From Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents 9819920272, 9789819920273

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From Hyperspace to Hypertext Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents Christopher Leslie

From Hyperspace to Hypertext

Christopher Leslie

From Hyperspace to Hypertext Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents

Christopher Leslie Bangkok, Thailand

ISBN 978-981-99-2026-6    ISBN 978-981-99-2027-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Nataniil This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

The historical study of science fiction can foster effective communities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Many STEM professionals credit their career paths to their exposure to science fiction, and science fiction classes are popular general college electives at universities with STEM majors. The early history of the genre in the United States, though, intersects uncomfortably with racist, sexist, and colonial discourses. As well, in its quest to support the supposed evolutionary excellence of white men, a notion of independence became the norm in the STEM professions and in science fiction that might be less than suitable today. At the start of the twentieth century, engineering and scientific professions erected barriers to membership, inventing a narrow definition of the type of person who could participate. As this paradigm became established, the first magazine dedicated to science fiction was established in the United States. In both endeavors, the overrepresentation of white, middle-­class men was noticeable, but it was not accidental. The professions directly and sometimes indirectly limited participation from people who were not white men. The people who desired fiction that fit in with the latest scientific and technical knowledge willingly adopted the same standards. These prohibitions were anchored in an assortment of discourses about gender, race, and nationality at the start of the new century. One thing v

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they had in common was the belief that a vanguard of white men were the purveyors of the next stage of civilization. They alone, supposedly, were capable of the abstract thinking needed for technical innovation and scientific discovery. The justifications for forestalling participation from those who were not white men were not uniformly stated and, indeed, were based upon waning scientific theories. Surprisingly, some authors of science fiction who claimed to be informing the public about current science were quite far behind the new scientific thinking about human differences. Science fiction from this period offers a window onto these discourses that is hard to obtain elsewhere. Using insights from gender theory alongside science and technology studies suggests how to answer important questions about the genre. For instance, in what way was science fiction complicit in helping so many people for such a long time think that it was natural that middle-class men with European heritage had the greatest capacity for logical, abstract thinking? As a corollary, one might ask, what role did science fiction play in establishing the belief that logical, abstract thinking—supposedly inherent in white men—was essential for scientific investigation and technological innovation? Additionally, to what extent were people aware of the limitations imposed by this new paradigm and how did they dissent from it? The answers to questions like these are important as we seek to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in STEM. As the following pages will show, many science fiction authors and editors played a role in making it seem natural that white masculinist thinking was best for STEM or, at the very least, they failed to challenge this discourse. Failing to address this issue today risks recreating the same discourses that lead to the need for DEI in the first place— and it also represents a lost opportunity to learn about DEI from the history of science and technology. It is tempting to believe that historical sexism and racism unintentionally marginalized people who were not white men until recently. As Michel Foucault has suggested with his postulate of the repressive hypothesis, though, one should not imagine an oppressive past as a counterpoint to a free present. This projection of repression onto the past only serves to make modern people feel they are freer. No one is free from ideology; the trick is not allowing discourses to forestall other possibilities. Assuming

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that people of the past were more repressed has other dangers. For example, the repressive hypothesis might convince people to overlook the challengers who did not accept the new paradigm of gender. These contenders—in the sciences and as writers of science fiction—are important because they show how the belief in white masculine superiority was not monolithic. The dissenters in early science fiction demonstrate a keen appreciation for the social constructedness of gender, a concept that became popular long after the early writers in this study made their first incursions into the sphere men created for themselves. In the wake of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, it has become common to say that gender is a performance. What it means to be a man or a woman is not a feature of nature but a cultural phenomenon. In recent years, some of the ideas that her original readers sometimes found difficult to accept have also become commonplace. I remember my early encounters with readers of Butler who could support only the idea that gender was different from sex. They were ready to accept that the categories of male and female had nothing do to with masculinity and femininity. That is not the whole story. For a time, people in my circle were reluctant to accept the difficult lesson. Many people would say that sex was an immutable scientific fact, and what you did with your sex (your performance) was a cultural phenomenon. Today, it is more common to accept the deeper lesson that all human characteristics fall on a spectrum, instead of the seemingly scientific practice of dividing men and women into two neat groups with obvious boundary lines. In order to demonstrate Butler’s idea, I often point to her description of drag performance, where one can see how gender and sex are both performances. A man, dressed as a woman, who you know is a man, but convincingly utilizes the motifs of femininity that seemed intrinsic to a biological woman throws a wrench into the works of some people’s sense of self. Gender performance covers over an abyss, helping us turn away from the difficult truth that a body “is not a ‘being,’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated” (p. 189). Because gender is such a strong part of constructing the self, and drag reveals it all to be a charade, trans and nonbinary people are often subject to violence from people they unsettle. Gender performance is not without

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consequence. The physical and sexual violence against LGBTQ+ people speaks to the deep-seated importance of the gender binary. At the same time, the also very small number of trans individuals has provoked a disproportionate debate about who can use which bathroom, who can use which pronoun, and who can play on which sports term. These actions are political violence against LGBTQ+ people, and even when they are not physical, they exact a toll. In the thirty years since Butler wrote Gender Trouble, it has become clear that LGBTQ+ people are not the only ones who can cause others to panic over identity, making Butler’s insight generalizable to any individual who shows that norms are anything but normal. Violence against marginalized people is not new, but in recent years a moral alarm has sounded against people who want to promote change. The vitriolic reactions against critical race theory and teaching about systemic racism, the unbalanced effort to restrict access to abortion, attacks on female politicians, the refusal to respect protests against extrajudicial police killing of people of color, inaction in the face of school shootings, the increase in hate crimes against Asian and Jewish people, and the legions of women who are denied justice after workplace assault are just some of the indicators that have become repetitive stories in the news cycle. It is not accurate to say that all of these crimes are committed by white men, but whiteness is often implicated and protected. Why is the white school shooter brought safely into custody, but the nonwhite suspect killed before reaching the police station? Why have human resource officers and other corporate employees protected and even enabled the misdeeds of white male assailants and yet failed to help create a work environment that is not only diverse but also welcoming to a wider range of employees? The systematic support of white men, what some call unearned privilege, has had astonishing persistence, and so has the claims against people who are white men. Unearned privilege is one of a variety of explanations for why STEM fields are overpopulated by white men. To explain this concept, Macintosh (2003) invokes a metaphor of an “invisible, weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks” that a member of a majority group can use in their endeavors. This backpack does not bypass hard work or individual aptitudes,

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but it makes it more likely that a member of a privileged group will succeed. Claude Steele has described the opposite of this benefit for privileged groups as stereotype threat. Steele was able to demonstrate this phenomenon that helps to explain differences between members of demographic groups, explaining that the internal fear that one might reflect social stereotypes has a measurable impact on performance. A white male student, who fits in with the gender and racial background common in STEM majors, does not have to spend time worrying about these fears. Nothing is easy about becoming a scientist or an engineer, but the system usually works better for members of the predominate group. In my discussions with students, it is clear that these academic concepts are uncomfortable when applied to an individual. To a student who is part of a traditionally underrepresented group, the suggestion that their efforts might not be fairly judged by their merits is itself destabilizing. Knowing that there are structural blocks to success can lead students to abandon STEM for fields where their talents are better appreciated, like the finance industry. For struggling students from groups that are traditionally overrepresented, the rejoinder is that their race or sex does not really benefit them. Part of the problem is that it is not so easy to understand concepts like unearned privilege and stereotype threat. Aside from that, though, is the fact that gender roles are not really set up to benefit individuals. The roles set up in the twentieth century for scientists and engineers are hegemonic, in the sense that they make life easier for people who adopt the norms, but it is hard to see how they provide direct benefits. In fact, one can see how these roles limit the creativity, emotional life, and personal freedom of the white men who supposedly benefit. There are ways of seeing this phenomenon in science fiction. In the midst of the Cold War, Cordwainer Smith wrote “Scanners Live in Vain,” which is about an elite group of men needed for hyperspace travel. In order to serve the intergalactic empire as navigators, men submitted to mutilation, severing their brains from their bodies so that they would not suffer from disorientation caused by faster-than-light travel. The legion of altered men—known as Scanners—experience most of their lives without emotion, except when they visit their homes on leave. Confronting their wives and families, they reconnect their intellects to their bodies, a process known as cranching. This bewildering experience of emotion is

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short-lived; Scanners disconnect their emotions when they return to space and monitor each other to make sure no one is cranching too much. Smith’s story is an important allegory for the sacrifices men make in order to perform the roles that are needed by galactic commerce. However, he adds a final—and tragic—episode to the story. Scientific advances have made the debilitating mutilations endured by the Scanners unnecessary. Now, the Scanners have lost their purpose, their fraternal rites unnecessary, their sacrifices unneeded. The Scanners, who had been motivated by a sense of manly virtue, found their freedom to do their duty to be an illusion. As well, men who have adopted the proper performance of a logical thinker for the STEM professions might find that their sacrifices were in vain. The Scanners adopted a professional association that mimicked the notion of the Enlightenment public sphere. The freedom people expect to find in this kind of association is also illusory, but the rhetoric of openness is belied by the exclusions used for forming these associations in the first place. People who queer the professions—a woman in science field overpopulated with men is a ready example, but I also think about an engineer in a developing country who seeks treatment that is equitable to the white engineers from the home office—suffer disproportionately from discourses that seek to convince them that they are less valuable and less capable. This is particularly alarming in STEM education and professions, which persistently lack diversity but depend on diversity for innovation. The people who grind against the norms in universities or offices not only are disproportionately threatened by violence in their personal lives but also face slow deaths when they are outside the inner circle, unable to access knowledge about the professions that is passed along socially and judged unfairly by people who purportedly make determinations on promotions based on merit. Broaching these topics in university classrooms is not easy. It is difficult to tell someone that he benefits from unearned privilege when he and his family have struggled and risked everything so that he could get an education. It is difficult to respond to the only white student at an extracurricular diversity program who says that diversity programs have isolated him. It is difficult to hear gossip about a successful and well-­ funded colleague suggesting that her research is not innovative enough

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and she should be denied tenure or promotion. It is difficult to respond to a student’s assertion that her team is more trustworthy because the other team consists of students who are not citizens of the United States. It is difficult to undo the impact of a student who walks into my classroom, where a group of prospective high school students are seeking to experience what college life is like, only to hear him quip, “Must be recruiting day. I’ve never seen so many girls [sic] in the same classroom before.” It is hard to counteract a first-year student’s thinking who says she is leaving STEM because, “I just cannot be around these people anymore.” Even with courage and respect, coming to an understanding is difficult because it is hard to see how unspoken assumptions condition the way we interpret facts and the stories we tell about the facts often drift in the direction of existing social standards. The person who is most famous for describing how scientific facts so often fail to overcome existing beliefs is Thomas S. Kuhn. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions points out that new information is always filtered through existing practices—what he calls a paradigm—with the result that solid, contradictory facts do not often bring about a revolution. Instead, normal science continues along unperturbed until the contradictions build up to such an extent that a paradigm shift, which is not exactly a revolution, occurs. There are many hidden gems in this book, including his insight that people are unlikely to accept the normative force of paradigms unless they themselves have witnessed a paradigm shift. It is my contention that, instead of waiting for the future to reveal itself to students and colleagues, one way to witness a paradigm shift is through the interdisciplinary study of STEM. Using the term coined by Yackman (2008), I suggest we should add history, literary studies, and other liberal arts—represented by the letter A—to create STEAM that will lead to better outcomes in STEM. Fields like gender studies and science and technology studies are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge, but unfortunately they have not often been brought to bear on the historical study of science fiction. As I hope the following pages show, though, this STEAM type of investigation provides compelling insights. In my research, I have been inspired by gender theorists like Butler because they have done so much to demonstrate how the social roles that seem so natural are, instead, convenient social fictions—and the

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convenience is not for the marginalized person, nor really for any individual at all. Nonetheless, because the gender roles are created, transmitted, and enforced by humans, they can be resisted or changed. Science fiction offers an opportunity to examine how some of our current discourses about gender were created and challenged. Gender is a performance, but this does not explain why the limited roles we have inherited were so satisfying and long-lasting. While working on this project, I kept thinking about how science fiction often proposed ideal roles for a new cadre of technical professionals. In this regard, science fiction helps to explain why individuals accepted gender roles for the benefits that they imagined they would confer, even when they did not obtain them. When periodicals and the people around you assert that the roles are advantageous, you adopt them. Any problems you personally experience afterward are due to your own shortcomings. I have also been inspired by scholars like Isiah Lavender Jr., who have gone back into the archive of science fiction to show how a fresh reading of science fiction can be a source of new insights into the process of Othering. In his Race in American Science Fiction, he points out texts that—in a positive or negative way—offer lessons about the racial discourses in science fiction and show why the available alternatives are so important. For my part, I seek to do something similar, but with a focus on white masculinity. The roles imagined for white men are not typically admirable, but by studying them, one can learn a lot about the discourses shaping education and innovation in the twentieth century. Looking back on the history of science fiction, one can find abundant examples of authors who boosted the new paradigm and their widespread acclaim attests to the pervasiveness of this discourse. At the same time, understanding the paradigm of white masculinity provides an opportunity to understand fiction written by dissenters more fully. Critical race scholars like Dorothy Roberts have also been an important part of my research (not to mention my teaching). Roberts’s Fatal Invention is a compelling overview of the social construction of race. Her succinct statement that race is not a phenomenon in nature that later became politicized, but a scientific concept invented for political purposes, is an important background concept for this work. While reading early U.S. science fiction, one often sees nationalities and alien species

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but one does not often encounter human races. This is a particular form of racial thinking that was prominent as the first U.S. magazines devoted to science fiction were established. Although racial hierarchies were orthodox science in the nineteenth century, in scientific circles the paradigm suffered a collapse around the time of World War II. In science fiction, though, one often sees characters and plots that resonate with the outdated thinking. The historical study of the genre thus offers an opportunity to understand and reflect on the persistence of racialized thinking. The challengers to this discourse, writing stories they hoped would raise the consciousness of the science fiction community, demonstrate considerable dexterity in revealing the paradigm, offering inspiration for potential creators of new fiction.

Motivation and Overview In recent years, I have been disturbed by the fan backlash against DEI in science fiction. Media producers have made clear their commitment to retracting some of the racism, sexism, and colonialism found in popular movie projects. As a long-term fan myself, I have enjoyed and welcomed new productions that have modern sensibilities about difference, but not everyone feels the same. I felt a similar sensation reported by Judith Merril when she wanted to voice a community opposition to the Vietnam War: I was surprised to find such vehement opposition. The fan who edited one of the recent Star Wars films to create a “defeminized” version shocked me. Although the United States’ problem with white masculinity has been obvious, I was dismayed to find it so strongly represented in science fiction fandom, which for me had always been a community that supported DEI. For the bookends of this project, I have chosen two imaginary technical innovations that bear the marks of their creation by white masculinist thinkers. The time when hyperspace was invented as part of the shared genre coincides with the editorship of Hugo Gernsback, the first editor of the study. The term hypertext was coined in 1965, and thinking of the term more broadly as changeable, group-created text marks the end of the study, when computing (and science fiction) had found their way

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into universities. As originally imagined by John W. Campbell, Jr., a jump through hyperspace was a complex but precise maneuver, but one that causes disorientation in the rational men piloting the craft. This trade-off between the loss of reason and the accomplishment of the goal is similarly found some thirty years later when Theodor Nelson coins the term hypertext: a release from reason in order to aid an independent thinker’s goals. What was a new paradigm of masculine thinking at the start of the century, though, had become a design principle by 1965. Science fiction studies are, these days, an important part of university education—for STEM students of course, but also for other students who want to understand the modern world. At a time when concerns about DEI have been heightened and the consequences of white masculinity are clear, the science fiction classroom can be an important zone for examining the genesis of these beliefs and strategies for combatting them. A deeper understanding of the history of DEI can surely serve as a springboard for more equitable classrooms and workplaces. What is more, those who wish to create science fiction can benefit from the opposing voices that coexisted with the authors and editors promoting a new tie between masculinity, engineering, and civilization. Accordingly, this book is divided into three parts, each one an “era” that was influenced by an important editor: Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, and Judith Merril. The chapters in each part analyze authors who each editor championed as well as authors who challenged their vision. One unexpected finding was the success and persistence of the notion of manly excellence, which is portrayed so well by Gernsback in his novel Ralph 124C 41+. As seen in Part I of this study, the trust in the mechanism of the public sphere led to a particular kind of hailing function. The longevity of Gernsback’s legacy (annual science fiction awards are still awarded in his name) points to the love science fiction fans have for his vision. As seen in Part II, Campbell continued along this path, even though scientific findings had discredited the science behind the so-called supermen. Some authors, as shown in Chap. 6, as well as anthropologists and other social scientists offered alternatives to the rugged, independent masculinity favored at the start of the century. In Part III, one can see how Judith Merril continued to build on this thinking, emphasizing the importance of community and symbiosis. In the analysis of the new wave offered in Chap. 8, one might have expected to find the promotion of

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this egalitarian and communal ethos, but the main figures of the movement instead portray the suffering one must go through in order to maintain one’s manly excellence. Chapter 9, then, seems like an anticlimax: while it would have been possible to find the promotion of community and self-publication in the first efforts of computing inspired by science fiction as well as in the first university considerations of science fiction, the opposite seems to be the case. The promotion of manly intellectual independence comes to a crescendo, where science fiction and the technological solutions it inspires are devoted to honing isolated intellects. Given the effort of dissidents to push science fiction in a different direction, this outcome is disappointing, particularly in the modern moment, where challenges like COVID-19 and climate change have shown the need for individuals to work together to create long-term solutions for the common good. There were authors showing how technology is not separate from society, and they were joined by authors in other corners of universities who showed that technology did not determine society. Rather, at the time of the new wave, one sees a new field of science and technology studies that shows the synergies among science, technology, and society. As seen in Chap. 9, though, it seems like the lesson practitioners have learned is that no one’s body matters and that technological solutions cut easily through differences in social environments, much the same way as is seen in the first part of the study. This kind of thinking is unsuitable for the Anthropocene, and people with professional interests in STEM can benefit by making new selections of which science fiction to read, or at least by learning to read science fiction differently.

Methodological Notes In the text, I have thoroughly described my dependence on gender theory and science and technology studies (STS). Other aspects of the text may not be obvious to some readers. It may be helpful to learn more about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in STEM, the cultural studies fields of new historicism and postcolonial studies, and the form of narrative theory known as reader response.

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One important theoretical concept in this work is hegemonic masculinity. Hegemon is an ancient Greek word used to describe regional governors who maintained their authority by largesse and favors instead of the presence of soldiers. The term hegemony took on new meaning from the political theorist Gramsci (1973). Gramsci points out that a ruling power maintains its authority in two ways: “domination” or “intellectual leadership” (p. 57). Using force or punishment is a last resort; more effective is hegemony, or the structures of civil society that en-courage consent of the governed. To make a trivial analogy, pedestrians often walk on the right side of the sidewalk, even though there is no explicit law stating this. An individual who walks on the left is not breaking the law but will find it inconvenient. The tradition of walking on the right functions like hegemony in the sense that it is an unenforced rule, and breaking it results in inconvenience and perhaps injury. Connell (2005) proposed that masculinity functions hegemonically in 1995. Masculinity was once considered a monolithic, archetypal construction, but Connell seeks to show that masculinity is “constructed in interaction” (p. 35). Like the concept of privilege, Connell suggests that there is a “patriarchal dividend” provided to those who conform. Later, Connell writes, hegemonic masculinity is an “historically mobile relation” that describes the current “claim to authority,” not necessarily enforced by direct violence (p. 77, 79). Like walking on the right-hand side of the street, conforming to the current norms of masculinity is the smoothest path for individuals. Overall, readers will notice my analysis depends on examining evidence from five literary elements as part of a methodology known as close reading. When I was a Ph.D. student at the City University of New York, I attended a lecture by Jane Gallop, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. My early days of cultural studies were saturated with literary and aesthetic theory, which was at that time pitched as a corrective to close reading and other formalistic approaches to literature that ignored the world outside of the text. At the start of my doctoral studies, Gallop astonished me by suggesting that close reading is an important part of ethical reading practice. Maybe there is no consensus these days on how to do close reading. Gallop (2000) has outlined her approach to close reading, and it does not

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precisely match my own. We share the goal of making students aware that their preconceptions can twist what they remember about a text. Reading literature, after all, should not just be a confirmation of what we already know but an opportunity to encounter someone else’s point of view. She writes: What do I mean by ethical? I believe it is ethical to respect other people, by which I mean: listen to them, try and understand what they are actually saying, rather than just confirming our preconceptions about them, our prejudices. I believe it is our ethical obligation to fight against our tendency to project our preconceptions, that it is our ethical duty to attempt to hear what someone else is really saying. (p. 12)

Close reading came into disfavor when it was used to avoid difficult questions about literature and its ideological role. For a time, other forms of cultural theory were ascendant. A modern use of close reading does not seek to eliminate these newer forms of theory, but only to augment them with solid evidence from the texts under consideration. One of the joys of teaching science fiction is that it causes readers to stop and rethink their assumptions about literature. In an ordinary literature class, it can be difficult to get students to think about the narrator of a text as anyone but the author; in science fiction, the narrative voice from one possible future may reflect some aspirations of the author, but it is certainly not the author who is tied to the present. In this book, as in my teaching, I focus on five elements of literature in order to make these contradictions clear. They sometimes overlap, and the selection of these five aspects of a text is not intended as a scientific taxonomy. Instead, they are five ways in which a story comes alive to a reader. Characterization. Some characters demonstrate a difference between what they do and what the narrator of other characters say about them. A famous example of this is in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where all the characters and the narrator seem to think that Kurtz is a hero, whereas his actions in the novel make it clear he is a monster. This can be called the difference between summary and dramatic characterization. Another common issue with characterization is a stock type. The older, wise scientist who is ignored when they try to warn others is a common

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character type; the helpless woman who is kidnapped is also a common type. In the hands of a creative author, the reader’s expectations of a character type can be violated. In this way, the failure of a character to fulfill the demeaning aspects of its type can be an important lesson in consciousness-raising. A conflict between the types of characterization often points the way to an important insight about a story. In Clare Winger Harris’s The Fate of the Poseidonia, for instance, Margaret is described as plain and George is described as a young man of science. These summary characterizations, though, conflict with their actions. George exhibits xenophobia, is ineffective against his rival, and ultimately goes nowhere. Margaret is calm, and she embarks on a new life on Mars within an alien culture. Judith Merril and Cyril Kornbluth’s character Gunner Cade is depicted as dedicated to his mission, but his actions describe him as curious about the world. These conflicts create a sense that something is out of whack with the setting. In other stories, though, characterization is consistent: Gernsback’s Ralph is always a capable genius, not only in the way that he acts but also in the way that others describe him. In this case, it seems as if the setting of the story is validated. Narration. Literature is told by a narrative persona to a presumed audience. Although many students are trained to distinguish between a first-person narrator (who is supposedly partisan) and a third-person narrator (who is supposedly objective), the distinction is not always as clear as it seems. The Great Gatsby, for instance, seems like it has an anonymous, third-person narrator, but looking more closely, readers will see that it is told from the perspective of Gatsby’s neighbor. Grammatically, it is not so simple to use second-person narration, but as is seen in the following chapters, that does not stop authors from making the attempt in experimental fiction. Sometimes the perspective of the narrator can be inferred to be that of the author, but literary professionals prefer to avoid the so-called intentional fallacy. How can a reader be sure that the opinions and attitudes expressed in a text are the same as the authors? If nothing else, sometimes people change their minds. More importantly, though, authors often create fictional persona to tell their stories. In addition, they even can be

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seen to create authorial personas for themselves that may or may not match their actual biographies. The most important thing about narration is the personality of the narrator. Does this persona match the ideals of the audience? Is the narrator trustworthy or unreliable? Another important part of narration is the presumed audience. Anyone can potentially be the reader of a text, but the narration gives clues about who fits in with the author’s (and publisher’s) assumptions about who will be picking it up. In the context of the present study, predictions about who is reading the text figure in large part to make an analysis of the genre. Plot. When people say plot, they usually mean a synopsis of the story (i.e., a plot summary). Analysis of the plot is more complicated. A plot is often arranged around a binary pair: the complication and the resolution (or climax). The complication marks a break away from the everyday world of the characters, who then experience a sequence of events that get them ready for the final challenge. The complication of the plot in Star Wars is when Luke Skywalker purchases R2D2. This splits Luke off from everyday life and begins the rising action. The sequence of events in the rising action may not be told chronologically. For instance, Luke Skywalker is far along in his plot before a fact from the past, that Darth Vader destroyed his father, enters into the rising action. In general, the rising action trains the characters to accomplish the final task, bringing the plot to a resolution. After the plot is resolved, the story enters into the denouement. Rewards and punishments are distributed; Luke and Han get a medal, and the characters enter into a new normal. This concept of plot is familiar to readers of Greek classics; it is described well by Aristotle as a key aspect of a play. For Aristotle, the strict attention to the plot and the careful arrangement of the events lead to catharsis or the feeling of pity and fear that releases antisocial emotions. To accomplish this, plots are strictly fashioned, like a train going down a track. If this sounds coercive, that is because it is. Aristotle described plays that were used as part of a religious festival. This coercive nature of catharsis leads some authors to avoid a tightly constructed plot. These authors—particularly after World War II—prefer a looser, episodic style that avoids the coercion of catharsis.

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Like characterization, plots can come out of the stock. A stock plot is a well-known plot, such as a plot arranged around the complication of a kidnapping and the resolution in rescue. The second half of Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ uses this stock plot. Plot is an important part of Umberto Eco’s analysis of the reader’s response to popular fiction. A clever author will exploit how a reader will imagine a plot will be resolved, and then take the resolution along a different path. A reader can imagine different resolutions to a plot, but they are not always fulfilled. This disruption of expectations can have an effect of raising a reader’s consciousness. Setting. The time and place of a work are often the first considerations of a setting. In science fiction, of course, the time is one of the many possible futures and the setting is unfamiliar to the Earth in clever ways. In addition, science fiction often employs shared settings, in the sense that many authors use the genre conventions of hypertext. Finally, in science fiction, the constraints of the setting are more apparent than in literary fiction. The possibilities for the characters in the setting, what might be called the environment for action, are more obvious. The difference between realism and naturalism can be subtle, but in science fiction, it is often clear how much influence the characters have over the setting and what abilities or social worlds surround them. Style. An author’s use of words can be thought of as style. An author’s word choice, including the use of specialized technical vocabulary, can be an indication of the intended audience, which shows how the five elements sometimes overlap. This can include figures of speech and allusions, as well as the absence of either. Science fiction, like other pulp fiction, often does not contain fanciful comparisons. A play by Shakespeare contains allusions to Greek and Roman mythology as well as to great moments in British history. These allusions demand that the audience learn a lot before understanding the play. Science fiction, in the main, does not contain many allusions to high literature or to historical events. However, there are often allusions to technological achievements (such as Campbell’s allusion to the Integraph at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Science fiction authors also make use of fictional allusions to future historical events. Another aspect of style often seen in science fiction is neologism. Oscar Wilde made up the term Bunburying in his play The Importance of Being

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Earnest as a demonstration of his wit. Science fiction authors often delight in creating their own terms; both hyperspace and hypertext are neologisms. It is curious how often narrators in science fiction refuse to explain neologisms to the reader, like the permanents in Merril’s “Death is the Penalty.” Bangkok, Thailand

Christopher Leslie

References Butler, J. (2010). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities: Second Edition. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1990). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage. Gallop, J. (2000). The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 16(3), 7–17. Gramsci, A. (1973). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (Trans.) Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith. International Publishers. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. U Chicago P. Lavender, I., III. (2019). Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. Ohio State UP. McIntosh, P. (2003). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. In S. Plous (Ed.), Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination (pp. 191–196). McGraw-Hill. Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century. The New Press. Smith, C. (2005). Scanners Live in Vain. In R. Silverberg (Ed.), The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume 1 (pp. 290–321). Orb. Steele, C. M. (1997, June). A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance. American Psychologist, pp. 613–629. Yakman, G. (2008). ST∑@M Education: An Overview of Creating a Model of Integrative Education. In Proceedings of the Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology (PATT-19) Conference: Research on Technology, Innovation, Design & Engineering Teaching, Salt Lake City, United States of America, pp. 335–358.

Acknowledgments

My colleagues Maggie Kulik, Brooks Heffner, and Carrie Shanafelt have provided so much support emotionally and editorially that it is hard to imagine this book without them. As well, my mentor and dissertation advisor, Marc Dolan, and my dissertation readers, Alison Griffiths and George Otte, provided helpful advice and asked good questions that helped bring about the finished project. The team at Palgrave Macmillan (including the anonymous peer reviewers) has been helpful in keeping the project moving forward, particularly during the pandemic that seemed to make everything slower than usual. I am grateful for the hundreds of students at universities in three countries who have patiently listened to my lessons and taught me quite a bit about how readers encounter science fiction. My life has forever been enriched by my time at what is now called NYU Tandon School of Engineering but used to be known as Polytechnic University. I started working as a full-time lecturer before I finished my Ph.D.; having the opportunity to continue my research in Science and Technology Studies in classrooms full of engineering and science students was an invaluable apprenticeship. Through the auspices of the U.S. Fulbright Program, I was also able to teach at Universität Potsdam, Germany, and the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou. These

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experiences helped me to think about American Studies in an international context, which improved my scholarship in numerous ways. I am particularly grateful for my colleagues at SCUT because they made it possible for me to remain in China after the conclusion of my Fulbright year. The extraordinary academic freedom they tried to offer me, as well as their flexibility in my teaching and living arrangements, made it possible for me to complete this long-term project. The interest of colleagues from universities around China who invited me to speak to their students provided useful feedback as well. In fact, it was not until around the time I was living and working in China that this project took its final form. I was still able to attend international conferences, and several experiences in particular confirmed for me that I was on the right track: Sensational Scholarship: The Pulp Studies Symposium at James Madison University, the Second Science Fiction and Communism Conference at the American University in Bulgaria, the 2018 meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association at Chaminade University in Honolulu, and annual meetings of the City Tech Science Fiction Symposium, held online due to the ongoing pandemic. The attendees and organizers of many other international conferences, before the project approached its final form, helped me with their questions, comments, and silences to hone my ideas and think about a global audience. Librarians and archivists have played an important role in this research, and I am grateful for their assistance. The staff at Boston University’s Gotlieb Center, the University of Texas Henry Ransom Center, the University of Santa Cruz’s Heinlein Papers, Brown University’s Lovecraft collection, and Eastern New Mexico University’s Brackett Papers all have my undying gratitude for their help. In addition, the staff at the New York Public Library, Archives Canada, and various university libraries provided invaluable support. A dissertation-year award and travel grant from my alma mater, the City University of New York Graduate Center, helped finance the early phases of this research. Some of the insights in Chap. 3 appeared in the article “A Rocket of One’s Own: Scientific Gender Bending by Isabel M. Lewis, Clare Winger Harris, and Leslie F. Stone in the Early

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U.S. Science Fiction Pulps,” published in Femspec 18.2 (2018): 10–39. An earlier version of part of the analysis for Chap. 6 appeared in “An Earthman in Spacetown: C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith Stories as a Catalyst for Social Science Fiction” in America 37 (2014). Moscow: Russian Society of American Culture Studies, 304–313.

Contents

Part I The Gernsback Era   1 1 Cosmopolitan Gentlemen of Science  3 2 Planet Smashers of the Second Industrial Revolution 51 3 Have We Not Had Enough of War?109 Part II The Campbell Era 173 4 Archeology of the Future175 5 The Editor with One Hundred Hands237 6 The Challenges of Inclusion291 Part III The Merril Era 339 7 C  onfronting Cold War Masculinity341 xxvii

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8 The End of Science Fiction407 9 Science Fiction and the University461 I ndex505

Abbreviations

AMZ Amazing Stories AST Astounding Stories (after 1960, known as Analog) DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion EE Electrical Experimenter ESP extrasensory perception F&SF The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction PK psychokinesis SFRA Science Fiction Research Association STEM science, technology, engineering, and mathematics STS Science and Technology Studies WON Wonder Stories and related titles WT Weird Tales

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Advertisement for Hugo Gernsback’s wireless communication device, the Telimco. Electrical Record, Feb. 1907, p. 55 Fig. 1.2 In Hugo Gernsback’s story, Ralph first meets Alice due to a communication failure. Note Ralph’s bulging cranium, which contains so much brain energy that it seems to have caused baldness. This illustration was used as the cover for the 1925 book version and accompanied the 1929 republication of Ralph 124C 41+ in AMZ Quarterly vol. 2, no. 1 (p. 5) Fig. 2.1 The cover of the September 1928 issue of AMZ offered a graphical interpretation of Gernsback’s term scientifiction Fig. 2.2 Detail from an illustration in the magazine publication of E. E. Smith’s Skylark of Space (1928a). The male inventors show their girlfriends the ship Fig. 3.1 An image that accompanied Clare Winger Harris’s “A Runaway World” in WT. She employs a deceptive narrative frame where the world’s scientists are anxious about the observations they make. Ordinary people, however, are shown to be more adaptable Fig. 3.2 In order to assert a male persona, L. Taylor Hansen supplied a portrait of a man, which appeared along with the publication of his 1930 story, “The City on the Cloud” Fig. 4.1 Popular Science Monthly shows MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering Vannevar Bush with the Integraph, the inspira-

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30 75 83

128 163

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Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Fig. 9.1

List of Figures

tion for a device in a story by John W. Campbell, Jr. The Integraph “in eight minutes solves problems that take mathematicians weeks” (Powell, 1928, p. 13) 182 Detail of an illustration that accompanied John W. Campbell’s “Twilight” in the November 1934 AST. The caption repeats the words of Ares Sen Kenlin, shown lower left: “Then I saw the city of perfect machines” (p. 44) 201 Susan Calvin interviews a robot in Isaac Asimov’s “Little Lost Robot,” AST March 1947 248 In Asimov’s “Playboy and the Slime God,” humans are abducted by aliens and subjected to sexual abuse 277 An illustration accompanying C. L. Moore’s “There Shall Be Darkness” depicts a woman with what looks like a magic wand deploying beasts in resistance to the colonizing forces (p. 22) 311 Detail from an illustration that accompanied Leigh Brackett’s Sea-Kings of Mars. Matt Carse looks like he is falling into an abyss during his journey 329 An illustration accompanying an article by Judith Merril (1951) about the Hydra Club features Futurian David A. Kyle flying through the front door in an Air Force uniform. Isaac Asimov with a “Dr.” button turns the spit that holds Frederik Pohl, who is being roasted. Looking a bit like the woman on the cover of her first anthology, Judith Merril is to the left of Pohl, observing but not protecting her soon-to-be ex-husband. Futurian editor Robert Lowndes is smoking a pipe in the foreground352 Merril organized the signatories of the advertisement opposing the Vietnam War on the right; the reactionary advertisement is shown on the left 401 In 1950, Merril edited her first anthology, the same year when her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, was published 423 After many years of editing the Year’s Best anthologies, Merril extended her musing about the label “science fiction” (1966b). The word “science” appears on top of “fiction,” asking a question about both and the combination as well. She further wonders about the label in her subtitle: “year’s best what?” 438 The display used for Spacewar!, a computer game inspired by Skylark of Space474

Part I The Gernsback Era

1 Cosmopolitan Gentlemen of Science

The connection between Hugo Gernsback’s work as an author and editor of U.S. science fiction and a paradigm shift in gender roles for science and engineering is not immediately obvious. The typical assessment of Gernsback is that he coined the phrase “science fiction,” demanded scientific accuracy, and assembled a fan community, and he is sometimes criticized for restricting science fiction to a technical elite. What is less appreciated is Gernsback’s linkage of masculinity, scientific progress, and the global spread of Western civilization. This new discourse was not yet widely accepted. Some might assume that Gernsback unconsciously adopted prevailing beliefs when he venerated an inventive aptitude in white men as necessary for human civilization. As will become clear in this and the following chapters, though, Gernsback was one of the figures who explored and exploited this linkage. In this way, Gernsback’s work offers an invaluable look into the new paradigm. The social construction of gender and Gernsback are not often studied together. Instead, science fiction studies sometimes laud Gernsback as the person who invented U.S. science fiction, and the annual Hugo awards attest to his enduring legacy. After his death in 1967, though, his fortune turned. The atrocities of the technological society—along with a shift in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_1

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the understanding of the relationships among science, technology, and society—led to a reevaluation of Gernsback’s legacy, particularly of his scientism. For instance, British new wave author Aldiss (1973) discredits Gernsback’s type of science fiction as “propaganda for the wares of the inventor” (p. 182) and goes as far as to say that Gernsback “was one of the worst disasters to hit the science fiction field” (p.  209). Gunn (1975) echoes a common sentiment: Gernsback’s vision of an elite group of scientific men led “to a ghetto wherein they could live in genteel poverty, much admired by their neighbors and largely ignored by the residents in more gracious neighborhoods” (p.  34). Subsequent creators have certainly taken these criticisms to heart, and books, movies, television series, and video games today reach large audiences. Even though much more variation is permissible under the name science fiction today, some of the underlying assumptions are legible in Gernsback’s editorial decisions persist. Gernsback’s vaunted promotion of technical accuracy and his supposed dissemination of new scientific ideas do not hold up on closer examination. One persistent linkage of his work from fifty years in science fiction—and among the writers he promoted—was actually outdated. Even as the scientific foundation for the idea that white male thinkers were the most insightful started to crumble, popular interest in the supposed innate ability of white men to think logically and invent prolifically increased. Recent work in science and technology studies (STS), however, offers an opportunity to examine this discourse in the context of gender, race, and colonialism. A few scholars have looked at the intersection of the history of science and engineering with gender studies (Bederman, 1995; Kimmel, 2006; Oldenziel, 1999; Pursell, 2007), but these insights have yet to be applied in science fiction studies. A deeper investigation reveals how Gernsback built on new assumptions about who could best succeed in science and technology and how those achievements were the legacy of thinkers who promoted the superiority of cultures that traced their roots to northern Europe. Gernsback’s direct involvement in science fiction was relatively short lived, beginning with the 1926 publication of Amazing Stories (AMZ) and ending with the sale of Wonder Stories (WON) in 1936. As can be

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seen in his longer-lived electronics magazines, though, Gernsback carefully crafted a persona as a professional man of action: an inventor who immigrated to the United States, made some of the first experimental television broadcasts in New  York City, and established a publishing company. Gernsback’s magazines published what he called scientifiction, including some of his own stories, but he also encouraged his readers to take an active role. He was not satisfied by readers who accepted the stories passively, demanding that they debate the science, engage in experiments, and write. Hailing readers as active participants in creating the future was a clever marketing strategy, but it also matched the expectations of an audience that assumed a technical gentleman must not only study but also implement learning in real-world,  vigorous activity. Gernsback’s stated goal to promote a community of vigorous men that operates like a scientific public sphere can be attributed to unspoken concerns about masculinity and the technological society. By looking at the persona Gernsback crafted for himself and the implied audience of his early scientific magazines, one can see evidence of the community’s ideals at a time when engineering practice was adopting gender norms and imagining global projects as the most suitable training for new talent.

1.1 An Immigrant Battling Industrial Innovation Gernsback successfully crafted a persona of a gentleman who was stymied by modern civilization, even though details of his actual inventions are sparse. What Gernsback felt was an unfavorable climate for inventors in Europe allegedly led him to emigrate to the United States; Moskowitz (1974) states that Gernsback could not get a patent in France or Germany. In February 1904, the story goes, the nineteen-year-old man who would give science fiction its name sailed into Hoboken, New Jersey, but he did not intend to become a writer or publisher. He brought with him what many describe as a new design for a battery that could “melt a piece of metal as thick as a pencil” (O’Neil, 1963, p. 64). After he arrived in the United States with his invention, though, he says he had to “abandon it

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as impractical” for mass production, yet no one documents his improvement or evaluates its efficacy.1 He then interviewed for a job at a company that made batteries for the U.S. Navy. He got the job, but after the interview he was caught rifling through the technical papers in the boss’ office, leading to his immediate dismissal. Gernsback’s subsequent business ventures, as he told them to Moskowitz, also failed due to circumstances beyond his control, such as an embezzling partner and an economic downturn. These anecdotes demonstrate the ways in which Gernsback and others like Moskowitz assume that an individual genius should have found success in America’s gilded age. Historians of science and industry, though, look back on this time differently. Starting around 1850, some scholars assert that a second industrial revolution was underway, exploiting communication technology, transportation networks, and management theory to develop corporations that offered products and services to mass consumers. Gernsback, in trying to operate as a small, independent business owner, was swimming against a current of consolidation and vertical integration that marked the turn of the twentieth century. The phrase “second industrial revolution” was coined by Landes (1969), referring to the advances in chemistry and electronics that expanded the range of consumer products after the 1850s. Aided by inexpensive means to bring goods to the market, companies utilized economies of scale to create formidable barriers to competition. The second industrial revolution had a profound impact on the culture of innovation: instead of disruptive flashes of innovation, corporations required technical professionals to provide incremental innovations, a large number of customers willing to try new products, and a diversified industrial organization with centralized management and research  Gernsback himself often writes about this experience, but the key chronicler is Sam Moskowitz, a collector and fan historian who organized the first world science fiction convention in 1939 and worked for Gernsback for about a year in the 1950s. Noting that he questioned Gernsback “thoroughly” during biweekly meals and “innumerable conferences” during his employment, it seems that Moskowitz heard Gernsback present his persona many times (1986, p. 60). A perusal of patents awarded to Gernsback via Google Scholar does not, however, reveal a patent for this device. Patent US-842950-A, granted in June 1906 and assigned to the Royal Battery Company, is essentially a carrying case for batteries that would, surely, allow them to be connected in series. Gernsback was awarded thirty-four patents, but only this one relates to batteries. 1

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facilities. As detailed by Chandler (2005), businesses were increasingly organized into multiunit corporate entities that passed components among them; these new companies were marked by their ability to prohibit new entrants into markets and discourage innovations that would disrupt their profitability. The development of research laboratories, such as the research branch of  American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T) formed in 1911 to solve technical problems related to the telephone (renamed Bell Labs in 1925), demonstrates how the dream of independent inventors had become anachronistic. As the second industrial revolution reached maturity, one can see a fear that the ideal of the amateur scientist and the independent inventor established in the previous century would have to be revised; the worldly man of letters who engaged in scientific pursuits as an amateur seemed more like a dilettante in the age of industrial science. Shapin (2008) characterizes this transformation of science from a “calling” into a “profession.” Gernsback’s call for solitary geniuses was increasingly nostalgic; as the century wore on, the nineteenth-century ideal of a disinterested amateur was increasingly deprecated. Independent geniuses, Shapin points out, were disruptive and became less valuable than team workers with technical backgrounds who would work steadily for corporations, solving problems and offering manageable, incremental improvements. In this context, Gernsback’s promotion of independent amateurs was a reaction against a workforce that was becoming increasingly corporatized and offering products to mass-produced publics. Gernsback’s actual biography shows how he was trained for the world of disinterested amateurs that was fading away. He was born Hugo Gernsbacher in Luxembourg in 1884. He attended grammar school in Luxembourg but eventually moved to Bingen am Rhein, Germany, where he graduated in 1903 at a new school that was then called Rheinisches Technikum für Maschinenbau und Elektrotechnik. At the time, specialized education for engineering and science was rare, and Gernsback’s well-­ rounded education included literature and languages (he grew up speaking German, but he was fluent in English and French as well) in addition to technical subjects. He admired the writing of Percival Lowell (1896), who proposed that Mars could be the home of “local intelligence” (p. 201). He also admired Mark Twain’s character Huckleberry Finn, the

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teenage boy whose resistance to education and his home life lead him to adventures, a boy who is able to see the world with fresh eyes and escape from cultural prejudices. Shortly before he emigrated to the United States, Gernsback penned a lengthy novel in German, Ein Pechvogel, using the name Huck Gernsbacher. The protagonist’s misadventures take place in England, sometimes involving science and invention, but always failing because he lacks “common sense” (Moskowitz, 1971, p. 11, 13). Although the novel was never published, he carries the persona forward, bringing a stack of newly printed calling cards with the name Huck Gernsback on his trans-Atlantic voyage (O’Neil, 1963, p. 64). The young man, similar to his namesake, strikes out into territory that is unknown to him—but both Hucks should have realized that their dreams of a life free from societal encumbrances were fantasies. Gernsback’s commitment to the ideal of the nineteenth-century amateur, and the attendant public sphere of learned gentlemen, is shown in some of his earliest publications. Shortly after arriving as an entrepreneurial immigrant, he published two pieces in Scientific American, using the name Huck Gernsback. The second letter, “The Lunar Rainbow” in September (1905), responds to a discussion in the journal regarding the existence of a natural phenomenon. Gernsback writes that his native country Luxembourg is high above sea level but the surrounding air has high humidity: this allows for a clear observation of the “moonbow.” Gernsback asserts that it is the rarity of observation that accounts for the fact that lunar rainbows are not more widely known. Gernsback asserts a persona of a nineteenth-century natural historian, reporting phenomena to the scientific public sphere. The bourgeois public sphere, according to Habermas (1991), grew in influence at the same time as the age of science after the British Civil War. Emmanuel Kant, in his 1784 essay “What Is Enlightenment,” stated that the public use of reason was key for a man to think for himself instead of being guided like a child. For Habermas, the training ground for this release was public discussion of the arts, which played a new role. Before the reign of Charles II, Habermas asserts, the arts were primarily in service to the state. Instead of glorifying religious or monarchic leaders, the arts could be financed by the rising middle class, either by individual sale (like a Flemish portrait or a still life) or by selling tickets (like for a Mozart

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concert). The “public” sphere is an intermediate space between the “state” sphere (i.e., the monarchy) and the “home” sphere (i.e., the home of a landowner). In public, using one’s reasoning faculty led to a new sense of individualism. In a place like a coffee shop, one could discourse freely about matters of public concern. Habermas describes three institutional criteria for conversations in the public sphere conversations. First, the quality of the argument and not the rank of the speaker was the primary concern. Second, discussion revolved around the conduct and construction of social life, topics of “common concern” once dominated by monarchs and religious leaders. Third, the public sphere was, in principle, “inclusive” even if the public might be characterized by exclusion “in any given instance.” Habermas admits that poverty and the lack of educational opportunity limited participation, but he insists that a new category of the social world emerged nonetheless. Not everyone might or could participate in every conversation, Habermas writes, but the participants were conscious of being representatives of the public as a whole (pp. 36–37). Habermas’s failure to consider the de facto exclusion practiced in the bourgeois public sphere is taken up more fully in Sect. 1.5 of this chapter. Gernsback evokes the public sphere, which is not surprising due to the way the age of science depended upon its principles. In so doing, his work demonstrates the limitations of the concept. Although the ideals of the public sphere are admirable, they are also limited in their utility for analysis. Firstly, one need only think about Enlightened gentlemen discoursing on matters of the so-called common good while enjoying coffee, sugar, and cocoa, which in Europe were products derived from the global trade of enslaved people in the Americas. Habermas celebrates their intention to “change domination” (p.  28), yet their attention was not drawn to their own complicity in violently extracting labor from people they thought to be less than civilized. Secondly, as pointed out by Shanafelt (2022), in Kant’s formulation there are really no other people. “The irony of Kant’s position is that while seeming to empower the individual to express his own judgment in public, he first demands that he subjugate that judgment to the imagined judgment of others” (p. 24). In an arena where the best argument is deemed victorious, an Enlightened individual crafts his statements to be acceptable and defensible against

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the objections of an imagined audience. The public sphere as a concept seems emboldening, except that it effaces social economic realities and it normative shaping of public reason. Learning how to write plausible science fiction—building on what are perceived to be common insights and everyday knowledge in one’s stories—becomes the most recognizable feature of fiction in the Gernsback era. This persona of the international amateur in the scientific republic of letters is key to understanding Gernsback’s intervention in the second industrial revolution. In short, Gernsback responded to the barriers to entry he encountered in the corporate U.S. by creating consumer products that would allow individuals to experience the lost nineteenth-­ century ideal. The company that eventually led to success was a joint venture, which Moskowitz asserts was “the first mail-order radio house in the world.” In 1905, Gernsback came out with an inexpensive wireless telegraph, the Telimco (an acronym based on the letters of the company name: the Electro-Importing Company). Advertisements can be found in periodicals like Popular Mechanics and the World Almanac and Book of Facts, as well as trade magazines like Electrical Record (Fig. 1.1). He was rewarded with department store orders. One cannot argue that Gernsback’s promotion of hands-on learning was improper, but his effort was not separable from his experience with corporate America. Douglas (1987) has pointed out the amateur age Gernsback promoted and its resistance to commercial radio. In 1906, the Fleming valve and Lee de Forest’s audion were used to make expensive receivers, and the invention became less accessible to the “scientific dabbler.” Douglas writes, “very few companies sold equipment for home use,” and the tuning coil was not supposed to be sold because it was covered by a Marconi patent (pp. 196–197). Marconi’s invention was used for point-to-point communication in an effort to compete with telegraphy and telephone at the turn of the twentieth century, but it stifled innovation for broadcast uses. In order to circumvent the expense and patents, word got around on how to use common household refuse to create simple radio sets. Quaker Oats cylinders became the core for a tuning coil; photography plates wrapped in foil were the condensers. Brass spheres from bed stands became spark gaps, Ford Model T ignition coils were transformed into transmitters, and a rotary spark gap was formed by

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Fig. 1.1  Advertisement for  Hugo Gernsback’s wireless communication device, the Telimco. Electrical Record, Feb. 1907, p. 55

an electric fan. As documented by Douglas, Gernsback was “the most avid promoter” of amateur radio (p.  199). The Electro-Importing Company was probably the first to sell wireless apparatus to public; he urged parents to encourage the hobby because it would keep their children at home instead of in pool halls or nickelodeons.

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The rising number of amateur experimenters—and the occasional pranks they committed—attracted the attention of the U.S. government, which began talking about regulating the medium in 1908. Gernsback’s nineteenth-century ideals, as well as his business interests, made him an advocate for radio amateurs. He formed the Wireless Association of America in 1909 and appointed de Forest to its board of directors. The only prerequisites for membership were U.S. citizenship and ownership of a wireless station (an unstated third requirement was being male, given the pronouns in the announcement). There was no membership fee, but Gernsback urged all boys to register (1909, pp. 343–344). This was the first amateur radio club, and Gernsback claimed he had registered 10,000 members by 1910. In a letter to the New York Times, Gernsback (1912a) said it would be foolish to discourage the amateur wireless operators, which he numbered at 400,000. The same issue of the Times carried an article stating that a U.S. Navy expert was touring Europe and was ready to invest a million dollars to support U.S. technical capabilities (1912). The lines were drawn between amateurs and military or corporate interests. Gernsback (1913), though, eventually proclaimed success in mobilizing the legislature to reject “unfair laws” and turning the public’s attention to the need to protect amateur operators. After Gernsback encouraged members of the Wireless Association of America to contact their congressional representatives, Gernsback says 8000 letters and telegrams were sent. The Wireless Act of 1912 (known by Gernsback as the Alexander Bill) was signed into law, adopting some recommendations from Gernsback, and the Wireless Association of America disbanded. A few years later, though, Gernsback returned to his organizing effort. Stating that the outbreak of World War I necessitated the organization of national defense, Gernsback pointed out that amateur radio could be an important source of emergency information. Accordingly, in 1915, he founded the Radio League of America, encouraging operators to follow the laws, preventing the transmission of fraudulent messages, and pledging service to the government in a time of need: “If Uncle Sam grants the amateur the free use of the ether[,] it certainly is up to the amateur to give something in return for the privilege” (1915, p.  382). In addition, the Radio League connected amateurs with each other and organized relays to transmit messages throughout the country. In honor of Washington’s

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birthday in 1916, the League managed to send a message to President Wilson, the governors of 37 states, and 137 mayors through a network of short-range operators who repeated the message to each other, reaching both coasts of the United States from Iowa in about an hour: There were millionaires and poor, hardworking farm boys, several priests, six ministers, three ladies and numbers of radio clubs, schools, boy scouts and all working on this relay, and they did the trick in good shape, just like Americans can do when they get started. … The original M. S. G. is as follows: “Q.S.T. Amateur Relay. A democracy requires that a people who govern and educate themselves should be so armed and disciplined that they can protect themselves. (Signed) Colonel Nicholson, U.S.A.” (Kirwan, 1916)

In a way that foreshadows the way he imagined the audience for science fiction, Gernsback hails his customers as directly using technology to create amateur communities in a domain increasingly dominated by for-­ profit corporations. These amateur associations carry forward the spirit of nineteenth-century amateur science but with an added twist of civic responsibility. The pride that the organizers felt for their patriotic duty to prepare for a possible invasion of the United States is palpable. Gernsback’s altruism might be partial here—after all, he was using these associations to promote his publications. These lessons would be replicated in 1934 when Gernsback founds the Science Fiction League. These discourses would soon find their way into consumer products more generally. This ideology was so prevalent that mass-market cultural products had a large enough market to be successful. The Erector Set, first on sale in 1914, offers a glimpse into the culture of boyhood that was generated around that time. Alfred C. Gilbert, one of the entrepreneurs in the business of selling kits for informal, out-of-school time education, produced a combination of experiment book and catalog in 1920 entitled Gilbert’s Boy Engineering. Gilbert set a world’s record for pole vaulting at the 1908 Olympics in London. He produced a fascinating testament to these changes in 1920. Strangely, the Gilbert Boy Engineering catalog opens with a series of articles about sports, including Gilbert’s own 8-page detailed instructions on the scientific approach to pole vaulting. The messages he wishes to convey with this article are that a young boy might be daunted by mastery of difficult tasks, but the careful application of one’s

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attention would ultimately show success. Several other chapters about athletic accomplishments are found at the start of this book about engineering experiments, which seem out of place unless one is cognizant of the burgeoning theories regarding men, masculinity, and engineering. Gernsback’s vision for his customers opposed the trend toward specialized, expert knowledge that was an unintentional by-product of the second industrial revolution. As large corporations provided goods and services that resulted from the exploitation of advances in science, consumers were engaging with devices and products that they did not understand. Large-scale mass production required industrial research, and as the age of industrial research reached maturity, there was already a movement toward organized research and away from the curious amateur investigator. As the second industrial revolution reached maturity, Gernsback’s effort is best seen in the context of a fear that the ideal of the amateur scientist and the independent inventor established in the previous century would become extinct; this fear was tied to a new vision of masculinity at the turn of the century. The civilization that these ideals had brought about would be threatened as well.

1.2 Pivot to Publishing After Gernsback started to advertise his radio kits, the oft-repeated story is that some were skeptical that Gernsback could sell a radio for $7.50. Some consumers were of the opinion that such devices cost $50,000 and were only available to the large companies of the second industrial revolution. Gernsback (2007) reports that he was visited by a police officer who responded to complaints from a reader. Even after demonstrating the radio, however, the officer was not impressed: seeing the wires in the radio circuitry, the officer could not understand how the radio was “wireless.” According to Ashley and Lowndes (2004), Gernsback used this experience as an inspiration for the next phase of his career as a publisher. Dismayed at the general level of ignorance concerning technical matters, he began publishing the first radio magazine, Modern Electrics, in 1908. From the start, Modern Electrics was a compendium of science news from unnamed correspondents in Europe, circuit diagrams to help

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readers conduct practical experiments, and letters from readers seeking advice. Gernsback, taking up the tone of his letter-writer Huck, tells stories about his investigations of electrical phenomena. His description of an alarm that would go off when the sun rises, for instance, includes encyclopedic information about the discovery of the element selenium, instructions on how to use the element in a homemade sensor, and descriptions of applications ranging from wireless telephony to the titular experiment, the sun alarm. Gernsback and his authors write about the future of electric technology, discussing new developments and evoking an international public sphere. One article tells of telephotography via “our Berlin correspondent,” who reports that a photo of the German emperor was transmitted over 1000 miles by wire by Dr. Arthur Korn from the University of Munich. In October 1908, another unnamed correspondent supplies a story of electrical surgery, where a knife is replaced by an electric spark that “incises soft tissues with the same ease as a hot knife goes through butter.” In this issue, a Paris correspondent writes about the “Photo-Cinematograph,” which synchronizes sound and motion pictures. Along with science nonfiction articles, advertisements for kits and manuals, and “how-to” articles, Gernsback included imaginative fiction as part of the means of resistance. Honing his image of the cosmopolitan amateur scientist, Gernsback provided the tools needed to make the transition from a passive consumer into knowledgeable tinkerer. Gernsback’s support of the culture of innovation more generally was driven, in part, by U.S. government regulations that sought to constrain the use of radio. By 1910, Gernsback had a staff of sixty in New York City to support his radio kit. That same year, the U.S. government took its first steps to regulate radio transmissions. As the new legislation took shape, Gernsback (1912b) credits himself for carving out a space for amateurs: he wrote “a great number of protesting letters” and he hopes that “amateurs will have the same liberty and perhaps greater liberty” because they will no longer have complaints from government or commercial users (pp.  784–785). This legislation required that operators register themselves and allowed for government intervention in wartime, a provision that started to be exercised in 1915. Gernsback’s editorials and articles at this time increasingly describe the ways amateur experimenters are an important part of national defense. As part of this effort to support

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amateur operators, he organized the Radio League of America in 1916, making it a condition of membership that the amateurs would pledge their services to the government. Far from accepting the idea that the radio waves must be free of communication as the United States prepared to enter World War I, Gernsback (1917b) extorts: “Can not [sic] our red-­ blooded boys be trusted to assist our officials in running down spies, who probably would not be readily located otherwise? … Trust our very capable American youths to ferret out the senders of questionable signals or strangely worded messages” (p. 3). These brave words could not forestall the inevitable, and President Wilson declared that the government would seize the radio stations needed for military communication and close all others on 6 April 1917. At this time, Gernsback pivoted to a more generalized ideal of an individual engaged with technology through his catalog of electronics parts, manuals, and periodicals. This entrepreneurial response was necessitated by the fact that Gernsback’s wireless telegraph was now proscribed. With handbooks and prepackaged experiments, Gernsback showed “an inspired blend of craftiness and constructive thought,” dividing his “heaps of contraband” into $5 products that he could sell at 400 percent profit (O’Neil, 1963, p. 64). For this reason, some historians portray him as a champion of the “radio masses” and suggest he is an important figure not only in the history of radio but in the history of media (Massie & Perry, 2002, p.  278). Gernsback encouraged his customers to tinker independently instead of being passive consumers of devices they did not understand, fighting against the stultifying tendency of modern industry that blocked a man’s inventive faculties. Gernsback started to drift away from what readers could accomplish on their own in this period. Articles speculating about the use of electric devices in warfare began to fill the pages. Also, Gernsback continued to expand the topics covered by the magazine. The subheading on the cover, “Popular Electrical News Illustrated,” was changed to “Science and Invention” in June 1918, presaging the magazine’s new title in 1920. At this time, some of his famous prophetic articles appear, like “Television and the Telephot” (1918a) where he describes an addition to the phone system that will allow callers to see whom they are talking to. Gernsback wrote other less-remembered articles, like “The Automatic Solider,”

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describing radio-controlled automatons that can bolster defense of trenches. Soldiers in underground bunkers miles away, aided by aerial surveillance, can wield machine guns, flamethrowers, and poison gas against their enemies (1918b, p. 372). Throughout runs the assumption that Gernsback’s readers, balancing their analytical minds with real-world effort, can make civilization resilient. In their work, they are able to maintain their individuality in the face of pressure from industry and government. In 1913, Gernsback changed the name of Modern Electrics to Electrical Experimenter (EE), a monthly magazine selling for 10 cents. Using techniques other publishers had already developed to reach out to audiences, and his own interest in being part of an Enlightenment republic of letters, Gernsback was able to mimic a patrician public sphere. Pulps, as pointed out by Cheng (2012), used letters to the editor to “cultivate public engagement” (p. 40). Gernsback, taking the lead from the mainstream pulps, ran a series of contests to gather his audience of fan-practitioners. Designed to get young people moving, the contests validated readers who used their hands to supplement their book learning. The “How to Make It” department offered prizes of $1, $2, and $3 for the “most useful, practical, and original idea.” Readers sent in their short articles (150 words) about their tips on how to do new things with old equipment. Another opportunity in the “With the Amateurs” department was an electrical laboratory contest, where readers competed for prizes by submitting photographs of their home apparatuses. These short features were punctuated by advertising toward the end of each issue. “You Can Be a Super-Man” screams a headline in the October 1919 issue, urging readers to “take your place as a real leader” and “[f ]ill yourself with vitality” by reading a book on muscular development by Earle E. Liederman. Altogether, these issues provide a wide variety of individuals showing their wares and promoting manly excellence. The emphasis on the scientific republic of letters is also clear at this early stage from the writing he included, although in a way that might be unexpected. Many different voices are given space, and if there is misinformation or inconsistency, one has to trust in the public sphere as a battleground of truth. In the midst of the voices in his magazine is Gernsback the carnival hawker, and in true Bakhtinian fashion he sings

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both the high and the low. In his monthly, one-page editorial on or near the contents page, Gernsback presented his ideas and commentary on current events—sometimes contradicting himself. The June 1916c editorial praises the mysteries of the luminiferous ether, suggesting it is the medium that permeates all matter and allows light and sound waves to propagate. After the war, however, with no apparent contrition or irony, Gernsback reverses himself in December 1919. Stating that Einstein had astonished the world by stating a beam of light may be curved, Gernsback extends the findings to the concept of ether. Because it was a theory postulated by Faraday and Maxwell to explain a wave theory of light, Einstein’s supposition that light behaves like particles obviates the need for the “jelly-like material” to explain visible phenomena. He quips at the end, “The next decade will no doubt shed further ‘light’ on the question” (1919b, p. 730). Readers are invited to join in because nothing in science is ever settled. Other editorials take up contradictory positions, which further demonstrate Gernsback’s commitment to the public sphere concept. An October 1919a editorial “The Elusive Martian Canals” examines the hypothesis that there are no canals on Mars because no astronomer has been able to photograph them. Although Gernsback defends Lowell’s inaccurate idea of the canal, his discussion offers insight into the independent gentlemen he hoped to create. Gernsback discusses the issue of refraction in the atmosphere, as well as the constraint of the relatively coarse resolution of a photographic plate and the demand for long exposures due to the faintness of the light coming from Mars. The supposed proof of the photographs, Gernsback asserts, is no proof at all. For all of the credit Gernsback earns for promoting scientific accuracy, one must be careful about what this means. Certainly, today’s science is often discredited tomorrow; the nature of scientific advance suggests that all scientific findings are temporary. This is akin to the public sphere, where no discussions are ultimately finished and any proposition may be reopened. For Gernsback, the scientific attitude seems to have been one of making new deductive claims rather than following the path of induction. Instead of adding new information to refine accepted theory, promoting one point of view, Gernsback chose to defend all points of view, including even a theory that was quickly losing ground.

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Gernsback also focuses his readers’ attention on how inventions will bring about a new stage in human civilization. An unsigned article details a plan by Lewis Yeager that would provide a “newsophone” service in the June 1920 issue. Yeager would allow users to telephone a particular number geared to their interests so that they can hear the news spoken. This idea was hardly new; a similar idea was proposed by Jules Verne in his newspaper of tomorrow, showcased in his novel Paris au XXe siècle. The concept was demonstrated at the 1881 Paris Exposition Internationale d’Électricité and turned into a commercial telephone service in Hungary two years later (Marvin, 1988, p. 224). A February 1920 unsigned interview article describes the calculations by Robert Goddard that show it would be possible to send a projectile to the Moon and provides pictures and diagrams that show how Goddard is testing his ideas. Articles also seek to instruct readers with a peculiar history of technology that suggests that the same technological desires have accompanied the development of western civilization. An unsigned story “Did the Romans Have ‘Wireless’?” details the system of mirrors to send signals in ancient Greece and classical Rome in December 1919. Some articles approach the unlikely or the bizarre. John J. Furia, who is described as affiliated with New York University’s physics department, contributes an article about perpetual motion machines in the August 1919 issue. Hereward Carrington, Ph.D., in the October 1919 issue, shows how laboratory instruments have supposedly been used to investigate psychic phenomena. Gernsback’s reputation as a purveyor of accurate science needs some nuance. Given the variety of topics covered by EE, the title was a poor fit. While it was starting, the magazine was a part of his retail business, but Gernsback’s interests grew broader. In an editorial in the July 1920 issue, Gernsback explains that due to reader demand, the need for “general” articles had increased so that the magazine could provide “the latest word in science, the newest invention, the latest development in the realm of human endeavor.” Unexpectedly, the tale Gernsback creates goes, general readers who were not interested in experiments started to read the magazine. “The business man, the manufacturer, the doctor, the professor, the student and countless others found […] an intellectual gold mine.” The new magazine would continue to appeal to “the thinking class,” as EE

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had, but with the new title, Gernsback hopes that Science and Invention will exceed a circulation of one-half million, and thus be able to provide a wider range of material for all its readers (p. 279). In August 1920, the change was official and Science and Invention went on the newsstands with a subtitle, “formerly Electrical Experimenter.” The population of tinkerers being too small for commercial success, it seems Gernsback sought a bigger market. Subsequently, he hails his readers as a cadre of elite thinkers. In the first editorial of the refurbished magazine, Gernsback announces that there is some difficulty defining what science is, exactly. Noting that Bacon listed his sciences as “history, poesy, and philosophy,” Gernsback notes that today everything has become “scientific,” from cooking to cleaning streets. “We are surrounded with science all day long as well as during the night.” However, he points out that today’s scientists are backward as they were in the days of Galileo. The public is willing to embrace new ideas, but the official scientists of the world are too conservative. Just like a scientist who ignored the idea that the Earth and Moon do not stand still, today a scientist “scoffs and jeers” at many “fantastic dreams” that are coming from the public. “It matters little that Jules Verne or Nikola Tesla are a hundred years ahead of the times—the scientists scoff and laugh unbelievingly,” he writes. With that introduction, the path for Science and Invention is clearly marked: Gernsback will seek to bring the findings of true science to his readers, at the same time that he will try to gather the news, fiction, and information needed so that his magazine will be a staging ground for new inventions to form.

1.3 Masculinized Technology and Overcivilization Gernsback’s frustrated career as an inventor is not often told in the context of manly civilization, yet this aspect of the historical environment demonstrates that Gernsback’s appeal to individuals who work independently from large corporations is consonant with contemporary stories of threats to masculinity that endanger white civilization. Bringing in a larger context helps to make clear what some have found suspicious in

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this time period: Evans (2016), for instance, has written that Gernsback era fiction often “implicitly” ties technological progress to white supremacy, presenting “a somewhat clumsily written restatement of white supremacist doctrine for a technological age” (p. 60). According to the racial pseudoscience2 of the time, though, this connection was explicit, so one can take this argument much further. In the year before Gernsback came to the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt signed a treaty with the newly organized country of Panama to finish a foundering canal project. These events might seem unrelated, but they reveal a lot about the background to Gernsback’s vision of the scientific gentleman. Gernsback does not overtly write against the notion of women in science and engineering—and as shown in Chap. 3, he promoted some notable fiction by women. Overall, though, the paucity of women as editorial advisors and inventors reflects a new effort by science and engineering experts to create a masculine domain. Gernsback’s notions of innovation seem natural today, but that is because he was one of the individuals who helped craft a new vision of masculinity at the start of the twentieth century. His positive reception shows how science and what was known as the “practical arts” were redefined as masculine. In the context of Roosevelt, Gernsback’s call for improving civilization by means of vigorous amateurs who did not befuddle their minds with study is revealed as a gender ideal. Before his success in Panama, Roosevelt had to reinvent himself. When he first entered politics at the end of the nineteenth century, he had been called “Jane Dandy” and “our own Oscar Wilde” due to his appearance as a refined gentleman. Confronting the public perception that he lacked his manhood after losing an election in 1885, he went out into the Dakota territory to demonstrate that he possessed the manly virtues of “mutuality, honor, self-respect.” Afterward, he espoused the “western cure” (Kimmel, 2006, p.  182) and used himself as an example of the  In using terms like “racial pseudoscience,” it is important to remember that the schools of thought they refer to were not considered less than scientific when they were current. Stocking (1968), for one, declines to use modifiers like “pseudo-” for ideas that scientists at one time could “reasonably embrace” (p. 42). This modifier runs the risk of severing the link between outdated practices and their legacies, which is certainly not my intention. However, I feel the modifier is important so that the outdated ideas do not regain legitimacy. 2

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danger of what came to be known as overcivilization. Subsequently, Roosevelt’s public persona encompassed “every possible guise” of manhood: cowboy, safari hunter, pioneer, warrior, father, president, diplomat, husband, historian, naturalist, preacher, a panoply Kimmel calls “a well-­ rounded yet hardened manly presentation” (p.  187). This masculinity that assumes one person is capable of success in many domains is not unique to Roosevelt, but Roosevelt embodied it colorfully. The rugged man who fulfills all of the roles required by civilization, but is endangered if he spends too much time within its confines, is a character type that will become an important part of U.S. science fiction. Bederman (1995) draws a connection between Roosevelt and the supposed science of race prevalent at the turn of the century. “Civilized manly power,” Bederman writes, came from manhood and whiteness, a connection she draws out from his writing about sexuality. A white man can restrain the masculine passions of the body; a person who lacks aggressive sexuality is effeminate, but if he acts on sexuality freely, he is a savage. Mastery requires an “advanced intellectual and moral capacity” (p.  85). The success of Americans on the frontier was due, Roosevelt writes, to their good blood: not just their personal abilities, but the effort of earlier generations who had worked hard, restrained their emotions, and carefully embodied “manly virtues” (Dyer, 1980, p. 24). Roosevelt would assert that a man’s refusal to live a life full of manly virtues would result in the accumulation of unfavorable traits that would harm him and be passed on to his offspring. In this way, one can see how the definition of a white man was tied to the idea that he was superior in the way he used tools and brought about advancements for civilization and also the way he channeled his passion. This pseudo-evolutionary notion suggested that the difference between the supposed “white” races and others was that they had evolved past the purportedly savage races, a theory that is known as the stages of civilization and was an important feature of early science fiction. In the context of this rhetoric about civilization’s dependence on clear thinking that comes from disciplined gender and race, Gernsback’s editorial mission to recruit scientific thinkers as authors of fiction takes on a different cast. White men in technical endeavors were seen navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, using learning and clear thinking while at

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the same time avoiding the threat of overcivilization. The peril of this journey was exacerbated as college education increasingly became required for careers in science and engineering. The requirement that professional engineers must be college educated was not present from the start. In fact, for most of the nineteenth century, engineering education was not an academic discipline taught at universities. The lone exception was the U.S. military academy, West Point. For all others, Cowan (1997) writes, only “on-the-job training could have taught a young person how to practice engineering.” Indeed, most universities had little coursework in science, let alone engineering, and taught “gentlemanly subjects” like Latin, Greek, and rhetoric (p. 139). Those who wanted to become engineers would learn as apprentices on projects that were already underway, even though they had no academic training except possibly for lectures. Coincident with the second industrial revolution, though, the artisan approach declined as universities added engineering to their curricula and new institutions were created to train engineers. At the time that science fiction first got its name, these social practices led to the naturalization of assumptions about who could study technical subjects. Men must learn to channel their emotion into manly public passions, while women must learn to turn their passions inward to childbirth and familial duties. This thinking was then returned to developing school policies, which led to further support for the theory because men seemed confident in technical subjects and many women believed that thinking too much could be harmful to their health. This reinforcing effect, making social assumptions seem as if they are scientific fact, is known in STS as co-­construction. At the start of the twentieth century, Garlick (2003) notes, “being a man” was an inner personal identity, with the requisite need to prove one’s manhood. A new “heterosexed subject” needed masculinity or femininity for its “coherence” (p. 163). Simultaneously, men were imagined as the ones who think rationally, and engineering was imagined as best done by those who are best at rational thinking. “Clearly, there is something ‘masculine’ going on in this account of modernity’s desire for rationalization, order, and control” (p. 160). This masculine subject was both an agent of civilization and the future of humanity. Pursell (2007) has traced this ethic of the vigorous male in the history of engineering. Young apprentices were urged to leave the confines of

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stultifying urban centers to do engineering in areas that were perceived to be free from constraints, like the Panama Canal or in the Philippines. The canal would open in 1914, a triumph of American engineering. The engineers who brought it about were the epitome of a new masculine subject that would be both an agent of civilization and the future of humanity. These ideals, newly formulated for the twentieth century, match Roosevelt’s published essays and public actions—and at the same time, they serve as a subtext for Gernsback’s writing and the fiction he promoted. A fiction that values hands-on experience, vigorous activity, and men who can easily slip into different roles would best suit this discourse of what it meant to be a man. Against the prevailing assumption that college education was mandatory, this fiction naturalizes the autodidact, a person who easily adapts to many different domains, capable of action in disparate contexts but most effective in a domain that has few constraints, with the rational mind as its unifying focus. Gernsback’s commitment to masculine science was not necessarily a prohibition against women. There seem to have been no women on his advisory boards, although he did publish women authors. One of the first women to appear in Gernsback magazines was an astronomer who wrote nonfiction, Isabel Martin Lewis. She represents the inroads women had made into computational astronomy. Before 1859, Maria Mitchell was the only woman astronomer in the United States, but from 1900 to 1940, women had become 43 percent of the community of astronomers (Lankford & Slavings, 1990, p.  59). As photographic and statistical methods came into fashion, there was a large body of material to analyze. One graduate student at Laws Observatory at the University of Missouri was described in 1920 as being “handicapped by her sex less than any aspirant that I have known” (quoted in Lankford & Slavings, p.  60). Despite their significant numbers, it seems as if they were limited in influence. Men would make the observations and report the findings in writing; in between the data collection and analysis would be a large amount of calculation, and for this women were employed as “computers”: people who compute. Without diminishing their achievements, it is worthwhile to consider why women were welcomed as desk workers even though it was presumed they could not take part in more active technical pursuits. Of course, part of this constraint came from the belief that

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women should have a subsidiary role, but it is also related to the belief that more active pursuits were unsuitable for women.3 This assumption that women were suited for office work closer to home becomes important to science fiction authors, as seen in the forthcoming chapters. The length of Lewis’s career and the prominence she attained were unlike many of her peers; half of the women in astronomy from 1900 to 1940 had careers shorter than five years and only 12 percent had careers longer than twenty-five years (Lankford & Slavings, p.  63). In 1905, Lewis earned her master’s degree from New York State’s land-grant recipient, Cornell University, specializing in the mathematics of eclipses. From 1905 to 1907 she was an astronomical computer for a famous astronomer, Simon Newcomb. In 1908, Lewis was hired by the Naval Observatory, “a tribute to her abilities” because women were not often hired at this time; she worked full time from 1908 to 1912 (Westwood, 1955, p.  101). The 1914–1915 edition of the Woman’s Who’s Who of America lists Lewis as a “computor” [sic], noting that she is opposed to vivisection and in favor of women’s suffrage (Leonard, 1914, p.  489). Lewis reduced her commitment to part time when she married Clifford S. Lewis, a colleague at the observatory, in 1912. There was an unspoken assumption that a woman could not be both a professor and a wife (Rossiter, 1982, pp. 15–16). Lewis worked part time until the death of her husband in 1927, at which time she was classified as astronomer from 1930 until she retired in 1951; she continued to write until 1955. Westwood calculates her tenure at the observatory as forty-three years, and overall she was active in astronomy for an unusual period of fifty years. Although Lewis’s career represents an important role for women in science, their great numbers at the start of the twentieth century belied their limits. Being forced into part-time work seems to have prompted Lewis’s role as a popularizer of astronomy, which in turn brought her to Gernsback’s  This prejudice seems to continue today. As noted by Mellström (2009), Malaysian computer science is dominated by women, which offers many women a technical career. The fact that women dominate IT but are not represented well in other STEM fields is the result of social constructs related to gender. Engineering fields like civil engineering are thought to be unsuitable for women because of the “outdoor working environment” and the fact that engineers have to confront “foreign labourers at construction sites” (p. 895).

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magazines. In 1916, Lewis started to reach out to a popular audience about the wonders of astronomy and earth science with her columns in the New  York Evening Sun; a collection of these articles appeared as Splendors of the Sky in 1919. She also wrote for Popular Astronomy, The Scientific Monthly, the Astronomical Journal, and Nature Magazine for thirty years. She contributed a regular column on astronomy to Gernsback’s EE (later known as Science and Invention), and articles from this periodical become part of her 1922 book, Astronomy for Young Folk. Introducing her column in 1918, Gernsback employs an egalitarian tone. Avoiding male-only pronouns, Gernsback writes that “Infinite space holds forth so many wonders and enlarges our mental horizon so enormously that modern man or woman must consider his or her education incomplete without at least a rudimentary knowledge of the wondrous world spread out in space all around us.” Although he has always wanted to present his readers with the pleasures of the universe, he says, he could not find someone who could do so adequately until he found “Mrs. Isabel M.  Lewis.” Citing her as being “connected” with the U.S.  Naval Observatory and also the author of a series of articles in the New York Sun, Gernsback writes that she is “a very exact as well as a highly learned writer” who has the “rare faculty of interpreting difficult and dry subjects in a popular manner.” She continued to appear irregularly from 1920 to 1922. In 1924, after a short break, Lewis wrote a shorter column highlighting the month’s astronomical activity. Lewis was an innovator who defied the sentiment that women should not do technical work at the start of the twentieth century. However, reading Lewis’s articles can be somewhat disappointing if one is seeking evidence of disruption to the common consensus on gender. There are no traces of a struggle to get an education or to be taken seriously as an astronomer. In fact, despite Gernsback’s inclusive language, she maintains the sexist practice of gendering planets “he.” Her articles include references to Newcomb and prominent astronomers and speak to a network of scientists working together. She also deals with history, comparing old knowledge with what is now available with modern equipment, like moons of Jupiter. True to Gernsback’s dream, she speculates on the existence of life on other planets and notes the vast size of the universe. In October 1918, she provides some updates on Percival Lowell, who

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inspired so many writers of science fiction by his hypothesis that there were canals on Mars—but she also suggests that there are skilled observers who do not see anything. In April 1919a, she writes about Earth from the perspective of Mars and Venus; in May 1919b, her article about astronomical distances explains parallax and explains that many stars have no parallax because they are so far away. She patiently shows her readers the world from an astronomer’s eyes, playing an educational role for Gernsback’s readers. Lewis was not the only woman to appear in Gernsback’s early magazines, even though she was the most prominent. Lewis’s public work quietly took on the cause of women, demonstrating her logical mind and healthy body. Not only was she a successful scientific worker but she also raised a family. By pointing out the collaborative notion of the scientific community, she exposed the absurdity of separate scientific spheres for women and men, experts and amateurs. Lewis participated in expeditions to observe eclipses in Russia and Peru (Westwood, p.  101); that being said, in her popularization of astronomy, her role was confined to her desk, performing calculations and writing about astronomical phenomena. Perusing the pages shows pictures of some women who were inventors and radio operators, demonstrating the paradox created by the new paradigm of masculine science at the turn of the century. As shown in Chap. 3, some believed that a woman using her intellect would harm her body. A logical woman could protect her health in this clerical role, yet a man spending so much time at his desk would have endangered his manly intellect. It was impossible to deny that women had intellectual capabilities that were suitable for the new century, but it was not so difficult to invent new constraints on their participation.

