Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

401 Pages·2012·26.91 MB·English

by  John Cheng

ASTOUNDING WONDER
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A S TOUNDING
W ONDER
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 r e s s
p h i l a d e l p h i a
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
PART I. CIRCULATION 13
1 “Magazines for Morons”: Pulp Magazines and the Emergence of Science Fiction 17
2 Conversations from the “Backyard”: Reading and Imagining Community 51
PART II. READING 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
PART III. PRACTICE 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 Octo-
ber 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