publication, implying that every issue would be followed by another; rarely if ever would a magazine announce that its publication would cease. “That first issue of Science Wonder was heaven,” Frederik Pohl recalled, “but I didn’t realize that the fact that it was a magazine implied that there would be other issues for me to find.” Only a second encounter brought home the implications of science fiction’s magazine form. “When another science-fiction magazine came my way, a few months later, it was like Christmas,” he said. “Given two examples, I was at last able to deduce the probability of more, and the general concept of ‘science fiction magazines’ became part of my life.”42 Magazines’ regular publication cycle as well as their publishers’ practice of announcing the contents of upcoming issues gave readers a sequence and an order within which they could locate their random piece-work reading, although pulp publishing’s volatility meant that some magazines folded without publication of previously announced stories or completion of serial installments. Still, readers indexed magazines to reconstruct that order as best as they could and to try to fill in gaps. “To see what I was missing,” Arthur C. Clarke remembered, “I started an index, listing all issues and filling in their contents from the ‘Coming Next Month’ box (not always reliable!) and from subsequent readers’ comments.”43 The order of magazines’ publication became significant in several ways beyond readers’ desire or need to reconstruct them. For some readers, the irregular, part-time nature of their access to magazines and reading was similar to their own circumstances and acceptable for that. Salesmen on the road, military people stationed overseas or at sea, or travelers in general, they found leisure where and when they could. The regularity and continuity of

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magazine publication, much like the regular schedule of radio broadcasts, allowed readers, and listeners the flexibility to adapt their involvement to the circumstances of their lives and still maintain the feeling of participation. While missing an issue or two, or perhaps more, of a pulp, like missing episodes of a radio broadcast, was not ideal, knowing that they were merely gaps in a larger cycle that could be reconstructed later provided reassurance of a sort. Some other readers were not satisfied with such reassurance. Reconstructing magazines’ order was their way of overcoming the irregularity of their reading. While for some readers, indexing and acquiring magazines were necessary means toward the goal of reading, for others, these ancillary measures developed into a distinct activity serving a different purpose. Collecting magazines offered its own pleasures outside of reading fiction. Pulp collectors researched and indexed specific issues, searched assorted venues—including used, secondhand magazine stores, which existed in the interwar period because of the popularity of magazine fiction—and corresponded and bargained with other collectors for coveted issues in the right condition at the right price. Additionally collecting and reading complemented each other. Having acquired all the installments of a particular serial, readers were as apt to reread it as they were to search for other issues with other serials. “I couldn’t wait to read it,” Frederik Pohl said, recalling the pleasure of acquiring a science fiction pulp issue. “Having read it, at once I read it again; having all but memorized it, [I] attained the wisdom to go looking for more. I found more,” he described the additive impulse. “I found back-number magazine stores where I could pick up 1927 Amazings and 1930 Astoundings for the nickel or dime apiece that even my ten-year-old budget could afford.”44 Collecting practices became collective practices through the same impulse that motivated letter writing. Backyard correspondence columns were valuable resources for readers to find back issues of magazines they had not yet acquired or read. Not insignificantly, given readers’ limited abilities to purchase issues outright and regularly, these requests often involved offers for barters or trades rather than direct exchange of money. “Anyone interested in exchanging Amazing Stories or any other science fiction for books by Edgar R. Burroughs from the ‘Tarzan’ series, or his ‘Mars’ stories can get in touch with me at the above address,” wrote Joseph H. Doerfler. “I also have other books by Jack London, Zane Grey, Rex Beach, Talbot Mundy, Rudyard Kipling, that I would be willing to trade.” His letter included an appeal to

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the editor about his circumstances. “I hope you will print this letter,” he explained, “because I certainly would like to get those back numbers and this is about the only way I can do so.”45 Readers wrote to advertise as well as ask for back issues, a fact that editors noted and used to further the exchange and readers’ loyalties to their magazines. “I have noticed that many new readers ask concerning back numbers,” wrote Carl R. Canterbury, 1527 Eleventh Avenue, Moline, Illinois, in a letter printed immediately after Doerfler’s. “I have collected science fiction for a number of years and as a result have a large collection. It is now necessary to dispose of it,” he stated, “and I would appreciate it if you could find room to print this letter.” For interested readers, his letter detailed the extent and condition of the collection.46 Readers’ attempts to fill in the gaps of their reading were greatly aided by their letters columns. “When the correspondence columns put me in touch with other British ‘fans,’” Arthur Clarke explained, “I was able to buy—or swap—missing issues. By the outbreak of war in 1939, I had acquired a complete run.”47 Readers’ letters gained greater significance in light of these reading practices. The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “excess of seeing” is useful in this context.48 Because every individual occupies a singular and definite place in the world, he argued, they see, experience, and know the world in ways that others cannot. This “excess of seeing,” as he called it, is both unique and incomplete and for that reason forms the basis for aesthetic activity, which in his conception is fundamentally an act and relation of exchange. One person’s excess of seeing adds to another’s perspective, extending its horizon and expanding its limits without forfeiting individual distinctiveness. Art and culture, in this sense, are attempts at empathy, to extend the excess in another’s perspective into one’s own and understand their interpolation and interpellation. In the same sense readers’ letters expressed not only their individual opinions but also their “excess of seeing” into science fiction’s larger, collective whole. Readers read letters for more than ordinary exchange and discourse. Because letters within a single column discussed the contents of several issues, they bridged the gaps in readers’ irregular, piece-work reading. Readers used other readers’ letters to index magazines they had not seen and to reconstruct, as much as they could, serials they knew only incompletely. They helped one another redefine the relations of time and available space that magazines introduced into their fiction. Community was not simply a slogan for pulp backyard columns but also a product of cooperative action for mutual benefit. Sharing was part of their understanding of reading. “My

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head was popping with spaceships and winged girls and cloaks of invisibility,” Frederik Pohl remembered his perspective as a precocious ten-year-old reader, “and I had no one to share it with.”49 This sense of community produced and was reproduced by the interconnected circulation of magazines and ideas. Readers used letters to triangulate their own positions and perspectives on stories, magazines, and other subjects relative to those of others. Comments within correspondence columns not only helped readers find what they were looking for but also helped fashion tastes and desires about what to look for. Barter and trade offered to broaden and extend the scope of science fiction readers’ interests. “I have several novels, history and science books, which I will trade for Amazing Stories,” wrote Le Roy Christian Bashore of 310 North Seventh Street, Lebanon, Pennsylvania. “Some of the history and science books are very interesting and educational,” he added. “If anyone is interested in trading with me, please write to me at once, and I will forward my complete list of books.”50 Through the discussions columns, readers new to science fiction could discover for themselves what other readers had found earlier: information about material and topics they had not encountered before as well as feelings of excitement and anticipation. “My interest in Amazing Stories as a continued, living entity, rather than a mere periodical has lately been rejuvenated by the ‘Discussions’ columns,” John A. Leiter wrote from 333 United States Bank Building, Portland, Oregon, “especially by repeated reference to ‘The Moon Pool’ and the ‘Skylark’ stories. Having read the magazine haphazardly several years ago, I was not definitely sure whether I had read these eminent examples of science fiction or not.” Motivated by other readers’ comments, he had searched secondhand stores to accumulate a set of issues with those two serialized stories as well as stories for the years 1929 through 1931. His collecting, however, was only partially complete. “I expect to fill in the other months,” Leiter said, “until I have a complete set from the beginning of the magazine.”51 Because they became part of the public record of science fiction, published letters were particularly influential in establishing stories’ status within its community.52 While stories’ publication produced popularity based on their appeal and quality, their sustained popularity depended also on science fiction’s social dynamics. In an emergent genre, readers’ efforts to catch up to perceived community standards converged with editorial practices. Reprinting stories in moments when they lacked new material, pulp editors promoted them as classic supplements to readers’ journeys of discovery and

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the result of large numbers of reader requests. Encouraged and empowered, readers submitted further requests, which editors reprinted when and where they could, while pronouncing their preferences and opinions. Within this process of publication, opinion, discovery, and recovery continued commentary sustained stories that were not originally popular to be reintroduced to later, sometimes larger audiences with different interests and perspectives. Stories became canonical, considered classic, in turn—as opposed to merely popular—when they maintained a sustained presence in the circulation of repeated iterations. Originally published in their native countries as magazine serials, the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were available to interwar American readers in single-volume books and were well known to some science fiction readers in that form. Nevertheless many science fiction readers learned of them only through their later reprinting in pulps and from letters commenting on them. Similarly, although A. A. Merritt’s “The Moon Pool” was first published in an all-fiction pulp, All-Story Weekly, in 1918, many interwar readers encountered it through a later reprinting in Amazing. “The reading public’s response was electric,” the science fiction fan and historian Sam Moskowitz wrote about that encounter. “It was as if Merritt had been discovered for the first time.”53 In the same sense the social dynamics of its reading culture sustained science fiction as a cultural genre and public. If Hugo Gernsback introduced the term and an original concept for it, readers’ conversations maintained that social recognition even as they added to, extended, and changed what it represented. “The Moon Pool” and other works by Merritt became science fiction, and Merritt, Wells, and Verne became science fiction writers within the same conversations where readers discovered each other and formed a science fiction community. Some fortunate readers may have encountered these writers’ works directly and firsthand in the original, but given the circumstances of most pulp science fiction readers, their primary concern was to have read them wherever and whenever they might be found so that they could be discussed. Each process, reading and discussing, relied on the other, and each was social in its character. The continued appeal of science fiction depended on its community continuing to read, imagine, and offer opinion despite the departure or entry of individual members or magazines. Discussions that determined the sustained appeal of stories and magazines sustained, in turn, that community of readership. While popular pulp stories were reprinted as books, the reading experience they offered was not the same, taken out of its social context. Many interwar readers turned to

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the magazines where they first appeared as their sources not only for fiction but also for opinions about what counted as good fiction. The hallmark of a classic in this reading culture was to be reprinted and discussed again in magazines, to remain in the circulation of conversation. Such notable examples of science fiction from the 1920s and early 1930s as Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” E. E. Smith’s “Skylark” series, and Jack Williamson’s “Legion of Space” were all reprinted in different science fiction magazines later in the same interwar period. While the social dynamics that informed conversations, collecting, and canons clearly marked the emergence and development of science fiction’s community, they also pointed to its limits. Because the backyard of the letters columns was by its nature a public space, it was also a space for the ritual enactment of events outside its pages. Readers wrote far more letters to editors than could be published. Their selective publication meant that letters not only expressed individual readers’ interests but also represented the science fiction community and its activities to the larger public for science fiction pulps. “There is also a point about this I dislike,” John Baltadonis of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, expressed privately to T. Bruce Yerke of Los Angeles: “the fact that one wont [sic] be able to write as many letters as he would like to—mistakes in science, ideas, etc., never occurring to the reader in fast rapidity for any lengthy duration of time.”54 Issues that readers discussed at length in private correspondence were distilled and represented by their published letters. “Allow me to present a new plot to authors,” D. G. Lyle, 21 Marlborough Road, Bradford, Yorkshire, England, wrote humorously about the unanticipated consequences of his search for back issues within the science fiction community. “The villain persuades his victim to insert a letter in the Discussions Column of A.S. asking for back numbers. From this point, the victim’s slender resources are gradually depleted by the cost of acknowledging all the applications received. Finally a point is reached when, tottering upon the verge of insanity, he decides to ignore all future inquiries! Henceforth the exquisite mental torture, occasioned by abusive letters on the score of discourtesy, commences.” He explained further, using his letter to make amends publicly, “I must say my letter of over a year ago was highly successful. Those who, in the past, have had no reply from me, will now, I hope, forgive me.”55 Lyle’s letter also hinted at some of the private behavior outside the view of the reading public of “Discussions.” The publicity of correspondence columns further changed and compli-

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cated readers’ reading of and involvement in them. The dynamics of public places and spaces are dependent on related and concomitant dynamics of privacy.56 Readers generally associated issues of publication, public, and publicity with editorial control. In contesting editors and establishing their own voices in science fiction’s conversations, however, readers discovered that they had gained a means and perhaps a freedom of expression, but not one without consequences or responsibilities. Published letters garnered the scrutiny of their publicity. Some readers, such as Baltadonis, enjoyed the additional attention. “The one thing I do like about Science Discussions,” he wrote to Yerke, “is the fact that one has to think a deal before he can write a fair letter.”57 Others, who valued private exchange without public attention, enjoyed it less. Readers’ increased self-consciousness showed in their letters and changed the dynamics of the backyard and its capacity for discussion. While the pulp letters columns continued to be places where science fiction readers learned about each other, their interests, and their activities, many readers also began to correspond directly. Their unmediated exchanges allowed them substantive conversations at a frequency and pace of their choosing. Where initially science fiction readers delighted in the public expression that allowed them to form a sense of community, increasingly they sought private expression to preserve it. Part of readers’ desire for their own voices in science fiction’s conversations was freedom from editorial meddling. “Let’s start a real discussion and let the editor keep out of it,” said A. M. Riordan of Flagstaff, Arizona. “Lots of us readers are somewhat of scientists ourselves, and we do not need the editor to put us right. If there is not space in the magazine to publish it,” he argued, “publish the names and addresses and let us have our argument in private.”58 Part of Riordan’s and other readers’ desire was also privacy for their free exchange. Privacy, or rather the lack of publicity, allowed members of the emerging science fiction community a different kind of reading and a different kind of interaction. Some readers, in fact, stopped writing to science fiction magazines altogether, preferring nonpublic conversations with other readers. In this sense the idea of community captures but does not adequately convey the dynamics that developed within science fiction. Sociologists, particularly in the early twentieth century, saw community’s close interpersonal relations as differing markedly from society’s more general and impersonal interactions. Certainly, readers found common cause and developed collective social practices for criticism and collecting within their backyard conversations. As significantly, they looked to make their imagined community

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more concrete, and the connections they formed and forged became the basis of their social relations. “My personal involvement with sf. fandom was due entirely to the letters columns in the sf. magazines of the 1930’s,” recalled Russell Chauvenet. “I could write to those whose addresses were published, and those noting my own letters could write to me. In this way kindred spirits could be discovered, and friendships, some of them lifelong, could be formed.”59 Nevertheless the rubric of science fiction’s participatory culture sustained and maintained several overlapping and interconnected groups—what might more appropriately be called interest groups and social networks. The variety of their communications and interactions was both more and less personal than community in a conventional sense, especially in their mediated withdrawal into smaller, private social circles. As readers pursued social relations beyond conversations, imagined commonality gave way to action and activity, and also occasionally competition and conflict. While readers began expressing opinions about stories, magazines, and science, their enthusiastic pursuits led many to become more: writers, editors, publishers, and fans; scientists, engineers, technicians, and tinkerers. Achieving their positions, however, they also grappled to define their relative authority and distinction—especially when they occupied several positions simultaneously—within the evolving circumstances and conditions of interwar society and science. If pulp publishing’s material conditions circulated science fiction’s participatory ethos and progressive possibilities, readers’ conversations became social practices with actual, not potential, consequence. Connecting conversation to practice and science fiction to the pursuits it inspired was their continued impulse to imagine science. Despite Miss Anita Forbes’s reservations, pulp fiction readers exercised considerable effort in their entertainment. Their exercise and effort, in fact, spoke to the character of their reading. Reading was a dialogic process, reconciling imagination and the larger world within which readers situated themselves and their broader social concerns. For interwar pulp readers, this process involved effort beyond the act of reading. The distribution of interwar pulp magazines and fiction—their social technology—required their readers to collect and connect specific issues and serial stories, and in the process it fostered a greater distribution and circulation of culture as readers connected, often playfully, their individual circumstances to those of others. For an emergent science fiction genre whose public proclaimed participation, the pages

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of pulp backyards became spaces for this reading, this interplay. The letters and addresses of readers that editors printed marked not only the connections possible within this space but also the efforts of readers to make those connections. Reading’s dialogism also shaped science fiction’s content, particularly the constellation of ideas and issues it associated with science. The circulation of letters, magazines, and stories that enabled their conversations allowed readers different forms of imagining. Reading magazines and then others’ letters led to a collective imagining of community, one that informed and influenced their imaginings of science and fiction. Reading stories led them to imagine science’s potential and possibilities for knowledge, adventure, and romance. Commenting on all and sharing their individual interests and concerns, readers also injected fragments of broader social discourse—information, knowledge, and social values from their immediate circumstances that they felt were appropriate and relevant—into the culture of science fiction’s backyard. As they redefined the character of participation that publishers sought to create for them, readers’ exchanges also reshaped the character of science within their writers’ fiction and their editors’ features, reading it with unanticipated intent and unintended consequence. Science fiction’s conversations not only fostered a community of readership, they imagined and reimagined science and fiction within the social dynamics and historical circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s.

PART II READING

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A

s science fiction emerged historically, so too did the types of stories and figures that have come to distinguish it. Exploration of strange environments, travels across time and dimension, and epic battles for the fate of worlds, on the one hand, and rocket ships, ray guns, robots, and aliens from outer space, on the other, became familiarly associated with science fiction because, in their time and place, they expressed historical sensibilities that resonated with and within the developing genre. The specific historical conditions that produced science fiction also informed what it expressed. If its material and cultural circulation established science fiction in the 1920s and 1930s as a literary genre and center for conversation and community, they also complicated not only how but also what to read from it. Because pulp publishers mass-produced fiction to fit a generic type, pulp science fiction’s free, frequent, and indiscriminant borrowing from any and all sources also made it, ironically, a particularly effective window into contemporary scientific and social discourse. Because pulp magazines contained more than stories, their other content contributed as well to science fiction’s significance and signification. Their editorials, features, and letters from readers, as well as their cover art and illustrations, expressed both individual, specific concerns and shared sensibilities. The extraliterary quality and intertextual relation of this additional content expanded interwar science fiction’s discourse and complicated its perspective.1 Editors, writers, and readers expressed their diverse, overlapping opinions—occupying several textual and narrative roles—and in the noisy cacophony of their exchange brought the force and rhythm of broader historical trends, transformations, and concerns squarely to science fiction’s conversations.2 Pulp science fiction was, in this sense, an example of what the historian Lawrence Levine called the “folklore of industrial life.”3 Imagining science’s potential and exploring its possibilities, the wonder interwar science fiction presented was sublime, a combination of awe and apprehension.4 Its stories, letters, and features touched, directly and indirectly, upon the era’s modern tensions, echoing its ambivalent, anxious, but ultimately celebratory dynamic. These comments and conversations coalesced around specific tropes that contained their concern and gained new figurative and expressive significance. Facts and devices crystallized scientific knowledge and technological expertise, making their larger enterprise and consequence—building the

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nation’s industrial economy—accessible and authoritative. Women, Asian aliens, and robots represented domestic and national anxieties, while their difference reassured the nature of technology and individual ability. Linear history underwrote both the physics of time travel and modernity’s progress. Taken in their broadest sense, the diverse figures of this scientific sublime shared a common concern with ordinary individualism in America and, by extension, other modernizing societies. If scientists, engineers, industrialists, and other experts and leaders transformed modern society with science and technology, everyone lived equally, if differently, the consequences and implications of those changes. Science, it seemed, determined the ability of amateurs and other, otherwise ordinary people to live, work, and exist; and science fiction allowed them not only to imagine but also to consider and discuss its implications. Reading interwar science fiction was not only to imagine science but also to consider its historical situation and juncture.

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

“Amazing Stories to me occupies a unique position among the almost countless number of periodicals which flood the newsstand monthly,” wrote Howard S. Gable, 3950 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri, to Amazing’s editor in 1929. “It is one of the few fiction magazines which I read,” he said, explaining that science was his real interest. “Naturally, I read other magazines, Chemical Society Journals, journals on inorganic chemistry, but no other fiction magazine.” Still, after reading these scientific journals, he enjoyed turning to science fiction. “One can forget Earth and hurry away with the speed of light to Mars, Venus, and to other distant planets,” he explained. Science fiction allowed him “to travel into the depths of space on a mission to save the world” or “to accompany some eminent scientist into his laboratory, where he is perfecting a new invention.” The adventures it provided were especially comforting, he said, “after my own . . . idea is found to be all wrong.”1 Gable’s letter and similar letters from other readers spoke to the way science fiction in the 1920s and 1930s linked science and fiction. The format and editorial practices of the pulps lent their conversational character to promoting and fostering this relationship. Although motivated by commercial interests, interwar science fiction editors also genuinely believed that science held imaginative potential and progressive purpose. Toward that end and to bolster their claims and proclamations for science fiction, they and the writers they published drew from any source available to infuse stories and magazines with scientific content, emphasizing factual details. Readers, in their turn, read science fiction to situate both its facts and its fictions within the circumstances of their lives. In the exchanges circulating within the

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science fiction community, they testified to their own activity, citing sources for detail and knowledge; demonstrating an ability to reason; and arguing positions about science’s character, purpose, and place. Changing social circumstances for science also situated this exchange. Status, education, and credential informed but did not determine science fiction’s backyard discussions. The conversations included readers, writers, and editors who were trained, educated, and could otherwise claim expertise and authority, but they also gave voice to amateurs, students, tinkerers, science enthusiasts, and people who admitted they had not yet learned, and certainly not mastered, new knowledge and new devices. Their insistence that their opinions and views mattered revealed a tension about authority, expertise, and distinction in science and society. Holding this tension in balance was interwar science fiction’s democratic ethos of science and discovery. On the one hand, this ethos welcomed everyone to its community and guaranteed them the right to participate in its conversations. On the other hand, it allowed participants to discover science’s wonders for themselves and demonstrate distinction within their common enterprise. Echoing Howard Gable’s sentiments, this participatory ethos was adventure that was also comforting. Organizing and managing its tensions was the particular relationship that interwar science fiction forged between fact, fiction, and science. For interwar science fiction, “amazing,” “astounding,” and “wonder” were more than magazine titles; they were also metaphors for a specific style to imagine science, clarion calls for its conversation. Here again Hugo Gernsback was an important catalyst. Gernsback developed a view of participatory science before he began his science fiction ventures, during his earlier days in amateur radio and radio publishing in the first decades of the twentieth century. His enthusiasm for radio was for its possibilities for communication and technological development. His specific interest was the culture of two-way radio operators who populated the airwaves of early twentieth-century America, which he believed continued a distinctive tradition of popular invention.2 Unlike members of the scientific establishment, these enthusiasts furthered technological progress through creative collaboration: imagining potential innovations, discussing them, and bringing them to fruition. In the era when commercial and corporate interests were combining to make radio overwhelmingly a broadcast medium, he argued for the necessity of two-way radio communication. “It is absolutely necessary,” he wrote arguing against proposed gov-

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ernment regulation of radio, “that the amateur be allowed his freedom of the ether, without it he can accomplish nothing.”3 Gernsback’s passion for radio and technological progress developed into a more general enthusiasm for science and scientific progress, as broadcast radio slowly and successfully removed amateur radio from the airwaves, relegating ham operators to a sliver of the newly declared public and licensed frequency spectrum.4 The evolution of his magazines expressed this evolution of his interests. Modern Electrics (1908) became the Electrical Experimenter (1913) and then split into Radio News (1919) and Science & Invention (1920), both of which he continued to publish. It was to this publishing history that he added Amazing in 1926 and Science Wonder in 1929. Gernsback brought this enthusiasm to science fiction. What distinguished science fiction pulps from other pulps in the 1920s and 1930s—and from later science fiction—were their optimistic claims to progress and purpose. Although the genre’s readers, writers, illustrators, and editors speculated freely about many things including the social consequences of science, interwar science fiction was a science fiction more than it was speculative fiction.5 The success of science and technology and its repercussions in popular discourse fostered a belief that the future held further amazing and astounding wonders. Gernsback’s magazines, in particular, expressed this exuberant, electric faith as they preached what he called the “gospel of science” and established a tone that his successors and imitators followed, if not completely whole-heartedly.6 Interwar science fiction pulps took the idea that possibilities imagined through fictional speculation might one day prove to be realities and transformed it into an ideal where imagination would lead to realization. History and experience had shown modern society, they proclaimed, that nothing was necessarily impossible. Possibilities became realities through people’s efforts, including those of ordinary people, and an important aspect of that effort was the imagining of those possibilities. “The wonders of modern science no longer amaze us,” Gernsback wrote in Science Wonder. “We accept each new discovery as a matter of course.” Instead, “we even question why it had not come about sooner,” he observed. “The man in the street no longer recognizes in science the word impossible: ‘What man wills, man can do’ is his belief.”7 The interwar science fiction pulps strived strenuously to affirm Gernsback’s pronouncement that “We live and breathe day by day in a Science saturated atmosphere.”8 Snippets of science of every persuasion culled from any available source provided the basis for writers and editors to extrapolate imaginative

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devices and plots. The discovery of X-rays at the turn of the century inspired not only scientists but also writers to seek and imagine rays for a wide variety of purposes. Science Wonder’s first story (and serial), Irving Lester and Fletcher Pratt’s “The Reign of the Ray,” told the history of the world following the discovery of a ray that disabled explosives. Ray Avery Myers’s “Into the Subconscious” was centered around a ray device capable of probing ancestral memories. Radioactivity and radiation served a similar variety of functions, making monsters of plain folk in the Arizona desert in Ed Earl Repp’s “The Radium Pool.” Einstein’s theory of relativity and its associated idea that time was a fourth dimension allowed writers to explore two different kinds of stories. On the one hand, time-travel stories such as R. F. Starzl’s “The Man Who Changed the Future,” Francis Flagg’s “An Adventure in Time,” and Arthur G. Stangland’s “50th Century Revolt” recounted adventures on the premise that given the proper device or means of transport, time could be traversed as easily as distance. On the other hand, extradimensional stories extended the idea of a fourth dimension to extrapolate adventures in additional, as yet undiscovered dimensions.9 The physical sciences were not the only fields to contribute to the science in science fiction. Writers also capitalized on developments in biology and the life sciences, particularly endocrinology and genetics. Dr. David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” told a tale of women transforming themselves physically into men by taking injections of male hormones. Edmond Hamilton incorporated T. H. Morgan and H. J. Muller’s findings about the effects of radiation on genetics in his “Master of the Genes” to address the potential horrors of genetic research. The growing popularity of anthropology and archaeology in the 1920s and 1930s, spurred by successful books by Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict and by popular fascination with the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s (“King Tut”) burial site and its rumored “Curse of the Pharaohs,” was similarly manifested in science fiction.10 Harl Vincent’s “The Menace from Below” and its sequel, “The Return to Subterrania,” imagined a subterranean world where primeval man, “pithecanthropus” of 1930s physical anthropol­ogy, still lived. Ethnographic studies of other peoples and other cultures in faraway lands conjured up an element of exoticism and the possibility of lost races.11 Jack Williamson’s “The Alien Intelligence,” for example, told a tale of a lost race of white men in an Australia terrorized by alien creatures.12 The features and departments that pulps used to foster their reading publics also worked to encourage reader interest and knowledge of science.

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When Gernsback first created it, Science Wonder ran a “Science News of the Month” column chronicling current developments in such areas as astronomy, aviation, chemistry, biology-evolution, geology, medicine, physics, radio-television, and miscellaneous general knowledge. It also occasionally published special “science fact” features such as the summer of 1929’s threepart “The Problems of Space Flying” by Capt. Hermann Noordung.13 Also a Gernsback creation, Amazing continued to include notes about scientific and technical developments to fill space within its pages during T. O’Conor Sloane’s later editorial stint and printed O’Conor Sloane’s dry and occasionally lengthy discourses explaining this scientific principle or that technological device: “Inefficiency in Engineering”; “Heavy Stone”; “Bridges and Tunnels”; and “Meters, Barleycorns, Feet, Paces, and Other Measurements.”14 In the late 1930s, when it emphasized amazement more than science, Amazing still ran Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” columns of bizarre but still true facts of nature. Focusing on fiction more than fact, Clayton Publications’ Astounding contained few science features in its first years. Only in 1933, in its last two numbers, was a “Science Forum”—written by Carlyle Elliott, B.A., B.S., Ph.D.—included as part of a final effort to imitate the magazine’s competitors more faithfully and avoid, though unsuccessfully, failure. When Street & Smith resurrected the Clayton title, the company corrected the error, running regular science departments and, beginning with editor F. Orlin Tremaine’s 1934 reprinting and serialization of Charles Fort’s Lo!, adopting Gernsback’s earlier tactic of printing occasional nonfiction features along with fiction.15 The shifting reputations of different science fiction pulps and their concomitant shifts in popularity and fortunes demonstrated the significance of science to their readers. “So it was left for you,” exclaimed Frances Tebbetts of Seattle, Washington, commenting on the conversion of his friends, “to awaken them to the wonders of Science; to its real meaning, and the glamour and romance of it!”16 Under Gernsback’s editorial guidance, Amazing in the mid-1920s was heralded as the preeminent, if the only, science-oriented science fiction pulp. By the late 1920s and into the early 1930s, the situation had changed. The Clayton chain entered the scene in 1930 with Astounding, edited by Harry Bates. T. O’Conor Sloane assumed Amazing’s editorship after Gernsback was forced out, and Gernsback returned with its rival, Science Wonder. “It is the policy of Science Wonder Stories,” he declared, “to publish only such stories that have their basis in scientific laws as we know them, or in the logical deduction of new laws from what we know.”17 Despite later losing the “science” in its name, Science Wonder gained the competitive edge

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over Amazing and Astounding on the basis of its scientific credibility. Readers argued that Sloane’s credentials—he held a doctorate in chemistry—did not translate into the science of his fiction and that Astounding was a poor imitation of either of Gernsback’s originals. By the mid-1930s the situation had shifted again. Street & Smith assumed publication of Astounding in 1933, and Standard Publications took over Wonder, converting it to Thrilling Wonder in 1936. Gernsback left pulp publishing with the failure of Wonder in 1936, and Astounding gained the mantle of scientific respectability, first, after a few initial rocky years, under the editorial direction of F. Orlin Tremaine and then under the lead of his successor, John W. Campbell. By that point, in the late 1930s, Amazing and Thrilling Wonder were seen as indulging science fiction’s more fantastic aspects. Such optimism, enthusiasm, and exposure were part of a cultural dynamic that overdetermined science. Imagining its possibility was particularly important in an early twentieth-century era that celebrated an idea, science, that contained a multitude of associations, some of which worked in opposing and contradictory fashion. Many of the examples of science cited by science fiction editors and fans were, strictly speaking, examples of technology, specifically new technologies that had transformed society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Techniques pioneered in Britain and Europe’s industrial revolution, particularly mechanization of established craft and skill and application of new understandings of energy and power, had arrived in the United States in the nineteenth century, driving the country’s economic development. New business practices for organization, production, and distribution—what Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand”— provided these technologies additional scale and scope after the Civil War, particularly railroads’ combination of iron and steel, steam power, and telegraphy.18 These developments changed agriculture and the acquisition of natural resources as well as industry and, as significantly, their interaction and interplay, connecting the emerging nation’s metropolises to its hinterlands in ways that transformed both.19 Celebrated in new industrial expositions and captured emblematically in massive steam engines, skyscrapers, elaborately engineered bridges such as the Brooklyn Bridge, and internationally in the Eiffel Tower, technology was impressive, visible testimony to transformative power. Its developers, Bell, Westinghouse, and Edison, among others—who also consolidated research and commercial interest—were celebrated not only for their individual innovations but also for constituting an American tradition of invention.20

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Modern technology promised discovery and change on a more individual and equal scale. Although nineteenth-century industrial technologies affected the lives of people rich and poor—reshaping social and class relations and conditions for work, particularly among artisan classes—other than a few urban exceptions such as bridges, early mass transportation and electric city-lighting systems, they functioned mostly to serve and benefit the wealthy and influential.21 Workers who produced materials and built and operated machinery did not generally enjoy the fruits of the technologies they made and maintained. Newer technologies such as the telephone, radio, electricity, the automobile, and the airplane, several developed in the late nineteenth century, however, marked the personal modern. They impressed less with size and scope and appealed more with ideals, specifically the freedom and possibility they offered ordinary people. Once they entered people’s lives, argued their enthusiasts, they would reform the ways they lived them: redefining transportation, communication, and the workings of their homes.22 The limit to their affect was not social class but access and availability. Modern in this sense was not necessarily urban. Early telephone, automobile, and radio development and use occurred as much in rural areas as in cities.23 Modern technology’s appearance and form also promised personality. Design entered manufacturing in the early twentieth century, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, literally shaping and coloring old and new technologies from dinner plates to automobiles and everything between.24 The shape of AT&T’s early phones, particularly its “candlestick” model, while mostly functional, emphasized individual use and privacy in an era of shared lines. Offering a number of models with stylish bodies in a range of available colors, part of a pioneering business concept of preplanned or “artificial” obsolescence to encourage cyclical consumption, allowed General Motors to supplant Ford Motor Company as the world’s largest auto manufacturer in the 1930s, while Henry Ford insisted that reliability was more important than style and offered his cars only in black.25 In an era of mass production and consumption, the development of style and design, even of technological devices, allowed expression of personal flair and individual distinction. Even new machines that were not as readily available to everyone, such as airplanes, were painted with colors and marked with designs and logos, distinguishing an individual owner’s personal taste or a commercial airline’s brand. Attention and exposure to these modern technologies bridged issues of actual access and availability while maintaining immediacy. If magazines inaugurated a national culture of communication at the turn of the century,

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they provided a larger platform for already evolving print media—local and regional newspapers and direct-mail flyers—that advertised and discussed information. With more heralded mechanical inventions, radio, the phonograph, and the telephone, they constituted what Warren Susman called a “communications” revolution in which modern media were both means for and subjects of discussion.26 Developed initially by Marconi in 1900, radio became well known to the general public only in 1912 when amateur radio operators played a notable role reporting the sinking of the Titanic. Their success and subsequent popularity also spurred debate about proper and appropriate use of the medium, one that Gernsback fought and lost to broadcast corporations.27 Several new technologies, including photography, motion pictures, and the phonograph, conveyed an apparent realism despite the framing and mediation they required and in spite of the technique, skill, and art required to produce that realism. Errors in recording or filming, ironically, readily revealed the artifice and process of their production but were discarded, not displayed, and infrequently discussed. The singular idea of science, more abstract and less visible, anchored this plethora of technologies and associations and provided a broader framework for their discussion. Its intellectual framework was systematic and formal and claimed comprehension and comprehensiveness. With a record of scientific and public success for syntheses of theory and findings from evolution to electromagnetism in the nineteenth century, early twentieth-century scientists were particularly concerned to advance what they saw as science’s progress and universal reach. Einstein’s work on relativity, for example, extended electromagnetism and synthesized its findings with those of gravity in an effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to produce a unified theory of physical forces. Similarly the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead sought to derive mathematics and its truths from formal logic in their Principia Mathematica. The rubric of unifying universal knowledge extended into popular discourse, where it enabled a cultural logic of discovery that allowed ordinary people a way to comprehend not only science but also technology, and to comprehend them on an individual basis. Discovery combined technological invention in its myriad and multiplying forms and the range of natural and social phenomena that science explored under a single category of wonders waiting to be revealed and allowed that revelation outside the pace of actual progress, at a pace of people’s choosing. “As people read, they become educated, become acquainted with the ‘mysteries’ of our little world,” Francis Tebbetts, a “Real Fan,” wrote to Science Wonder Stories.

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“No longer do we marvel at the radio, airplane, automobile, and the countless commonplaces of our age,” he exclaimed. “They are real, natural!” He continued, “and so does [sic] the science fiction stories, open our eyes and minds to the possibilities in which our imaginations will some day realize.”28 Reading and discussion were integral to imagination and discovery because they put them into practice. Reading about and discussing technology realized people’s personal involvement in it even outside of actual experience. Reading about and discussing science recapitulated the act of discovery in an individual, if actually indirect, sense. The associated notions mutually reinforced one another’s affect. In the eyes of interested observers, being informed now meant keeping informed, specifically about developments in science and technology. If most people in the United States did not have access to electricity until the 1940s and some only later, in the 1920s and 1930s almost everyone knew enough about it to want to discuss its implications for their lives. In 1920 the newspaper publisher E. W. Scripps created a science wire service, the Science News Service, whose stories featured technology as much as they did science. By the end of the decade it served over one hundred newspapers with a combined estimated daily circulation of seven million.29 While modern media such as photography, motion pictures, phonograph records, and radio, which are produced, projected, and broadcast for viewing and listening audiences, are conventionally seen as one-way communication technologies, each spurred publication of associated industry, trade, and enthusiast magazines that enabled extratechnological commentary and dialogue. In this sense these devices and their discussions were technological wrinkles within a broader development, what Raymond Williams called the “Long Revolution”: the long-term cultural and class consequence of print, literacy, and the social interaction and engagement they enable. Within an emerging culture of communication, representation was increasingly a part of realization and authority was increasingly linked to and a part of authorship. Imagination, consideration, and discussion were the means by which individual people marked their own, more particular, local circumstances. Science fiction readers believed that science was already in their lives, even if they did not fully comprehend it, and they wanted to find a way to discuss it. While the impulse to discuss science, technology, and their implications was not limited to science fiction, it found particular expression and form within interwar pulp magazines and stories. While perhaps not widely popular in a general sense, science fiction was intensely popular to science enthusiasts because it claimed to connect what was possible to what would

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be real, to relate fiction to fact. In the midst of already historic transformations whose consequences were still nevertheless incomplete, progress and purpose were liminal terms: imminent, yet not quite inevitable, ideas that required imagination. Gernsback adopted Aldous Huxley’s saying “Those Who Refuse to Go Beyond Fact Rarely Get as Far as Fact” as a motto for his radio magazine, Science & Invention. He extended this principle in Amazing, declaring that “extravagant fiction today” would become “cold fact tomorrow.” Similarly, Science Wonder proclaimed its motto that “Prophetic Fiction Is the Mother of Scientific Fact” across its masthead in every issue. A slogan contest in 1930 officially designated Science Wonder as “The Magazine of Prophetic Fiction.” In relating fact to fiction, Gernsback argued a historical connection between the two. Scientific facts were science past, knowledge already fashioned, already made. Scientific fiction was science future, science still to be fashioned or made. Science fiction’s imagining of science linked past to future, fact to fiction, beyond the horizon of present science. This rhetoric extended beyond metaphor to the literal. From their inception Amazing and Science Wonder linked fact-oriented features to their fiction. Amazing included a “What Do You Know?” department testing readers’ knowledge with such questions as: • How does Venus compare in mass with the Earth, and how does its period of revolution, determining the length of its day, compare with that of the earth? • What is factorial calculation? • How could you separate crystalline molecules from colloids? • What is one of the absolute and definite characteristics of the Hindu yoghi? • What did the Roman gladiators say as they passed the Emperor? • Is an automatic dishwasher and dryer a possibility?30 The answers could be found within Amazing’s stories, validating their science beyond and despite their status as fiction. For those readers who did not already know the correct answers, “What Do You Know?” provided page numbers where they could find them. Science Wonder attempted to live up to its claims as an educational institution with its equally testing and nearly identical “What Is Your Science Knowledge?” department. To supplement the diet of information that the “Science News of the Month” feature provided, the magazine also included a “Science Questions and Answers” col-

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umn where readers’ questions were answered and information they did not understand fully was explained. Science Wonder also occasionally added economic incentive to readers’ curiosity and knowledge, combining the pulp convention of contests with an emphasis on scientific fact. One “Find the Fatal Flaw” contest asked readers to use their own knowledge of psychology and evolution and powers of logical reasoning to find the fatal flaw in Ray Avery Myers’s “Into the Subconscious” and win a cash prize.31 In fine established pulp practice, Street & Smith’s Astounding followed the path pioneered by Amazing and Wonder with similar features and contests. Interwar science fiction’s call for science fact tapped into an already present reservoir of sentiment. Some readers waxed enthusiastically in their responses. “Print all scientific facts as related in the stories in italics,” Mr. George W. Anderson of Fairmount, West Virginia, suggested. “This will serve to more forcefully drive home the idea upon which you have established your magazine. Personally, when I have some such system blazing forth before my eyes,” he said, “I am inclined to stop and consider what I have learned, for future reference.”32 “Your ‘Science Questionnaire’ is a swell feature,” wrote Lloyd G. Neily of East St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, to Amazing Stories about its science quiz that integrated factual knowledge within its stories. “I always look at it first and try to answer the questions,” he explained. “After I have read the stories I go back to the ‘Questionnaire’ and try to answer the rest of the questions and see how much I have learned.”33 Others were more measured in their approval. “Although, in my opinion, Amazing Stories is one of the most interesting fiction magazines published,” wrote W. F. Crist of 3448 Clay Street, San Francisco, California, “some of the stories have such obvious scientific mistakes in them, that they seem more like fairy tales than scientifiction, and consequently appear to be out of place in your magazine.”34 Attention to science, particularly the accuracy of its factual content, explains the popularity of a certain style of science fiction to readers at the time. Later critics and fans describe, often pejoratively, stories of the interwar era as clunky, clumsy, simplistic, and more concerned with discourses on the operation of their science than development of character or theme. While such descriptions are not necessarily inaccurate, their dismissals miss the point. While readers also valued traditional elements of literary style—plot, character, theme, and language—as the volume of discussion on the subject testified, for many in the 1920s and 1930s, science was their primary concern. For them, scientific accuracy was a stylistic prerequisite, although accuracy, in this sense, was the strict truth of its facts and not a more comprehensive integration of knowledge,

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reasoning, and context. Impossible science and technology were the worst elements of what they considered “bad” science fiction, a standard of which writers were well aware. “It may be far-fetched, it may be fantastic,” Robert Heinlein would later comment about writing science fiction, “but it must not be at variance with observed facts.”35 Or as Arthur C. Clarke exclaimed, taking the pulp science fiction writer Capt. S. P. Meek to task many years after Meek’s errors, “Absurd science—yes. False science—no!”36 Factual knowledge provided a common currency for science fiction’s participatory science and an organizing concept for like-minded enthusiasts. Critical readers awarded bouquets and brickbats for the validity of stories’ scientific content, and they offered explanation and, where necessary, correction of errors to accompany those awards. While their purpose was serious, their communitarian dynamics still allowed a spirit of camaraderie and even mischievous amusement. “Some of your readers send in an indignant letter,” T. J. D. of Cleveland, Ohio, wrote, “when they catch an anachronism or a physical impossibility.” He suggested to both the editor and other readers an alternative rationale. “But I’ll bet they really enjoyed themselves, because they were keen enough to catch it,” he said, “and it was only a sense of personal vanity that caused them to pen their triumph to you.” To prove his own point, he added humorously, “That’s just what I’m going to get around to in a minute, after I get you in a good humor.”37 Critique and correction of facts engaged the science fiction community so much that they generated exchanges that extended beyond an original story and scientific point. In the May 1930 Amazing “Discussions” column, for instance, Dr. Miles J. Breuer answered criticisms raised by readers about his story “The Hungry Guinea Pig.” The exchanges barely touched on the story and instead focused on the issue of animal gigantism that Breuer used as an imaginative device. “The objections to the giant laboratory animal,” he said, “are based on the conceptions that the weight of an animal increases as the cube of a linear dimension, whereas its muscular strength increases only as the square.” He acknowledged the relevancy of the point, noting “the interesting natural fact that an ant is able to carry 200 times his own weight, whereas a man carries barely more than his own weight.” Still, he defended himself. “It is true that there is a limit to the size that animals can assume on this earth. But this limit cannot be found on the basis of this cube-tosquare relationship.” His response to scientific criticisms was not to refute them but to complicate the considerations and in the process demonstrate his own expertise. “The strength of a muscle increases with the cross-section

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of the muscle,” he pointed out. “Its length determines only the amplitude of its contraction. The weight of muscle depends on its volume, therefore both on cross-section and length.” He argued that readers assumed that gigantic animals resembled their smaller counterparts and were only proportionally larger, while in reality, “the larger the animal, the greater its relative muscle volume.” Using the example of horses, he explained that it was possible for a horse to be twice the size of an ordinary horse, but that its strength and appearance would be different: “it would be tremendously bulging full of muscle.”38 Breuer’s attempt to answer his critics with his own expertise only drew further criticism. “Looking back over the magazine for May, I notice a terrifying error by Dr. Breuer,” wrote Victor A. Endersby of 1942 Canon Drive, Montrose, California. “Terrifying, I mean, because if he makes such in a matter of biology, what are the rest of us likely to do? I refer to his discussion on the horse increased twice the size,” Endersby explained. “He says that a horse doubled in size would be eight times the weight. Correct. But he says that it would only have twice the muscle power, which is wrong.” Endersby proceeded to demonstrate his own prowess for explication. “The muscle cross section increases as the square of its diameter,” he noted, “so the horse would be four times as strong with eight times the weight, and needs his muscle area doubled.” Additionally, “the diameter of his muscles should be multiplied by the square root of two instead of two,” he observed. “That would increase a three-inch muscle to about 4.2 inches instead of six.” Endersby, however, agreed with Breuer’s general conclusion that very large animals were possible given both the earth’s natural circumstances and the prior existence of such large animals as dinosaurs.39 Amazing’s editors intervened to end and resolve the exchange. With a brief note celebrating the virtue of critical dialogue, they published a further response from Breuer to Endersby in which Breuer admitted error but thanked his critic for strengthening the conclusions of his original argument. “Mr. Endersby’s argument sounds correct to me, and so do the mathematics,” Breuer wrote. “I must have made an error.” Still, he pointed out that his was “an error, not in biology, but in mathematics. As a matter of fact,” he noted, “my error succeeded in making my argument give a much more conservative conclusion than is actually the truth. With Mr. Endersby’s correction, for which I am duly grateful, my line of argument acquires much more force than it had in the first place.”40 Breuer’s exchange with Endersby revealed the several social roles that facts

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could play with regard to science and knowledge. The sociologist of science Bruno Latour adapted the concept of a “black box” from cybernetics to consider the ways that representations and material forms of science related its claims to authority and knowledge. Conceptually, placing a “black box” around an idea or theory or within a machine allowed it to be used instrumentally without regard to its internal complexity or certainty. How a black box worked was not important as long as it worked; it was science already made and ready for presentation. When necessary a black box could also be opened to reveal what was inside. Only then was the process of science’s making open to consideration, debate, and possibly dispute. An open black box revealed science “in action,” the various practices that had actually produced its finished product: “uncertainty, people at work, decisions, competitions, controversies.” 41 In this sense scientific facts—as used by science enthusiasts as well as scientists—were conceptual “black boxes,” bits of ready-made science. As Breuer and Endersby demonstrated, factual details could be asserted and examined for different purposes. Presented without question, they removed uncertainty from view in order to assert authority. Presented for question, they opened discussion about the knowledge represented within, including its uncertainty and debate. Both modes of science fact were in full display in interwar science fiction’s conversations. Given the opportunity, many readers strove, sometimes at length, to demonstrate their ability. “Time is a fourth dimension possessed by any body relative to any other body with respect to which it may be in motion,” stated Felix B. Wadel of Box 166, Tyler, Texas, in a response to Amazing’s 1929 publication of “Discoveries of Dr. Mentiroso.” He elaborated on the specifics: “When a body moves relative to another, its dimension along the line of motion, as viewed from the other, is decreased. And another dimension is increased—that of time. Under these conditions, simultaneousness is no longer absolute! From a body traveling, say with respect to the earth, two earth events which occur at the same time may not appear simultaneous. And the earlier event, of the two, may appear later.” The purpose of his extended discourse on space, time, and relativity was to point out that the story assumed scientific and technological achievements that were not yet realized. “To get the effects comparable to those claimed by the ‘Lying Doctor,’” Wadel noted, “one would have to travel within but a minute fraction of the velocity of light, and this is, according to the latest experiment of Dr. Michelson, 186,176 miles per second! I can conceive of no one having the temerity to claim such a speed as this, as yet it does not come within the realm—even of scientifiction.”42 Such demonstration of individual ability aimed for distinction within a

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community of peers, within its democracy of scientific opportunity. “After reading Mr. [John W.] Campbell’s discussion of Dr. Smith’s ‘Skylark’ stories,” wrote P. Schuyler Miller of 302 South Ten Broeck Street, Scotia, New York, “I set out to juggle a few expressions of my own, in an attempt to find the energy required to give a body the speed of light. . . . I played a bit with equations, and I obtained an interesting relation for my answer.” He then offered a lengthy demonstration of his calculations connecting the conservation of momentum to the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations and Einstein’s famous formulation of the relationship of energy to mass:43 The mathematical demonstration follows: In order to give a body a certain velocity, its kinetic energy, or energy of motion, must be increased to a suitable value. If we let E equal (kinetic energy) M equal mass of body at any instant V equal velocity of the body at that instant, then physics shows us that Differentiating

E = ½MV 2

1.

∂E = MV∂V 2. If the mass of the body remains constant, equation (1) would be strictly true over any range, using a constant of M. However, relativity has shown that the mass of a body is a function of the velocity in accordance with the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equation M = ___________ Mc M = ___________ – V 2/c 2 √c 2 – V 2 √1 If we now substitute in equation (2), we find that Mc ∂E = ___________ ∙ V∂V √c 2 – V 2 If we substitute in (2), we find

∂E = cMV∂Vc 2 – V 2

To find the total energy required to change the velocity of the body from zero to c (the velocity of light), we integrate between those limits, giving

= mc√c2 – V2 = –mc2

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where the negative sign indicates that the energy must be absorbed or put into the body. In other words, the energy required to raise the speed of any body from rest to the velocity of light is equal to its mass at rest multiplied by the square of the velocity of light! E = mc2 . . . Unless my equations are incorrect, or incorrectly based, it seems evident that for a body to be speeded up from rest, or near rest, to the velocity of light, its own mass, or an equivalent mass, must be annihilated and used as energy. Interesting, to say the least!44 The different modes of science fact complicated the assurance that facts offered for a democratic science. Latour’s distinction between science in action and science already made—between open and closed black boxes—does not address claims of accuracy or truth for either form of science, seeking instead to situate evaluation of such claims within broader social discourse and practice. Scientific theory and knowledge can achieve success, he observed, from assertion and reproduction of its claims as much as from its actual explanatory power. In this sense authority and acceptance as much as accuracy were relevant concerns in the evaluation and discussion of science. Observations achieved in specific local circumstances, a controlled laboratory environment, for instance, could be transformed into general and universal knowledge through a multiplication of contexts favorable to its acceptance.45 In the same way, despite his disclaimer that they could be “incorrect or incorrectly based,” Miller’s inclusion of equations, derivations, and calculations won tacit acceptance of his scientific ability from readers without sufficient background in mathematics and physics to question their imbedded knowledge and those who chose not to verify their details. Issues of authority and acceptance similarly lay at the heart of exchanges when readers provided reasoned but “wrong” scientific explanations. “The writer . . . is all agog about interplanetary transportation,” observed T. R. Bartlett of 3111 West Coulter Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, skeptically about an earlier reader letter to Amazing.46 “My own opinion of that ‘rocket car’ business,” he stated, “is that it is fundamentally unsound. A rocket depends for its motion on the very simple principle of action and reaction. When there is nothing tangible to react on, a rocket must stop,” he concluded, offering a view of extraterrestrial mechanics shared by other science

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fiction readers. “I picture a rocket outside of the earth’s atmosphere as a man trying to row with his oars beating the air,” he offered as an analogy for his reasoning. “Since the oar blades cannot obtain a hold, the boat cannot move.” Bartlett’s letter was printed in Amazing, but its editors corrected his errors in a response. “You entirely misunderstand the action of a rocket,” they wrote. “Action and reaction are equal and opposite. The action of a rocket is due to the rush of gas from the case or body; the reaction of the gas is against the body of the rocket which drives it on,” they explained, noting further that “there is no resemblance between the rowing of a boat and the motion of a rocket.”47 Nevertheless, Bartlett’s letter contributed to science fiction’s conversations. While it was inaccurate in its examples and explanations, it was still useful because it was correctable. This sense of science provided the democratic foundation for science fiction’s conversations. Debates about whether spaceships violated the LorentzFitzgerald equations or whether gigantism in animals was biologically, much less mathematically, possible were not simply efforts to prove individual readers’ abilities. Although they often disagreed substantively, science fiction readers also shared a common belief that they could and should distinguish what was possible from what was impossible in science. Science in this sense was a general authority independent of individual opinion and able to adjudicate the claims of readers, writers, and editors alike. Under its aegis readers could equally present their views to be considered, and whether they were right or wrong, each was entitled to a judgment under the authority of science. Such judgment was democratic not only with regard to the equal status of individual readers, but also because readers engaged in, and took comfort from the security of, its collective enterprise. Its principle and process were as important to science fiction as its outcome. “If my reasoning is faulty, if I am wrong in this,” declared Charles L. Campbell, Detachment Q.M.C., Presidio, San Francisco, following a lengthy discussion of the effects of radiation on evolution in John Taine’s “Seeds of Life,” “I should like it very much if someone would explain to me where I am wrong and what the truth really is.”48 Similarly, after giving his calculations about the energy required to travel at near-light speeds, Miller added, “My work may have a flaw in it, if so, I would like someone to point it out, for my own benefit, at least.”49 This general authority of science assuaged a tension between knowledge, ability, and progress. In a sense readers’ concerns about science’s accuracy were concerns about their own scientific aptitude and ability. “What Do You Know?” quizzes that asked “How can an actinic color effect be produced by

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infra-red rays?” and “What is a plausible reason for not leaving a space traversing sphere?” implied that readers possessed knowledge about infrared rays and space traversing and that they could explain them more fully if required. Moreover if, as their credo promised, modern science’s development produced continued innovation and, in turn, continued information, even the most enthusiastic efforts could not keep up with its progress. Science’s potential and progress promised, paradoxically, to overwhelm society with a wealth of information without a means to organize and manage it. The efforts and prodigious pulp output of science fiction writers and editors, ironically, added to this anxiety. The more they cribbed science content from external sources for their stories and features—­­in the name of science—the more they expanded the knowledge for which readers might feel responsible. In this context a universal authority to distinguish the possible and impossible, the accurate from the inaccurate, provided reassurance. Such concerns paralleled those regarding early twentieth-century science education. Recognizing the transformations that science had already wrought and arguing for their continuation, early twentieth-century progressives redefined scientific pedagogy as part of their general reform of public education. Particularly influenced by the ideas of John Dewey, these reformers installed changes in science curricula and instituted them systematically across school districts and through the publication of widely used textbooks. Established largely at the high school level over the course of the first decades of the century, these changes combined disparate fields of knowledge largely taught on the basis of instructors’ experience into scientific disciplines organized around and taught from unifying principles and methods. Botany, zoology, and physiology, for instance, the study of plants, animals, and the human body, respectively, were subsumed under biology, the study of life.50 Unifying these various disciplines in turn—including applied and technical fields—was a generalized concept of science, based in reasoning and a characteristic method for observation, reflection, and testing. Emphasizing science and its method was necessary for general education, these reformers argued, because most students would not become scientists. While students might not gain sufficient knowledge to have scientific expertise, they still required a sense and familiarity with science to contribute to modern society. “Since the mass of pupils are never going to become scientific specialists,” Dewey argued, “it is much more important that they should get some insight into what scientific method means than that they should copy at long range and second hand the results which scientific men have reached.”51 While in-

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tended to convey a useful understanding of science, however, these educational reforms also emphasized its general authority and social significance over individual ability and knowledge. Given high school graduation rates in the early twentieth century, in the 1920s and 1930s these reforms may have contributed more to the public discourse of science than they had actual effect in classrooms.52 This tension between authority, expertise, and democracy was evident even in the tactics science fiction editors used to promote a participatory science. Where they could, they sought writers with backgrounds in science to write their stories, not always succeeding. Some interwar science fiction writers were students of science. John W. Campbell, Jr., attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before transferring and completing his degree at Duke University. Others, such as Miles J. Breuer, M.D., and David H. Keller, M.D., were certified professional practitioners. Edward E. “Doc” Smith was, in fact, “Dr. Smith” with a Ph.D. in agricultural chemistry. A very few were distinguished within their respective scientific professions; for example, John Taine was the pseudonym for Eric Temple Bell, president of the Mathematical Association of America and author of Men of Mathematics.53 Others, however, had little or no scientific or technical background or expertise at all, such as some professional pulp writers whom editors used when they lacked new material. While prior experience and expertise helped writers satisfy readers who expected valid science in their fiction, editors still checked for unwarranted loose ends and sometimes intentionally left them in. Editors also appealed to outside expertise, explicitly celebrating their professional authority. Despite his enthusiasm for amateur science, Gernsback assembled a panel of scientists to serve as associate science editors for Science Wonder. “It has long been my feeling,” he explained to readers, “that having an authority in the various sciences . . . would be of the greatest aid in mapping the future course of science fiction.” These editors’ recognized stature, he argued, allowed them to advise “upon the scientific correctness of such stories.”54 Still, while science fiction readers respected the authority of such experts, it was not enough to satisfy their enthusiasm and aspiration. Indeed their combined interest and enthusiasm for science and science fiction epitomized the character of, and contradictory tensions within, interwar America’s popular culture of science. If the authority of science represented the limits of actual ability and knowledge, it also inspired science enthusiasts, including

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Table 2. Original Associate Science Editors for Science Wonder Stories Astronomy Professor Samuel G. Barton, University of Pennsylvania Professor Donald H. Menzel, Lick Observatory, University of California Dr. Clyde Fisher, Curator, The American Museum of Natural History Botany Professor Elmer G. Campbell, Transylvania College Professor Margaret Clay Ferguson, Wellesley College Professor C. E. Owens, Oregon Agricultural College Electricity Professor F. E. Austin, Dartmouth College Mathematics Professor C. Irwin Palmer, Dean of Students, Armour Institute of Technology Professor James Byrnie Shaw, University of Illinois Professor W. A. Titsworth, S.M., Alfred College Medicine Dr. David H. Keller, Western State Hospital Physics and Radio Dr. Lee de Forest, Ph.D., D.Sc. Physics Professor A. L. Fitch, University of Maine Zoology Dr. Joseph G. Yoshioka, Illinois State Institute for Juvenile Research Source: Editorial page, SWS 1, no. 3 (August 1929): 197.

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many science fiction readers, to gain as much knowledge as they could and to imagine its potential. Although some had backgrounds in science, many of them had limited education beyond elementary school and still less access to formal scientific training.55 Instead interwar science enthusiasts learned about science where and how they could: from popular magazines and newspapers, science journals, new public libraries, groups and organizations, and even occasionally from their own experiments. “I am only a young farmer, 28 years old,” wrote Clair Broadstreet of Wytopitlock, Maine, “and I haven’t the education to grasp some of the terms and expressions of science, but I do my darndest. I was helped along a whole lot by travel and experience, as well as by reading every scientific magazine I can get hold of.”56 The fluid and piecemeal character of the information they gleaned from these sources—which paralleled the borrowing practices of writers—fueled anxieties about science even as it piqued interest in it. The incompleteness of people’s knowledge was more apparent in the face of science’s universality, particularly because interest and effort did not always translate into aptitude. Within this context the science news that science fiction pulps carried and indeed the scientific place they claimed for fiction were not as fantastic as they might have seemed. Science fiction’s sense of wonder and amazement was not only an appreciation of science but also a sublime apprehension of these tensions within it. It is useful to remember, then, that fact carries specific significance not only to science but also to fiction. Writing about specifically science fiction, the scientist and cultural critic Donna Haraway observed that fact and fiction are related. “Facts are opposed to opinion, to prejudice,” she explained, “but not to fiction. Both fiction and fact are rooted in an epistemology that appeals to experience.” Fiction is “an active form, referring to a present act of fashioning,” while fact is “a descendant of a past participle, a word form which masks the generative deed or performance. A fact seems done, unchangeable, fit only to be recorded,” she said, while “fiction seems always inventive, open to other possibilities, other fashionings of life.”57 Haraway’s discussion of the relationship between fiction and fact paralleled Latour’s discussion of open and closed black-box science, but for different purposes. Both considered different modes of representation, but where Latour’s concern was to situate science and authority within social discourse, Haraway’s was to locate experience within the discourse of science fiction. How fact in its various modes enabled specific fictions informed the way science was understood and imagined, particularly in a popular culture in which few readers had formal scientific training. Unlike later types of science fiction and

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despite its own rhetoric, interwar science fiction allowed facts to enable fiction more than it explored how fiction might produce facts. Science fiction’s one arguably formal innovation to narrative acknowledged this sensibility. At various points within science fiction stories, their narratives, the events the stories relate, pause to allow scientists or heroes to explain, sometimes in great depth and detail, how particular scientific principles or technological devices worked. Other genres, particularly crime and detective stories, featured similar digressive moments when their lead detectives or agents explained how the crimes at the center of their stories had been committed. These revelations, however, represented the culmination of their stories’ plots and narrations. They revealed chronologies and details of events that their stories, up to that point, had purposely and perhaps deceptively kept ambiguous. Erle Stanley Gardner’s ace pulp attorney Perry Mason, for instance, cleared his clients by demonstrating ingenious alternative explanations to the more obvious but inaccurate conclusions of the police and authorities. In contrast, science fiction’s explanatory digressions were narratively awkward, not necessarily contributing to and at times even interrupting the course of their stories’ action. Nevertheless, they remained important and indeed innovative in the broader mimetic sense of narrative: reproducing experience.58 These moments recognized the interest and input of readers, many of whom specifically requested them. Those who chose to read and think through the explanations offered read themselves into their stories, while others skipped past them. Actively reviewing and reaffirming their knowledge, expertise, and ability, they fashioned individual experience into a larger, collective enterprise.59 Following the general discourse of the time, readers’ affirmations also merged technology into science’s greater wonder. If facts were conceptual forms of scientific knowledge, machines and devices were its material manifestations. In George Paul Bauer’s “Below the Infra Red,” Carl Winter, Ph.D., suspected that creatures and beings might inhabit different planes of existence beyond normal human perception, and he built an apparatus to attune human eyes and ears to perceive and, in a sense, visit such a plane below the infrared frequencies of light. Bauer’s premise, in other words, promised to see beyond frequencies that were already imperceptible.60 In Miles J. Breuer’s “The Driving Power,” Professor Grimm invented an “Integrator” that reorganized electron patterns known through “intra-atomic physics” to allow him to generate animate and inanimate objects from air.61 Winter’s apparatus, Grimm’s Integrator, and other science fiction contraptions were

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functional analogs to its facts. They were narrative entry points for readers’ extraliterary recognition and interpellation of their own experiences and circumstances. “I am much more interested in the description of a new machine or the expounding of a startling scientific theory,” said Joseph F. Dachowski of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, “rather than in a narrative of adventure.” Dachowski was not disavowing adventure but expressing his greater interest in a different kind of adventure, not through science fiction’s formal literary narratives but through the fictions its technology and science allowed him to imagine.62 Concepts, then, worked as characters, although not in a strict, conventional sense. The science fiction author and critic Samuel Delany noted perceptively that science fiction of the Gernsback era was, in a sense, closer to poetry than to narrative fiction because it held an evocative concern with what Delany called “thingness.”63 In its stories, scientific facts as well as technological devices were artifactual, concrete rather than abstract points of reference for readers who wanted nevertheless to entertain science’s fiction. “In the beginning, science appealed to me as a means of power, a way of working wonders, a sort of magic wand,” the science fiction reader and later writer Jack Williamson said. “I lived largely in imagination, fed in those days before radio and television on pretty slender materials,” he recalled about his childhood growing up on an isolated farm in New Mexico. “I was fascinated by the artifacts of technology that I knew.” He remembered the sight of “the enormous-seeming engine that drove the irrigation pump on the farm at Peco and the railway trains I some­times glimpsed and the first automobiles I saw.”64 At the same time these formulaic evocations also stretched credulity, perhaps too far, in the opinion of some. “The extrapolations of most science fiction writers rocket starward from pads much too narrow and rickety,” commented Harry Bates, the original editor of Astounding Stories. “If the writers were solidly grounded in the sciences, and if they were aware of the intermeshings of the sciences, and if each had a stiff conscience,” he maintained, “there’d be very little science fiction written. Literally, most writers would not be able to finish a story, from guilty awareness of the piling up of related things that were scientifically incompatible. However, it happens that each member of the species has a permissive conscience, which allows the id it should be shushing to march about yelling: ‘Extrapolate si!—relate no!’ ”65 Bates, however, misunderstood writers’—some, such as Williamson, who were first readers—understanding of readers’ relation of fact to fiction. The factual character of science resolved its tension between authority and

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knowledge by separating the two. Interwar science fiction’s participatory culture depended implicitly on the authority of a universal, generic science. Its authority authorized readers as well as editors and writers to imagine and aspire to abilities and knowledge they might not actually possess. Science fiction stories and conversations accepted scientific claims as much as they debated them, keeping many of their “black box” assertions closed. Even when readers criticized writers’ or each other’s use of facts, those criticisms were corrections and clarification of accepted knowledge, not challenges to their larger paradigms or conceptual frameworks. If they challenged experts, they did not necessarily challenge expertise. Science’s authority remained above their social engagement. At the same time this focus on science’s knowledge elided its practice. The range of certifiably correct concepts in interwar science fiction conversations—radioactivity, X-rays, evolution, spacetime, robots, genetics, rocketry—testified to their observance of ongoing scientific and technical development. A focus on facts and things, however, removed the broader course of science’s development outside the range of issues that readers generally expressed or explored. They avoided what the sociologist Andrew Pickering called the “mangle” of practice: the intertwined complex of uncertain circumstances and social interactions that determine the results of science.66 Inserting their own experience and asserting their expertise into science fiction’s social community, they did not necessarily develop experience or expertise outside it. Left in the space of this separation were its changing social circumstances. Although Gernsback’s original concern and inspiration for science fiction’s democratic ethos was the social condition for the production of innovation and knowledge, the stories and articles he published rarely touched on the subject. The brightness of science’s modern wonder removed attention from the increasing social organization that produced it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries General Electric, Bell, Du Pont, Kodak, and other corporations had realized the benefit of consolidating and directing research in laboratories to develop and refine technological products. Initially allowing federalism and the free market to decide issues of common concern such as technological standards, in the twentieth century, particularly after World War I, the federal government, through the newly created National Research Council and other agencies, increasingly advanced scientific research in the national interest. These corporate and government interests combined with the increasing precision and detail of research to transform scientific and technological practice slowly, promoting systematic, coordinated agen-

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das that required larger, more elaborate machinery, space, funding, and resources.67 Where the apparatus that Ernest Rutherford used to “split the atom” in 1919 could be held in his hands and made by a single skilled technician from materials costing a few pounds, E. O. Lawrence’s mid-1930s Berkeley cyclotron weighed eighty-five tons, occupied an entire room, required several people to operate, and cost ten thousand dollars; its expansion cost ten times that, and a later model cost in the millions of dollars.68 Professional scientific, medical, and technical associations established in the late nineteenth century—the American Medical Association (1847), the American Chemical Society (1876), the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (1884), and the American Physical Society (APS, 1899)—amassed greater power and authority arguing that credentials marked expertise and ability and campaigning to discredit the “hunt-and-try” methods of less formally trained practitioners. By 1920 a quarter of the APS’s members worked in industrial research, and over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, 40 percent of its members worked for GE and AT&T. In the midst of this transformation, interwar science was a shifting but settling mixture of enthusiasm, organization, and method. While individual amateurs continued to pursue research and invention with occasional success, their work and interest occurred more and more on the peripheries of normal practice.69 Gernsback’s belief that communication and discussion were democratic antidotes for these developments underestimated their emerging significance and overestimated readers’ own mediated circumstances. Establishing networks for conversations did not grant participants actual experience with their subjects. Many, if not most, of his radio readers were also radio operators, so their discussions led more directly to changes to their medium: where to get parts and materials to find and tune frequencies, increase the range and strength of their output, and clarify their signals; and what to talk about and when. Few, if any, science fiction readers had a similar relationship to and effect on the conditions of science, itself a more diverse and amorphous subject to define. While agreeing science enthusiasts embraced Gernsback’s call to convene and his democratic aims, their information was piecemeal and culled from available sources. Their intent was first to improve their own situations, awareness, and knowledge before they might improve science. Science education’s emphasis to teach method and authority and Gernsback’s own strategy of emphasizing science fact and content as an introduction to the wonders of science shifted the dynamics of science fiction’s discussions away from his original purpose. In this sense interwar science fiction was

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itself a particular fiction of science. It did not entertain the making or fashioning of science as much as it evoked a science that was factually open and still already made, already fashioned. The freedom of facts allowed readers to discover their own fictions of science. Reactions to Dr. Edward Elmer Smith’s popular “Skylark” series illustrated the extent of this practice. Smith’s original story, “The Skylark of Space,” was published in Amazing in three installments from August to October 1928. Its quick popularity inspired equally popular sequels. “Skylark Three” was published in Amazing in three installments beginning in August 1930, and “The Skylark of Valeron” was published in Astounding Stories and required seven installments beginning in August 1934.70 The “Skylark” stories were among the most popular of all interwar science fiction, and all three serials were reprinted in later science fiction magazines and published as stand-alone volumes. Epic tales of romance, adventure, and battle that centered around the struggle between its two main protagonists, Dr. Richard Seaton and the villainous Dr. Marc “Blackie” DuQuesne, Smith’s stories expanded the scope of interwar science fiction’s imagined domain. While most stories from the period considered the possibilities of interplanetary travel, Seaton’s spaceship, the Skylark, traveled through interstellar space to intergalactic realms and even farther beyond. The subtitle for “Skylark Three,” “the tale of the galactic cruise which ushered in universal civilization,” gave a sense of its expansive and grander stage. The scope and scale of Smith’s adventures, which included the later, more popular “Lensmen” series as well as the “Skylark” stories, earned them their own subgenre classification.71 They were not only science fiction; they were also “space opera.”72 Their popularity aside, Smith’s stories still had to meet the standards of the time. Interwar science fiction readers interjected scientific interest even to stories where science was not paramount to their themes and styles. Perhaps recognizing those interests, Smith provided a detailed discussion in his original story about the “intra-atomic energy” within copper that powered the Skylark. Nonetheless attempts at more contemporary or realistic extrapolations of science were not distinctive features of his narratives. Their operatic sensibilities came from their adventure, the immense scale of their universe, and their moral and ethical consideration, drawing on their scope and perspective, of universal value. In the broader context of achieving universal civilization throughout the galaxy, full knowledge of the details of Einstein’s special theory of relativity might have seemed relatively unimpor­ tant. Readers, however, criticized Smith’s stories for their improper science

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or lack of scientific consideration in purely imagined devices, however small, but not for their grandiose social extrapolations. The combination of fact and fiction in interwar science fiction revealed and resolved its conflicts and complications. The relationship between the two allowed readers to negotiate and resolve those tensions, at least temporarily. Readers’ attention to facts was the other side of their requirement for relaxation. It not only demonstrated their scientific abilities but also separated their acceptance of the unproblematic scientific nature of facts from their desires, nevertheless, to speculate, imagine, and find inspiration within them. The two were part and parcel of the same thing. Having provided an extensive discourse on the implications of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations for interstellar travel to argue that “Dr. Smith plays havoc with the newer mathematical physics” in his “Skylark” stories, P. Schuyler Miller reversed the point of his criticisms. “We cannot check him by experience,” he said, “and we cannot understand the work of Einstein and the rest well enough, as yet, to intelligently combat him with fundamentals.” More to the point, flaws in the science did not detract from the story’s other, positive qualities. “I agree with Mr. Tarkins that Triton would probably have been crushed (the ray-projectors would certainly have been),” Miller said, “but that doesn’t spoil the story.” That and other accumulated errors did “not alter the fact that ‘Skylark Three’ was at least as good, and possibly a bit better than ‘The Skylark of Space,’” he stated. “There are no kicks coming from me on that score!”73 For Miller, there was no apparent contradiction between blasting Smith’s science and enjoying his story. Although it still formed the basis for science fiction’s appeal, the connection between science and story—between fact and fiction—had been separated by his desires for each, taken independently to their extremes. The pages of interwar science fiction pulps testified to this resolution. The page where Miller’s letter appeared, for instance, was not unusual in its contents. His letter, replete with equations of kinetic and potential energy, their mathematical differentials, Einstein’s famous equation of mass to energy, and other derivations, was the first in that month’s “Discussions” column, occupying the bottom third of the page and continuing on to a subsequent page. Above it was the column’s nameplate; the figure of a reader, a quill pen, and an inkwell on the left-hand side; a pile of letters on the right; the underlined word “Discussions” between; and an elaborate box surrounding the whole, ornamented with both “brickbats” and “bouquets” representing the currency

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of the columns’ critical exchange. Above the nameplate and extending to the top of the page was the conclusion of A. H. Johnson’s “The Superman.” The last lines of the story abutted the top of the nameplate: “Hail to the Emperor of America! No longer Prince James of the Kingdom of the South, but Emperor of America from the frozen Arctic to the blue Caribbean!” they shouted. “Long life to our Emperor and Empress. The End.”74 The page figuratively and literally represented science fiction’s complicated landscape. In the same place detailed scientific explanations and conversations representing a democratic science existed in juxtaposition with imagined acclamations and hails to a future emperor of America, separated only by the mediating presence of the magazine’s editorial and rhetorical strategy. The page was an odd combination of peculiar contrasts. Although its themes were large and grand—democracy and empire, science and adventure, logic and imagination—its setting still appeared inviting, appealing to ordinary readers and conveying a particular backyard atmosphere to pulp science fiction’s fiction of science. Its appearance was the intention of its overall graphic presentation: here science, fact, and fiction could be combined without contradiction. Still, if the form of interwar science fiction’s science resolved its internal tensions by separating authority and knowledge, it allowed broader social issues and values into the space between them. These concerns found expression in other figures, heroes, heroines, scientists, and villains that, in turn, shaped science fiction and reshaped its science and fiction.

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

In a second honorable-mention winning entry for a 1929 Science Wonder essay contest, Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., addressed the question “What Science Fiction Means to Me.” Not yet the well-known writer and originator of intergalactic space operas, Smith repeated the sentiment other readers expressed about science fiction’s connection of science and fiction. “Since no mind can be driven at top speed continually and still function ef­ficiently,” he wrote, “it follows that the scientific mind, above all others, requires relaxation. He needs reading that does not necessitate a great deal of concentration and yet ma­terial sufficiently deep to hold his interest. To this seeming paradox there is only one answer—science fiction.” Smith elaborated the broader social character such an engaged and relaxed mind held. “In general,” he said, “he is married, perchance has a family grown. He has been married to one woman for years,” and “he knows real marital love, deepening and becoming richer with every passing year.” Marriage’s stability and emotional growth also engendered sound moral and social values. “He is intrinsically decent,” Smith explained, “and knows that the vast majority of his fellow-men are likewise decent.”1 Marriage and family, marked by the presence of women, connected the two sentiments of Smith’s essay. Domestic stability not only established the character of a scientific mind; it also provided reassurance that was central to science fiction’s relaxation. If the freedom of facts allowed readers to demonstrate their scientific aptitude, the stories they read demanded the same of their characters. On its face, however, interwar science fiction was hardly relaxing for either readers or characters. If extrapolated science was the

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possible means to its adventure, this also drove its drama. The wonders of the one transported protagonists to other worlds where the apprehension of the other involved them in constant contest. Amazing devices and astounding theories were met and matched by awesome knowledge, strange devices, and unfamiliar nature. Triumph within this necessary tension demonstrated characters’ ability, reassured science’s potent adventure, and allowed readers relaxation. Male characters affirmed their heroic virtue, which women, heroines, reinforced. Where victory over alien science and environment could not be won, female characters also provided alternative resolutions to science fiction’s tension. Their rescue and reunion redeemed men’s heroic efforts and confirmed, indirectly, their virtue. While some readers argued that they were unnecessary and superfluous, female characters marked a broader domestic sensibility within science fiction. Its gendered dynamic connected masculine ideals to feminine concerns; affirmation of the one required the presence of the other. “Sex differentiation must be upheld by whatever means are available,” observed Deborah Cameron, “for men can be men only if women are unambiguously women.”2 Romance’s figurative redemption assuaged, if it could not actually resolve, the representative anxieties within science fiction’s adventures. The same dynamic reassured science’s modern complication and concomitant implication for individualism. Progress’s redefinition of ability recalled historical transformations of work and home in science fiction and interwar society. While it required individual mental and physical prowess, it also indirectly reminded people of the system of their lives and livelihood, the interconnection and reliance of people on one another and within networks for power, transportation, communication, and commerce. In industry’s original revolution, science and technology had expanded these networks, spurred manufacturing and wage labor, and reconfigured public sensibilities and convenience. Their modern incarnations, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, promised similarly that convenience would return to the home’s personal privacy. Women’s familiar difference was, in this sense, also familial presence, working doubly to relieve modern turns within science fiction’s expressive tension. The domestic stability they represented reaffirmed men’s anxious individual ability: to prove one’s self and to provide for others. Similarly, figuratively, women integrated the networked extent of modern technologies into a singular, personal sensibility that mirrored marriage’s merging of extended families into one. Dismissing women’s place in science fiction also removed

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the troublesome issue they incorporated from the genre’s celebration of science and progress. These interrelated dynamics—within which women were the most visible but not sole figures—allowed both men and technology to be unproblematically individual. Indeed and ironically, these gender dynamics were so familiarly present, they worked without the presence of actual women and when the issues they addressed did not involve women. Heroes proving themselves also implicitly proved themselves worthy to provide. Romance relieved concerns that were not explicitly gendered: state and corporate expansion; and the mechanization of work and entertainment. The dynamics of domesticity engendered, explicitly and implicitly, the tranquillity of science and society. If the combination of science and fiction supplied science fiction’s distinctive appeal, it was also the source of its tensions. Within its inclusive ethos, the science fiction community held several reading communities with different styles and preferences.3 While some readers read science fiction for the science it allowed them to imagine and discuss, other readers read science fiction for the adventure it promised. These readers understood their imagined universes as places to explore, not to explain or to have explained to them in apprehensive detail. “The subtitle of Amazing Stories is ‘Scientific Fiction,’” exclaimed George K. Addison of 94 Brandt Place, Bronx, New York, comparing it to a rival science fiction magazine. “That’s an egregious misnomer. Your stories are little more than scientific treatises in narrative form,” he complained. “They lack action, adventure, romance. Gripping suspense and human interest are utterly foreign to them. With few exceptions they are tedious, insipid, lifeless.” Carmen McCable of San Francisco asked, “What do I care how some one is going to go to the moon now or when the sun falls? What I’m interested in and crave to occupy my interest is what adventure he goes through after he gets there. Almost every device there could be upon a spaceship,” she said, “has been described and re-described until the reader knows every thing by heart.”4 These readers wanted adventures that science fiction’s imagined potential provided. They followed the exploits of its heroes and heroines as they traveled to other worlds, times, and dimensions and encountered and occasionally battled the creatures they found there. “The stories that appeal most to my imagination,” said Leo Teixeira of Montreal, Canada, “are those that involve encounters with terrifying monsters of the air, land, and ocean inhabiting inter-planetary systems.” Amazing Stories “is infernal and damnable,” complained Bradford Butler, counselor at law, New York City. “Once a month,”

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he explained, “it turns an otherwise amiable and attractive household into an inferno of selfishness—son against father, daughter against mother, and each against the field.” The root of their domestic conflict was “each seeking to pre-empt the copy of the magazine to learn how Gerald got out of the mountains of Mars or how Octavius saved the fair Olivia from the machinations of the super-heterodyne monster of the Moon.” In their search for adventure, these readers subsumed concerns about science to concerns about nature, shifting from considering how nature worked to what it enabled. “I have read many interplanetary travel stories and enjoy them,” wrote Marie La France, 335 Fourteenth Street, Portland, Oregon. “That authors now inject science but makes them the more plausible and interesting. I am the last to pick flaws in their methods,” she explained, commenting on other readers’ proclivities to find errors in science fiction. “Let the author [of the letter] write his own story. We read fiction because it entertains or interests us. If we do not like a story, we need not read it.” T. J. D. of Cleveland, Ohio, echoed her sentiments. “If we can’t go to Mars or Saturn by plane just yet,” he said, “we can at least go in imagination and we mustn’t blame our author for a few occasional apparent inconsistencies or tricks.”5 Science fiction covers marked the presence of both types of excitement and thrill. For example, the December 1931 and March 1933 covers of Wonder Stories both depicted scenes from stories featuring robots and presented, in visual terms, the terrific logic of their wonder. Each illustration portrayed prominently a complicated machine. The one had a pneumatic tire; mechanical arms, one wielding a ray gun; and a round, one-eyed head attached to a riveted body marked with letters, numbers, and symbols. The other walked on jointed, mechanical legs and had a smooth, beetle-like body from which several tentacle arms extended. Their respective detail promised discussion and elaboration of their component and combined function. At the same time, both robots held young women in their clutches while also warding off would-be, and presumably male, rescuers with ray gun and ancillary tentacles respectively. Their threat divided heroes from heroines and provided the tension for one’s adventure and the other’s romance. Together the relationships of robot, hero, and heroine spoke to science fiction’s various appeals. Despite their prevalence and prominence, however, females and romance were seen as problematic to science fiction and sparked sharp debate. In 1930 when Science Wonder Stories dropped “Science” from its title for the shorter and simpler Wonder Stories, readers’ responses were swift, heated, and divided. Those readers interested in science fiction’s science were ap-

Figure 4. December 1931 and March 1933 covers of Wonder Stories. By permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate.

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palled. “Your aim, I take it, is to make the title more ‘catchy,’” wrote Lloyd E. Foltz of Indianapolis, Indiana, “to that class of magazine addicts who are already reading, ‘Sappy Stories,’ ‘Slushy Romances,’ and so on, ad nauseam.” He argued that the changes betrayed science fiction’s premise. “I believe this is a mistake,” he said. “It will attract a type of reader to whom S. A. means sex appeal and not scientific adventure.” Other readers disagreed. “Now for the burden that some of the readers seem to carry—romance,” wrote Darrel Richards, 8620 Hamilton Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. “Why shouldn’t ‘females’ . . . be included in the science fiction stories?” he asked. “Remember, ‘Love makes the world go around.’”6 Since interwar science fiction pulps continued to carry stories satisfying both reading communities—sometimes in the same story—the debate had no resolution. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s readers revisited the issue. The “love-interest is altogether incongruous in Science-Fiction,” declared Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan of 11 Frankfield Terrace, Summerhill South, Cork, in the Irish Free State in 1933. “The idiotic female proceeds to fall into grave danger with tiresome regularity,” he explained, “no matter what the plot is. It is . . . evident to the lowest form of intellect exactly what is going to happen. The hero, with tensed jaw, goes to the aid of the fair girl, nearly, but not quite, gets killed, and gets away with everything, including the heroine.” A young Isaac Asimov wrote to Astounding in 1938, “When we want science-fiction, we don’t want swooning dames, and that goes double. Come on, men, make yourself heard in favor of less love mixed with our science!”7 Making women the focus of debate created a dynamic within which female science fiction readers felt compelled to speak and act. While some women felt that female characters and romance detracted from the science in science fiction—and some men argued otherwise—they nevertheless believed they, and women generally, had a place in science and science fiction. Readers who signed their letters with their full, and identifiably female, names often also stated that they were women or, in the case of younger readers, girls. “I am a Senior in a small high school in an adjoining town,” wrote Gloria Rosselli of Hickory Street, Seaford, New York. “Because I am only seventeen (and a girl at that!),” she said, “maybe I’m not supposed to enjoy the highly educational and scientific stories which you publish . . . but I do.” Women and girls also claimed their presence and interest in science and science fiction’s connection to it. “This is another letter from a mere girl,” wrote Barbara Baldwin of 566 College Avenue, S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I am seventeen years old and have been reading Amazing Stories for about a year.