1.4 From Science Fact to Scientifiction These notions of masculinity and their tie to white civilization make a provocative backdrop to Gernsback’s promotion of hands-on experimentation, and they also make it easier to see how he promoted the connection through his early  science fiction. It is in the pages of his own Modern Electrics that Gernsback first serializes his novel Ralph

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124C 41+ in monthly installments, starting in April 1911. Gernsback writes his story to reach out to the audience of his experimenter publications, so it is not surprising that the story centers on electrical inventiveness. However, the preceding discussion about gender leads to some important caveats. The story is full of descriptions of devices from the future, but generally they are described in use. There is little discussion about how they work, as most of them (like televised theater) were not yet practical. Even though Gernsback has been accused of writing fiction to sell electric parts, a reader of this story cannot hope to bring to life the inventions described. How, then, did Gernsback get a reputation for paying attention to scientific accuracy? The fanciful devices are described by the narrator with a convincing tone. The insistence on scientific accuracy should be amended to say that they are scientifically plausible. This notion of plausibility is not foreign to the scientific community. In their study of early modern science, Shapin and Schaffer (2011) noted that scientific reports were “technologies of trust” (p. 60). One writes about one’s discoveries with a plentitude of detail so that the community of (mostly) male readers feels as if the experiment could be recreated. Gernsback’s fiction mimics this tone, which he first used in the articles for Scientific American, albeit here in a future-looking manner. The speculative science and future technology are described in a way that convinces the community of readers that they could be made, in accordance with what they accept as conventional. In Ralph 124C 41+, Gernsback demonstrates the responsibility of an author of science fiction that will remain in effect for generations to come: an author must possess enough scientific knowledge and sufficient awareness of the audience’s expectations that no one will question the plausibility of the speculation. As it was in early modern science, so it is in early science fiction. This is a discipline of the self: an author must internalize the constraints that meet with the community’s needs. In his future setting, Gernsback imagines a new connection between science and society. The story of Ralph is not much more than an updated Verne story—full of interesting inventions—unless one considers the setting. In contrast to the professionalized and depersonalized science of the second industrial revolution, Ralph is a quintessential nineteenth-­century

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amateur gentleman, a handsome and virile young man who operates from his home. In some ways, this seems like an idealization of Gernsback himself, but the intentional fallacy is defeated in one key aspect: Ralph is generously funded by the government. The “plus” designation given to Ralph and nine other scientists is a way to ensure that society maximizes their potential. Ralph is characterized as something of an altruistic recluse, but as the novel unfolds we learn that his selflessness is not necessarily an element of his character. Ralph’s intellect is so great that he is considered a public asset that must be protected. Everything that he needs is provided to him, and he is carefully guarded by doctors who monitor his diet and forbid him to use tobacco. In a conversation with the planetary governor, who apparently calls on Ralph regularly, Ralph asks to be relieved of his super-scientist status. The governor declines: “You belong to the world—not to yourself,” he reminds Ralph (1958, p. 21). Ralph’s expertise lies mostly with electricity, but similar to Roosevelt’s, it crosses into other areas such as politics, life sciences, and media. Ralph is a solitary, capable individual in New York City in the year 2660, supported by the government in all of his inquires. The international, gentlemanly group of geniuses with the “plus” designation is curious for two reasons: first, they work autonomously, never seeming to set an agenda for concentrated effort, nor do they collaborate with each other while their work is in progress. Instead, they lead global innovation without encumbrance from each other or the social world, sharing only their finished work. Second, the international character of this group is limited to Europe and the United States. Gernsback demonstrates that Ralph is working concurrently with and building on the findings of British, French, Italian, and other scientists who might be considered to be part of the elite group of colonizing countries at the start of the century. The theory that the evolved white man’s burden from his responsibilities to humanity is clearly depicted. If Gernsback had only intended to inspire his readers to become inventors, one might have seen more direct discussion of how inventors could overcome challenges from corporate innovation strategies. Careful scrutiny shows how the story is actually more focused on contemporary debates about masculinity and science. As a character type, Ralph is a nineteenth-century disinterested amateur. His free-ranging intellect

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provides practical benefits to humanity, but it also serves as preparation for stupendous action when the need arises. Ralph meets Alice, a Swiss woman, by means of a telecommunication fault—Ralph is accidentally connected to Alice when trying to make another call (Fig. 1.2). The fault turns out to be fortunate, however, because an avalanche is bearing down on Alice’s home. Quick-thinking Ralph uses his advanced knowledge of physics and the electrical infrastructure to melt the avalanche with a

Fig. 1.2  In Hugo Gernsback’s story, Ralph first meets Alice due to a communication failure. Note Ralph’s bulging cranium, which contains so much brain energy that it seems to have caused baldness. This illustration was used as the cover for the 1925 book version and accompanied the 1929 republication of Ralph 124C 41+ in AMZ Quarterly vol. 2, no. 1 (p. 5)

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jury-­rigged device that accepts an enormous electrical surge from Ralph’s laboratory more than 6000  kilometers away. Ralph’s public funding might be dismissed as an extravagant luxury, but he is necessary for facing unexpected challenges. Ralph and the others with “plus” designations are important members of civilization because they quickly spring into action based on pressing needs. Ralph has pervasive access to the world government, an advantage he uses when his girlfriend, Alice, is kidnapped and he sends her photograph to all police in “ten seconds” (p. 99). Gernsback imagines a world where a few geniuses can bypass bureaucracy and get things done. Another tie to contemporary thinking about white masculinity relates to Alice’s kidnapper, the Martian Llysanorh’. The 1925 book publication adds some objectionable details to his characterization. Whereas the second installment of the original publication blandly stated that Ralph made a televised speech, the narrator in the book publication goes further. In this and subsequent editions, the narrator notes that a member of the audience is a Martian, obvious because of his physical characteristics: “great black horse eyes” and “slightly pointed ears.” The narrator asserts that Martians are common enough in New York City, but not too many had made Earth their home, deterred by a law “which forbade the intermarriage of Martians and Terrestrials” (1958, pp. 23–24; see also 1929, p. 11). The timing of this insertion into the text cannot be accidental. The U.S. eugenics movement saw the pinnacle of its influence the year before the story was republished in book form. The Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act) set up a racial quota system, allowing immigration based on the proportions of foreign-born residents counted in the 1890 U.S. Census (i.e., before the increase in immigration from countries outside of northern Europe). Also in 1924, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act, which prohibited the marriage of a white person with anyone who had traces of other so-called races. Soon, half of the states in the union would pass laws against miscegenation. The narrator’s casual acceptance of this kind of law, and the assertion that it provides a check on immigration of people the narrator considers undesirable, are a chilling reminder of the racial politics lurking beneath the surface.

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The connection to U.S. racial politics is just a reminder that Martian stories in general have a long tie to racial pseudoscience, which is described more fully in Chap. 2. The character of Llysanorh’ fits in with a constellation of theories about the history of sentient life in the wake of Percival Lowell’s conjecture that Martian civilization preexisted Earth’s. The theory of an ancient civilization on Mars reflects what was known about the solar system: the outer planets coalesced first, meaning that environmental conditions on Mars would have stabilized before Earth’s. Lowell and science fiction authors after him were preoccupied with the idea that all organisms underwent similar phases of evolution. To believe that humanoid organisms independently evolved in different and in separate geographic regions, in fact, harkens back to a nineteenth-century theory to explain racial differences known as polygenism. These scientists relied on the belief of “separate and special creations” (Haller, 1971, p. 75). Indeed, before Darwin, polygenism and race in general were the “central theoretical concern” of anthropologists (Stocking, 1968, p. 40). This belief, passing through Lowell and onward to Gernsback, sought to rationalize their conviction that the human race was divided into biologically distinct races. To them, Mars was a civilization that had passed through the stages of civilization first. Their advanced development suffered a decline because they were unable to manage their planet’s degradation. The tie to scientific racism is not hard to see. Although non-white civilizations produced significant feats of engineering before Europe, they were later surpassed. Not only is Llysanorh’ an exemplar of this theory due to his origin in a previous instance of humanoid life, but he also matches the polygenic fear of miscegenation, or racial mixing: in this paradigm, his actions are not just illegal due to kidnapping but because he threatens public health by mixing races. Despite his larger physical size and the historical advantage he has from the development of his society, Llysanorh’ is no match for Ralph’s white manliness, which is emphasized by the plot. Although the plot seems not too finely crafted, with each episode being written with only a vague sense of the arc of the plot, there is a complication and resolution. The complication comes a bit late with Alice’s kidnapping. Without any experience in space flight, Ralph quickly designs, develops, and pilots a spacecraft. Even death is no obstacle for Ralph; Alice is killed during the

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rescue, Ralph’s amateur interests pay off. He had been investigating revivification out of personal curiosity, but this knowledge becomes immediately useful and he revives Alice, resolving the complication through his amateur investigations. Although Ralph seemed somewhat of a dilettante at the start of the story, by the resolution of the plot validates his idiosyncratic investigations because they have prepared him for solving exigencies. On the one hand, the story carries forward Gernsback’s business proposition to create an inventive space for anachronistic ideas about inventors. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a reader following Ralph and building a space ship independently—and hopefully no reader is inspired to kill and attempt to reanimate creatures. In the end, the science that the story promotes best is outdated racial pseudoscience, both in terms of polygenism and the fear of miscegenation. This inconstant use of scientific accuracy in Ralph 124C 41+ is mirrored in Gernsback’s later short fiction pieces under the title “Baron Münchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures.” In these, the story of the inventions that help the Baron in his escapades are punctuated by deliberations by the narrator, “I. M. Alier,” who makes known his discontent with the editor and the scientific community at large. In a January 1916a installment about ESP, an editorial note states that scientists “ridicule” the idea that thoughts can be transmitted, but he asks readers to remember that twenty years ago, transmission by radio waves was first achieved (p. 475). In the June 1916b installment, the author complains that the editor, whom he calls a “crank,” will not give him space to include a diagram about the sound amplifier he has made, and then proceeds to make a verbal description; the editor then announces that the author is not allowed to expand the “How to Make It” department into his story (p.  92). In the February 1917a issue, the author states that the Moon must once have had an atmosphere, but it “vanished into space”; an asterisk marks an editor’s comment that states “the exceedingly attenuated ‘atmosphere’ which Münchhausen reported … is probably of a volcanic nature” (p. 724). There is no scientific fact here. Gernsback’s type of scientific accuracy is the unfinished conversation, with the personae voicing varying opinions as if they are in competition, in order to present an image of science that is an exchange among gentlemen all over the world. The most important part of science to him is there is no end to the dialogue.

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Inventors as paragons of white masculinity play an important role as Gernsback finalizes the idea of the genre he will christen as science fiction. The August 1923 issue of Science and Invention marked a significant commitment to the genre, although it does not quite hit the nail on the head. The words “scientific fiction number” blazed across the cover and inside were six scientifiction stories. Gernsback’s editorial for this issue starts boldly: “every inventor must be a prophet.” He asserts that many people oppose the magazine “because we exploit the future,” and the imaginary opponents are apt to denounce “any idea just because it is new and appears impossible.” Despite this imagined hostility, inventors are always thinking about the future; even when they do not have the technical capability, they know that a device will become commonplace (p. 319). An unstated assumption of his editorials was that the majority of these inventors were young men, readers who would use science to bring civilization to a higher stage. Here, one starts to see a modification of Gernsback’s public sphere concept. Anyone might be allowed to participate, but ideas will be evaluated based on their (supposed) attention to scientific accuracy. As a result, the participants are almost a persecuted elite, even if they are the future of humanity, because outsiders cannot understand. Although this might seem as an abrogation of the public sphere concept, the closed society is in fact one of the prototypes mentioned by Habermas (1991). In addition to the salons and coffee houses, which are perhaps better remembered, Habermas mentioned the secret “table societies,” or Tischgesellshaften, in Germany, what Habermas calls “a public sphere … existing largely behind closed doors.” Because they gathered individuals from various social strata and they encouraged individuals to exercise their reason among “cultivated human beings,” Habermas considers them an important staging ground for a more widespread concept of publicness (p. 30, 35). So too, it seems, did Gernsback; setting up what he considered a barrier based on merit did not appear to challenge his notion of a free conversation. The first magazine in the United States devoted to science fiction, Amazing Stories (AMZ), began publication in 1926; although today one might describe the contents as science fiction, Gernsback had not yet begun to use this term, preferring the portmanteau scientifiction. The first time a Gernsback publication used the actual phrase “science fiction”

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might be in the January 1927 issue of AMZ. In response to a letter from a reader, the editorial comment defends reprinting stories of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, the latter being called “a sort of Shakespeare in science fiction” (p. 974). The “scientifiction” moniker would come to an ignoble end. Forced into bankruptcy, Gernsback lost control of his magazines in 1929, including his treasured term “scientifiction.” Announcing a new magazine in 1929, Gernsback sent out a solicitation to readers for a $50 prize he offered for an essay about “What Science Fiction Means to Me.” Science Wonder Stories, later known as only Wonder Stories, was the phoenix rising from the flames of Gernsback’s bankruptcy. In the new magazine, he would regularly use the new term “science fiction.” The authors he promoted as science fiction writers often exemplify the connections among whiteness, masculinity, and civilization that he established in his early publishing career, as demonstrated in Chap. 2. However, some of the authors he championed cut across the grain, providing an alternative view, as seen in Chap. 3. Gernsback would publish various titles in the Wonder Stories vein from 1929 until 1936, when he left science fiction publishing. Another division of his publishing interests would continue. In 1928, he had started a publication called Your Body, which included essays by science fiction author David H. Keller. Later, his magazine devoted to human sexuality, Sexology, began publication in 1933. In a similar vein to Science and Invention, Gernsback says his motivation was his concern about the general public’s ignorance. His science fiction illustrator, Frank R. Paul, often contributed to the magazine. Articles focused on a wide range of topics, including cross-dressing, prison rape, masturbation, and a proposal to computerize matchmaking. When Alfred Kinsey published his books on human sexuality, Sexology proclaimed that it was “on the scene” long before him (Yoe, 2008, p.  89). The archives of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University contain some correspondence between the two organizations, including a few letters directly between Kinsey and Gernsback. However, it is clear that Kinsey had little regard for Gernsback’s amateur and anecdotal research, including a collection of erotica that Gernsback had collected. After Gernsback’s death, Moskowitz found an unpublished novel among his papers, which Gernsback presumably had been working on

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from 1958 to 1959. Moskowitz said that Gernsback had failed to publish it because of its unusual style—nonfiction articles interwoven with a novel. Moskowitz published the novel as Ultimate World (1971) without any of the nonfiction, and what remains is disconcerting. The near-future setting imagines an invasion of people from Xeno. The narrator tells the reader that the protagonist is a professor at Columbia University, an inventor, and an expert in all branches of science. The aliens abduct him and his wife from their bedroom into outer space, where they are titillated by the absence of gravity and the spying eyes of the aliens. In the morning, they wake up with a feeling of being “beat up,” as one does “after an extended orgy” (p. 26). The Xenos conduct what the narrator says is “veritable Kinsey research,” hovering their craft over locations where all sorts of sexuality are practiced, including homosexuality, masochism, prostitution, and group marriage (p. 78). In this way, Gernsback uses some of the information he garnered from Sexology in a fictional setting, with a nonplussed  tone that demonstrates the same scientific acceptance of the variety of human practices found in Sexology. That being said, the novel imagines a transformation of humanity in a much different manner than had been proposed in his earlier fiction. Whereas research and knowledge had seemed to seep outward from Gernsback’s elite and his publications, in this story the Xenos force biological evolution on humanity. The first victims are homosexuals, who are somehow easily identified and their brains probed in order to discover what “actually causes” homosexuality (p. 96). Then, children between the ages of 6 and 8 are abducted and their brains infused with transformative biological material. On their return to Earth, the tens of millions of children demonstrate mental telepathy. Perplexingly, the narrator asserts that these characteristics acquired during the children’s lifetimes have permanently altered their physiology and will be passed on to future generations. What is more, the children use ESP to, among other things, give sexual counseling to their parents. Along with a group of three-year-old modified, precocious children the Xenos leave behind at the end of their occupation, the human race is also altered. The main change reported by the narrator is the conviction that war should be abolished. Gernsback’s desire to weave a science fiction setting together with the facts of human sexuality—at least as he saw them—is a magnum opus of

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sorts. Coming not too long after World War II, with the Nazi horrors in the name of improving the population, one can easily question Gernsback’s judgment. The choice of dystopian elements might have seemed like a good way to garner the attention of readers, bringing them into confrontation with a near-future world where young people, even before puberty, had much better information about their sexuality than their parents, and war could be eliminated by means of mutual understanding. Nevertheless, the disregard for the cost of this transformation, including the mutilation of millions of children, is shockingly depraved. In the mode of satirical work like “A Modest Proposal,” perhaps this novel could have seen better success. Coming from the pen of an author-publisher who had advocated for scientific accuracy for his entire career, though, this story is an ignoble terminus.

1.5 The Authors Gernsback Couldn’t See Gernsback’s repeated editorials about what makes good science fiction and his statements that it was hard to find led readers to believe that each issue contained rare and valuable information that was uniquely suitable for the new technological elite. In truth, Gernsback’s limited thinking about progress resulted in artificial scarcity. Today, critics have documented many authors who were writing fiction with an eye to science. The closed nature of Gernsback’s vision of the genre works together with his promotion of a meritorious, cosmopolitan public sphere, much like the German table societies. Readers who are judged to have enough scientific acumen can have a place in his magazines if they participate in invention contents, write letters, or submit stories in response to various contests. The prominent place Gernsback afforded to Lewis and some others suggests that he was not categorically opposed to women in science. Even so, there were not too many women writers in Gernsback’s magazines and it is difficult to identify any writers of color. Investigating the Gernsback’s decisions of what to include—and the other authors who could have been recruited or reprinted—reveals how he participated in supporting new connections between white men and the technological society.

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This disconnect between a rhetoric of inclusion and a practice of exclusion seems to be a fundamental part of the formation of the public sphere. Critics of the concept are skeptical about a universal medium where participants can debate their common concerns. Kant’s notion that an enlightened civilization emerges when a private person exercises reason in public before a literate audience is palliative. Schiebinger (2004) has pointed out that in the eighteenth century, women’s increasing participation in the public sphere was met by new thinking by Carl Linnaeus, which resulted in a scientific consensus that women had such an important role in the domestic sphere that only men should enter into the public. As pointed out by Fraser (1990), there were always other public groups, such as women’s salons, and the public sphere (with a definite article) was seen as universal even as they limited participation from others than white men. Fraser writes that “exclusions and conflict” are “constitutive” of the public sphere, not unfortunate flaws that could be corrected later; for this reason, she appends the adjective masculinist to describe the public sphere (p. 62). Gernsback’s notion of an open conversation about matters concerning a universalized public was marked by similar exclusions. From the benefit of modern recovery efforts, one realizes that much more was available than the limited number of women authors Gernsback recruited. Collating the results of recent scholarship with the authors that appear in Gernsback’s magazines leads to an awareness of how much he excluded. Instead of accepting his statement that good scientifiction was hard to find, one should recognize that he was in fact rejecting the wide range of fiction that was published in mass-market periodicals like All-­ Story, Argosy, or WT as well as regional newspapers. These publications that Gernsback could not see support Fraser’s notion of counterpublics, “parallel discursive arenas” that challenged the exclusionary practices of the public sphere (p. 67). What is more, this recognition helps to show how the women who did appear in his magazines, some of whom are the subject of Chap. 3, were not pioneers in a conventional sense but were building on an established tradition. The elephant in the room, at least from the point of view of modern science fiction studies and considering Gernsback’s own interest in revivification, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Why did Gernsback not include

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her in what he called the Poe/Wells/Verne type of story? Today, following new wave historians like Brian Aldiss, it is commonplace to assert that Frankenstein is the “first” science fiction story. The book was reprinted, anthologized, and dramatized throughout the nineteenth century, and what is more, Shelley published two dozen stories, some of which are anthologized as early science fiction today. Shelley was a candidate for inclusion in AMZ. Gernsback never selected any of her work, and the fact that it appeared in WT in 1932 suggests that it was the kind of fiction that Gernsback was reacting against. The story is clearly imbricated in a world of science. The captain who relays the tale is engaged in a scientific expedition to the North Pole; the layers of narrative encourage skepticism about the ideal of objective reports in scientific discourse. In this context, recent scholars such as Mellor (2001) have suggested, this nameless monster with human intellect and emotions but without white skin and proportions pleasing to European eyes recalls the formerly enslaved people trying to find their way in a hostile environment. There were other works available for reprinting. Clarke (1961) has documented many future stories, among which one can see those written about and by women during a resurgence of women’s political activity at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1895 Mercia, The Astronomer Royal by Amelia Garland Mears is a romance of the year 2002 where women are equal to men while The War of the Sexes by Florence Ethel Mills Young in 1905 details a future when men have vanished. In fact, several women wrote utopian novels that could have been considered by Gernsback. Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy was published in book form in 1889. The narrator of the novel, Princess Vera Zarovitch, says she is not a literary author but has written her story out of a duty to science. After a shipwreck, she travels near the North Pole and discovers the lost land. The isolated, beautiful country is marked by many technological and scientific advances and a pristine social order, free of crime. The narrator, though, after learning about how science eradicated men, desires to return home. Inez Haynes Gillmore published Angel Island in 1914, in which a small group of shipwrecked men find themselves on an island populated by winged women. The men clip the women’s wings, hoping to keep them nearby, but eventually the women persuade them to treat them equitably. Another women’s utopia is Charlotte Perkins

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Gilman’s Herland, which she published in her own journal in 1915. In this text, three young men embark on a scientific expedition to investigate rumors of an all-woman society. The trio enjoys the orderly, erudite community, and they debate with their hosts and try to fulfill the role of a spouse in a world that has not seen men for 2000 years. These novels are sophisticated and innovative, and what is more, they sport strong analyses of the connection between science and society. There were also prominent pulp authors, such as Francis Stevens. Her first story was published in the March 1904 Argosy under the name G. M. Barrows. She went on to publish a dozen stories and novels in the mainstream pulps. Her 1918 story “Friend Island” is notable in many respects. The setting is a future time when women have proven themselves to be the stronger sex; the narrator remembers a life before the transformation but completely accepts the new situation as normal. He meets an older woman who was a sailor in the time of diesel engines, which have since been abandoned for less dangerous sailing ships. The story works in several ways to demonstrate to readers the arbitrariness of gender roles as they are often portrayed in fiction. For one, Stevens allows her female sailor to speak in dialect. The narrator convinces the sailor to tell stories of her younger days. She begins: I remember it because ’twas then that I come the nighest in my life to committin’ matrimony. For a man, the man had nerve; he was nearer bein’ companionable than any other man I ever seed; and if it hadn’t been for just one little event that showed up the—the mannishness of him, in a way I couldn’t abide, I reckon he’d be keepin’ house for me this minute. (Ashley, 2015, p. 154; emphasis in original)

The sailor spins a yarn about encountering sentient islands on a voyage transporting a cargo of petticoats from San Francisco to Brisbane. Humorously, the sailor points out that “leather breeches or half-skirts” (p. 154) would have been more profitable, but the captain (who was a man) felt that women who lived on land should wear petticoats. The narrator presents a worldview that naturalizes women’s superiority. When the ship sinks in the tropics, the sailor finds herself marooned on a volcanic island. A typical male-centered plot might have found  the man

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stranded without food or water, beset by hostile native forces. In Stevens’s story, though, the sailor connects to nature. She discovers the island is sentient and she takes to calling it Anita. When the sailor is happy and content, Anita is pleasant and bountiful, but when she is angry or distressed, Anita becomes dangerous. The sailor’s potential mate is a man who had been living on Anita but became frightened and swam away before the sailor arrived. After some time of peaceful living on Anita, a smaller island floats up, carrying the man, Nelson Smith, who had tried to swim to safety. The sailor recounts their time together, again reversing gender stereotypes, showing them to be arbitrary: During them days I really got fond of Nelson Smith. He was a companionable body, and brave, or he wouldn’t have been a professional aeronauter, a job that was rightly thought tough enough for a woman, let alone a man. Though he was not so well educated as me, at least he was quiet and modest about what he did know, not like some men, boasting most where there is least to brag of. Indeed, I misdoubt if Nelson and me would not have quit the sea and the air together and set up housekeeping in some quiet little town up in New England, maybe, after we had got away, if it had not been for what happened when we went. I never, let me say, was so deceived in any man before nor since. The thing taught me a lesson. (p. 161)

The man’s transgression was, again humorously, that he used foul language when he hurt himself. The first time, before the sailor arrived, he was chased off the island by snakes, and this time, the pair are forced to leave by a ferocious volcanic eruption. The sailor concludes her story, “A man is just full of mannishness, and the best of ’em ain’t good enough for a lady to sacrifice her sensibilities to put up with.” As for the narrator, he reflects on the exploits of Odysseus, Gulliver, and “the history of one Munchausen, a baron” (pp. 162–163). The eighteenth-century story of Baron von Münchhausen was famous enough to be lampooned by Stevens, but Gernsback finished his own version of this story in EE the year before, in February 1917. The implication is clear: a woman author is not impressed by the supposed excellence of canonical male exploits. In

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fact, first wave feminists were quite skilled at bringing fiction to the mainstream that interrogated gender norms and the assumptions of the adventure genre. These stories were ignored by Gernsback. Interest in recovering women’s writing beginning in the 1980s led to the rediscovery of many texts. Anthologies like Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836–1919 (Kessler, 1984) contain women writers who wrote fiction with at least a tangential connection to science, even though they were published in book form. Recent anthologies like The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers by Ashley (2015) have begun to collect the many writers in the mainstream pulps who could have been considered for inclusion in Gernsback’s magazines—or could have themselves attempted to place their stories in one of his titles. This makes arbitrary statements that they were “simply forgotten” (Ashley, 2015, p. 2) seem disingenuous. As pointed out by Davin (2006), women published science fiction in mainstream, general-interest magazines where they were not only accepted but welcomed. Given the early genre’s heavy dependence on the pulps for inspiration and content, Gernsback’s failure to recruit women is particularly distressing. An alternative hypothesis to Gernsback’s statements about how hard it was to find good writers, then, was that there were too many women writers who did not fit in with what Gernsback and his readers thought was good science or scientific personae. As seen in the next chapter, Gernsback’s publishing was an act of differentiation. The stories he wrote and published in his early magazines extolled the virtues of a manly, rigorous scientific community. The women that we see in these stories— Gernsback’s Alice, for instance—are cherished as delicate and sensitive creatures, not as scientific citizens. Given these assumptions, one can imagine that there was a blockage in both directions: although Gernsback was mining mainstream publications for suitable authors, at the same time, few women writing in the pulps found it desirable to focus their effort on writing for Gernsback’s audience. Scholarship that presents the women as lonely pioneers risks missing this point and the excellence of their effort. Another potential source of authors and stories for Gernsback was the burgeoning black press, a phenomenon that also fits in with Fraser’s notion of a counterpublic. With the “explosive growth” of the black

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popular press at the turn of the twentieth century, Hefner (2021) points out, black authors and publishers were able to reach larger audiences. Science fiction played a role in these periodicals, offering an alternative to stories “depicting racial conspiracies and celebrating white ingenuity in the face of racial threats” (p. 7, 89). National newspapers joined literary magazines like The Crisis, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910, to serve as a public sphere that, by not claiming to be universal, could better hone readers’ participation in Enlightenment. Anthologists and scholars hoping to broaden the canon of science fiction in recent years have turned to these periodicals. For instance, Thomas (2000, 2004) includes two 1920 stories by Du Bois, “The Comet” and “Jesus Christ in Texas,” as well as Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Goophered Grapevine,” which first appeared outside of the black press in the Atlantic. Even though these stories did not make it into the tightly constrained canon of early science fiction represented by Gernsback’s selections for his magazines, they share many fictional techniques with his scientifiction. For this reason, scholars like Lavender (2019) have suggested that the concept of afrofuturism be extended retroactively to include these early science fiction stories. When the term was coined in 1993, Lavender explains, it was in the context of analyzing contemporary genre productions. However, scholars have pointed out the virtue of analyzing earlier texts under this rubric. Lavender does an outstanding job using afrofuturism to gain insight into the Martin Delany’s novel Blake; or the Huts of America, serialized from 1859 to 1862 in the black press. As pointed out by Lavender, protagonist Henry Holland exploits international communication networks and makes observations to create a useful map. Lavender concludes: “afrofuturism helps us understand that Blake functions as a scientific and political meditation on race and freedom as well as a fantastic fugitive adventure” (p. 69). The protagonist’s characterization, the romantic hopefulness of the setting, and the rising action of the plot all seem to fit in with science fiction. The concept of afrofuturism has aided the effort to expand the canon of science fiction writers to include authors who did not meet Gernsback’s thinking about the genre but today can be seen to have utilized a science fictional mode. A good example of this is Pauline Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood, serialized in The Colored American Magazine in 1902–1903 (while

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Hopkins was editor) and was recently reprinted as part of MIT Press’ “Radium Age” series of early science fiction. The protagonist, Reuel Briggs, is a medical student in Boston who uses occult powers to revivificate a love interest and then travels to Ethiopia in search of treasure. He encounters an ancient civilization that prospers in the ruins of a lost city. The fact that Briggs is a man of science who undertakes an archeological expedition qualifies the story as science fiction. In fact, this is one of the first expressions of an idea that will become an important subgenre of science fiction that, as will be seen in Chaps. 3 and 6, challenges white supremacy. The story took on another ideological battle that might be hard to see today. As documented by Bernal (1987), ancient Greeks freely admitted their indebtedness to the schools in modern-day Egypt and its forbearer, Ethiopia. Bernal calls this acceptance of the superiority of African culture the “Ancient Model,” which is attested in Greek texts of the classical period. Meroe, mentioned by both Hopkins in her story and Bernal (1991), was the cultural center of the Upper Nile where Isis and other Egyptian deities got the names that are familiar today (p. 167). In the Enlightenment, Bernal notes, the Ancient Model lost its legitimacy as a continental theory of the races took hold of the scientific imagination, so that by the end of the nineteenth century African culture was seen as derivative and mystical whereas ancient Greek culture was the result of intellects honed by warfare with Aryan tribes in Europe. In this way, Hopkins engages in an important tectonic shift, which would see the restoration of the reputation of Egyptian cultures after World War II. As shown by the afrofuturist reading, African Americans were often surrounded by science in the sense that white civilizations used science to inscribe alternate identities. As pointed out by Hefner, the black newspaper Chicago Defender serialized Charles Chesnutt’s 1900 novel The House behind the Cedars from 1921–2. This novel by Chesnutt is also an intervention into the pseudoscientific discourse of race. Shortly before the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, John Warwick, a mixed-race protagonist from North Carolina, travels to South Carolina, where different state laws allow him to attend college. When war breaks out, Warwick becomes a hero of the Confederacy. George Tryon, Warwick’s friend, does not know of his mixed heritage. Tryon falls in love with Warwick’s sister but soon learns the truth. The arbitrary definitions of race that brought

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Warwick to South Carolina and Tryon’s consternation about his feelings for a black woman—and his extended ruminations about his love despite her supposed uncivilized nature—are superb elucidations of the contradictions of the race concept at the start of the twentieth century. Not all of the authors in the black press examining the race concept were black; The White Man’s Burden was published by T. Shirby Hodge, the pen name of Roger Sherman Tracy, a white doctor. The narrator is catapulted 5000 years into the future to find that civilization is led by black people. The cause of the reversal was a cultural failure. The chief characteristic of white civilization is “a monotonous succession of periods of civilization and savagery,” which is caused by white people’s “instinct for domination.” Because they always insist that their civilization is “the only true civilization” and their science “the only true science,” white civilization is always involved in conflict (Tracy, 1915, p. 51). Other social groups, instead of conquest, invest their energy to uplift their people. The narrator gets a tour of the new civilization, much like Gernsback’s Ralph gives a tour to Alice, and the scientific accomplishments of black people cause the narrator to despair: he has been “forced to abandon all my preconceived ideas about the negro. … My pride of my race was broken down” (p. 102). Although the narrator wakes up to find his voyage to the future was just a dream, he says he often thinks back to idealized world, drawing the lesson that “the white man’s burden is himself ” (p. 225). As pointed out by Hefner, this novel was serialized in the Baltimore Afro-­ American from 1920 to 1921 and was regularly advertised in the Crisis (p. 28). Given that Tracy practiced medicine, he was at least as qualified as Gernsback contributor Miles J. Breuer, and Tracy’s use of the scientific utopia genre could have made his fiction seem at home. These and other stories that Gernsback could not see, like the women in the famous story by James Tiptree Jr., were within his grasp, but passed by as a blur. They offer an interesting opportunity for analysis. Could not have Gernsback, who claimed that he was having trouble finding good scientifiction, included reprints of at least some of these in the first years of AMZ? Shelley, Bradley, Stevens, Gilman, Du Bois, Delany, Hopkins, Chesnutt, and Tracy certainly fit in with the Poe/Verne/Wells type of story that Gernsback said was the foundation of the genre. Their exclusion could not have been a matter of literary quality given that Gernsback

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had already set the bar fairly low with Ralph 124C 41+. One might suggest that they do not fit in with Gernsback’s assumptions about white manly civilization, which is an obvious barrier, but as is shown in Chap. 3, Gernsback was sometimes willing to publish stories that sought to criticize this concept. Barrow’s and Tracy’s utopian novels seem to resonate with Gernsback’s own writing. Their absence points to a criticism of the public sphere concept itself: opening the coffee shop discussion to anyone who wants to participate presumes that everyone knows where the coffee shop is and feels welcome to enter. The onus would have fallen on Gernsback to extend his network to include these authors, in the same way that he included stories from European correspondents. Recent critics and anthologists are doing exceptional work to write the authors that Gernsback could not see into the science fiction canon, but one can wish that the authors had been there from the start. These authors would have generated a worthwhile conversation about the uses of modern science to discipline populations and, as well, would have inspired more authors in the early years of science fiction.

References Aldiss, B.  W. (1973). Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday. Ashley, M. (2015). The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers. Dover. Ashley, M., & Lowndes, R. A. W. (2004). The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936. Wildside. Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. U Chicago P. Bernal, M. (1987). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. Rutgers UP. Bernal, M. (1991). Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. Rutgers UP. Carrington, H. (1919, October). Investigating ‘Psychical Phenomena’ with Scientific Instruments. The Electrical Experimenter, 7(6), pp.  521, 566, 571–572. Chandler, A. D., Jr. (2005). Inventing the Electronic Century. Harvard UP.

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Cheng, J. (2012). Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America. University of Pennsylvania Press. Clarke, I. F. (1961). The Tale of the Future, from the Beginning to the Present Time. Library Association. Cowan, R. S. (1997). A Social History of American Technology. Oxford UP. Davin, E. L. (2006). Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965. Lexington Books. “Did the Romans Have ‘Wireless’?” (1919, December). The Electrical Experimenter, 7(8), p. 747, 832. Douglas, S. (1987). Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899–1922. Johns Hopkins UP. Dyer, T. G. (1980). Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. Louisiana State UP. Evans, T. (2016). The Technology of Race: White Supremacy and Scientifiction. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 27(1 (95)), 47–67. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80. Furia, J. J. (1919, August). Experiments in Physics, No. 1: Perpetual Motion. The Electrical Experimenter, 7(4), p. 315, 377. Garlick, S. (2003, October). What Is a Man? Heterosexuality and the Technology of Masculinity. Men and Masculinities, 6(2), 156–172. Gernsback, H. (1905, September 23). The Lunar Rainbow. Scientific American, 93(13), p. 239. Gernsback, H. (1909, January). Wireless Association of America, under the Auspices of Modern Electrics. Modern Electrics, 1(10), pp. 343–344. Gernsback, H. (1912a, March 29). 400,000 Wireless Amateurs: To Discourage Their Work Would Check Progress in the Art. New York Times, p. 12. Gernsback, H. (1912b, February). Editorial. Modern Electrics, 4(11), pp. 784–785. Gernsback, H. (1913, February). Wireless and the Amateur: A Retrospect. Modern Electrics, 5(11), pp. 1143–1144. Gernsback, H. (1915, December). The Radio League of America. Electrical Experimenter, 3(8), pp. 381–384. Gernsback, H. (1916a, January). Thought Transmission on Mars. The Electrical Experimenter, 3(9), pp. 474–475, 523, 526. Gernsback, H. (1916b, June). Martian Amusements. The Electrical Experimenter, 4(2), pp. 92–93, 132–134. Gernsback, H. (1916c, June). Ether. The Electrical Experimenter, 4(2), p. 75. Gernsback, H. (1917a, February). Martian Atmosphere Plants. The Electrical Experimenter, 4(10), pp. 724–725, 751.

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Gernsback, H. (1917b, May). War and the Radio Amateur. The Electrical Experimenter, 5(1), p. 3. Gernsback, H. (1918a, May). Television and the Telephot. The Electrical Experimenter, 6(1), pp. 12–13, 51. Gernsback, H. (1918b, October). The Automatic Soldier. The Electrical Experimenter, 6(6), pp. 372–373. Gernsback, H. (1919a, October). The Elusive Martian Canals. The Electrical Experimenter, 7(6), p. 490. Gernsback, H. (1919b, December). Ether and Space. The Electrical Experimenter, 7(8), p. 730. Gernsback, H. (1920, July). Publisher’s Announcement. The Electrical Experimenter, 8(3), p. 279. Gernsback, H. (1923, August). Predicting Future Inventions. Science and Invention, 11(4), p. 319. Gernsback, H. (1927, January). Response to Ralph H.  Campbell. Amazing Stories, 1(10), p. 974. Gernsback, H. (1929, Winter). Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660. AMZ Quarterly, 2(1), pp. 4–53. Gernsback, H. (1958). Ralph 124C 41+. Fawcett Publications. Reprint 2008 by Wildside Press. Gernsback, H. (1971). Ultimate World. Walker and Company. Gernsback, H. (2007). Hugo Gernsback: A Man Well Ahead of His Time. BookSurge Publishing. Gilbert, A. C. (1920). Gilbert Boy Engineering. A. C. Gilbert Co. Gunn, J. (1975). Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. Prentice-Hall. Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT P. Haller, J.  S., Jr. (1971). Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900. U of Illinois Press. Hefner, B. E. (2021). Black Pulp: Genre Fiction in the Shadow of Jim Crow. U Minnesota P. Kessler, C. F. (Ed.). (1984). Daring to Dream: Utopian Stories by United States Women, 1836–1919. Pandora. Kimmel, M. (2006). Manhood in America: A Cultural History. Oxford UP. Kirwan, W. H. (1916, May). The Washington’s Birthday Amateur Radio Relay. Electrical Experimenter, 4(1), pp. 24–25, 64.

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Landes, D.  S. (1969). The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge UP. Lankford, J., & Slavings, R. L. (1990, March). Gender and Science: Women in American Astronomy, 1859–1940. Physics Today, pp. 58–65. Lavender, I., III. (2019). Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement. Ohio State UP. Leonard, J. W. (Ed.). (1914). Lewis, Isabel Eleanor Martin. In Woman’s Who’s Who of America (p. 489). American Commonwealth Company. Republished 1976 by Gale Research Company. Lewis, I.  M. (1918, October). The Planet Mars. The Electrical Experimenter, 6(6), pp. 362–363, 428, 430–431. Lewis, I. M. (1919a, April). The Planet Earth as Others See Us. The Electrical Experimenter, 6(12), pp. 868–869, 911–912. Lewis, I. M. (1919b, May). Astronomical Distances. The Electrical Experimenter, 7(1), pp. 24–25, 54, 56. Lowell, P. (1896). Mars (2nd ed.). Houghton Mifflin. Marvin, C. (1988). When Old Technologies Were New. Oxford. Massie, K., & Perry, S. D. (2002). Hugo Gernsback and Radio News Magazine: An Influential Intersection in Broadcast History. Journal of Radio Studies, 9(2), 264–281. Mellor, A.  K. (2001). Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril. Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23(1), 1–28. Mellström, U. (2009, December). The Intersection of Gender, Race and Cultural Boundaries, or Why is Computer Science in Malaysia Dominated by Women? Social Studies of Science, 39(6), 855–907. Moskowitz, S. (1971). The Ultimate Hugo Gernsback. In Ultimate World by Hugo Gernsback (pp. 7–18). Walker and Company. Moskowitz, S. (1974). Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction. Hyperion Press. Moskowitz, S. (1986, Summer). Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Lundwall’s ‘Adventures in the Pulp Jungle’. Foundation, (36), pp. 57–67. New York Times. (1912, March 29). Viewing Wireless Stations: American Navy’s Expert Getting Ideas in Europe—Now in Italy. New York Times, p. 6. “‘Newsophone’ to Supplant Newspapers”. (1920, June). The Electrical Experimenter, 8(2), pp. 147, 207–208. O’Neil, P. (1963, July 26). Barnum of the Space Age: The Amazing Hugo Gernsback, Prophet of Science. Life, 55(5), 62–68.

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Oldenziel, R. (1999). Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945. Amsterdam UP. Pursell, C. W. (2007). The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins UP. Rossiter, M. W. (1982). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Johns Hopkins UP. Schiebinger, L. (2004). Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Beacon. Shanafelt, C.  D. (2022). Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste. University of Virginia Press. Shapin, S. (2008). The Scientific Life. U Chicago P. Shapin, S., & Schaffer, S. (2011). Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1968). Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. The Free Press. “The Goddard Moon Rocket.” (1920, February). The Electrical Experimenter, 7(10), pp. 986–987, 1048. Thomas, S. R. (Ed.). (2000). Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Grand Central Publishing. Thomas, S. R. (Ed.). (2004). Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Warner Books. Tracy, R. S. (1915). The White Man’s Burden: A Satirical Forecast. Gorham Press. Westwood, R.  V. (1955, February). Isabel Martin Lewis. Nature Magazine, pp. 100–101. Yoe, C. (Ed.). (2008). The Best of Sexology: The Illustrated Magazine of Sex Science. Running Press.

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The lessons Hugo Gernsback learned from his mail-order business and his early publications are evident in his later editorial choices, particularly his authorial persona. From the debut of EE to his first magazines dedicated to science fiction, he hailed his readers in the same way: gentlemen who were members of an elite, amateur subculture who sought to build on the legacy of European civilization and spread it globally. In this way, Gernsback was well invested in the concept of the international republic of letters before he began publishing AMZ in 1926. Although it is true that he coined the phrase and played an important role by giving the genre a foothold in the popular press, it is misleading to say that Gernsback invented the genre of science fiction. Genre historians have pointed out that the idea of science fiction predated Gernsback’s interventions, so it is worthwhile to consider what, exactly, differentiates Gernsback’s magazines. As described in Chap. 1, there is an implicit gender problem; new restrictions about who had credibility meant that his demand for scientific accuracy would favor male authors who were able to obtain professional credentials. Intentionally or not, Gernsback mirrored common assumptions about gender and civilization, and for many years his most remembered authors were ones who expanded on these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_2

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cultural constructions in the name of modern science. Although scientific accuracy seems to be lacking in many stories, they are enthusiastic about promoting the superiority of their protagonists and their effort to globalize western civilization. The cosmopolitan ideal that was Gernsback’s winning formula did not overtly support empires, sexism, or racism.1 However, the authors who are most remembered from their appearances in the Gernsback era reinforce, rather than challenge, nineteenth-century hierarchies of sex and race. Indeed, the first half of the twentieth century saw scientific alternatives to deterministic notions of human differences. As his authors imagined ways to travel faster than light, they relied on the pseudosciences of progress and difference. According to this scientific racism, only white men were capable of abstraction and innovation; others could only imitate. Some of Gernsback’s authors, as described in Chap. 3, took the opportunity to show how new scientific findings challenged prevailing assumptions about globalization and sexism. Overall, however, his authors demonstrate the close tie between the new definitions of masculinity and the trust in empires to promote civilization. Someone like Gernsback, who upholds the nineteenth-century ideals of amateur, disinterested science, does not think of science and technology as domains separate from the rest of society. In a practical way, he insisted that fiction was an important part of innovation, and also that innovation was a primary marker of civilization.

2.1 A Genealogy of Science Fiction Magazines Remarking that Gernsback originated the idea of science fiction before an international audience might bring about reprobation. Even if it is true that Gernsback was the first to publish a successful monthly  In the study of literature, one often hears that analysis should not be based on the presumption that one can know what an author was thinking. Avoiding the so-called intentional fallacy, however, does not mean an analysis must shy away from wondering how popular notions about race, gender, and civilization helped readers enjoy some stories more than others. The artistic choices that guided both Gernsback and his authors can be attributed to the prevailing paradigm of masculine civilization. 1

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magazine devoted to the genre in English, it is historically inaccurate to say that he invented science fiction. There were similar magazines circulating around the time that Gernsback immigrated to the United States. This does not discredit him; in fact, it is an opportunity for analysis because a critic can examine what differentiated Gernsback’s titles from the others available. Given that the other specialized magazines did not last very long, one can also attempt to attribute the longevity of Gernsback’s titles to the fit of his choices with the needs of his audience. The first challenges to the common presumption that Gernsback created the first science fiction magazine came at the time when the new wave was ascendant. Lundwall (1977) and Aldiss (1986) decry the way in which U.S. historians of science fiction erase its roots in European publishing. According to this correction, Gernsback drew upon a variety of international sources to come up with the idea for AMZ. A French magazine, Journal des voyages et des aventures de terre et de mer (Magazine of Voyages in the Air and Sea), started publication in 1877. The Russian magazine Mir priklychenniv (World of Adventures), starting in 1910, was an adventure magazine that had science fiction—translations of Verne, but also some originals. There is evidence of interaction with Gernsback; Mir priklychenniv published translations of Gernsback material precursors in the 1920s, and Gernsback uses at least one story, “The Revolt of the Atoms” by Vladimir Orlovsky, from the March 1927 issue. La science et la vie (Science and Life), beginning in 1913, was an example of science nonfiction that could have inspired Gernsback. Aldiss (1986) points to two magazines he supposes inspired Gernsback. Hugin was a Swedish magazine that arrived in 1916, self-published by Otto Witt, continuing for eighty-six issues, and included some of Europe’s famous authors like Jules Verne. This magazine, like Gernsback’s Science and Invention, published fiction and news for an audience interested in science. Austrian Karl Hans Strobl became one of the editors of Der Orchideengarten (The Orchid Garden), which published its forty-six issues starting in 1919, reprinting Apuleius, Čapek, de Maupassant, Poe, and others. The University of Heidelberg has made digital copies of Der Orchideengarten available, showing it to be an attractively illustrated fantasy magazine. The limited circulation of these magazines also distinguishes them from

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Gernsback’s more ambitious titles, even though they could have been inspirational. In service of his thesis that the United States was guilty of a “gradual (and to my mind inevitable) American usurping of science fiction,” Aldiss (1986) erroneously mentions that Strobl, editor of Der Orchideengarten, and Witt, publisher of Hugin, studied with Gernsback at Bingen am Rhein. He hypothesizes, “Maybe they met, and each decided to launch SF magazines. Only Hugo, seeking the New World, made it to the Big Time” (p. 202, capitalization as in original). Witt was a mining engineer who attended school in Freiberg, Germany (Holmberg, 2019). Strobl, for his part, had already finished his postgraduate study in law and was working in 1900 when Gernsback began his undergraduate study (Kosel, 1906). Indeed, the technical school Gernsback attended was founded only in 1897, at a time when Strobl was studying in Prague. It is easy to check the biographies of Witt and Strobl to find that they could never have met, but this inaccurate story nevertheless has been repeated by others. The alleged connection Aldiss makes to Strobl is salacious because Strobl would go on to join the Nazi party. The effort to put Gernsback on a trajectory that would lead the genre to totalitarianism is not uncommon to proponents of new wave science fiction. In this regard, though, Aldiss can be seen as fundamentally correct; even if they went to different schools, they were tapping into the same audience. One way of understanding how Gernsback created something new was that he transformed these smaller efforts into mass media. His twenty years’ experience as an entrepreneur in the United States coincided with a publishing bonanza that utilized the advantages of the second industrial revolution. The inexpensive magazines known as the pulps got their name from the low-quality paper utilized by high-speed industrial presses. As pointed out by Belk (2017), the rapid increase of this kind of publishing is not surprising, given the expansion of postal routes and communication networks facilitated by railroads. What is more, the increased production of periodicals depended on global networks for raw materials, and they exploited the same networks that were used to accumulate gutta-percha and wood pulp for distribution of printed material (pp. 18–9). Publishers, such as Frank Munsey, followed the path of other second industrial revolution companies, using economies of scale and

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national distribution as their business model. They realized that they could earn more money from advertising than from selling the physical copies of the magazine, which led to low prices per issue to increase circulation and the development of multiple titles to share advertising clients. As Gernsback was placing advertisements for Telimco, it would have been hard for him to miss the success of these magazines. The first pulp was the Munsey magazine The Argosy, which switched to an all-fiction, monthly format in 1896. In 1905, Munsey started an additional pulp, All-Story. Contrary to the serialized stories Munsey published in Argosy, All-Story predominantly ran entire stories, hence the name. By the time that Gernsback was serializing Ralph 124C 41+ in his Modern Electrics, Argosy’s circulation was 450,000 and All-Story was 250,000. All-Story published the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s planetary romances, Under the Moons of Mars, in 1912. A competitor to Munsey, Street & Smith, began publishing its own pulp magazine The Popular Magazine, in 1903; by 1911 it would have a circulation of 400,000. A few months after All-­ Story began publication, Street & Smith began publication of Smith’s Magazine (circulation 150,000) and in July 1906 founded The People’s Magazine to accompany The Popular. Although not technically a pulp, Pearson’s Magazine began operation in 1896, publishing some famous works of science fiction like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and by 1911 had a circulation of 180,130. The idea of a general audience magazine started to break down in the teens, right at the time Gernsback ended publication of Modern Electrics and began EE. In March 1914, All-Story began more frequent publication under the name All-Story Weekly. The success of the All-Story format led to many imitators and competitors. An All-Story-inspired pulp Adventure became one of the leading magazines of the 1910s. Top-Notch Magazine converted from a dime novel series to pulp in October 1910; The Monthly Story Magazine began publishing in May 1905 (later known as Blue Book Magazine). Street & Smith created the specialist pulp Detective Story Magazine in 1915, which carried over a serial established from its Nick Carter stories, and in 1919 they premiered The Thrill Book, an effort to create a magazine devoted to fantastic fiction that lasted for sixteen issues. Thrill Book contained “pseudo-science” stories, including

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two by Murray Leinster (“A Thousand Degrees Below Zero” in the issue of 15 July and “The Silver Menace,” 1–15 September), but it was mostly devoted to adventure stories. Other specialized titles followed, including WT, which began publication in 1923. Gernsback would follow the trend of specialization. In 1920, Science and Invention became the title of the Gernsback magazine formerly known as EE in an attempt to create a specialty title dedicated to the technological age. At this time, Gernsback could consider himself to be a minor player in the pulp field: Science and Invention claimed a circulation of 131,361 in 1922, beating out Munsey’s 106,160 and not far behind the combined Adventure and Action Stories of 194,869. The field was dominated by major publishers: the new Argosy, which absorbed All-Story in 1920, boasted a circulation of 470,280 and the pulps published by Street & Smith (including Ainslee’s, Detective Story, Love Stories, People’s Favorite, Popular, and Top-Notch) jointly claimed a circulation of 779,718. Part of Gernsback’s effort at specialization was differentiation, where he chose to criticize the vague scientific themes in the pulps—and the lack of support for the ideal of progress—for the new scientific elite. He would further specialize his business, focusing on scientifiction when creating AMZ in 1926. To suggest that modern science fiction is Gernsback’s is misleading. According to Ashley (2000), there was a boom in science fiction at the end of the teens. He chronicles more than one hundred stories featuring scientific concepts in the pulps alone. In his review of the pulps, Starr (2004) points out a paradox: the techniques of mass production that led to the wide dissemination of periodicals had the effect of creating a diversity of reading material. While emblems of mass production such as the Model-T call to mind the lack of customization and saturation of a market with a repetition of products, such was not the case for publications. The increasing ability to produce more magazines for larger audiences led publishers to imagine different readerships. Gernsback is a part of this trend. More importantly, though, was that Gernsback repeatedly defined his publications as an alternative to the pulps, even as he attempted to match their circulations.

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2.2 The Paradigm of Progress A preoccupation with the idea of progress coming from men’s innovation in technology and science differentiates Gernsback’s publications and the stories he typically selected for publication. This is not to say that innovation leads to positive changes in every story; certainly, one sees dystopian worlds and destructive forces—particularly when the person leading the innovation lacks the requisite character or standing in society. This need for the technical community to ensure that innovation is led by the right sort of person seems, retrospectively, to match the story of the twentieth century, where innovation typically benefitted only a core group of countries. The pride implicit in the science fiction community’s enthusiasm for the innate capabilities of men of European descent relates to racial pseudoscience that was popular at the time. Tellingly, these stories rely on outdated theories that species are transformed by interaction with their environments, which at the turn of the century were part of scientific racism, such as social Darwinism. One of the key tenets of science and technology studies is that scientific knowledge is often filtered through social discourses. Thomas S. Kuhn (1970) offers one of the best-known illustrations of this phenomenon. The model of the universe that put the Earth in the center, Kuhn points out, was not immediately overturned when it was challenged by data. Religious and philosophical leaders were so invested in their way of thinking, what Kuhn calls a paradigm, that any contrary data was reinterpreted to support it. One can see this happening with the pseudosciences of race at the start of the twentieth century. Although belief in evolution was widespread at the time Gernsback was working— after all, more than one hundred years had passed since Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had credibly proposed that species developed from earlier forms of life—the trust in Charles Darwin’s theories about natural selection was low. Ideologically, Darwin’s species thinking did not fit in with the gospel of individuality and self-improvement, making other explanations of evolution more popular. In Lamarck’s supposition that characteristics acquired during an organism’s life were inherited by offspring, scientists and philosophers found a theory that suited their moral beliefs. When

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acquired characteristics are the impetus for evolution, an organism is “an active, creative agent in charge of its own and its species’ destiny” (Bowler, 2003, p. 238). In this intellectual environment, evolution was thought to be teleological, or heading toward an ultimate goal; through the application of appropriate effort, organisms would experience evolution as a sort of progress that “assured the perfectibility of man” (Haller, 1971, p. 98). Herbert Spencer transformed the unpredictability of natural selection into a parable of social progress, as demonstrated by his phrase “survival of the fittest.” The supposedly new thinking still supported racial hierarchies. The idea that men of northern European descent had inborn traits that made them natural innovators best suited for global leadership was one of the pernicious outcomes of several centuries of racial pseudoscience. In the eighteenth century, Carolus Linnaeus memorialized the belief that the climate of the four corners of the Earth produced for different types of humans. Climate, it seemed, excited the humors differently; starting from the belief that biology led to behaviors and aptitudes, scientists decided that some regions of the planet produced the best humans. The thinking was that some environments produced the most suitable conditions for innovation. In the global south, food was too plentiful, with a result that humans did not have to invent tools for subsistence. In northern Europe, cold winters meant humans had to adopt a culture of innovation in order to survive. However, this theory ran into a challenge when humans born in one climate migrated to another. They and their offspring seemed unchanged, challenging environmental determinism even though it was still desirable to have a theory that supported racial hierarchies. Darwin’s work presented a possible disruption, but it was not immediately able to flip the paradigm. Scientists updated the older thinking with a neo-Lamarckian belief in acquired characteristics, allowing the paradigm to continue. This theory still supported the old idea that some human groups were of a better stock than others. Through many generations, biological adaptations in service of these habits led to different races, which to some scientists were tantamount to unique species, a theory known as polygenism. In the late nineteenth century, scientists enlisted Lamarck’s theories of progress toward an ideal type and

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degradation from the environment to form the neo-Lamarckian theory of individuality. In a suitable environment with good lifestyles, an organism could evolve favorably and pass on new traits to offspring. Charles Darwin had sought to disrupt this kind of thinking, showing that environment does not directly cause changes to organisms in the way that most nineteenth-century naturalists believed. His observations while onboard the Beagle, especially the time he spent on the Galápagos Islands, showed how organisms were more independent from environment than was typically thought. The volcanic islands sustained species that were more appropriate for the nearby continental environment, such as the fresh-water turtles who had to adapt their behaviors to fit the climate that was inhospitable to them. What is more, even though the islands were ecologically uniform, different islands supported different types of life. Bodies did not change so much as behaviors. Darwin showed how habit led to differences in what seemed like related species without changing biology, such as two types of lizards where one was amphibious and the other abhorred going into the water. As Gernsback was exploring publishing, evolution was an accepted idea, but Darwin’s ideas seemed outdated. Darwin had proposed that evolution was not teleological; organisms were not on a predefined road of progression from a lower type to a superior type. Seemingly random differences sometimes gave some species an unexpected advantage, leading to larger populations. At the turn of the twentieth century, the effort to make Darwin’s ideas supposedly more scientific led to a repurposing of his findings by Spencer and others to say that humanity was on a march toward perfection. This new thinking applied to both individuals and groups; each person had an obligation to embrace and enhance their biological inheritance. Darwin’s work had also cast doubt on the theory of polygenism, which suggested that humanity was composed of discreet groups that were akin to separate species. This theory spanned a variety of beliefs. For some, humanity may have had a common ancestry, but living in different environments had led to habits and evolution that led the species to diverge. A more extreme belief was that humanity emerged independently in different areas around the Earth in geographic isolation, and each form of humanity had unique biological characteristics related to its

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environment. Darwin had asserted in his 1859 Origin of Species that landforms and environments do not inevitably produce unique forms, but his finding was counter to important tenets of racist thinking. Authors in the Gernsback era—including the young John W.  Campbell, as described in Chap. 4—wrote in accordance with the theory of polygenism even though they typically failed to indicate its racist connotations. So, many settings involve spontaneous generation of humanoid life, which differs from humans on Earth due to differences in the environment, such as gravity, solar spectra, or preponderance of chemical elements. Abetting this pseudoscience of race was what was called the stages of civilization theory, described by Lewis H. Morgan in his 1877 work Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, and serving of the basis of ethnographic studies at the turn of the century. A human society supposedly must pass from savagery to barbarism before moving on to civilization. According to Morgan, the Aryan and Semitic groups were the first to emerge from barbarism, and the Aryan group alone that brought humanity into civilization (Morgan, 1877, p.  39). This theory not only suggested that humans in earlier stages did not have the capacity for individuality, but also says that they need tens of thousands of years to pass through the same stages that the so-called Aryan race had already passed. In this way, identifying which “stage” a population had reached would reveal an individual’s abilities and aptitudes. Combined with neo-Lamarckian ideology, there was no room for the culture concept, which states that all humans can learn and share information. In fact, culture was seen as inexorably tied to biology: bees innately make hives, beavers instinctually make dams, and white people inherently make civilization. In the United States, the new thinking about Lamarckian acquired characteristics, the stages of civilization discourse, and a narrow interpretation of the fossil record led to rigorous attempts to defend the old paradigm. The creation of this form of neo-Lamarckism was so robust that some call it the American School (see, e.g., Haller, 1971, pp.  187ff). Some intricate work was done to protect the old paradigm. For instance, in the womb and in childhood development, humans were thought to

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recapitulate the stages of civilization. Early embryos resembled fish2 and then transformed into mammals. G. Stanley Hall, the first person to be awarded a Ph.D. in psychology in the United States and the founding president of Clark University, extended this theory to human mental development. After birth, children acted like savages before becoming civilized. Weaving the stages of civilization and biological recapitulation together, Hall believed that he could see “the slow unfolding of a mass of instincts which were the gradual Lamarckian acquisition of [human] evolutionary experience” (Stocking, 1968, p. 126). Children love the water and rocking back and forth because these activities remind them of the distant origin of life in the ocean. Childhood is a time when humans resemble their less evolved ancestors, before the development of human ethics and creativity, making adulthood a newly evolved form (Gould, 1977, pp. 139–41). Recapitulation, although it was flawed and was on its way to being discredited, was scientific orthodoxy among biologists; it took on a new life outside of biology with the help of Hall and his followers. According to this post-natal theory recapitulation, though, only white men continued to the highest stage. At puberty, according to this racist and sexist theory, women and people of color ceased their development; as arrested adolescents, they were incapable of the types of thinking associated with civilization, like invention and abstraction. Although similar to the great chain of being concept from the Renaissance, Bederman (1995) points out, this theory was notable for its literalness. “Children were not metaphoric savages,” she writes. They were passing through “primitive evolutionary stages.” Due to biological limitations, one could no more teach advanced concepts to children than they could teach them to savages. Civilized intelligence was the final evolutionary stage, but it would come only to white men in adulthood, the only group that had added this “most advanced stage” to their recapitulatory path (p.  93). White men’s secondary sex characteristics, such as developing musculature, lowering voices, and growing beards, were evidence of their  The decline of recapitulation is fully described by Gould (1977). The common ancestry of all life described by Darwin explains why features that look like gills appear in both fish and mammals. Shubin (2008) describes modern thinking about the similarities between all creatures with skulls, from sharks to humans, even though this information was not available at this time. 2

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divergence from less evolved types (Russett, 1989, pp. 74–5). Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 infamous poem “White Man’s Burden,” for this reason, says the non-white people of the world are “half devil and half child.” Although white men were able to sublimate their evolutionary energy to move to a higher stage, others were incapable and diverted the energy to other purposes. Women, and men who were not white, could not develop thick beards, deep voices, and a capacity for abstract and inventive thought; instead, their evolutionary energy was directed differently in the body instead of the mind, so they became lustier and prepared for childbirth or physical labor. (As will be discussed in Chap. 3, women were thought to be damaged by rigorous thinking because they needed their internal energy for maternal functions, leading to sex-segregated institutions.) In the name of science, men mixed and matched these pseudosciences regarding race and sex, imagining that they were breaking down the vestiges of nonscientific creationism instead of admitting they were propping up a failing paradigm. Instead of naively believing in an unchanging world created some 5000 years ago, these men imagined that they were on the vanguard of scientific thought. That is not to say that these men were atheists—Bowler (2003) points out that the most active neo-­ Lamarckians were not scientists but philosophers and literary men who thought that the transmission of acquired characteristics was “the kind of mechanism a wise and benevolent God would institute to produce adaptation and progress” (p. 237). Social Darwinists thought of themselves as inheritors of Darwin’s work—hence the name—but these ideas are not found in Darwin’s writing; to the contrary, scholars have pointed out how Darwin’s work often challenged the discourses that supported race-based slavery (see, for instance, Desmond & Moore, 2011). As described by Gould (1977), there certainly were arguments about racial inferiority before Darwin’s Origin of Species, but after its publication, “they increased by orders of magnitude.” He continues: The litany is familiar: cold, dispassionate, objective, modern science shows us that races can be ranked on a scale of superiority. If this offends Christian morality or a sentimental belief in human unity, so be it; science must be free to proclaim unpleasant truths. But the data were worthless. We have

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never had, and still do not have, any unambiguous data on the innate mental capacities of human groups—a meaningless notion anyway since ­environments cannot be standardized. [Because] the chorus of racist arguments did not follow a constraint of data, it must have reflected social prejudice pure and simple—anything from an a priori belief in universal progress among apolitical but chauvinistic scientists to an explicit desire to construct a rationale for imperialism. (pp. 127–8)

Kuhn’s paradigm concept helps to show how participation in the public sphere may not lead to the adoption to new truths; the presumption that the better argument will win out does not always mean that a theory that best fits the facts will succeed. In fact, Kuhn helps to show how difficult it is for adherents of the new paradigm to support their cases: societies invest heavily in laws, schools, laboratories, and the like to support the old paradigm. Adherents to the new paradigm do not have these structural advantages and must, Kuhn says, move forward with little more than “faith” (1970, p. 158). In the age of imperialism, the old paradigm was particularly reassuring because it asserted that inequality was not related to history or economics. The refinements of social Darwinism and its attendant theories made sure that no one was chauvinistic for asserting northern Europe provided the best ancestry. Biological evolution and the stages of civilization, according to the popular pseudoscience, led to the belief that non-white races had “lower levels of intelligence and a weaker moral sense” (Bowler, 2003, p. 293). According to the law of progress, those at the apex of civilization have a burden to support humanity and improve human culture. Indeed, one anthropologist sought to weaken the negative connotation accorded to imperialism and replace it with a sense of the “strong man’s burden,” which he asserted meant making alliances between white men and the non-white strong men who could assist them in globalizing European ideals of civilization. An enlightened society, J. G. McGee says in 1899, must not only care for its own people but also the “world’s weaklings” (qtd. in Haller, 1971, p. 106). With this type of thinking, indigenous social and economic forms were tied to an earlier stage of civilization and should be abolished. This feeling of inevitable progress toward a higher ideal not only justified policies of forced assimilation within the United States as it entered into the age of imperialism but also protected the old paradigm from challenges of new data.

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At a time when biodiversity was decreasing and aboriginal populations were threatened, the impact of human activity on the planet was being seen. Social Darwinism not only underwrote ideals of racial privilege but also legitimized globalization. In an effort to deny that the planet had entered into an epoch known today as the Anthropocene, social Darwinists thought of diminishing diversity as an inevitable feature of progress. Based on an application of the second law of thermodynamics, a social Darwinist would say that the energy to create different forms on the tree of life is limited. There are many kinds of fungus because those species are not very complicated. Higher forms of life, though, show less variation because they are complex and require more energy to develop. Thus, the purity of the highest type and the extinction of supposedly lower species were aspects of progress. In terms of humanity, a social Darwinist would say that much diversity was possible when humans were less developed, but the future of the race would muster all of the available energy, leading to one powerful type. Certainly, this type informs the characterization of many science fiction heroes in the Gernsback era. It is not accurate to say, however, that science fiction writers and readers were simply reflecting the biases of their time. A new paradigm regarding human difference was making itself known. When one thinks of science fiction settings that involve parallel humanoid evolution and plots that depict the clash between civilizations, it is hard not to think of these racial theories. Although it is clear that these notions of progress and racial superiority are in the background of much of early U.S. science fiction, by the time AMZ began publication, they were by no means current thinking. Gould (1977) points out that the recapitulation theory of Ernst Haeckel had been discredited as its component parts were found to be faulty at the start of the century. The rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance made it impossible to believe that habits created new genes; the idea that higher stages of life were added on to the end of a fetus’ gestation did not accord with new information gained by embryology. More troubling, though, was the observation that human beings had features that resembled the infants of lower animals (pp.  203–5). In addition, human infants cannot, like other mammals, walk or see. The growing realization that humans were prematurely born and showed juvenile characteristics, known as neoteny, would occupy scientists’ imaginations:

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opposite to the theory of recapitulation, the most advanced species seemed to be the one that was the least evolved. Findings in disparate fields like endocrinology, paleontology, and population genetics would come together to discredit neo-Lamarckian thinking and, when brought into conversation with each other, lend support to Darwin’s thinking. These findings would be called the modern synthesis and were accepted in scientific circles before World War II (Bowler, 2003, p.  338). Neo-­ Lamarckian theory, which proponents had billed as the hard new truth at the time Gernsback was developing science fiction, was actually declining. In addition to new scientific findings that challenged scientific racism, Gernsback could have promoted new thinking in anthropology about the culture concept. Franz Boas, the anthropologist whose students are famous for promoting the concept of cultural relativism, sought to challenge the stages of civilization theory and the nineteenth-century idea that biology and culture were inexorably linked. In the late nineteenth century, Boas (1982) published in anthropological journals, taking on mainstream beliefs in articles like his 1894 study of racial crossing that provided empirical evidence that mixed-race individuals were no weaker than their supposedly pure-race parents. In the same year Gernsback published Ralph 124C 41+, Boas (1911) published his study The Mind of Primitive Man. In this seminal work, Boas demonstrated that there is no physiological difference between a primitive person and a civilized one. The theory of the stages of civilization could not be supported; there was no correlation between racial types and cultural stages. To the extent that one saw stages in civilization, they were not biological: “cultural stage is a phenomenon dependent upon historical causes, regardless of race” (p. 249). In the next few decades, the unifying characteristic of humanity would be seen as the ability to use and transmit culture, making it impossible to account for differences between racial groups with imagined biological differences (see, for instance, Barkan, 1992). Although these ideas were not obscure, they rarely appear among writers of the Gernsback era, demonstrating how many writers were reactionary rather than a vanguard—and showing how the public sphere concept was not amenable to new ideas. Instead, it reinforced the existing paradigm. Gernsback was not alone in his promotion of retrograde theories about human difference. The fact that they lingered on long past their shelf date

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is a testament to how well they fit in with popular notions of human difference. Gould himself, who attended high school in New York City after World War II, remembers lessons about Haeckel’s recapitulation “fifty years after it had been abandoned” (1977, p. 1). Scientists were mounting evidence to question the ideas that environment caused types to emerge and that each individual recapitulated the history of evolution, returning to Darwin’s original thesis, but scientific racism still held the imagination of the public. If Gernsback and his ilk had been promoting new scientific findings, they would have been educating the public about challenges to social Darwinism and support for Darwin’s anti-teleological hypothesis on the path toward the modern synthesis. Instead, they continued with the popular belief, supposing that there were innate processes in organisms that had made human populations centered on northern Europe naturally superior. Many of the authors who found a home in Gernsback’s magazines not only embraced this idea but also extrapolated it enthusiastically despite mounting evidence that contradicted the paradigm.

2.3 The New Sort of Magazine Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, described in Chap. 1, is a good example of how the pseudoscience of progress underwrote the fiction that characterizes the early years of science fiction. Before publishing it in AMZ in 1926, Gernsback experimented with this type of fiction. The fiction that appears in Science and Invention is not differentiated from the nonfiction articles, as if to say both offered valid scientific insights. Building on the invention story, Gernsback’s writers describe how a new breed of expert can support global empires with innovation. Herbert L. Moulton’s “The Deflecting Wave” in the June 1921 issue is a good representative. Billed as a “radio-dirigible story,” Moulton’s story is about a near-future airship. After setting the scene of freight-carrying dirigibles piloted by radio signals, the third-person narrator tells us that one of the craft has gone missing. Abruptly, the story switches to the first-­ person diary of Rutherford Morgan, an observer who hides on the Atlantide airship. Morgan is strange character type, with no special qualifications or title; he is not an engineer, nor a manager, nor an owner.

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Readers can identify with him, though, as a person with a high level of general intelligence without vested interests. The company has hired Morgan and others to find out what is causing the ships to go missing. His narration in his diary is like that of a natural historian, making general observations and then determining that the craft is off course by making solar observations. Morgan does not do much, especially because the craft is autonomous, and in fact he has fallen asleep when he is captured. While he sleeps, pirates deflect his ship by attracting it to a stronger navigation signal. The assumption that there was something wrong with the technology is proven false; Morgan sees that technological pirates are to blame. With the help of another captured observer, he frees the missing dirigible and they float back to base on Long Island. The observers are momentarily famous, but go back to normal life, and third-person narration returns. Readers are told that because of Morgan’s observations, the navigation devices can be improved to prevent piracy. Morgan’s type—a genteel, well-educated independent thinker who does not fight nor manage nor invent—fits in with Gernsback’s promotion of an elite man of science but does not fit in with the assumption that Gernsback was using fiction to sell devices. The shift in narration helps to show how this ideal impacts the reader. The third-person narrator conveys the impression of momentous events facing civilization, almost like a news reel. The first-person narration highlights Morgan’s intellectual type. These two narrators work together to introduce readers to a new kind of expert: the genteel man with broad general knowledge who is can assist the smooth functioning of global commerce. Aside from this and the faraway dream of autonomous craft, there is nothing that reflects science in this story. Another representative story from the last issue of EE before it becomes Science and Invention is Clement Fezandie’s “My Message to Mars” from the July 1920 issue. The protagonist and narrator is a radio operator who has been building an apparatus with the power to reach Mars. The first-­ person narrator’s method for making contact is quite logical. He starts by repeating a pattern of ten slow dashes—something that would be unlikely to appear in nature. To his delight, the narrator, “Budd,” receives an answer. By sending and receiving patterns, a set of communication protocols develops for numbers, simple arithmetic, geometry, telling time,

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and measurement (in imperial units, of course). At one point, an editor intrudes: The narrator asks an astronomer to calculate the precise time of noon “on Mars” so that he can coordinate their schedules; the editor remarks in a footnote that the author has made an error because it is always noon “somewhere on Mars” (p. 320). In the story, the convention of cosmopolitan gentlemen in dialogue with each other is repeated, much as was seen in the Münchhausen stories. The fact that the protagonist is male contradicts the facts of commercial telegraphy; men were heavily outnumbered as telegraph operators at the start of the twentieth century. This creative decision belies the assumption that men are innovators and women are office workers, denying the fact that women were the glue that held international communication networks together. The setting of this story makes it seem as if it is natural for Budd to follow his curiosity, even though he has little practical expertise using telegraphy to communicate. In a reprise of telegraphic folktales like Ella Cheever Thayer’s Wired Love (1880), one of the plot points is that the narrator is unknowingly chatting with a member of the opposite sex. This is an occasion for the inclusion of some usable technical information: the reader learns how a photograph is sent by telegraph using a grid pattern and conventions for simple shapes (an early form of computer graphics). In both Fezandie’s and Thayer’s stories, the revelation of the user’s sex is presented as a surprise, but only because of the reader’s assumptions. In Fezandie’s story, the narrator is astounded, and then embarrassed, that he has been talking to a woman without a chaperone. He stops referring to her as “Marty” and begins to call her “Miss Mars” and “Martianess.” The delay in telling readers about the Martian woman creates a moment of levity at the end of the story. When the Martian asks the narrator to marry her, the narrator becomes flustered and says yes, instantly regretting it. Here I am pledged to a Martian girl [sic] 153 years old and weighing one thousand pounds. I haven’t the slightest idea of what she looks like. I may be engaged to a spider or a snake or something a hundred times worse, and I fear that any day she may drop down from heaven (?) and claim fulfillment of my promise. (p. 322, question mark in original)

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The editorial voice intrudes again, this time to praise the story: it was not until this comic ending that the editor was aware that the story was fiction. While most of the story seems “smooth and logical,” the ending makes the editor feel “he’s been spoofing us (as our English friends would say)” (p. 322), and so the editor reports that he is sending the story back. Fezandie’s story is not so different from Wired Love that it could not have appeared in pulp magazines. Ashley (2000) says Fezandie’s story “epitomized” Gernsback’s ideal for scientific fiction. He “extrapolated from existing known science to suggest future inventions and what they might achieve, and all for the sole purpose of stimulating the ordinary person with a penchant for experimenting with gadgets into creating that future” (p.  46). However, it is hard to see where this story describes extrapolation or innovation; the story depends on technical details  of devices already in use. Maybe the key difference is that the protagonist is male. It is not so hard to imagine the story with a female protagonist who, either through experimentation or through unexpected technological accident, suddenly encounters signals that do not fit with her experience. What is different in this story, like so many stories promoted by Gernsback, is that a male scientific mind without practical experience can build on established technology to transform the world. The characters and narrators in Gernsback’s magazines are notable for the depiction of inborn ingenuity—their innate capacity to innovate intuitively—and they are rewarded with new knowledge and experience that others who do the actual work cannot achieve. When Gernsback states he is making a new sort of magazine, then, the science fiction is not what is new. Based on the genealogy of science fiction, it is hard to say that Gernsback was creating the genre. What he brings to the market is a forum for authors and readers to contemplate the society of the future and what kind of superior humans will be needed there. In the inaugural issue of AMZ, dated April 1926, Gernsback himself admits that there are already plenty of fiction magazines available, but AMZ is “something that has never been done before in this country.” He calls the type of fiction that interests him scientifiction, a “charming romance” that is mixed with “scientific fact and prophetic vision,” the kind of fiction written by Verne, Wells, Poe, and Bellamy. Despite his reliance on reprints from the pulps, he claims that this kind of fiction has

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only been available in his earlier magazines, like Science and Invention. These authors are supposedly on the vanguard of a new sort of fiction and are predicting progress, which has been seen to be a vexed term. In this first editorial of AMZ, Gernsback (1926a) notes that in addition to stories by Verne, Wells, and Poe, he is talking to authors so that he can include “a number of German, French, and English stories, and we hope very shortly to be able to enlarge the magazine” (p. 3). Some critics, like Stableford (1978), say that there were not so many writers, so Gernsback’s “recourse” was to use his literary heroes (Verne, Wells, and Poe), to reprint stories from the pulp magazines (Garrett P. Serviss, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and George Allan England), and to find “scientific romances in French and German” to translate for his magazines (p. 50). Nevertheless, as discussed in Chap. 1, Sect. 1.5, by 1926 there was a wide variety of material already in print that Gernsback could have selected for his new magazine. The assertion that there was not enough of the right kind of science fiction needs some nuance: there was not enough fiction that expressed notions of racial progress. Gernsback’s definition of scientifiction as a Verne/Wells/Poe type of story has captivated many critics’ attentions, but Gernsback left breadcrumbs to the type of story he planned to promote. The stories he mentions are curious because they do not necessarily fit in with what Verne, Wells, or Poe wrote. In the second issue’s editorial, Gernsback (1926b) promises that he has acquired rights for “Die Macht der Drei,” which he calls “one of the greatest—and perhaps the greatest—recent scientifiction story,” and “Feuer am Nordpol,” both published in Weimar Germany. Even though Gernsback praised these stories highly, they never appeared. Both of them, argues Hancock (2018), sought to relegitimize the use of technology, which had been critiqued by artistic and literary circles after the atrocities of World War I (p. 91). The former story, the title of which can be translated as “The Power of Three,” was written by engineer Hans Dominik. Before its book publication, the novel was serialized in twenty-­ six parts in a German magazine, Die Woche, in 1921 and 1922. The three are a new breed of humans who use the power of the mind to unleash destructive forces and come to dominate the Earth in 1955. Two of the three are northern European (German and Swedish), and the third is from India. They are about to be defeated when the Indian uses ancient

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(i.e., Aryan) culture to give the trio more strength. The later story, which can be called “Fire at the North Pole” in English, was translated into Spanish but does not appear to have an English translation. It was written by Karl August von Laffert, who published a dozen science fiction novels from 1919 to 1934 after a military and diplomatic career during World War I.  Laffert specialized in geopolitical stories where bureaucracy is overcome and modern civilization challenged (Erdbeer, 2010, p.  163). Feuer am Nordpol, a German colony, Nova Thule, is established at the North Pole. As pointed out by Hancock (2018), “thule” is a mythical, northern homeland for the Aryan race (p. 106). In 1933, Laffert would join the Nazi party and become an officer of the SS, the Nazi internal police. Both of these novels show how a new sort of man enabled by powerful, destructive weapons can bring about an orderly and successful global civilization. Gernsback’s love for them makes it clear that part of the fault he found with contemporary fiction is its failure to assert the power of masculine civilization. In this second issue, Gernsback also writes that he has acquired the rights to “The Messiah of the Cylinder,” a 1917 story by Victor Rousseau that had been published in Everybody’s Magazine, which is another curious choice. The year before AMZ began publication, Rousseau had published a non-genre novel, The Selmans, under his pen name V. R. Emanuel (1925). The story concerns a Jewish family in London that has escaped poverty and confronts a new age. A review in the New York Times (1925) relies on anti-Semitic tropes, pointing to the family’s “ambition to distinguish itself above its surroundings through wealth and changes of names” and their cravenly turning their back on their less successful relatives. This critique seems unfair. The novel, in fact, offers a complex examination of the contradictions facing the upwardly mobile characters, particularly the earnest young Jewish painter, David (and Gernsback for that matter). David seems to think his prospects will be “all right” if he keeps away from Jewish people (Emanuel, 1925, p. 294). He admires western society based on ancient Greek ideals, but his modernist friends are seeking inspiration from African and South Pacific societies. In business, his colleagues are planning to exploit British colonial operations in East Africa. This conundrum of a new generation of what the narrator calls “Anglo-Jewery” (p. 19) apparently appealed to Gernsback, even though

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the New York Times seems to miss the point, saying that the various challenges David faces make the book “altogether chaotic” (p. 39). The conclusion predicts an unfortunate fate for someone hoping to promote Enlightenment civilization: David’s idealism seems unsuited for the age of imperialism. One should not commit the intentional fallacy and assume the author thinks David’s plight is acceptable. In fact, the experience of reading the novel can make a reader feel distain for David’s contemporaries’ willingness to be tools of global empire. Rousseau’s “The Messiah of the Cylinder” (1917), despite Gernsback’s promise, did not appear in AMZ. It is easy to see why the story appealed to Gernsback: a core group of cosmopolitan men who are well versed in science and philosophy and speak many languages open the novel, decrying the state of human civilization. They decide to exploit a new (and barely described) scientific innovation for hibernation because they hope globalized science will transform the future society. The narrator is Arnold Pennell, one of the hibernators, who awakens from a cylinder into a nightmare world. The system of nations has been destroyed by war while he was asleep, and a new society has emerged. H. G. Wells is lauded as a prophet. Marx, Darwin, Mendel, Nietzsche—and the champion of recapitulation, Haeckel—are honored as pillars of the eugenic, caste-­ based, authoritarian world government. In an unexpected turn, Herman Lazaroff, one of the narrator’s hibernating companions, has become the intellectual leader of this frightening world. The future setting of this story is uncomfortable: are eugenics and technocratic fervor destined to destroy freedom? One need not worry. The rising action concerns Pennell’s discovery of the secrets of this world. If one Gilded Age intellectual can topple the world with anti-individualistic theology, it takes only a second one to set civilization onto the right track. Pennell spreads stories about the world before the destruction, including what he says is the true story of Christianity. This revolution is unsatisfactory by the way the leaders gain the trust of the people by promoting the story of Jesus Christ and, in particular, regress to a medieval Christianity to enforce morality. In the denouement, the narrator adopts the first-person plural: “we have only begun to struggle with the difficulties before us.” In setting up a “benevolent anarchy,” the new leaders abolish two things: divorce and

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eugenics. The former is an evil that harms Catholic civilization, and its practitioners brought about social collapse. The latter was a “madness” that was a symptom of the twentieth century’s “inability to reason.” The demands of eugenic practitioners increased dramatically, futilely trying to enforce human homogeneity. Instead, the new global order came to accept an individualistic ideology that “each soul needed to work out its earthly pilgrimage in a body adapted to its abilities” (pp. 353–4). Both Lazaroff and Pennell come from the time of the readers, representing two potential paths for them. The dichotomy might serve a didactic purpose, but there is a strange aftertaste: choose either the intrusion of eugenics into everyday life or accept a radical individuality so that everyone can follow their own evolutionary paths. The proscription against divorce and transforming the world government into a medieval theocracy certainly favor the hegemony of men. The ultimate power honored by the story’s plot goes to a young scientist who steps away from his everyday pursuits to engage in diplomacy and theology, despite the fact that he has no experience in these fields. There is little in this story that relates to scientific pursuits, even though Gernsback was touting it as the kind of fiction that will be found in his new magazine. Again, we see that the main discussion in a Gernsback publication would have been the status of civilization and the hope that outdated racial pseudoscience will bring about a better world. These stories raise questions about Gernsback’s conflation, wittingly or not, of scientific accuracy with themes of social Darwinism. Even if Poe, Verne, and Wells were not prophesying the evolution of an elite evolutionary group that would be the future of the human race, in the context of AMZ, their work takes on a new cast. It seems unwise to suggest that Gernsback was a propagandist for an organized white supremacist cabal, as Aldiss seems to have tried to say by connecting Gernsback to Karl Hans Strobl, yet the new magazine also shows the extent to which stories about the future are likely to delve into theories about the future of the human race that are tinged with racialized theories. What is more, these selections and Gernsback’s editorials help to nuance what Gernsback was looking for in a story that prophesized the future. The narrators of these stories explain known scientific and technical facts, even though the key innovations that move the plots are obscure.

