Soul of the Future: Pulp Fiction

“Looking back upon the place, it may have been a ghetto, but it was a golden ghetto, a place of brotherhood and opportunity and wonder. Before Gernsback, there were science fiction stories. After Gernsback, there was a science fiction genre.”
James Gunn

The turn of the twentieth century saw an outburst of inventions that would transform ordinary life. But for awhile, the automobile was mostly a plaything of the urban rich, motion pictures were as yet sporadically seen (the first Nickelodeon devoted exclusively to movies opened in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1905) and airplanes were an infrequent curiosity.

But radio sets were a miracle that individuals could put together and own. Years before there was a single commercial broadcast station (again in Pittsburgh, in 1920) there were thousands of radio enthusiasts in the United States alone, sending and receiving radio signals.

One of them was a European immigrant with the ungainly name of Hugo Gernsback. His enthusiasm for new technologies began when as a boy in Luxembourg he wired his family home for electricity. He was also fascinated with American culture, particularly Wild West stories. After studying electrical engineering at a German university, he emigrated to the United States in 1904.

He went into business importing European radio equipment for sale to American radio hobbyists. The association of amateur radio buffs he started in 1909 immediately attracted 10,000 members, and multiplied from there. He sold radio kits and published manuals and catalogs for them. They began including articles, and soon evolved into a series of magazines, such as Modern Electrics, Radio News and Science and Invention.

These publications promoted not only radio but an experimental technology combining picture with sound that Gernsback dubbed “television.” Among his fervent readers were Marconi, Edison, Tesla, rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, and the unsung genius of television, Philo T. Farnsworth, as well as the RCA chief who pirated Farnsworth’s inventions to build a television empire, David Sarnoff.

Gernsback began adding fictional stories of the future, including serializing his own novel (Ralph 124C 41+) in Modern Electrics. Eventually in 1926 he started a magazine devoted entirely to such fictions called Amazing Stories. Its first issue included stories by Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and H.G. Wells. He would republish many of their stories and novels in later issues (17 stories and six novels by Wells alone) but he also began receiving and publishing new stories.

Other such magazines emerged in the 1930s, printed on cheaper pulp paper to keep them inexpensive. (Gernsback’s penchant for paying writers poorly or not at all also contributed.) A genre was born, which after a false start or two, Gernsback named “science fiction.”

Many new stories followed the lead of the elders, creating variations on themes by Mary Shelley, Verne, Burroughs and especially Wells (in an appendix to his book Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction, James Gunn produces his somewhat arbitrary list of the most prominent science fiction themes. A work by Wells was cited in 12 of the 14 categories, and was often the earliest.)

The earliest pulp stories tended to emphasize technologies at the expense of story, becoming known as “gadget fiction.” Still, new technologies naturally became an important topic in science fiction, especially as rocketry advanced and rockets to space became a foreseeable possibility. Many of the early 20th century pioneers of rocketry were inspired by science fiction (Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsy and German Hermann Oberth by Jules Verne, American Robert Goddard by H.G. Wells) and some wrote their own science fiction stories.

Other space technologies were envisioned first by fiction writers. Artificial space satellites were first proposed in novels as early as 1869 (Edward Everett Hale’s The Brick Moon) and an Austrian engineer and a German science fiction writer each described a working space station in 1928.

“Astronautics is unique among all the sciences because it owes its origin to an art form," writes astronomical artist Ron Miller. "Long before engineers and scientists took the possibility of spaceflight seriously, virtually all of its aspects were explored first in art and literature, and long before the scientists themselves were taken seriously, the arts kept the torch of interest burning..."

This relationship remained strong through the golden age of the pulps in the 30s and 40s, when new names were established as science fiction masters. Several of the more prominent writers had science backgrounds: E.E. “Doc” Smith, author of the early Skylark series, had degrees in chemistry and physics, Isaac Asimov in biochemistry and Arthur C. Clarke in physics and mathematics.

The worlds of science fiction and science—or at least technology—sometimes overlapped more directly. Robert Heinlein, an engineer with graduate work in math and physics and a prominent science fiction author, helped design a high-altitude pressure suit for the U.S. Navy, which he based on the description of a space suit he read in a 1931 pulp story by Edmond Hamilton. Heinlein’s work on the suit was continued by another science fiction writer (and aeronautical engineer), L. Sprague de Camp.

Though early pulp science fiction tended to emphasize the wonders of technologies, at least some stories also dealt with perils, including a 1933 series by Laurence Manning in Wonder Stories (another Gernsback magazine) that at one point depicted a future Earth depleted and ruined by pollution. (The series was later published as a novel of future history called The Man Who Awoke.)

Although some science fiction stories took place in the historical present or past, most were set in a future. Inventing futures became a more serious business in 1938 when John W. Campell became editor of the magazine Astounding. According to Lester del Rey, “He wanted them [his writers] to live in their futures. And he wanted those futures to be livable.”

The writers responded by becoming “future-oriented, with the sense that the present was not the permanent center of everything: to them, the future was a real place. It was three-dimensional.”

To make these futures “real,” Campbell urged his writers to imagine the social implications of new technologies. He urged them to question their assumptions based on the present or even prior science fiction. “’Yes, but’ was one of his favorite openings to a discussion,” del Rey recalls.

Campbell felt that the “fiction” or literary aspect was at least as important as the “science,” so he encouraged his writers to focus on characters, and their responses to change. Those writers would include many of the enduring names in American science fiction, including Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt and Lester del Rey.

Campbell, according to del Rey, “had no desire to ‘bring science fiction into the mainstream. But he was totally serious about the fact that science fiction was the only fiction that dealt fully with modern reality.”