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What we want is more interplanetarian stories and less detective stories,” she said, explaining her science fiction preferences and asserting their broader gendered appeal. “I think that most of the other girls will agree with me in that respect.” She also argued that girls, like boys, could be inspired to science through science fiction: “It might interest you to know that I have bought a three-inch telescope since I first became interested in astronomy through Amazing Stories.”8 Female readers’ letters to science fiction’s “backyard” community challenged assumptions about the nature of science and science fiction and their respective publics. In a sense they encountered an analog to what Elaine Showalter called the “feminist crash of the twenties.” Having secured passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the right to vote, she explained, feminists in the 1920s gained equality in principle but not in practice and had to reconcile the difference in their experience and expectations.9 Female readers announced their gender to signal their presence and counter perceptions about women’s place, or lack thereof, in science and fiction. Indeed, although women may have been a minority of science fiction readers, women who studied science were not as uncommon as interwar readers believed. While a large majority of youths in the 1920s and 1930s, men and women, did not attend high school or college, middle- and upper-class women were a sizable percentage of those who did, and many of them studied science.10 Women composed a higher percentage of graduates with science degrees in the 1920s and 1930s than from the 1940s to the 1960s—a historical result of more men, proportionately and from middle-class and working-class backgrounds, entering high school and college after World War II. Nevertheless female science fiction readers recognized the general perception that science was a male preserve and pursuit. “In the 1930s, science fiction was almost entirely masculine,” Asimov recalled later, repeating that perception. “The readership was almost entirely masculine, after all, and so were the writers.”11 More vocal enthusiasts proclaimed their gender and interests hoping that other women and girls would find common cause with them. At the same time more privately inclined women may have declined to acknowledge their gender publicly. Many discussion column readers believed that women, authors as well as letter writers, signed their writings with initials rather than full names to maintain relative anonymity and avoid the associations accompanying explicit identification as women.12 Women’s requests for direct correspondence with other women also argued for the possibility, if not necessity, of separate exchange and activity within science

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fiction, a private communication and community perhaps not possible in its larger public.13 Women’s presumed difference, however, was a symptom of broader associations and relationships within science fiction. Romance did not detract from adventure, nor were the two antithetical. They were, in fact, linked within a larger dynamic that spoke to science, science fiction, and their social concerns. Within interwar science fiction, female characters did represent romance, not sex, at least within its stories—suggestive and at times lurid depictions of women on pulp covers and in illustrations inspired their reputation for pandering sex appeal.14 Women, however, not only marked romance—specifically heterosexual romance; they also implied the presence of men within it, the subjects for whom they were objects of desire. Similarly, as women were the visible and criticized partners of romantic pairs, romance itself was the visible and also criticized partner to adventure whose value was assumed. While readers questioned romance’s relevance to science’s fiction, they never questioned that science’s capacity for adventure. The one, nonetheless, involved and added to the other. When Darrel Richards advised readers, “Remember, ‘Love makes the world go around,’” he added that it “also gives a rosy atmosphere to an otherwise cold, machine-like scientific story.” Wryly capturing science fiction’s fragile and fraught interplay of gender and adventure, C. L. Moore said, “I should think that any middle-class girl, reared as I was in middle America, would have been enormously grateful for the opportunity to go to Mars. I certainly was.”15 The motto of Science Wonder Stories proclaimed, “Prophetic fiction is the mother of scientific fact.” Both adventure and romance worked through readers’ identification with characters in their stories. Characters not only drove stories’ narrative flow and provided their resolution but also involved readers in that flow and resolution, offering them a part in the exploration of science fiction’s imagined worlds. “Amazing Stories prints those stories that hold the reader’s interest, helping spare hours to fly and be enjoyed by all,” Le Roy Christian Bashore exclaimed about his favorite magazine. Its specific appeal was that he and other readers could “actually live the thrills and lives of each new character from the pens of your wonderful staff of writers.” J. Stirling, Caixa Postal 282, Pernambuco, Brazil, wrote, “Amazing Stories ‘gets’ me, and when once I commence a story, I seem to live in it along with the characters.” Despite the sparse characterization of women in science fiction, female readers identified with them, living their characters’ adventures vicariously and even giving them additional ones outside stories. As a young reader Jane Raymer

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idealized Wilma Deering, not Buck Rogers, Deering’s love interest and the ostensible protagonist of their adventures. “My mother made me a Wilma Deering costume,” she recalled, “for which I added a flying belt composed of one wooden coat hanger and two Dr. Lyons tooth powder cans. We lived in an old folks neighborhood,” she said, explaining the context for her live adventures. “They objected to my roller skating because I might scratch the sidewalks. I have since wondered just what they thought of a kid running down a hill in such an outlandish costume.”16 In this context characterization, not character development, was the issue. Like most pulp fiction characters, science fiction characters were not the subjects of individual consideration and development in modernist novels. Instead they were archetypes, expressions of particular values with which readers might sympathize and, publishers and editors hoped, identify. Ostensible protagonists, science fiction heroes were often men from nonscientific walks of life. They ranged widely in occupation from the hardboiled detective Taine in David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” to Hawkins, the aviator of P. Schuyler Miller’s “Tetrahedra of Space,” to the newsman Ned of Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat’s “In 20,000 a.d.!” and “Back to 20,000 a.d.”17 Regardless of occupation and background, each embodied specific masculine virtues. Echoing Edward Smith’s ideal “scientific mind,” he believed in love and family, altruism, and the decency of the average man; he was educated, well read, and intelligent; he was properly cultured, but he did not need to be. Most importantly, as a modern individualist, he was readily adaptable to any new situation. Stephen in Jack Williamson’s “The Moon Era” was a prototypical science fiction hero. An “instructor of history in a small high school in Texas,” he had played college football and upon graduation returned to coach the team at his appropriately named high school, Midland. Young, athletic, and downto-earth practical, Stephen did not actively pursue science. Nevertheless he was an informed and knowledgeable amateur. When his uncle explained the technical details of the moon ship he had invented, Stephen comprehended them without prior training. Upon entering the moon’s alien environment, he was able to assess the situation, confront its difficulties, and control his own destiny. On the moon Stephen acclimated himself to its changes in gravitation and atmosphere, battled purple balloon creatures and crimson spheroid rock-tunnelers, and defeated members of an advanced civilization, the Eternal Ones.18 For every hero, a heroine usually followed. Women characters in science

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fiction were often equally involved in stories’ action and adventures as heroes. When he first emerged from a five-hundred-year radioactive-gas-induced sleep in “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” Tony Rogers—later nicknamed “Buck” in the story’s comic strip adaptation—witnessed Wilma Deering, the love of his new life, blasting a pack of pursuers with her ray gun. Heroines similarly embodied the virtues courage, loyalty, and devotion, but their virtues served to reflect and reveal those of heroes and to inspire their love. When Winfield Fowler in Jack Williamson’s “The Alien Intelligence” saw the maid Melvar of Astran, he realized his love. “I was struck—and I will admit it, conquered— by her face,” he confessed.19 Similarly in R. F. Starzl’s “The Man Who Changed the Future,” a glimpse of Myra through an astral projection into the future inspired the story’s hero, Paul, to love and action. Recognizing the depth of his feeling and the urgency of her need against the menacing gangster Angelo, he willed his body forward into the future to save Myra and win her love.20 Complicating the duo of hero and heroine, and capturing some of the differences that readers expressed about science fiction, was the figure of the scientist. If science fiction facts were science idealized and its machines science objectified, its scientists, echoing popular American opinion, were science personified. The scientist’s personality, which had several facets, expressed its various appeals. His—exclusively male—first principle was the pursuit of knowledge and, with regard to readers’ concerns, its explication. Such devotion stood apprehensively outside, and sometimes at the expense, of other values. “It is not a reason that you could understand, I think,” Doctor Alascia, the Central American geneticist in Edmond Hamilton’s “Master of the Genes,” said to the Americans Thorn and Jerry explaining why he continued to experiment on humans while knowing that his research created monstrous births. “I am doing it simply to increase knowledge of the human genes,” he declared, “my own knowledge, and the knowledge of all science.”21 Also definitively male, the scientist often was a loner. He did not lack social grace or manner, but his genius and his quest for knowledge distanced him from the rest of mankind. The scientist’s redemption was the assurance that his endeavors would benefit humanity. Popular belief in the positive value of science allowed people to understand the scientist’s actions, if not the scientist. At times the scientist willingly sacrificed himself for the sake of this knowledge. A scene from Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” captured this ideal of the noble scientist as it also explored the limits of scientific research. In an exchange between the biologist Pollard, Dutton, and the unnamed first-person narra-

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tor, Pollard proposed using the device he invented to accelerate evolution’s effects on himself. “I propose to try it on myself,” he said gravely, “and to find out for myself the evolutionary changes that await humankind.” Dutton and the protagonist insisted that he was mad, but Pollard remained resolute. “You are trying to tell me that I have become a little mad,” he acknowledged. “No, I am sane—perhaps wonderfully sane, in trying this. . . . If we could use this method of mine to take all mankind forward through millions of years of evolutionary development at one stride, wouldn’t it be sane to do so?” he asked, proposing that advancing knowledge is its own greater form of sanity. “To accelerate the evolution of the human race?” protested the protagonist, asking about the limits of science. “It seems somehow a thing forbidden.” Pollard replied, “It’s a glorious thing if it can be done, and I know that it can be done.”22 The three figures of scientist, heroine, and hero formed a resonant base for interwar science fiction’s various concerns while triangulating their tensions. Occasionally one character played the role of scientist and protagonist. In Francis Flagg’s “An Adventure in Time,” Bayers was both a “blond viking of a man” and a professor of physics at Berkeley. Science fiction’s infrequent archaeologists and anthropologists were similarly both scientific and heroic.23 For the most part, however, scientist and hero were different characters, separating the sources of a story’s scientific authority and knowledge and its adventure and virtue. The hero stood between the scientist and the heroine, drawn in different directions by their respective attractions. The one represented science’s wonder and potential, its promising future beckoning to the hero against the familiar tradition of the other’s romantic love. The front illustration for Kennie McDowd’s “The Marble Virgin” epitomized these relationships. The scientist and the hero—in this example an artist— stand in the foreground. The scientist concentrates on his mechanical and electrical creation, adjusting its settings, while the artist focuses his attention on science’s physical creation, the artificial woman Naomi. She stands upon a pedestal in the middle, dressed as a Greek goddess in the chamber where she has just been created. The hero looks backward to his love, while the scientist looks forward to his.24 Interwar science fiction’s imagined worlds offered a creative counterpoint to this triad of characters. Removal from the present to the future; to another planet, moon, or world; or to other dimensions and realities allowed science fiction readers to consider places where conditions and rules fundamentally changed. In this sense these new worlds were also new natures, governed by

Figure 5. Front illustration from Kennie McDowd’s “The Marble Virgin.” By permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate.

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new and imagined science. Stories’ adventure and narrative tension stemmed from the contest between their characters and these contexts. Confronting creatures and circumstances that demonstrated their environment, heroes, heroines, and the occasional scientist revealed the distinctive nature of these brave new worlds and addressed the concerns they represented. In the Flash Gordon comic strip created in the 1930s, Yale All-American Flash Gordon and fellow passenger Dale Arden survived a plane crash in a tumultuous storm to stumble upon Dr. Hans Zarkov. A scientist, Zarkov informed them that a mysterious approaching planet caused both the storm and their crash, and he then forced the two to accompany him on a rocket to the planet to fight its dangers directly. Once there the trio discovered a complex world of kingdoms vying with each other and against the ruler of their loosely united empire for power. Like science fiction’s imagined worlds generally, these kingdoms were variations on the common theme of science’s potential, while their number, in the strip’s serial continuity, approached the limit of its infinite possibility. Collectively and individually Flash, Dale, and Dr. Zarkov’s usual response to their representative politics, common to many interwar science fiction stories, was not diplomacy but direct contest with and victory over hostile characters and conditions. In the first months alone, of many years of serial adventure, they fought red monkey men, wolvron-taming brown dwarves, and flying hawk men as well as the perils of ice caverns and overgrown jungles. Quite a few science fiction stories, however, presented such vivid and potent circumstances that their adventures involved survival and escape, not victory. Resolving adventure’s anxieties, in these cases, required romance’s reassuring balance. Much derided, female characters were seen, mistakenly, as the source of these anxieties. “Of course, there were women in the stories,” Isaac Asimov recalled of his days as a science fiction reader. “But they were there only to be caught and then rescued, only to be fought over by hero and villain,” he explained, echoing the sentiments of other readers. “They had no life of their own and left no impression.”25 His perspective, however, misunderstood female characters. Certainly most were not fully and vigorously characterized, but neither were most male characters. To notice the one and not the other was the incongruous result of equating different figures, hero and heroine, with different narrative roles. As Asimov recognized, women’s capture and rescue, sometimes repeatedly, initiated adventure, revealing heretofore unknown dangers of science fiction’s new worlds. More significantly women allowed heroes to distinguish themselves and their virtues. Women’s rescues and their reunions with heroes were particularly important where

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straightforward victories or conquests were unavailable. If they could not overcome the potent dangers they faced, science fiction heroes’ ability to save those they loved and for whom they strove and fought still demonstrated their virtue. Although he defeated most of the foes he faced, Flash and Dale also met situations they could not defeat and from which they barely escaped. Their reunion, nevertheless, reassured their adventure, allowing both its thrilling excitement and an indirect but still triumphant resolution of its concerns.26 The two modes of resolution, adventure and romance, were not mutually exclusive; many interwar science fiction stories drew upon both. Romance, however, allowed science fiction’s adventures and its scientific and social implications to be enjoyed unproblematically. While interwar science fiction stories gained a reputation for celebrating science, they involved more than simply presenting science optimistically. Extrapolated science drove their adventures on two levels, entry and environment, with opposing sentiments. Typically a scientific theory or technological device, introduced by a scientist if the story had one, provided an entry to the story’s imagined worlds. While these transporters were amazing and wondrous, the places they took adventurers to, in most instances, were not. Instead, whether to heighten the excitement of science fiction’s considered nature or to comment on science’s negative potential, stories’ imagined environments often expressed concerns about science’s extrapolated consequences. Heroism’s direct victory, romantic reunion’s indirect triumph, or both resolved those concerns figuratively and redeemed and preserved science’s potential. If their resolute efforts were not actually rewarded, their figurative resolution exchanged an explored possibility for the opportunity to imagine another. Rendered historically inconsequential and neutral, science was also made morally neutral. Its factual content could be—and was—explained and evaluated enthusiastically without regard to consequences or conclusions, optimistic or pessimistic. Rocket ships and ray guns thrilled knowledge-seeking scientists and romance-averse readers when their representative concerns were assuaged. Romance, as much as adventure, allowed interwar science fiction’s peculiar celebration of science. At the same time romance’s reassurance of adventure was also the source of its controversy and that of female characters. Their presence remarked the anxieties they resolved. While female characters bore the double burden of enabling and reassuring those tensions, romance required that they be different from male characters, that they be heroines and not heroes. If their heroes’ virtues included rugged individualism and scientific aptitude, to equate rather than subsume female heroines to male heroes threatened not only to expose

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male presumption of heroism but also to question its virtues. Similarly, scientific minds that required relaxation, to use Edward Smith’s term, required not only women but women who represented home and household and unambiguously so. Heroic rescue in science fiction in this sense gained additional significance. A woman’s rescue represented not merely her safe reunion with the hero but in many cases the return of both, from and after science’s transported adventures, to the safety and familiarity of home. Most science fiction stories concluded with both reunion and return, but the heroine’s representative domesticity was particularly important when she and the hero did not actually arrive home. For serial features in which another adventure arose before or as the current one was resolved, rescue and reunion suggested the possibility of a return home even if it was never realized. After leaving Earth in an attempt to save it, Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Zarkov never returned. As their adventures unfolded, the one after the other, Flash’s rescue and reunion with Dale, although always only temporary, still represented and reminded them (and their readers) of their original purpose: not only to defeat the dangers they faced but also to return to a saved and safe Earth. Even though their exploits eventually cycled through other permutations of the rescued and the reunited, those variations still relied on domesticity’s dominant note. When Dale rescued Flash or Zarkov, she was still the heroine, not the hero or the scientist. Asimov’s comments about women characters in interwar science fiction observed, if perhaps unintentionally, the same sentiment. “Once, in those early years,” he remarked in an anthology of the period he edited, “I recall being really moved by the relationship between a man and a woman as pictured in a science fiction story.”27 The story was Jack Williamson’s “The Moon Era,” and the relationship was between Stephen, its Texas history teacher, and his companion in his adventures on the moon. After Stephen encountered and befriended a local lunar female shortly after arriving, their relationship developed slowly while they traveled and endured travails together. Only before a climactic battle against the Eternal Ones did Stephen recognize his full feelings. “Abruptly an ache sprang into my heart, and my eyes dimmed,” he said, “so that the bright golden image of her swam before me. I had hardly realized what her companion­ship had come to mean to me, in our long days together,” he explained. It was not appearance—and its implied physical attraction—however, but reassuring virtue that drove his emotions: “Strange as her body was, [she] had come to be almost human in my thoughts. Loyal, courageous, kind—a comrade.”28

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In an exception to the general rule of romantic reunion, Stephen lost his companion while defeating his foes. Nevertheless the realization of his feelings was enough to provide romance’s usual reassurance. If Stephen was the prototypical adventurer, his lunar love was, in his view, the epitome of womanhood. While Asimov wryly observed that “it was perhaps inevitable that the woman involved wasn’t really a woman,”29 his comment and the example of Stephen’s nonhuman love expressed a subtly significant point: it was not the presence of actual women but the sense of familiarity, of romance, family, and household, that female characters brought to men, science, and adventure that was important to science fiction.30 That the adventurer’s ideal companion had no name but was simply and evocatively called “the Mother” made the same point. Stories in which women were the subjects of science fiction’s social extrapolation similarly testified to the importance of this domestic ideal. Dr. David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” imagined giving women the same opportunities as men. In the hypothesized history of its lengthy prologue, postwar equal economic opportunity eroded familiar social values and stability. Allowed to compete in an opened business world, women proved not merely equal but superior. Enjoying their professional success, they chose careers over traditional domestic roles, destabilizing not only homes and families but also society generally. In response a group of male business executives conspired to remove women from business, systematically discriminating against them to reverse their previous gains. The story proper followed the travels and adventures of Taine, a detective hired by the same businessmen to investigate odd and seemingly unconnected events in the aftermath of their corporate restoration. An all-too-smooth return to tradition and a sudden inflow of extremely competent new men raised their suspicion, and rightly so. Frustrated by their exclusion, ambitious women had formed their own conspiracy, transforming themselves physically into men to retake the work world and bypass its institutional barriers. The women’s counterrevolution succeeded initially, but it failed ultimately because of unanticipated consequences from their actions. Discovering and infiltrating their conspiracy, a disguised Taine revealed himself at the story’s end to confront its leaders and inform them of their imminent failure and demise. In their rush to achieve misguided purposes, the women had erred, fatally for their plans, in using science without complete information about its outcome. Their feminine metamorphosis worked, but its utility for world domination was marginal and its success temporary because its physiological

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transformation also brought slow and inexorable insanity to all who undertook it. Despite their best efforts, the women failed without Taine’s or any other man’s need to act. Complex in its twists, Keller’s story demonstrated both the value of domesticity’s dynamic to science in science fiction and the place of women within it. Rather than celebrating science, his tale expressed reservations about its use and possible abuse. While it presented women as superior to men—and thus perhaps unfairly discriminated against—it also employed women to demonstrate science’s potential pitfalls. In their efforts to achieve not equality but dominance, the story’s women reached beyond their able capability and brought catastrophe in their improper use of science. Rather than addressing that impropriety directly and correcting its use, however, the story addressed the women’s presumption to change their social place. Not needing to act, Taine took the opportunity to denounce the “feminine metamorphosis” of the story’s title and concern. “You took the best that we have bred, and, through your desires to rule,” Taine exclaimed, exasperated, “you have changed them into five thousand insane women.” His outrage was about not the conspiracy’s misuse of science but its social cost. Those now or soon to be insane women, he bemoaned, were “girls who would have made loving wives and wonderful mothers if they had been well advised.” With thousands of women in the defeated conspiracy awaiting eventual insanity, the story’s central concern was misguided social aspiration more than the dangers of science. Indeed its cautionary moral suggested that redeeming the one reaffirmed the other. If unnatural ambitions perverted science, social restraint might maintain its propriety. In this unusual story, adventure’s tension lacked the balance of romantic resolution and reassurance. Perhaps avoiding confusion and contradiction between thematic content and character, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” had no heroine to reflect the hero’s virtue. Taine referred to that absence, invoking his own domestic tranquillity while denouncing the women’s conspiracy. “I am . . . ashamed to tell anyone,” he admonished the conspirators, “because you belong to the same sex that my mother and wife and daughters belong to.” Possessing full knowledge of the feminine metamorphosis’s effects, he could not fathom female reasoning. “I did not think women could be so—peculiar,” he exclaimed. “I really thought women liked us men.” Trying to understand their perspective, he positioned himself relative to women in his own family. “My women folks are wild about me,” he said. “You ought to see the neckties my wife selects for me and the scarf-pin.”31 Taine’s inability to comprehend their motive—economic and social self-determination—and

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the story’s unsatisfactory conclusion resulted from its adventure’s unresolved romance. Although it suggested science’s redemption with reaffirmed domestic values, without proper romantic resolution the story could not provide reassurance about its own domestic theme and subject. Interwar science fiction’s anxious attention to and association of women, romance, and domesticity were not surprising. Expectations and evolving realities about women and the home were the most visible manifestation of broader historical developments. The mechanical and mass production that fueled late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialization and consumerism also accelerated and attenuated ongoing rearrangements of social networks, practice, and place. As scholars of gender have argued, one consequence of modern capitalism’s development was an emergent distinction between separate spheres of social interaction and association.32 The growth of factory manufacturing that led more men to work for wages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also required them to leave their homes, indirectly spurring the expansion of businesses and associations serving them. This secondary economy provided transportation, food and drink, and other services for men outside of their homes, but as significantly it sparked new social relations. Taverns, public houses (or pubs), and gentlemen’s clubs and lodges that served men meals outside their homes also provided space for socializing: conversation and camaraderie, discussion and debate. This new public domain, historians argue, was a necessary firmament for expansion of democratic political ideals and an informed republican citizenry. Expansion of markets and wage labor also shifted household economics. As more men worked outside their homes, commercial alternatives for their household tasks such as acquisition, purchase, and transport of fuel, water, and provisions, butchery, repairs for shoes and pots, and the like reduced and eventually removed their domestic practice. Remaining household tasks became “housework,” the work of women who remained at home. Cleared of tasks considered commercial, homes gained new significance as places for privacy and cultivation, marked increasingly with distinctive sentiment, decoration, and style. These historical developments reinforced one another, sustaining and maintaining their respectively separate social spheres. The market’s logic argued that wages made the exchange of commercial work for household work equivalent and indeed provided workingmen with flexibility and freedom for political pursuits—even if it required them to work more hours for that freedom. Conversely, domestic tasks, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and handicrafts and decoration were not wage work in the same

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sense and for the same purpose—even if households hired help to perform them. Women’s private accomplishments distinguished their place in the home and implicitly reassured men’s role in public and political affairs. Crossing domestic and political affairs, then, could bring dire consequences. “Change, change!” exclaimed the Berkeley physicist Bayers in Francis Flagg’s 1930 “An Adventure in Time.” He remarked, “I had expected, of course, to see changes, but not this drastic sweeping away of everything familiar,” commenting as much on contemporary circumstances such as the 1919 passage of the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote as on the story’s imagined circumstances. Traveling forward to the year a.d. 2999, he discovered that all the changes in future society stemmed from women’s social roles in the twentieth century. Specifically and significantly its government was matriarchal. “Biologically all women are mothers—of boys as well as girls,” a woman leader in the future explained. “It was only natural, indeed, inevitable, that they should eventu­ally take over the running of the world, as long ago they took over the running of the household.” The change in governance was in society’s best interest and a natural extension of women’s domestic and nurturing roles. “The rule of the woman is then the rule of the mother who wishes the best good for all of her children.” Women controlled society through their control of motherhood, and all values associated with dominance had transferred to women. “Even Shakespeare was a woman,” remarked the future female; “we have an authentic bust of her in the Pantheon of Fame.”33 The ultimate concern of Flagg’s story, however, was the loss not of masculine dominance but of individual human value and ability within the structure of a controlling state. A masculine twentieth-century man, Bayers attracted the attention of Editha, a woman from the feminist future, and the two fell in love. Editha, however, was chosen to become a “Mother,” a privilege given to few women within the matriarchate. She lost both her personality and her love for Bayers when she was selected to become a mindless child producer for the state. He was similarly honored with removal to the “House of Husbands,” from which he eventually escaped and returned back in time. Telling his story to skeptical twentieth-century colleagues at the story’s conclusion, he revealed the brand etched into his chest marking his status as a “Husband.” The irony of a husband being husbanded—husbands being both cultivators, including branding, of livestock and heads of households—spoke to the story’s complicated use and inversion of gendered norms. Women’s command within the home allowed them, in the future, also to command outside of it in politics and government. Flagg’s future female society

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inverted dynamics of political power and disrupted the conventional gendered division of private and public spheres. Having women rule and dominate inverted, in turn and in gendered terms, the significance of government and civil society: that which distinguished humanity from animals and the state of nature. Instead of reassuring traditional domestic norms, Editha’s ascension to Motherhood demonstrated the perversion of that inversion. The loss of her individualism, erasure of her personality, also denied Bayers and the story science fiction’s usual romantic resolution. Flagg’s concern echoed similar sentiments within interwar science fiction. Laurence Manning’s 1933 vision of an ecological future in his “The Man Who Awoke” also worried about individual ability. Its contemporary protagonist, Norman Winters, woke from a long sleep to a world in the year 5000 where people lived in small forest communities called “origs,” worked one to two hours a day, and harvested their every need from the woods surrounding them. Their carefree existence, however, did not allow for luxuries because of its conservational economy. “I must apologize to you for the food,” the Chief Forester said to Winters. “We are on slightly curtailed supplies, due to our population having grown faster than our new plantings.” Then he remarked, situating hospitality within scarcity, “Oh, you will have a good meal. I do not mean to starve you.” Continuing, he elaborated the situation, “but . . . you will be expected not to ask for a second service of anything and excuse the absence of luxuries from my table.” Natural resources were so scarce that the elderly were forbidden to use them in order to save for the next generation. The story’s ecological subject was, in part, a comment on the excesses of the interwar period’s emerging culture of consumption. Its future society remembered a twentieth-century world of people they knew as “Wasters.” “For what should we thank the humans of three thousand years ago?” asked the Forester, rhetorically. “For exhausting the coal supplies of the world? For leaving us no petroleum for our chemical factories? For destroying the forests on whole mountain ranges and letting the soil erode into the valleys?”34 As a way of life, conservation also carried unanticipated consequence. While worldwide scientific effort had reduced the time each person worked, the future forest people accomplished little with their extra time beyond idling amid their trees. Their inactivity struck a strange chord, to Winters’s twentieth-century mind. “It came upon him that these people were downright lazy—and this he afterwards observed to be almost invariably true.” The system that provided people’s needs and restricted overabundant production had also eroded their will to provide and slowly degraded their self-worth.

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Denied freedom, men could still hope to free themselves, but supplied with all their basic comforts, these forest people had lost initiative and incentive. Gender’s lens made this loss apparent to Winters, as it had more directly for Bayers. The men were “fine specimens of humanity physically speaking,” he observed. Nevertheless they “seemed somehow effeminate and too soft. Their faces were too smooth and their bodies too graceful to suit his twentiethcentury ideas of what vigorous manhood should look like.” Downgraded ambition degraded masculinity into an able but ineffective femininity. The future’s conservation had failed to preserve the virtue that traditional gendered values instilled. Again, as a story without a heroine, Winters’s adventure found no reassurance in romance. Instead the future, or more specifically the further future, offered hope of a compromise between consumption without restraint and conservation without purpose. “After all, this age was a reaction against his own,” he realized amid the turmoil caused by his arrival. “There had been two extremes, that was all history would say of it.” He hoped that “Truth lay in neither, but in some middle gen­tler path. Mankind would find that road in time—say another thousand years or more.”35 If feminized men represented conserved production in Winters’s future, women in the interwar period, his original historical age, represented a new era of consumption and convenience. While modern science and technology promised to transform society generally, many of their inventions promised changes and freedom specifically to women and most of their innovations centered on the home and housework. Mechanical refrigerators chilled food, and gas and electric stoves heated it, quickly and consistently. Washing machines and electric irons simplified laundry, and vacuum cleaners eased the burdens of sweeping and dusting. Promising to transform housework, domestic technologies also promised to transform women’s lives, providing them with greater freedom and time to explore, learn, and improve themselves. “So many of the former activities of the home have been taken over by factory production,” Edith Clark recalled concluding in college, “that a woman who is content to be homemaker alone, is stultifying herself and lapsing into the role of parasite.”36 Other products, such as hot combs, handheld blow dryers, and curling irons to straighten and style hair, and cosmetics, developed jointly by the chemical and advertising industries, promised new realms for women’s expression and enjoyment.37 Readers of “slick” magazines in the period were well aware of this domestic appeal. Irrespective of title, theme, or perspective, they displayed its representative devices and proclaimed its promise in the advertisements that

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allowed their publication. Their vision of the new home was part of a broader revision of advertising in the 1920s and 1930s whose designers and executives were, as the historian Roland Marchand observed, modern technology’s heralds and modernity’s “town criers.”38 Focusing less on products and more on the benefits they provided, interwar marketing campaigns claimed comfort for their middle-class publics, presenting advertisements as broad social tableaux that collectively argued for the convenience and freedom that modern life would bring. Products as diverse as automobiles, chemical cleaners, soft drinks, and yeast found common cause within this encompassing theme. Women played a new and prominent role within these campaigns because surveys showed that they, more than men, decided household spending and choices. Advertisers assumed women, specifically middle-class women, as the audiences for all their advertising and marketing, not only those for domestic products. “The proper study of mankind is man,” a 1929 ad in one industry journal observed, “but the proper study of markets is woman.”39 In marked contrast—and not simply because of the pulps’ lack of advertising— science fiction’s general technological enthusiasm rarely touched on domestic technology. Of the over 240 topics that editors chose for their editorials from 1926 to 1936, exactly one approached the subject, T. O’Conor Sloane’s dry December 1933 “Electric Units in the Home.”40 In actual practice, modern domestic tranquillity proved more complicated to achieve than had been advertised. Efficiency and convenience worked to cross-purpose as well as common purpose, depending on perception and assumption. Expectation shaped people’s adoption and use of household technology as much as its actual capability did. In their 1924 study in Middletown, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd calculated that washing machines were less cost effective than subscribing to available laundry services, factoring in the machine’s initial cost and the costs to operate, maintain, and repair it. Moreover washing machines in homes, unlike those at commercial laundries, were not used constantly but rather sat unused most of the time. “There is reason for suspecting,” they concluded, that this “represents not ‘progress’ but a back-eddy in home-making technique.”41 Nevertheless washing machines’ lack of use represented comfort’s potential and principle, not inefficiency: owners could wash laundry easily and when they wanted. Not inconsequentially home washing machines became increasingly popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and throughout the twentieth century their convenience gradually becoming seen as necessity. Similarly the advertised convenience of modern appliances and other

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household products revised expectations about necessary housework. In her aptly titled More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan observed that scientific and technological improvements to clean the home also raised expectations about its cleanliness.42 A growing list of available devices and reagents increased the list of necessary household tasks. Vacuum cleaners mandated floors and rugs without dust, and chemical cleaning-agents called for kitchens and bathrooms—the two rooms that changed most in twentieth-century homes—to be spotless and sparkle. Rather than bringing domestic freedom, modern technology’s revised expectations required as much if not more effort from women than before its advent and adoption. Thinking initially that modern mechanized housework would be simple, Edith Clark soon realized that “to cook three meals a day, wash the dishes, and keep our small house only moderately clean was to me desperately hard work,” and she hired a maid to help with her housework.43 Women, however, were not the only people to bear the weight of modern domestic expectations in society and science fiction. Female readers were not the only readers to announce details of their positions in life in their science fiction letters. Young readers, boys under fifteen and girls under eighteen, often stated their ages when they wrote to editors. Farmers, military servicemen (particularly those stationed at sea and overseas), and others with part-time or piecework employment, such as traveling salesmen, cited their positions or jobs. While these readers stated their status to explain their presumably unusual interest in science and science fiction, collectively their explanations and prevalence also observed, implicitly, readers whose affinity for science and science fiction were presumed. Few readers stated that they were adult men or had families or established, professional careers—except science workers identifying their jobs to show their natural affinity to science fiction. Instead interwar science fiction assumed these extrascientific characteristics for readers and scientists. In an era that predated social standards based on educational stages, this assumption and association was especially significant. Adolescence ended not upon attaining a prescribed age or degree but upon achieving set life goals: steady employment, marriage, and the establishment of home and household. While Edward Smith waxed about the relaxation that science fiction offered the scientific mind, other readers who had not yet achieved its presumed social status carried the expectant weight of its assumptions, not only about women but also about the ability to provide. In this sense domestic dynamics extended beyond their visible expression, governing issues and concerns that did not directly evoke or involve women.

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To an interwar America anxious about individual achievement, robots usefully expressed threats to ability, specifically men’s ability. David Keller’s “The Threat of the Robot” articulated this concern in a cautionary tale of football’s corporate takeover. Using the same motif as his “Feminine Metamorphosis,” Keller presented a group of industrialists that conspired to replace human football players with mechanical ones to gain greater control over the sport. Keller’s aptly named hero, Ed Ball, however, realized their substitution and managed to sabotage a crucial game that would have established the conspirators’ position. The author’s choice of football as the arena for robot replacement allowed the story to affirm masculine virtue with mixed class implications. While Ball’s exclamation that “with these robots, you threatened the very life of American labor” reclaimed men’s football prowess, his other statements belied its class sympathies. Professional football emerged in the interwar period as a popular working-class alternative to college football, whose amateurs from wealthier, privileged families played for the pure love of the sport and generally gave it up upon graduation to pursue careers in business, law, or medicine. The very term “profession” captured its broader social tension, signaling the propriety of work as much as payment for it. “You de­stroyed the best there was in sport,” Ball proclaimed after thwarting the industrialists’ designs, echoing this sentiment. “You turned mankind into a selfish, introverted, anti-social animal who cared for little save his own enter­tainment. You did this to make money,” he concluded, criticizing the conspirators’ commercial interests but also, indirectly, those who played football for pay.44 Corporate and commercial corruption of modern ability resonated with similar concerns about the government and expansion of state authority. In a 1929 letter about Irvin Lester and Fletcher Pratt’s story “The Reign of the Ray,” a reader disapproved of its apparent regard for Fascist Italy. Fascism had brought the country, he wrote to the contrary, a regime “which curtailed the thought and limited the action of the individual, which accepted the rule from above as the inevitable, which stifled inventive genius, and which allied itself with the rankest sort of intolerance and superstition.”45 Arthur Frederick Jones’s “The Inquisition of 6061” was a parable on this same theme. Using letters instead of names to signify his characters’ loss of distinction, he wrote a story that imagined a future where the Council, headed by its leader, X, controlled the world and most of its population through a religion that worshipped electricity. The few remaining unbelievers were rooted out and rounded up to be converted or killed. The Council’s technological authoritarianism was clear to J, the story’s hero, who was sentenced to die

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because of his resistance to X. “Three-quarters of the world had thrown out their souls,” he realized, “and were now to be even smaller machines than before.” En route to his execution, he saved the life of one of his two guards and convinced both of them to think for themselves rather than obey blindly the edicts of the Council. He did not blame them for the situation, he explained, but blamed the Council’s mastermind. X had convinced most people that an “in­dividual was not capable of thinking for himself, because if he did, they would see the wrong of the inquisition and the motive of some power behind it.”46 Having freed the minds of a few, J’s revelation soon spread, and the movement it sparked eventually overthrew X and his authoritarian Council. Jones’s warning that state authority would shackle individual freedom echoed criticisms of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Given Roosevelt’s inauguration and Hitler’s ascension to the German chancellery in early 1933, the same year of the publication of Jones’s story’s, its imagined future suggested, indirectly, that expansive increase of the federal government’s size and scope too closely resembled fascist and National Socialist developments abroad.47 Still, the issue in “The Inquisition of 6061” was not so much the size and extent of the government but its use of technology to control the lives and wills of its people. In this sense, while government or corporate control of technology conveyed its modern individualist anxieties, what they expressed more broadly was the tension of its networked nature. Celebrated as singular, nominal devices—the telephone, the automobile, the radio, or, in the case of electricity, a concept—many modern technologies relied on attendant infrastructures to function. Telephones required networks of available lines and switchboards and operators to make connections between callers. Automobiles provided their drivers and passengers with greater individual mobility, but they also required a network of roads, bridges, and tunnels to facilitate driving. They also relied on subsidiary support systems for fuel, service, repair and replacement of parts, and indeed to finance their purchase, while also giving rise to a secondary market for used cars.48 Broadcast radio required a system of wired networks, developed in the early and mid-1920s, to reach regional and national audiences, and its programming, similar to slick magazine publishing, required advertising’s subsidy and underwriting.49 This systematic extent required coordination, standardization, maintenance, and regulation—not easily established in competitive markets—that stood outside and beyond the scope of ordinary people. Automobile manufacturers competing to sell cars realized that standardized and interchangeable formats for their parts benefited their industry as a whole. Similarly

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electricity and the many new devices it powered depended on industry standards that were originally fiercely contested—alternating current (AC) as opposed to direct current (DC) and agreed values for voltage and amperage—and the growth of regional networks for distribution and delivery.50 Naming electricity in his future society, Jones made the concept it represented singular and proper, in the process making its distributed and potential nature less nebulous and more knowable. Its status as a religious figure and figurehead signified power without considering voltage’s potential; amperage’s frequency; their requisite industrial standards, which varied internationally; and the material conditions that produced spikes and fluctuations in its actual, realized effect. Conceptually it removed these calculations off the power grid. Technological interdependence transcended ideological difference even while its economic and social implication produced political difference. In linking technological innovation and economic growth, city boosters and municipal governments in the nineteenth century spearheaded the development of both, creating the first technological networks locally. Their continued growth regionally converged late in that century and into the twentieth, and their contests to establish national networks and industrial standards reconfigured relations between the federal government and industry regarding technological development, particularly after World War I. In the 1920s this relationship was, on its face, indirect. Believing in the efficiency of “natural monopolies,” the government left their pursuit in private hands. Still, the government was involved, intervening to provide regulation and oversight where it deemed necessary. Amateur enthusiasts had spurred radio’s first popular boom in the late 1900s and early 1910s, building crystal wireless sets to converse with one another. Federal regulation in the 1910s, however, shifted radio from two-way communication toward commercial broadcast. Similarly when amateurs also fostered the first broadcast audiences transmitting scheduled music, weather, and news in the early 1920s, government frequency and licensing requirements and regional zoning allowed corporate interests to consolidate the majority of broadcasts within radio’s network system.51 The Department of Commerce, reorganized and separated from its labor responsibilities, assumed the National Bureau of Standards—taking the lead in developing standards in aviation and radio—and encouraged businesses and industries to pursue more basic research.52 The new department’s emphasis on organization, expertise, and efficiency to promote industrial economic development brought its Secretary for much of the 1920s, Herbert Hoover, success, fame, and the Presidency for his progressive outlook.

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The upheaval of the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent hard times of the 1930s shook deeply modern ideals of technological progress and economic growth. While the economic downturn had global reach, it presented the United States with an ideological identity crisis: the nation that lived by the creed that everyone could and should take care of himself was confronted with the dilemma that this ideal might not be possible. In that sense Jones’s and other writers’ critical views of government from the period commented as much on Hoover’s technocratic progressivism as Roosevelt’s expansive policies.53 In the changed circumstances of the 1930s, organizational and systematic efficiency appeared impersonal and unsympathetic to the plight of people amid the Depression, and expertise without the appearance of empathy was politically ineffective. That tension between technological promise and impersonal progress informed Ed Ball’s—and David H. Keller’s—critique of robots and commercial football in “The Threat of the Robot.” Robots were unproductive technology because they allowed more than simple replacement of human labor. For football, their coordinated, artificial ability also allowed industrialists the power to engineer the results and indeed the excitement of games. Their efficiency diminished rather than enhanced personal experience. “There was little of the altruistic, the love of humanity,” Ball observed, “in your efforts to popularize these scientific discoveries.” Moreover robots were only the most visible components of the industrialists’ conspiracy. Ball pointed to their strategic incorporation of radio, television, and other communications networks to increase attention to, and attendance of, football. Their profit derived from making sport commercial entertainment, while the threat that robots represented was its systematic and synthetic control. “I little realized the changes in human life that were the direct result of your com­mercializing the inventions of science,” said the now more modernly realistic football player at the end of the game and story. “I found that you had given to the world some blessings, but they were all tangled up with rather definite curses.”54 Shuffled in the shift from sport to entertainment was the question of whose perspective was mechanized, players’ or spectators’ and labor’s place within it. While they expanded government on an unprecedented scale, Roosevelt’s policies were nevertheless personal. Under his administration the government in the 1930s continued technological oversight and regulation but also played a larger role in its direct development. Federal sponsorship of largescale projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Columbia River dam system shaped their respective regional economies and determined the

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course of electric availability in America.55 Massively involved, his projects and policies sought to establish an institutional infrastructure that would mediate the worst effects not only of the adverse economy but also of society generally on those people least able to care for themselves. They put into practice his inaugural proclamation in the face of the Great Depression that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”56 Government efforts—to provide unemployment, Social Security, wage and labor laws, and so forth—worked not to control but to assist people in their lives. Their success and failure depended ultimately on people’s perceptions of their effect and effectiveness, on whether they accepted the government’s New Deal. The appeal of Roosevelt’s New Deal extended to his use of new technologies, most notably of radio. Indeed the one informed the other. The participatory impulse present since radio’s inception suited both the substance of his policies and the sentiment of his politics: emphasizing individual action and accountability but appealing to a sense of ethical and collaborative, rather than self-centered, individualism.57 While like other politicians before him Roosevelt gave radio addresses to present his positions and policies, his weekly “fireside chats” were especially effective and popular, and ultimately memorable, because they recognized the medium’s conversational intimacy. Despite its name, broadcast radio was—and is—a multicast, not a broadcast, medium. Where a microphone or megaphone allowed one speaker to address many simultaneously, radio conveyed more immediate and individual conversation, a sensibility its transmissions multiplied across time and space.58 “The oldtime orator who tore off his coat and collar and who made a windmill of his body as he spoke, will not be the speaker who holds a radio audience,” the political writer Edward G. Lowry observed in 1924. The difference was subtle but crucial: radio required speaking, not shouting, to one’s audience. Lowry explained, “The radio spellbinder needs a clear, concise message. He need not be an orator. In fact, many men who are not good public speakers have found themselves in demand as radio speakers.”59 For Roosevelt, the repeated and regular effect of the president talking to listeners as if he were in their homes personalized not only his policies but also the presidency and government generally. As Robert McElvaine observed, after Roosevelt, “the government” referred to the federal government and the “United States” had become a singular “it” instead of a plural “they.”60 Jones’s concern to the contrary, government technological use, in the case of radio, required attention to rather than imposition over individual consideration.61 Where radio and the New Deal renegotiated people’s personal relation-

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ships with government, they and other modern technologies also revised other personal sensibilities, reconfiguring distinctions between private and public. Specifically their enterprises reengaged domestic frontiers, boldly going where men had been before. Over the course of the nineteenth century, manufacturing and industry developed technological substitutes for established networks to move goods and people; distribute power, heat, and water; and remove waste—integrating and automating systems that were already, in part, mechanized. The increased capacity and capability of trains, trolleys, and subways; waste and water systems; and gas and electric lighting not only aided the social dynamics that produced men’s political public but, particularly for cities and towns, also opened a general social public: clearing and cleaning land for parks and other spaces, pumping water for fountains, lighting streets, and inspiring a variety of daytime recreations and nighttime entertainments.62 In the twentieth century these systems expanded to serve rural areas and increasingly individual homes, but their expansion carried different effects: personalizing the home and its new devices while reinforcing domestic privacy. Indeed, while modern devices promised personal accessibility, the entry of technological networks into homes actually transformed households more. Extension of utilities brought water, steam, gas, and electricity into homes; removed their waste; and powered their new appliances. While washing machines, irons, and refrigerators offered greater convenience, what actually made their associated household chores more individually manageable was separating the work they required from other arduous, ancillary tasks that utilities rendered obsolete: procuring fuel, water, and ice; heating water and irons; cooling and drying perishables. These innovations of distribution and domestic tasks also supplanted businesses that served homes, directly and indirectly, and substituted technological for commercial exchange, removing its sociability. In making commercial laundry and delivery less common and ice and milk delivery less necessary, they reduced ordinary social interaction with the people who previously delivered these products. Laundrymen, milkmen, icemen, and deliverymen generally called on modern homes seldom and with little frequency. Technological networks also brought communication and entertainment back home and reversed previous historical trends. Within a longer historical arc, radio was not new. Its system adapted and modified, without replacing, preexisting social networks and organization. In this sense its broadcasts— what it delivered and listeners wanted—were socially familiar, news and entertainment, and already available from other sources and venues. Radio’s

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form, however, was technically and socially innovative. The conversational immediacy of radio, as much as its lack of wires, drew listeners’ focus to receivers, not the organization and machinery for transmission and broadcast. Radio was also a social as well as an individual experience: friends and family gathered around receivers to listen and discuss what they heard. Moreover, because they often gathered in their homes—around kitchen tables, in parlors, and on porches—radio, like television later, made previously public entertainment private and personal. Domestic privacy, however, redefined entertainment’s social nature. Before technological media such as radio, music concerts, dramatic and comedic performances, sporting events, and movies required audiences to travel to and sit or stand in venues that shaped their experience. Radio, like phonographs and television, reproduced performances without those enclosing social contexts and in the personal comfort of home revised their experience. If radio encouraged discussion between listeners, viewers, and their devices, it removed direct interaction with athletes, performers, and other participants that was available in live, public venues, replacing it with more indirect and mediated sports, film, and other publications.63 Telephone users similarly redefined personal sensibilities. Particularly in the early years of the industry when several users and households shared party lines, telephone users learned to consider their conversations private and personal even in the presence of other people. Not insignificantly the entry of technological media and networks into homes was commercially motivated and not universally celebrated. As Ed Ball warned in “The Threat of the Robot,” commercialism’s extended corruption was domestic, the result of “placing all entertainments in the home.”64 Because the home stood at the center of these technological and social rearrangements, women bore many of their consequences and the significance of their idealization and anxiety. Observing that mid-twentieth-century car costs replaced, in almost exact amounts, turn-of-the-century costs for domestic service and help in annual family budgets, Ruth Schwartz Cowan argued that the automobile, more than the home, symbolized the ways modern families reconfigured their household practices, specifically the purchase and transport of goods. Where men had previously purchased groceries and other goods and arranged for their delivery home, by mid-century families with cars drove to stores and purchases no longer included transport. Responsibility for the task transferred to women, who also became primary purchasers, as shopping gradually became part of women’s housework. Reducing household delivery generally, technological innovation of utilities

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and other distribution networks indirectly increased individual families’ responsibilities for delivery and transport of goods without similar systematic technological substitutes. While automobiles were idealized for the greater mobility and freedom they offered, they also produced, ironically, “more work for mother”—to use Cowan’s insightful phrase. Women’s familiar—in both senses of the term—difference made them particularly suited to express the dynamic of these reorganized home economics. Already viewed as domestic partners for public men, women also represented the extension and reproduction of family: originally members of other families, they formed new families through marriage to their husbands and renewed the process with the children they bore. This relationship offered a logic for shifting domestic social relations: “family” realized success and tranquillity, while “woman” contained their individual concerns—paradoxically also denying women the status of individuals in their own right. The twentiethcentury social ideal of the nuclear family emerged from interwar advertising campaigns promoting an “American Way of Life” that included house, job, and automobile.65 Although many interwar households did not conform to its depiction, its emphasis on family governed social norms and practices, especially with regard to work. Women who worked earned lower wages even where they performed the same tasks as men, a practice to discourage women from seeking permanent work and encourage them to marry and raise families.66 While many women still earned money working part-time and doing piecework, they were expected to be full-time householders. Nevertheless, as Elaine Showalter noted, only the most extreme feminists proposed that men take part-time jobs and share in childcare and running households.67 Compounding their situation, single women and women who worked found it particularly difficult to find assistance and relief. Examining twentieth-century federal legislation and policy, Linda Gordon observed that programs on behalf of women succeeded only when couched in domestic terms: for the benefit of children or to preserve families, but not for women themselves. If women headed households in practice, those households were problematic, not ideal. “The result was not a happy one,” the prologue to Keller’s “Feminine Metamorphosis” warned about the domestic consequences of working women. “The situation had become so acute that many corporations had passed regulations, strictly limiting the advancement of women in their employ.”68 In the same way women’s familiar difference contained technology’s systematic tension, generally and within science fiction. Domestic association of certain technologies or their use allowed, indirectly, invention and

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innovation’s overdetermination. Vacuum cleaners, electric irons, and household cleaning agents aided women specifically, while radios, telephones, and automobiles benefited families and society generally. The exploits of World War I fighter plane aces and barnstorming pilots in the 1920s culminated in Charles Lindbergh’s celebration as a “lone eagle” and “mechanical genius,” while interwar aviation’s larger growth was in commercial travel and transportation.69 Its emergent business focused on bulk accommodation across a network of regularly scheduled flights, not achievement, and after World War II advertised the comforts of air travel with the familiar domesticity of female stewardesses.70 Gendered notes and overtones in interwar science fiction captured the same dynamic. If stories imagined societies fully and systematically informed by science and technology, where individual ability remained in doubt, women or femininity presented its weakness and vulnerability. At the same time the conspicuous absence, at least directly, of domestic technology within science fiction helped explain science fiction fans’ vocal views on women and romance. Arguments that women and romance—and implicitly domesticity—were unnecessary distractions and corruption in effect denied the technological developments they represented. In the process they also cleansed signs of modern invention’s systematic nature to celebrate its individual potential unproblematically. In Edmund Hamilton’s “The Reign of the Robots,” romance saved mankind from its future enslavement to technology. Loring, a scientist, transported Perry, a philanthropist and skeptic of robots’ predicted menace, to the distant future to convince him of their actual threat and ask him to invest his millions in contemporary efforts to prevent its realization. The future society they encountered confirmed Loring’s dire prophecies. Humans lived a bleak existence, enslaved to machine “Masters” in a huge underground city. Over the course of the story the two time travelers became involved in an uprising against these inhuman Masters, but the revolt failed, and Loring and Perry barely survived by returning to the present. Shaken but convinced, Perry agreed to donate his money to Loring’s efforts but also pleaded with the scientist to allow him to return to the future to rescue Eda, the future woman he had come to love, from the machines.71 In a surprise twist, Eda appeared at the story’s end to reveal that she was Loring’s daughter and moreover that the entire venture into the future was an elaborate hoax staged to persuade Perry of the threat that robots represented. Despite the deception, romance prevailed. Reunited with Eda, Perry remained convinced and stood resolutely by his decision to donate his money. Domestic virtue assured technology’s proper place.

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Interestingly the same dynamic also explains how robots became machines. Although the terms “robot” and “machine” are now virtually synonymous, robots were not originally mechanical. The figure of the robot first appeared in the Czech writer Karel Čapek’s 1921 play, R.U.R.—short for Rossum’s Universal Robots.72 The term “robot” was adapted from the Czech word robota, meaning “drudgery” or “hard work” (deriving originally from associations with forced servitude: corvée and serf labor), while the figure, an artificial worker, expressed Čapek’s concerns: the alienation of labor, human freedom, and the nature of life.73 The robots in R.U.R. were biological, not mechanical, constructs produced under controlled conditions in the factory where the play is set.74 The difference and distinction are central to the play’s conclusion and moral. Robots’ capacity to learn led them to recognize their subservience and overthrow their human creators, killing all but one. Their rebellion, however, also destroyed knowledge of their production process, which they tasked Alquest, the last surviving human, to rediscover. Although his research was unfruitful, he realized that robots had learned not only to kill and wage war but also to love. Two robots, a male and a female who were unaware of the full implications of their feelings, each offered to be dissected in Alquest’s research in order to save the other. While human beings would become extinct, Alquest realized, the qualities that defined their humanity—love, expression, culture, and civilization—would survive, within robots. “All that we have done and built . . . all this will not pass away,” he proclaimed at the play’s end. “It’s only we that have passed away. . . . Life will not perish!”75 In this original sense, robots expressed not only workers’ desire for freedom and control over their labor but also the complications of human—and natural—potential. The robots in “Reign of the Robots” were in many ways the opposite of those in R.U.R. Their difference extended beyond their mechanical metamorphosis. Although Hamilton borrowed Čapek’s mechanism of robot rebellion, his robots were representative machines, expressing directly the idea of machines enslaving their creators without addressing the implications and complications within the revolt’s role reversal. The Masters were inhumane because they enslaved humans, not because slavery and forced servitude were questionable human situations. Similarly, romance—unquestioned love— reassured, without resolving, the story’s central tension and adventure. As much as Perry’s newfound conviction, his reunion with Eda ensured their collective promise to thwart the possibility of robot rule. In a story ostensibly concerned with robots’ implications for human labor and freedom, their domestic sensibility established its final tranquillity while leaving robots simply to be

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machines. Their mechanical clarification allowed revised robots, in a Fordist age of mass production, to signal labor’s alienation and foreshadow issues that renewed the labor movement during the Depression. In their signature actions, automobile and other members of industrial unions in the mid-1930s revised older tactics preventing workers from entering workplaces and, instead, organized “sit-in” strikes in which workers took over factories and dismantled and destroyed machinery. Occupying places of commercial production and desecrating their mechanism echoed, symbolically, the social and technological dynamics within science fiction that produced mechanical robots. At the same time, making robots machines narrowed their original, broader associations. If they expressed issues that were implicitly gendered, as in Keller’s “The Threat of the Robot,” interwar science fiction’s mechanical robots had no gender—and by Čapek’s original logic, no possibility for love and no capacity for humanity. This neutered neutrality allowed them to separate social and technological concerns and with visible and gendered women clarify science fiction’s various appeals. Their figurative utility within those dynamics perhaps explains their greater prevalence over Čapek’s biological models. The December 1931 and March 1933 covers of Wonder Stories discussed earlier—for “Reign of the Robots” and “The Threat of the Robot” respectively—articulated visually that clarity. Women and machines are shown centrally and in large scale and detail, but they figure only indirectly in the resolution of the various social tensions they represent. Each robot threatens the woman in its possession, but neither woman tries to free herself. Together the robot and the woman represent science fiction’s linked potential: the one for adventure, the other for romance. Off to the right, smaller male figures on one cover and two pairs of hands, presumably men’s from their suit sleeves, on the other, mark the effort to achieve that potential. Only indirectly threatened and marginal to the scenes—which were framed for and aimed at the magazines’ readers—the men’s success was nevertheless the covers’ suggested culmination, establishing individual and familial virtue. If mechanical robots represented alienated labor, their defeat recuperated men’s traditional productive ability and reunited them with the romantic counterparts. Both resolutions affirmed science fiction’s domestic tranquillity. Still, where women’s familiar difference had conventionally also redeemed technology’s potential, these revised robots were different. Their figurative transformation was fundamental. Progressing from the personally familiar to the naturally threatening removed robots’ technological potential beyond the scope of reassuring dynamics. In this sense rare, nonmechanical

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robots were instructive in a different way. Despite its utility and breadth, the resolution that romance and domestic dynamics offered had limits. If they expressed and resolved social consequence within science fiction, they could not address its concern with natural difference. Robots’ still indeterminate associations, however, could. In Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat’s two tales of the future, “In 20,000 a.d.!” and “Back to 20,000 a.d.,” as in R.U.R., robots were not machines but biological laborers, bred specifically for manual work and overseen by a race of balloonheaded Masters. In “In 20,000 a.d.!,” Tom Jenkins, a twentieth-century farmer, travels to that future where he encounters a group of Robots who, through an accident in their production, accidentally gained intelligence and selfconsciousness. With the assistance of Tom and a maverick Master, they revolt against the other Masters and their leader, a great, disembodied brain, the Jed. In “Back to 20,000 a.d.,” Sid and Ned, Tom’s scientist and journalist friends respectively, return to the future to overthrow the Masters and the Jed.76 The stories’ concern, however, extended beyond the tension of robot servitude. Their extended time frame allowed them also to imagine the results of evolution and comment on its popular interwar corollary, eugenics.77 In their account thousands of years of controlled breeding for representative characteristics had produced a future world not only of Robots but also of Masters and Mothers. These future forms represented, literally, selection and projection of social status into nature, in the process making its contingency permanent and ostensibly innate. Within this tripartite society, as their class name noted, women existed solely to reproduce and lived sequestered in a temple where they were provided with food and comfort but not allowed to leave. The ruling class Masters were enlarged brains with atrophied bodies, possessing both superhuman intelligence and technology advanced almost beyond the understanding of twentieth-century visitors. They were also literally white. In contrast, the Robots were huge and hulking, twelve feet tall with four arms, “two where they usually are, and two more extending straight out sideways . . . from the hips, one on each side.” They were also literally black, “[n]ot black like our colored folks,” farmer Tom explained, “but jet black, like a hole in the ground on a dark night.”78 While evolution allowed the stories to comment on race and gender, it also presented a dilemma for their narrative and figurative resolution.79 The stories’ injection of color into evolved form updated robots to account for American social dynamics while complicating its representative tension. The Robots’ figurative combination of race and labor not only signaled increased

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African American presence among industrial workers in the 1920s and 1930s but also evoked American slavery—still the lived experience of some—and their future revolt against the Masters contained the anxieties of both racial present and legacy. At the same time their division of traditional masculine virtue, of labor and civic engagement, made neither Robots nor Masters (nor the sequestered Mothers) sufficient to fulfill the requirements of science fiction’s romantic reassurance. The extent of their evolution elevated these figures’ expression of social concerns, but its nature also, and ironically, denied their conventional resolution. Although the original story sought to free Robots from their oppressive Masters, when Ned and Sid finally succeeded in overthrowing the Masters in the sequel, the liberated world was not to belong to its future freeman, Charlie, and his fellow Robots. Instead, in a pulp twist, members of a “Golden Age” society that had preceded the evolved world of 20,000 a.d. returned from a long sojourn on Neptune to reclaim the world.80 These advanced but unevolved, and therefore still recognizably human, expatriates restored order to a world whose nature had been corrupted. Their return confirmed the domestic tranquillity of the present’s future and the future’s past and recuperated its science; their superior technology did not carry the social complications of the Masters’ eugenic evolutionary excess. These humans’ surprise reclamation of the future Earth also revised the original significance of the stories’ robots. Unlike Čapek’s robots, Schachner and Zagat’s Robots did not recuperate work through love and life but lived the permanent purgatory of their evolutionary corruption. Their figurative dynamic argued, however sympathetically to its condition, that race’s mark could not be cleansed. Ironically, echoing the social dynamics of racial segregation—within which racial workers still cleaned and cooked for homes they were precluded from entering socially—in the stories’ future perfect logic the home’s familiarity excluded the fundamental division of race. The exclusion was in a sense always and already apparent from their evolutionary exploration. Although the two tales were rare within interwar science fiction for examining race directly, in imagining evolved types in 20,000 a.d. they did not include black Mothers. Avoiding miscegenation, mixing issues of both race and gender, prevented tainting the romantic assurances that women—implicitly always white women—provided for science fiction’s adventures. If race expressed natural, fundamental difference, its resolution lay outside and beyond the familiar difference of domestic dynamics.

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

In 1931 a young reader of science fiction, Howard Lowe of 606 West 137th Street, New York City, wrote a letter of admiration and comment to the editor of Amazing. “Your wonderful and amazing magazine has filled every dull moment for about a year and a half,” he exclaimed; “it was first introduced to me by my pal.” Lowe had both praise and criticism for aspects of the magazine. He commended its artists for the “fine drawings they have been doing,” but he had an objection and a suggestion. “Your artists always draw Martians almost like human beings,” he observed. “They seem to always have two eyes, two arms, a body, and two legs like us earthlings. I would like to see drawings in the future with different looking Martians. . . . I am only a boy of thirteen and Chinese. I am most interested in your stories containing Chinamen as the villains,” he said, asking the editor, “please don’t always pick on them. I am sure others would do.” Despite his criticisms, Lowe was still excited about Amazing. “Our magazine is the best of its kind on the market,” he proclaimed. “I don’t mean maybe!”1 Lowe’s letter is revealing not only for his desire for less human Martians and fewer Chinese villains but also for its juxtaposition of his concerns. His two requests were related, making similar criticisms of science fiction from different perspectives. His appeal for non-Chinese villains addressed science fiction’s reality, arguing against racial stereotyping and its limitations for science fiction. His desire for less human Martians spoke to science fiction’s potential, particularly its possibility to transcend human concerns—such as racial categories. Both criticisms argued that the conventional nature of science fiction’s creatures and their characterization limited the genre’s full potential.

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It was no accident that science fiction’s imagined creatures bore the burden of its expectations. Their figures conveyed the specific concerns not only of their being—their bodies, minds, and behavior—but often also of the places they inhabited and that science and readers explored. The tension they embodied drove the adventures within science fiction stories in the 1920s and 1930s and defined the broader dynamics and limits of their depicted possibility. It was also no accident that race figured significantly in their characterization. If gender dynamics grounded familial and familiar difference within and among science fiction’s adventurers, racial dynamics expressed fundamental difference in the nature of the worlds they visited. Although interwar science fiction included a variety of racial characterizations, early twentieth-century racial views of Asians—or more appropriately, of “Orientals” and “Asiatics”—gave its specific concerns, particularly the terrific potential of science and technology, their most powerful expression.2 Asians’ status as inassimilable aliens within America anchored the various associations of science fiction’s creatures, lending them a qualitative “alien” difference at a time when the term “alien” was not yet used in or related to science fiction. The character of Asian aliens and their affinity with human Martians revealed the state of interwar science fiction’s imagined and transformed nature. The attention they attracted spoke to the combination of awe and apprehension with which readers regarded science’s wondrous worlds while demonstrating the place of racial dynamics within that scientific sublime. The defeat of “different” creatures—racially or alien—and assumption of their territories resolved the moral and social dilemmas of science’s adventures while preserving its progressive potential. The inhabitants of interwar science fiction’s imagined worlds found a variety of forms. Most beasts and animals were nondescript with an appearance matching their terrain, marking the fauna to the flora of their role as generic background. Some combined features of known terrestrial animals and were more notable for the specific permutations of their chimeric form than their actual originality. In Charles S. Tanner’s “Tumithak of the Corridors” and “Tumithak in Shawm,” for instance, the Venusian shelks were tenlegged spiderlike creatures with wasp bodies.3 Occasionally the inspiration for these creatures’ form was drawn from other sources. The geometric shape of the invaders of Earth in P. Schuyler Miller’s “Tetrahedra of Space” gave literal form to their analytic abilities, with a nod to Platonic philosophy. The

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humanitarian Martian named Tweel in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” reinforced the distinctive incomprehensibility of its mind with a body that similarly was difficult to describe.4 Other inhabitants of interwar science fiction’s other worlds, particularly those endowed with civilization and technology, resembled humans with only a minor variation of feature, such as skin or hair color, style and type of clothing, jewelry or other decoration, or an odd tool. While they varied in form and way of life, many of the creatures encountered in interwar science fiction shared one common quality: by either character or coincidence, they provided a menace or threat to science fiction’s adventurers. This attribution was expressed in form and behavior, although the one often implied the other. Some forms or characteristics, however, were more prevalent and significant than others. As Keith Thomas observed, the modern sensibility that assigned human values to animals also classified them within a hierarchy of associations.5 If the denizens of science fiction’s worlds were beasts, they more likely resembled terrestrial insects, reptiles, or worms than mammals and had scales, chitin, or exterior membranes instead of fur or skin. They were more than likely to be predators than plant eaters, and their quick display of extraterrestrial tooth and claw suggested that a natural competition for the “survival of the fittest” applied across galaxies, dimensions, and possibly the universe. Reinforcing this notion, the distinctive features of science fiction’s extraterrestrial humans were their weapons and the ways these were used. Similarly when nonhuman creatures had human features, they were typically eyes used to observe, follow, and interrogate their prey and opposable appendages they used to wield weapons. The menace of alien creatures served several purposes within interwar science fiction stories. Alien conflicts with protagonists provided the tension that drove stories’ narratives; the several battles within many stories were the action in their adventure. The shelks were the mortal enemies of Tumithak, the protagonist in Tanner’s stories. In the prehistory of the future Earth he inhabited, the shelks betrayed the generosity of humans visiting their native Venus. Learning the existence of other worlds beyond Venus’s cloud-covered sky from their visitors, they repaid this sharing of astronomical knowledge by invading and conquering Earth and driving humans to live underground, where subsequently, over several thousand years, they struggled to develop a subsistence society that still lived in fear of enslavement by the shelks. This subterranean society formed the place for Tumithak’s adventures and his eventual defeat of the shelks.

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The shelks, however, were more than enemies for Tumithak to fight; they were also foils against which he revealed his virtue. His triumph over the shelks demonstrated his personal qualities—strength, determination, intelligence, and martial skill—and justified his hard-fought and long struggle in freeing human society from its oppressors. The enemy alien’s defeat—usually but not always in death—was the science fiction hero’s triumph, not only in his resolution of the story’s conflict but also in the redemption of the values he represented. “The alien was merely a displaced Indian in the adaptation of the western to galactic dimensions,” the literary scholar Thomas Clareson observed. “For years he was dismissed as the ‘Bug-Eyed Monster’; the only good alien was a dead alien.”6 Within the logic of this dynamic the greater the threat, the greater the triumph. Many pulp science fiction stories emphasized the difference in their imagined creatures to highlight their threat, exaggerating its dramatic tension for melodramatic relief. In the process the ordinary difference of creatures, which could be accidental or incidental, became alien difference, gaining moral and fundamental significance in its connection to an opposition of good and evil. This moral significance allowed science fiction’s imagined creatures to hold thematic tensions beyond what they specifically represented. While science fiction’s promise was the potential of the worlds science imagined for it, the actual places its stories presented to readers were generally neither notable nor memorable in their conception and often quickly sketched in generic terms. Instead these other worlds provided backdrops for the battles between science fiction’s explorers and the inhabitants they encountered. The burden of science fiction’s adventure was removed from their undiscovered country to their native sons. Similarly, while the technology that allowed travel to these worlds provided food for readers to debate their scientific plausibility, these and other reader debates existed outside the narrative structure of science fiction’s stories. The conflicts between competing residents provided science fiction stories with their central narrative premises and their excitement and tension. The strength of their resolution reassured the other thematic tensions that science fiction held, even if it did not actually resolve them. This dynamic, along with its relative priorities, is perhaps best seen in the covers of science fiction pulps. While the various features of these covers— stylized title, publisher, editor, and author information—sought to establish relationships between readers, stories, and magazines, their artwork served dual purposes. Always a single color illustration, science fiction cover art functioned like other pulp cover art, establishing a visual window between

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the world of the reader and the world imagined in one of the magazine’s stories.7 Science fiction cover art also expressed and reinforced, in visual terms, the representational logic established in many science fiction stories between their protagonists, the worlds they encountered, and the residents thereof. The first cover of Amazing, in April 1926, displayed a varied and different world for readers to consider: a group of skaters glided across an icy terrain where clipper ships sat immobile atop hilltops of frozen waves and a massive ringed planet dominated a yellow sky. Four of the next five covers, however, established a more conventional pattern. The visible features of imagined worlds, including a brick-red coastal bluff, two oceans, and a green and blue backdrop of indeterminate nature, provided background relief for a more

Figure 6. April, May, June, July, and September 1926 and January 1930 covers from Amazing Stories.

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central conflict between human adventurers—or a device containing them— and menacing figures: a malevolent butterfly creature with slanted, human eyes; a long-necked seagoing dinosaur; an enormous fly; and a spear-wielding lizard creature, respectively. Secondary but significant features were the devices the adventurers used, held, or occupied that represented the science enabling their adventures. This trio of figures appeared on almost every pulp science fiction cover in the interwar period, with the occasional omission of the adventurer—which elevated the reader to the role—or the scientific device’s assumption of the role of menace, variations to its basic theme. This set of associations and priorities provided a powerful dynamic not only within individual stories but also for interwar science fiction collectively. The impact of its visual form lay in its regular and consistent appearance, almost irrespective of the range of stories science fiction pulps published. With few exceptions, interwar science fiction cover art followed the convention of its form, reinforcing the logic of its underlying dynamic. In painting most of the covers for the earliest science fiction pulps, the artist Frank R. Paul contributed to this consistency—possibly initially to create a specific look to associate with Gernsback’s efforts to establish science fiction or to have a template to generate covers quickly to meet the demand and deadlines of pulp publishing. Changes in editorial and managerial regimes at the publishing companies of interwar pulps, such as Arthur Lynch’s replacement of Gernsback at Amazing, brought stylistic changes to covers and new lead artists, but they did not alter the established logic of science fiction covers. Paul’s competitors and successors, notably H. Wesso, Leo Morey, and Howard Vachel Brown, had different visual styles but continued his visual conventions in their covers.8 Writers who imitated one another’s formulas and editors who valued consistency contributed in their own ways to a synergy of cover, story, and convention. These variations on Paul’s original maintained its representational logic across the covers of the various science fiction pulps in the interwar period, while the stories continued that logic in the characterizations of alien creatures. The dominant presence of this specific logic helped establish science fiction’s distinct and recognizable identity as a pulp genre. Science fiction readers recognized this logic even while they argued against its limitation. “We seem to take life on other planets on the same standards as that which exists here,” J. Raymond Stimps of Havre, Montana, observed. “Just because life on this earth is in certain forms, is that any reason why it should be the same all over? What may seem lifeless or inert on our earth could be life or something equivalent on some other planet,” he

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argued and then asked the quintessentially speculative science fiction question “Why not?” Although Stimps’s general concern was the familiarity of terrestrial form in alien life, his specific complaint, like Howard Lowe’s in his letter, addressed their resemblance to humans. “Why have life so human in form?” he asked. “Is it because our minds refuse to judge a thing in any other way, but by itself?” he wondered.9 Stimps’s desire to exceed science fiction’s conventional assumptions required an assumption of its science. His comments raised a defining question and dilemma for a science fiction: what is the role of difference, particularly fundamental difference, within a new, imagined nature? The issue was particularly relevant to sciences of life and living beings. Biology’s emergence in the nineteenth century offered a systematic and comprehensive perspective on life and its diversity. Older natural history traditions had cataloged a broad range of natural forms that included, but extended beyond, living beings. Biology’s new science, however, proposed a unifying concept, life, that distinguished living forms from other natural objects. Life’s common origin and a mechanism to explain its diversity, evolution through natural selection, powerfully recast existing knowledge of the natural world and redefined its scientific study. This biological revision extended not only to what was known but also to what was unknown. As Michel Foucault observed, previously anomalous objects such as fossils and monsters became evidence to support a new order of things that biologists, geologists, and paleontologists reconstructed.10 In natural histories, creatures whose characters were not well understood—and therefore “monsters”—were often described as an amalgam of body parts from more familiar references. A basilisk was part rooster and part snake, and the original chimera, whose name became eponymous for the category of mixed-part monsters, had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and a tail that was a serpent’s head. With the advent of biology, monsters became mundane—creatures whose evolutionary history was not yet known. Fossils, which were previously thought to be hybrids of beast and stone, became calcified remains of animals, the result of local environmental conditions and longer-term geological processes. This understanding, with evolution, added a historical component to the significance of fossils and the scope of biological knowledge. Fossils that did not resemble existing species were not inexplicable curiosities but evidence of extinct species that were now potentially understandable. Under biology’s comprehensive logic, the collective knowledge drawn from fossils and the geological strata where they were found

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offered not only a historical record of past diversity but also explanations for the evidentiary “gaps” in that record. Although most scientists had adopted a biological perspective by the end of the nineteenth century, this shift in thinking required more time to disseminate within broader society and its popular discourse. Although biology was taught in colleges and universities beginning in the late nineteenth century, it was only generally introduced into high school curricula in the early 1910s.11 The well-known 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, which evidenced the introduction of biology teaching (and evolution) as well as opposition to its possible religious implications, was sparked, among other things, by the routine adoption of a biology text first written in 1914. Depending on their age and level of education, interwar readers had varying exposure to and knowledge of biological concepts—and scientific knowledge generally—that would later be widespread. While they shared the same concern about conventional humans, Stimps’s and Lowe’s letters illustrated the still-continuing shift in biological assumption. Stimps’s letter reflected a modern biological perspective, invoking “life” explicitly. Perhaps because, as a thirteen-year-old, Lowe may not yet have studied biology, his letter echoed natural historical traditions, discussing the parts of living beings such as arms, legs, eyes, and bodies without mention of the concept. As readers recognized—if not to its full scientific extent—the ascent of biology and life also affected science fiction. The issue, however, was not biology’s scientific merit relative to natural history. Both traditions informed the imagined possibilities of nature in the 1920s and 1930s. Both biology and natural history saw living beings as natural expressions and products of their environment, affecting and affected by its conditions. This premise, in fact, presented a conundrum for science fiction: if nonterrestrial life was the product of its environment and the environments of unexplored worlds were unknown and not yet comprehended, how was it possible to imagine either or the one without the other? Imagining new life forms required imagining the nature and history of their environments. The richness, or lack thereof, of these new natures was the limit to science fiction’s potential for new forms of life and vice versa. The language writers used showed the difficulty in achieving this promise as much as their resort to convention over creativity. Many, if not most, stories explained how creatures in their imagined worlds came to be different, but those explanations referred to familiar knowledge or analogies, relying on that familiarity without challenging its assumptions. Repeating the technique of natural history traditions, they imagined new

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life forms from the pieces and parts of the familiar. It was no accident that hybrids and chimeras thrived in interwar science fiction’s unknown worlds. Nor was it accidental that Martians—who were supposed to be completely different because they were from Mars and not Earth—like humans had two eyes, two arms, and two legs. Satisfying the more comprehensive difference of biological life, however, required more than familiar monsters. The line between beast and men— which traditionally marked fundamental difference: body from mind, slave from master, and primitive nature from civilization—was insufficient to bear the burden of this demand. In Captain S. P. Meek’s “Submicroscopic” stories, Courtney Edwards recounted his first encounter with the “Mena”: “I couldn’t tell at first glance which they were,” Edwards said, “a group of men, or beasts.”12 His attempt to describe them combined elements of both. Their general form resembled a gigantic gorilla: they were black, hairy, and about seven feet tall on average, and they had “enormously powerful chests and arms that hung to below their knees. At times they dropped forward so that their knuckles rested on the ground and came ahead on all fours at a more rapid rate than their relatively short bandy legs could carry them when they were in an upright position.” Nevertheless they were not gorillas. “They had two eyes, but they were not placed as is usual with animals of the monkey or human species,” Edwards explained. “One eye was set in the middle of the forehead and the other in the back of the head.” Weapons and other accessories added human elements to their bestial form. “They were naked except for a G string and belt from which hung a short heavy sword, and in their hands they carried spears about ten feet long.”13 While the Mena were a newly imagined form of life, they remained conventional because they were familiarly monstrous. Although they were part beasts and part men, both parts were nevertheless familiar references. Truly new life required an unfamiliarity that was also comprehensive. It needed to realize, without revealing, an entire ecology. It needed to express fundamental difference. It needed, in other words, to be alien. While the term “alien” has become closely associated with science fiction, it was rarely used in interwar science fiction. Its use and connection to other related tropes— “bug-eyed monster” (or BEM)—date from the post–World War II era when it was also linked to a newly emergent term and phenomenon, the “unidentified flying object” (UFO).14 Nevertheless many science fiction literary critics credit an interwar science fiction story, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1934 “A Martian Odyssey,” as the first to portray an alien creature.15 A variation on the

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Homeric epic its title referenced, Weinbaum’s tale related the adventures of Dick Jarvis, a scientist from the spaceship Ares, on Mars after a mechanical mishap during a preliminary exploration separated him from the ship and its crew. Reunited with them after a long journey, Jarvis recounted the events of his trek in narrative flashback before offering concluding remarks about their significance and what they portended. What made Jarvis’s odyssey notable was his encounter and travels with a Martian, Tweel—or more accurately, Trrrweerrlll. Tweel did not have recognizable human form or features. Jarvis described the creature as a “freak ostrich” with a large “beak” that was half beak and half trunk. It had a “little roundish body,” a “long neck ending in a tiny head—and that beak,” “fourtoed feet,” and “four-fingered things—hands, you’d have to call them.” Its physical form was not, however, what made Tweel distinctive. Tweel was intelligent, capable of language, and carried weapons and other equipment. Although recognizable, however, Tweel’s intelligence was fundamentally different from human intelligence. “Either I missed some subtle point,” Jarvis explained to his crewmates, “or we just didn’t think alike—and I rather believe the latter view. We could exchange ideas up to a certain point, and then—blooey! Something in us was different, unrelated.”16 This fundamental difference did not, however, mandate hostility. “In spite of all difficulties, I liked Tweel,” Jarvis admitted, “and I have queer certainty that he liked me.” “I don’t doubt that Tweel thought me as screwy as I thought him. Our minds simply looked at the world from different viewpoints, and perhaps his viewpoint is as true as ours,” he suggested, voicing a cultural relativism that was new and not widely accepted in the interwar years.17 More significantly, “communication is possible between them and us,” Jarvis said; “Tweel proves that. It may take years of patient trial, for their minds are alien.” The effort would prove worthwhile, however, because these aliens were not only intelligent but possibly also superior. “Somewhere on Mars—and you’ll find I’m right—is a civilization and culture equal to ours, and maybe more than equal,” Jarvis declared. “The point I’m making,” he said, “is that Tweel and his race are worthy of our friendship.”18 Weinbaum’s Tweel showed both the potential and the limit of science fiction life. Its monstrous form was ordinary and familiar, but its distinctive and different mind made it extraordinary. This difference satisfied the criticisms of readers such as Lowe and Stimps, who called for nonhuman Martians as well as biology’s imperative that nonterrestrial life not have ecological or evolutionary ties to Earth. Nevertheless, Tweel was alien by assertion and acclama-

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tion. The Martian’s difference in perspective was Jarvis’s conclusion from their failure to communicate. A few descriptions of the creature’s weapons in action aside, Tweel’s civilization and culture were neither encountered nor explained, and the Martian’s possible superiority to the crew of the Ares was Jarvis’s postulation. For its attention to possible cultural perspectives, Weinbaum’s story, in the end, adopted the perspective of its narrator. Jarvis, a chemist, served as the story’s anthropologist, his odyssey its ethnography of an alien. In this sense questions about ethnography’s purpose and efficacy apply.19 Whether Tweel was actually a fundamentally different alien—and Jarvis’s account a transparent and objective description—was not the issue. Jarvis’s argument to befriend this alien revealed his anthropological—and anthropocentric— concerns. Could ideas of friendship, culture, or civilization apply to Tweel if the Martian was actually fundamentally alien? Or were they instead Jarvis’s measure of his and humanity’s own concern with progress? The fundamental difference Tweel represented allowed, by implicit comparison, a measure of human science’s worth. In this sense the alien was no ordinary monster and played a new and potent role in science fiction’s imagining of life and science. The rare interwar example of an alien creature, Tweel was exceptional in another sense. Tweel’s difference was fundamental, but this Martian was no invader from outer space. The comparative measure of progress the creature offered was benign. Tweel’s possible technological superiority and the advantage that superiority offered in an interstellar survival of the fittest was tempered by the possibility of friendship, at least to Jarvis. The perspective Weinbaum offered on culture and civilization was that progress was more than technological superiority. In this sense his alien subverted the more prevalent dynamic of hostility and threat, one usually and powerfully conveyed by the more common trope for fundamental difference in interwar science fiction: race. That stories from the 1920s and 1930s used the more familiar notion of race to create these associations is not surprising. A century of scientific— and racist—thought culminating in social Darwinism and the eugenics movement had concluded that race was an integral and significant concept within biology, with important social and sociological consequences.20 The social context of race and race relations in interwar America expressed the same rising sentiments. Anxieties about an emergent American nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century fueled related impulses for racial segregation and anti-immigrant sentiment that, after the brief and tense required unity of World War I, became virulent, violent, and acceptable in public discourse. One hundred percent American slogans and nativist sentiment

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culminated in the postwar Palmer raids and new immigration laws that for the next four decades reduced previously large immigration numbers to a trickle.21 The popularity of D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation and its apartheid logic was reflected in a social environment of public racism that saw separate—and inherently unequal—public facilities and occasional lynching as acceptable communal rituals. Other incidents of the period, including the 1921 riot and torching of Tulsa’s prosperous segregated Greenwood district, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan’s public marches in Washington in the mid1920s, and the unjust convictions of the “Scottsboro Boys” in the early 1930s, testified to the role of racial difference amid anxieties of national identity.22 Efforts to remove Mexican workers and bar Asian immigrants from entry and to redefine the constitutional sense of natural law and rights that applied to less civilized peoples within American territories demonstrated that race’s central divide was not between black and white but between citizens and those people seen as colored and not worthy of full inclusion and rights. In a nation that promised equality and opportunity, Americans who lived unequal conditions and suffered unequal rights decreed by law also became the targets of social frustration about its unrealized promise. Despite the predominance of this dynamic, race worked in several ways within forms of cultural expression, sometimes at counterpurpose. Issues of production, representation, authorship, and readership complicated the simple notion that cultural products, including science fiction, would be either progressive or regressive in racial terms. Clearly the system of racial classification, segregation, and exclusion that developed in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extended to pulp publishing and other culture industries. In the 1930s N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals classified magazines into three distinct categories: “General Interest,” arranged in subject subcategories; “Women’s Periodicals”; and “Negro Publications.”23 Within science fiction, as in much of pulp and other popular fiction, nonwhite characters were rare and, if visible, were subordinate and generally insignificant. Richard Seaton, the hero of E. E. Smith’s “Skylark of Space,” employed both a dusky “colored” assistant and a Japanese American houseboy. Both were quickly left behind in the course of his intergalactic travels and adventures. Rare examples of science fiction in the interwar era written by African Americans and featuring African American characters were not published in Amazing, Astounding, or Wonder. Instead such stories were published in African American publications. George Schuyler’s “The Black Internationale” and “Black Empire”—penned under

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the name Samuel I. Brooks—which imagined the revolutionary overthrow of contemporary society with the aid of black-developed science and technology, were serialized between 1936 and 1938 in the Pittsburgh Courier, an African American newspaper.24 Such structural obstacles to racial representation in publishing obviously did not preclude members of racialized groups from reading or participating in culture of the “mainstream” science fiction pulps. The fan historian Sam Moskowitz claimed that African Americans made up a significant portion of the science fiction reading public in Manhattan, and Warren Fitzgerald, the first president of the “Scienceers” science and science fiction fan club and an early member of the American Interplanetary Society, was African American.25 Science fiction’s racial tropes allowed not only direct expression of contemporary racial anxieties but indirect expression of other larger anxieties as well.26 Because the idea of race expressed social and political concern about natural difference, it served as a powerful means for science fiction to represent the tensions within its reconfiguration of nature, science, society, and change. These tensions held particular requirements for its racial tropes. As Schachner and Zagat’s biological Robots in their stories about 20,000 a.d. showed, representations of African Americans and blackness carried powerful associations. Although they expressed the profound alienation of naturally marked inferiority and evolutionary primitivism, they nevertheless also marked the familiarity of its inclusion—or rather its occlusion—within the American body politic. The perverse and problematic relation between the two was what Gunnar Myrdal would later call the “American Dilemma” of race.27 With a different but still racial status within American social and political discourse, Asians more aptly fulfilled the requirements for science fiction’s anxieties. Their representation of difference extended otherness to the inhabitants of science fiction’s transformed nature. When these imagined creatures were expressed racially, more often than not representations of Asians were the convention for that difference. A brief sample of story titles from Amazing Stories—Malcolm Afford’s “The HoMing Gland,” W. I. Hammond’s “Lakh-Dal, Destroyer of Souls,” and Volney G. Mathison’s “The Mongolians’ Ray”—suggests that such racial representations were not uncommon.28 Although there were relatively few Asians among the denizens of the worlds explored in interwar science fiction, the Asians it did include helped to create some of the most successful and enduring science fiction characters in American popular culture. Asians were the foes who brought out the best in science fiction’s heroes.