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In the second issue’s editorial, Gernsback asserts that his readers are thankful to get rid of the “sex-appeal” type of story found in the pulps, substituting “a literature that appeals to the imagination, rather than carrying a sensational appeal to the emotions.” The “romance” Gernsback seeks is not love interests but Romantic with a capital R: literature about the transformation of society. As described in Chap. 1, there were already stories like the scientifiction that Gernsback came to promote. Authors must be rigidly constrained on a path between acceptable science and science prophecy. The cover of the magazine in September 1928 illustrates these constraints clearly (Fig. 2.1). First and foremost, the graphic shows how the scaffolding of the magazine allows “fact” and “theory” gears to guide the pen that writes scientifiction. To many critics, this is evidence of Gernsback’s demand for scientific accuracy. One might rightly assert, especially after examining this fiction, that a (male) writer must constrain the mind, accepting the cold equations of science and their implications without ever considering the real world. The image itself seems like a badge that one can wear on a uniform; certainly, after years of practice, Gernsback had mastered the ability to assemble his readers into a corps of innovators who would bring about humanity’s next generation of leaders. In addition to the graphic, one should pay attention to the textual elements on the periphery. Note the pride the cover takes that David H. Keller is not just an author, but also a medical doctor. Also, at the top center is a small advertisement for Gernsback’s radio station, WRNY. The editor of the magazine is not an ordinary man of letters; he is also an inventor who transforms scientific insight into technical achievements. One of the ways Gernsback filled his new magazine was by recruiting authors from the pulps. Some of the recruits went on to be famous writers of science fiction, such as Murray Leinster. Leinster was one of the nine pen names of William Jenkins. In his personal correspondence, Jenkins would say that he was born in Virginia, the descendent of John Jenkins, the colonial governor of Virginia. His first published writing was a belated obituary of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general (Stallings & Evans, 2011, pp. 6–7); his family were slave holders, and Jenkins himself was cared for by a black woman when he was younger. He said he ran away from home to be a writer when he was seventeen years old; in 1915,

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Fig. 2.1  The cover of the September 1928 issue of AMZ offered a graphical interpretation of Gernsback’s term scientifiction

he sold his first story as Jean Farquar to H. L. Menken’s The Smart Set. In 1918, at the age of twenty-one, Jenkins joined the Army and worked in Central America, but his part in a revolution was “more than usually abortive” when they were betrayed by their candidate for president. (He

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says the Jenkins’s story “Insult to the Family,” published in the 31 May 1947 Saturday Evening Post, relates to this experience.) After the war, he got tired of writing “family life” stories for Argosy and tried his hand at science fiction, but he invented the Murray Leinster name to separate himself from his work in The Smart Set. Argosy published “The Runaway Skyscraper” and “The Mad Planet” in 1919 and 1920, respectively, using the name Leinster. He also continued to publish in other venues, and as the “eminent lady novelist, Louisa Carter Lee,” he published over thirty stories in Street & Smith’s Love Story Magazine. By the time Gernsback was putting together AMZ in 1926, Leinster became interested in radio drama and produced a thrilling story about a horse race (Martin, 1926). It may be the radio connection that endeared Gernsback to Leinster; certainly, there is little scientific about this career. Even though Gernsback promised accurate science, “The Runaway Skyscraper” (Leinster, 1926a) is remarkable for its lapses. The setup of the story is that Arthur Chamberlain, a young engineer of an unidentified discipline, struggles to find success in New York City. He shares his office in a new skyscraper with Estelle Woodward, who is also worried about her future, but in her case, she is worried about her marital prospects because she does not like the men in the city. They break off their awkward conversation when they notice that everything outside the building is moving backward. A Manhattan building, a modern marvel, has been sent approximately 3000 years into the past. The science of this transformation is not well described, and the protagonists accept the change in their reality and react to make the story plausible. A reader’s historical awareness is activated by the story. The characters encounter aboriginal inhabitants in Manhattan, and looking at their handcrafts, Arthur uses stages of civilization theory to quickly categorize them into an early savage state because they use clay but have not yet learned to make pottery. The narrator notes the English language had yet to be invented, and probably Rome was yet in the early stages of development. Indeed, Arthur the young engineer is conversant with a wide range of scientific and technical disciplines, and by extension, the readers are supposed to be as well. As is repeatedly seen in Gernsback’s supposedly rigorous stories, the scientific information in the story is ancillary. To add some scientific detail, for instance, Arthur mentions that, according to Einstein, time is

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the fourth dimension, and just as one can fall from a height, one can fall in time. Of course, there is nothing in Einstein’s theory that would account for moving backward in time. In addition, Arthur and Estelle note that watches and clocks are moving backward, as if timepieces literally monitor the flow of time, and even though inexplicably the characters’ subjective experience of time is still moving forward. Using his intuition alone, Arthur presumes that the foundation of the building was attached to the bedrock of Manhattan island, and the whole structure had—somehow—“sunk into the fourth dimension” (p. 262). Although the idea of sinking into a dimension does not make scientific sense, the narrator sounds like a clear-minded physicist, making a didactic analogy to an elevator descending to a lower floor, and from this presumption assumes that there is no further danger to the building. He then makes a plan to reverse the process by trial and error, guided only by his technical intuition. Although the scientific accuracy is lacking, the story depicts the idealized engineering personality that Gernsback had been offering to his readers for twenty years in other magazines. Addressing the 2000 office workers who had been transported to the past, Arthur assumes “temporary leadership” and forms a project team and a police force because he cannot trust a “city-bred man” (p.  258). The young engineer deduces, without much evidence at all, the cause of the time travel. Although he has no thorough understanding of what has happened, he tells the crowd that he has figured it out. He goes on, “I’ll tell you even more honestly that I think I’m the only man among us who can put this tower back where it started from.” Confident that he will find a solution, he asserts that the most pressing problem is providing food and shelter to the workers. Here the story bridges into a different kind of science, the pseudoscience of the stages of civilization, and shows an engineer’s role in maintaining a population at the precipice. The aboriginal inhabitants on Manhattan island can feed themselves, but their moderate production cannot be expected to feed the large number of stranded city dwellers. Nor, the narrator asserts, can the refugees care for themselves: they are “soft in body” and unable to care for anything except “the most conventionalized emergencies of life.” They can only earn food by “manipulation of figures in a book” or “juggling profits and prices,” but getting their

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food from natural sources was “a really terrifying thing for them” (p. 260). Arthur the engineer seems more than familiar with the sources of food, even though the office workers only know the end result of industrial processes, and his training seems to have prepared him to balance numerical thinking and practical problems: he has avoided the perils of overcivilization. What is interesting about the engineering personality Jenkins proposes in this story is not just Arthur’s deductive thinking and supposedly innate leadership, despite his lack of practical experience, because these qualities were the benefits that Gernsback had already suggested that his readers could obtain by tinkering and reading broadly. The engineer in this story is cut off from the technical community. He is qualified to open his own engineering office, but the others in the building are ordinary workers. He puzzles out some aspects of the situation with Estelle, but most of his thinking is in the form of interior monologue described by the narrator. This is evident near the resolution of the plot in a chapter that is dedicated to Arthur’s thinking alone. In the original publication in Argosy, this was simply Chapter X, but in AMZ the chapter is entitled “Theorizing on the Strange Occurrence.” Outdoors at night, Arthur describes the scene with a cool admiration that can only be described as sublime. In an effort to mimic the deep emotion felt by a Romantic poet, Arthur is trapped in a reverie among the local people, the stars, and the modern skyscraper, which he finds aesthetically pleasing. From his position on the ground he looked into the dimness of the forest on all sides. Black obscurity had gathered beneath the dark masses of moonlit foliage. The tiny birch-bark tepees of the now deserted Indian [sic]  village glowed palely. Above, the stars looked calmly down at the accusing finger of the tower pointing upward, as if in reproach at their indifference to the savagery that reigned over the whole earth. Like a fairy tower of jewels the building rose. Alone among a wilderness of trees and steams it towered in a strange beauty; moonlit to sliver, lighted from within to a mass of brilliant gems, it stood serenely still. (pp. 261–2)

Arthur feels insignificant in this context, yet his humility seems out of place; he analyzes the present situation with deep appreciation of the variables around him while the others are making mundane preparations

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for sleep. He has internalized the kind of engineering thinking needed to resolve the unexpected and unknown problem. For all of the story’s emphasis on the international, cosmopolitan community of science that supports modern civilization, Arthur does not need to talk to anyone. From his training, he has internalized the engineering mentality and is capable of solving the problem independently. As if a reward for his thinking, a midnight flock of birds crashes through the skyscraper’s windows, a deus ex machina providing a feast and eliminating the only problem that Arthur could not solve. The use of plot in this story is notable only for its lack of any disruption to the reader’s expectations. The building is brought back to its original location, the inhabitants riding back to the present. In this plot, the connection between an unexpected technical challenge is resolved by the young engineer’s mastery of the engineering personality. The catharsis here reinforces social norms: a reader may pity the challenge the character faced, and the reader may fear that they have not sufficiently disciplined themselves to succeed if they face such a challenge. The denouement demonstrates the benefits that come from Arthur’s excellent performance of the engineering personality. In a rewriting of the origin myth of New York City, one of the office workers asserts that he traded with the local people for ownership of the island, a claim he will pursue in court, retroactively justifying the occupation of indigenous lands by New York City. Rewards and benefits distributed in denouement often include marriage, and this story follows that typical pattern: Estelle has begun to have a romantic interest in Arthur, who admits that he has felt attraction to her also. Their problems at the start of the story have been solved: Arthur has work, and Estelle has found a husband. Emerging from the threat to civilization that only an engineer could solve, the two will go on to raise the next generation of humanity. The other Jenkins story that Gernsback reprints is “The Mad Planet” (Leinster,  1926b) which, again, is not so accurate in terms of science. Similar to “The Runaway Skyscraper,” this story is more interesting as a cultural manifestation of someone thoroughly invested in the stages of civilization theory. The second story imagines a time in the future when civilization has been lost and one supposedly worthy individual has started the long process that will restore civilization. In “The Mad Planet,”

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the narrator describes how humanity reached a golden age of peace and equality in the twentieth century, progress that was quickly lost with a change in the Earth’s geology. A Darwinian setting for this story would have described how, like the turtles of the Galápagos, humanity was flexible enough to change its habits and carry forward civilization. Jenkins, however, depicts humanity on a precipice, and civilization’s failure to guard against threats to its supremacy leads to its downfall. In the context of Anthropocene studies, “The Mad Planet” is interesting in the way it diverges from an H. G. Wells story and avoids the cultural aspect of civilization theory found in “The Time Machine.” For Wells, cultural habits caused an unfavorable rift between the manual Morlock and the ethereal Eloi. For Jenkins, a barely understood change in the planet’s climate causes the destruction of human civilization. A poorly described event sends massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, even though at the start of the twentieth century, a scientific mind might have predicted the reliance on fossil fuels would have the same effect. Regardless, the excess carbon dioxide returns the planet to a carboniferous age. Plants prosper, insects become predators. In the thick air, humans compete for the scarce land at high elevations, causing civilization to crumble. Importantly, Jenkins uses an environmental determinism in the vein of neo-Lamarckism to say that biological changes that are forced onto humans: they grow bigger lungs, but the high level of carbon dioxide is poisonous and causes humans to become lethargic, accelerating the reversion to savagery. The new environment causes the human mind to lack the energy to “cope with new problems or transmit the knowledge they possessed” (p. 738). The racial theory inherited from the nineteenth century included the idea that European superiority came from eons of effort, and also the specific environment of the north. Here, Jenkins imagines this process in reverse. Curiously, Jenkins depicts something of a restart on the path toward civilization as if reasserting Lamarck’s idea that the drive toward higher forms exists inherently in an organism. Burl, the protagonist, is described as simultaneously atavistic and also the descendent of the First World president. Within him, in other words, is the seed of civilization. After 30,000 years of degradation, he and his companions are described as being in a near-animal state, not even knowing how to hunt. The

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narrator uses the language of the stages of civilization directly; like an anthropologist would assert that children had to recapitulate evolution and savages would not evolve after adolescence, the narrator explains Burl’s lack of curiosity by stating, “the savage and the child are most often content to observe without comment” (p. 743). However, it seems like humanity has devolved to a form that is stable with the environment, and the story depicts the stirring of Burl’s consciousness. Motivated by the desire to feel pride from accomplishing things that his tribe cannot, and wishing to impress a young woman who made him feel funny inside, Burl applies an insight from one situation to another: “Burl was learning how to think” (p. 764). In this way, the narrator mimics the stages of civilization theory that savages do not really invent, but react to danger, and they try their ideas with a childlike fascination. Here, Burl has risen slightly above with rudimentary abstract thought. The narrator then asserts how Burl’s habit of thinking will benefit him and his tribe. Like “The Runaway Skyscraper,” the denouement is that Burl will have children with a worthy mate. The narrator describes Saya’s femininity as innate, and Burl’s love for her makes him her slave. Burl realizes that his accomplishments are trivial compared to the privilege of walking next to Saya openly. Again, the overt science apart from the pseudoscience of progress in this story is slim. On the first page, the narrator says that mysterious fissures have opened in the Earth’s crust, releasing the carbon dioxide. However, at first this phenomenon was unnoticed because scientists believed that burning fossil fuels had already been increasing the fertility of plants. From there, though, the story turns to speculation about what would happen to living things on Earth due to this unexplained change. Once Burl is introduced into the story, there is little science aside from the pseudoscientific stages of civilization commentary. The only other science that remains is the curious habit of inserting Latin names for some of the life forms.

2.4 Hyperspace and Race E. E. “Doc” Smith did not coin the term “hyperspace”—more about that term will be taken up in the next section—but Smith can be credited with creating the first fiction that allows protagonists to leave the confines

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of the Solar System and, at the same time, originating a subgenre that comes to be known as space opera. As critics have said that Gilgamesh did not know it was the first of its type, Smith did not know Skylark of Space was originating a genre. A discovery in a government laboratory is discredited, inventers are stymied by corporate espionage, and then (after an accident with the device) the protagonists travel to different stars. Accepting that Skylark originates the idea of space opera, though, it also shows how elite masculinity that breaks free of inhibiting forces is a key precursor to the epic battle. The composition of Smith’s first story is legendary among fans. While a government scientist and a doctoral student in 1915, Smith expressed his dream of space travel to his friends Carl and Lee Hawkins Garby. Lee Hawkins Garby encouraged him to write his ideas into a story, which revolved around two couples (Fig.  2.2). Smith felt he could write the main plot, but he was inadequate for the “romance” parts of the story, so he sought Garby’s help. The story was completed by 1921, but Smith could not find a publisher; in 1922, it was rejected by Argosy because it was “too far out” for the audience. Smith saw AMZ on the newsstands and sent it for consideration; serialization commenced in August 1928. The editorial note says it is the “greatest interplanetarian and space flying story that has appeared this year” and praises it for its rare and successful inclusion of “love and romance,” which is not “foolish” in this story. Garby is credited as a co-author—the magazine publication says, “in collaboration with” (p. 390). Smith edits the story for book publication in 1946 and, in the process, drops her byline. In the editing, Smith also makes some other changes, including excising the racialized language regarding his laboratory assistant who, in the original version, had been referred to as “colored” and “dusky.” Skylark opens immediately with a complication, as if it is an action story, but this adventure theme masks the unlikely setting. Richard Seaton is a government scientist testing out a new metal, which he calls “X,” causing an unexpected explosion. His colleague in the Bureau of Chemistry assumes that Seaton has made a mistake or is under the influence of a hallucinogen. Seaton himself has to forget his “scientific training,” which told him the energy he released was “unthinkable” (1928a, p.  390). A further difficulty is that, having made his discovery at a

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Fig. 2.2  Detail from an illustration in the magazine publication of E. E. Smith’s Skylark of Space (1928a). The male inventors show their girlfriends the ship

government lab, his research does not belong to him. Seaton is a kind of amateur genius, a throwback to the ideals of the nineteenth century of invention, whose inventiveness is rewarded by insults in his bureaucratic environment. The setting of the discovery, though, makes one wonder which U.S. government lab would sponsor inquiry-based science like this. The actual conditions of technical research in the second industrial revolution

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were much different; although some government-sponsored science was starting to be seen, particularly in public health and safety, there were no government-sponsored labs devoted to pure science. The opening of Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+ had proposed one way to avoid the conundrum of independent men having to take corporate jobs: a transformation of the scientific life so that Ralph’s masculinist ideals of science are fully supported are unencumbered by bureaucracy. Smith was only six years younger than Gernsback, and he started writing just a few years after Ralph was first published, but Smith’s experience in college was more current; Smith was finishing his Ph.D. as Gernsback’s publishing empire matured. Smith and Garby imagine an alternative environment that is stifling the male scientist. The setting of Skylark, instead of predicting the future of government-sponsored research, reflects a revision of the lavish scientific lifestyle Gernsback creates for Ralph. This stifling setting is not limited to the laboratory. Seaton quits his job and with a rich friend, M. Reynolds Crane (known as Martin), starts a private company so that they can figure out how to exploit the latent power in nature with the discovery. Their efforts are again obstructed, this time by Seaton’s former workmate, DuQuesne, who seeks to sell the secret to the monopolistic World Energy Corporation. Once again, the reader is left to wonder about the setting. Which company has a global monopoly on the world’s energy? Certainly, companies like Standard Oil and AT&T had been operating in monopolistic fashion at the start of the twentieth century, but Smith and Garby extrapolate the current business environment into a commercial nightmare. The protagonists thus sail between the stultifying conformity of a government research center and the rabid capitalism of a monopolistic corporation, seeking a path that eliminates the intrusions on their masculine intellects. Both choices are dissatisfactory, so the characters must find their own path that allows them to avoid the advanced stages of the second industrial revolution, as was described in Chap. 1, but also eliminate the deleterious effects of overcivilization. Smith and Garby’s protagonists are repaid for their faith in their own interest with an adventure and the experience of new environments where they can use their intellect freely. One reason for Smith’s success is that he crafted a convincing authorial persona that made him a valuable contributor. Leaving school after the

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sixth grade, he lived the “routine life of a husky kid living on the wrong side of the tracks” (Smith, 1953, p. 2). He worked at a variety of manual jobs in Wisconsin and Idaho until 1907, when at the age of twenty-seven he attended preparatory school and then completed his undergraduate degree, getting a well-rounded education. He earned good marks, joined a sports team (rifle), supported the arts (singing in school Gilbert and Sullivan productions), was a member of student organizations, and worked as a photojournalist (Sanders, 1986, p. 8). He finished his degree at the University of Idaho in chemical engineering in 1914. After graduation, he took a job at the Bureau of Chemistry in Washington, a forerunner to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and not some sort of science think tank. At the same time, he began his postgraduate study at George Washington University, working under an explosives expert. He contributed his talent to the food industry, developing cereal mixes, “the most important of which turned out to be donut mixes,” he writes. He quips that he could have piloted a Curtiss JN biplane in World War I, but “chemists were too scarce. (Or were Jennies to valuable?)” (p. 159). In fact, he was an explosives expert in both world wars. Despite its support for nineteenth-century anachronistic ideals, ideals that Gernsback himself had created AMZ to promote, Skylark is something of a strange choice for Gernsback and others to admire due to the lack of scientific accuracy. Many details of Smith’s stories are well done; he describes metalworking and chemistry like an insider. Nevertheless, some of the science in his stories is fanciful, not factual. His Lensmen series proposes a purposeful genetics program to breed a superior human; even Francis Galton, the person who coined the term “eugenics,” knew that selective breeding could not result in goal-directed evolution. The power used to fly the Skylark depends on a mysterious, unknown element whose properties the characters manipulate mostly by trial and error. Their interstellar voyage is also unexpected; due to an accident, the characters get to the speed of light but keep accelerating. Smith and Garby disregard Albert Einstein’s careful work, which was being publicized while they were composing the story, as irrelevant theory that is demolished by hands-on experience. As a result, one suspects that the important factor for the readers is not the science but the exuberance of the

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characters being able to demolish bookish limits on exploiting the forces of nature. The importance of Smith’s setting goes beyond the hyperbolic extrapolation of the second industrial revolution environment into a similarly hyperbolic pair of planets. The first planet the crew lands on after their interstellar journey is in a carboniferous era, where the air “seemed filled with monsters so hideous as to stagger the imagination” (1928b, p. 549). No drama is possible here; the brute force of the primitive creatures and the lack of culture lead the crew to seek another planet. Their second landing is on a planet inhabited by a vastly superior intellect, a disembodied intelligence who calls the crew “a very inferior race of animals” and says the Skylark and its instruments “are merely toys” (1928b, p. 550). This creature can manipulate matter and space, and yet has trouble when it tries to dematerialize Seaton. There is something advanced in Seaton that the superior being cannot fathom, suggesting that these humans are at a higher level of evolution than might be apparent, but again the crew sees no potential for adventure. They leave in search of a planet where they can have a meaningful experience. On a third planet, Osnome, the crew finds itself in the midst of a war between two groups, the Kondalians and Mardonalians. They initially interact with the dominant Mardonalians, but it becomes clear that their opulence and wisdom are based on their authoritarian rule of the planet. The Skylark crew makes an alliance with the subjugated Kondalians, who are expert mechanics but have not yet been able to harness interatomic forces. Combining their knowledge with Seaton’s expertise in chemistry, they are able to create a weapon to free their people. What is remarkable in this reversal is that the plot makes it seem natural that the humans should work with the underdogs, simply based on their cultural attributes. Like nineteenth-century anthropologists, the crew evaluates the Konalians: they show honor for strangers, they believe in a supreme being, they are capable of innovation. Based on these characteristics, the Skylark crew decide to disrupt the established government of the planet and unleash massive destructive forces in support of the Kondalians. The reliance on the stages of civilization theory is far from subtle. On this planet, the crew also finds that religion on Osnome is a mixture of what Seaton calls “Darwinism” and “economic determinism.” The

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Osnomians practice eugenic execution—“abnormal persons are not allowed to live.” Through clean, moral lifestyles, they believe they will obtain a better physical type, and the higher the type, the faster their evolution will proceed. Soon they hope to reach their highest form of evolution, the “Ultimate Goal,” when they will know all things. In the magazine version, Seaton explains that “survival of the fittest”” is the law of their god (1928c, p.  622). The Kondalians believe that they have a duty to exterminate the unfit Mardonalians. In addition, in the magazine version, the people they have enslaved are said to be “so low [on] the scale, millions of years behind in evolution, that they do not count.” Seaton goes on to explain the belief that enslaved people “are simply intelligent and docile animals, little more than horses or oxen” and also “must be exterminated” (1928c, p.  622). These comments about the enslaved people are omitted from the book version (1970, p.  126). In both versions, the imminent genocide elicits no reaction from the crew, even though their technology will play a role, and at their next meeting with the Kondalian leader, protagonists request that the Kondalians perform a double marriage ceremony. After Seaton and Crane have married their brides, the Kondalian describes the natural basis for the alliance between dissimilar species in this way: The vindication of our system of evolution is easily explained. The strangers landed first upon Mardonale. Had Nalboon [the Mardonale leader] met them in honor, he would have gained the boon. But he, with the savagery characteristic of his evolution, attempted to kill his guests and steal their treasures, with what results you already know. We, on our part, in exchange for the few and trifling services we have been able to render them, have received even more than Nalboon would have obtained, had his plans not been nullified by their vastly superior state of evolution. (1928c, p. 627)

Smith had the opportunity, which he did not take, to revise these sentiments after World War II. Skylark’s dependence on the stages of civilization theory is not an anomaly in Gernsback-era science fiction. Take, for instance, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1934 “A Martian Odyssey” (1998). The anthropology that supports the outdated neo-Lamarckian school is palpable. Jarvis, the crewmember of the Ares who gets lost in the auxiliary

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rocket, encounters several forms of life while he tries to make his way back to the ship, including a silicon-based form of reproducing pyramid. Of the types of life he encounters, he only considers Tweel to be worthy of his attention and help because he notices Tweel carries a tool belt. Jarvis comes across Tweel, a creature the crew of the Ares likens to an ostrich, engaged in a struggle with an animate plant. Jarvis is not sure which side he should take, if he should take a side at all. However, when he realizes that the plant is a beast without culture and Tweel uses tools, he comes to Tweel’s assistance. Although the encounter with Tweel and the plant suggests that creatures with a vastly different biology, who clearly did not travel the same path to civilization, are nevertheless equals and potential allies, the reliance on the theory of the stages of civilization is clear. Like the alliance between the Skylark crew and the Kondalians, Weinbaum suggests one can see which species uses tools in order to determine who is worthy of respect and who can be executed. Smith’s writing has greater import than it may seem because his stories were published in pulp magazines before World War II and then edited and collected for book publication after the war (including one 1961 boxed set called The History of Civilization). The appearance of outdated racial pseudoscience in the 1920s is curious enough, but the fact that he did not temper his books after the war—along with their enduring popularity—speaks to a failure of science fiction’s public sphere. The American eugenics movement saw its zenith in the 1920s. The “one-drop” standard passed in a 1924 marriage law in Virginia became the “most rigid antimiscegenation law in the United States” (Cashin, 2018, p. 96). The federal immigration law in 1924 established a national quota system that was to last three years, and a follow-up law was passed in 1927 that made the system permanent. Also in 1927, the U.S. eugenics movement was successful in Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court hearing about Charlottesville native Carrie Buck’s refusal to submit to the Virginia law that allowed for surgical sterilization of women who were thought to be unfit. Many eugenicists were uninterested in so-called negative eugenics, or preventing the reproduction of undesirables, preferring so-called positive eugenics, or encouraging births from the most desirable citizens. To be clear, there is nothing “positive” about eugenics—all forms of eugenics are misguided—but executions and forced sterilizations were some of the most

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terrifying accomplishments of the movement. Buck’s loss in her appeal to the Supreme Court reflected the widespread support of this practice; thousands of women were forced into sterilization in the name of eugenics, with over one-third of the operations taking place in California. The so-called science of eugenics, however, would not last so long. When Vannevar Bush took over the Carnegie Institute in 1939, he reviewed the work of the Eugenics Records Office and found it to be without scientific merit, forcing its director into “premature retirement” in 1940, thirty years after the office was opened in Cold Spring Harbor, New York (Lombardo, 2008, p. 213). Adolph Hitler, whose manifesto Mein Kampf was published in 1924, cited the U.S. immigration restrictions as a justification for his dream of racial hygiene. Germany, which passed eugenic sterilization and marriage laws in the 1930s as a precursor to Hitler’s Final Solution, used statements from U.S. eugenicists and the international community “to quell opposition to Nazi race policies” (Kühl, 1994, p. 88). In the wake of eugenic atrocities of World War II, the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization passed two resolutions that, although not reflecting unanimous opinions, beginning “the industry of scientific anti-racism” (Barkan, 1996, p. 103). Despite the lack of support from scientific circles, though, the impact of eugenic policies would be felt long after World War II. Virginia’s racial integrity act would remain in force until overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967 with its landmark case Loving v. Virginia. Virginia’s legislature repealed just some parts of the sterilization act in 1974, an ending called “disappointing” (Lombardo, p. 254). In other words, the legacy of eugenics continued thirty years after it had been disgraced. The clear trend was that ideas of scientific racism, based in obsolete nineteenth-century thinking, were on the decline during Smith’s career. Although one might think that Smith was tangentially playing with themes that are related to white supremacy, his later work expands on this kind of thinking. This is most evident in the Lensmen series, a collection of stories that Smith planned for serial publication and then revised. The new versions directly make the connections to racial pseudoscience clearer. Take, for instance, Triplanetary (1973), which was first serialized in 1934. The story begins with a plot regarding interplanetary commerce and the discovery of the Lens devices. For the 1948 book publication,

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though, Smith adds six chapters to the beginning. In the new Book 1, the first three chapters describe how intelligent life spread throughout the known universe 2000 million years ago and how this early civilization impacted Earth. The allusions to racist ideologies in a book published so soon after the atrocities of World War II are hard to accept. The new chapters describe the conflict between the Eddorians and the Arisians (the latter, when spoken aloud, sounds suspiciously like Aryans). Two galaxies were passing through each other, with the result that the first planets formed. The recorded history of the Arisians began when they had to move their planet away from a dying star, propelling their engineering achievements at the same time as they were encouraged to preserve their culture. Here, Smith is repurposing the theory of human races promulgated in the nineteenth century: the so-called white race was propelled to dominance because of the European climate that forced them to innovate. He also incorporates some modern racial pseudoscience, suggesting (in a social Darwinist way) that the Arisians once had many different races, like humans. However, their development of technology led inevitably to war and only one race remained. Lest anyone missed Smith’s extrapolation of racial theory, he makes the connection to stages of civilization clear: The Arisians went through the usual stages of savagery and barbarism on [their] way to Civilization. The Age of Stone. The Ages of Bronze, of Iron, of Steel, and Electricity. Indeed, it is probable that it is because the Arisians went through these various stages that all subsequent civilizations have done so, since the spores which burgeoned into life upon the cooling surfaces of all the planets of the commingling galaxies were Arisian, not Eddorian, in origin. Eddorian spores, while undoubtedly present, must have been so alien that they could not develop in any one of the environments. (p. 12)

In this way, Smith naturalizes the dominance of the human form. In addition, the anti-force of the Eddorians is described as being formless and sexless; they can assume human form, but in reality can transform themselves into any form that they need for a task. One can extrapolate Smith’s thinking by saying that it is the humanoid’s inability to change form that led to the need for tools and thus their righteous superiority.

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What is more, their bodies are without sex, and they do not have children in a conventional sense. As a form that reproduces by division, Smith says, they are basically immortal; each new being after a division does not have to learn, possessing the knowledge and experience of the previously unified self. The fact that the Eddorians are characterized as being opposite of the Arisians and described with a string of unfavorable adjectives— “intolerant, domineering, rapacious, insatiable, cold” as well as “persevering, analytical, and efficient” (p. 13)—suggests the essential role played by the forced evolution in service of the Arisian goal to create a race that is prepared to be guardians of the galaxy, encompassing everything from hands to binary gender. One must be careful when interpreting questionable fiction like this to avoid the intentional fallacy. It would be wrong to assume that Smith approved of the extreme racial eugenics in his writing. Nevertheless, after the atrocities of World War II, Smith actually intensifies the racial pseudoscience. The new chapters describe how the Arisians have been secretly guiding life forward to a state that is ready for “effective use of the Lens, without which the proposed Galactic Patrol cannot come into being” (p. 20). The Eddorians have engaged secret operations to destabilize the growth of this civilization. The Arisians do not resist. Hoping to keep their plan for evolution hidden, they allow civilizations to fall, confident that the general trend will be progress. Thus, the loss of Atlantis and Rome, and the two world wars, are described as necessary setbacks that will benefit the Arisian genetic breeding program. It is clear, too, that the Arisians are guiding biological evolution, not developing a social structure, in order for future humans to be capable of using the Lens. In science and technology studies, however, the ability to utilize and build on earlier innovations is what accounts for technological progress; Misa (2011) calls this a “cumulative and permanent” technological change that comes from the transmission of knowledge (p. 26). This has nothing to do with biology. It is true that humans in the past 10,000 years have experienced some evolution—the defect of blue eyes that had a social appeal and the sickling of red blood cells that provided resistance to malaria are ready examples, and today a whole industry has developed around the single nucleotide polymorphisms that allow for individuals to trace their ancestries. That being said, the  human organism overall has been

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remarkably uniform, with the ability to use and transmit culture being the chief and common characteristic of the species. Yet Smith proposes that in order to be able to use advanced technologies, like the Lens, the human organism has been engaged in a racial transformation that may have begun in prehistoric times but is also apparent in Atlantis, Rome, and the twentieth-century wars in Europe and Asia. In other words, the Arisian (Aryan) strain has persisted throughout these conflagrations and one day will be the population that is suitable for space opera adventures. In spite of these questionable applications of racial pseudoscience—or maybe because of them—Smith’s brand had an immense impact on science fiction. Smith’s legacy was enduring; as described in Chap. 9, the creators of one of the first computer games, Spacewar!, were inspired by their love of space opera. Before then, many authors carried forward the features of Smith’s fiction. In 1928, Gernsback’s editorial comments point out that Smith is a “chemist of high standing and an excellent mathematician.” John W. Campbell, Jr., the infamous golden-age editor, was inspired negatively by Smith; as described in Chap. 4, Skylark was first published when Campbell was an undergraduate. Isaac Asimov wrote to Smith that he used to occupy his mind during his “dull” Shakespeare course in 1937 by calculating the minutes until he would receive the next installment of Smith’s Galactic Patrol in AST. Asimov (1975) made this statement: If I had to pick the moment in my life when my reading experience hit its peak, 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, that was the moment.

As is seen in Chap. 5, Asimov was invested in anti-racist science fiction before World War II. Perhaps one can understand that the teenaged author was not yet too familiar with the racial discourses that undergird Smith’s fiction, but by 1975 he had published against the pseudoscience of race and had called out his friend and editor for racial theories that smacked of the Nazi final solution. Author Robert A. Heinlein also lavished praise on Smith, pointing out his trade skills, from blacksmith to square dance caller,

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and describing him as “the perfect, gallant knight, sans peur et sans reproche”3 (2003, p. 407). Vernor Vinge does address the racial side of Skylark in his introduction to the Bison Books edition, but blandly, saying that “genocidal fantasies” like Smith’s “sprang from innocence” (Smith, 2001, p. viii). No one calls Smith to task for his reliance on theories about race, the same theories that led to so much violence in the twentieth century. Against a defense of Smith and others that their thinking was simply part of their time, one can rightly respond that these are the same authors who said they were promoting scientific accuracy in their work. Perhaps the connection to the supremacy of white civilization and the assumptions related to masculinist theories of innovation were subliminal to these authors and many fans because they had been preconditioned by their training in technical schools. The degree to which they were aware of the discourses they promoted, though, may not be very relevant, particularly after World War II. Following the theory of the public sphere, one could say that Smith was just putting forth a proposition that others could accept or challenge as they wished. It is not easy to find these challenges in the fiction that was published, particularly after World War II.  In fact, there were some alternative visions to the white supremacy found in much science fiction; some are described in Chap. 3. These were published and ran alongside stories by Smith and others, but as will be seen, they were quickly written out of fan histories of the genre after World War II and they were not collected into anthologies like others who supported the connection between masculinity and civilization. Their absences leave hyperspace-enabled, planet-smashing space opera to serve as the emblem of the era.

2.5 The Cosmos Serial As Cheng (2012) has noted, science fiction’s emergence in the pulps instead of books led to different kind of experience for the audience. The direct engagement with readers empowered them to think of themselves  Translates as “without fear and beyond reproach.” This is an allusion to a medieval French knight, Pierre Terrail, the Seigneur de Bayard, the so-called perfect knight. An 1860 biography by W. Gilmore Simms uses this phrase in its title. 3

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as critics and creators, leading to a “dialogic process of production and reception” (p.  52). The high degree of enthusiasm fans felt propelled them to reach out to each other. Even so, author and editor Frederik Pohl (1978) reports, “in the early 30s, to be a science-fiction reader was a sad and lonely thing” (p.  18). Some enterprising fans collected addresses from the letter columns and begin correspondence clubs, but these were rare. In conjunction with his new ventures after the loss of AMZ, Gernsback started the Science Fiction League in 1934, much like his earlier radio organizations. The announcements for the League suggested it was a noncommercial, amateur association to promote science fiction. Local chapters sprung up in cities. The science fiction organization did not seem to help his new publication Wonder Stories that much, which struggled financially, resulting in Gernsback’s sale of the magazine in 1936. Even so, Pohl reports, it was the beginning of fandom, helping him and others to realize that there was a community of like-minded people they could talk to. This was important to Pohl, who reports that he was introduced in the eighth grade to AST by a classmate, because science fiction was something that someone has to hide: passed between coevals, it is an unsanctioned activity. These fan communities would play important roles in the public awareness of science fiction, including the first World Science Fiction convention (see Chap. 4). The zenith of the Gernsback-era amateur community was a serialized round-robin story entitled Cosmos. A quintessential fan production, the editors gathered some of their favorite authors, each writing one episode of a space opera-type story. From July 1933 to January 1935, the fanzine Science Fiction Digest added Cosmos as a supplement. Well-known fans were the editorial team of the magazine, including Forrest J. Ackerman, a charter member of Gernsback’s amateur organization, the Science Fiction League, and Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of the first fanzine, The Comet, in 1930 and to whom Gernsback had awarded a prize for promoting science fiction. All would go on to prominence in the genre, based in part on their work to assemble Cosmos. Palmer provided a basic outline to the authors, inviting the team’s favorite authors to participate; two dropped out, but several others joined, with the result that eighteen authors penned seventeen installments.

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Cosmos is sometimes described as a triumphant accomplishment of early science fiction. The plot the editors provided was suitable for multiple authors and reflects the groundwork completed by Gernsback-era writers. According to Palmer’s one-page synopsis, the Solar System is inhabited by seven sentient species, each receiving a message from an unknown source asking them to develop spaceflight and meet on Earth’s moon (Ritter, 2022). After the gathering, the representatives realize that the message was a trap to trick the species of the Solar System into fighting each other so an invading force from Alpha Centauri can expand into the solar system. Even though they lack power and experience, according to the synopsis, the solar system’s defenders are destined to win an epic space battle. The forgoing analysis points the way toward some angles of analysis of Cosmos’s support of the connections between  masculinity and empires that might otherwise go unnoticed. The proposed setting reflects neo-­ Lamarckian assumptions, with each planetary environment producing divergent biologies that nonetheless are humanoid. Not only does this represent a mistaken view about environmental determinism, but also the lack of diversity of the  globalized human species has the flavor of social Darwinism. As the authors complete their installments, they strangely make the dominant force human. Three authors decline to describe any indigenous life, so that the representatives of Mercury and Venus are humans, and the inhabitant of the Moon is unceremoniously moved to Westchester County outside of New York City. Along with the official Earth representatives, humans have a majority, and then the prearranged plot gives the humans an additional advantage: the fleet from Saturn is distracted by a rescue operation to halt the destruction of the Neptune delegation. The other two groups, coming from Castillo, a moon of Jupiter, and Mars, are adjuncts to the Earth representatives. As the authors complete their installments, humans from Earth overtake the synopsis’s diversity of species from different planets. Another oddity is Cosmos’s lack of scientific extrapolation. Counter to the assertions that Gernsback-era authors and readers demanded scientific rigor, there are few people of science among the authors. For instance, despite the editors’ desire to bring together species that are biologically distinct, none of the authors have a background in biology. E. E. Smith

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and John W. Campbell have the solidest technical credentials. Ralph Milne Farley was an artillery expert, David H. Keller was a psychiatrist, and Bob Olsen was a science teacher. Others indicated their status as tinkerers and armchair anthropologists of a sort; most of them were authors from the mainstream pulps and Gernsback science and fiction magazines. The number of them who call themselves amateur chemists are matched by those who are called amateur archeologists or orientalists. Cosmos’s mistaken speculation about the interaction between biology and environment—already scientifically questionable by 1933—is exacerbated by the fact that none of the authors worked in a relevant field. The authors invest a lot of speculative energy, yet technological innovation in fields where authors had more experience is absent. Future technology in the series is mostly derived from shared knowledge gleaned from earlier stories in Gernsback’s magazines: spacecraft, communication devices, and weapons are new to the characters but not to the readers. At other times, the inventions are inscrutable: the operation of the robots cannot be discerned, and their brains are said to disintegrate when someone tries to examine them. These observations bolster the current study’s claim that the scientific accuracy of Gernsback-era science fiction was centered on the ability of authors to craft deductions about the future of humanity more than to extrapolate new scientific findings or invent technological devices. This problem is worsened in the installment written by John W. Campbell, Jr. (1974), who (as described in Chap. 4) would become one of the most famous editors of science fiction and had already made a name for himself as an MIT student who insisted on accuracy in science fiction. Campbell was not among the first choices of authors for this serial, but clearly Cosmos depended on his coinage of the term “hyperspace” from his 1931 novel Islands of Space, the means by which spaceships could traverse interstellar distances (p.  161). Midway in the sequence of episodes, a powerful entity describes how it is possible to use strange energy to transfer objects into the fourth dimension, allowing ships to cross vast regions of space instantaneously. Cosmos adopts Campbell’s corollary that the supreme achievement of the masculine intellect, being able to move to anywhere in space instantaneously, comes at a price: the men at the controls lose their orientation in space.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the use of strange energy for hyperspace is not the only weak science in Campbell’s Cosmos installment. In his part, Campbell depends on political science and neuroscience instead of his expertise, physics and electronics. He starts his episode by describing the Alpha Centauri characters’ attempts to use mental telepathy to manipulate the races of the solar system. They are troubled by an phenomenon that Campbell introduces into Cosmos, a sense of disorientation that he calls “the Wrongness of Space.” This phenomenon threatens the efficacy of the Centauri devices, but also interrupts their minds, “which is far more serious, for through mind alone may we conquer” (pp. 139–40). Later Cosmos authors change this idea into an entity with a malevolent intention that must be defeated at the end of the series. In addition, the Alpha Centauri antagonists have developed a new mind-amplifying device, which makes the user feel omnipotent: “he was the universe” (p.  143). Through an unexplained mechanism, the device transforms every thought into a disruptive, disintegrating blast. Extrasensory perception (ESP) will become a favorite topic of Campbell’s in later years, but he does little here to explain this phenomenon; the way he describes it seems much like a radio transmission. The Wrongness’s ability to disrupt cognition, however upsetting it might be to a man who has been trained to think that rationality is an essential feature of masculinity and the key to the performance of his duties, is similarly unexplained. Yet another curiosity about the collection of authors is that they are all men, demonstrating the gender problem of fan culture from the start. As shown in Chaps. 1 and 3, there were plenty of women who could have been contacted to participate in this fan production. Eighteen male authors, some of them working together, write the Cosmos episodes. The strange exception is one chapter that was purportedly written by a woman: Gernsback regular Miles J. Breuer, the editors report, supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and “Miss Rae Winters” takes his place for the seventh installment. Winters, the editors noted, had written a story for the fanzine, “The Girl from Venus,” earlier in the year. Palmer, however, later confessed that this was one of his pseudonyms (Giles 1949, p. 10). Palmer was slated to write the tenth episode, so it is understandable that he would not want to spoil the collaborative spirit by writing more than one chapter himself. This is not the only instance of a male

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writer taking on a female pseudonym, but the reason why Palmer would choose a female pseudonym is worth pondering. In the middle of the Neptune episode, an imprisoned princess Teena is introduced. Once free, she desires to accompany Steepa, her husband, on the journey to the moon; she is informed that it is too dangerous for a woman, but she stows away on the trip anyway. Although this should have caused problems with fuel and supplies, Teena used her authority to take the place of Steepa’s companion. Why did the twenty-three-year-old Palmer use a female pseudonym? It is not as if the installment broke any new ground in gender relations. One might expect that, because the authors were seventeen men and one man pretending to be a woman, the Cosmos episodes would be homogenous. Even though their plots and settings go off in their own directions, the narration remains consistent: each author has mastered the tone of reliability and plausibility as a discipline of the self. The extent to which the eighteen authors have internalized the masculine, deductive personality that smoothly avoids disrupting the audience’s sense that the story is plausible is remarkable. In this way, they mimic the ideal scientific worker who instinctually meets the needs of the community. This seems to be the most scientifically accurate aspect of the stories. Outside of narration, the stories are somewhat inconsistent. The automatons, for instance, are sometimes described as an asset of Earth before the collective decides that they are a menace. The authors demonstrate considerable variation in terms of setting, taking the readers on a tour of the planets involved in the story, including geology and culture at each stop. In spite of this considerable variation, the narrative voice is oddly uniform. Despite the novel biologies, different language systems with different names for familiar objects (like the planet Earth), and the disorientation caused by faster-than-light travel, the narrative persona remains confident and consistent. The characters describe the setting and events definitively, and in brief sections of narration, the narrator has no problem affirming their statements and making sense of it all for readers. The collective omniscient narrative persona is matched by the characters, who can explain everything, even the unexplainable, much the same way as Jenkins’s character Arthur in “The Runaway Skyscraper.”

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With all this being said, it may be unsurprising that the episode that garners the most votes from readers is “The Last Poet and the Wrongness of Space” by A. Merritt (1974). This episode focuses on Narodny and his effort to defeat the robot menace that is destroying individuality and imagination. Narodny is a polymath, fulfilling the Rooseveltian dream of a person who can easily master various disciplines. He was an outstanding inventor, but unlike Gernsback’s Ralph, Narodny is also someone who could make compositions from the “music of the spheres.” An appealing aspect of his characterization is that he is not just a scientist, but he is also a poet and a musician. The narrator describes the rest of humanity as possible atavisms; in other words, Narodny is a superhuman at the next phase of evolution (pp.  123–7). With the help of a team, Narodny captures some of the automatons that are threatening civilization on Earth, hoping to gain information with which to devise an attack. In the geopolitical context, Merrit’s staffing decisions are worth considering. Counter to Palmer’s synopsis, Narodny is a refugee from Russia, the country that was “the most mechanized; the most robot-ridden.” The statement that the automatons are unified in their thoughts and actions cannot be not accidental; the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had led to an uncomfortable international situation. At the time Merritt’s installment was printed, April 1934, the United States had just granted diplomatic recognition to the new communist republic. Narodny’s status as someone who refused the collective culture of a communist state fits in with the fears of overcivilization; the U.S.S.R., readers should suppose, has been readily assimilated by a robot menace due to their conformist culture. In many ways, Narodny represents an idealized figure in the Gernsback era: a man who has mastered the art of thinking without losing his vigor and his love for individuality. There are, apparently, no established organizations that can coordinate a defense. In order to save civilization, Narodny assembles a team of ten other advanced humans. This international group is somewhat diverse. The team consists of two Chinese people who are not refugees, seeming to reflect the hope that China’s relatively new republican government would be successful in restoring the country’s long cultural history and staying clear of the communism that had transformed Russia. Merritt

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also proposes that two other ancient civilizations be represented. Although India had lost its sovereignty (which would not be regained until the 1947 revolution), Merritt says that one of the ten is Hindu, a direct descendant of Buddha. Another is a Jew who traces his ancestry to Solomon. There also are three women on the team, apparently representing modern Europe: a German, a Basque, and an Eurasian. The team that Merritt proposes is optimistic and seems to be truly cosmopolitan, at least more cosmopolitan than Gernsback’s scientists with the “plus” designation. A major difference, though, is the insistence on bloodlines that can be traced to antiquity, perhaps suggesting racial purity or authenticity. Two episodes after Merritt’s, though, Doc Smith (1974) takes this all away, favoring an approach similar to Skylark. He dismisses Narodny, who he says is insufficiently antagonistic to the robot menace—and goes so far as to accuse him of assembling a “coterie of kindred spirits” and hiding in “a subterranean Paradise, aloof from humanity and automaton alike” (p. 138). A new team of Anglo-human men take over the story. Using a military organization, they prepare to fight the robots, but Campbell’s Wrongness unexpectedly destabilized their cool command of their minds and bodies in the middle of a meeting. One of the character’s “precisely spaced enunciation” turns into a “hideous drooling, a slobbering, meaningless mumble.” The narrator, of course, does not face this problem—but neither does one of the leaders, Stone, who had developed some sort of blocking mechanism that foils the robots’ disorienting ray. “I know what they are doing and they are not surprised,” Stone says, with the narrator using the adverb “coolly” to describe his demeanor. Without evidence or evaluation, Stone knows what to do: with a quick adjustment, he restores masculine rationality to the men. Cosmos, after Smith’s intervention, will not escape from the interplanetary patrol mode, leaving behind the collaborative vision of Merritt’s Narodny. The portrait of Narodny as the man who can master poetry, music, and technology may have been appealing enough to readers to give the episode the first rank in the poll, but Smith’s refashioning of the tale and elimination of the cosmopolitan humanity in favor of a space force earns second place. Although the masculinist assumptions of Merrit’s Narodny and Smith’s space command are subtle, there are other installments that wear the gender trouble on their sleeves. For instance, the second installment

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written by Gernsback regular David H. Keller (1973) makes a joke of misogyny. The setting Keller establishes on Earth is one where mechanical instruments have not only eliminated the need for direct action but are threatening to overpower the human race. James Tarvish, an elderly, unmarried man, dreaming of interstellar travel, instructs his staff to invent a spacecraft and searches for a companion. He settles on Henry Cecil, “a man who was brave, intellectual, clean, and in every way representative of the best in the cultural achievements of the age” (pp. 134–5). Cecil is invigorated when he learns that no women will come along for the journey, citing how he had been treated poorly by women in the past, one stating that men were the inferior sex. Tarvish himself says he is running away from a woman who wants to marry him, but this turns out to be a ruse. Once they are on their journey, Tarvish introduces Cecil to a male and female dog he has brought along for breeding, and then introduces him to his young niece, Ruth. The dogs and the young humans bring about offspring to the pleasure of the old industrialist. Keller ends his chapter with Ruth taking control of the ship and bringing them back to civilization so that her children will have a proper education. “‘Wonderful girl!’ sighed the old man. ‘College graduate’” (p. 145). The narrator begrudgingly acknowledges that the ship will function in this new family atmosphere, but the purpose of the expedition—to avoid the stultification of manly intellect and extermination by machines—does not alarm the woman that Keller creates; indeed, she seems to think the overcivilization represented by the technological society will not be beneficial to the children. The man’s unhappiness with women is not strange to Keller. His 1929 story “The Feminine Metamorphosis” seems to be a scientific exploration of gender: given findings in endocrinology, the differences between men and women are not as stark as they had been described in the nineteenth century. Although many would use this observation to assert that greater equality was natural, the plot of Keller’s story revolves around a female scientist who seeks to use access to scientific knowledge to disrupt democracy. A group of women finance sex change research with the express purpose of infiltrating society. By the end of the story, the cabal exercises its power and the narrator reveals that women are committing sexist acts against men in the name of equal rights. This sort of anxiety about reverse

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sexism was in the forefront of stories that Keller wrote under the female pseudonym Amy Worth. For instance, his 1933 story “A Piece of Linoleum” is told from the perspective of a domineering, childless wife who drives her husband to suicide by her fastidiousness; the twist comes at the end, when a psychiatric professional takes the side of the wife, wondering why her dead husband did not appreciate her more. Keller, as one of Gernsback’s regular contributors, makes the threat from the home sphere literal and legitimizes barriers to women’s education at the same time. As if Keller’s installment of Cosmos did not make the case for masculinity strongly enough, the third installment by Arthur J. Burks describes an androphobic society on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter. Through science, the women of this society have found a way to almost eliminate the need for men in reproduction. Only one in seven generations needs a male to reproduce, and men are no longer born to the artificially evolved race. The rest of the time, the declining population of men are cloistered and treated as if they are deplorable creatures. The plot of this episode, though, opens with the female leaders seeking out one of the men for his inventiveness and bravery. In other words, the story suggests that the women who have used science to change the basic facts of their species do not feel as if they are adequate to create a spacecraft and respond to the message they receive from Alpha Centauri. More than one feminist utopia had already appeared before Burks’s installment—think of Mizora by Mary E. Bradley Lane (1880–1881) and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)—and these stories suggest that some of the problems faced by modernity are brought about by masculinist thinking. Burks’s story proposes a different point of view; like Keller’s story “A Feminine Metamorphosis,” he supposes feminists are wrongly seeking to usurp the natural order, and Burks goes a step further to say that the women will regret it because they will one day need a man to provide invention and bravery. Although there were several authors who could provide a militaristic, planet-smashing ending for Cosmos, this honor was reserved for Edmond Hamilton, who had made his start in WT with a two-part world-­wrecking novel Crashing Suns in the same month that Skylark was first published. Hamilton is an expert in the kind of space opera where engineers can use

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their knowledge of physics to rearrange the orbits of planets or destroy them entirely. In his Crashing Suns, the inhabitants of the Solar System are threatened by a species whose sun is dying; they have hurtled their sun by means of a vaguely described ray into our Sun, promising humanity’s destruction in order to save another civilization. In the stories Hamilton writes later, the concept of a militaristic alliance emerges (in Crashing Suns, it is called the League of Planets, similar to the international organization formed after World War I, the League of Nations). Fan writer Wilson Tucker (1941) described this kind of fiction as “space opera,” using uncomplimentary words like “hacky,” “stinking,” and “outworn” to discredit stories like this where space ships are used for world saving (p. 9). Hamilton does not burden his readers with the details of his elusive mechanism that allows faster-than-light travel and to slice planets in half; instead, his readers must be satisfied with descriptions of comradeship, duty, and sacrifice. In addition to a lack of scientific explanation of the fanciful elements in Hamilton’s concluding episode to Cosmos (1974) it is strange to read lapses in technical judgment. The narrator suggests that Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto’s orbits have brought them into the same quarter of the solar system. The bounds of this area are quite large; the orbits of Saturn and Pluto could be as much as 6 billion kilometers apart. In addition, although most of the planets are focused on an elliptic plane, Pluto’s orbit deviates considerably, increasing the volume. The invading fleet is said to be arriving near Pluto; Martin gives the order for forces to meet between Neptune and Pluto, as if he is saying to meet between second base and the center fielder on a baseball field. Even if the ships move incredibly fast, trying to find each other and coordinate action would be much more complicated than just pointing in a general direction and saying meet me there. Yet, this aspect of the story does not trigger any sense of implausibility because readers and authors alike presume that the men in this story have complete mastery of physical space. This practical matter, though, seems inconsequential in comparison to the actions that lead to the conclusion. The enemy lays waste to Neptune, destroying civilization there. Stone, observing the destruction, deduces that the aliens are using a ray that transforms matter into force: “You know an atom is simply confined force and that pale beam releases it,”

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Stone says (p. 140). As the invaders lay waste to the cities of Neptune, Martin arranges to give Stone a view of the interior of one of their ships. Although Stone only briefly sees the mechanism, thanks to his “piercing eyes,” he understands how to build one (p. 145). Within a few hours, he has replicated the unknown technology on board the ship; it works on the first try. In fact, it is so powerful that it can be used to dematerialize the planet. Thanks to the recursive nature of the transformation of atoms into force, though, this will also mean the destruction of Pluto, Uranus, and maybe Saturn. Wastefully, the Earthlings state Pluto and Uranus are irrelevant because they are uninhabited. Saturn has a population, and the crew is not so callous as to think them expendable. However, they would also prefer that their beam destroy the entire Solar System rather than “tamely letting ourselves be conquered and killed!” (p. 147). Although a reader can easily overlook the hyperbolic plot, excusing its excesses as the price for the enthusiastic action, space opera subversively promotes a peculiar technical personality. Without testing or calculation, the crew unleashes the force of the atoms that make up Neptune. Their intuition is proved correct; Saturn is unharmed. Implicit in this narration, though, are the ideas that a masculine thinker can quickly deduce and improve mechanisms, the presumption that nature is full of latent energy that a skilled scientist can exploit, and the promise that human teams will intuitively avoid the potentially deadly consequences of their actions. In spite of the cosmopolitan overtures of earlier writers in the serial, the chauvinism at the end Cosmos is bald. First of all, the destruction of a planet inhabited by a peripheral species becomes an essential aspect of the rising action. In case the reader misses this kind of thinking, Hamilton has named Stone and Martin’s ship the Washington, taking the name of the first U.S. president. In fact, the Washington is never risked in the final operation; Steepa, the last of the Neptunians, sacrifices himself by carrying the dematerializing device in his own ship while the humans observe from a safe distance. The narrator describes the cry of victory aboard the Washington as “superhuman” (p.  150). It is not just that humans were successful in this story; the representatives of Earth, who had evolved to the next stage, were able to meet the challenge faced by the interstellar foe by their deft application of technology to nature that marks the conclusion of Cosmos.

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At first glance, it seems that not a lot is at stake in Cosmos: it is fan publication created for honor, not for money, with a small audience. The only thing that mattered was the appreciation of fans. The limited distribution of the collaboration makes it seem insignificant, but the cloistered nature of the project makes it much more important for understanding the underlying ideals of Gernsback-era fiction. Freed from the constraints of editors guarding the interest of a paying audience, the authors are quite free to do what they want. In this purity of purpose, the assumptions of Gernsback-era science fiction are revealed—and given the long careers of several participants, the overt disclosure helps to catalog the unspoken assumptions of authors and editors in the years to come.

References Aldiss, B. (1986). Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. Atheneum. Ashley, M. (2000). The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950. The History of the Science-Fiction Magazine Volume I. Liverpool UP. Asimov, I. (1975). Introduction. In J.  Gunn (Ed.), Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. Prentice-Hall. Barkan, E. (1992). The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars. Cambridge UP. Barkan, E. (1996). The Politics of the Science of Race: Ashley Montagu and UNESCO’s Anti-racist Declarations. In L.  T. Reynolds & L.  Lieberman (Eds.), Race and Other Misadventures (pp. 96–105). Dix Hills, NY. Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. U Chicago P. Belk, P.  S. (2017). Empires of Print: Adventure Fiction in the Magazines, 1899–1919. Routledge. Boas, F. (1911). The Mind of Primitive Man. Macmillan. Boas, F. (1982). Race, Language, and Culture. U Chicago P. Bowler, P. J. (2003). Evolution: The History of an Idea (3rd ed.). U of California P. Campbell, J. W. (1931, Spring). Islands of Space. AMZ Quarterly, 4(2), 146–229. Campbell, J.  W. (1974). Interference on Luna. In Perry Rhodan (Vol. 38, pp. 138–148). Ace Books.

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Cashin, S. (2018). Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy. Beacon P. Cheng, J. (2012). Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America. University of Pennsylvania Press. Desmond, A., & Moore, J. (2011). Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. U of Chicago P. Emanuel, V. R. (1925). The Selmans. Dial Press. Erdbeer, R.  M. (2010). Laffert, Karl-August von (K.  Literaturlexikon and W. Kühlmann, Ed, pp. 163–4). Walter de Gruyter. Fezandie, C. (1920, July). My Message to Mars. Electrical Experimenter, 8(3), 318–322. Gernsback, H. (1926a, April). A New Sort of Magazine. AMZ, 1(1), 3. Gernsback, H. (1926b, May). Thank You! AMZ, 1(2), 99. Giles, G. (1949). The Palmer Hoax. Science-Fantasy Review, 4 (17, winter 1949–1950), 10–14. Gould, S. J. (1977). Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Belknap Press. Haller, J.  S., Jr. (1971). Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900. U of Illinois Press. Hamilton, E. (1974). Armageddon in Space. Perry Rhodan, 60, 137–150. Hancock, J.  M. (2018). Blood and Snow: Conservative Nationalism and Ice Spaces in Weimar Germany’s Science Fiction. PhD diss., University of Tennessee. Retrieved March 1, 2023 from https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_ graddiss/4984 Heinlein, R. A. (2003). Larger than Life. In Expanded Universe (pp. 405–409). Simon and Schuster. Holmberg, J.-H. (2019). Witt, Otto. In J. Clute, D. Langford, P. Nicholls & G.  Sleight (Eds.). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Gollancz. Retrieved January 23, 2022, from https://sf-­encyclopedia.com/entry/witt_otto. Keller, D.  H. (1929, August). The Feminine Metamorphosis. Science Wonder Stories, 1 (3), 246–63, 274. Keller, D. H. (1973). The Emigrants. In Perry Rhodan (Vol. 33, pp. 132–146). Ace Books. Kosel, H. (1906). Deutsch-österreichisches Künstler- und Schriftsteller-Lexikon 2. der Ges. für graphische Industrie. Kühl, S. (1994). The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford UP. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. U Chicago P. Leinster, M. (1926a, June). The Runaway Skyscraper. AMZ, 1 (3), 250–65, 285.

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Leinster, M. (1926b, November). The Mad Planet. AMZ, 1(8), 736–757. Lombardo, P. A. (2008). Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck V. Bell. Johns Hopkins UP. Lundwall, S. (1977). Science Fiction: An Illustrated History. Grossett and Dunlapp. Martin, J. T. W. (1926, May 13). Outside Listening In. Brooklyn Times. Merritt, A. (1974). The Last Poet and the Wrongness of Space. In Perry Rhodan (Vol. 48, pp. 129–139). Ace Books. Misa, T. J. (2011). From Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins UP. Morgan, L.  H. (1877). Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. Charles H. Kerr & Co. Moulton, H.  L. (1921, June). The Deflecting Wave. Science and Invention, 124, 166–172. New York Times. (1925, December 6). London Jewry. Book Review Section, 36, 39. Pohl, F. (1978). The Way the Future Was: A Memoir. Ballantine. Ritter, D. (2022). How Cosmos Came to Be. The Cosmos Project. Retrieved February 1, 2022 from https://cosmos-­serial.com/how-­cosmos-­came-­to-­be/ Rousseau, V. (1917, September). The Messiah of the Cylinder. Everybody’s Magazine, 37(3), 335–354. Russett, C. E. (1989). Sexual Selection: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Harvard UP. Sanders, J. (1986). E. E. “Doc” Smith. Wildside Press. Shubin, N. (2008). Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Pantheon. Smith, E. E. (1928a, August). Skylark of Space. AMZ, 3(5), 390–417. Smith, E. E. (1928b, September). Skylark of Space. AMZ, 3 (6), 528–56, 558–9. Smith, E. E. (1928c, October). Skylark of Space. AMZ, 3 (7), 610–36. 641. Smith, E. E. (1953). The People Who Make Other Worlds, No. 11: Edward E. Smith. Other Worlds #27, 5 (3), 2, 159. Smith, E. E. (1973). Triplanetary. Pyramid Books. Smith, E. E. (1974). Course Perilous. In Perry Rhodan (Vol. 49, pp. 133–144). Ace Books. Smith, E.  E. (2001). The Skylark of Space: Commemorative Edition. U Nebraska Press. Stableford, B. M. (1978). The Sociology of Science Fiction. Borgo Press. Stallings, B. J., & Evans, J.-A. J. (2011). Murray Leinster: The Life and Works. McFarland.

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Starr, P. (2004). The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. Basic Books. Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1968). Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. The Free Press. Thayer, E. C. (1880). Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes. W. F. Johnson. Tucker, W. (1941, January). Depths of the Interior. Le Zombie, 4 (1) (No. 36), 9. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from http://www.midamericon.org/tucker/ lez36i.htm. Weinbaum, S. G. (1998). Martian Odyssey. In R. Silverberg (Ed.), The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1. Orb.

3 Have We Not Had Enough of War?

The discourse that connected the new definition of masculinity to civilization was not unique to Gernsback-era magazines. For hundreds of years, intellectuals had sought to naturalize the idea that white men were innate leaders and innovators. At the turn of the century, though, the rising tide of non-white men with technical credentials was met by new restrictions on who had access to scientific and technical careers, leading people to assume that only white men could succeed in these domains. One should not believe, however, that this discourse was adopted unthinkingly. People with scientific and technical backgrounds as well as new scientific findings challenged this discourse. As seen in Chaps. 1 and 2, Gernsback’s magazines tended to reinforce the connection between white masculinity and scientific civilization, but some authors resisted the new definition. In particular, this chapter considers work by Claire Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, and L. Taylor Hansen. An understanding of the gender politics in science and engineering helps today’s readers to appreciate these authors’ work more fully. Women writers, who were better represented in the general pulps than they were in Gernsback’s magazines, tended to approach a story for Gernsback with an awareness of his audience’s adherence to the new paradigm. This © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_3

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presents a conundrum when trying to read their stories. On the one hand, they lack overt support for women or even female characters; on the other hand, they focused on the newly established generic conventions that, as seen in the previous chapters, tied masculinist science to progress. They do not often present a role for women in science, nor do they exhibit excellence in the type of triumphant stories of superscience Gernsback often championed. This conundrum leads to a consideration of why Gernsback selected these authors for publication at all. The way these authors challenge some of the key assumptions of Gernsback and his other authors offers the one explanation for their inclusion: scientifiction was open to correctives to guarantee the triumph of Anglo-European civilization. Recent scholarship by Davin (2006) and others has shown a robust presence of women authors in the Gernsback era, countering some historians of science fiction who claim that women writers of science fiction before 1970 were insignificant or too few. For instance, Knight (1975) says he wishes to correct the failure to include science fiction from the 1930s in fan memories. His anthology includes authors like Murray Leinster, John W. Campbell, Jr., David Keller, and Stanley Weinbaum but includes nothing from Harris, Stone, or Hansen. Despite its title, Sam Moskowitz’s anthology When Women Rule (1972) contains no stories written by women. When women from Gernsback’s magazines are considered, they are often dismissed as writing fiction that is inferior to the presumed leaders of the field, like E. E. Smith. Bleiler is a convenient measure of this type of demeaning review. He compiled one of the first bibliographies of magazine science fiction shortly after World War II, but this left out many women writers because he focused only on book publications, reflecting biases among fan editors, who proposed volumes to publishing companies. Bleiler (1982) edited a volume of critical studies of “major authors.” The earliest writer in the collection is Mary Shelley, but it includes no women of the Gernsback era. His later encyclopedias (1990, 1998) that include magazine fiction do include women authors, although, as will be shown below, his comments are less than complimentary. It seems that Gernsback’s readers did not think that fiction that challenged the masculinist bias in science and science fiction demonstrated excellence, which led to the assessment by fan historians that this

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kind of story was not valuable. The authors in Chaps. 1 and 2 were loved by readers because their characters could easily harness the forces of nature, their masculinist bias encouraging them to ignore the sources of their raw materials, the impact of technology on the environment, and the connection between science and society. After World War II, most women authors had been written out of the early history of science fiction because fan historians did not think their work was interesting enough to be reread or they just failed to consider short fiction published in pulps outside of Gernsback’s magazines. The neglect of these authors and the critique of masculinity in general began to be corrected in the 1990s. At this time, it became clear that women had always been a part of science fiction, just as they had always been a part of science. As pointed out by Roberts (1993), the misogyny in science fiction was “so extreme” that readers found “a strong case for feminism in the texts” (p.  3). Although Roberts does not refer to Harris, Stone, or Hansen, her point is well taken. Larbalestier (2002) begins with a chapter on Gernsback and points out that female writers had a place from the start, however “tenuous” it was (p. 24). Reviewing the letters from female fans and Gernsback’s assertion that there were as many female as male readers of his magazines, Larbalestier suggests one should not “conflate” the sexism found in writing of the time with the notion that there were few female writers because it will “actually lead to the forgetting of important female writers” (p. 155). Merrick (2009) makes it clear that women were not only present in the early days of the genre but so were debates about gender roles. In 2006, Larbalestier edited a feminist science fiction anthology that included Harris’s “The Fate of the Poseidonia” and Stone’s “Conquest of Gola.” Donawerth, in an essay introducing Harris, points out that earlier claims that the pulps lacked  female writers cannot hold up after fifteen years of scholarship about them. Recently, these pioneering authors reached a remarkable achievement by being inducted into the Library of America in an anthology edited by Yaszek (2018). Authors like Harris, Stone, and Hansen, who for a time were absent from critical attention, are newly relevant because of the concern about the impact of human activity on the planet, sometimes called Anthropocene studies. The authors also provide a glimpse into the social barriers to work in science and engineering, to a

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certain extent debunking the assumption that access to technical achievements is purely based on merit. With some practice, one can recognize the critique of masculinist bias in these stories.

3.1 Navigating New Obstacles The assumption that the paucity of women writers of science fiction in the Gernsback years was caused by the predominance of men in technical professions must be nuanced by historical analysis. The reason why there were fewer women in science and engineering was due to new constraints on who could become a scientist or an engineer. In the nineteenth century, educational credentials were not needed to join technical professions; university education was typically devoted to the liberal arts and reserved for an elite social class. Science and engineering were populated by disinterested amateurs, in the sense of people who loved knowledge but did not have a personal stake in the findings. The fresh-faced college graduates that are both stock characters in and authors of science fiction in the Gernsback magazines were a new phenomenon. Learning about the means by which women resisted these redefinitions is an important step in reading Gernsback-era science fiction that challenged the new gender definitions. An important background concept for the understanding of women in science and engineering is that women have always played an important role. The discourse of women escaping from a sexist past and their triumphant breaking through barriers for the first time in the 1970s is a myth. Feminist historians of science demonstrate how many generations of women have gained a foothold in science, only to have the next generation rewrite the rules of participation in order to exclude women. For instance, Schiebinger (1999) wonders how historical the exclusion of women truly is, given that 14 percent of German astronomers in 1700 were female, a percentage that had not been surpassed even when she was writing. As the “prestige” of science grew, Schiebinger (1993) finds an erasure of the influence of women, as men claim to have been the progenitors of science (p. 190). What is more, the foundation of the major scientific societies—Royal Society of London in 1660, the Académie

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Royale des Sciences in 1666 Paris, and the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin in 1700—was accompanied by the exclusion of women (1993, p. 11). Shteir (1996) has chronicled the female catalogers of biological specimens after Linnaeus who not only added to the range of botanical knowledge but also contributed to the self-education of the legions of amateur investigators who documented flora in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hicks (2017) has demonstrated how the women who dominated British computing after World War II were reclassified by regulations, favoring men for leadership positions. Instead of incremental inclusion, historians see a recurring pattern of increase and exclusion. Even if some organizations banned women, in the climate of amateurism of the nineteenth century, women could enter into the realm of science through informal learning at museums and public lectures, the same venues used by men. As a result, there were prominent women in science in the early United States. As a teenager, Maria Mitchell, born in 1818, was trained by her astronomer father and provided calculations for Nantucket mariners. Rossiter (1982) has chronicled how women became scientists in these early years. Before 1820, she writes, women received education from fathers and supportive men. In 1847, while working as a librarian at the Nantucket Atheneum, Mitchell discovered a comet from a roof of a library, earning a medal from the King of Denmark. In 1849, she became the United States’ first female astronomer when the Nautical Almanac Office hired her to observe Venus. After Vassar College was founded in 1861, Mitchell was the first professor appointed to the faculty and the first building completed on the new campus is the college observatory. This building included living quarters for her and her father (Vassar, 2003) and a 12-inch equatorial telescope, one of the best in the United States. She set up an astronomy program that became “a model for the other women’s colleges” (Mack, 1990, p. 75). Mitchell shows one of the pathways available to women, spanning the period when science was done by amateurs to the time when new college programs were excluding women from technical professions. The requirement that professional engineers be college educated was not pervasive before the Gernsback era, and the change was an overt effort to police the boundaries of the discipline. Specialized university

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education for engineering was uncommon before the U.S. Civil War. The prominent antebellum schools—Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the U.S.  Military Academy at West Point, and the Lawrence School at Harvard—graduated only 318, 200, and 49 men, respectively (Mann, 1918, p. 16). For all others, Cowan (1997) writes, only “on-the-job training could have taught a young person how to practice engineering” (p. 139). Those who wanted to become engineers would learn as apprentices on projects that were already underway. The artisan approach declined as universities added engineering to their curricula and new institutions were created to train engineers. This transformation was far from innocent. The new restrictions on sex led scholars like Oldenziel (1999), for one, to question the typical assumption that some sort of unconscious bias transformed engineering into a masculine profession. The United States needed to expand the ranks of engineers from 1870 to 1920, at the mature stage of the second industrial revolution, with the result that it became a “mass occupation” (Oldenziel, p.  85). Cowan (1997) points out that the 1880 census counted 7000 engineers. At the start of the new century, more than 10,000 students each year (mostly men) were entering school to study engineering. As a result, the 1920 census counted 136,000 engineers. An increasing proportion of this new generation were men who had college backgrounds in the field. However, it was still possible to enter engineering through the old method of apprenticeship, and this was the path taken by many women. Cowan, for instance, points to Kate Gleason, who took over her father’s machine shop and went on to develop the use of concrete blocks in construction (p. 140). As engineering turned into a profession, though, this pathway was slowly constrained, so that a college degree was required to obtain an engineering job. Most of the new private engineering schools were single-­ sex, charged tuition, and required full-time attendance; as Cowan points out, this limited the profession to middle-class men. The stages of civilization theory clearly provided an important backdrop because it suggested that only in primitive societies were women users of tools. This was also a time when women were forming political organizations and immigrants were pouring into the United States, which could have been a source of engineering talent. Instead of opening doors to meet the demand for professional engineers, however, professionals erected

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gateways to ensure that only men—and the right type of man—would be a part of this expansion. This is an expansion of the insight from the earlier chapters of this study regarding overcivilization. With the increasing concern about the stultifying effects of civilization on masculine power, the requirement that scientific men should spend time in libraries and in cities also came under scrutiny. In fact, the transformation of engineering into a bookish subject brought consternation because men were increasingly concerned that indoor learning was a gentile and effeminate activity. In order to compensate, “engineering educators became the most articulate purveyors of an academic male esthetics that stressed hands-on experience and a slap-on-the-back kind of manliness” (Oldenziel, p. 157). The balance promoted by Theodore Roosevelt showed men how to engage in intellectual activity and simultaneously  assert their vigorous manliness. Passing the gauntlets of outdoor life, organized sports, and sex segregation winnowed the population of young men. At the turn of the century, women found additional restrictions on their participation in STEM. For instance, they were not allowed to join engineering professional associations. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) was the first of what would become a group of national technical organizations. These associations were similar to the artisan guilds of previous generations, but they made an explicit effort to certify the qualifications of their members. Their interpretation of excellence led them to provide several tiers of membership. Anyone could join the society, but in order to be a full member with voting privileges, one had to be male with five years in the profession and experience leading engineering work; in other words, members had to be managers and not workers: “mechanics, masons, machinists, and women need not apply” (Cowan, 1997, p. 143). Today, experience in the “field” is an integral part of engineering training, and this metaphor of outdoor work echoes the fear of overcivilization. As a result, even those women who gained admittance to universities found significant obstacles in the profession. Nora Stanton Blatch, for instance, earned a degree in civil engineering from Cornell University in 1905. She was permitted to join the ASCE, but the association denied her application to become a full member in 1915. Her lawsuit against the ASCE was unsuccessful, even though she went on to work in the field (Pursell, 2007, p. 104). At the start of the twentieth

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century, it seemed natural that vigorous, middle-class men were best suited to lead the new professions of engineering. Despite these new restrictions, women nevertheless persisted. Pursell (2007) tells the story of several women who worked in STEM despite these blockages. Ellen Swallow Richards was the first woman to matriculate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; she completed her degree in 1873, opened MIT’s first laboratory for women in 1876, and taught courses in sanitary engineering in 1890. Julia Morgan, the first woman to earn a degree in civil engineering from the University of California in 1894, finally became one of the few architects who had both engineering and design backgrounds. Gleason, the one who manufactured concrete blocks, became the first woman elected to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1914. These success stories were not the norm, but they were some of the earliest images of technical women available for science fiction, particularly for the character surnamed Gleason in Leslie F. Stone’s “Out of the Void,” discussed below. Pursell feels that many talented women experienced “ghettoizing” into a narrowly constrained set of fields, particularly those related to “domestic concerns” (pp.  105–6). Although one might think it was women’s personal interests that led them to these domains, their careers show how their initial interests in various fields of engineering were funneled into domains that fit in with the companionate prejudices of the time. Richards, for instance, became the first president of the American Home Economics Association, and in 1910 she declared that housewives must cooperate with “trained men and women” so that homeworking could be “worked out on engineering principles” (quoted in Pursell, p.  246). Richards’s effort was a bold attempt to bring more women into the science and was partially successful. Nerad notes how home economics moved from amateur clubs to academic disciplines because of this movement. At the same time, Nerad (1999) notes, the academic programs were designed to “isolate the many women students” so they would not be in the same classrooms as men (p.  11). Although some may have dreamed that professionalizing women’s work would lead to more women in science and engineering, the larger social trends regarding gender would win out. Because of home economics, the goal of liberating women from drudgery backfired and tied women to the home more than ever

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before. Cowan (1983) has famously made this point in More Work for Mother: it is true that technology allowed for tremendous changes in American households at the turn of the twentieth century, but these changes did not free women from household labor. In fact, the changes made women more productive at home, meaning that they were expected to accomplish alone what in the previous century had been done by a staff of three or four and help from the husband and children. What is more, as the sole person responsible to provide healthy and clean men and children for the social world, women were increasingly isolated at home. Whereas some nineteenth-century women were able to break free of the home to participate in the many first-wave feminist causes of the time— suffrage, abolition, temperance, anti-lynching, and anti-­imperialism— this became more difficult at the time Gernsback was creating his new magazines. Thus, to say that science fiction had fewer women writers and images of women because historically there were not so many women in technical fields at the start of the century misses the point, which is that women’s numbers were actively suppressed. The establishment of science and engineering education in the Gernsback era had a vexatious relationship with gender and race in other ways. In order to promote technical education in fields like agriculture, military tactics, and what were called the mechanical arts, the U.S. government concocted the Morrill Act of 1862, which led to the establishment or expansion of some of the most famous programs for technical education, such as those at Cornell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech. The funding mechanism led to the nomenclature “land-grant university” because it relied on the use of millions of acres of land in the western United States held by the federal government. This land had been confiscated from indigenous American tribes earlier in the century and was turned over to universities as part of a plan to “settle the continent with (mostly) white people” (Nash, 2019, p. 439). Some schools, like Texas A&M University (originally called the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas), were founded expressly as land-grant universities. There was little open land in eastern states, so some existing schools like MIT received western property to  finance existing programs. Today, universities have begun to acknowledge the odious practice that at the time apparently seemed

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natural: using federal power to replace what was regarded as a primitive society that did not exploit the land sufficiently with a new vision of a technological, white civilization. In the early stages of science fiction, someone studying engineering would be enveloped in an institution invested in the theory of progress. Being established by the federal government, land-grant colleges were imbued with an ideal of providing access to young people who might not otherwise have an opportunity to go to college. The inclusive definition changed toward the end of the century to meet existing social assumptions. For instance, the growing “separate but equal” doctrine of the Jim Crow south made its presence felt: when the Morrill Act was expanded in 1890 to the former states of the Confederacy, a provision was added that race could not be used as a criterion for admission unless a state created a separate university that was open to people who were not white. As a result, some of the country’s historically black colleges and universities were established as land-grant colleges. Land-grant colleges originally welcomed women, but what it meant to be co-educational changed over time. As noted by Oldenziel (1999), women were welcomed when the programs were new and needed students, but they were shut out later. What is more, MIT closed down the school of mechanic arts and deemphasized public lectures, which had been mainstays of engineering education, so as to “sanitize the profession from the sweat, dirt, and callouses associated with labor” (pp. 64, 155). Not only can one see the pattern of increase turning into exclusion, but also how significant public investment in science and engineering education came along with exclusionary policies and the denial of indigenous rights. One should not assume that women accepted these developments, however. A generation before Gernsback started publishing his magazines, those being excluded had already mounted effective resistance to obstacles. One reaction was for women to set up schools for themselves. Using inheritances and other sources of income, all-women’s universities were founded so that women could continue their education. The movement toward women’s education gained strength after the Civil War, when many of the famous colleges for women started (such as Vassar College in 1865, Wellesley College in 1870, Smith College in 1871, and Bryn Mawr in 1885). What is more, some universities were convinced by

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women activists to admit women (such as Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1893), while prestigious colleges opened up “annexes” for women (Barnard College by Columbia in 1889). Though women’s schools helped overcome the new barriers to women’s education, this practice had its limits. By the end of the century, only a handful of women had earned Ph.D.s in the sciences. In order to enter into the world of science, Rossiter writes, women engaged in “educational guerilla warfare” and engaged in a process of “infiltration” (p. 31). Oldenzeil’s characterization is blunter: women found their way to professional credentials though “patrimonial patronage and matrimonial sponsorship,” and as a result had a feeling that their identity had been borrowed from their fathers and brothers (1999, p.  150). Individual women tested the system on many fronts, such as finding professors who would allow them to attend lectures. This did not directly lead to degrees, but it showed how women utilized the social world and the ideal of amateurism to participate in science and engineering. The gender differential that seemed factual, and even unfortunate, in the Gernsback era was far from natural. In fact, it was carefully orchestrated to facilitate the entry of white male elites and provide barriers to others—and it was part of a program to remake the western United States into what was thought to be a modern civilization. At the start of the twentieth century, Pursell (2007) writes, a cadre of engineers formed “a social stratum between the mechanic and the entrepreneur,” what he calls “a bureaucratic middle class” (p. 101). This group would be the presumed audience for many Gernsback authors, even though there were clearly many others who had scientific interests and aptitudes. This transformation of engineering from an apprentice system to a combination of academic degrees and field training would have a long-lasting impact. One hundred years after the completion of the Panama Canal, men would still be overrepresented in engineering disciplines and the hard sciences. The same ideological shift had a lasting impact on the public understanding of science, and science fiction as well. As pointed out by Bartter (1992–1993), there were images of women who got things done before what she calls the science fiction era. Soon, though, it would be hard to find an engineer represented as female, even if women sometimes appeared as scientists. Bartter describes the new masculinist paradigm

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well: engineers work “on the frontier of technology,” which is a male domain, and the male engineers labor to “Make Things Work for the comfort and safety of the women and children” (p. 410). Unfortunately, she also notes, even with the influx of women writers, the situation has not changed much. Nevertheless, the story of women in science and engineering before science fiction got its name is a reminder that this myth of a male domain is a cultural construct, and what is more it is one that was built for ideological purposes. It was not accepted without challenges, and it can be rewritten.