Meanwhile, two young science fiction pulp magazine fans in Ohio dreamed up a “strange visitor from another planet” who first appeared in Action Comics in 1938. Superman was the first dramatic character in a comic book and the first superhero—beginning a genre that dominates science fiction storytelling in big budget movies during the first decades of the 21st century.

From the beginning, the science fiction pulps inspired a unique readership. Pulps got so many unsolicited and thoughtful letters from readers that letters sections became regular and important features. Some of the most avid letter writers became story writers.

Writer, editor, impressario Forrest
Ackerman in costume from 1936 film
Things to Come, at WorldCom 1 in 1939.

Fans organized and held local, regional and finally national science fiction conventions, interacting with writers and editors—the first such fan gatherings ever held (apart from a few clubbier groups such as Sherlock Holmes devotees.) Fans had their own newsletters and developed their own vocabulary. All the aspects of the huge conventions associated with television and movies—including the costumes and role-playing—originated with the pulp science fiction conventions.

The first World Science Fiction Convention was held in New York in 1939, a few miles away from the World’s Fair and its three-dimensional future that fans could walk around in. A pulp editor told an audience, “I didn’t think you fans could be so damn sincere.”

He promptly commissioned Edmond Hamilton to write the Captain Future series for such young fans. Though it derived from the team of heroes myths such as Jason and the Argonauts, Captain Future and his specialized trio of misfits (a robot, an android and a disembodied brain) became a template for subsequent science fiction and superhero adventures.

Though much of the best science fiction in the first half of the 20th century appeared in pulps or was written by pulp authors, the genre became to some extent defined by lesser work. Pulp science fiction was often simplistic, dressing up standard conflicts in space suits, with one dimensional characters (though not always the muscled heroes and voluptuous damsels of the bold cover art, which might have nothing to do with the stories inside.) Stories featuring attacks by a “bug-eyed monster” were so frequent as to earn that subgenre name.

With their striking but sometimes lurid covers, cheap paper and purple prose, the science fiction pulps defined the genre as a poor and suspect relation of mainstream publishing. At a time when any kind of space travel was considered crazy fantasy, their obsessive fans with such weird preoccupations as space aliens and the future added to the growing isolation of science fiction.

Yet veteran science fiction writer and editor Lester del Rey argued that the pulps and the genre characteristics were crucial to science fiction’s development. Not only did the magazines foster friendships and an international network of associations in a “genuine subculture” with its own beliefs and traditions, but “to some extent, science fiction has developed its own ethics and values.”

Another factor created critical and audience distance. With the rise of what came to be called “sociological science fiction” in the pulps, stories began to examine possible consequences of technology, as well as critiquing society more generally. As U.S. society became more conformist, science fiction could be annoyingly subversive.

The science fiction pulps prospered in the 1930s and 40s, gradually diminishing in the later 50s and 60s. By then, a few science fiction authors were being published in mainstream magazines, and the baby boom generation’s first forays into adolescence led to several series of hardcover novels designed for young readers. (The difference, according to Heinlein was that the books for juveniles “are somewhat harder to read because younger readers relish tough ideas they have to chew and don’t mind big words.”)

Heinlein’s sequence of novels for young readers was among the most successful. Another was the Winston Science Fiction Series, featuring a number of authors including Arthur C. Clarke, Raymond F. Jones, Poul Anderson, Ben Bova and Lester del Rey.

Those books led to a growing market for science fiction novels, especially in paperback, and some became best-sellers. But the taint of the genre remained, so that well into the 21st century, science fiction works and writers, and even actors and everyone outside the effects and costume departments of science fiction films and television, almost never got the big prestige prizes.

A telling paradox of the genre might be that while science fiction doesn’t deal as overtly with personal or emotional matters as more accepted fictions, it evokes strong emotion in readers. But these tales inspire feelings that mainstream stories don’t stir as powerfully, such as wonder, amazement and a sense of possibility.

The inside cover illustration of all the Winston SF novels--For
young readers like me who read library copies without dust
jackets, this was the memorable image.

This is perhaps why the realists of the fantastic often appeal to the young. Isaac Asimov remembered devouring the stories in a new pulp magazine: “when every word was fire, and when the print itself, the images it provoked, the smell of the pulp paper, the feel and weight of the magazine, all combined into a vivid and agonizing transport because I wanted to be part of the story and couldn't…" These science fiction stories "ravished my soul and opened it to a music of the spheres that few can hear…"

In the 1960s the aging writer Henry Miller recalled his youth poring over Rider Haggard's tales in a secret hillside cave with his blood brothers. "...these books were part of our Spartan discipline, our spiritual training…..Our grown-up boys, the scientists, prate about the imminent conquest of the moon; our children have already voyaged far beyond the moon. They are ready, at a moment's notice, to take off for Vega—and beyond. They beg our supposedly superior intellects to furnish them with a new cosmogony and a new cosmology. They have grown intolerant of our naïve, limited, antiquated theories of the universe."

“Something so absurd as a boyhood book momentarily captures the mind and never quite releases it,” a character muses in a novel by Jim Harrison. But these books speak not only to boys.

The young Ursula LeGuin shared copies of Thrilling Wonder Stories with her brother, making favorite phrases from the stories a part of their secret language.

Young Margaret Atwood hid from homework in the basement by reading Rider Haggard and H.G. Wells in old volumes forgotten by her father.

“Wells’ fictions were the first books I read,” proclaimed the erudite scholar and writer Jose Luis Borges. “Perhaps they will be the last.”

They were responding to the age-old fascination of stories. “Let us worship the spine and its tingle," Vladimir Nabokov remarked. "That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science."

That little shiver—of hope or of horror—was leading to the future.

All of which prompts (but does not beg) the question: What is science fiction? And what is its role in exploring the soul of the future?

To be continued...Prior posts in the series can be accessed by clicking on the Soul of the Future label below.