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They were the original enemies to Anthony “Buck” Rogers, the heroic protagonist in Philip Francis Nowlan’s 1928 “Armageddon—2419 a.d.” and its 1929 sequel, “The Airlords of Han.”29 Part of the story is familiar: Rogers, known as Tony, not Buck, in these stories, was a twentieth-century man propelled into a brave new twenty-fifth-century world. Part of it is less familiar: upon waking from a 492-year state of suspended animation induced by radioactive gases, Tony rose to lead future Americans in the Second War of Independence against Mongolian Han Airlords who ruled the earth and its skies from great airships propelled by “repeller rays” and armed with “disintegrator rays.” Nowlan’s vision of the future was an extension and culmination of nineteenth-century Yellow Peril stories. In the twenty-fifth century Asians had successfully invaded America and, in fact, ruled the world. As the title of his original story exclaimed, this future was literally Armageddon, realized as the final war between the white and yellow races of the world. Its only resolution was the ultimate eradication of its Asiatic enemy. As Tony prophesied darkly to Wilma Deering, his comrade at arms and love interest, at the end of “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” “unless you and I are killed in the struggle, we shall live to see America blast the Yellow Blight from the face of the Earth.”30 The adventures of Flash Gordon also demonstrated the ability of Asians to reveal the greater ability of its hero.31 An imitation of Rogers, Gordon also fought an Asiatic nemesis, Ming the Merciless, and his minions. Although actually an invader from outer space, Ming nevertheless was a variant on the familiar early twentieth-century Oriental villain. In addition to his evocative name, other representative clues indicated the resemblance. He and other men of his race wore costumes reminiscent of the long formal robes of Chinese Mandarins, and they shared the physical features of long, narrow faces, shaved heads, and goatee and mustache typically ascribed to fictional Asian villains. The name of the world Ming ruled with an iron fist, Mongo, suggested an abbreviated “Mongolian” or “Mongoloid.” As the “Planet of Doom,” Mongo represented the same threat of the Yellow Peril from outer and other space that ultimately was the source for Tony Rogers’s Han Airlords. Rushing on a collision course with Earth, it carried the potential for Asian domination and, if allowed to strike, destruction of the world. Ming’s people, of all the heterogeneous inhabitants of Mongo, were its Orientals. An amalgamation of the tropes of several distinct geographic regions and ethnic customs within a single imaginary whole, “the Orient” identified their racial nature. In the original comic strip they were visibly a yellow race, with each character colored an intensely bright yellow to emphasize the

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association.32 While the men of his race wore Chinese dress, the women wore sexually revealing clothing denoting members of a Middle Eastern harem.33 Nevertheless the collective total of their visual and linguistic features marked them as members of the same race sharing the common features of other Oriental enemies, particularly their emotional—or lack thereof—makeup. “We, on this planet, have progressed far beyond you earthlings,” Ming observed to Dale Arden before he attempted to transform her into one of them with his “dehumanizing” machine. “The reason for our success is that we possess none of the human traits of kindness, mercy, or pity,” he explained. “We are coldly scientific and ruthless!” If she survived the machine’s process, her transformed nature would allow her to become his wife. Ming’s racial self-assessment agreed with Wilma Deering’s description of the Mongolian Han from “Armageddon—2419 a.d.”: “They are a cowardly race in one sense, but as clever as the very Devils in Hell, and inheritors of a calm, ruthless, vicious persistency.”34 That Asians were the most natural enemies in interwar science fiction was no historical coincidence. Much of the social and political discourse about Asians in the early twentieth century centered about their developing political position within the United States.35 The concerns that they raised created the racial category of “Asian” to encompass a variety of peoples from a diversity of ethnic, religious, national, and geographic backgrounds. In a series of legislative acts and political agreements beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and continuing into the twentieth century, individual Asian groups were systematically prohibited from immigrating to the United States solely on the basis of their ethnic background.36 Similarly a series of Alien Land Acts passed in the 1910s and 1920s by states ranging from California to Kansas slowly and systematically eroded Asian immigrants’ ability to own and work agricultural land.37 Municipal ordinances based on issues of public health and safety but specifically targeting Asians similarly restricted their ability to make their livelihood in a variety of work situations such as laundry and mining.38 Many states prohibited marriage between Asians and whites, and the 1922 Cable Act removed citizenship from white women who married Asians.39 In a series of legal cases from the end of the nineteenth century into the 1920s and 1930s, the status of Asians within the United States defined the emerging limits of American citizenship itself: while Asians born in the United States were granted birthright citizenship, Asian immigrants, no matter their length of stay, were denied naturalized citizenship.40 Amid this constellation of linked concerns, racial exclusion—the

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ex-corporation of Asians from the American body politic—remained their categorical resolution.41 Although Asian Americans and their non-Asian allies challenged these restrictive and exclusionary laws, policies, and attitudes with every means available, Asians became aliens in the political and social discourse in America.42 Asians within America, including native-born Asian Americans, occupied a particularly contradictory political position as a diverse group of outsiders collectively defined and categorized by their very exclusion and whose exclusion helped to define what it meant to be included.43 The presence of these “aliens ineligible for citizenship”—to use the phrase by which they were classified and categorized—helped to define what it meant to be American citizens by denoting the boundary between alien and citizen and marking it in clear and sharp contrast.44 They were what the historian Mae Ngai called “impossible subjects” in the American political landscape.45 The interwar fiction factory reproduced the reflections of this racial discourse, refracted by its own immediate and particular concerns. In the 1930s Collier’s magazine published several serials based on the English writer Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels, reviving the author and character to new and greater American popularity.46 Their success led to printings in book form and film and radio adaptations and helped beget imitative pulp titles such as Oriental Stories (1930-34) and The Mysterious Wu Fang (1935-36) and Dr. Yen Sin (1936), the only pulp magazines to feature villains as title characters.47 Their visibility in popular fiction, given the assignment of Asians within American racial politics of inclusion and exclusion, illustrated the inverse relationship between cultural representation and political power: disempowered, disenfranchised, and excluded Asians gained greater visibility refigured fictionally as powerful alien invaders. In 1930, the year it serialized Daughter of Fu Manchu, Collier’s sold roughly 2.2 million copies each month, while the U.S. Census counted only about a quarter of a million people of Asian descent in America.48 The Asians who inhabited science fiction adapted the otherness of these Oriental representations and gave it particular purpose.49 Science fiction shared with other pulp fiction, particularly detective, mystery, adventure, and horror stories, a general fascination with the “weird.” A fraught combination of difference and danger, the weird’s excitement drew from revealing unknown qualities of people, things, and places to surprise and shock readers, and found its most popular and enduring expression in the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and weird pulps such as Weird Tales.50 Science fiction’s specific contribution to this delicate tension was to add a measure of science and technology. “When I wrote science fiction,” the pulp writer Paul Ernst

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recalled, “it was just a wisp of science built around the weird.”51 The exotic associations and fundamental difference that the Orient carried resonated both with the general weirdness within interwar science fiction and with the specific weirdness of its scientific and technological anxieties. As racial subjects, Oriental Asians provided a familiar reference within the vast, unrealized, and unknown possibilities of imagined science. As alien subjects, they transferred that familiarity and its related resolution to the inhabitants of science fiction’s other worlds. Although they were actually terrestrial, the menace of Oriental Asians gave the conflict between science fiction’s protagonists and the imagined creatures they encountered greater and more resonant significance. The association was clear: not only were Asians alien in America; they were also alien in outer space. In science fiction’s extrapolations of science and society, they also signified the alien in other space. Asian figures helped demonstrate the authority of scientific knowledge, but their racial difference gave the facts they represented an additional mystique: the excitement of scientific discovery included the revelation of hidden secrets of nature. The manner of their scientific explication resembled the manner in which many readers expressed their scientific abilities in their letters: it was information revealed, not knowledge learned.52 It was incidental but significant and sometimes surprising. Racial information in the previously discussed “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” for example, provided a convenient means to resolve the story’s anxious moral about gendered propriety. In Keller’s tale the conspiracy of excluded and frustrated women gained their access to transformative scientific power and world domination through Oriental means. Building a secret laboratory in China, they achieved their metamorphoses through injections of the distillate product of “gonadectomies” performed on abducted Chinese men. Further and better knowledge of the Orient also provided the women’s downfall. As the detective Taine revealed at the story’s conclusion, their otherwise perfect metamorphoses were tainted by their use of Chinese gonads. He exhibited his masculine superiority by explaining the complete “facts” of Chinese blood: because of inherited traits, Chinese men became permanently insane in late adulthood. This greater knowledge restored natural order to the relations of men and women through natural means. While not directly related to the story’s disorientation of gender and power, Taine’s possession of information about anonymous Chinese men inflected those concerns through a specific prism of science, race, and virility to provide the story’s ultimate and proper re-orientation.53

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The singular Oriental genius of detective and crime fiction embodied and epitomized this revelatory discourse. Sax Rohmer’s signature villain, Fu Manchu, who first appeared in magazine serials published in Britain in the 1910s, provided the model on which other similar characters were based.54 Rohmer’s first description of his evil genius captured many of the themes he and his imitators combined to great effect.55 With a “brow like Shakespeare,” a “face like Satan,” and “long-magnetic eyes of true cat-green,” his physical features signified culture, evil, and a mesmerizing charisma. The menace of his form was multiplied by his mind, “all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect,” and his capital, having at his disposal “all the resources . . . of a wealthy government.” His far-flung organization was shielded by its secrecy and aided by conspirators who “denied all knowledge of his existence.” Rohmer explained, “Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”56 Despite Rohmer’s declaration, the peril Fu Manchu represented was not the original Yellow Peril. The product of nineteenth-century British and American agitation and press about imminent influxes of products and invasions of peoples from Asia, the term “Yellow Peril” and its associated images in advertising, handbills, and magazines were specifically concerned with the danger that Asian labor represented to industrial capitalism. While they continued the Yellow Peril’s general concern of Asian invasion, the popularity enjoyed by Fu Manchu and other Oriental villains derived from their twentieth-century modernization of that concern. Their threat was not labor but knowledge, and knowledge wrongly used. That threat resonated with science fiction’s concerns and was readily adapted to its use to comment on science, technology, and their modern development.57 The giant intellect these evil geniuses possessed included scientific knowledge that was both modern and Oriental. Yen Sin and Fu Manchu not only wielded vast scientific and technological knowledge; they also carried professional credentials as medical doctors. These mad scientists drew upon up-to-date, cutting-edge knowledge and technology, but they remained traditional founts of explanation and revelation. What was unclear, perhaps intentionally, was whether their villainy made their new science mad or whether the madness of their science made them villains. The modern Oriental villain was the antithesis and perversion of the celebrated ideal of the American inventor.58 In “The Mystery of the Singing Mummies,” its writer Donald Keyhoe described the details of Doctor Yen Sin’s headquarters when the secret government agent Michael Traile, the story’s protagonist, finds it. On a large table sat a miniature replica of San Francisco,

Figure 7. The mysterious Wu Fang.

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“amazingly correct in detail,” even with lights shining in some of its buildings. To one end of the table was a row of recessed buttons in front of a large chair. Traile realized that he had found the “nerve center of Doctor Yen Sin’s base” and that the miniature city was part of the “Crime Emperor’s secretcommunication system, built so he could tell at a glance the exact position of any spy who was reporting.”59 Completing the image was Yen Sin himself, with a headset, microphone, and cables literally plugging him into the landscape of his syndicate. Although the scene showed the Crime Emperor controlling his vast resources, the combination of complex machinery and interfacing equipment also evoked scenes from modern, organized industrial technology: telephone switchboard operators, assembly line machine operators, and other, similarly new forms of technical labor. In this context Yen Sin’s epithet, the “saffron-skinned wizard of crime,” evoked similar issues within the images of two otherwise dissimilar wizards in twentieth-century popular discourse: the Wizard of Oz; and Thomas Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” Although they related entirely different messages and intentions, Yen Sin’s situation within his headquarters resembled the situation of the Wizard of Oz as Dorothy and her companions learn he is not a wizard at all. In L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 novel, the great and terrible Oz was revealed to be an ordinary man from Omaha, who explained that his awesome visage and affect were illusionary products of puppetry and ventriloquism. In MGM’s 1939 film adaptation, however, he was unveiled from behind a curtain and shown simply to be operating the buttons and levers of a machine whose unexplained parts produced his illusion.60 The similarity of his mechanically updated wizardry and Yen Sin’s technological nerve center spoke to emerging and still evolving issues of applied knowledge, command and control, and the division of labor that transformed the use and practice of technology and science in the first half of the twentieth century. In contrasting criminal and semi-comical fashion, both wizards addressed the central concern of their situations: who exactly was in control, the man or the machinery? The wizardry of Oriental villains also addressed evolving and conflicting associations within the image of Thomas Edison specifically and inventors generally. Deemed the “Wizard of Menlo Park” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Edison was celebrated for his many inventions, from the incandescent light bulb to the phonograph to the motion picture. Yet, while his popularity was based on an affirmation of American ingenuity and individualism, his success drew significantly from the incorporation of

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innovation to an industrial context. Applying principles of mass production to systematically develop new technologies, Edison pioneered techniques that helped create modern industrial research laboratories, including the one he built in Menlo Park, New Jersey. While these laboratories succeeded in producing many technological innovations, they also redefined invention and inventors. In their large and centrally organized enterprise, credit was assigned to its manager, if at all, with little or no credit attributed to the work of other people involved in the effort. Edison’s wizardry was his singular credit for the collective effort of Menlo Park. His success was also the source of his eventual decline. As the historian of technology Thomas P. Hughes noted, after World War I laboratories, not their celebrated leaders, became the symbols of invention and discovery. “Industrial scientists, well publicized by the corporations that hired them,” he explained, “steadily displaced, in practice and in the public mind, the figure of the heroic inventor as the source of change in the material world.” “Research and development” began to replace “invention” in everyday language as American invention shifted from a “revolutionary to an evolutionary mode.”61 The scientific Oriental genius expressed these concerns but absolved them through the perversion of diabolic intentions. The modern Asian villain possessed far-flung capital and organization invested in his corporate purposes. Yen Sin and Wu Fang, limited to the confines of American “Chinatowns,” still had the means to build and run research laboratories, to furnish and maintain lavish headquarters, and to travel by ship, plane, car, or even submarine. Each also had a seemingly unending supply of South, Southeast, and East Asian henchmen, turncoat Caucasian men, and enslaved white women to do their every bidding. Other strange and weirdly unnatural creatures in their service such as baby-faced things with adult hands capable of strangling and specially cultivated and intelligent half-lizards, half-rats, Wu Fang’s favorite instrument for assassination, demonstrated the perverse results of their experiments in miscegenation. Vast and expansive, these criminal empires nevertheless remained secret and invisible. Dr. Yen Sin’s subtitle, “The Invisible Peril,” gave literal voice not only to corporate growth and consolidation of science, but also to its occurrence beyond the perspective of ordinary individuals. Beyond contributing a conspiratorial mystique, this invisibility also allowed Oriental villains to embody both individual genius and industrial organization and assuage their tension. Their powerful menace redeemed the idea of genius and control, if temporarily and in evil form. Epithets such as “Dragon Lord of Crime” and “Crime Emperor” reminded

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readers that these criminals were masterminds of their organizations. The power of these invisible empires was revealed to be insignificant, in turn, when they did not survive the defeat of their leaders. The adventures these evil geniuses provided followed a narrative logic that reversed the discourse of modern science’s incorporation and affirmed individual ability. The “visible invisibility” of a modern “yellow peril incarnate in one man” provided the melodrama of his—and his incorporated empire’s—potential threat. Having foiled another of Yen Sin’s ploys, Michael Traile summarized the situation. “He [Yen Sin] has a habit of combining the mysticism of the East with the latest devices of the West, and with diabolical results,” he said. “Yen Sin’s tricks aren’t always so easily explained.”62 Traile’s statement to the contrary, however, stories involving Oriental villains also involved explaining their tricks. While within the purview of a given story’s characters the villain’s organization and knowledge were hidden and unknown, the story, within its narrative flow, always revealed that organization and knowledge. In addition, although in principle the Oriental villain possessed powerful hidden knowledge, in actual practice his heroic counterparts determined its consequences through their actions and their own revelatory ability—whose factual details were conveniently revealed and explained to readers. The story’s suspense was the result of the continued interpellation and extrapolation of these disjoint perspectives. The continuation of individual stories and magazine serials depended not just on Yen Sin’s genius but also on Traile’s explanation, revelation, and defeat of every area of his archenemy’s scientific “Invisible Empire” that became visible. The revelation of Oriental villains worked to similar and greater effect when adapted from crime and detective fiction to science fiction. Their transplanted transference amplified existing scientific and technological concerns into anxieties about their fullest potential. Asian characters gave particular expression to science fiction’s modern concern with evolution and a transformed nature. Early twentieth-century American scientific racism saw biological evolution reproducing social evolution through the form of race.63 Science fiction’s Asians were similarly the products of racial evolution: the social values they expressed found permanent form through the course of nature’s progress. Unlike other, primitive peoples who represented the known human past, Asians, specifically more civilized Chinese and Japanese, represented the potential scientific future in science fiction. As villains, however, their racial difference allowed them to represent science’s negative potential in ways that science fiction’s heroes could not. At the conclusion of “The

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Airlords of Han,” Tony Rogers outlined the history of the Han’s conquest of Earth. In an extended discourse on twenty-fifth-century anthropological and historical understanding, he explained that their abilities were the products of natural evolution, not social development. Defeat of these enemy Asians was both a resolution to Rogers’s adventures and a triumph of social themes expressed by his hero and antithetically by the enemy Han. Revolution, in his imagined racial future, was also evolution. These Mongolian Han in the twenty-fifth century were literally lords of the air. They were rarely directly visible to Rogers’s new American revolutionaries, instead living enclosed within “cities of sparkling glass they had flung skyward on the sites of ancient American centers” and encased within large mechanical airships when they traveled. Enclosure bred isolation and removal from the earth without apparent need of external resources or territories save for “relatively small surrounding areas of agriculture.” Their “magnificently . . . degraded scheme of civilization” relied exclusively on their ability to control and manipulate nature and had severed their ties to its original, pristine state. Luxurious slaves to their own advanced technology and science, they had also lost their humanity in a slow slide down the slope of its concomitant moral degeneracy. The forests of their neglected empire served instead as sites for the “growth of a vigorous new American civilization” rising to overthrow a Han people “devitalized by its vices and luxuries, with machinery and scientific processes to satisfy its every want, with virtually no necessity of labor.”64 These vital new Americans represented a sharp contrast to their Han opponents. They avoided moral degradation by maintaining their superior physical prowess and retaining their physical connection to the land that shaped their values. They traveled individually on the land, propelled by the strength of their own muscles, which were aided but not replaced by antigravity belts. In contrast the Han traveled luxuriously en masse above the land within ships carried by the artifice of science. The new revolutionaries learned to fight and won their Second War of American Independence using the individualistic tactics of their metaphoric Minutemen forebears, defeating a Han military regimented by social hierarchy and diminished by overreliance on technology. Nowlan’s twenty-fifth-century Orientals embodied the apprehensive possibilities of science’s potential to degrade society and opposed them to the more optimistic possibilities of science’s potential to improve society embodied within the new revolutionaries led and invigorated by twentieth-century Rogers. Their ultimate victory in their future revolu-

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tion represented more the triumph of the values and potential they would bring to their new world and new nature and less that of the power and authority of science. While Rogers and the Han Airlords fought for a future Earth, the logic of degradation brought by Asian villains was usefully extended to justify science fiction’s wars between worlds. Conflict between the inhabitants of imagined worlds was not new. Although it preceded science fiction’s interwar emergence and consideration, H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds prefigured many of the genre’s alien and Martian concerns—indeed linking the two for the first time—and arguably established its associations with the idea of an “invader from outer space.” In the novel Martians poised to invade viewed Earth with “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.” Their mental superiority, moreover, was the result of a separate but equal evolution that specifically evoked alien difference and justified invasion and war. “Life is an incessant struggle for existence,” the narrator noted, “and it would seem this too is the belief of the minds upon Mars. . . . this world is still crowded with life, but crowded only with what they regard as inferior animals.” He observed, “We men, the creatures who inhabit this earth, must be to them as alien and lowly as the monkeys and lemurs to us.”65 Wells’s 1898 original, however, separated the inevitability of this logic from its moral implication. The story began, significantly, with a quotation from Kepler that interjected subjectivity and perspective into its subsequent and brutal narrative of interspecies and interplanetary conflict. “But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?” its epigram began. “Are we or they Lords of the World?” it continued, asking finally, “And how are all things made for man?” While the story’s prologue made the Martians’ pitiless intent clear, it also questioned human assumption of moral superiority and, in the context of the late nineteenth century substituting species for race and nation, British and other evolutionary rationales for imperialism. “Before we judge them too harshly,” the narrator cautioned in the story’s prologue, “we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought . . . upon its inferior races.” He asked, “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”66 Subsequent versions of War of the Worlds, however, were not so introspective and circumspect. Amazing’s 1927 two-part reprint omitted the original’s epigram, and the magazine’s cover art and inside illustrations emphasized the carnage wrought by superior Martian technologies. CBS and Mercury Theatre on the Air’s 1938 radio adaptation, whose broadcast on Halloween

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weekend famously sparked a public panic, was similarly unequivocal.67 Relocating the scene of the story’s invasion from England to Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, and reporting circumstances that augured hope for late 1930s concerns—a resolved war scare (in Europe) and better business, sales, and employment—it also removed the original’s moral consideration. Its revised prologue excluded Kepler’s epigram, omitted references to human ruthlessness, removed Wells’s one use of the term “alien,” and emphasized a collective and comprehensive sense of invasion. In a performance that made him famous, Orson Welles’s narration made it clear that “we” were being invaded.68 Asian characters brought similar clarity to the contests that human heroes had with creatures on other worlds. Science fiction protagonists’ arrival on these worlds were cast as exploration and discovery, but the conflicts and outright battles they had with natives demonstrated the potential violence of such endeavors. Their adventures required moral and ethical justification, particularly when their victories claimed new territories. As the not infrequent use of the phrase “conquest of space” in the context of space exploration illustrated, the two ideas, conquest and exploration, were associated if not actually synonymous.69 The associations that Asian opponents brought to science fiction, the otherness of advanced and degenerate civilization, allowed the connection. Degeneracy justified conquest—exploration’s coincidental and expeditious by-product—as redemptive reclamation. This sentiment found perhaps its fullest expression in the figure of Ming the Merciless. Among the most popular and well-remembered characters in mid-century comic strips, Ming combined the worst, but most effective, qualities of science fiction’s update of the Oriental villain. The absolute ruler of Mongo, Ming was the planet’s version of Fu Manchu’s incorporation of evil. His imperial administration oversaw a diverse population of aliens enslaved to his devilish purpose, and the melodramatic opposition of his personified empire to Flash Gordon’s heroic individualism provided the primary premise of their comic—which was comic in form but serious in its content. A native of another world whose references nevertheless signaled Asian, Ming expanded the scope of Fu Manchu and other terrestrial Oriental villains. His alien nature extended the fundamental difference of his Orientalism beyond human science’s ability to manipulate and control nature to represent a transformed nature itself. The minions he ruled were not different races but different species produced in Mongo’s alien ecology. The connection his empire provided between those species and the regions he ruled—Mongo’s land, sea, and air and possibly those of other worlds—was different and more radical

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than those typical of terrestrial Oriental villains. Where their empires were invisible because they sought secretly to invade and dominate familiar and already inhabited places, Ming’s dominion was openly acknowledged, forming the domain where all of Flash Gordon’s adventures took place. The moral character of this connection reversed the usual sense of Yellow Peril invasion in terrestrial stories of Oriental villains. While the actual invaders of Mongo in Flash Gordon were its Earthling humans, Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and Dr. Hans Zarkov, they were seen not as invaders but as liberators. The long arc of the comic strip’s adventures was not the salvation of Earth but the redemption of Mongo from Ming’s corruption and oppression. Presented originally as an imminent threat, the collision with Mongo that would have destroyed Earth never occurred. Perhaps because of the different serial requirements of the comic strip form, Ming’s menace similarly served as a framing device more than it actually drove the adventures of Flash, Dale, and Zarkov. Appearing at the beginning of the strip to present his omnipotence, Ming subsequently disappeared for long stretches before reappearing periodically and briefly to restate his original position. His status in this sense was symbolic: his despotism nullified his political authority and rendered the lands he ruled ideologically neutral territory.70 The more immediate adventures of Flash and company were a series of encounters with Mongo’s other residents that followed a familiar and revealing pattern. The visiting Earthlings proved their virtue to overcome initial hostility and conflict, befriended their foes, and convinced them to join an alliance to overthrow Ming. The series of their success among a veritable menagerie of otherworldly, hybrid creatures—lion-men, hawk-men, shark-men, and so on—made their efforts liberating, not invasive, in a contest for the state of Mongo’s nature. All-powerful in principle and extraterrestrial in origin, Ming is revealed by Flash and his friends to be familiarly Asian: even within his own body politic he required ex-corporation. The relationship between conquest and exploration can be seen even in critically acclaimed, progressive science fiction. It is displayed in the range of creatures and references inhabiting the Martian world imagined in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and its sequel, “The Valley of Dreams.”71 Despite the presence of Tweel, the aliens in the stories that were more representative of interwar science fiction were its other nonhuman Martians. These monstrous creatures served as the familiar foes that Tweel and Jarvis, in their newfound friendship, overcame. The dream-beast was a multi-limbed, ropy-armed mass that enticed and entrapped its victims by manipulating

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their desires, assuming the guise of the object of those desires. Barrel-beasts were ancient, parthenogenic, silicon-based life forms that built moundcities and communicated via booming rhythms emanating from drum-like diaphragms at the top of their barrel-shaped bodies. Both types of creatures were intelligent in their own fashion, and the barrel-beasts represented an advanced city-building civilization whose trails of successively larger stone pyramids provided monuments of their evolution and social development. Both also required defeat and occupation of their territories. Weinbaum’s alien Tweel was innovative for fundamentally different intelligence, but the Martian’s alien status was exceptional only because the creature was deemed friendly and equal to humans. Its exception neither changed nor challenged science fiction’s broader narrative logic pitting heroes against foes within a clash of civilizations competing for conquest. An ancillary moment in Weinbaum’s story, which not coincidentally involved an Asian reference, illustrates this point. During another of Jarvis’s long discourses on the peculiar relationship he had with Tweel, he used the example of the Negrito people to help explain Tweel’s alien difference. Trying to get a sense of Tweel’s language, Jarvis wondered “if his [Tweel’s] language wasn’t like the primitive speech of some earth people.” Negritoes, he noted, “haven’t any generic words—no word for food or water or man,” but “words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea water, or strong man and weak man.” His point was that they had “no names for general classes.” He explained, “They’re too primitive to understand that rain water and sea water are just different aspects of the same thing.”72 Tweel, however, was not primitive; he was simply different, and in that sense his alien status did not preclude his superiority over primitive humans. The invoked primitivism of the Negrito, however, carried the burden of American anxieties about territorial expansion, imperialism, and conquest and the civilizing process. Most Americans learned of the Negrito in the aftermath of the United States’ war with Spain in 1898. Although the war itself was brief, its consequences were long-standing. After joining the war initially to assist colonial independence efforts, the United States instead assumed control of Spain’s colonies—including the Philippines, among the places the Negrito live—becoming a reluctant and ambivalent, at least at first, global empire. Capital progress, calling for market expansion and military security and readiness, won the war of ideas against anti-imperialists who argued to maintain American democratic ideals. The logic of “white man’s burden,” published for the situation, reinforced that victory in racial terms

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and required its public demonstration.73 The Negrito were among its messengers, put on display as part of a large official scientific exhibit on the Philippines, its peoples, and their cultures at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The first large-scale exposition after the war, the fair and its companion Olympic games commemorated the centennial United States’ first territorial expansion, the Louisiana Purchase, while celebrating its latest. Advertised as evolution’s “Missing Link,” Negritoes were shown living in a recreation of their natural primitive state, and their exhibit attracted large crowds and popular interest.74 Significantly this racial nature and that of other natives of America’s new territories were pivotal in early twentieth-century Supreme Court rulings that the Constitution did not apply to them—and suggested a distinction between certain natural rights applicable to all and “remedial” rights inherent to Anglo-Saxon character and particular to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.75 In the context of Weinbaum’s Martian stories, Negritoes were a double reminder of Tweel’s Martian exceptionalism. On the one hand, their general earthly primitivism was a simple contrast to Tweel’s civilized difference. On the other hand, their specific historical reference also evoked the civilizing imperative within science fiction and passed its burden to the nonwhite, nonman, nonhuman Tweel. The friendliness Jarvis saw in Tweel—despite his alien nature—was recognition of both their common distinctions. Significantly neither the actual culture of Negritoes nor their state of social and technical attainment mattered for their function within Weinbaum’s story. They served the role that Asians generally conveyed by association to science fiction’s other aliens: to denote difference, particularly different or obscure knowledge of nature. Indeed Oriental Asians were the only actual “aliens” in interwar science fiction. Although Asians gained notoriety as aliens in the period’s discourse, the term “alien” appeared rarely in the period’s science fiction. Although Jack Williamson included the word in the title of his “The Alien Intelligence,” he did not use it to refer to the story’s threateningly intelligent creature.76 Instead, as in Wells’s single use of the term in War of the Worlds, “alien” was an adjective used to describe creatures, objects, or attitudes that were generally foreign and different. Other terms such as “foreign,” “odd,” “weird,” “strange,” and “beastly” were used in similar fashion and far more frequently in science fiction of the 1920s and 30s. In that era, “alien” connoted difference; it did not denote creatures from outer space or other worlds. Although the grammatical distinction between “alien” as a noun and the term as an

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adjective is not large, its implications for the affinity between representations of Asians and representations of science fiction’s alien creatures were nevertheless significant. The familiar conventions of racial Asian difference grounded the conventions of alien difference in science fiction. The seemingly infinite possibilities for life in science fiction’s other worlds lent them an abstract sense of difference that had no point of reference. Their diversity gave them no possibility for similarity. Much like an adjective without a noun, these diverse creatures could only be described and not understood as things in and of themselves. Conventional human qualities, or lack thereof, lent perspective and reference by concrete comparison even while they limited the possibilities for imagining aliens. Oriental villains’ lack of human emotion, for instance, allowed their association with nonhuman beings. When Eric Gordon exclaimed of Yen Sin, “But confound it, he’s still human,” Michael Traile replied pensively, “Sometimes I wonder. Yen Sin is devoid of every human emotion, except hate and greed.”77 Science fiction’s Asian representations extended the quality of their difference to allow science fiction’s aliens to become, in a sense, Oriental aliens. While Asians became more exotic in science’s other worlds because their imagined nature reconfigured racial basis, other inhabitants of those worlds became more Oriental. Many creatures in science fiction assumed the roles that Oriental Asians played in figuring fundamental difference: they presented and explained nature’s hidden secrets; they represented the negative potential of science; they were the products of natural evolution; and they expressed contemporary racial, cultural, social, and political anxieties about ex-corporation from the body politic. They became alien by association with Asians and only later, in the cold war period, became aliens by themselves. The affinity of Asian racial difference to alien difference explained the greater presence of Asians in science fiction’s alien populations. William Lemkin’s “The Doom of Lun-Dhag” made this connection readily apparent. In his story missiles raining destruction on the Western world appeared at first to have been sent from outer space, but, in a usual pulp surprise twist, turned out to have been launched from Asia. Two young chemist-heroes who boarded one of these missiles for a return trip came to learn the actual truth. Upon meeting their opponent, his revelation confronted them with the realization that he was not a Martian as they suspected but a scientist from Tibet, the titular Lun-Dhag. In a remarkable literal statement of science fiction’s association of Orientals and aliens, Cliff Hale exclaimed to his companion, Ray

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Fletcher, after they had been captured, “Tibet or Mars! . . . it makes no difference.” Their dire situation still required resolution. “We’re in a jam,” Hale said, “and we’ve got to get out of it—somehow.”78 Indeed several Asians in interwar science fiction could claim extraterrestrial ancestry. The issues that Weinbaum’s stories and others separated into different kinds of creatures could be combined to great popularity and effectiveness in Asians who were actually aliens. These characters realized the intent of Hale’s exclamation: there was literally no difference between Orientals and aliens because they were one and the same enemy race—and species. The key to the superior scientific attainment of the Han in the history of Tony Rogers’s twenty-fifth-century world was an intervention from outer space. “Our historians and anthropologists find much support for the theory,” Rogers reported, “that the Han sprang from a genus of humanlike creatures that may have arrived on this earth with a small planet (or large meteor) which is known to have crashed in interior Asia late in the Twentieth Century.” These creatures, “with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul,” he continued, “mated forcibly with the Tibetans.” This interspecies interbreeding gave the Han human adaptation and superhuman ability. It “strengthen[ed] their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapt[ed] themselves to earthly speech and habits,” explained Rogers, “and in some strange manner intensif[ied] even further their mental powers.”79 The Han’s subsequently rapid global conquest was the result not of ordinary historical social development but of extraordinary, extraterrestrial interference in Earth’s evolution. They, and their successes and failures, were neither simply Asian nor alien but both. This unnatural natural history added new dimensions to the associations of both. On the one hand, it confirmed Asian scientific achievement, already suspected of evil intention and moral degradation, to be a cheat in the otherwise normal clash of civilizations. On the other hand, it added to early twentieth-century America’s already potent anxieties about the consequences of miscegenation, which it suggested could not only be interracial but also interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic. These additional associations informed and transformed the already resonant meaning of Wilma Deering’s first words in the comic strip version of Anthony Rogers’s adventures, Buck Rogers. In the strip’s first panel, Buck emerges from his five-century slumber to see the woman who will ultimately be the love of his life blasting distant figures and cursing them as “Half Breeds!”

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If they were not quite what readers such as Howard Lowe and J. Raymond Stimps wanted of imagined life and living beings, interwar science fiction’s creatures were the products of their genre and the conditions and concerns of early twentieth-century science and society. Despite his protestation and assurance that “others would do,” the human Martians and Chinese villains that Lowe noticed, and wished to see less often, embodied specific and powerful associations about the nature of nature: its scientific comprehension, on the one hand; and its social implication, on the other. That the potential and limits of both relied on their conventions of difference spoke to the resonant relationship between the figures and what they represented. Although the term was not yet in full use, the emergence of the alien in science fiction carried and contained the burden of the genre’s innovation and imagination. Creatures of other worlds, dimensions, and times represented themselves and those places. The “science fiction transformation,” Raymond Williams observed, requires “radical linkages between life-forms and lifespaces.”80 Although they sometimes resembled chimeric monsters from folklore and natural history traditions, however, science fiction’s alien creatures also needed to meet the expectations and requirements of biology’s new and comprehensive definition of life. Linking form to space, the alien embodied the fundamental difference of its unknown ecology. If in practice it remained familiarly human, the alien always asked the potential difference of other life and other worlds. The familiar difference of race, specifically the emergent category of Asian, provided a resonant reference for these alien associations and offered additional thematic expression and resolution to modern concerns about science, technology, and their social consequence and implication. The new figure of the Oriental villain updated nineteenth-century anxieties about Asian labor, which already defined Asians as invading aliens, to address these modern anxieties. Their singular genius and invisible empires echoed popular fascination with heroic inventors and scientists and the growing consolidation and transformation of science and technology by industry and government. The degenerate moral character of science fiction’s Asians resolved the thematic concerns they represented. Their defeat redeemed the technology that these natural enemies used and revealed the prowess of ordinary, technologically adept, but not always credentialed heroes. Asian villainy extended this dynamic and its mystique to science fiction while adapting and assuaging additional concern about exploration and consequence. The visible nature of their racial reference grounded the abstract unknown qualifications of

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interwar alien creatures. Although the postwar alien from outer space was not racially marked and was a less determinate object of internal, not external, anxiety, the interwar association of Asian and alien—of differences in other space—oriented its later, familiar unfamiliarity. The conventions that science fiction’s racial characters and alien creatures carried also spoke specifically to the potential of science. If interwar pulp editors argued that science fiction imagined science and its possibilities, the science that their stories demonstrated was not a science of system, method, and practice but one of sublime revelation. Where stories acknowledged the explanatory and demonstrative moments of speculative science that readers required, however, those moments occurred within a larger framework of narrative logic and cultural conventions and references that asked and answered anxious and awesome questions about science within society. If science fiction utilized familiar dynamics of gender and race to reassure domestic tranquillity and resolve fundamental difference, its larger purpose was to contain the sublime regard it held for science. The concerns that heroic protagonists, stalwart heroines and scientist sidekicks, and diabolical aliens embodied allowed narrative resolutions that removed those concerns from science, allowing it to be seen as pure and purely objective and preserving its implications for progress. This resolution, however, carried its own consequences for the notion of progress. If its logic required a sharp distinction between what was constituted, seen, and imagined as natural and what was social—that readers’ criticisms about conventional characters recognized—it also asked if the progress it preserved was natural or social. Science fiction and its readers’ concern with life and its forms were particularly significant because they literally embodied the issue. Evolution, the biological mechanism for change, required an accounting of the transformation from one form to another. It was, in other words, historical. In this sense concerns to delimit and distinguish social and natural change in science fiction asked ultimately about agency within its conception of history. That several of the revelatory discourses in interwar stories were both scientific and historical spoke to this point even as they eventually presented its divided resolution. Science fiction redeemed science’s potential and progress by removing them outside human history. This historical removal extended, indeed, even to the science of time and its possibilities that interwar science fiction imagined.

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

Writing to the editor of Amazing Stories in 1927, Sterling Bunch of Fort Worth, Texas, commented on several stories he had read, some of which he liked and others he disliked. “I much prefer stories like ‘The Visitation,’ in which the whole theme is optimistic, and the destiny of the human race is painted in brighter colors,” he wrote. “Don’t we see enough of the morbid in real life without bringing it too forcibly into fiction? After all, isn’t it just as probable that an invading race from Mars or Venus would bring good to the world as bad? Please give us more Fourth Dimensional stories. I consider this one of the most interesting subjects of modern science. Relativity and the Fourth Dimension have already radically changed our scientific thought,” he explained. “What our ideas and conceptions of the universe will be one hundred years hence no one can say, but it is a safe bet such conceptions will be molded to a great extent by relative and ultra-three-dimensional mathematics.”1 The sentiments Bunch expressed were not atypical. Time travel and travel in other dimensions were popular subjects for writers’ stories, editors’ declarations, and readers’ discussions. Similarly readers evoked Einstein and his theory of relativity in the letters to editors, both to demonstrate their understanding of its physics and mathematics and to call for time travel and dimensional travel stories. Connecting readers, science, and those stories was the idea that time was a fourth dimension. Mathematical extrapolation of spatial dimension to time suggested that it could be traversed in the same way an object or person moved through space. Demonstrated and celebrated as a consequence of Einstein’s theory of special relativity by his mathematics

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teacher in the early 1900s, time’s dimension validated late nineteenth-century fiction’s scientific speculation. Post–World War I experimental confirmation of Einstein’s proposition, contrary to established physics, that gravity curved space legitimized his mathematically based physics, catapulted him from scientific fame to international celebrity, and inspired science fiction to imagine time travel further. In interwar science fiction, however, Einstein’s status was appreciated more than the implications of his developed work. General relativity’s extension of special relativity argued that space and time were curved and that their condition was the consequence of an understandable cosmological history. Writers’ explorations in the 1920s and 1930s of travel in time and across dimensions, however, maintained a linear concept of time that crossed over rather than considered history. This linearity, spatially and mathematically, precluded general relativity’s broader possibilities and historical implications. Interwar time travel stories were, in this sense and ironically, bound to and products of their time. Although their subject was hypothetical and imagined, its discursive field and bounds—what was said, how it was said, and what assumptions underlay it—revealed a conception of time and history that was very much an expression of interwar science, social dynamics, and the place of ordinary individuals within them. Echoing Sterling Bunch’s preference for optimism and brighter-colored destinies, linear time preserved a sense of progress for society and science and made the risk within science fiction’s imagined futures manageable. Traveling forward in time before traveling back maintained the certainty of returning to a known present, leaving the possibilities and paradoxes of changing history’s presence within the present that Einstein’s ideas ultimately suggested for science fiction of another, later era. The modern time-travel story originated before both science fiction and Einstein’s theories of relativity.2 First published in 1895, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine popularized the idea of time travel and the genre of time-travel stories.3 The story adopted and extended ideas about possible extra dimensions popularized in Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novella, Flatland.4 However, while Abbott’s novella was a satire of Victorian society, Wells’s story adapted its mathematics to straightforward adventure and exploration. His titular device, built by the never-named Time Traveller, allowed “travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as [its] driver determines,” and afforded him a series of adventures in the future.5 Traveling to the year 802,701, he

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encountered a transformed world inhabited by the Eloi, small, beautiful, and graceful child-beings living in a lush surface Over-world, and Morlocks, carnivorous, apelike creatures, “bleached, obscene, Nocturnal Things” who dwelled within a harsher, subterranean Under-world. Recovering the Time Machine after the Morlocks stole it, he activated it again to elude their pursuit and continued forward through time past the end of human society to the twilight of Earth itself. From there the Time Traveller returned to the story’s late nineteenth-century present to recount his experiences and then used the device to depart again, never to return. Wells’s vivid depictions of the future, particularly the world of the Eloi and Morlocks, are the parts of his story that have become familiar through its several distillations and adaptations in film, television, and other media. Wells’s original text included an extended explanation of how time travel was possible that other versions omit. The Time Traveller’s return to his present provided a narrative frame for this mathematical discourse. “Space,” the Time Traveller explained, “is spoken of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at right angles to the others.” But “why three dimensions particularly,” he asked, continuing, “why not another direction at right angles to the other three?” Mathematics, he said, allowed the representation of extra dimensions beyond ordinary perception. “You know how on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a figure of a three dimensional solid,” he asked. “Similarly they [mathematicians] think that by models of three dimensions they could represent one of four,” extending analogy. The extra dimension was not merely hypothetically possible, he explained; it existed, only out of apparent sight. “If they could master the perspective of the thing,” the Time Traveller concluded, they could confirm its presence, asking rhetorically tongue-in-cheek, “See?” Building on the possibility of extra dimensions, Wells suggested that time was similarly a dimension of experience. “There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space, except that our consciousness moves along it,” declared his Time Traveller. “Scientific people . . . know very well that time is only a kind of space.”6 Most time-travel stories in the first half of the twentieth century followed this basic premise. Higher-order dimensional geometry and the notion that time was another dimension suggested that people could travel through time as they could through space if they could acquire the ability to see or perceive that extra dimension and a means to traverse it. Reprinting The Time

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Machine in its May 1927 issue, Amazing Stories introduced time travel and its dimensional logic to an interwar reading audience, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s Amazing and its imitators, Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories, published a variety of variations on this basic theme. While these stories and their offshoots, dimensional travel stories, differed in their proposed mechanisms for travel and descriptions of their destinations, they maintained the logic of Wells’s story.7 Stories with divergent subjects—gender dynamics in Francis Flagg’s “An Adventure in Time,” robot technology in Edmond Hamilton’s “The Reign of the Robots,” and political oppression through mind control in Clifford D. Simak’s “The World of the Red Sun,” to use but three examples from Wonder Stories—shared a common assumption of travel through time.8 Interwar America, however, offered a different social and cultural environment for time-travel stories from what Victorian Britain provided for The Time Machine’s original publication. Pulp magazines’ features and readers’ letters, themselves products of postwar publishing, gave voice not only to time travel’s unchanged premise but also to its changed associations. The notion of “time as the fourth dimension” gained new significance, drawing on Einstein’s work on relativity and benefiting from the public’s new and renewed interest in him after World War I. Products of the fiction factory, pulp time-travel stories utilized almost every combination of time, dimension, and travel in this new popular scientific discourse as their bases and occasionally included the idea of relative perspective. Leslie F. Stone’s “The Man with the Four Dimensional Eyes” told the story of a millionaire who hired a scientist to build a machine that allowed him to travel into an extradimensional, hyperspatial world that he was already able to see.9 In Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback penned an editorial acclaiming “The Amazing Einstein.”10 Readers’ letters about time-travel stories almost always cited time as the fourth dimension and often referenced Einstein, occasionally elaborating on his work and its relevance. “Time is a fourth dimension possessed by any body relative to any other body with respect to which it may be in motion,” explained Felix B. Wadel of Tyler, Texas, in a 1929 letter to Amazing Stories a few months after Gernsback’s editorial that also cited the Michelson-Morley experiment and Lorentz-Fitzgerald contractions, research and ideas related to Einstein’s.11 Association with Einstein was no accident. Implications from Einstein’s ideas lent support and credibility to The Time Machine’s premise for time travel after its 1895 publication. Hermann Minkowski’s mathematical formu-

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lation of spacetime in 1908, in the wake of Einstein’s publication detailing special relativity, echoed the propositions of Wells’s fictional Time Traveller more than ten years earlier.12 In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson suggests that Minkowski drew specific inspiration from Wells.13 Einstein’s further work on general relativity established him as a famous and renowned physicist by the end of World War I.14 News coverage of Arthur Eddington and the British Royal Astronomical Society’s expedition to measure the arc of light’s deflection during the 1919 solar eclipse propelled him into a new limelight.15 Scientifically its experimental results confirmed Einstein’s new theories over those predicted by Newton’s theories. Politically and socially in the immediate postwar climate, his iconoclastic intellectual personality, his status as a German Jew, and his public position on scientific internationalism trumped the nationalist perspective some had attached to a German scientist’s ideas triumphing over the epitome of British science. As his twomonth tour of the United States two years later in 1921 confirmed, Einstein had became a celebrity; he was not just a physicist but an iconic scientist within popular culture. Press coverage of him, his work, and his travels as well as publication of many works popularizing his theories made relativity and its associated ideas subjects of great interest and discussion.16 The ideas of spacetime, time as the fourth dimension, and their implications for time travel were part of this sprawling conversation. Einstein’s popular persona also appealed to interwar science fiction and its signature principle, imagining science. Although his physics was squarely based on the findings of the scientific community, Einstein was celebrated for his individual genius.17 His work on special and general relativity demonstrated a distinctive, indeed a special ability to incorporate previous findings into a radically reconceived view of the physical world. To use Thomas Kuhn’s later twentieth-century concept, Einstein’s theories constituted a paradigm shift in physics.18 His celebrity in this regard, however, was not simply intellectual. Discussion of his ideas about relativity and the ideas they were replacing or subsuming often compared the lives and characters of the men who formulated them, Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton, the latter also a publicly celebrated genius. Special relativity represented a synthesis of both Newtonian mechanics and electromagnetism, but comparisons to Einstein’s genius invoked Newton without significant mention of Faraday, Maxwell, and other scientists who had formulated electromagnetism. Other notable twentieth-century physicists who inaugurated paradigm shifts did not draw similar comparisons of genius. Einstein presented his theoretical ideas with

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great certainty publicly and privately, and repetition of memorable statements to this effect reinforced that self-presentation. When asked what if Eddington’s expedition had not verified his predictions, he replied confidently, “I would have been sorry for the dear Lord (Eddington)—the theory is correct.”19 Similarly when presented with experimental evidence suggesting that the speed of light was not constant, he responded, in an often-repeated line about God and nature, “subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not.”20 Adding to Einstein’s reputation was the bold proposition that his theories did not represent experience about the state of the natural world so much as they defined what that experience would actually be. Indeed his solutions to anomalies within classical physics required a leap of imagination beyond perception. Special relativity introduced subjectivity and perspective into physics with its suggestion that every observer in the natural world existed within their own relative frames. What they could see or experience was a product of that perspective, and in a sense distorted. Nonetheless, because the relationship between relative perspectives was precisely understood, those distortions could be calibrated. General relativity extended the notion further. Einstein’s theory radically redefined the notion of space itself. While space was understood previously as an unlimited emptiness, which matter occupied, Einstein proposed instead that matter did not occupy space so much as constitute it, shaping its fabric with material presence. “Physical objects are not in space,” he wrote in an account of his ideas for a general audience, “but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept ‘empty space’ loses its meaning.”21 Einstein’s field equations further defined the relationship of space and time within an idea, spacetime, that cannot be directly observed, and he declared that it, and by implication the universe, was curved and bounded. Spacetime and its curvature had to be imagined, often with the aid of descriptive metaphors and visual diagrams that showed the projection of higher-dimension geometry into three-dimensional representations. The diminished place of experience within these theories, and their reliance on mathematical formulations, drew their share of critics, particularly among scientists. The renowned physicist J. J. Thomson famously declared, “We have Einstein’s space, de Sitter’s space, expanding universes, contracting universes, vibrating universes, mysterious universes.” He continued, “the pure mathematician may create universes just by writing down an equation, and indeed if he is an individualist he can have a universe of his own.”22 Nevertheless, while Einstein’s work and what came to be called theoretical—in both senses of the word—physics required belief beyond experience, their

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explanations of the physical world remained solidly scientific because they generated consistent and predictable results. Such results only indirectly verified the theories that predicted them, but they were still experimental findings from actual observations. Part of the excitement over Eddington’s expedition, one of the rare occasions when experimental results corroborating Einstein’s hypotheses could be obtained, derived from the tension about the relative places of experiment, observation, and mathematics within physics. Confirmation of Einstein and relativity was also confirmation for theoretical prediction and for imagination over experience. In this sense Einstein’s ideas and persona affirmed interwar science fiction’s all-ready encouraging impulse to hypothesize and speculate. Its democratic ethos argued for consideration of any and all opinions. In an October 1930 letter to Amazing Stories, Victor Endersby introduced several ideas that science and science fiction had inspired him to consider. Part of a larger series of correspondence that discussed animal gigantism in Dr. Miles J. Breuer’s story “The Hungry Guinea Pig,” at the end of this letter, Endersby switched from arguing Breuer’s original contentions to broader cosmological speculation. “I submit the possibility that, since the Universe is constantly kinetic, in evolution in all its parts, including matter itself, the ‘laws of nature’ may not themselves be static,” he said. “The gravitational constant, among many other things considered permanent, might be in a state of change,” he suggested, “slow, but definite over aeons,” He concluded, “Anyway, it’s worth thinking about.”23 Endersby’s new suggestions served a different purpose from the distinction he marked for himself previously arguing Breuer’s facts. His conclusion that his ideas were “worth thinking about” suggested that he might be correct and that verification justified speculation. His faith that truth would prevail echoed Einstein’s publicized comments about his theories being correct and sentiments that many science fiction readers shared. “Facts and truth have always been kept from man,” a reader proclaimed in Science Wonder Stories. “Always we were taught (and ordered!) to bend humble knee to the false gods and creeds, to the monsters of our own creation, never to ask why or to doubt.” Marie La France, in a letter to Amazing Stories about the possibility of life on other worlds, asked, “Who knows what germ of future truth lies in the scientific stories of today?” “It’s astonishing how many things come true,” a 1939 Time magazine article quoted the veteran writer Ray Cummings exclaiming about science fiction.24 This celebration of truth in speculation, however, contained several

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complications. While repeating and explaining established facts marked one’s ability and distinction within science, such distinction did not translate into similar ability innovating and advancing science. Moreover in practice scientific truth is systematic. Its consistency requires change that maintains a sense not of continuity but of historical accountability.25 A single speculative hypothesis may be proven true, but any new truth must also take into account other established knowledge. Its verification, absent that accounting, is a truth that accomplishes little. At face value Endersby’s propositions were plausible and possible. Nevertheless they went against the general logical principle that the simplest explanation is also the best explanation—what is also known as the law of parsimony or Occam’s razor.26 In other words, while the premise that constants (gravitational or otherwise) change could be true, an explanation or reason for why that change would occur is also needed to accept that premise scientifically. Truth is a necessary but insufficient basis for scientific reasoning. Even if they proved accurate, Endersby’s speculations were accidental because they were arbitrary. Perhaps inspired by connotations of the term “relativity”—that associated it with coincidence, accident, and arbitrariness—this type of theorizing only superficially resembled the science of Einstein’s theory. As creative and innovative as Einstein’s thinking was, it was consistently systematic. Despite the attention given his solving anomalies within existing scientific theories, his work combined anomaly and theory to produce a new, comprehensive framework. Moreover relativity was not random. Indeed the opposite notion was so central to Einstein’s ideas that he considered calling his theory one of “invariance” rather than “relativity.” His discomfort with some of the conclusions of quantum mechanics, specifically Heisenberg’s unfortunately named uncertainty principle, led to his famous and equally misunderstood declaration that “God does not play dice.”27 General relativity not only reconceptualized space and time but did so with attention to particular and specific detail. The existing circumstance and condition of the physical universe—its understood invariance—provided the basis for Einstein’s ideas about their relative interdependence. While his popularity inspired scientific speculation that could be arbitrary, Einstein’s own science was rooted in a historical sensibility. To borrow a distinction from the evolutionary biologist G. G. Simpson, Einstein’s ideas combined historical and ahistorical scientific perspectives.28 In the ahistorical sciences specific circumstance is not of great importance or significance methodologically. In classical mechanics where or under what

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circumstances an atom or molecule may exist does not affect their predicted behavior. The term “atom” was adopted in modern science originally because what it named was not only a basic and indivisible component of matter but also individually atomistic: one atom of hydrogen behaves the same as every other hydrogen atom. Although atoms carry distinctive properties—mass and atomic number, for instance—that distinguish them from other kinds of atoms, those distinctions reinforce their interchangeability. In the historical sciences, on the other hand, circumstances are central. What rock formations exist where, what terrain exists where, and what the current climate is at a particular location are necessary and prerequisite concerns for geology, topography, and meteorology and climatology. Their specific conditions allow connections to be made between what exists in the present, what existed in the past, and what occurred in between, historical connections that reveal the processes that shape the natural world.29 Those same conditions are also the limiting preconditions for what can happen in the future. Knowing that evolution occurs, for instance, does not suggest that any organism—or more specifically species—can evolve into any imaginable form. Species evolve only from species that presently exist. In this sense evolution is historically contingent: its history and future depend on the exact circumstances of the natural world. Actualism is a foundational principle within the historical sciences for this reason. The premise that change in the past is understandable in terms of processes that occur in the present—which Endersby’s speculation also violated—requires ordinary connection between observed phenomena absent evidence of extraordinary processes or forces outside the established purview.30 Evolution follows a historical course where speciation adds new and different metaphorical “branches” to an already existing genealogical “tree.” If scientists observe a linear progression of evolutionary forms, its linearity is only coincidental because the progression followed one specific path among several that developed. Similarly, because the lines in evolutionary genealogies mark departures in their historical development—species from species, genus from genus, and so forth—they mark the limits of evolution’s adaptive possibilities. Species and other observed evolutionary forms that appear to develop from one line across to another defy history’s contingency and require explanation that resolves their contradiction. Relativity synthesized these seemingly opposite approaches. It folded the particularity of natural circumstance into precisely defined mathematics and mechanisms. Not only was historical contingency a significant aspect of relativity; it also provided the means to explain, in precise detail, previously

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unexplainable phenomena. The calibration of relative positions—in spacetime—under special relativity explained the difference in the results observed from those positions. General relativity similarly defined the shape and curvature of space and time relative to the distribution and location of matter that compromise it.31 Relativity is also predictive in what might be called a historical sense. While it does not determine what will occur in the future, it sets predictive parameters for what may or may not occur. In a popular scientific formulation from the late twentieth century that derived from Einstein’s conceptualization of spacetime, if there is enough matter in the known universe given its age and the rate at which it is expanding, it will either continue to expand indefinitely or it will expand eventually to a specific limit where it will then collapse back upon itself—where it will then expand again in a “Big Bang” similar to the one that created our current universe.32 The divergent cosmological destinies depend entirely on one historically contingent condition: how much matter there is where. Similar constraints inform contemporary astrophysicists’ search for “dark matter” and “dark energy.”33 Yet while Einstein’s theory of relativity maintained a historical sensibility with its attention to particular circumstance, it remained an example of natural history, not social history. His introduction of subjectivity and perspective into physics, ironically, left no room for human agency. His revised universe was subject to history, but on terms that are largely outside most ordinary day-to-day lived experience. While they affect the physical universe profoundly, the differences his theories predict are only observable—from the perspective of most people—in extreme circumstances or on rare occasions.34 Relativity, as much as it inspired and awed casual and professional observers, is an example of what the historian Fernand Braudel, working within the tradition of the French Annales school of historiography, called the longue durée.35 The long historical perspective of its natural environment, its slow and therefore apparent lack of change, forms a backdrop for the faster-paced course of human history. Einstein—the man, his ideas, his persona, and the perceptions they inspired—figured the same way for interwar science fiction readers and other popular science enthusiasts. Their engagement with him only partially derived from a desire to comprehend his ideas. The popular scientific discourse that engagement produced also, if not as significantly, reflected the appeal of those ideas through the prisms of their interests. If there was no place for human agency in Einstein’s ideas, agency was at the core of popular science’s evocation of Einstein; and historical agency was at core of his association with time travel.

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The significance of these concerns can be seen, ironically, in the incongruity of Wells’s premise for time travel with Einstein’s ideas. The notion that time is a fourth dimension that can be traversed makes sense only from a perspective that precludes other implications about time and dimension within his work and when they were developed. Einstein developed his ideas about relativity piecemeal and over the course of more than a decade. He first arrived at what is now called “special relativity” working on electrodynamics in 1905. His subsequent efforts synthesized those results with work on gravity and subsumed special relativity within general relativity’s broader framework. In his early career Einstein was less concerned to develop formal mathematical underpinnings for his ideas about how natural forces worked in the physical world. It was his former university math professor Minkowski who published special relativity’s mathematical basis and introduced the idea of spacetime. That idea helped popularize the concept of time as a fourth dimension, but as the result primarily of Einstein’s work, not of Minkowski’s. Issues of originality and credit aside, the notion was appropriate with regard to special relativity in the prewar period but would be complicated in the interwar years by Einstein’s continued efforts. In his work leading to general relativity, Einstein relied much more on mathematics as a method to flesh out his ideas about physics. The hallmark of general relativity’s revision of the physical view of the universe, the curvature of space—or more accurately of spacetime—relied specifically on the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometries. The results of special relativity were still correct but recast within this new mathematics. Einstein demonstrated that Minkowski’s earlier formulation of spacetime was a limited instance of a more general set of mathematical expressions, the Lorentz-Fitzgerald field equations. The advantage of their formulation lay in its independence from a specific geometric framework. Minkowski’s spacetime assumed a Euclidean geometry in which dimensions are flat, the same geometry that also informed Newton’s mechanics and conventional notions of infinite space. Within general relativity’s concern with gravity’s effects, the geometric foundation it provided special relativity became the special reductive case in which gravity has no effect. Where there is significant gravitation, the more general model of a Lorentzian manifold—a mathematical expression that describes the topology of simple and complex geometries—better represented the shape of spacetime. The dimension, or more properly the space, a manifold represents need not be flat. It may be curved, twisted, folded, or indeed have any number of loops or holes—depending on one’s perspective—similar to the hole

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of a doughnut or the loop of a coffee cup handle. The combined product of several dimensions, spacetime in general relativity was not only curved but also had topological features. When a sufficiently large amount of matter is compressed in a small enough space, for instance, spacetime curves indefinitely into itself, forming a Schwarzschild singularity or what is now more commonly known as a “black hole.”36 General relativity’s scientific achievement showed how a more geometrically flexible mathematics, that subsumed Minkowski and Newton’s narrower Euclidean geometric sensibilities, also explained the physical effect that gravity and matter had on space. Including non-Euclidean geometric perspectives, however, complicates the sense of a dimension in Minkowski’s formulation, its popularization, and its basis for Wells’s time travel. Dimensions within Euclidean geometry are planar—or flat—with straight axes that extend indefinitely. These orthogonal lines help to locate coordinates within what is presumed to be empty and never-ending space. Dimensions within non-Euclidean geometries define the shape and extent of the space they represent. They follow straight lines in a conventional sense, but only relative to, and locally within, the space they define and not in an absolute sense. Lines of latitude and longitude, for instance, are straight when followed along the curvature of Earth but curved from any perspective that sees Earth as a sphere. They do not extend indefinitely but wrap back upon themselves. From this perspective the premise of traveling through a dimension makes sense only within the particular geometry of the space it defines. In a planar dimension, travel along a line is indefinite, never arriving at a point where one has previously been. In a spherical dimension such as the surface of the earth, travel along a line will eventually return the traveler to places he has previously visited, provided he travels far enough. In more convoluted dimensions, travel along lines is further complicated. Traveling in a line that passes through a black hole makes no physical sense by definition, even if it remains richly suggestive to the imagination.37 Despite Einstein’s relative complications of time’s dimension, time travels presented through science fiction in the 1920s and 1930s adhered to a Euclidean sensibility, following Wells’s original formulation and premise. In this sense, while editors, writers, and readers evoked Einstein to proclaim their possibilities, this was done ironically for his prestige, not the full implication of his work. General relativity, spacetime, and spacetime’s non-Euclidean basis circulated in popular scientific discourse, but the potential they offered science fiction remained untapped until later in the twentieth century. Time’s status as the fourth dimension and linear dimensions generally over-

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shadowed black holes as subjects for its discussion and imagination. When it came to stories about time, interwar science fiction wanted to travel. Interestingly, Wells’s original story allowed for readings that tempered exploration of time travel and inoculated him against criticism about its actual scientific viability. Imbedded in the Time Traveller’s exposition of time travel is the suggestion that one’s experience of such travel is mental or psychological. Consciousness moves through time but, like memory, is fallible or flawed. That idea, combined with the stress that the Time Traveller exhibits the more he travels in time, suggests that the Time Traveller’s adventures in the future might be products of his imagination. After returning from the future and before he leaves to travel again in time, the Time Traveller exclaims, “I’m damned if it isn’t all going.” He declares, “This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory,” and then wonders, “Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream?”38 Although he is the protagonist in the story’s proposed time travels, the Time Traveller is not its narrator. He arrives midway in the story and in his travels to give an account of everything that has passed thus far to the actual first-person narrator, who then relates his adventures secondhand. The nested narrative frames allowed different perspectives on the story’s recounted events and their actual veracity: the Time Traveller’s straightforward accounting of his travels in time and the narrator’s skeptical perspective that wonders if the Time Traveller’s accounts are actually true. The Time Traveller’s disappearance at the conclusion of the story merges the two perspectives: his narrative presence disappears and with it, the consciousness of his time traveled experiences. The only evidence that remains are two small flowers he leaves behind in the story’s present, given to him by Weena, an Eloi he befriended in the future—if he actually traveled there.39 Interwar science fiction was more definitive about traveling through time. Time travelers moved freely back and forth in time with no complication or caveat. Nathan Schachner and Arthur Zagat’s “Back to 20,000 a.d.” was not only a sequel to their earlier “Into 20,000 a.d.!”; the story’s title also spoke to the ability to travel back and forth between points in time.40 While time-travel stories depended on the premise of traveling through time, the experience of those travels was neither interesting nor important. In Francis Flagg’s “An Adventure in Time,” Bayers made this point, recounting the sensation of his time travel: “I was conscious only of a sickening swoop, a moment of utter disintegration. Beyond that I experienced—I saw—nothing.” His account is interesting not only for its description of the experience but

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also because, in an example of intertextual meta-reference and comment, he disputed Wells’s version of time travel where the Time Traveller sees the passage of time, albeit at the Time Machine’s accelerated rate.41 Similarly the actual time traveled was no more significant than the experience of the travel. The Time Traveller’s 800,000-year leap into the future became 20,000 for Schachner and Zagat’s Tom Jenkins and 1,050 years for Flagg’s Bayers. Many time-travel stories did not provide any chronological references to gauge how far their travelers had gone. What made time travel compelling was where—or more properly when— the time travelers went. While automobiles, airplanes, and other new forms of transportation had entered the public imagination at the turn of the century, tourism and travel industries based on them developed in the interwar period. Nascent airlines competed with each other in the new business of carrying passengers and cargo on airplanes as well as other forms of air transportation such as dirigibles. The interests of large industries, automobile and tire manufacturers, and gasoline producers aligned with the concerns of city and small-town chambers of commerce and local businesses to produce a network of roads, service stations, and lodging and encouraged middle-class Americans to explore the diversity of American life within that network.42 Flying across the nation or taking the newly established U.S. Highway system, travelers in the 1920s and 1930s changed time when they crossed time zones—first implemented by railroads in the late nineteenth century but formally adopted by the United States in 1918 and most other nations in the 1920s.43 Time travel in this sense constituted a form of tourism within science fiction. Time machines offered, literally, temporal mobility and allowed readers to explore other times, particularly to consider social differences. Schachner and Zagat borrowed Wells’s extrapolation of human social development to consider its racial implications. While the Eloi and Morlocks represented divergent extremes of wealth and leisure versus work and labor, both groups were white. The Robots and Brains in Schachner and Zagat’s future represented the same divergent social evolution but expressed it in terms of black and white skin as well as large and small forms. They further distinguished these two male “races” from female Mothers. Flagg’s future drew its inspiration from Lewis Morgan’s anthropological work to explore the implications of a matriarchal society.44 Other time-travel stories, such as Clifford D. Simak’s “The World of the Red Sun,” followed Wells’s description of a posthuman world to consider futures inhabited by nonhuman life forms.

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Time travel was the purest expression of interwar science fiction’s general interest in the future. The idea of time as a dimension placed the past, present, and future within a single historical line that extended toward a horizon of possibility. “I agree with your authors that time is infinite in both directions. Thus, there is a connection between past, present, and future,” Thomas Cassidy wrote to Amazing Stories in a 1928 letter about “Time and the Fourth Dimension.”45 This linear sense of time and history linked readers and science fiction to a sense of progress. Science fiction “teaches us to imagine the future of our world by that change which has come about from the past to the present,” Samuel Shackman of Brooklyn explained in a 1927 letter. “Scientific development the last few decades has been marvelous,” he declared. “Fifty years ago, who would have thought of seeing a person who is miles away and speaking to him at the same time!” he continued, citing examples for his case. “Who would have thought that one can travel from one continent across more than 3,000 miles to another in less than a day and a half? Similarly who can tell what fifty years hence will be?” he asked.46 Linear time and progressive history provided a powerful situation for interwar science fiction’s foundation in verifiable truth and readers’ explanations of fact. This nexus of associations was most powerfully expressed in professions of science fiction’s capacity for prophecy. Readers, editors, and writers alike referred frequently to scientific innovation and technological inventions accurately predicted in science fiction stories as reasons for their enthusiasm. Having just criticized readers for insisting too much on scientific accuracy and not allowing writers to write creatively, Marie La France declared, “History shows us that in the past, many a wild tale has been a prophetic one. Tales have been written of flying air boats, submarine travels, projected pictures, voices, invisible rays, in the days of practical witch-craft. These are now accepted as matters of course.”47 In his retrospective memoir about his early days reading Astounding Stories, Arthur C. Clarke devoted a substantial portion of it to the same task of verifying science fiction’s predictions.48 Readers’ citations of science fiction’s prophetic truth were almost always true. The truth of their references, however, lay more in readers’ belief in science and science fiction than in any particular predictive ability. Verification of prophetic prediction complemented readers’ recitations of established fact. The one relived past experiences of scientific discovery; the other promised its future recurrence; together they fostered an individually collective sense of science. Participation in these linked practices was, in this sense, more

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important than compiling a comprehensive record to measure its efficacy. Science fiction fans’ enumerations of predicted science resembled baseball fans’ recitations of players’ feats and games’ plays with one significant difference: science fiction fans’ citations were anecdotal, not statistical. Readers and editors evaluated science fiction’s prophecies individually with the perspective of hindsight, and they did not acknowledge the relative success of science fiction’s prophecies compared to its failed predictions. Indeed they rarely, if ever, mentioned instances where science fiction predicted incorrectly. Instead interwar science fiction’s accurate prediction of scientific developments was the result of persistent repetition: make enough predictions, and some were bound to come true. “Extrapolate they do—far and unconscionably,” Harry Bates said of his pulp science fiction writers. “Zing, in one second, they’re in the middle of a science-silly but awfully science-seeming culture in Andromeda. Far, far from any entangling alliances with the science of Earth. Way way out.”49 Actual predictive success, however, was neither the point nor the purpose of these prophetic claims. Prophecy promised a future of continued progress, and progress contained change. “The passing of time and its effects upon us,” Samuel Shackman observed, mark “the all-important consequences of that one word, ‘change’ means, most in our lives.” This enthusiasm for change was a modern perspective. Scientific and technological advances had not only fundamentally altered the way many people lived; they had also introduced a cultural expectation for continued change. While some social observers expressed concern and anxiety about this condition, those involved with interwar science fiction found it a source of inspiration. “Science-Fiction will always remain to me an Ideal,” observed J. Harvey Haggard, a reader who later became a writer. “[It is] something priceless beyond powers or riches, something beyond the sordid world and its monotonous realities.” Manuel Noble of New York wrote in the same vein, “If I am correct, the purpose of this kind of story is to stimulate the imagination, and to take one’s mind away from the monotony of life.” According to Le Roy Christian Bashore, 310 North Seventh Street, Lebanon, Pennsylvania, the magazine Amazing “kindles the spark of adventure that lies in all mankind. To some it is more than a joy—a relief from the worries and hardship of the day.”50 Science fiction’s idealism and faith in progress extended throughout the interwar period. Readers’ declarations of inspiration certainly resonated with the general euphoria and expansion of the 1920s, born out of a postwar release of the tensions within forbearance, vigilance, and reservation. Excite-

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ment over Einstein, Lindbergh and the Lindy Hop, radio broadcasts, motion pictures, automobile road races and vacations, barnstorming pilots and air shows, graceful “sky lining” dirigibles: all were part and parcel of a cultural moment that also gave rise to science fiction. Science fiction’s inspiration resonated equally, albeit on a different frequency, with the downturn in economic and social conditions in the 1930s. As the historian Robert McElvaine reminds us, the “Great Depression” became “great” only from historical hindsight.51 Not knowing that the economic turmoil and downturn would last into the 1940s, people in the early and mid-1930s could only confront their new circumstances with the lessons of their experiences and the ideals of their principles. Their attempts to reconcile their lived experiences with their expectations marked both the 1920s and the 1930s. Caught in the grasp of worldwide depression, Americans sought security in their cherished values, and for some, the fiction of science provided such a means. “At the present time, when humanity finds itself in the throes of a world-wide depression,” Hugo Gernsback wrote in a 1931 editorial, “everybody is looking for light on the subject; and people ask themselves what is the cause of the depression.”52 He observed, “It is the common talk of the misinformed, as well of the so-called informed classes, that the present unemployment situation is due to the ma­chine.” Responding to those and other critics of “our ‘Machine Civilization,’” he argued instead that machines increased employment. “I will go on record and state,” he declared, that “all useful inventions and useful machines so far invented have not only helped the human race socially, but have been the direct cause of keeping millions of people employed.”53 Only the “wonders of the machine age,” Gernsback maintained, offered a solution to the crisis. “The problem was psychological,” agreed Donald Wollheim, a science fiction reader and fan who later became an influential editor in his own right. “The problem was that you had no future,” he continued, expressing concerns that prompted him to form the socialist-leaning Michelist science fiction fan movement of the late 1930s. “I mean, you were eighteen, nineteen, and there were absolutely no jobs, no openings, no nothing. It was an endless futility—you knew what you wanted to do,” he said, “but there wasn’t a chance in the world.”54 More-optimistic fans focused more on what they wanted and less on its probability. “Surely wonder stories will hit the peak now!” Raymond A. Palmer declared in the first years of the Depression. “With all this staring him in the face,” he argued about science fiction’s proven predictions, “how can anyone doubt that the depression is over? Hurrah for wonder stories,

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prosperity’s messenger boy!” If the present held no future for science fiction readers, a different future was promised in the fictions of science they read and imagined. Its ideal presented a path over the visible historical horizon toward an imagined present that might hold hope. “Science-Fiction will always remain to me an Ideal,” J. Harvey Haggard recalled, “something priceless beyond powers or riches, something beyond the sordid world and its monotonous realities. A golden gate to a new Utopian domain, it lay stretched before my inspired vision. And it was a vision which the hardships of the world and the trials of life could never take from me.” Interwar science fiction presented an almost quixotic optimism despite the Depression’s bleak circumstances. Will Rogers captured the paradoxes within this sentiment in his perceptive remark that “we are the first nation in the history of the world to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.”55 A linear sense of time was important in this respect. Situating past, present, and future along the same historical arc, writers used the future to reflect upon and assure the present. Earl and Otto Binder’s 1935 “Robot Aliens” presented a calm and recovered 1955 world that offered an optimistic historical perspective on the Depression. “That it was a tranquil world,” their narrator declared, “may be judged by the many blessings that came upon civilization after the dreadful Depression of 1929-35.” The future story’s history provided a narrative for the end of the Depression in the reader’s and writer’s present: “There came a miraculous re­juvenation of the United States in 1935, and its effect swiftly started the ball rolling and took the yoke of stagnation from the world.” Its specific detail of historical recovery addressed what were really contemporary concerns. “The unemployed had been put back to work; factories had opened full blast; currency had stabilized and circu­lated freely, and the threat of war had died to faint rumblings.”56 Failure of this interwar science fiction prediction did not dilute its assurance or purpose. This purpose tempered the consideration of future social development and evolution in interwar time-travel stories. While they borrowed Wells’s premise of traveling through time to compare the future to the present, they reached different conclusions about the future, the present, and progress. Throughout his various adventures in time, Wells’s original Time Traveller was explicitly retrospective in his social commentary. His encounters with the Eloi and the Morlocks inspired him to hypothesize and then revise his opinions about the implications of late nineteenth-century social concerns, specifically socialism, communism, and the division of labor and wealth. His conclusion ultimately, however, neither argued nor assessed their relative

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merits. Traveling so far forward into the future, the Time Traveller moved past the historical point where progress reached its pinnacle and encountered what he concluded was “humanity on the wane.” The Eloi and Morlocks represented two different paths into decline from this “too perfect triumph of man.” Technological progress had so perfected the comforts of people’s lives that they had forgotten the significance of work and the struggle to live. “This has ever been the fate of energy in security,” the Time Traveller declared. “It takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.” His perspective on progress and humanity, albeit long-term, was pessimistic. If time formed a line that could be traveled, human history and progress followed an arc reaching a height from which it must inevitably fall. Human history was not the full extent of natural history, however. The Time Traveller continued forward into the future to explore the remaining history of a posthuman world. Time-travel stories in the 1920s and 1930s generally explored human futures from a less pessimistic perspective. While all the places science fiction imagined resolved its tensions, time travel’s resolution was uniquely concrete because history—not space or dimension—was its mode of transformation. Other worlds expressed the same potential as other times, but time travel’s imagined possibilities were products of history; their realization was its progress.57 At the same time, interwar time-travel stories followed a peculiar logic. Contemporary characters who traveled to futures expressing extrapolated present concerns represented present values. In this sense resolving future dilemmas affirmed their past, reaffirming the reformed present. Francis Flagg’s envisioned future in “An Adventure in Time” was a matriarchal dystopia and a cautionary tale about the essential virtue of traditional gender roles and social organization. In their various journeys to the world of 20,000 a.d., Ned, Sid, and Tom, Schachner and Zagat’s plain folk heroes from the 1930s, always conveyed the sensibilities of their point of origin and eventually restored its socially divided future world to true, Golden Age humans. The circumstances of Edmond Hamilton’s dire machine future in “The Reign of the Robots” were not actually prevented by his protagonists. Perhaps echoing the possibility that Wells presented in The Time Machine, its future turned out to be an elaborate scene staged in the present. Although his adventures in the twentieth-fifth century are technically not time-travel stories because he did not return to the present, Tony Rogers’s triumph against the Han Airlords in the Second War of American Independence affirmed twentieth-century virtue over its future degradation.