3.2 Challengers to the Sciences of Difference The thesis that authors like Harris, Stone, and Hansen were directly engaged in a critique of discourses that naturalized the connection between masculinist thinking, technology, and civilization might seem overreaching, but that is because the contemporary publication of significant critiques is not well known. There was a strong effort to promote eugenics, such as the federal Immigration Act of 1924 establishing race-­ based immigration quotas and state laws prohibiting miscegenation. Although these laws were not overtly directed at women, legislators sought to police women’s bodies. What is more, the incursion of women into science and technical fields was met with renewed vigor that supported the supposedly natural biological inferiority of women. An understanding of these discourses and the reactions against them help to establish the fact that it is not unusual to find critiques like the ones in stories by Harris, Stone, and Hansen. In the days Gernsback was establishing his publishing empire, white supremacists like Lothrop Stoddard made a surprising connection between technology and power that, in a covert way, reinforced the exclusion of women and people of color from science and engineering. Stoddard’s infamous 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy presents a shocking thesis that technology has helped non-white people expand their populations while the supposedly white nations of the world were seeing reproduction rates declining. This kind of thinking was, in part, a criticism of white women who were

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supposedly betraying their race by failing to procreate enough. The intellectual class of scientifically minded women that is the legacy of the nineteenth century was not silent about this effort to discipline their bodies at the start of the twentieth. If Gernsback and his male authors had truly been interested in educating the public about new findings in science, they could have championed these new ideas. Stoddard was not the first to articulate the theory that white, college-­ educated women were failing to reproduce at rates that matched non-­ white women in the United States and throughout the world. Sociologist Edward A. Ross coined the term “race suicide” (1901, p. 88), an idea that was supported by Engelmann (1901) and popularized by Theodore Roosevelt (1905). Today, one might think it is natural that women who have access to information about reproduction would take charge of when and how many children they bear, but to these leaders, the idea that men were unable to procreate was a social sin that could be mitigated by preventing women from obtaining education; instead of women’s choice, men blamed women’s ambitions. Clarke (1873) writes that women who study in a masculine environment harm their reproductive organs and even pass along the damage in a neo-Lamarckian way: “On account of this neglect, each succeeding generation, obedient to the law of hereditary transmission, has become feebler.” Russett (1989) notes how this pseudoscience, out of patriarchal (and patronizing) kindness, led people to believe that women’s health demanded that they not attend college or at least be afforded a curriculum that met their physiological needs. The patronizing idea of separate education that was not too taxing is reflected in Clarke’s subtitle: “a fair chance for the girls.” A woman who had a public life in science would risk approbation by people armed with these discourses. The regressive, pseudoscientific theories about the female intellect were also a part of the neo-Lamarckian stages of civilization theory described in Chap. 2, which proposed that women were less evolved than men. Even as women were active in the public sphere and attending colleges, some scientists promoted the idea that an adolescent boy would undergo one more phase of evolution that was unavailable to women and people of color. The ultimate stage of this evolution resulted in the growth of a beard that turned gray due to the white bile produced by the intensity of

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his abstract thought. The absurdity of the connection to the ancient theory of humors going unseen, this theory was used to prove the biological superiority of white men: the failure of women (and many people of color) to eventually develop lush, white beards was seen as biological evidence of their inferiority. As told in Darwin’s Descent of Man, women remained plain and uniform after adolescence while men went on to exhibit a wide range of types. The variability of male types, the idea that males were the fancy members of the species, was an important aspect of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Female types were plain and predictable, even if they had the power to choose the men who would be the fathers of the next generation. The ideal of a woman who was plain and restrained went beyond gender and was tied into the discourse of white civilization even though new scientific findings challenged it. This thinking was then returned to developing school policies, which led to further support for the theory because men seemed confident in technical subjects and many women believed that they could be harmful to their health. This reinforcing effect, making social assumptions seem as if they are scientific fact, is known in science and technology studies as co-construction. It is not surprising that women were antagonistic toward these new definitions that tied masculinity to science and civilization. Women could be hindered but not stopped; the fear that men would be overwhelmed by the influx of academically talented women into Stanford University led to a cap on the total women admitted (Degler, 1991, p. 108). Written challenges to theories of women’s inferiority circulated, some of them coming from the women’s colleges where scientifically minded women had found a home, what Fraser (1990) might call a counterpublic. One nonfiction challenge was from Wellesley, a women’s college, by Nevers (1895). She sought to confirm a study by a psychology professor from the University of Wisconsin, which had become the state’s land-­ grant institution after the passage of the Morrill Act. The professor had compared the patterns of word association between men and women, seemingly confirming that women are more imitative than men, and that men tended to use more abstract words than women. Nevers conducted her own study with the female students. The women in her study did not demonstrate the stark differences to the men at Wisconsin in the original

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study. Nevers displayed a great deal of professional courtesy in her report, noting that her sample size limits any new deductions from her own study. Instead, she concludes that “the serious study of the supposed psychic difference between the sexes” has led to such divergent conclusions that “the worthlessness of ordinary generalizations is made very clear,” especially given the different training of men and women (pp. 366–7). Although she confines her conclusions to the study results, from the foregoing analysis, one can see how membership in a counterpublic helped Nevers successfully challenges widespread theories of difference that circulated at the turn of the century. Women who did not have advanced education also mounted a challenge to the theory of women’s biological inferiority. Gamble (1894), for one, was a school teacher and superintendent who clearly spent a great deal of her time reading theories about women’s nature. She uses the same reasoning found in Darwin’s Descent of Man and other tracts to rethink the relationship between the genders, using their own evidence against them. For instance, she points out that biologists assert that the transition “from egg-layers to the milk givers” was one of the most important steps that led to human development, and all of the structures for that transformation  were made in women’s bodies. Furthermore, she writes, the ability to grow a fetus and suckle an infant means that a woman has advanced features that never appear in men (p. 11). She also takes pains to point out that the generally larger size of men does not make them superior: “he is still shorter lived, has less endurance, is more predisposed to organic diseases, and is more given to reversion to former types” (p.  37). Gamble also points to the growing interest in neoteny, even though she does not use the word itself. For instance, the lack of body hair is supposedly a marker of evolution that separates humans from animals, and yet men tend to be hairier than women. She says Darwin noted but failed to consider the consequences of the fact that “hairiness denotes a low stage of development.” Indeed, a reader of Gamble is likely to chuckle as she turns Darwin’s deductions on their heads. She writes, “idiots, who, by the way, are more numerous among males than among females, are frequently covered by hair” and often “revert to lower animal types” (pp. 41–2). She then goes on to review the anthropological thinking of figures like Lewis Morgan and Edward Tylor that underlies the

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stages of civilization and historians who say that human civilization was generated by men alone. She concludes with an eye to the future, offering the opinion that society has just reached the “threshold of human knowledge and possibility.” Further study, she hopes, will elevate humanity, even if the process is slow (p. 350). Gamble successfully points out the way that preconceptions can harm the interpretation of scientific observations. The dissertation of Helen Bradford Thompson, a woman who would go on to have an influential career in psychology, underscored the point made by people like Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Women and Economics (1898): habits, training, and social structures were the cause of the differences observed between men and women. In her dissertation, Thompson (1903) pointed to social influence on behavior, pointing out that there were smaller differences in the sexes when men and women have the same educations. Boys are encouraged to individuality. They are trained to be independent in thought and action. This is the ideal of manliness held up before them. They are expected to understand the use of tools and machinery, and encouraged to experiment and make things for themselves. Girls are taught obedience, dependence, and deference. They are made to feel that too much independence of opinion or action is a drawback to them—not becoming or womanly. A boy is made to feel that his success in life, his place in the world, will depend upon his ability to go ahead with his chosen occupation on his own responsibility, and to accomplish something new and valuable. No such social spur is applied to girls. (pp. 178–9)

These findings are just a few representative voices at the start of the twentieth century, and they would only grow more influential and gain followers as time went on. In 1909, one starts to see authors declare that recapitulation hypothesis was dead, and so was “the conception of woman as midway between the child and the man, together with all those parallels among children, women, and savages” (Russett, 1989, p.  158). In 1919, an author in a sociology journal pointed out that the idea that women were intellectually unfit for certain professions would have to be “put into cold storage.” Until there are equal “social incentives and

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opportunities,” he continues, it is impossible to tell if a percentage of women is capable of scientific research, literary production, business leadership, and so on (Snedden, 1919, p. 547). At the time Gernsback was putting together his ideas of how science fiction should be written, these dissenters were no longer a speculative vanguard but an established group. Instead of championing new scientific thought, Gernsback and his authors worked to preserve older theories that tied manliness, rigorous thinking, and the colonial spread of civilization. These writers are also remarkable for their understanding of how scientific knowledge is shaped by the social world. Several generations before Kuhn (1970) demonstrated how the concept of a paradigm should be used to see the interactions between science and society, these authors show how discourse shapes knowledge. In the wake of Kuhn, a concept known as social construction became central to science and technology studies. What are popularly believed to be pure scientific discoveries are always made and described in a way that fits in with the social world. Hacking (1999) describes this vividly in his discussion of the sedimentary rock dolomite. Nothing seems less like a social construct than a rock. Yet in his investigation, he shows everything from the name of the rock to the reasons for studying the rock, and the admissibility of the kind of science that is valid to learn about the rock are inflected by the social world—and in his explanation, the social world did not improve the understanding of the rock. Paradigms persist because they fit in with social realities, like law, the economic system, social relations, and national ideologies. To admit that science is socially constructed is to recognize that what people are willing to accept as valid evidence, and the questions they are willing to ask, depends not only on the evidence but their worldview. This causes a problem for those who assume the public sphere will innately cause truths to surface. Using humor, empirical evidence, and logic, Nevers, Gamble, and Thompson illustrate one of the key concepts of social constructivism: the scientific findings and technical solutions that are judged to be valid have a snug fit with social realities, even when the findings rely on absurd or unacceptable precepts. These days, the concept that race and gender are social constructs might be more familiar than the term social constructivism used in science and technology studies. The synergy between the

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two concepts is not hard to recognize: scientific concepts regarding race and gender led to social norms that made arbitrary connotations seem like they were simple truths. To say that race and gender are social constructs, though, should not be taken to mean that they do not have an impact in the social world. Racism and sexism certainly shape people’s everyday experiences through violence and structural inequalities. Race and sex can also inspire powerful social forces, helping people to form counterpublics where individuals can experience solidarity, seek protection, and learn from each other. In scientific circles, though, the surety that race and sex were reliable concepts that could differentiate individuals into a small number of discrete groups was already on the decline by the time Gernsback started publishing his magazines.

3.3 Clare Winger Harris: The Consequences of Bias Clare Winger Harris, a female writer who had a prominent place in Gernsback’s publications, attended one of the nineteenth century’s new women’s educational institutions, Smith College. At risk of leaning too heavily on Harris’s biography, it seems clear that her challenges of masculinist thinking in her writing reflect a dissident culture at Smith. Her first story appeared in WT in 1926, making her one of the many women who wrote scientifically minded fiction at a time when Gernsback had just started to publish AMZ. After responding to a Gernsback contest, she became one of his star writers. Harris was not, to be sure, the first woman to write for a pulp magazine; in addition, like the other writers Gernsback published, her writing only indirectly supports the cause for women. Her first story, “A Runaway World” in the July 1926 WT (Fig. 1.1), has a male scientist for a protagonist, Henry Shipley. The everyday action opens in 2026 with a third-­ person narrator describing how he curses his maid for not keeping things tidy. He is interrupted by a visitor who explains that a calamity is facing the world: the Earth is leaving the Solar System. Shipley describes the Solar System using an analogy to the Bohr model of an atom and a theory

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related to the fourth dimension. The setting relies on an interplanetary communication network that promotes interspecies understanding. Earth scientists are thrown into disarray when they learn that the planets have increased their speeds and the Earth is on a trajectory away from the sun. This story seems in many ways that it could have been written by any of Gernsback’s authors and that gender has no impact. Technologically, the story is dominated by interplanetary communication among men. This includes a “televisio” set (Harris,  1947, p.  15) that works, as Gernsback’s early implementation of television did, in two parts: a reliable radio conducts sound, and the picture displayed “in combination.” The device is not used for broadcast entertainment; as fictionalized by Gernsback, it is for personal communication, and in this case, it is shown to enhance the ability of scientific men all over the world to communicate. In other words, the story exhibits the same kind of offhand references to science found in Gernsback publications and, in fact, science seems imbricated in white male civilization. However, one of the curiosities of this story is its narration. It starts off in a grand style, in the third person with descriptions of great scientists like the arrogant Shipley (Fig. 3.1). About a third of the way in, the narration switches to follow the story of James Griffin, a first-person narrator who admits he is not an “astronomical man” (p. 14). Turning away from the great men in the frame narration, the new narrator provides insight into the story. Griffin makes allusions to ancient culture, like the destroyed city of Pompeii, reminding the readers how climate catastrophes are not unknown in human history. Griffin describes how the Earth’s climate changes, along with the perception of the Sun and other heavenly bodies, during the journey. When the planet finds its new home in orbit around a different star, Griffin and the other characters delight in the way facts have changed; the narrator suggests his wife is delighted because the solar year is twice as long as before, apparently appeasing her vanity because she will age twice as slowly. Although this joke may not seem supportive of the cause of women, it does show how ordinary people can adapt with humor but scientists have rigid concepts of their place in the universe.

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Fig. 3.1  An image that accompanied Clare Winger Harris’s “A Runaway World” in WT. She employs a deceptive narrative frame where the world’s scientists are anxious about the observations they make. Ordinary people, however, are shown to be more adaptable

The change in narration points to the reason why this story could not appear in AMZ. A typical Gernsback author would not have needed a different narrator and would have focused on the interplanetary network of scientists. After learning that the planets were hurtling into the void, one genius with a speculative technology would have stepped in to reverse the phenomenon or to exploit the energy. In this alternate story, experts ascertain the fate of the entire planet and leap into action, not having time to consult with democratic leaders. In the story that Harris actually wrote, though, the superior beings apparently transforming the universe do not communicate with humans, and like a scientist examining an atom, superior beings might not even fully understand the environment they are manipulating. Harris’s story does not involve humanity’s clash

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with a malevolent non-human race, nor does an elite cadre develop super-­ scientific technology that unleashes previously unseen power. This type of story may not have appealed to many audience members; Bleiler (1990) focuses his summary on the journey of the Earth without thinking about the reaction of the characters and concludes that the story is “amateurishly presented, though a good idea for the time” (p. 346). In Harris’s story, humans accept their adventure and use the opportunity for astronomical sightseeing, admiring the universe. Also, importantly for the present study, Harris does not propose that women have some sort of superior role to play. Instead, she offers an alternative male character type to oppose the super-scientists favored by other authors. “A Runaway World” appeared in the pulps just as Gernsback got AMZ started. His December 1926 issue had a cover illustration that did not accompany any story inside; Gernsback used this as a gimmick to attract new writers, promising prizes for the three best stories from readers. He reminded them that the story must be scientifiction that is plausible and fits in with modern science. Harris submitted a story, “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” which won third place and was published in the June 1927 issue. In his introduction, Gernsback seems less than congratulatory; he writes about his surprise that one of the prizes should go to a woman because women cannot, “as a rule,” produce scientifiction. He does suggest that this results from their educations and “general tendencies on scientific matters,” not because of their biology. He says that the story has charm and is enjoyable because it is not “overburdened with science”—a backhanded compliment—but also says that he hopes to see more of Harris’s fiction in the future. This he does, and he publishes seven more of her stories until the magazine changes hands in 1929. To modern eyes, Harris’s “Poseidonia” might seem unfortunate in its depictions of difference. It employs a male, first-person narrator, George Gregory, who seems at first to be an ordinary representative of scientific society. Unlike Griffin in her first story, Gregory is xenophobic, reacting viscerally to a darker rival, Martell. Gregory and Martell meet at a gathering of amateur astronomers to hear a lecture by Professor Stearns. In the question and answer period, Stearns responds to Martell’s question by saying naturally any intelligent life will do what it can to restore a healthy environment for its species. Martell turns out to be a visiting Martian

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who has a plan to steal some of Earth’s water to replenish Mars’s lost oceans. Both Gregory and Martell have identified Margaret as a love interest. This female character is, as Darwin supposed, plain—but she has an opportunity to further the direction of the species by choosing a mate. In the end, Margaret leaves the narrator—who has a plain name, George Gregory, and himself seems to be lacking in individuality in his thinking—to live a life on Mars with Martell. The idea that a female human would accept miscegenation and move freely in a strange society confronts prevailing sexist and racist discourses. The story is also innovative in the way it plays with assumptions about variability in men and women. The reader is left with reconciling the conflicts among the elements of the story, but Harris has arranged them well. The characters violate their types cleverly. The narrator, George Gregory, will not see any adventure. He and the other male astronomers using a telescope and dreaming of faraway planets fit in with the type of explorers, but they do not find a passage to Mars. The presumed reader’s initial identification with the George Gregory type likely to leads to disappointment mimicking his status as an amateur gentleman will not bring the reader on an adventure. Margaret, in the character type of a plain female, should have been unable to undertake an adventure but is paradoxically the only human who does. The setting, too, is in conflict with the ideals of the audience. The best thinkers and the mightiest weapons of Earth are unable to stop the Martians from taking what they need. Extrapolating the theory that Mars is at higher stage of civilization, the story makes it seem inevitable that humans are relatively helpless. There is no plucky super-scientist who can marshal his recent experimentation and the resources of the planet to reverse the superior civilization’s expropriation of Earth’s resources. Similar to the situation in “A Runaway Planet,” humans can only observe the awesome power. These tensions demonstrate Harris’s advanced thinking on topics regarding women and science, and they could have served as a starting point for new thinking about the social construction of gender, although it seems like some readers were unable to see it this way. Bleiler (1990) does not include “Fate of the Poseidonia” in his encyclopedia of fiction before 1930, but he does add it to his later Gernsback-era volume (1998), explaining the story from Gregory’s point of view. Margaret’s last speech

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is somewhat distorted; she is reported to say that the attacks on Earth will stop and even suggests that Margaret says she still loves Gregory while, in fact, in the story she concludes that she could not love Gregory because he was too jealous. Bleiler ends with a two-word summation: “pretty bad” (1998, p. 173). Thus, a typical Gernsback reader might feel quite dissatisfied by the negative portrayal of Gregory unless he realizes that Gregory is an anti-hero, an unreliable narrator, who fails to benefit from his masculinist ideals. Although the somewhat negative portrayal of Margaret can be mitigated to a certain extent by the story’s effort to critique masculinity, some of Harris’s stories have no women characters at all. Consider the 1928 story “The Miracle of the Lily.” A series of speeches from male scientists from different generations chronicles humanity’s heroic battle against insects and the freedom from dependence on plant foods. Humanity has also established radio contact with the people of Venus, where a battle rages against what they refer to as “insects,” and television contact with the Venusians is imminent. The stupendous triumphs of human technological advancement have left one of the scientists remorseful about what has been lost: I am told that I spring from a line of ancestry who were not readily acclimated to changing conditions. I love beauty, yet I see none of it here. There are many who think our lofty buildings that tower two and three thousand feet into the air are beautiful, but while they are architectural splendors, they do not represent the kind of loveliness I crave …. Trees, plants and flowers brought delight into the lives of people as they wandered among them in vast open spaces, I am told, where the earth was soft beneath the feet, and flying creatures, called birds, sang among the greenery. True, I learn that many people had not enough to eat, and that uncontrollable passions governed them, but I do believe it must have been more interesting than this methodical, unemotional existence. (1947, p. 130)

The plot brings the reader’s attention back to evolution. The male scientists, working to eliminate threats and make the planet productive for human life only, have assumed that they are the highest form of life even though, as the narrator suggests at the start of the story, what is the

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dominant form of life on a planet changes in different evolutionary periods and is an arbitrary historical accident. The climax of the story comes when the people of Earth assemble to view the first television communication with the people of Venus. The dominant form of life there is a variety of intelligent insects, and the pests they sought Earth’s help to eradicate are a primitive form of humanoids. Chagrined, the people of Earth refuse to broadcast images of themselves and do not know onto which side of the evolutionary battle on Venus they should intervene. On the surface, “The Miracle of the Lily” has nothing to do with women. A careful reading, though, shows a critique of a masculine vision of science and the presumption that white civilization is the singular and inevitable apogee of evolution. Presaging Merchant’s “death of nature” (1980) and current thinking about the Anthropocene, the plot leads reader to consider how an unthinking belief in the natural dominance of the technological society can result in scientific theories and developments that will lead to the destruction of what is good and beautiful. The human race has the ability to overcome many challenges—in the story, they manufacture oxygen synthetically to replace plant life and defend the factories heroically against insect saboteurs—but the story asks readers to consider what they should create, in addition to what they can create. What is more, the denouement of the story casts doubt on the science fiction genre’s typical tale of heroic fleets shooting off into space to fight interplanetary battles, known as space opera. Whereas, before the physical appearance of the Venusians had been revealed, the people of Earth were ready to build ships and travel to Venus to fight a war to defend their new allies, now they have the desire to conquer the insect people. The narrator bemoans the coming conflict—“have we not had enough of war in the past?”—but at the same time supposed that “man is not happy, unless he has some enemy to overcome, some difficulty to surmount” (1947, pp. 144–5). One finishes the story wondering if the development of technology and human curiosity must always be driven by the need to destroy what one perceives to be enemies. Harris’s following contributions to AMZ, in a similar fashion, do not present compelling female protagonists, but they challenge her contemporaries’ presumption that white male civilization is some sort of evolutionary apex. Her 1928 story “The Menace of Mars,” for instance, involves

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a conglomerate consciousness that threatens the individualistic white male civilization. Instead of a menace from Mars—the typical fearful story of an invasion force that originates on the red planet—Harris’s story asks readers to reconsider the definitions of what is alive. The connection to white supremacy is quite clear in her 1930 story “The Ape Cycle.” In this story, modern science is bent upon the forcible evolution of apes to create more capable servants, which unsurprisingly leads to an ape rebellion. Instead of the public culture of science and engineering, Harris imagines an illicit family dynasty that transforms human society through forced labor. Harris names the scientist family in her story Stoddart, mimicking infamous author Lothrop Stoddard.1 Tellingly, the resulting situation leads first to the stagnation of the human race. A woman, Sylvia, finally disguises herself as an ape and infiltrates their organization. After she leads humanity to reassert its authority over the apes, Sylvia exclaims that they could have gone to Mars except for the wasted effort defeating the failed experiment. In stories like these, Harris compels her readers to reconsider their assumptions based on the presumption that western assumptions about science and engineering have brought about a superior civilization. Harris’s career is also interesting for the way she is received after World War II, when the somewhat neutral attitude gives way. In 1947, when Harris’s work was collected in the anthology Away from the Here and Now, the inside flap of the book jacket proclaims Harris to be the first woman science fiction writer but claims that she writes “sugar-coated science”: stories based on vital ideas, written with scientific accuracy, and appealing to the emotions. The biographical note on the back cover relates her early love of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne while her coevals were reading Elsie Dinsmore (a series of children’s stories by Martha Finley about a girl without a mother in the antebellum southern United States) and Beverly of Graustark (a fantasy written by George Barr McCutcheon about a woman from a fictional, feudal European country). It also mentions that she was married in 1912 and raised three scientific sons (one attending the California Institute of Technology, the other Ohio State College of Engineering, and the third being a Master Technical  This same trick had been used by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby three years earlier.

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Sergeant in the Marines) and is now proud of the “third generation of scientists,” her grandchildren. Even though Harris had offered a thoughtful critique of masculine bias in science, in order to promote the hardcover her authorial persona was transformed into a paragon of feminine science: a woman whose interest in science has made her an effective breeder of future scientists. As with Isabel Martin Lewis, this was thought to be an achievement: her effort to think scientifically did not harm her ability to raise children, pace Edward Clarke. Reading Harris in the context of the early twentieth-century science of gender is productive, and her later stories similarly explore the consequences of the masculine bias of her scientific contemporaries. She does not craft compelling female characters, and some stories have no women at all. As a result, anyone looking for a vivid portrait of a female action hero will have to look elsewhere—which many did. Harris is an important figure, however, in the way her fiction contests the application of evolutionary theory to definitions of femininity. In so doing, she demonstrates that the construction of womanhood was far from inevitable and that well-placed authors challenged it.

3.4 Leslie F. Stone: Science and Empire Leslie F. Stone is another early female science fiction writer whose writing is best understood as a critique of the proposed ties among white masculinity, technology, and civilization. Although she does create some memorable characters, her stories usually depict the failures and contradictions of the new definitions of masculinity that had taken hold at the start of the century. For this reason, the context of gender studies and STS play an important role in reading Stone’s stories today. For a time, one way fan historians denied the connection of Stone’s stories to gender was by asserting that Stone hid her sex behind a pseudonym. This was a curious effort to dismiss her writing: critics deny the importance of Stone as an early female writer by stating that her writing was published as if it were a man’s, regarding her work as derivative. It is not precisely true, though, that Stone was hiding her sex. Leslie is a name with gender ambiguity, but it was her name from birth; “Stone” was the

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family name she used before her marriage. Stone (1997) tells the story that a friend told her that editors and readers might not accept a woman writer of science fiction, leading her to use the initial “F.” instead of her middle name, Frances, which has a more feminine connotation. However, she reports being welcomed by Gernsback, who “liked the idea of a woman invading the field he had opened,” and T.  O’Connor Sloane (p. 101). A 1929 writer of a letter to AMZ did not realize that Stone was a woman; however, the editor replied that readers could expect more stories from Stone—“who by the way, happens to be a woman” (McCall, 1929, p. 866). The editor’s comment to Stone’s “The Rape of the Solar System” published in AST after Gernsback lost editorial control refers to Stone as “Miss” and her stories as “charming” (1934, p. 12). Far from concealed, Stone’s sex was promoted to readers. The friendliness toward Stone’s sex seemed to dwindle over the years, though. When John W. Campbell took over AST, Stone (1997) reports, she went to inquire about a story, “Death Dallies Awhile,” which she had submitted to the previous editor. She recalls him saying, “I am returning your story, Miss Stone. I do not believe that women are capable of writing science fiction—nor do I approve of it!” (p. 101). One of the landmark events in women’s science fiction was the inclusion of Stone’s “Conquest of Gola” in Groff Conklin’s 1946 anthology, The Best of Science Fiction. Stone reports, though, that Conklin had included the story without realizing she was a woman and offered the opinion that women could not write science fiction (p.  101). Although Stone was welcomed as a woman in the Gernsback era, confusion arose from readers who presumed all authors to be men or, if they were willing to admit there were women writers, assumed they would be writing about women’s topics and uninterested in technology and civilization. After the Campbell era, it seems as if the situation had changed, and those who enjoyed her fiction and included it in anthologies may not have even realized she was a woman. As might be expected from the precedent established by Harris, Stone’s stories do not seem to address gender, nor do they promote compelling female characters. In the context of new thinking that was challenging nineteenth-century notions of race and gender, however, their connection to feminism is revealed. Two of Stone’s earliest stories were the 1929

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“Men with Wings” (Stone, 2010) and the 1930 follow-up “Women with Wings” (Stone, 1930), which appeared in Gernsback’s Air Wonder Stories. The stories directly enter a conversation about race and gender at a time when eugenics and imperialism were tied together. “Men with Wings” is set in the twenty-fifth century, when a secretive nation of winged men is seizing attractive, blonde women. The narrator presents a future history that tells readers that the winged species resulted from the experiments of a man named Mentor, who created a potion from bird glands to make men who could fly. The abduction of women and the explicit mention of their Aryan appearance puts the story squarely into the realm of white masculinity, but Stone has gone one step further, connecting to new findings about the endocrine system. At the turn of the century, the scientific assumption that there was a stark dividing line between male and female was challenged by findings in embryology and endocrinology (see, e.g., Russett, 1989). In the womb, men and women start out the same, and sex characteristics occur developmentally, and differentially, depending on the presence and concentration of hormones. The stage was being set for an understanding of the social construction of gender as the science developed to support the idea that sex and gender  characteristics are on a continuum. Stone’s story proposes that masculine science will take away this important early finding and use it to force the evolution of humanity. The backstory is further developed in “Women with Wings,” where Mentor’s experiments are said to have begun in the sixteenth century. Stone intertwines the plots of her stories with the development of the modern age. The future history turns the somewhat magical project of secretive cabal into a plot started in the Renaissance, culminating a thousand years later. Turning race suicide back on the men, Stone proposes that this project threatens its own survival: the experiment is causing the extinction of the female sex. The revelation that science used by Aryan men has so weakened their biology that they have resorted to abducting women is a reversal of Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color, which proposed that non-white people were benefitting from white civilization and producing offspring at stupendous rates. The winged men, instead of correcting their science, have resorted to kidnapping to artificially continue their legacy.

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The solution proposed to the men’s inability to procreate at the end of the story is to end racial segregation. The narrator notes that Mentor had engaged in a careful policy of discovery and suggests that despite the wrongdoing that has been committed, the society can rectify itself. The winged men of Earth—after “cautious co-mingling”—have determined that interbreeding is beneficial (1930, p.  1003). This story came at the high point of the eugenics movement, a time when racial hygiene dominated public discourse. Finding an author who so clearly embraces miscegenation is remarkable. The optimism that an Aryan menace may think twice and reform itself may be unwarranted, but the stories suggest that reform is the right course because of other achievements. In “Men with Wings,” the narrator describes a communistic society without marriage. Aside from the fact that this elite group is abducting people, they have formed a scientific society that has grown past private property. In “Women with Wings,” the reforming winged group forms an inclusive world state, eliminating hierarchies based on racial pseudoscience, and elects Mentor as leader. At the start of “Women with Wings,” Mentor addresses the leaders of the nine states, and the narrator uses egalitarian tones in describing them. The members of the African state have “come into their own,” and the council  declares that color does not impede representation (1930, p. 985). Although some racial characteristics remain—wings from different regions have different colors—the narrator describes a multiethnic, collaborative world government to supplant visions of a globalized empire. The disruption that these stories may have caused for readers—or perhaps proof that the critique of masculinist science offered by the story is too subtle for some readers—can be glimpsed in the editor’s note that appears with “Women with Wings.” According to “a well-known evolutionist,” the editor says, humanity would have sprouted wings if there had been a need. This attempt to connect the story to what supposedly everyone knows and show that it is scientifically plausible paradoxically supports the racial pseudoscience that the story challenges. Although Lamarckians had long asserted that a creature’s inner drive and the pressures of the environment would deterministically force adaptations, Darwin and those coming after him asserted that unusual features occurred first, and then sometimes became widespread if they gave a subspecies an unexpected advantage. Regardless of the editorial comment,

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Stone does not utilize the neo-Lamarckian idea, nor does she engage in any sort of commentary on evolution. If the story had been interested in evolution of a Darwinian sort, the background would have been different: a small community of different humans would have had an unusual characteristic. Perhaps they would have at first been maligned, but due to an unexpected change in environment, suddenly this group would become dominant. Instead, Stone’s stories illustrate how culture and ideology threaten to direct science to the destruction of humanity, and the only solution is to reform the cultural and ideological assumptions demonstrated by the editorial comment. One does not necessarily see explicitly feminist themes in Stone’s stories. However, Stone makes use of tropes from utopian literature to critique masculine science in a way that presages Anthropocene critiques. Stone’s “Hell Planet” is remarkable for the way it articulates a reverse-­ angle view of the Gernsback era’s vision of technological progress during the second industrial revolution: space exploration is based on colonial exploitation. The historians of the electronic age that Gernsback helped shape, such as Chandler (2005), make no mention of where the raw materials for electronic devices were coming from. As Gernsback was establishing his mail-order electronics company and publishing his first science fiction story Ralph 124C 41+, more than 200,000 nautical miles (about 370,000  km) of underwater submarine cable had been laid. In order to protect the wires from salt water, they were encased in a rubbery plant resin, gutta-percha, extracted by colonial labor from trees in Southeast Asia. The amount of resin needed for this network can be estimated at 27,000 tons (about 25,000 metric tons). Given that each tree could produce only about one kilogram, millions of trees had been cut, bringing the species to the brink of extinction (Tully, 2009, p. 575). The history of colonization is epitomized by the scramble for Africa, which brought almost 90 percent of the continent under the control of outside powers from 1870 to 1914 (Chamberlain, 2013, p. 3). The exportation of valuable materials like gold and diamonds is well known, but Europe also extracted material needed for the second industrial revolution: resources like copper for wire, tin for solder, rubber for tires, and palm oil to lubricate machines. Thus, colonial exploitation was a hidden cost of the optimism of the globalized world brought about in Gernsback’s Ralph

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124C 41+. Stone’s “Hell Planet” is a challenge to science fiction that ignores the connection between the development of technology and colonialism, putting a face on the suffering that would be exacted to accomplish the dreams of her fellow writers. In “Hell Planet,” an expeditionary force is motivated by “vast deposits of cosmicite” on an intramercuriall planet called Vulcan. Cosmicite is a fictional mineral needed for spaceflight, causing adventurers to brave the inhospitable Vulcan environment in order to recoup their monetary and human losses from a previous, failed expedition. In order to ensure their success, the expedition spends time with the local population, taking the time to learn the language and customs of “these savage little people” (p.  20). The narrator’s disparaging tone signals that readers might not wish to trust the narrator’s point of view. The characters contrive an excuse to bypass the local reverence for cosmicite, failing to complete a long ritual-seeking godhood so that they can take the mineral without retribution. As a result, most of the expedition dies after violating the customs, with only one member of the crew returning to base with an amount of the mineral. The captain ends the story by predicting the result of their exploitation: These poor untutored savages will fight to preserve their rights. Thousands will die before they learn their lesson; the rest will become slaves to dig out their ore. Our own men … poor devils … they’ll sweat and toil in this noisome jungle, under the blistering sun. […] Some will succumb … and their bones … will rot! Riches! Man’s damnable desire to conquer, to nose in where he don’t belong. In the future men will point to you and me. They will say … ‘those pioneers … they were men!’ Bah! Sheep! That’s what we are … pigs for the slaughter … pigs for slaughter! (1932, p. 27, ellipses in original)

This is a skillful critique of colonial exploitation. The native people seem to be enslaved, but so too do the colonizing forces sent to exploit them. The colonial encounter degrades both sides, as the story reminds readers. However, a second critique operates as well, more subtly, perhaps, but definitely more relevant to the present investigation. In Stone’s future history, triumphant visions of space travel and interplanetary patrols will have been predicated on the supply of cosmicite. With many losses, both in terms of life as well as morality, crew members were finally

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able to exploit a planet abundant in the material required to create the ships used in science fiction adventures. Thus, Stone deftly inserts a reminder of first-wave feminisms, such as opposition to colonialism, into the genre. Stone’s critique focuses on the mentality of the white male explorers. There are no women in the story, and the narrator is an anonymous third-person storyteller who seems to advocate the point of view of the male protagonists. The narrator dutifully but plainly describes the harsh conditions of Vulcan, the mechanisms that the explorers use to survive, the fox-like native inhabitants, and the need of spacefaring civilizations for cosmicite. The narrator allows the captain’s threnody to end the story without comment. Although this critique of colonialist exploitation is valuable, it does have its limitations. The horror of the crew recalls Heart of Darkness, published in book form by Joseph Conrad in 1902. Conrad as a public figure criticized imperialism, but the way his novella focuses on European male protagonists has an unintended side effect. As famously noted by Nigerian author and critic Chinua Achebe (1988), in Heart of Darkness, the people of the Congo are relegated to the shadows, becoming part of the hostile environment, lacking humanity. The readers of the novella may be shocked by Marlow’s inhumane exploitation of the local people in the name of empire so much that they will enlist themselves in the chorus of voices speaking against colonialism. However, Conrad works with the same idea that justified the colonial exploitation of the people of Africa. Both Conrad and colonizer alike fail to depict the history of European interference in Africa that disrupted the many civilizations on the continent, making it seem as if the African people had nothing to lose in the conflict with globalization. A similar critique might be made of “Hell Planet”: Stone chooses a setting where the local people have supposedly barley reached the barbarian stage of civilization, and her narrator uses some language from the stages of civilization theory. The Vulcan language is said to consist of only a few hundred words, and the hierarchical society involves a few representative leaders and thousands of people who seem to be enslaved. The story’s strong focus on critiquing the masculinist assumptions behind colonization is effective, but the most a reader can feel for the local people is a benign fascination with their primitive culture and their religious practices, which seem to have some sort of

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scientific basis. The editorial note that accompanies this story is not perturbed by Stone’s challenge to imperialism; readers are encouraged to decide for themselves if the dream of interplanetary travel is just related to “man’s damnable desire to conquer,” but at the same time, the note admires Stone’s realistic attention to the devices that will help humans survive in inhospitable environments. Even though Stone’s stories do not always have female characters, Stone used fiction to complicate readers’ expectations about gender. The letter writer praising Stone’s “Out of the Void” assumed the author was a man, revealing a complexity in her story greater than might first appear. The December 1929 letter says that the writer has had many discussions based on the subject written by “him” (i.e., Stone) and that “he” is a “natural born writer with a fertile imagination” (McCall, 1929, p. 866). Gernsback makes an immediate correction, but reading the story itself shows why the letter writer might have been confused, aside from the presupposition that science fiction authors were male. The story has a complicated narration. The frame story is told by an average man staying in his fishing shack who is caught up in events when an alien spacecraft abducts him. Donawerth (1997) cleverly suggests that this narrator is a parody of a matter-of-fact narrator by Hemingway (p. 158). This narrator maintains male pronouns in the outer frame of the story, but he admits that a woman more central to the plot, Elsie Rollins, has edited his narration to fill in the details. Presumably, she is the one who has added a footnote at the start of the story that criticizes the narrator for “his lack of technical knowledge” and explains some details about the propulsion of a rocket ship (1929a, p. 449). The footnote playfully complicates the gender of the story’s narrator by referring to him as a man. A female author has employed a male narrator who has a female editor. In the second installment of the story, the editor’s note continues the game, recounting the narrator’s abduction and referring to him as “he” (1929b, p.  554). This is correct but misleading, and one can read the editor’s response to the misgendering in the letter as a concerted effort to confound readers. The reader learns that Elsie Rollins’s uncle, Prof. Ezra Rollins, had recruited Dana Gleason, Jr., a famous soldier and adventurer, to fly his rocket to Mars, but Gleason never returned. Three aliens have brought

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her journal and a message back to Prof. Rollins. The backstory reflects the consternation of women, described by Rossitter (1982), at the start of the twentieth century who wished to be a part of manly domains like science and exploration: Gleason has spent most of her life dressed as a man so that she might undertake adventures and scientific pursuits, aided by her rich father (p. 445). Within the already-complicated frame story, Elsie reads Gleason’s journal to the narrator, the professor, and the aliens. In the journal, Gleason reveals her fear of exposure at the hands of a male suitor. So, a woman reads the words of another woman pretending to be a man in a story purportedly composed by a male narrator but penned by a female author. Later in the journal, readers learn of another man who had discovered Gleason’s secret before her departure. Richard Dorr, a young mining engineer who represents the new breed of engineering men at the start of the century, stowed away in her craft and so accompanies her. Gleason’s diary recounts her feelings about this new situation: far from Earth, she has a companion on her adventures, causing her to vow to maintain the cause of women so that all might find love, adventure, and intellectual fulfillment. Even so, Gleason must remind Dorr a few times that she is more than capable of taking care of herself. Readers have to spend some time untangling the various layers of narration and the implications of the gender deception, providing an example of how authors and publishers in the Gernsback era were aware of the possibilities of exploring the social construction of gender. The narrative complexity allows Stone opportunities to critique gender and technology that would otherwise be impossible. The duo crash-lands on Abrui, a planet outside the orbit of Neptune that has its own pink sun and an abundant supply of radium. Again, as in “Hell Planet,” Stone plays with a setting that is on the fringes of the known. The intramercurial planet Vulcan in “Hell Planet” had been discredited by Einstein; Pluto, which would be discovered the year after “Out of the Void” was published, had long been predicted due to perturbations in Neptune’s orbit. The narrator notes that Earth’s astronomers had not seen Abrui but, like Pluto, it somewhat follows the path of Neptune. Separated in the rescue, Gleason and Dorr explore the complex social relations on the planet individually. Seeming to follow Smith’s Skylark, the story leads the characters to find three sentient races on the planet, one golden, the other silvery, and the

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third bronzed. The silver race seems to be dominant, and the golden race is enslaved. A setting with a hierarchy of races is a common theme in Gernsback-­ era science fiction that reinforces neo-Lamarckian fantasies about human races. The story at first also seems to support the racial hierarchies proposed by polygenism, as if the geographical advantages held by the silver race have caused the other races to spend more time on survival instead of intellectual and scientific pursuits. However, after some experience on the planet, Gleason fails to find evidence to support the idea that the strongest are superior in a social Darwinist paradigm, and Gleason says that racial differences here are not biological but due to historical accident and environmental circumstances. The issue of slavery is at first mentioned in the narrative without comment, but the plight of the enslaved is recounted in increasing detail, such as an observation that there are no beasts of burden native to Abrui, so a breeding program resulted in a humanoid population that could bear the privileged over mountains. Where Smith had relied on tensions between racial groups, the only comments he made about them were in line with the outdated stages of civilization theory. Stone, for her part, takes the time to employ more modern thinking akin to Franz Boas’s culture concept. By the time Gleason discovers Dorr is alive, she has added to the technology of Abrui, setting up a radio system, and become a well-known personage. They arrange a meeting, and Dorr reveals his plan to start a war to end slavery. He is confident that he will prevail because he is a war hero, but Gleason was a soldier, too. She asks, echoing words from Harris’s “The Miracle of the Lily” a year earlier, “have you and I not had enough war?” (1929b, p.  559). Much like any planet-smashing space opera of the Gernsback era, the silver race has a deadly weapon that will surely cause destruction. She points out that war is not a good solution, but Dorr dismisses her caution, sticking to his masculinist solution, using mighty forces to bring about peace. Dorr’s opinion becomes irrelevant when the ruler of the silver race captures him. Gleason consults with a servant assigned to her, Dure, and with a young man of the silver race who has little power, Ubca-tor. Together, they devise a less violent scheme. They communicate to the enslaved golden race, signaling a time for all to abscond silently with the overseers’ airships. Because of their cooperative

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effort, the battle lasts for just one day, and although some loss of life occurs, the narrator notes Gleason’s plan has resulted in little harm to the civilian population and no damage to the farmland. Dorr, once released, will help the three races reestablish their relations on an equitable ground. The plot of this story contrasts with the warlike stories of super-science offered by other Gernsback-era writers. In a story that refuses the epic battle of space opera, “Out of the Void” proposes a different kind of criticism of some of the fundamental assumptions of early science fiction, cleverly juxtaposing two different ways to achieve an outcome. As with Harris, with Stone it is worth thinking about the contradictions among the elements of the story. The setting describes three races with differing levels of ability and efficacy, much the same way readers of Gernsback publications assumed that the races of humanity were divided into discrete groups. Like the characters of Skylark in Space, Stone’s protagonists land in the midst of inequality that seems naturalized. Dorr, for his part, jumps right in and plans to use his assumptions about civilization and force to bring about the outcome he thinks is suitable without considering the consequences; after all, he is a military advisor in this context, and as an elite outsider, he will not have to suffer any repercussions after the conflict. In the hands of other authors, this setting readily lent itself to a space-opera plot centered on the clash of civilizations. Even though Gleason has had many of the same experiences as Dorr, when Dorr is removed from the action, she chooses a path that is more suitable to what makes her unique. Like the women scientists and engineers at the turn of the century, Gleason understands the power of community to overcome adversity, and she appreciates the role civilization plays in protecting life. Although this can be a starting point not just for new thinking about international relations but for the underlying assumptions of space opera, it is questionable whether many in the audience were thoughtful enough to see how. For instance, the fan historian who started his catalogue in the years after World War II quips, “one wonders why” the resolution of the plot is that “Dorr ends as warlord of the planet,” forgetting of course that Gleason is the protagonist. Bleiler (1998) sums up the story by stating it is “probably an effort to write a woman’s interplanetary romance on a shopgirl level, but a very bad job” (p.  414). Certainly, Gleason considers the

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potential of a relationship with Dorr in the larger context of trying to negotiate a social persona that meets her gender, but it is bizarrely dismissive to say that “Out of the Void” is a love story. More obvious, though, is the idea that, for this fan historian, a woman must be writing interplanetary romance, so he focuses his attention on Dorr’s supposed success in politics and seems to think that the only people who should read the story are women, even though Stone’s stories are clearly pitched toward the audience of newly minted male engineers. It would be many years before anyone would say, like Donawerth (1994, p. 144), that Gleason was the first female astronaut. Stone’s follow-up to “Out of the Void” is a short piece in the December 1929 issue of AMZ, “Letter of the Twenty-Fourth Century”  (Stone, 1929c). This short, 2000-word letter from Harry to his pal Joe is as much as a look into the future as it is a critique of science fiction. Harry tells Joe that he has returned to the playsite that they had visited as children and uncovered a pile of magazines and boxful of books from the years 1920 to 1935. Using the English he learned in school, Harry tells his friend about the visions of the future gleaned from the dusty pages: the humans of the future would be turned into creatures, or subject to catastrophes, or plagued by other “unholy terrors” (p. 860). Sometimes humans would become the “pawns” of an alien race, at other times they would become a mechanical race. Some suggest that the black race would take supremacy over the white, and others say that all races would be subsumed into one “great race.” Likewise, there were tales of women gaining supremacy over men and children being raised by machines. Although these plots were ones seen in Gernsback’s magazines, they seem ridiculous in the mouth of an enlightened person of the future. Harry wonders if these writers would be disappointed to find that the changes to humanity were not cataclysmic but extensions of what they had already known. There are no supermen, there are no inversions of social norms. Instead, they see greater mobility due to improvements in air travel, radios that function as easily as the telephone, and religious and educational opportunities delivered to the living room. In fact, Harry expects, the “prophetic ancestors” might be dismayed to find that humans are “still enjoying family life and simple amusements.” Harry tells of a new world where humanity joins in collective governance based on advancements in telecommunications and the abolition of squalor and

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poverty. Harry writes: “They could not know that the world’s knowledge would be freely given to all, worker or idler alike; that radio would make the whole world kin and the poorest of the poor would have their little airplanes in which they could, with their children and wives, climb to the heights of heaven or circle the world in a day” (p. 861). Much like Harris’s story in WT, the “The Runaway World,” this story is not a triumphant tale of an elite who bring about a global civilization through the exploitation of science and technology. Instead, Stone suggests that it is more appropriate to find a continuity in future society, extrapolating from history those institutions that have persisted and imagining how they might employ technology to expand human freedom. Stone continued to write for AMZ even after it passed from Gernsback’s hands. Some of her stories in the 1930s work to suggest that the present state of civilization on Earth derives from historic conflicts in the distant past. In this way, Stone’s post-Gernsback stories are a sort of anti-space opera. Protagonists are not vying with other groups in a social Darwinist fantasy of racial superiority. In fact, they are bystanders who cannot match the beings they encounter. Consider, for instance, “The Rape of the Solar System,” which was published in the December 1934 issue of AMZ. For this story, Stone returns to the transneptunian body that had been predicted by the same nineteenth-century astronomer, Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, who had predicted (and named) the  intramercurial planet Vulcan. Photographic evidence was released in 1930 to confirm that the perturbation in Neptune’s orbit was, in fact, caused by a large mass. The story opens when two Earth adventurers explore an astronomical station on the planet. The narrator, one of the pair, proclaims himself to be not too smart, but obviously he is capable; perhaps he feels inadequate because he has not been college educated. They find documents that the narrator’s companion, who has a talent for languages, begins to translate. The action of the story ends, and the narration is turned over to Garo Mofa’s history of the solar system. After two months of translating, the final message from Mofa, the last survivor of Pluto, seems to suggest that the current configuration of the planets in the Solar System was, in fact, the result of an interplanetary war. The narrator’s companion translates, and the narrator eagerly retells the story of the last Plutonian to the readers.

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Mofa says he does not know where humanity came from, but Pluto was once the greatest planet of humans, fifth in orbit around the sun and much larger than its current size. The people of Pluto learned how to travel to other planets, finding humans on Mars and the Moon, somewhat different in complexion and size, corresponding to the yellow, black, and white races. Mars and Pluto divide Earth, which was uninhabited at the time. Although the yellow, black, and white races could have shared Earth peacefully, the jealousy and greed of the people from Pluto led to interplanetary war. Pluto devises a technology to expel the lunar atmosphere into space. After the Moon capitulates, Mars and Pluto become enemies. Pluto expels the atmosphere of Mars; Mars uses a ray to destroy Pluto’s moons and some of its mass. Eventually, the people of Pluto use rockets to turn their planet into a projectile, hoping to destroy Mars but failing to consider how delicately the forces of the Solar System are balanced; Pluto loses a third of its mass and seeks to return to its orbit but fails. It travels outward until caught loosely by the gravitational pull of Neptune. The havoc wreaked by this interplanetary battle leads to the known solar system: the debris in the path of what used to be Pluto’s place as the fifth planet is the remnants of its lost mass and moons; Mars and the Moon are airless. As Mofa ends his story, civilization on Pluto is nearly gone, but he is gladdened that the three races have found a place on Earth. This epic planet-smashing story, including the destructive rays that slice apart worlds and the transformation of homeworlds into projectiles, seems not very different from Gernsback-era space opera, save for one aspect: the story offers an explanation for the human races. Once a unitary species with an unknown origin, on three different planets they diverged in appearance. Mofa knows that the three races on Earth will undergo a period of barbarism after the war before becoming again a civilization that builds cities and explores space. Mofa hopes to warn future humans, hoping that they will use their one world in peace and avoid, for the most part, the aggression that destroyed their ancestors. It is not until the end of the story that the narrator reveals that the people of Pluto were the white race: the land-stealing, jealous aggressors. The people of Mars, who offered a valiant defense, were the black race, and the people of the Moon were the yellow race. As in “Men with Wings” and “Women with

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Wings,” Stone projects that the white race brings about the downfall of civilization while at the same time offering the hope that it will reform its culture and work with other groups in peace. After the astronauts find Mofa’s document, the narrator does not directly intervene. After learning that the Plutonians are the white race, a reader can return to the story to learn more about their character. “The beast of the field desires blood” is one of the outright statements. In a slight recasting of the stages of civilization story, the reader hears that it is natural for birds to love air and flowers to love the sun, but humans are not satisfied easily. Humans require possessions, the reader learns, and this leads to the “lust for wide acres” that is a primal instinct, as is “the rude mating of the animal” (p. 19). Readers know that they are expected to sublimate their sexual urges, and so saying the desire for expanding land is like the animal urge to procreate sits uncomfortably. The setting of this story, a world where the white race is on a path toward destruction, incorporates abstract theories of racial conflict and the imminent war in Europe as a past lesson that should be avoided. Readers see how the epic space battle, so common in the Gernsback era, is not a demonstration of superiority but the inevitable result of unrestrained passion. The denouement of Mofa’s story is tragic: all three societies have been crushed, and their offspring have to start again on a new planet. Unlike “Out of the Void,” the destruction here has not been avoided, even though there were voices that had advised against the plan. Another example of a Stone plot that includes the rearrangement of the Solar System appeared in post-Gernsback AMZ. Like “The Rape of the Solar System,” Stone’s December 1935 “The Fall of Mercury” similarly tells a planet-smashing epic that involves the history of races. The title sets up an expectation in the reader that a civilization on Mercury will crumble. The first-person narrator, Bruce Warren, describes himself as an adventurer and is accompanied by Morton Forrest, whom Warren says is more scientifically minded. On a trip to Mercury, which they assumed would be uninhabited, they are captured and held along with other species from the solar system. It becomes clear that they will be subject to medical dissection. Resistance seems worthless. Subject to superior might and technology, the prisoners lethargically comply.

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A captive from Saturn, Chen-Chak, then takes over the narration, telling a lengthy pre-history of the solar system. Ages ago around a different star called Rax, a white race (the Raxge) and a black race (the Raxta) had settled their warfare by agreeing to inhabit different planets. Unfortunately, Rax was about to collapse. There is no time to evacuate the planets, but they are able to propel the planets into space. They end up in the human Solar System, the planet with diminutive white people becoming Mercury and the planet with much larger black humanoids becoming Saturn. Mercury over time became too small even for the small frames of the Raxge, and they now were planning to conquer the other species of the solar system, enslaving them. The other species in the Solar System are clearly outclassed. The Raxge and Raxta have had much longer to develop amazing technology, and have even modified their own physiology to suit their needs, much like the followers of Mentor in “Men with Wings.” As a result, the Raxta are a species that derives nourishment from light. The Earthlings and the other inhabitants of the Solar System are unable to participate except as interlocutors because they have made so little advancement. At the start of the story, Warren and Forrest had thought of themselves as superior beings, but now they admit they are savages. Chen-Chak, once back in his Raxta ship laboratory, quickly mounts an attack on Raxge, the current inhabitants of Mercury. Chen-Chak had hoped to convince the Raxge that their plan was unjust, but he was unable. The climax of this story is that Chen-Chak causes the literal fall of Mercury into the Sun. The humans are immediately alarmed, knowing that the masses of the heavenly bodies balance each other. Chen-Chak states plainly that his people were watching the balance and that the temporary ecological damage would give way to a better future. In a narrative comment, Warren states the lesson he learns from the encounter: the various people of the Solar System must “live in harmony, in brotherhood, not in strife and slavery.” He muses that the system is “too small to contain such creatures as the Mercurians” (p. 73). Stone’s didactic story, a parable of two races that are more similar than distinct, shows how culture can result in scientific advancement but also cause harsh ideological conflict. The planet-smashing in this story was not done by an elite group of humans reaching a higher evolutionary  level, but something witnessed by humans who have not yet

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harnessed the forces needed for planetary engineering. In this story, the human protagonists are like the story’s readers. They do not have extraordinary abilities. They do have a choice to make about how they will evolve. Bleiler (1998) summarizes this story as a space opera fought around two different suns and provides the kind of summation he reserves for female authors: “not quite successful” (p. 418). It is certainly true that the story does not succeed in enchanting the reader who is interested in exploiting the universe, as if it is a source of untapped energy waiting to be released. Instead, Stone’s readers have the opportunity to consider the interrelationships among science, technology, and civilization.

3.5 L. Taylor Hansen: Antagonistic Anthropology Historicizing science fiction in the context of contemporary debates about gender, race, and civilization helps to provide a deeper understanding of the writings of L. Taylor Hansen, one of the important gender-­ bending writers of the Gernsback era. As might be predicted by the work of Harris and Stone, described above, Taylor does not provide positive portrayals of women nor address women’s issues directly. Several of Hansen’s stories employ the theme of superior ancient civilizations, though. Considering his prior academic interest in these topics, one can see that Hansen is not simply indulging in fanciful tales but taking up a challenge to the prevalent ideologies of race before World War II. Starting with “What the Sodium Lines Revealed” in the Winter 1929 edition of Gernsback’s AMZ Quarterly, Hansen published seven stories. In addition, Hansen started writing nonfiction in September 1941. After the war, Hansen continued by writing more than fifty nonfiction articles on science and history for AMZ. Hansen is also the author of three nonfiction scientific books. Hansen is sometimes put on a list with Leslie F. Stone and C. L. Moore as people who were forced to conceal their sex in order to gain publication in science fiction magazines. As is discussed in this chapter and in Chap. 5, Stone and Moore did not hide their sex; as previously noted,

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many women were able to find a home for their science fiction in the mainstream pulps. Based on research by Bleiler, although Hansen’s first name is often reported as Louise, it was in fact Lucille; either way, “L. Taylor Hansen” is no more a pseudonym than F. Scott Fitzgerald or L. Ron Hubbard, strictly speaking. That being said, for his entire writing career, Hansen referred to himself 2 with masculine pronouns. One of the curiosities about Hansen’s legacy is the accusation that he concealed that his sex assigned at birth was female, leading to the theory that the science fiction community was so hostile to women that he had to masquerade as a man. In the wake of the revelation that his birth sex was female, misinformation circulated about him that was used as an example of how women writers of the period suffered. For instance, as asserted by Davin (2006), of all the women in the early science fiction magazines, only Hansen seems to have concealed his sex. Hansen’s supposed subterfuge does not hold up in the light of current sensibilities of trans and nonbinary people, though, given that he used the masculine persona so consistently. With his fifth story “The City on the Cloud” in the October 1930 Wonder Stories, a photo of a close-cropped young man in a shirt and jacket is shown with his name (Fig. 1.2). The male persona was clearly an important personal choice. Reports about confrontations between superfan Forrest J. Ackerman and Hansen started to appear in print in the 1970s. Ackerman supposedly invited Hansen to appear at a meeting of the 1939 Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. According to some reports, the society honored Hansen, and attendees were surprised that he appeared to be a woman. Hansen then told Ackerman privately that the stories were written by his brother, “a world traveler,” and then left, never to appear at a fan meeting again (Moskowitz, 1970, p. 4). Bleiler (1998) reports Ackerman’s story about a phone conversation where Hansen told him that he was not the author of the stories, but he simply handled them for the fictitious brother. Bleiler, for his part, notes that Hansen was “not an important author” but suggests that speculation about his identity “has rendered her  Gender identity is complex, and one cannot consult with Hansen regarding preferred gender pronouns; yet, today it is easy to accept Hansen as trans or nonbinary and to use the masculine pronouns he obviously preferred to use in print. 2

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[sic] interesting” (p. 168). Davin (2006) points out some contradictions in Ackerman’s various reports, but overall concedes that there is little authoritative information because Hansen was “an exceedingly secretive person” (p. 116). This was the time, admittedly, that Campbell used his editorship of AST to pursue theories of rigor and spoke about the supposed inability of women to write good science fiction. In all of these accounts, no one has tried to explain why Ackerman was so keenly interested in breaking a person’s desire to keep personal details private and why he was so fascinated that Hansen used male pronouns even though he presented as a woman. Many men, including Raymond Palmer, Murray Leinster, and David H. Keller, had written with women’s aliases, and John W. Campbell, as discussed in Chap. 4, would create a pseudonym based on his wife’s name. The assumption that it is uninteresting for a man to use a woman’s name suggests a bias that a man can play any role. People who consider Hansen’s legacy seem preoccupied with Ackerman’s idea that Hansen was hiding his sex, as if he were somehow damaged, instead of appreciating his careful performance. Indeed, the reception of Hansen’s writing has not done justice to his identity, pointing toward an opportunity for better use of gender-based literary criticism. Donawerth (1997) suggests that Hansen faced a psychological “paradox of authorship”: Hansen felt that a woman could not be an author of science fiction, so he displaced authorship onto “her [sic] adventurous brother, to serve as an alibi.” In this way, the brother’s sex and his “experience as a traveler” protected Hansen “from social disapproval” (p. 114). As much as this theory seeks to sympathize with Hansen, one needs to push the analysis beyond some sort of creative handicap. Certainly, had Hansen simply wished to publish science fiction, he could have sent stories to WT. Indeed, the opportunity to publish with Gernsback was not the prize that some may assume—keep in mind all of the claims about Gernsback’s failure to pay his authors and the limited scope of his publications—and this is particularly true for Hansen given his academic interests. It seems disingenuous to assume that Hansen adopted male pronouns to gain opportunities to publish. Davin suggests that Raymond A. Palmer, editor of AMZ, may have participated in a deception. Palmer, as described in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.5, was the creator of the first fanzine and the

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co-organizer of the Cosmos serial where he had used a female pseudonym. As editor of AMZ, Palmer published many women writers, so it would not have been required of Hansen to adopt a male identity. Davin points out that Palmer published dozens of Hansen’s nonfiction articles, so Davin finds it difficult to believe that he did not know the “truth” about Hansen’s sex. Palmer’s son (Personal correspondence,  2011) does not think his parents were aware of Harris’s sex; nevertheless, if Palmer did in fact understand Hansen’s identity, his effort to support Hansen’s preferred persona speaks more to his humanity rather than a conspiracy. Perhaps more importantly, one should consider Hansen’s use of a male identity not just in science fiction but also in the scholarly community of anthropologists and sociologists. The theory that Hansen could not write as a woman is challenged by the long length of his career: even if Hansen had felt uncomfortable in the early days, Palmer offered a friendly alternative, continuing to refer to Hansen as he. In later life, Hansen in He Walked the Americas (1963) refers to himself with masculine pronouns. Hansen’s last publication, a book called The Ancient Atlantic (1969), starts with the familiar “L. Taylor” persona but ends, on the last page, with a sketch of a woman dated 1942 and his full name in caption, “Lucile Taylor Hansen.” Transcripts of Hansen’s teaching or public lectures have not yet come to light, but this gender reveal at the end of the text suggests that Hansen delighted in presenting a male persona in print only to defy expectations in person. Given that Ackerman had confronted Hansen in 1939 about his gender before publishing with Palmer, and that Hansen continued using male pronouns consistently for thirty years after, today it would be better to assume Hansen found it more comfortable to assert a male identity and to appreciate Palmer’s kind acceptance of his gender even after fandom had treated Hansen rudely. An analysis of Hansen’s writing as a whole suggests that he crafted the persona of an infiltrator, a writer who subverted biases of science and science fiction. As the previous analysis of Harris and Stone has pointed out, women attempting to crack into Gernsback’s science fiction magazines did not do so with the obvious intention of championing the cause of women. As a student in the 1920s, Hansen would have been likely to encounter head-on the masculinist and racist theories of civilization that his fiction subverts. In addition to his stories, Hansen makes biographical

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comments to describe himself as an outsider who had access to stories unavailable to scholars in his school days. Hansen has left behind several autobiographical statements, which are now in the hands of Palmer’s son (Palmer, Personal correspondence, 2011). It quickly becomes clear that young Hansen was no stranger to imperialism even though he does not directly use that word. He points out that, in 1893, his father met his mother soon after he had graduated from West Point. Military records show that, upon graduation, Edward Taylor was detailed to the Department of Dakota, just a few years after North and South Dakota had become the thirty-ninth and fortieth states of the United States in 1889. Hansen, who likes to say that he was born eight years after the death of the Lakota leader Sitting Bull, spent his early years “in a small broken-­ down fort” that was left over from the Great Sioux War, and a Sioux woman cared for him (Palmer, Personal correspondence, 2011). At this time, the U.S. government was enacting policies to divide reservations into plots of land for each family, an attempt to eradicate the tribal custom of communal ownership, a misguided theory based on the stages of civilization that hoped to propel indigenous people into higher stages. In addition, young people were sent to missionary schools and forced to speak English. In 1898, with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Hansen’s farther was part of the infantry in Santiago de Cuba and participated in the battle of San Juan Hill (the one that made Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders famous). After serving in Cuba, Taylor was dispatched to the Philippines, another colonial encounter, but was killed at the age of thirty-two in a 1899 railway accident (Holden, 1901, p. 536). Hansen’s early life was shaped by the policies of forced assimilation of indigenous people in the United States and then the expression of U.S. imperialism in the Spanish-American War. This autobiographical persona can be supplemented with more practical experience from his educational records. Hansen was born Lucille Taylor in St. Louis, Missouri, in late 1897. He went to high school using that name, at a school with an experimental curriculum designed by Calvin M. Woodward, the dean of the school of engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Affiliated with the university, Manual Arts High School was an educational innovation when it first opened in 1880. At a

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time when St. Louis had grown to become the fourth-largest city in the United States and was home to thousands of manufacturers, the curriculum at Manual sought to provide an alternative to the dichotomy between vocational training and generalized college-preparatory education that focused on the liberal arts. In an effort to inspire young people to respect factory workers, students spent time in workshops, but they also learned gentlemanly subjects like history and language. This hands-on curriculum is akin to Gernsback’s demand for readers who are creators. In order to graduate, students had to complete a project that would show mastery of a first-year polytechnic university student: “actual construction” of a machine, along with mechanical drawings and patterns used for castings. The school became the most popular secondary school in the city by the 1890s. Although the school had begun as a means to train factory supervisors, at the turn of the century Manual was sending more students to higher education than any other St. Louis school (Coates, 1923, pp. 20, 33–34). Hansen’s gender identity may have been at home, given the school’s emphasis on developing “bright and industrious boys.” Woodward’s description of the school in the aughts was “to put the whole boy to school”: “The boy is a very complicated machine. He needs to be trained on all sides, and all I ask is that he shall have the light to shine on all sides of him” (pp. 69, 73). Hansen’s attendance at this school had an obvious impact on his later writing, which will be discussed in due course, but he does not make mention of it in his biographical statements. This is a common practice for trans individuals to avoid deadnaming; referring to the name one used before adopting a name that suits a person’s gender identity—the so-called dead name— can be demoralizing. Hansen’s early education would have been an invaluable asset for his authorial persona, yet he omitted it and chose to focus on the time since he asserted a male gender. Hansen’s education continued at two land-grant institutions, which were established with the help of land seized by the federal government from Native American tribes when Hansen attended the University of Illinois from 1917 to 1919. In 1919, he convinced a professor and his wife to take him to their summer cabin in Michigan and gained an invitation to a meeting of an Ojibway (Chippewa) tribe. Here, he heard that the tribe planned to execute representatives of the federal government,

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whom they accused of embezzling. After being convinced by the speeches, with the chief ’s daughter as interpreter, that the tribe was seriously considering violence, Hansen suggested that the tribe send representatives to present their grievances to President Wilson, noting that murder will just bring more trouble. The tribe appreciated his guidance and have him the name “She [sic] Who Points the Way” after a “blood-rites” ceremony (Palmer, Personal correspondence, 2011). As Hansen continued his research, this tribal membership, he writes, gave him a point of entry to learn more about indigenous peoples. He kept hearing legends of a white prophet who had visited the western hemisphere long before tribes made contact with Christian missionaries. Hansen was so intrigued that he spent years tracking down stories about the prophet, learning about what his interview subjects called the pre-Christian time in the Americas. Hansen earned a teaching certificate and finished his bachelor’s degree at UCLA, another land-grant institution, and he also spent time at other universities, completing some postgraduate study in anthropology, archeology, and geology. He spent time at the University of South California (one year) and Redlands University (1.5 years), as well as summers at the University of Mexico, Long Beach State, and Berkeley (and he refused their offer of a doctoral stipend to study anthropology and geology). This background experience is an important window into the science fiction he wrote to supplement his income as a teacher. Hansen credits his interest in science fiction to two other men. The first was his mother’s second husband, who used to tell him stories about his travels to Venus and Mars. The second was his first husband, Fred Hansen, whom he married in 1924. He piqued his interest in science fiction, he but bet him that he could not participate in the genre. After his husband told him that he would not be published because Lucile was a woman’s name, Hansen decided to initialize his given name and create a new name based on two men’s names: his surnames at birth and in marriage. He continues, Fred laughed and told me I would have to send a picture. I went out the next day where he was working on a car and called him. As he looked out I snapped his picture. I sent this and later another picture. I continued writing for years, leaning to science more and finding it far more interesting than fiction. (Palmer, Personal correspondence, 2011)

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This origin story casts a different light than the story typically told. Hansen was not an aspiring writer who changed his name in order to gain acceptance. In fact, before writing science fiction, his life had long been impacted by the U.S. policies of colonization and assimilation, and he was already doing anthropological research for papers in college. After being taunted by his husband, he decided to take up the challenge to break into the science fiction field. With the knowledge of his personal background, the history of science, and the study of the genre in the current manuscript, it becomes easier to see Hansen’s iconoclastic tone. What is also remarkable is the comfort that the pulp medium gave Hansen to assert a renegade male identity, which he would use for the rest of his career. His first story appeared in AMZ Quarterly, running alongside a reprint of Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, Clare Winger Harris’s “The Evolutionary Monstrosity,” and “The Beast-Men of Ceres,” which was credited to Aladra Septama, a feminine-sounding pen name of the male author Judson W.  Reeves. However widespread the feeling that women were not welcome as writers of science fiction, it seems the opposition was not well organized. The narration of this first story, “What the Sodium Lines Revealed” (1929a), is remarkable because of the several frames that separate the setting from the readers, as if the nineteenth-century domain of amateur men had been encased in amber. The first frame of narration was, at least at first, known only to a few people: the adventurous male authorial persona invented by Hansen. This secret frame is mirrored in the story: Captain James B. Matthews, a military telegraph expert, is a first-person narrator who is sent by his commanding officer to the home of a wealthy man, Larone, to help decode a message he has discovered by accident. Larone, an amateur astronomer, accidentally slipped a diffraction grating into his telescope while he was observing Jupiter. He summoned Dr. Esteban from the Mt. Wilson Observatory when an unusual observation resulted: the spectral lines that should have been dark to indicate the presence of sodium are flickering and seem to be broadcasting in Morse code. They show Matthews the apparatus, and he transcribes a lengthy story that turns out to be the testimony of David Thromant, a fresh Yale Ph.D. whose father brought him along on an amateur voyage to other planets. Fearing publicity, Larone demands secrecy, but Thromant begs

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for his story to be told; as a result, the telegraph operator invents the conceit that he will change the names and publish the supposedly true story as science fiction. The various layers of this story thus insulate the male-dominated elite world, characterized by dilettantes, personal relationships, and a lack of openness, from the new world of professional science. Most readers will not be able to enter this world—even the narrator fumbles about the protocols of polite society needed to enter the home of a wealthy gentlemen—which is a bit alarming considering the time and effort the readers of science fiction had expended in order to assemble their technical credentials. The story weaves together many of Hansen’s research interests, such as indigenous American culture and the lost city of Atlantis. Hansen’s ethnographic research provides some welcome realism in this story. Thromant’s father had been aiming for Mars but is killed by unexpected forces, and his son ends up on a moon of Jupiter. There, he cannot easily communicate with the local inhabitants. Finally, they find a common frame of reference. Drawing a diagram of the solar system, they begin to learn each other’s language and communicate by drawing diagrams and using few words. It turns out that a woman who traces her ancestry to Earth, Moa, lives among them. After some confusion, Thromant understands that her ancestors came from Atlantis and that she is able to understand the ancient Greek he studied at Yale. She informs Thromant about the situation, including the fact that an astronomer from Mars, Magu, lives among them. The interactions with Magu help to transform this story from an adventure into a critique of anthropology. The dialogue in the story reminds the reader of discussions about Mars in the vein of Percival Lowell’s, including the idea that Mars would have had a much longer period of sustaining life. Hansen puts this into the context of the stages of civilization theory as Magu condescendingly evaluates the people of Earth. They are in a state of barbarism, Magu suggests, and it is not just unprofitable to communicate with them, but also dangerous. At the human stage of development, the “pastime” of war combines with technical achievement, making it “the most dangerous period in the evolutionary history of a life type” (1929a, p.  135). In other words, the planet-smashing epics of science fiction and the real-life atrocities in

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World War I are not evidence that humans have reached the apogee of civilization. To Magu and his race, humanity seems on the verge of extinction. Magu’s patronizing attitude is curious, though. He wonders why Europeans do not wish to engage intellectually with the Hottentots, but he also suggests that another race is worthier of attention: ants. He asserts that egg-laying species are by nature more communal, and he suggests that when the young are in the care of the state, a species is more likely to advance. This is not a moot point, as Magu points out that the star Vega is approaching the sun and will crash in about 265,000  years. In that time, the ants might evolve to become a worthy species, but nevertheless, Magu is unwilling to suggest that cooperation with humans would be beneficial. This might be alarming to a human, but then Magu asks what humanity is doing to prevent degenerate humans from breeding, and he hopes that eugenic wars are conducted to eliminate the “unfit from degenerating the race” (1929a, p. 136). Thromant rejects this version of eugenics, saying that only the best humans go to war, and there have been no attempts to stop anyone from producing offspring. This leads Magu to condemn humans as “childish,” but his ideas are in conflict with the experiences of the reader. Eugenic discourse was quite prevalent, and as Hansen was living in the state of California, where eugenic sterilization was popular, it seems as if the amateur men of this isolated group have quite a bit of ignorance. The interdisciplinary interests that drive “Sodium Lines” are also present in “The Undersea Tube,” Hansen’s second story, published in November 1929. The first-person narrator says that his story resulted from a disaster that destroys a technical marvel that was engineered by his friend—an underwater railway connecting New  York and Liverpool— but also provides him a glimpse of an ancient culture. The narrator presents readers with a brief future history of the underground tunnel, starting with the rail connection of England and France at the end of the twentieth century, as well as tubes connecting New  York with Montreal and Chicago, and in this way it seems much like a typical Gernsback-era narrative of progress. Hansen’s training at Manual is evident here, as technical diagrams depict the engineering requirements required to keep the device moving.

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Unfortunately, the engineering team did not consider that their knowledge of geology was insufficient. An underground volcano had caused a crack during construction, but the engineers simply sealed the fault and continued working. For Hansen, who is interested in how ancient legends might be clues to scientific fact, the modern theory of continental drift is attested to by stories of the sunken continent, Atlantis. The scientists in charge of the project, unfamiliar with the theory of continental drift, do not realize the mid-Atlantic ridge is a dynamic zone. The crack refuses to be filled; engineers instead adapt by using pumps and the project seems to succeed. “Man had essayed the greatest feat of the planet, and had won. A period of wild celebration greeted the first human beings to cross each direction under the sea” (1929b, p. 722), the narrator comments, overlooking the problems. The tube continues in operation for three years before the narrator is sent to France on business; he plans to use the undersea tunnel but his friend (an engineer on the project) calls him on the “television phone” and urges him to take a different route. His friend has filed a minority report stating that the crack cannot be filled due to the fact that it is not caused by pressure. As foreshadowed in the introduction, the narrator is caught in an earthquake as the train passes the fault. As the sole survivor, he witnesses the grandeur of the ancient civilization that was hidden by the engineers—statuary and relics being consumed by fiery magma—and is perhaps rescued by a citizen of the lost city. The narrator has no time to explore this find. He is knocked unconscious and awakens in a hospital room, where his story of the lost civilization is regarded as fantastic, including the idea that he was rescued by one of its inhabitants. Key to appreciating this story is considering the interrelationship of the story’s components: a lost world, an engineering invention and a scientific discovery, an urban disaster. Although the story activates many generic expectations, the one thing it manages to do consistently is ridicule the training of engineers that excludes history and culture. The tunnel may be the “greatest feat” of “man,” but in their pride and ambition, the men of this project failed to do their homework. As detailed in Hansen’s first nonfiction book (1946), Frank Taylor’s3 1910 theory of  No relation to L. Taylor Hansen.

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continental drift and Alfred Wegener’s refutation in 1912 relied on the mid-Atlantic ridge for part of their explanation, but neither had come to an agreement on the nature of this formation. Even by 1929, when Hansen was writing this story, there was not reliable knowledge about the earthquakes along the ridge. Only the narrator’s friend can make the intuitive leap based on the available facts—a leap that happens to be justified—but he is unable to make his opinion heard. Hansen’s readers, though, can see how respecting old stories that might too easily be dismissed as legends could improve engineering design and lead to safer innovation through interdisciplinary information Hansen’s story “The Man from Space”  (1930a), published in the February 1930 AST almost a year after Gernsback lost control and a month after Campbell’s first story, “When the Atoms Failed,” appeared. Far from the earnest young men one has become accustomed to in the pages of AST, though, this first-person narrator is amusingly lacking in seriousness, a bit lazy and overconfident. The story opens during a professor’s lecture, which lays out several theories. The young man and his fraternity brothers had been out dancing the night before, so they are struggling to stay awake. After the lecture, the narrator finds out that the test papers for the imminent calculus quiz have been stolen and the assessment has been canceled. Shortly after, they are drugged and kidnapped by an alien being, flying away to a nearby star in his spaceship. The Sun goes supernova, destroying the Earth. They observe phenomena that support one of the theories from the professor’s lecture. Soon, though, the narrator is rudely awakened. He slept through the lecture, but he has an opinion based on his dream, an opinion that had been debunked during the lecture. He asks his companions to go play tennis, but they remind him of the calculus quiz. The climax of this plot is disillusionment; the faster-than-light ship on the interstellar voyage is on the same order as a college student wishing that his calculus quiz would be canceled. The most important part of the story, it turns out, was the professor’s notes on stellar phenomena that the young man had missed while he was dozing. By the time he wrote his fourth story, “The City on the Cloud” (1930), Hansen had perfected the male first-person narrator that he would use to lampoon established experts. This story appeared in the October 1930 issue of Gernsback’s Wonder Stories, one of the publications Gernsback

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started after losing control of AMZ. The apparently male narrator is told an extraordinary story about a strange ship over Death Valley. As in Harris’s “Runaway,” the scientific establishment is an ineffective bystander. The plot of the story begins with an outsider entering the office of a physics professor at the University of California. The nameless visitor—the jaded professor did not get his name—tells him a story of an apparition that looks like a city. The professor likens this story to the strange stories students tell as academic excuses. The professor explains away the stranger’s story with physics, revealing how refraction can cause strange sights in the sky. The stranger becomes angry and leaves the office in a huff, with the narrator commenting that he strolled “out of my life” (1930b, p. 431), meaning that there is no way for the professor to follow up about the story. A nice touch in this story is that the stranger’s burro is named “Shelley,” with the unusual spelling suggesting it is named after Mary Shelley. Although the narrators tell strange stories in Frankenstein, at least they treat each other as credible witnesses and consider the evidence. In 1930, it seems, the advanced training for science and engineering has created a filter for the truly unusual. It is alongside “City on the Cloud” that the portrait based on the photograph of Hansen’s husband appeared (Fig. 3.2). This would be the last time Hansen appeared in a Gernsback publication. The chronology of Ackerman’s harassment the year before can be inferred as a cause; Ackerman was one of the early converts to Gernsback’s science fiction fan clubs. At this time, Hansen returned to AMZ, which had continued publication without Gernsback’s influence. In Hansen’s “The Prince of Liars,” found in T.  O’Connor Sloane’s October 1930 issue of AMZ, the narration again pokes fun at conservative scientific minds. The first-person narrator admits that he was unwilling to accept Einstein’s theory of relativity and calls himself a “Newtonian” who believes in absolute values for time and space (1930c, p. 585). The editorial note that accompanies the story draws a connection between this narrator and the readers: “whether you [the reader] have been able as yet to master any of [Einstein’s] conceptions or not, there is a world of fascination in this story” (p. 582). Instead of creating a compelling demonstration of some principle of relativity, though, the story introduces

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Fig. 3.2  In order to assert a male persona, L. Taylor Hansen supplied a portrait of a man, which appeared along with the publication of his 1930 story, “The City on the Cloud”

the narrator to a mysterious, vampire-like recluse. Through the description of the Prince’s possessions and his retelling of his adventures, a science fiction reader starts to realize that the Prince’s supposed longevity is due to his repeated trips at speeds faster than light. This has given him an impressive understanding of human history, and he serves as a mouthpiece for the criticism that the modern world is not as advanced as one might think. Even though the events of the plot have an impact on the reader, they do not seem to impact the narrator, who seems to think that the Prince is simply an eccentric amateur historian. This narrative persona, a stodgy and reactionary scientist, is Hansen’s hallmark.