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Such affirmation similarly inspired interwar explorations of posthuman futures. In Clifford D. Simak’s “The World of the Red Sun,” the triumph of Harl and Bill, fellow travelers in time, over the great tyrannical brain GolanKirt was the triumph of twentieth-century virtue over future oppression. Locked in a struggle with Golan-Kirt’s mind-control powers, they resorted in the end to their humanity, to their emotions, finding that simple laughter long forgotten in the future world defied the great brain. Golan-Kirt “was beaten, beaten at last by men from out of a forgotten age. . . . The twentieth century men felt his dread power lift from them, sensed the despair which surged through him.” The end came swiftly thereafter. “The time revolvers of the time-travelers came up almost simultaneously. This time the sights lined on the brain. There was no power to ward off the danger.” A roar of guns, and the men of the twentieth century had won their gritty victory. In a final twist, Harl and Bill found themselves prisoners of the forceful stream of history when they discovered that they could not reverse their course and return to the present. Attempting to travel back in time, they continued forward to a further future where they came upon crumbling, eroded statues of themselves commemorating their future and past triumphs in the world of the red sun. Humankind had become extinct, but its victory remained in the images of the two time travelers from the 1930s.58 The sentiment echoed the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd’s observation in the 1930s that America in transition recalled R. H. Tawney’s famous statement: “they walked reluctantly backwards into the future, lest a worse thing should befall them.”59 “The World of the Red Sun” was a rare story that illustrated a second dimension to time’s linearity. Mathematically linear functions express operations and actions that are time-independent and in a sense reversible. Motion in a straight line—assuming a Euclidean geometry—is the exemplary case. Move a ball from one place to another, and it is straightforward to move it back to its original location by reversing the original act of motion. Nonlinear functions are time-dependent and not reversible.60 Pour red paint into a can of white paint and stir. The paints form a series of complex patterns of red and white spirals and whorls with each stir. Those patterns and the stirs that produce them can be precisely expressed mathematically, depending on the paints’ density, relative quantity, and other factors, but the process they describe is irreversible. Each stir of the mix makes a new pattern out of the previous one but destroys it in the process. Because each produces the next in turn, every new pattern depends not only on its immediate predecessor but also on every pattern that preceded it. The patterns form a sequential series,

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but the series is genealogical, expressing its accumulated production rather than a simple linear progression. History’s passage, not time’s progress, sustained Simak’s story, limiting Harl and Bill’s ability to reverse the direction of their time travels. Interwar readers and writers were not unaware of these issues.61 Thomas Cassidy’s 1928 letter about “Time and the Fourth Dimension” argued against time travel’s viability because time was not history. If time set the dimension for history’s passage, history remained a specific accumulation of events that influenced one another. “The past is never dead,” he declared. “Things in the present are so because of the impress of events in past time.” He continued, pressing history’s contingency, “Likewise, the future will be what it will be because of the impress of events, both past and present. . . . The future will never be what it might have been but for today.”62 The story provoking his reaction, A. Hyatt Verrill’s “The Astounding Discoveries of Doctor Mentiroso,” was, however, its author’s attempt to poke fun at time travel.63 While Cassidy and other readers strenuously and seriously objected to the lengths to which the tale stretched the idea of time travel, editors and other readers pointed out clues suggesting that the story was a spoof. “Esnesnon,” the substance that the story’s protagonist, Doctor Mentiroso, discovered, allowed him to control the fourth dimension was the word “nonsense” spelled backward. Similarly, “Mentiroso” was a Latin-derived term that loosely translated into “lying phenomenon.” While the Lying Doctor’s exploits may not have been interesting, Verrill’s gimmick and the outrage it provoked were popular enough that Mentiroso returned in several sequels. Cassidy’s relationship of time to history informed Murray Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time,” in which a series of strange phenomena began altering local environments and conditions around the world in 1935.64 Miscellaneously reporting those episodes, the story also interwove the adventures of a group of college students and their mathematics instructor from northern Virginia in the situation. Exploring the sudden appearance of a sequoia forest north of their campus, Professor Minott abruptly abducted students, taking them from the forest to the Potomac basin, where they encountered a village of Chinese peasants. Explaining the historical and regional incongruity, he revealed that an upheaval of nature had upset both space and time. Repeating time travel’s original premise that “time is a dimension,” Minott added a wrinkle to its mathematical implication. “In imaginative travels into the future, . . . we assume that the future is a line instead of a coordinate,” he noted, “a path instead of a direction. We assume that if we travel to futureward, there

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is but one possible destination.” That assumption “ignore[s] the possibility of traveling to the eastward in any other line than due east,” he said, explaining its flaw, “forgetting that there is northeast and southeast and a large number of intermediate points. . . . We talk of three dimensions and one present and one future,” but “there is a theoretical necessity—a mathematical necessity—for assuming more than one future. There are an indefinite number of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks’ in time.” Following Minott’s logic and his suggestion to “start a hundred years back,” Blake, one of the students, realized their implication. “As there must be any number of futures,” he reasoned, “there must have been any number of pasts besides those written down in our histories. And—it would follow that there are any number of what you might call ‘presents.’”65 As its title declared, Leinster’s story did not involve travel through time but rather sidewise in or across it.66 Anticipating the cataclysm, Professor Minott had prepared arms, ammunition, and textbooks and kidnapped the students to enlist them in his campaign to conquer its changed world. The world’s altered topography combined the overlapping geographies of several possible histories, their respective regions shifting back and forth from one time path to another. These periodic oscillations, which were accompanied by an experience of vertigo, allowed the inhabitants of one region temporarily to cross its natural “fault” lines and enter its neighbors’ alternative present. Journeying into several regions and their respective presents in this manner, as the students struggled with Minott’s leadership and plan, their group met and fought Norsemen, Confederate soldiers, Native Americans, Romans, and dinosaurs, among others. When, having fled a fierce firefight between Romans and Confederates into a Carboniferous jungle, another oscillation revealed a region in their original time and space across a stream, Blake and the others seized the opportunity to return to its historical path. Minott and Lucy Blair, who decided to rejoin him at the last moment, remained behind to pursue their separate manifest destiny, vanishing as a final convulsion closed the stream’s temporary temporal fault. Rejecting the reductive linear path of most interwar time-travel stories, Leinster still accepted time’s mathematical linearity. Connecting space and time allowed Leinster and Minott to argue that their respective dimensions constituted a field of possible historical paths, the premise informing Leinster’s group’s exploratory journey.67 At the same time that connection was metaphorical and not actually consequential. Borrowing, if not directly referencing, Minkowski’s spacetime geometry and Einstein’s work more broadly,

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Leinster did not account for the comprehensive interdependence of circumstances they also required. Although Minott and the students’ time travels were exciting for what the travelers experienced, they were not historically eventful. Through encounters and battles with peoples from divergent histories the group had no discernible impact on the regions they entered, at least within the scope of the story, because they left without seeing their effect. Suggesting the historical import of decisions, of choosing different routes in time and space, the one decision the students made, to take a separate path from that of Minott and Lucy, returned them to their original time and space. Their choice, moreover, effectively reversed their travels and their possible historical effect. Within two weeks of the group’s return, the oscillations in space and time, despite Minott’s dire prediction that they might destroy the universe, ceased as suddenly and inexplicably as they had started. In this sense, while it innovated interwar time travel, Leinster’s story also reinforced its linearity mathematically and historically. Indeed his and other writers’ variants as well as readers’ letters testified to the predominance of this imaginative mode. Enabling travel through time, most interwar timetravel stories returned their travelers from their adventures to an unchanged present. Moreover, while time’s dimension allowed for travel backward and forward in time, most stories explored its implications for the future, not the past. Where time travelers traveled back in time, they returned from travels first and forward to the future. This focus on the future allowed time-travel stories to explore historical themes while maintaining historical agency and its potential for progress. Avoiding too close a comparison of time and history, it finessed the complications of historical contingency. Traveling to the past, time travelers might alter the historical circumstances where and when they traveled and thereby alter the present to which they returned. While “Sideways in Time” raised and explored spacetime’s several possible historical paths—or alternative timelines, as they are known today—its travelers moved between their presents, not their futures or pasts, and similarly avoided the consequences of their travels. Nathan Schachner’s “Ancestral Voices” was a rare interwar story to consider the present’s past contingency. Like Leinster’s “Sidewise in Time,” whose publication it preceded, amid a series of miscellaneous personal vignettes, Schachner’s tale followed the exploits of a scientist, Pennypacker, who had invented a time machine.68 Headstrong and proud, he insisted on demonstrating his device conclusively by traveling to the past himself despite his assistant’s warning about its dangers. Transported to Aquileia on the Adriatic

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coast, he arrived in the year 452 a.d. in the midst of Attila’s sack and destruction of the city. When an approaching Hun, who appears oddly familiar, attacked him, Pennypacker drew his gun and shot the Hun dead. In a surprise, the time machine returned to 1935 bearing not Pennypacker but the dead Hun’s body. Pennypacker’s travel and action in time, the story reveals, affected history with direct personal consequence. The vaguely familiar Hun he killed incidentally was his ancestor and that of other people in the story’s scenes, and his premature death had eliminated him, them, and all his other descendants from history. Their “Ancestral Voices” could no longer be heard. In this sense, exploring time travel’s implication, Schachner’s story addressed its historical contingency, not its dimensional place. At the same time, intended primarily as a satirical critique of racial purity in the 1930s, which Schachner explained in a letter accompanying the story in Astounding, its view of history was social, without addressing social and natural history’s interdependence. As readers pointed out in their letters, if in the story’s altered present Pennypacker and his relatives no longer existed, within the scope of the story’s narrative their memories and the results of their actions still existed.69 It was this natural premise and the dilemma it presented for time travel that Ray Bradbury addressed in his 1952 “A Sound of Thunder.”70 A cautionary tale of hunters traveling to the past to shoot dinosaurs, the story embraced history and its contingency fully. Concerned about their uncertain social and legal acceptability and taking pains to avoid unnecessary scrutiny, the operators of the story’s time safari scrupulously prepared against the consequences of disturbing the past. They scouted and marked targets already destined to die in advance and provided a floating antigravity path for the story’s ahistorical hunters to walk on and oxygen masks for them to wear in order to avoid disturbing the grass, underbrush, and atmosphere of the past climate their safari visited. “We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past,” Travis, the safari leader, said. “A Time Machine is finicky business.” Any change in the past, even the smallest and least significant, he explained, could alter the present in profound and unexpected ways because it carried not only direct consequences but also their subsequent and cumulative historical effects.71 A single changed circumstance might affect others that derived from or depended on it, which might in turn affect still others, triggering a cascading series of changes whose effects rippled out ever more broadly and widely across history. “A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on,

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a depression, mass starvation, and finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries,” Travis explained. “A small thing . . . could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time.”72 His concern and explanation proved prophetic. Frightened at the sight of the Tyrannosaur they were hunting, Eckels, the hunter whom Travis is most nervous about, stepped off their marked path, unknowingly and inadvertently crushing a butterfly with his shoe. Traveling back through the Time Machine, the safari returned to an altered present where words were spelled differently and the losing dictatorial candidate in the recent presidential election had instead won. While the story’s titular “sound of thunder” was the noise the Tyrannosaur made living and dying, it was also the sound at the story’s end, when Travis readied and raised his weapon, presumably to make good his promise to kill Eckels should his ineptitude change past and present. As such it also expressed metaphorically the force of history, of past events’ cascading effect rushing to meet the present like the sound of thunder rushes to fill the air to signal a lightning strike. Drawing on Leinster, Schachner, and others’ time-travel exceptions, Bradbury’s story signaled a new mode for late twentieth-century time-travel stories that continued into the twenty-first century.73 Their subjects remained time and history, and their protagonists sometimes still traveled through time. However, if they explored the extent of time’s dimension, it was not to follow a single historical line but to trace several alternative timelines and to consider not their possibilities but their consequences. This new mode of imagining time travel expressed the concerns of its historical times. Bradbury wrote his story in a post–World War II era that was less certain about progress and change and grappling with the historical magnitude of the Depression and the war. Einstein was no longer German but an American and as famous for advocating the development of the atomic bomb and promoting world peace as he was for developing relativity. Nevertheless the possibilities—including alternate timelines—limits, and paradoxes that general relativity’s revision of spacetime had suggested since the end of World War I found greater consonance in the more uncertain times of World War II and after.74 Spurred by an exchange with the mathematician Kurt Gödel, Einstein considered time travel’s consistency with general relativity in the late 1940s.75 Bradbury’s reformulation of time travel drew from an awareness of Wells’s formulation, but it was equally informed by, and part of, this cultural current.76 It was a historical revision in several senses of the term.

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Interwar time-travel stories did not have the benefit of this perspective. While they expressed historical concern, that concern was more to place readers and writers—indeed science and science fiction—within history than to make their mark within it. The stories evoked prediction, prophecy, and progress, and geniuses such as Einstein, but their main point was the reassurance of ordinary cause and purpose. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science have observed that modern science offers a specific and limited sense of causality. Its explanatory framework covers immense breadth and scope without contradiction and has produced many practical applications. Still, science explains how the physical world works without explaining why, in a final metaphysical sense, it works and emphasizes this mode of explanation in scientific training and education. In “Sidewise in Time,” Professor Minott described space and time’s shifts in detail, but could not address why ultimately they occurred. Most popular understandings of causality, however, do not separate metaphysical and physical explanations. Although some, and possibly many, interwar science fiction readers would later seek and receive formal training, when they read science fiction, they asked why as much as, if not more than, how from their science. They had questions about the purpose as well as the application of science, and the fiction of science fiction allowed them to imagine that part of their science. When interwar science fiction readers discussed change and history in their letters, they expressed that relation as part of a natural rather than a social history. For Shackman and other readers, history was not the contingent product of social circumstance and force. Instead, seen through a lens of a modern science that saw such transformative forces and motives as natural, it gained a rationality that provided its own inevitability. Within a progression of speculation—“who would have thought?” and “who can tell?”—connecting past, present, and future, science bound time within science fiction’s extrapolations and explorations of nature. While time travel made imagining history simple and natural for people, it also diminished their role within it. An unintended consequence of the modern perspective that science fiction acclaimed was a shift in its perspective on history and change. Where revolutions, whether social or scientific, had previously meant momentous and drastic change because they were extraordinary, the large number of fundamental transformations associated with modernity and modern life made revolution seem ordinary.77 Becoming constant and continuous, change became common. Trying to comprehend this sensibility, science fiction adopted an older, ancient—in its original, former sense—historical perspective.78 In this view of

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history, science acting over time had become the agent of change, not people. Its history of science was a catalog of scientific achievements and technological inventions, not explanations of human achievement and invention. Lost in time travel’s desire to link science past and present to science future was the practice of science, the contentious and undetermined process that would connect events across the horizon of possibility and certainty. Two covers from Amazing Stories offer graphic illustration of these points. Most interwar science fiction cover art portrayed the action and drama of a story within its issue. The April 1928 cover of Amazing, however, presented the artist Frank R. Paul’s rendition of a design that Hugo Gernsback conceived to represent “scientifiction” itself, his precursor to the later term, “science fiction,” visually and symbolically. Unusually and unconventionally indirect for a pulp cover, having no hero, villain, or featured creature as a focus, it was, at the same time, more direct in what it expressed about science fiction and agency. Against a colored background whose visible spectrum extended from a distant, angled horizon, an enormous watchful eye dominated the cover. At one corner of the cover and the eye was Earth dwarfed, American hemisphere forward, with attendant moon. Within the circle of the eye’s pupil and iris a cog of technological devices and scientific advances—submarines, airplanes, zeppelins, tractors, dynamos, surgery—represented science’s cyclical and continuing revolution. Along the eye’s lower lid the course of human history, from caveman to Roman to cavalier knight to modern and future man, marched ascending toward Earth. This historical line, powered by electric lightning that were the eye’s lashes, drove the separate but related machine of science onward, each toward its respective progressive future. The gigantic eye, which Gernsback explained represented the “mind’s eye,” looked outward from the cover, however, posing the question of subjectivity for the entire scene: whose eye/“I” was it, that of an engaged reader or that of an objective science elevated to a sublime vantage from which it observed nature’s transformation? The September 1928 cover of Amazing expressed similar concerns. It introduced another illustration of “scientifiction,” the winner of a cash-prize contest that Gernsback had announced in the same April issue displaying his visual concept for its associated ideals.79 The lines and figures of this new design, which readers adopted as a symbol for the genre, were more representational than Paul’s broadly expressive canvas. Against a white background, red-riveted girders formed an industrial frame through which the perspective of another universe was visible. A crescent moon, a ringed planet, and several stars formed its heavenly firmament above the horizon of a yellow

Figures 8A and 8B. Amazing Stories, April 1928 and September 1928 covers. By permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate.

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plane whose features were not yet apparent. The girders also supported and made visible a mechanism that wrote scientifiction, figuratively and literally, onto that unrealized terrain. Again the image emphasized the scientific, and in this case, technological, sublime; there was no apparent author writing scientifiction, only a machine to produce it. The scene suggested that science, represented by fact and theory–which named the twin cogs driving the device–rather than absent human actors was responsible for scientifiction and that the progress of both was driven by time’s inevitable progress. Interestingly and perhaps intentionally this writing machine could not have worked given its arrangement of levers and gears, a point never discussed within Amazing’s pages. Interwar time-travel stories, like interwar science fiction in general, were progressive but not utopian. They struck a particular variation of what Raymond Williams called science fiction’s “at once liberating and promiscuous” mode.80 Extrapolating modern science, pulp science fiction prompted readers to examine and explore the possibilities of future societies and imagined worlds. Science, however, promised not only to reveal the unknown but also to comprehend it. By the 1920s and 1930s its broad and potent authority claimed not only space but also time and evolution. Nature’s unknown worlds became science fiction’s other worlds. Particularly in popular discourse, science’s authority exceeded even some of its practitioners’ findings and concerns. Interwar science fiction’s evocation of Einstein to validate time-travel stories that preserved the present and progress, despite implications of his later work to the contrary, illustrated that authoritative determination. The inevitability of its progress gave interwar science fiction a flattened sensibility of fiction and history that the author William Gibson appropriately called the “Gernsback Continuum.”81 Progress’s inevitability also redefined science fiction’s sense of social possibility. Promoting science’s potential sparked readers’ ability to imagine a transformed nature within which all change was possible. At the same time it diminished their sense of historical agency within the scope of progress and change. Modern science’s authority distinguished science fiction’s concerns from those of utopian fiction. Where utopian fiction considered the possibilities that science’s power over nature offered for social change, science fiction placed social possibility within science’s power for natural change. As Williams observed, “while the utopian transformation is social and moral, the science-fiction transformation . . . is at once beyond and beneath: not social and moral, but natural.”82

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Nevertheless interwar science fiction reassured readers’ optimism for both scientific progress and adventure. Stories of the period have been described and derided for their optimistic tone and celebration, even glorification, of the wondrous facts and artifacts that progress was sure to produce.83 Science fiction’s devices, however, were only part of its work. Encapsulated theory and knowledge, they were stories’ initial means to possibility, technical portals to adventure. The concerns of modern society and the consequences science might bring them, many dark and dire, provided substantial fuel for those subsequent tales, and resolution of their tensions, not science’s unabashed celebration, provided interwar science fiction’s sense of optimism. Contemporary modern dilemmas—gender relations and family values, race and national citizenship, relations between the state and the individual, labor and the effects of industrialization—found powerful expression in the genre’s panoply of pulp characters: motherly women, mad scientists, Oriental Asian aliens, black-skinned robots, gendered machines, and merely mundane monsters, creatures, and beasts. The social notes within this natural menagerie called for sublime and complex resolution through heroic action. Science fiction’s heroes defeated the denizens of its other worlds in battle while also realizing requited romance with its heroines. Victory in adventure and romance recapitulated values that Americans in the 1920s and 1930s wanted to be traditional and resolved the drama of science’s dystopic potential. While some readers, such as Howard Lowe, recognized the social implications within these dynamics, their narrative reassurance still allowed all readers to participate in science fiction’s democracy. Readers’ pursuit of science fiction’s possibilities altered the nature of its scientific promise. Their interests in a participatory science fiction became less about understanding how they might affect science’s possibilities and more about how science might affect them. Although they continued to mark their scientific distinction by reciting fact and prediction, in their letters and efforts readers also cited stories, plots, and characters whose exploits they lived vicariously. Science fiction’s connection of science to fiction disguised its subsequent separation of science’s social and natural concern. Interwar science fiction resolved science’s social implications through the radical separation of its characters from the worlds they visited. Characters represented social virtues while the other worlds represented social dilemmas removed to natural form. Science provided the means to locate and cross the fundamental divide—and to return from it—and represented the potent excitement on its other side: between the two sides of science it presented,

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the moral triumphs of science fiction’s characters resolved the social issues presented within its transformed nature. Science fiction’s views of social possibilities were lost beneath its extension of natural possibilities beyond the scope of what was known and ordinary. In this sense interwar science fiction’s wondrous and amazing gadgets were always finished products. These devices expressed concerns about science, but they did not reveal the contingent processes that produced them. Science fiction extrapolated modern science’s potential to such an extreme that scientific knowledge of time and other natural forces bound historical possibility. Within this imagined natural history, linear time arranged and connected the certainty of science’s natural production into a social chronology that was no less certain. Science fiction’s stories reversed its originally promised relation of fiction to fact: fact fashioned fiction more than fiction fashioned fact. Reversing the direction of past to present to extrapolate the future, it removed sight of what was impossible beyond and below the horizon of what it presented as imaginably possible. Science’s complicated relationship to modern society was subsumed beneath readers’ reification of science as they looked beyond to what it promised them. Science’s possibility and progress were the dimensions that defined interwar science fiction’s “Gernsback Continuum,” and time’s certain line preserved it. Ironically science fiction’s elevation of science to higher authority also undermined the growing authority of science professionals. Ongoing transformations in the social enterprise of science—the work of scientists and their institutional ties to universities, corporations, and government—were also lost within interwar science fiction’s imagined nature. Because its authorial claims rested not on human ability but on an independent science, objectivity vested science fiction with a competing authority to contest scientists’ professional authority and expertise. A uniform method that ensured comprehensibility to all who would observe the natural informed that higher authority and justified science fiction’s differences of scientific opinion. A similar vesture of a democracy of popular science within the science fiction public allowed readers to answer, challenge, and criticize all comers, including professional scientists, on equal terms and as equals. As the cultural critic Andrew Ross noted, if interwar science fiction was conventional and even naive in its technological visions, it nevertheless expressed ideas and concerns that were central to many strands of progressive thought at the time.84 The same conventions that were science fiction’s limits also represented its potential. They were also the means to inspire readers

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toward action and activity. Although science fiction readers ultimately followed different paths to achieve the potential they saw within science fiction, their feeling that they could act and the actions they took revealed the progressive optimism the genre’s interwar cultural economy produced. The politics within this economy found expression not only in its representations but also in the experiences of members of its communities as they sought to make their fictions real. This form of social agency, its limits and potential, they would have to discover and struggle with for themselves. Pursuing science and science fiction, the science fiction community experienced history in its practice—their moment-to-moment choices determining their circumstances and fortunes irreversibly outside the more comfortable parameters of the interwar period’s imagined time travels.85 Taking action beyond reading, however, these enthusiasts nevertheless still required imagination, if in a different sense, within their lives.

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cience fiction’s historical emergence was always more than literary. For all the ways the genre marked science’s modern sweep and scope and contained its social situation, its readers made as much of and from science fiction as its stories expressed—not only imagining its cause but also answering its call. While many enjoyed simply reading stories and following magazines, the most active enthusiasts for science fiction sought to realize its scientific and social promise. Their aspirations and activities demonstrated not only reading’s extraliterary dimensions but also its extension and development into social and professional pursuits. This popular culture required effort in its entertainment; its determined participants strove to prove their ability and achieve distinction in science, science fiction, or both. Within science fiction some formed correspondence and local clubs, establishing social networks that organized regional, national, and international conventions. Some tried their hand at writing and illustrating stories, while others edited and published their own magazines. Across the range of these pursuits, the most avid came to see themselves as fans distinct from ordinary readers. Within science, devotees sought the comfort and authority of knowledge, studying formally and informally, experimenting to test its theories, and tinkering with devices to capitalize on its concepts. While their interests spanned the gamut of fields and technologies, many followed rocketry in particular, seeing it as the best means to extend aerial adventure to the extreme altitudes of space, the moon, and other planets. Inspired by science fiction’s participatory impulse, some joined and, in some instances, formed societies to put rockets and science to action. Enthusiasts’ activities answered interwar science fiction’s figurative dynamics and addressed their historical situation. Fandom and rocketry did not often or directly touch upon heroes, heroines, mad scientists, robots, aliens, or time travel—except where fans discussed stories and their subjects. Nevertheless, their emerging practices engaged the same issues of ability, adventure, assurance, and progress that science fiction’s literary tropes expressed and, after a fashion, resolved. Practice differed from trope, however, in its historical dimension, contradiction, and resolution. While publishers’ efforts in the 1920s sparked the emergence of science fiction’s reading community, by the mid-1930s their cost-cutting measures within the Depression economy spurred anticommercial sentiments among its members. Readers’

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critiques and the increasing independence of their other endeavors led them to develop a sense of fandom distinct from not only other readers but also producers of professional science fiction. Similarly the technological modern impulse that inspired science fiction in the 1920s also redefined expertise, slowly refining the means for scientific achievement and legitimacy. Rocket enthusiasts, many lacking degrees and credentials to avow their status, observed this shift to professional standards, adapting their enterprise from gathering and discussing information to launching rockets to testing their engine parameters. In their industry, both fans and rocketeers acknowledged the distinction between amateurs and professionals without accepting its divide, accommodating ordinary individualism’s contradictions within that dynamic. Adopting professional decorum publicly, they still entertained enthusiasm privately. If the backyard activities of amateurs and hobbyists launching fanzines and rockets held limited scope beyond their participants, the contours of their emerging practice still spoke to broader historical tensions within the nature of productive relations: of shifting associations between activity, effort, work, profession, and achievement.

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

“I am a member of the Science Fiction Association,” Eric C. Hopkins of 2c Stirling Road, London, wrote to Amazing Stories in 1938, “and am writing in response to your request for the results of letters published in your Discussions columns.” Acknowledging Amazing for printing an earlier letter in its April 1937 issue, he said, “Please accept my deepest thanks,” for “it has opened up many avenues of stf. [scientifiction] which I never knew existed.” That first letter, he reported, had drawn letters from readers in the United States from Iowa, New Jersey, and Washington and from a “young lady cowpuncher” in Texas, and it had also put him in touch with several “Britishers” with whom he corresponded weekly and with London members of the Science Fiction Association with whom he was busy arranging face-to-face meetings. “I am no longer alone,” he wrote. “It may not sound much, but to me it means a lot because I am able to discuss science fiction with all sorts of people, whereas formerly I vented my spleen on the Editors. When you are getting letters almost continuously, it is quite hard work, but still it’s good fun.”1 Hopkins’s experience was not unusual. Science fiction readers’ letters led to exchanges within and through the backyard of their pulps, and for many, to activities beyond them. As their conversations led to face-to-face meetings and more, their understanding of their community and their roles within it also changed and developed. Enthusiastic about science and science fiction beyond reading, many formed clubs and associations, some through correspondence and others meeting locally in person. Inspired and encouraged by pulp contests and features, some wrote stories and articles, while others,

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using available, low-cost reproduction technologies, edited and published their own pamphlets and magazines. Their proliferating practices reinforced, even as they redefined, Hugo Gernsback’s original public and genre. By the mid to late 1930s many members of science fiction’s community identified themselves specifically as fans. “What we science-fiction fans mostly wanted to do with each other’s company was to talk,” Frederik Pohl recalled, “about science fiction, and about the world.”2 Fans’ success beyond talking, however, complicated their community. As their argument, which began in the late 1930s, about whether “fandom is a way of life” (“FIAWOL”) or “fandom is just a goddamn hobby” (“FIJAGH”) indicated, the activities of members were serious, involving, and divided; indeed, that their community was perhaps several social networks.3 Once established and announced, clubs and magazines competed for members, readers, and distinction. Many members maintained casual sociability at their own pace, pursuing causes where and when they arose. Some, however, adhered earnestly to science fiction’s progressive claims, seeking to advance science and society. Still others approached science fiction lightly but still seriously, reveling in its entertaining and mischievous sociability. Recognizing their popularity, pulp editors formed clubs and leagues associated with their magazines and hired fans as both writers and editors. They discovered, however, that the community their magazines fostered extended beyond their pages and their control. Given the means, fans exercised their own self-determination and authority. While some nonfan readers joined pulp-sponsored clubs, these were short-lived because of the already present internecine competition between existing fans and clubs. Similarly, while many fans readily accepted the opportunity to sell stories to and work for science fiction pulps, some also came to prefer writing and publishing on their own. Increasingly separating the realms of “fanzines” and “prozines”—the terms they used to distinguish amateur fan publications from the commercial pulps—fans learned to live the experiences of both. In this sense if fandom was a product of science fiction’s community, it was also a calibration of class and class dynamics within its popular culture. Fans’ broader collective sensibility, however, still contained these differences. While they competed and squabbled with one another and with professional publishers and editors, science fiction fans maintained enough cohesion to organize regional and, by the end of the 1930s, national and worldwide science fiction conventions. Although critics of interwar pulp magazines expressed concern about readers’ easy leisure—recall Miss Anita

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Forbes’s elegant characterization, “entertainment without exercise”—science fiction readers were enthusiastic and industrious. As Eric Hopkins observed, their communal activities were good fun and hard work. Industry in forging social relations and opportunities led science fiction fans, on the one hand, to a community that was conversational and active and, on the other, to choices with real consequence about their hobbies, their work, and their lives. Readers began forming clubs and organizations almost from their initial involvement in science fiction. The formation of local clubs was part of their effort to take the community dynamics they had found in the pulps’ backyard out of their pages. Readers from the same area who could, met face-to-face to discuss their common interests. “Talk was cheap,” Frederik Pohl recalled about the economics of entertainment and social interaction for New York– area residents during the Depression. “One reason for the growth of sciencefiction fan clubs in the thirties was that you could get an evening’s worth of entertainment out of two nickels spent on the subway.”4 Many readers wrote to the letters departments announcing these events and clubs to solicit new members. The first letter in Amazing Stories to print the full address of its writer was from John Mackay of Jersey City, NJ to form a club for “young men interested in science, ranging in age from 18 to 23 years.”5 Charles Hornig, 213 Orchard Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey, wrote Amazing to announce a similar club at his high school: “I am going to try to found a ‘science-fiction’ club in school, as every Wednesday we are allowed one hour for a club. I now am the manager of our school magazine, the ‘Hamiltonian,’ in which I recently had an article published called, ‘Odd Facts in Science’ in the Science Department. Many people asked me, including teachers, ‘Where did you learn it?’ I did not hesitate to answer ‘In Science-Fiction magazines.’”6 Where readers could not or preferred not to meet in person, they developed other kinds of organizations. “May I make an announcement?” asked E. C. Love, Jr., 106 North Jackson Street, Quincy, Florida, in a 1933 letter to Amazing. “It is regarding a Science Club. Its name is the Edison Science Correspondence Club.” The club was intended for youths, and membership was limited to those ages twelve to eighteen, although it was open to either sex and foreign as well as domestic members. There were no dues as yet, he said, and they would be made only with the full consent of members. “The club has been in formation for some time,” Love explained, “but public announcement is just being made.” Interested readers were asked to write Love or Carl Johnson, 129 Campbell Street, Danville, Virginia.7 While the club’s one

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formal activity was to publish a monthly paper with stories, articles, and poetry by its members, its effective organizing principle was to facilitate correspondence between like-minded individuals interested in science, science fiction, and other similarly related subjects. If readers’ conversations in science fiction pulps gave them a sense of community, their organizing efforts gave that community greater social coherence. Many readers whose interests began as isolated pursuits used pulp science fiction’s letters columns to discover each other and correspond about their mutual interests. Clubs such as the Edison Science Correspondence Club broadened the social benefits of one-on-one correspondence to include others. Multiplying its relationships, they formed collective social bonds connecting all members to each other. At various points in the 1930s science fiction readers read about, formed, and joined a variety of soci­eties or clubs—many of them correspondence clubs—organized around the themes of science or science fiction or both. International and other more geographically scattered readers also formed regionally centered clubs for their specific parts of the world. Eric Hopkins found fellow Britishers and London members of the Science Fiction Association. N. S. Jenkins of 48 Gilbert Street, New Plymouth, New Zealand, wrote in to “announce the advent of a much needed Science Fiction organization in New Zealand.” Interested New Zealander and Australian readers were directed to communicate with Jenkins or Mr. N. Patton, Pokeno, New Zealand.8 Several clubs rallied around the idea of science fiction promoting science that Gernsback first proclaimed. In 1932 Van Horn Fabricus of 447 Central Avenue, Orange, New Jersey, announced the formation of the Association of Interplanetary Engineers.9 Interest in science fiction notably brought together groups interested in issues of rocketry and interplanetary travel. The American Interplanetary Society (AIS), later the American Rocket Society (ARS), the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), and the German Interplanetary Society (Verein für Raumschiffahrt, VfR) all announced their existence in the pages of interwar American science fiction magazines.10 Through the AIS’s institutional ties, science fiction readers also learned about similar rocket societies in Cleveland and Peoria and at Yale University and about individual rocket enthusiasts throughout the United States and overseas.11 While many clubs pursued scientific interests, several formed the basis of what later became purely science fiction fan clubs. Readers organized clubs not only for readers’ individual benefits but also for their collective benefit. Henry Ackerman of 5200 Maple Avenue, Pimlico, Baltimore, Maryland, an-

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nounced another correspondence club for boys in 1934. Unlike its possible rival, Love and Johnson’s Edison Science Correspondence Club, Ackerman’s club favored Gernsback’s original “scientifiction” rather than science or science fiction. The Scientifiction Association for Boys was intended “for boys up to the age of 19 (nineteen) years.” Its intention, in addition to publishing a monthly newsletter, was to pursue the reading and collecting of science fiction collectively. For young boys with limited means, pooling their resources was a means toward mutual satisfaction. Members sent in two magazines of their own, which were returned when they left the club, to form a collective library from which all could borrow. Monthly membership dues of ten cents were used to purchase more magazines and books for the club. Interested readers were instructed to write to Ackerman. “We answer all letters,” he wrote.12 Of particular significance to the developing science fiction community was the Science Correspondence Club (SCC). The organization emerged from the efforts of several groups, each originally acting independently. In 1928 Aubrey Clements of Montgomery, Alabama, formed what he called the “Science Correspondence Club,” announcing the club in the pages of Amazing and gathering members as responses came in. In the same year, while corresponding among themselves, Walter Dennis and Sydney Gerson, c/o. 4653 Addison, Chicago, Illinois, also set upon the idea of a correspondence club, which they also called the “Science Correspondence Club,” to disseminate “science and scientific thought among the laymen of the world.” They announced their idea in the pages of Amazing Stories Quarterly and by the next year their group claimed two dozen members while Clements’s had twenty-five members.13 Membership was not mutually exclusive and indeed overlapped. Although he was the founder of one SCC, Dennis was also the sixth person to join the other, where he served as chairman under Clements’s presidency. In 1928 Aubrey MacDermott, Clifton Amsbury, Lester Anderson, and Louis C. Smith on the Berkeley-Oakland side of San Francisco Bay began meeting monthly as the Eastbay Science Correspondence Club (ESCC).14 Raymond Palmer, originally a Chicago SCC member, suggested a national merger between the various organizations. By late 1929 the two original SCCs and willing members of the ESCC, which had reorganized as the Eastbay Scientific Association, merged into one club under a constitution drafted by Dennis, Clements, and A. B. Maloire of Chehalis, Washington.15 The January 1930 “Discussions” column featured a long letter from Dennis and Gerson announcing the new combined organization. “Our aim is to

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promote the advancement of science through intelligent discussion and the creation of new ideas among its members,” they explained. Potential members were required to meet qualifications of sincerity, an ability to discuss science “seriously and intelligently,” and a sense of humor and personality. “Now and then a little humorous and personal discussion are indulged in by the members,” they said, “to relieve the mind, after an intensive discussion on Mathematics—Structure of the Atom—and other topics.” Membership dues, which were three dollars annually, covered the costs of the club bulletin; the purchase of “a certain amount” of club stationery, which members were encouraged to use when corresponding; and a small contingency fund. The offices of president, secretary, treasurer, and librarian, they announced, had been defined and some of them filled. The position of librarian was the club’s most significant because that person maintained its library, collecting “all clippings, books, magazines, articles, photographs, experiments, and any other scientific literature he can gather.” Individual members were also asked to submit clippings from newspapers and local literature, but the librarian was responsible not only for collecting but also for separating, tabulating, and sending out all the club’s holdings. Materials would be sent to members on request for postage and a small fee to be reimbursed when they were returned. Their club’s membership, Dennis and Gerson announced, was “increasing by leaps and bounds” and numbered over fifty, including the science fiction notables Dr. Miles J. Breuer, Jack Williamson, and David M. Speaker. Still they sought to expand it further, specifically appealing to women. “We now have four young ladies in our club roster,” they noted, hoping that small but still significant number might encourage other women to join.16 Despite their declared intention to “inscribe ourselves for the betterment of Science,” the Science Correspondence Club’s success was not from members’ scientific efforts. Between 1930 and 1933 the Chicago chapter of the organization did promote science, publishing a magazine, initially called The Comet and later titled Cosmology, that carried popular scientific articles intermixed with occasional materials related to science fiction. The SCC (renamed the International Scientific Association [ISA] in 1931), however, contributed more to interwar science fiction’s social development and organization. Editors, happy to see their readers acting upon the ideals they had set out for science fiction, gave extensive coverage to the SCC, publishing its members’ letters as they announced the formation of chapters across the country.17 Although it survived only until 1933, over the course of its severalyear existence the SCC was less an actual club and more an extensive social

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network. It allowed a number of locally organized groups and correspondence clubs to become aware of each other and come together in a loose national coalition, and it allowed members who could be only correspondents, such as Maloire; Palmer of 1431 Thirty-eighth Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and E. W. Smith of 541 1/2 Church Street, Ottawa, Iowa, to participate equally in that coalition. As significantly, learning from their experience, many SCC members continued their science fiction activities and developed new ones after the organization’s demise, taking the lead in other groups. As many of science fiction’s other enthusiasts discovered, despite their rhetorical equivalence, science-based clubs, while not impossible to organize, were more difficult to establish and sustain than science fiction clubs. Public recognition of the Science Correspondence Club within the science fiction pulps brought the inclusion and affiliation of other, previously existing clubs. The Scienceers, a New York City–based group organized in 1929 as a science group but which quickly became more interested in science fiction, incorporated as a branch of the SCC.18 Similarly the Boys Scientifiction Club, a science and science fiction group for boys between ten and fifteen formed in 1930 by Linus Hogenmiller and Forrest J. Ackerman, announced its affiliation with the SCC in 1931.19 Beyond its immediate purpose, their statement demonstrated the extent of the science fiction community’s growth beyond the competitive commercial boundaries of individual science fiction pulps. Formed through correspondence in Wonder Stories, the Boys Scientifiction Club affiliated with another, the SCC, which had emerged from Amazing’s letters department, and announced the association in the pages of Astounding. By the early 1930s and within a few years of its inception, science fiction’s backyard did not exist exclusively in the pages of any one magazine. Still, because their community was a product of the pulps and many members retained ties to them, science fiction readers’ activities outside of them retained much of their character, style, and sensibility. Organizing readers to discuss science and science fiction on their own and for each other, the SCC and other clubs followed the pulps’ publishing example. With the opportunity to develop alternative formats for what they produced, science fiction enthusiasts copied the pulps, perhaps trying to replicate their conversational character, and industriously produced magazines themselves—which they initially called “fanmags” but later changed to “fanzines”—to communicate their interests.20 While their Chicago chapter’s original Comet/Cosmology carried popular science articles and occasionally science fiction, other and sometimes the

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same SCC/ISA members began producing pamphlets, bulletins, and other publications focusing on science fiction. The Scienceers published what is regarded as the first exclusively science fiction fanzine, the Planet, from July through December 1930. The Boys Scientifiction Club published four issues of their Meteor before the club reorganized as the Junior Scientific Association and retitled the magazine the Scientific Magazine, even though it largely covered science fiction.21 In 1932 the Scienceers Allen Glasser, Mortimer Weisinger, and Julius Schwartz along with Forrest J. Ackerman, formerly of the Boys Scientifiction Club, joined to publish nine issues of the Time Traveler. Subtitled “Science Fiction’s Only Fan Magazine,” the Time Traveler became a printed journal in its third issue with the assistance and access to equipment of Conrad H. Ruppert. A falling out between Glasser, Schwartz, and Weisinger led the latter two joined by Ruppert, Ackerman, and Raymond Palmer of the SCC and others to start their own Science Fiction Digest, which they would publish for five years from 1932 to 1937. Following their example, Charles Hornig in nearby New Jersey began writing and editing the Fantasy Fan, also printed by Ruppert.22 Interested readers and fans could acquire these early fanzines either by purchasing them, usually for a dime, or by exchanging one fanzine for another.23 Their success lay in the new opportunities that fanzines offered science fiction. Called “fanzines” to distinguish them from the commercially produced and published pulps, which fans called “prozines,” short for “professional magazine,” they represented the activities and authority of fans specifically. Like the SCC/ISA and other correspondence clubs, fanzines drew their audiences from readers of the prozines by way of their letters columns, appealing to those who wanted to pursue science fiction further. What they offered readers, however, was more than the opportunity to read more science fiction. Fanzines represented fans’ industry in both senses of the term, a significance that interwar science fiction stories’ and conversations’ concern with individual ability amplified. They allowed readers to demonstrate their individual productivity while complicating the usual sense of a reader and reading. Already vocal, opinionated readers seized the additional space for criticism, publishing reviews and critiques of ’zines, pro- and fanalike. Others moved beyond criticism to actual production, writing science fiction poems, stories, and serials and drawing and painting illustrations and artwork. Still others worked to edit and produce fanzines, which given their various and usually limited means, varied tremendously in their appearance and format.

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The variety of their titles and content reflected the variety of fans’ output. Industrious, aspiring authors wrote their own science fiction stories and articles about science, society and politics, and their most and least favorite prozine stories while more graphically and visually inclined fans contributed illustrations and designs. More socially oriented observers also wrote about members of the science fiction community and their and its individual and collective history and traditions.24 These features represented fanzines’ industry in a different sense. Articles noting club activities and bulletins about other fanzines marked fans’ relative social independence, which was connected to but separate from the practices that prozines predicated. If this separation was not actual autonomy, it nevertheless gave fans authority over their activity outside the pulps. In fanzines science fiction fans’ enthusiastic efforts and output not only furthered their collective sensibilities but also developed an industry that required its own systems of production, distribution, communication, and exchange. One youthful reader’s correspondence with other science fiction fans in the mid and late 1930s provides a rare glimpse into its details. While much of the content of T. Bruce Yerke’s exchanges involved personal, often playful matters, it also revealed an extensive network of active enthusiasts pursuing their own interests while learning from the experiences of others before them. Some of their conversations were extensions of the literary and scientific debates of the prozine discussions columns. With a faster rate of exchange, they continued those debates in repeating cycles of greater elaboration and reference. Based in Los Angeles, Yerke wrote to people throughout the United States, and his correspondence allowed him to explore a variety of science-related movements in the 1930s, including Technocracy, with which he was briefly involved.25 Privacy outside the pulp backyard’s public scope also allowed frank discussion about the prozine industry. A letter from John V. Baltadonis of Philadelphia to Yerke explained his decision not to write letters to Astounding. “The only thing deterring me from writing letters to Astounding Stories at present, is the change of name,” he wrote. “I, for one, favor Brass Tacks to Science Discussions. The latter name is only an excuse for Astounding Stories to save some dough. I know.” He explained, revealing inside information about the industry, that Astounding’s editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, changed the department’s name to avoid extra publication costs. The federal government considered the name “Brass Tacks” and the feature to be advertising for Astounding, changing the pulp’s percentage of advertising and thereby raising

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the cost of its postage and distribution. “Tremaine changed the name to make it more clear and to not leave a bit of doubt in the Inspector’s minds,” Baltadonis said. “Note the name, Science discussions.”26 Yerke’s correspondence, like that of other science fiction readers, involved ways to extend his collection of stories and magazines. Several people gave references and relayed information about where to acquire back issues, including a price list from Parker & Oehrig, a secondhand magazine shop in Rockville Centre, New York. Like many other readers, Yerke encountered science fiction stories piecemeal and after their initial publication. Unable to purchase magazines containing them directly from newsstands or by subscription, like other collecting readers he relied on used-book and magazine stores to find and procure back issues. Disappearing after World War II when paperback book publishing, along with comic books briefly in the 1940s, replaced both pulps and slicks as the primary source for popular fiction, usedmagazine stores and sales were an outgrowth of magazine distribution. Rather than returning outdated issues to publishers, standard industry practice was for distributors to return only magazine covers for accounting purposes, dispose of the rest of the issue locally, and save freight costs. Many distributors, in turn, saved themselves the cost of actual accountable disposal, dumping them or, in under-the-table arrangements, leaving them somewhere to be acquired by interested interests. Many coverless magazines found their way to stores that carried both used books and used magazines, where they were resold, usually well after their initial publication dates and for less than their original prices. The comparatively higher prices that Parker & Oehrig set for science fiction magazines in 1938, however, demonstrated the higher popularity they had gained by the late 1930s, fueled by the collecting efforts of a growing number of fans. While back issues of detective pulps and other miscellaneous titles routinely sold for five to eight cents, science fiction numbers cost fifteen to fifty cents, with older issues and quarterlies commanding the high end of that range. Baltadonis was Yerke’s guide into the world of fanzines, providing access and opportunity. “At present, I suscribe [sic] to almost every one,” he wrote to Yerke. “And, the ones I dont [sic] have a subscription to, I intend to suscribe [sic] to in the near future.”27 An initially more involved and connected fan, he passed information about various fan groups and their fanzines along to Yerke. After a few months of corresponding, for instance, Baltadonis asked Yerke, “Did you ever hear of the phantasy legion?” The group, he explained, was an organization working for the “furtherment of Scientific-

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Table 3. Parker & Oehrig Secondhand Magazine Prices 1938

SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINES

Astounding Amazing Monthly Amazing Quarterly ’34–’38 ... 20¢ ’34–’38 ... 25¢ 1928 ... 60¢ Before ’34 ... 45¢ ’30–’33 ... 35¢ Other years ... 40¢ Before ’30 ... 50¢ Science Wonder Stories ... 35¢ Air Wonder ... 35¢

Wonder Monthly ’30–’32 ... 25¢ ’33–’36 ... 20¢ ’36–’38 ... 15¢ Weird Tales ... 23¢

DETECTIVE MAGAZINES G-Men ... 6¢ True Detective ... 8¢ Daring Detective ... 8¢ Thrilling Mystery ... 7¢ The Spider ... 7¢ Detective Fiction Weekly ... 8¢ Dime Detective ... 7¢ Panthom Detective [sic] ... 7¢ Thrilling Detective ... 7¢ MISSCELANEOUS [sic] Boys Life ... 5¢ Open Road for Boys ... 3 for 10¢ American Boy ... 6¢ Blue Book Mag. ... 7¢ American Magazine ... 15¢ Sarurday Evening Post [sic] ... 5¢ Adventure ... 8¢ G-8 ... 8¢ National Geographic ..15¢ Air Trails ... 7¢ Popular Mechanics ... 7¢ to 17¢ (Depending on condition) Flying Aces ... 7¢ Popular Science ... 8¢ Travel ... 15¢ Sports Afield ... 7¢ New Yorker ... 7¢ Field and Stream ... 8¢ Nature ... 10¢ Hunting and Fishing ... 3 for 10¢ Source: Excerpted from a sheet of titles and prices from Parker & Oehrig, 14 Wallace Street, Rockville Centre, New York, 1938. Note: Parker & Oehrig also offered three different kinds of magazine assortments. No. 1, at a price of $0.45 (would cost $1.00 at newsstands), had “Many types of reading.” No. 2, at $1.10 (newsstand price $2.50), promised, “Will last long time.” No. 3, at $0.60 (newsstand price $1.50), was composed of “Magazines for Boys.” “Some magazines included in assortments: Life, Look, Pic, Pix, American Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, American Freeman, Country Gentleman, American Boy, Boys Life, Pocket Photo, Hunting and Fishing, Everyday Astrology, Modern Mechanix, Readers Digest, Science Digest, Top Notch, Thrilling Love, Dusty Aryes [sic], Secret Agent X, etc.”

tion.” Members were “requested to submit material to the club organ for the purpose of having their work published and to aid their talents,” and dues for a lifetime membership were fifty cents, payable in installments. “I’m almost sure that you’ll be interested in joining,” he wrote, “that explaining why I broached the subject to you.” The club’s magazine, Phantasy World, he reassured Yerke, “will be glad to receive stories, articles, etc. from you for publica-

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tion.” David A. Kyle, 215 West Twenty-third Street, New York City, was the group’s contact person if Yerke decided to join.28 Although he was not working for financial gain, Baltadonis also wanted to get credit with the fanzine’s publisher for Yerke’s interest. “If you intend to join,” he wrote, “please mention my name as having gotten you to join. I’ve made an arrangement with Kyle to get as many members as I possibly can, and I want to keep an accurate count on how many I do get for the Legion.”29 Like other fanzine readers, Baltadonis also produced them himself, and also like them, he shared information about how to produce them. Despite their determination and enthusiasm, few science fiction fans had access to the resources and equipment necessary to print and publish magazines. Regular offset printing required a commercial press, machine type, and the skill and labor to set it, things that Conrad Ruppert, who worked in a print shop, provided for New York–based fans. Less expensive mimeographs and dittos, as spirit duplication was more commonly known, still required machinery and waxed stencils and styluses (for mimeographs) or solvents and inks (for dittos) used to make imprints. Nevertheless fans educated themselves about such issues as the relative technical merits, qualitative benefits, and financial costs of different methods for mass reproduction, and they relayed practical hints about how best to produce quality results. Baltadonis, his childhood friend Robert Madle, and Madle’s cousin Jack Agnew had begun using typed carbon copies to produce two short-lived fanzines, the Science Fiction Fan and Imaginative Fiction, before moving on to other technologies.30 “Just recently, we got hold of enough type to print a 5x8 page,” Baltadonis wrote to Yerke explaining that the fanzine he helped produce was trying to move to offset printing. “We still need spacers, quoins, keys, instructions, experience, etc., on the art of printing before we can put out the magazine,” he said. “However, that places us a step nearer our goal.”31 When Yerke mentioned possibly starting his own fanzine, Baltadonis recommended using a hectograph set. Baltadonis and his fellow Philadelphia fans had discovered the technology in 1936 and applied it to produce several fanzines.32 Hectography was a method of transfer printing using gelatin as its transfer medium. Negative carbon proofs prepared with special typing ribbons and pens left impressions on a cake of prepared gelatin that transferred as positive type onto blank sheets pressed onto the cake before its ink dried. Reapplying ink allowed the gelatin to be used again. Hectographs also transferred illustrations, which were typically hand-drawn onto carbons. Gelatins, ink—typically purple but available in several colors—ribbons, pencils,

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and carbons were assembled in inexpensive sets that were available in chain stores. At Montgomery Ward, Baltadonis reported, “a good hectograph set costs $3.89.” Hectographs were also relatively simple and straightforward to use. “They are not hard to work,” he noted, “if you work them the right way.” Moreover, “if you are really serious about the matter and do intend to purchase a set,” he wrote Yerke, “don’t purchase anything till you get an answer to your next letter from me.” Baltadonis explained that he had recently written the hectograph’s manufacturer asking for their direct sales price. In his next letter, he would pass along “detailed information about the art of hectographing, the prices of the company I wrote to, my assurance of assistance for material (especially art work), and anything else you might want to know.”33 The information about hectographs he shared with Yerke was widespread within the science fiction community by the mid-1930s. The May–June 1934 issue of the International Science Fiction Guild’s Bulletin—the group renamed itself the Terrestrial Fantascience Guild the next year but continued publishing the Bulletin—was the first fanzine produced with the technology, and science fiction’s network of correspondence and clubs quickly disseminated its practical knowledge.34 Baltadonis, Madle, and Agnew had learned of it through another fanzine, the Science Fiction Collector, and actively promoted it within the fan community. Particularly because it was relatively low cost, many if not most fans used hectography, sometimes in combination with other print technologies, to produce their fanzines.35 The Philadelphiabased Fantasy Fiction Telegram and Fantascience Digest were hectographed, although the latter converted to mimeography in 1939. Phantasy World, put out by the Phantasy Legion, which Baltadonis wrote Yerke about joining, was a mixed-product combining hectographed and mimeographed pages. While more well-established or well-funded fanzines were printed with mimeographs, ditto machines, and offset-printing, which were mechanized and increased the speed of reproduction, the hectographed fanzine epitomized the industry that interwar science fiction’s backyard conversations inspired.36 Readers could produce its purple-printed, hand-pressed pages in their own backyards. Since art was one of his many interests, Baltadonis also offered his services to Yerke as an art editor. Interspersed among and within his letters to Yerke were examples of his work, including pencil sketches and full-color crayon drawings. In one letter, he offered to draw “any amount of pictures you desire.” He wrote, “The only thing you have to do to earn your picture is to suggest a scene (an [sic] make it a good one) and I’ll draw it for you.”37 In another letter he

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Figure 9. Color pencil drawing by John V. Baltadonis, 1937.

wrote, “Instead of drawing a scene with those crayons (which I might do also), I’ll go one better and present you with a water-color drawing.”38 Baltadonis’s artistic endeavors included more than gifts to correspondents and friends. They led him to pursue his more specialized talents within the emerging science fiction fan and fanzine world. He and William H. Miller, Jr., 69 Halsted Street, East Orange, New Jersey, another fan with artistic abilities, formed their own “club for the amateur stf artist,” the United Fantasy Artists (UFA). Its membership was open to similarly art-inclined members of the science fiction community and offered their services to fanzine publishers in need of artwork they could not provide themselves. In exchange for those services, they asked for subscriptions to the fanzines they helped. Like most fanzine producers, they were also collectors, and since most fans, particularly in the interwar years, had limited means, they improvised a mostly cooperative system of barter and exchange for the industry they created. Fanzines provided the science fiction community a rough framework and structure to continue despite competing interests. From the moment

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readers discovered their voices in letters columns they began to disagree. Within the organizations and clubs they subsequently formed, disagreement led to dissent and occasionally to division. Indeed differences about the direction groups should take were as much a part of the science fiction community’s dynamics as its more cooperative discussions. The letters columns of the prozines served as a public record marking the creation, demise, and rebirth of several clubs and organizations throughout the 1930s as members joined together, fought, and occasionally resolved their differences. Weisinger and Schwartz’s split with Allen Glasser, their coproducer of the Time Traveler, was the first of several that led eventually to the dissolution of the Science Correspondence Club. Glasser, for his part, announced his revival of the Scienceers, “one of the first local organizations of science-fiction fame” (and now separated from its former SCC affiliation) in Amazing Stories in 1933.39 Similarly, Clifton Amsbury, 2216 Ward Street, Berkeley, California, redirected the attention of Eastbay readers in 1932 to “the Eastbay Scientific Association, a branch of the International Scientific Association, which was founded (as the Scientific Correspondence Club) through the columns of this magazine.”40 The availability of information about how to produce fanzines gave science fiction fans’ dissent a peculiar dynamic. Instead of working out their differences, they could just as well expand their social public. The elastic freedom of their fan press allowed dissenters, opponents, and malcontents to form another group and fanzine, or several, which they used to announce and promote their differences. Schwartz, Weisinger, and Ruppert pioneered this practice in creating Science Fiction Digest after their split with Glasser, and other clubs and fans soon followed suit. Fanzine publishing was as volatile as pulp publishing, although for very different reasons. Fan differences led to a proliferation of titles, while their competition and fragile finances made many short-lived. By various counts fans produced a total of twenty-seven titles of varying size and quality in 1937 and forty-seven in 1940, in addition to those produced within emerging social collectives known as amateur press associations, or APAs.41 By comparison, for much of the 1930s the prozine industry comprised the perennial Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder (which by then had become Thrilling Wonder). In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of new titles, including Marvel Stories, Dynamic Stories, Startling Stories, Planet Stories, Astonishing Stories, and Fantastic Adventures, as well as a few hybrid genre-hero pulps such as Captain Future—Wizard of Sci-

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ence, joined the trio of stalwarts and provided more fuel for fan and fanzine discussions. Their expansion of science fiction, however, followed the parameters that prozines, fanzines, and fans had already established. Fan activities and organizing efforts had not gone unnoticed in the prozine world. Fanzines gained sufficient stature that prozines began including reviews of popular titles and those published by prominent fans—which were not necessarily popular. Having distinguished their enthusiasm in the fanzine scene, some fans also sought to use the prozines and their readers for entertaining fun. In late 1934 Wilson “Bob” Tucker announced the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Wire Staples in Scientifiction Magazines in Astounding’s “Brass Tacks.” A tongue-in-cheek play on the serious announcements of science and science fiction societies in the interwar pulp correspondence departments, the SPWSSTFM, as it came to be known in fans’ alphabetic shorthand, attracted a few dozen members while confusing other, nonfan readers. Responding to Tucker, another active fan, Donald Wollheim, proclaimed the foundation of the International and Allied Organization for the Purpose of Upholding and Maintaining the Use of Metallic Fasteners in Science Fiction Publications of the United States of America, or in its subsequent shorthand, IAOPUMUMFSTFPUSA. The two announcements inaugurated a flurry of letter and fanzine activity that collectively came to be known as the “Great Staple War.”42 Initially their exchanges consisted of friendly back-and-forth banter and competition between the two groups for members, who switched willingly and often. When writers of several letters objected to the attention the two “alphabet societies” were receiving, readers seized the opportunity to form their own “anti-alphabetical alphabet societies,” provoking a secondary frenzy of group formation, announcements, and playful acronyms. The Great Staple War ended abruptly in early 1936 when a fan convinced Astounding’s editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, that Tucker had died and to print a notice to that effect along with a posthumous letter from Tucker urging unity among the alphabet societies.43 Finding out that Tucker was alive and that he may have helped perpetuate the hoax of his death for further fun and fan recognition, Tremaine banned him from “Brass Tacks” and moved the department’s focus to Astounding’s more general, nonfan readership. In 1934 Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories announced the formation of the Science Fiction League (SFL). Its stated purpose was to organize science fiction fans and their activities for greater efficiency and common, global cause. “There are now actually thousands upon thousands of active fans, who take

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Figure 10. Science Fiction League logo, 1934.

the movement as seriously as others do music or any other artistic endeavor,” Gernsback announced in his April editorial. “Many fans collect science fiction stories,” he reported, adding, “Research is being conducted by others. The time is auspicious to coordinate all who are interested into one comprehensive international group.” Wonder’s next issue introduced a logo for the league, a red, yellow, and blue image of a rocket ship flying about Earth. “The founders of the science fiction league sincerely believe they have a great mission to fulfill,” Gernsback proclaimed ambitiously in its editorial. “They believe that there is nothing greater than human imagination, and the diverting of such imagination into constructive channels [italics in original]. They believe that SF is something more than literature,” he confessed, echoing the

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active enthusiasm of science fiction fans. “They sincerely believe that it can become a world-force of unparalleled magnitude in time to come.”44 Gernsback’s plan for the Science Fiction League was to organize fans— and by extension the science fiction community—formally under his and Wonder’s aegis. Fans in the same geographic area formed local chapters, which would report their activities to the rest of the league and the broader science fiction community through a new public forum, a dedicated column in Wonder Stories. League membership brought several benefits: an official certificate of membership; membership buttons; use of the logo on printed stationery, for official chapter and organizational use; and assignment of a unique SFL membership number. Additionally the pages of Wonder’s new department were open exclusively to SFL members, although in actual practice SFL members wrote to both its official league column and Wonder’s regular reader column, “The Reader Speaks.” Still, league members began to identify themselves in “The Reader Speaks” by their SFL numbers and chapter affiliations after, and occasionally omitting, their names and addresses. Many science fiction fans, including several who published their own fanzines, enthusiastically enlisted as SFL members. George Gordon Clark of Brooklyn was particularly proud to be member number one and authorized to form the SFL’s chapter one, the Brooklyn Science Fiction League.45 “In the history of SF fandom,” Madle later recalled, “it is surpassed only in importance by the creation of Amazing Stories itself!”46 The league’s formation was also a product of the Great Depression and its effect on pulp publishing. Both the economic downturn of the early 1930s and competition from Amazing and Astounding had eroded Wonder’s audience, sales, and status. Gernsback’s unstated purpose, and that of his newly hired editor, Charles Hornig, who served as the SFL’s managing secretary and put in much of the effort for the league, was to recapture some of its former wonder. The organization’s symbols and new forum promoted a greater and exclusive distinction, marking SFL members as different not only from other, ordinary readers of Wonder Stories but also from those who read its competitors and who therefore could not read accounts of the league’s activities. Gernsback and Hornig’s designed pageantry attempted to strengthen sentiments and affiliations readers might have with Wonder Stories into outright identification. “What Hugo hoped for from the Science Fiction League,” Frederik Pohl recalled later, “was a plain buck-hustle, a way of keeping readers loyal.”47 Fanzines’ already established independence, however, allowed fans to

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criticize editors, their choices, and decisions, indirectly affecting the SFL. While early in science fiction’s social development readers voiced their criticisms in letters to the editor, the extent of those criticisms declined without disappearing as more involved fans removed them to fanzines. In 1935 the Terrestrial Fantascience Guild’s Bulletin published an exposé of Gernsback, Hornig, and Wonder Stories by the active fans Donald Wollheim (of the Great Staple War), William Sykora, and John B. Michel. The trio claimed that the magazine and editors were failing to pay writers for the stories they published.48 Three writers, W. Varick Nevins III, Arthur K. Barnes, and Chester D. Cuthbert, joined Wollheim, who was a writer as well as a fan, in bringing and winning suit against Gernsback for their payments. Wollheim, Sykora, and Michel continued their criticism of Wonder and its editors in the pages of the International Scientific Association’s (ISA) International Observer. This iteration of the ISA, which took “For the Study of Science as an Avocation” as its motto, was a more science-oriented group that Sykora revived after the ISA’s previous and short-lived affiliation with the Science Correspondence Club. Ironically, despite its criticism of Gernsback, the ISA used an adaptation of a logo he developed for Amazing’s precursor to science fiction, the inelegant phrase “scientifiction,” in the mid-1920s as its official emblem. The trio’s criticisms led Hornig to expel them from the SFL and its Brooklyn chapter, of which they were card-carrying members. The September 1935 SFL department of Wonder Stories served public notice of their departure, duly noting its terms and circumstances. In response in 1936 the three former members stormed a meeting of the Eastern New York chapter of the SFL where Hornig was speaking and took over the meeting in the name of the ISA. There they convinced chapter members to cut their ties to their parent organization and reorganize as the Independent League for Science Fiction (ILSF).49 The move was the beginning of a subsequent all-out campaign against the SFL. “Every time they organized an SFL chapter in New York,” Wollheim recalled, “we would attend its meetings and subvert them into joining the International Scientific Association. Quite honestly, we were conducting warfare against the SFL, and we were expelled for good and sufficient reasons. The Brooklyn chapter didn’t survive its contact with us for more than two meetings. We took them all over—we ate up three or four Science Fiction League chapters.”50 Wollheim, Sykora, and Michel’s antics and actions demonstrated the difficulty the SFL faced in achieving its aims. In a broad sense the SFL was successful coordinating and organizing fans. Its formation brought a renewed

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level of interaction and exchange within science fiction and, with Astounding’s Great Staple War letters, introduced new and casual readers to the more enthusiastic, but hitherto relatively private, world of fans and fanzines. Despite Wollheim, Sykora, and Michel’s co-optation of SFL chapters, their campaign in its own way recognized the league’s popularity and significance. Their conflict was with Gernsback, Hornig, and Wonder, not the SFL, whose membership they sought to convert to their cause. In a more narrow sense, however, the SFL’s aim to organize science fiction’s fans under the auspices of Wonder was not successful because it was not particularly original. Fans had already begun to organize themselves, and within fans’ developing social dynamics Wonder and Gernsback’s prior claim to have created science fiction only garnered the magazine and the editor respect for and after the fact. It and their claims for the SFL’s future potential carried no inherent authority, nor did they provide any means to discipline disagreeing readers and unruly fans. League membership did not preclude fans from their other activities; indeed its popularity drew from their connection and continuation. In this sense the SFL was itself a sign and symbol of the efforts readers had already made to leave the public space of the backyard. As the Great Staple War’s alphabet and antialphabetical alphabet societies showed, fan membership in a group was fluid and at times frivolous. Membership in the SFL, although more involved and substantial, was another affiliation available to fans, adding to but not substituting for the identification they already had and the relationships they had built as science fiction fans. Allegiance to that idea and identity allowed for a rearranging of affiliations when they came into conflict. Despite the league’s initial popularity, Wonder’s sales did not increase significantly, continuing a slow decline through the 1930s from its initial height and heyday in 1929. Both Gernsback and Hornig left the magazine in 1936 when Gernsback gave up publishing science fiction. Although Wonder’s reincarnation, Thrilling Wonder, continued the SFL and its department for a while, its new publisher, Leo Margulies, made clear that he was not interested in fan activities, and the SFL slowly declined, with its more active and enthusiastic members joining the broader fan community to which it had exposed them. With the exposure of the Great Staple War and the SFL, fans in the midand late 1930s continued to broaden and expand their activities. Although it drew attention from fans nationwide, the ISA’s feud with Gernsback, Hornig, and Wonder largely involved fans, clubs, and SFL chapters in the New York area, where pulp houses had their offices. In its few years of existence, however, the SFL helped establish local clubs throughout the country, including

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active groups in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles. These new fans, as Baltadonis’s correspondence with Yerke demonstrated, added to the proliferation of fanzines and, more significantly, moved to extend their activities beyond their local areas. In the midst of their dispute with Wonder, members of the ISA found time, money, and effort to travel to Philadelphia, where in October 1936 they met with members, including Baltadonis, Madle, and Agnew, of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society (PSFS), the recently renamed Philadelphia chapter of the SFL. Wollheim moved that their meeting be designated the First Science Fiction Convention, and the groups pledged to work to convene a World Science Fiction Convention in 1939 in conjunction with the upcoming New York World’s Fair, appropriately themed “The World of Tomorrow.” Acrimonious disputes between Wollheim, Michel, and Sykora that divided and disbanded the ISA did not prevent their factions and other fans from meeting again to continue planning the 1939 event: in New York City in 1937 at the Second Eastern Science Fiction Convention—the 1936 meeting in Philadelphia having been redesignated the first; and in Newark in 1938 at the First National Science Fiction Convention.51 Three years of planning and a decade and a half of science fiction conversations culminated in the 1939 World Science Fiction Convention, held July 2-3. World’s Fair officials had offered an assembly hall and group-discounted admission in addition to a proposed “Science Fiction and Boy Scouts of America Day,” but the organizing committee declined, and the convention was held at Caravan Hall on the east side of Manhattan instead of the Fair’s Flushing Meadow site.52 Approximately two hundred people including many prominent fans, editors, and writers from across the country attended the event, which honored Frank R. Paul, the cover artist for Gernsback’s magazines in the 1920s and early 1930s. Activities included speeches, a screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, a banquet, and a softball game between the Queens SFL and the PSFS. Several attendees also went to a July 4th evening excursion to Coney Island that was not part of the official convention.53 The gathering garnered coverage from Time magazine in a one-page report entitled “Amazing! Astounding!” and which quoted Thrilling Wonder and the Thrilling chain’s chief editor, Leo Margulies—ironically, given his original position on fan activities—as saying, “I am astonished. I didn’t realize you boys could be so damn sincere.”54 The event, however, was marred in the eyes of some members of the science fiction community because six fans, members of the Futurian Science Literary Group (Futurians), were specifically excluded: Frederik Pohl, Robert Lowndes, Cyril Kornbluth, Jack Gillespie, John Michel,

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and Donald Wollheim, who had first proposed the New York convention at the 1936 Philadelphia meeting. Their exclusion spoke to the politics within fandom in the late 1930s. United in their fight against Gernsback, Hornig, and Wonder in 1935 and 1936, the three SFL and ILSF renegades, Wollheim, Michel, and Sykora, soon split over their own disagreements about the direction fandom should take. Despite their antics, the three took seriously the pulps’ progressive and democratic claim for science fiction but differed in their views of its implications for fandom. On the one hand, as his revived ISA demonstrated, Sykora felt that science fiction and fandom should work toward greater participation in and contribution to advancing science. Fellow fan Forrest Ackerman characterized his view, and that of others who agreed, as following the motto “Save Humanity with Science and Sanity.”55 On the other hand, Wollheim and Michel leaned toward developing democracy directly, arguing that science fiction’s progressive outlook should pursue politics, specifically exploring its connection to socialism and communism. In 1937 their differences forced a divide. Sykora expelled Wollheim, Michel, and other fans from the New York branch of the ISA and dissolved the branch altogether. In turn, members of the branch elected Wollheim to all the offices of the ISA simultaneously, whereupon he disbanded the entire organization. In early 1938 Wollheim, Michel, and other left-leaning fans in the New York area formed the Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction (CPASF) and began publishing its official organ, the Science Fiction Advance. In addition to more esoteric pursuits such as writing a science fiction version of the “Internationale,” they began pursuing their motto “Dreamers awaken . . . the future is upon us!” by proclaiming the virtues of what became known as “Michelism” throughout the science fiction fan community.56 Science Fiction Internationale57 (words by John B. Michel, sung to the tune of the Internationale) Awake, ye science-fiction readers! Awake, ye star-begotten fans! For science fiction is advancing! Its fate is one with Man’s. The torch of science goes before us, The flag of reason is unfurled.

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We are the Vanguard of the Future, We’ll build a new and better world! ’Tis the final conflict, Let each stand in his place; The International Council Shall be the human Race. A peculiar combination of fandom and Popular Front political sensibilities, Michelism reflected the more open social attitude of the 1930s toward left-wing political perspectives.58 Many avowed Michelists were openly sympathetic to socialist thought, goals, and agendas, and like Michel and Pohl some members participated actively in organizations such as the Young Communist League. Named after Michel but proselytized more by Wollheim, Michelism was “the belief that science-fiction followers should actively work for the realization of the scientific socialist world-state.” Its achievement, according to the CPASF, was “the only genuine justification for their activities and existence.”59 To that end its members argued that science fiction should organize to advance socialism in America and worldwide. That focus would give their disparate community noble purpose and allow its members to better themselves. Socialism’s progressivism “would direct the minds of the idealist youth who are the main readers of science-fiction,” the CPASF maintained, “into channels more advantageous to them and to humanity.” Taking exception to Gernsback’s original science fiction premise, which Sykora and his followers now espoused, they argued, “Rather than delude them into false ideas of becoming scientists all, it would give them a more accurate and ideal presentation of the world.”60 Despite its followers’ enthusiasm, Michelism did not produce a political movement. It did, however, spark passionate debate and heated exchanges within science fiction. Some fans, informed and not, debated the merits of socialism and communism as either ideologies or movements, but most of the discussion centered on fandom. Their rhetoric aside, Michelists’ efforts extended science fiction, specifically its creativity and excitement, to their socialist ideas more than they advanced socialism through science fiction. Its community offered passionate participation that those who also joined the Communist Party and the Young Communist League did not find in those organizations. Reflecting back, Pohl commented, “The YCL was so square it was a disappointment.”61 Certainly their political perspectives informed their

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actions and activities. Wollheim and Michel’s (and, at the time, Sykora’s) war against Gernsback and Wonder over SFL chapters was only a prelude to a broader campaign they and others launched within science fiction. Once formulated as a more general political position, Michelism was a banner under which its proponents railed against commercialism and editorial control of science fiction and rallied fans and followers in numerous fanzine articles and voluminous correspondence in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Its explicit message echoed the fictional Ed Ball’s—and the author David H. Keller’s— exclamation in “The Threat of the Robot” about commercializing the inventions of science: “I found that you had given to the world some blessings, but they were all tangled up with rather definite curses.”62 More indirectly, while many fans did not accept or espouse Michelism, its anticommercialism still informed the distinction many increasingly made between their activities and those of the prozines. That emerging cultural divide, between amateur fans and professionals, also paralleled Ball and Keller’s perspective on football’s amateurs and professionals. The concern for the science fiction community, and for fans specifically, however, was neither commercialism nor political ideology. Michelism’s most divisive position was its argument that science fiction fandom should have a single and specific larger purpose. Beneath their frivolity and fun, fans’ activities mirrored the concern for individual ability and authority that interwar science fiction stories expressed. As their reading and fan communities showed, their individualism led to mutual collaboration, displaying the ethical sensibility that historians observed, characteristically, of 1930s society and culture. In the same manner Michelism’s greater concern for collective and material practice still asked and argued for fans to reach their individual potential. Particularly after almost a decade of economic upheaval that led many to consider, if not to doubt, capitalism’s preeminence, Michelism’s politics considered, unsurprisingly, economics’ moral sentiments. If fandom existed outside the commercial consideration of prozines, progress toward its potential required an ethical purpose beyond simply maintaining its existence. Still, while Michelists condemned many fanzines and fan activities for misguided pandering to the commercial interests of science fiction editors, the very issue they raised and the numerous articles they wrote, in fact, provided much of the substance and volume of those fanzines and activities in the late 1930s when they advanced Michelism.63 For many fans, however, the strength of their community lay in its diversity as much as in its collective will. Amid their fun and frivolity, fans had intro-

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duced each other to concerns as varied as Esperanto and systems for simplifying spelling, to Technocracy and rocket science, to socialism and communism as well as right-leaning political ideologies. Because of the richness of this exchange, some felt that fandom’s collective purpose, if it had one, was to maintain that diversity. “The way the question stands to my eyes, and the reason I opposed Michelism in the first place,” Yerke wrote privately to Wollheim in late 1938, “was because of the basic assumption that—Science-Fiction Fans, acting as Science-Fiction Fans, will never accomplish anything. There are not sufficient number of fans, let alone sufficient numbers of scientifiction readers in general who could, even if they wanted to, form an organization that would ever do any good. . . . Stf fans as a body cannot do anything.” He suggested instead that Michelists let fans “merge their attentions to various existing organizations such as you mentioned, the YCL, Socialist Party, Esperantist Movement, SAT, SATR, IWW, if they want to, and similar such movments [sic].” The Michelist group could serve as a clearinghouse and use their publications to describe and “point out the various aims and advantages from these movements, and then the fan can do as he pleases.”64 The exclusion of the Futurians at the 1939 New York convention, however, revealed the limit of this inclusive dynamic. The split between Sykora and Wollheim and Michel that spawned Michelist and anti-Michelist political discussion was also personal and political, in a different sense, in its practical consequence for its participants. In 1938 Sykora, Sam Moskowitz, James Taurasi, and others organized what they called “New Fandom,” a fan group that opposed Michelism and, more significantly, worked to reconnect and coordinate fan activities with professional editors and publishers. Their support and commercial sponsorship swung control of planning for the New York World Convention in 1938 to the New Fandom faction. The ousted original planners, several of whom formed the Futurians as a literary complement to their more overtly political organizations, in typical fan fashion, proclaimed their own rival faction under the rubric True Fandom.65 The exclusion of the six Futurians from the New York gathering was, in this sense, not only a power struggle between New and True Fandom but also the culmination of several years of Michelist debate and Sykora’s, Michel’s, and Wollheim’s personal feuds. Infused with overlapping personal, political, and professional differences, their ongoing conflict was also a competition for fan, and in the case of New Fandom, commercial, recognition and authority. In a broader sense their conflict and its consequence marked the difference between fans’ imagining science fiction and their actual practice. While

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many fans did not agree with Michelism, they believed there was a place for it within science fiction and fandom. The interwar stories they read entertained science’s potential by, on the one hand, resolving—through victory or romance—the dangers of its possibilities or, on the other hand, imagining yet another. This elastic dynamic postponed indefinitely any final conclusion about that potential, reserving its historical determinacy and preserving the inevitability of its progress. In much the same way the idea, in Yerke’s words, that “the fan can do as he pleases” was an imaginative principle that drove fans, fanzines, and fandom as well as its elastic form of dissent, preserving their community by making ever more room for expressed difference.66 The exclusion of the Futurians, however, revealed the myth and limit of that expansive notion. At the moment when science fiction fans from across the country and overseas gathered to celebrate their community, the voices of some members were not allowed to be heard. Wollheim made this same point after the 1939 New York gathering. “The Convention has been and gone,” he wrote in an article for the Science Fiction Fan, a Denver-based fanzine edited by Olon F. Wiggins, offering his view of the situation. “According to the original plans as first worked out in 1937,” he recalled, “it was to be a fan convention to discuss for the first time the problems of fandom, the problems of science fiction and the world. The opportunity of getting fans together across thousands of miles could not be let slip without solving the problem of fandom by discussion. But the New Fandom leadership never dared face open discussion,” he explained, addressing the broader significance of the Futurians’ exclusion. “During the entire session as a result, an element entirely new to stf occurred—underground activity,” he continued. “Where freedom of thought is suppressed officially, it will grow unofficially.”67 Where before fans had united to fight commercial editorial control of their activities, New Fandom’s leaders showed that fans could also deny other fans.68 Moved to act outside their conversational community, science fictions fans faced the more determinate consequences of their activities. While fans had always, in effect, chosen whom they corresponded with, they became more self-conscious of the circles within which they circulated, keeping some open and inviting while restricting others to fans they felt they could trust. In a broad sense the events of the World Convention not only revealed tensions between fan factions; they also demonstrated explicitly the several ways science fiction fashioned identities and affiliations. Most science fiction enthusiasts in the interwar period were not so industrious that they became

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fans. Many began as and remained participant readers of stories, features, and letters in the prozines. The efforts of fans, however, made it difficult for even casual readers not to be aware of them and, by extension, the amalgam of overlapping and interconnected social networks science fiction brought together. Despite their more self-conscious social dynamics, fans maintained the welcoming collective spirit of their backyard origins, corresponding with new and less involved members of their community as part of their continued development of fan activities. “Readers of your magazine will be interested in the new Futurian Federation of the World,” Frederik Pohl wrote to the “Under the Lens” letters column of Marvel Science Stories in August 1939. It is “an organization that will make strong attempts to enroll every science fiction reader in its ranks,” he explained, inviting the new pulp’s audience to join the group whose members had been excluded from the New York convention a month earlier. “It is not necessary to be one of the ten most popular fans to join The Futurians,” Pohl continued. “It is merely required that one have an active and alive interest in science fiction and in the future.”69 If fans maintained the premise with casual readers that all voices in science fiction’s conversations were equal, they had already realized, in ways outside of fan feuds, that some voices carried more weight than others. Fans’ distinction from more casual readers was not the only way science fiction’s industrious enthusiasts fashioned their identities. Part of the original attraction of science fiction’s conversational culture was its easy rapport between writers, editors, and readers. While by the end of the interwar period readers who had developed fan activities sought to distinguish themselves from professionals—and eventually from other fans—others had become professional writers and editors. Complicating and informing the divide between fans and professionals was the fact that some were both. Many science fiction writers by the mid- to late 1930s had become interested in science fiction first as readers. Given the space in pulp letters, and later fanzines, to voice their views, they found they could reproduce within their cultural space what some of them had already discovered on a local level: that they liked audiences too. “During lunch hour, we would sit on the curb in front of the school,” Isaac Asimov recalled about his precocious high school days in the early 1930s, “and to anywhere from two to ten eager listeners, I would repeat the stories I had read, together with such personal embellishments as I could manage. It increased my pleasure in science fiction, and I discovered . . . that I loved to have an audience.”70 He eventually turned from this oral tradition to writing, which could reach a far larger audience,

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albeit one not as personal.71 Already giving suggestions for improvements in stories, some readers tried their hand implementing their ideas. In science fiction’s formative years, in the 1920s and early 1930s, these attempts meant competing for recognition while trying to break into the market for writers. The occasional contest prizes that story-starved pulps in this emergent genre offered and the prospect to earn money writing provided additional incentive. Clare Winger Harris, then Mrs. F. C. Harris, 1652 Lincoln Avenue, Lakewood, Ohio, began her writing career by winning third place in Amazing’s initial story contest of 1926.72 Similarly, Arthur Stangland and P. Schuyler Miller, the latter already an enthusiastic letter writer, were contest winners in Science Wonder’s first year and enjoyed popularity in the mid1930s. Given the piecework and competitive nature of the writing market, many of these writers wrote and sold what they could, supporting themselves by other means. These part-time writers continued to be full-time readers. Indeed writing stories gave them yet another reason to read the discussions columns. “After my stories began appearing in the SF magazines,” Lloyd Arthur Eshbach recalled, “I became an avid reader of the letter departments, which were carried by all publications. I had read them before as a fan, even contributing to them occasionally—but now I had a new interest. What, if anything, would the readers have to say about my work?” Meeting through the discussions columns, Eshbach and Miller began a ten-year correspondence about a variety of matters including a proposed but never consummated collaboration.73 In turn, becoming a writer could lead to becoming a fan. Donald Wollheim escalated his fan activities after he was not paid for a story that he had written and Wonder had published. Some fans brokered their social connections into other professional opportunities. Mortimer Weisinger and Julius Schwartz parlayed their involvement as fans in the early 1930s producing the Time Traveler and Science Fiction Digest into successful careers publishing popular culture. Weisinger went from being a member of the Science Correspondence Club and a founding member of the New York–based Scienceers in the early 1930s to working for Leo Margulies editing Thrilling Wonder in 1936 after the Thrilling chain assumed Gernsback’s title. In the 1940s he went on to edit the Superman comic created by his longtime science fiction friends and correspondents, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.74 After Weisinger’s editorial ascendance, Schwartz assumed control over Solar Sales Service, the literary agency that the two of them had started out of their originally amateur activities. Well versed in

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readers’ tastes and preferences through his own correspondence and reading of fanzines, Schwartz became an influential agent splitting the difference between fans and pros. Finding aspiring writers among science fiction readers and fans, he introduced them and their work to Weisinger and other editors he came to know within science fiction’s social networks.75 Weisinger was not the first fan to become a prozine editor. In producing fanzines, readers had also become more knowledgeable about the technical and organizational details of publishing as well as about the tastes of other readers. While letter columns had long been an editorial source for reader preferences, science fiction editors recognized that fans’ enthusiastic and involved activities made them more reliably informed about consumer tastes and trends beyond the occasional reader letter. Needing to replace a departed editor—David Lasser, who felt he could contribute more socially during the Depression working to help the unemployed—quickly, Hugo Gernsback hired a fan in late 1933 to edit Wonder Stories. In a feat that inspired many other science fiction readers and fans, seventeen-year-old Charles Hornig went from reading science fiction and writing letters to his editors to editing a fanzine, the Fantasy Fan, to a paid salary as managing editor of Wonder Stories in three months. There he helped start the Science Fiction League and feuded with Wollheim, Sykora, Michel, and other fans who occupied positions similar to where he had been months before. These new science fiction professionals, however, did not forgo their origins. Many of them continued to read the prozines for pleasure, work in the amateur fan world, and correspond with other members of their community. Indeed their work as professionals almost required their continued efforts as fans. In crossing the boundary between professional and amateur, however, fans blurred every distinction it marked. For some, such as Schwartz, Weisinger, and Hornig, work in fanzines provided experience and entry into professional work. For writers particularly, fanzines offered a middle ground where they could publish pieces they had not sold with the possibility, albeit a small one, that they might be noticed for future sales. More significantly science fiction enthusiasts such as those who worked exclusively on fanzines had become a curious combination of both producer and consumer. Not only were they readers; they had also become writers, editors, and publishers in their own right. What might originally have been separate identities for individuals, depending on their places and functions within their community, increasingly became different roles they played, depending on the tasks they performed. Nevertheless these amateurs did not make their livings

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from their livelihoods. While a few fanzine publishers made money from occasional sales, most spent and lost money on their endeavors. Their interests, however, were not financial but cultural. Seeking to distinguish themselves within the fan community, they were amateurs by status and choice, but not necessarily because of the quality of their work or the authority they carried within science fiction. Not surprisingly fans debated the issue, which was interwoven with threads of Michelist concerns about commercialism and fandom’s purpose. Some proclaimed that fandom was “a way of life,” others exclaimed it was “just a goddamn hobby,” and still others argued the merits for both propositions.76 This industrious complication of cultural conventions and roles influenced science fiction’s broader social realm. As their enthusiasm gained them, over the course of the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the ability to be first readers and letter writers and then story writers, editors, and publishers in fanzines and prozines and to be them simultaneously, readers and fans recapitulated some of the pulps’ industrial practices. They adopted different voices and inflections and, like the fiction factory, different pseudonyms to distinguish between the various roles they played. Myrtle R. Jones, one of few early women fans, used the acronym in the Esperanto alphabet for her initials, Morojo, as her moniker in fan activities.77 Forrest Ackerman, her companion, had begun his involvement in the science fiction community as a teenage fan in the early 1930s. By the late 1930s he was widely known as one of the most active of fans, signing much of his correspondence 4e, the spelling of Forrie (short for Forrest) under his own simplified spelling system— which presaged the simplified spelling conventions developed much later for electronic mail and texts. In an extreme example, two brothers, Earl and Otto Binder, were known separately as letter writers and science fiction fans but also collectively as Eando (“E and O”) Binder, a fairly well-known professional story writer and fan. These nicknames, spellings, and pseudonyms were more than self-designations for their associated roles. As they circulated within science fiction in the letters columns of prozines, in fanzines, and through direct correspondence, they became recognized and recognizable personae, disguising the actors they involved behind performative masks. These personae and performances furthered subcultural practices within science fiction. From their earliest letters to science fiction pulps, readers had sought to distinguish their individual ability and authority. Letter writers’ various uses of “black box” facts, asserting their unquestioned veracity or, alternatively, disclosing the details and theories they contained, managed

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issues of authority and objectivity within their scientific and technical discussions. Pseudonyms, simplified and abbreviated spellings, and use of acronyms for alphabet and antialphabetical alphabet societies as well as other alternative fan terms served a similar function managing cultural authority within fandom. On the one hand, fans who knew the significance of the terms “fanzine,” “prozine,” “FIAWOL,” and “FIJAGH” used their shorthand to assert their knowledge and status casually without question or explanation. Those who used the term “stf ” in the mid-1930s knew both that it was Gernsback’s abbreviation for the “scientifiction” that Amazing proclaimed originally in the mid-1920s and that fans had appropriated it for their own use, particularly to signify anticommercialism and dissatisfaction with Gernsback and Wonder. On the other hand, readers new to science fiction and fandom needed to ask about and have explained insiders’ assumed knowledge. Authority and acceptance could not be claimed without demonstrating a sense of this subcultural history and tradition, which curious newcomers could also learn and retrace by reading and collecting back issues of prozines and fanzines. Indicatively, by the late 1930s, fanzines and some prozines also ran articles chronicling science fiction and fan histories and featured “who are they?” columns discussing and revealing the identities of significant amateurs as well as professionals. At the same time active fans continued inventing traditions, customs, and terminology. Planning fan conventions, they developed a shorthand using variations of the term “con,” short for “convention,” to indicate a specific convention location or type. Following this protocol, the 1939 New York World Convention was both a NYCon and a WorldCon. When Morojo and 4e Ackerman attended NYCon in costumes based on the movie “Things to Come,” they began a trend that subsequent WorldCons made a tradition: inclusion of a masquerade ball.78 This subcultural dynamic, however, pointed to social differences that could not be imagined away. If fandom’s development gave fans the opportunity for fun and creativity, its growth marked both their successful industry and its complication. If fans’ use of pseudonyms and shorthand terms invested differential authority to their associated roles and active insiders, these were also reminders of the uneasy and unresolved tension between the freedom to manufacture distinction and the freedom implied in the idea of conversations between equals. While readers and letter writers such as Charles Hornig and John W. Campbell could also be professional writers and editors, because they were professionals they were not fans just like any other fan. All rhetoric to the contrary, their words and actions carried greater weight and

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consequence within science fiction’s public because of their positions and achievements. The use of pseudonyms and personae disguised the issue but could not remove it. Nor were professional roles any more easily separable. After he became editor of Astounding, Campbell continued to write stories under the name Don A. Stuart, taken from his wife’s maiden name, Dona Stuart, to separate his writing from his editorial position.79 Knowledgeable science fiction professionals and fans, however, kept informed about such professional practices, diminishing their effectiveness except among uninitiated readers or less up-to-date fans. In this sense the 1939 NYCon, the first WorldCon, marked the contours of science fiction’s community beyond its organizers’ intentions.80 Originally planned as a gathering for fans to discuss the nature of science fiction and fandom, it celebrated fan activities and practices without engaging either conversation seriously. Several years of Michelist debate and furious fan feuds about whether fandom had a single, broader purpose instead produced the exclusion of six Futurians. If the concerns that Michelists and other fans raised about the politics of commercialism, which were not inconsequential given the global economic turmoil of the 1930s, were not directly addressed, they were nonetheless answered indirectly by the popular culture that had developed within fandom. Industrious science fiction enthusiasts had successfully blurred the boundaries between readers, writers, and editors; between amateurs and professionals; and between ordinary, casual readers and more active and in-the-know fans. At the same time their very success stretching those boundaries made the roles and identities they defined problematic. Science fiction had grown so large and so diverse that it was not possible to define a single way that people participated within it. Conventions, however, produced a useful solution, if not a resolution, to the situation. Their attendees were, by nature and self-selection, active and enthusiastic and therefore inclined to consider themselves fans—and incidentally and perhaps grudgingly professionals. Whether they believed it was “a way of life” or “just a goddamn hobby,” fans had come to see fandom as a necessary part of their lives. If Michelism could not unite science fiction fans to a single progressive cause, the 1939 World Convention demonstrated that they were nevertheless willing to meet under fandom’s banner. Sharing little common purpose beyond its simple affiliation, they put aside the other boundaries and distinctions, commercial and cultural, that they were otherwise defining and defeating. Convening fans mirrored the paradoxical contradiction of the early fanzine community: individually they expounded

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differing and sometimes opposing views; collectively they were the means for both cooperation and dissent. Moreover, because professional publishers, editors, and writers also attended conventions, fans forgave their individual differences to relish fandom’s unifying subcultural dynamic. With an inclusive ethos celebrating fan activities and conversations, conventions recapitulated for participants the communal vision they had originally imagined within science fiction even if in actual practice outside their gatherings that idea had become so extended and extensible that it verged on losing any meaningful significance. The 1940 Chicago “Chicon” and 1941 Denver “Denvention” followed the 1939 “Nycon,” and science fiction’s annual WorldCon continues as its largest social gathering. Similarly, while the exclusion of the Futurians forced fans to realize fandom’s inclusive limits, it led in other ways to their reimagining their sense of its community. While some continued to publish fanzines in the usual fashion, others, concerned with commercialism, began participating in publishing collectives known as amateur press associations, or APAs. In the mid-1930s Donald Wollheim, Frederik Pohl, and John Michel briefly joined the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) and the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA). In 1937 Wollheim organized the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA), the first of several science fiction APAs.81 APAs gave fanzine publishers more effective and efficient means to distribute their work among each other. Members produced their own ’zines, but instead of mailing them directly, they sent copies in bulk to appointed distributors, who collated them and mailed the collated sets back to members, minus their original fanzines. FAPA and other APAs epitomized the impulse behind the science fiction community’s initial emergence: they institutionalized the independence of members’ conversations, particularly from commercial influences.82 “Measures are needed badly to preserve the individual publications,” Wollheim wrote, “and to place the entire field of fan magazines upon a more friendly, less commercial and more solid foundation. There are many fans desiring to put out a voice who dare not for fear of being obliged to keep it up, and for the worry and time taken by subscriptions and advertising.” He continued, “It is for them and for the fan who admits it is his hobby and not his business that we form FAPA.”83 While they developed independently of other traditions within fandom, FAPA and APAs were equally subcultural. Each member was producer and consumer, and all voices were equal. Although APAs had offices to carry out its various organizational functions such as distribution, which usually

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rotated among members, decisions were made through the consensus of the whole. Although still democratic in that sense, APAs were no longer democratic in other senses: they were not so much a collective whole working for common purpose as a collection of individuals working for mutual benefit. In addition, while some members of FAPA such as Wollheim eventually worked as professionals, their involvement in the organization remained outside the concerns of the professional world. Reflecting their growing separation from that world, the fanzines that APAs produced began to resemble less and less the prozines other fanzines still imitated. Many stopped noting prices on their covers. Others stopped including page numbers. More significantly, almost from their inception APAs began to include “mailing comments” from members about each other’s fanzines—and eventually about each other’s comments—that soon made up as large a part of their mailings as the actual ’zines themselves. Like the letters columns in science fiction prozines before them, APAs created the opportunity and means for communication and conversation. Unlike those correspondence columns, APAs took measures to ensure the equanimity of those conversations: limiting membership, and actively including all members and avoiding partisan distinctions. While FAPA emerged out of fan activities, many of their conversations eventually did not concern science fiction at all.84 Its development was not surprising, following fandom’s general progression away from science fiction’s stories toward its social activities. Indeed FAPA’s collective distribution expressed the same conservative impulse as conventions’ celebration of fandom. While the one was removed to private practice and the other remained public culture, both sought to preserve and protect the quality of science fiction’s original conversations. As Michael Ashley observed, “For science fiction fans, the fiction became secondary.”85 By 1939 voices from science fiction’s backyard could be heard throughout the genre’s magazines. Raymond Palmer, John W. Campbell, and Mortimer Weisinger, all former contributors to pulp science fiction discussions columns, were installed as editors of Amazing, Astounding, and Thrilling Wonder respectively. Frederik Pohl edited the new Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories for Harry Steeger’s Popular Publications, and Charles Hornig returned to editing late in the year with Science Fiction. Palmer, a former officer in the Science Correspondence Club, commented, “Here at last, I had it in my power to do to my old hobby what I had always had the driving desire to do to it.”86

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However, as Hugo Gernsback had learned, editorial control of magazines was not control over their audiences. His successes became the basis of his exit from science fiction. Fans’ and readers’ embrace of the SFL had not bolstered Wonder’s eroding sales in the face of competition from Amazing and particularly Astounding. Gernsback used his April 1936 editorial, “Wonders of Distribution,” to announce that Wonder Stories would no longer be available from newsstands but only by subscription. “Unfortunately, up to the present time, this has never worked out,” he wrote about subscription’s risks, “because only a comparatively small percentage of people can be induced to subscribe to any type of magazine in advance.” He observed further, “The collection difficulties between publisher and individual readers are greater than when distributing the magazine at wholesale to newsstands.”87 Still, in a bold and desperate move, he bet that readers of the genre and public he had helped create would demonstrate their continued interest and loyalty and subscribe, rejuvenating Wonder’s finances and fortunes. Science fiction readers, however, were aware of the magazine’s declining quality and, informed by fan sources, of Gernsback’s record of financial mismanagement. They rejected his distribution scheme overwhelmingly, and Won­der Stories folded shortly thereafter. Gernsback sold its rights to Standard Magazines, which revived it as part of its Thrilling chain, and he left science fiction publishing for good. His mistake was to underestimate what he had started. He had created new magazines and coined new terms and his pulps had manufactured a recognizable genre and public drawn to its vision of a progressive and democratic science. Its participatory ethos, however, inspired readers not only to imagine science’s adventure and possibility but also to pursue their interests socially and collectively. Demonstrating their industry, these enthusiasts formed clubs, wrote and produce fanzines espousing their own views and political perspectives, and eventually leveraged their developing ability and expertise into pay and positions as writers and editors in their own right. Over the course of the 1930s their emerging, and at times conflicting, practices expanded science fiction’s popular culture, opening its professional opportunities while developing a self-consciously subcultural world of amateur fans. While some of fandom’s activities were frivolous, fandom’s emergence nevertheless expressed seriously the interwar period’s historical circumstances. If Gernsback’s original vision of science and science fiction’s potential captured the progressive mood of the mid-1920s, the fact that few readers and fans, despite their enthusiasm, paid full if any price for what they read

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demonstrated the practical constraints of the period’s popular culture. As both fandom and the Depression developed during the 1930s, science fiction’s distinction between amateurs and professionals and fans’ concern about its commercialism were further calibrations of these cultural and financial considerations. It is not surprising that when asked by Gernsback to demonstrate their loyalty in the midst of that Depression, most readers chose—where they actually had the economic means to choose—a broader and independent sense of science fiction, aligning more toward fandom’s emerging amateur freedom instead of Wonder’s subscription. Problematic in some of its own emerging practices, fandom still allowed its followers and readers more generally to imagine their own vision of science’s fiction.