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This type of authorial persona would carry forward into the second phase of Hansen’s career, started when he had begun his doctoral studies. After publishing seven short stories from 1929 to 1942 under the name L.  Taylor Hansen, he began a series of nonfiction articles in the AMZ edited by Palmer. This new type of writing first appears in the September 1941 AMZ: a monthly column under the heading “Scientific Mysteries.” This nonfiction seems tied to Hansen’s academic study and represents a significant commitment on Palmer’s part. In these nonfiction articles, Hansen maintains his iconoclastic tone. As if addressing a group of bored students, like the fraternity brothers in “Man from Space,” who have many misconceptions about geology and anthropology, Hansen takes on some big issues in just a few pages and often includes scholarly references. For instance, in his July 1942 article, “The White Race: Does It Exist?,” Hansen points out the impossibilities of drawing clear boundary lines between human races based on physical characteristics. This represents an early expression of an idea that would take hold after World War II, found in the UNESCO Statement on Race and in Isaac Asimov’s nonfiction writing. In May 1943, he takes on the Christmas holiday, showing his readers that it combines many earlier festivals. Soon, Hansen’s interests turned toward indigenous Americans. In March 1945, an article describes the rich tapestry of American tribes—before not only European conquest but also the Beringia migration. Hansen also recounts a public dispute. A colleague scoffed after Hansen asserted that the Americas had seen great civilizations and that some myths were based on accurate astronomical observations. The colleague says early Americans were just savages. However, Hansen concludes, he has “revenge” (1945a, p. 205) when he finds an accurate star chart in a collection at the Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Bringing the antagonist to the collection, he not only confirms it is a star chart but also that it is much older than Hansen had believed. Hansen reports almost gleefully how the astronomer has become disoriented due to his assumption that expertise in one field did not carry over to experience in another. This second phase of Hansen’s career contains some anomalies: some articles are written as if they come from fictional persona. Tellingly, these pseudonyms are masculine, giving further credence to the theory that Hansen preferred others to think of him as a man. In 1946 and again in

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1948, Hansen publishes two articles under the pseudonym Rev. Chief Sequoyah. On the one hand, it is not unusual for pulp authors to use pseudonyms in order to avoid having two bylines in the same issue. Both times Hansen uses the Sequoyah name, he also appears in Palmer’s AMZ using his traditional name. On the other hand, the full-on impersonation of an indigenous American seems offensive today. Even if the motive were to diversify the masthead of the magazine, one could wish that Hansen had used his tribal contacts to recruit a writer. The two articles with this false persona continue Hansen’s habit of investigating legends in the context of modern scientific knowledge. Another pseudonym used by Hansen was “Oge-Make,” for the first time in the January 1948 AMZ. The name appears again in the September 1949 issue of Fate, a magazine co-­ founded by Palmer that was dedicated to the paranormal. The editorial note for this article and the narrator of the article itself assert that the author is a member of the Navajo tribe, which is located mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. The narrator challenges the reader: you are probably white, but if you had tribal affiliation, you would know that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) have appeared in the skies for millennia. The narrator then recounts the old tales of the elders about silver airships. The last phase of Hansen’s writing comes near the end of his life in 1976, when he published two books of cultural anthropology in the 1960s. The first is He Walked the Americas (1963), which traces the various legends of a white prophet who is mentioned by many American tribes. Hansen spent many years tracking down these legends. One can see Hanson’s use of a male persona. A Chippewa chief was smoking his pipe and watching the sunset. The text continues, with Hansen using a male pronoun to refer to himself: Toward him came the college student [Hansen], the one the tribe adopted by “blood-rites” and for whom there was warm affection. That affection was more than mutual. That child of the white race found all of these people charming. He admired the agile and cat-like grace of the dancers; the smooth silken skin of the women; the quiet beauty of their language, at times most hauntingly poetic in its phrasing. They lived in a world unknown to white men, a world in which the past was present; a past more distant than our histories. Upon their reservations, poverty-stricken and spirit-broken, the student was learning to see them through their own eyes—as the Ancient Ones and keepers of the Olden Knowledge. (p. 66)

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One of the innovative things about this volume is its Socratic narration. Hansen’s narrator describes a continuing dialogue between tribal experts and Hansen’s anthropological narration. In this way, it resembles Zora Neal Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935): engaged in a conversation. For instance, Hansen reports learning one story and then using it “as a wedge” to prompt others to tell another story (p. 159). Of the nineteenth century anthropologist Hubert H. Bancroft, Hansen notes that some of the “greatest weaknesses” in the field are people who lack the ability to cooperate with modern tribes so that they can learn about older nations. To them, an indigenous American “either turns his back or simply answers ‘yes’ to everything. Result—nothing” (p. 234). Coupled with Hansen’s insistence on interdisciplinary training, this challenge to people who conduct anthropology without rapport with their subjects points to Hansen’s familiarity with the new standard in anthropology. The participant-­ observation method would become increasingly important in the twentieth century. In all three phases of his career, Hansen used male pronouns and a masculine persona. For the Gernsback publications, Hansen even supplied a photograph of a man. Editor Raymond A. Palmer, in his editorial overview for the second issue where Hansen’s nonfiction appears (Palmer, 1941), refers to him as “scientist L.  Taylor Hansen,” using masculine pronouns, and reminding readers that they have seen his story “Lords of the Underground” (p. 9). Palmer wrote the headline “L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself ” for one of his letters in AMZ in 1943. Given the stalking by fans Hansen experienced, it is worthwhile to note that the words “address withheld” appear where a city and state normally appear (p. 202). This defensive type of letter was repeated in 1945, where Hansen replied to correct a letter writer’s misunderstanding of his report on Egypt (1945b). Palmer continues to refer to Hansen with male pronouns throughout the run of his articles. Toward the end, he respectfully refers to the author as “Mr. Hansen” (Palmer, 1948a, p. 6) and, the last time he previews Hansen, uses masculine pronouns (Palmer, 1948b, p. 6). Finally, in his academic career, Hansen used the masculine persona, even referring to himself as a man, albeit performing a gender reveal in his last book. This final authorial choice in Hansen’s last known publication, after forty years of performance, suggests how this male persona may have been more than a response to the perception that science fiction did not welcome women. It is not so hard to imagine that Hansen, the enthusiastic

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and pugnacious scholar, used an authorial masculine persona as an opportunity to be relieved from the patronizing politeness demanded of women in the professional world. At the same time, appearing in public as a woman would have had its advantages. First is amusement at the shock of his audience. When readers familiar with Hansen’s work finally had a chance for an in-person meeting, they would get a little jolt to find a woman standing in the place of a person they had thought of as a man. Extrapolating from the confrontation reported to Ackerman, where Hansen concocted an unlikely story about not being the true author, the lecture-hall script almost writes itself: Sorry that Mr. Hansen cannot be with us today; we’ll have to muddle along by ourselves … or Please continue to think of me as a man, and do not hold back your thoughts and criticisms so that we can have an honest discussion. Thinking ahead to the anthropologists in the 1973 story by James Tiptree, Jr., “The Women Men Don’t See,” one can see another advantage. The male narrator first refers to the women scientists as “blurs,” as if he can barely distinguish them from the background. This might offer some advantage while doing field work, a woman escaping notice so that she can obtain data unobstructed. Ruth later says that women “live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world machine” (2004, pp. 115, 135). The pugilistic nature of the fan columns and meetings in science fiction may have helped Hansen learn how to enjoy the shock value of a gender masquerade. It does not seem that Hansen presented as a man in field work, but this is not necessarily a contradiction. Becoming a “blur” might have led to better opportunities to observe and learn. Finally, as a writer who admired indigenous American civilization and took to combatting the vestiges of scientific racism in universities, this authorial persona seems to have allowed him to engage in the battle of ideas without any condescension regarding gender.

References Achebe, C. (1988). An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987. Doubleday. Bartter, M. A. (19921993). Science, Science Fiction and Women: A Language of (Tacit) Exclusion. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 49(4, Winter), pp. 407–19

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Bleiler, E. F. (1982). Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Bleiler, E. F. (1990). Science Fiction: The Early Years. Kent State UP. Bleiler, E. F. (1998). Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years. Kent State UP. Chamberlain, M. E. (2013). The Scramble for Africa (3rd ed.). Routledge. Chandler, A.  J. (2005). Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Industries. Harvard UP. Clarke, E. H. (1873). Sex in Education: or, a Fair Chance for the Girls. J.R. Osgood. Coates, C.  P. (1923). History of the Manual Training School of Washington University. Government Printing Office. Cowan, R. S. (1983). More Work for Mother. Basic Books. Cowan, R. S. (1997). A Social History of American Technology. Oxford UP. Davin, E. L. (2006). Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965. Rowman & Littlefield. Degler, C. (1991). In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. Oxford UP. Donawerth, J.  L. (1994). Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Syracuse UP. Donawerth, J. L. (1997). Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Engelmann, G. J. (1901). The Increasing Sterility of American Women. JAMA, 37(14), 891, 894–5. Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy. Social Text, 25(26), 56–80. Gamble, E. B. (1894). The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of Her Inferiority to Man. G. P. Putnam. Hacking, I. (1999). Rocks. In The Social Construction of What? (pp. 186–206). Harvard UP. Hansen, L. T. (1929a). What the Sodium Lines Revealed. AMZ Quarterly, 2(1, Winter), 120–138. Hansen, L. T. (1929b). The Undersea Tube. AMZ, 4(8), 720–725. Hansen, L. T. (1930a). The Man from Space. AMZ, 4(11), 1034–1045. Hansen, L. T. (1930b). The City on the Cloud. Wonder Stories, 2(5), 426–431. Hansen, L. T. (1930c). The Prince of Liars. AMZ, 5(7), 582–599. Hansen, L. T. (1943). L. Taylor Hansen Defends Himself. AMZ, 17(6), 201–202. Hansen, L. T. (1945a). A Scientific Jig-Saw Puzzle. AMZ, 19(1), 196–198. 205. Hansen, L.  T. (1945b). An Open Letter to Leland Hickling. AMZ, 19(1), 200–201. Hansen, L. T. (1963). He Walked the Americas. Amherst Press.

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Hansen, L. T. (1969). The Ancient Atlantic. Amherst Press. Hansen, L. T. (1946). Some Considerations of and Additions to the Taylor-Wegener Hypothesis of Continental Displacement. Harris, C. W. (1947). Away from the Here and Now: Stories in Pseudo-Science. Dorrance & Company. Hicks, M. (2017). Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. MIT Press. Holden, E. S. (1901). Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S.  Military Academy at West Point, New  York. Supplement Vol. IV: 1890–1900. Riverside Press. Retrieved March 1, 2022, from http://digital-­ library.usma.edu Knight, D. (Ed.). (1975). Science Fiction of the Thirties. Bobbs-Merrill. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. U Chicago P. Larbalestier, J. (2002). The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP. Larbalestier, J. (Ed.). (2006). Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Wesleyan UP. Mack, P.  E. (1990). Straying from their Orbits: Women in Astronomy in America. In G. Kass-Simon & P. Farnes (Eds.), In Women of Science: Righting the Record (pp. 72–116). Indiana UP. Mann, C. R. (1918). A Study of Engineering Education. Carnegie Foundation. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://www.nationalsoftskills.org/downloads/Mann-­1918-­Study_of_Engineering_Educ.pdf McCall, C. W. (1929). ‘Out of the Void’ Admired. AMZ, 4(9), 866. Merchant, C. (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. Harper and Row. Merrick, H. (2009). The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Aqueduct Press. Moskowitz, S. (1970). Introduction to “The Undersea Tube.” In Science Fiction Classics Annual 1970 (pp. 4–16). Ultimate Publishing Co. Moskowitz, S. (1972). When Women Rule. Walker. Nash, M.  A. (2019). Entangled Pasts: Land-Grant Colleges and American Indian Dispossession. History of Education Quarterly, 59(4), 437–467. Nerad, M. (1999). The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California. SUNY Press. Nevers, C. C. (1895). Dr. Jastrow on Community of ideas of Men and Women. Wellesley College Psychological Studies, 2(4), 363–367. Oldenziel, R. (1999). Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945. Amsterdam UP.

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Palmer, R. A. (1941). The Observatory. AMZ, 15(12), pp. 8–9, 61. Palmer, R. A. (1948a). The Observatory. AMZ, 22(1), pp. 6, 48–9. Palmer, R. A. (1948b). The Observatory. AMZ, 22(1), 6. Pursell, C. (2007). The Machine in the Garden (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins UP. Roberts, R. (1993). A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction. U of Ill. P. Roosevelt, T. (1905). Remarks Before the Mothers’ Congress. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-­before­the-­mothers-­congress Ross, E. A. (1901). The Causes of Race Superiority. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 18, 67–89. Rossiter, M. W. (1982). Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Vol. 1). Johns Hopkins UP. Russett, C. E. (1989). Sexual Selection: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Harvard UP. Schiebinger, L. (1993). Women in Science: Historical Perspectives. In Women at Work: A Meeting on the Status of Women in Astronomy (pp.  11–9). Space Telescope Science Institute. Schiebinger, L. (1999). Has Feminism Changed Science? Harvard UP. Shteir, A. B. (1996). Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860. Johns Hopkins UP. Snedden, D. (1919). Probable Economic Future of American Women. American Journal of Sociology, 24(5), 528–565. Stoddard, L. (1920). The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stone, L.  F. (1929a). Out of the Void, A New Interplanetary Story in Two Parts—Part 1. AMZ, 4(5), 440–455. Stone, L. F. (1929b). Out of the Void, Part 2. AMZ, 4(6), 544–565. Stone, L.  F. (1929c). Letter of the Twenty-Fourth Century. AMZ, 4, iss. 9, 860–861. Stone, L. F. (1930). Women with Wings. Air Wonder Stories, 1(11), 984–1003. Stone, L. F. (1932). Hell Planet. Wonder Stories, 4(1), 14–27. Stone, L. F. (1934). The Rape of the Solar System. AMZ, 9(8), 12–25. Stone, L. F. (1935). The Fall of Mercury. AMZ, 10(7), 27–73. Stone, L. F. (1997). Day of the Pulps. Fantasy Commentator, 9(2), 100–2, Fall. Stone, L. F. (2010). Men with Wings. Femspec, 11(1), 86–155. Thompson, H. B. (1903). The Mental Traits of Sex: An Experimental Investigation of the Normal Mind in Men and Women. U of Chicago Press.

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Tiptree, J. Jr. (2004). Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (J. D. Smith, Ed.). Tachyon Publications. Tully, J. (2009). A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-Percha. Journal of World History, 20(4), 559–579. Vassar College. (2003). Maria Mitchell and Women’s Rights. Vassar Encyclopedia. Retrieved February 1, 2023, from vcencyclopeddia.vassar.edu Yaszek, L. (2018). The Future Is Female: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, From Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin. Library of America.

Part II The Campbell Era

4 Archeology of the Future

After decades of willful ignorance, the science fiction community began to rethink the reputation of legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr., coming to a head in 2019 when author Jeannette Ng criticized his legacy. In their acceptance speech for the award for a new writer named for Campbell, which had been given by Analog each year since 1973, Ng called out Campbell’s defenders, saying that the vision that Campbell promoted was “Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists. (Yes, I am aware there are exceptions).” Analog soon responded by removing Campbell’s name from the award, and Ng won a Hugo award for Best Related Work in 2020 for their acceptance speech. Making an overture to the anti-racism protests that have swept the United States, Ng started off their 2020 speech by noting that one does not erase history by “pulling down memorials to dead racists”; instead, they noted, “it is how we make history.” Historians of science fiction often say that its golden age was the brainchild of Campbell, a physics major who began writing science fiction in the 1930s. Campbell inherited the notion of a public sphere from Hugo Gernsback, which as already shown could not ensure egalitarian discussion. In the case of Campbell and others who admired their own © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_4

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intellects more than trying to learn from others, what they thought of as a public sphere was more of an echo chamber, particularly when it came to the lasting belief in neo-Lamarckian forms of racism, which had long been discredited. Without the context of the paradigm of white masculinity described in the current study, it can be hard to see the connection between his legacy, his fiction, and his work as an editor. Human ethnicities are not mentioned in his early stories, there are no women, and like many bigots he uses kind words for people who are not white men. In public presentations and editorials toward the end of his career, he made his racism and sexism clear, but surely it was always implicit in his work. Campbell’s supporters felt (and some still feel) that it was unfair to criticize his work based on his personal beliefs. If it is so easy to claim there is no racism or sexism in his work, a deficit in current theory is clear. Attention to the history of science is helpful in this context in order to understand the prejudice that was present from the start, even though it lacks hostility to people who are not white men. Campbell’s later career coincided with the time when science and technology studies were taking on a new direction. Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), for instance, countered the widespread assumption that science is disruptive and receptive to new data; revolution does not characterize the conduct of science. Kuhn points out that brief periods of disruption are separated by long periods of “normal science,” where potentially conflicting data are subsumed to protect the existing paradigm. Although this counters common notions of scientific progress, it makes sense when taking into consideration the extensive investment in an existing paradigm, for universities and infrastructure, that is inconvenient to change. Kuhn’s insight was directed against so-called Whig history, or the idea that progress in science is a link of progressive discoveries by heroic figures. Kuhn did not study science fiction, but the Whig history he challenged is seen in stories of super science. As can be seen in his early fiction, Campbell promoted the idea that scientific insight would release superior power that would force a quick, inevitable, and profitable change in how things get done. His narrator in “The Black Star Passes,” for instance, says that science seems to “leap up on itself,” building at an increasing pace “like some crystal which, once started, grows ever faster” (1930c, p. 494). In order to explain why

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progress is not always steady, Campbell invented conspiracies by supposedly lazy thinkers that held back insightful people. As was apparent with the analysis of Hugo Gernsback’s work, it is hard to understand why someone with a reputation for promoting new and accurate scientific information would be mired in discredited theories about race, gender, and civilization from the nineteenth century. However, the fact that Campbell’s ideas do not fit in with modern notions of bigotry can make it difficult to see them today. Understanding his assumptions about technology and racism, though, can help to encourage better thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM. Campbell’s emphasis on logical deduction is thrilling in a space opera, where characters encounter the unknown and quickly use their wits to survive. However, Campbell’s deductive style became a tiresome “prove me wrong” in his relentless mind puzzles related to paranormal phenomena and destructive when he analyzed racial injustice. No amount of retrospective analysis can change the cold historical fact that Campbell was employed by the major publisher Street & Smith as an editor of AST (Astounding Science Fiction, after 1960 known as Analog) for more than thirty years until his death in 1971. This stupendous tenure suggests Campbell’s ability to turn out, month after month, a periodical that was avidly anticipated by readers and was profitable to the publisher. What is more, he managed a stable of writers who would follow his directions and endure, even if they did not accept, his views that modern civilization was based on the supremacy of the white male intellect.

4.1 The “New Author” with “Marvelous Ability” Campbell’s early fame came largely from writing space operas that challenged the supremacy of Edward E. Smith. Born twenty years before Campbell, Smith had already entered the technical workplace when he worked with Lee Hawkins Garby on the first draft of the Skylark of Space in 1915, and the setting of the story reflects the industrial science at the start of the century (see Chap. 2). Campbell began his undergraduate study as a physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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(MIT) in 1928, the same year that Skylark appeared in AMZ. The public persona Campbell would adopt—a scientist who loves science fiction—is not entirely justified, in much the same way Gernsback’s is questionable. Campbell read Tarzan and John Carter of Mars before he was eight years old. Soon he was reading “Jeans, Eddington, and astronomy texts” at nine years old (Moskowitz, 1974, p. 30). He says he read WT when it had science fiction, and saw the first issue of AMZ in 1926. He does not say he met Vannevar Bush, an MIT professor at the time, but he met Norbert Wiener, who helped Campbell with some ideas (p. 34). In the year he joined MIT, the student newspaper exhorts the new students as “an untried crowd of youngsters” but reminds them MIT is different from peers like Dartmouth, Yale, and Harvard: Tech “lacks the usual collegiate campus atmosphere, with its hazing, green caps, and so on … it is a school for men and not a workhouse for Brown Baggers” (The Tech, 1928, p. 2). The gentlemanly tradition in education was ineffective for future engineers; instead, new students should strive to fit the template of vigorous young men described in Chap. 2. The undergraduate Campbell wrote two stories, “Invaders from the Infinite” and “When the Atoms Failed,” and sent them to AMZ, but there was a long delay in publication, possibly related to the change in ownership of the magazine that year. Campbell’s first writing to see publication was a letter in the second issue of Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories, complaining about a science quiz based on a story in the first issue that suggested that speed in outer space is limitless. Campbell admits Smith had already taken this on in Skylark of Space, explaining that Einstein’s theory could be refined, but Smith took facts as they were known into consideration. In the story that was the basis of a quiz question, though, Campbell feels there was an insufficient connection to known fact. He ends his letter with the question, “But to be serious, will you please tell me what your rates on stories are?” (1929, p. 190). “Invaders from the Infinite” was lost, but Campbell’s first story appeared in the January 1930 AMZ. The editor’s introduction to “When the Atoms Failed” notes that “our new author” is a student at MIT and has a “marvelous ability at combining science with romance,” meaning a fanciful adventure, not amorous fiction (1930a, p. 911). The story is entertaining

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and instructive, the editor continues, and readers can test their knowledge and be inspired to read more in scientific textbooks (about cosmology and atomic theory, at least). Campbell’s early fiction and his work as an editor would follow this pattern: his narrators assume the audience is familiar with introductory science concepts. Authors may invent new science or surpass the current status of technology, but they must put their new ideas into conversation with college-level material so that it is plausible to other men. Although this might seem to be an objective standard, it depends upon a previously screened group (i.e., U.S.-born white men) permitted to enter college. As described in Chap. 3, this was not an open group limited only by merit. One way to start an analysis of “When the Atoms Failed” is to look at how it inverts H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. There are several similarities: Earth has survived an invasion from Mars by creatures who have superior technology. The story opens with a first-person frame narrator, David Gale, in 1957. Gale, like Wells’s narrator, is a journalist who witnessed the invasion. The stories differ in one major respect, however. The resolution of the Wells plot depends on an idea from Darwin that organisms that are best suited to their environment are most likely to succeed. The Martians’ superior technology and the actions of humans in the Wells story are ineffectual; in fact, the plot of the story shows how superior technology does not necessarily convey an advantage when an organism leaves its evolutionary environment. Campbell takes up the proposition that Wells rejects: the social Darwinist idea of survival of the fittest. A superior human intellect facing a threat draws upon social resources to release new forces of nature. This is a direct extrapolation of social Darwinism from the economic into the technological sphere, showing that there is more than a slight correspondence between Herbert Spencer and John Campbell. Indeed, Campbell’s early fiction reaffirms the idea that race conflict is an important driver of civilization, as Lothrop Stoddard had maintained. In this story, one can see a refinement of the earlier generation’s Rooseveltian masculinity described in Chap. 1: although both generations share a fear of overcivilization, Roosevelt and the engineers described by Pursell (2007) would leave cities with the intention to return, invigorated. After establishing the frame, the story of the inventive genius

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Stephen Waterson begins; Gale is a communicator who says that he was only a spectator. His daily work is interrupted when Waterson calls, telling him to dress in camping clothing and prepare enough gear for a thirty-day stay. Unlike the fully staffed laboratory in Ralph 124C 41+’s New York City, Waterson has been working alone in the Arizona desert. Part of his concern is the destructive potential of the atomic forces he is working with—several gashes in the landscape attest to his early errors— but he also wanted a place that was “quiet” (p. 915). Away from the noise of the city, and also the interference from colleagues urging caution or regulators seeking safety, Waterson finds it better to work in an isolated campground. Campbell adds to this rugged masculinity a theme that will be important for the genre henceforth: the manly need to escape city life and, as a corollary, the idea that innovation is independently disruptive, not building on the success of others. Whereas Gernsback and Smith had used city settings, showing connections between existing society and the work of the protagonists, Campbell brings his heroes to remote locations. In Campbell’s stories, civilized settings stultify elite men’s inventiveness; wild nature is the springboard for inventors to express their masculinist intellects. In his desert workshop, Waterson has created a calculating machine he can use to derive “the ultimate, definitive equation of all matter.” These equations made practical Einstein’s insight about the connection between energy and matter, and Waterson learns how to release energy as well as create or destroy matter (p. 913; emphasis in original). Knowing the mathematical relationships among matter, energy, gravity, and the shape of space, Waterson creates a heat ray, antigrav device and propulsion system and builds them into a small, deadly ship that had been intended for exploration but now will be used to defeat the Martian invaders. The fallacies here are compounded. First of all, the story imagines that a rapid calculating machine will unleash a genius’s innovative potential. Modern scientific and technical development is based on interactive teams: no one person would be tasked with creating several different devices. Instead, teams of engineers work on systems and, ultimately, the teams’ work must be interoperable. This teamwork and the necessary social world of cooperation, Campbell proposes with this story, are unnecessary with a calculating machine. The loss of the social world is also

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demonstrated at the end of the story. Here, Waterson walks a thin line between a genius who will save humanity or the isolated lunatic who will threaten civilization. In the denouement, Waterson echoes Wells’s The World Set Free and sends an ultimatum to “the governments of the earth.” He refuses to hand over his knowledge and demands that the world’s governments destroy their own weapons and form a planetary union (p. 975). Only the narrator and the hero were privileged to see the two-­ day conflict, but their technical accomplishment and their military victory led to a transformation into forced global governance. The description of a computing device in this story is an important part of Campbell’s reputation for accurate science, but it may be undeserved. Waterson looks back on 1929 (i.e., the year Campbell wrote the story), saying that the MIT Integraph could complete calculations “too complex for Einstein himself to work out.” He explains that he made improvements to this device (p. 913). Commentators on this story credit Campbell for describing a computer before it had been invented; Ashley (2004) says the story is remarkable for “its prediction of the computer” (p. 156); Stableford (2006) calls it a “mathematically innovative supercomputer” (p. 75). May (2018) writes that Waterson’s computer is “a sophisticated idea for 1930” (p. 8); Moskowitz (1974) calls it “a pre-­ space-­age electronic ‘brain’ to aid in his calculations,” noting that few other authors had recognized the need for number crunching (p. 33). It is important to state that Campbell was borrowing from a method of analog computing that he did not invent. The Integraph (Fig. 4.1) was a device promoted by MIT Professor Vannevar Bush; a 1928 article in Popular Science Monthly entitled “Machines that Think” makes it clear that the public imagination had already been captivated. Whereas an ordinary calculating machine performs operations on fixed quantities, the article points out, Bush’s machine allows a range of values to be calculated for variables. Bush is quoted as saying that he can use the machine to solve any second-order differential equation, a practical matter for engineers. The article continues: “by answering problems beyond present human mastery,” the Integraph “opens the doors to important fields of research hitherto inaccessible” (Powell, 1928, p. 13). Campbell has Waterson, the supposedly independent inventor, build on the well-­ publicized tool. For whatever reason, Campbell does not mention Bush.

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Fig. 4.1  Popular Science Monthly shows MIT Professor of Electrical Engineering Vannevar Bush with the Integraph, the inspiration for a device in a story by John W. Campbell, Jr. The Integraph “in eight minutes solves problems that take mathematicians weeks” (Powell, 1928, p. 13)

Neither Bush nor Campbell directly mentions the feminine labor that they hoped to replace with the Integraph. Waterson’s abilities in the wilderness are released by the elimination of the supposed bottleneck of calculation. The work to determine the values of dependent variables was typically done by rooms full of human computers, such as those described in Chap. 1. The necessity for engineers to find solutions to differential equations quickly would be stronger in the kind of adventures Campbell imagined, and his heroes could not be constrained by maintaining contact with calculators in the city. The liberatory power of Waterson’s improved Integraph provides an escape from the home space. The way he describes the device to his friend Gale is as a kind of oracle, a machine that has “done something no man ever did.” Even after discovering how to unleash energy from the atom, “the machine kept working at these great long equations.” Like a man telling his friend about a prophecy

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from the Pythia, Waterson tells Gale the fear he felt when he understood the ultimate destination of the machine’s calculations: “I was scared when I saw what those equations meant.” After conducting tests, he tells Gale, “the machine was right” (p. 913). Although one might expect the calculating machine to appeal to men’s love of rational thinking, it is clear that Campbell’s characters seek to eliminate the need for women computers and to focus their attention on invention and exploring the unknown. Another early achievement of Campbell’s came in his novel Islands of Space (serialized in 1930 and published as a novel in 1956). His protagonists develop a hyperspace drive—credited with being the first mention of hyperspace in fiction. The people of Negra (with a name frighteningly close to the epithet used for African Americans when spoken with a southern accent) have been thwarted in their attempt to steal Earth’s sun in Campbell’s previous novel, and the protagonists Arcot, Wade, and Morey decide to use the technology they invented to travel to other stars. They learn that the Negrans have changed their fate by moving their planet so that it orbits around a new star, from which the trio quickly retreats, and then travel on to other planets to encounter civilizations that are different, and sometimes crumbling. The strong man Torlos is a member of one of the species the trio encounters. They are amazed by his strength when he bends a crowbar. It turns out that his bones are made of iron, but one of the shipmates is not convinced that such a thing is possible. Arcot explains patiently: “How can stone grow?” countered Arcot. “That’s what your bones are, essentially—calcium phosphate rock! It’s just a matter of different body chemistry. Their body fluids are probably alkaline, and iron won’t rust in an alkaline solution.” (1956, p. 133)

This discussion is notable in several respects. Campbell, in 1930, is fascinated by an alien being with a unique biology that provides superior capabilities, an idea that will soon be used superhero fiction. After some prototyping in fan publications, DC Comics’s Superman would appear in 1938. Armengol (2013) offers an interesting reading of this character type in the context of masculinity: Superman stories are based on a dichotomy between an intellectual worker, a “wimpy bespectacled

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newspaper reporter,” and an “alluring muscular hero” (p. 34). Armengol identifies Superman as a sort of “remasculinization,” where the business-­ class men reasserted their virility in the threatening economic environment of the Great Depression. Success in the office no longer translated into social success. For people failing to demonstrate their manhood in the marketplace of work, Superman’s ability to transform himself from meek employee into the protector of the planet was appealing. Campbell’s heroes do not wear outlandish capes, but the concept of remasculinization is a helpful way of understanding his characters. Seemingly ordinary, they can easily deploy their superhuman abilities—mental and physical—when faced with a challenge. Campbell, who was finding discomfort in the university world and soon would be underemployed in the Great Depression, reflects this obvious escape. Another interesting aspect of the Torlos character is that he shows Campbell’s commitment to polygenism. As described in Chap. 2, some science fiction authors repurposed this theory of racialization in their stories, suggesting that humanity was widespread (either through migration or through spontaneous generation) and that life in each environment, over successive generations, would result in minute mutations that would result in distinct populations over time. The description of Torlos as a product of parallel evolution represents this kind of neo-Lamarckian thinking. It is too simplistic to say that all of the characters in Campbell’s fiction are white men; it is also important to see how Campbell’s fiction reflects outdated notions of racialization. In his novel The Mightiest Machine (serialized in AST in 1934–1935 and published as a paperback novel in 1947), the human race has spread to different planets in the solar system. The main character is Aarn Munro, who is born on Jupiter. This fact has provided him with a unique birthright: he is short in height but wide in stature, giving him supernatural strength. Here and elsewhere for Campbell, environmental conditioning takes on a power to transform the basic template for a humanoid organism that is then passed on as genetic inheritance. This is no different from the neo-Lamarckian theory of racial differentiation that underwrote the stages of civilization theory and social Darwinism. As with Smith’s Skylark and the Cosmos serial described in Chap. 2, Campbell extrapolates racial theories to support his fiction in other ways

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that might not immediately be obvious. Munro’s superior intellect leads him to develop a device that allows him to travel to other stars. Munro and his friends coincidentally find their way to a Solar System where races who once had contact with Earth (the Tefflans and the Muans) are engaged in a war with the intent to eradicate the other. The Tefflans, who used to live below the surface, resemble caricatures of the devil. One of the colonists speculates that some had been left behind and lost their civilization as they mingled with the base humanoids of Earth. Some landed in Europe, where they fought with a race of ogres and eventually won, creating a new bloodline. Others landed in Africa, which the story suggests was the home of unintelligent natives. Although the colonists are able to raise the intelligence of the races in Egypt, in doing so their “blood” is so “overcome” that civilization there vanishes. In similar cases around the globe, “when the blood of the old Ma-jhay-anhu was diluted, it won for a time, and then died. … [O]nly the undiluted Ma-jhay-anhu blood lived to reach a civilization once more that endured fairly well,” and this race has come across the stars to help them in their battle (2008, pp. 84–5). In this novel, Campbell attempts to explain technological differences on the planet Earth with an imaginary infusion of alien “blood” into the aboriginal species of Earth. The theory here offers a new take on racist thinking, trying to show how human races could seem similar but remain biologically distinct. Campbell suggests that there used to be many hominid species on Earth. These were quite different until being unified by alien mating; only peoples that managed to maintain a high degree of alien blood were able to maintain their civilized character, and those groups that today seem backward result from aliens mating with species that were so savage that the alien traits did not survive. This kind of pseudoscience is comforting to the racist, because the racial differences are inviolable—the original source of civilizing power is long gone, and the races of Earth either can choose to spread their racial inheritance, risking the dilution of their stock, or can resist mating with races that might endanger any chance Earth has of maintaining civilization. This discussion of race displays an alarming fear of miscegenation and a reaffirmation of polygenism long after most scientists abandoned these concepts.

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These stories propelled Campbell to fame. Despite Campbell’s success as an author, his personal life was in disarray, causing him to resign from MIT and continue his education at Duke University. The often-repeated story about Campbell was that a general college requirement caused a detour in his studies. According to the university bulletin, MIT is similar to many other technical institutes, where students need to demonstrate proficiency in foreign languages such as French and German in order to read technical reports from those countries. The bulletin also states that the number of physics majors may be winnowed to as few as twelve students after the second year. Many report that Campbell’s failure in German caused him to leave the university, which he did after the exam period in 1931. Moskowitz (1974) points out that Campbell also had trouble graduating from high school, and the MIT bulletin does not note any requirement for a high school diploma. What is more, Campbell’s habit at MIT was one of “straightening out instructors” (p. 31). This kind of obnoxious behavior would not have endeared him to the faculty. Bleiler (1982) wonders if the cause of Campbell’s academic trouble was that he wanted to write science fiction more than study German (p. 152). Del Rey is quick to point out that his difficulty was not with math or science, but German (1979, p. 48). In the summer of 1931, after he left MIT, Campbell married Doña Stuart, whom he met when she was in high school in Waltham, MA. At this time, he also took a two-month tour of Europe, which he later described as some sort of scientific expedition. Instead of saying that it provided him with needed release or gave him context for his own life, he talks about as if it were some sort of anthropological mission, a field far removed from physics. Supposedly he was “searching for social patterns” and that in a few months he was able to “absorb at least two years’ worth of data” (Nevala-Lee, 2018). These reallife disruptions are nowhere to be found in Campbell’s fiction; his narrators and characters not only demonstrate a cool demeanor when facing intergalactic menaces, but their personal lives or unaccomplished goals never trouble them. If only Campbell had been honest enough to include these kinds of challenges in his fiction, inspiring his readers to persevere against personal and professional difficulties. This biographical information serves as a check on the intentional fallacy. The bravado of Campbell’s characters and the confidence of his narrators are fictional devices, not

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some sort of insight into his own personality. As such, they attest to what he and his readers hoped scientific and technical professionals would experience: freedom from error, emotions, and the social world.

4.2 Homosocial Technical Teams Presumably, the feedback Campbell received from his first stories and his interest in differentiating himself from Smith led him to refine his writing. The team of Arcot and Morey, soon joined by Wade, a former pirate, and draftsman Fuller always in the background, represents a new standard for super-science stories. The basis of these stories—the release of terrible energies from nature that overwhelm all opposition no behalf of a globalized Earth—is not different from his earlier fiction, nor is the supposition that a few young men of the new generation are representatives of a new breed of humans. Campbell’s intensification of the homosocial bonds and the incremental progress that conflicts with outsiders brings show his brand of space opera to be consonant with social science at the start of the twentieth century. Campbell’s space operas of 1930—Piracy Preferred, the Black Star Passes, and Solarite—are remarkable for changes in setting, starting with a problem and resolution first on Earth, then in the solar system, and finally in a different star system. New developments in each story allow the protagonists to further their potential. Despite the changing setting, the plot arcs of the stories are remarkably similar. In each, before the complication, the heroes have been engaged in well-funded scientific exploration based on their own interests in a throwback to nineteenth-­ century ideals and, to be sure, Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+. The complication in each story demands that the heroes step away from their disinterested pursuits and make practical use of their scientific knowledge. The heroes learn to better release the forces of nature, harnessing tremendous energy that they use against their adversaries. The resolution of all three plots comes after Smith-esque epic battles where their superior knowledge gives the heroes a tremendous tactical advantage. The denouement of each story is careful to point out that the losses in life were offset by the social gains; the losses humanity suffers in the space

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opera, according to the stories, are justifiable because of the advances they will provide for civilization. The strong homosocial ties between the protagonists and the veneration of Arcot and Morey’s fathers seem strange in comparison to the works of Gernsback and Smith. This is especially true when taking into consideration the repeated biographical comments that Campbell had a strained relationship with his father, an electrical engineer who worked for New Jersey Bell Telephone. Arcot and Morey’s fathers embody two poles of Campbell’s life—business and science—but offer the young men amity and support. In Campbell’s stories, the fathers check in and confirm their sons’ findings, but they do not interfere. The fathers validate their sons’ status as the next stage of evolution. The best way to understand these patriarchal relationships may be in the context of the fiction series by author and publisher Edward L. Stratemeyer, who was responsible for such long-lasting, ghost-written series as the Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, and The Hardy Boys. It seems as if Campbell took the Gernsback business model of providing a new kind of fiction seriously, and brought in elements from successful series of books for boys. The Arcot and Morey series starts out as similar to what Cornelius (2012) calls a dyadic boys’ series, with Arcot and Morey being best friends. As Corenelius points out, the pairs in boys’ series books resemble the triangulation described in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (2015). Instead of negotiating through a silenced woman, though, the boys in these series negotiate their homosocial bonds through technology. Motorcycles, cameras, and ray guns serve the same mediating role as Guinevere does for Arthur and Lancelot. The boys in these stories share admiration for their teammates’ ability to master the phallic power of their devices (p. 190). The connection between Campbell’s fiction and the boys’ series is both trivial and profound. For instance, Corenelius notes, “admiring the male form” is an important part of these books (p. 194). In Campbell’s stories, men admire each other’s musculature; Waterson’s 6′2″ frame was described as being almost too large to fit through the portal, and in Piracy Preferred the narrator comes out to directly state that height and intelligence are correlated. More profoundly, technology in the boys’ series books is not a symbol for masculinity; it is a feminine entity that must be mastered by masculinity. Mastery of technology allows the characters to refine their sense of self

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and find a “socially acceptable” way of expressing their masculinity (p. 197). Campbell’s stories are almost entirely devoid of women, and the characters delight in demonstrating their inventions and their mastery of tools to each other. Campbell does not admit to reading boys’ series books, but considering how Campbell builds on the homosocial world of the boys’ series is productive. One of Campbell’s innovations is to imagine men in the role that had been occupied by teenagers. Joe and Frank Hardy, when they were first imagined, were fifteen and sixteen. In 1930, Campbell was a college student, and his classmates and potential readers were, presumably, young men familiar with boys’ series books. The protagonists in his stories, always adults, have finished their studies and have entered the world of work, albeit a fantasy world where they can follow their intellectual curiosity. In this way, Campbell demonstrates an expansion of theories of masculinity formulated at the start of the twentieth century. As described in Chap. 1, Roosevelt supported vigorous activity by men. Opposed to coeducation, he praised G. Stanley Hall’s theories about manhood. Hall, a founder of the recapitulation theory, published his book Adolescence in the same year that Gernsback emigrated to the United States. Hall (1894a) seeks to explain the connection between education and physiology. In puberty, he writes, “all is solvent, plastic, vulnerable and formative.” In a “composite” nation like the United States, there are many strands of inheritance that could result in “arrested development,” and a separate danger results if one of the strands gains control (pp. 154–5). Asserting that the greatness of civilization can be measured by its education for adolescents, Hall calls for new thinking in education. In a young person, the “rapidly forming new tissue must be irrigated with blood … young men are by nature orgiastic and must have excitement.” If educators do not provide excitement through intellectual enthusiasm, young men will find it on their own “in the sphere of drink or sex, or both.” Civilization must provide young men an opportunity to begin a “transcendental supernatural cult” that helps them realize that duty is a divine virtue. This cannot be solely a rationalist, logical thinking about duty—one must also provide passion toward duty because most of life is “instinctual and emotional” (p. 156). At a time when biological recapitulation and attendant theories were falling into disrepute, people like Hall worked to find a new home for them in a theory of manhood.

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Later ideas of Hall (1905) help to explain science fiction’s outreach to young men and, as well, show the connections the audience imagined among whiteness, civilization, and technology. Hall writes that misbehaving (white) boys are on a developmental path to civilized men. Reading frontier adventure stories, in this theory, is like a vaccination for boys in puberty, providing a path to white manhood. They learn to turn their wild play into “athleticism” and other activities that encourage mutual support (pp. 398–9). In order to pass through this stage successfully and assume the mantle of his supposed racial superiority, a young man must first act in savage ways. Then he learns to channel his emotions into appropriate manly passions: love of justice, reverence for logical analysis, perseverance to complete difficult tasks. The summary characterization of many men in science fiction includes youthful athletic accomplishments that then are transformed into mission-centric passion in accordance with this theory. Tests for adolescents and young men that are so often seen in science fiction are an effort to depict a rite of passage, with the result that a person can utilize primal urges to reach higher states of civilization, what Hall calls “super-men.” Hall does not advocate that men should become devoid of emotion or that they will eliminate all traces of savagery. Pubescent, wild emotions for teenage men were an important transition point; they must learn to channel their sexuality through education in order to be reborn, a “moment in his physical development when the individual was born again as a full-fledged member of his race” (Bederman, 1995, p. 103). In this way, puberty links a savage ancestry to a man’s future as a potential father, leader, and generator of civilization. At the turn of the twentieth century, Hall (1894b) asserts that evolution has shown that teachers are the primary agents “in the march of progress.” Supermen will result, he says, when individuals mature “to a more complete maturity, physically, mentally, and, above all, morally.” This notion, which exhibits traces of neo-Lamarckian thinking, suggests to Hall that many people are unable to reach the final stages of mental growth, meaning that they will not embody “full physical manhood” that he believes was an ideal from ancient Greek to modern German education (p. 85). Science fiction authors add Hall’s thinking to Roosevelt’s, supposing that individual white men must navigate a perilous path to manhood or risk

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losing the prerogatives of what they assumed to be his inborn evolutionary status, even if the scientific basis for the belief in acquired characteristics was waning. A popular boys’ book series, Young Engineers, brought together these contradictions. Starting in 1912 with Young Engineers in Colorado, five books were spun off from a successful boys’ series by H. Irving Hancock. Tom Reade and Harry Hazelton, two protagonists from earlier series, did not have enough money to obtain technical training in college but were attracted to the “great constructive work that is done by the big-minded, resourceful American civil engineer of today.” The duo gets jobs as “cub engineers” with an engineering company, S. B. & L., that is building a railroad. The members of the all-male team they join have advanced training and experience, but they agree to give the boys a try without any condescension. The book is remarkable for the way it suggests the two white teenagers without formal training can simply use instincts to manage a railway project. They defeat a nefarious duo, a local (degraded, “old breed”) man and a corporate spy working together to commit fraud and sabotage the project. To get the surveying and design work done more quickly, they contact a professor at a local university, who helps them recruit a team of “thirty healthy, joyous young students of engineering.” The professor and the president of S. B. & L. are amazed at the teenaged protagonists’ aptitudes for leadership and happily turn over responsibility for the engineering to them. The young Reade remains cool and calm, almost to the point of idleness, throughout his trials, even when he engages in a gun battle. In this way, he is a paragon of the manly virtues espoused by Roosevelt and Hall. Young Engineers in Colorado foreshadowed the way that some science fiction authors, like Campbell, deployed theories of gender, race, and civilization to create fictional settings and inform their plots. Surely, one could excuse the books for not including women by saying the publisher sought a market of young men and it was impossible for young women to break out of the social norms at the start of the century. However, this simply demonstrates how thoroughly the new theory of masculine whiteness had become naturalized. Authors often choose settings that reinforce the assumptions of their audiences. The choice of placing the young men “in the field” in a conflict between an earlier stage of humanity and the

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tools to bring about the next phase shows how this fiction is imbricated in the ideology of manly civilization. The young men’s ability to defeat corruption, physical threats, and the incredulity of more experienced engineers is in line with the Hall theory of adolescent development. At the same time, the choice of this setting and assumptions about the path the boys must take leaves no place for women. In the gender ideology that suffuses this story, the only place for women would be in the cities, which could harm men with overcivilization. The wilderness is the place where their development will come to a successful resolution. It is notable that the protagonists demonstrate not even a hint of romantic interest; all one can see is how they have directed their passions into completing their mission and defending the integrity of the enterprise. Due to this, they are paragons of white civilization. The young, all-male super scientists in Campbell’s early fiction will have a lasting impact on many writers’ conception of the connection between manly scientific rigor and the future of (white) civilization. Because of Campbell’s reputation as a discontent later in his life, an understanding of his early fiction can be hindered. His work squarely fits into mainstream ideas about manliness and civilization, directly connecting the burgeoning field of science fiction to the discourse about adolescents, who will be the backbone of a new global civilization. Campbell’s “Piracy Preferred” is set in the year 2126, precisely 200 years after the birth of AMZ. It begins with the ingenious robbery of a transcontinental shipment headed to San Francisco: all of the security protocols were bypassed, and the crew was incapacitated. However, the criminal behind the theft worked hard to ensure the physical safety of the people involved. In a letter, he describes how to revive the crew, and he compensates the company by leaving an equivalent amount of preferred stock certificates in his new venture, Piracy, Inc. The story then moves to a comfortable New York apartment to introduce the protagonists, William Morey and Richard Arcot. They are meant to be earnest technical geniuses, but when we first see them, they might as well be Oscar Wilde’s Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff: they have just enjoyed a game of tennis and now are lounging in their bachelor’s pad on the thirty-ninth floor, smoking their pipes. As with the remasculinization concept seen in the analysis, though, any threat of overcivilization is eliminated when their intellects are tested by villains.

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From an outsider’s point of view, the two seem similar: both are college-­ educated, middle-class, white Anglo-Saxons with Protestant given names. Even so, the narrator strives to explain to us that they are separate halves that complement each other. The narrator’s gaze passes over their bodies, noticing that Morey is four inches taller than his friend, but goes on to say that Arcot has the greater mental power. Morey has a logical mind that can transform abstract thought into mathematical formulae, but Arcot has an intuitive talent to quickly “grasp the broad details of a problem and get the general method of a solution developed.” His deductive mental abilities are combined with the ability to “see practical uses for things” (p. 232). Arcot, the son of a famous physicist, has invented a new kind of calculus, and like Waterson (and Newton, for that matter), this new math has led to profound, industry-changing inventions. Morey’s father is president of Transcontinental Airways Corporation and the protagonists’ nominal boss. Arcot’s deductive mind is necessary for the characters to complete their tasks. When fighting the Pirate, he observes the limitations of Wade’s devices, rapidly deduces their inner working, and creates an improved device. He is somewhat humble about his quickness; he tells his team that they might marvel at the “greatness of the genius” that can construct an apparatus in one day, but in fact his scientific dilettantism meant that he had been working on related ideas for some time (p. 239). In other words, it was not until his research had some sort of practical purpose that he had a reason to bring it to a conclusion. Social cohesion is an important part of boys’ series books, and Campbell mimics it. His characters are grown counterparts to the young protagonists of boys’ series who have developed a strong social bond: “these two were boon companions,” the narrator tells us. “They worked, played, lived and thought together” (p. 232). An important part of the boys’ series plots is challenges to the team by outsiders. There are two other members of the team who are potential challengers, but Arcot and Morey deftly avoid any difficulties in their relationship. The most obvious challenger is the Pirate, who could potentially disrupt the economics of their scientific dilettantism. What is strange about the team’s accommodation of Wade is how Campbell’s vision of science fiction does not permit a human with an elite technical imagination to remain an adversary. After defeating Wade with his own tools, in the 1930 magazine publication,

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Arcot simply offers Wade a job, suggesting that it would be a good business decision to have all the smartest minds working on one team. Their work is essential to the furtherance of civilization. In “Piracy,” for instance, Arcot explains his hope that his invention will forestall the collapse of civilization. He supposes that within two centuries, civilization will be “doomed” by the shortage of metals. He says that “history shows” that many civilizations’ supply failures provide an opportunity for “invading hordes of barbarians” with better equipment to take over (p. 248). He hopes his device will allow mining operations to be developed on the planets and other objects in the solar system, a sentiment that he carries forward into the sequel, “Solarite.” In “Solarite,” the story suggests that Wade had been suffering from a blood clot that gave him a tendency toward “kleptomaniacy,” which was easily cured by a skilled surgeon. The 1953 book version eliminates this detail and adds a new scene to the denouement of “Piracy Preferred” that shows Campbell’s increasing attention to psychology. In the book publication, Arcot has a meeting with Morey’s father about the possibility of hiring pirate Wade. Referring to a “psychomedical report,” he tells the boss that Wade has “two different identities dancing around in one body.” The elder Morey asks for Arcot’s opinion because he knows that Arcot has grown up at a time when psychomedical treatments are more common, and Arcot points out that luminaries like Newton and Faraday had breakdowns but recovered to do important work. The story’s acceptance of nonnormative psychologies could be kind, but here the suggestion is that anyone who works against the dominant social order has a mental defect that should be corrected with medicine. Although someone might bristle at the idea that Campbell is proposing mind control, it is clear here and from his editorial vision that he imagines that the natural state for all Anglo-Saxon men is to cooperate for the betterment of civilization. Campbell suggests that antagonism among white humans is an easily curable physical defect, whereas conflict with species from outside of Earth derives from their depravity. In “Solarite,” the people of Lanor and Kaxor cheat and steal from each other due to jealousy and the lust for power, and there is no hope for rectification. In the book revision of these stories, Campbell makes a few other changes to reflect new ideas; for a while after Pluto was discovered, it was

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considered a planet, and Campbell dutifully changes his comments to say there are nine planets. Similarly, when he was writing there were ninety-­ two elements, but at the time of the book publication more had been discovered, with the prospect of even more to come, so he simply writes “more than 92.” Some details, however, do not change. After settling on the name Solarite for the ship, Arcot wonders about the ceremony to give it a name. “We can’t have a pretty girl christen this ship, that’s sure. A flying bachelor’s apartment christened by a mere woman? We will have the foreman of the works do that” (1930d, pp. 712–3). Despite his promotion of C. L. Moore’s writing (see Chap. 6), and a friendship with Judith Merril (Chap. 7), in his later life Campbell was not alarmed by his character who sees women as a threat to the homosocial order on board the ship enough to edit this passage. Campbell’s early fiction offers ample evidence of the social construction of theories of civilization and the limitations on who could work in science and engineering. He cannot be credited for inventing the definition of the ideal adolescent as part of white masculine civilization. He does, however, depict how this ideal was used to police the conduct of young men in single-sex educational environments so they could go on for careers in science and engineering. Civilization came from the steady effort of white men, thus white men must work steadily to protect civilization. Given Campbell’s trouble finishing his undergraduate education, he was not a paragon of the ideals he promoted. Nevertheless, his work epitomizes the advanced development of this ideal in the middle of the twentieth century. His young men are ready to start their careers, eager to use their superior intellects to quickly invent and advance the cause of civilization, never coming across a problem they cannot solve though deduction. They are capable of doing so because they have sublimated their emotions into manly passions and severed themselves from the distractions of the home world. Their remasculinization as super-science heroes, though, hides an uncomfortable truth: they are nearly indistinguishable from their work. Why was this narrow definition of what it was to be a man so popular, not only in Campbell’s writing but in the ideal technical worker in the midst of the Great Depression and thereafter? Galison and Hevly (1992) point out that the New Deal saw the first large-scale federal investments in innovation, which would build to big

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science, a partnership among universities, industry, and government in World War II. This transformation would demand a significant increase in the number of interchangeable professionals who would work long hours on narrowly defined projects. Gernsback had resisted the loss of nineteenth-century ideal of the disinterested amateur, but the popularity of Campbell’s fiction shows how the theme of meritorious men on a mission, which aided the large-scale projects that would come to dominate innovation, had developed into what seemed to be a natural definition of the technical worker.

4.3 From Fandom and Pseudonyms to “The Presence” Campbell’s fan credentials, including his contribution to Cosmos (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.5), his letters, and his fiction, took him on a path from university studies to a professional role in the genre. His persona as an authoritative voice in science, partly deserved, helped to cement his reputation. However, Campbell would champion a new kind of fiction, a more thoughtful brand of story that set the direction toward a different kind of fiction in the 1960s. In 1934, at the time when he was wrapping up his second attempt to obtain an undergraduate career, this time at Duke University, Campbell started to use a pseudonym, Don A. Stuart. Stuart is the family name of his first wife; her given name, Doña, became the first name and middle initial of his new persona. In other words, this is something of a drag name. Many have said that the planet-smashing epics of good and evil under his legal name were so popular that he did not want to dilute the reputation of that persona, so in 1934 he adopted another name for a different kind of story. Others point out that the use of pseudonyms in the pulps was a method that authors used that allowed them to publish multiple stories in the same issue; the repetition of the same name on the masthead would have caused magazines to seem as if they lacked depth. None of these ideas, though, explain why Campbell would take his wife’s name for a new kind of story at a time when pulp adventure plots were

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still at their height. The use of a female pseudonym is not unique to Campbell; David Keller had published a slew of stories as Amy Worth. Yet as Keller used the Worth persona to parody a woman’s point of view, the Don A. Stuart stories take an increasing interest in the human element and a wistful setting related to the loss of humanity. The invention of Don A. Stuart came a time of substantial personal turmoil for Campbell. Newly married, he began to study at Duke University in the 1932–1933 school year, again with a major in physics. His wife, according to Nevala-Lee (2018), disapproved of his writing in general and wished for him to pursue a career as a scientific researcher. That being said, Nevala-Lee continues, his wife represented an artistic and theatrical personality that Campbell found appealing, which accounts for some of the aspects of the Stuart persona. When their marriage was new, she would sit at his feet “in adoring puppy dog style, while he discoursed on the problems of the universe.” As pointed out by Nevala-Lee, Campbell came into the orbit of parapsychologist researcher Joseph B. Rhine when he arrived at Duke. When tested with the Zener cards (circle, cross, wavy lines, star, etc.), Campbell unfortunately did not seem to possess any capacity for ESP. During his last year at Duke, Campbell took no courses in the sciences, instead choosing electives in English, philosophy, and religion. Nevala-Lee’s assessment is that “it looked for all the world like the schedule of a student who was questioning his priorities.” Thereafter, he would use his wife’s name for a new type of story that the brash engineering student could not author. Enthusiasm seemed to drain out of Campbell’s fiction after he left MIT, even before writing as Stuart. The 1932 AMZ story “The Last Evolution” is remarkable in that it breaks one of Campbell’s later dicta— that humans be superior in a science fiction story—but it also demonstrates some literary cleverness. The title of the story leads a reader to trust the first-person narrator’s position as “the last of my type,” an individual who tells the story of humanity’s progress into the twenty-sixth century. A globalized, uniform humanity developed machines with capabilities needed for sentience—the ear, then the eye, and then the brain. Machines had intelligence, but humans had an “illogical, brilliant imagination.” Then, the Outsiders attack (p. 414). Humanity’s devices create a machine of pure thought, which is capable of repelling the alien invasion. In the

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denouement of the story, though, readers learn that the narrator is F-2, one of the machines who made the ultimate intelligence. Just as humanity has vanished, so too will F-2, given its robot body is susceptible to material degradation. The narrator reaches out to the readers at the end of the story, telling them that the story has been sent back in time to change their beliefs. This is a bewildering story for someone accustomed to reading the Arcot, Morey, and Wade space operas. The publishing field was also experiencing some turmoil in the 1930s. Gernsback’s long-term experimentation with publishing had finally found the right formula for the mass market. Even though he lost control of AMZ in 1929, it continued publication with an issue edited by T. O’Connor Sloane appearing in May. Like a hydra, Gernsback’s Science Wonder Stories appeared in June and Air Wonder Stories in July of the same year. Gernsback (1930), in the first editorial for Science Wonder Stories, states that his magazines are discussed by inventors and scientists, and teachers insist that their students read them because “they widen the young man’s horizon, as nothing else can.” The stories he publishes are “clean”—they reject the “vicious and debasing sex story”—and they appeal only to the imagination; his stories are vetted by a panel of authorities before being published, so that his readers will not be misled by distorted facts. “It is the policy of Science Wonder Stories 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” (p. 5). In addition to reaffirming his dedication to scientific accuracy, such as it was, Gernsback also acknowledges the questionable company pulp magazines kept on the newsstands and affirmed his magazines’ role in a healthful development of young minds a la Hall. With the proliferation of science fiction pulps, it was unsurprising that others took notice. In January 1930, a new science fiction magazine— Astounding Stories of Super Science (AST)—was available from the pulp publisher Clayton Magazines, which was well-established in western adventure and detective pulps. Harry Bates, who had no credentials in science fiction but had been editing westerns for the company, led the new magazine. He pledged that the magazine would “anticipate the super-scientific achievements of To-morrow” with stories that are “strictly accurate in their science” and also “dramatically and thrillingly told”

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(1930, p. 7). Although the marketing material sought to differentiate these titles, the reborn AMZ and the new AST were not far from what Gernsback had been offering; AST even included stories by Gernsback regulars like Murray Leinster, Miles J. Breuer, M.D., and Victor Rousseau. Both titles showed a decreasing amount of deep technical detail. This may have seemed a necessary sacrifice for publishers in search of larger audiences, but it was a trend that Gernsback had already initiated. Without the technical details, hails to the masculinist personality become only more apparent. Bates tells the story of AST’s origin this way: William Clayton, the publisher, would receive a proof of each magazine’s cover monthly in his office. At the time, he was publishing thirteen magazines, and his printers cut the covers from rectangular sheets of paper. “This meant that month after month three of the sixteen places would stare empty at Clayton, in effect reproving him for not having three more magazines so that they need not be empty” (Rogers, 1964, p. ix, emphasis in original). Bates, thinking of AST, wanted to edit a magazine of speculative fiction. He declines to title the magazine “science fiction” because “as a phrase hardly anyone had ever seen or heard it (Amazing preferring the horrible ‘scientifiction’).” In the end, he settles for Astounding Stories of Super-Science (Rogers, xi). Within a year, it had reached a higher circulation than AMZ (Goodstone, 1970, p. 201). Clayton, who had earned his first money with a “tame girlie magazine,” by this time had built a line of adventure titles and was briefly the richest publisher of the pulps. AST was an afterthought born of market excess, a cousin to the cheap thrills of girlie magazines and adventure stories. Soon after the appearance of AST, a market report appeared regarding the “pseudo-scientific field,” noting that AST was paying a higher rate for science fiction than ever before. In addition to the dedicated titles, pulps like Argosy and Blue Book were publishing it with greater regularity (Ashley, 2004, pp. 162–3). After two years of regular publication, though, issues of AST appeared sporadically—just four issues in the fifteen months between July 1932 and September 1933—and Clayton was facing bankruptcy. Eventually his titles were put up for auction and acquired by Street & Smith Publications, the major pulp publisher that had invented the idea of diverse holdings of specialized pulp magazines

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(Goulart, 1972, p. 13; see also Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1). A new issue of AST appeared in October 1933. F. Orlin Tremaine, formerly a Clayton editor, took control from Bates (Ashley, p. 204). As described in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.1, Street & Smith had more than thirty years’ experience publishing pulps at this time. Although Gernsback had the corner (supposedly) on scientific accuracy, Street & Smith if nothing else was a better business operation. Rates were higher, payment prompter. It is worth noting, then, that the first time a Don A. Stuart story appeared was in the November 1934 AST with “Twilight.” Nevala-Lee (2018) points out that Campbell had spent a long time writing it, but he had been unable to find someone to publish it. It was Tremaine, who had ”no particular interest in science fiction,” who picked it up. “Twilight” is characteristic of the less enthusiastic, moody tales that reject the technological boosterism of the Gernsback era at about the same time as C. L. Moore (discussed in Chap. 6) started writing for WT, with her first Northwest Smith story appearing in 1933. Moore’s first story in AST appears in the October 1934 issue, one month before Campbell’s, showing how a more wistful tone was appreciated by the new editors. The coincidence between the appearance of the two is remarkable. It seems that Moore’s stories were an essential part of Campbell’s transformation. It is undeniable that Moore’s aesthetic and themes were important for the golden age and beyond, and she was important to Campbell when he became editor of AST. Strange as it might be, Campbell seems to have enjoyed this kind of story as a sort of parallel track in his creative life. Even so, “Twilight” may not have been loved by readers. Moskowitz (1974) says it was “so different in approach” that it would “disorient” them. The main character, Ares Sen Kenlin, is described as an extraordinarily handsome white man who speaks with a beautiful voice. It turns out that his father was a genetic engineer and Kenlin, a scientist who lived in the year 3059, was the first of a new race he created. Caught in a spatial anomaly, Kenlin finds himself seven million years in the future, confronting the final evolution of his race. In this far future, machines have provided humans everything they want. Kenlin explores gigantic cities that seem to have few inhabitants (Fig. 4.2). Similar to Clare Winger Harris’s “Miracle of the Lily” (described in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3), humanity had eliminated all threats

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Fig. 4.2  Detail of an illustration that accompanied John W. Campbell’s “Twilight” in the November 1934 AST. The caption repeats the words of Ares Sen Kenlin, shown lower left: “Then I saw the city of perfect machines” (p. 44)

over the millennia. There is a similarity to Harris’s wistful setting. The style is poetic with sentence fragments: The great, metal city rising straight-walled to the human city above, broken by spires and towers and great trees with scented blossoms. The slivery-rose glow in the paradise of gardens above. And all the great city-structure throbbing and humming to the steady, gentle beat of perfect, deathless machines built more than three million years before—and never touched

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since that time by human hands. And they go on. The dead city. … [The builders left behind men who] wander through the vast cities their ancestors built, knowing less of it than the machines themselves. (1934, p. 58)

For Campbell, the elimination of biodiversity brings an end to human history. Without a struggle for existence, a social Darwinist like Campbell believes, there is no possibility for existence. The future humans had great minds, but are listless and lonely; future humans have “lost the instinct of curiosity” (p. 55). Kenlin becomes anxious to return to his own time, and the future humans easily help him with the intricate calculations. However, Kenlin points out, they only do so when asked. He learns that some of the machines on the planet could truly think, but they had been turned off. He orders the machines to create a curiosity device. He then tries to return to his own time, but misses his mark, landing in the reader’s present. In this way, “Twilight” has a curious frame narration. The story of Kenlin is told by a contemporary of the readers, Jim Bendell. Bendell is said to be selling real estate but a reader with attention to the history of white manly civilization will realize that Bendell is selling “homesteading plots” in Nevada: in other words, land acquired by the dispossession of indigenous tribes. This is a curious decision for a writer in 1934. In June of that year, the U.S. legislature passed the Indian Reorganization Act, which slowed the forced assimilation of native peoples. (Recall that Campbell’s first university, MIT, was one of the original beneficiaries of the land grant legislation signed by President Lincoln in 1862.) The 1934 legislation delayed the creation of individual parcels of land, which had been an attack on the tribes’ communal culture. In Nevada, tribes as a group had been able to maintain their cultural hegemony to a certain extent, but Bendell’s work suggests that they were unsuccessful. The setting of the frame narration, it seems, is a time when resettlement has resumed. Bendell sells the property and speaks about “the beautiful country,” but he himself never leaves the city (p. 46). In this way, the story suggests a lineal relationship between Bendell, Kenlin, and the humans at the twilight of the race. The white race’s elimination of threats was, in the space of 1000 years, relatively successful. Yet the love of cities and the veneration of machine precision, over a period of seven million

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years, destroyed everything that made humanity great. The wistfulness of this story is then a product of overcivilization. Once the conflicts that had made characters like Arcot, Morey, and Wade great had been removed, the story suggests, the decline of humanity began. In addition to Harris, this story of course resembles H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, where cultural differences have transformed humanity into two separate groups: the brutish Morlock and the ethereal Elloi. Campbell adopts their familiar, elegiac tone. Unlike Harris and Wells, however, Campbell bases his story on the social Darwinist notion that competition and conflict lie behind great human accomplishments. Ongoing competition and racial animosity, in Campbell’s view, are essential generators of progress. The legend of this story, as reported by Algis Budrys, is that Campbell composed it in 1932 after reading a novel by C. E. Scoggins, The Red Gods Call. The novel ponders the idea of laborers at an architectural dig in South America. For Campbell, the image of “laborers grubbing out the dirt betrayed no sense of kinship with their jungled-over ancestral glories” (Silverberg, 1970, pp. 23–4). This notion of the precarious position of civilization, on a precipice that can be threatened by unfavorable conditions, is a favorite theme of white supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard, who feared the imminent destruction of the white race. A reader who is not conscious of these racial ideologies can certainly read this story and think of it as a monitory tale about the loss of human creativity caused by the worship of machines. What, though, is the alternative to the nightmare that ends this story? Embracing multicultural cities, rejecting conflict and competition, seem to be the stages that led to the extinction of human curiosity. If one feels remorse for the far-future destiny of humanity in a Stuart story, then one has bought into the social Darwinist theory that racial violence and lusty competition are essential factors for the creation and the maintenance of the white race. Don A. Stuart was just one of the pseudonyms Campbell used in the 1930s. In July 1935, Karl van Campen, a Germanic version of his name, became a letter writer for AST (and also wrote one story). A series of science articles appeared in AST under a third pseudonym, Arthur McCann, starting in June 1937. As a result, much of what one read in AST was likely to be authored by Campbell. The March 1935 issue, for instance, contained “Blindness” by Stuart, an installment of “The Mightiest

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Machine” by Campbell, and a letter from van Campen. The June 1937 issue contained Stuart’s “Forgetfulness”; “Stress-Fluid,” a science article by McCann, and a letter to the editor signed John W. Campbell. This overrepresentation of Campbell’s writing presages the days when he became editor, reading and influencing every author who appeared in the magazine. Because of the tone of the pseudonymous stories by Stuart shortly before he became editor, some think that Campbell helped the genre make a transition to the social sciences. Writing as Don A. Stewart in a 1940 fan magazine, he encourages writers to think about the civilizations that contain their stories. His tone is demeaning from the start, with the title using the archaic second person singular “wouldst,” a form an adult would use to address children. To reinforce his dominance, he calls his readers “wee” ones. Historians, he claims, focus on kings and emperors, but archeologists seek artifacts that show “the details of life that gave the forgotten times reality.” Science fiction does not need “admirals of space navies,” Campbell concludes, “but the broken pots of another age” (Campbell, 2003, p. 462). As seen in earlier chapters, though, the fields of archeology and anthropology in general were not always used to support new thinking about humanity. Lewis Morgan, one of the first proponents of the stages of civilization theory, suggested that just a cursory examination of the tools a society uses could be used to extrapolate the status of all members. According to this type of thinking, there was no impact of learning or development; it can be difficult today to appreciate how strictly this thinking was applied. For Morgan and others invested in the stages of civilization theory, the evolution of a brain was tied to culture. Human groups that still sustained themselves by hunting—that is, indigenous Americans—had not started to pass through the stages of civilization. Biologically, then, it was assumed that they had hope of progress (Haller, 1971, p. 100). Franz Boas marked the beginning of a new paradigm similar to modern-day thinking, stating cultural differences were not tied to biology, and one should look instead to socioeconomic circumstances, history, and access to training, but this idea would not spread quickly. For every Boas who stated that all human beings regardless of race have the ability to use and transmit culture, there were one hundred others at the time Campbell

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was in school who felt they could extrapolate the distinct racial differences of a society by analyzing its artifacts. Although this concept was losing currency in scientific circles, Campbell demonstrates how it still had a hold on the popular imagination. “Who Goes There?” is the best known of the Stuart stories, published in the August 1938 AST. In part, this story is a horrifying adventure—as demonstrated by the 1982 film version by John Carpenter, The Thing— but it also undertakes a sociology of technology, as it investigates the interpersonal dynamics of the scientific expedition. Even as Campbell is expressing an interest in the social sciences, though, the most memorable element of these stories is the loss of humanity. It is remarkable that someone like Judith Merril (1966a) would later say she preferred Campbell’s space opera to his Stuart stories. She quotes a review of the London World Science Fiction Convention that says Campbell was at his best when he described the “pain or personal potential” of individual characters, which she says disappeared with the Stuart persona. Her own take on this is that, as science fiction gained a wide audience, Campbell could not claim to be a leader. It is true that he “narrowed from the vastness of space to the greater complexity of ‘sociological’ s-f with him presiding” (p. 380). Yet this interest in the cultural side of technology is not seen in the Stuart stories. Merril has made an important point. The Stuart stories exhibit the destruction of white masculinity from a force as inevitable and powerful as the movement of a tectonic plate. Instead of a struggle for individuality, readers experience a chill at its loss. As the Stuart persona developed, Campbell passed the language requirement at Duke University. He appears in a Duke commencement program in 1935, after about three years of study. A quick look at the commencement program reveals Campbell’s degree was a bachelor of arts (B.A.) and not a bachelor of science (B.Sc.). The university confirms his major was in physics, which can be considered a field of the liberal arts, but he does not appear in the university yearbook. Looking for employment during the Great Depression, Campbell tried to work as a salesperson (cars, exhaust fans, and gas heaters). His best career prospect, though, seemed to be writing. For six months in 1935, he worked for organic chemist Carleton Ellis writing technical literature. In June 1936, he wrote the first of a monthly astronomy series, which continued until November

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1937. By the time he published “Who Goes There?,” he had published a dozen-odd stories as Stuart. He was also one of the most respected writers of space opera with his stories of super science. Campbell’s nonfiction astronomy articles are worth reviewing briefly for the way they reveal his worldview as he transitioned into an editor. These articles contrast with Isabel Martin Lewis’s (described in Chap. 1). Martin was an observational astronomer, and she was careful to make reference to the profession when she writes. While reading her, one can imagine the tools and techniques being used to gather empirical evidence to test her deductions, and thus one sees the path to participating in astronomy as an observer on Earth. Campbell’s point of view is quite different. His tone astounds the reader with the majesty of the cosmos, personifying the planets and dramatizing the history of the universe without any human observer. Consider the breathless account of the Sun and a passing star, bringing out the matter that theoretically created the solar system: Each a million-mile ball of incredibly hot matter—nearing, nearing— flames leaping out that were to make worlds, whole solar systems—shrieking at each other with a roaring thunder whose mere vibrations of sound would have pulverized this planet—and passing. But this is the thing that paralyzes my thoughts: I cannot conceive that this thing, this blasting of flames that made worlds, the explosions that scattered giant planets over three billion miles of space—all that flaming catastrophe—took place, and was done not in more than three hours! (1937, p. 34, emphasis in original)

The fractured syntax reflects the narrator’s difficulty in comprehending the titanic forces at play. The reader is enthralled by an exciting drama but is not compelled to participate in astronomy in the same way that a reader of Martin might be. Campbell takes his readers to the planets with an engaging word portrait, cycling backward and forward in time. The contingency of this theory and the method to obtain the data to support it are missing from the account. Readers must sit quietly and listen to the superior intellect as the Solar System grows around them, inevitably, without any possibility for chance or unexpected outcomes. Even when

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Campbell describes history, he follows a series of deductions that flow inevitably from one to the next. There is no social world here, only the lineal progress of science. Eschewing the social world, Campbell states his interest in the inevitability of science directly in a letter to Asimov in 1956. Science transforms human history, but science does not have a purpose. “Science is like a glacier; its course is predictable, but there isn’t a hell of a lot we can do about it,” he writes. Science can predict outcomes of experiments and due to the influence of science on society, the future of humanity is predictable (Chapdelaine, 1993, p. 281–2). Later, he would write that a liberal education is imparting the sense that the world cannot change. Studying Latin and Greek classics, he says, is a lesson for students in a basic fact: “there are things in the Universe that cannot be changed by human opinion” (p. 302). This distrust in the world of culture and the promotion of a supposedly solid science is an interesting one, particularly in the twentieth century as it becomes clear that science is not separable from the social world. Campbell’s writing apprenticeships paid off in September 1937 when Tremaine, the editor of AST, offered him a job as assistant editor (Stableford, 1987, p. 48). AST, a magazine just seven years old, had already come to dominate the field thanks to the commercial footprint of Street & Smith. After just a few months, Campbell succeeded Tremaine after Tremaine was promoted to a higher position within the Street & Smith organization. Bleiler (1982) calls Campbell the first professional science fiction editor because he was the first person with experience in science fiction to take on a career as editor of science fiction; others who edited at the time were businesspeople, publishing executives, or young writers who were trying to earn a living until their fiction took off. In March 1938, after he became editor, Campbell changed the name to Astounding Science Fiction. In the following year, he published several new authors, including Robert A. Heinlein. Some like Asimov say that his July 1939 issue ushered in the golden age of science fiction with two new authors—Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt—but today one should add the story by C. L. Moore. At an early stage of his editorship, some readers already had a notion of how Campbell would keep a thumb on the scale when judging science

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fiction. In the 1930s, as documented by Moskowitz (1954), fans in the New York City area had a dream of bringing together scientific experimenters with the writers of science fiction, as well as the idea of reaching out to fandom from outside the tristate area. At these events, films of rocket experiments, special issues of zines with stories by famous writers, and internecine politics combined to make fan conventions a place where enlightenment might emerge. With the news that New York City would host the 1939 World’s Fair, the fan community dreamed of a convention that would gather fans from all over the world (or, at least, England and Canada). Donald Wollheim was appointed as chair of the steering committee. Within fandom, though, a debate began: “scientifiction,” as they still called it, was to some only a means to an end and not an end in itself. Writing should serve as a stimulus for learning more about the real world, not as a “pseudo-scientific refuge for persons either incapable of pursuing a technical career, or else too lazy to do so.” This faction called out people who had strayed away from the scientific life and decided to “dilly-dally with pulp writing, editing, and cartooning” (Moskowitz, 1954, pp. 84–5). Although this might not seem to apply to Campbell directly, further developments place Campbell on the wrong side of this debate. At a Philadelphia fan meeting in 1937, a challenge arose to mainstream science fiction, led by John B. Michel. Calling himself a “charter reader” of AST (1933, p. 956), Michel had made a prominent place for himself in the grassroots fan organizations of the New York City area. Michel was one of a group of science fiction fans who frequently wrote letters to the pulp magazines, which they called “prozines” (professional magazines) to contrast with their own amateur publications, known as fanzines. This group became antagonistic to Gernsback publications, which they saw as too idealistic. According to Gernsback, after trying to instigate insurrections in the Gernsback-sponsored Science Fiction League, Michel, Wollheim, and William S. Sykora were expelled for “spreading gross untruths and libelous slander” (1935, p. 496). A grain of salt must be added to this report; Wollheim had not been paid for a story Gernsback published in 1934, so he used the fan network to find out who else had not been paid to support a lawsuit, which he won. Michel penned a manifesto for the Philadelphia convention, “Mutation or Death,” but due to his discomfort speaking in public, Wollheim read

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it aloud. Michel’s manifesto of transformative science fiction and the power of the science fiction community became known as the basis of Michelism. Science fiction, as they presently knew it, was intellectually bankrupt. The discussion of science fiction as an end in itself was “throwing the bull,” but fans should aspire to a higher purpose suited to their superior imagination and ability. Science fiction should inspire fans to fight against this dull, unsatisfying world, this stupid, asininely organized system of ours which demands that a man brutalize and cynicize himself for the possession of a few dollars in a savage, barbarous, and utterly boring struggle to exist. … Science fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life. (qtd in Moskowitz, 1954, p. 118–9)

It would seem that the authors and readers of Campbell’s stories, especially as Don A. Stuart with a bleak vision of the future, would be allies of Michel. Campbell’s affiliation with a major publishing company, to be sure, did not help. Improving the modern world, though, was not Campbell’s goal—indeed, as would be shown in future years, Campbell deplored what he saw as a softening of the conditions that had produced the so-called white race. Eliminating competition and embracing cooperation would be causes of humanity’s demise, not something Campbell would embrace. Given that public sentiment was pointedly against communism at the time of the convention and had only increased by the time Moskowitz was preparing his manuscript in the early 1950s, Moskowitz goes to some pains to state that the proponents of this proposal were not strictly communist. Michel had joined the Young Communist League in 1935, recruited Pohl, and they and their colleagues in fandom aligned themselves with Popular Front communism without literally joining the party. Pohl (1978) reports that they wrote and published their manifesto, which had a lot of V. I. Lenin and H. G. Wells in it. Circulating it, though, made Pohl dissatisfied: “It was treated as entertainment instead of a revelation” (p. 68). Science fiction fans, Pohl says, are ready to make “preposterous assumptions,” and so they “will play any game you

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propose. Just tell them the rules, and they are off … and then, ten minutes later, they’re playing a quite different game” (p. 69, ellipsis in original). Pohl’s distain for the genre’s political potential does not seem to be shared by others. Moskowitz (1954) is the chief chronicler of these years, but he also had a vested interest, as he would come to be the chair of the first World Science Fiction committee. He says that Wollheim and his “comparatively inactive circle of adherents” gave little to fandom except feuds (p. 103). Moskowitz, writing about himself in the third person, tries to give an objective account of these years, establishing his credentials in the flurry of fan publications and demonstrating what he saw was a steady decline in Wollheim’s popularity. That being said, he provides lengthy quotations from the debate carried out via fanzines, much like the pamphlet wars of the English Civil War. In 1938, for instance, Moskowitz quotes from Wollheim’s rant defining Michelism, stating that “science-­ fiction followers should actively work for the realization of the scientific socialist world-state.” The aims of advancing socialism and the world state are best achieved by international communism (1954, p. 160). The opposing players vying for control of the 1939 convention met in New York City. Moskowitz and Wollheim made their cases to Campbell and Leo Margulies, another editor. In order to shore up support for his leadership, Moskowitz declared “new fandom” as an organizing association and produced a new fanzine consisting only of nonfiction. Campbell wrote approvingly of New Fandom and reiterated his support for Moskowitz’s vision of the fan community. Street & Smith would help with donations for the convention, and Campbell would appear. At a fan meeting in 1938, Campbell announced his commitment to the “inner circle” of fans, like letter writers and amateur publishers. In order to aid this community, he said, he would offer “Brass Tacks” as a forum for reader opinions. This would be “free advertising” for any fan publication (Moskowitz, 1954, p. 147). This gesture toward the public sphere was appealing, but as is shown later in this chapter, Campbell’s notion of what was meritorious was tainted by his own personal biases. Although Pohl (1978) and others claim the convention was the dream of the fan-centric idealists, a group consisting of Will Sykora, Jimmy Taurais, and Moskowitz had taken over the planning committee and

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invited professional editors and writers (p. 94). The goal of writing science fiction, as promoted by this new leadership, turned away from advocacy of political engagement and toward professional writing. This other side— including Michel, Pohl, and other New York City fans who wished that science fiction would support transformative politics—founded their own club, the Futurian Society of New York. This club of mostly urban, working-class youth had a “mighty mission” to provide science fiction fans with an education in progressive politics (Knight, 1977, pp. 15, 53). Many went on to be influential authors and editors: in addition to Merril, Michel, Knight, Pohl, Wollheim, and Asimov, members included James Blish, Virginia Kidd, David A. Kyle, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert Lowndes, Leslie Perri, and Dirk Wylie. These fans were ardent but they did not fit the mold that had made Campbell: few studied science or even finished college. Pohl and Kyle had met at Brooklyn Technical High School, a feeder school for students interested in science and engineering; neither of them graduated. Asimov, as described in Chap. 5, finished his Ph.D. but felt the sting of anti-Semitism during his education; Merril, as noted in Chap. 7, started college to study economics but felt uninspired to complete her education. Although the group lost the opportunity to organize the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, they gained notoriety during the event. Kyle (1998) mimeographed an anonymous zine decrying the leadership of the convention for usurping Wollheim’s gathering. Moskowitz presumed the Futurians were behind the publication, although they had no idea of Kyle’s actions. He confiscated the booklets and other material the Futurians were planning to distribute and banned six of the club from entering. Moskowitz has preserved some of the text from this pamphlet, warning fans of a “dictatorship” that sought to silence the democratic fan community (p. 215). The event, bombastically referred to in fandom as “the Great Exclusion Act of 1939,” kept some of the Futurians out of the conference, but ultimately failed. Asimov, newly published in AST, walked in with the Futurians, but he was not blocked and he attended the convention. The Futurians set up in public venues around the convention and later hosted a counter-convention in Brooklyn. A successor group to the Futurians, the Hydra club, hosted its own convention in 1950; Sykora stopped in, dropped of leaflets decrying Hydra’s leadership, and left (Pohl 1978, p. 96).