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

The urge to explore, to discover, to “follow knowledge like a sinking star,” is a primary human impulse which needs and can receive no further justification than its own existence. The search for knowledge, said a modern Chinese philosopher, is a form of play. Very well: we want to play with spaceships. —Arthur C. Clarke, “The Challenge of the Spaceship”1

In the summer of 1931 Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories of Super Science, and Wonder Stories each published letters to the editor from the American Interplanetary Society (AIS). Writing on its behalf, Secretary Nathan Schachner declared its goals and purpose. “To your readers,” he said, “we offer our active and associate memberships.” Society membership, he explained, gave “lovers of science fiction a chance to assist in the bringing to realization of the dream of all interplanetary travel.”2 Each letter included the society’s address to write for further information. Schachner’s call to the interplanetary cause reflected the different environment for imagining, pursuing, and producing science that science fiction’s emergence enabled. A generation earlier a young Robert Goddard read and was inspired by scientific romances to pursue science, specifically rocket science, but his reading and subsequent research were, and continued throughout his career to be, solitary endeavors.3 Interwar science fiction similarly inspired its readers to science, but having also fostered a community for like-minded enthusiasts, their attempts to realize science’s imagined

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potential were collective and communal. While an older Goddard continued his research in private, the possibilities for a rocket science that was part information, part ingenuity, and part effort remained open to social invitation. Other rocket enthusiasts filled the public vacuum he left in his withdrawal, forming organizations, most notably the American Interplanetary Society, to pursue its cause. Not only inspired by science fiction’s stories, they used its letters columns to advertise and recruit members to their community. The AIS in particular also included science fiction editors and writers as well as enthusiasts among its original members and leaders. Like science fiction fans, their evolving practice confronted issues of legitimacy, authority, and an emerging distinction between amateurs and professionals, but while the issues were similar, their circumstances and conditions were neither parallel nor congruent. Successful science in the interwar period increasingly required social as well as material capital and, in the process, transformed its practice. This new, expert science emphasized its “making,” accumulating data and producing results that were neither final nor finished but that nevertheless marked rigorous and principled method. Although discovering extraordinary wonders still won acclaim, demonstrating proper method in achieving more ordinary outcomes, particularly those that were repeatable, also won acknowledgment, recognition, and their concomitant authority.4 While rocket enthusiasts, many of them amateurs, began endeavoring to build working rockets, those who realized more success tempered their efforts, delaying their larger aspirations to pursue its incremental, technical details. Moving from launching rockets entirely from scratch, they experimented with and tested rocket components, fuels, and materials. Such practice, however, still required “imagining” science in the same fashion that interwar science fiction proposed, articulating an inspiring vision to connect the data and results of science in the making to their eventual potential and final purpose. The enterprising efforts of amateur interwar rocket societies presented and represented popular rocket science in action. For most amateur rocketry groups in the interwar period, science was science fiction; its practice began with imagining science. This was doubly the case for the American Interplanetary Society.5 The society was formed in the spring of 1930 in New York City, and nine of its twelve original members were editors or writers for Hugo Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories.6 David Lasser, the organization’s first president, was a graduate of the Mas-

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sachusetts Institute of Technology and managing editor for Science Wonder and the other magazines in Gernsback’s Stellar Publications chain.7 Nathan Schachner, the AIS secretary; Fletcher Pratt; Laurence Manning; and William Lemkin, Ph.D., were relatively well-known science fiction writers.8 Charles P. Mason was associate editor of Science Wonder and editor of Everyday Science and Mechanics, another Gernsback publication, and he, Charles W. Van Devander, and G. Edward Pendray, the society’s vice president, also wrote science fiction under the pseudonyms of Epaminondas T. Snooks, Peter Arnold, and Gawain Edwards respectively.9 Adolph L. Fierst was Gernsback’s rewrite man.10 Rounding out the initial dozen were Lee Gregory, a syndicated women’s page columnist and Pendray’s wife; Warren Fitzgerald, the leader of the Scienceers, a science fiction fan club also interested in science; and Everett Long.11 While the language they used was as sensational as the pulp stories some of the members wrote, the group was serious in its purpose. They were science enthusiasts, not trained professionals, and they believed, as did Gernsback, that scientific knowledge empowered people. In addition, in contrast to Goddard, they were committed to promoting popular participation in science’s collective development. “We are attempting not only to organize something,” Lasser declared, “but to organize something radically new and different, and to carry on our work as amateurs.”12 Gernsback had, in fact, encouraged them to organize and paid the expenses of their first meeting, recognizing that publicity for the society was also publicity for science fiction and Science Wonder Stories.13 Attention to publicity and a genuine interest in advancing science were not mutually exclusive; indeed the combination of the two was characteristic of and often necessary for success in popular science in the interwar period. The group’s decision to include “interplanetary” in its name recognized this point. Their interest in extraterrestrial travel belonged to a broader cultural fascination with aerial adventure in the United States in the early twentieth century. The flurry of interest and plethora of volunteers to accompany Robert Goddard on a trip to the moon that greeted the publication of his “Extreme Altitudes” article in 1919 was part of a developing interest in all things flying or capable of flying. Aerial enthusiasts traced World War I flying aces, populist barnstormers, and pioneering pilots such as Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, despite their disparate concerns and circumstances, to their original forebears in flight, the Wright brothers, within a celebratory genealogy of aviation’s progress and adventure.14 In a few short decades

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intrepid aviators had not only achieved flight but had also advanced it technologically to cross the Atlantic, circumnavigate the globe, and approach the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The Wright brothers’ original Flyer had inspired other forms of airplanes, fixed-wing monoplanes, biplanes, and triplanes and also other forms of air travel, including balloons, blimps, gliders, and dirigibles—or as they were better known, airships. Rockets and travel to outer space, to the moon, and to other planets, in this sense, were the next steps in the logic of this tradition’s progression. It would be, in the words of the society’s mission, “one of the most stupendously romantic adventures attempted by man.”15 Interwar popular culture bore witness to the new experiences that the sky, the air, and beyond offered. Flight, which involved moving through altitudes independent of the ground, was still a radically new form of travel, at a time when scientists and science fiction were already considering the physics of traveling through time and other dimensions beyond ordinary space’s three. Although aviation’s development and publicity kept society informed and inspired about air travel’s progress, few people in the early twentieth century had actually flown. Everyone else was left to finding a way to fly or imagine the experience. In this sense the era’s popular culture helped define its aerial fascination.16 Pulp magazines and stories, motion pictures, comic strips, and radio broadcasts categorized its adventures, creating mechanisms for and types of them. In the 1920s and 1930s pulp experimentation produced barnstorming stories, which did not enjoy significant popularity, and air stories, which focused on aerial battles and dogfights that distinguished their pilots’ prowess and their planes’ specifications in such titles as Bill Barnes’ Air Adventure, G-8 and His Battle Aces, and Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds. Their success fed the late 1930s run of Ace Drummond in a comic strip and film serial cowritten by the World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker, whose career paralleled the media, companies (King Features Syndicate and Republic Films), and success of science fiction’s Flash Gordon.17 The one expressed the airplane’s adventures to the other’s rocket and interplanetary exploits. Less obviously but still significantly, popular culture also informed people’s perspective of aerial possibility. Not strictly an air adventure, the climatic scenes of the film King Kong (1933) included aerial views of the great ape, the recently completed Empire State Building and New York City. Intercutting shots from the biplanes and pilots as they gunned Kong down from his perch, the film also offered a visual experience of flying and aerial combat to its audience.18 The press provided similar perspective. Science journalism emerged as

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a specialized form of news and reporting after World War I. Exemplified by Scripps-Howard’s new wire service, the Science News Service, and the writing of Waldemar Kaempffert for the New York Times, it focused on news and developments in science and technology, frequently running stories about aviation and rocketry.19 While it adhered to journalism’s emerging professional emphasis on objectivity and factual accuracy, interwar science journalism did not differ significantly from popular culture’s imaginative fiction in effect. Walter Benjamin’s observation that reporting conveys both information and story usefully explains their relationship.20 Although journalists sought to remove subjective considerations from the facts they reported, they still strove to make their news relevant to their readers’ experiences. A news article’s story in this sense resituated personal consideration removed from its information. While the details and developments they reported were factually accurate and carried the greater weight of science’s association of objectivity, early science news articles also sought to convey science’s story, and like pulp fiction, they found their inspiration in adventure. In an era of limited formal education, especially science education, interwar science journalism emphasized science’s inclusive enterprise, and its features were often written as imaginative hypotheticals, offering personal experience of the science they reported to readers who were versed in neither.21 These practices allowed the public to read reports of rocket science as they did science fiction: for technical detail, adventure, or both. The AIS tapped into this impulse, proposing scientific research and subsuming it to a larger goal of building ships to travel through outer space to the moon and farther, with an additional goal of gaining recognition for the society and its science. The group and its members lacked both professional and public regard, and their efforts in their first years of existence centered as much on attracting attention to the organization as they did on achieving its goals. “Because the aim of the Society is to popularize the idea of interplanetary flight and to educate the public, as well as to publicize itself,” Pendray observed, “our publicity efforts have naturally been of a double nature.”22 Lacking formal training, they began collecting a library of books, articles, and press clippings related to interplanetary travel, which would be available to all society members. Using the collection and other materials, they scheduled occasional classes to educate themselves and anyone else interested about the subject’s scientific and technical concerns as well as other related issues. “We have all gained enormously by [our] series of mutual enlightenment classes,” Lasser declared after the AIS’s first year, “and we therefore constitute a group

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whose knowledge of the problem of rocketry is a valuable source of information for any scientist.”23 Scientific competence, however, particularly self-taught competence, was not scientific authority. Such authority, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, is “defined inseparably as technical capacity and social power.”24 In this regard social standards for scientific authority and legitimacy in the interwar period were mixed and shifting. Educational reforms in the late nineteenth century had added science to the general college curriculum, and by the early twentieth century most colleges carried concentrations and majors in scientific and technical fields, and those that had expanded into universities also offered advanced degrees and training. Emerging professional associations, in particular, welcomed these graduates and emphasized their degrees as well as continued education and development requirements as credentials to vest their authority and expertise.25 At the same time awareness that few people—less than 10 percent in the 1920s—enjoyed the resources and life circumstances to attend high school, much less continue to college and graduate studies, tempered the full weight of formal credentials.26 The presence of older, less formally trained practitioners in various technical fields as well as a tradition of self-taught tinkerers and inventors also argued that degrees were not the only measure of scientific and technical ability. Although the balance of consideration tipped toward formal credentials as educational access and attendance increased over the interwar years—and expanded greatly after World War II—practical experience, learned expertise, and demonstrable ability still argued as much for scientific authority as did degrees and professional membership. While the Depression of the 1930s brought widespread loss of income, resources, and jobs, for popular science enthusiasts, unemployment also offered them an ironic opportunity to pursue its cause, contribute to its growth, and possibly prove their worth. “Much of the lack of enthusiasm . . . can undoubtedly be laid to unemployment and the business depression,” AIS president Lasser observed in 1931. “People are . . . reluctant to spend money for other than immediate necessities. . . . I don’t doubt . . . there are the very men that we want, and that they want us. It means only some connecting link to bring us together. You men and women are that link.”27 More to the point, credentials, ability, and effort were not mutually exclusive, and the society sought to establish its credibility on all fronts. Borrowing Science Wonder Stories’ example of a board of scientific advisers to verify its science, the AIS solicited the recognition of respected scientists to bolster its

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legitimacy. Following Gernsback’s earlier offer to Goddard of an associate editorship of Amazing Stories in exchange for a stock option in the magazine, Lasser tried to persuade the reclusive rocket scientist to become a member of the society and to lend it his prestige. “I want to invite you to become an honorary member of our Society and a member of our Advisory Committee,” he wrote to Goddard, “which will be composed of men of the same standing as yourself.”28 Goddard politely declined as he had the earlier offer. The society also conducted a less personal postcard campaign advertising their existence to physicists and astronomers at universities and other scientific institutions. The stamped and addressed cards they sent to these experts requested replies to two offers: the one for free subscription to the society’s Bulletin; the other for information about requirements for membership. With the exception of New York University physicist Dr. H. H. Sheldon, who became an enthusiastic supporter, most respondents’ affirmative answers to the first and mixed responses to the second echoed Goddard’s response and indicated the status of the AIS in professional opinion: polite interest but not yet worth investment of membership.29 The society’s attempts to draw general public attention met with more success. Their experience as producers in a mass-market culture industry afforded them access to the power of the press.30 In his capacity as a parttime science writer for the New York Herald Tribune, Pendray regularly covered rocketry and other interplanetary issues on his beat.31 His tribute in the paper’s May 25, 1930, Sunday edition to Max Valier, the German rocket experimenter who died a fiery death in the trial of his rocket-propelled car, indirectly advertised the society’s interplanetary cause. More directly the AIS’s announcements about its formation resulted in short pieces in the New York American, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York World.32 To promote its first public meeting on April 30, 1930, the AIS orchestrated a donation to its library from Capt. Sir Hubert Wilkins, the explorer recently returned from Antarctica, of a seventeenth-century interplanetary book— The Discovery of a New World, or a Discourse Tending to Prove That There May Be Another Habitable World in the Moon—by his ancestor John Wilkins, a bishop of Chester. Although President Lasser had actually purchased the book, the society gained further exposure from the press, implicitly connecting Wilkins’s exploration of the polar unknown to its intended explorations of the interplanetary unknown.33 The society’s regular public meetings offered further publicity and, more importantly, the opportunity to convert public attention into public accep-

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tance. Having gained enlightenment in matters concerning aspects of interplanetary travel, individual members assumed the vestments of authority to enlighten others. They translated the information they gathered from literature on rocketry into their own expert knowledge, lecturing to audiences at meetings held at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).34 In its first year alone the society presented an impressive range of lectures. President Lasser discussed possible military uses of the rocket in his “The Rocket and the Next War.” Vice President Pendray provided general context with his “The History of the Rocket” and “Worldwide Advances in Rocketry.” Secretary Mason raised the question “Can Man Exist in Outer Space?” Future society officers Manning and Van Devander demonstrated their active membership, the former speaking on the practical problems of “The Mechanics of Rocket Flight” and “External Aids to Rocket Flight,” and the latter on “Navigation in Interplanetary Space.” Thomas W. Norton and William Lemkin addressed the “Physiological Implications of Rocket Flight” and “Rocket Fuels and Their Possibilities.”35 Proper presentation of authority included resolute purpose and composure. “I do not think you need have fear of your success as a public speaker,” Pendray advised first-time expert lecturer H. Franklin Pierce. “You have something to say; the only requirement is that you get to work and say it.” Pendray added reassuringly, “If, having covered the ground, you run out of something to say, you can count on me to ask questions which will continue the discussion. . . . The first thing you know the evening will be over, and you will still have things you have left unsaid.”36 The society’s January 28, 1931, meeting, in particular, drew the gaze of those in professional and popular science. The many appeals there to recognized authorities succeeded in enlisting the aid of the astronautics expert and new AIS member Robert Esnault-Pelterie—the French answer to America’s Goddard and Germany’s Hermann Oberth—who agreed to lecture at the meeting.37 Adding to the spectacle, the AIS screened an English-language version of Fritz Lang’s feature film Frau im Mond (“Woman on the Moon”), a moon-rocket adventure for which Oberth and a German rocketry group, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR), had served as technical advisers.38 Dr. Sheldon presented an outline of Esnault-Pelterie’s ideas, and Pendray stood in to read the astronauticist’s paper because its author had taken ill.39 The audience included an estimated two thousand people, twice the capacity of the hall in the AMNH, and the program had to be repeated to accommodate the crowd, which had waited several hours to attend. The attention attracted more attention, and the New York Herald Tribune endorsed the society a few days later.40

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Although it bridged the distinction between professional and popular science, the endorsement still remained tempered by that distinction. With its legitimacy the AIS won recognition as a source of scientific information and not merely a group of crackpot enthusiasts. At the same time the ability to provide information was not equivalent to the ability to discover or create it.41 In a cultural milieu that ascribed science to genius and genius to individual personality, the society’s recognition for presenting Esnault-Pelterie to its audience was prestige by association and replication of his celebrity, not prestige from its own reputation.42 The audience’s autograph seekers illustrated the significance of this distinction when they mistook Pendray, the substitute reader, for the authentic but absent Esnault-Pelterie. “Lasser, as chairman of the meeting, announced the substitution in an unmistakeable [sic] way,” Pendray recalled later, “but nevertheless many members of the audience came clamoring up to the rostrum afterward demanding Esnault-Pelterie’s autograph. After several fruitless efforts to explain that I wasn’t the great Frenchman in person, I gave up and signed Esnault-Pelterie’s name right and left. As a result of that night’s work there are hundreds of copies of Esnault-Pelterie’s signature in autograph collections that couldn’t be phonier.”43 The AIS also presented the science of the evening in the same fashion. Its members tailored the screening of Frau im Mond to illustrate the science in its fiction, cutting romance scenes to emphasize the adventure and technique of rocket flight. Flyers advertising the film at the meeting listed the rocket scientist Hermann Oberth as the director of the film; omitted mention of Fritz Lang, its actual director, and UfA, its film company and distributor; and featured photographic stills of the same technical scenes provided by the VfR, stills that the German group used in its own publicity.44 The society’s report of the event in its Bulletin, however, read by its more distant members who could not attend, did not mention these particular arrangements or the autograph seekers’ case of mistaken identity.45 The society’s efforts notwithstanding, its various audiences took what they wanted from the meeting. The immediate audience for the film and the meeting responded to the AIS’s promotion of interplanetary travel, but they were attracted by the celebrity of its science, by the scientists engaged in it, and by the adventures they imagined it might ultimately bring to them. This promise differed greatly from the adventure of practicing science, specifically with the society, which it had also sought to foster in audiences. Despite the interest generated by the event, the AIS recruited few new members to its cause. Seeking to extend interest beyond its meetings at the American Museum

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of American History, the organization and its officers explored other avenues to encourage interplanetary exploration and engage possible new members. Informed by their review of existing literature on rocket science, Lasser sought to share the society’s mutual enlightenment with a broader reading audience, writing and publishing—at his, Pendray’s, and Schachner’s own expense—The Conquest of Space, the first nonfiction English-language book to discuss rocketry and spaceflight seriously, in 1931.46 Inspired by the VfR’s involvement with Frau im Mond, previous movies about moon travel such as All Aboard for the Moon and Hello Mars!, and continual offers to Goddard and other rocket scientists, the society offered its services to motion picture producers, garnering some interest. R. M. Langer, an agent for Paramount Productions, Inc., read a letter “with great interest” and forwarded it on to director Cecil B. DeMille.47 The AIS’s interest in motion pictures was not only to promote their authority but also to find resources for their proposed science. “The Society, like many such experimental groups these days,” Pendray, chair of its newly formed experimental committee, wrote to Langer, “is not overly supplied with funds.” He said, “We feel that we can give suggestions of considerable value to Paramount in connection with the filming of this picture,” suggesting that at the same time, “we also feel that it would be advantageous to Paramount to make a contribution to the Society’s experimental fund in return.”48 Pendray similarly appealed to broader audiences by appearing on radio broadcasts. An extensive presentation for WOR, New York’s Macy-Bamberger Boys’ Club show in April 1932, followed earlier appearances on radio talk shows for WOR in February and two Columbia University stations, W2XW and W2XAB, in March.49 Introduced as “one of the world’s recognized authorities on rocket ships,” Pendray used his knowledge to convey the experience of an imagined voyage to the moon to his listeners. When Captain Jack, the on-air navigator of boyhood adventure, exclaimed in interested curiosity, “I know that I would be interested, and I’m sure that the members of the Boys’ Club would like to know just what it would be like to take a trip to the moon,” Pendray replied cautiously, “Of course, Captain Jack, you know that I’ve never taken a trip to the moon, myself, but we know a good deal about the nature of space and something about what the trip would be like. I would be glad to tell you what I can about that experience. Needless to say, it will be the most tremendous thing that any man has ever gone through.”50 In the course of his firsthand account of a trip to the moon and back, read with special sound effects in the background—hiss! for an acceleration of ninety-

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six feet per second, Thud! for Captain Jack’s encounter with free fall, and crash! for landing on the moon—he demonstrated the expertise of his accumulated knowledge. He explained that liquid oxygen and hydrogen would be the proper rocket fuel; that acceleration is an increase in speed; that life insurance cannot be collected until legal death, six years after a personal disappearance; that gravity does not affect objects in space; that parachute landings on the moon are impossible without air; and that the gravity of the moon is one-sixth that of Earth. He also referred readers to Lasser’s book, carried conveniently in both Bamberger’s and Macy’s book departments, for further information on the subject.51 Where AIS members were most able initially to capitalize on their appeal was in their own backyard; that is, in the discussions columns of science fiction pulps they helped to write and edit. In the summer of 1931 Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories of Super Science, and Wonder Stories each published letters to the editor from the society. Switching his role from science fiction writer to society member, Nathan Schachner reiterated the organization’s stated goals and purpose. While he wrote to the editors, his intended audiences were actually their readers. “To your readers,” he said, “we offer our active and associate memberships, giving to lovers of science fiction a chance to assist in the bringing to realization of the dream of all interplanetary travel.”52 His letter included the society’s address to write for further information. Science fiction’s rocket enthusiasts heeded the call. From places as diverse as Tampa Bay, Florida; Eagle Bay, Oregon; Brooklyn, New York; Brookline, Massachusetts; Saxonburg, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; and from overseas, readers responded to the society’s announcements, expressing their sincere desire to realize as fact soon the fictions they read. “I have read numerous stories on interplanetary travel and intrigue,” wrote Sgt. H. R. Hinkley, stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines, “and I sincerly [sic] hope to see the day arrive when such stories will discard the cloak of fiction and don the robes of reality.” E. W. St. Luke of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wrote, “I was unaware that an organization such as the A. I-P. S. existed until I chanced to read your letter in the Amazing Stories magazine this morning. I did not believe that there could be such an organization, that enough future-minded people existed to foster the plans which the American Interplanetary Society calls for.” Expressing his desire to be a part of its noble enterprise, Arnold Gutierrez Vogel of Mexico City wrote, “I would like to obtain information about the American Interplanetary Society, and also about the classes of membership, as I’m interested in the dream of Interplanetary travel, and

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would like to assist, if possible, in bringing it to realization.” Indeed, despite its more publicized attempts, the AIS was most successful finding members among people already imagining the science of rockets and interplanetary adventure. The organization’s 1931 records show that the majority of inquiries about the society and membership referred to Schachner’s letters to science fiction pulps. “Consistent publicity has been obtained in the pages of Wonder Stories,” reported C. P. Mason, the society’s secretary, “and to this source must be attributed the larger portion of the out-of-town membership.”53 Maintaining the interest of members eager to realize imagined hopes required, eventually, practicing and producing science. Having gained mutual enlightenment, members of the AIS voted in 1931, with some disagreement and objections, to form a research and experiments committee to conduct experiments and construct vehicles that advanced space travel. Although the society’s initial interest and goals were not rockets specifically, the committee focused its efforts on rockets and rocketry as a means for, and prelude to, space travel. Its success and that of its experiments, both of which evolved over time, changed the direction of the organization enough that members decided to renamed it the American Rocket Society (ARS) in 1934. The term “rocket” carried several valences. A rocket was both a means of propulsion and a type of vehicle. Combustion of fuel, contained or fed in an engine chamber, produced heated, pressurized gases that when expelled through one or more outlets provided power and thrust to vehicles equipped with rocket engines. In the interwar period this general principle powered a variety of vehicles, not all of them intended to fly, for a variety of purposes. Members who read the AIS’s Bulletin in the 1930s encountered, among other reports of the uses of rockets, the following: Dr. Paul Heylandt testing his rocket-driven “Comet Car” at the Tempelhof Airport on the evening of May 2, 1931;54 a rocket ice sled designed, built, and tested by Harry Bull, a Syracuse University student, at Lake Oneida, near Syracuse, New York;55 an explosively failed rocket-mail shot by the German Gerhard Zucker at Harris, in Western Isles of Scotland on July 31, 1934;56 three similarly failed attempts at rocket mail delivery by the Australian Rocket Society;57 and a report by Harold A. Danne, aeronautic engineer, about future transatlantic crossings using rocket airplanes that he estimated would take one and one-half hours to make the flights at three thousand miles per hour and at a maximum altitude of fifty thousand feet.58 These reports detailed many technical issues still to be worked out, but they conveyed a common experiential theme: rockets were exciting and adventuresome, if perhaps recklessly and explosively so.

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Although rocket engines could power any vehicle, they were particularly suited for space travel. Goddard’s 1919 article “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” which started a popular rocket fad, proposed that rockets were capable of reaching and operating in space.59 Sufficient thrust applied toward the ground, he showed mathematically, would lift a vehicle equipped with a rocket engine high enough into the sky to escape Earth’s gravitation and reach an “infinite” altitude. A later, 1924 article argued, with experimental data, that rockets could operate in a vacuum.60 A craft or vessel equipped with a rocket engine was, in this sense, ideally suited to travel into space and across distances that held no atmosphere, adventures that could include, in their turn, trips to the moon and to other planets. The strength of the overlapping associations explains the eventual synonymy between a rocket engine and a rocket ship: the engine is the vehicle is the adventure. Still, the combination of technical difficulty, odd and perhaps even misguided inspiration, and explosive mishap imbued the idea of rocket science with an ambivalence not usually associated with other experimental sciences. Initially the society’s experiments sought to solve technical issues its members saw as obstacles to the group’s larger aims of interplanetary travel and adventure. Goddard’s proposition, while demonstrated in principle, remained to be demonstrated in practice. Actually achieving significant, much less extreme, altitudes involved such issues as appropriate engine design, what fuels to use and in what combination, flight stability and navigation, and landing. The AIS, like other interwar experimenters, focused on liquid-fuel rockets. Unlike solid-fuel rockets used in mail rockets and rocket cars, which burned fuel with oxygen from the atmosphere, liquid-fuel rockets carried all necessary fuels, including liquid oxygen, for combustion, power, and thrust. Goddard had patented a liquid-fuel design in 1914 and began experimenting with rockets based on it in the 1920s, first successfully launching one in 1926. The notoriety that further publicity of his work attracted, however, led him, with funding from the Guggenheim family, to withdraw to New Mexico in 1930 to work on these issues privately. Less adverse to the public eye, in 1931 Esnault-Pelterie demonstrated a rocket engine using liquid oxygen and gasoline, and the VfR, with whom the AIS developed a close relationship and correspondence, succeeded in flying a liquid-fuel rocket, although not to great altitudes. Aware of these efforts, the AIS in its experimental program hoped to make its own scientific contribution designing, building, and launching liquid-fuel rockets. Their successful experiments, members imagined, would be the first of many steps toward their ultimate goal.

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The society’s first rocket gave material expression to this process. Designed and built by Pierce, with Pendray contributing, using the general pattern of one of the VfR’s rockets and “rule-of-thumb, assisted by faith,” AIS Rocket No. 1 was begun in 1931 and completed in January 1932.61 Made of aluminum and magnesium alloys, the rocket consisted of two long, thin, parallel cylindrical tanks attached at the top to an assembly housing the motor and a cone-shaped nosepiece that held a parachute to open for landing and at the bottom to a set of four fixed fins for guidance. The assembled device was approximately nine inches in diameter, stood seven feet tall, and weighed fifteen pounds loaded with fuel. Its motor weighed one pound, was cooled by water in an outer jacketing tank, and used liquid oxygen and a special grade of gasoline pressurized by nitrogen as its fuels. The rocket’s two tanks each housed a separate fuel, and when the tanks’ valves were opened, gas pressure forced the fuels together into the motor chamber, where they could be burned, providing power and thrust. Testing and launch were delayed until land in New Jersey was found, made available by a Mr. Egil Hohe, to use as a proving ground.62 In addition to the rocket, the experiment committee built a proving stand, a solid framework of wood planks supporting two rounded upright members fourteen feet high that served both to guide the rocket upward during its launch and to measure the power of its motor. Completing its launch and measurement system were several wires attached to the rocket, which allowed its fuel valves and motor to be operated remotely by members of the committee 150 feet away in a protected dugout. An additional dugout allowed for close observation and photography. After the rocket was set properly on the proving stand, its launch was to be triggered by successfully opening both fuel valves and igniting the fuels. Designs in hand, the society put them into practice. Having found their proving ground, members devoted their weekends from late August into November 1932 assembling and testing the rocket’s parts and systems. Pouring and loading liquid oxygen into its tank proved particularly difficult, as was operating the fuel valves consistently. During the first test with a loaded oxygen tank, the valves would not open, and Pierce, at some risk to his safety, had to pull their wires with a stick. Having worked out the details of the system to their satisfaction, the group assembled over the weekend of November 12 and 13 to conduct final tests and an actual launch. Despite unfavorable weather conditions, at the end of the day on Saturday they successfully ignited the rocket’s engine, achieving a sustained burn without releasing it into the air.

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The ground firing test completed satisfactorily, they reassembled the next day to launch the rocket. That culminating event, however, was thwarted and delayed indefinitely when the rocket was accidentally dropped while being placed in the proving stand. “It proved too fragile to stand even so small a shock,” Pendray reported at the society’s regular monthly meeting in New York, “and the parachute apparatus and trusses were badly bent.” Nonetheless, he continued, “we believe we learned from this rocket all it had to teach us. The shot would have been spectacular, but probably not particularly important from an experimental point of view.”63 Pendray’s remark reminds us that experiments provide points of view and that those perspectives serve several purposes. Historians and sociologists of science have reconsidered the place of experiments within science, arguing that they constitute both scientific and cultural practice. Experimentation, in their view, involves not only design and implementation of experiments but also presentation and reproduction of their results.64 Because those not actually present understand what occurs in an experiment only indirectly, how it is reported and represented—materially, socially, textually, and graphically—mediates its results and claims. Together actual practice and its social and cultural extension produce scientific knowledge, inform its evaluation, and constitute its authority.65 Experimental reproducibility, in this regard, is a central feature of modern scientific practice where experiments validate as much as they verify theory. On the one hand, where their practice and results are repeatable and reproducible, experiments argue and support broader claims, multiplying specific findings generally.66 On the other hand, how experiments are framed and presented can also elide conditions, circumstances, and contexts that make their findings specific and less generalizable.67 In this sense the calibration of experimental frameworks influences their credibility and authority as much as their actual results. Attention to this broader aspect of experiments argues neither for nor against the validity of their results but situates their claims within other social, often extrascientific concerns. Care for its point of view allowed the society to find Rocket No. 1 a success. For the interested public, the AIS issued a press release a few days after the tests and aborted launch announcing their efforts and results. It gave their experiment’s date, location, and other details in reporting “a successful ground test of the first liquid fuel rocket of the American Interplanetary Society,” noting that it “indicated a possible altitude of ten miles had the rocket been released.” The press release quoted Pendray declaring, “The test was completely successful. . . . We have concluded that our design, which is

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Figure 11. AIS Rocket No. 1 igniting on the society’s proving stand, 1932. From G. Edward Pendray Papers, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

unique in the field of rocketry, is satisfactory and that rockets can be built to ascend to great heights.” The press release, however, did not mention the society’s equipment difficulties, report why the rocket was not actually launched, or explain how the society arrived at its estimate of the rocket’s potential altitude, the press release’s only criterion of success other than the working of the rocket’s parts. Additionally, although it cited Pendray in his capacity as chair of the experimental committee, the press release made no mention that he was also its author.68

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Noted only in passing in the press release, the proving stand proved crucial for the society’s claims. Intended as a guide to steady the rocket initially during launch, the stand was also used to calculate the rocket’s power and thrust during the ground-firing test. In that test the rocket was held in place by a light pole attached at one end to one of the two large uprights, which had soaped guides attached to it, and at the other end to a coil spring, which was in turn attached to the base of the stand. The arrangement allowed any lift from the rocket as it fired to be communicated to the pole and spring, the results of which could be seen and measured from the soaped guides. While these measurements were secondary to the society’s original aim to launch the rocket, they became significantly more important when the rocket was damaged. With no actual launch possible, they provided an alternative basis for evaluating the rocket’s success. Indeed the proving stand measurements not only salvaged the experiment but also redefined its purpose and meaning. Given the results in the ground test, Rocket No. 1 almost certainly would have flown had it not been damaged. Among the eight points that Pendray reported privately to the society and that the committee learned from the experiment, six involved greater durability and dependability of the rocket and its parts. “Every piece of apparatus,” he said in his final point, “must be sturdy, and so designed as to avoid uncertainty of operation, liability to minor accidents, etc.” Neither these lessons nor an actual launch, however, were the results reported publically. Instead the proving stand’s mechanism became the experiment, which its measurements verified and validated. The marks on the stand’s guides after the ground test indicated that Rocket No. 1 had achieved a lift of sixty pounds, and based on rates of fuel flow and consumption, the experiment committee estimated that its motor had burned for twenty to thirty seconds. Using those two measurements and the rocket’s weight, the committee calculated that the rocket would have flown to a height of sixteen miles in a vacuum, had it launched. Compensating generously for actual air resistance, committee members arrived at their estimated achievable height of five to eight miles.69 This figure was rounded up to ten miles in the press release. In this way an unsuccessful rocket launch, reframed conceptually, became a successful motor test whose findings and extrapolations still confirmed the theory and principle of the society’s designs. Although the proving stand’s measurements were accurate, the case made for the rocket and its estimated altitude was circumstantial, hypothetical, and speculative. Absent considerations that might have affected an actual launch and flight—the

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effectiveness of guidance and stabilizing mechanisms or the engine-cooling system in flight, for example—allowed the full context of the experiment to be collapsed into the few measurements the society managed to salvage. Significantly the experiment’s revised framework also allowed AIS members, as they recounted the experiment, to report its findings as objective facts separate from the more subjective story of their experience. Removed from its measurements and calculated estimates were the joy of their successful ground test and the disappointment of their damaged rocket. Listeners and readers of the society’s public reports, in their turn, witnessed the same objective results when they repeated their understanding of the experiment and its outcome. They became its “virtual witnesses,” to use Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer’s felicitous phrase.70 In this sense the AIS’s press release and subsequent article in its Bulletin were vital parts of the experiment’s cultural practice. They combined multiple contexts, circumstances, and consequences into a single narrative whose repetition across various media produced and reproduced the society’s science and success. The same experimental practice informed the tests and flight of AIS Rocket No. 2 the next year. Built from parts salvaged from Rocket No. 1, the new rocket incorporated new materials and technologies: a more rigid structure to minimize damage from unintended contact and collision; an aircooling system replacing the older water-cooling jacket; and balsa wood fins coated with metallic paint whose tips were painted red for easy recovery in water. The society’s new proving site was Marine Park in Great Kill, Staten Island, New York, near the home of newly elected AIS president Laurence Manning (where the new rocket was also assembled). Water recovery was part of the committee’s new plans, which included launching the rocket over the waters off Staten Island. Members of the committee were assigned and rehearsed specific roles: Pendray was Command; Bernard Smith was the Valveman; Manning, the Timer; Alfred H. Best was Lighter; Carl Ahrens, Helper; and Alfred Africano was the Transitman. Other observers included members of the society, representatives from the New York Fire Department, cameramen for Acme News Pictures and Universal Newsreel, and other curiosity seekers. This experiment too did not go as expected. The remote-control mechanism failed to open the fuel valves, and Valveman Smith, at the risk of personal injury, ran heroically to open them while the ignition fuse burned steadily closer toward the rocket.71 Launched at twenty minutes past eleven in the morning on Sunday, May 14, 1933, Rocket No. 2 did actually fly. It did

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not, however, reach the altitude forecast for Rocket No. 1, attaining instead an altitude of 250 feet before its oxygen tank burst and the rocket fell in pieces into the water. “The apparatus was almost instantly covered with the yellowish flame of burning gasoline,” Pendray recounted for readers of Astronautics. “The guiding fins were thrown off. The tanks and motor continued the flight for several hundred feet, but fell over parallel with the ground. They finally dropped into the water about 400 feet offshore, and were retrieved by two boys in a small boat.” he reported. “The fins dropped nearer to the land, and Mr. Smith rescued them by wading out into the water,” he added. “Despite this mishap,” Pendray declared, “the experiment must be considered a success. It proved without doubt the efficacy of the rocket motor developed by the Society and gave us our first actual experience with the firing of a liquid fuel rocket.”72 As before, this day’s events were reframed into accomplishments for the society. Parts of the rocket that performed well or as expected were emphasized. The rocket motor again ignited, proving its efficacy “without a doubt.” The rocket lifted off into the air and achieved a significant velocity, providing the society firsthand experience with liquid-fuel rocket launches. Buttressing the achievement again were calculated figures: an estimated velocity of about 200 feet per second and an estimated altitude of 250 feet. Failed parts of the rocket were declared mishaps, viewed as temporary setbacks contributing neither to the experiment’s success nor its failure but still providing further lessons learned. “The accident proves,” Pendray remarked about the flight’s explosive conclusion, “the need of redesigning future rockets with a view to placing the oxygen tank well beyond the reach of the flame.”73 Together the rocket’s working parts and instructive mishaps arranged the day’s events into a narrative of success. This effect was most apparent in the photographic and newsreel coverage of Rocket No. 2. Both showed the rocket taking off, capturing it in mid-air a few milliseconds and feet after launch. Neither showed it burning, bursting in mid-air or falling to the ground in pieces. Photographs were taken of the committee members examining its debris, but these were not released publically. The launch and flight of the rocket were signs of the experiment’s success, despite its other, less promising circumstances and results. Reports of its rockets’ success spread across the society’s audiences and networks. The AIS’s experience presenting science and fiction popularly proved also to be effective promoting its new experimental practice. Months before the experiments were performed, the organization prepared the public

Figures 12A and 12B. AIS Rocket No. 2 on launch (above) and after (left), 1933. From G. Edward Pendray Papers, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

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for news of their eventual outcome. A tireless innovator of popular science, Pendray displayed Rocket No. 1 at the society’s February 18, 1932, meeting and wrote an article about it for the Sunday, March 27, 1932, New York Herald Tribune. The captions for the accompanying photographs iterated points that the society’s news release would later make, and the complete presentation allowed readers to imagine the rocket’s flight well before it actually flew. The AIS was particularly resourceful in the arrangement it made for the photographs used in the Herald Tribune coverage. In exchange for credit for all photographs and exclusive coverage of the experiment, the Acme News Picture agency shot and distributed promotional stills of society members with their rockets and agreed to contribute half the royalties from the sale of the photos to the society’s experimental fund. Pictures showing the parachute being loaded into the rocket, the motor of the rocket, the rocket ready for flight, and a liquid-fuel rocket appeared between February and July 1932 across the country and even in Europe in such magazines as the Business Bourse, Popular Science Monthly, Mid-Week Pictorial, Popular Aviation, and Modern Mechanics and in such newspapers as La Presse, the Philadelphia Record, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Buffalo Evening News, the Minneapolis Star, the Detroit Daily Mirror, the Border Cities Star, the Boston Post, the Baltimore Post, and the Portland Oregonian.74 The initial royalty payment of forty-nine dollars covered the cost of the purchased materials used in the experiment, and the AIS later earned another fifteen dollars from additional sales.75 The AIS made a similar arrangement with the Universal Newsreel Agency for film coverage of the experiment. Its footage of Rocket No. 2’s launch, while potentially inspiring, was complicated, however, by the actual circumstances of its presentation. The agency’s coverage of the society’s successful rocket was one of several news items spliced into a single, longer newsreel that ran before, after, and sometimes in the intermission of movie features. Rocket No. 2’s successful flight was part of a program that also included information about a recent storm, an anthropological piece on Hopi Indian rituals, and scenes of Columbia University students rioting over the removal of a radical instructor. Newspaper coverage of the newsreel showed that watching one segment meant watching all of them. The May 19 Richmond News-Leader relayed information about the rocket launch under the general headline “Newsreel Shows Storm Wreckage,” and the Albany News notice that “a new rocket device made by the American Interplanetary Society bursts in air over Staten Island” was buried in its article “Indian Fiesta in Newsreel.”76 Coverage of the society’s experiments proved similarly problematic when

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actually distributed. As announcements circulated across news wires, they were translated into articles reflecting the local interests of papers and their reporters. Several papers covered the AIS’s rockets and experiments positively, although they varied tremendously in degree. The New York Herald Tribune, Pendray’s part-time employer, carried the story on May 21 with the headline “A Rocket Soars” and included Acme’s photographs of the event. The Charleston (S.C.) News Courier simply reported, “Rocket Experiment. Machine Reaches Altitude of 300 Feet,” and the May 15 Denver Post stated, “U.S. Interplanetary Group Tests Rocket.” The May 17 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was more enthusiastic, announcing, “The first American test of a rocket,” adding editorially, “It was bound for the moon.” The May 16 Staten Island Advance advanced that claim further and farther with the headline “Starting toward Mars.” Other papers were not so optimistic. The Omaha World-Herald reported “Rocket Test Called Good Despite Blast,” and the New York Herald Tribune had earlier related, “Interplanetary Rocket Soars 250 Ft., Blows Up.” Several papers were quite blunt in their assessments. The New Orleans Tribune, the Reno State Journal, the Minneapolis Journal, and the Los Angeles News headlines about the rocket launch read respectively, “Rocket for Moon Is Wrecked at 300 Feet,” “Rocket Explodes at Climax of N.Y. Test,” “Gas-Oxygen Racket [sic] Explodes in Test,” and “Test Rocket Flight Fails.” Several papers offered editorial commentary. “Natural laws are stubborn things,” wrote the editors of the Dayton Herald of Ohio. “Occasionally they seem to be conquered,” they continued. “Experience, however, usually proves that it is not causes that have been conquered, but only effects.” The Richmond News-Leader of Virginia reported about the society, “The object of this earnest body is to establish communication with Mars, and to that end it has been designing high-powered rockets and firing them at the inoffensive skies.” Concerned with the etiquette of rocket launches, the paper asked, “would it not be the course of common celestial courtesy to ascertain Mars’ hospitality to the idea of this projected bombardment before plans for establishing communication have gone too far?”77 Nevertheless the varied coverage and reactions of newspapers to the experiments did not detract from the society’s professional achievement. Although the experiments did not realize the organization’s original goals, the society accumulated sufficient scientific capital to set the terms of its subsequent course and discourse. Success or failure, the results of the AIS’s experimental program required consideration from other recognized and

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would-be rocket scientists. This newfound authority could be seen in the society’s publications and publicity. Where Lasser’s 1931 The Conquest of Space had reviewed existing information about rocket science, after inaugurating its own experiments the society in subsequent accounts of rocket science focused more on members’ own findings, claims, and exploits. Pendray’s earlier article for Elks magazine had used a still of a fictional rocket from Frau im Mond as an illustration, but his piece for Scientific American in 1934 featured the society’s Rocket No. 2 to argue fiction’s realization.78 Reproduced realism for a recognized popular science magazine such as Scientific American testified to the society’s professional success, if not its scientific success. Pendray’s promotion to the science editorship of Literary Digest and articles for Scientific Progress, Popular Science Monthly, and New Outlook similarly attested to the society’s new fortunes, while a 1935 New Yorker article debuted its new social status.79 The AIS achieved enough authority that Pendray could pronounce in his Scientific American piece that despite the claims of others such as Goddard, “none had come so near solving the fundamental problems of rocketry as . . . the American Interplanetary Society.”80 Writing his own summary of the field, Rockets through Space!, in 1936, British Interplanetary Society (BIS) founder P. E. Cleator agreed, describing the ARS as “the most active group of rocket experimenters in the world to-day.”81 The society also adapted organizationally to its new prestige. In May 1932 the journal it produced for members was renamed from Bulletin of the American Interplanetary Society to the more scientific Astronautics. The month before the Bulletin had upgraded from its initial mimeographed form to more expensive, offset printing, a better quality it retained in its subsequent career as Astronautics except for a brief return to mimeography from May 1933 to November 1934. In April 1934, when the group had three additional rockets planned to test, it changed its name from the American Interplanetary Society to the American Rocket Society. Many of its members, including newer members who joined learning of its experiments, were “repelled by the present name.” Although its officers maintained that the name change did not mean they had “abandoned the interplanetary idea,” they no longer entertained seriously ideas for spaceships to travel interplanetary space and methods to communicate across it.82 Soon after its name was changed, however, the society abandoned rocket launches, focusing instead on experiments to collect technical data and information about rocket motor designs. The issue was not rockets but their results. The organization hoped its new rockets would capitalize on the success of the previous two, but tests

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proved mixed and limited.83 New member John Shesta’s design was completed first and flew on its second attempt on September 9, 1934. Designated Rocket No. 4 even though it was the third tested, the rocket attained an altitude of 382 feet, reached an estimated velocity of more than 1,000 feet/second, and after following a mostly horizontal trajectory landed 1,338 feet from its launch rack. Despite the failure of its parachute mechanism and its subsequent crash landing, because of its flight Rocket No. 4 too was deemed a success.84 That flight was also the last for a rocket built by the society. Rocket No. 3, which was tested next, followed a design by Bernard Smith and Pendray to compensate for Rocket No. 2’s shortcomings. Trying to avoid the overheating that had caused No. 2’s engine to burst in mid-air, they moved No. 3’s oxygen tank farther from its exhaust, but the design proved so unwieldy that the rocket never flew.85 Nevertheless, ARS No. 3, nicknamed “Ronald Rocket,” enjoyed a subsequent career as a display model at society events and for its publicity throughout the 1930s before it was lost during the 1939 New York World’s Fair.86 Another group of society members including H. Franklin Pierce, Nathan Carver, and Nathan Schachner designed Rocket No. 5, or more properly ARS No. 1, but it was never tested.87 Instead, weighing the costs and benefits of their experiments, the group decided on a longer-term research program. Pendray wrote to Alexander Klemin, of New York University’s Guggenheim School of Aeronautics and editor for Scientific American, proposing a five-year, one-hundred-thousanddollar project jointly sponsored by the ARS, NYU, the Smithsonian Institution, and the United States Weather Bureau. “What is most urgently needed,” he emphasized, “is patient, careful, unspectacular laboratory work.” Out of that work, he said, “will come the information we need to place rocket construction on an engineering basis.”88 While Klemin found the proposal interesting, the money was not forthcoming, and so the society proceeded on its own. While some members, most notably Carver and Pierce, whose No. 5 awaited testing, wanted to continue building and launching rockets, the organization accepted Pendray’s argument for more systematic research. Individual members were still free to experiment on their own, but the ARS established policies and priorities for its own experimental program. The experiment committee, now called the technical committee, chose to focus on motors and fuel mixtures. “Causes for [their] failure or inefficiency could then be carefully observed and analyzed,” the committee reported, “in striking contrast to the difficulty of determining the causes of failure or success of a rocket in flight.”89

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John Shesta’s new proving stand, built from parts of Rocket No. 4, proved useful in this regard. Holding a test engine in place, the device’s hydraulic piston measured its power and pressures from its fuel and liquid-oxygen tanks and combustion chamber and relayed the readings to a set of pressure gauges positioned away from the stand. Observers monitored the gauges during the tests while a camera, set to shoot once per second, kept a running photographic record of their readings.90 A new site in Crestwood, New York, near Pendray’s summer home hosted four series of experiments over the course of 1935. The first, in April, tested aluminum nozzles of different lengths and under different pressures. The second static test, in June, tried a nichrome nozzle, a new fuel-injection system, and several other variations, including using alcohol as a fuel. In August a third series of experiments tested several engine designs, four of Shesta’s and a water-cooled model of the VfR’s Willy Ley, who was a guest at the Pendrays’ at the time. A final series in October aimed to improve on those results and add to the society’s accumulating data on engine and fuel systems.91 The new experimental program, however, produced mixed results and received mixed reviews. Results of its nozzle tests led to the conclusion that long nozzles were of no value, high pressures were more effective, and nichrome was a better material than aluminum, which burns out repeatedly. In its engine tests, one failed to ignite while the others ignited too much, burning through yet another nozzle in one case and exploding in another, toppling the proving stand. The tests also attracted additional attention and press coverage, but having achieved a measure of professional credibility for the society, members now found some aspects of the publicity less desirable. The explosive results of the August tests led to complaints from neighbors; a New York Sun headline, “Rocket Explodes in Westchester, Huge Projectile’s Blast Is Heard for Miles”; and a New York Times article that reported “fragments of hot metal,” blasts that shattered windows, and “prolonged explosions” heard from up to three miles away.92 They also brought a visit to the Pendrays from the Yonkers Bureau of Combustibles searching for explosives and concern from Pendray’s insurance company about its liability policy.93 While NYU’s Klemin and Maj. Lester D. Gardner, secretary of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, observed the October proceedings, the occasion also drew a sizable gathering of uninvited onlookers.94 More significantly, despite precautions for the tests’ hazards, a fragment from another motor explosion struck a female bystander who stepped from behind a tree to snap a photograph.95 She was rushed to the hospital, and her injuries required medi-

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cal treatment, therapy from a masseur, a special surgical cuff, home stay for fourteen weeks, and a full year for recovery. The ARS paid her medical bills and other incidental expenses, which totaled over one thousand dollars and compensated her an additional three hundred dollars. The episode’s consequence and cost, unintended but nevertheless realized, led the society to decide in the spring of 1936 to cease its experimental program.96 It was no small irony, then, that the static tests garnered the society its greatest professional prestige and acclaim. The year after the tests the Société Astronomique de France (Astronomical Society of France) awarded the ARS the 1935 International REP-Hirsch Prize for its findings. Given annually to acknowledge outstanding contributions to the practical development of rockets, the ARS was the prize’s first American and group recipient. The selection committee specifically cited the society for the “body of practical knowledge and experience” it had accumulated and Alfred Africano’s mathematical analysis of its data.97 Presentation, as much as actual practice, was crucial to this postexperiment recognition. The static tests’ greater precision yielded more substantial findings than the earlier rocket launches had. The proving stand’s photographic record, in particular, allowed the technical committee to plot tested motors’ output (measured in pounds of thrust) and fuel tank pressures (measured in pounds per square inch) over time, which Astronautics charted in graphs accompanying its reports for each series of tests. The collective data allowed Africano to summarize the tests’ results and conclusions in a 1936 paper for the Journal of Aeronautical Sciences. In a set of careful calculations, he estimated an average velocity (thrust) and thermal efficiency for the liquid-fuel motors the ARS tested, compared their results to those of solidfuel rockets, and derived a set of empirical equations relating engine design parameters to its output. Those equations and specifications for a rocket that Africano included in the article allowed him to estimate the altitude it would achieve. Taking into account its powered (while burning fuel) and projectile (after exhausting its fuel) flight with variable air resistance, he concluded that “the present development of the rocket motor is already sufficient to propel a meteorological rocket to an altitude of 7 1/2 miles.”98 Africano’s claims for the rocket were, in part, artful artifice, extending beyond the static tests’ results. Precision and detail aside, the society’s new experiments resembled its earlier ones in their extrascientific effort and effect. Functionally the new proving stand’s hydraulic piston, pressure gauges, and motion picture camera were more sophisticated versions of the soaped

Figures 13A and 13B. Photograph of rocket engine on 1935 ARS proving stand and diagram of its proposed Stratosphere Rocket.

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guides from Rocket No. 1’s proving stand. Beyond the comparison of the thermal efficiency of the ARS’s alcohol-liquid oxygen motors against gunpowder rockets—which proved favorable by a scale of ten—the static test data largely contributed to Africano’s derivations and formulations. While they were more comprehensive, his motor calculations worked similarly to the society’s earlier estimates for its rocket launches, providing a conceptual, and in this case mathematically fortified, framework to confirm speculative success. His article did not mention that this rocket was hypothetical, having not been built or launched. Considering several possibilities for loss of engine thrust, Africano reasoned from abstract physical principle, not actual solutions to the technical obstacles that the ARS knew it faced and which the tests were intended to address. Overheating engines bursting in midflight became possible pressure “loss in the combustion chamber because of dissociation at the high temperatures.”99 Given the static tests’ reduced ambition, the machinery, measurements, and mathematics that were used maintained the experiments’ greater purpose. If Africano’s article and Astronautics’ reports minimized the tests’ adverse aspects, they also reminded readers and followers that the tests were meant to lead to actual flight. Literally their accounts connected the mundane, mostly unsuccessful testing of nozzles and engines to a broader vision of scientific achievement and adventure. Materially the precision of the society’s new equipment, data, and designs worked culturally as well as scientifically, their detail arguing for the full reality of that vision. In Africano’s article a photograph of a motor on the proving stand lent credibility to its diagrams for the Stratosphere Rocket, unlabeled as a design, and a graph of an actual motor test was virtually indistinguishable from a graph charting the rocket’s hypothetical flight. The article’s text reinforced the suggestion, discussing the rocket as if it had actually been built and flown. This measured but inspiring published account overwrote other public experiences of the static tests. The calculated flight of the article’s idealized rocket subsumed the sights and sounds of burning nozzles, explosive engines, echoing booms, flying shrapnel, and injured bystanders that people attending the actual tests witnessed and whose spectacle attracted crowds to them. If the clarity of published perspectives masked the experiments’ actual and messier practice, it also bridged tensions within the society about its priorities. The bystanders whom the society attracted to its tests and some of its own members wanted to launch rockets and see them launched, believing in the adventures and developments they promised. Enthusiasts inspired

Figures 14A and 14B. Graphs of the rocket engine’s actual fuel consumption (right) and its imagined flight (below).

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by popular sentiment and science fiction, they were equally inspired, to use Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase, to play with spaceships. How rockets worked mattered less, in this sense, than that they did work. Other society members, especially those on its technical committee as they worked on their experiments, came to believe the opposite. Understanding how rockets worked mattered because it was the only way to get them to work, and scientific method—rigorous, systematic experimental study of a variety of designs— promised that understanding. That promise was still a fiction, although perhaps a necessary one. The static tests were exemplary science for their method and their values. Although they did not actually lead to improvements in the society’s rocket designs, through the improved proving stand the measurement of their parameters and understanding of their limits were refined. Accepting these lowered expectations required accepting the values advanced by professional science, specifically the positive contribution of accumulating data. Embarking on its study of rocket motors and fuels, the ARS deferred its goal to launch rockets just as its experiments were a deferment of its original interplanetary mission. Deferment, however, still implied eventual fulfillment. Refining its priorities from enlightenment to experiment to systematic technical research required maintaining a larger vision and purpose beyond the increasingly narrow scope of the society’s activities. In this sense the impulse to imagine science—to connect known facts to their potential results—was as important to scientific practice as it was to popular science. Whether proper method might produce results or whether it would produce them was a line too fine for most members of the society to draw, but what those results were was clear. An illustration produced by the ARS at the same time it produced those accompanying Africano’s article showed a rocket launching under its own power, achieving free flight over Earth’s surface, and landing safely with a parachute. Its idealized trajectory represented the larger result the society eventually hoped to achieve but that it had not yet come close to realizing. While the ARS had successfully launched two rockets, with two others not attaining even that level of achievement, none of them had landed safely. That almost all of the nozzles and engines the society tested burned out and exploded only reinforced the need for the picture. Despite Africano’s calculation of probable altitude, none of the designs tested would have flown rockets far or high. The illustration and the diagram for the stratosphere rocket in Africano’s article put the motors and proving stand within their proper perspective. The

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Figure 15. Illustration of an imagined successful rocket launch, flight, and landing. From G. Edward Pendray Papers, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

test engines were shaped chambers of aluminum, steel, and other materials with nozzles of similar materials attached to outlets directing their exhaust. Placed on the proving stand with lines feeding from the fuel tanks, they hardly resembled rockets at all. Without the diagram situating the motor within its larger design, readers might not have recognized it as part of a rocket. Similarly observers of the actual proving stand tests might not have recognized them as rocket experiments. The tested motors were placed upside down, directing their thrust and exhaust skyward, not toward the ground as they would in an actual launch. To watch them expel flame and gas into the air was not necessarily to see rockets, much less to see them fly. Seeing their science in action required imagining its larger potential and purpose. Envisioning the experience of the society’s experiments was particularly important to its members who were removed from them. The organization’s presentation maintained its collective enterprise while managing its authority and professional status against the more enthusiastic inclinations of individual members. From its inception, the AIS/ARS offered two forms of membership with different dues. Active members were those able and willing to participate in its events. Associate memberships were available to those who could not attend its events but still wanted to be part of the group and promote its larger goals. The difference was not insignificant. The society’s meetings, lectures, and eventual experiments were staged in the New York City area, but throughout the bleak economic circumstances of the 1930s,

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Figure 16. Photograph of 1935 ARS proving stand in action. From G. Edward Pendray Papers, Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.

membership dues, largely from associate members, provided most of the funds for its operation. C. P. Mason, the society’s first secretary, recognized early on the need to cultivate a social sensibility among its more distant members. “At the present time,” he observed in a 1931 report, “it is possible to give our associate members only a receipt and a subscription to the Bulletin— neither of which are [sic] very impressive.” He continued, “A suggestion received from more than one, and which in my belief will be worthy of consideration when the Society is [in] a position to undertake it, is the design of a suitable lapel badge which may be worn by members of the A.I.S., and will serve to attract no small attention among their friends and acquaintances. This is a piece of sales psychology which is of some importance.”100 Mason’s broader concern was to find a way to channel members’ enthusiasm, which their correspondence showed was in no short supply and which, initially, aligned with the AIS’s aspirations. “I am very much interested in this line of science,” wrote Edward Spier of Anacortes, Washington, who also

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contributed letters to science fiction, “for it has a scope of adventure and discovery that can never be told in the words of any language.” He explained, “I have always been trying to get in a position where I could be in the front as far as interplanetary travel is concerned and where I could obtain the latest reports and discoveries of this fast growing reality of science.” Vincent Anyzeski of New Haven, Connecticut, admitted, “I can only profess to a deep interest to the exploration of the outer atmospheres and of outer space by any means.” Ruth Nichols of Rye, New York, wrote, “To me the methods of communication and transportation to other planets constitutes [sic] the most inspiring and farreaching (in all senses of the word) study in which the human being can afford as a hobby to engage. . . . Will you be good enough to advise me whether you have any women members, and if so, their names, and general background?” An earnest Stuart Ayers of Lewiston, Idaho, confessed, “I know very little about explosives, rocket motors, and all that it is necessary to understand to work on the science, yet I want to work with rockets. If I could learn a few of the fundamentals, I could begin.” After inquiring about the society, he added again for emphasis, “I want to work with rockets!”101 Although many prospective members learned about the society through science fiction, they were equally enthusiastic about science, and like Ayers, they were willing not only to entertain but also to work at both. “My first interest in interpl. activities were born, I believe at college,” Ruth Nichols explained, “as I made a point of electing courses in every science department offered.” Many declared their intent to pursue education and training they did not yet have. “I am aware of the fact that my education along this line is limited,” S. K. Hudgens admitted. “In order to get the proper foundation for this work,” he continued, “I intend to begin study at the very bottom, and would appreciate a suggestion from you as to what books or special course to study.” Albert Trube reported, “I intend to be an aeronautical engineer consequently; knowing that future airplane traveling will be at extreemly [sic] high altitudes, I will make a thorough study of the rocket and its possibilities and defects. . . . I have a few hunches about a rocket plane myself, but I might as well let the matter alone for a while untill [sic] I get further advanced in the work.” Hudgens shared Trube’s sentiment, declaring, “it is my desire to be able to carry out experiments with rockets when I have learned what has been accomplished previously in this work.”102 Others wanted to advance directly to experimentation, especially after learning about the society’s successful rocket launches. For them, as for the society’s New York members originally, real rocket science was just this side

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of fiction. They were already sure of its eventual success, and their interest in the society was to play a part, if not individually, then collectively, in realizing its results. “I am figuring on doing a little experimental work on rockets,” George Murphy stated, having been referred to the society by Popular Science Monthly. “I need a little advanced information (on how) or theory on rocket ships,” he explained, “and a chemical formula on rockets or something to give me an idea of how to start. Please answer real soon.” George A. Barker wrote, “I would thank you for any material which you may have describing types and construction details of rockets which have been used; [and] also, any references pertaining to rocket construction and etc.”103 Some prospective members shared their own ideas about rockets and space travel. “Included you will find a design of a rocket,” Mr. A. F. Nickolas, 232 South Thirteenth Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, wrote. It “will not only do away with air resistance in front of the rocket, but will help pull it forward through the atmosphere,” he explained. “If for any reason you cannot use this design of a rocket, let me know as I have other ideas on the construction of rockets.” While inquiring about the group, interplanetary travel, and rocket experiments generally, Julius Wagner suggested magnetic repulsion as an alternative means for vehicle propulsion. Others offered their expertise and resources, simply wanting to help. “I am a chemist and electrician,” declared Wilfred Moss, “and have a laboratory for scientific research of my own.” Robert W. Biach wrote, “I have just graduated from Yale, having specialized in Chemistry. Possibly I might have some knowledge in that field which would be of use. Please let me know if I can help in any way.”104 Contributing to members’ collaborative outlook was the society’s emphasis on open science. This perspective was seen from the group’s contrasting relations with Goddard and other rocketry groups in the early 1930s, particularly the VfR and the British Interplanetary Society (BIS). As the inclusion of “interplanetary” in its name indicated, the BIS emerged in Britain in 1930 out of, like the AIS in the United States, the enthusiastic combination of science fiction and popular science. Similarly, while the VfR’s name translated literally as the “Society for Space Travel,” it was known among English-speaking members of science fiction and early rocketry’s interconnected communities as the “German Interplanetary Society.” Having similar interests and goals and facing similar issues, the three groups shared information, resources, and occasionally personal, more than professional, assistance. The VfR arranged film screenings and lectures to publicize the BIS’s cause as it had for the AIS. Pendray and P. E. Cleator, the main force behind

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the BIS, corresponded for several years about strategies for publicity and recruitment. Cleator helped promote Lasser’s Conquest of Space in Britain, and Pendray in turn helped promote Cleator’s book Rockets through Space in the United States. In a prelude to the AIS’s initial rocket experiments, Pendray and his wife, Lee Gregory, visited the VfR in Germany in 1931 to observe the organization’s operations and experiments and examine its designs. Pendray, Gregory, and Cleator later helped Willy Ley flee Germany in the mid-1930s when the National Socialists gained power and absorbed the previously independent VfR into their national military research efforts.105 Withdrawn to New Mexico, Goddard was less forthcoming with his research, preferring to file private reports to the secretary of the Smithsonian. He was, however, quite attentive to the activities of potential competitors, and he wrote to Pendray disputing statements in his AIS report on the trip to Germany. In a carefully worded piece, Pendray had reported that the VfR’s Mirak was the first “continuous-flow” liquid-fuel rocket while noting reports of a 1929 flight by a Goddard rocket.106 Goddard claimed his original and prior success with liquid-fuel rockets, citing both a report to the secretary of the Smithsonian and mention of his flight in the press.107 Defending himself, Pendray expressed the need for greater openness in their common endeavors. He had not seen the report to the Smithsonian and found no mention of Goddard’s experiment amid many newspaper clippings gathered by the “library of a large metropolitan newspaper”—the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked. This was “a general condition,” he noted in a letter responding to Goddard, “not a special one with this particular newspaper” as far as news about Goddard’s public scientific practice was concerned. While the society did not want to detract from his efforts, “long silence [causes] more harm both to your reputation and to the development of rockets,” Pendray continued, “than any amount of idea-piracy that might occur as a result of greater frankness.” In contrast, the VfR had “no secrets and desire[d] none.” Like the AIS, they were “not working for personal glory, but for the quickest possible development of the rocket.”108 Pendray argued that the inaccessibility, and therefore irreproducibility, of details of Goddard’s experiments was a disservice to science. Instead public science served the greater public good. When H. H. Morris inquired if the society had patented its designs, he was encouraged to use them freely. “The Society has not to date patented any rockets,” according to his reply, “and members are free to duplicate same, to improve upon same, and to use the plans which appear from time to time in Astronautics.”109

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The society’s experiments helped crystallize its open, collective sensibility. While membership continued to grow as a result of periodic announcements in science fiction pulps, inquiries also increased in the years that the organization’s tests circulated in the news. Many, such as one from Harry C. Rowe, asked not only about membership but also about nearby activities they could attend. “Could you tell if there are any organizations in the San Francisco Bay Region,” he wrote, “which are conducting experiments in this field of engineering research?”110 The Bulletin, which became Astronautics, was particularly important in this sense because it bridged the society’s science and its practice, sharing both with all its members. At first its articles extended the information and mutual enlightenment of the society’s active New York members’ meetings to its associates, but with the society’s initiation of experiments, the publication’s reports also related their experiences with members too distant to participate directly. Unlike the AIS/ARS’s press releases, which summarized the information and results of the group’s launches and tests, the articles in Bulletin/Astronautics provided more compelling and uncertain narratives, unpacking the details of events and tests and expressing the emotions of the experimenters who were present. The Bulletin’s coverage of Rocket No. 1 offered a fuller account of the experimental committee’s experience with it, including the exigencies of its control systems. While the society’s press release noted the rocket’s remotecontrol fuel valves, its report to members described the system’s actual, more difficult operation. The “weakness of our apparatus,” the Bulletin observed, were the connections between its batteries and relays to its fuse wire. Temporary wiring, “made hastily, loosely and under unpredictable field conditions” did not always provide good electrical contact. “The result,” the article remarked, “was that sometimes the fuses would blow, and sometimes not. Unfortunately, they did not in our first oxygen pressure test, and Mr. Pierce at length went up to the rocket and pulled the wire out with a long stick, releasing a beautiful cascade of liquid oxygen and gas.”111 Intended to share the experiment’s technical and scientific findings, the report also shared the emotions and feelings of society members present— founding members Pendray, Lasser, Schachner, Lemkin, Manning, and Gregory and Alfred Best, Alfred Africano, and the heroic Pierce. Unanticipated weather and wind injected misery and misfortune into their plans. “Bad luck seemed to follow our footsteps on that last week-end,” Pendray, the article’s author, remarked. Their misfortune “was really attributable,” he explained, “to the extreme cold weather, the rain which was falling by starts and stops,

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the gusty wind, which made work difficult.” The conditions compounded the experimenters’ already heightened anxieties, which the rocket’s successful ignition resolved in a glorious blaze. “The fuse, the flare, and the uncertainty about the performance of our rocket motor all disappeared at once,” Pendray shared with readers. “With a furious hissing roar, a blue white sword of flame shot from the nozzle of the combustion chamber, and the rocket lunged upward against the retaining spring,” he continued. “It is impossible adequately to describe the sight, or to convey the feeling it gave us. I suppose we were excited; but there was a certain majesty about the sound and sight which made it impossible for the moment to feel excitement as such.” Indeed the climactic moment of ignition was so overwhelming that everyone forgot their previously worked-out procedures, abandoned the safety of their dugouts, and simply watched the rocket in action. “We forgot to remain behind the shelter of our earthworks,” Pendray confessed. “Moreover, we forgot to count the seconds as they passed in that downward pouring cascade of fire.”112 The experiment in this regard was a success not only for its publicly announced results but also for its privately and collectively shared, among members, experience. The press release’s report of the proving stand’s measurements and calculations summarized the rocket’s conceptual framework, but the Bulletin’s more detailed internal account entertained excitement for its readers. Pendray’s portrait of society members emotionally and scientifically overcome by the rocket’s ignition allowed more-removed members to fulfill their own expectations. Short of actually attending the New Jersey launch attempt, they could still imagine its experimental experience. The society’s open science was an open invitation to participate, if only virtually and indirectly, in its practice. Indeed members present and removed shared a common vision of Rocket No. 1’s ideal, imagined result. Although the rocket was damaged and never launched, the majestic flame and thunder of its ignition and lift against the proving stand’s restraints still sufficed for members to imagine its flight, barring the unfortunate inconvenience. The emotion of the moment, as much as its subsequent mathematical extrapolation, inspired members’ faith in their efforts. Such inspiration sustained associate members’ enthusiasm. Contributing dues only to read about others’ exploits in the Bulletin/Astronautics appealed only to those who believed in its continued collective enterprise. Some members lost their faith after joining. “I desire . . . to sever my connection with the Interplanetary Society,” Felix Wadel, who maintained his connection to science fiction, wrote the ARS in 1934. “I live so far away [and] get to New York

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so seldom, that I receive little benefit from my association from it.” Many associate members, however, subscribed to the society’s larger scientific vision and enterprise. Those forced to relinquish their membership in the face of the Depression’s grim economic conditions made this point clearly. “I am sorry that I shall not be able to renew my membership,” Bill Bailey wrote apologetically. “It is rather inconvenient at this time to spend three dollars for a membership, since I do not live in New York and can not attend the meetings of the Society.” Nevertheless he wanted to remain in contact and suggested slashing the dues for more distant members. “Due to financial conditions over which I have no control,” Otto B. Dellermann explained, “I will have to drop my membership from now on. When conditions improve I will resume it again. But at this time I cannot keep it up. Sorry.” John L’H. Crosson confessed, “I, too, have at last become a victim of the unfortunate circumstances which have ruined so many of us in the past few years. As I have always been greatly interested in the Society + it’s [sic] work it is with regret that I must terminate my membership.” Nevertheless he remained an optimistic believer. “Perhaps another time I shall be able to renew it,” he wrote, adding, “may the Society have the best of success in the coming year.” Members who were in similar difficulties but lived nearer the organization’s activities were more fortunate. After explaining his financial situation, Alfred Africano, not yet the author of the ARS’s award-winning article, was made an active member in 1934 by special dispensation, and his dues were waived.113 Inspired by the society’s inclusive vision, distant enthusiasts proudly cast their own projects under its collective standard. Harry Bull, a twenty-one-yearold Syracuse University student and AIS member, wrote in 1931 to share the thrilling experience of a rocket-powered ice sled he invented. Built with materials costing a total of twenty-two dollars, the vehicle was low and torpedoshaped with solid-fuel rockets pointing back and downward at a slight angle to provide thrust. In front of an assembled crowd of five hundred on the winter ice of Lake Oneida near the university in upstate New York, Bull had demonstrated his device with mixed results. Two students helping him were burned by the flare from the rockets, but the sled’s five trial runs showed it capable of reaching speeds of seventy-five miles per hour and traveling fifty feet across the ice.114 As with the society’s tests with Rocket No. 1 the next year, calculations from the trials’ rudimentary measurements extrapolated their conceptual and hypothetical success over less favorable conclusions: the sled moved for about half a second before stopping, possibly from the effect of the rocket’s heat on the lake ice. Notwithstanding such complications, Bull

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remained optimistic about his invention, forwarding photographs and news clippings of the event along with diagrams and other promotional materials to the AIS to share with its members. For the next several years he similarly and enthusiastically reported his efforts with other rocket devices, a rocketpowered airplane and mail rockets, noting that he advertised his society membership to reporters.115 Members’ faith in the organization’s collective spirit also inspired them to bring others into its fold. In most cases, individual members enlisted likeminded acquaintances. Samuel Lichtenstein, an early member, was H. Franklin Pierce’s dentist and introduced the subsequently active member to the society. Byron L. Prugh, a Rutgers student, gave lectures to his fraternity on rockets and hoped to persuade several of his brothers to become members. Occasionally, some recruited more broadly and wholesale. B. K. Goree, Jr., a graduate of Exeter, Princeton, and the University of Texas law school, wrote several times to the New York headquarters reporting the publicity campaign he was conducting on the ARS’s behalf. Following society precedent, Nathan Carver wrote to Astounding in 1934 advertising the organization and its experiments to find new members from science fiction’s familiar source. After Wonder’s formation of the Science Fiction League in 1935, George Clark, SFL member number one and alphabet society member, offered to include news of the ARS, as well as that of the BIS and other “Organized Rocket Experimental Societies” of the world, in the fanzine he edited with the aid of the Esperanto Organization. “The average Science Fiction fan,” he observed, “is also a scientist in the making.”116 As the society’s circumstances and reputation changed, however, so did its relations with members. Within science fiction, the separation of fact from status channeled readers’ enthusiasm and interest while preserving science’s authority. The same dynamic governed the AIS’s initial information gathering, mutual enlightenment, and openness, but as it gained prestige and authority for its own experiments, the society became more self-conscious about how individual members’ claims and actions affected its standards and status. While it welcomed Bull’s promotional efforts in the early 1930s, by the mid-1930s some members’ untempered enthusiasm brought unwanted consideration. Pendray reprimanded Carver for his 1934 letter to Astounding. Holding no formal office, Carver should not have presumed to write on the society’s behalf. While the letter, like almost every one addressed to science fiction pulps, drew positive responses from new rocket enthusiasts, the ARS had become more interested in recruiting serious members with technical