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From this point, Campbell began to separate himself from fandom, even though he would maintain some trappings of fan culture. As an editor, Campbell continued fan practices of discussion and collaborative world building, but in a corporate and mandatory setting. Westfahl likens Campbell’s vision of science fiction to a “gigantic, continuing scientific brainstorming session,” and the concepts that survive the audience of scientists are worthwhile because they are “the reasoned conclusions of a group of qualified individuals” (1992a, p. 61). The participial adjective “reasoned” resonates here; Westfahl points out the argument and discussion having preceded publication, which is like the public sphere when constrained to a qualified, preselected group. It is not as if science fiction is a spontaneous check on the authority of science, although many believed it to be so. John Huntington suggests that science fiction is unique among popular entertainment because it is self-creating, instead of being part of a corporate interest. In science fiction, he continues, not only are the readers and writers the same people, but also “one thing that distinguishes the genre is the frequency with which writers become editors” (1996, p. 141). Although Gernsback publications hailed readers as fan-practitioners, this was not quite the same later. Campbell’s heavy-­ handed editing style was a bottleneck; authors had to follow his opinionated suggestions. What authors would come to call “bull sessions” repeatedly took place in his office or in lunchtime meetings. His lengthy, typewritten rejection letters had an argumentative tone similar to a fanzine rant. Despite using these techniques for developing stories, one key difference was that Campbell had a gatekeeper role. In a fanzine debate, authors could express their opinions and the speaker with the most persuasive argument would carry the day. In this way, the periodicals and conventions organized by fans resembled the Enlightenment’s public sphere. Campbell regularly provided affordances for a semblance of a public forum, although it is obvious that there was attention paid to rank. Having to pass through a gauntlet before accessing a mass media audience is not the same as the impression Campbell gave, that he was developing the intellects of his authors and readers. It is not hard to find statements that use Campbell’s work to hone intellects to justify the unsavory aspects of his career. Writer and editor Lester del Rey says: “As an editor, he was so large

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a man that he made a tiny and seemingly unimportant field grow to fit his vision and his stature” (Biggle, 1973, p. 227). One critic says that Campbell’s editorial work “stands as the event in the ‘Golden Age’ of science fiction” (Remington, 1981, p. 59; emphasis in original). Science fiction author James E. Gunn (1975) writes that Campbell’s meetings with writers “became contests of imagination and logic, with every idea turned on its head” and, as a result, new stories emerged (p. 156). Asimov compares Campbell’s power to a spell: “He made science fiction the most exciting thing in the world” (Platt, 1978, p. 9). Asimov (1981) elsewhere created this vivid image: Campbell was a spider sitting in his web. To him came his fifty writers. He gave each one his ideas and watched for the sea changes that came back, and those sparked other ideas that he gave to other writers. He was the brain of the superorganism that produced the “Golden Age” of science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. (p. 206, emphasis in original)

Theodore Sturgeon writes: “Once I got seven thousand words of comment from him on a five-thousand-word story” (Biggle, 1973, p, 227). Campbell’s argumentativeness has been noted in several memoirs. Albert Berger suggests that his “deliberately outrageous argumentative statements” were designed to stir a discussion “from which, he said, might come insights that no one, including himself, had previously had” (1993, p. 197). In publishing extreme views, one might conclude that he was attempting to do for all of his readers what had done in private with his writers: spur original thought. This kind of bullying might be seen as a kind of remasculinization of writers and audience members. Frederik Pohl (1978) remembers the experience of a personal meeting with Campbell to be confrontational: when visiting him, one had to be ready to be confronted with new ideas that Campbell was turning about in his head. Pohl surmises that Campbell would assault everyone who came into his office with whatever topic he would address in that month’s editorial, honing his own ideas (pp. 81–2). On the weekends, L. Sprague de Camp reports, friends would come to Campbell’s apartment and he would hand each a manuscript when he arrived: “This made for a rather quiet gathering but was doubtless of value to us in learning our craft”

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(Harrison, 1973, p. 105). These authors came to express the belief that authors of science fiction must make their fiction plausible by consciously using what most authors know about society and science, but they never seemed to consider how this ethic would perpetuate social norms of science because they did not consider science and engineering as social activities. When Campbell took the position as editor of AST in 1938, he had seven years’ experience as a fan-practitioner of science fiction and one-­ half year in a science fiction office. He followed up on his promise to reinstate the “Brass Tacks” feature that published letters from readers. In a typical issue, a dozen letters were published. Readers argued about stories’ scientific facts, praised authors’ ingenuity, asked questions, made suggestions, and venerated AST. As will be noted in the next chapter, Isaac Asimov got his start as a published writer in the “Brass Tacks” column, and it was through this mechanism that new authors were initiated. As editor, Campbell had some ideas about what the aim of the genre should be, tying science fiction to the evolution of humanity. In changing the magazine’s title from AST to Astounding Science-Fiction in March 1938, Campbell begins by suggesting the reader of science fiction is a unique type; the “average mind” cannot understand or appreciate science fiction. This fan admits there is a vast amount of information to be learned about the universe and that, at the same time, humans can learn it. This creates an interest in tomorrow that is a very important marker of the science fiction fan, the type of person that AST wants to attract: Those who can, and are willing to[,] think of the future, are the ones we can, and want to, appeal to with Astounding. Science is the gateway to that future; its predictions alone can give us some glimpse of time to come. Therefore, we are adding “science” to our title, for the man [sic] who is interested in science must be interested in the future, and appreciate that the old order not only does change, but must change. (1938a, p. 37, emphasis in original)

In the June 1939 editorial “Future Tense,” Campbell proclaims that science fiction is something new, free from its antecedents. While other civilizations had fantasy and prophecy, Campbell asserts that they come

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from a different motivation, the fear of the future. That this new genre has attracted a new audience must mean it is part of “some totally new characteristic of our new civilization”: “for the first time in all the history of Man’s climb, he looks forward to better things, and not backward to a forgotten ‘Golden Age’” (p. 6, emphasis in original). Campbell suggests science fiction is a natural accoutrement to a civilization that has become so advanced that it can shape the future—and looks forward to the opportunity. The readers of AST, as Campbell promotes them, are a unique group, the vanguard of a new form of human civilization that has the ability and the desire to make a better tomorrow. These are not gratuitous musings, of course: Campbell, like Gernsback, is struggling to make the magazine work. These readers need a new form of literature and a new mechanism for communication in order to achieve these developments, and he offers copies of AST as a means to this end (and, of course, to keep his job as editor). In a continuation to “Future Tense,” Campbell’s editorial “Democracy” sets up an analogy to the public sphere for the genre of science fiction. He suggests that the contents of the magazine comprise a collection of the “readers’ votes” and he is the “election board official”—not the elected official. The candidates are the writers, and their platforms are their stories and their styles. Campbell notes that his restoration of the “Brass Tacks” feature has been successful in “forming and directing the continued expansion that Astounding is undergoing” (1938b, p. 125) and that he will begin summarizing the letters he does not print to give readers a sense of what the entire audience is thinking about each issue. In the September 1938 editorial announcing the end of the fifth year of Street & Smith’s AST, he announces a new feature: “The Analytical Laboratory, a tally of the votes for the best stories.” This feature allows readers to see what ideas are popular, what ideas have failed, and helps to make his editorship less of a personal crusade about science fiction and creates the impression that Campbell simply rides the waves. He will continue to publish letters in “Brass Tacks” to give further insight into what the audience is thinking. Noting the strides AST has made in the past five years, Campbell suggests this is only the beginning: “with new authors and the Analytical Laboratory and your coöperating letters to guide them, Astounding will advance more in the coming year than ever it has before!”

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(1938c, p. 57). This editorial voice was remembered as his legacy for many years, more than his authoritarian views about pseudoscience, racism, and sexism. Given his dictatorial editorial practices, the paean to the public sphere is more marketing than reality. The same can be said about his vaunted insistence on accurate science. For an author whose statements about science fiction insist on scientific accuracy, the appearance of paranormal activity is at first jarring. In “Solarite,” the human team travels to Venus and has trouble communicating. In their first encounter, Arcot feels a thought take form in his mind. The ideas are generated by the Venerian, and Arcot can receive them fairly well. The narrator asserts that “ideas are everywhere the same,” so they can express gratitude for saving their people. Proper names, though, are difficult to communicate because they are not universal. In the 1950s, Campbell’s love for ESP and other paranormal phenomena led him to use his editorial space to promote all manner of scientifically questionable devices and ideas. When one looks at his editorials, however, it is clear that Campbell is opposing himself to the scientific establishment. In his 1959 editorial “We Must Study Psi,” for instance, Campbell promotes himself as a collector of unofficial information—and praises his readers for doing the same. In the editorial, Campbell says he has long been interested in telepathy; Smith’s Lensmen series was about psi powers. Science fiction’s ability to inspire new engineering through the explication of scientific principles has been established by the 1950s, Campbell writes, so it is time to move on so science fiction can fulfill its function “as a frontier literature” (p. 4). He reviews some stories about people using dowsing rods on construction sites to find water pipes and other reports of paranormal science. In moving to sociology, anthropology, and psychology, science fiction has tried to draw attention to the illogical and incalculable—what he calls “subjective reality,” a clear tie to his interest in Dianetics, described in the next section. Despite the scientific advances made to understand objective reality, Campbell writes, little is understood about emotions and desires. This is because the analytical tools brought to bear on these inner phenomena are incapable of dealing with the illogical nature of emotions and desires. “Evidently,” he writes, “what we need is a non-logical technique of analytical thinking—a method of thinking that is

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more-than-­logical. A non-logical-but-rational technique” (p. 161). The reason for studying psychic phenomena, then, is because they are the easily observable experiences that arise from subjective reality. In addition, he expresses interest in a propulsion device designed by Norman L. Dean that he purports does not need fuel; the potential of Hieronymus machines to capture the power of the mind (and other experiments in extrasensory perception); and the alleged cover-up of krebiozen, which was promoted as a cure for cancer. Campbell’s pseudoscientific views on race were unpublished in his early career, but they became pronounced in editorials in the 1960s. This progression from the weird to the terrible ultimately sealed Campbell’s fate. Mysticism could have been an entry point into the rejection of a culture saturated by technology. In the hands of Campbell, though, paranormal powers and paradoxical machines were a way to locate a new breed of elite humans. Campbell, in this editorial and others, returns to the idea that he is at the nexus of a community that is an alternative to, if not opposed to, the traditional networks of the technological establishment. His role as editor of a mass media magazine to create an alternative public that is his most telling legacy. At the same time he is known for demanding scientific rigor in fiction, he is also a promoter of pseudoscience. With perverse enthusiasm, Campbell the man of science showed interest in fringe ideas and thought he could use them to sharpen his audiences’ cognition. This turn to pseudoscience, though is more of a continuity than a disruption. His earliest stories relied on mental telepathy, and he later encouraged investigation into phenomena like dowsing rods, which are sticks that some claim can detect underground water. He was an early promoter of Dianetics, the essays and stories by L. Ron Hubbard that were a precursor to what today is known as the Church of Scientology. He seems to have believed that these discussions were effective thought experiments. Campbell’s reputation seems to have hinged on his insistence on scientific accuracy despite his promotion of pseudoscience. Stableford (1998) writes, “the one enduring legacy of his work, which has not lost its value, and never will, is his insistence … that the methodology of science fiction is analogous to the methodology of science” (p. 49). Westfahl (1992b) claims that Campbell became a great editor because he learned from the

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writers he championed. At the same time, Westfahl states, the decline of Campbell’s influence in the 1950s and 1960s can be attributed to the fact that he drove writers away: “Campbell was a racist, a bigot, a sexist, and an anti-Semite” (p. 50). Contrary to the vaunted success of Campbell’s editorial sessions, they do not seem to have succeeded as instantiations of the public sphere. Westfahl claims that Campbell’s abrasive conversational style served only to help Campbell gain insights that he could use for his own editorials. What is more, Campbell increasingly asserted that the conversations he guided in bull sessions with science fiction researchers meant that he was keeping up with new scientific findings. Campbell believed that “scientists and leaders” were not listening to avenues of important research, so science fiction writers should “do their own scientific research.” Dianetics was just the first of many Campbell pseudoscientific obsessions (p. 54). With only a B.A. in physics, earned years before, Campbell continued to assert that he was capable of passing judgments on a wide range of scientific fields. Late in his career, Campbell’s belief in his own stature ossified even as his reputation suffered. Campbell’s supporters felt that this estrangement was the natural outcome for someone who “never gave up” pushing others. He was “the agent of destiny, a magician” (Hay, 1985, p. 10). In 1964, Campbell complains that the great old writers do not want to work with him, even for a “mess of dollars.” He explains the situation this way: Most of them got their scientific orientation based in the early thirties, and they’ve been living on it ever since. How many of them are in contact with actual research work being done today? … Will somebody tell me why the Great Old Authors will not get off their literary tails and consider something new? They hate me for shoving new concepts and new ideas at them—and [they] damn me for their lack of a Sense of Wonder! (Rogers, 1964, p. xxi)

In part, this helps to explain Campbell’s enduring appeal. The ideas of race and gender he promulgated were not new science, but hangovers from the nineteenth century. Dowsing rods were ages old, harkening back to the pre-scientific world. Even if Hieronymus Machines were newly patented, the dream of using ESP or other psychic phenomena certainly was not. The promotion of discarded ideas as cutting edge and

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his appeals to theories about the future of “Man” must have fit in with readers and a group of writers that felt much the same way. Judith Merril (the focus of Chap. 7) sparred with Campbell over the years, yet she refused to condemn him. Writing in 1966, she noted that he was already taking some criticism. The decade 1935 to 1945, she maintains, owes a lot to him as a writer and editor. As editor, he was able to marshal a significant amount of talent that made great improvements to the genre. Because of him, the field gained considerable strength; the new markets after 1948 were more demanding than before, but they gave authors an opportunity to avoid him if they wanted to. Whatever damage he had done, Merril conciliates, it is insignificant compared to the improvements he generated. “It is hardly reasonable to condemn Campbell for not improving things enough … [it is] true that Campbell was the right man for the right time—and perhaps as true that his peculiar limitations were as useful as his considerable abilities” (1966b, p. 40, emphasis in original). She says that the end of his influence came when he started to promote answers instead of asking questions, as he did with Dianetics. Even though some of Campbell’s worst actions were still in progress and people like Asimov were holding their tongues when Merril was writing, her line of thought seems out of step today. If it is accurate to say that only Nixon could go to China, then maybe it is similarly accurate to say that only someone like Campbell could have signaled the challenges in making the pivot from the limited scope of the golden age to science fiction’s growing audience after World War II.

4.4 Manly White Civilization The connection between Campbell and white supremacy became clearer, paradoxically, when it should have diminished. Racial and imperial ideologies in World War II had proven to be dangerous. After some experimentation with L. Ron Hubbard in 1949, Campbell became infatuated by the possibility of making psychology more rigorous. As documented by Alec Nevala-Lee, Campbell encouraged Hubbard to relocate to New Jersey, near Campbell’s home, and Campbell reached out to authors and experts to promote the idea. Unsurprisingly, considering his novel Slan,

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A. E. van Vogt (1940) was an ardent promoter. The earliest audience of Dianetics was science fiction fans, as it appealed to their ideas of science. Hubbard’s dissertation, filling more than forty pages [in AST] and seemingly resulting from years of diligent research and study, was logical, enticing and thoroughly persuasive. … All over the country, the same thing was happening: science-fiction fans were buying the book and auditing their friends, who then rushed out to buy the book so they could audit their friends. (Miller, 1988, pp. 153, 159; emphasis in original)

Hubbard’s book would soon be listed as a bestseller in the Los Angeles Times, even at the same time that it was being denounced by medical experts. Hubbard began offering classes and lectures about auditing, one of the key features of Dianetics. Dianetics was not the beginning of the trouble between Campbell and his first wife, Nevala-Lee writes, but it was the impetus that led her to start spending weekends away from their home. This gave Hubbard more time to recruit Campbell. They worked on an article that they intended to publish in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Hubbard’s book would be published in AST in May 1950, and his lengthy treatise appeared in AST at the same time. The idea was that friends and family could meet together to “audit” each other and resolve inhibitory memories that damaged the ability of a person’s analytical mind. The connection between Dianetics and white masculinist science is not immediately obvious, although scholars have noted Hubbard’s “deep-­ rooted hatred of women” and his “rabid hostility” to the medical profession (Miller, 1988, pp. 155–6). Dianetics’ simple process of self-­discovery that men could use to attain personal goals mimics the attitude to many authors and readers who celebrated fiction that described the stultifying forces of civilization. In the context of the present study, the effort to provide therapy to release hidden human potential brings a new twist to golden-age theories of race and the important role technology played in the stages of civilization theory. As pointed out by Nevala-Lee, Campbell seems to have contributed to Hubbard’s thinking, tracing the analogies between the human mind and digital computers to Campbell, and even asserting that the name “Dianetics” was chosen for its affinity for

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“cybernetics,” which Campbell learned about through his connections with MIT, particularly Norbert Wiener (1950), who coined the term cybernetics. The idea that Hubbard, who dropped out of a civil engineering program, and Campbell, who had an undergraduate degree in physics, could intuit a new science of the mind mimics the golden-age heroes who can master any discipline because of their advanced cognitive abilities. The assumption that the field of psychiatry had missed the basic premises of the human mind—and that two failed engineers without any professional interest in the field could form the foundation of a revolutionary vanguard—seems just as implausible as many of the other quickly developed technologies in science fiction stories. Campbell’s desire for Dianetics to cure problems facing modern men and, in particular, his hope that it could work as a potential cure for homosexuality, link Campbell and Hubbard to the Cold War crisis of masculinity. Taking the fear of overcivilization a further step, the fear for the faceless man in a crowd was easily tied to the stereotypes of citizens of authoritarian countries, as will be described further in Chaps. 7 and 8. Having already accepted before the war that too much obedience and too little virility was the fate of the urban man, after the war men were asked to invigorate themselves and distrust those who lacked manhood. Marvel Science Stories, in its effort to cover the “controversy” of Dianetics, carried an essay by Hubbard entitled “Homo Superior, Here We Come!” in its May 1951 issue. The goal of Dianetics, Hubbard suggests based on one of his practitioners, is not to become a God, but to become a “superman.” He concludes, maybe unconsciously echoing Gernsback, “any of us can now engage in this great scientifictional experiment called Dianetics: we all can be better than we are” (pp. 113–4, emphasis in original). Hubbard harkens back to G. Stanley Hall’s dream that a new breed of humans could be inculcated through training. For Campbell’s part, something like Homo superior had long been a preoccupation, as demonstrated by his insistence that space-faring Earthmen must always prevail over other species. As stated by Attebery (1998), Campbell had often requested stories about the new race of humans (p. 62). As described in Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3 , Judith Merril recounts in her personal correspondence that when she met with Campbell, she was subjected to the preliminary thinking that would become his editorial in the

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January 1952 issue of AST. In this essay, he suggests that, some 8000 years ago, a mental mutation—with “a greater ability to organize and apply facts”—appeared in Homo sapiens (p. 6). Much like van Vogt’s Slan, this mutation did not produce noticeable physical differences, Campbell writes, but it is responsible for rapid and repeated efforts toward civilization. Now, the Homo superior mutation is widespread, leading humanity into a new age, an empire of technology. As is clear from the context provided in Chap. 2, this theory sounds suspiciously like neo-­Lamarckian stages of civilization, making the superiority of some individuals inevitable. Campbell’s belief that new ideas would easily overpower the old was limited only to certain domains, however. In terms of human diversity, certainly, the growing scientific consensus that all humans were the same species was unable to overcome Campbell’s deep-seated beliefs. Campbell’s racism was typical in the sense that it is cloaked by gentility; his allies tried to spin his out-of-step viewpoints by stating he was conservative but not right wing. Perry A. Chapdelaine, who edited two volumes of Campbell’s letters, contends that fandom is prone to “gossip and dissent” that lead to “monstrous untruths.” Chapdelaine (1993) blames “blind liberals” in the 1960s for besmirching Campbell’s reputation. They were so effective, Chapdelaine notes, that Campbell was blocked from friendships and awards, and he and his second wife found themselves isolated at science fiction conventions. In the 1950s, letters that Chapdelaine selects for publication show two important characteristics of Campbell’s personality. In 1953, he tells Asimov to ask his students some basic question that will test their knowledge of physics. For example, will a cup of coffee cool faster if one adds cream, or should one wait until the coffee has cooled before adding cream? The counterintuitive answer that delights Campbell is that the high temperature coffee will lose more calories of heat per second than the cooler combination of cream and coffee (p. 88). The next month, he tells Asimov that what makes science fiction different from ordinary literature is that a typical novel describes the individual person, but science fiction thinks about the experience of a culture (p. 92). The shards of pottery that Campbell had proposed as the aim of science fiction thus are supposed to reveal the evolutionary status of an entire society, much like Lewis Morgan had proposed. This twin

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personality—one that confronts individuals who seem to lack mental agility in science, and another that seeks to promote generalizing fiction about entire population groups, as if humans had become globally homogenous—is increasingly evident at the end of Campbell’s career. Chapdelaine’s collection does include some incendiary comments by Campbell. Writing to Asimov1 in October 1957, for instance, Campbell states that the “lineage” of people of African descent has never matched the accomplishments of the so-called white race. Echoing a pseudoscientific stages of civilization concept from the nineteenth century, Campbell writes, “the Negro does not learn by example. … The Negro is exceedingly hard to teach.” Ignoring the colonial legacy that disrupted African kingdoms in the modern period, Campbell claims that no group in Africa ever built a nation (Chapdelaine, 1993, p. 374, emphasis in original). Later, he will write that he can forget the term Negro and talk about Homo africanus, a breed of humanity that “has never developed a civilization above the ritual-taboo order.” In fact, he says, he does not care about race, he cares about the accomplishments of a people. “The one thing I’m interested in is the development of MEN. Supermen. And I don’t give a damn what racial stock they start from—just so that they achieve” (p. 478, emphases in original). In these letters, one can see some deplorable attitudes, but these letters have been selected to support Chapdelaine’s thesis that Campbell was not bigoted. Other letters between Asimov and Campbell that are not printed by Chapdelaine but are preserved in the collection at Boston University’s Gottlieb Center place this argument in a larger context. In 1961, Campbell writes to Asimov what might be seen as the first principle of his racism: human races result from selective breeding, with partners choosing members of their own race. Believing that both personality and physiology traits are determined by genetics, and that what makes a mate desirable is culturally determined, Campbell concludes that there are differences between races based on breeding, a hallmark of polygenism. Campbell represents a new twist on neo-Lamarckism. Making a gesture to the challenge presented by the culture concept, Campbell says that the  This chapter focuses on the correspondence between Campbell and Asimov inasmuch as it reveals Campbell’s attitudes. Asimov’s responses are found in Chap. 5. 1

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different cultures of different races have made pronounced and definite differences. In the same letter, Campbell writes that white superiority is based on the better culture of white people. It is wrong to assume, he says, that the superior achievements of white people are the result of biology. Europeans, he suggests, invent universities, cultural institutions, and science to improve their own kind. Other groups, he writes, because of their tribal organization, were hemmed in by superstition and tradition and failed to develop methods of science. Europeans valued the thinker who could make things that worked. While he claims to have researched his ideas with works of history and anthropology, it is clear that his reading list is selective. Campbell’s words offer a glimpse onto how some individuals find it difficult to let go of outdated beliefs. As noted by Kuhn (1970), adherents to the existing paradigm will seek to assimilate conflicting data instead of making the leap of faith to the new paradigm. Asimov and Campbell engaged in the activity of Enlightenment: each exercising their intellects before a literate audience. Nevertheless, Campbell took the culture concept, an idea designed to combat scientific racism, and modified it to suit his preexisting beliefs instead of accepting new data. This debate shows how logic and argumentation do not necessarily lead to someone changing strongly held beliefs, casting doubt on the efficacy of the public sphere to rectify aberrant information. For example, on 20 December 1961, Campbell writes to Asimov that he does not judge people by their skin color, eye type, or anything else, but nevertheless, there is a correlation between generations of selective breeding and culture. There is no direct connection between the color red and putting out fires, he writes, but because of cultural decisions, that association is warranted. Years of selective breeding in Africa, Campbell states, have resulted in cultural decisions that can be identified by skin color, but he states that this idea is not racist because he does not believe they are caused by skin color. He goes on, in a letter that is not included in Chapdelaine: The white man who wants to be superior because he’s white needs to have his stupid ears pinned back, to be made to acknowledge that no white slob should presume to the order of rights and privileges that an American gentleman like Ralph Bunche has earned.

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But, equally, dammit, the NAACP should have its stupid ears pinned back, and be made to recognize that no man has any rights, by reason of possessing black skin, other than those he himself earns. … [S]ome people are slobs, and must be treated as second-class citizens. And do not pull that stupid crack about “we have all the educational facilities,” because it is utterly irrelevant. We built those facilities; that was our great triumph at the start—and that is not a cause of, but a proof of, the real superiority of the White cultural selective breeding concepts. I cite that as the greatest proof of all of the real superiority, in real-Universe terms, of the white racial selective-breeding concepts.

Campbell denies that his beliefs can be reduced to the idea that white people are superior, insisting that he is both anti-democratic and anti-­ aristocratic. Claiming again that he has checked his ideas by reading anthropology, he says the facts are clear. The only valid way to make judgments, he says, is to evaluate individuals, and those evaluations have proven his point. When 90 percent of white people pass a test yet only 10 percent of black people pass, Campbell says, a natural fact has been observed and cannot be controverted any more than one would criticize findings in a chemistry lab. Young people in New York City, he writes, are unteachable; the best schools can do is to keep them off the streets. In this situation, he writes in a letter not included by Chapdelaine, authoritarian methods are necessary: it is positively lethal to encourage a moron to use the judgement God neglected to give him. He must, instead, be trained, in a carefully Pavlovian manner, to react to Authority—to want someone else to do his thinking for him, so that he’ll know what to think.

Later, in a November letter, Campbell states that black people lack the drive to do useful things. This kind of thinking is not racist, Campbell repeatedly asserts, because he is talking about cultural tendencies. In a denial of privilege that echoes some people’s thinking about whiteness today, he denies charges of racism by saying he is not purely white. Although he presumes that people of color are representatives of homogenous groups, he purports that his racial makeup is diverse, and because of this diversity, he in fact cannot be racist. How can he have racist

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feelings when he is a “mongrel”? His Irish, Scotch, and French ancestors were “demeaned” by the English, the French in their way “despised” the Germans, the Dutch never respected Hungarians. So what am I? French-German-Scotch-Irish-Magyar-Dutch-you-name-it-­ I-got-it, plus some question as to whether one ancestress whose antecedents couldn’t be checked was 1/4 Negro or 1/4 Indian.

The same month, Campbell writes to Asimov that Jewish people are like communists because each group wants an international system that is in conflict with people’s preferred society at home. For the same reason, he says he does not support the United Nations or any sort of world government. In general, Campbell writes, the reason for what he calls anti-­ white bias is due to the success of civilization. When groups do not have contact with each other, there is no opportunity for inter-group animosity. In 1963, he writes that the USSR’s effort to bring a group of people from Africa to Russia for training resulted in hostile reactions from the local people, and the situation was so bad that a university in Moscow had to set up separate facilities for black people. The group was diverse, representing different races from around the world, Campbell continues, and he concludes that the failure to get along proves that black people want special privileges, not equal rights. The Irish, he suggests, were once lower than black people, but now (in 1962) an Irish Catholic is in the White House. Campbell publicly suggests in his editorial “On the Selective Breeding of Human Beings” that eugenics has been practiced ever since the start of the human race, in the sense that creatures that could speak and could learn to use their reason over their instincts were selected as mates and those who could not were killed or, at least, not selected as mates. The idea that control over one’s emotions is a genetic characteristic is a hangover of the nineteenth-century supposition that genetic inheritance included temperament. The connection to racist thinking is clear at the end of the essay, when Campbell suggests that a rapist is a person who has failed to “override an instinctive drive” (p. 178) and, in an earlier day and age, would have been killed without mercy. He does not go so far as to say that modern rapists should be executed, but he does say that they are less than human.

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The way that Campbell describes the fates of societies in contact with more developed civilizations also reflects his zeal for globalization. In his 1961 editorial “Colonialism,” he praises the native peoples of New Zealand, Hawaii, and Alaska for creating a hybrid society when faced by European cultures with a greater technological capability. Campbell points out how the Inuit (whom he calls Eskimos) quickly become adept at using mechanized devices, but also shared their knowledge of Arctic survival. He concludes that societies can engage in a relationship of mutual teaching when each has a developed civilization—development here not being dependent on having sophisticated industrial tools but having an established set of skills and techniques that is passed between generations. In areas with tribal forms of society and little proliferation of technology, such as parts of Africa, Campbell says slavery results from intercultural conflict. In this editorial, he says he would like to “raise the question” whether the Africans were “responsible” for their enslavement—responsible because they had a tribal form of government that is not a defense against civilizations based on technique (p. 175). It is not a question of certain races being suited for slavery, but certain forms of societal organization. Campbell takes some pains to disassociate himself from racism—perhaps recalling Asimov’s warning (described in Chap. 5) that others will consider him to be racist if he does not take care with the words he publishes. Campbell does refuse to accept the liberal proposition that all individuals can change depending on circumstance, and yet, given his frequent claim that racial characteristics result from the history and culture of social groups, and that he specifically refrains from suggesting that there are specific racial markers that help one identify members of the “barbarian” race, an investigation only reveals what is commonly known: racists do not think they are racist. He does seem unhappy with common discourses about race, but his alternative ideas are not particularly thoughtful. While it is interesting that Campbell would only belatedly be called out on account of racism, even more interesting are his ideas about how technology intersects with race. In the same way his astronomy nonfiction asserted the evolution of the universe was inevitable, so too Campbell asserted the progress of social groups was foreordained.

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4.5 Declining Reputation The essay “Starship Stormtroopers” by new wave writer Michael Moorcock (1978) starts with a condemnation of Robert Heinlein, but the chief villain was Campbell. Campbell and his writers seemed like they were fighting the Vietnam War twenty years before the United States became involved, Moorcock writes, and “sf supplied a lot of the terms and atmosphere for American military and space technology.” Campbell and his writers thought they were producing “a fiction of ideas” that was “offering idealistic kids an ‘alternative’ that was, of course, no alternative at all” (pp. 42–3). The essay serves well to understand the growing disdain for Campbell. Looking back on the riots in the wake of police brutality in Watts, Los Angeles, Moorcock reports sitting on a panel discussion with Campbell in 1965. According to Moorcock, Campbell promoted his abrasive views on human races. Campbell started with an analogy to nature—“the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery”—and went on to say that freed Russian serfs returned to their former masters and “begged” to be reenslaved and, similarly, American blacks were against emancipation. Moorcock, with typical aplomb saying that the experience was more intense than watching Doctor Strangelove, was left almost speechless. Author John Brunner, however, provided a “cool demolition of Campbell’s arguments,” and Campbell for his part ended up with an appeal to God to support his views (p. 43). It is difficult to square reports like these with summary statements from his supporters that Campbell was not prejudiced. Samuel Delany recounts Campbell’s racist editorial policies in his 1998 essay “Racism and SF” (2000). Balanced commentary like this had little effect for many years, and science fiction criticism largely ignored the elephant in the room, sometimes blandly noting Campbell’s racism and love for pseudoscience as if they were necessary flaws in the genre’s epic hero. In an essay published about thirty years after he started publishing, Delany thinks back to when he had won a Nebula Award for his sixth novel in 1967 and had sold his ninth novel, Nova, to Doubleday. Seeking to sell the serial rights, he sent the novel to Analog. Delany reports that Campbell rejected the novel because his readers would not relate to a black protagonist. Delany calls this “the slippery and always

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commercialized form of liberal American prejudice,” imagining what is happening inside Campbell’s head. He does not have any problems with black people, Delany projects that Campbell would say, and “there was not a prejudiced bone in his body!” Delany felt as if the discussion was on the level of fashion—as if he had placed his protagonist “in a purple brocade dinner jacket,” but this was not, unfortunately, en vogue that year. Reading Nova today, it is hard to imagine any motivation besides prejudice that led Campbell to reject it. The novel contains sound science and thoughtful speculation, like the future of the periodic table of the elements and a plausible mechanism to achieve faster-than-light travel, and adds a cosmopolitan setting that is woven through with highlights from western history. At a time when the pseudoscience of race had unraveled, the leader of the golden age could not enter into an intelligent analysis of what he saw in the story that made it unappealing; even more so, one would wonder why Campbell, who had used the last part of his career to upset his readers, would pass on the chance to disrupt their expectations further. What is troubling is that Campbell had, in fact, serialized a novel with a black protagonist a few years earlier. Mack Reynolds’s “Black Man’s Burden” was promoted on the cover of the December 1961 issue of Analog. The story starts with protagonists who attempt to work in Africa, which is depicted to fit colonial stereotypes about the hopelessly tribal population. Disparate teams of black people who were not born in Africa have come under the aegis of various organizations to propel the continent toward civilization. The novel’s title echoes the infamous poem by Rudyard Kipling, “White Man’s Burden,” that was used to encourage the United States to Americanize the Philippines. By the time the story was written, the United States had given up on its goal of transforming people that Kipling had called half savage and half child by globalizing western culture, and yet the setting of this story has deployed college-educated sociologists to attempt the same project. The story begins with an encounter in Africa as if it were another planet. The protagonists are selling solar-powered television that disseminates entertainment and information, which the narrator asserts was difficult for the indigenous people to use in a way that Lewis Morgan would approve: “the eye of the desert man is not trained to pick up a picture … he would not recognize his own photograph” (p. 14). In spite of the

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assumption that the people of Africa are primitive, at least he story does carefully describe the Scramble for Africa and the impact of colonization, even though it fails to mention any of the independence movements that were spreading across the continent. In fact, the outsiders in the story have a strategy meeting in Timbuktu. This location fits a colonial mindset as an ancient unknown place in Africa; the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the name of the city can be used to mean “the most distant place imaginable.” The immediate historical context makes it unsuitable, though; the Mali Federation, which included Timbuktu, had declared its independence from France just the year before. This story says the quiet part of golden-age fiction out loud. The protagonists assert, as does Asimov in his Foundation series, that historically minded sociologists can propel a population along the path toward civilization. Although the motivations of Asimov’s psychohistory seem neutral and even noble in the Foundation, here their connection to the neo-Lamarckian stages of civilization is made clear. In moves that predict Frank Herbert’s Dune, the protagonists plan the forestation of the Sahara and spread a myth about a savior that is later fulfilled by one of their number. On a faraway planet, the idea of exploiting local culture to stop colonial exploitation might seem admirable, but Black Man’s Burden helps readers to realize that it and Dune represent lost opportunities to represent the challenges of decolonization. Reynolds’s future history also shows that concerns about the human future are not so different from Lothrop Stoddard’s: the narrator asserts that the transfer of technology destroyed the former colonies’ newly gained freedom. Income inequality, population growth, and factory automation had made the economic system in developing countries untenable. The story imagines foreigners colluding without any input from the local people about their destiny—asserting the continent is devoid of doctors, lawyers, engineers, or scientists—and also perplexingly suggests that the white imperial powers that destabilized the country have no obligation to help. The problem is with African people, the story assumes, and American blacks should bear the responsibility of fixing it. Mack Reynolds, explaining how he came to write a story about American blacks who return to Africa remake the continent with so-­ called civilization, reports that most long stories in Analog originated in John Campbell’s suggestions:

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whole chunks of them were based on his ideas. I don’t mean that he necessarily agreed with a great deal in them, but, as always, John liked to throw a handful of mud in the fan just to stir up controversy and get the folk to thinking. (Harrison 202)

The neo-Lamarckian thinking that led colonizers to believe that they were helping developing countries move along the stages of civilization had been discredited even before Campbell had started publishing Analog. It might have been worthwhile to explore the failures of the stages of civilization theory; as described in Chap. 3, others had already done so in science fiction, just not in a Campbell publication. The legacy of these forays against white imperialism would find different champions, such as Judith Merril (see Chap. 8). This episode amply demonstrates the troubling nature of Campbell’s tenure as editor. At the same time he blocked a black writer from entering the science fiction public sphere, he encouraged a white author to create black characters who echo white imperial attitudes. To the contemporary audience, even Reynolds’s blackface seemed to be a refreshing change. Oliver T. Shannon, who identifies himself as a black professor of mathematics at a historically black college, now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, writes a letter to the editor praising the story. He is grateful that the story did a “pioneering job” of portraying black folk outside of the stereotypes of “grinning fools” and “switchblade carriers,” feeling that it was remarkable that some of the characters had “intelligence, character, and initiative.” Careful reading of the letter reveals that the professor did not entirely love the story, saying that he will not make “adverse criticism” because he is “very pleased that this first effort has been published” (Analog April 1962, p. 172). Today, it is hard to account for Campbell’s many supporters who denied his prejudice was problematic, especially because discourses outside of science fiction had moved on from the principles that underwrote his writing and public comments.

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References Armengol, J. M. (2013). Embodying the Depression: Male Bodies in 1930s American Culture and Literature. In Embodying Masculinities: Towards a History of the Male Body in U.S. Culture and Literature. Peter Lang. Ashley, M. (2004). The Gernsback Days: A Study of the Evolution of Modern Science Fiction from 1911 to 1936. Wildside Press LLC. Asimov, I. (1981). Asimov on Science Fiction. Doubleday. Attebery, B. (1998, March). Super Men. Science Fiction Studies, 25(1), 61–76. Bates, H. (1930, January). Introducing Astounding Stories. Astounding Stories of Super-Science, 1(1), 7. Bederman, G. (1995). Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. U Chicago P. Berger, A. I. (1993). The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology. Borgo Press. Biggle, L. (1973). Nebula Award Stories Seven. Harper and Row. Bleiler, E. F. (1982). John W. Campbell, Jr.: 1910–1971. In Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (pp. 151–159). Charles Scribner’s Sons. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1929, July). Questions Infinite Speed. Science Wonder Stories, 1(2), 190. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1930a, January). When the Atoms Failed. AMZ, 4 (10), 910–925, 975. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1930b, June). Piracy Preferred. AMZ, 5(3), 228–252. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1930c, Fall). Black Star Passes. AMZ Stories Quarterly, 3 (4), 492–523, 574. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1930d, November). Solarlite. AMZ, 5(8), 706–737. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1932, August). The Last Evolution. AMZ, 7(5), 414–421. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1934, November). Twilight. AST, 14(3), 44–58. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1937, February). Other Eyes Watching: A Study of the Solar System. AST, 18(6), 34–39. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1938a, March). Science-Fiction. Astounding, 21(1), 37. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1938b, April). Democracy. Astounding, 21(2), 125. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1938c, September). Five Years! Astounding, 22(1), 57. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1939, June). Future Tense. Astounding, 23(4), 6. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1952, January). Proposed History. Astounding, 48(5), 6–8. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1956). Islands of Space. Ace Books. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1959, January). We Must Study Psi. Astounding, 62(5), pp. 4–7, 159–62.

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Campbell, J. W., Jr. (2003). “Wouldst Write, Wee One?” A New Dawn: The Complete Don A. Stuart Stories. NESFTA Press. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (2008). The Mightiest Machine. Wildside Press. Chapdelaine, P. A., Sr. (1993). The John W. Campbell Letters with Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt: Volume II. AC Projects. Cornelius, M. (2012). Technology as a Nexus for Homoerotic Desire in Boy’s Series Books. In S. Ginn & M. G. Cornelius (Eds.), The Sex Is Out of This World: Essays on the Carnal Side of Science Fiction (pp. 187–203). McFarland. Del Ray, L. (1979). The World of Science Fiction: The History of a Subculture, 1926–1976. Ballantine. Delany, S. (2000). Racism in SF. In S. R. Thomas (Ed.), Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Grand Central Publishing. Galison, P., & Hevly, B. (Eds.). (1992). Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford UP. Gernsback, H. (1930, June). Science Wonder Stories. Science Wonder Stories, 1(1), 5. Gernsback, H. (1935, September). The Science Fiction League. Wonder Stories, 7(4), 496–499. Goodstone, T. (Ed.). (1970). The Pulps: Fifty Years of American Pop Culture. Chelsea House. Goulart, R. (1972). Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. Arlington House. Gunn, J. (1975). Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction. Prentice-Hall. Hall, G. S. (1894a, December). On the History of American College Textbooks and Teaching in Logic, Ethics, Psychology and Allied Subjects. Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 9(2), 137–174. Hall, G. S. (1905). Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (Vol. II). Appleton. Hall, G. S. (1894b). Remarks on Rhythm in Education. National Educational Association: Journal of Proceedings and Addresses, 84–5. Haller, J. S., Jr. (1971). Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900. U of Illinois Press. Harrison, H. (Ed.). (1973). Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology. Random House. Hay, G. (1985). The John Wood Campbell Letters. In P. Chapdelaine et al. (Eds.), The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1. AC Projects. Hubbard, L. R. (1951). Homo Superior, Here We Come! Marvel Science Stories, 3(3), 111–114.

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Huntington, J. (1996). ‘Not Earth’s Feeble Stars’: Thoughts on John W. Campbell Jr.’s Editorship. In G. Westfahl, G. Slusser, & E. S. Rabkin (Eds.), Science Fiction and Market Realities. U Georgia P. Knight, D. (1977). The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction “Family” of the 30s that Produced Today’s Top SF Writers and Editors. John Day. Kuhn, T. (1970). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. U Chicago P. Kyle, D. (1998). Caravan to the Stars. Mimosa, 22, 4–8. Retrieved December 1, 2022 from http://jophan.org/mimosa/m22/contents.htm May, A. (2018). Rockets and Ray Guns: The Sci-Fi Science of the Cold War. Springer. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1966a). The Year’s Best S-F: 11th Annual Edition. Dell. Merril, J. (1966b, May 1). What Do You Mean Science? Fiction? Part 1. Extrapolation, 7(2), 30–46. Michel, J. O. (1933, January). The Ross-Smith Controversy. AMZ, 7(19), 956. Miller, R. (1988). Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard. Henry Holt. Moorcock, M. (1978). Starship Stormtroopers. Anarchist Review, 1(4), 41–44. Moskowitz, S. (1954). The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom. Hyperion Press. Moskowitz, S. (1974). Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction. Hyperion. Nevala-Lee, A. (2018). Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. HarperCollins. Ng, J. (2019). [Acceptance speech]. https://medium.com/@nettlefish/ Ng, J. (2020, August 1). 2020 Hugo for Best Related Work Acceptance Speech. https://www.youtube.com/ Platt, C. (1978). Dream Makers: Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers at Work. Ungar. Pohl, F. (1978). The Way the Future Was: A Memoir. Ballantine. Powell, H. F. (1928, January) Machines that Think. Popular Science Monthly, 12–3. Pursell, C. W. (2007). The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology (2nd ed.). Johns Hopkins UP. Remington, T. J. (1981, June). SF: Mapping the Territory. The North American Review, 266(2), 58–62. Reynolds, M. (1961, December). Black Man’s Burden. Analog, 68(4), 6–55. Rogers, A. (Ed.). (1964). A Requiem for Astounding. Advent.

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Sedgewick, E. K. (2015). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP. Silverberg, R. (Ed.). (1970). The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics’ Anthology of Science Fiction. Harper and Row. Stableford, B. M. (1987). The Sociology of Science Fiction. Borgo. Stableford, B. M. (1998, July). Creators of Science Fiction, 11: John W. Campbell, Jr. Interzone, 133, 46–49. Stableford, B. M. (2006). Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. Routledge. The Tech. (1928, September 24). Frosh Rules, 48 (47), 2. Westfahl, G. (1992a). ‘A Convenient Analog System’: John W. Campbell, Jr.’s Theory of Science Fiction. Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction, 54, 52–70. Westfahl, G. (1992b, Fall). ‘Dictatorial, Authoritarian, Uncooperative’: The Case against John W. Campbell, Jr. Foundation, 56, 36–61. Wiener, N. (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings. Da Capo Press.

5 The Editor with One Hundred Hands

The breadth of Isaac Asimov’s publications and his formidable public presence offer intriguing examples of the success and limitation of mainstream golden-age science fiction writers. Late in his career, Asimov’s persona gained him appearances before world leaders and network television audiences; hundreds of his short essays about the future appeared in a variety of publications outside of science fiction venues. In a way that predicts recent concerns about the impact of human activity on the Earth under the rubric of the Anthropocene, Asimov was often called on to speak about how to avert catastrophes that inadvertently develop from technological advances. This persona was based on a lifelong fan-to-­ master engagement with science fiction: Asimov read Science Wonder Stories when he was nine years old while working in his father’s candy store, published his first stories as he began his undergraduate studies in science, then turned away from his university job to pursue writing full time. More than any of the best-known writers after World War II, Asimov challenged some tenets of white masculinity that had hardened during his career. As a result, he was one of the few golden-age writers to transition into the subgenre that was antagonistic to the golden age, the new © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_5

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wave, as evinced by his appearance in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967. Although his dissident whispers seem to have lost him some opportunities to place stories with John W. Campbell’s AST, Asimov did not publicly elucidate his challenge to Campbell’s vestiges of nineteenth-century racial pseudoscience. In fact, as he gained stature in the field after World War II, Asimov hesitated to articulate critiques outside of his fiction. There, subtle markers of this challenge remain, and the analysis of the preceding chapters can be used to open a window into his writing and the audience who felt it was natural for him to speak about the future of humanity and the need for planetary consciousness but to avoid confrontations about race or to stop harassing women. Asimov’s repeated verbal and physical abuse of women undercut his noble words designed to protect the future of humanity. His attacks were well enough known as he became a full-time writer, and for a while as a public figure he attempted to portray them as part of a personality of a scientific man who broke stereotypes by being a seducer of women. By not acknowledging the social constructions that would lead an audience to find a sensual scientist amusing, Asimov reinforced the tie between masculinity and science. His desire to be an exception led to unfortunate consequences; his persona as a lady’s man did not fit well with acknowledging the women who were his contemporaries in science fiction. In addition, Asimov’s reticence about his battle with AIDS before his death in 1992 represented a lost opportunity. After a career dedicated to educating the public about science, not to mention fighting discrimination, Asimov could have lent support to fighting the stigma about the disease, which at the time was thought to be confined to gay men and drug users. The public would not know the truth for ten years. Asimov’s limitations have a lot to say about the culture of science in the twentieth century. What Asimov called “social science fiction” at first glance seems to be liberatory; he wrote in 1953 that the value of science fiction is that the future has “no known competitor,” so authors can imagine innovation outside of social challenges brought about by technical change. Yet, the earlier chapters sound a warning note. In the same way that young engineers were exhorted to travel to the Canal Zone to avoid encumbrances from the social world (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.3), freedom from bureaucratic science and the social world are keys to Asimov’s

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fiction. Authors of social science fiction created settings that allowed their heroes to bypass social and political issues, even at the same time that authors and audiences believed that they were engaging with a literature of ideas that promoted the understanding of science and technology. Additionally, studying Asimov with new eyes provides an understanding of the useful connection between science fiction and literary fiction, yielding insights into the naturalization of the masculine personality as a social construct. Leslie Fielder (1960) has written about the cult of boyishness in U.S. literature, demonstrating the paradox of men who find their identities in the wilderness while shunning women, who represent the stultifying pressures of civilization. Asimov’s fiction (and his writing about himself ) is mostly characterized by boyish chastity. This seems to connect him to U.S. literature as a whole: in the Foundation stories and positronic robot stories, there is barely any love at all, let alone women. Fiedler writes that, from Charles Brockden Brown to Paul Bowles, U.S. literature fails to deal with “adult heterosexual love” and is obsessed with “death, incest and innocent homosexuality” (p. xi). The “boyish” theme of “our oddly juvenile literature” (p. 175) fits in with an ideology that the nation is young: a youth trying to avoid responsibility for its misdeeds. This is a helpful rubric for understanding golden-age U.S. science fiction: like Campbell’s Arcot, Morey, and Wade, Asimov’s protagonists are eternally boyish. As noted by Fielder, the eternal youths in U.S. literature found challenges in the wilderness, far from cities; analogously, Asimov’s heroes find scientific challenges when they are in outer space, a kind of wilderness far from laboratories and universities. Asimov confined women—including his famous female character Susan Calvin— to the home setting in line with this discourse. Further connections can be drawn between persistent assumptions about innovation in STEM, literature at mid-century, and the masculine personality. For instance, historian of science Steven Shapin (2008) describes the transformation of science from a noble calling to a pedestrian job in the twentieth century, but he omits a discussion about gender. The study of Asimov as a representative of this new scientific culture helps to fill in this gap. The world of technical professionals described by Shapin—filled with university bureaucracies, government contracts, routinized research—is in Asimov’s fiction the manifestations of the home

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life, the place whither heroes must escape in order to innovate and whence they reluctantly return when their adventures are over. They thrive in the space station or a colony when the technology is under development, but they are reluctant to return to the corporate office, the lecture hall, and the community. Asimov reveals a great deal about the development of not only science fiction but also technical professions.

5.1 Disentangling Autobiography One of the challenges related to analyzing Asimov is that he wrote copiously about himself. Asimov often told the story of his humble beginnings from an immigrant working in his father’s candy store to becoming one of John W. Campbell’s most successful protégés. Facing prejudice against Jews, Asimov attended segregated New York City schools only to see his goal of becoming a doctor thwarted. Nevertheless, he was successful in earning a Ph.D.; he worked as a government scientist in World War II and did a short stint in the U.S. Army. During the Cold War, Asimov was a professor of biochemistry at the same time as he became a spokesperson for the public understanding of science, eventually giving up university work to be a full-time writer and public intellectual. This compelling by-your-bootstraps narrative, though, conceals more than it reveals. Asimov wrote little nonfiction about psychology or other social sciences, yet he used pseudo-psychological elements in his stories, such as psychohistory and robot psychology. In the early years of his second marriage to author and psychoanalyst Janet Jeppson, Asimov published two full-length autobiographies, In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980). Under the chronicle of events can be seen psychological exercises that chronicle the struggle of the id and the superego over Asimov’s identity. Learning to read Asimov’s thoughts about himself in this way explains certain paradoxes: for instance, he documents his frequent harassment of women at the same time he claims to be a champion of feminism. In the autobiographies, Asimov presents a theory that his harassment was a learned response based on a conflict in his subjectification, making his troubling interactions with women seem inevitable.

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When the id is threatened, he seems to say, it is natural for him to lash out in a childlike way. However reassuring this insight may have been to him personally, his seemingly comprehensive autobiographical statements cause misdirection. With some awareness of the psychological dynamic, one can predict where corrections to his biography are needed. The intersection of gender theory and the history of science shows why Asimov’s excuses about his sexism are inadequate. From the vantage point of his autobiographies, Asimov connects his failure to respect women to an unfortunate consequence of his precocious intellect. The young Asimov tried to challenge his father’s sexism, he writes, but at the same time, he skipped grades in school, putting him out of sync with his more mature classmates. Although this helped him to focus on his studies, he also suggests the age difference made it difficult to connect with girls. Starting college at the age of fifteen only continued his awkwardness with women in his undergraduate years, he writes. This gender trouble, of course, is by no means unique to Asimov, although he may be distinctive for turning it into art. Moreover, even if he has correctly diagnosed his developmental failures, they do not explain why his fiction and authorial persona found such widespread appeal with readers. Asimov attended Boys High School, a school that fulfilled its promise to provide economic opportunity to the children of New York City by means of rigorous academic preparation. Asimov’s explanation of his inadequate socialization neglects the significance of this environment in the history of science because he seems to think it natural to separate students by sex. The story of how this institution became male-only parallels the sex segregation of land-grant colleges at the turn of the century described in Chap. 3. In 1878, the city of Brooklyn established its first public high school, Central Grammar School, just a few years after Edward Clarke published his 1873 Sex in Education, which promoted separate curricula for boys and girls (see Chap. 3, Sect. 3.2). By the time the school moved from a rented building in downtown Brooklyn to a purpose-­built facility in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1886, the story goes, the student body had grown to such a size that the building could accommodate only the female students. Surely other solutions could have been found. Building Girls High School to segregate the sexes is not so simple as a response to overcrowding. Asimov is quick to blame his family and

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personal background for his sexism without seeing them as imbricated in a larger set of social structures. Asimov started reading science fiction in 1929, the year Gernsback lost control of AMZ and coined the name science fiction; the inclusion of “science” in the titles of the new magazines was the way Asimov convinced his father that the magazines had educational value. He was also a fan of boy’s series books like the Rover Boys and Tom Swift, but he had little access to the printed copies, leading him to write his own. A chapter of “The Greenville Chums in College” resulted, which was followed by more ambitious but now-lost fantasy stories (1966, pp. 48, 50). The part that Asimov often leaves out of this story, though, is writing letters to the editor as he finished high school and began college. His first two letters, published in the Feb. 1935 and Dec. 1937 AST, are conventional reports about his likes and dislikes. The publication of these letters helps to explain how he came to be in Campbell’s office to deliver a manuscript in June 1938. During this visit, which Asimov remembers warmly, Campbell tells Asimov about his pen name (Don A. Stuart, discussed in Chap. 4) and shows him that his third letter will be published. Campbell did not accept the story Asimov brought, but his letters convinced him of “the genuineness of my interest,” Asimov writes (1972, p. 13), which emboldened him. In this third letter, published in July 1938, Asimov pans “Ra for the Rajah,” a short story by John Victor Peterson. The story’s college-age narrator is caught in a love triangle that involves his classmate, a Martian, and an heiress from Earth. The climax is that the narrator wins a prestigious scientific award but is unsuccessful in his romantic pursuit. Asimov writes that it would be more suitable for some sort of “scienti-love magazine” (1938a, p. 158). In the same issue, Donald G. Turnbull wrote to complain that “females have been dragged into the narratives” and the resulting love stories have no place in AST. Readers are looking for science “or for the good wholesome free-from-women stories which stretch their imaginations. A woman’s place is not in anything scientific,” Turnbull wrote (1938, p. 162). Asimov later writes to support him, stating, “When we want science fiction, we don’t want swooning dames, and that goes double.” Asimov continues Turnbull’s presumption that women can only have an auxiliary role in science fiction and exhorts, “Come on,

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men, make yourself heard!” (1938b, p. 161). This discussion—although it is not in line with Asimov’s theory of his psychological development— is in line with what Merrick (2009) and others have previously observed: debates about gender were a part of the genre from the start. What is remarkable in this instance is how Asimov’s assent to the anti-women debate helped to triangulate his relationships with men, showing how misogyny served as a social lubricant between male fans. In the November 1939 Startling Stories, Asimov praises the editors for the September issue because it had no women. Countering an idea that he attributes to others—that women must be included for human interest—he then states that there are other forms of human interest besides love. He then facetiously suggests that nothing would be added to one of the September stories by including a woman, assuming that she would be kidnapped and needing rescue, and then she would have to rescue the hero when he himself is caught. “That always happens when a shemale [sic] is brought in (usually by the hair) and if that’s human interest (or any other kind of interest) then I’m a pickled herring” (1939b, p. 115, emphasis in original). In the May 1940 issue of Super Science Stories, Asimov wrote in praise of the love interest in Robert Heinlein’s “Let There Be Light.” Noting that he has had a “semi-official” role combatting love in science fiction, he states nevertheless that he likes this story. In Heinlein’s story, a male and female scientist run into each other at a restaurant before their planned meeting. Their preconceptions about the other hinder their recognition, but after some good-natured banter they develop both a good working relationship and a personal relationship. The connection between Asimov’s letters and his early fiction is not hard to make: it never occurred to him that a woman could have a different role besides a distressed damsel. These sentiments are not mentioned in his autobiographical statements later in his career. As did Gernsback, Campbell hailed scientifically minded readers and encouraged them to become writers. The choices in the creation of this fiction seemed natural to them, and the circumstances that made them seem natural seemed essential for their vision of the future of humanity. Asimov’s stories promote this gender construction against what he and others saw as the stultifying feminization of civilization. After a few rejections by Campbell, Asimov is accepted for the July 1939 issue of AST,

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which as discussed in Chap. 4 was the first issue Campbell’s role as editor was on display. Campbell writes about the future of atomic power in his editorial, inaugurating the golden age of science fiction by pitting a new kind of technician, the atomic engineer, against the “sheer violence” of nuclear fission (p. 7). Science proved that tremendous untamed power was available, but the next stage would not be managed by physicists. Engineers, Campbell insists, would voyage into the unknown in order to tame the wild power for commercial purposes. “Trends,” Asimov’s story in this pivotal issue for science fiction, is like Campbell’s wistful Don A. Stuart stories, but with the added sense of near-future science. The idea for the story derived initially from a research position Asimov obtained in 1938 from the National Youth Administration. This New Deal program paid college students for summer study opportunities. Asimov was placed with a social scientist who was interested in the sociology of science. He and Campbell became interested in how insights from Asimov’s research could impact a science fiction setting. Asimov reports that Campbell did not like the story too much, so Asimov worked on several rewrites (and Campbell possibly also inserted his own paragraphs). Campbell liked the idea that social forces were stifling innovation, making “Trends” the first Asimov story he selected for publication. The plot of “Trends” involves the effort of John Harman to launch his rocket, The Prometheus, “in defiance of world opinion and world conscience.” A newspaper editorial suggests that private citizens stop him because the government has so far refused to intervene. Harman goes so far as to say that they are threatening to lynch him (1939a, p. 34). At a time when black men were still being lynched, it seems strange to create a story where a white man fears lynching for following science. One should not underestimate the strangeness of this word choice; in fact, Harman says he has an “inalienable right to pursue knowledge,” extending the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to scientific pursuits, but he is faced with millions of people organized to defeat his technological dream (p. 38). A saboteur wrecks the ship shortly before its launch, but the resolution of this plot is, unsurprisingly, Harman’s defiant launch of a second ship. In the denouement, though, the characters receive a great prize: Harman’s effort is so inspiring that it reverses the social stagnation that had been threatening all scientific endeavors.

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As the preceding chapters would predict, the story pits the stultifying influence of civilization in the home space against the exuberant sensation of technical men feel outside of the laboratory and the office. Clifford, the first-person narrator, is an employee of Harman’s. The team retreats to the narrator’s farm in Minnesota, public sentiment leads to the election of a Congress that outlaws research on space travel, and a federal agency is established to supervise all research by industry and universities. No progress is possible in the home space of laboratories and universities. A court challenge by a professor from Stanford University is heard, but the Supreme Court finds the law constitutional. Progress on the project is only possible when the men are unencumbered, working in secret in a rural setting with private resources. Without the budget and support of the home space, the New Prometheus is not as grand as the first, but nevertheless capable of bringing Harman to space without seeking approval of the research board. The setting that seeks to inhibit science is a future history: in other words, a story of the future that is told as if it is a historical event. In 1973, the influence of religion will have increased, and religious leaders feared Prometheus. The first events of the story tell of social resistance to technology, causing the reader to wonder how this future could come about. Through flashback, some characters suggest that history is like a pendulum, and social mores inevitably swing back and forth without human intervention. After World Wars I and II, the story suggested, science will have flourished because “men were not afraid … somehow they dreamed and dared” (p.  35). Shortly before the flight of the New Prometheus, Clifford says the pendulum is swinging against the team, but Harman says that the long-term “trends” have more momentum than just a few years can erase. For the protagonists, the overall tendency of the past 500  years has been toward science, and the unscientific efforts to thwart the men might as well be people trying to defeat gravity. There is no effort to educate the masses; indeed, in the story they are merely an obstacle that the elite must circumvent in order to bring the human race into a new era. This exuberance at the pinnacle of human achievement is thrilling, and it is not surprising that Campbell used this story to mark the change of editor.

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5.2 Lab Partners in Outer Space Asimov is quick to point out that his early life was devoid of productive relationships with women, but he does not state directly where he drew inspiration for his male characters. The kind of men that interest the early Asimov in the hero position are working men with more practical experience than theoretical knowledge, typically in teams as if they are in a classroom laboratory. The resolutions of the plots in these stories present the idea that it is practical experience and not a position of authority that people need when they encounter difficulties. For instance, Asimov’s first published story features a male trio: Warren Moore, Mark Brandon, and Michael Shea. Looking back on “Marooned off Vesta,” which was rejected by Campbell but appeared in the March 1939 AMZ, edited by Raymond A.  Palmer, Asimov writes that he is unaware why his eighteen-year-old self was drawn to Irish protagonists. Christian given names and Anglo-Irish surnames predominate in these early stories, and the characters’ freedom to enter workplaces easily to gain the necessary hands-on experience contrasts with the increasing amount of friction Asimov felt from anti-Semitism in higher education. Identifying with another group of immigrants who also were not considered white enough at the time, Asimov idealizes a world of work where merit and successful completion of tasks are enough to gain entry. The pattern of lab partners is repeated by the characters Jimmy Turner and Roy Snead in “Ring Around the Sun” (March 1940 Future Fiction). They are top pilots tasked with testing a new shielding system that would allow shortcuts near the Sun. Asimov adds the chagrin of students in lab class who have not studied the written material thoroughly. The shielding is effective, but too effective, so the pair suffers from extreme cold. Enraged, after their successful return they plan their violent revenge on their supervisor. The denouement is memorable for its humorous joke: they had listened carefully to the oral briefings about controlling the mechanism, but they failed to read the detailed written instructions about how to adjust the shielding, which would have prevented their suffering. The chagrin of the boyish men, who created their own hardship because they hated paperwork and documentation, solidified the theme of the conflict between the masculine workshop and the feminizing home.

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These teams predict a more famous pair: Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan, the heroes of several of Asimov’s robot stories (in The Complete Robot, Asimov notes that they are modeled after Penton and Blake, one of the teams Campbell used in his early fiction). Employees of United States Robot & Mechanical Men Corp., Powell and Donovan observe products under actual working conditions, where they need troubleshooting even though they have been tested and planned carefully in the research lab. The use of the two characters allows them to think aloud their problems and move toward a solution, emphasizing the need for teamwork. However, they also discipline each other. The narrator, for instance, comments that Powell believes that “nothing was to be gained from excitement” and when the redheaded Donovan is showing signs of emotional distress, Powell asks him what his problem is: “Break a fingernail?” When one moves outside of the groove of cool rationality, the other slips him back into place. Powell and Donovan are having trouble with their robot, nicknamed Speedy, who they need to deliver materials for their survival. Speedy is caught in an ethical trap posed by the balance between the Second and Third Laws of Robotics: the order from Donovan was not given with any urgency, and completing the order involves considerable risk to the robot’s chassis. Powell complains about the deductive method: “We’ve determined everything about our problem but the solution.” In the face of an unexpected problem, they guess about different solutions, relying on their deductive intuition: “logical guessing” is what they say in the story “Catch that Rabbit.” In all cases, the heroes are practical men of action, unencumbered by too much training—they are not theoreticians, but the people who are tasked with working out the bugs when industry tries to make practical devices out of scientific insights. They work in a sort of wilderness, outside of the corporate research center, where troubles manifest themselves. On the one hand, it seems as if anyone can be there, and for many readers, this is true. Most readers can be on a team in this fictional setting, but there are no women technicians. This truth and the way Asimov and his peers treated the women who came into their presence calls into question the openness of this setting. Although Powell and Donovan are repeatedly used in his fiction, Asimov is proud of his female character from this era, the

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robopsychologist Susan Calvin (Fig. 5.1). She first appeared in the May 1941 issue of AST. Asimov (1982) writes: You will note, by the way, that although most of the Susan Calvin stories were written at a time when male chauvinism was taken for granted in science fiction, Susan asks no favors and beats the men at their own game. To be sure, she remains sexually unfulfilled—but you can’t have everything. (p. 265)

Asimov’s pride in this character because she bucks the trend in early science fiction is disingenuous because he is one of the perpetrators of the chauvinism he reports. By 1941, Calvin is certainly not the only female character in science fiction, and it is not true that male chauvinism was always present and natural, particularly outside of magazines edited by Gernsback and Campbell. The self-importance Asimov feels toward this character should also be tempered by the fact that she is the only kind of woman who could appear in the setting Asimov has created for his characters. Calvin was based on one of Asimov’s professors. He recounts that he became so anxious about using her name, Caldwell, that he asked

Fig. 5.1  Susan Calvin interviews a robot in Isaac Asimov’s “Little Lost Robot,” AST March 1947

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Campbell’s assistant Kay Tarant to strike it out and replace it with Calvin, a name that he imagined would cause the least labor in retyping. Calvin is a representative of the home world in these stories. One of her earlier appearances is in what is ostensibly a Powell and Donovan story, “Runaround” (AST, Oct 1941). She was not in the original manuscript, however; Asimov edits her into the story for the 1950 publication of I, Robot: restarting an abandoned mining facility on Mercury, Powell and Donovan refer to her as “old lady Calvin” in the denouement, dreading their next posting on a space station. The belief that a merit-based scientific culture would allow any woman who was qualified could to have an influential position, twinned with the belief that few women could gain qualifications, led to tortuous depictions like Asimov’s Calvin. Calvin is the exception that proves the rule; Asimov is a good example of what gender theorists call “masculinism”: a cloak of universality and objectivity that covers the intrinsic inequalities of workplaces and epistemologies (Nicholas & Agius, 2018). The homosocial world depicted by Asimov falls into step with his belief that women are necessary only for home life, and home life in the future will decline. In this way, Asimov reflects the next stage of the co-construction of masculinity and engineering: now that women have been hindered by regulations to leave the sciences and support the home, they will be rendered useless by the future’s communal lifestyles. A stern taskmaster from the corporate office, Calvin threatens the boyish, intuition-driven work of the practical men in the field. Her demand for scientific rigor and her work process devoted to scientific accuracy might have seemed, to Asimov and his fans, to be a noble effort to portray a woman in a scientific role in golden-age fiction. To be sure, Calvin is a memorable character. However, no woman appears as a lab partner in Asimov’s fiction. Women have no place in the wilderness in this mid-­ century gender paradigm. Other options surely could have been imagined: a female teammate, men who relished abstract work in the research lab. Even though Asimov promotes his fiction as being ahead of the curve on women’s lib, he was not breaking new ground in this respect. Instead, he was reinforcing the gender paradigm that had already been established.

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5.3 Interplanetary Prejudice Asimov’s homosocial teamwork perspective in the era when white masculinity was prominent is not surprising, and the stories that utilize it are well loved by fans, maybe even more than Campbell’s teams, described in Chap. 4. That being said, Asimov wrote another tranche of stories that demonstrated new thinking about racialization. Asimov’s position here was as an outsider to science fiction, given the retrograde thinking often on display in golden-age science fiction. Indeed, his allegories of race, especially his short fiction before World War II, suggest an opportunity that was lost to the genre. His stories of this type promote the excellence of individuals who cross disciplinary and social boundaries, offering an alternative to the theories of homogenized super-heroes often seen in his contemporaries. The difference may have been too subtle for some readers; the stories fit in with the notion that an elite group of humans are destined to be the leaders of the next evolutionary stage of humanity and, therefore, they  eventually find a place with Campbell. The fact that Asimov tried out stories of this type and then abandoned them suggests that the development of golden-age racial stories was not inevitable. The opening pages of Asimov’s 1979 autobiography are a complex undertaking where Asimov carefully describes the contradictions involved with his identity. His readers were probably aware that he was not born in the United States, but they may not have realized the implications of the fact that his family emigrated from Russia in 1923. Asimov makes it clear that his family would not have been able to enter the country the next year when the United States established its restrictive quota system with the Immigration Act of 1924 (the Reed-Johnson Act). In an apparent effort to help readers understand that he experienced discrimination despite his physical appearance, Asimov explains how his experience is similar to other non-white groups. In his pursuit of education, he describes his Jewishness as a “scent,” a smell that others seek to ascertain whether it is too strong. Asimov then tracks his progress through the Brooklyn school system, asserting that he attended “segregated” schools. Even though segregation had been outlawed in New York City schools in 1920, the fact of neighborhood-based schooling meant that segregation

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continued in practice. Among the teachers Asimov recalls fondly was his second-grade teacher, who was black. He recounts his early days of sharing stories with his coevals, deploring their tendency to create black and Chinese characters with stereotypical accents. He notes that the largely Jewish neighborhoods and schools of his youth are now the homes of largely black populations in Brooklyn. Asimov also sought to remind readers that he was not white. He reports in The Early Asimov that Campbell suggested that Asimov adopt an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym, an idea that Asimov flatly rejected. The smooth explication of a persona with mixed heritage must have evolved from the many times Asimov had to describe his biography and helps to explain why he was one of the few of Campbell’s protégés whose reputations survived. After Campbell’s death in 1971, Asimov made some effort to differentiate himself from his mentor, even though he does not criticize Campbell directly. At the time of Campbell’s demise, Asimov’s reputation was mostly based on his positronic robot stories and the Foundation series. In 1972, The Early Asimov collection is dedicated to Campbell. However, few of the first thirty stories (in other words, the first half ) were published in AST. It was not until World War II that Campbell regularly published Asimov’s work. Racial prejudice was often a theme of Asimov’s early stories, but that theme that was pushed into the background later in his career. Asimov’s experience in segregated New York City schools seems thinly concealed in his racial stories. His interest in fighting racism may help to explain why it took so long for Campbell to accept his work. His second published story, “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use,” appeared in the May 1939 AMZ. The setting of the story is a colonized Venus; fifty years previous, the Venusians had shown visiting people from Earth the planet’s resources. By the time of the story, a segregated society has come about. The people of Venus cannot vote or attend college; they also are denied access to public accommodations similar to Jim Crow laws: they cannot ride in public transportation, eat, stay at a hotel, or live in a home with Earthlings. Karl, an Earthling, states that the same situation had existed on Earth “with regard to certain so-called ‘inferior races’” but the “disabilities” that caused the condition “were removed” and “today total equality reigns” (1972, p. 85). The setting will be transformed by Antil,

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an individual who is connected to the ancient language and culture of his civilization but is also educated in modern interplanetary politics. Karl and Antil seem to be friendly protagonists, although the Earthling harbors some unfortunate prejudices against Venusians despite his feelings of affection for Antil. The pair visits sacred ruins of ancient Venus, and Antil himself seems to have internalized some of the colonial prejudices of his friends, saying that the ruins are “the sole existing remnant of the time when we, too, were a great race, rather than the degenerate remains of one” (p. 85). Karl is the first Earthling to visit the ruins, and inside, they tour a space like a museum with technological devices that Karl envies. Antil, using his cultural awareness, discovers that his ancestors had developed a terrifying weapon that disconnects a person’s higher consciousness from their autonomic nervous system, rendering an attacking army useless because they cannot manipulate their machines. Then, using his understanding of modern politics, Antil sends Karl back to Earth, where he unsuccessfully tries to plead the case for Venusian sovereignty. Inspired by their superior weapon, Venus takes over the colonial settlements, and the Earth sends warships to quell the insurrection. The Venusians deploy their weapon against the armada, and the admiral is so distraught over the fate of his soldiers that he commits suicide. In short order, a peace treaty is signed and the Venusian people are free. For a reader, “The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use” seems at first to be an exuberant reversal of golden-age themes, down to the detail that the admiral of the unjust Earth fleet is of Prussian ancestry. In a way similar to L. Taylor Hansen (see Chap. 3), the story also proposes that the current supremacy of (white, masculine) humanity is insignificant when compared to ancient civilizations. The story was unacceptable to Campbell; the revenge of the non-human (i.e., non-Nordic) people would never appear in a magazine under his control, and yet the reversal is not as strong as it might seem. Even so, the story bears the marks of the Campbell era. The story proceeds in the same way that Arcot, Morey, and Wade’s possession of technology that they barely understand changes the tide of conflict and assures dominance afterward. It also relies on the male protagonist’s supposedly wide range of aptitudes in different social roles, even those where he has no experience. Finally, the story suggests that oppression and structural inequality are easily overthrown.

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Another clear expression of the supremacy of mixed protagonists is “Half Breed.” Rejected by AMZ and AST, Frederik Pohl took it on when he became editor of Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories in February 1940. In the story, inventor Jefferson Scanlon’s creative struggle to create atomic power is interrupted by noise from a dozen boys bullying a “tweenie,” a child who shares ancestry from Earth and Mars. The story’s narration deftly invokes Scanlon’s thinking, revealing the desperate form of segregation being practiced: “There was no mistaking that brush of wiry, dead-white hair that rose stiffly in all directions like porcupine-­ quills. Scanlon marveled, what was one of those things doing outside an asylum?” Scanlon cannot stand by “idly” as a “helpless creature” is being worked over by a “crew of gamins” and surprises himself by intervening, calling the hooligans “heathens” (1972, pp. 147–8). What the scientist presumed to be a helpless victim of bullying, though, turns out to be an insightful innovator. The mixed-race child, Max, learns about Scanlon’s research quickly and solves a thorny problem. Like others of Asimov’s heroes, Max is a tortured being who propels research forward. Max becomes a leader for the oppressed mixed-race individuals, gathering them into a segregated community, and then uses his invention to build ships that will take them to Venus. Reflecting on his younger self, Asimov says it is not surprising that “a Jew growing up during the Hitler era” would be interested in “racial prejudice on an interplanetary scale” (p. 166). It is unfortunate, though, that the resolution of this plot is that the individuals who do not fit in are forced to leave the planet. Ray Bradbury’s related stories, “Way in the Middle of the Air” in The Martian Chronicles (1950) and its sequel “The Other Foot” in The Illustrated Man (1951), employ this theme, but consider the plight of actual people facing discrimination instead of the fictional tweenie. Like Asimov, Bradbury proposes that racial prejudice is so intolerable that black people save their money and build their own fleet. Although Lavender (2011) credits Bradbury for his depiction of the inability of the United States to resolve social injustice and his careful representation of the effect of racism on the white imagination, he is careful to point out the limits of this kind of story. The resolution of the plot improperly suggests that individuals can use technologies to erase race. To the contrary, Lavender writes, the story shows how “technological advances seem to

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continually divide humanity along fault lines of various differences” (p. 97). To this, one might add that the fantasy that technical training is available to all and that private consortiums can easily accomplish goals that large-scale government projects find challenging is unfair. That being said, one has to wonder at the impact of this story, given that the people facing prejudice are ciphers for black people instead of the actual humans who suffered. Because the story was successful, Pohl requested a sequel. “Half-Breeds on Venus” appeared in the December 1940 issue of Pohl’s Astonishing Stories, and it was the first time an Asimov story was the inspiration for the cover art. The Tweenies fleeing discrimination easily make friends with the indigenous people of Venus, the Phibs. When imperialist Earthlings arrive, a group the Tweenies call “purebreds,” the Tweenies fear that their colony will be destroyed. With the help of the Phibs, they use local fauna to attack the Earthlings while they perfect their shield technology. In a clever use of psychological warfare, they convince the Earthlings that this area is not the right place to settle. Counter to a reader’s expectations, the racially pure, colonizing Earthlings are thwarted by a hostile environment, while the mixed-race people fleeing oppression find allies and exist peacefully on a strange planet. Other space opera stories about hostile environments could have been inverted this way, if readers had venerated Asimov as much as they say they did. Lavender values Bradbury’s own version of this story ten years later, which takes the bold step to say that after white and black people had been separated for a while, “the psychic wounds of racism” have healed and “humanity has quite simply evolved beyond one of its greatest flaws” (2011, p. 102). Asimov’s choices do not allow for the story to make such a direct statement about actual race relations, but his abstraction has the virtue of offering a critique of science fiction themes. The feeling of superiority held by the purebred colonizers is common enough in planet-smashing epics that Asimov’s reversal is notable. Instead of supporting social Darwinism, Asimov’s story values the population that best fits in with its environment. Asimov’s early stories concerning race were not accepted by Campbell for AST. Asimov wrote rather blandly that his technique for bypassing Campbell’s prejudices was to rely on a human-only galactic empire.

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Despite his clear interest in multi-species environments, Campbell’s requirement that the (white) humans be always superior did not fit in with his storytelling. If all the characters were human, though, the stories would pass through Campbell’s gauntlet. This has a definite impact on the stories from the 1940s and later that made Asimov famous. Certainly, the Foundation stories present a human-only empire that seems devoid of racial differences. A story like “Homo Sol” (in the September 1940 issue of AST) is set in a world where the human-only empire has forgotten the location of the planet from whence it originated. The robot story “Evidence” (AST September 1946) seems like a passing story, except that instead of passing for white, the main character who is running for political office is secretly presumed to be a robot. Even though Asimov laid the groundwork for a different kind of story, he did not publicly follow through. As a professor after World War II, Asimov helped to popularize research challenging the essentialist notions of human races. Asimov’s professional commitment to anti-racism extends beyond science fiction and is part of his professional activity. For example, in the Golteib letters is a request from Simon and Schuster to review a book that they are considering, C.  D. Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society. On 14 January 1969, Asimov writes his review, criticizing the text’s support for the idea that natural selection has produced pure races, that is, polygenism. Darlington, who seems to have made an effort to update a march of civilization text like Josiah Nott’s 1854 Types of Mankind, rearticulates the neo-Lamarckian idea that human groups, over epochs of inherited characteristics, have produced distinct biologies and only some (i.e., northern Europeans) are capable of  innovation and world leadership. Pointedly, Asimov is dismayed that the book writes about the so-called Aryan race. “I should have thought that Hitler had once and for all made it impossible for any self-respecting scholar to speak of ‘Aryans.’” Asimov predicts that the book will become “a Bible of the Right” but continues to say that he thinks the book should be published “because I’m against censorship of any kind,” even though he is glad “that it isn’t being published by any of my own publishers.” In this way, Asimov’s interest in combatting racism was a professional responsibility.

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An extended exchange of letters1 between Asimov and Campbell about the nature of human races occurred in the wake of Asimov’s 1955 nonfiction book Races and People (Asimov & Boyd 1955), which he co-wrote with William C. Boyd, Asimov’s colleague at Boston University who used the distribution of blood types to support the thesis that there were no simple dividing lines among human races. An analysis of this exchange offers important context for Asimov’s early fiction at the same time it helps to illuminate why Campbell refuses to see how his thinking about human difference reflects white supremacy, even though this issue is absent from Asimov’s autobiography of this period, In Joy Still Felt, and it is only subtly a theme in his writing of this period. This nonfiction work prompts an extended (albeit private) debate with Campbell, which seems to have harmed their friendship and professional relationship. Even so, Asimov’s stories after this debate do not become more obvious in the fight against racism; in fact, as Asimov gains acclaim as a public figure, this theme is so subtle that it is easy to miss. Surprisingly, Asimov is a frequent defender of Campbell. Asimov is clearly indebted to Campbell, for Asimov sees Campbell’s tutelage to be a formative moment in his career. In his single-volume memoir published toward the end of his life, Asimov points out that in the days before World War II, racism and racial stereotypes were an ingrained part of the American scene. It was not till World War 2 and the fight against Adolf Hitler’s racism that it became unfashionable for Americans to express racist views. […] Hitler’s example killed its respectability except among the troglodytes we always have with us. (1994, p. 41)

This raises an interesting question. Asimov does not include any information about race in his chapter on Campbell, nor does the topic of race come up in the 1960s part of his memoir when Campbell’s editorials turn into multiple-page rants on current events. Does Asimov consider Campbell to be a “troglodyte”? Asimov does tell Campbell that the ordinary conversations between them do not seem to reveal strong racism,  Additional correspondence between Asimov and Campbell is described in Chap. 4.

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but his editorials and the stories that he publishes encourage people to have racist notions. In a collection of letters edited by his brother Stanley Asimov (1995), little evidence appears of the heated dialogue he carried on with Campbell. In the published volume, there is a 1963 letter from Asimov to Campbell. Campbell apparently had asserted that he wants black Americans to “earn” their rights, to which Asimov responds: “Groups don’t have to earn their group rights. Individuals have to earn their individual rights. The Negroes want their chance to earn rights as individuals” (p. 99). He goads Campbell by suggesting that Campbell would never reject a story outright from a black man because “in Alabama” “they” think that “the chances of a Negro writing a good story are so small” (pp. 100–1). Asimov concludes with a prediction that Campbell will come over to his side, but it is hard to tell if Asimov’s faith is warranted. Of course, by this time he wrote this letter, Campbell had already rejected Delany’s Nova (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.5). A tantalizing note appears in Stanley Asimov’s volume: John Campbell died on 11 July 1971. In late years we corresponded little because of deep disagreement on social issues. This is all that is left of a voluminous and, sometimes, acrimonious correspondence. (p. 102)

This would seem to indicate that the letters in this volume are all that remain. In the Boston University archive are these words in a handwritten note on a 2 × 2 scrap of paper (with a “Sorry. Isaac” appended). That being said, the scrap of paper is accompanied by many letters that are not published by his brother or Chapdelaine (1993). Consider this letter to scholar Alexi Panshin: He [Campbell] and I have held long correspondences on the matter of America’s race problem to the point where the letters grew so heated, we both decided to stop lest it mar our friendship. Campbell’s views on Blacks are, from my standpoint so wrong, harmful, and worst of all, inhumane, that I would give a large-ish sum for the eloquence required to change them.

Asimov wrote his letters to Campbell about racism at a time when he knew his papers would be archived at Boston University, and sometimes

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they read like a person trying to create a paper trail. He always writes to Campbell to give him the benefit of the doubt, yet does not give any ground in the debate. For instance, this 8 January 1962 letter to Campbell (that is not included by his brother) shows Asimov to be sensitive to racial justice, even though he is not known for harmonious gender relations. He reminds Campbell that even if he does not live life as a racist, his philosophy in Analog editorials and the stories he selects for publication are influential. I prefer the company of my books and my typewriter to other people. But when I decide to use a public toilet or a public library or a public means of transportation I do not have the write [sic] to demand that everyone else be kicked out until I am through just because I prefer to be alone.

Asimov writes to Campbell in 1965, even though many people think Campbell is a white supremacist, “If you were really a racist I wouldn’t be arguing with you.” Campbell’s problem, Asimov tells him, is that he does not wish to evaluate individuals, preferring instead to use rules of thumb to make decisions. In November 1962, he writes to Campbell (in a letter not included in the anthologies): Supposing I were me, except that I was a Negro in Africa. What could I do? Write science fiction and popularized science in Swahili? Who would buy it? Who would pay me? I might work just as hard as I do now but no one would support me and some white tourist would say, “Look at that lazy black bastard sitting in the corner and making voodoo marks on palm-leaves?”