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skills rather than idealistic amateurs.117 Melville Irvine Seath received a mixed response when he wrote in 1934 asking if the society encouraged “small time” experimenters and if it had a club flag. Experimenters were encouraged and all society materials made available to them, he was told, but there was no club flag. More significantly, the organization no longer shared information with the many “dreamers” who contacted it.118 Concluding that age corresponded to ability, the society voted in 1936 to accept only members over the age of eighteen.119 By the mid- and late 1930s, active membership was no longer available to any enthusiastic participant but required “suitable technical training and experience” and “proper background of scientific training and interest.” Associate membership was redefined to those “interested and [who] wish to aid in rocket research and the publication of the results.”120 Similarly, as the society’s focus and priorities changed, its standards for appropriate science also changed. While the ARS continued to promote rocket science generally, it encouraged practical experiments over pronouncements of theories and ideas. “Let me encourage you to experiment,” Pendray wrote to Kenneth Pritchard, who had proposed a new idea for a rocket, “rather than to discuss plans which are not based on experience. We have no shortage of ideas. It is experimental data that are scarce.” He then suggested more sympathetically, “If you do not have facilities for firing rocket motors, construct them anyway, and the society will test them (within reason!) on its new motor proving stand.”121 To A. F. Nickolas, Pendray observed, “Yours is the difficulty often encountered by those who have had no practical experience with the problems at hand and possibly too little acquaintance with the data at present available on rocket behavior. . . . I would also like to suggest that, instead of sending ideas on paper to the society, you actually try building rockets.” Continuing with a familiar refrain, he said, “There is no shortage of ideas on paper. Every mail brings me some.” Justifying the ARS’s increased specialization, he continued, “The shortage is in experimental data. It is this gap that the society’s experimental committee is trying to fill.”122 Desire for data divided the society’s members on the nature and purpose of experiments. While attempted rocket launches inspired members wanting their adventure, inspiration alone was insufficient to advance their science. Static tests no longer flew rockets in the air—nor did they, as it turned out, reduce rockets’ explosive potential—but they produced significant data to show for the effort. Arguing the benefits of systematic research, the ARS also distanced itself from members’ individual endeavors. Its officers rejected Carver’s idea to launch rockets at sea from obsolete navy boats in 1934 and

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his other ideas, some with H. Franklin Pierce, to continue flying rockets.123 Its board members more politely refused Pierce’s requests for formal assistance testing and launching new rockets in 1936 and 1937, although they eventually lent him equipment and supplies with the understanding that the society was in no way responsible for his experiments’ outcomes.124 Focused on testing, the society similarly did not pursue rockets’ various applications. Associate member F. K. Kessler resigned from the organization in 1937 wanting to work specifically on mail rockets. The split was cordial, with mutual understanding of their diverging interests, and the ARS continued to refer interested members to him. Several former and current members, including Pierce and Willy Ley, who resettled in the United States, were involved in NYU professor Alexander Klemin’s launch of an air-mail rocket/glider at Greenwood Lake, New York, in 1937.125 The society’s shifting priorities similarly guided its relations with rocketry groups. The ARS continued to have warm relations with the VfR—until its absorption into the German military—and the BIS, which it encouraged to pursue experiments’ practical path. “I am of the opinion that there is no one thing you can do for rocketry,” Pendray wrote in 1934 to the BIS’s Cleator, “as important as the commencement of experimental work, even if it is on the smallest and least ambitious scale. Statements by even so eminent a person as Sir James Jeans will never shoot a rocket. It is only laboratory and field work that will bring this about.” The BIS, he thought, should learn from the AIS’s experience as an organization. “In our early years we went through very much the same sort of effort to attract attention to our cause,” Pendray said, “as that in which you are engaged. We did succeed in getting prominent men to make interesting statements, but we found that all of this led to nothing. It did not build any rockets, neither did it lead in any important way, to an enlargement of the society.” He continued, “On the other hand, when we began experimentation, we found that the problem became easier, and moreover, we began to interest persons with practical talents. As a writing man, I should not, of course, disparage writing, but it is certainly not a substitute for practical achievement.”126 With other groups in the mid-1930s, however, particularly those with experimental ambitions of their own, the society established cordial but less forthcoming relations. Reserved regard marked its affairs and relationship with the Cleveland Rocket Society (CRS), an organization active for several years in the mid-1930s in Cleveland, Ohio. The CRS resembled the ARS in many ways. A local group of engineers, machinists, students, and other

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enthusiasts led by the businessman Edward Hanna and the recent German immigrant Ernst Loebell, it published an informational bulletin about rocket-related subjects, called “SPACE”; conducted rocket experiments; and welcomed interested members near and far, most of whom it also drew from science fiction’s pool of devotees.127 The two groups were amiable for the most part, exchanging bulletins, announcing each other’s activities, and sharing members eager for rockets’ interplanetary potential. From the ARS’s perspective, however, the CRS’s experiments, which that organization announced as qualified successes, were not sufficiently systematic. “There is another, perhaps subtler reason why those of us who were actively promoting and writing about rocketry ceased to have much faith in the Cleveland Rocket Society,” Pendray would later recall. “We never saw any technical results or data come out of it that appeared to give any solid basis for CRS’s talk about ‘successful experiments.’” Expressing the basis for the ARS’s eventual success, he said, “But measurement of these quantities would have been the only sensible reason for the tests in the first place. Failure to obtain them is most astonishing. As a result, even if Lobell [sic] had discovered something of importance, it would probably have made little impression on the engineering fraternity, because it would not have been backed up by engineering data reproducible by others.”128 Pendray’s recollection, however, was not entirely correct. Although the CRS launched one rocket in 1934, from the onset that organization’s emphasis was testing rocket components, focusing, as did the ARS later, on engines. Conducted in 1933 and 1934, their firing tests, in fact, resembled the ARS’s 1935 static tests: running motors, of Loebell’s designs, within a proving stand to assess their performance. The designs proved moderately successful, indeed arguably better than the ones in the ARS tests. The motor in the CRS’s October 21, 1933, test fired nine times for durations between 10 and 120 seconds and a total of more than seven minutes before its fuel ran out. A second test a week later ended more abruptly when the gasoline tank exploded, and a third test in June 1934 on a new proving stand designed to measure lift and other parameters also concluded inconclusively when a valve malfunction in its third firing led to its fuel burning a hole through the motor. The CRS’s experimental error, however, was not anticipating the difficulty of observing the results of its tests. While timing its motor’s firing in the fall, CRS members did not measure its thrust. Standing at a distance from its improved proving stand in 1934, the Cleveland experimenters used field glasses that did not allow them to see accurately the stand’s readings. The CRS’s experi-

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ments, ironically, were too technical and not technical enough; the engines they tested were rigorous in their design and performance, but their results were not reproducible in any significant detail. Without precise test data to extrapolate a flight and only a stamp cachet to commemorate the one rocket it did launch, the CRS did not muster much enthusiasm for either science or its adventure through their experiments. Despite their modest technical successes, the organization as a whole did not translate its experiments and other activities into a larger collective enterprise. Unable to maintain the interests of members, local and distant, CRS folded after several years.129 In contrast, it was the reproducibility of data and experience that maintained, if unevenly, the ARS’s longevity through the 1930s. If its experiments inspired members and others to join the cause of rockets, after the society stopped conducting them in 1936, the reputation those awarded it allowed the ARS to extend its interests, absorbing organizations it might have competed with earlier, such as the CRS. That same year the society instituted a new form of membership, allowing groups, which continued to emerge locally, to affiliate with its more established organization. Considering first the possibility of branch chapters, board members opted instead for affiliates. “The Society would be unable to exercise adequate control over such branches,” minutes of their meetings revealed, “while being subject to the obligation and responsibilities such a set-up would entail.” Before applying for affiliation, these groups, of six or more, would give “reasonable evidence of permanence,” and while not required, a plan for experiments was “desirable.”130 The Peoria Rocket Association, previously independent, applied to affiliate with the ARS in 1937 and was joined soon after by the Westchester Rocket Society; the Amateur Research Society of Clifton, New Jersey; and the Yale Rocket Club and later by the MIT Rocket Club.131 In Britain the BIS expanded similarly, accepting the Manchester Interplanetary Society, the Leeds Rocket Society, and the Paisley Rocketeers Society, which had emerged independently in the mid-1930s, as affiliates in the late 1930s.132 The ARS’s reorganization allowed it to split the difference between its concerns and its priorities. On the one hand, clarifying the status of affiliates and individual members separate from its central organization limited the ARS’s responsibility in the event of experimental mishaps. While members were able to cover the costs of the bystander injured in the October 1935 static test, those costs exceeded the original cost of the tests and equipment and indeed the society’s annual budget. Financial liability for continued experimentation was a privately held but publicly unspoken concern for the

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ARS in the late 1930s and a large reason it ceased its experiments in 1936. On the other hand, differentiated membership allowed the society to bridge its previous experimental divide. The organization continued to promote an ethos of systematic and positive research. At the same time the efforts of its affiliates as well as individual members, while not officially sponsored by the society, continued the adventure of rocketry’s broader enterprise. Its extended organization sustained the ARS through several lean years. The meager economic conditions of the Depression were a constant context for the group’s existence, contributing to the organization’s concerns about experimental liability and members’ willingness and available time to work on rockets. Founding president Lasser had left the society in 1933 to organize workers for unemployment relief, feeling that the issue was more urgent than space or science fiction; Gernsback relieved him of his duties at Wonder Stories the same year, declaring, “if you like working with the unemployed so much, I suggest you go and join them.”133 Not inconsequentially the organization ceased its experiments during the relapse of economic recession in 1937 and 1938. Recession’s presence and rockets’ absence tested followers’ faith in the organization. In 1938 Secretary Max Krauss reported a decline in membership, particularly among associates, with several dropping out disappointed “because there have been no rocket shots such as they anticipated. The next year he reported a total of 106 members, only 6 more than the organization had in 1931, its first year of existence.134 Nevertheless the society’s cause continued to circulate. Reports, analyses, and commentary about its experiments, the one continuing after the other ceased, reproduced its mediated acclaim. The certainty of their original production—visually and visibly illustrated by rockets launching skyward, hardhatted experimenters observing engine tests, detailed designs, and precisely charted calculations—projected a confident vision of rocket science in action amid the era’s uncertainty. Public libraries and interested groups across the country and from overseas maintained subscriptions to Astronautics.135 Readers who chanced on the journal, other articles about the ARS, and letters in science fiction pulps after their original publication continued to write the society, curious and inspired. In the absence of the dormant experimental committee, affiliates and individual members sought to replicate and improve on its earlier efforts, designing, building, and in some cases launching rockets, which they diligently reported to the larger society. Shesta and James Wyld worked in 1938 to improve Shesta’s first proving stand while they were unemployed, one of them subsisting on rye bread spread with lard and

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the other on chop suey and spaghetti.136 Pierce’s tests and launches on July 4, 1937, and May 9, 1938, at Old Ferry Point in the Bronx, while not society sponsored, attracted members’ notice and fueled, if briefly, their appetite and aspirations for rockets.137 These various extended efforts maintained the society long enough for members to find renewed purpose. In the fall of 1938, with his career flourishing and thinking the organization would benefit from new leadership, Pendray, the society’s longtime principal and promoter, resigned from its board and as editor of Astronautics.138 Africano and others persuaded him to rethink his resignation, however, and his decision reinvigorated the society’s publicity and promotional efforts. Already involved in planning for the 1939 New York World’s Fair—conceiving its perhaps most memorable concept, the “time capsule”—Pendray arranged for the ARS to help develop a “Rocketport of Tomorrow” display, featuring Rocket No. 3, Ronald Rocket, for Chrysler’s exhibit hall.139 A new brochure aimed at prospective members built on the society’s cumulative record, summarizing its achievements and advancing directions for further development. Featuring photographs of Rocket No. 2’s triumphant launch and a static test in action on the 1935 proving stand, the brochure announced the ARS’s “rocket principle,” detailed its membership structure—including a new junior membership for those under eighteen— and outlined concrete steps for “progress towards rocket flight.”140 The society’s emphasis on practice and training also proved fruitful to its rejuvenation. The vision of incremental science and sensibly minded specialists that its experimental agenda advanced resonated among the members the society attracted after the mid-1930s. Increasingly prospective members referred to technical expertise and abilities in their inquiries to the ARS. By fall 1938 a group of newer members along with several of the society’s longtime enthusiasts renewed static tests. Shesta’s second improved proving stand was used to test first, in October, a Pierce design developed during the society’s experimental hiatus and then, in December, two designs by recently recruited members: Robert Truax, a student at the U.S. Naval Academy; and Wyld, a recent Princeton graduate. Both engines used regenerative cooling, with fuel circulating around the combustion chamber and absorbing heat as it flowed in—warming to a temperature for more efficient burning—and dispersing the absorbed heat as it flowed away. Truax’s motor failed to disperse enough heat and vaporized its fuel explosively, but Wyld’s motor burned for fourteen seconds and provided a thrust of ninety pounds.141 More significantly, by not burning through its chamber, the engine avoided the overheating

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problems of previous society motor designs. Taking steps to protect the organization’s and members’ liability, the ARS board approved resuming its experimental program in April 1939.142 The society advertised Pierce’s solid-fuel rocket launches later in the year, although in order to avoid attracting outsiders, Pendray advised members not to mention rockets.143 Wyld’s success finding employment in Virginia in 1939, however, temporarily interrupted momentum from his engine’s success. With his return to New York the next year to join a small medical-electric concern, the society resumed experiments in rocket science.144 Over the summer of 1941 the ARS tested motors built by Nathan Carver and Charles Piecewicz, Africano, Robert Youngquist (representing its new MIT affiliate), and Pierce, as well as Wyld’s regeneratively cooled model twice.145 Adjustments and refinements on the design more than doubled the duration of its burn and increased its thrust 50 percent. More importantly the motor’s effective endurance, burning without bursting, promised its practical applicability for actual air-born rockets. “The test proved conclusively,” Astronautics editor Roy Healy reported, “that a reliable motor for aerological sounding rockets has at last been designed, build, and tested.”146 That promise drew interest from the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, which sent two representatives to a test firing of the Wyld motor in November, while Shesta prepared to use it in an actual launch to test further aspects of rocket flight, specifically gyroscopic stability.147 The society’s belief in programmatic research and method over more fanciful imaginings of science, and the organization and maintenance of its membership, had produced its promised results. The outbreak of war, however, changed the direction of the ARS and its enthusiasts. The possibility of rockets’ use in warfare, which the society had discussed periodically in theory and which the VfR’s absorption into the German military had reinforced, had suddenly become more immediate.148 A week and a half after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Shesta, Wyld, Pierce, and a recent ARS recruit named Lovell Lawrence, Jr., who had first contacted the navy, formed an independent company, Reaction Motors, Incorporated (RMI), to design and manufacture rocket engines—aspiring analogically to be the General Motors of rockets.149 The navy’s interest led to the first of many military contracts for RMI, and after an initial period of difficulty the company expanded, becoming by war’s end the nation’s largest and most significant manufacturer of liquid-fuel rocket motors.150 The company’s commercial success, however, also redirected the efforts of the ARS’s most active experimenters and marked the end of the organization’s own research. The

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society’s most successful static engine test in 1941, ironically, was its last. The ARS continued to promote rocketry and collegial science, becoming a semiprofessional and eventually a professional organization for aerospace research, but the unfolding events and circumstances of World War II, and later the cold war, revealed the limits and contradictions, previously unimagined, within its original aspirations for rocketry’s open science and interplanetary adventure.151 “I claim one positive triumph for science fiction, totally beyond the scope of so-called main-stream fiction,” Robert Heinlein observed in a 1969 essay, “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues.” He wrote, “It has prepared the youth of our time for the coming age of space.”152 In one sense the celebrated science fiction author was speaking to the general connection of the genre and its enthusiastic community to the American space program, which reached its high point that year with its successful Apollo mission to the moon. In another sense, however, the former navy lieutenant, rocket enthusiast, and associate member of the American Interplanetary Society was remarking more directly on his own personal involvement, and that of other science fiction readers in the spaceflight movement in the 1930s, before he became noted within and without science fiction. The sentiment he expressed would not have been lost on other interwar members of the society, despite their efforts to manage the organization’s accumulated authority. While the ARS’s cultivated organization and reputation for research rigor helped produce the success of its static tests in 1938 and 1941, so too did the more adventurous experiments by individual members from which the organization distanced itself. Ivy League educated and technically adept, James Wyld was also a self-admitted tinkerer and developed his regenerative-cooling motor working with some of the society’s other avid rocketeers, specifically Shesta and Pierce. While they appreciated the technical obstacles they faced, their details were technicalities in their larger quest to make rockets work and see them fly. Before submitting his motor to the rigor of the society’s proving stand in fall 1938, Wyld had already installed a version in a rocket that Pierce had built and launched earlier in May.153 The success of his engine not only redeemed Wyld’s effort; it also recouped and redefined Pierce’s position within the society. An active member throughout much of the organization’s existence, he was the first to propose that it launch rockets, and as an experienced machinist from his time in the navy, he helped build many parts for several of its rockets. Nevertheless for many years, with

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a job as a subway ticket-taker, he was seen mostly as an amateur enthusiast with needed manual skills.154 Pierce ran unsuccessfully for the society’s board several times in the mid-1930s. While he was building and launching his own rockets during the ARS’s experimental hiatus, however, his unwavering determination gained the respect that his role helping Wyld develop his motor cemented. Pierce successfully won election to the ARS board by the late 1930s, served as its president in 1940, and was one of RMI’s cofounders in 1941. Without exaggerating their relationship and connection, enthusiasts for interwar rocket science and science fiction faced similar concerns in their pursuits and activities. While they charted separate courses, both groups practiced within the same popular scientific culture and were, in a sense, part of a common enterprise to achieve science’s promise and progress. Both required imagination connecting knowledge to science’s potential and purpose—situating information within its broader story—and both reinforced interest in the other. The communities of each openly spoke of the other, overlapping in many ways. Followers of rocket science read science fiction, and science fiction readers followed rocket science, In addition, like Goddard, they often read the two together and interspersed with each other. AIS/ARS members’ experience writing science fiction and whetting science’s potential proved useful in producing their science. Framing their experimental data and findings within conceptual and mathematical calculations, they subtly shaped their perspectives to include more inspiring, adventurous, and imaginative results. Like science fiction readers and fans, rocket enthusiasts negotiated the complex and countervailing social dynamics of community, balancing its promise of democratic inclusion against individual desires for distinction. These negotiations influenced and were influenced by tensions between scientific authority and knowledge, on the one hand, and between professional and popular science, on the other. Like science fiction’s emergent fans, the boundaries these distinctions and tensions drew did not so much define rocket enthusiasts as they defined different roles they might play in different contexts, individually and collectively, publicly and privately. The ambivalent associations attached to the term “rocket scientist” speak to the difficulty of these negotiations. To be a “rocket scientist” was both to command knowledge and authority that few had and to have idealistic, possibly out-of-touch dreams. Despite imagination’s common necessity within both science fiction and science, different practices emerged for each from its specific interwar dynamic. For readers and fans, interwar science fiction’s

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radical separation of science from its social context encouraged them to suspend the reality of their social circumstances to discuss and debate openly, and occasionally entertainingly, science’s potential and possibility. For rocketry, distinction’s increasing importance, based as much on credential and profession as on actual ability, discouraged open entertainment of science’s grander purposes in favor of rigorous method and incremental technical testing. The efforts of the ARS to protect the authority it achieved against members’ continued desire for adventure—fueled in no small part by their science fiction reading—spoke to that divergence. For professional rocket science, unlike professional science fiction, acclamation increasingly required disavowing inspiration and creativity of culture and social interaction’s presence within its practice. While experimenters privately entertained their imaginative fictions, they did not reveal them publicly. “John Shesta, Laurence Manning, and I are planning to build some things and test them secretly,” Pendray wrote to Pierce in February 1936. “I think it would be fun if you would join our particular group and bring along your ideas and equipment,” declared the principal advocate for the ARS’s research and rigor as the organization decided to halt its experiments. Recognized for its interwar technical achievement, the American Interplanetary/Rocketry Society is not recognized for its cultural and social achievement. Yet for the most part, despite its mid-1930s acclaim, its experiments produced little of lasting technical consequence to rocketry. Goddard launched a liquid-fuel rocket earlier, in 1929, and to higher altitude than any of the ARS’s rockets attained. The Cleveland Rocket Society, if reports are accurate, tested a motor on its providing stand in 1933 that burned longer with sustained thrust and without overheating and bursting than Wyld’s regenerative-cooling motor even in its best tests in 1938. From an overly harsh perspective, for most of the 1930s the ARS’s experiments simply affirmed that liquid-fuel rockets could fly and that overheating engines that burst posed a major obstacle to practical rocket flight. Still, it is not surprising that the society’s members, rather than Goddard or the CRS, formed a successful enterprise to manufacture liquid-fuel rocket engines. If it produced few technical breakthroughs in rocketry, the organization advanced its science, advocating rigorous and systematic testing and sustaining an environment for engaged discussion and action. Rocket science, as the ARS practiced it, was socially, not naturally, historical. If its research agenda promoted experiment reproducibility and data, its professional aspiration encouraged careful mediation to present such findings as positive and

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natural, removing their contingency from consideration. Over time its members accepted and adopted such practices because these were socially useful; all but the most zealous of the society’s rocketeers came to realize the benefit, within science’s developing conditions, of presenting rocketry properly, professionally, and publicly so that they might entertain its adventure privately. Indeed the society’s sociability was as significant as its actual research agenda was. The collective, collaborative ethos it inspired sustained not only the society but also popular enthusiasm in the 1930s for rockets and their interplanetary possibility during the several years it halted experiments. Rocketry in the interwar years did not affirm science’s inevitable progress; it revealed enthusiasts’ contingent, inconclusive efforts to build and understand rockets and to maintain hope and faith in their collective endeavor. In early 1942, writing to Westinghouse’s public relations counsel G. Edward Pendray, H. Franklin Pierce, vice president of Reaction Motors, Inc., noted a recent article in the New York Sun Mirror. The newspaper reported a “chap . . . planning to prepare himself to fly Rockets.” Perhaps reminiscing about his own personal journey from intrepid experimenter to aspiring entrepreneur, Pierce observed, “I always feel that youth has [sic] a way of making their dreams come true. That is why,” he explained on the verge of World War II’s expansion of military-industrial relations, “I feel that when ‘this’ is over our Society will rapidly grow to something big.”155 Pierce’s sentiment about youthful dreams echoed one that Goddard had expressed to H. G. Wells ten years earlier. “What I find most inspiring is your optimism,” he wrote admiringly to the author who inspired his scientific career. “It is the best antidote I know for the feeling of depression that comes at times when one contemplates the remarkable capacity for bungling of man and nature.”156 Though similar in thought, Goddard’s and Pierce’s experiences imagining and practicing rocket science could not have been more different. Both contributed significantly to advance American rocketry during the 1930s and 1940s, but while the one, a formally educated physics professor, experimented in well-funded solitude in the desert Southwest, the other, a machinist by trade and a self-taught amateur enthusiast, had joined a barely funded society whose experimental sociability proved invaluable to his career and fortune. For Pierce and other members of the interconnected interwar communities for science fiction and science, their activities and practice were more fun, and more fruitful, while they were working and playing with others.

EPILOGUE Beyond the “Gernsback Continuum”: Science Fiction’s Community and Social Networks

Science-fiction . . . reminds us that the worlds of wish and the world of matter—if that separation is still viable—have been married in other ways before. —Reuel Denney, “Reactors of the Imagination”1

The war changed almost everything—again. The Great War, as it had been known in the 1920s, became the first of two world wars, recasting the historical sensibility of the years between them. The prestige of science remained colossal if not enhanced by World War II, but the wonder of science’s modern promise receded in the realization of its innovative and awesome destructive power. New tactical military use of aerial technology, the sudden surprise of blitzkrieg and aircraftcarrier-borne attack, symbolized the outbreak of war in Europe and America’s entry into a global war that involved competing economic and political ideologies, colonial empires, and their extension across the world. For all sides, war’s vigorous pursuit was marked both by singular emblems of technological development and the scope of its military-industrial output. V1 and V2 rockets, jet-propelled airplanes, radar and sonar-guidance systems, radio telephony, and early electronic calculators and computers augured, on the one hand, science’s improved technological capability. Massed application of conventional military force on the eastern front; coordinated aerial bombing of England, continental Europe, and the Japanese homeland; the industry of the Third Reich’s “Final Solution”; and Japan’s poisoning of land and water during its retreat from captured territories in China and

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Southeast Asia argued, on the other hand, for science’s increased capacity. The war’s enduring final symbol, the atomic bomb, captured both impulses: a single and singular weapon wrought the same destruction that massed bomber wings had already demonstrated on Japanese cities for months. The laudatory language of achievement and development, itself a product of modern war, should not, however, obscure the finality of the conflict’s consequence; an estimated thirty to sixty million people died in World War II.2 Interwar science fiction imagined many outcomes for science’s potential, but none approached the scale and scope of actual war’s capacity for death and destruction. The war also changed publishing and popular fiction. War-time paper rationing limited the production and publication of pulp magazines generally. Comic books, an outgrowth of the pulps in the late 1930s, offered a graphically illustrated medium for their stories—and in the process transformed heroes into superheroes—until public concern about the appropriateness of their material in the mid-1950s set back the industry’s expansion and development.3 Paperback books, which also emerged in the late 1930s and whose perfect binding allowed smaller, more portable volumes than the staple-bound pulps, gained greater popularity after the war, aided by publishers’ production of editions for armed service members stationed overseas.4 Together these new print media provided alternative formats and markets for the popular fiction previously found in the pulps. Similarly, new technological media, broadcast radio in the 1930s and television in the 1940s, continued films’ translation of fiction’s imaginative impulse from text and print to sound, image, and their combination; popular fiction was, strictly speaking, no longer exclusively literary.5 Although producers of movies, comic books, and paperbacks continued to rely on direct sale of their creative products, radio and television adopted and extended the business model of “slick” magazines. While advertising revenue paid for distribution costs, instead of charging for their products, the industries’ networks broadcast their shows “free” to anyone with the equipment to receive them. These combined changes effectively ended pulp publishing. “It was not literature, but it was a living while it lasted,” Allan R. Bosworth later recalled about writing for the pulps. “It ended with more whimper than bang-bang, about 1940, leaving a lot of writers destitute and bewildered.”6 In 1943 Argosy, Munsey’s original five-cent pulp, became a twenty-five-cent slick under Popular Publications.7 In 1949 Street & Smith, the original fiction factory, gave up publishing pulp magazines and comic books. While a few of its titles

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survived when converted to slicks, most of its long-running and well-known ones—Detective Story, Western Story, Doc Savage, and The Shadow among them—ceased publication. While a few magazines continued to be published in pulp format into the 1950s and 1960s, their vivid and gaudy glory remained only in fans’ memories, collections, and recollections.8 Significantly, Astounding Science Fiction joined Mademoiselle, Charm, Air Trails Pictorial, and the Pic Sports Quarterly on the list of titles that Street & Smith continued to produce.9 Science fiction magazines had survived the pulp jungle’s demise. Science fiction survived as well, but its character changed to accommodate war-time and postwar circumstances. A new generation of editors and writers who came of age in their predecessors’ establishment of the genre gained it greater literary distinction for their more sophisticated and socially engaged stories. Previously popular only among interwar pulp enthusiasts, science fiction became generally popular in the various new media of the 1950s mainstream. Their formats, however, did not always retain the pulps’ departmentalized features, and science fiction’s relations with readers and audiences were recast in the translation. While science fiction magazines after World War II continued to publish readers’ letters, in the broader array of the genre’s several postwar formats, these letters did not indicate as significantly fans’ private activities nor introduce them as often to newcomers. With both thriving separately, science fiction’s public and private realms no longer required the interaction that allowed their initial emergence. Experience became memory became history as those pulp origins were reimagined to suit postwar requirements. As significantly, postwar society’s shift from progress to affluence reconfigured science fiction’s expressive formulations and operative sensibility; its previous sublime wonder became simply apprehension mixed with anxiety.10 Following in King Kong’s footsteps from the 1930s, “monster” movies featured insects, lizards, and other creatures—in one case an unhappy heiress—grown to extraordinary size and power through exposure to radiation or other extreme or extraterrestrial effect and wreaking destruction on nearby homes, towns, and cities.11 Time-travel stories abandoned imagining future potential to disturb present certainty, exploring the implications of altering the past and considering the consequences of alternative histories and timelines.12 Asimov’s rules, or as they were later and better known, the laws of robotics, restricted revolt against humans to broach new behavioral terrain for robots, cementing their status as machines and foreshadowing notions of artificial intelligence.13 Sightings of “flying saucers” beginning in the late 1940s

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merged with prewar concerns and weird stories of extraterrestrial visitation to consolidate science fiction’s denizens into “aliens,” which allegations of government cover-ups in U.S. Air Force investigations of “unidentified flying objects” (or “UFOs”) imbued with conspiratorial tinges.14 In a cold-war era of American containment of the Communist bloc that included proxy wars with its Asian client-states, human racial difference no longer sufficed; aliens became, instead, “bug-eyed monsters” and invaders from “outer space.”15 Collectively these postwar tropes subtly realigned science fiction’s engagement with, and responsibility for, nature’s excitement. Adventure anxiously arrived here, to affect ordinary people, as much as they traveled to find and overcome it out there. The war also changed the practice of science. Issues of scale, scope, innovation, and industry that transformed both technology and popular culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had begun also to apply to areas of science in the 1930s.16 Martial imperative and marshaling furthered their application within a new paradigm for research and relations. Federal funding fueled work in basic science, its applied development, and industrial production, consolidating mutually beneficial ties between universities, industry, and the government. The Manhattan Project’s success developing the atomic bomb during World War II demonstrated the efficacy of such interconnected efforts to large-scale scientific and technological endeavors. In the years of the cold war, with Soviet nuclear success and Sputnik stimulating its growth and resolve in the mid- and late 1950s, this enterprising military-industrial complex turned to ever-more sophisticated and expensive endeavors: the development of the hydrogen bomb, the space and ballistic missile program, nuclear power, and high-energy particle accelerators. “The large-scale character of modern science, new and shining and all-powerful, is so apparent,” the historian of science Derek de Solla Price remarked, “that the happy term ‘Big Science’ has been coined to describe it.” He explained, “Because the science we have now so vastly exceeds all that has gone before, we have obviously entered a new age that has been swept clear of all but the basic traditions of the old. Not only are the manifestations of modern scientific hardware so monumental that they have been usefully compared with the pyramids of Egypt and the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, but the national expenditures of manpower and money on it have suddenly made science a major segment of our national economy.”17 “Big Science,” however, involved more than massive machines and budgets. Its experimental mechanisms increasingly required ancillary devices

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for power generation, storage, and modulation and to monitor, record, and evaluate their results. Following the earlier lead of technology industries, scientific laboratories expanded from single rooms to buildings to dedicated sites and complexes. Sponsored institutional research also required administration, management, and oversight—and where needed, security and transport—as well as their requisite staffs and bureaucracies. More significantly, while its coordination allowed the achievement of grand scientific ambitions, Big Science also redefined the character of scientific work, in particular requiring greater collaboration. De Solla Price noted this development but could not offer a full explanation. “Surprisingly enough, a detailed examination of the incidence of collaborative work in science,” he said, “shows that this is a phenomenon which has been increasing steadily and ever more rapidly since the beginning of the century. It is hard to find any recent acceleration of the curves that would correspond to the coming of the big machine and indicate this as a recognizable contributing cause.”18 Focused more on characterizing larger trends and their clearly identifiable factors, de Solla Price overlooked and underestimated more subtle—and more arguable—shifts in science’s social sensibility in the early twentieth century. Big Science changed not only scientific practice but also participants’ roles and involvement within it. In large-scale research programs and projects involving complex systems with a variety of components and parameters, work was apportioned and distributed, and discovery and invention were partial, incremental, and rarely individual. Instead they were increasingly shared, products not only of scientists but also of technicians and equipment operators, team and project leaders, and supervising officials, and they reflected as well the interests of executives, investors, and politicians. Collaboration complicated acknowledgment, credit, and satisfaction among science’s contributors, both for their roles and for their expectations. Managing these dynamics required, among other things, maintaining a sense of their collective enterprise and belief in its progress and eventual promise. Although not solely responsible for this sensibility, interwar science fiction shared and cultivated its sentiment. Given an outlet for their enthusiasm, many of its readers accepted science’s greater purpose and undertaking so long as they could also imagine and make a place for themselves within it. In several instances its youthful enthusiasts made later careers of their hobbies. Seeking to realize the fictions they read as fact, they became technicians, science writers, and practicing scientists. “I have read your magazine for a long time now,” Fred Trauger of Lindsay, California, wrote to Amazing

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Stories in 1933, “and I want to tell you right now that from the very first it has fascinated me.” Its fiction inspired his decision to study and possibly pursue a career in science. “I have become so interested in science and astronomy that I am planning my courses in school towards this end,” he explained. “That is what your magazine has done to me. You may consider it a compliment or not,” he said, but “I do not believe I would ever have arrived at this conclusion had it not been for your magazine.” He admitted, “Perhaps I am being influenced a great deal by the fact that almost all of the scientists in your stories gain world-wide fame and glory through their achievements,” but he affirmed his conviction, “I am going to carry out my ambition, false illusions or not.”19 Trauger attended Fresno State College, graduating in 1939 with a degree in geology. Then after graduate studies at Stanford and service in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he joined the U.S. Geological Survey, where he published a number of articles about water resources in the western and southwestern United States and became a recognized authority on the subject, particularly in eastern New Mexico and the southern Great Plains, as well as on two hobbies, roses and turquoise.20 Although he achieved neither worldwide fame nor glory, Trauger realized his ambition of a career in science and after retiring established a scholarship in earth and environmental studies at his college alma mater for students pursuing the same ambition.21 Experience within science fiction offered an outlook on science and its practice beyond formal theory and professional standards. “Fortunately, my own career stayed on the leading edge of technology,” Roy Lavender remembered in an autobiographical essay. An avid young reader of science fiction in the 1930s, he attended college, graduating with an engineering degree, and after a stint in the military and a few various jobs found long-term employment in the burgeoning post-World War II aerospace industry. Over the course of several decades at North American Aviation, he worked first on a variety of military aircraft projects in Ohio and then transferred to its West Coast facilities to work on the Apollo and, later, satellite projects. “It [was] a wonderful world for a science fiction fan who loves to design gadgets,” he recalled, recollecting several personal triumphs. “When the Apollo circled the Moon and the astronauts reached into B-3 locker for their cameras,” he noted, “they pulled them from the shock absorbing sheath I designed. On the test stand for the Saturn rockets, cameras look up into the flame to photograph the performance (or failure) of the engines. They survive in a protective box I designed.”22 While he made a career in aerospace, Lavender declared that science fic-

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tion fandom “is my way of life.” He and his wife, Deedee, raised a family but also participated in local fan groups where they lived and organized and attended science fiction conventions, particularly favoring Midwestcon, which was oriented more toward fans than professionals. “It is my family picnic,” he explained. Lavender also looked for fellow fans, observing them in a variety of fields. “Every astronaut we worked with,” he noted, “was also a science fiction reader, if not a fan.” Science fiction, moreover, was more than entertaining adventure. It also provided perspective on politics, priorities and their impact on the industry in which he worked and the world in which he lived. “When you’ve watched galactic empires fall,” Lavender said, “you can take a longer view on local politics.” Science fiction fans are “aware of the world that could be,” he explained. “Changes do not panic them.”23 Science fiction also spurred enthusiasts’ entrepreneurial endeavors. Founded by writers and editors at Wonder Stories, the American Interplanetary/Rocket Society conducted experiments and social outreach in the 1930s that brought together James Wyld, John Shesta, H. Franklin Pierce, and Lovell Lawrence, Jr. On the eve of World War II, the four rocket enthusiasts formed Reaction Motors, Inc. (RMI), the first commercial rocket company in the United States. During the war and after, it delivered liquid-fuel rocket engines to the military, including ones that powered the Bell X-1 aircraft that first broke the sound barrier in 1947 and the Viking research rocket in the late 1940s and early 1950s. With its business growing, RMI still struggled with debt in the postwar period, receiving an influx of cash from the Rocke­ feller family’s investment in 1947 before Mathieson Chemical Corporation purchased a 49 percent interest in 1953 and incorporated the company as an affiliate. Although its original founders left in this period, the reorganization provided RMI firmer financial stability and allowed the now corporate division to expand, developing larger, more powerful engines and realizing its slogan, “Power for Progress.”24 In 1958 RMI merged with Thiokol, a chemical and synthetic rubber enterprise that had moved into manufacturing solid-rocket propellants. Although it was initially viewed as a complementary arrangement, the merger proved problematic in practice and to RMI’s business. Expansion of suburbs closer to its facilities in New Jersey in the 1960s made its engine tests liable to lawsuits concerning their noise, while the cost of relocation was prohibitive and cuts in military spending reduced the naval contracts that provided much of its business.25 Thiokol gradually phased out its RM division in the 1970s while its other divisions continued to flourish—providing solid-fuel components to many American aerospace

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projects in the twentieth century, including the Pershing, Minuteman, Poseidon, and Trident missile systems; the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo manned rocket projects; the Pioneer, Voyager, and Magellan exploratory space probe systems; and the rocket booster for the Space Shuttle. Such entrepreneurial endeavors were not limited to science. Introduced to the pulps’ inner workings through their interwar industry, enthusiasts were well positioned to parlay personal efforts into careers in science fiction and publishing—while maintaining their fan activities. John W. Campbell’s ascendance from student and fan to the editorial helm of Astounding in 1937, a position he held until his death in 1971, and his subsequent publication of works by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Theodore Sturgeon, among other writers, inaugurated what many critics consider science fiction’s “Golden Age.” Already an emerging writer in the 1930s, C. (Catherine) L. Moore met Henry Kuttner when he wrote a fan letter to “Mr.” Moore in 1936, and after marrying in 1940, the two collaborated in a prolific writing partnership until his death in 1958. Many members of the Futurian Science Literary Society in the 1930s worked in science fiction over the course of the next few decades. Asimov, James Blish, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert Lowndes, Judith Merril, Frederik Pohl, and Donald Wollheim became writers with varying degrees of success. Knight, Pohl, and Wollheim also served as editors, first in magazine and then book publishing. Wayne Woodard, who worked under the name Hannes Bok, became a noted artist, and Virginia Kidd, a notable literary agent.26 Asimov, Briton Arthur C. Clarke, and Los Angeles–based Ray Bradbury and Heinlein, who kept his early enthusiasm for rockets and science fiction unknown to fan circles, in particular enjoyed success not only within science fiction but also among wider, general audiences; Asimov and Clarke also gained regard for their scientific and technological work. Asimov’s Foundation and Robot series, Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and Time Enough for Love were well received critically and popularly and remain among the most well-known works of the genre.27 Others expanded their interests to other forms of popular print culture in the postwar era. Mort Weisinger, who assumed the helm of Thrilling Wonder when Standard Publications acquired Hugo Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, left Standard in 1941 to edit comic book titles, particularly Superman and Batman, for National Publications. Over the course of several decades at National, known more popularly as DC Comics, he introduced many concepts and supporting characters to their respective imagined worlds and helped

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create other well-known superheroes, such as Aquaman and Green Arrow.28 In 1944 Julius Schwartz, Weisinger’s friend, fellow fan, and partner in a literary agency, became the editor for All-American Comics, which National acquired two years later. Retained in his position for several decades, in the 1950s Schwartz oversaw the development of the superhero titles Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom as well as the idea of a collaborative superhero organization, the Justice League of America.29 An ardent Michelist and anticommercialist fan in the 1930s, Donald Wollheim pioneered science fiction’s entry into new mass-market paperbacks, editing the genre’s first anthology in 1943, working for Avon (1947–51) and then Ace Publishing (1952–71), where he helped establish its Ace Books list, before creating his own imprint, DAW Books, in 1971.30 Over the course of this career he published many new science fiction authors; helped Ace republish Edgar Rice Burroughs’s novels, many of which had been out of print since their original pulp appearances; and published paperback editions of Frank Herbert’s Dune and a short-lived unauthorized edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.31 As science fiction’s origins showed, readers and fans in the 1920s and 1930s made pulp science fiction an engaging social medium. If its enthusiasts used pen, pencil, type, paper, and conventional post and their correspondence operated at a rate different from that of electronic mail and other twenty-first-century social media, within their magazines, their stories, and their epistolary exchanges, they still found a sense of community and formed social relations within networks based on mutual interest. Answering science fiction’s call, their activities had not only specific social and historical consequence but also gained a cumulative advantage from those networks’ interdependence.32 Science fiction’s significance drew not only from the careers and lives it inspired and brought together but also from their range and diversity, from the extent of its enthusiasts’ interconnected, cumulative association. Their efforts and its emergent collectivity moved them, science, and fiction beyond the conventions that Hugo Gernsback imagined for his magazines. This is not to discount Gernsback’s efforts but to recognize their direct and indirect consequences. But for his several attempts to create magazines, science fiction may not have emerged in the interwar era as a recognizable genre or may have found another form. Because of his innovation, popular science enthusiasts found its welcoming social sensibility, and from its inspiration they made science fiction more than a category of fiction and culture. Still, science fiction expressed but did not contain popular science’s broader impulse: ordinary people seeking to determine their own place in a

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society increasingly shaped by science and technology. Readers’ and fans’ engagement with science fiction addressed the issue in part, finding in their fiction and activities an assurance for ordinary ability. Raising concerns about expertise, authority, and amateurism, they accepted the terms that emerged from their interwar discourse: readers’ standards for a “good story,” on the one hand, suspended consideration of its heroic melodrama from the reality of its circumstances; while, on the other hand, they maintained science’s factual objectivity to authorize the same story’s and readers’ demonstrations of knowledge and ability. Those terms, in turn, reinforced emerging distinctions between professionals and amateurs in both science and science fiction. Fandom and other amusing activities within science projects and labs in the 1930s and into the postwar decades argued against these distinctions in practice, but their subcultural, underground nature also maintained professional appearances. Expressing their popular scientific and other enthusiasms privately, they abdicated their place in public discourse.33 Absent their voices and others, popular science’s place in public discourse in the postwar period shifted. In the late 1950s the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow famously argued that division between the “two cultures” of natural scientists and literary intellectuals hindered modern society and its progressive development.34 While his thesis specifically concerned Britain and its educational system, it generated much public discussion about the nature of science and society generally. Premised on a genteel sense of culture and a formal sense of science, its false opposition continues to inform public discourse about those relations, delegitimizing amateur and other alternative perspectives on science. At the same time, given their increased number and social prominence, professional scientists in the postwar years dictated a different, more exclusive sensibility for science based on expertise and separate from the subjective circumstances of its production—what the anthropologist Sharon Traweek aptly described as a scientific “culture of no culture.”35 Interwar science fiction’s premise of progress, moreover, did not and could not offer resolution to the central tension within popular science’s concern. Despite the best of efforts, science’s potential and possibility were easier to imagine than to achieve; indeed to realize one possibility is to foreclose others. If science’s progress seemed natural because its subject was nature itself, it was difficult to affect in actual practice because its practitioners operated within a world that was both natural and social, subject to politics, economics, and other historical considerations. Progress could take many forms and be achieved in many ways, given one’s aims, aspirations, and principles.

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The paths taken by two interwar science enthusiasts in their careers make this point. Brought together by science fiction and Hugo Gernsback, David Lasser and G. Edward Pendray found mutual interest in their interplanetary aspirations and collaborated to found the American Interplanetary, later Rocket, Society in 1930, the one serving as its first president and the other as its first vice president. Within a few years, however, they chose different directions for their pursuits. A graduate of the University of Wyoming, Pendray had moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree at Columbia, and after graduating he worked as a science journalist, writing other pieces on the side, including science fiction. After meeting Lasser and helping found the AIS/ARS, Pendray became the society’s primary force throughout the decade, particularly in the early and mid-1930s when he served in several offices and capacities and spearheaded the organization’s experimental and public relations efforts. In 1936 he joined Westinghouse, where he oversaw that company’s advertising, technical publications, and public and educational relations, creating its Science Talent Search and the idea of the “time capsule” for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In 1945 he left to start his own public relations firm, which he led until retiring in 1971. Throughout his career he maintained his ties to rocketry and aerospace, assisting in the establishment of the Jet Propulsion Center at the California Institute of Technology and the Guggenheim Laboratories at Princeton in 1948, and consulting for Congress in the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He also continued to promote rocketry and science generally to the public and, ironically, given Pendray’s and Robert Goddard’s differences in the 1930s, coedited Goddard’s published papers with Goddard’s widow.36 Motivated by another view of progress, Lasser chose a different path and had a different career. A child of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, he lied about his age in order to enlist in the army during World War I and was gassed in its last major battle. After recovering, he used his service and disability to win a scholarship to college. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with a degree in engineering in 1924. He then worked a variety of jobs before Gernsback hired him in 1929 to edit Science Wonder and the short-lived Air Wonder. In charge of their day-to-day operations and managing their content, Lasser, more than Gernsback, was arguably responsible for Science Wonder’s success in the early 1930s, in particular working to maintain its progressive ethos and its stories’ scientific credibility.37 Researching background material for interplanetary stories drew him

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to rockets’ technical possibilities and led him to organize the meetings that resulted in the AIS’s formation. At the same time he also acted on his political sensibilities, joining the Socialist Party, organizing unemployed workers to demonstrate for jobs, and then leading the citywide union they formed. In 1932, weighing the priority of his efforts for interplanetary travel against his work to improve the conditions of the unemployed in the midst of the Depression, he resigned his position with the AIS and was also fired by Gerns­ back for his activities.38 After Lasser was freed of his editorial and rocketry responsibilities, the range of his efforts grew and his organizing turned to administration. By 1936 his original local union had formed the basis of the national Workers’ Alliance of America, and he became a supporter of Roosevelt’s New Deal. “While the Socialists were people who had dreams of what they might do, it was Roosevelt who was really doing things,” he recalled. “So I became a Roosevelt supporter.”39 At the same time, he confessed in a letter to Pendray in 1936, “I still hope to fly on an honest to goodness rocket ship before I die.”40 By the early 1940s Lasser was working at the War Production Board, and his efforts and good relations led Roosevelt to suggest him for a position heading a proposed job-training program within the Works Progress Administration (WPA). His earlier political associations and involvement in the AIS, however, led to his appointment being blocked. During appropriations hearings for the WPA, Representative Martin Dies denounced Lasser’s “past affiliation with and leadership of communist front organizations” and involvement with Technocracy. Declaring it “illustrative of [a] marked tendency toward one form of mental aberration or another,” Dies noted that Lasser was president of the “Interplanetary Travel Association.” While the WPA appropriations passed, it included an extraordinary proviso excluding Lasser explicitly from the position for which he had been recommended.41 The same concerns were raised again later when he was asked to join the staff of Secretary of Commerce Averell Harriman and Lasser was effectively blacklisted from federal service—until President Carter formally dismissed the suggestions against him in 1980.42 In 1950 Lasser became chief economist for the International Union of Electrical Workers and worked for that organization until he retired in 1969.43 He eventually returned to his advocacy not only of rocketry and spaceflight but also of their social consequence. Both Pendray and Lasser shared Gernsback’s vision for science fiction’s transformational possibilities for science and society. While Pendray’s subsequent career argued more for science’s potential and Lasser’s for social po-

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tential, both remained committed to that original popular scientific impulse amid the enormous changes that industry, politics, and the climate of the postwar period brought to the nature of their work.44 Each in his separate way had continued to promote the AIS’s original mission to interest the American public in spaceflight as had the organization they founded. Although neither remained involved in the society after the 1930s, the ARS’s membership increased rapidly after World War II and into the 1950s as the aerospace industry grew, spurred by the cold war and government funding—while in the late 1940s its headquarters included a science fiction fan division.45 In 1963 the ARS merged with the Institute for Aeronautical Sciences (IAS) to form the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a professional association for aeronautic and astronautic technical professionals.46 By 1966 the AIAA counted its maximum of thirty-three thousand members and was, in the words of the sociologist Williams Sims Bainbridge, “probably the foremost aerospace engineering organization in the United States.”47 Pendray and Lasser lived to see the Apollo spacecraft reach the moon in 1969, although neither participated personally in what they had proclaimed in 1930 to be “one of the most stupendously romantic adventures attempted by man.” Their past hope had become their present reality, although its realization and social import amid a cold-war space race and enormous government and commercial investment were far from what they had believed and anticipated. As Lasser could personally testify, its progress was also the result of struggle and difficulty, not easy effort.48 Despite decades of government suspicion of his work and activities, he had remained optimistic in his outlook. In 1958 shortly after Sputnik sparked national anxieties and stoked cold-war tensions, he argued that the perspective from space might ease those tensions and form the basis for human social cooperation. “Perhaps, where we failed to find the basis of cooperation from the ground up we may do so from space down,” he suggested. “We may so establish the idea of the common heritage and common destiny we share, that we can in time overcome the things that separate us.”49 Imagining science, he maintained, inspired our social sensibility for progress.

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ABBREVIATIONS

AIS AMNH ARS AS ASS AWS BIS CRS CSMC GEP NARA NASM NMAH PRHG

RHG SFACA SFS SWS TWS VfR WS

American Interplanetary Society American Museum of Natural History American Rocket Society Amazing Stories Astounding Stories of Super-Science Air Wonder Stories British Interplanetary Society Cleveland Rocket Society Critical Studies in Mass Communications G. Edward Pendray Papers, Princeton University Archives National Archives and Records Administration National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History Archives, Smithsonian Institution The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, Including the Reports to the Smithsonian Institution and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, ed. Esther Goddard and G. Edward Pendray, 3 vols. (New York: McGrawHill, 1970) Robert H. Goddard Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, private collection, now part of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University Science Fiction Studies Science Wonder Stories Thrilling Wonder Stories Verein für Raumschiffahrt Wonder Stories

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NOTES

Introduction 1. Originally set in England, Wells’s novel was adapted for the Boston area and appeared under the title Fighters from Mars, or The War of the Worlds, in and near Boston. See “Material for an Autobiography of R. H. Goddard, Written in July 1927, with interpolations made in 1933,” PRHG, 1:7. 2. “Material for an Autobiography,” PRHG, 1:9–10. 3. “On Taking Things for Granted,” graduation oration, South High School, Worcester, Mass., June 24, 1904, PRHG, 1:66. 4. See PRHG, 2:656; PRHG, 1–3, passim; and Milton Lehman, This High Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 22. 5. Robert H. Goddard, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 71, no. 2 (1919): 1–69. 6. He calculated the amount of flash powder a rocket would have to carry to ignite on the moon and be visible from Earth. See Goddard, “Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” 55–57. 7. “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon,” New York Times, January 12, 1920, 1, 3; “Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon,” Boston American, January 12, 1920, 1. 8. Bronx Exposition, Inc., to Smithsonian Institute, January 12, 1920, box 2, RHG, published in PRHG, 1:408–9. 9. “First Volunteer for Leap to Mars,” New York Times, February 5, 1920, 1; “Woman Asks to Rocket with Capt. Collins to Moon,” New York American, March 21, 1920, 1; “Asks for First Ride to the Moon,” New York World, September 21, 1920, 1; “Volunteers for a Trip to Mars in a Rocket” news clipping and Vanora Guth to Smithsonian Institution, April 3, 1920, box 2, RHG. Public response was so great that, the editors of Goddard’s published papers explained, “only a few examples from the deluge to the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Goddard following the early 1920 publicity are included.” PRHG, 1:408n. See various letters, PRHG, 2:583, 584, 666, 911–12. 10. Lehman, This High Man, 110. 11. Statement by R. H. Goddard for newspapers, January 18, 1920, PRHG, 1:409. 12. R. H. Goddard to Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, January 19, 1920, box 2, RHG, published in PRHG, 1:410. 13. Lehman, This High Man, 111.

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Notes to Pages 3–6

14. William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger, 1983), 28–29. See also PRHG, 1–3, passim. 15. John Henry Boyle, “Oh They’re Going to Shoot a Rocket to the Moon, Love” (1922), cited in Lehman, This High Man, 110; Walter Rolfe, “The Moon–Rocket March” (1924), Samuel DeVincent Sheet Music Collection, series 1, box 7, NMAH. 16. Roy Turk-Willy White, “I’m Going Way Up to Mars” (1920), DeVincent Sheet Music Collection, series 1, box 7, NMAH. 17. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 197. 18. On the cultural prestige of science in this period, see Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science Our Own (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971). For a different perspective, see John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 19. Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2–4, observes that while the word “technology” existed, it was not popularly used until after World War II. 20. Cultural histories of technology include Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Leo Marx, The Pilot and the Passenger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine (New York: Penguin, 1977). 21. Allen, Only Yesterday, 199. 22. Allen, Only Yesterday, 197. 23. On the “American Way of Life,” see Charles McGovern, Sold American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 8. On the “American Dream,” see James Truslow Adam, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 214–15. 24. Gramsci notes the interest and regard the European Left held for American technological movements such as Fordism and Technocracy. See Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 279–318. 25. Allen, Only Yesterday, 197. 26. Patrick Rizzo, “A History of the First Forty Years of the Amateur Astronomers Association,” adapted by Stephen Lieber for the Amateur Astronomers Association website, http://www.aaa.org/membersarticle12; “4,500 Battle in Museum to See Einstein Film,” New York Times, January 9, 1930, 3. 27. On the car culture, see James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); and James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975). On radio culture, see Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In (New York: Times Books, 1999); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Kathy M. Newman, Radio Active (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). On movie culture, see Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America (New

Notes to Pages 6–7

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York: Vintage, 1975); and Lary May, Screening Out the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 28. An extensive literature exists on “imagination.” In particular, scholars point to Vico’s place of imagination in his philosophy of history. Within literary studies, Bakhtin considers the “dialogic” imagination. C. Wright Mills coined the term “sociological imagination.” Historians and sociologists of science have also recently considered imagination in scientific practice. See Gianbattista Vico, The First New Science, trans. and ed. Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Gerald Holton, The Scientific Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 29. Scholars in communications began rethinking this paradigm in the late 1980s to consider media audiences. See Martin Allor, “Relocating the Site of the Audience,” CSMC 5 (1988): 217–33; Susan J. Douglas, “Notes toward a History of Media Audiences,” Radical History Review 54 (Fall 1992): 127–38; John Fiske, “Meaningful Moments,” CSMC 5 (1988): 246–51; John Hartley, “The Real World of Audiences,” CSMC 5 (1988): 234–38; Henry Jenkins III, “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching,” CSMC 5 (1988): 85–107; Klaus Bruhn Jensen, “Qualitative Audience Research: Toward an Integrative Approach to Reception,” CSMC 4 (1987): 21–36; James Lull, “The Audience as Nuisance,” CSMC 5 (1988): 239–43; and Kathleen Newman, “On Openings and Closings,” CSMC 5 (1988): 243–88. 30. “[M]eans of communication, having been reduced from their status as means of social production, are seen only as ‘media,’” Raymond Williams observed; “devices for the passing of ‘information’ and ‘messages’ between persons, who either generally, or in terms of some specific act of production, are abstracted from the communication process as unproblematic ‘senders’ or ‘receivers.’” Raymond Williams, “Means of Communication as Means of Production,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 51. Historians of reading and print have challenged this perspective. See Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 31. If, as Joseph Levenson maintained, intellectual history is the “history not of thought, but of men thinking,” cultural history is the history not of cultural objects, forms, and texts but of people living, acting, and interacting. See Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), 163. 32. “Culture,” the British cultural historian Raymond Williams observed, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” He identified three distinct but related realms of associated meaning to the word, while the anthropologists Arthur Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published an entire volume cataloging the distinctions and differences in its use. See Raymond Williams, Keywords (1976; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87; and Arthur L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture (New York: Vintage, 1952).

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Notes to Pages 7–8

33. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51. 34. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984); Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Power of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture (London: Verso, 1996). 35. Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); William Leach, Land of Desire (New York: Vintage, 1993); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The People and the Park (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). 36. Fox and Lears, The Culture of Consumption; McGovern, Sold American; Ohmann, Selling Culture; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), xvii–xxxi; Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up for Air . . . ,” Intellectual History Newsletter 12 (1990): 3–21; Richard Butsch, ed., For Fun and Profit (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1988). 37. See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49; Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1996). For other perspectives, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), introduction; and Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 38. Stuart Hall, “Notes on ‘Deconstructing’ the Popular,” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Ralph Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–240; Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–48. 39. Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), xvi–xvii. 40. Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 31–49. 41. Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Michaels relies on Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-value in his discussion. See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (New York: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906), 48, 83, 95. 42. For discussions of reader-response theory, see Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-

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Response Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). Principal texts include Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); and Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). For its use in cultural analysis, see Davidson, Reading in America; Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Elizabeth Long, “Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority,” American Quarterly 38 (Fall 1986): 591–612; and Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of the Romantic Sensibility,” in The Great Cat Massacre (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 43. “It is necessary to bring together two perspectives that are often disjointed,” the historian Roger Chartier maintained, “the study of the way in which texts and the printed works that convey them organize their prescribed reading; and . . . the collection of actual readings tracked down in individual confessions or reconstructed on the level of communities of readers.” See Roger Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 158. 44. In literary theory, intertextuality is Kristeva’s synthesis of de Saussure’s semiotics and Bakhtin’s dialogism, using the latter’s notion of heteroglossia to argue for the presence of intertextual codes, rather than more direct intersubjective social relations, within literary texts. Julia Kristeva, Desire: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 69. 45. Robert Darnton argues for reading’s broader “communications circuit.” Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in Reading in America, ed. Davidson, 27–52. 46. John Cawalti argues that popular genres, in this way, serve as critical supertexts. John G. Cawelti, “The Question of Popular Genres Revisited,” in Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 97–98. 47. As Henry Jenkins maintains, “poaching” their texts. Henry Jenkins III, Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 1992). 48. A full-length study of fan subculture is Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 49. See, for instance, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929); and Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937).

Part I 1. Several argue that Lucian of Samosata’s True History is the earliest known science fiction text. See S. C. Fredericks, “Lucian’s True History as SF,” SFS 3, no. 1 (March 1976): 49–60; Roy Arthur Swanson, “The True, the False, and the Truly False: Lucian’s Philosophical Science Fiction,” SFS 3, no. 3 (November 1976): 227–39; James E. Gunn,

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Notes to Pages 15–20

The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Viking, 1988), 249; and Greg Grewell, “Colonizing the Universe: Science Fictions Then, Now, and in the (Imagined) Future,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 55, no. 2 (2001): 25–47. Other candidates include Cyrano de Bergerac’s Other World (1657), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752), and Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634). 2. “Every literary work faces outward away from itself, toward the listener-reader,” noted M. M. Bakhtin, “and to a certain extent thus anticipates possible reactions to itself.” See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 257. 3. “The Text,” observed Roland Barthes, “decants the work . . . from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish . . . the distance between writing and reading . . . joining them in a single signifying practice.” See Roland Barthes, Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 162.

Chapter 1 1. Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory (New York: Random House, 1955), 267. 2. Brian Stableford points to English writer William Wilson’s use of the term in the nineteenth century. Sam Moskowitz argues that Gernsback’s use in Science Wonder is the first because of its significance. Gary Westfahl agrees while noting that he first used the phrase in a response to a letter to the editor in Amazing in 1927. See Brian Stableford, “William Wilson’s Prospectus for Science Fiction: 1851,” Foundation 10 (June 1976): 9–10; Sam Moskowitz, “How Science Fiction Got Its Name,” in Explorers of the Infinite (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1957), 322; and Gary Westfahl, “‘An Idea of Significant Import’: Hugo Gernsback’s Theory of Science Fiction,” Foundation 48 (Spring 1990): 48. 3. Hugo Gernsback, “Science Wonder Stories,” SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 5. 4. Hugo Gernsback, “A New Sort of Magazine,” AS 1, no. 1 (April 1926): 3. 5. Given the industry’s practices, pulp financial details were difficult to gauge accurately. Amazing’s estimated gross annual income in 1929 was $185,000 with a net operating profit of $55,000. Eric Leif Davin reports that Gernsback’s weekly pre-Depression salary was $1,025; his brother Sydney, their corporation’s treasurer, earned $750; and T. O’Conor Sloane, its associate editor, earned $225. See Eric Leif Davin, Pioneers of Wonder (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), 28. 6. Roger E. Stoddard, “Morphology and the Book from an American Perspective,” Printing History 17 (1987): 2–14. 7. Roger Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 161. 8. Aldous Huxley, “Pulp,” Saturday Review of Literature, July 17, 1937, 10. 9. Peter Haining, ed., The Fantastic Pulps (New York: Vintage, 1975), 13. Histories of the pulps include Haining’s; Tony Goodstone, ed., The Pulps (New York: Chelsea House,

Notes to Pages 20–23

323

1970); Lee Server, Danger Is My Business (San Francisco: Chronical Books, 1993); Robert Kenneth Jones, The Shudder Pulps (West Linn: FAX Collector’s, 1975); and Ron Goulart, Cheap Thrills (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972). 10. Michael Denning distinguished between three historically specific forms that are commonly combined and referred to as “dime novels”: the story paper, the dime novel, and the cheap libraries. Those that coexisted with the early pulps were technically “cheap libraries.” Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents (London: Verso, 1988). 11. Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958), 306. 12. Alvin Barclay, “Magazines for Morons,” New Republic, August 28, 1929, 41–44. 13. Margaret MacMullen, “Pulps and Confessions,” Harper’s Monthly 175, no. 1 (June 1937): 95. 14. Marcus Duffield, “The Pulps: Day Dreams for the Masses,” Vanity Fair 40, no. 4 (June 1933): 26–27, 51, 60. 15. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 39. 16. Henry Morton Robinson, “The Wood-Pulp Racket,” Bookman 67, no. 6 (August 1928): 648–51. 17. “Magazine,” in fact, derives etymologically from French, Italian, and Arabic words for “store” and “warehouse” before gaining its modern association with publishing. “Periodical,” on the other hand, refers literally to the regular period of a journal’s publication. The etymological distinction is retained in French, where magasin still means “store” or “shop” without association with la presse periodique, while “magazine” borrows its English spelling and use to refer to a publication. See Oxford English Dictionary; conversation with Jack Censer, Department of History, George Mason University, 1995. 18. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 1–4. 19. David Clayton Phillips, “Art for Industry’s Sake: Halftone Technology, Mass Photography and the Social Transformation of American Print Culture, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1996). 20. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth-Century, 2–3, 6–13. 21. Jack Williamson, “In at the Creation,” interview by Jeffrey M. Elliot, in Jeffrey M. Elliot, Pulp Voices, Science Fiction Voices #6 (San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1983), 12. 22. Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed (New York: Pantheon, 1989); Richard Ohmann, “Where Did Mass Culture Come From?,” Berkshire Review 16 (1981): 92–93; Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture (London: Verso, 1996). 23. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 7. Tebbel and Zuckerman see the years 1861–1918 as one extended period of development. John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1991). 24. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 12. 25. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 7; Ohmann, Selling Culture, 25. 26. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

324

Notes to Pages 23–29

27. Ohmann, Selling Culture, passim; Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, passim. 28. Sam Moskowitz, Under the Moons of Mars (New York: Holt Rinehart Winston, 1970), 320. 29. The postal reforms of second-class postage setting up “zoned advertising postage” were instituted as a provision of the 1917 War Revenue Act. Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Postal Subsidies for the Press and the Business of Mass Culture, 1880–1920,” Business History Review 64 (Autumn 1990): 451–88. 30. Reynolds, Fiction Factory, passim. 31. Harold Hersey, Pulpwood Editor (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1937; repr., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 26–49. 32. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 37; Goodstone, Pulps, xiv. 33. Thomas H. Uzzell, “The Love Pulps,” Scribner’s 103, no. 4 (April 1938): 36. 34. Douglas Waples, Research Memorandum on Social Aspects of Reading in the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1972), 76; Frank Cioffi, Formula Fiction? (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 19. 35. Illustrations and artwork made up the rest of the costs. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 37. 36. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 116. 37. Frank Gruber, The Pulp Jungle (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1967), 20–22. 38. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 116. 39. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 80–81. 40. Howard Brown, an editor with Ziff-Davis publications in the 1940s and 1950s, confirmed this practice. Howard Brown, telephone interview by author, NMAH, Washington, D.C., September 1, 1992. 41. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 24–25. 42. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 130. 43. Theodore Dreiser, “An Interview with Theodore Dreiser,” interview by Robert van Gelder, New York Times Book Review, March 16, 1941, sec. 6, p. 16. 44. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 87. 45. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 177. 46. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 221–22. 47. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 177. 48. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 221–22. 49. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979). 50. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 122. 51. Will McMorrow, “An Artisan’s Defense,” New York Times, March 15, 1933, 12. 52. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 8–25, passim. 53. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Denning, Mechanic Accents; Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Trudi J. Abel, “A Man of Letters, a Man of Business: Edward Stratemeyer and the Adolescent Reader, 1890–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1993).

Notes to Pages 29–33

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54. Lee Server credits the playwright Sophie Treadwell, who advanced the theory that the successful pseudonym consisted of two monosyllables with the same vowel in each, with helping Faust develop “Max Brand.” Server, Danger Is My Business, 26. 55. Reynolds, Fiction Factory, 182; Server, Danger Is My Business, 26; Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 114; Michael L. Cook, ed., Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Magazines (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 715. 56. Reynolds, Fiction Factory, 186. 57. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 16. 58. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 26. 59. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 184–86. 60. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 59–63. 61. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 52. 62. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 61. 63. Waples, Research Memorandum, 139–48, 158. 64. Jones, Shudder Pulps, 225. 65. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 183. 66. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 183. 67. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 178–82. 68. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 178. 69. Russel B. Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse (New York: Dial Press, 1970), 211. 70. “Plots While You Wait,” New York Times, March 14, 1933, 14. 71. Duffield, “Pulps,” 27, 51. 72. Histories of the novel generally see the form as an eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury innovation in prose narrative concerned with character and social realism. Its links to the growth of publishing and printed book markets also gave rise to associated ideas of individual authorship and artistic expression. Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, vol. 1, History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: the Rise of Sociology, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), notes the relationship between the rise of the novel and the emergence of sociology as a scientific discipline. 73. John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 6, 8. 74. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 76. 75. He suggests the interwar period as the time and pulp magazines as the place of such commercial genre formation. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 224n8. 76. Sean McCann, “‘A Roughneck Reaching for Higher Things’: The Vagaries of Pulp Populism,” Radical History Review 61 (1995): 21. 77. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 65–94, passim; Herbert Hungerford, How Publishers Win (Washington, D.C.: Ransdell, 1931), 22–23. 78. Goodstone, Pulps, v. 79. McCann, “Roughneck Reaching for Higher Things,” 21. 80. “Big Business in Pulp Thrillers,” Literary Digest 123, no. 1 (January 1937): 30.

326

Notes to Pages 34–38

81. Moskowitz, Under the Moons of Mars, 402. 82. Moskowitz, Under the Moons of Mars, 386. 83. The interwar circumstances of pulp publishing resembled the second, “unification” phase of the business historian Richard Tedlow’s three phases of mass marketing. Richard Tedlow, New & Improved (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 4–12, passim. 84. N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals occasionally listed the largest of pulp chains with aggregated circulations, explaining that “space [was] sold only in combination as a group.” N. W. Ayer & Son, Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer & Son, 1920–39), s.v. “Street & Smith,” n. 85. Server, Danger Is My Business, 31. 86. Popular Publications’ thirteen titles had a total circulation of 1,500,000 in 1936; Thrilling’s ten titles had a circulation of 1,155,000; Street & Smith’s (twelve) circulation was 1,100,000. Information is adapted from Jones, Shudder Pulps, 119. Jones’s figures are from N. W. Ayer & Son’s Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals and Standard Rate and Data Service’s circulation reports, Standard Rate and Data Service (Wilmette, Ill.: Standard Rate and Data Service, 1919–39). These pulp chains produced more pulp titles than were included in these figures, which reflect information for the most stable of these chains’ titles. 87. Astounding changed its name in 1964 to Analog, under which it continues to be published. Harry Bates, “To Begin,” in A Requiem for Astounding, ed. Alva Rogers (Chicago: Advent, 1964), ix. 88. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 72–73; Jones, Shudder Pulps, 16. 89. In an interview with Eric Leif Davin, Lasser remembered that his pay was seventy dollars a week, while Hornig remember Lasser’s salary as seventy-five dollars a week. Examining the records, Davin concluded that it was actually sixty-five dollars a week. See Davin, Pioneers of Wonder, 47, 67, 94, 95. 90. Gruber, Pulp Jungle, 20–22, 72–73. 91. Server, Danger Is My Business, 30–31. 92. Wyn purchased Harold Hersey’s Magazine Publishers in 1928, and Steeger borrowed five thousand dollars from his stepfather to start Popular in 1930. Hersey attempted the reverse, trying to become a publisher as a result of his editing experience. See Jones, Shudder Pulps, 78; Goodstone, Pulps, v; and Server, Danger Is My Business, 31. 93. Their designed appeal constituted what Chartier called a “protocol of the[ir] reading” even as they were cast as invitations to readers from the editor and the publisher. Chartier, “Texts, Printing, Readings,” 168. 94. The notion of a designed “intended audience” for magazines parallels Wolfgang Iser’s concept of an “implied reader” of texts. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 95. Schudson, Discovering the News. 96. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 60. 97. Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Tarzan of the Apes,” All-Story 24, no. 2 (October 1912): 241–372.

Notes to Pages 38–43

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98. Server, Danger Is My Business, 31. 99. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 61–62. 100. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 50. 101. Server, Danger Is My Business, 31. 102. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 59. Howard Brown corroborated Hersey’s account of pulp editors’ practice of coordinating covers with stories. Brown interview, September 1, 1992. 103. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 87. 104. Moskowitz, Under the Moons of Mars, 430; Sam Moskowitz, “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom: A Reconstruction,” in Science Fiction Fandom, ed. Joe Sanders (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 25. 105. Goulart, Cheap Thrills, 17. 106. Robert Sidney Brown, “Hangar Flying,” Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds 1, no. 5 (November 1934): 119–20. 107. While in early dime novels, writers spoke directly to readers in their stories, often about conditions in their lives completely removed from their stories’ actual narratives, editors spoke from and for pulp magazines. See Christine Bold, “The Voice of the Fiction Factory in Dime Novel and Pulp Westerns,” Journal of American Studies 17 (1983): 29–46. 108. Street & Smith published Detective Story, Western Story, Love Story, and Sport Story. 109. Cook, Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Magazines, 170–74. 110. Lester del Rey, The World of Science Fiction (New York: Ballantine, 1979), 65; Server, Danger Is My Business, 128. 111. Rogers, Requiem for Astounding, 16, passim; del Rey, World of Science Fiction, 58. 112. Server, Danger Is My Business, 31. 113. Semioticians distinguish between two types of relationships that linguistic signs form: paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Between them, a sign’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations determine its signification. Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 9. 114. Bates, “To Begin,” xi. 115. Gernsback, “New Sort of Magazine,” 3; Hugo Gernsback, “Thank You!,” AS 1, no. 2 (May 1926): 99; Hugo Gernsback, “The Lure of Scientifiction,” AS 1, no. 3 (June 1926): 195; Hugo Gernsback, “Fiction Versus Facts,” AS 1, no. 4 (July 1926): 291; Hugo Gernsback, “‘Impossible’ Facts,” AS 1, no. 5 (August 1926): 387; Hugo Gernsback, “Editorially Speaking,” AS 1, no. 6 (September 1926): 483; Hugo Gernsback, “Idle Thoughts of a Busy Editor,” AS 1, no. 12 (March 1927): 1085. 116. Hugo Gernsback, “The Most Amazing Thing (in the Style of Edgar Allan Poe),” AS 2, no. 1 (April 1927): 5; Hugo Gernsback, “Amazing Creations,” AS 2, no. 2 (May 1927): 109; Hugo Gernsback, “Amazing Youth,” AS 2, no. 7 (October 1927): 625; Hugo Gernsback, “Amazing Thinking,” AS 2, no. 12 (March 1928): 1125; Hugo Gernsback,

328

Notes to Pages 43–49

“Our Amazing Minds,” AS 3, no. 3 (June 1928): 197; Hugo Gernsback, “Our Amazing Senses,” AS 3, no. 3 (July 1928): 293; Hugo Gernsback, “The Amazing Unknown,” AS 3, no. 5 (August 1928): 389; Hugo Gernsback, “Our Amazing Universe,” AS 3, no. 6 (September 1928): 485; Hugo Gernsback, “The Amazing Einstein,” AS 4, no. 1 (April 1929): 5. 117. Hugo Gernsback, “The Wonders of Gravitation,” SWS 1, no. 2 (July 1929): 101; Hugo Gernsback, “The Wonders of Inter­stellar Flight,” SWS 1, no. 7 (December 1929): 629; Hugo Gernsback, “The Wonders of Creation,” WS 2, no. 11 (April 1931): 1209; Hugo Gernsback, “Wonders of the Machine Age,” WS 3, no. 2 (July 1931): 151; Hugo Gernsback, “Wonders of Atomic Power,” WS 3, no. 12 (May 1932): 1301; Hugo Gernsback, “Wonders of Technocracy,” WS 4, no. 10 (March 1933): 741; Hugo Gernsback, “Wonders of Mystery Rays,” WS 7, no. 6 (November–December 1935): 645. 118. T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Amazing Stories,” AS 4, no. 2 (May 1929): 103. 119. T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “The Corner-Stones of Chemistry,” AS 7, no. 1 (April 1932): 5; T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “The Early History of the Electric Light,” AS 7, no. 6 (October 1933): 486; T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Light Wave Lengths and Light Years,” AS 9, no. 1 (May 1934): 6. 120. Gernsback, “New Sort of Magazine,” 3; Gernsback, “Science Wonder Stories,” 5; Harry Bates, “Astounding Stories,” ASS 1, no. 1 (January 1930): 5. Bates’s editorial was pure imitation. Astounding would not carry another editorial until shortly before its purchase and renovation by Street & Smith in 1933. 121. Bates, “Astounding Stories,” 5; also cited (in its entirety) in Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days (New York: Bantam, 1989), 8–9, and in Server, Danger Is My Business, 123, 125. 122. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Penguin, 1982). 123. Moskowitz, “Origins of Science Fiction Fandom,” 17–19; Michael Ashley, ed., The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, vol. 1, 1926–35 (London: New English Library, 1974), 24–25. 124. Gernsback, “New Sort of Magazine,” 3. His republication of European novels, however, was less the result of his access to their authors and more from the vagaries of international copyright and enforcement of their infringement. 125. Ashley, The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, 1:23. 126. Hugo Gernsback, “$500.00 Prize Story Contest,” AS 1, no. 9 (December 1926): 773; Gernsback, “Idle Thoughts of a Busy Editor,” 1085; Hugo Gernsback, “The $500 Cover Prize Contest,” AS 2, no. 3 (June 1927): 213; Ashley, The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, 1:25. 127. Gernsback, “Editorially Speaking,” 483. 128. Bates, “To Begin,” xiii–xiv. 129. Server, Danger Is My Business, 20 and facing illus. 130. “The Curse of Capistrano” was serialized over five issues of All-Story Weekly—100, no. 2, through 101, no. 2 (August 9, 1919, to September 6, 1919); adapted into the 1920 film The Mark of Zorro; and republished as a book with the same title. Its author, Johnston McCulley, wrote more than sixty more stories from 1922 to 1959 featuring the character. Tony “Buck” Rogers first appeared in Philip Francis Nowlan,

Notes to Pages 49–54

329

“Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” AS 3, no. 5 (August 1928): 422–49; and its sequel, Philip Francis Nowlan, “The Airlords of Han,” AS 3, no. 12 (March 1929): 1106–36. 131. National Allied Publications, popularly known as DC Comics, began publishing New Fun and New Comics in 1935 and Detective Comics in 1936. Comic book titles were generic before specializing in superheroes. Superman first appeared in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) and Batman in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939) before heading up titles in 1939 and 1940 respectively. 132. Gernsback’s science fiction was not what contemporary critics call “sf.” Judith Merril, Samuel R. Delany, and other writers and critics in the 1960s sought to blur the distinction between “science fiction” and “fantasy” and coined the term “sf ” to include not only science fiction but also its associated “speculative fiction,” “science fantasy,” “speculative futures,” and “speculative fabulation.” See Judith Merril, “Fish Out of Water, Man Beside Himself,” in SF12, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Dell, 1968), 11; Spider Robinson, book review, Destinies 1 (April–June 1979): 183; and Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin, book review, Fantasy and Science Fiction 51 (July 1976): 32. See also William Sims Bainbridge, Dimensions of Science Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 19n65, 66; and Frederick Andrew Lerner, Modern Science Fiction and the American Literary Commu­nity (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985), 5. Ironically, some fans and critics use “stf,” a short form of Gernsback’s “scientifiction” precursor to “science fiction,” to refer to stories from the interwar period. 133. Ashley, The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, 1:21.

Chapter 2 1. These words are said by the Player in Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 84. 2. “Pulp Magazines Called a Menace,” New York Times, November 29, 1936, sec. 1, p. 27. 3. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson discuss the difference between “productionof-culture” studies in sociology, which examine the production of cultural forms and the production of “culture.” Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., introduction to Rethinking Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 33 and passim. 4. James W. Carey, Communications as Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), discusses the relationship between community and communications and its implications for culture. 5. Harold Hersey, Pulpwood Editor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 24. 6. Hugo Gernsback, “The Lure of Scientifiction,” AS 1, no. 3 (June 1926): 195; Hugo Gernsback, “Thank You!,” AS 1, no. 2 (May 1926): 99; Hugo Gernsback, “Editorially Speaking,” AS 1, no. 6 (September 1926): 483. 7. Gernsback, “Editorially Speaking,” 483. 8. Where I quote readers’ letters, I include the readers’ names and addresses as originally published in the correspondence columns. 9. Gernsback, “Editorially Speaking,” 483.

330

Notes to Pages 55–60

10. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 23–24. 11. Figures calculated from table 26 in Michelle Hope Herwald, “Amazing Artifact: Cultural Analysis of Amazing Stories 1926–1938” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977), 564. 12. Richard Handler, “Vigorous Male and Aspiring Female: Poetry, Personality, and Culture in Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict,” in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and Others, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 134; Nyle L. Katz, “Recommended by Teacher,” SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 93; G. M. Pendy, “It Lends Inspiration,” WS 3, no. 11 (April 1932): 1288; Albert Tondra, “From a Music Teacher,” SWS 1, no. 5 (October 1929): 476. 13. Vernon Wilfred Harvey, “A Letter of ‘Likes and Dislikes,’” AS 11, no. 2 (February 1937): 136. 14. Stanley Wolf, “Criticizing the Critics,” AS 4, no. 9 (December 1929): 864; Clyde F. Beck, “A Color Problem. Swallowing Food and Liquids against Gravitation. Literature in Stories. Helium Balloons. Notes on Stories,” AS 4, no. 10 (January 1930): 980; J. G. Strong, “An Interesting Letter with Valuable Suggestions from an English Reader,” AS 4, no. 10 (January 1930): 985. 15. George Baskin, “A Very Pleasant Letter from a Very Appreciative Reader,” AS 8, no. 2 (May 1933): 186; Leslie A. Croutch, “slip-ups,” AS 12, no. 4 (August 1938): 139–40. 16. James K. Smith, “An Inquiry about College Training Answered by Dr. Keller” and Keller reply, AS 4, no. 9 (December 1929): 873; Clare Winger Harris, “A Very Interesting Letter from One of Our Authors,” AS 4, no. 2 (May 1929): 179; Miles J. Breuer, M.D., “An Interesting Communication from Dr. Miles J. Breuer about Gigantism in Animals and the Existence of Normally Huge Animals,” AS 5, no. 2 (May 1930): 181–82; S. P. Meek, “A Most Interesting Letter and Valuable Letter from Captain Meek,” AS 6, no. 12 (March 1932): 1144; P. Schuyler Miller, “In Defense of Non-Protoplasmic Life,” WS 3, no. 10 (March 1932): 1195, 1197. 17. Olive Robb, “A Most Amusing Letter from England Criticizing Dr. Smith’s Conversational Slang,” AS 6, no. 12 (March 1932): 1147; Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., “Dr. Smith Accepts Miss Robbs’ [sic] Challenge,” AS 7, no. 1 (April 1932): 88; Olive Robb, “A Gallant Lady with Modern Trends Bravely Defends Her Title with Delectable Poisonous Spear,” AS 7, no. 3 (June 1932): 281; Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., “Dr. Smith Means It This Time,” AS 7, no. 4 (July 1932): 380–81; Olive Robb, “A Very Nice Letter from Miss Robb,” AS 7, no. 6 (September 1932): 765. 18. John O. Michel, “The Robb-Smith Controversy: A Letter Which Gives a Concluding Statement,” AS 7, no. 10 (January 1933): 956; C. E. Tickele, “An Englishman Comes to the Defense of Dr. Smith,” AS 7, no. 6 (September 1932): 569; Fred C. Miles, “Time Travel—Dr. Smith Upheld and Admired,” AS 7, no. 6 (September 1932): 572; Neil E. Adams, “Stories Since Its Beginning,” AS 7, no. 6 (September 1932): 575; Charles Schneeman, “Dr. Smith and Miss Robb and Some Criticisms of Mr. Campbell’s Work,” AS 7, no. 9 (December 1932): 858; Jack Palmer Saunders, “About Dr. Smith and Miss

Notes to Pages 60–66

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Robb,” AS 7, no. 9 (December 1932): 861; D. G. Lyle, “More about Miss Robb and Dr. Smith, Slang and Its Effect upon Languages,” AS 7, no. 12 (March 1933): 1146. 19. Bill Bailey, “Improvements in amazing stories Noted—A Letter of Kindly Criticism,” AS 8, no. 2 (May 1933): 187; Olive Robb, “Another Letter from Miss Robb, and One Just as Nice as Her Last, Opening with a Good Word for Dr. Smith” and editorial response, AS 7, no. 10 (January 1933): 956 20. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 98–99. 21. Howard Brown, telephone interview by author, NMAH, Washington, D.C., September 1, 1992. 22. John W. Campbell, Jr., editor, Astounding Science-Fiction, New York, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, June 24 and July 8, 1938, in the possession of the author; Leo Margulies, managing editor, Standard Magazines, Inc., New York, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, September 24 and December 20, 1937, in the possession of the author; F. Orlin Tremaine, editor, Astounding Stories, New York, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, January 22, March 2 and 26, and June 3, 1937, in the possession of the author. 23. Hersey, Pulpwood Editor, 91–92. 24. Fred Anger, “A Communication to the Editor Not Less Interesting for That— amazing stories Is Not Slipping,” AS 10, no. 5 (August 1935): 138; Croutch, “Slip-Ups,” 139–40; Earle B. Browne, “Suggestions for the Discussions Column,” AS 2, no. 7 (October 1927): 718. 25. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), xx, 172. 26. Jack Williamson, Wonder’s Child (New York: Bluejay Books, 1984); Sam Moskowitz, “Superman,” in Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961), 101– 17; Damon Knight, The Futurians (New York: John Day, 1977). 27. Figures from U.S. Census, also included in table in Wilbur Schramm, ed., Mass Communications, 2nd ed. (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1960), 112. 28. Carl F. Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, and Katherine Tinsley, Literacy in the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 29. Angus Campbell and Charles Metzner, Public Use of the Library and Other Sources of Information (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, 1950), 1–14. 30. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents (London: Verso, 1988). 31. Although the public library movement in the United States popularized the idea of public libraries in the nineteenth century, only select cities established them. Donations, particularly from Andrew Carnegie, greatly expanded their numbers around the turn of the twentieth century, but rooted in ideals of social uplift and education, many focused on holdings related to that mission, not popular fiction. See Sidney Ditzion, Arsenals of a Democratic Culture (Chicago: American Library Association, 1947); Nancy C. Kranich, Libraries and Democracy (Chicago: American Library Association, 2001), particularly Frederick Stielow, “Reconsidering Arsenals of a Democratic Culture,” 3–14; and Kaestle, Damon-Moore, and Tinsley, Literacy in the United States. 32. Gunther Barth observed that while for most of the nineteenth and twentieth

332

Notes to Pages 66–75

centuries the western United States was sparsely populated compared to the East, it had the highest urban concentration. Gunther Barth, Instant Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 33. Douglas Waples, Research Memorandum on Social Aspects of Reading in the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1972), 101–2, 139. 34. Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days (New York: Bantam, 1989), 11–13. 35. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Over My Shoulder (Philadelphia: Oswald Train, 1983), 30, 35–36. 36. Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 6–7. 37. Roy Lavender, “FIAWOL—Fandom Is a Way of Life,” unpublished manuscript in the possession of the author. 38. A. A. Wyn, “Pulp Magazines,” New York Times, September 4, 1935, 18. 39. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 13. 40. Clarke, Astounding Days, 12–13. 41. Joseph H. Doerfler, “Back Numbers of amazing stories Wanted in Exchange for Books,” AS 9, no. 6 (October 1934): 142. 42. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 5. 43. Clarke, Astounding Days, 13. 44. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 5. 45. Doerfler, “Back Numbers of amazing stories,” 142. 46. Carl R. Canterbury, “A Good Word for Discussions: Back Numbers for Those Interested,” AS 9, no. 6 (October 1934): 142. 47. Clarke, Astounding Days, 13. 48. M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 22–27. 49. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 7. 50. Le Roy Christian Bashore, “Books to Exchange for Amazing Stories—An Appreciation for Pennsylvania,” AS 10, no. 5 (August 1935): 138–39. 51. John A. Leiter, “Suggestions for Contests and a Special Feature,” AS 7, no. 9 (December 1932): 859. 52. Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Albert Spaulding Cook, Canons and Wisdoms (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Willie van Peer, “Canon Formation: Ideology or Aesthetic Quality?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (April 1996): 97–108; John Guillory, Cultural Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Cornel West, “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” Yale Journal of Criticism 1 (Fall 1987): 193–201. 53. Sam Moskowitz, “A. Merritt,” in Explorers of the Infinite (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1957), 202. 54. John V. Baltadonis, Philadelphia, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, April 2, 1937, in the possession of the author. 55. D. G. Lyle, “More about Miss Robb and Dr. Smith,” 1146.

Notes to Pages 76–85

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56. An extensive literature exists on the relationship between private and public spheres of experience, particularly with the rise of public culture as an outgrowth of urban culture. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 57. Baltadonis to Yerke, April 2, 1937. 58. A. M. Riordan, “H. G. Wells Under Fire, But Also a Lot of Constructive Criticism,” AS 2, no. 8 (November 1927): 809. 59. Russell Chauvenet, Silver Spring, Maryland, to the author, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1992, in the possession of the author.

Part II 1. The literary critic M. M. Bakhtin observed, “The reality reflected in the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text (if they exist) and finally the listeners or readers who recreate and in so doing renew the text—participate equally in the creation of the represented world in the text. Out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work (in the text).” See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 253. On intertextuality, see Julia Kristeva, Desire: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 2. On conjunctural and “long” historical perspective, see Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 3. Lawrence W. Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Review 97 (December 1992): 1369–99. 4. A large literature exists on the sublime in literary and cultural criticism. See, among others, Longinus, “On the Sublime,” trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell, in Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995); Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).

Chapter 3 1. Howard S. Gable, “An Encouraging Letter from a Reader Who Appreciates Our Authors,” AS 4, no. 9 (December 1929): 865. 2. Deborah Elkins, “Hugo Gernsback’s Idea of Science and Fiction, 1915–1926,” History Department, Yale University, May 8, 1987, unpublished paper, in the possession of the author. 3. Hugo Gernsback, “The Future of the American Radio Amateur,” Radio Amateur

334

Notes to Pages 85–86

News, July 1919, 23; Hugo Gernsback, “Government Radio Control—Once More,” Radio Amateur News, September 1919, 101; Hugo Gernsback, “Developing the Radiophone,” Radio Amateur News, December 1919, 269. 4. Susan J. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), chap. 6 and passim; Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). 5. Later authors sought to expand the idea of science fiction beyond its scientific focus. Robert Heinlein preferred “speculative fiction” in 1947 in “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction,” in Of Worlds Beyond, ed. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (1964; Chicago: Advent, 1947), 13–19. Writers in the 1960s argued for “sf ” to blur the distinction between science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of speculative fiction. See Judith Merril, “Fish Out of Water, Man Beside Himself,” in SF12, ed. Judith Merril (New York: Dell, 1968), 11. Donna Haraway, in Primate Visions (London: Routledge, 1989), 5, argues that science is itself fictive. 6. Gary Westfahl is the most ardent proponent of Gernsback’s contribution to science fiction. See Gary Westfahl, Mechanics of Wonder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998). 7. Hugo Gernsback, “Science Wonder Stories,” SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 5. 8. Gernsback, “Science Wonder Stories,” 5. 9. Irvin Lester and Fletcher Pratt, “The Reign of the Ray,” two-part serial, SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 6–33, and (July 1929): 120–31; Ray Avery Myers, “Into the Subconscious,” SWS 1, no. 5 (October 1929): 426–35; Ed Earl Repp, “The Radium Pool,” two-part serial, SWS 1, nos. 3–4 (August 1929): 218–29, and (September 1929): 344–60; R. F. Starzl, “The Man Who Changed the Future,” WS 3, no. 1 (June 1931): 55–63; Francis Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” SWS 1, no. 11 (April 1930): 1019–36; Arthur G. Stangland, “50th Century Revolt,” WS 3, no. 11 (April 1932): 1206–19. 10. According to E. E. Slosson, editor of the Science News Service news wire, astronomy and archaeology were the two most popular sciences. See David J. Rhees, “Public Images of Science in America: Science News-Letter, 1922–1929,” May 23, 1977, essay, reprinted on the Science Service website, http://scienceservice.si.edu/essay/index.htm. 11. The many sequels to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes illustrate the popu­larity and marketability of this approach: Tarzan and the Ant Men (Argosy AllStory Weekly, February 2–March 15, 1924); Tarzan and the Lost Empire (Blue Book, October 1928–February 1929); Tarzan and the City of Gold (Argosy, March 1932–April 1932); Tarzan and the Lion Man (Liberty, November 1933–January 1935); and Tarzan and the Leopard Men (Blue Book, August 1932–January 1933). 12. David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” SWS 1, no. 3 (August 1929): 246–63; Edmond Hamilton, “Master of the Genes,” WS 6, no. 8 (January 1935): 959–69; Harl Vincent, “The Menace from Be­low,” SWS 1, no. 2 (July 1929): 142–68; Harl Vincent, “The Return to Subterrania,” SWS 1, no. 11 (April 1930): 992–1013; Jack Williamson, “The Alien Intelligence,” two-part serial, SWS 1, nos. 2–3 (July 1929): 102–18, and (August 1929): 234–45.

Notes to Pages 87–93

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13. Capt. Hermann Noordung, “The Problems of Space Flying,” three-part serial, SWS 1, nos. 2–4 (July 1929): 170–80, (August 1929): 264–72, and (September 1929): 361–68. 14. T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Inefficiency in Engineering,” AS 5, no. 9 (December 1930): 773; T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Heavy Stone,” AS 6, no. 8 (November 1931): 679; T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Bridges and Tunnels,” AS 7, no. 10 (January 1933): 869; T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Meters, Barleycorns, Feet, Paces and Other Measurements,” AS 10, no. 6 (October 1935): 8–12. 15. Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days (New York: Bantam, 1989), 114. 16. Frances Tebbetts, “A Real Fan,” WS 5, no. 9 (April 1934): 1051. 17. Gernsback, “Science Wonder Stories,” 5. 18. Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). 19. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). 20. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis, rev. ed. (1989; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 138, 139. 21. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 22. Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 23. Claude Fischer, American Calling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 24. Jeffrey Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). 25. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 156–57; Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited, 12–13, 106. 26. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 27. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting. 28. Tebbetts, “A Real Fan,” 1051. 29. David J. Rhees, “A New Voice for Science: Science Service under Edwin E. Slosson, 1921–29” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1979), chap. 2, pt. 3. 30. August, September, and October 1927 “What Do You Know?” departments of Amazing Stories, 450, 530, 700. 31. Hugo Gernsback, “Fundamental Error Contest,” SWS 1, no. 8 (January 1930): 746. 32. Hugo Gernsback, “Editorially Speaking,” AS 1, no. 6 (September 1926): 483. 33. Lloyd G. Neily, “A Highly Appreciative Letter, Which Is Certainly Very Pleasant to Receive,” AS 12, no. 1 (February 1938): 137. 34. Hugo Gernsback, “Plausibility in Scientifiction,” AS 1, no. 8 (November 1926): 675. 35. Heinlein, “On Writing Speculative Fiction,” 17. 36. Clarke, Astounding Days, 42. 37. T. J. D., “Flowers First and Then Flaws,” AS 2, no. 4 (July 1927): 410. 38. Miles J. Breuer, “An Interesting Communication from Dr. Miles Breuer about Gigantism in Animals and the Existence of Normally Huge Animals,” AS 5, no. 2 (May 1930): 181, 183.

336

Notes to Pages 95–104

39. Victor A. Endersby, “A Criticism of Dr. Breuer’s Story ‘The Hungry Guinea Pig,’ and a Communication from Dr. Breuer,” AS 5, no. 7 (October 1930): 662. 40. Editorial reply to Endersby, “A Criticism of Dr. Breuer’s Story ‘The Hungry Guinea Pig,’” AS 5, no. 7 (October 1930): 662. 41. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 4. 42. Felix B. Wadel, “A Suggestion Apropos of the Fourth Dimension, the LorenzFitzgerald [sic] Contraction,” AS 4, no. 3 (June 1929): 284. 43. In his manipulation of physical equations, for instance, Miller substitutes a specific value, M, for a general term, m. 44. P. Schuyler Miller, “The Skylark Stories and Einstein,” AS 6, no. 5 (August 1931): 475. 45. Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed, ed. Karen Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983), 141–70. 46. Bartlett’s skepticism was in response to Albert L. Mills, “The Rocket in a Vacuum Again,” AS 3, no. 8 (November 1928): 758. 47. T. R. Bartlett and editorial reply, “A Confirmed Skeptic in High School: His Misconception of the Action of a Rocket,” AS 3, no. 8 (November 1928): 755, 758. 48. Charles L. Campbell, “A Letter Too Good to Keep Another Three Months,” AS 6, no. 12 (March 1932): 1140. 49. Miller, “The Skylark Stories and Einstein,” 475. 50. Philip J. Pauly, “The Development of High School Biology, New York City, 1900– 1925,” Isis 82 (December 1991): 662–88. 51. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1917), 258. 52. Claudia Goldin calculates that less than 10 percent of Americans graduated from high school in 1910 and argues that, with important regional exceptions, the “high school movement” to increase attendance and graduation occurred between 1920 and 1935. Claudia Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History 58 (June 1998): 345–74; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary Schooling in America, 1910–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 683–723; and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 53. Clarke, Astounding Days, 84. 54. Hugo Gernsback, “The Wonders of Space,” SWS 1, no. 3 (August 1929): 197. 55. Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School”; Goldin and Katz, “Human Capital and Social Capital.” 56. Clair Broadstreet, “Adventurous Correspondent,” AS 2, no. 3 (June 1927): 310. 57. Haraway, Primate Visions, 4. 58. Although fiction published before the 1920s and 1930s also featured such narrative moments, they were not part of the self-conscious cultural circuit of reader, writer, and editor that produced interwar science fiction.

Notes to Pages 104–110

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59. John Barry discusses the origins of the term “technobabble” in the 1980s in his work on the language of computers and computing, noting its connection to science fiction’s explanations of fictitious technology and science. Interwar science was more accurately “technospeak,” not “technobabble,” “unobtainium,” or “handwavium.” Its purpose was not obfuscation but narrow replication of accuracy to allow a broader suspension of disbelief about speculation. See John Barry, Technobabble (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 60. George Paul Bauer, “Below the Infra Red,” AS 2, no. 9 (December 1927): 882–902. 61. Breuer’s story included footnotes discussing Grimm’s theories of “intra-atomic physics.” Miles J. Breuer, M.D., “The Driving Power,” AS 5, no. 4 (July 1930): 306–11, 323. 62. Joseph F. Dachowski, “One Bouquet in Order,” AS 2, no. 4 (July 1927): 415. 63. Samuel R. Delany, “Critical Methods: Speculative Fiction,” in Many Futures, Many Worlds: Theme and Form in Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977), 285–86. 64. Jack Williamson, “In at the Creation,” interview by Jeffrey M. Elliot, in Jeffrey M. Elliot, Pulp Voices: Science Fiction Voices #6 (San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1983), 9–10. 65. Harry Bates, “To Begin,” in A Requiem for Astounding, ed. Alva Rogers (Chicago: Advent, 1964), xii. 66. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 67. A. Hunter Dupree, Science and the Federal Government, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Hughes, American Genesis; Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), intro. 68. John Ziman, The Force of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 215–19. 69. On research laboratories, professional organizations, and by comparison “independent inventors,” see Hughes, American Genesis, 180–83. 70. Edward Elmer Smith, in collaboration with Lee Hawkins Garby, “The Skylark of Space,” three-part serial, AS 3, nos. 5–7 (August 1928): 390–417, (September 1928): 528–59, and (October 1928): 610–36, 641. 71. “Triplanetary,” AS, four-part serial (January 1934–April 1934); “Galactic Patrol,” ASS, six-part serial (September 1937–February 1938); “Grey Lensmen,” ASS, four-part serial (November 1941–February 1942); “Children of the Lens,” ASS, four-part serial (November 1947–February 1948). The four stories published in Astounding formed the original series, but “Triplanetary” was rewritten in novel form in 1948 to fit the others in the series, and another novel, First Lensman (Fantasy Press, 1950), linking the revised novel chronologically to the others was written in 1950. 72. Sam Moskowitz, “Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.,” in Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961), 9–26. On “space opera,” see Brian Aldiss, ed., Space Opera (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974). 73. Miller, “The Skylark Stories and Einstein,” 475. 74. A. H. Johnson, “The Superman,” AS 6, no. 5 (August 1931): 475.

338

Notes to Pages 111–117 Chapter 4

1. Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., “What Science Fiction Means to Me,” 2nd honorable mention, SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 88. 2. Deborah Cameron, Feminism and Linguistic Theory (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 259. Scholars also cite Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (London: Women’s Press, 1997), 20, as the source for this statement, but Heilbrun was citing Cameron. 3. On reading communities, see Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 4. George K. Addison, “A Challenge to Print Is Best Met by Printing the Communication,” AS 6, no. 1 (April 1931): 94; Carmen McCable, “A Challenge to Men,” WS 2, no. 3 (August 1930): 276. 5. Leo Teixeira, “What a Passionate Devotee to Reading Thinks of Amazing Stories,” AS 2, no. 4 (July 1927): 413; Bradford Butler, “Amazing Stories ‘Infernal, Damnable’ . . . . ,” AS 1, no. 11 (February 1927): 1077; Marie La France, “Are There Other Inhabited Worlds than Our Earth?,” AS 4, no. 11 (February 1930): 1036; T. J. D., “Flowers First and Then Flaws,” AS 2, no. 4 (July 1927): 410. 6. Lloyd Foltz, “Pearls before the Swine!,” WS 2, no. 2 (June 1930): 78; Darrel Richards, “The Monthly Magazine Approved of, a Little Romance Welcomed, Some Letters in the Correspondence Column Commented On,” AS 5, no. 8 (November 1930): 760. 7. Fitz-Gerald P. Grattan, “A Letter of Criticism and Appreciation from Ireland,” AS 7, no. 12 (March 1933): 1146; Isaac Asimov, “But Are There Meteors in Interstellar Space? Arthur McCann Does the Science Shorts,” ASS 22, no. 1 (September 1938): 161, quoted in a discussion of the 1938–39 “love interest controversy” thread in Astounding in Justine Larbalestier, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 117–35. 8. Gloria Rosselli, “A Letter from a High School Senior,” AS 4, no. 3 (June 1929): 286; Barbara Baldwin, “A Mere Girl Writes Us a Letter, and a Good One,” AS 4, no. 10 (January 1930): 988. 9. Elaine Showalter, These Modern Women (New York: Feminist Press, 1989). 10. Claudia Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History 58 (June 1998): 345–74; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary Schooling in America, 1910–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 683–723. 11. Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 285. 12. On women science fiction writers in the 1920s and 1930s, see Jane L. Donawerth, “Science Fiction by Women in the Early Pulps, 1926–1930,” in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women, ed. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1994); and Eric Leif Davin, Partners in Wonder (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006), which includes an extensive bibliography of women science fiction writers from 1926 to 1965.

Notes to Pages 118–126

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13. A growing literature exists on the private spaces women make for themselves within science fiction and on “slash” subcultures in popular culture. See Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Henry Jenkins III, Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Constance Penley, “Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology,” in Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 135–62. 14. On women in science fiction, see Larbalestier, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction; Pamela Sargent, Women of Wonder, vol. 1 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995); and Robin Robert, A New Species (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 15. Richards, “The Monthly Magazine Approved Of,” 760; C. L. Moore, “Poet of FarDistant Futures,” interview by Jeffrey M. Elliot, in Jeffrey M. Elliot, Pulp Voices: Science Fiction Voices #6 (San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1983), 46. 16. Le Roy Christian Bashore, “Books to Exchange for Amazing Stories—An Appreciation for Pennsylvania,” AS 10, no. 5 (August 1935): 138–39; J. Stirling, “An Interesting Letter from Brazil: Uniformity in Stories about the Moon Asked For,” AS 6, no. 7 (October 1931): 670; Jane C. Raymer, Prescott, Arizona, to author, Washington, D.C., September 13–15, 1992, 2, in the possession of the author. 17. David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” SWS 1, no. 3 (August 1929): 246–63; P. Schuyler Miller, “Tetrahedra of Space,” WS 3, no. 6 (November 1931): 728– 33; Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat, “In 20,000 a.d.!,” WS 2, no. 4 (September 1930): 311–23; Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat, “Back to 20,000 a.d.,” WS 2, no. 10 (March 1931): 1121–51. 18. Jack Williamson, “The Moon Era,” WS 3, no. 9 (February 1932): 1016–35, repr. in Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 286–336. 19. Jack Williamson, “The Alien Intelligence,” two-part serial, SWS 1, no. 2 (July 1929): 102–18, and no. 3 (August 1929): 234–45. 20. R. F. Starzl, “The Man Who Changed the Future,” WS 3, no. 1 (June 1931): 55–63. 21. Edmond Hamilton, “Master of the Genes,” WS 6, no. 8 (January 1935): 966–97. 22. Edmond Hamilton, “The Man Who Evolved,” WS 2, no. 11 (April 1931): 29–30. 23. Francis Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” SWS 1, no. 11 (April 1930): 1019–36. 24. Front illustration for Kennie McDowd, “The Marble Virgin,” SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 51. 25. Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 285. 26. These readings of science fiction are similar to the readings of romance novels in Janice Radway’s study of contemporary romance readers. See Radway, Reading the Romance. 27. Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 285. 28. Williamson, “The Moon Era,” in Before the Golden Age, ed. Asimov, 333. 29. Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 285. 30. Joan W. Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 28–50; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

340

Notes to Pages 127–136

31. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” 274. 32. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Estelle Freedman, “Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870–1930,” Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979): 512–29; Mary Ryan, Women in Public (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Linda Kerber, “Separate Sphere, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39; Nancy Cott and Drew Faust, “Recent Directions in Gender and Women’s History,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History 19 (March 2005): 4–5. 33. Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” 1021, 1024, 1031. 34. Laurence Manning, “The Man Who Awoke,” WS 4, no. 10 (March 1933): 358, 360. 35. Manning, “The Man Who Awoke,” 354, 366. 36. Edith Clark, “Trying to Be Modern,” The Nation, August 17, 1927, 153–55, cited in Showalter, These Modern Women, 20. 37. Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar (New York: Macmillan, 1999). 38. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 3. 39. Printers’ Ink, November 7, 1929, 133, cited in Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 66. 40. T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D., “Electric Units in the Home,” AS 8, no. 8 (December 1933): 6–9. 41. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929), 173–76, 498. 42. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 43. Clark, “Trying to Be Modern,” 153. 44. David H. Keller, “The Threat of the Robot,” SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 73. 45. “Bolshevism vs. Fascism,” SWS 1, no. 3 (August 1929): 280. 46. Arthur Frederick Jones, “The Inquisition of 6061,” WS 5, no. 5 (December 1933): 442, 445. 47. Lawrence W. Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” Yale Review 74 (Winter 1985): 196–223; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (New York: Knopf, 1982). 48. James J. Flink, America Adopts the Automobile (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970); James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 49. Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). 50. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); David E. Nye, Electrifying America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992). 51. Smulyan, Selling Radio, chaps. 3–5. 52. A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 271–77, 338–43; Rexmond C. Cochrane, Measures for Progress (Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Standards, 1966).

Notes to Pages 137–143

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53. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984), 51–71. 54. Keller, “The Threat of the Robot,” 73. 55. Clinton J. Andrews, Regulating Regional Power Systems (Greenwood, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995). 56. Davis W. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 57. Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 199–202. 58. At the same time, this conversation intimacy was artificial, part of the technological and social invention of the radio “audience.” See Douglas, Listening In, chap. 6, esp. 131–33. Calvin Coolidge, the first president to give radio addresses, was notably ineffective because background noises, fingers rustling on paper, ice tinkling in glasses, and dishes rattling, that distracted listeners’ attention. See Edward G. Lowry, “Radio’s Part in Politics,” Popular Science Monthly 105, no. 1 (July 1924): 23. 59. Lowry, “Radio’s Part in Politics,” 23. 60. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression, 325, 336. 61. Brinkley, Voices of Protest. On broadcast radio’s potential to foster extreme forms of collective authoritarianism, specifically fascism, see Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt Reader (New York: Urizen Books, 1978); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1996); and Ronald V. Bettig, “The Frankfurt School and the Political Economy of Communications,” in Rethinking the Frankfurt School, ed. Jeffrey Thomas Mealon and Caren Irr (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 81–96. 62. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The People and the Park (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Lou Ehrenberg, Steppin’ Out (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 63. Lynn Spiegel, Make Way for TV (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 64. Keller, “The Threat of the Robot,” 73. 65. McGovern, Sold American, 262–95. 66. The first movement to advocate equal pay for women did not occur until World War II and even then was a tactic to win higher wages for male union workers. 67. Showalter, These Modern Women, 19. 68. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” 248. 69. John William Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly 10 (Spring 1958): 3–16. 70. Kathleen Barry, Femininity in Flight (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 71. Edmond Hamilton, “The Reign of the Robots,” WS 3, no. 7 (December 1931): 848–59. 72. The play premiered in Prague in 1921 and in the United States and England in

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1922 and 1923 respectively. It was translated into English and adapted for the English stage in 1923. 73. Although the term “robot” first appeared in R.U.R., Čapek later credited his brother, Josef, for suggesting it over the more general Latin-derived labori, which he originally considered. See Karel Čapek, Two Plays by Karel Čapek, ed. and trans. Voyen Koreis (Brisbane: Booksplendour Publishing, 2008), 9; and Karel Čapek, Lidové noviny, December 24, 1933. 74. They were more akin to the later figure of the android whose associated issues echoed those raised by R.U.R.’s robots. See in particular Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Doubleday, 1968); and its film adaptation, Bladerunner, dir. Ridley Scott (Warner Brothers, 1982). Čapek argued against robots’ association with machines; see Karel Čapek, Lidové noviny, June 9, 1935. 75. Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), trans. David Wyllie (public domain, University of Adelaide ebooks, Creative Commons license), act iii, conclusion. 76. Schachner and Zagat, “In 20,000 a.d.!”; Schachner and Zagat, “Back to 20,000 a.d.” 77. Mark Haller, Eugenics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (New York: Knopf, 1985); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). 78. Schachner and Zagat, “In 20,000 a.d.!,” 314. 79. The same extrapolations from evolution led to late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury ideas of “scientific racism.” See Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; and George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 80. The imagined future of 20,000 a.d. might be seen as a parable on the themes raised within the contested history of American “Reconstruction” after the Civil War— replete with “freedmen,” “carpetbaggers,” and economic and cultural concerns about “modernization.”

Chapter 5 1. Howard Lowe, “A Chinese Reader’s Criticisms,” AS 6, no. 5 (August 1931): 477. 2. Broader accounts of representations of Asian Americans in popular fiction include Sue Fawn Chung, “From Fu Manchu, Evil Genius, to James Lee Wong, Popular Hero: A Study of the Chinese American in Popular Periodical Fiction from 1920 to 1940,” Journal of Popular Culture 10 (March 1977): 534–47; and William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982). 3. Charles S. Tanner, “Tumithak of the Corridors,” AS 6, no. 10 (January 1932): 898– 919, repr. in Isaac Asimov, ed., Before the Golden Age (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 229–83; Charles S. Tanner, “Tumithak in Shawm,” AS 8, no. 3 (June 1933): 201–32, repr. in Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 375–448. 4. Edmond Hamilton, “The Reign of the Robots,” WS 3, no. 7 (December 1931): 848–59; P. Schuyler Miller, “Tetrahedra of Space,” WS 3, no. 6 (November 1931): 728–33,

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repr. in Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 156–93; Stanley G. Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey,” WS 6, no. 2 (July 1934): 175–90. 5. While many cultures have been concerned about human cruelty to animals, Keith Thomas argues that their primary issue was the deleterious effect of that cruelty on human character, not its actual effect on animals. He argues further that a concern for animals is part of a modern sensibility about the natural world. See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 6. Marshall Tymn, ed., The Science Fiction Reference Book (Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1981), 16. 7. To borrow the language of film studies, the pulp cover was an analog to a cinema screen. It formed a frame that simultaneously invited entry into the magazine’s diegetic world and, with the presence of its border and its overlaying text, reminded the reader of their external viewing world, keeping the two in tension and dialogue. However, while a movie screen’s frame offered a window to view apparently realistic events in its imagined world, pulp covers were representational frames. In a single image they attempted to convey the essence of a story, usually illustrating a turning point or climax within its narrative. Etienne Souriau is commonly credited for introducing the notion of diegesis to film studies and narratology, where it is now widely used, but when and where are not clear. See Henry M. Taylor, “The Success Story of a Misnomer,” Offscreen 11 (August–September 2007); Etienne Souriau, preface, in Etienne Souriau, ed., L’Univers filmique (Paris: Flammarion, 1953); Etienne Souriau, Vocabulaire d’esthétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990); and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 8. Paul, Wesso (Hans Waldemar Wessolowski), Morey, and Brown are known collectively as the “Big Four” pulp cover artists. See Everett F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press), 598–602. 9. J. Raymond Stimps, “Mistakes of Authors: The Remarkable Drawing,” AS 2, no. 5 (August 1927): 517. 10. He observes, “Against the background of the continuum, the monster provides an account, as though in caricature, of the genesis of differences, and the fossil recalls, in the uncertainty of its resemblances, the first buddings of identity.” See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), 157 and, more broadly, 150–57. See also Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936). 11. Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Philip J. Pauly, “The Development of High School Biology: New York City, 1900–1925,” Isis 82 (December 1991): 662–88. 12. Captain S. P. Meek, “Submicroscopic,” AS 6, no. 5 (August 1931): 390–400, repr. in Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 66–92; Captain S. P. Meek, “Awlo of Ulm,” AS 6, no. 6 (September 1931): 486–512, repr. in Asimov, Before the Golden Age, 93–153.

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13. Meek, “Submicroscopic,” 73. 14. For a fuller examination of the history of the alien in American culture, see Zoe Couacaud, “How the Alien Invaded the American Mind” (Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney, 2006). The idea of “invader from outer space” can be argued to date from H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, but the actual term was not used in that work. The phrase “bug-eyed monster” dates from a 1939 letter: Martin Alger, TWS 14, no. 1 (August 1939): 121–22. While the term “unidentified flying object” (or “UFO”) dates from a 1949 U.S. Air Force report, Donald Keyhoe, the principal writer for Dr. Yen Sin, is commonly credited with introducing the term into popular discourse in the early 1950s; see Donald E. Keyhoe, Flying Saucers Are Real (New York: Fawcett, 1950). 15. Sam Moskowitz, “Dawn of Fame: The Career of Stanley G. Weinbaum,” in Explorers of the Infinite (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1957), 296–312. Moskowitz argues that “A Martian Odyssey” is science fiction’s first attempt to portray nonhuman intelligence sympathetically. 16. Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey,” 179. 17. The idea of “cultural relativism” is generally associated with Franz Boas’s school of thought in early twentieth-century anthropology. Melville Herskovits, his student, was a major proponent of the idea in the 1940s and 1950s; see Melville Herskovits, Cultural Relativism (New York: Random House, 1972). For a different view of Boas, see John Webber Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18. Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey,” 180, 186. 19. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 20. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (New York: Knopf, 1985); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). 21. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (1955; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002). 22. James Hirsch, Race and Remembrance (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); “Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921” (State of Oklahoma, 2001); David Mark Chalmers, Hooded Americanism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Nancy McLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Dan T. Carter, Scottsboro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); James E. Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage, 1995). 23. See, for instance, N. W. Ayer & Son, Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer, 1938), 1168–79. 24. They are reprinted in George S. Schuyler, Black Empire, ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991). On Schuyler, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “A Fragmented Man: George Schuyler and the Claims of Race,” New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1992, 31, 42–43.

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25. Sam Moskowitz states that Fitzgerald was a black man and the only known and active black science fiction fan during the 1920s and 1930s. Sam Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1974), 11. See also Sam Moskowitz to Frank H. Winter, November 22, 1974, G. Edward Pendray biographic file, NASM. Pendray, however, clearly remembered that Fitzgerald was not black, but even if he had been, he “certainly would have been welcome.” G. Edward Pendray, interview by Frank H. Winter, January 30, 1976, typed transcript, 3, Pendray biographic file, NASM. 26. Michel Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994). 27. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944). 28. Malcolm Afford, “The Ho-Ming Gland,” AS 7, no. 11 (February 1933): 1006–16; W. I. Hammond, “Lakh-Dal, Destroyer of Souls,” AS 2, no. 12 (March 1928): 1184–93, 1201–2; Volney G. Mathison, “The Mongolians’ Ray,” AS 4, no. 3 (June 1929): 258–63, 271. 29. Philip Francis Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” AS 3, no. 5 (August 1928): 422–49; Philip Francis Nowlan, “The Airlords of Han,” AS 3, no. 12 (March 1929): 1106– 36. Ron Goulart, ed., The Encyclopedia of American Comics (New York: Promised Land Productions, 1990), 55–56, gives a summary of Rogers’s and Nowlan’s crossover into other media. 30. Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” 449. 31. Goulart, Encyclopedia of American Comics, 134–35, discusses the origins of the Flash Gordon comic strip. 32. For examples, see Flash Gordon, vol. 1, “Mongo, the Planet of Doom” (Princeton, N.J.: Kitchen Sink Press, 1990), passim. 33. The image of scantily clad women in harems is a fraught product of Western orientalism. See Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004). 34. Flash Gordon, vol. 1, 15; Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” 449. 35. General histories of Asian Americans include Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans (Boston: Twayne, 1991); and Roger Daniels, Asian America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992). 36. On immigration and exclusion, see Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, passim; and Chan, Asian Americans, chap. 3 and passim. See also Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Charles J. McClain, Asian Americans and the Law, 4 vols. (New York: Garland, 1994). 37. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 298–99; Chan, Asian Americans, 38, 39, 47, and passim. 38. On ordinances and statutes, see McClain, Asian Americans and the Law; and Milton Konvitz, The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-

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versity Press, 1946). On public health, see Nayan B. Shah, Contagious Divides (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 39. Ronald Takaki’s discussion of the Roldan miscegenation case brings out many of the linkages in American concerns about Asians. See Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 330. See also Chan, Asian Americans, 60; and Megumi Dick Osumi, “Asians and California’s Anti-Miscegenation Laws,” in Asian and Pacific American Experiences: Women’s Perspectives, ed. Nobuya Tsuchida (Minneapolis: Asian/Pacific American Learning Resource Center and General College, University of Minnesota, 1982). An ostensibly progressive reform, the Cable Act revised previous policy and practice that stripped citizenship from women who married noncitizens, but it maintained a specific exception for women who married Asians. See Leti Volpp, “Divesting Citizenship: On Asian American History and the Loss of Citizenship,” UCLA Law Review 52 (2005); UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 870087, available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/ abstract=870087. 40. U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898); Takao Ozawa v. U.S., 260 U.S. 178 (1922); and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). See Jeff H. Lesser, “Always ‘Outsiders’: Asians, Naturalization, and the Supreme Court,” Amerasia 12 (1985–86): 83–100; McClain, Asian Americans and the Law; Konvitz, The Alien and the Asiatic in American Law; and Ian F. Haney-López, White by Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 41. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 42. On work ethic and standards of living, see Lawrence Glickman, A Living Wage (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999). On race, gender, citizenship, and labor, see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). On U.S imperialism in the Philippines and its cultural representation, see Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). On U.S. and Japanese representations of war and race during World War II, see John Dower, War without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1987). 43. Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994). 44. Asian aliens oriented twentieth-century America in much the same way that, according to Edward Said, the “Orient” of the Near—or Middle—East oriented the Western European “Occident” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 21–22 and passim. Douglas Little, in American Orientalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), argues the United States post–World War II orientalist relationship with the Middle East. A large body of literature exists that criticizes and extends Said’s work. Said has revisited the issue in Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique 1 (Fall 1985): 89–107; and Edward W. Said, “Orientalism, an Afterword,” Raritan 14 (Winter 1995): 32–59. Other critiques and considerations include James Clifford, review of

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Edward W. Said, Orientalism, History & Theory 19 (1980): 204–23; and Gyan Prakash, “Orientalism Now,” History & Theory 34 (1995): 199–212. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), explores the idea of multiple orientalisms. Scholars have extended Said’s work to other geographic regions; see Edward Said, Reflections on Orientalism (East Lansing: Asian Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1983). 45. Ngai, Impossible Subjects. 46. Wu, The Yellow Peril, 165. Wu also relates a rare protest by Chinese diplomats against an MGM film version of Mask of Fu Machu, which he argues halted backing for further films; see Wu, The Yellow Peril, 170–71. See also Tina Chen, “Dissecting the Devil Doctor: Stereotype and Sensationalism in Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu,” in Re/collecting Early Asian America, ed. Josephine Lee, Imogene Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 218–37. 47. Marshall B. Tymn and Michael Ashley, eds., Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 187–88, 414–15, 454–56. Oriental Stories was renamed Magic Carpet magazine beginning with the January 1933 issue. 48. The average monthly circulation of Collier’s in 1930 was 2,257,290; see N. W. Ayer & Son, Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals (Philadelphia: N. W. Ayer & Son, 1931), 1251. A 1930 Asian population of 264,766 is an aggregate of figures in Series A 59–70, Nonwhite Population, by Sex and Race: 1820–1950, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1960), 9. This population figure is calculated to represent most closely the current census category of Asian and Pacific Islanders by combining male and female totals for Japanese, Chinese, and “All other races” categories. The “All other races” group included Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, Indonesians, Polynesians, and other Asians. 49. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 50. H. P. Lovecraft evoked another sense of alien difference, relating the experiences of a 1930 expedition to an ancient city in Antarctica. Its ruins revealed that its builders visited from another world long ago, but the expedition’s members were driven mad from their inability to comprehend the scope of the experiences. Although in the story the idea of “ancient astronauts” was introduced, there was no direct contact between the expedition and the long-dead “aliens.” See H. P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness,” three-part serial, ASS 16, nos. 6–9 (February, March, April 1936). 51. Robert Kenneth Jones, The Shudder Pulps (West Linn: FAX Collector’s, 1975), 221. 52. Commenting on the rise of the novel and the newspaper in the nineteenth century, Walter Benjamin observed the difference between two forms of narrative content: “story” and “information.” “Story” derived from experience and was intrinsically tied to social familiarity among all it involved, the storyteller and those people to whom he told

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his stories. “Information” was divorced from such familiarity and its communication mediated through indirect means. See Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83–109, particularly 87–89. 53. David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” SWS 1, no. 3 (August 1929): 246–63. 54. Although Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories were moderately popular when first published in England before World War I, the character and the author enjoyed their greatest popularity after a hiatus of fourteen years when Collier’s imported both to America and revived their careers in 1930. The majority of the stories were published in this latter period from the 1930s to the 1950s. See Wu, The Yellow Peril, 165. 55. Wu, The Yellow Peril, 172–74. Wu also discusses Fu Manchu’s “good” counterpart in pulp fiction, Charlie Chan, but science fiction did not feature imitations of the Chan detective character. 56. Sax Rohmer, The Insidious Doctor Fu-Manchu (1913; New York: Pyramid, 1961), 17. 57. On scientists, engineers, and industry, see David Noble, America by Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). On scientists and government, see A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (New York: Knopf, 1977), is an informative case study of one particular scientific community, detailing the individual efforts of George Ellery Hale and Robert Millikan in, among other professional activities, the formation of the National Research Council. On the professionalization of medicine, see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 58. John Huntington, Rationalizing Genius (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), is a literary analysis of science fiction’s legitimization of an ideology of individual scientific genius. 59. Donald E. Keyhoe, “The Mystery of the Singing Mummies,” Dr. Yen Sin 1, no. 3 (September–October 1936): 73–74. 60. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 15; The Wizard of Oz (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939), directed by Victor Fleming, screenplay by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf. 61. Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis, rev. ed. (1989; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 138, 139. 62. Donald E. Keyhoe, “The Mystery of the Dragon’s Shadow,” Dr. Yen Sin 1, no. 1 (May–June 1936): 45. 63. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man; George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Peter J. Bowler, Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 64. Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” 422, 426. 65. H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds, Project Gutenberg EBook, originally serialized

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in Pearson’s magazine in 1897 and published by William Heinemann in 1898. Quotations are from bk. 1, chap. 1, “The Eve of War.” 66. Wells, War of the Worlds, epigram and bk. 1, chap. 1, “The Eve of War.” Wells drew Kepler’s quotation from Robert Burton’s (using the pseudonym Democritus Junior), The Anatomy of Melancholy; Democritus Junior, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1847), 299–300. 67. Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940); Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast (Boston: Little, Brown Books, 1970). 68. Audio recording of the original broadcast is available from the Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/details/OrsonWellesMrBruns, and a transcription by Michael E. Eidenmuller is available from AmericanRhetoric.com, http://www.americanrhetoric. com/speeches/orsonwellswaroftheworlds.htm 69. David Lasser, Conquest of Space (1931; repr., Burlington, Ontario: Apogee, 2002), for instance, was the first English language nonfiction book to discuss rocketry and space exploration. 70. The literary scholar Amy Kaplan observed what she called a “double discourse of American imperialism” in turn-of-the-century historical romances linking a disembodied empire to an embodied masculine identity. Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 3 (December 1990): 659–90. 71. Stanley G. Weinbaum, “The Valley of Dreams,” WS 6, no. 6 (November 1934): 676–90. 72. Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey,” 180. 73. Rudyard Kipling published his poem in 1899 to argue against American ambivalence about its imperial responsibilities. Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden,” McClure’s 12, no. 4 (February 1899): 290–91. 74. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 154–83, particularly the photograph on 175. 75. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901), was one of a series of “Insular” cases following a racial logic in deciding that the Constitution only partially applied to the United States’ unincorporated island territories. De Lima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 1 (1901), and Downes v. Bidwell first addressed the issues in Puerto Rico. Dowdell v. United States, 221 U.S. 325 (1911), and Ocampo v. United States, 234 U.S. 91 (1914), extended them to the Philippines. See Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 76. Jack Williamson, “The Alien Intelligence,” two-part serial, SWS 1, nos. 2–3 (July 1929): 102–18, and (August 1929): 234–45. 77. Keyhoe, “The Mystery of the Dragon’s Shadow,” 13. 78. William Lemkin, Ph.D., “The Doom of Lun-Dhag,” AS 7, no. 8 (November 1932): 678–702. 79. Nowlan, “The Airlords of Han,” 1136.

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80. Raymond Williams, “Utopia and Science Fiction,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 208–9.

Chapter 6 1. Sterling Bunch, “Fourth Dimension Stories and Interplanetary Voyaging Asked For,” AS 2, no. 9 (December 1927): 904. 2. An extensive review of time travel in physics and metaphysics as well as science fiction is Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines, 2d ed. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1999). 3. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine first appeared as a serial in William Ernest Henley’s New Review in 1895 before being published in book form later the same year. The story exists in the public domain in the United States. Page references come from the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, ed. H. M. Geduld, 1987 Indiana University Press edition. Wells used a British spelling, with two “l”s, for “traveller,” which I repeat when referring to his character. 4. Edwin Abbott, Flatland (London: Seeley & Co., 1884). 5. Wells, The Time Machine, 34. 6. Wells, The Time Machine, 32, 33. 7. Extradimensional stories include Murray Leinster, “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” ASS 5, no. 1 (January 1931): 72–108; Murray Leinster, “The Fifth-Dimension Tube,” ASS 11, no. 3 (January 1933): 366–416; and Leslie F. Stone, “The Man with the Four Dimensional Eyes,” WS 7, no. 3 (August 1935): 287–93, 365. 8. Francis Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” SWS 1, no. 11 (April 1930): 1019–36; Edmond Hamilton, “The Reign of the Robots,” WS 3, no. 7 (December 1931): 848–59; Clifford D. Simak, “The World of the Red Sun,” WS 3, no. 7 (December 1931): 878–89. 9. Stone, “The Man with the Four Dimensional Eyes,” 287–93, 365. 10. Hugo Gernsback, “The Amazing Einstein,” AS 4, no. 1 (April 1929): 5. 11. Felix B. Wadel, “A Suggestion Apropos of the Fourth Dimension, the LorenzFitzgerald [sic] Contraction,” AS 4, no. 3 (June 1929): 284. 12. Minkowski presented his ideas in a September 1908 lecture in Cologne, which was published the next year; see Hermann Minkowski, “Raum und Zeit,” Physikalische Zeitschrift 10 (1909): 104–11; and Hermann Minkowski, Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1909). See also Albert Einstein, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,” Annalen der Physik 322, no. 10 (1905): 891–921. En­ glish language versions, “Space and Time” and “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” are found in H. A. Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, and Hermann Weyl, The Principle of Relativity (New York: Dover, 1952), 73–91; 35–65. 13. Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 132. 14. Albert Einstein, “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie,” Annalen der Physik 49 (1916): 769–822. An English language version, “The Foundation of the

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General Theory of Relativity,” is found in Lorentz, Einstein, Minkowski, and Weyl, The Principle of Relativity, 109–64. 15. F. W. Dyson, A. S. Eddington, and C. R. Davidson, “A Determination of the Deflection of Light by the Sun’s Gravitational Field, from Observations Made at the Total Eclipse of May 29, 1919,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, series A, 220 (1920): 291–333; Peter Coles, “Einstein, Eddington, and the 1919 Eclipse,” in Historical Development of Modern Cosmology, ed. Vicent J. Martínez, Virginia Trimble, and María Jesús Pons-Bordería, Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) Conference Proceedings, vol. 252 (2001), 21–42. 16. Einstein’s postwar popularity is discussed in many biographies. In addition to Isaacson, Einstein, see also Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971). For an account of Einstein’s popularity in the press, see József Illy, Albert Meets America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 17. John Huntington, Rationalizing Genius (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), is a literary analysis of science fiction’s legitimization of an ideology of individual scientific genius. See also Roland Barthes, “The Brain of Einstein,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1989), 68–70. 18. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 19. Clark, Einstein, 287. 20. Isaacson, Einstein, 297. 21. Albert Einstein, Relativity: the Special and the General Theory, 15th ed. (1916; New York: Random House, 1952), vii. 22. Clark, Einstein, 301. 23. Victor A. Endersby, “A Criticism of Dr. Breuer’s Story ‘The Hungry Guinea Pig,’ and a Communication from Dr. Breuer,” AS 5, no. 7 (October 1930): 662. 24. Frances Tebbetts, “A Real Fan,” WS 5, no. 9 (April 1934): 1051; Marie La France, “Are There Other Inhabited Worlds than Our Earth?,” AS 4, no. 11 (February 1930): 1036; “Amazing! Astounding!,” Time, July 10, 1939, 32. 25. Historians and sociologies of science point out that while by definition science is a systematic form of knowledge, it is practiced socially and subject to the “mangle” and boundaries of its social constitution. See Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 26. Roger Ariew, Ockham’s Razor (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976). 27. Isaacson, Einstein, 335, 384–93. 28. George Gaylord Simpson, “Historical Science,” in The Fabric of Geology, ed. Claude C. Albritton (San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper & Co., 1963); Richard A. Watson, “Is Geology Different: A Critical Discussion of ‘The Fabric of Geology,’” Philosophy of

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Science 33 (March–June 1966): 172–85, however, argued that Simpson created a false dichotomy. See also Doreen Massey, “Space-Time, ‘Science’ and the Relationship between Physical Geography and Human Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24, no. 3 (1999): 261–76. 29. Simpson, “Historical Science,” uses the terms “immanent” and “configuration” for these conditions, noting that J. D. Bernal preferred “contingent” to “configuration”; see J. D. Bernal, The Physical Basis of Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951). 30. On actualism and scientific method, see George Gaylord Simpson, “Uniformitarianism: An Inquiry into Principle, Theory, and Method in Geohistory and Biohistory,” in Essays in Evolution and Genetics in Honor of Theodosius Dobzhansky, ed. M. K. Hecht and W. C. Steere (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 43–96; and Stephen Jay Gould, “Is Uniformitarianism Necessary?,” American Journal of Science 263 (1965): 223–28. 31. The precise predictability of relativity’s model for material interdependence inspired Bakhtin to consider similar ideas of interdependence in literature. His concept of chronotope or “time space” borrows explicitly from Einstein. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. Explaining Bakhtin’s broader concept of “architectonics,” Michael Holquist observes, “Bakhtin honors both things and the relations between them—the one can not be understood without the other. . . . an architectonics is intended to describe an activity: the relations it orders are always in a state of dynamic tension”; see Michael Holquist, introduction, in M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), xxiii. See also Michael Holquist, Dialogism (London: Routledge, 1990), 114–18, 155–62. 32. The oscillating universe theory, sometimes called the “Big Bounce,” is discussed in R. H. Dicke, P. J. E. Peebles, P. G. Roll, and D. T. Wilkinson, “Cosmic Black-Body Radiation,” Astrophysical Journal 142 (1965): 414. Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 26n1, explains that while this theory has not been disproven or ruled out, since it is actually inconsistent with general relativity, it attracts little interest among cosmologists. 33. Iain Nicolson, Dark Side of the Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality (New York: Knopf, 2011). 34. One area where relativistic circumstances have effect in practice as well as in principle is in computing, specifically microprocessor design. As researchers and manufacturers seek to produce faster processors, they pack transistors into such small spaces that their dimensions relative to the speed of light require calibration for the effects of relativity. 35. Fernand Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée,” in On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). The Annales school takes its name from the scholarly journal, Annales d’Histoire Économique et Sociale (Annals of Economic and Social History). Its proponents view human history as part of a larger history

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with a broader scope and perspective that includes geography, material culture, and long-term historical structures. 36. This phenomenon is named after Karl Schwarzschild, a German mathematician and physicist, whose calculations extending Einstein’s ideas demonstrated their existence in 1916. See Karl Schwarzschild, “Über das Gravitationsfeld eines Massenpunktes nach der Einsteinschen Theorie,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1916): 189–96; and Karl Schwarzschild, “Über das Gravitationsfeld eines Kugel aus inkompressibler Flüssigkeit nach der Einsteinschen Theorie,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1916): 424–34. English language versions, “On the Gravitational Field of a Mass Point According to Einstein’s Theory” and “On the Gravitational Field of a Sphere of Incompressible Fluid According to Einstein’s Theory,” are available online through arXiv.org: arXiv:physics/9905030v1 and arXiv:physics/9912033. Interestingly, Einstein initially did not believe in their physical reality, although he changed his mind by the interwar period; see Isaacson, Einstein, 249–51. 37. Modern mathematics and physics define space and dimension topologically using set theory’s more general but abstract framework to express its parameters. 38. Wells, The Time Machine, 88. 39. Wells, The Time Machine, 69, 88, 90. 40. Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat, “Back to 20,000 a.d.,” WS 2, no. 10 (March 1931): 1121–51. 41. Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” 1020–21. 42. Marguerite S. Shaffer, See America First (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). 43. Standard Time Act, 15 USC 264, adopted March 19, 1918. On shifts in cultural perspectives about time and space in the early twentieth century, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Space and Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). 44. Flagg’s protagonist, Bayers, cites Morgan’s Ancient Society and Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (in the text, Origin of the State, Private Property, and The Family) as historical accounts of matriarchy; see Flagg, “An Adventure in Time,” 1023; Lewis H. Morgan, Ancient Society (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1877); Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, trans. Ernest Untermann (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1902). 45. Thomas Cassidy, “Time and the Fourth Dimension: A Disagreement with A. Hyatt Verrill,” AS 2, no. 10 (January 1928): 1004. 46. Samuel Shackman, “A Pioneer in Its Field,” AS 2, no. 6 (September 1927): 610–11. 47. La France, “Are There Other Inhabited Worlds than Our Earth?,” 1036. 48. Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days (New York: Bantam, 1989), passim. 49. Harry Bates, “To Begin,” in A Requiem for Astounding, ed. Alva Rogers (Chicago: Advent, 1964), xii. 50. Shackman, “A Pioneer in Its Field,” 61; Manuel Noble, “Our Critics Criticized,” AS 2, no. 4 (July 1927): 412; Le Roy Christian Bashore, “Books to Exchange for Amazing Stories—An Appreciation for Pennsylvania,” AS 10, no. 5 (August 1935): 138–39.

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51. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression, 1929–1941 (New York: Times Books, 1984). 52. Warren I. Susman, “The Culture of the Thirties,” in Culture as History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 154; Hugo Gernsback, “Wonders of the Machine Age,” WS 3, no. 2 (July 1931). 53. Gernsback, “Wonders of the Machine Age.” This editorial was unusual for both Gernsback and the pulps generally for its subject and its length: four pages compared to the usual one. 54. Damon Knight, The Futurians (New York: John Day, 1977), 10. 55. Raymond A. Palmer, “Prosperity’s Messenger Boy,” WS 3, no. 10 (March 1932): 1192; J. Harvey Haggard, “An Author’s View of Science-Fiction,” WS 5, no. 7 (February 1934): 792; Lawrence W. Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” Yale Review 74 (Winter 1985): 210–11. 56. The two brothers published under a single pseudonym Eando (E. and O.) combining their names; Eando Binder, “The Robot Aliens,” WS 6, no. 9 (February 1935): 1033. 57. While advances in theoretical physics since Einstein have added spatial dimensions, including several that are necessarily microscopic and convoluted, despite metaphorical analogies between space and time, the time dimension remains unique. See Stephen Hawking and George Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988); Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage, 1999); Lisa Randall, Warped Passages (New York: Harper Collins, 2005). 58. Simak, “The World of the Red Sun,” 887, 888. 59. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937), 510. 60. In the postwar period nonlinear mathematics formed the basis of what became known as chaos theory. See Edward N. Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993); and James Gleick, Chaos (New York: Penguin, 1988). 61. They raised, for instance, what has come to be known as the grandfather paradox. One reader declared, “There is only one kind of Science Fiction story that I dislike, and that is the so-called time-traveling. It doesn’t seem logical to me. For example: supposing a man had a grudge against his grandfather, who is now dead. He could hop in his machine and go back to the year that his grandfather was a young man and murder him. And if he did this how could the revenger be born? I think the whole thing is ‘bunk’”; see Nahin, Time Machines, epigram. David Lewis, “The Paradoxes of Time Travel,” American Philosophical Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1976): 145–52, addresses the paradox and its implications. 62. Cassidy, “Time and the Fourth Dimension,” 1004. 63. A. Hyatt Verrill, “The Astounding Discoveries of Doctor Mentiroso,” AS 2, no. 8 (November 1927): 746–759, was published only a few months after Amazing’s May 1927 reprint of Wells’s Time Machine.

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64. Murray Leinster, “Sidewise in Time,” ASS 13, no. 4 (June 1934), repr. in Before the Golden Age, ed. Isaac Asimov (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), 537–83. 65. Leinster, “Sidewise in Time,” in Before the Golden Age, ed. Asimov, 552, 553. 66. Gary Morson, in Narrative and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), his study of narrative in Russian literature, calls this “shadow stepping.” 67. The Sidewise Awards in Alternate History, given since 1995, are named after Leinster’s story; see http://www.uchronia.net/sidewise/about.html. 68. Nathan Schachner, “Ancestral Voices,” ASS 12, no. 4 (December 1933): 70–83. 69. See various letters, ASS 12, no. 5 (January 1934); ASS 12, no. 6 (February 1934). 70. Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” Collier’s, June 28, 1952, 20–27. 71. These historical ripples are sometimes referred to, incorrectly, as the “butterfly effect.” Edward Lorenz, an early contributor to chaos theory, coined the term, which refers to examples within nonlinear mathematics where small changes in initial conditions have large and consequential effects, in a 1972 talk, “Predictability: Can the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” While the butterfly effect and alternative history share common concerns, they are not directly related. Repetition of their assumed connection in recent popular culture, however, has led to their association. Originally unpublished, Lorenz’s talk appears as an appendix in Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos. 72. Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” 23, 24, 27. 73. L. Sprague de Camp’s “Lest Darkness Falls” and “The Wheels of If ” explored alternative histories in the past, while his “A Gun for Dinosaur” was a response to Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”; see Allen B. Debus, Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 92–94. Robert Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps,” published under the pseudonym Anson McDonald, explored time-travel paradoxes he developed more fully later in “—All You Zombies—.” See L. Sprague de Camp, “Lest Darkness Falls,” Unknown 2, no. 4 (December 1939); L. Sprague de Camp, “The Wheels of If,” Unknown Fantasy Fiction 4, no. 2 (October 1940); L. Sprague de Camp, “A Gun for Dinosaur,” Galaxy Science Fiction 11, no. 5 (March 1956); Anson McDonald, “By His Bootstraps,” ASS 28, no. 2 (October 1941); and Robert Heinlein, “—All You Zombies—,” Fantasy and Science Fiction 16, no. 3 (March 1959). 74. Michio Kaku, Physics of the Impossible (New York: Anchor, 2009); Michio Kaku, Einstein’s Cosmos (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). 75. Kurt Gödel, “An Example of a New Type of Cosmological Solution to Einstein’s Field Equations of Gravitation,” Reviews in Modern Physics 21 (1949): 447–50; Albert Einstein, “Reply to Criticisms,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1949; repr., New York: MJF Books, 2001); Isaacson, Einstein, 510–11; Palle Yourgrau, Gödel Meets Einstein (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); Palle Yourgrau, A World without Time (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 76. Debus, Dinosaurs in Fantastic Fiction, 95–96 makes the same observation. 77. “Revolution” originally referred to the orbits of the planets and the sun around the earth in Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmological model. Publication of Copernicus’s De

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revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres) in 1543 marked a shift to a heliocentric view and, in inaugurating the “scientific revolution,” also gave rise to the sense of revolution as an epochal shift in human affairs. The word’s use in the phrase “Glorious Revolution,” referring to William of Orange’s ascendance to the English throne in the seventeenth century, marked its first political use. The phrase “scientific revolution” first appeared in Alexandre Koyré, Études Galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1939). See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957); I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 78. For various perspectives on natural history, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Pantheon, 1983); and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). 79. Hugo Gernsback, “$300.00 Prize Contest: Wanted: A Symbol for ‘Scientifiction,’” AS 3, no. 1 (April 1928): 5. See also Gary Westfahl, “Wanted: A Symbol for Science Fiction,” SFS 22, no. 1 (March 1995): 1–21. 80. Raymond Williams, “Utopia and Science Fiction,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 209. 81. William Gibson, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in Mirrorshades, ed. Bruce Sterling (New York: Arbor House, 1986), 1–3. See also Andrew Ross, “Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 411–33, also published as chap. 3 of Andrew Ross, Strange Weather (London and New York: Verso, 1991). 82. Williams, “Utopia and Science Fiction,” 209. He writes, “while the utopian transformation is social and moral, the science-fiction transformation, in its dominant Western modes, is at once beyond and beneath: not social and moral but natural; in effect, as so widely in Western thought since the late nineteenth century, a mutation at the point of otherwise intolerable exposure and crisis: not so much a new life as a new species, a new nature.” 83. Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin, The World beyond the Hill (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989), 170–88 and passim; Clarke, Astounding Days, passim; Michael Ashley, ed., The History of Science Fiction Magazines, vol. 1, 1926–35 (London: New English Library, 1974), 17 and passim. Reminiscing about his first encounter with the cover of a science fiction pulp, Clarke, Astounding Days, 12, observed, “They don’t make spaceships like that any more.” 84. Ross, “Getting Out of the Gernsback Continuum,” passim. 85. Bakhtin observed, “the answerable act is, after all, the actualization of a decision– inescapably, irremediably, and irrevocably. . . . The performed act constitutes a going out once and for all from within possibility as such into what is once-occurrent”; see Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 28–29.

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Chapter 7 1. Eric C. Hopkins, “A Letter from One Who Seems to Like Us in Spite of Our Many Short-comings,” AS 12, no. 1 (February 1938): 138. 2. Frederik Pohl, The Way the Future Was (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978), 26–27. 3. Robert Coulson, “Fandom as a Way of Life,” in Science Fiction Fandom, ed. Joe Sanders (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), 11–14. 4. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 13. 5. John Mackay, “Wanted—A Young Men’s Science Club,” AS 2, no. 5 (August 1927): 515. 6. Charles D. Hornig, “Amazing Stories in the School: A Most Interesting Letter from a Young Reader,” AS 6, no. 7 (October 1931): 668. 7. E. C. Love, Jr., “Notes on Reprints and a Compliment to Dr. Smith: A New Science Club for Young Members,” AS 7, no. 10 (January 1933): 959. 8. N. S. Jenkins, “The New Zealand Science Fiction Association,” AS 9, no. 9 (January 1935): 136. 9. Van Horn Fabricus, “The ‘Association of Interplanetary Engineers,’” AS 7, no. 2 (May 1932): 86. 10. See, for instance, Nathan Schachner, “A Letter from the Secretary of the American Interplanetary Society,” AS 6, no. 6 (September 1931): 574; Nathan Schachner, “The American Interplanetary Society,” WS 3, no. 1 (June 1931): 134; Nathan Schachner, “For Rocket Fans,” ASS 7, no. 1 (July 1931): 136. On interwar rocketry groups, see Frank H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983); William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (Malabar, Fla.: Robert E. Krieger, 1983); Michael J. Neufeld, “Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology: The Rocketry and Spaceflight Fad in Germany, 1923–1933,” Technology and Culture 31 (October 1990): 725–52; and Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 26, 43, 77. 11. On the Cleveland Rocket Society, see John Tascher, “U.S. Rocket Society Number Two: The Story of the Cleveland Rocket Society,” Technology and Culture 7 (Winter 1966): 48–63. AIS/ARS correspondence records, box 6, 8, 9, GEP, discuss their relations with the rocket societies in Cleveland, in Peoria, and at Yale. 12. Henry Ackerman, “A New Science Club: Scientifiction Association for Boys,” AS 9, no. 6 (October 1934): 140. 13. Drawing on his personal experience and extensive correspondence with members of the science fiction community, Sam Moskowitz has reconstructed these origins in great detail; see Sam Moskowitz, “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom: A Reconstruction,” in Science Fiction Fandom, ed. Sanders, 28–32. 14. The name was later changed to the Golden Gate Science Fiction Club, then to the Golden Gate Scientific Association, and even later back to the Eastbay Scientific Association, perhaps reflecting the changing geographic location of its members. 15. Some members of the original ESCC did not want to merge with the SCC, so

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willing members formed an additional club that merged with the SCC. See Moskowitz, “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom,” 29. 16. Walter Dennis and Sydney Gerson, “More about the Science Club: An Interesting Account of Its Progress,” AS 4, no. 10 (January 1930): 979–80. 17. In 1930 in Amazing alone, “Discussions” included letters from several members: Raymond A. Palmer, “The Science Correspondence Club,” AS 5, no. 1 (April 1930): 82; Sidney Gerson, “The S.C.C. and Amazing Stories, Comments on the Magazine as It Now Appears,” AS 5, no. 1 (April 1930): 82, 85; E. W. Smith, “Something about the Correspondence Club—Theory of the Aurora Borealis,” AS 5, no. 1 (April 1930): 86; A. M. MacDermott, “The Science Correspondence Club,” AS 5, no. 3 (June 1930): 279; F. B. Eason, “The Science Correspondence Club, Atlanta Branch,” AS 5, no. 6 (July 1930): 371, 373; and F. B. Eason, “The Science Correspondence Club,” AS 5, no. 8 (November 1930): 757. 18. Allen Glasser, “Scienceers Reorganize, as the Outgrowth of the Original ‘Science Correspondence Club,’” AS 7, no. 11 (February 1933): 1049. 19. Moskowitz, “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom,” 31. 20. Harry Warner, Jr., credits Louis Russell Chauvenet with coining the term “fanzine” in the late 1930s to replace “fanmag,” used earlier; see Harry Warner, Jr., “A History of Fanzines,” in Science Fiction Fandom, ed. Sanders, 175. 21. Moskowitz, “The Origins of Science Fiction Fandom,” 30–32. 22. Robert A. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” in Science Fiction Fandom, ed. Sanders, 39. 23. Warner, “A History of Fanzines,” 176. 24. See, for instance, one reader’s letter advertising his new fanzine: Allen Glasser, “A Letter from the Editor of The Time Traveler—A Science Fiction Magazine,” AS 7, no. 10 (January 1933): 958. 25. T. Bruce Yerke’s correspondence, in the possession of the author, includes a number of letters detailing his involvement with the Technocracy movement. 26. John V. Baltadonis, Philadelphia, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, March 20, 1937, in the possession of the author. 27. Baltadonis to Yerke, March 20, 1937. 28. John V. Baltadonis, Philadelphia, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, May 18, 1937, in the possession of the author. 29. Baltadonis to Yerke, May 18, 1937. 30. Robert A. Madle, “My Pal Johnnie,” Mimosa 23 (January 1999): 33–36, available online, http://www.jophan.org/mimosa/m23/madle.htm. 31. Baltadonis to Yerke, May 18, 1937. 32. Madle, “My Pal Johnnie”; Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 48–49. 33. John V. Baltadonis, Philadelphia, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, June 15, 1937, in the possession of the author. 34. Wilson Shepard of Oakman, Alabama, produced the Bulletin. 35. Although hectographs and mimeographs both used typed carbons as the transfer medium, hectograph ink was purple, while mimeograph ink was black. See Edmund

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C. Hanley, “Double-Surfaced Hectograph Speeds Up Duplication Work,” Popular Science 135, no. 5 (November 1939): 193; Edith Louise Allen, Mechanical Devices in the Home (Peoria, Ill.: Manual Arts Press, 1922), chap. 26, 207–8; and Milburn Price Doss, Information Processing Equipment (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1955). 36. Harry Warner, Jr., All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969), 283. 37. John V. Baltadonis, Philadelphia, to T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, May 3, 1937, in the possession of the author. 38. Baltadonis to Yerke, May 18, 1937. 39. Glasser, “Scienceers Reorganize,” 1049. 40. Clifton Amsbury, “Evolution and Heredity: Neo-Darrowism—Telepathy, a Rather Profound Letter,” AS 7, no. 2 (May 1932): 188–89. 41. Donald Wollheim, July 1937 FAPA mailing; Warner, “A History of Fanzines,” 177. 42. Great Staple War letters were in ASS vol. 14, no. 5, to vol. 16, no. 5. They include Bob (Dictator) Tucker, “Rubber Staples and Doughnuts” (January 1935): 157; Bob (Dictator) Tucker, “The SPWSSTFM Reports!” and Jack Speer, “Here It Is” (March 1935): 156, 157; Donald A. Wollheim, F. J. A. High Cocolorum, Kenneth Sterling, D. T. G., High Booleywag, “Tucker Beware” (April 1935), 156; Bob (Dictator) Tucker, “Chewing Gum” (May 1935): 156; L. P. Wakefield, “Warning to Tucker!”; Tom Jackson, “It’s a Democracy!”; and R. M. Holland, Jr., Grand Bozzywoz, SPSSWDMAWIOFPOTUOHT IPTC-OSTFPITQNOPPAF, “Microscopes and Fieldglasses!” (June 1935): 156–57; Phillip McKiernan, “Attention, Dictator Tucker!”; Ross Wilson, Jr., “The Search for Tucker!”; and Sammy Dirkens, “Tucker, America, and SPWSSTFM!” (July 1935): 154–55, 157; Arthur R. Mink, S. F. P. S.—Society for the Prevention of Societies, “A Blast of Comment!”; Bob (Dictator) Tucker, “The Dictator Replies!”; Leroy Christian Bashore, “The Last Word!”; Forrest J. Ackerman, “Impressions!”; and Donald A. Wollheim, “Tucker, Betrayed!” (August 1935): 155, 157, 159; D-456, “A Call to Arms!”; Raymond Hood, Jr., “Appearances Count!”; Bob (Dictator) Tucker, “Tucker Takes It!”; n.a., “Drama!”; SPWSSTFM member 33, Secret Service Agent No. 1, “Attack!”; and R. M. Holland, Jr., “Mastication!” (September 1935): 152–54, 158; Phillip McKiernan, “Pfui, Pfui!”; Wm. G. Dexter, “Welcome!”; Frank Driggers, “Sequels Surpass!”; E. H. Lichtig, “Three-Dimensional Effect!”; John Crockett, “Take Out the Wire Staples!”; and William L. Hathaway, “Comfort!” (October 1935): 154–59; Bob (Dictaphone) Califf, “Balance—But Not for Tucker!” (November 1935): 154; Ralph Schroeder, “Serial Salvation!”; Randall O’Brien, “Another Problem!”; Milton A. Rothman, Member AP-385-FS APSFMATRSTFS, “An Argument for Argument!”; Mephisto, “Enter—the Referee!”; William V. Kenney (Dictator of Helvania), “It Behooveth and Puzzleth; Dale Tarr, “‘Tarred’ and Feathered!”; Joe Waterman, “It’s the Story That Counts!”; R. M. Tobey, “On Degenerate Brickbatting”; and Bob (Dictator) Tucker, “Gold Bricks and Platinum Staples!” (November 1935): 154–59; Lionel Dilbeck, “Will Science-Fiction Go Poetic?” (December 1935): 155–56; Anne Smidley, “‘I Will Answer Them All’—Bob”; D. C. Thomas, “Problems Answered!”; Francis L. Ellissen, A. Ward, R. H. Spiers, J. A. Comer, Tony Lupino, Micheline Sureine, “Only a Few Requests!”; L. M. Jenson, “Wants Superscience!”; and Arthur R. Mink, “The Welsh Attack!” (January 1936): 153–57.

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43. Smidley, “I Will Answer them All–Bob” and editorial prologue and response, 153. 44. Hugo Gernsback, “The Science Fiction League: An Announcement,” WS 5, no. 9 (April 1934): 933; Hugo Gernsback, “The Science Fiction League,” WS 5, no. 10 (May 1934): 1062; also cited in Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 42–43. 45. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 25. 46. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 42. 47. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 16. 48. Differing accounts and interpretations of the events exist with their authors on various sides at the time. For perspectives from fans associated with New Fandom, see Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II”; and Sam Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1954). For perspectives from members of the Futurians, see Pohl, The Way the Future Was; and Damon Knight, The Futurians (New York: John Day, 1977). 49. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 43–44; Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 42. Madle refers to the ILSF as the Brooklyn League for Science Fiction. 50. Knight, The Futurians, 11–12. 51. Donald A. Wollheim, “A Science-Fiction Convention,” AS 12, no. 2 (April 1938): 143. 52. Knight, The Futurians, 39. 53. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 51; Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm; Ray Bradbury, who attended, later wrote an article for DC Comics about the Coney Island trip entitled “The Greatest Night of My Life.” 54. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 51; “Amazing! Astounding!,” Time, July 10, 1939, 32. 55. Knight, The Futurians, 14. 56. Though there is significant overlap between “Michelists” and members of the Futurians, the two were not the same. 57. Paper insert, Science-Fiction Advance 1 (July–August 1938): 2, SFACA. 58. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1997), 225–26, includes the Futurians in what Denning calls the “cultural front” in the 1930s. 59. “What Is Michelism?,” Science-Fiction Advance 1 (July–August 1938): 2, SFACA. 60. “What Is Michelism?,” 2. 61. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 53. 62. David H. Keller, “The Threat of the Robot,” SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 73. 63. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 49. Wollheim carried on the discussion at a furious pace with a variety of correspondents, including Yerke. 64. T. Bruce Yerke, Los Angeles, to Donald Wollheim, New York, December 11, 1938, in the possession of the author. 65. Donald Wollheim, “‘New Fandom’ versus True Fandom,” MSA Bulletin 4, no. 1 (September 1939), SFACA. 66. Yerke to Wollheim, December 11, 1938. Yerke shared Wollheim’s political leanings and sympathized with Michelism, but thought its basic premise impractical.

Notes to Pages 240–249

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67. Donald Wollheim, “Fanfarade,” Science Fiction Fan 3, no. 12 (July 1939), SFACA 68. The Futurian exclusion became part of later fan tradition and terminology, spawning the idea of a “fakefan” and earning Sykora the epithet “anti-fan.” See Wollheim, “‘New Fandom’ Versus True Fandom.” 69. Frederik Pohl, Marvel Science Stories 1, no. 5 (August 1939): 108. 70. Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 106. 71. Lawrence W. Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Review 97 (December 1992): 1369–99, discusses similar oral traditions that developed within radio culture. 72. Hugo Gernsback, “The $500 Cover Prize Contest,” AS 2, no. 3 (June 1927): 213. 73. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Over My Shoulder (Philadelphia: Oswald Train, 1983), 47, 49–50. 74. Sam Moskowitz, “Superman,” in Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961), 114. 75. Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow, 110–77. Among Solar Sales Services’ early clients were the following: Henry L. Hasse, David H. Keller, P. Schuyler Miller, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Alfred Bester, Eando Binder, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, John Russell Fearn, and Manly Wade Wellman. John Clute and Peter Nichol, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993), s.v. “Julius Schwartz,” 1060. 76. The debate continues, with various proponents, within science fiction and other forms of fandom to this day. 77. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 78. 78. Madle, “Fandom Up to World War II,” 51. 79. His stories under this pseudonym engaged more immediate social issues, unlike the intergalactic adventure romps he had written under his own name. 80. For a detailed discussion of science fiction fandom during the 1940s, see Warner, All Our Yesterdays. 81. Pohl, The Way the Future Was, 43–44. Science fiction “apas,” though similar in some respects, differ from the press associations formed by NAPA and UAPA, which are known as “ajays,” short for “amateur journalism.” Harry Warner, however, argues that Wollheim had not heard of “amateur journalism” when he first conceived of the APA. See Bernadette Bosky, “Amateur Press Associations: Intellectual Society and Social Intellectualism,” in Science Fiction Fandom, ed. Sanders, 182. 82. Warner, “A History of Fanzines,” 176. 83. Warner, All Our Yesterdays, 191. 84. Bosky, “Amateur Press Associations,” 181–96. 85. Michael Ashley, ed., The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, vol. 1, 1926–35 (Lon­don: New English Library, 1974), 44. 86. Warner, All Our Yesterdays, 76. 87. Hugo Gernsback, “Wonders of Distribution,” WS 7, no. 8 (March–April 1936): 901.

362

Notes to Pages 251–253 Chapter 8

1. Arthur C. Clarke, “The Challenge of the Spaceship,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (December 1946): 68. 2. Nathan Schachner, “A Letter from the Secretary of the American Interplanetary Society,” AS 6, no. 6 (September 1931): 574; Nathan Schachner, “The American Interplanetary Society,” WS 3, no. 1 (June 1931): 134; Nathan Schachner, “For Rocket Fans,” ASS 7, no. 1 (July 1931): 136. 3. After Goddard removed himself to New Mexico, he continued a private involvement in science fiction, writing several admiring letters to Wells: R. H. Goddard to H. G. Wells, April 20, 1932 and September 29, 1936, PRHG 2:821, 1026. 4. Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 258. 5. Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1966), 136, 376; Harry Warner, Jr., All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969), 29. 6. The AIS incorporated in New York state, listing David Lasser, G. Edward Pendray, Laurence Manning, Nathan Schachner, and Charles P. Mason as its members. See Certificate of Incorporation, 1930, State of New York, box 2, GEP. 7. Amazing Detective Tales, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Wonder Stories Quarterly. See among many science fiction indices, Donald B. Day, Index to the Science-Fiction Magazines, 1926–1950 (Portland: Perri Press, 1952). 8. Their publications for Science Wonder Stories included Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat, “In 20,000 a.d.!,” WS 2, no. 4 (September 1930): 311–23; Nathan Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat, “Back to 20,000 a.d.,” WS 2, no. 10 (March 1931): 1121– 51; Nathan Schachner, “Ancestral Voices,” ASS 12, no. 4 (December 1933): 70–83; Irvin Lester and Fletcher Pratt, “The Reign of the Ray,” two-part serial, SWS 1, no. 1 (June 1929): 6–33, and no. 2 (July 1929): 120–31; Laurence Manning and Fletcher Pratt, “The City of the Living Dead,” SWS 1, no. 12 (May 1930): 1100–1107, 1136–37; Laurence Manning, “The Man Who Awoke,” WS 4, no. 10 (March 1933): 756–67, 796; William Lemkin, Ph.D., “The Doom of Lun-Dhag,” AS 7, no. 8 (November 1932): 678–702; William Lemkin, Ph.D., “Isle of the Gargoyles,” WS 7, no. 7 (February 1936): 820–53, 877. 9. Their work in Science Wonder included Epaminondas T. Snooks, “Why the Heavens Fell,” WS 3, no. 12 (May 1932): 1374–78; and Gawain Edwards, “A Rescue from Jupiter,” SWS 1, nos. 9–10 (February 1930): 774–87, and (March 1930): 910–25, 933. 10. Frank H. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), vii–xv, 73. 11. Sam Moskowitz maintained that Fitzgerald was the only known and active black science fiction fan during the 1920s and 1930s. Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1974), 11; and letter from Moskowitz to Frank H. Winter, November 22, 1974, G. Edward Pendray biographic file, NASM. Pendray remembered otherwise, but even if he had been black, Fitzgerald “certainly would have been welcome.” Frank H. Winter, interview with G. Edward Pendray, January 30, 1976, 3, G. Edward Pendray biographic file, NASM; and AIS files, box 2, GEP.

Notes to Pages 253–256

363

12. David Lasser, President’s Annual Report to the American Interplanetary Society, April 13, 1931, box 1, GEP. 13. According to Sam Moskowitz, Gernsback was principally responsible for the formation of the AIS: “Gernsback apparently had no motive in mind other than advancing science.” Moskowitz to Winter, November 22, 1974, G. Edward Pendray biographic file, NASM. 14. Joseph Corn, The Winged Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Fred Erisman, Boys’ Books, Boys Dreams, and the Mystique of Flying (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2006); Fred Erisman, From Birdwomen to Skygirls: American Girls’ Aviation Stories (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2009); John William Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly 10 (Spring 1958): 3–16; Michael J. Neufeld, “Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology: The Rocketry and Spaceflight Fad in Germany, 1923–1933,” Technology and Culture 31, no. 4 (October 1990): 725–52. 15. Purpose and Constitution of the American Interplanetary Society, box 1, GEP. 16. Robert Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). 17. Edward V. Rickenbacker, Ace Drummond (Racine, Wisc.: Whitman Publishing, 1935); Walter David Lewis, Eddie Rickenbacker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 18. King Kong (RKO Radio Pictures, 1933); Wohl, The Spectacle of Flight, 302–3. 19. On the founding of the Science Service, the first science news service, see Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971); Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science Our Own (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); David J. Rhees, “A New Voice for Science: Science Service under Edwin E. Slosson, 1921–29” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1979), chap 2, pt. 3; David J. Rhees, “Public Images of Science in America: Science News-Letter, 1922–1929,” May 23, 1977, essay, reprinted on Science Service website, http://scienceservice.si.edu/essay/index.htm 20. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83–109, esp. 87–89. 21. Its evocation of adventure to enhance its information was the converse of interwar science fiction’s use of fact to advance its fiction. 22. G. Edward Pendray, Vice-President’s Annual Report to the American Interplanetary Society, April 13, 1931, box, 1, GEP. 23. Lasser, President’s Annual Report, 1931. 24. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” Social Science Information 14 (1975): 19–47. 25. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis, rev. ed. (1989; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 138, 139; Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (New York: Knopf, 1977).

364

Notes to Pages 256–259

26. Claudia Goldin, “America’s Graduation from High School: The Evolution and Spread of Secondary Schooling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Economic History 58 (June 1998): 345–74; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary Schooling in America, 1910–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 683–723. 27. Lasser, President’s Annual Report, 1931, 8–9. 28. Milton Lehman, This High Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 169; also cited in William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger, 1983), 125. See also correspondence between David Lasser and R. H. Goddard, April 1930, PRHG, 2:735. 29. Of the surviving records, fifteen scientists returned cards to the AIS. All indicated their interest in the Bulletin, six inquired about membership, seven declined it, and two did not comment. See box 2, GEP. 30. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1996). 31. David Dietz, “Four Billion Miles by Rocket,” Cincinnati Post, May 16–22, 1933. 32. April 13, 1930, clippings from New York American, New York Herald Tribune, and New York World, box 2, GEP. 33. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, 74. See also April 29, 1930, clippings from New York American and New York Herald Tribune and May 1, 1930, clippings from New York American, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune, box 2, GEP. 34. The AIS library included works by Goddard, Albert Ingalls, Clyde Fisher, Henry Norris Russell, John Q. Stewart, and others, mostly from magazine articles, various boxes, GEP. Fisher, who had ties to Hugo Gernsback and served on the scientific advisory board for Wonder Stories, helped the society gain access to the AMNH. They paid five dollars per meeting for the room and two dollars for the attendants. See receipts for November 21, 1930, and December 5, 1930, meetings, box 1, GEP. 35. Lecture manuscripts, various boxes, GEP. 36. G. Edward Pendray to H. Franklin Pierce, December 12, 1932, box 4, GEP. 37. Esnault-Pelterie not only became a member; he also presented the AIS with an autographed copy of his recently published book, L’Astronautique, and donated the American rights to it to the society. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, 75. 38. Neufeld, “Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology,” 738–41. 39. “Two Thousand at Museum Meeting,” Bulletin of the American Interplanetary Society 8 (February 1931): 1. 40. New York Herald Tribune clipping, January 31, 1931, box 2, GEP. 41. They constituted different forms of symbolic or cultural capital. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). 42. John Huntington, Rationalizing Genius (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Warren Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in Culture as History (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 271–85; Leo Lowenthal,

Notes to Pages 259–264

365

“The Triumph of Mass Idols,” in Literature, Popular Culture, and Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 109–40. 43. G. Edward Pendray, “The First Quarter Century of the American Rocket Society,” Jet Propulsion 25 (November 1955): 586–88. 44. The VfR benefited from similar publicity, and they too were aided by their relationship with the German science fiction writer Otto Willi Gail. See Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, 36. 45. Pendray, “The First Quarter Century,” 586–88. 46. They printed five thousand copies of Conquest of Space initially. A British press, Hurst & Blackett, published a new edition in 1932, and Penguin Press in New York also later published the volume. See Tom D. Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers (Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2006), 35. 47. The members of the society admitted that their expertise was theoretical and not as yet demonstrable, but Langer did not share their concern. “For fictional purposes such as those involved in the production of the motion picture,” he wrote them, “it does not seem to me to be a serious criticism that technique is presupposed which does not exist in actual practice. To my mind, it suffices to have the technique sound in principle”; see R. M. Langer to G. Edward Pendray, July 6, 1933, box 5, GEP. 48. G. Edward Pendray to R. M. Langer, Paramount Productions, Inc., July 13, 1933, box 5, GEP. 49. Notes on radio appearances, box 4, GEP. 50. Macy-Bamberger Boys’ Club radio script, February 19, 1932, 4, box 4, GEP. 51. Macy-Bamberger Boys’ Club radio scripts, February 19, 1932, and April 8, 1932, box 4, GEP. 52. Schachner, “A Letter from the Secretary of the American Interplanetary Society,” AS, 574; Schachner, “The American Interplanetary Society,” WS, 134; Schachner, “For Rocket Fans,” ASS, 136. 53. H. R. Hinkley to AIS, July 18, 1931, E. W. St. Luke to AIS, August 28, 1931, and Arnold Gutierrez Vogel to AIS, November 10, 1931, box 2, GEP; C. P. Mason, Report of the Secretary—1930–31, 1, box 3, and AIS membership correspondence files, 1930–31, box 2, GEP. 54. Bulletin (May 1931): 1, box 4, GEP. 55. Photo and caption, press clippings, box 6, GEP. 56. Photo and caption, box 3, GEP. 57. Leslie Johnson, BIS, to G. Edward Pendray, May 10, 1936, includes notice about the efforts of the Australian Rocket Society, box 6, GEP. 58. Bulletin (May 1931): 5–9, box 4, GEP. 59. Robert H. Goddard, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 71, no. 2 (1919): 1–69. 60. Robert Goddard, “How My Speed Rocket Can Propel Itself in a Vacuum,” Popular Science (September 1924): 38. 61. Pendray, “The First Quarter Century,” 588.