In 1963, he writes to Campbell that inclusion is an important issue for technical progress. “We need all the scientists and thinkers we can get, so we must educate all the uneducated we can get our hands on,” he writes on 27 October 1963. Anything that results in inferior education, such as segregation, must be abolished. Campbell refuses to relent, stating that human races come from group selection of traits that they find desirable and necessary. It has nothing to do with skin color, Campbell says, but some “cultural patterns” that need to be unlearned. Although Asimov

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had been conciliatory until this point, he states that there are no inferior races that can be delineated by superficial characteristics. “I believe that you think inferiority on a ‘race’ basis not only is, but should be,” Asimov writes on 9 November 1963. By this time, Asimov had also started to break away from Robert Heinlein, whom he had met through Campbell and worked with at the Philadelphia Navy Yards during World War II. In their debate about race, Asimov concedes that Campbell is not an “honest-­to-God ultra-conservative” but that Heinlein is becoming one, based on Heinlein’s opposition to a nuclear weapon test ban. In February 1962, Asimov says that he considered writing to Heinlein to say “if he killed himself he would be forever safe from being ground under by the Communist tyranny and that he could do that with a bare bodkin without involving the rest of us.” Asimov’s interest in the golden-age form of racism lurks in the background when he writes his combination detective and science fiction novels, The Caves of Steel (serialized in 1953 and published in book form in 1954) and The Naked Sun (serialized in 1956 and published in book form in 1957). The narrator of The Caves of Steel states that New York City has been around for at least 3000 years, placing the novel sometime in the fourth millennium. For Asimov, ever the student of history, intervals of 3000 years should also be thought of backward; about 3000 years before the novels were written, the first texts of what would become the Torah were written. Someone looking back on the future Asimov imagines for the robot detective novels could think of the present time as the earliest ages of recorded history. Whereas golden-age writers sometimes imagined chance mutations bringing about a new civilization or other times imagined drastic and swift changes based on new technology, Asimov posits a relatively stable human race and human society. In Caves of Steel (Asimov 1954b),  the main character, Elijah Baley, must solve the murder of a human visitor to Earth, assisted by a robot companion, R. Daneel Olivaw. In his trip to the Spacer enclave on Earth, the narrator provides the reader with a fanciful description of the different people and structures of the city. The supposed stark differences between life on Earth (which because of overpopulation described as crowded, dirty, short of fresh food, and beset by disease) and the Spacer worlds (which are clean worlds of erudition, leisure, and longevity due to

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their robot labor) do not hold up. Baley’s robot partner Daneel’s appearance is supposed to mimic a stereotype of the Spacer breed—in the Naked Sun he is described as “tall, bronze of skin and hair, handsome, large, cool, aristocratic” (p. 35)—yet Baley is constantly surprised that Spacers do not fit his preconceptions. The agent in charge of the investigation is bald and has a misshapen nose, so that he “was a Spacer who might have been an Earthman for all his appearance.” The widow does not fit Baley’s preconceptions either: she is not tall, her hair is not bronze. The same is true when he meets Dr. Fastolfe, whose homely appearance Baley finds comforting. Baley as a protagonist is transformed by the plot, but his path is to become a hybrid individual. At the start of The Naked Sun, the complication comes when he is called into service to solve a murder. He reluctantly accepts the assignment and an ancillary task: report on the culture of the Spacer worlds. He is disdainful of robots, calling them “boy.” Humans had followed this practice in Asimov’s earlier robot stories, but here the narrator comments that Baley used “the ‘boy’ address that Earthmen always used for robots, but the robot showed no adverse response.” The robot could not be offended, the narrator states, because its responses were constrained by the Laws of Robotics. Yet, Baley works with and to a certain extent respects his partner Daneel, and their partnership is crucial for solving the murder. In his investigations, Baley himself is frustrated by the lack of scientific thinking among the Spacers, who find it difficult to propose a test for poison, and their fastidiousness that destroys potential evidence of crime; despite their wealth and advanced technology, a detective has a more scientific mind than they. The Solarians believe that their superior genes have eliminated psychological abnormalities—including the ability to commit murder—forcing Baley to point out that genes and environment interact to produce individuals. The climax of the plot is, unsurprisingly, that Baley solves the murder. When he returns to Earth, he earns no rewards in the denouement. He makes his report, and offers a warning that Solaria is more like Earth than anyone would think: both are on a path toward irrelevance due to their increasing insularity. In the same way that Solarians have retreated onto their estates, the people of Earth have retreated into their cities. Baley calls for the people of Earth to look outward, but his

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superiors are unwilling to listen to his message. Alienated from his home, Baley muses that the cities are a womb, and the first thing a man must do on the path to manhood is to be born. Baley imagines a future for his family in the stars in a way that is strongly aligned with the masculine discourse that cities are deadening, feminine influences that must be left behind. In this way, readers experience the collapse of a false dichotomy, even though the characters themselves are convinced that their way of life is superior and their foils are degenerate. This is a curious experience that differentiates the robot detective novels from previous fiction that it resembles. In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, for instance, the reader experiences the undesirable division of humanity into the brutish Morlock and the ethereal Eloi, which Asimov has borrowed to a certain extent with the Earthlings and the Spacers. Wells’s two narrators, though, maintain the sensibilities of Victorian gentlemen, and the Morlock and Eloi never realize their commonality. In E. M. Forester’s “The Machine Stops,” readers observe a future society much like that of Solaria, where humans rarely meet in person, preferring to communicate remotely. Asimov separates these types; Baley, who like most people on Earth has lived his entire life underground, suffers from severe agoraphobia, like the underground citizens of Forester’s novel. A reader of Forester simply views the future of humanity as an unfortunate demise. Asimov’s narrator, however, repeatedly points out how the supposedly polar types resemble each other and, importantly for anti-racist thinking, that the types themselves are not uniform. Some aspects of the setting that should shake up the reader’s consciousness, though, may not be effective as anti-racist experiences. The Solarians, for instance, practice eugenics and seek to force evolution among their young in a way that, particularly in the wake of World War II, should be objectionable. One of Baley’s hosts informs him that Solaria resembles Earth, and a reader might tie the use of the word “plantation” to describe Solarian homes and the fact that robot laborers far outnumber the citizens to mean that the applicable period of Earth history is the southern United States before the Civil War. No, Baley is told, the relevant antecedent is Sparta. Truly, the youth of Solaria never meet their parents, and they were prepared to assert their planet’s hegemony against a

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consolidating galactic empire. A reader with a well-rounded background like Asimov might suspect that the allusion to Sparta would indicate there are flaws in Solarian culture; certainly, Sparta was dominant for a time, but later succumbed to a confederation of Greek states and ultimately the Roman Empire. Even so, the Solarian belief that their superior society is available to a decreasing number of people is much like a social Darwinist would describe the future of humanity. The depiction of fetal engineering to stop mutation shows the social resistance to change and the belief that they are the apex of humanity; the Solarian belief that recapitulation can be exploited as a means to quickly transform a species’ habits is an outdated, neo-Lamarckian way of thinking of human behavior. These ideas may not seem suspicious to a reader simply because there is no narrative voice or plot element that directly condemns these practices. Because of Asimov’s understanding of the pseudoscience of race, one can presume that the Solarian ideology should be viewed with suspicion, but this context may not have been obvious at the time, nor is it today. Asimov, for the most part, constrains his critique of racial pseudoscience to his private correspondence and his professional work. As a result, one can infer that his interest in masculinity and innovation was more suitable for his audience. This is clearly seen in the first portion of the Foundation series, “Foundation,” published in May 1942 (in the book version, it is known as “The Encyclopedists,” with new chapters inserted ahead). The story begins with men who have been sent to work far from the galactic center because decadence threatens the galactic empire. This kind of setting, where the stifling setting limits not just clear scientific thinking but progress in general, had become so firmly ingrained in the modern imagination that it was hard to imagine an alternative. However, it was just thirty years earlier that Gernsback had imagined a productive relationship between individuals, government, and industry; the intellect of Gernsback’s Ralph is in no way harmed by the influence of the home environment. From the feeling of the Skylark crew that they must declare their independence from government and industry to the way that human civilization depends upon Arcot, Morey and Wade’s ability to work independently away from home base, though, authors developed a mythos of golden-age civilization founded on scientific masculinity. In

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this way, “Foundation” is based on a contradiction: civilization tortures the scientific mind. In other words, the civilization that benefits from scientific minds also threatens their ability to contribute. The stock plot of a declining civilization leading to its rebirth seems to contradict the goal-directed evolution of the neo-Lamarckian viewpoint from the stages of civilization. Asimov’s praise for Smith, who suggested that successive rises and falls of civilization were part of a plot to bring about a superior race, sits uncomfortably here. Certainly, the forward progress of civilization promised by other authors is not guaranteed in an Asimov setting. For Asimov, civilization is a fragile, hard-to-reach pinnacle that can be easily lost. Nevertheless, Asimov’s cyclical vision of history does share a characteristic with the others, which is the idea of universal history. The long cycles of rise and fall are felt by almost everyone in a society; history is something that happens according to its own calculus and is resistant to human effort. Despite Asimov’s public statements that suggest humans can transform the future, in his stories only a few great figures can make a change, and even so, they are fighting what seems like an inertial force caused by the flow of time. The heroes of the Foundation, for instance, can lessen the damage from the collapse of the galactic federation, but they cannot stop the forces of history that seem to act on their own.

5.4 Misfits Fleeing Big Science Asimov had to take some time off from writing because he was working at the Philadelphia Navy Yard for three and a half years testing materials for the war effort: as L. Sprague de Camp describes it, they were “fighting the Axis with slide rule and requisition forms in quintuplicate” (1966, p. 33). Asimov, de Camp, and Robert A. Heinlein experience first-hand the coming age of big science. As the conflict drew to an end, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, wrote that after the war, scientists will not go back to the old way of doing things. Even so, the enforced teamwork and bureaucratic administration of big science has had the result that scientists are caught in a deluge of information. Bush proposes the Memex, a sort of analog multimedia computer, as a

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way to help researchers more efficiently to profit from the mountains of research. During World War II, a partnership among government, universities, and industry was formalized. After the war, the partnership came to be known as big science, which funneled an exponential increase of funding into technical innovation. As the United States continued to make development of science and engineering a national priority and used technology to reinforce its global dominance, the notion that science fiction was some sort of a niche pursuit for an educated elite lost its luster. World War II cemented the place that science and engineering would play in U.S. policy, domestic and foreign. “This has been a scientists’ war,” wrote Bush (1946) as the United States prepared to drop the bombs. Funding for the research for these weapons—as well as other wartime needs like communication, radar, and mass-produced penicillin—was developed in a system Bush operated. An electrical engineer who became president of MIT, Bush (no relation to the two U.S. presidents with the same surname) formalized the proposal and contract system that created cooperation among government, universities, and industry that is still used today to fund much research. This idea was not entirely new. As documented by the contributors to the Big Science anthology (Galison & Hevly, 1992), the methodology of big science existed before the 1930s; the New Deal had several examples of large-scale projects like the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley electrification project that required this tripartite cooperation. This system proved indispensable during the war, but it would transform the funding for innovation even after the war. In 1940, about $234 million was expended for research in around 3000 corporate laboratories; in 1950, $2 billion in federal money was spent for research in the national interest, which increased in 1954 to $9.4 billion (Shapin, 2008). After World War II, government, not private corporations, would be the primary funder of innovation. Big science also challenged funding mechanisms proposed by Gernsback in the creation of his dilettante genius, Ralph. After the war, direct funding for individuals by the government was anathema. The tripartite idea was an effort to distinguish the American system from the fascistic ownership of industry and research. The agenda and budget for

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science were set by the government, but the solutions depended on professors and commercial experts working in a professional environment. The tripartite partnership of big science had a practical goal: enriching institutions thought vital to democracy. Taking university and business leaders away from their comfortable environments and placing them in government-sponsored institutes would not just inhibit their productivity, but it would also harm the next generation, who would not benefit from expert leadership. In September 1945, Bush says that big science protects scientific ideals: “all scientific progress results from the free play of free intellects working on subjects of their own choice” (Woolf, 1945, p. 72). An individual imbedded in a corporate or academic environment would be the new hero, not the Dick Seatons fleeing bureaucracy. The problems with big science were not immediately acknowledged, but they were predictable. Bush did not acknowledge that his was a gendered vision of science, but he was tapping into the same valorization of manly autonomy that had been seen in science fiction in the Gernsback and Campbell eras. Massive funding for universities, which had been amenable to the exclusion of women in science and engineering, would also exacerbate gendered differentiation. As has been pointed out by historians of technology like Mindell (2002) and Shapin (2008), the development of science and technology during World War II made a significant turn. The new process involved work on a deadline; the enforced collaboration between the military, universities, and industries; and teams that were made up of people from different disciplines. As well, the belief that the amateur ideals of the nineteenth century could thrive in the midst of capitalistic war research may have been too simplistic: as critics would soon point out, anyone who wanted to do research outside of the domains decreed to be in the national interest would be unable to match the funding provided by government grants. What is more, science had become well-funded, but it also became routine, filled with meetings, deadlines, and standards. As noted by Shapin (2008), science was transformed from a calling into a career. The post-war scientific domain needed workers, not geniuses—and thus demands increased for a labor pool that was docile more than disruptive. Gernsback, Campbell, and so many of their authors had failed to anticipate how their generalist backgrounds—some technical training combined with science and the arts—would be

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deprecated as the masculinist domain they imagined came into being. Having helped to convince the public and policymakers that science was best done through abstract thinking by individuals who had sublimated their emotions into manly passions, the next generation of science fiction readers would have a constrained professional personality and seek something different from the genre. The triumphant feeeling when atomic weapons were  used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was short-lived, however. Atomic weapons had been developed in secret, and the debate of whether and how to deploy them was limited to a small circle of technical advisors to the president. This kind of elite decision-making seemed natural to science fiction authors before the war, but its emergence in the real world was less than appealing. The detonation of atomic bombs meant that science fiction had become reality. As noted by Scheibach (2003), in the New Yorker on 18 August 1945 a commentator asserted that school children had abandoned army games and now played atomic bomb on the playground. Scheibach writes that educators sought to teach responsibly about the fear of the atom, noting that atomic problems start when reaction are uncontrolled; careful mastery of the atom would prevent an atomic blast (p. 64). Importantly, though, the bomb also represented a shift in the relationship between science and society. Although some felt that the experience of World War II had made science fiction important, Asimov (1969b) reacts with some doubt at the dawn of the atomic age: The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable. Once the horror at Hiroshima took place, anyone could see that science fiction writers were not merely dreamers and crackpots after all, and that many of the motifs of that class of literature were now permanently part of the newspaper headlines. … I myself was ambivalent. (p. 93)

Asimov states that his ambivalence was partly ordinary—nuclear explosions were frightening—but also he felt that the “crystallization” of science fiction in the real world would “nail the science fiction writer to the ground.” Before the bomb, science fiction was free and writers could do what they wanted. Afterward, though, authors would have to attach

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science fiction to the part that had become real. He says this is sort of “tomorrow fiction” that is “no more new than tomorrow’s headlines.” So he seeks to make fiction that is connected to the present until he could find a way to make it relevant the day after tomorrow. He says “Breeds There a Man …?” (1969b) is part of this effort. This story is remarkable for the way that it continues the effort to understand the cycles of history, but also expands on Asimov’s character type, the tortured man of science. The main character is a male genius who is experiencing mental anguish due to his atomic research. This tortured man of science, Dr. Elwood Ralson, is easily identified by the chemical stain on his face, having been harmed by his work. He is described as a person with “queer” habits who did not speak to his co-workers and sometimes just sat at his desk, seemingly not working. Due to his unhappy childhood and his superior intelligence, he had an inability to have relationships with others. As well, he cannot enjoy “a normal sex life”—he is unmarried and never has had “sweethearts.” Uncomfortable around others, Ralson does not really fit in with the bureaucracy and red tape in the laboratory, but he is also successful in with top-secret atomic research. Ralson denies that he’s an important man, “any more than there are important individual bacteria.” Cultural advances come in “spurts,” and Ralson gives unsurprising examples of western civilization to support his point: Israel in the seventh century BCE, Attic Greece, the Emirate of Cordoba in the eighth century CE, fourteenth-century Florence, Elizabethan England. Do civilizations follow laws of growth and decline? Ralson says that the spurts are the cause: “each time a group of men [sic] showed too much vitality and ability, a war became necessary to destroy the possibility of their further development” (1969b, p. 104). He attributes this destruction to an outside cause, making an analogy to a petri dish with a ring of penicillin. If a bacterium gets close to the edge and might escape, it will be killed by the penicillin at the perimeter: “there is a penicillin ring about our intellects” and if they go too far, they must die. It seems like this strain of humans is resistant, fighting atomic annihilation through social means, and in Ralson’s lab they are fighting with technical means. However, Ralson predicts, the alien beings will soon decide that their experiment has gone too far and resort to drastic means to return humanity to a basic level by provoking atomic war.

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The sense that history is outside of human control, which was started in the Foundation story, has taken a literal turn in “Breeds There a Man …?” because human history is suggested to be an experiment monitored by alien intelligence. Ralson consults with a famous historian, who told him that what seem to be revolutionary moments in history are in fact built on the struggles of the past. This line of thinking should have been accessible to Asimov in detail; Lewis Mumford’s 1934 Technics and Civilization had shown how the amazing feats of human development depended on centuries of intermediate innovations. Ralson, though, dismisses the historian not with facts but with his intuition. In the same way that Ralson can easily see a solution to a thorny problem in the laboratory by a flash of insight, he says too that he instinctively knows that the historian is wrong. Like Campbell’s heroes, Ralson is a genius whose deductive mind quickly finds a solution and he brings about leaps in technical development that otherwise would be impossible. The story’s setting also makes a direct connection to big science. Big science budgets have made science offices look like corporate headquarters. One of Ralson’s colleagues asserts that “government money flows easily,” but it is hard to convince congressional representatives to make appropriations unless they can “see, smell, and touch the surface shine.” Ralson’s genius makes it easy for the laboratory to find funding, and his eccentric personality is needed in the stultifying environment of big science. His instability, though, threatens the enterprise: if he quits his work, the steady, ordinary lab workers will not be able to produce results. With statistics showing that scientists are leaving atomic science and committing suicide at rates higher than other professionals, Ralson’s mental anguish seems to be part of a larger pattern. He continues with his research on providing a defense against nuclear weapons even though it tortures him. His eventual suicide—and the suicide of a laboratory worker who had built one of his devices but had never met him—seems to confirm Ralson’s theory that their inability to work productively and their tortured personal lives are the price they must pay for being geniuses. A few years later, the tortured personality of scientific genius is repeated in Asimov’s 1954 story “Sucker Bait” (AST February and March 1954). The Confederacy of Worlds has let a contract to spaceship Triple G to convey a group of scientists to an uninhabited planet called Junior.

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Although it seems incredibly Earth-like, 100 years before the first colony with 1000 settlers had survived for only a year before being destroyed; it was impossible to find out what had happened remotely. The story sets up antagonism between the ordinary people and the scientific elite. The narrator mentions early on the contempt the crew feels for the scientists, calling them “eggheads” (1954a, p. 9). The antipathy is returned; Mark Annuncio, a twenty-year-old savant, resents when the captain and others he calls “noncompos.” Short for non compos mentis (not in control of one’s mind), noncompos is what Mark and others in his specialized division call outsiders. Mark is a member of the Mnemonic Service, and his advocate is psychologist Oswald Mayer Sheffield. Mark is one of one hundred people in the Mnemonic service. He is maladjusted and introspective. The Confederacy has more than 80,000 worlds, and running a huge political organization like this requires computers. In this setting, one-half of the population “does nothing but compute” and there are “computing subcenters on every other world.” Nevertheless, data get lost, and there is a bifurcation of data. Computers have a limitation: users have to ask them questions because computers cannot use imagination or intuition. “Every world knows something no other world knows—almost every man.” People have to work together, but they do not always know when information unique to one of them might be meaningful. At the time of the story, there are only 100 mnemonics, but as civilization expands, the Confederacy will need more. Mark used to be tortured, suffering from headaches and unable to sleep through the night, but in the service he became more adjusted. A man like Mark is different from other men. He’s got a queer, distorted upbringing and a queer, distorted view on life. … He’s easily upset—and he can be ruined. That mustn’t happen, and I’m in charge to see it doesn’t. He’s my instrument; a more valuable instrument than everything else on this entire ship baled into a neat little ball of plutonium wire. (p. 21)

The setting that surrounds sensitive Mark in many ways resembles the duty-bound world of big science that Asimov and others tried to work in after World War II. The crew is multidisciplinary, and no one questions the knowledge of anyone else’s specialty. In this world of regimented

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innovation, the Mnemonics work in secret and are officially an experiment. The insights from the service had already saved enough money to pay for itself, but the service was also afraid of criticism that they were wasting tax dollars. “In the machine-centered civilization that filled the galaxy, it was difficult to learn to appreciate the achievements of [a] naked mind without a long apprenticeship” (p. 25). Mark’s interactions are limited, and no one asks him direct questions so as to avoid influencing his unconscious mind. At the same time, the focus on the associative mind harkens back to Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The childishness of the Mnemonics is a result of their personal sacrifice in service to the empire. Starting at the age of five, doctors “trained them into personal ruin,” molding them, segregating them from “normal children lest they develop normal mental habits.” No Mnemonic had ever gotten married, and normally they stay at home. Mark is childishly inductive by training—any fact can be important—and his handlers know that they should not select information and refrain from worrying if they do not understand his requests. As the science crew investigates the planet, Mark begins to conflict with the experts, and his ability to span the disciplines reveals professional rivalries. He becomes worried about why the captain calls this planet “sucker bait,” and he does not want to tell the crew. The term refers to planets that seemed habitable but in fact resulted in the entire loss of the colonies. Unexpectedly, Mark causes a commotion among the crew by telling them that a thousand settlers had already died there. In the process, Mark renders Sheffield unconscious and is arrested for mutiny, with the result that the ship begins the return journey to Earth. In the ship-board trial, Mark admits that he had discovered the cause of the first colony’s collapse: the planet had an abnormal amount of beryllium salts. At the time when Asimov was working in World War II, beryllium had been used in atomic research and fluorescent lights before its toxicity became known. In the future world of the story, the mineral was no longer used and thus no one knew that it could cause death. Mark’s curiosity during his training had once led him to a collection of paper books. This kind of associative thinking based on eidetic memory is precisely the reason for the existence of the Mnemonic Bureau. In spite of the way that Mark has irritated the crew, the conclusion of this plot leads to the conclusion that

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tortured individuals who do not fit in with the strictures of big science are an important part of scientific discovery. The appearance of characters like Ralston and Mark after Asimov’s encounter with big science during World War II cannot be a coincidence. They are a type of character that Asimov creates as admirable thinkers on the vanguard of human knowledge, but they are misfits in the increasingly bureaucratic world of post-war science. Tellingly, these characters are despised and feared by the colleagues, but the plots of these stories make it seem necessary to accept their eccentric and seemingly unproductive behavior. As Asimov’s effort to fit in with the world of university research after the world begins to fail, Asimov creates a character type for his readers that evokes sympathy for the supposed geniuses. At a time when the world of research has become routinized and incremental, though, it is doubtful that anyone would tolerate their antisocial behavior, let alone provide them funding.

5.5 Repelling Women Writers Asimov’s fiction, full of men seemingly on the lam from women in the home sphere, seems like it is a reaction against what sometime science fiction author Philip Wylie called “momism”: recent technological advances have liberated women from toil, and with their new-found liberty they are tormenting men. Wylie suggests that he is concerned about the denigration of women, which he paradoxically claims is the reason why mothers are tyrants who force men to lose their virility and value security over liberty. First published in 1943, the book was reprinted many times and then reissued in 1955 with comments from the author. “Mom’s more than ever in charge,” Wylie writes; the United States can no longer boast that it contains “great, free, dreaming men.” Moms are Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s “shock troops” (1955, pp. 186–7). Mark Annuncio’s social ineptitude—just like Powell and Donovan’s fear of “old lady Calvin”—makes it seem like Asimov’s characters are suffering from momism. In his professional life, Asimov developed a persona as an overgrown juvenile, almost as a satirical exemplar of the product of momism.

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This persona would conflict with the role Asimov would fill after the fall of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. The fact that a country with a communist economy had beat the United States into space with the first artificial satellite into Earth’s orbit caused a crisis of confidence in the capitalist bloc, which had assumed that free inquiry and scientific innovation could never flourish in a planned economy (see Allen, 1960, Unna, 1960). Asimov “berated himself ” because he had been spending too much time on science fiction instead of working as a “great science writer.” Market forces were also at play; the coming space race “served to increase the importance of any known public speaker” who could address science, “and that meant me,” Asimov writes in his autobiography (1980, p. 106). Asimov was suddenly offered money and prestige for nonfiction science articles and public appearances to explain science to the masses. Writing to Campbell in 1962, Asimov says that he “unhappily” watched the John Glenn flight, and he has been unhappy about atomic weapons. As a result, he is drifting away from science fiction. The world of reality is invading my private world of science-fiction and I don’t like it—from an emotional standpoint, although intellectually I am delighted. I resent having news-reporters and congressmen and the general public get into the act, because space-travel belongs to me and you and to the other science-fiction writers and readers. It does not belong to the damned outsiders. I am even very unhappy about Glenn being involved because I feel pretty sure he has never read any science-fiction. In fact, I wonder about myself. My last important science-fiction story was written in the fall of 1957. Sputnik I went up in the fall of 1957. Any connection? My official explanation is that when Sputnik I went up—I felt the need of writing on science for an American public that was going to be beaten out by the Russians if science wasn’t accepted as something important, and publishers started beating at my door (they still are) for straight science, rather than science fiction. But, I ask myself, did I drift away from science-fiction because somewhere inside me something was offended and terribly upset over the intrusion of the outer world—the Philistines—on my private domain? Did I give it up because it had been contaminated by the heathen? I don’t know. I may have.

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Asimov had already had some experience as a public intellectual. After he moved to Boston to become a professor, he was a frequent letter writer about ethical issues to the Boston Globe: in one letter, he wonders if he is the only one offended by the “anti-Negro propaganda” in Al Capp’s comic “Li’l Abner” (1968, p. 10). He made public appearances in the Boston area. To this were added educational television appearances, where Asimov, looking handsome in a dark suit, was introduced as a distinguished professor who found use for his encyclopedic knowledge about the history of science. He also became known for extrapolating the future of science. Writing for Ladies’ Home Journal in 1971, for instance, Asimov makes a pointed statement for inclusion of women, concluding that if space exploration is not available to both men and women, it should cease. Asimov’s arguments in favor of women are in some ways demeaning; women would be needed to make men comfortable on the long trip to Mars. However, Asimov deftly counters typical discourses that made it seem natural that only men are explorers. Women are trained, he writes, to avoid demonstrating intelligence and to “bend to capricious male judgements,” so it is unsurprising that men think women are intellectually inferior. That women—who he calls “Earth’s largest and most consistently discriminated-against minority”—can find roles of responsibility and success in this atmosphere is a testament to their abilities. In a way that precisely contradicts Asimov’s creation of a hostile environment for women, he writes that there are already women scientists, and more would join the profession “if the social climate were more favorable” (pp. 201–2). Asimov’s counter to public morality is somewhat vexed, where he wonders if the possibility of a heterosexual orgy in a space capsule is more favorable than a homosexual one. He also notes a Soviet woman’s success in bringing her capsule home and also bearing a healthy child afterward mean that there should be less patronizing concern about women’s health. The odd sexuality Asimov imagines for astronauts is somewhat unique in his work. His characters infrequently enjoy love or physical relationships. Figures like Mark and Ralston cannot engage in sexuality; it is an activity for more ordinary people. For instance, he says his 1940 “Half-­Breeds on Venus” is his most romantic story, explaining its origin as the belated start to his dating as a postgraduate student. There is barely anything romantic in the story, but it is unusual in that it involves family relationships. For

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Asimov, it appears, home life is romantic. Something else that sets the story apart is mixing: mixing of species is joined by the mixing of genders. As such, it serves as a counterexample that proves the rule. Romance and family are possible in “Half-Breeds on Venus” because the protagonists are not white. They form an alliance with other non-­human species to counteract the incursion of imperialist humans (i.e., white civilization). Asimov’s effort to explore his sexuality continues in the 1950s, albeit in a much different fashion. In particular, three short stories he wrote after World War II did not fit well with the kindly professorial image he would be asked to present. In 1955, Asimov published “The Portable Star” in the last issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories (Winter 1955), but he declined to republish it in any of his anthologies. In his autobiography, he says it is the story he is the most ashamed of. He blames the failure of the story on his effort to keep up with a new trend of frank discussion of sex in stories. Phillip Jose Farmer’s story “The Lovers,” in particular, had won a Hugo in 1953 (he would later expand the short story into a novel in 1961). Farmer’s story concerns Jeanette, a member of an all-female, mimetic parasite species called the Lalitha. They disguise themselves as human females to reproduce; they do not need sperm to reproduce, just an orgasm while looking at a man. There are many genes in her, but the nerves travel from the eye to the camera obscura uteri: something like photographs of the man are used to select hair color, nose shape, and other features (1952, p. 60). Unfortunately, they die if they become pregnant and Jeanette has been consuming alcohol to preserve her life, because alcohol makes Lalitha sterile. If they do not become pregnant, the Lalitha live long, becoming like goddesses. Through their undue influence they caused human civilization to collapse. Although Farmer’s story has been praised for its imaginative depiction of sex between species, the fear of female sexuality and the devastating effect of intercourse make one wonder why. The reader learns that the male protagonist, Hal, comes from a religiously fundamentalist future. The reader watches Hal and others who are abused by this race of parasitic women who have no use for men biologically, only seeking to deceive them into intercourse to benefit their own species. Hal has been indoctrinated in this future society where families are supervised, forming an atmosphere of “fear and ignorance and suppression.” In particular, men

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are taught to shun sexual relationships as some sort of vestigial practice that humanity will eventually evolve beyond (p. 48). Hal objects to the consumption of alcohol because of his religious beliefs; he substitutes the alcohol which causes her to become pregnant and die. As a result, Jeanette dies and Hal is alienated from his companions. Asimov says his story “The Portable Star” was written in an effort to join the trend started by “The Lovers” (1980, p. 19). At first, it is hard to see how this story can be said to be following Farmer. The story begins in medias res; during a space voyage, a man enters the quarters of his friend’s wife “with one straightforward objective in mind.” The characters are under some sort of mind control. When they come to their senses, the narrator asserts that they were “slaves more thoroughly than any Earthly understanding in the word” (pp. 54–5). Then the plot resets to the motivation for the voyage. The men were co-workers back on Earth; one had purchased a spacecraft that the narrator describes much like an expensive sailboat, one that required minimal skill to operate. They bring their wives on a vacation, which goes well until a fault in the ship means they can no longer jump through hyperspace. They land on what they thought was an uninhabited planet, but they quickly find out that there are energy beings who can induce emotions in humans. The crew encounters incredible fear when they try to manipulate the controls, and they also find themselves overcome with lust for each other. Like Asimov’s other short fiction, the story centers on a pair of middle-­ class colleagues. The involvement of their wives, though, is depicted as a mistake that is exploited by creatures who do not have human restraints on intimate relationships. The story does involve some sort of sexual liberation in terms of a wife swap, but the escapade is forced upon them. (This story was published in 1955, which, as described in Chap. 1, was just before the time that Gernsback was working on a similar theme for his novel Ultimate World.) What is more, the men are overwhelmed by the influence of the aliens, which they feel as strong emotions. In other words, the story assumes that the proper man has a narrow range of emotional responses. Fittingly, the reader of this story sees that a man is being manipulated when he feels fear or love. They confirm that their plan to distract the aliens has succeeded when their emotional state returns to a smooth functioning rationality.

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The second story of this type is “I’m in Marsport without Hilda” (1969a;  published in Venture Science Fiction in 1957 and reprinted in Asimov’s Mysteries), at a time when Asimov’s experimentation with writing about sexuality comes into conflict with his public persona. In his autobiography, Asimov says that this title came from conversations with his friends about his trips to NYC without his wife. The protagonist in this story is returning to the home space and his wife, Hilda, but has one night of freedom. Max, an agent for the Galactic Service, has a date with his Marsport girlfriend interrupted to solve a smuggling case: one of three prominent figures is involved with drug smuggling, but they cannot be searched due to their high status. Max finds himself distracted by thoughts of his postponed dalliance, and decides to use this against the suspects, knowing that two of them will be under the influence of the drug. He tells stories about his anticipated dalliance until the smuggler gets hot under the collar. The story has a detailed description of Flora, the girlfriend, but she is described as an unintelligent prostitute. Max never manages to have his date with her, even though he gives her a lot of money, when his wife intervenes. Thus, the only sexual activity in the story involves a sex worker who gets paid without performing services and a man who sexually arouses another man by telling him erotic stories. One man’s family commitment blocks him from sexual enjoyment, and another man’s guilt is revealed by homosocial manipulation. Biographically, “I’m in Marsport without Hilda” seems to have caused Asimov to confront his growing public persona. He describes the story in his autobiography by saying the hero describes a sexual encounter and then seizes the suspect who can listen well enough “to develop an erection.” Asimov, who writes that he is “proud of the decency of my stories,” says he did not give too detailed a description, nor did he “specifically state there was an erection.” Asimov is “humiliated” when his editor tells him to “clean it up” (1980, p.  116). Irritated that others’ stories, like those of L.  Sprague de Camp, are increasingly explicit (Dragon of the Ishtar Gate has an orgy), Asimov continues to complain. The editor explains, “Isaac, your books are so proper that librarians are confident enough to buy them without reading them, and we don’t want to do anything to upset them” (1980, p. 117). The inclusion of these details in his autobiography adds to the Freudian explanation of his behavior.

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The third story of this type, from the March 1961 AMZ, is “Playboy and the Slime God” (Fig. 5.2). Again, Asimov claims that the story was not from his own imagination. The impetus of this story was an article in a 1960 issue of Playboy, “Girls for the Slime God” by Mike Resnick.

Fig. 5.2  In Asimov’s  “Playboy and the Slime God,” humans are abducted by aliens and subjected to sexual abuse

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With a mocking tone, its editorial note says that the article was disillusioning because it does not really find much sex in science fiction, except for the a few stories from years ago. Unfortunately, the editors say, authors have been more interested in “cultural taboos” than “heaving breasts.” However, they felt sympathy for the “Playboy people,” so they commissioned “one of sf ’s most sex-appealing writers” to prove that they have not forgotten that “S-X” is “the most important thing in the universe.” The most interesting aspect of Asimov’s story is the narration. It begins with an omniscient, third-person narrator, but it slowly dawns on the reader that the perspective of this narrator is not human. The narrator describes bug-eyed monsters who are observing Earth and are puzzled by the humans; they communicate with sound waves; they have no “color patch” that the aliens use to communicate, and their eyes are flat. After overcoming the hurdle of the narration, a reader witnesses the aliens argue about speciation—are male and female humans one species or two? And how does sexual reproduction work? By studying a periodical that they translate as “Recreationlad,” apparently a transliteration of Playboy into their language, the aliens learn a little bit about human sexuality. As might be expected in the wake of “Portable Star,” though, the actual sexuality depicted in the story is stunted. Marge and Charlie, who had been waiting on an elevated train platform when they were abducted, awaken. The aliens implore the pair, who did not know each other previously, to copulate. Most of the questions, however, are directed to Marge, particularly about her breasts. The aliens seem nauseated by the actions they have read about but never seen; the humans suffer indignities but refuse to cooperate, and they are returned to Earth unharmed. The denouement? The shared suffering has made them feel camaraderie, and even though they are both married, they decide to have some drinks together. The theme running through “Marsport,” “Portable Star,” and “Playboy” is not immediately apparent, but it denies the primacy of monogamous couples with binary genders. A different kind of sexuality, involving a third-party catalyst that does not directly take part in the action, seems to emerge from these stories. This sexuality, while not enticing or based on consent, seems to be the best that Asimov could do with his fiction based on his vision of human sexuality. In his 1972 novel The Gods Themselves,

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he even creates a species with a three-part cooperative sexuality required for reproduction. The awkward sexuality of these stories seems out of step with the public persona Asimov cultivated as a respected professor, but they do shed light on his experience as an outside observer of human sexual experience. Since the time when Asimov wrote his first letters to the editor, it was clear that he had troublesome relations with women. In later years, organizers of Chicon III put together an exhibit about Chicago’s World Science Fiction Convention in 1961, which included correspondence between one of the organizers and Asimov. Chicon wished Asimov to deliver an address on the “Positive Power of Posterior Pinching” and promised to provide “some suitable posteriors for demonstration purposes” (Zvan, 2012). Not only was Asimov’s behavior well known in science fiction circles, it was seemingly encouraged. Asimov’s groping was, for a time, counter to his public persona outside of science fiction circles. In general, until the 1970s, it is not hard to find fawning newspaper stories about his intellectual curiosity, his prolific writing, and his concern for education. In the 1970s, as science fiction was coming into the public eye and Asimov was becoming a spokesperson for the public understanding of science, the personae collided. The conflict between these two personae can be seen in a pair of appearances on the Dick Cavett Show. On 13 February 1970, he made a pass at a woman. His wife and daughter, who were watching at home, were upset by his behavior. Asimov says in his autobiography that his marriage was already collapsing, but this humiliating moment helped to make it clear it was over. In order to facilitate his divorce, he moved to New York City, because in that state he could get a no-fault divorce decree, unlike in Massachusetts. They separate on July 1970; Janet Jeppson, who would become his second wife, helped him move, and he starts dating her in September 1970. On 4 June 1971, Asimov appears again on the Dick Cavett show to promote his new book, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man. On the dust jacket, Asimov was identified only as “Dr. A” and his face on his author’s photo was covered by a lacy brassiere. When he made his appearance on stage, Asimov similarly wore a bra on his head. This childish prank was, Asimov reflects, the “silliest thing I ever did on television” (1980, p. 570). In his

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1971 book, “Dr. A” reports that he had been accused of being a dirty old man since he was fifteen years old—in other words, at the time when he wrote his first letters to the editor of AST. He details experiences of homosocial environments, such as what he calls “orgies”: several men cajoling a woman. He feels dismay when he hears other men committing what we would today think of as harassment; nevertheless, he says orgies must be protected expression by the U.S. Constitution. The “Dr. A” personality, which fits in better with the sex stories of the 1950s, leads to a handful of follow-up titles, marking a liberation of sorts for Asimov. Campbell dies on 11 July 1971; Asimov’s divorce is finalized the following year, and his public persona comes under wide scrutiny. For the first time, Asimov’s unpleasant behavior becomes mentioned in public reports about him. A 1973 portrait in the Washington Post comments in the fifth paragraph that Asimov, then fifty-three years old, cultivates a “self-image of a dirty old man” (Dreyfuss, 1973, p. B1). In 1976, a report about Asimov’s attendance at a seminar notes that in the first hour, Asimov has “kissed six pretty girls” and “recited four quite good limericks about people at his table.” The author concedes that some attendees “were not amused,” but the author also says the banter must be playful because he is “desperately in love with his wife, New York psychiatrist Janet Jeppson” (Kernan, 1976, p. B1). Similarly, in 1979, a reporter writes “a lecherous-acting” Asimov was asked by “a blond in a green dress” for a “quickie.” Asimov tells the woman that there is nowhere to go, and then calls out to Jeppson, “Janet … this girl says she’s going to attack me.” Jeppson is asked if Asimov’s banter bothers her. “Oh no,” the newspaper quotes her. “That’s just the way he is.” Later in a hotel room, the reporter says Asimov is unexpectedly shy. To prove that he “really is a dirty old man,” he provides a limerick about Lancelot to the reporter (Dugger, 1979, p. B3). In 1979, this persona appears in the Boston Globe. His “unabashed chauvinism” may be the reason why there are no romantic or sexual aspects of his books—one secretary in a publishing house says he is an “amiable Neanderthal” who has the “bad habit” of “snapping the back elastic of brassieres” (McLaughlin, 1979, p. 8). These reports are couched in a tone of polite acceptance, as if Asimov’s troubled behavior is an unfortunate facet of a childish genius.

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Asimov makes it clear that his comfort with public speaking comes from his many years of speechmaking at science fiction conventions, and this aspect of fandom also starts to come into the public eye at this time. In 1974, a reporter covering the 32nd World Science Fiction Convention in Washington disparagingly wrote about a public program featuring Asimov and Harlan Ellison where the two traded barbs under the rubric of a dialogue about science fiction. The reporter notes that “two of the world’s leading science fiction writers” spoke for an hour but had very little to say about the genre, instead insulting each other. Asimov asserts that Ellison found out that he was a man only a year ago, and Ellison responded by calling him a yenta. Ellison (who plays the role of “gadfly”) must have Mickey Mouse pajamas under his clothes, and Asimov (who seems like a “fatherly professor”) is wearing women’s underwear. The reporter asks two women what they thought; one says it was just an act, and the other says the performance was “disgusting” (Shales, 1974). In more recent years, Ellison drew the ire of the science fiction community after grabbing a breast of Connie Willis during the presentation of the 2006 Hugo awards. His response was that he made a childish gesture in response to Willis’s warning to him to behave properly, and he did not harass or attack her. As these reports appeared in the press, Asimov had started to write his autobiographies, which unabashedly include his inappropriate words, although there is little mention of physical contact. He never made a connection between his behavior and what he says is a natural lack of women in science fiction. At the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland in September 1955, for instance, Asimov met André Norton, whom he says was “writing excellent science fiction juveniles” but notes she “was actually a woman.” His harassing behavior is not at all mentioned, just some sort of abstract truth: “The masculine character of science fiction at that time made that sort of thing seem sensible then” (1980, p. 38). Even from the vantage point of the 1970s when he was writing his autobiographies, he seems surprised that his behavior was offensive. He was rude to Janet Jeppson, his future wife, at the 1956 World Science Fiction Convention. When she asked him for an autograph, he inquired about her profession. Learning that she was a psychiatrist, he quipped, “good … let’s get on the couch together.” His narrative persona in his

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autobiography assures the reader that he was just in a bad mood and not disinterested a liaison (1980, p. 66). Later, Asimov writes, “I didn’t even know I had offended her at the time” but Jeppson, for her part, remembers that she walked away never wanting to see him again (1980, p. 116). In addition, he tells his readers, at a student-faculty show at Boston University in 1956, he made some “humorous comments” about the “skin-tight” clothing of the dean’s assistant, who “had the figure to make the procedure worthwhile” (1980, p. 54); he later refers to her as a “young lady” (1980, p. 100). He provided an apology in writing, volunteered his resignation to the dean, and reports never participating in such an event again. A year later, in a different conflict, he agrees to relinquish his salary in exchange for the right to continue to use his academic title. So, at this early stage of his celebrity status, one can see that Asimov’s flippancy was disturbing to others and that he was somewhat self-aware. Based on what Asimov writes about himself, these were not isolated incidents. His description of the 1959 World Science Fiction convention in Detroit expands on this bad behavior. Not wishing to travel by plane or automobile, Asimov took the train, and he had a “little fantasy” about a “pretty girl” in the adjoining roomette, hoping for a “very pleasant conversation” with perhaps “added features.” He does not get any “added features” because she was a nun (1980, p. 171). When he arrived at the convention, he met a twenty-one-year-old fan (Asimov was thirty-nine and married at the time), which Asimov writes makes up for his failure with the nun. Asimov provides the measurements of her body but makes it clear that he was not the only bad actor here: many authors had fawned on her, one of whom ends up marrying her after the convention. Overall, Asimov maintains that he is playful but innocent. In fact, he asserts that science fiction conventions benefit teenage readers because they participate in the subculture and meet their heroes. Astonishingly, on the same page, Asimov writes: I loved autographing. … When I am feeling particularly suave during the autographing sessions, which is almost all the time, I kiss each young woman who wants an autograph and have found, to my delight, that they tend to cooperate enthusiastically in that particular activity. (1980, p. 175)

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In this way, Asimov makes his womanizing seem as if it were a part of a carefully honed public persona. He describes harassment as a way of relieving tension. Working in 1974 with NBC on a television program made him feel uncomfortable, so when he arrived at the writing conferences, “I eased my unhappiness by engaging the various pretty young ladies in light-hearted banter, and my role was clearly that of the ‘sensuous dirty old man’ concerning whom I had written” (p. 673). He also describes his travel by boat to England at the invitation of Mensa. On the one hand, Asimov describes his discomfort about IQ testing. In “Thinking about Thinking” (reprinted in The Planet that Wasn’t), he says with a progressive attitude that IQ is an artificial concept that he worries might make a group “too easily” think that they are superior (p. 678). At the same time, he reports that he composed and performed a bawdy poem during one of the dinners on the return trip aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2. Before he spoke, he felt the table had been “stiff and silent,” but after he recited it, people laughed “and the reserve broke down at once. I was delighted and wrote down the limerick.” He continues, “I began making it a practice to construct limericks whenever I was trapped in company and bored” (p. 679). In this way, Asimov presents the dirty man persona as an almost inevitable outcome of his socially awkward self, trying to ingratiate himself with his dinner companions. Although Asimov’s actions are deplorable, it is wrong to think of them as simple personal foibles. They had definite consequences. Like John Campbell and Judith Merril, Asimov was an editor and reviewer, not just an author. In this work, and in his speeches before the science fiction community, he developed a persona as an objective historian despite his own vested interest in the history of the genre. To be sure, Asimov did not create the hostile environment in science fiction fandom, and he was not the only fan-historian to neglect the women who wrote before 1970. That being said, he participated in the sexism of the field and profited from it directly. Asimov likes to think of himself as a champion of diversity and a promoter of feminism, which is true to a certain extent, but as shown in other chapters of the current study, there were other authors who supported these themes more successfully. What is more, it seems obvious that Asimov’s habitual groping and demeaning comments would have served to repel many authors who might have challenged his belief

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that he was a trailblazer. The social side of the science fiction community, which relied on personal relationships and discussions, in this way was harmed by his behavior. Before 1960, Asimov had already assembled several anthologies of his own writing. With the power of his name to sell books becoming apparent—Nine Tomorrows was his twenty-ninth book—Asimov turns to anthologizing other writers, first when he proposes and edits The Hugo Winners (1962), a volume that collected the stories that won the award named for Gernsback from 1955 to 1961. Asimov edits two more anthologies of this type in the 1960s (one with Groff Conklin, the editor of the 1946 The Best of Science Fiction), and then ten in the 1970s, and in the 1980s his anthology production explodes, with his name on over one hundred (albeit many co-edited). In the same way he did for anthologies of his own work, such as the 1972 The Early Asimov, Asimov inserts personal history and opinions for each story. In a tone something like a dinner speech, Asimov establishes the lineage of the contributors, encourages pride in the history of the genre, and places the field in the context of the larger society. For instance, in The Hugo Winners (1960), Asimov provides an introduction that reads like a speech at a banquet: “Let me introduce this book in my own way, please; by which I mean I will begin by introducing myself. I am Isaac Asimov and I am an old-timer” (p. xii). Asimov reports that he was asked to be the emcee for any Hugo awards ceremony for any convention he attended. One can surmise, then, that the editorial notes mimic the speeches he gave. Readers experience the Hugo winners as if they are part of a civic association. This effort for The Hugo Winners encourages the reader to see the genre as an open, democratic community, a character like the public sphere that the preceding pages have shown was in fact lacking. Asimov’s editorial persona as dinner party speaker portrays the early years of a vibrant community that was unsure of its potential success, yet at the same time he does not acknowledges the compromises he had to make along the way. Asimov’s tone introduces the reader to a variety of individuals, who, along with his by-the-bootstraps autobiographical comments, implore the reader to find a place among them. However, he shows no enlightenment in the way that he writes about women, either. In words that today might seem shocking, Asimov puts into print the kind of sexual

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harassment that one can expect was common at science fiction gatherings, perpetrated by himself and others. He overtly acknowledges his own abuse of women and fails to acknowledge women working in science: Anne McCaffrey is a woman. (Yes she is; you notice it instantly.) What makes this remarkable is that she’s a woman in a man’s world and it doesn’t bother her a bit. Science fiction [in 1973] is far less a man’s world that it used to be as far as the readers are concerned. Walk into any convention these days and the number of shrill young girls fluttering before you (if you are Harlan Ellison) or backing cautiously away (if you are me) is either frightening or fascinating […] The writers, however, are still masculine by a heavy majority. What’s more, they are a particularly sticky type of male, used to dealing with males, and a little perturbed at having to accept a woman on an equal basis. It’s not surprising. Science is a heavily masculine activity (in our society, anyway); so science fiction writing is, or should be. Isn’t that the way it goes? […] I get along marvelously well with Annie. Not only am I a “Women’s Lib” from long before there was one, but I have the most disarming way of goggling at Junoesque measurements [i.e., large breasts] which convinces any woman possessing them that I have good taste. (p. 329; emphasis in original)

Asimov makes it seem as if it is natural that women are underrepresented in science, claims that he is a supporter of second-wave feminism, acknowledges that his reputation makes women flee from him, and reduces McCaffrey to her body—all in one introduction. McCaffrey, who appears in 1973 in the second volume of award winners, is the first woman Asimov is obligated to write about. (The first woman to win a Hugo was Elinor Busby in 1960, but she does not appear in the anthology because her award was not for writing fiction; she co-edited a fanzine with her husband.) McCaffrey won her award in 1968, some fifteen years after the first awards were distributed, and another five years passed before Asimov published this comment. The construction of masculinity is a choice rather than an historical accident. Even though there were by 1973 many prominent women in science, and of course Asimov’s own dissertation advisor was a woman, it is unreasonable to write that science was dominated by men and that bias carried over into the genre.

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By making his first anthology about the winners of the Hugo award, Asimov can absolve himself for not selecting women. This defense cannot be utilized for his other editorial decisions. The selections he made with Conklin for Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales (1963) include fewer than five stories that can readily be identified as by women; as will be shown in Chap. 6, by this time editors like Judith Merril had been showcasing the many contemporary female writers of science fiction. This problem is exacerbated in a 1974 series of anthologies inspired for his nostalgia for the days of science fiction before Campbell. The third volume of Before the Golden Age is the only one to include a woman (Leslie F. Stone, represented by “Human Pets of Mars”); the other twenty-six stories in the four volumes are written by men. What is remarkable about Asimov’s 1985 anthology Great Science Fiction Stories by the World’s Great Scientists is again the editorial notes. The note about “James Tiptree, Jr.” recalls how, after ten years’ worth of stories from Tiptree, it was revealed that he is actually a she, Alice Sheldon. In 1967, Asimov writes, she begins using the pen name and hides her gender because of “fear of losing her dissertation grant, ruining future employment opportunities with the CIA and damaging her reputation with her colleagues.” Because she is a nontraditional student and a woman, Asimov speculates, she would not have been able to enter the field, even though her dissertation (completed when she was fifty-two) is a “recognized classic in the field” (p. 265). In addition, he writes a headnote for himself, saying that he is “perhaps the world’s greatest explainer of science” (p. 209) and reminding his readers that he himself is a Ph.D. in Chemistry who worked for the U.S. Navy Air Experimental Station and taught biochemistry for several years at Boston University. The other contributors have similarly diversified pedigrees: education in the sciences, frequently serving in the military, many professional publications, and a range of scientific publications. Only Sheldon is portrayed as someone who does not fit in. Surely, Asimov is not unique in his self-evaluation as a supporter of women at the same time he drove them away, either in science or in science fiction. The result was a benefit to him: he could claim credit for being a pioneer who supported women because had erased or silenced others who could challenge his claim. What is notable about the evidence

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that he has left behind, though, are the false promises of the public sphere. Men like Asimov promote their own efforts to be free of sexism and break the mold. While they promote the myth of a merit-based environment, an alternative zone where all are welcome and will be judged only by the excellence of their ideas, of course few women want to be around them. The failure to recognize the troubles he had in gaining publication leads to the unfortunate assumption that the obstacles others faced were simple failures and not human-created constructs.

References Allen, G. V. (1960). Statement. In Review of the Space Program: Hearings before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S.  House of Representatives (pp. 35–46). Government Printing Office. Asimov, I. (1985). Great Science Fiction Stories by the World’s Great Scientists. Asimov, I. (1994). I, Asimov: A Memoir. Doubleday. Asimov, I. (1968, September 9). Offensive? Boston Globe, 10. Asimov, I. (1938a, July). We Changed the Story Title as the Magazine Title— For Greater Clarity of Meaning. AST, 21(5), 158. Asimov, I. (1938b). But Are There Meteors in Interstellar Space? AST, 22(1), 160–161. Asimov, I. (1939a). Trends. Astounding, 23(5), 33–46. Asimov, I. (1939b). Feminine-Less Issue. Startling Stories, 2(3), 115. Asimov, I. (1940). Rebuttal. Super Science Stories, 1(4), 126. Asimov, I. (1953). Social Science Fiction. In R. Bretnor (Ed.), Modern Science Fiction. Coward-McCann. Asimov, I. (1954a). Sucker Bait. AST, 52(6), 8–38. Asimov, I. (1954b). Caves of Steel. Fawcett. Asimov, I. (1955). The Portable Star. Thrilling Wonder Stories, 44(3, Winter), 54–64. Asimov, I. (1956). The Naked Sun. Doubleday. Asimov, I. (1961). Playboy and the Slime God. AMZ, 35(3), 30–43. Asimov, I. (Ed.). (1962). The Hugo Winners, Vol. 1. Fawcett Crest. Asimov, I. (1966). Portrait of the Writer as a Boy. Fantasy and Science Fiction, 31(4), 46–55. Asimov, I. (1969a). I’m in Marsport Without Hilda. Asimov’s Mysteries, 130–144. Asimov, I. (1969b). Nightfall and Other Stories. Doubleday.

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Asimov, I. (1971). No Space for Women? Ladies’ Home Journal, 115, 201–2, 204. Asimov, I. (1972). The Early Asimov, or Eleven Years of Trying. Doubleday. Asimov, I. (1979). In Memory yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954. Avon. Asimov, I. (1980). In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978. Doubleday. Asimov, I. (1982). Introduction to “Liar” in the Complete Robot. Doubleday. Asimov, I., & Boyd, W. C. (1955). Races and People. Abelard-Schuman. Asimov, S. (Ed.). (1995). Yours, Isaac Asimov: A Lifetime of Letters. Doubleday. Bush, V. (1946). As We May Think. In Endless Horizons (pp.  16–38). Public Affairs Press. Campbell, J. W. (1939). Addenda. 23(5), 4–5. Chapdelaine, P. A., Sr. (1993). The John W. Campbell Letters with Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt: Volume II. AC Projects. Clarke, E.  H. (1873). Sex in Education: Or, a Fair Chance for the Girls. J.R. Osgood. de Camp, L. S. (1966). You Can’t Beat Brains. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 31(4), 32–35. Dreyfuss, J. (1973). Asimov: Intellectual Protrusions. Washington Post, p. B1. Dugger, C. (1979, August 4). The Admiral and the Astrologer, the Actor and …. Washington Post, p. B3. Farmer, P. J. (1952). The Lovers. Startling Stories, 27(1), 12–63. Fielder, L. A. (1960). Love and Death in the American Novel. Criterion Books. Galison, P., & Hevly, B. (Eds.). (1992). Big Science: The Growth of Large-Scale Research. Stanford UP. Kernan, M. (1976, July 27). Isaac Asimov: Savant of Science Fiction, Lover of Limericks, Master of Mysteries. Washington Post, p. B1. Lavender, I., III. (2011). Race in American Science Fiction. Indiana UP Press. McLaughlin, J. (1979, January 20). Isaac Asimov: He Describes Himself as Frenetic and Chauvinistic. Boston Globe, p. 8. Merrick, H. (2009). The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. Aqueduct Press. Mindell, D. (2002). Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control and Computing before Cybernetics. Johns Hopkins UP. Nicholas, L., & Agius, C. (2018). The Persistence of Global Masculinism: Discourse, Gender and Neo-Colonial Re-Articulations of Violence. Palgrave Macmillan. Scheibach, M. (2003). Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945–1955. McFarland.

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Shales, T. (1974, August 31). An Invasion of the Sci-Fi Writers on the Day Two Worlds Collided. Washington Post, p. C1. Shapin, S. (2008). The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. U Chicago Press. Turnbull, D.  G. (1938). Misogynist! Bet You Hear from Miss Evans! AST, 21(5), 162. Unna, W. (1960, October 20). USIA Polls Show U.S. Prestige Dip Abroad Since Launching of Sputnik. Washington Post, p. 1+. Woolf, S. J. (1945, September 2). Dr. Bush Sees a Boundless Future for Science. New York Times, p. 72. Wylie, P. (1955). Generation of Vipers: Newly Annotated by the Author. Pocket Books. Zvan, S. (2012, September 9). We Don’t Do That Anymore. Retrieved August 19, 2022, from https://the-­orbit.net/almostdiamonds/2012/09/09/we-­dont­do-­that-­anymore/

6 The Challenges of Inclusion

One can imagine many outcomes from the public sphere that arose after Gernsback established the first science fiction magazines dedicated to the new cadre of science and engineering professionals. As was seen in Chap. 5, even an author like Isaac Asimov, who sought to challenge the paradigm, had limited success. That should not be taken to mean, as Asimov and others might suggest, that they were some sort of lonely vanguard. Factually speaking, there were many fiction publications that catered to a mass public that was increasingly informed about basic scientific facts and modern technical developments. When John W. Campbell became editor of AST, the narrow community that reinforced the paradigm that masculinity was naturally suited for science and engineering felt like a niche, but it was backed by a major commercial publisher. Although it is fitting to blame Campbell’s bigotry for the failure of challenges to the negative aspects of masculinist and colonial assumptions about technological challenges, another aspect of the story of the genre’s development is the expectations of science fiction readers served by Street & Smith. In 1949, Campbell published a summary of the responses of a questionnaire to AST readers, stating that 93 percent of its readers were men and 80 percent were under the age of thirty-five. This © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_6

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is not necessarily a definitive statement of the readership since the results were not a scientific sampling but dependent on survey responses. These readers’ willingness to respond, though, shows that they felt committed to being members of the audience, successfully defending the genre’s borders. Despite this readership, for a time Campbell attempted to broaden the scope of the magazine’s contents. He himself, as noted in Chap. 4, wrote wistful stories under a pseudonym derived from his wife’s name He also published some stories from women writers. In fact, C. L. Moore played a pivotal role as he defined his new editorial vision for the magazine. Campbell’s stories published under the name Don A. Stuart have a similar tone to Moore’s stories in WT before she joined AST. Although she went on to publish many stories with Campbell, another author, Leigh Brackett, who first appeared in AST, published only three. Her work did not fare well in Campbell’s analysis of readers’ letters, so she took advantage of the many new options available to science fiction writers after the war. One could have wished that Campbell had worked harder to shift the paradigm, especially given his antagonism to conventional thinking, but his pragmatism overcame his willingness to buck the system. Moore stopped writing science fiction in the 1960s, but Brackett went on to considerable fame as a Hollywood screenwriter, ending her career with the first draft of the script that would become the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. Notwithstanding the differences between Moore and Brackett, one thing they have in common is that they have been used retrospectively as an example of the barriers to women who wished to publish their work in golden-age venues. Along with making suggestive comments about Leslie F. Stone, some scholars and fans have said that Moore and Brackett concealed their true identities with pseudonyms. As was discussed in Chap. 3, though, it is disingenuous to say they concealed anything. Male readers, though, presumed authors were male and felt surprise when they learned otherwise. Remarkably, Moore and Brackett were still remembered in the 1970s when the authors in Chap. 3 had been mostly neglected after the war; their continued presence offers a significant opportunity to examine the construction of gender at the time of the golden age.

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The gender trouble that surrounded these authors since their first publications intensified in the 1970s, when readers and critics started to ponder the simple fact that the modern memory of the golden age included so few women. Fan historian Moskowitz (1974), for instance, suggests Moore’s sex was “carefully kept” from the readers of WT (p. 305), a comment that makes little sense given that so many women were published there. Davin (2006) notes that Moore was the 116th woman to appear in that magazine (p. 68). Author Pamela Sargent (1975), who signaled a sea change with her anthologies of women writers, suggests that Moore was successful at adopting a “male point of view,” which was necessary for pulp science fiction (p. xix). As for Brackett, Sargent said that “she writes exactly like a man steeped in machismo” (p. xxi). This kind of interpretation made its way into academic studies. Lefanu (1988), for instance, notes that there were few women writers of science fiction before World War II, so Moore and Brackett “may have assumed a male voice and non– gender specific names to avoid prejudice on the part of editors and readers alike” (p. 2). Ashley (2005) writes that Moore used initials to conceal her sex and later hid behind joint male pseudonyms with her husband (p. 150). A revaluation of Moore and Brackett’s reputations seems warranted if for no other reason than that the mistaken theory that they had to suffer personal shame in order to become published seems unfair. There is another way to understand this choice: after writing for mainstream pulps, Moore and Brackett successfully infiltrated the masculinist citadel, upending the presumptions of science fiction readers. In their public statements, Moore and especially Brackett deny that they faced overt discrimination. Brackett also denies an interest in feminism, even as her fiction asks readers to grapple with gender roles. As will be seen later in this chapter, she often blames herself for being unable to continue publishing in AST. In addition, Campbell welcomed Moore, and she was a mainstay of AST during the war years—Moore and her husband “carried” AST through World War II, contributing 41 stories according to Carr (1988, p. 31)—which helps to make understandable the claims of some fans that misogyny was not the direct cause for the paucity of women. It does seem impossible to blame an individual’s gatekeeper status for limiting access to the science fiction public sphere; blaming Campbell would presume that in the hands of other leaders,

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AST would have had a different readership. For scholars interested in the history of inclusion in science and engineering, though, these authors offer unique insights into how common discourse about women failed to open the minds of the mission-oriented individuals who were fans of science fiction. As with the other chapters in this study, the implications of this analysis go beyond science fiction writing. The failure to appreciate the role of culture and education to naturalize the reciprocal definition of masculine minds and technical excellence made it seem a sad but unavoidable fact that science fiction would be confined to men. The scarcity of women writers before 1970 has sometimes been cast as a reflection of the natural facts of U.S. professional life. Bainbridge (1986), for instance, points to gender divisions in majors at the University of Washington. He writes, women “do not like the physical sciences as much as men,” and “they are drawn less often to technical careers,” so it would seem necessary to follow that there are few women interested in science fiction (p. 172). As science fiction entered universities in the 1970s, scholars could note that women made up around 10 percent or less of science fiction fans and of students in science and engineering classrooms. Surveys showed that women did not typically enjoy science fiction but also showed they did not appreciate the assumptions about science and technology behind so much science fiction: men were more likely to say that technology can improve human life; to have positive attitudes about military and defense research, and space exploration; and to prefer to physical sciences over social sciences. Women were more likely to say that machines cause unemployment, that humans should protect the environment, and that the government spends too much money on space exploration (Bainbridge, 1986, pp. 174, 176). There is nothing intrinsic in the hard sciences or the funding priorities of big science that demands that men find the hard sciences appealing and women do not. The goals of scientific and technical research are set by the social world, not by some internal necessity of the fields themselves. The lack of women in science education, and their underrepresentation in science fiction, led some to assume that there was some sort of sex difference at play that led to the culture. In fact, the reverse is true. The assumptions about the desired outcomes of science and engineering fit in better with social

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constructions of gender for men and tended to dissuade women. Although supposed facts like college enrollments and the sex of science fiction writers tend to make these differentials seem natural, science fiction publications provide a window onto how those roles were anything but.

6.1 C. L. Moore and the Lovecraft Circle C. L. Moore bridges three important eras of the science fiction genre. In the pulp era, she published in WT and the Street & Smith AST edited by Tremaine before John W. Campbell became editor. In the Campbell era, she became an important part of the golden age, first in issues edited by John W. Campbell as the new editor of AST, then during World War II in collaboration with her husband. Some of her work was republished in the anthology boom immediately after the war. As part of the general feminist effort to find women in science fiction, Moore was later “rediscovered” as a founding mother; even though her work was never really off the radar, in this final stage her stories found greater republication and respect. In the recovery period, the assumption that Moore had to conceal her sex in order to reach an audience became prominent. Even though her first publications were not in science fiction pulps, the theory that Moore actively concealed her identity due to sexism in science fiction is hard to avoid. Writers-turned-historians like Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl claim that Leslie Stone and C. L. Moore had to modify their names for the male audience of science fiction. This story that Moore used her initials to disguise her gender has been repeated many times; Yntema (1988) and many others report it, and it is written on the back cover of the Northwest of Earth anthology (Moore, 2007). Davin, of course, disputes this claim: Moore’s first story in Weird Tales (WT), “Shambleau,” was voted best story of the issue, over stories written by men. If it were the case that Moore’s gender was ambiguous, Davin says, this was not the case after Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger revealed it in the May 1934 zine, The Fantasy Fan. Fan chronicler Sam Moskowitz denies the significance of this, saying that there were never more than sixty copies of this fanzine, so “the news was slow in being passed along the grapevine”

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(1974, p. 305). Despite Moskowitz’s claim that editors hid her sex from readers, no evidence backs up his claim. As Davin notes, WT refers to her as a woman in September 1935, and she signs her own name as Miss Catherine Moore to an October 1935 letter in the magazine. The first letters about “The Bright Illusion” in AST praise her; E. E. Doc Smith’s approval of her story in the Brass Tacks column of AST (Jan 1935, p. 153) says she is female. According to some, the true reason for her use of initials was that Moore was afraid that she would lose her job as a bank teller. In 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression, Moore was the only person in her family who was working, and so she was afraid she would risk her job if her employer knew she wrote for “disreputable pulp magazines” (Davin, p. 114). Moore herself told a slightly different story; in a letter she writes in July 1934, during the Great Depression, she felt that she would be the first in line for layoffs if the bank knew she had other income. The received wisdom is that Moore had to conceal her sex, but it seems more accurate to say that male readers assumed that she was a man. The story that Moore was a thwarted female intellect trying to pass as male is less interesting than the portrait that emerges as Moore introduces herself to the Lovecraft circle, who were affiliated with WT. This magazine, which began publication in 1923, was part of the trend toward specialization in the pulps. In the years Moore was writing for WT, the main figures of fantasy writing were associated with H. P. Lovecraft, an early contributor to WT who went on to publish dozens of stories with the magazine. In her letters to members of the Lovecraft circle—poet R.  H. Barlow and H.  P. Lovecraft himself—one can see a picture of Moore’s early life as a writer. Barlow initiates the conversation, praising her for “Shambleau.” Moore thanks him for his compliment of her “maiden effort in this line,” yet despite her effort to telegraph her sex, Barlow continues to address her as a man in his second letter. Far from concealing her identity, though, Moore corrects him in her second letter, signing her name “Catherine Moore” above a typed “C. L. Moore” in a letter of 28 March 1934. She was twenty-three at the time, barely a year younger than Campbell, and working despite the Great Depression. In her letters, Moore says enjoys playing bridge and watching popular movies, she detests the hot weather, she is intrigued by sources of legends, she relishes discussing points of grammar, and she is annoyed by editors.

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She says that she came from an “Atlantic-Monthly sort of family” that identified the pulps as Wild West and Love Confessions. When she reached college, she writes, she finally “conquered the inhibitions of a lifetime” and brought WT into her room. She says she enjoys Wonder Stories, AMZ, and the new management of AST. In terms of authors, she says she respects Lovecraft and another of the circle, Robert E.  Howard. She admits that she has not read E. E. Smith’s Skylark stories, but she wished that she could, based on what she has heard from other fans. She is not a great fan of Edgar Allen Poe—at first, she says that she is upset by his “ponderous” style. Later, she writes that when she was fifteen, she became ill with scarlet fever, measles, and mastoiditis, which gave her delirium and fever. From this experience, she knows first-hand what it is like “to be mad, when everything is all muddled and horrible, and you’re conscious enough to know that everything’s awfully wrong, and can’t do anything about it,” so she cannot enjoy Poe as an author. For a similar reason, she writes to Barlow that she cannot enjoy Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” because she has awful dreams of being lost. It also becomes clear that Moore began writing early, long before she would have considered which sex would be best for her audience. In a personal letter, Moore tells how she got her start writing when she was nine years old: she and a friend began to make up countries of their own, working on a “romantic island kingdom” like Atlantis. Although she began to study at Indiana University in the 1930s, the Great Depression forced Moore to leave college and learn shorthand and typing. Working for an Indianapolis bank as a typist and doing typing exercises of the “quick brown fox” variety, she says in an autobiographical note that one day she started to type random lines from literature that she remembered from college, such as snippets of Keats, Browning, and Byron. Then she found herself writing about a “red, running figure.” Without even adding any breaks to the text, she began the opening lines of her story, “Shambleau” (Moore, 1975), a story about Northwest Smith’s encounter with a Medusa-like alien, which was published in WT in 1933. The letters offer an intriguing portrait of Moore. She wrote at the bank; this is clear when she admits that she is writing from memory of a letter or story she left at home. Her work life also intrudes in her stories; she casts her eyes around her desk when coming up with the names for

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her characters. “Alendar” is a “calendar” without the C. “Yarol” is a transposition of the Royal typewriter she used. The god “Il” in “Bright Illusion” was snatched out of April on the calendar, as does Apri. God Lsa in “Dust of Gods” comes from an advertisement for L. S. Ayres and Company in Indianapolis. When she was typing “gold dust” and left out the L by mistake, she became interested in “god dust,” resulting in the story “Dust of Gods.” Her fiction is thus a recasting of the work environment into a mechanism for her to earn a little financial and intellectual independence. The letters also provide insight into her life as a woman. On 5 July 1934, she points out that she wants to get married, but she has to wait until she can afford it because then she will have to quit her job. The stories then are an important part of her income. In one letter, after reporting that she has finished making a dinner gown, Moore muses about sewing, wondering why it is not one of the fine arts: it involves three dimensions, requires color sense, and demands a knowledge of materials, making it more complicated than just stitching. In spite of Moore’s affinity for the Lovecraft circle, there is a disconnect between her work, which seems to disrupt the reader’s expectations about empire and race, and the Lovecraft circle’s lament for declining white masculinity. Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft correspondent and creator of the Conan the Barbarian character, puts a pin in it with a previously unpublished story found in his manuscripts and published in a chapbook, “The Last White Man” (1964). Howard’s story of a “splendid example of a wonderful race” that had sunk “to the depths of degeneracy” makes obvious overtures to Lothrop Stoddard and the concept of race suicide. The race was rich but idle; pleasure made them “degenerate weaklings.” Soon, the race started losing athletic competitions to another group who “had been enslaved for ages” (pp. 22–3). Asserting with an update to Malthus that the black race doubles every forty years but the white race only doubles every eighty years, Howard’s narrator states that the white race had taught “the negroes” sanitation and stopped tribal wars by training black men to fight their wars. A mixed-breed Arab man with a “Satanic” genius arose and slaughtered the white race in a world war. When the “Satanic Arab” died, the civilization fell apart. The black race was doomed because “they were destroyers, not builders.” Without white men, there was no progress; humans reverted to “bestial savagery”

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(pp.  27–8). The story ends with the last white man overrun by black people. This story suggests that the Lovecraft circle’s interest in savages and primitive instincts was more tightly tied to theories of racialization than is immediately apparent. Colonialism and masculinity are involved in Moore’s fiction before she published in AST, although she does not exhibit a concern for whiteness in the same way at the Lovecraft circle. “Shambleau” starts with hero Smith wandering the streets of Earth’s “latest colony on Mars,” Lakkdarol, a frontier town at the crossroads of civilizations. When Smith first hears the name “Shambleau” in the street, the narrator states that strange sounds are possible in the “raw, red” city where anything might happen. The narrator describes the population as “motley,” a mixture of “Earthmen and Martians and a sprinkling of Venusian swampmen and strange, nameless denizens of unnamed planets” (Moore, 2007, p. 18). Even so, Lakkdarol is a part of a vast colonial empire. The narrator tells readers that they are not to ask what Smith’s business is, but only that he is awaiting the arrival of his partner on a cargo ship and he is interested in the port city’s exports. The Medusa story could never have happened on Earth, the narrator continues, and so the source is simple: humans of a lost civilization like Atlantis built cities of steel and space ships and encountered Medusa in their travels. While this civilization is gone and forgotten, humanity’s ancient myths are repeated as myths and memories. The eponymous monster in “Shambleau” appears suddenly. Smith sees what the narrator describes as a brown girl running through the street, and he protects her from a pursuing posse. At first, the reader’s sympathies are with Smith and the girl. She is a stranger being persecuted by a mob, and the right thing to do is to help her. She does not share much of Smith’s language, but she manages to tell him she is from far away. He takes her into his protection, seemingly a virtuous action. Shambleau and Smith spend some time together, and Smith is both attracted to her and repulsed by her, having conflicting visions of her as a goddess and a demon. He finds that she will eat neither fresh produce nor food concentrates; she says enigmatically that the food she eats is much better. The climax of the story is unexpected because the narrator’s point of view is tied to Smith’s, and Smith loses his rationality. However, Smith’s colleague, Yarol, finally arrives on Mars. Yarol discovers that the business

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matters Smith came to settle are in disarray and Smith has not been seen in three days. He finds a frightening scene in the dark apartment: in the corner is “a mound like a mass of entrails, living, moving, writhing in an unspeakable aliveness” (Moore, 2007, p. 39). Smith is barely conscious, caught in a slimy mess. Yarol, who is somewhat familiar with the legend of Shambleau, manages to free Smith and kill the creature. After Smith’s convalescence, Yarol tells him that the species seems to have existed long before recorded history. In order to prey on another’s life force, they camouflage themselves in a form that excites people and use their mental powers to bring their victims’ life force to the fullest expression. Smith surmises that these creatures are successful because they can reach into the civilized mind to find dark corners of the psyche that take perverse pleasure in being tormented. Smith, the protagonist of Moore’s first four stories in 1933 and 1934, is something of an anti-hero. In the decade after the conventions of the space opera had been established, Moore critiques the typical characterization of a space hero. Northwest encounters beings and societies that he cannot comprehend, and his civilization is only now reaching the feats of a previous, now lost, human civilization. Smith apparently has a rational mind, just like the other heroes of space opera, but even though he has learned to channel his emotions into manly passions and has a physically fit body, he is undone by ancient creatures. This depiction of previously great societies that had made higher achievements than future humans is an important counter to notions of white masculinity. Like L.  Taylor Hansen’s stories described in Chap. 3, Moore’s fiction debunks the idea that the current human society and the future societies depicted in science fiction are the apogee of civilization. The narrator asserts: Man has conquered space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own. (2007, p. 17)

In the context of this study, one can see how the Northwest stories, like the stories of L. Taylor Hansen described in Chap. 3, counter the social Darwinist assumptions about the supremacy of Anglo-European imperialism. However, Moore developed this setting outside of traditional science fiction venues.

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Moore’s “Scarlet Dream,” which first appeared in WT in May 1934, begins when Smith buys a shawl at the Lakkmanda Market on Mars. It has a dazzling pattern and is made of a shimmering fabric the color of scarlet germaniums. Smith brings the shawl back to his room and spreads the fantastic fabric on his bed before he goes to sleep. He is mesmerized by the fabric and finds himself transported to a new reality, with a patch of scarlet fabric in the sky as a sort of portal. He meets a woman there who wishes to keep him close to the temple where she lives, but this way of life is incomprehensible to the action-loving Smith. “But you have no cities? Where are the other people?” he asks. She explains that there is a monster that terrorizes the population, and they are too easily slaughtered if they group together. Because he cannot return to his own world, he threatens to leave the temple area to find new adventure. His companion tells him that there is a way out, deep in the temple, where he can find a portal back to his own reality. They must avoid perils, but they manage to get Smith home. Throughout this story and others, the swashbuckling Smith is described as bewildered and confused. When he reaches the temple portal, he again finds the intriguing, linear pattern of the shawl, but this time in the room, and it causes Smith to lose control of his perception. The narrator explains: The sight of it, somehow, set up a commotion in his brain, and it was with whirling head and stumbling feet that he […] realized that he stood at the very center of those strange, converging lines, feeling forces beyond reason coursing through him along paths outside any knowledge he possessed. (2007, p. 112)

In these stories, the strong, logical, and capable Smith is repeatedly confronted with powers he does not have the capability to understand. This is not his own failing; certainly, the narrator asserts that his reputation as a capable hero is unsurpassed. Presumably in center of empires, the urban environment is more organized and the unexpected is less frequently encountered. When Smith travels to port cities on the periphery, he engages with mystery. This image of lawless spaceports that are an unfriendly, even dangerous, periphery of the massive industry that would

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be necessary to support an interplanetary empire permeates the Northwest Smith stories and will be picked up in many science fiction stories thereafter. It is also notable how Moore turns away from planet-smashing adventures in outer space to focus on the conflict between perception and reality, an early expression of the new wave’s interest in inner space. These stories were written while Moore corresponded with the Lovecraft circle. First with Barlow and then through encouragement from Lovecraft himself, Moore reads back issues of WT and a good deal of fantastic fiction from their libraries. She begins to accept books and magazines from Barlow in the mail on loan, finally having the chance to read Skylark when he sends her one of the first installments in June 1934. In a letter, she agrees with Barlow that it is not the greatest fiction ever written, but she appreciates Smith’s enthusiasm. The next month she writes that she gets tired of stories of this type whose plots start with a powerful discovery, a trip through space, and “pop-eyed” wonder. In another letter, she points to When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie as examples of what she does not like in her fiction. These stories, albeit published in Blue Book, resemble planet-smashing space opera from AMZ as described in Chap. 2: scientists observe planets hurtling into the solar system, threatening to destroy the Earth, but miraculously a remnant of humanity is able to develop technology to move to one of the wandering planets. This convention, she writes in a letter, makes it hard to appreciate human characters, and the “other-worldly details of civilization” are to her most interesting. She enjoys writing “in the most flagrantly unconvincing way about perfectly ordinary human beings in conventional Earth-countries on other planets.” In other words, the narrowly portrayed men of superscience and their supposed triumphs are uninteresting to her. It is notable that she also avoids hyperspace travel, preferring instead to have transportation at sublight speeds. At this time, Moore finishes the first in a second series of stories that concerns Jirel of Joiry, the first sword and sorcery heroine. “Black God’s Kiss” and “The Black God’s Shadow” are published in WT in 1934. She calls this her “kindergarten” period, and she admits that she is seeking an audience to make a sale as much as she is trying to write serious fiction. Lovecraft sent her some pointers on writing fiction, which she says she

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typed for reference, but she replies to Lovecraft that she is unsure if she can turn away from earning money for aesthetic concerns. However, the character of Jirel is a disruption in the sword and sorcery genre, which was decidedly male-centered. “Black God’s Kiss” begins with men discovering that their warrior opponent is a woman, which the narrator blandly states always happens when men have to reevaluate their assumptions. Moore, the office assistant, writes about a woman who is pretty tall, “savage as the wildest” of men, who spouts off curses and wears her red hair cut short. Thus, Moore’s early fiction already shows an enjoyment in defying an audience’s expectations about sex. “Black God’s Kiss” carries in its setting some of the destabilizing elements that she had used with Northwest Smith. Jirel, the daughter of a king, is endangered because their castle has been captured. Because of her youthful explorations, Jirel knows that the castle had been built on a long-forgotten tunnel that had not been built for humans. Without fear, she descends into the earth in search of a weapon to exact her revenge, and the narrator notes that “the world was very old.” The winding tunnel, the narrator notes, leads through “poly-dimensional space”; even though Jirel is “no scholar of geometry or aught else,” she maintains a clear head on the frightening journey to an underground cavern populated by strange beings. An apparition tells her to take what she gets from a temple to her adversary. She enters a dark, underground shrine, where she feels compelled to kiss a stone statue. The kiss imbues her with the god’s spirit, which she knows she must take to her enemy. Returning to castle, she seeks out the conqueror and collapses in his arms, exhausted from carrying the essence given to her by the stone god. Aroused by her weakness, the enemy seeks a kiss, but at the last moment sees “the savage glare of victory in her eyes.” It is too late; Jirel transmits the essence, painfully draining away his life. Moore’s choices in this story may be a bit subtle, but they offer a contrast to the sword and sorcery genre and even to traditional epics like Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, or Beowulf. These heroes offer a glimpse of nascent humanity—the seeds of civilization to come—which sometimes have racist overtones, as seen in Jenkins’s Burl (Chap. 2). Moore supports the idea that human civilization is not the first or an inevitable evolutionary apex, which (as described in Chap. 3) is an essential aspect of anti-racist

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science fiction. However, this story in WT could not have found its place in a Gernsback or Campbell publication. Certainly, one could add more scientific jargon to the story to teach readers about some aspects of relativity. The characterization of Jirel, though, would be completely unsuitable. Setting aside the fact that she is memorable as a strong female hero, one should notice her curiosity, open-mindedness, and trust. In the hands of an author in AMZ or AST, this character would have been much different. She would have studied the confusing descent into a different dimension and, with a few simple tests, would have made a quick deduction about how the mystery fits in with accepted ideas in physics and perhaps exploited the energy as a tool. Similarly, the character would have dismissed the helpful apparition, and the mystery of the creature in the temple would have been quickly explained and rationally exploited, even though a golden-age male character would not have been likely to use his own body as a vessel to deliver the creature to the antagonist. Jirel—who, unlike the heroes of AMZ and AST, does not benefit from the new technical education and is untutored—must rely on her experience and relationships, even with unknown entities. Her explanations of phenomena come only from her senses, and the narrator explains phenomena only after their results are apparent.

6.2 The Limits of Rationality By 1935, after a handful of successful stories, Moore began to describe her dissatisfaction with her home life in her letters. Amelia Earhart, for instance, had come to her city for the Indianapolis 500, but her “hard-­ hearted fiancé” would not take her. Later in the year, she cut her hair short like Jirel’s, having worn it waist-length since her youth. She broadened her reading, partly in conversation with the Lovecraft circle but also by reaching out to her friends and colleagues. She bristled at news from Lovecraft and Barlow’s travels, wishing that she too had a more mobile life and had met the people they had mentioned. Her fiancé’s unexpected death in February 1936—Moore writes that he was killed while cleaning his gun, a common euphemism for suicide—led her to take her mother on a bus trip to Florida in search of Barlow.

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After the death of her fiancé and this trip, Moore’s professional life began to change. She was promoted to be the secretary of the bank president, and she had to organize hotel rooms for visiting bankers and their wives at a conference. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by social niceties, she still expresses her respect for business leaders. Apparently, Lovecraft had outlined plan for a political takeover of business. Moore’s experience has made her disdainful of government officials and bank examiners, but she also respects the fact that few bank employees were laid off during the Depression. Her criticism is not pitched against capitalism or fascism, but against masculinist personalities, as described in an October 1936 letter: Clothed in their little brief authority, the lamentably large majority of [bank examiners] are so arrogant, so puffed up with self-importance, and the knowledge that their social and financial superiors, the bank officers, must do as they recommend, that by the time they’ve gone the typists who worked for them are verging on hysterics and the officers are in a state of polite insanity. […] I have yet to encounter a crew of them in which one member at least isn’t so blatantly self-important and gratuitously insulting that you have to count up to ten every time he speaks to you before answering. If this is an example of the sort of people into whose hands authority would fall were the government to take over business, heaven preserve all capitalists.