366

Notes to Pages 264–273

62. “for release Tuesday morning, November 15,” 1932, box, 2, GEP. 63. G. Edward Pendray, “The History of the First A.I.S. Rocket,” Astronautics 2, no. 24 (November–December 1932): 3, 4. 64. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Thomas Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 65. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 25 and chap. 2; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 66. Bruno Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” in Science Observed, ed. Karen Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay (London: Sage, 1983), 141–70; Latour, Science in Action, passim. 67. Michael Benson points out the processing required to produce color photographs from the raw data received from space probes and telescopes in his book Beyond: Visions of the Interplantary Probes (New York: Abrams, 2008). 68. “for release Tuesday morning, November 15,” 1, box, 2, GEP. 69. Pendray, “The History of the First A.I.S. Rocket,” 2, 4. 70. On virtual witnesses, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 60. 71. G. Edward Pendray, “The Flight of Experimental Rocket No. 2,” Astronautics 3, no. 26 (May 1933): 3–10. 72. Pendray, “The Flight of Experimental Rocket No. 2,” 10–11. 73. Pendray, “The Flight of Experimental Rocket No. 2,” 2. 74. See typed list, box 4, GEP. 75. Correspondence between G. Edward Pendary and Harry Cohen, November 19, 1932, and August 22, 1933, box 4, GEP; “Pictures of the Rocket Flight,” Astronautics 3, no. 26 (May 1933): 11; Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, 78. 76. Box 4, GEP. 77. AIS news clippings, box 4, GEP. 78. G. Edward Pendray, “Rockets to the Moon,” Elks (October 1931); G. Edward Pendray, “What’s in the Rocket?,” Scientific American 151, no. 1 (July 1934): 10–12. 79. Fletcher Pratt, “Rockets to the Planets,” Scientific Progress (1933): 99–103; Harry Bull, “Mysterious New Aircraft Powered by Reaction Motor,” Popular Science Monthly (January 1935): 27; Ugo Andres (G. Edward Pendray), “Men of Space,” New Outlook 164 (October 1934): 26–33; Morris Markey, “Skyrockets,” New Yorker, April 6, 1935, 37–46. 80. Pendray, “What’s in the Rocket?,” 12. Goddard had already contested the AIS’s claims on several occasions. See R. H. Goddard to G. Edward Pendray, May 29, 1931, printed in Bulletin 1, no. 10 (June–July 1931): 9 and reprinted in PRHG, 2:795, and Goddard correspondence with AIS, box 4, GEP. 81. P. E. Cleator, Rockets through Space or the Dawn of Interplanetary Travel (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1936), 166. See Cleator’s detailed account of AIS’s experimental program, 146–49, 159–76. 82. Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, 82.

Notes to Pages 274–283

367

83. “Three New Rockets Being Built,” Astronautics 3, no. 27 (October 1933): 1–8. 84. “Rocket Experiments of 1934,” Astronautics 4, no. 29 (September 1934): 1–3, 9; “The Flight of Rocket No. 4,” Astronautics 4, no. 30 (October–November 1934): 1–2, 12. 85. “Test Report on Rocket No. 3,” Astronautics 4, no. 30 (October–November 1934): 5. 86. Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, 42. 87. “Three New Rockets Being Built,” 1, 8. The tests were probably not conducted because of Pierce and Carver’s more marginal position within the organization. 88. G. Edward Pendray, “A Proposal for the Establishment of a Fund for Rocket Research with the Object of Developing High-Altitude Rockets for Scientific and Meteorological Investigation,” box 6, GEP. 89. “Gain in Membership Matches Striking Improvement in Experimental Technique,” Astronautics 5, no. 31 (June 1935): 2. 90. Alfred Africano, “The Design of a Stratosphere Rocket,” Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences 3, no. 8 (June 1936): 287–90. 91. “Gain in Membership Matches Striking Improvement in Experimental Technique,” 2; “Report on Motor Tests of June 2nd,” Astronautics 5, no. 32 (October 1935): 3–4, 20; “Rocket Motor Tests of October 20, 1935,” Astronautics 6, no. 34 (June 1936): 5, 13, 20; Pendray, “The First Quarter Century,” 591. 92. “Rocket Explodes in Westchester, Huge Projectile’s Blast Is Heard for Miles,” New York Sun, August 26, 1935; “Motor for Rocket Explodes in Tests,” New York Times, August 26, 1935. 93. G. Edward Pendray to Walter Guptil, Phoenix Mutual Life Company, September 4, 1935, box 7, GEP. 94. “Rocket Motor Tests of October 20, 1935,” 5, 13, 20. 95. Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, 44. 96. “Woman Injured in Rocket Blast,” New York Times, October 22, 1935. The society’s final audit listed their respective contributions: ARS, $150; Alfred Africano, G. Edward Pendray, and Peter van Dresser, $325 each; John Shesta, $300; and James Wyld [sic], $50. “Ramona Jennings Fund, Final Audit,” box 8, GEP. 97. ARS press release, June 29, 1936, box 8, GEP. The aerospace historian Frank Winter observed, “In retrospect, this work turned out to be far more significant than the flights. Much valuable data was gained and led to major developments that were of benefit to the entire country”; Winter, Prelude to the Space Age, 83. 98. Africano, “The Design of a Stratosphere Rocket,” 287. 99. Africano, “The Design of a Stratosphere Rocket,” 290. 100. C. P. Mason, Report of the Secretary—1930–31, 3, box 3, GEP. 101. Edward Spier, Anacortes, Wash., to AIS, December 28, 1931, Vincent Anyzeski, New Haven, Conn., to ARS, August 19, 1934, Ruth Nichols, Rye, N.Y., to ARS, September 8, 1934, and Stuart Ayers, Lewiston, Idaho, to ARS, July 1934, boxes 5–6, GEP. 102. Nichols to ARS, September 8, 1934, S. K. Hudgens, Decatur, Ga., to ARS, November 14, 1934, and Albert Trube, Austin, Tex., to AIS, September 9, 1931, box 2, 6, GEP.

368

Notes to Pages 284–291

103. George Murphy, Detroit, Mich., to AIS, November 16, 1931, and George A. Barker, Washington, D.C., to ARS, November 12, 1934, box 2, 6, GEP. 104. A. F. Nickolas, Harrisburg, Penn., to ARS, October 1934, Julius Wagner, New York, N.Y., to ARS, January 24, 1934, Wilfred Moss, Kewanee, Ill., to ARS, August 21, 1934, and Robert W. Biach, New Haven, Conn., to AIS, June 27, 1933, box 5, 6, GEP. 105. Various Willy Ley files, GEP. 106. Bulletin 9 (May 1930): 5. 107. Goddard notarized a statement stipulating the details of his various rocket experiments on March 16, 1926; April 3, 1926; December 26, 1928; and December 30, 1930, including the witnesses who were present. Notary statement, 1935, box 2, RHG. 108. G. Edward Pendray to Robert H. Goddard, June 9, 1931, box 4, GEP. 109. H. H. Morris, Hampton, Va., to ARS, July 14, 1934, and ARS reply to Morris, July 16, 1934, box 6, GEP. 110. Harry C. Rowe, Berkeley, Calif., to ARS, November 29, 1934, box 6, GEP. 111. Pendray, “The History of the First A.I.S. Rocket,” 3. 112. Pendray, “The History of the First A.I.S. Rocket,” 3. 113. Felix B. Wadel, Tyler, Tex., to AIS, March 12, 1934, Bill Bailey, Pittsburgh, Pa., to AIS, January 13, 1933, Otto B. Dellermann, Spokane, Wash., March 16, 1933, John L’H. Crosson to AIS, December 21, 1933, and Alfred Africano, New York, N.Y., to AIS, April 16, 1934, box 5, 6, GEP. 114. “Rocket Ice Boat to Be Tested,” New York Sun, March 6, 1931, box 4, GEP; photo and caption, press clippings, box 6, GEP. 115. “Mysterious New Aircraft Powered by Reaction Motor,” Popular Science Monthly (January 1935): 27; G. Edward Pendray to Harry Bull, October 3, 1934, box 6, GEP. 116. Byron Prugh, New Brunswick, N.J., to Samuel Lichtenstein, April 22, 1935, various B. K. Goree, correspondence, George G. Clark, Brooklyn, N.Y., to ARS, September 30, 1935, and November 30, 1935, box 5, 6, GEP; Nathan Carver, “The American Rocket Society,” ASS 13, no. 6 (August 1934): 156. 117. Stuart Ayers, for instance, wrote to the Society after seeing Carver’s letter. Ayers, to ARS, July 1934, box 6, GEP. 118. Melville Irvine Seath, Minneapolis, Minn., October 24, 1934, and ARS response, box 6, GEP. 119. ARS to Frederick I. Harmon, Houston, Tex., August 21, 1937, and ARS by-law amendment 1938, box 9, GEP. 120. Membership information from Bulletin 1, no. 1 (September 1938): 4, and ARS brochure, 1939, box 10, GEP. 121. G. Edward Pendray to Kenneth Pritchard, AIS correspondence files, box 6, GEP. 122. G. Edward Pendray to A. F. Nickolas, October 29, 1934, box 6, GEP. 123. Carver correspondence, box 6, GEP. 124. Miscellaneous Pierce correspondence and board meeting notes, April 12, 1937, box 9, GEP.

Notes to Pages 291–296

369

125. Kessler file, box 9, GEP; A. Klemin, “On the Aerodynamic Principles of the Greenwood Lake Plane,” Astronautics 7, no. 36 (March 1937): 7–9. 126. G. Edward Pendray to P. E. Cleator, November 5, 1934, box 6, GEP. 127. John Tascher, “U.S. Rocket Society Number Two: The Story of the Cleveland Rocket Society,” Technology and Culture 7 (Winter 1966): 48–63; John Tascher, M.A. thesis, Case Institute of Technology, 1964, on the CRS, box 8, GEP. Several ARS members mentioned CRS in their correspondence: Mevlin C. Mawhinney, Cecil, Pa., to ARS, Aug. 12, 1935, Donald A. Wollheim, New York, N.Y., to ARS, October 4, 1935, and Ira P. Hurley, 960 Marine Street, Mobile, Ala., October 2, 1937, box 6, 9, GEP. 128. G. Edward Pendray to John Tascher regarding M.A. thesis, 1964, box 6, GEP. 129. SPACE 1, no. 1 (December 1933): 9, and SPACE 1, no. 3 (July 1934): 8–12, box 6, GEP. 130. “Affiliate Groups,” internal ARS memorandum, 1936, box 8, GEP. 131. Affiliation files, box 9, GEP. 132. Science fiction letters announcing societies, BIS files, GEP. 133. Gernsback may also have had financial reasons for firing Lasser since he replaced him with Charles Hornig for less than half Lasser’s pay. See Eric Leif Davin, Pioneers of Wonder (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), 57. 134. Report of the Secretary, Annual Meeting, April 29, 1938, 2, box 10, GEP; Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, 44. 135. Report of the Secretary, April 29, 1939, 3. 136. James H. Wyld, “Reminiscences of a Decade,” RMI Rocket 2, no. 12 (December 1951): 5, box 11, GEP. 137. Pierce papers, various boxes, GEP. 138. G. Edward Pendray to Alfred Africano, October 10, 1938, box 10, GEP; Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, 44. 139. G. Edward Pendray, “The Story of the Time Capsule,” reprinted in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (1939), 533–54, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; miscellaneous photo captions, box 1, GEP; “Rocket Demonstration at New York World’s Fair,” Astronautics 9, no. 43(August 1939): 16; Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, 45. 140. ARS to Frederick I. Harmon, Houston, Tex., August 21, 1937, box 9, GEP; American Rocket Society informational pamphlet (1939), 2, box 10, GEP; ARS by-law amendment 1938, box 10, GEP. 141. John Shesta, H. Franklin Pierce, and James Wyld, “Report on the 1938 Rocket Motor Tests,” Astronautics 9, no. 42 (February 1939): 2–6. 142. Board of Directors meeting, April 14, 1939, minutes, cited in Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, 45; liability waiver form, June 8, 1941, box 11, GEP. 143. Alfred Africano, “New Model Stability Tests,” Astronautics 9, no. 44 (November 1939): 1; John Shesta, “Powder Flight Tests,” Astronautics 10, no. 45 (April 1940): 3; Pierce launch invitation, box 10, GEP.

370

Notes to Pages 296–302

144. Wyld, “Reminiscences of a Decade,” 5–6. 145. John Shesta and Roy Healy, “Report on Motors Tests of June 8, 1941 at Midvale,” Astronautics 11, no. 49 (August 1941): 3–5; Roy Healy and John Shesta, “Report on Motors Tests of June 22,” Astronautics 11, no. 50 (October 1941): 3–6. 146. Roy Healy, “Wyld Motor Retested,” Astronautics 11, no. 50 (October 1941): 8, box 10, GEP. 147. “Hobby Discussion Led to RMI Birth,” RMI Rocket 2, no. 12 (December 1951): 2; Wyld, “Reminiscences of a Decade,” 6; Healy and Shesta, “Report on Motors Tests of June 22,” 3–6. 148. David Lasser, “The Rocket and the Next War,” Astronautics 1, no. 13 (November 1931): 6–10; Alfred Africano, “Preliminary Design of a 3” Rocket Projectile for Aircraft,” Astronautics 11, no. 46 (July 1940): 3–5; Roy Healy, “Aerial Cannon and Rocket Shells,” Astronautics 12, no. 48 (May 1941): 3–8. 149. “Hobby Discussion Led to RMI Birth,” 2; Wyld, “Reminiscences of a Decade,” 5–6. 150. “Hobby Discussion Led to RMI Birth,” 2–4. 151. Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers. 152. Robert Heinlein, “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues,” in The Science Fiction Novel, ed. Basil Davenport (Chicago: Advent, 1969), 46. 153. Eugene M. Emme, Aeronautics and Astronautics (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1961), 26–36. 154. Pendray interview with Winter, 1. 155. H. Franklin Pierce to G. Edward Pendray, January 19, 1942, box 11, GEP. 156. Goddard to Wells, April 20, 1932, PRHG, 2:823

Epilogue 1. Reuel Denney, The Astonished Muse (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1957), 187. 2. John Dower, War without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1987), epilogue. 3. David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). 4. Robert A. Carter, “How It All Began: A Swift History of American Mass Market Paperbacks,” Publishers Weekly, May 26, 1989, S4–S8, S38; Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984); James D. Hart, The Popular Book in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950); John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 4 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981); John Tebbel, Between Covers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Frank L. Schick, The Paperback Book in America (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1958). 5. Susan Smulyan, Selling Radio (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In (New York: Times Books, 1999); Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, April 1997). 6. Allan R. Bosworth, “The Golden Age of Pulps,” Atlantic Monthly 208, no. 1 (July 1961): 57.

Notes to Pages 302–304

371

7. “All-Fiction Slick,” Newsweek, August 23, 1943, 91. 8. In 1957 the pulps’ primary distributor, American News Company, was liquidated. Mike Ashley, Transformations (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), 191; and Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 9. “Street & Smith Giving Up ‘Pulps,’” New York Times, April 9, 1949, 19. 10. Observers invoke John Kenneth Galbraith’s phrase “affluent society” to describe and celebrate postwar prosperity without noting its irony given the social disparity that was his subject and concern. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). 11. Them! (Warner Brothers Pictures, 1954); Tarantula (Universal Pictures, 1955); It Came from beneath the Sea (Columbia Pictures, 1955); Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Allied Artists Pictures, 1958). The crossover sensation Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (Embassy Pictures & TransWorld, 1956), a dubbed and edited version of Gojira (Toho Pictures, 1954), and other Japanese monster movies contributed significantly to the subgenre but also drew from a longer cultural tradition of, and interest in, mythological monsters and demons. 12. In particular see Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder,” Collier’s, June 28, 1952, 20–27; and Robert Heinlein, “—All You Zombies—,” Fantasy and Science Fiction 16, no. 3 (March 1959). A later variation of Heinlein’s story is David Gerrold, The Man Who Folded Himself (New York: Random House, 1973). 13. Nine stories that Isaac Asimov published in Astounding and Super Science Stories between 1940 and 1950 were published collectively as Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Gnome Press, 1950), including “Runaround,” ASS 29, no. 1 (March 1942), the first story explicitly relating Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” Wanting to portray robots sympathetically and nobly, Asimov aspired to move beyond the “Frankenstein complex” he believed cast robots only as mechanical monsters, not fully recognizing that the revolts of Shelley’s monster and Capek’s robots against their creators were transitional steps within their larger consideration of the nature of humanity. See Isaac Asimov, introduction, The Rest of the Robots (New York: Doubleday, 1964); and Isaac Asimov, In Memory Yet Green (New York: Doubleday, 1979), 237. 14. Kenneth Arnold first used the term “flying saucer” to describe an object he observed in Washington state in 1947. Donald Keyhoe, principal writer for Dr. Yen Sin in the mid-1930s, linked the phrase to the U.S. Air Force’s term “UFO” (short for “unidentified flying object”) in his Flying Saucers Are Real, which popularized the idea of a government conspiracy to hide the truth revealed by its investigations into such sightings. Many observers credit Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, with the term “UFO,” but it actually dates from a 1949 U.S. Air Force Project Grudge report that predates his involvement. See Lt. H. W. Smith and Mr. G. W. Towles, “Unidentified Flying Objects: Project ‘Grudge,’” Technical Report No. 102–AC 49/15–100, declassified 1998, Records of Project Blue Book 341.15, NARA. 15. The phrase “bug-eyed monster” dates from a 1939 alphabet society letter from Martin Alger to Thrilling Wonder Stories: “Speaking of the SPWSSTF, the cover inspired

372

Notes to Pages 304–308

me to organize the SFTPOBEMOTCOSFP (Society for the Prevention of Bug-Eyed Monsters on the Covers of Science-Fiction Publications)”; see Martin Alger letter, TWS 14, no. 1 (August 1939): 121–22. 16. Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly, eds., Big Science (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). 17. Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 2. The term “Big Science” comes from Alvin M. Weinberg, “Impact of Large-scale Science on the United States,” Science 134 (July 21, 1961): 164. See also Alvin M. Weinberg, Reflections on Big Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967). 18. Price, Little Science, Big Science, 87. 19. Fred Trauger, “‘Amazing Stories’ as an Inspiration to a Young Man,” AS 7, no. 10 (January 1933): 955. 20. Frederick Dale Trauger obituary, Albuquerque Journal, May 11, 2008, D9. 21. Frederick Dale Trauger Endowment Scholarship, http://www.csufresno.edu/ shcic/resources/scholarships.shtml. 22. Roy Lavender, “FIAWOL—Fandom Is a Way of Life,” unpublished manuscript, in the possession of the author, 4, 6, 7. 23. Lavender, “FIAWOL—Fandom Is a Way of Life,” 4, 5, 7. 24. Frank H. Winter and Frederick I. Ordway III, “Pioneering Commercial Rocketry in the United States, Reaction Motors, 1941–1958,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 38 (1985): 155–68. 25. Frank H. Winter and Frederick I. Ordway III, “Pioneering Commercial Rocketry in the United States, Reaction Motors, 1958–1972,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 40 (1987): 405–16. 26. Damon Knight, The Futurians (New York: John Day, 1977). 27. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, like his Robot series, with which it eventually merged, began as a series of stories published in Astounding from 1942 to 1950. Four from 1942 to 1944 were combined with a new chapter in Foundation (New York: Gnome Press, 1951). Foundation and Empire (New York: Gnome Press, 1952) combined two longer stories from 1945, and Second Foundation (New York: Gnome Press, 1953) combined stories from 1948 through 1950. Those three comprised the Foundation trilogy until Asimov revised the series in the 1980s and 1990s, adding four more novels; he eventually combined its historical time line with that of the Robot series. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine, 1953) was originally published in a shorter version as “The Fireman,” in Galaxy Science Fiction 1, no. 5 (February 1951), while his Martian Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 1950), combined a series of short stories from the late 1940s and early 1950s set in the same imaginary Martian setting. Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Putnam, 1961), appeared originally as a novel, while Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: New American Library, 1968), was the rare work to be simultaneously published as a novel and produced as a film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick and Clarke wrote the novel and screenplay together based on Clarke’s earlier stories “Sentinel of Eternity,” in 10 Story

Notes to Pages 309–311

373

Fantasy 1, no. 1 (Spring 1951); and “Encounter in the Dawn,” Amazing Stories 27, no. 5 (June–July 1953): 4–14. 28. Guy H. Lillian III, “Mort Weisinger: The Man Who Wouldn’t Be Superman,” The Amazing World of DC Comics #7 (July 1975): 2–8. 29. Eric Nash, “Julius Schwartz, 88, Editor Who Revived Superhero Genre in Comic Books,” New York Times, February 12, 2004, A25; Julius Schwartz, Man of Two Worlds (New York: Harper, 2000). 30. Donald Wollheim, obituary, Locus 25, no. 6 (December 1990): 68–71. 31. Wollheim obituary, Locus; Robert Silverberg, Reflections & Refractions (Grass Valley, Calif.: Underwood, 1997), 253–56. 32. Interestingly, de Solla Price’s work outside Big Science on networks of scientific citation presaged contemporary network theory, specifically of “scale-free” networks whose emergent “cumulative advantage”—or in modern terms, “preferential attachment” —maintain regardless of increase or decrease in their size. See Derek J. de Solla Price, “Networks of Scientific Papers,” Science 149 (July 1965): 510–15; and Derek J. de Solla Price, “A General Theory of Bibliometric and Cumulative Advantage Processes,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 27 (September–October 1976): 292–306. On scale-free networks, which are particularly relevant in characterizing the growth of the World Wide Web, see Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, “The Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks,” Science 286 (October 15, 1999): 509–612. On the related “small world” problem, see Manfred Kochen and Ithiel de Sola Pool, “Contacts and Influence,” Social Networks 1, no. 1 (1978–79): 5–51; Jeffrey Travers and Stanley Milgram, “An Experiment in the Small World Problem,” Sociometry 32, no. 4 (December 1969): 425–43; and Duncan Watts, Six Degrees (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004). A recent anthology of network theory is Mark Newman, Albert-László Barabási, and Duncan J. Watts, The Structure and Dynamics of Networks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 33. In this sense, while it was certainly also more, science fiction’s culture constituted a form of what Gramsci called hegemony. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); and Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgas and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), esp. 34–37 on serial novels. 34. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1960; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Among many responses, see Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966; New York: Doubleday, 1986), 299. 35. Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 162; Steven Shapin, Never Pure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 36. G. Edward Pendray, “The Story of the Time Capsule,” reprinted in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (1939), 533–54, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution; The Story of the Westinghouse Time Capsule (East Pittsburgh, Pa.: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, 1939).

374

Notes to Pages 311–313

37. Eric Leif Davin, Pioneers of Wonder (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), 38–43, 47–49, 51–52. 38. Roy Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in Our Time’: The Socialist Party and the Unemployed, 1929–1936,” Labor History 20 (Fall 1979): 485–509; Davin, Pioneers of Wonder, 58. 39. Davin, Pioneers of Wonder, 58. 40. De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 42; David Lasser to G. Edward Pendray, May 15, 1936, box 1, David Lasser papers, University of California, San Diego, archives. 41. Kilgore, Astrofuturism, 46–47. 42. Davin, Pioneers of Wonder, 59. 43. David Lasser obituary, Washington Post, March 6, 1996, B6; Lawrence Van Gelder, “David Lasser, 94, a Space and a Social Visionary,” New York Times, May 7, 1996, A24. 44. Perhaps indicating the extent that these interests still converge, the American Astronautical Society published a volume on science fiction and space exploration as part of its history series. See Eugene M. Emme, ed., Science Fiction and Space Futures, AAS History Series, vol. 5 (San Diego: American Astronautical Society, 1982). 45. Harry Warner, Jr., All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1969), 29. 46. Since 1951 the ARS and the AIAA have presented the G. Edward Pendray Aerospace Literature Award annually for an “outstanding contribution or contributions to aeronautical and astronautical literature in the recent past.” Since 2002 the AIAA has also presented the Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award to the “best original contribution to the field of aeronautical or astronautical non-fiction literature published in the last five years.” See AIAA Honors and Awards (Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, n.d.), 4. 47. William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger, 1983), 139; Frank Winter, Prelude to the Space Age (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983); Tom D. Crouch, Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers (Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2006). 48. For a political history of the space age, see Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 49. David Lasser, “Space, Satellites, and Survival,” Trades Unionist, May 31, 1958, 5, cited in Kilgore, Astrofuturism, 47.

INDEX

Abbott, Edwin, Flatland, 180 Ackerman, Forrest J. (“4e”), 221–22, 236, 244–45 “Adventure in Time, An” (Flagg), 86, 121, 129–30, 182, 191–92, 197 advertising, 4–5, 7–8; “American Way of Life,” 5, 141; magazines, 21–24, 131–32, 135, 247, 302; pulp magazines, 23–24, 33–35, 41, 55, 132, 223; radio and television, 7, 135, 302; women, 132 Afford, Malcolm, “The Ho-Ming Gland,” 159 African American: publications, 158–59; science fiction, 145–46, 158–59, 345n25; segregation, violence, and injustice, interwar, 158 Africano, Alfred, 268, 276–78, 280, 286, 288, 295–96 Agnew, Jack, 226, 227, 235 air stories. See aviation, popular culture Air Wonder Stories, 36, 225t, 311. See also Science Wonder Stories; Wonder Stories “Airlords of Han, The” (Nowlan), 160, 168–69 alien, 9, 196, 213, 304, 344n14; animals, human attitudes toward, 149, 343n5; bug-eyed monster (BEM), 150, 155, 304, 344n14, 371n15; creature, 9, 86, 148–52, 151f, 155–57, 172–78; environment and nature, 112, 119, 171, 174; fundamental difference, 148, 150, 155, 157, 175–77, 347n50; invasion, 162, 170–71, 175, 177, 304; life, life form, 147–50, 152–55, 177; Martians, 147–48, 155–56, 177; nationality and citizenship, 161–62, 174; outer

space, from, 15, 81, 163, 176–78, 304; racial association, 9, 82, 148, 159, 163, 174–78, 208; sympathetic, 149, 156–57, 172–74, 176; term, science fiction, 148, 174, 177, 196, 304. See also Asian All-Story, 34, 38–39, 39f, 41, 48; “All-Story Table-Talk,” 41; All-Story Weekly, 74 Allen, Frederick Lewis, 4–5 amateur, 82; amateur press association (APA), 229, 247–48, 361n81; hobbyists, 214, 247, 298; professional, relationship to, 214, 238, 243, 246, 250, 252–53, 310; publishing, 216, 220–29, 235, 244 (see also science fiction fanzine); radio, 18, 84–85, 90, 136; science, 101, 119; science fiction (see science fiction fan); science enthusiasts, 8, 10, 84, 107, 252–53, 290, 298, 300; sports, 134; writers, 26–28 Amazing Stories, 15, 20, 108, 147, 158–59, 229; adventure and romance, 113–19, 179, 182; AIS, 251, 257, 261, 305; contests, 47, 93, 205, 215, 242; correspondence column, 54–63; covers, 38–39, 39f, 150–51, 151f, 205–7, 206f; “Discussions,” 54–55, 59–63, 73, 75, 94, 109, 219; editors, changes, 18, 87, 152, 248; fans, 229, 232–33, 245, 248–49; Gernsback Continuum, 205–9, 206f; magazine public/genre, 35–50, 53–54; prices, 225t; publishers, 18; readers, 68–76, 215–21, 305–6; reprints, 47, 74, 170; revenue, salaries, 322n5; sales and subscription, 65–66; science, discussion, 93–99, 185, 193–94; science features, 83–88, 92–93; science fiction, origins, 6, 18

376 Amazing Stories Annual, 18 Amazing Stories Quarterly, 18, 55, 219, 225t American Interplanetary Society (AIS), 252, 311; affiliates, 293; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), 313; American Rocket Society (ARS), as, 218, 262, 273, 297–99, 313; Astronautics, 269, 273, 276, 278, 285–87, 294–96; authority and legitimacy, 256–57, 273, 276, 290, 299; Bulletin, 259, 262, 268, 273, 282, 286–87; enthusiasm, science and spaceflight, 253–54, 282–84, 297–99; experiments, liability, 275–76, 293; experiments, members, 288–89, 291, 294–97; experiments, rockets, 262–70, 266f, 270f, 274, 286–87; founding, 252–53; priorities, 253, 255, 262, 273, 289–91; publicity, 255, 257–62, 271–72, 275, 295; relations, members, 159, 281–84, 286–90, 293–94, 297, 369n127; relations, other rocketeers, 284–85, 292–93; RMI, 296, 298, 307; science fiction, and, 218, 261–62, 298; static tests, engines, 275–82, 277f, 279f, 282f, 295–97 American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), 6, 102t, 258 American Rocket Society (ARS). See American Interplanetary Society Amsbury, Clifton, 219, 229 “Ancestral Voices” (Schachner), 201–2 anthropology, and archaeology: ethnography, 157; interwar popularity, 86, 334n10; primitive speech, peoples, 173–74; science fiction, inspiration for, 86, 192 Apollo program, 297, 306, 308, 313 Arden, Dale, 123–25, 161, 172 Argosy, 20, 24, 34, 41–42; Golden Argosy, 20, “Log-Book,” 41; Popular Publications, acquisition by, 42; slick magazine, conversion to, 302 “Armageddon—2419. a.d.” (Nowlan), 48, 120, 160–61 Asian: anti-Asian legislation, 161; extraterrestrial association, 176; fundamental difference, 148, 162–63, 177–78; Ne-

Index grito, 173–74; Orientalism, 148, 160–69, 171–77, 345n33, 346n44; political category, 161–62, 178, 208; progress, degenerate, 162–70; racial category, 148, 161–62, 177; science fiction and popular culture, in, 147–48, 159–76; Yellow Peril, 160, 164, 168, 172. See also alien Asimov, Isaac, 8, 241, 308; Foundation series, 308, 372n27; laws of robotics, 303, 371n13; Robot series, 308, 371n13, 372n27; women in science fiction, 116– 17, 123, 125–26, 338n7 Astounding Stories, 15, 20, 50, 108, 158, 182; AIS/ARS, 251, 261, 289; “Brass Tacks,” 55, 223, 230; competitive success, 232, 249; creation, 36, 43; editors, changes, 87–88, 223–24, 246, 248, 308; Golden Age, science fiction, 308; magazine public/genre, 35, 42–46; post–World War II, 303, 326n87; price, 225t; publishers, 36, 42, 66, 87–88, 303; “The Reader’s Corner,” 55, 56f; readers, 116, 193, 202, 221, 223, 229–30; sales and subscription, 66, 71; science, use, 87–88, 93, 105 author: authorship, 18, 25, 29, 57, 158, 325n72; reader, relationship to, 18, 57, 158; writer, distinction, 27–28. See also writer automobile, 4, 48, 196; design and style, 89; gendered use, 132, 140–42; networks, technological, and support, 135; scientific progress, symbol, 89, 91, 105; tourism and travel, 4, 135, 192 aviation: aerial combat, 142, 254, 301; aerospace industry, 297, 306–7, 311, 313; airplanes, 4, 42, 283, 301; airships, 4, 45, 195, 205, 254; aviators, celebrity, 142, 195, 253–54; barnstorming, 142, 195, 253; flight, experience, 41–42, 254; industries, 4, 89, 192, 283; popular culture, 31–32, 41–42, 160, 169, 213, 253–55; progress, 4, 45, 87, 89, 91, 205, 271; rocket plane, 262, 289; standards, 136 “Back to 20,000 a.d.” (Schachner and Zagat), 119, 145–46, 191

Index Bakhtin, M. M., 72, 321n44, 322n2 (part i), 333n1 (part ii), 352n31, 356n85 Baltadonis, John V., 75–76, 223–24, 226–28, 228f, 235 Bates, Harry, 36, 43–44, 47–48, 50, 87, 105, 194 Bauer, George Paul, “Below the Infra Red,” 104 Baum, L. Frank, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 166 Bell, Alexander Graham, 3, 88, 106 Best, Alfred, 268, 286 Big Science, 304–5, 372n17 Binder, Eando (Earl and Otto “E and O” Binder), 244; “The Robot Aliens,” 196 Binder, Earl. See Eando Binder Binter, Otto. See Eando Binder biology: eugenics, 157; genetics, 86; life, 100, 153–54, 156, 177; natural history, relationship to, 153–54; pulp features, science news, 87; science, emergence as, 100, 153; science fiction, inspiration for, 86, 157; teaching, high school, 100, 154. See also alien; evolution; history Blassingame, Wyatt, 30 Bradbury, Ray, 360n53; The Martian Chronicles, 308, 372n27; “A Sound of Thunder,” 202–3 Brand, Max (Frederick Schiller Faust), 29, 325n54 Breuer, Miles J., 60, 94–96, 101, 220; “The Driving Power,” 104; “The Hungry Guinea Pig,” 94, 185 British Interplanetary Society (BIS), 213, 218, 284–85, 289, 291, 293 Brown, Howard Vachel (artist), 152, 343n8 Buck Rogers (comic strip), 120, 176 Bull, Harry, 262, 288–89 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 50, 309; Mars novels, 71; Tarzan novels, 38, 71, 334n11 Campbell, John W., 58, 97, 101, 245; Astounding, editor, 88, 246, 248, 308; Don A. Stuart (pseudonym), 246 Čapek, Karel, 143–44, 146, 342n73; R.U.R., 143, 145

377 Carver, Nathan, 274, 289–90, 296 causality, 204; historical, 9, 202–5 Chartier, Roger, 18, 21, 326n93, 321n43 Clark, George, 232, 289 Clarke, Arthur C., 193, 251, 280; reader, 67, 69–70, 72, 94; writer, 308, 372n27 Clayton, William, 36–37, 43 Clayton Publications, 36–37, 42–43, 55, 66, 87 Cleator, P. E., 273, 284–85, 291 Cleveland Rocket Society (CRS), 218, 291–93, 299 comics: comic books, 49, 224, 242, 302, 308; comic strips, 49, 123, 160, 171–72, 176, 254; controversy, 1950s, 302; pulps, competition, 49, 302 commerce, and commercialism: anticommercialism, fan, 213, 238, 244–47, 250, 309; chambers of commerce, 192; culture, 5, 7–11, 15; Department of Commerce, 136, 312; expansion, late nineteenth and early twentieth century, 5, 64, 88–89; household tasks, alternatives, 128–29, 132; networks, 112, 139; rocketry, 307; sports and entertainment, 33, 134, 136–37, 139–40, 238 community: organizations, 1930s growth, 63; reading, 58–60, 72–78, 113; society, distinction from, 76. See also under science fiction Conquest of Space, The (Lasser), 260–61, 273, 285 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 133, 140; More Work for Mother, 133 culture, 7, 319n32; class, 20–21; communication, 89–90; community, 63; consumption, culture of, 7, 89, 130–31; definitions and use, 319n32; form, 4, 21, 33; manufactures, 48–49; mass commercial, 7, 10–11, 15, 33, 257; personality, 57; popular, 7, 11, 15, 52, 64, 304; relativism, 156, 344n17; subculture, 10, 244, 247, 249, 310, 339n13 Daughter of Fu Manchu, 162 Davis, Robert H., 34–35, 41, 53

378 DC Comics (National Allied Publications), 308–9, 329n131 Deering, Wilma, 119–20, 160–61, 176 Delaney, Samuel, 105, 329n132 Dennis, Walter, 219–20 Devander, Charles W. Van, 253, 258; Peter Arnold (pseudonym), 253 dime novel, 8, 38, 65, 323n10; genre, 33, 49; pulp magazines, 8, 20, 64–65, 68, 327n107; writers, 29, 31 dimension. See under mathematics; space; time Dr. Yen Sin, 162, 164, 166–68, 175 Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds, 41 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 183–85 Edison, Thomas, 18, 88, 166–67 Einstein, Albert: celebrity, interwar, 6, 43, 180, 182–84, 204; Gödel, and time travel, 203; ideas, popular interest, 5–6, 182–83, 195; relativity, 182–85, 187–90; reputation, post–World War II, 203; science fiction, discussion, 96–98, 109, 182; science fiction, inspiration for, 86, 179–80, 183, 190, 200, 207; theoretical physics, and experience, 184 electricity: access and availability, historical, 91, 135–36; homes, expansion into, 4, 139; infrastructure, network, 135–36, 139; science fiction, discussion, 96–98, 109, 182; science fiction, inspiration for, 134; scientific progress, symbol, 44, 89; standards, industrial competition, 136 Endersby, Victor A., 95–96, 185–87 Eshbach, Lloyd Arthur, 68, 242 Esnault-Pelterie, Robert, 258–59, 263 evolution: extinction, 153; history and, 153, 178, 187; life, diversity, 153; race, extrapolation, 145–46, 168, 174, 192; science fiction, 99, 121, 145, 168–69, 196 experiment, 262–69, 270f, 273–76, 286–88, 292–97; data, measurement and collection, 267–69, 275, 290–92; experimenters, 257–58, 262–69, 274–76, 285–300; imagination and experience, 278–82, 281f; point of view, 265, 268; prediction,

Index 184–85; results, reproduction and extension, 265, 268–69, 275–81, 287, 292–93; theory and, 180, 183, 185, 265, 290–91 fact: ability, demonstration, 94–96, 98, 108– 9, 111; black box, concept, 96, 98, 103, 106, 244; discovery and surprise, 108, 163; fiction, and, 103–4; journalism, 255; objectivity, and, 268, 280; science, artifact, 92–96, 104–6, 120, 208, 217; science fiction, 9, 41, 43, 81, 83, 87; truth and verification, 93–94, 185–86 fans, fandom. See under science fiction “Feminine Metamorphosis, The” (Keller), 86, 119, 126–27, 134, 141, 163 Fierst, Adolph L., 253 Fitzgerald, Warren, 159, 253, 345n25 Flagg, Francis, “An Adventure in Time,” 86, 121, 129, 182, 191, 197 Flash Gordon (comic strip), 123, 160, 171–72 flying saucer, 303, 344n14, 371n14. See also unidentified flying object Ford, Henry, 4, 69, 144 Ford Motor Company, 69 Fort, Charles, Lo!, 87 Foundation novels (Asimov), 308, 372n27 Frau im Mond (“Woman on the Moon”; Lang; film), 258–60, 273 Fu Manchu, 162, 164, 348n54 Futurians (Futurian Science Literary Group), 239, 241, 308; WorldCon exclusion, 235, 239–40, 246–47 gender, 9, 37, 112–13, 148, 178; domestic ideals, 9, 111–13, 125–28, 133, 141, 146; science fiction, 111–16, 115f, 119–31, 122f, 142–46, 163; science fiction readers, 117–19; separate spheres, 128–29, 139–41 General Motors Company, 69, 296 genius: evil, 164, 167–68, 177; individual, 120, 134, 142, 166–67, 183, 204, 259 genre: cultural category, 49; fiction, 8, 17– 19, 33–36, 49; form, commercial, 8, 24, 35, 37–38, 40–42, 48–49; form, literary,

Index 32–33; formulas, 29–33; magazine public, 8, 33–50, 74, 216, 249; recognition and classification, 33–35; science fiction, 4, 7–9, 11–15, 42–50 geometry: dimension, 94–96, 179–84, 189– 90, 199–203; extradimensional stories (see under science fiction); Euclidean and non-Euclidean, 181–82, 184, 189– 90, 198–200. See also space; spacetime German Interplanetary Society. See Verein für Raumschiffahrt Gernsback, Hugo: AIS, 252–53; editorial practice, 37, 43–50, 53–54, 57, 87, 92–93; editorials, 43–46, 53, 182, 195; fan relations, 216, 230–34, 236, 238, 250; finances, magazines, 18, 233, 249; Gernsback Continuum, 207, 209; gospel of science, 44–45, 84–85, 218, 237, 249, 312; management, 232, 236, 243, 294, 311–12; participatory ethos, science, 50, 53, 84, 106–7; publisher, 17–18, 37, 42, 87–88, 249, 253, 309; radio, 84–85, 90, 92; science advisors, 101–2, 257; science fiction, invention, 17–18, 35, 42–50, 74, 152, 309; scientifiction, 18, 43–46, 205, 206f, 219, 245; SFL, 230–32, 243 Gerson, Sydney, 219–20 Goddard, Robert H., 1–4, 6, 11, 251; AIS/ ARS, 257–58, 260, 273, 284–85, 311, 366n80; “A Method of Extreme Altitudes,” 2, 253, 263; moon rocket affair, 2–3, 253, 317n9; rocket research, 3, 252–53, 263, 285, 299; science, solitary pursuit, 3, 11, 251–53; science fiction, 1–2, 4, 6, 251, 298, 300; Wells, 1–2, 300, 362n3 Gordon, Flash (character), 123–25, 160, 171–72, 254. See also Flash Gordon (comic strip) Great Depression, 5, 69, 137, 203, 256; AIS/ ARS, 288, 294; historical hindsight, 195; labor, 144, 312; New Deal, 137–38, 312; psychology, 1930s, 195; pulp publishing, 24–26, 213; reading, 66–67; science fiction, 195–96, 217, 232, 250; unemployment, 243, 256, 294, 312

379 Gregory, Lee, 253, 285–86 Gruber, Frank, 26–29, 31, 50 Hamilton, Edmond: “The Man Who Evolved,” 120; “Master of the Genes,” 86, 120; “The Reign of the Robots,” 142–43, 182, 197 Hammond, W. I., “Lakh-Dal, Destroyer of Souls,” 159 Hanna, Edward, 292 Harris, Clare Winger, 60, 242 Healy, Roy, 296 Heinlein, Robert, 94, 297, 308, 334n5, 355n73 Hersey, Harold, 26–27, 38–41, 61–62 history: agency, 177, 188, 201, 204–5, 207, 210; contingency, 9, 187–88, 201–2; Gernsback Continuum, 207, 209; inevitability, 9, 176, 188, 197, 204, 209; longue durée, Annales school, 108, 352n35; natural, 153–54, 177, 343n10 (see also biology); progress, 44–46, 82, 85, 178–80, 193, 196–99, 203–10; sciences, 186–88 home, and household: advertising, 132; domestic ideals, women and, 125–29, 133; historical development, 112, 128–29; housework, 128, 131, 133, 140; progress, 4–5; segregation, 146; technology, 4, 89, 131–33, 138–42 Hoover, Herbert, 136–37 Hornig, Charles, 217, 222, 245, 248; SFL, 232–34, 243; Wonder Stories, 36, 236, 243 Hughes, Thomas P., 167, 318n19 “Hungry Guinea Pig, The” (Breuer), 94, 185 Huxley, Aldous, 19, 92 imagination, 6, 57, 110, 192–94, 210, 319n28; experiments and experience, 278–82, 281f; reading, dialogic, 77, 322n2 (part i), 333n1 (part ii); science, 49, 85, 91–92, 105, 298; science fiction, 1, 18, 45–46, 113–14, 177, 190–91, 231, 301; theoretical physics, perception and experience, 184–85

380 “In 20,000 a.d.!” (Schachner and Zagat), 119, 145–46, 191 individual: ability, 82, 96–97, 101, 112–13, 130–31, 142, 168–70; aptitude, 53, 58, 60–63, 76; aptitude, science, 93–99, 105, 109, 185–87, 282–84; fan industry, 222, 238, 244–45; government/state and, 129–30, 134, 138; individualism, ethical, 138; individualism, ordinary, 57, 82, 167, 180, 214 industry: design, style, and planning, 19, 69, 89, 131–32, 306; fan, science fiction, 222–28, 233, 236–48; government and, 5, 136–38, 177, 223, 304, 310, 313; industrial revolution, 63, 88, 205; mass production, 4, 52, 89, 128, 167, 144; media, 89–90, 135–40, 302; military and, 301, 304–8, 310; pulp, science fiction, 52–55, 87–88, 223–24, 229–35, 242–43, 248–49; pulp magazine, 19–50, 61–66, 81; research and development, 88, 106–7, 167; standards, standardization, 23, 25, 135–36; technology and, 89–91, 134–40, 166–67, 177, 301–2, 304–6; tourism and travel, 4, 21, 128, 192 “Inquisition of 6061, The” (Jones), 134–35 International Scientific Association (ISA), 220, 229, 233–34, 236 interplanetary: conflict, 170–71, 176; stories, 48, 108, 114, 117, 254; societies, 213, 218, 284–85, 293; travel, and adventure, 98, 251–55, 259–62, 283–84. See also rocket; space; and individual rocket societies intertextuality, 9, 81, 192, 321n44 invention, 44, 46, 50, 90, 131, 209; discovery, 80, 167; industrial system, 107, 142, 167; inventors, 83–84, 88, 166; popular tradition, 84, 141, 193, 205 Johnson, A. H., “The Superman,” 110 Jones, Arthur Frederick, “The Inquisition of 6061,” 134–35 Jones, Myrtle R. (“Morojo”), 244 Jones, Robert Kenneth, 20, 36

Index Keller, David H., 60, 101, 102t; “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” 86, 119, 126; “The Threat of the Robot,” 134, 137, 238 Kepler, Johannes, 170–71, 322n1 (part i), 349n66 Keyhoe, Donald, 344n14, 371n14; “The Mystery of the Singing Mummies,” 164 King Kong (film), 254, 303 Klemin, Alexander, 274–75, 291 Kornbluth, Cyril, 235, 308 Krauss, Max, 294 Kuttner, Henry, 308 labor: division of, 166, 196; laws, 138; race and, 145–46, 164, 169, 177; robots, 9, 134, 137, 143–46; technology and, 166, 169; unions, 144, 312; wage, 25, 112, 128; work and, 192, 226 laboratory: environment, 94, 98; industrial, 106, 167; science, 83, 107, 183, 284, 305; size and space, historical increase, 106– 7, 305; work and data, 274, 284, 291 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis (film), 235; Frau im Mond (“Woman on the Moon”; film), 258–60, 273 Lasser, David: AIS/ARS, 252–53, 257–59, 286, 311; The Conquest of Space, 260–61, 273, 285; education, 252–53, 311; federal blacklist, 312; science enthusiasm, 253, 255–56, 312–13; Science/Wonder Stories, 46, 243, 253, 294, 311, 326n89; unemployment relief, union organizing, 243, 294, 311–12 Latour, Bruno, 96, 98, 103 Lavender, Roy, 68–69, 306–7 Lawrence, Lovell, Jr., 296, 307 Leinster, Murray, 203, 350n7, 355n67; “Sidewise in Time,” 199–201, 204 Lemkin, William, 253, 258, 286; “The Doom of Lun-Dhag,” 175–76 Lensmen novels (Smith), 108, 337n71 Lester, Irvin, “The Reign of the Ray” (with Fletcher Pratt), 134 Ley, Willy, 275, 285, 291 Lichtenstein, Samuel, 289 Lindbergh, Charles, 3, 142, 195, 253

Index linearity. See under mathematics; time literacy, 64, 91 Loebell, Ernst, 292 Lovecraft, H. P., 162; “At the Mountains of Madness,” 347n50 Lowndes, Robert, 235, 308 Lynd, Robert S. and Helen Merrell, 63, 132, 198; Middletown, 132; Middletowns, 63–64 Madle, Robert, 226–27, 232, 235 magazine: advertising, and, 8, 21–24, 33, 35, 41, 131–32, 135; historical development, 21–25, 22f, 64–65, 302–3; distribution and circulation, 23, 64–67, 69; qualities, 21–22, 22f; sales, subscription, and acquisition, 65–69, 224, 225t; term, and periodical, 21. See also advertising; pulp magazine; slick magazine “Man Who Awoke, The” (Manning), 130–31 Manning, Laurence, 253, 258, 268, 286, 299; “The Man Who Awoke,” 130–31 Margulies, Leo, 29, 36, 234–35, 242 market: fiction, popular, 16, 19–20, 25–28, 31–32, 34, 65, 242; media, post–World War II, 302, 309; magazine, 18–25, 33–35, 34t, 37–38, 42, 48–49, 325n72; marketing, 2, 4–8, 23–24, 132; paperbacks, mass-market, 309; second-hand, 71, 73 135, 224, 225t; separate spheres, and, 128; standardization, and, 135 “Martian Odyssey, A” (Weinbaum), 75, 149, 155–57, 172 Mason, Charles P., 253, 258, 262, 282; Epaminondas T. Snooks (pseudonym), 253 mathematics: calculations and experiments, 263, 265–69, 276–78, 279f; dimension, 94–96, 179–84, 189–90, 199–203 (see also geometry; space; time); error and verification, 95–99; fan interest, 220; linear, and non-linear, 180, 190, 198–201, 355n71; mathematician, 101, 102t, 203; physics, and, 1–2, 98, 180–82, 184–90; system, unified, 90 Mathison, Volney G., “The Mongolians’ Ray,” 159

381 McDowd, Kennie, “The Marble Virgin,” 121, 122f media, 12, 181, 254, 268, 303; communication, 63–64, 90–91, 107, 323n29; culture, mediated, 7, 18–19, 90–91, 107, 110, 138–40, 319n30; experiments, mediation, 265–72, 294, 299; forms and formats, 15, 49, 64, 140, 302–3; mass, 7, 64; print, 38, 90–91, 302; social, 309; technological, 11, 90–91, 138–140, 302 Meek, S. P., 60, 94; “Submicroscopic,” 155 men: characters, science fiction, 112–16, 119–31, 122f, 134–35, 142–46; domestic ideals, 111–13, 125–28, 133, 141, 146; education, 117; manhood, vigorous, 119, 123–25, 129–31, 133–34, 169–70; public sphere, 128–29, 139–40, 143–46; readers and writers, science fiction, 117 Merritt, A. A., 50; The Moon Pool, 73–74 Michel, John B., 233–40, 243 Miller, P. Schuyler, 60, 97–99, 109, 242; “Tetrahedra of Space,” 119, 148 Ming the Merciless, 160, 171–72 Minkowski, Hermann, 182–83, 189–90, 200 modern: modernity, 9, 82, 132, 204; science, 17, 179, 196; science, and ability, 168; science, and progress, 45, 85, 100, 131, 204–9, 206f; science, large-scale, 304–5, 372n17; society, 82, 85, 100, 208–9, 310 Mongo, Planet of Doom, 160–61, 172 “Moon Era, The” (Williamson), 119, 125–26 Moon Pool, The (Merritt), 73–74 Moore, C. (Catherine) L., 118, 308 Morey, Leo, 152, 343n8 Moskowitz, Sam, 74, 159, 239 motion pictures, 4, 6, 35, 44, 90, 166, 195, 254, 260. See also individual films Munsey, Frank, 20–21, 24, 42, 302 Myers, Ray Avery, “Into the Subconscious,” 86, 93 Mysterious Wu Fang, The, 162, 165f narrative, 15, 170, 196, 202, 325n72, 347n52; digression, revelatory/explanatory, 104–5, 113, 168; experiments and, 268–69, 286; flow, characters, and, 118,

382 narrarive (cont’d) 123, 149, 156; frame, 181, 191, 343n7; logic and resolution, 145, 168, 173, 178, 208; roles, 81, 123; serials, 65; structure, 30, 33, 150 nation: citizenship, 128, 158, 161–62, 208, 346n39; nativism, 157 network: cumulative advantage, 309, 373n32; distribution, 4, 52, 89, 112, 136, 139–41; science fiction, 213, 216, 220– 23, 227, 243, 309; social, 10–11, 128–30, 139–41, 220–21, 241–43, 269–72; technological, and communication, 112, 135–42, 302; transportation, 21, 89, 112, 142, 192; writers, 26, 47 New York Herald Tribune, 257–58, 271–72, 285 Newton, Sir Isaac, 1, 183, 189–90, 193 Nowlan, Philip Francis, “The Airlords of Han,” 160, 168–69; “Armageddon—2419 a.d.,” 48, 120, 160–61 Oberth, Hermann, 258–59 Palmer, Raymond A., 195, 219, 222, 248 Paul, Frank R., 152, 205, 235, 343n8 Pendray, G. Edward: career, journalism, 257, 271–73, 311; career, late 30s and post– World War II, 295, 311; Gawain Edwards (pseudonym), 253; Esnault-Pelterie, as, 258–59; experimental data and method, on, 274, 289–92; Goddard, relations, 285, 311; public relations, 258–61, 265–66, 295–96, 311; rocket experiments, 264–69, 274–75, 286–87, 299; rocketry, personal relationships, 253, 258, 284–85, 291, 299–300; science enthusiasm, 311–13; time capsule, 295, 311 phonograph, 4, 6, 90, 140, 166 photography, 21, 90–91, 264 Pierce, H. Franklin, 258, 289, 297–98; RMI, 296, 300, 307; rocketry, 264, 274, 286, 291, 295–96, 299 Pohl, Frederik, 232, 237; career, 248, 308; reader and fan, 68–71, 73, 216–17 Popular Publications, 25, 33, 37, 248

Index Pratt, Fletcher, 253; “The Reign of the Ray” (with Irvin Lester), 86, 134 Price, Derek J. de Solla, 304–5, 309, 373n32 print, distinction from text, 18, 21, 326n93, 321n43. See also media; technology private: correspondence, 75–76; publication, 248 (see also under amateur); sphere, 128–29, 139–41; women, in science fiction, 117–18 professional: amateur, relationship to, 214, 238, 243, 246, 250, 252–53, 310; aspiration, achievement, 272–73, 296; attitudes, behavior, 214, 310; authority, 209, 256; career, work, 133, 213, 242, 284; class, 7, 66–67, 126, 256; credentials, degree, 101, 164, 256; science, 102t, 106–7, 256–59, 280, 298–99, 310; science, associations, organizations, 107, 297, 313; science, standards and method, 11, 214, 280, 306; science fiction pulp magazine industry (“prozine”), 214, 216, 222–23, 229–30, 238–39, 241–48, 307–9; sports, 134, 238; status, 255, 275–76, 281; writers, 26–28, 101, 241 progress: modern, 5, 9, 44–46, 82, 112–13, 194, 204–8; science, 3–5, 83–86, 90–91, 99–100, 178–80, 204–9, 310–13; science fiction, 9–10, 44–46, 85–88, 193–95, 204–9, 207f, 213, 236–39, 310–13; technology, 84–85, 89–91, 112–13, 131–45, 164–68, 177 public: forum, published correspondence, 52, 57–64, 71–73, 75, 234; magazine, 33– 46, 49–50, 52–53; space, 7, 53, 75, 139, 234; sphere, 128–29, 139–41, 143–46 pulp magazine, 19–26, 22f, 46–52, 64–73, 81, 91, 254, 302–3; advertising, 24, 55, 223; artists, 152, 205, 235, 343n8; chains, 8, 35–38, 66; covers, 38–41, 39f, 114, 115f, 118, 150–53, 151f, 205–7, 206f; cultural manufactures, 48–49, 57; distribution and circulation, 64–67, 223–24; editorial practice, 36–50, 53–55, 83–88, 178, 216, 223; editors, 230, 235, 248; features, 41–42, 52–54, 61–62, 86–88, 92–93, 223; fiction, 26, 29–32, 38, 162;

Index formulas, 29–33, 50; genre, fiction, 8, 17–19, 33–36, 49; hero, 40–41, 49, 229; letters columns, 54–63, 56f, 71–78, 217–21, 252, 261–62; market, 33–35, 34t; public, magazine, 8, 33–50, 74, 216, 249; reprints, fiction, 47, 49, 74–75, 170; reputation, and criticism, 19–20, 52–53, 216; sales, subscription, and acquisition, 65–69, 225t; serials, 65, 70–72; surprise, 142, 148, 175; villain titles, 162; writers, 26–29, 31–32, 48, 194, 242. See also individual titles race: difference, fundamental and natural, 145–46, 148, 156–59, 163, 168, 170–71, 176–78; imperialism, American, 173–74; miscegenation, 146, 167, 176, 346n39; race war, 160, 170; racial categories, and classification, 158, 161–62, 177; representation, in popular culture, 145–48, 158–60; segregation, violence, and injustice, interwar, 146, 157–58 radiation, 86, 99, 303; radioactivity, 86, 106, 120; ray, fiction, 86, 109, 134, 159–60, 193; ray, physics, 5, 44, 86, 100, 106; ray gun, 81, 114, 120, 124; scientific progress, symbol, 193 radio, 6, 15, 35, 49, 87, 102t, 142; advertising, 7, 135, 302; amateur, 18, 84–85, 90, 107, 136; broadcast programs, 162, 170–71, 195, 254, 260; communication, broadcast, 71, 85, 135–36, 138, 302; communication, two-way, 18, 84, 136, 301; conversational intimacy, 138, 140; device and parts, 55, 140; entertainment, 140; fireside chats, 138; listening, 64, 68, 138–39; media, technological, 49, 64, 89–91, 135–40, 302; networks, and stations, 4, 54, 135–39; publishing, 46–47, 54, 84, 92; regulation, and standards, 85, 136; scientific progress, symbol, 44–45, 91, 105; War of the Worlds (broadcast), 1938, 170–71 railroads, 4, 21, 29, 52, 88, 192 Reaction Motors, Inc. (RMI), 296, 300, 307 reading: acquisition, of materials, 67–69;

383 community, 58–60, 72–78, 113; dialogism, 50, 52, 77–78, 319n28, 321n44, 322n2 (part i); implied reader, 57; indexing and collecting, 69–73, 111; piece-work, serials and, 70–72; writing, relationship, 57 “Reign of the Robots, The” (Hamilton), 142–44, 182, 197 relativity, 5–6, 86, 179–80, 183–91, 203; black hole, 190–91, 353n36; experience and theory, 184; historical development, 182–84, 187–90; history and, 187–88, 207; Lorentz-Fitzgerald equations, 97, 99, 109, 182, 189; Michelson-Morley experiments, 96, 182; reader demonstrations, 96–97; systematic synthesis, and invariance, 90, 186–89 Repp, Ed Earl, “The Radium Pool,” 86 Robb, Olive, 60–61 robot, 9, 49, 81–82, 182, 196–97, 213, 308; biological, 9, 143–44, 159; commercialism, 137, 238; domestic threat, 140, 145; laws of robotics, 303, 371n13; machine menace, 9, 49, 114, 115f, 142–44, 208, 342n74; masculine virtue, loss of, 134, 137, 196, 342n73; race, 145–46, 159, 192, 208, 308; rebellion, 143, 145–46, 303; stories, 134, 137, 140, 142–46, 196–97, 238, 308; technological networks, 137 Robot novels (Asimov), 308, 371n13, 372n27 rocket, 231f, 251–301, 306–8, 311–12; The Conquest of Space (Lasser), 260–61, 273, 285; designs, 263–64, 268, 274, 277f, 284–85, 292, 295–96; engines, 262–63, 275–82, 277f, 279f, 282f, 294–96, 299, 307; enthusiasts, 214, 218, 252, 261–62, 282–84, 288–91, 297; experiments, 264–69, 266f, 270f, 273–76, 286–96; films, 258–60, 273; flight, 268–69, 270f, 274, 291, 295; flight, imagined, 2–3, 123, 253–54, 258–59, 280, 281f; moon rocket affair, 2–3, 263; press coverage, 2, 257, 271–73, 275, 300; scientist, 1, 259–60, 272, 298–99; Rockets through Space (Cleator), 273, 285; science, rocketry,

384 rocket (cont’d) 11, 106, 213, 239, 251–52, 255–63; science fiction, 261–62, 289; ship, 81, 123–24, 231, 231f, 260; societies, 213, 218, 284–85, 293 (see also American Interplanetary Society; British Interplanetary Society; Cleveland Rocket Society; Verein für Raumschiffahrt); songs, 3; space, 98–99, 213, 255, 258–63, 297, 306–8, 313 (see also interplanetary travel; spaceflight); warfare, 258, 296, 301, 304, 308 Rockets through Space (Cleator), 273, 285 Rogers, Anthony (“Tony”), 39f, 120, 160, 169–70, 176, 197 Rogers, Buck (character), 48, 119, 160. See also Anthony Rogers; Buck Rogers (comic strip) Rohmer, Sax (Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward), 162, 164, 348n54 Roosevelt, Franklin, 135, 137–38, 312 Ruppert, Conrad, 222, 226, 229 R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”; Čapek; play), 143, 145 Schachner, Nathan, 251, 253, 260–62, 274, 286; “Ancestral Voices,” 201–2; “Back to 20,000 a.d.” (with Arthur Zagat), 119, 145–46, 191; “In 20,000 a.d.!” (with Arthur Zagat), 119, 145–46, 191 Schuster, Joe, 242 Schuyler, George (Samuel I. Brooks), 159; “Black Empire,” 158; “The Black Internationale,” 158 Schwartz, Julius, 222, 229, 242–43, 309 science: associations, organizations, 107, 297, 313; authority and prestige, 209, 252, 256, 272–73, 276; Big Science, 107, 304–5, 372n17; black box, 96, 103; collaborative, 253, 284–86, 305; education, 100–103, 107, 117, 154, 255–56; enthusiasm, 10–11, 87–105; government, 106, 304–5; historical, 186–88; imagination, 105, 113, 290–91, 298; industry, 4–5, 88–89, 177, 304–8; journalism, 91, 255, 334n10, 347n52; knowledge system, 4,

Index 90, 153–54, 184–88; method and standards, 11, 214, 280, 306; popular, 2–8, 10–12, 251–61, 271–73, 280–91, 298–99, 309–10; practice and presentation, 98, 252, 264–82, 284–87, 291–93; prediction and speculation, 185–88; principles, 186–87; professional, 102t, 106–7, 256–59, 280, 298–99, 310; progress, 3–5, 83–86, 90–91, 99–100, 178–80, 204–9, 310–13; scientist, fictional, 110, 120–23, 122f, 177–78; technology, relationship to, 4, 90–91, 104–5; two cultures, 310; warfare, military application, 301–2, 308; women and, 114–18. See also individual sciences science, and science fiction: discovery, 90, 163, 168–69; domestic ideals, 111, 119, 125–28, 133; extrapolation, 49–50, 83– 86, 90–92, 105, 108–9, 124, 163–68; fans, 218, 220–21, 233, 236; moral character, 130–31, 143, 161, 169–76; public, 17–18, 42–50, 83–111, 102t, 114–16; readers, 93–99, 105, 108–9, 185–87, 261–62; sublime, 40, 81–82, 103, 148, 178, 205–8, 303; wizardry, 166–67 Science & Invention, 85, 92 Science Correspondence Club (SCC), 219–23, 229 science fiction: canon, classics and reprints, 15, 47, 49, 74–75, 95; cultural category, 49, 303–4; devices, technological artifacts, 92–100, 103–9, 120, 150, 208–9, 217, 337n59 (see also facts); domestic ideals, 111–16, 125–34, 139–44, 208; exploration, conquest, and invasion, 1, 123–24, 148, 162, 164, 169–74, 176–77, 304; extradimensional stories, 86, 121, 182, 350n7; Golden Age, 308; post– World War II, 303–4; progress, 9–10, 44–46, 85–88, 185, 193–99, 207f, 213, 236–39, 310–13; pulps, and, 17–20, 34–36, 42–50; racial conventions, 145–48, 158–78, 208; science, extrapolation, 49–50, 83–86, 90–92, 105, 108–9, 124, 163–68; scientific adventure, 11, 49, 116; scientific romance, 49–50, 251;

Index scientific sublime, 40, 81–82, 103, 148, 178, 205–8, 303; social extrapolation, 126–35, 142–46, 169–70, 196–97; space opera, 15, 108, 111, 337n72; speculative fiction (sf), 85, 153, 329n132, 334n5; term, origins, 6–18; time-travel stories, 86, 129–31, 142–46, 179–83, 191–92, 196–204, 207 (see also time travel); utopia, and 177, 196, 207, 356n82; weird stories, 30, 35, 50, 182–83, 304. See also alien; robot science fiction, characters: adventure, and romance, 30, 113–16, 118–20, 208; amateur, ordinary, 119, 121, 171, 177, 197; commercial context, 29–31, 40, 48–49, 65, 308; hero, and heroine, 9, 19, 30–32, 110, 112–15, 115f, 118–27, 122f, 158 (see also men; women); reader identification, 118–19; representative concerns, 123, 134, 159, 167–69, 177–78, 197, 208–9, 213; rescue, reunion, and return, 123–27, 131; scientist, 110, 120–23, 122f, 177–78; triumph, conflict and competition, 30, 124–25, 150, 173, 208; villain, 9, 30–31, 160, 168–69, 205; villain, Oriental, 148, 160–61, 164–72, 165f, 175–77 (see also alien; Asian) science fiction, fans: alphabet society, 230; anticommercialism and left-wing politics, 236–38, 245; art, 227–28, 228f; conventions (cons), 235–36, 239–40, 245–47, 307; correspondence, 75–76, 223–28, 235, 239–40; costumes, 245; editors, dispute with, 230, 233–34, 236, 238; fandom, nature of (FIAWOL vs. FIJAGH), 216, 245; fanzines (fanmags), 216, 220–29, 235, 244; feuds and tension, 229, 235–39, 361n68; Great Staple War, 230; groups and organizations, 229–34; marriage, 308; Michelism, 236–40, 246; New Fandom, 239; Science Fiction League, 230–34, 231f, 238, 243, 289; subculture, 230, 240, 242; True Fandom, 239–40 science fiction, readers: aptitude, 53, 58, 60–63, 76; aptitude, science, 93–99, 105,

385 109, 185–87, 282–84; careers, 242–43, 245–46, 248, 306–9; clubs, 215, 219–22, 229; community, 16, 84, 94, 97, 106, 210; conversational community, 56f, 59–65; correspondence, 62, 75–76; education and background, 101, 103, 116, 133, 154, 255–56; international, 218; prediction and progress, 193–94, 204; pulp criticism, 58–59; women, 117–18; writers, and, 60, 94–96, 241–46, 249, 308 Science Fiction Advance (Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction), 236 Science Fiction Internationale (Michel; song), 236–37 Science Fiction League (SFL), 230–34, 231f, 238, 243, 289 Science News Service, 91, 255, 334n10 Science Wonder Stories: AIS, 252–53; contests, 93, 111, 242; gospel of science, 85–86, 92, 118, 185; editors, 36, 252–53, 311; magazine public/genre, 43–47, 87; merger with Air Wonder, 114–16; “The Reader Speaks,” 54; prices, 225t; reader experience, 70, 90; science advisors, 101, 102t, 256; science features, 87, 92–93; science fiction, origins, 17–18, 322n2 (chap. 1). See also Wonder Stories Scienceers, 159, 221, 229, 242, 253 scientifiction (stf), 18, 43–44, 46, 93, 96, 205–7, 233; stf, later fan use, 215, 219, 228, 230, 239–40, 245. See also science fiction separate spheres, public/private, 128–29, 139–41, 143–46 sf. See under science fiction Shesta, John, 274–75, 294–97, 299, 307 “Sidewise in Time” (Leinster), 199–201, 204 Siegel, Jerome, 64, 242 Simak, Clifford D., “The World of the Red Sun,” 182, 192, 198–99 Skylark novels (Smith), 73, 75, 97, 108–9 “Skylark of Space, The” (Smith), 108–9, 158 slick magazine, 21–25, 22f, 28–29, 33, 55, 64, 303; advertising, and, 23–24, 33, 131, 135, 302; popular fiction, 224; sales, cir-

386 slick magazine, (cont’d) culation, and subscriptions, 23, 35, 66; serial fiction, 65; writers, 25, 28–29 Sloane, T. O’Conor, 18, 44, 87–88, 132, 322n5 Smith, Bernard, 268–69, 274 Smith, E. E. (Edward Elmer), 101, 111, 119, 125, 133; Lensmen novels, 108, 337n71; Robb-Smith controversy, 60–61; Skylark novels, 73, 75, 97, 108–9, 158 society: impersonal relations, 11, 76; modern, 82, 85, 100, 208–9, 310; rocket, 213, 218, 284–85, 293 (see also American Interplanetary Society; British Interplanetary Society; Cleveland Rocket Society; Verein für Raumschiffahrt); social network, 10–11, 128–30, 139–41, 220–21, 241–43, 269–72 Solar Sales Services, 242–43, 361n75 “Sound of Thunder, A” (Bradbury), 202–3, 355n73 space: dimension, 94–96, 179–81, 189–90, 199–201; extradimensional stories (see under science fiction); infinite (Newton), 184, 189; material constitution of (Einstein), 184, 188; spaceflight, 2, 260, 297, 312–13 (see also interplanetary travel); spaceship, 73, 98–99, 108, 113, 156, 273, 280 (see also rocket ship). See also spacetime spacetime, 106, 182–84, 188–90, 200–201, 203 Standard Publications, 25, 35, 42, 88, 249, 308 Stangland, Arthur G., 242; “50th Century Revolt,” 86 Starzl, R. F., “The Man Who Changed the Future,” 86, 120 Steeger, Harry, 33, 37–38, 40, 248, 326n92 Stellar Publications, 37, 42, 253 stf. See scientifiction Stone, Leslie F., “The Man with the Four Dimensional Eyes,” 182; “The Human Pets of Mars,” 58 Street & Smith Publications, 20, 25–26, 34, 37, 302–3; Astounding Stories, 42, 87–88, 93

Index Stuart, Don A. See Campbell, John W. Superman (comic book), 242 Sykora, William, 233–39, 243, 361n68 Taine, John (Eric Temple Bell), 101 Tanner, Charles, “Tumithak in Shawm,” 148–49; “Tumithak of the Corridors,” 148–49 Tarzan novels (Burroughs), 71, 334n11 “Tarzan of the Apes” (Burroughs), 38, 39f technology, 9, 48–49, 82, 91, 113; craft and skill, mechanization, 88–89; devices, artifacts, 4, 88, 104–6, 150; gender, and, 131–34, 139–42, 144; government involvement, 136–37; industry, and, 4–5, 88–89, 135–37, 139–41, 166–67, 301–2, 304–8; media and communication, 11, 89–90; modern, and progress, 84–85, 89–91, 112–13, 131–45, 164–68, 177; networks, scope and scale, 88, 112, 135–41, 166; personalization, 88–89, 138–40; print, 90, 226–27; science, relationship to, 4, 90, 104; social, 52, 77; social impact, 64, 88, 122, 131, 133, 159, 310; weird, degraded, 137, 140, 162, 169, 177; term, use of, 4, 318n19; warfare, military, 142, 254, 301–2, 306–8 Teck Publications, 18, 37 television, 44–45, 87, 105, 140 “Threat of the Robot, The” (Keller), 134, 137, 140, 144, 238 Thrilling pulp chain, 25, 35, 249 Thrilling Wonder Stories (TWS), 35, 229, 234; acquisition, title, 42, 88, 242, 308 time: dimension, 86, 96, 179, 182–83, 189– 90, 193, 199; linear, and progress, 82, 180, 193–94, 196–99; time capsule, 295, 311; time zone, 192. See also spacetime Time Machine, The (Wells), 180–82, 191–92, 196–97 time travel, 9, 81, 179, 210, 213, 254, 303; alternative histories/timelines, 200–203, 303, 355n67; linear history, 82, 180, 197–201, 204–7, 209; posthuman future, 192, 197; relativity, as basis, 179–80, 182–83; social extrapolation, 196–97;

Index stories, 86, 129–31, 142–46, 179–83, 191–92, 196–204, 207; temporal mobility/tourism, 191–92; time machine, 180–82, 191–92, 196–97, 201–3; Wells paradigm, 180–83, 190–92, 196–97 Trauger, Fred, 305–6 Tremaine, F. Orlin, 37, 87–88, 223–24, 230 Truax, Robert, 295 Tucker, Wilson “Bob,” 230 unidentified flying object (UFO), 155, 304, 344n14, 371n14. See also flying saucer Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR; “Society for Space Travel”), 218, 296; AIS/ARS, relations, 258–60, 284–85; members, 275, 291; rockets, 263–64 Verne, Jules, 2, 15, 47, 49, 74 Verrill, A. Hyatt, “The Astounding Discoveries of Doctor Mentiroso,” 199 VfR. See Verein für Raumschiffahrt Vincent, Harl, “The Menace from Below,” 86; “The Return to Subterrania,” 86 Wadel, Felix, 96, 182, 287–88 War of the Worlds, The (Wells), 1–2, 170–71, 174; differences, adaptations and reprints, 170–71 Weinbaum, Stanley, 75, 174, 176, 361n75; “A Martian Odyssey,” 149, 155–57, 172–73; “The Valley of Dreams,” 172 Weird Tales, 50, 182, 225t, Weisinger, Mortimer, 222, 229, 242–43, 248, 308 Wells, H. G., 15, 49, 74, 300, 362n3; The Time Machine, 180–82; time travel, paradigm, 180–83, 190, 192, 196; The War of the Worlds, 1, 170–71, 174, 317n1 Wesso, H. (Hans Waldemar Wessolowski), 152, 343n8 Westinghouse corporation, 88, 300, 311 Williams, Raymond, 91, 177, 319n30, 319n32 Williamson, Jack, 21, 64, 105, 220; “The Alien Intelligence,” 86, 120, 174; “The Legion of Space,” 75; “The Moon Era,” 119, 125

387 Wollheim, Donald, 195, 369n127; career, 308–9; fan activities, 195, 230, 233–40, 242–43, 247–48 women: advertising, 132; characters, science fiction, 112–17, 115f, 119–30, 122f, 142–44, 338n7; education, 117; domestic ideals, 9, 111–13, 125–28, 141, 146; legislation and policy, 141; matriarchy, 129–30, 192, 197; motherhood, 127, 129–30, 145–56, 192, 208; pay inequity, 141; private sphere, 128–29, 139–41; readers, science fiction, 116–17; suffrage, 117 Wonder Stories, 182; AIS, 261–62, 307; covers, 114, 115f, 144; Depression era, 185; editors, 36, 243, 294; finances, 233, 243; magazine public/genre, 87–88; prices, 225t; publishers, 42, 249, 308; readers, 58, 114, 116, 195, 211; SFL, 230–34 “World of the Red Sun, The” (Simak), 182, 192, 198 World War II, 301–2; postwar aerospace industry, 306–8, 311, 313; postwar affluence, 303; postwar publishing and media, 302–3, 308–9; postwar science, 304–7, 310; postwar science fiction, 303–4, 308; technology, military use, 301–2 World’s Fair: St. Louis (1904), 174; New York (1939), 235, 295, 311 writer: reader, becoming, 241–46, 249, 308; science background, 101; tradesman, 25–29, 31–32. See also author Wyld, James, 294–99, 307 Wyn, A. A. (Aaron Weinstein), 37, 69, 326n92 Yerke, T. Bruce, 62, 75–76, 223–27, 235, 239–40 Zagat, Arthur L.: “Back to 20,000 a.d.” (with Nathan Schachner), 119, 145–46, 191; “In 20,000 a.d.!” (with Nathan Schachner), 119, 145–46, 191 Zarkov, Hans, 123, 125, 172

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took a long time to write and I have many people to thank for their assistance and support. My research led me to a various public and private collections and introduced me to their respective caretakers. The curators and archivists at the National Museum of American History and the National Air and Space Museum were invaluable in helping me navigate the Smithsonian Institution’s several archives. The staff at the Library of Congress, the Princeton University Library Archives, and the Northern Illinois University Library Rare Books and Special Collections helped me locate materials on magazine circulation, early amateur rocketry, and pulp magazines. Bill Blackbeard allowed me to peruse his collections at the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art, which are now housed at the Ohio State University. Martin M. “Mike” Horvat shared his trove of materials on early amateur presses and printing, which were at the time at his home in Stayton, Oregon, and are now at the University of Iowa. I especially want to thank the members of First Fandom, “the dinosaurs of science fiction fandom,” for their help, assistance, and kind words of encouragement during my research. Russell Chauvenet and Howard Brown spoke with me about their experiences with early fandom and pulp publishing. Bill Engle, Frank R. Paul’s grandson, allowed me to reprint his grandfather’s artwork. T. Bruce Yerke was extraordinarily generous in sharing his private correspondence from the 1930s. Financial support came, at various stages, from the National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Mellon Foundation, the Department of History, University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty research grant and a Mathy Junior Faculty award from George Mason University (GMU). The faculty of the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, particularly Jim Kettner, Jon Gjerde, Roger Hahn, and Jack Lesch, were instrumental in shaping my intellectual and professional outlook. Gerald Feldman and Evelyn Fox-Keller, in different ways, sparked my interest in

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historiographic perspective. John Heilbron and Laura Nader challenged me personally and intellectually; I hope I’ve learned their lessons well. Over many meals and cups of coffee, Jesse Berrett, Kay Edwards, Mark Eifler, Gerd Horten, Doug Mackaman, Katharine Norris, Clementine Oliver, Lisa Rubens, Linda Song, Eric Weisbard, Maochun Yu, and Joe Zizek shared lively discussions and engaging friendship. Troy Paddock, Adam Snyder, Peter LaVoy, Paul Harvey, Larry Glickman, Mike Ochoa, Glenn Robinson, Michael Thompson, Ricky Bluthenthal, and David Campt braved brutally early mornings for the camaraderie of basketball, while Howard Shelanski and Rich Hardack joined us for shuffleboard and poker sessions. Jane Stahlhut, Mabel Lee, and Diana Wear kept the department’s offices welcoming, interesting, and fun. At the Smithsonian Institution, where my ideas and research developed more fully, Art Molella and Charlie McGovern were terrific advisers for an apprentice historian. Among the curators and staff I encountered in the Smithsonian’s vast and various halls, Tom Crouch, Pete Daniel, Fath Davis Ruffins, David DeVorkin, Odette Díaz (now Díaz Schuler), Steve Lubar, Marvette Perez, and Debbie Warner were particularly generous with their time and interest. Fellow SI Fellows Nancy Bercaw, Joe Dumit, Oscar Campomanes, Brett Gary, John Gennari, Carolyn Goldstein, Jerma Jackson, Arlene Kriv, Ruth Oldenziel, Iwan Rhys Morus, Ed Russell, Peggy Schaeffer, Jennifer Tucker, and Elizabeth White epitomized intellectual community, which Mary Dyer kept humming with warmth and wit. Over the years the company and commentary of colleagues and students shaped my scholarly development and helped me find the voice and perspective to craft this book. At Binghamton University, Howard Brown, John Chaffee, Melvyn Dubofsky, Sarah Elbert, and Tiffany Patterson were warm and welcoming, and Amy Kuo, Dolly (now Túa-sBurgos), and Dana Stewart helped make living upstate feel like home. Over the course of a decade at George Mason University, Joan Bristol, Larry Butler, Michael Chang, Robert DeCaroli, Marion Deshmukh, Steve Diner, Sheila ffolliott, Sumaiya Hamdani, Bob Hawkes, Mack Holt, Mills Kelly, Randolph Scully, Suzanne Smith, Jeffrey Stewart, Rex Wade, and Ellen Wiley Todd shared their collective wisdom, experience, humor, and occasional poetic efforts; Jack Censer and Roy Rosenzweig taught me lessons about leadership and vision; and Betsy Rowe, Betty Lockhart, and Tuvinh Vuong in the Center for History and New Media allowed the faculty to be faculty. My students at GMU, almost all of whom worked to support their education, challenged and inspired me to teach and present scholarship accessibly. Natalie Weis and Elena Razlogova

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helped develop my database of reader letters, and Elena became an invaluable sounding board for ideas about readership and audience. At Northwestern University, Carolyn Chen, Jinah Kim, and Nitasha Sharma were exemplary colleagues and occasional singing companions, while Greg Jue inspired us all with his gentle, old-school example. Shuji Otsuka and Heidi Kim read drafts of chapters and allowed me to read their work. I have benefited tremendously from scholars I met professionally. Michael Denning and Janice Radway encouraged my work since its early stages. Conversations with Trudi Abel led to research that changed both our work. Jim Gilbert, Michael Kazin, Nelson Lichtenstein, Melani McAlister, Joe McCartin, Teresa Murphy, Tim Meagher, and other occasional visitors to our informal Washington, D.C., reading group shared their insights into American history and its profession. Deborah Kaplan was always gracious and generous in her understated support. Shane White shared sound advice and stories from down under and introduced me to Zoe Couacaud, who shared her dissertation. Erika Bsumek, Adrian Burgos, Vince DiGirolamo, and April Masters are friends who gave me important feedback and criticism. Involvement in Asian American studies, particularly the East of California network, opened new vistas for me, and I am proud to count Catherine Ceniza Choy, Kandice Chuh, Pawan Dhingra, Victor Jew, Elaine Kim, Bob Lee, Linda Maram, Gail Nomura, Franklin Odo, Steve Sumida, Jack Tchen, K. Scott Wong, Judy Wu, and particularly Gary Okihiro as friends as well as colleagues. Helen Zia reminded me to tell people’s stories. Friends and extracurricular interests have sustained me through the years I’ve worked on this project. Irene Chan, Tilly Chang, Christine Chen, Mark Chien, Rolla Chng, Tim Chng, Theo Chuang, Carlos Garcia, Greg Han, Ashley Hou, Mark Keam, Jeff Lee, Virginia Lee, Jacinta Ma, Keith McAllister, Anjali Paul, Ducchi Quan, Jeff Sutton, Andrea Wong, Karna Wong, John Yang, Cindy Yeh, and Hsinyu Yu brighten life through their passion, political commitment, singing, dancing, sports, and other random acts of fun. I gained much more than I gave from my work with APA Film and the Asian/ Pacific Islander Domestic Violence Resource Project in Washington, D.C. Visits from Joan Rebecca Taylor and Robert Long have always been invigorating and energizing. Robert Jen, Lily Lau, and Winnie Louie have been constant presences in my life since college. Since our days playing duets and quartets in high school, Leslie Gray has reminded me of the joy, and necessity, of creative expression. I need to thank several people in particular. Since before she was my

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housemate and fellow historian, Edith Kaneshiro has been a loyal and stalwart friend. Likewise, Karen Leong has been a great friend, insightful reader, and exemplary professional colleague. A common critical interest in popular culture and conversations while walking home from the Smithsonian with Ian Gordon developed into friendship and lessons learned about life. Throughout our years of arguments, debates, and working together, Ji-Yeon Yuh has been a fiercely consistent critic, confidant, and friend. In the final stage of my revisions, Stephen Mak offered insightful and constructive advice on chapters he read several times in several versions. With his unflagging and upbeat passion, George Lin inspired Asian American film festivals, filmmakers, and filmmaking across the country and at an important moment inspired me to finish this book. Bob Lockhart was my friend before he became my editor and, in his unwavering faith, allowed me the time and perspective to shape this book into what we both imagined it to be. For two decades Larry Levine was my adviser, colleague, and friend. With his partner-ineverything, Cornelia, he taught me not only how to think about history and culture but also how to be a scholar and a teacher, with dignity and decency, humanity and humor. I hope this book would have made him proud. My family has been the bedrock of my life. I grew up reading books and sharing adventures with my brother, Paul, and my sisters, Julie, Jean, and Bonnie, and they steadfastly supported me as I’ve worked on this book, as have my sister-in-law, Helga Lénart-Cheng, and my brother-in-law, Eric Chou. My nieces, Mira, Lindsey, and Evelyn, and nephews, Loránd and Olivér, are discovering the pleasures of reading, and their excitement has helped me rediscover them too. My father and mother, Liang-Tsai and ChunYeu Cheng, immigrated to the United States to make a better life for our family. They taught me to value responsibility and commitment, to respect work and effort, to appreciate the diversity of culture and expression, and to face life’s fortune and adversity with passion, compassion, and resolution. This book’s words, subject, and analyses are mine, but its broader sensibility I learned from them.