The personal nature of men will win out, and unless they change, there will only be power “in the hands of men with pull,” or what today we would call privilege. This period also sees Moore breaking away from the Lovecraft circle. In a November 1935 letter, Lovecraft had supplied Moore with a summary of racial types and their supposed natural heights, which could support polygenism. In this new period, she writes in response to a new treatise on racial characteristics, recoiling at some of Lovecraft’s racialized ideas. Moore, following a personal critique of racial theories, writes thoughtfully but not always delicately about racial pseudoscience. For instance, she writes, it does not make sense to say that Native Americans must be treated like cattle on reservations because the Mayans and Aztecs

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had expansive civilizations. In an apparent response to Lovecraft’s echoing of an old idea that the so-called white race is the most beautiful, Moore states that she has seen handsome black people and Asians. Additionally, she wonders about the legitimacy of the theoretical link between physical characteristics and culture because Polynesians look similar to white people, yet their social organization is like African tribes. She then tells a story about a conflict she used to have with her late fiancé. On the one hand, racial theories suggest that the supposed black race had evolved in order to be impervious to the heat, and yet news reports show that black people suffered disproportionately from heat exhaustion. Her fiancé would blame dark skin for absorbing too much heat, leading to weakness. However, if the theory that racial types resulted from the environment were true, would not people whose origins were in the “steaming jungles” have skin that was “more dazzlingly white” in order to reflect away the sun’s rays? Like the nonfiction dissenters of racial pseudoscience described in Chap. 3, Moore is adept at turning neo-Lamarckian deductions about acquired characteristics on their head. This was the end of Moore’s correspondence with the Lovecraft circle. The letters stop at the end of 1936; Lovecraft died in 1937, and Barlow’s life entered into turmoil at this point. Yet one thing will carry forward, which is the connection to the science fiction community. She struck up a correspondence with Henry Kuttner, who had written a letter to WT in 1934 to a “Mr.” C. L. Moore, according to Moskowitz (1974); they met for the first time in 1938, married in 1940, and entered into a writing partnership. Also in 1934, she sold her first story to AST. In 1935, Lovecraft had told Moore that he had placed writing in AST 1; “maybe I can sell more of my own,” she mused. After the death of her fiancé, Moore participated in the community more fully as a fiction writer. The first Moore story that appears in AST is “The Bright Illusion” (October 1934), in which characters who resemble Northwest and Jirel engage in an adventure set in the future. A weary traveler named Dixon encounters a city decorated with the captured dead from space forces and collapses. He is revived by someone using mental telepathy, but Dixon’s  Lovecraft’s novella At the Mountains of Madness was serialized in early 1936 and his story “The Shadow Out of Time” appeared in the June 1936 issue of AST. 1

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primitive mind is only able to garner a portion of the information. He has been selected as an envoy for some sort of conquest in a different dimension that he barely understands. Transported to a faraway location, he encounters creatures of an advanced civilization that were never humanoid. Indeed, his body cannot traverse the city, and even his mind will be overwhelmed if he gazes on the world for too long. The inhabitants have completely different biologies—their bodies are writhing tentacles—and they do not have binary genders; their reproduction is too complicated for him to understand. More importantly, they do not understand love. Like the tales involving Northwest, Dixon is immersed in a world he can only partially understand. As could be predicted from Moore’s distaste of Lovecraft’s suggestions about fiction, details regarding travel and technology are omitted from the story. Instead, long passages of this story are devoted to social and psychological issues rather than invention and adventure. Dixon’s sponsor transforms his body so he can complete his quest in a hostile environment. Then, the creatures are made to appear humanoid and the colors of the world are subdued so that Dixon’s senses are not overwhelmed. Dixon is introduced to the high priestess of IL, the god he is meant to destroy. She is a beautiful companion with “page-boy curls” and a hard metal body, except for her mouth, which was “soft and colored like hot embers” (p. 16). He steals a kiss, but he knows that the world he perceives is an illusion, and he wonders how it could have made the priestess feel. She returns the kiss; Dixon feels like he embraces a human woman, but he also knows it is a “mirage” and he wonders “what nameless rites she was actually performing behind the illusory veil which masked her real, writhing self ” (p. 19). Their love develops and disrupts the quest. When they gain an audience with IL, the god states it understands love’s importance in Dixon’s world. IL questions the pair, wondering if they can really love each other. The priestess states that two sparks of consciousness can love each other, regardless of their bodies. Dixon concurs, stating what he has learned since he first saw her body: The sight of you was dreadful to me, and I know how I must have looked to you. But the shock of that sight has taught me something. I know now[:] the shape you wear and the shape you seemed to wear before I saw you in

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reality are both illusions, both no more than garments which clothe that— that living, vital entity which is yourself—the real you. And your body does not matter to me now, for I know that it is no more than a mirage. (p. 32)

In the Gernsback era, a story by Clement Fezandie (see Chap. 2, Sect. 2.3) had ridiculed biological difference between species. Dixon, even though he is steeped in binary genders and human ideals of beauty, learns quickly and easily that he can find love in a world with strange creatures who have many genders. This is an important lesson about love, but it is not the only important feature of this plot. At the start of the story, Dixon had unquestioningly accepted the quest simply out of a need for adventure. With a little bit of experience in the world that he was meant to destroy, he abandons the adventure altogether, declining to commit an atrocity against the home of the creature he loves. In this way, Moore’s story demonstrates the destabilization of the hero stock character. She says the story was onethird of a Northwest Smith story she was working on, but when she was almost finished, she split it off into a separate story, representing something of an evolution of Northwest’s usual befuddled outlook. The connection to Campbell is noticeable; along with the story is an announcement that Campbell’s first Don A. Stuart story, “Twilight,” from “a new writer,” will appear in the following issue (p.  119). If Campbell had been reading WT, he would have already been familiar with her work, but now he would find it hard to ignore her and her reception by readers. Even though Moore’s syntax and word choice offer a dense reading experience more familiar to readers of the Cthulhu mythos than the crisp prose of science fiction, AST readers praised the story. One reader writes in the December 1934 issue of AST that because of the characters “BrightIllusion” is “outstanding” even though there is no science. The letter writer misgenders Moore, writing, “I bow to him” (Winks, 1934, p. 159). None other than E. E. Smith lavishes praise on Moore: the story is “adult fare … no fooling” and he read it three times. He does not agree, though, that an alien and a human can find love (1935, p. 153). Moore publishes two more stories in AST as Campbell is rising in the ranks and becomes an important part of Campbell’s vision for a new science fiction magazine. The first issue fully edited by Campbell contains Moore’s “Greater than Gods.” In some ways, she does not fit the

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mold for Campbell’s editorship. She is not a scientist, and her planetary stories show a disregard for the known facts of the universe. At the same time, the story does not particularly seem to represent the cause of women. Even so, Moore continues to write in a way that destabilizes masculinist traditions in science fiction. The male narrator of “Greater than Gods,” Bill Cory, is a researcher in sex selection, perhaps on the cusp of discovering a way of human reproduction without women. He himself, though, is faced with a personal problem: two women have been suggested for him as brides. The story gives the agency to the women of the future, who find a way to reach back into time and contact him, each advocating for herself. Thus the plot does not refer to Cory’s mastery of science to innovate a technological device to master time and space. Instead, the story concerns the consequences of the male narrator’s vision for the future. He has been dating Sallie, an expert in culture, but he learns that a marriage to her will lead to a matriarchy fearful of science because of its connection to war. On the other hand, the choice of Marta, a scientist like Cory, will lead to an unsavory militarized future. Instead of a character in a setting where the choices have already been made, Moore presents a man who should consider carefully how his choices will influence the future.2 Cory’s friend says: I think of the future as an infinite number of futures, each of them fixed, yet malleable as clay … At every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices … Each crossroad leads to a different future. (1975, p. 137)

Moore’s vision of an unfixed future seemed to resonate with some readers. Often, the masculinist vision of science describes characters in a future setting that is fixed and a plot that is based on a small set of possible actions that is made narrow by exigencies: Campbell’s space opera heroes breathlessly innovate just in time to save themselves and the human race. The male protagonist in “Greater than Gods,” though, finds that his analytical effort is flawed and his bipolar thinking is inadequate.  The theme of one person’s life choices impacting the future will be picked up by feminist author Marge Piercy in her 1976 novel, Woman on the Edge of Time. 2

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He instead finds that his office colleague, instead of Sally nor Marta, makes a more suitable companion, erasing the barrier between the scientific life and the home life. Readers seemed to appreciate this different vision. Campbell had started a regular feature, the Analytical Laboratory, in the May 1938 issue, that ranked the top five stories based on his analysis of comments from readers. “Greater than Gods” took second place in the AST’s Analytical Laboratory in September 1939, ahead of Asimov’s “Trends” (p. 32). Together, both authors became AST mainstays during Campbell’s early years. Even though Moore’s later stories in AST do not portray strong women characters or obviously engage in feminism, they mount a similar attack on the masculinist assumptions behind science fiction. Indeed, they do not follow the typical pattern of white men leading humanity into the future. For instance, “There Shall Be Darkness” (AST February 1942) might be called a “counter” space opera, set on Venus as the last Terrestrial Patrol departs. In the same way that Howard might have used to veil white supremacist ideology, Earth is being overrun by outside forces. Following Lothrop Stoddard, the colonial administrators point out that the “barbarian hordes” have taken advantage of exports of Earth technology so as to innovate dangerous weapons; as a result, “the greatest empire that mankind ever knew is crumbling from within” (2008, pp. 208, 212). The readers hear from Earth people about why they have to give up on transforming the culture of Venus, saying that their efforts to turn them into a civilized world have been wasted. They directly use stages of civilization discourse, asserting that the Venusians have no words for abstract concepts like “loyalty” or “honor” and respect only “the selfish animal values of survival.” In fact, Moore goes as far as having the colonizers say that the people of Venus are “childlike” (pp. 210, 248). Setting aside the intentional fallacy, one should not wonder if this is Moore’s supposedly true intention and instead consider whether she was depicting racial pseudoscience artfully. In fact, there is a bit of a conflict: only minor characters use this prejudiced language. The main characters are from Venus, which has been colonized for 300 years, and Mars, which is said to have had an ancient civilization. Their conversation after the Earthlings have left avoids racial pseudoscience and turns to managing a new, multicultural civilization that will take the place of the Earth empire.

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In this way, “There Shall Be Darkness” is a bit like Asimov’s Foundation series, except that there is no technological elite who will hunker down in order to save humanity. In fact, the story suggests that technological might is the destructor of civilization, not the marker of it. In this story, the formerly colonized people have little in terms of technology (Fig. 6.1),

Fig. 6.1 An illustration accompanying C.  L. Moore’s “There Shall Be Darkness” depicts a woman with what looks like a magic wand deploying beasts in resistance to the colonizing forces (p. 22)

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but they are the best hope for humanity. The perspective of the indigenous population that resisted hundreds of years of imperialism does avoid, to a certain extent, the vexatious portrayals Achebe noticed in Heart of Darkness and Stone repeated in “Hell Planet” (see Chap. 3). Even though the story relies on the stages of civilization theory—at the end of the story, the narrator expects that the Venusians will finally move on a path toward higher civilization as they too have to fight off the invaders of the Solar System—the discourse is laid out plainly in the story. Readers of science fiction were still heavily invested in this ideology, and the story gives them a reverse perspective on what is normally seen in science fiction. The fact that this anti-space opera is written by an author with little scientific training outside of her own reading is remarkable as well; Moore lacks the academic study of anthropology of a figure like L.  Taylor Hansen. In this way, “There Shall Be Darkness” suggests that the golden age of science fiction’s steadfast promotion of outdated theories was far from inevitable. Readers seem to have enjoyed the story, and could have with further consideration started to rethink some of the founding premises of space opera. In the Analytical Laboratory, Moore handily beat out E. E. Smith’s “Second Stage Lensman,” which the editor calls “a very real accomplishment” (Campbell 1942, p. 57). One of the letter writers in this issue claims the story is “that most rare of all things, a science-fiction story with neither plot nor writing weakness” (Bridges, 1942, p. 108). As seen below, Leigh Brackett’s story “The Sword of Rhiannon,” which appeared in the same issue, did not fare as well with readers. Moore’s “No Woman Born” (AST December 1944) is also best understood in its challenge to the idealization of intellect common in masculinist science fiction. A beautiful stage performer is nearly killed in a fire, and the only way for her to continue her life is with a radical transformation of her body. Deidre’s brain is transplanted into a metallic chassis, one dominated by abstract geometric forms. She finds that her new body allows for extraordinary performances. At the same time, though, her personality devolves into a cruel murderer. The notion that the human mind and body are connected only by electrical impulses was a theme that Vannevar Bush (1946) and Norbert Wiener (1950) would soon include in their epochal work. Bush, in fact, writes about a typist at the

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end of his “Memex” essay. It is hard not to think of Moore working in the bank when Bush writes, using feminine pronouns: The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand? (Bush, 1946, p. 37)

This paragraph calls to mind a terrifying image of a woman office worker with wires spouting from her arms so she can more efficiently prepare documents for her bosses. Bush, like Campbell had done in “When the Atoms Failed,” subtly imagines that women support staff were the bottleneck for men’s creativity. Wiener, for his part, suggests it will be possible to transform individuals into energy and transport them across telegraph wires. Patterns of information, not the body, are what is important to him. Although the fantasy that bodies are irrelevant is a theme shared by masculinist science fiction, “No Woman Born” does not rely on some sort of inherent characteristic of womanhood. Instead, Moore reminds her readers that their bodies matter: when humans feel hunger they are compelled to join a social group for meals; the fragility of their bodies constrains humans from violent action. Deidre loses her body and, as Moore shows in the rising action, as a consequence she loses her humanity. There are several readings of this story that consider the allusions to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (see, for instance, Gubar, 1980), but another allusion to consider is to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. One of the prophecies Macbeth receives assures him that “none of woman born” can harm him. He is killed, though, but a man who was delivered by an operation instead of being birthed through labor. Moore flips this around; maybe the men who encased her consciousness in metal thought that no woman born of man could harm them, but they were also misled. Deidre is a compelling, but not triumphant, individual. As is seen to her other stories, Moore does not create an inspirational female character, but her challenge to the masculinist assumptions of science fiction is convincing.

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“No Woman Born,” though, is one of the last stories Moore wrote alone. After her marriage in 1940, almost all of her work was collaborations with her husband. Moore’s early legacy is important for at least three reasons. The first is that she was a pivotal figure in science fiction in the golden age who happened to be female. Like the women writers of the Gernsback years, it is not the case that Moore took up typical feminist issues in her writing. Interestingly, however, her writing in Campbell’s AST did not match with what has come to be known and remembered as golden-age science fiction. Like the stories Campbell wrote as Don A. Stuart, Moore’s fiction offered an alternative to the technological supremacy inherent in what became known as the definitive work of the era. Despite their similarities, the Stuart stories are thought to be pivotal and Moore’s are relegated to a back burner. A second reason why Moore’s legacy is important is in her treatment of difference. Through the lens of white masculinity, one can see how Moore brings a new element to the discussion of race and civilization that supported the tie between gender and technology. Much fiction in AST relied on the scientific racism and social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, where all forms of life were thought to proceed toward a predefined goal. Starting in WT and later in AST, Moore complicated this simplistic, racist vision. Even races that derive from different environments and have different histories are able to interact and indeed fall in love. Taking the science of difference at face value, she suggests that the human-only universe is not differentiated enough—and details the nearly impossible barriers between aliens and humans—with the effect that the whole of humanity is seen as one species. Her stories, particularly through their use of setting, challenge the expectation of readers that the future is a realm that has come from and will be dominated by white masculinity—and that this is the only and best outcome. They also support a form of cultural relativism, showing how different species can relate to each other through what they have in common. A final way of appreciating Moore’s legacy is to think about the way she reflects an increased awareness of the interrelationships among science, technology, and society. Moore, indeed, was an early champion of science fiction that explored inner space, pointing to the future of the genre’s interest in psychology and other so-called soft sciences. Whereas

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science fiction writers often joined anthropologists in presuming an inevitable tie between the supposed higher races, masculinity, and advanced technology, Moore demonstrates an awareness of more complex relationships. As will be shown in Chaps. 7 and 8, science fiction authors begin to explore the realm of technology choice and its consequences, eschewing the notion that technology works by itself outside of the realm of human culture.

6.3 Leigh Brackett: Writing like a Man Leigh Brackett started her career with Campbell’s AST, but did not find the same success as Moore. Publishing only three stories with Campbell, she decided to take advantage of the new fact of the science fiction field: several magazines had emerged. Although AST was known for paying the best, after World War II, new options for authors who did not want to face Campbell’s gauntlet appeared. Brackett published elsewhere, then went on to work as a Hollywood script writer, and her interests coincided near the end of her life when she was asked to write the script for George Lucas’s second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back. In the context of the present study, Brackett’s writing career offers a unique perspective on the relationship of masculinist assumptions to science fiction. Like Moore, it is commonly said that Brackett had to conceal her sex with an ambiguous name because publishers and the audience were antagonistic to women. Even a recent statement in an anthology of Brackett’s stories includes this misinformation. Moorcock (2002) praises her for laying the foundation of the new wave’s “fundamentally humanist romanticism,” going on to say that she along with Moore, Merril, and editor Cele Goldsmith are the “true godmothers of the New Wave.” Nevertheless, Moorcock undoes his compliment by continuing the myth that fearfulness caused her to hide her sex, saying that when she first started writing science fiction it was an “unladylike” genre and so she “deliberately obscured her gender,” along with Moore, so as not to upset their readers (p. xi). Brackett committed no subterfuge. A few months after the February 1940a issue of AST where Brackett’s first story, “Martian Quest,” appeared, Campbell started off the July Brass Tacks

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column with a letter about Brackett. The letter writer had assumed Brackett to be a man, but Campbell used a forceful headline: “The ‘Leigh’ in ‘Leigh Brackett’ Is Feminine” (Campbell, 1940, p. 155). As with Stone and Moore, the myth perpetuates because it fits in with mistaken preconceptions about feminism and sexism. Brackett, looking back on those early years, blamed her lack of scientific training for her poor relationship with AST. “One big trouble I had trying to sell to Campbell was of course the fact that I did not have any great scientific or engineering background. And this is one thing he insisted on in his stories” (Truesdale, 1977, p. 11). Brackett liked to say that she did not know why Campbell took the first two stories from her—“they weren’t very good stories” is her unfair, self-deprecating evaluation—but then he rejected a story “rather viciously, so I decided it was a waste of time” (Truesdale, 1977, p.  11). Today’s awareness of social assumptions about who was allowed to do science requires telling this story somewhat differently. The implicit sexism in saying that her stories supposedly lacked  scientific rigor  was not acknowledged, but  Brackett did seem to have some awareness of the trouble. Her mother did not want her to go to school with boys, and then she had to care for her ailing mother, which limited her educational opportunity and certainly would limit her access to scientific education. As a result of what Brackett says is her lack of “sound scientific training,” according to Carr (1988), it was difficult for her to “consistently” sell to Campbell’s AST (p. 21). Thus, public policy that limited women’s access to science and engineering education was exacerbated by Brackett’s family situation. This suggestion that she lacked scientific training is something of a red herring, given the lack of scientific accuracy in many of the stories Campbell published; it does support the idea that Campbell used people’s scientific credentials to evaluate their stories, although it does not explain how Moore passed muster. Campbell selected and readers admired many stories that were weak in their science. To be sure, part of Brackett’s authorial guise was an open acknowledgment of the gender trouble her writing caused. Almost from the start of her career, Brackett began to polish her persona as a literary tomboy. After having published a dozen stories, AMZ featured her biography in the July 1941 issue. Brackett presents her younger self, tongue-in-cheek,

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as “very naughty” with “an uncanny faculty for imitating dialect.” She was captivated by imaginative adventures by Burroughs and Verne; enjoyed pretending to be a pirate, smuggler, and cowboy; and “made several unsuccessful attempts to go to Mars à la John Carter.” She did poorly in math and could only find a career as a writer. This profile, which was accompanied by a photo, does not hide her sex. Again in 1944, a photograph of Brackett appeared in Startling Stories’ “Meet the Author” with a headline using a feminine pronoun, “Leigh Brackett Steps Up and Tells Us about Herself.” The editorial comment opines that science fiction is growing up and “we are happy to note the constantly increasing number of women readers—and contributors—in this field.” Brackett follows with her typically humorous autobiographical statement as a tough kid. For instance, she asserts that she plays sand-lot volleyball, “and the way we do it you can get your head torn off” (1944b, p. 112). She mentions, as she did for AMZ, her love for performance, punning that one can behold in her “a ham of the first curing” (p. 113). This was not a writer who wished to conceal her sex from her readers. Brackett has retrospectively said of her experience in the pulps, “there never was any discrimination as far as I know of.” She says she felt welcomed and needed. The main issue, she says, was that not enough women were reading science fiction, and for this reason publishers assumed that the genre would not succeed because they could not sell advertising directed at women. “There were so few of us nuts that they were just happy to receive another lamb into the fold” (Truesdale, 1977, p. 9). The welcoming, and even defensive, editorial comments about women belie the hidden reality that the definition of science fiction preselected an elite group of men. The presumption of manliness meant that Brackett had to repeatedly tell others that she was a woman. Indeed, it seems like coming out as a woman was a regular part of her professional persona. Film producer and director Howard Hawkes, who was making a movie out of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, apparently came across Brackett’s murder mystery, No Good from a Corpse, published in 1944. Hawkes proclaimed, “this chap would make a good screenwriter on this, so get Mr. Brackett.” In a gossip column published after they met, “it was reported how astonished he was when this fresh-faced girl that looked like she had just come from a school-girl tennis court suddenly turned

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up” (Truesdale, 1977, p. 9). Brackett’s suggestion that she did not experience discrimination can thus be tempered to state that she was often presumed to be a man, and when individuals found out that she was a woman, she felt as if her work had been accepted on the basis of merit. As has been discussed earlier in this study, Campbell’s zeal for pseudoscience indicates the hypocrisy in his scientific rigor. Brackett seems aware of this, writing that some top male writers do not have “a spoonful of science to rattle in their heads” and have never wielded a two-handed sword, so it does not make sense that a woman is unable to write science fiction. In fact, she says, she has always been physically active; she has fought the ocean and she has swung a mattock, so from there she finds it easy to extrapolate. I have never in my life thought of myself as A Woman. I was always me, an individual, free-standing and in the round. Whatever I do or think or feel, I do or think or feel it not as some component of a mass group, but as myself. … To me, my sex has never been of the slightest importance outside of the bedroom. … I’ve always got on splendidly with the men I’ve worked with, I think, because I’m concerned only with the job in hand and not the man/woman game. The jealousy and spite I’ve encountered, oddly enough, has been almost entirely from women, most of them non-professionals … the cat-­ toothed smile and the sweet, “My, how I wish I was smart like you and could write all those books … dumb me, I just had five kids,” sort of thing, but occasionally from pros: one militant feminist actress with whom I found myself, to my dismay, on a panel, who said sneeringly that the men allow a few women to write for them, and an equally militant writer who said that some women write like men and therefore can get employment in the male-dominated industry. I stay as far away as I can from that lot, which I’m sure has not made me more popular with the women’s group in the Guild. I despise the term “woman writer.” I am not a woman writer. I am a writer, period. That I happen also to be a woman is beside the point. (1976, pp. 7–8)

After her death, some of her male friends expressed concern for the growing interest in Brackett as a woman writer. In a letter found with Brackett’s papers held by Eastern New Mexico University, one friend

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writes with disdain for “academics” who are interested in Brackett. “Most of them I suppose are feminists interested in her as a woman writer—not that Leigh was a feminist herself. These people, working up their biographies and bibliographies, know next to nothing about Leigh herself.” This distain for feminism is unsurprising, but the sentiment relies on a narrow definition of feminism and it seems discordant with others who stated she had to write like a man. In the context of the previous discussions, it seems unlikely that Brackett’s fiction was disconnected from criticisms of masculinist science, even if she does not take up the cause of women directly. Author Marion Zimmer Bradley (1988) provides an alternative interpretation. She starts by saying that Brackett is her friend and hero, so it is hard to write about her. However, Bradley disagrees that Brackett wrote like a man and points to economics. Brackett wrote for the market, Bradley says, and that market was dominated by men and boys who liked adventure stories. Writing for this market was an option better than “slaving somewhere as a schoolteacher or a waitress and writing the Great Feminist Novel at night” (p.  87, capitalization as original). Bradley expands on the story of Brackett’s negative experience on the panel discussion, which was at a feminist film festival. Instead of being honored for being successful in a competitive field, she was chastised for cooperating with the establishment. Bradley was surprised by this, especially given her opinion that the independent films at the festival were not very good. Bradley’s intervention is helpful because it reminds readers that Brackett made a choice in terms of writing, but it leaves some questions unanswered. What does it mean to write like a man? According to Bradley, Brackett said that  when she has women in her stories, they are “doing something, not worrying about the price of eggs or who’s in love with whom” (p. 88, emphasis in original). It is true that Brackett often used mediocre men as her characters, and the positive portraits of women she provides are not human. Like Moore and others, Brackett from the start tried to grind against the typical science fiction reader’s presumptions. This is evident in the contradiction between the plot and the title of “Martian Quest,” Brackett’s first story in AST, published in February 1940. Although the title suggests that a hero will undertake some sort of adventure, like capturing treasure, the main character is not an epic hero

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and the plot comes to a resolution without a space opera’s epic confrontation. Young Martin Drake has arrived on Mars at a time when two human efforts at colonization, what the leaders call Reclaimed Areas, are about to fail because the settlers are besieged by the indigenous lifeforms. The antagonists are the Khom, strong and deadly lizards that are almost impervious to gunfire. Drake is not well liked by the other settlers, but he has a keen mind: in particular, he is the only one to notice that the Khom may be violent but they are only eating the colonists’ crops. He examines a corpse, realizes that the creatures are not monsters but herbivores, and deduces that violence precipitates from competition with humans for the harvest. A quest plot could have been resolved in other ways: the subjugation of the Khom, the defeat of the humans. However, Brackett choses a nonconfrontational third way: Drake surmises that imported melons from Venus will disrupt the Khom biochemistry as the plot reaches its climax: he and his companions are besieged, but Drake disseminates a short report about his findings. Drake and his companions are rescued at the last minute. Like an epic, the characters faced danger in the completion of their quest. However, the resolution, unlike an epic plot, is the release of a report. Instead of a social Darwinist climax, coexistence of species is the new normal. The lack of a superweapon to destroy a supposed enemy points the way to solutions appropriate in Anthropocene that do not depend upon the superiority of humanity. Brackett’s second story in AST, “The Treasure of Ptakuth” (April 1940b), also has a male protagonist, Terence Shane, but disrupts the readers’ expectations. Shane is searching for a lost city on Mars, having been hired by the Martian Archeological Foundation. He is competing with an adventurer who exploits secrets for profit, Thaldrek of Ved. They meet Zenda Challoner, a beautiful half-Martian, half-goddess priestess who protects the ancient city. When they coerce her to gain entry, their expectations are foiled. They find that the treasure is an ancient mechanism that produces a “strange force” of a “cyclotron” that can induce immortality or death by saturating a body with gamma radiation (pp. 82, 84). Although the technology is formidable, it has unfortunate side effects that eventually cause madness in anyone it transforms. In an unexpected twist, Thaldrek tells Shane that the device will be barricaded in its cave, but he should go back to the Foundation to pass on the secret in the

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hope that the technology can be improved. Shane and Zenda have fallen in love, and Thaldrek wishes them happiness together. The struggle between the antagonists is dissipated by the resolution of this plot. Instead of one person gaining an advantage over the others, each party gains in the exchange. Slightly different from other authors of ancient civilizations in this study, Brackett also proposes that the excellence of prior science must still be improved, leaving room for her readers to play a role in the development of future innovation. Brackett’s third story in AST appeared in the February 1942 issue, which in a different world could be considered an exemplification of Campbell-era science fiction; the problem is that it does not fit in with post-war fan memoirs’ assumptions about gender relations in the genre. There are three women on the contents page: Brackett, author of “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon,” Moore, author of “There Shall Be Darkness” (discussed above), and Catherine Tarrant, who has the title of assistant editor. Other authors in this issue, like Theodore Sturgeon, E.  E. Smith, L. Sprague de Camp, and Raymond F. Jones, for a time found greater prominence than Brackett and Moore. Even if Campbell’s motivation was mercenary—a predominantly male readership limits a periodical’s ability to sell advertising, which would not be appealing to a consumer force like Street & Smith—the contents of this issue counter what is often thought of as the standard story of golden-age science fiction. In “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon,” which appeared in the February 1942 issue, Brackett again uses a male protagonist, Max “Brandy” Brandon, who steals Martian antiquities. He and his female friend are possessed by antagonists from 40,000 years earlier, revived in their quest to dominate Mars (a storyline similar to the Star Trek episode “Return to Tomorrow,” which would not air until 1968). Dust of the race gives Brandy a strange power that he likens to witchcraft. The voices of the ancient people, anticipating comments by Arthur C. Clarke, say no, the power is really simple science to people who have sufficient knowledge. Life is electrical impulses, they say; in the same way that metal can be charged with electricity, why cannot other objects carry life? Brandon learns to use his mind to combine oxygen and hydrogen in the atmosphere, providing drinkable water. Brandon urges the enemies to abandon their ancient battle and join together:

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The two of you, working together as balancing forces instead of enemies, could make Mars the greatest planet in the System. You could give her water again, and the air she’s losing, the courage and will to live that she’s lost. (p. 48)

The ancient creatures agree, but first they express their love for each other, remarking that romance has not changed so much despite the passage of millennia. Brackett’s anti-climactic fiction did not seem to resonate with readers, even as they showed a willingness to accept Moore’s wistful stories. Neither “Martian Quest” nor “The Treasure of Ptakuth” was voted by readers into the top five stories in the Analytical Laboratory. A letter about “Martian Quest” is dismissive in an interesting way. The reader does not think Drake is the right kind of man, characterizing the story as “shrinking-violet-proves-himself-to-be-a-hero-by-destroying-monster-­ menace stuff” (Gilbert, 1940, p. 160). A writer commenting on “Treasure of Ptakuth” says it is better than average and “gets a B rating” (Dobbs, 1940, p.  156). Despite these lukewarm responses, Campbell did take “The Sorcerer of Rhiannon,” the first of Brackett’s stories to appear in the Analytical Laboratory, albeit in fifth place. The story’s messages of setting aside grievances and building on the success of past civilizations did not resonate with AST’s readers: one letter writer said “Rhiannon” was “an amiable, unimportant tale, it offers adequate amused diversion” (Chauvenet, 1942, p. 104). After this Campbell rejected a story “viciously” and she went to other magazines (Carr, p. 43). The idea that Brackett wrote like a man in order to be accepted by science fiction readers thus is somewhat misleading given her lack of acceptances. Although Brackett has stated that she did not encounter outright discrimination, it is clear that her stories did not offer the remasculization Campbell and most of his readers were looking for. Contrasting her experience with Moore’s leads to the observation that the golden age was neither a time when there were no women writers nor when women writers were flatly rejected. A more complex dynamic is at play, one that reveals the limits to what Campbell’s readers were willing to accept. In these three stories, one can see how Brackett’s use of male protagonists maybe led to the accusation that Brackett had to write like a man in

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order to be accepted. This charge is certainly inaccurate in one respect: the aesthetic she created was not accepted by Campbell or the majority of AST’s readers. The qualities readers expected in good space opera, of course, were conditioned by its reliance on white masculinist themes. Brackett used male characters, but this is not unusual; as described in Chap. 3, Harris, Stone, and Hansen rarely included women. In the context of other writers in this study, the use of male protagonists in settings dominated by men does not necessarily imply a veneration of the masculine impulse in the future. Like Moore, Brackett avoided promoting an advanced technological landscape that seems like a natural outgrowth of white civilization.

6.4 The Future of Inequality Despite Brackett’s cool reception in AST, she went on to sell many stories to the new titles that proliferated in the wake of the popularity of AST: magazines like Thrilling Wonder Stories (1936), Startling Stories (1939), Planet Stories (1939), and Astonishing Stories (1940). These are in the same vein as her stories from AST, helping the critic to see how what was not acceptable to Campbell and some of his readers was received well in other fora. Her dystopian depiction of humanity contrasts with the optimism that white masculinity would spread inevitably across the galaxy, considering the conflict that lurks behind a human-only empire. The battered and bruised settings Brackett develops in her fiction are notable for the way they show how the future is likely to exacerbate inequality. Other golden-age authors focused on the virtues of justice and equality as humanity expanded civilization beyond the Earth. The Brackett story “The Halfling” (Astonishing Stories, Feb. 1943) uses a male narrator in a different way. Greene, the proprietor of Jade Green’s Interplanetary Carnival, shows the “wonders of the seven worlds” in what Lindfors (1996) might call “ethnological show business.” Greene meets Laura Darrow, a dancer who was born in space and does not have a passport. The narration describes Greene’s lecherous gaze, indicating he is not a good man, even though there is a bit of self-consciousness in the text as he thinks about his past self in the third person:

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I was watching the sunset. … I was standing alone, off to one side of the grounds. The usual noises of a carnival around feeding time were being made behind me … I was remembering John Damien Green [i.e., himself ] running barefoot on a wet beach, fishing for perch off the end of a jetty, and dreaming big dreams. I was wondering where John Damien Green had gone, taking his dreams with him, because now I could hardly remember what they were. (Brackett, 1973, p. 7)

The style of writing that might be called “writing like a man” is on display here: the hardboiled voice of Greene dominates the storytelling. The narrator’s wistful memory from his earlier years contrasts with his sense of loss as the manager of a tawdry carnival. Nevertheless, there is a palpable critique of golden-age science fiction here. Greene employs mixed-race individuals; the expansion of humanity into the Solar System has not resulted in peace and homogeneity but discord. The reflexive degradation that results from colonization is on display: Greene’s show in California recalls the long history of human beings who were captured and put on display. One of the best known was Saartjie Baartman, a woman abducted from South Africa and forced to perform in England and France at the start of the nineteenth century. Many others were brought back to centers of empires, such as the people from a supposedly primitive village in the Philippines for a display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The degradation of these individuals was a visual “confirmation and validation” of discourses that underwrote colonialism (Lindfors, p. 214). Some of the abuse one can imagine is directly mentioned in Brackett’s story; Greene threatens disgruntled workers with deportation to keep them in line. The revenge outcome of the plot is satisfying because of the details in this story, although it might unwittingly play into racist sentiments. As pointed out by Lavender (2011) in his discussion of a later Brackett story, “All the Colors of the Rainbow,” revenge was “difficult for black Americans to enact, let alone imagine, in this time period” (p. 90). A common racist comment is that if the conditions of oppressed people were so bad, why did they not revolt? In this story, Darrow is given a privilege not afforded to others. It is worthwhile to consider how some fans’ readings of “The Halfling” differ from the words on the page. Fans do not comment on the narrator’s

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exploitative business. Tyson (2009) simply uses him to reflect on the beautiful California setting. The plot, according to Tyson, is that Darrow was an amazing dancer hired by Greene. However, she is a “killer” hired to track down “renegade Callistans.” Fraser (2019) says Darrow has entered Earth illegally; she is a “cat-person assassin” who seeks to “avenge her tribe’s honor.” In fact, a series of murders does begin, and it turns out that Darrow is not the innocent kitten that she appears to be: “my tribe sent me,” she says simply. However, her effort is to stop the traders who sell her kind and other sentient beings in exchange for Earth money (pp. 28–9). Darrow tries to free the imprisoned workers, but even though she manages to open some cages, she is shot by Greene at the end of the story; the fans say she “sets a lot of beasts free, forcing Jade to start shooting.” This conflict between the story and the fan reading of it is illustrative, especially because these fans seem to respect and admire Brackett. As has been already seen, Brackett often uses unfavorable narrative personae as a critique, a facet of her work that was missed by the fan chroniclers, who seem to think that Greene is an unproblematic protagonist. It is too easy for Brackett’s critique to be lost among expectations of the genre, even in recent years. The bleak futuristic landscape on display in “The Halfling” is shared by other Brackett stories. In the “Citadel of Lost Ships” (Planet Stories, March 1943), for instance, the male protagonist Roy Campbell lives in a world of slavery and exploitation caused by the expanding empire, the Terra-Venusian Coalition Government. Fleeing from the Spaceguard, he first takes refuge with the Kraylens, a tribal people on Venus. He learns that his adopted people will soon cease to exist as Earth’s expansion destabilizes local cultures in the name of progress on Earth, and Mars, and Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Little people driven from their homes, robbed of their way of life, exploited and [displaced?] for the gaping idiots in the trade centers. Little people who didn’t care about progress, and making money. Little people who only wanted to live, and breathe, and be left alone. (p. 48)

In this part of the story, the narrator creates sympathy for Campbell, noting that the closing of the planetary frontiers would threaten the freedom

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of men like him who could not endure civilized life. Although one must be careful with biographical criticism, using the name Campbell for her protagonist so soon after her real-life negative experience with the AST editor seems suspicious. The narrator’s wistful concern for the threat to Campbell’s manhood seems sarcastic in this context, and the story offers an unexpected twist by suggesting the space force is not the home of technical masculinity. After so many authors of the golden age for so many years venerated manhood, Brackett offers an alternative pathway for manhood. Instead of sublimating emotions into manly passions, a hero can step away from the space force and the colonialism it represents. Leaving Venus, Campbell finds refuge with a renegade group that lives on abandoned ships bound together called Romany. Unfortunately, this bastion of freedom is also under threat: some of the leaders of Romany have abandoned their ideal of providing hope for endangered people and instead have sought a policy of stabilization and comfort. Campbell joins up with a renegade group from Romany that is planning to rescue the Kraylens, who have become “a symbol over which two points of view were clashing in deadly earnest” (p. 54). Predicting Cold War struggles even before the end of World War II, the resolution of the plot has the small team accomplish its mission, both rescuing the Kraylen and defeating the accommodationist faction. However, the hero must pay a price. Campbell is wanted by the Spaceguard, and he threatens Romany’s independence. Romany engages its engines and leaves its orbit around Venus, with Campbell abandoned as a scapegoat to draw the ire of the Coalition. His heroic manliness, at the end of the story, is unsuited to the freedom of Romany. He belongs locked in battle with the Spaceguard and threatens the future of free civilization. The contention that Brackett was not a feminist seems to be supported by her first novel. No Good from a Corpse is a detective novel that does not seem to involve any issues of women. Shadow over Mars, which appeared in the fall 1944a issue of Startling Stories (and was republished by Ace Books with the title The Nemesis from Terra in 1951), also might not seem feminist because it concerns a male hero’s effort to assert his will in the world. However, like her other work featuring male characters, the story is more complicated than it first appears. The hardscrabble male protagonist, Rick Urquhart, is being pursued by the agents of civilization and

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takes refuge in the home of a local family. The mother of the home tells him that his life is at a crossroads and offers to describe the different paths available  to him, telling him that she sees his shadow over Mars. This enigmatic prophecy becomes a refrain, but soon Urquhart stops thinking of himself as a mythical hero. He says he cares only about himself, “and it’s a good thing that I do because nobody else does or ever has” (p. 30). A harrowing sequence of events transforms Urquhart, including his literal crucifixion in the palace of one of Mars’s rulers who thought it was Urquhart’s ambition to rule Mars. Urquhart’s companions, though, hope he will work to defeat the Company, which has the full name of the Terran Exploitations Company. Brackett makes an effort to complicate the setting and the protagonist, although she does not directly challenge the stages of civilization. The narrator promotes the idea of an ancient civilization on Mars, and indicates it is easy to exploit: “everything was old, passive, faded and worn out,” the narrator states. Economic relationships fail to invigorate the once-great civilization: the trade passing through the city of Kahora was “like the chilling blood of an old man already three-quarters dead,” according to the narrator (p. 25). Urquhart falls in love with Kyra, a local woman, and she inspires him to think differently about what his shadow over Mars will be: the opportunity to make a new future: I love you, Rick, but it’s more than that. I love Mars. You’re going to make Mars a world where people can hope, and look forward. You don’t know what it is, Rick, to be young in a dead city, with nowhere to look but back! And I want a part in the building. Even if it’s just a little part, to know that I’ve helped will be enough. You can’t take that away from me. (p. 37)

Kyra does not survive, and the protagonist does not find his place in the society after he has brought new life to Mars. Having defeated the Company and ensured a new future, he asks for a ship and plans to head out to unincorporated territory. The character of Rick does not necessarily disrupt masculinity, given his portrayal as a tortured messiah, and overall the story is related to the difficulty Urquhart has in finding his dominant power. That being said, the setting of this story fits in well with Brackett’s other work, denying the expectation that the most interesting

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future development is an era defined by a homogenous equality. The trouble of creating an inclusive environment for all of the societies in the Solar System remains prominent and can be seen as a critique of the assumptions that underlie the white masculinist future imagined by science fiction. This novel is an example of how Brackett’s fiction depicts civilized masculinity if only to disrupt it. Her third novel, Sea-Kings of Mars (published in the June 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories, turned into the book The Sword of Rhiannon in 1953), uses a typical male scientist-explorer as its protagonist. Matt Carse is an Earth man who has lived most of his life on Mars, previously serving as a fellow in an association of interplanetary archeologists and a professor of Marian antiquities. As a result of his many years on Mars, he is familiar with the people and in particular the lawless areas. A thief encounters him one night and brings him to the Sword of Rhiannon, the weapon of a vanquished god who, like Prometheus, had revealed divine secrets. Carse convinces the thief to bring him to the tomb of the god, and he is plunged into the past, to a time when the civilization of the gods was strong. As was seen with Northwest Smith, Brackett depicts her male hero being bewildered on his journey by “a big, brooding sphere of quivering blackness” (p. 14). Light itself seems repelled from the conduit that brings him to the past (Fig. 6.2). Brackett’s story is clever in the way it avoids the pseudoscience inherent in golden-age science fiction’s hyperspace, similar to Moore’s antagonism to faster-than-light travel. Carse regains his senses and finds himself in the past. His educational background has enough science for him to surmise the plausibility that the ancient gods had mastered space-time and to understand the rudiments of their superior technology; the reader does not have to accept a vague description of a human-made device that breaks the known laws of the universe. Carse benefits from his keen interest in archeology and languages, instead of a supposed natural flair for diplomacy, violating the character type found in masculinist science fiction. The start of the story makes some references to relativity, and the narrator also speculates on the science that might be behind mental telepathy. Thoughts are electrical impulses traveling along neurons, the narrator points out, so should it not be possible to excite electrons to move in someone else’s mind? The people of the past Carse meets know

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Fig. 6.2  Detail from an illustration that accompanied Leigh Brackett’s Sea-Kings of Mars. Matt Carse looks like he is falling into an abyss during his journey

how to use a crystal that sends thoughts between people like a radio wave, even though the narrator doubts they understand the science. Again, it seems like the knowledge of ancient people can be utilized in the age of technology. This story, although it has the veneer of fantasy, is clever in the way it eschews the pseudoscience of others and engages in scientific thinking. Even as Brackett is entering the final stage of her career as a Hollywood script writer, her attention to the failed expectations of the male science fiction hero remain at the center of her fiction. Brackett’s story “Mars

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Minus Bisha,” published in the January 1954 Planet Stories, again uses the concept of inequality. The male protagonist is Fraser, a doctor who is working on Mars as part of an interplanetary humanitarian grant. He is honored by the narrator because he is capable of entering into this harsh setting. A strange figure leaves him with a young girl without explanation. When the child, Bisha, awakens, she states simply that she is being persecuted out of an ancient belief that she brings sickness to the people around her. The narrator sides with the rational protagonist: the local people are characterized by “superstition, ignorance, the pious cruelty of the savage.” At the start of the story, then, the narrator fulfills the reader’s expectation that a colonizing scientific civilization must wipe out local culture. Out of altruism, Fraser offers Bisha refuge from what he assumes is local medical myth. Soon, though, Fraser is showing symptoms of the disease: he repeatedly falls into unconsciousness. This plot challenges the assumption that ancient science is superstition. Fraser consults Tor-Esh, an indigenous healer, asking about what he assumes is an infectious disease. Tor-Esh chides him for the way he is using Earth knowledge to try to understand Mars: Have you thought of the canal? Not only this one, but the many canals that bind Mars in a great net. Have you thought how they must have been built? The machines, the tremendous power that would have been needed, to make a dying world live yet a little longer. … Can you conceive, you who come from a young world, how many races have evolved on Mars? … You have come with your thundering ships, your machines and your science, giving the lie to our gods, who we thought had created no other men but us. You look upon us as degraded and without knowledge—and yet you too are an ignorant people, not because you have forgotten, but because you have not yet learned. There are many sciences, many kinds of knowledge. (pp. 101–2)

Fraser demonstrates the power of open-mindedness as he begins to surmise how Bisha and those of her type before her had an evolutionary purpose: sharing minds in a community in order to coordinate mass efforts to maintain the civilization. The reminder that life can follow many paths of evolution counters the social Darwinism inherent in much of golden-age science fiction. Along with the growing scientific consensus

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around World War II, Brackett’s settings suggest that there is no teleology in evolution. What is more, given the reminder that Earth is a “young world,” humanity is likely to face a plurality of evolutionary paths, following the example of Mars. As opposed to golden-age authors who presumed a homogenized, globalized humanity was imminent, Brackett predicts that the more likely course is plurality. In this type of world, tolerance and intercultural awareness demonstrated by Fraser will be more important than the bravado and pride of typical heroes. Despite Brackett’s pointed critiques of the conventions of science fiction, it does not seem that she was taken seriously. Even Anthony Boucher (1955), the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF), introduces one of her stories dismissively, seeming to miss the point. Leigh Brackett is the acknowledged mistress of the flamboyant interplanetary adventure. No one can rival her in telling such a story as, say, “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon” so skillfully and even artistically that readers normally allergic to such extravaganza are astonished to find themselves enjoying it. (p. 75)

Brackett does not publish another story for Fantasy and Science Fiction after that until, at their request, she contributes a short story for their fifteenth-anniversary issue. Her condition for participating in the special issue is that they publish a story she writes (1964) to fit the “Purple Priestess” title Boucher invented in his rude comment. Bravely, Brackett creates a male protagonist who is an academic expert on Mars, Harvey Selden. As with her use of the surname Campbell, this name crosses the boundary from the fictional world into the people involved in the genre. Using almost the same family name as Asimov’s Foundation hero is interesting, particularly for the contrast: Asimov’s Selden was a visionary who could alter the forces of history, while Brackett’s Selden is an academic who is traumatized by a demon. The story is set about fifty years after the initial colonial exploitation of Mars. New treaties and governments have come into place, and Brackett employs the language of Cold War international development programs in the story. Selden is with the Bureau of Interworld Cultural Relations, specializing in Martian handcrafts, hoping to retrain some artisans who were displaced because of colonization.

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An officer on Selden’s ship introduces him to Martian society, but at dinner Selden clashes with his hosts. In particular, they get into a discussion about reports of the devotees of the god of the “mad moon,” a nickname for Phobos, one of Mars’s moons called Denderon in the local language. Selden ascribes the stories to superstition, particularly the accounts of human sacrifice, and suggests that what early explorers saw were modern vestiges of ancient rites, like children dancing around a maypole. His hosts drug him and take him into a remote area to meet the god and its priestesses, who wear purple. After becoming a first-hand witness to the destructive god who must be placated by human sacrifice, they ask Selden to please inform the interplanetary government about this shrine and the danger that could result if the god is disturbed. Perhaps unsurprisingly to readers of Brackett, this protagonist is not strong enough to face the certain reprobation that will come if he tells the truth about what he saw. Unheroically, he notifies his sponsors that he has urgent matters to attend to back on Earth. Musing about his choice, Selden thinks: If he believed that what he had seen was real, he would have to tell about it, even if no one would listen to him. Even if his superiors, his teachers, his sponsors, the men he venerated and whose approval he yearned for, should be shocked, and look at him with scorn, and shake their heads, and forever close their doors to him. (pp. 19–20)

Amusingly, Selden seeks the help of his psychoanalyst, who tells him his experience was a “sex fantasy,” the priestess was a “mother-image,” and the god was “symbolic of the female generative principle,” which made him feel guilty for being a “latent homosexual.” This diagnosis left Selden “enormously comforted” (p. 20). Brackett has mastered this type of anti-­ hero who represents not just an expert in the age of big science but also the kind of masculinist personality that Campbell would not accept for AST. As Selden approaches Mars, he notes the glint of sunlight on the canals, which at the time of writing many would know was impossible. As the twentieth century progressed, analysis of Mars made it increasingly clear that Percival Lowell had promoted a science-backed fantasy. The general

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idea that Mars once had much more water and atmosphere than it did in the present conflicted with general principles of geology, and spectral analysis of the light coming from Mars indicated it was more like the Moon than the Earth. Nevertheless, the theory of Martian canals and the ancillary ideas of the changing geology were still acceptable enough as Brackett was writing “Purple Priestess.” In fact, shortly before the story appeared, a collection of photographs of Mars was published by Slipher (1962), an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory. This collection supports Slipher’s lifelong ambition to prove that the physical geography of Mars included canals, sea beds, and vegetated areas. The professional disagreement would soon come to an end after “Purple Priestess” appeared, however. The story appeared a month before the U.S. launch of the Mariner 4 spacecraft, which would return the first close-up pictures of Mars that showed no evidence of canals. Looking back on this time, Brackett (1977) says her editors discouraged her from writing such stories as scientific information became more available: “the planet, they believe, has become too harsh a reality for my brand of legend” (p. 418). Brackett’s persistence in using her Solar System settings even though it was increasingly clear that they were mythical is an interesting choice. One key difference between modern space opera and Brackett’s fiction is that her characters do not leave the confines of the Solar System in fictional devices; like Moore, she distrusts stories based on hyperspace technologies. In the dozens of stories she published outside of AST, she often continues with the planetary romance style, even as observations of the planets made it increasingly unlikely that the environments could be suitable for humans. Another author who sometimes used local planets for his settings was Robert A.  Heinlein, but Heinlein insisted that human technology could make the planets habitable. Bracket did not choose the terraforming option, nor did she send her characters to other stars by means of speculative technology. As was discussed earlier with the planet Vulcan in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.4, the reader’s experience of this kind of fiction is like the “no place” of utopia. The only time Brackett’s characters travel to worlds outside the Solar System are when outside forces transport them across time and space. In other words, no human invention is strong enough to break the speed of light barrier, although there are ancient civilizations that were able to

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open holes in space-time. In this way, Brackett avoids the masculinist assumptions behind hyperspace devices. Perhaps because this kind of technology has become so naturalized by other golden-age writers, it does not seem like fantasy. As was described in Chap. 4, John W. Campbell started his career with a letter chiding E. E. Smith for his sloppy handling of faster-than-light travel. However plausible Campbell’s description of this technology might seem, it is still based on a speculative corollary to Einstein’s relativity. In addition, the reliance stories by Campbell and others on ESP is just a shortcut to avoid confronting true differences in culture that would occur after a hyperspace voyage. Along with C. L. Moore’s distain for the travel portion of golden-age science fiction, Brackett adds some scientific thought to the mechanism of ESP. Her self-deprecating comments about her lack of a scientific background notwithstanding, one could say that Brackett works harder to stick with known scientific facts. Familiarity with Brackett’s work reveals the obvious mining done by many modern multimedia productions. Her distain for the Corporation is echoed in the Aliens franchise, the non-technical form of interstellar transport is borrowed by many (memorably by Dune), and the degraded multicultural cities are staples of Star Trek and Star Wars. Whereas many golden-age writers promoted the dream of joining some sort of space force—think of Robert A.  Heinlein’s Space Cadet (1948)—Brackett is one of the first to suggest that the militaristic space league that supported the spread of humanity beyond the Earth might not be the force of justice. Even so, some who look back on Brackett’s career suggest that her work was derivative. Frederick Pohl, for instance, has said Star Wars is pulp science fiction from the 1930s and 1940s on the screen, as if Brackett was not a creator in this time. “I know it gave [Brackett] a lot of pleasure. It was the two things she was good at, science fiction and film scripts. For the first time in her life I think they went together” (quoted in Carr, 1988, p. 97). This comment suggests that Brackett was an opportunist who expropriated science fiction for mass media. Filmmaker George Lucas has distanced himself from Brackett, whom he asked to write the screenplay for the second Star Wars movie, The Empire Strikes Back. “It didn’t work out,” he says; “she was sick at the time she wrote the script, and she really tried her best. … That’s when I sat down and wrote two

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drafts, which are closer to the film” (Bouzereau, 1997, pp. 144–5). The distance between Brackett’s draft and the finished movie is not so great to someone outside of the industry, but nonetheless, even Lucas’s first Star Wars film is steeped in the genre promoted by Brackett. Fundamentals like the Mos Eisley spaceport, the character type of Han Solo, and the inclusion on telekinesis and ESP could all be seen in Brackett’s fiction, thirty years earlier than the films. Brackett did the heavy lifting to make this sort of science fiction popular, no matter what Pohl or Lucas might remember.

References Ashley, M. (2005). Transformations: The Story of the Science-fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970. Liverpool UP. Bainbridge, W. S. (1986). Dimensions of Science Fiction. Harvard UP. Boucher, A. (1955). Introduction to “The Tweener” by Leigh Brackett. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 8(2), 75. Bouzereau, L. (1997). Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays. Ballantine. Brackett, L. (1940a). Martian Quest. AST, 24(6), 78–90. Brackett, L. (1940b). The Treasure of Ptakuth. AST, 25(2), 72–84. Brackett, L. (1941). Meet the Authors. AMZ, 15(7), 136, 143. Brackett, L. (1942). The Sorcerer of Rhiannon. AST, 28(6), 36–48. Brackett, L. (1943). The Citadel of Lost Ships. Planet Stories, 2(2), 44–62. Brackett, L. (1944a). Shadow Over Mars. Startling Stories, 11(2, Fall), 11–64. Brackett, L. (1944b). Leigh Brackett Steps Up and Tells Us About Herself. Startling Stories, 11(2, Fall), 112–113. Brackett, L. (1949). Sea-Kings of Mars. Thrilling Wonder Stories, 34(2), 9–73. Brackett, L. (1954). Mars Minus Bisha. Planet Stories, 6(4), 94–105. Brackett, L. (1964). Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 27(4), 4–20. Brackett, L. (1973). The Halfling and Other Stories. Ace Books. Brackett, L. (1976). Leigh Brackett: An Interview Conducted by Paul Walker. Luna Monthly, 61, 1–8. Brackett, L. (1977). The Best of Leigh Brackett. Ballantine. Bradley, M. Z. (1988). One Woman’s Experience in Science Fiction. In D. Du Pont (Ed.), Women of Vision. St. Martin’s.

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Bridges, L. (1942). I Hope to Hear from C.  L. Moore More Frequently Henceforth. AST, 29(2), 108–109. Bush, V. (1946). As We May Think. In Endless Horizons (pp.  16–38). Public Affairs Press. Campbell, J. W. (1939). Analytical Laboratory. AST, 23(2), 92. Campbell, J. W. (1940). Brass Tacks. AST, 25(5), 155–160. Campbell, J. W. (1942). Analytical Laboratory. AST, 29(2), 57. Carr, J. L. (1988). Leigh Brackett: American Science Fiction Writer—Her Life and Work. The Ohio State University. Unpublished dissertation, UMI. Chauvenet, R. (1942). Agreed. AST, 29(3), 104–105. Davin, E. L. (2006). Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965. Rowman & Littlefield. Dobbs, D. L. (1940). Surrealism Does What Realism Can’t Sometimes. AST, 25(6), 156–157. Fraser, P. (2019, January 13). Astonishing Stories v04n03. Retrieved July 1, 2022, from https://sfmagazines.com/?p=9461 Gilbert, J. (1940). Well—You Can’t Characterize a Light Year, Anyway. AST, 25(2), 160. Gubar, S. (1980). C. L. Moore and the Conventions of Women’s Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies, 7(1), 16–27. Howard, R.  E. (1964). The Last White Man. The Howard Collector, 1(5, Summer), 22–29. Lavender, I., III. (2011). Race in American Science Fiction. Indiana UP Press. Lefanu, S. (1988). Feminism and Science Fiction. Indiana UP. Lindfors, B. (1996). Ethnological Show Business: Footlighting the Dark Continent. In R.  G. Thomson (Ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (pp. 207–218). NYU Press. Moorcock, M. (2002). Queen of the Martian Mysteries. In Martian Quest: The Early Brackett. Haffner Press. Moore, C.  L. (2007). Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith (C. J. Cherryh, Ed.). Planet Stories. Moore, C. L. (2008). Miracle in Three Dimensions and Other Stories (I. Lohr, Ed.). Isle Press. Moore, C. L. (1975). The Best of C. L. Moore. Doubleday. Moskowitz, S. (1974). Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction. Hyperion. Sargent, P. (Ed.). (1975). Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stores by Women About Women. Vintage Books.

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Slipher, E. C. (1962). The Photographic Story of Mars. Sky Publishing. Smith, E. E. (1935). Dr. Smith Comments. AST, 14(5), 153. Truesdale, D. (1977). An Interview with Leigh Brackett and Edmond Hamilton. Science Fiction Review, 6(2 (#22)), 6–15. Tyson, B. (2009, December 21). The Halfling—Leigh Brackett. Retrieved July 1, 2022, from https://leighbrackett.blogspot.com/2009/12/halfling-­leigh-­ brackett.html Wiener, N. (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings. Da Capo Press. Winks, J. L. (1934, December). Phew! AST, p. 159. Yntema, S.  K. (1988). More Than 100: Women Science Fiction Writers. Crossing Press.

Part III The Merril Era

7 Confronting Cold War Masculinity

Judith Merril championed the transformation of golden-age science fiction into what has come to be known as the new wave, but she has habitually been left out of histories of science fiction. Understanding why helps to explain the science fiction community’s influence on the history of the genre. The third editor considered in this study, Merril fielded a response to the transformation of masculinity in the United States during the Cold War. What is more, she sounded a note of change that focuses on the personal life of workers in science and technology, incorporating social sciences like psychology and sociology alongside the traditional sciences found in science fiction. Compared to the other authors in this study, Merril is one of the first to create compelling female protagonists. Although some had presented female characters—Isaac Asimov’s Susan Calvin, for instance, appeared in 1941—these were rarities who entered technical fields as exceptions to the rule. As discussed in Chap. 5, women characters like Dr. Calvin were portrayed in a way that suggested they damaged themselves by entering the masculinist domain with no one ever exploring, in fiction at least, why this might be so. As will be seen below, Merril is interested in women in the home space, which had been defined as stultifying by the paradigm © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_7

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of masculinist science fiction. She thoughtfully depicts the effects of this divided space on the people involved, including those men who break the norms of white masculinity that were presumed to be necessary components of a technological civilization. Merril is also important for the way she advocated for a broader definition of science fiction and sought mainstream audiences for her work. After the war, Robert A. Heinlein drew the admiration of his colleagues when he placed several stories in the so-called slicks, magazines that got their name for having higher production quality than the pulps. In February 1947, he published the first of four stories in Saturday Evening Post. At this time, Merril, who was writing for the pulps but also working as an editor for Bantam Books, also had broader aspirations for science fiction, but she accomplished her goal in an unexpected way. Some of her earliest published fiction, as described below, resembles Leigh Brackett’s in the sense that Merril mimicked the writing style of the magazines that were aimed toward men; like Brackett, Merril expertly subverted the expectations of readers in the titles she published. A perfectly acceptable path would have been to continue in this vein. Merril branched onto two other paths. Firstly, she started writing a new kind of fiction that more directly confronted the masculinist assumptions of pulp science fiction. Secondly, perhaps knowing that a new brand might not be widely praised by traditional fans, she engaged in editorial work—first as an anthologist and then as a reviewer—to create a space where new ideas about science fiction might find a home (see Chap. 8). Whereas the first two editors in this study, Hugo Gernsback (Chap. 1) and John W. Campbell (Chap. 4), seemed to reify the new construction of masculinity and technology, Merril was the first editor to challenge it and offer an alternative to writers and readers. Given her paramount importance, the way that Merril is often sidelined in histories of science fiction is troubling. The community’s omission of Merril can be traced to several factors. One is the undeniable influence of an acrimonious divorce and child custody hearings involving Frederick Pohl, an influential editor in the 1950s, who later became prominent in the academic study of science fiction in the 1970s. Not only did the protracted proceedings make it difficult for her to live a peaceful life and write in the 1950s, but also her former husband became

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one of the most vocal perpetrators of the myth that there were few influential women in early science fiction. Davin (2006) responds incredulously to Pohl’s contention regarding the lack of women writers and the myth that they had to conceal their sex: This is an extraordinary statement coming from someone who was married to three early female science fiction writers: “Leslie Perri” (published in 1941), Dorothy LesTina (published in 1943), and “Judith Merril” (first published in 1948 [in AST; other stories actually appeared earlier]). … Pohl’s attitude sounds suspiciously like a husband’s standard sexist dismissal of the “little lady’s” artistic efforts. … Pohl’s amnesia about the work of his own wives (two of whom had published SF before they married him and the third published while they were married) may also help explain the amnesia of some other male authors. (p. 45, emphases in original)

The influence of a disgruntled husband and his friends, however, cannot be the whole reason why Merril is not accorded a prominent position. Another factor must be her political beliefs and the actions she took to support them: as is discussed later in this chapter, her concern about civil society led her to emigrate to Canada and publicly support U.S. men who were fleeing the draft for the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s. She was not the only writer committed to the anti-war movement, but her vocal effort to organize opposition cannot be separated from her fiction, which challenged the bellicose uses of science promoted by the earlier two editors in this study. Theories of nation-building, the spread of civilization, and the fear of conformity that underwrote the U.S. involvement in Vietnam turned out to be more popular with science fiction authors and fans than Merril anticipated. Looking over histories of science fiction, Merril’s name is sometimes invoked, but she is usually relegated to a narrow role as editor and reviewer. At the start of the new millennium, though, new work considered Merril’s career as a whole. One important step was the publication of Merril’s memoir (2002), co-written with her granddaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary, which puts her biography and editorial work into conversation with much of her fiction writing. Yaszek (2008) added an important critical voice, noting that Merril imagined how science and technology

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offered an opportunity for “more egalitarian sex and gender relations” and that, more than earlier writers, she described how humans could defeat the “social and psychological difficulties attending the development of new scientific and social relations” (p. 64). Newell and Lamont (2012) built on this work with a full-length critical study. One of their stated motivations is that Merril’s fiction is in danger of erasure. As the reputations of her friends and colleagues remain steady—particularly Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl—silence about Merril is troubling. Editorially, she is said to be working on the same lines as other new wave authors and critics, making her work seem derivative, and her fiction writing is often left out of science fiction entirely. Merril’s influence on the path taken by science fiction is undeniable, albeit underappreciated. Her frequent examination of the home world that the adventurous men left behind is worthwhile in itself, particularly in the way she shows how the lack of scientific training can harm women— and how women can overcome the barriers. In addition, in her fiction Merril cleverly showed the role culture and ideology play in shaping expectations about science and technology. Merril’s work as an editor, perhaps more than as a writer, deserves more attention. As seen in Chap. 8, some fan historians reassigned the role Merril played in shaping the genre to men who, as can be shown, were simply following in her wake. Returning Merril to the story is certainly justified on ethical grounds; as the innovator, she deserves the credit. However, thinking about Merril’s editorial role in the context of her work as a labor activist and author also helps to explain the new wave’s basis in a critique of bias in science and engineering, an activity that was taking place as the funding for innovation and education became federalized.

7.1 Finding Community The analysis of Merril’s writing and editorial career should take into account her autobiographical statements simply because there are so many and she incorporated her biography into her fiction. Some were published, such as her introductions to her published works, Damon Knight’s memoir (1977) of the Futurian “family” that “produced today’s

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top SF writers and editors,” and Merril’s own posthumous memoir (2002). Others are found in drafts of biographical statements for publishers and personal comments in her correspondence, scattered among the papers she bequeathed to Archives Canada. Of course, one must avoid the intentional fallacy; a reader cannot assume that biographical statements are objective, biographical insights devoid of artistic craft. In fact, the way that Merril hones a particular version of her personal history yields insight into her work. Considering the various statements, a researcher soon becomes aware of Merril’s repeated refashioning of her authorial persona and how that persona fits with her insistence that science fiction is not just an intellectual pursuit, but a lifestyle and a tool to transform the world. For instance, Merril stresses that progressive politics is part of her core being, while science fiction is something exterior, a way of communicating with people who share her ideals and a way to earn a living. She often repeats her parents’ activism, stating that they were Zionists who met when they were working together at the Bureau of Jewish Education. Her father was a playwright; her mother was a social worker, suffragette, and a founding member of Hadassah, a volunteer women’s association founded to support Zionist ideals (Knight, 1977, p.  145). These biographical details serve to distinguish Merril from other writers who claim to have progressive ideals. The person who would later legally change her name to Judith Merril was born in Boston in 1923, just a few years after Pohl and Isaac Asimov. After her father died in 1929, for seven years she moved about with her mother, who was working as a dietician, including a stint at a summer camp near Milford, Pennsylvania. With her mother, Merril moved to the Bronx borough of New York City when she was 13. Her mother worked at a settlement house, where Merril “discovered the YPSL,” the Young People’s Socialist League (Knight, 1977, p. 146). At the time, she was a member of the Fourth International, the Trotskyist socialist organization that sought to establish worldwide socialism. Intending to pursue a degree in economics, Merril enrolled in the City College of New York but felt disenchanted, finding “better expression on soap-boxes at student peace rallies” (Tate, 1966, p. 3). She married her first husband, a science fiction fan whom she met at a Trotskyist July Fourth picnic, in 1940;

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together, they were union activists. Her first daughter, Merril, was born two years later. Her husband was soon drafted, and while he served in the Navy, the young mother took jobs she could do at home, such as literary assistant and sleuth for a credit corporation. Merril’s love for science fiction was sparked by this intimate relationship and then kindled by another. Merril engaged in extramarital affairs while her husband was deployed; they had an agreement about “temporary sexual freedom,” and she wrote him frank letters about her encounters (Knight, 1977, p. 147). She became involved with John Michel, the Brooklyn fan and author who had established his leftist credentials before they met (see Chap. 4). Merril calls him “the brilliant young writer of the group” (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 44). Merril does not prevaricate in her description of the relationship. In fact, over and again, Merril asserts that science fiction is not an abstract, artistic goal: it arises between people with similar ideological views who love each other. By the time Merril met Michel and the Futurians in 1944, she no longer considered herself a Trotskyist due to their “authoritarian organizational tactics,” although not necessarily because she had ideological differences. Saying that all of the group were “extraordinary people,” Merril clearly admires the Futurians who wished “to start history, not repeat it” (p. 43). In her memoir, she also recalls their antipathy toward John W. Campbell, likely based on the events that led to the “Great Exclusion Act” at the first World Science Fiction Convention five years earlier. Her admiration for the author Theodore Sturgeon was dismissed by the group, but she reached out to him privately. Drawn to the Futurians’ intense debates, Merril writes in her correspondence that she felt like she was joining bull sessions among college students, except that most members of the group had not finished college. (According to Knight (1977), Asimov was the only one to complete his degree.) In 1945, Merril had become a full member of the Futurians. She shared an apartment with one of the two other female Futurians, Virginia Kidd, who also was caring for a young child and had a husband overseas. Looking back, Merril writes fondly about the sense of community she felt. Not only did fans live together, but they supported each other in their creative and political endeavors. Her description of these years stresses the elective community that would be an important theme of her science fiction:

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Living with Virginia was lots of fun against the backdrop of great intellectual stimulation, caring for children, coping with relationships, buying groceries, and all those things that are part of everyday life as a single working mother. It’s hard to describe how much fun those things became, all these years distant. We lived a marvelous Parisian existence in our apartment on Washington Street next to the railway tracks. Our apartment became known as the Parallax. … Once a week everyone came over for a communal dinner. Virginia and I would do the shopping and the cooking, then we would proportion the cost of the meal to everyone who ate. Usually the others had some sort of [rotation] to do the after-dinner cleanup. (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, pp. 56–7)

Robert Lowndes, one of the group, started buying short nonfiction from her, and he and Michel pointed out that she could earn more money by fictionalizing the science fact she was writing for him. With humility, Merril said she did not know how to write a story; her friends said if she wrote one, then they would help her improve it. “What it needed was complete breakdown and reassembly, and [Lowndes] did this with such patience and skill. … [Then, Michel] went through it with a much sharper scalpel” (Knight, 1977, p.  148). This led to her first detective story, an important milestone, but Merril’s repeated telling of this sequence of events is related to her assertion that the published story was not the most important part of writing. She admires the collaborative process, something she will stress throughout her career. The early stories published by Merril under various pseudonyms seem somewhat conventional and only subtly address gender. The first, published under the name Judy Zissman, was “No Heart for Murder” (Crack Detective Stories, July 1945). The narrator is a conventional third-person storyteller; the setting is an urban apartment complex. There are some indications of the directions Merril will go: the brother of the murder victim is a soldier who has the “chemical warfare insignia” on his uniform (p. 44). The U.S. Chemical Warfare Service, which was established during World War I, would go on, after World War II, to advise others on how to minimize the effects of a nuclear attack and later to develop Agent Orange and napalm for the Vietnam conflict. The plot twist—that the wife of the victim, Sylvia, used chemistry knowledge she gained from the

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victim’s brother—also reflects Merril’s idea that women are just as scientifically capable as men. The second story by Judy Zissman, “The ‘Crank’ Case,” appeared in the January 1946 issue of Crack Detective Stories. It combines a detective story with a hero that comes from a sports pulp, a baseball player. The story is fairly conventional and shows no formal experimentation. Its most interesting aspect might be that the person committing the murder is named Fred, and he has a lot of debt from drinking and gambling, foreshadowing her troubled relationship with Pohl. Pohl had married another Futurian in 1940, but divorced her when he was deployed in Europe during World War II. He was still married to his second wife when his courtship with Merril began in 1946. Merril began publishing in 1939 using her name at the time, Judith Grossman. According to Cummins (2006), she published fiction and poetry while she was a student at Morris High School in the Bronx, distributed newsletters for civic engagement, and created and edited science fiction fanzines. Then, Merril published four stories using the name Judy Zissman in Crack Detective Stories, which was edited by Lowndes, as well as Blue Ribbon Western and Double-Action Western. In this opening phase of her pulp career, she used masculine pseudonyms: in 1947 and 1948 she published eight stories as Ernest Hamilton (combining two friends’ middle names) in pulps like Sports Action, and another seven stories as Eric Thorstein (an homage to sociologist Thorstein Veblen) from 1947 to 1950 in pulps like Western Action and Real Western Romances. She also published approximately two dozen nonfiction stories under fanciful names: Cowpoke, El Amigo, Jo Daniels, Judge Colt, the Pilgrim, and Uncle Bob. These early publications were not part of the carefully curated persona Merril presented in her later career: her first publication was not in AST in 1948. In fact, Merril was a seasoned author with professional publishing experience outside of science fiction. As with the criticism of Leigh Brackett discussed in Chap. 6, one could accuse Merril of “writing like a man” before she published her first science fiction story. For instance, Merril (1947) uses a male narrator, Georgie, who starts his description of the legal issues related to stealing in dialect: “Pop used to be legman for a mouthpiece before they framed him” (p. 91). Georgie and his companion, Muggsy, get involved in a dispute with the owner of a pool parlor

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over 50 dollars that were perhaps left behind by another patron. An editorial note states that Georgie and Muggsy had no right to the money and could be prosecuted for assault. There are few women in these stories, but considering the venue, it could just as easily be said (as with Brackett) that she had a good awareness of her audience. Merril’s early pulp readers probably did not know she was a woman, but her colleagues did. The magazines she published in were often edited by Lowndes, her Futurian colleague, for the pulp publisher Columbia Publications. The connection between pulp western stories and the idealistic Futurians might not be immediately obvious, but a close reading reveals how Merril’s stories sometimes used a veneer of entertainment to provoke a response to the hardships faced by the underclass. An obvious contradiction between the anticipated outcome and the resolution of the plot is seen in a story that Merril (1948a) publishes as Eric Thorstein, “Squaw Fever.” This story seems conventional, down to the words used to describe indigenous Americans—the title itself reflects a negative attitude toward miscegenation—and yet these elements do not match the plot, which vindicates a character who was accepting of a woman with a son from a previous marriage. One of a group of beaver trappers out west, Jerry Beacon, has fallen in love with a native American woman, whom they call Candy, and has accepted her son as his own. The complication of the plot is that Jim Purcell, a trader, bullies Beacon. As will be typical of Merril’s fiction, the resolution of this plot will counter readers’ expectations. Will Purcell and Beacon fight? Who will be the winner? In fact, Purcell and Beacon do not confront each other directly. In the rising action, Purcell is revealed to be an outsider, not accustomed to the ways of the west, and his distaste for Beacon’s love of a native American woman derives from his antipathy toward native people generally. He pilfers some of the local people’s traps, which causes a conflict—a standoff between the trappers and the local people. Unexpectedly, Beacon’s wife informs the members of her clan that Purcell is the culprit. In the confusion, Beacon ensures the safety of Candy’s baby and crosses to the side of his wife’s family. Purcell’s story comes to an end when he fires on the local people and they retaliate. Beacon, the character who is open-minded about family relationships and race, survives.

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Another story that shows Merril’s use of plot to undermine the expectations of her readers comes again from Thorstein, this time in Double-­ Action Western. Merril (1948b) focuses on a working man, Steve Andersen, who thinks he has struck it rich. The reason is revealed to the reader slowly. Andersen is sent into town for supplies, but he is also carrying a mysterious package. He is part of a team building a mill, and he gripes about his ill-treatment from his boss. Andersen exhibits a lot of anxiety about the strange package, and the first  third of the story sets up the reader’s expectation that Andersen has discovered something valuable. At the store, the shopkeeper’s inflexibility creates resentment. Finally, Andersen demands a quart of liquor (p. 95). A reader’s expected resolution of the plot, that Andersen proffers a pouch full of gold, turns out to be an anticlimax: it is full of gold dust, but the gold is not his. In order to gain his compliance, the store owner gives Andersen a bottle of whiskey for free, helps Andersen load the supplies on the wagon, and heads back with him in a casual manner, intending to stop rumors from spreading about the discovery of gold. The outcome reveals the line between landed merchant classes and laborers. The shop owner will collaborate with the mill owner to make sure that the working men will not get more than their wages. Through this kind of writing, it seems, Merril and her colleagues hoped to earn some money from the mass market while also effecting some class consciousness among their readers. These stories show how she found a voice in pulp magazines with feedback from her Futurian colleagues, but personalities of the group were unbalanced. After some political arguments, Merril and Michel broke up, an event that foreshadowed the breakup of the Futurians as a whole. Like many pivotal events in fandom, there are conflicting accounts of the breakup. Merril perhaps stated that she had no intentions of divorcing her husband, which made Michel accept Wollheim’s pronouncement that he must cut ties with her and several others. At an “indignation meeting” in September 1945, Merril, Kidd, Lowndes, and several others convened a meeting of the Futurians and passed a resolution that Wollheim, his wife, and Michel were no longer members of the group because they “abruptly and cold-bloodedly terminated all personal relationships with four members of the group,” according to court documents Merril preserved in her papers. The remaining members sent out

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notices to fans, which prompted Wollheim to sue the Futurians, seeking $25,000 in damages for libel (Knight, 1977, p. 173). Merril countersued Wollheim for an editorial he published about her; according to Wollheim, Merril believed it would be permissible for modernist poet Ezra Pound to be murdered by a “mob of socialists” but not as a state execution performed by the United States. Merril’s reasoning, Wollheim surmised, would be that she believed it was unacceptable for Pound to be executed by a “bourgeois capitalist state apparatus no more friendly to the cause of revolutionary socialism than was Fascist Italy.” Merril, Wollheim concludes, does not care for the rule of law but only for her Marxist vision of progress. According to her counterclaim, these allegations harmed Merril’s credit and reputation. The Futurians were able to get the case dismissed. Even though the members would maintain professional collaborations to a certain extent, the organization dissolved. Merril’s first husband returned from the war, but they soon divorced, and her relationship with Pohl flourished. From 1946 to 1951, Merril states in her memoir, she and Pohl were “a total centre” of the science fiction community (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 94). In October 1947, at the time when Merril was shopping around her first science fiction story, they founded a new organization, the Hydra Club, an invitation-­only group of science fiction publishers, writers, editors, and artists that first met in the apartment Merril and Pohl were sharing on Grove Street in Manhattan (Fig. 7.1). The reason for closed membership, as Merril (1951) explained it, was a desire to keep the meetings social and without acrimony. Although she was the same age as Asimov and traveled in some of the same circles, Merril did not attempt to write science fiction until after big science was well established. Merril’s delayed entry into science fiction may have been a benefit, given that she did not have to account for the changing relationships between science, technology, and society occasioned by World War II (see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.4). As might be expected from the binding of masculinity and rationality at the start of the century, the World War II transformation of how scientific research was funded largely omitted women and people without college degrees. Nevertheless, Merril used the new public interest in science and engineering to her advantage. Other author-editors were stymied by the new bureaucratic science that required office work more than free enterprise.

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Fig. 7.1  An illustration accompanying an article by Judith  Merril (1951) about the Hydra Club features Futurian David A. Kyle flying through the front door in an Air Force uniform. Isaac Asimov with a “Dr.” button turns the spit that holds Frederik Pohl, who is being roasted. Looking a bit like the woman on the cover of her first anthology, Judith Merril is to the left of Pohl, observing but not protecting her soon-to-be ex-husband. Futurian editor Robert Lowndes is smoking a pipe in the foreground

Hugo Gernsback had imagined fiction that returned to nineteenth-­ century amateur ideals, which were now clearly outdated. E. E. Smith’s protagonists stepped away from government-sponsored research to have free adventures. John W. Campbell could think of himself as a visionary

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misfit who was unjustly denied positions in the new technocratic order because he was a free thinker. At the time Merril started writing, however, the technical elite that science fiction had counted on as an audience would significantly change, becoming part of institutionalized innovation, and larger swaths of the population were interested in and affected by technological change. This transformation ground against the optimism of typical writers of the Gernsback and Campbell eras; while they had imagined that private individuals would be the ones to go to into space and that atomic weapons would be wielded only by mad scientists, it seemed as if governments were the mad scientists with atomic weapons and anyone who wanted a rocket would have to have a military affiliation. The dilettante heroes of Campbell’s tales or the gritty employees of Asimov’s robot stories were no longer at the vanguard of scientific innovation. Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein had already proposed one way out of the bureaucracy of big science, following the engineering educators of the start of the century: bring the heroes to the frontier where they could be unencumbered by smothering home life, universities, and governments that threatened to dull their inventiveness. Heinlein, for his part, ramped up this setting in the dozen so-called juvenile novels he wrote for Scribner’s from 1947 to 1958. In this series, his protagonists are young men far enough away from the center of the technological empire that their autonomy is protected. In the age of big science, innovation and invention were not free from politics and ideology, given that money and attention so often came from government agencies. The backdrop of manly autonomy that seemed so important in the 1930s and 1940s became less attainable for readers after the war. Merril’s autobiography (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002) explains away her delay into science fiction by suggesting that she started writing because she needed money, but one could just as easily say that she did not find her place in the genre until there was a larger audience looking for fiction that was concerned about the interactions among science, technology, and society. Even though some earlier writers had critiqued the masculinist bias and imperialist ambitions of the genre, few had made inroads into a broader examination of the social world in the age of technology. When technology was thought to be the natural output of an

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advanced race of humans, as described in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2, it was not simple to imagine alternatives. For (albeit former) Trotskyists like Merril, however, the Marxist connection between ideology and technology is easier to see. Trotsky himself died in 1940, but his essays about capitalism and technology were still relevant in the age of big science. At a time when Gernsback was extolling the virtues of an advanced civilization buttressed by electric devices, Trotsky (1926) said: I remember the time when men wrote that the development of aircraft would put an end to war, because it would draw the whole population into military operations, would bring to ruin the economic and cultural life of entire countries, etc. In fact, however, the invention of a flying machine heavier than air opened a new and crueler chapter in the history of militarism. … The ruling class, the possessing class, controls technique and through it controls nature. Technique in itself cannot be called either militaristic or pacifistic. In a society in which the ruling class is militaristic, technique is in the service of militarism.

Utilizing the Marxist insight that science, technology, and society shape each other seems to have been easy for Merril. She stepped away from the presumption of many other science fiction authors that science and technology were instinctual offspring of a superior race and avoided the technological determinism that underwrote the notion that the impacts of science and technology were inevitable. These are indications of a nascent stage of the social constructivism concept that would become prominent in the 1970s. Merril would go on to consider how national ideologies could harm supposedly objective enterprises. In addition, she would work to foster connections among science fiction writers around the world. Like the fiction Heinlein was selling to the Saturday Evening Post, the first science fiction story Merril wrote had a wider audience in mind. Instead of the technical elite that had been the mainstay of Gernsback and Campbell publications, Merril was thinking of a general reading public. Ahead of other science fiction writers who would complain about the ghettoization of the genre, Merril knew that there were a significant number of readers who were not technical professionals but who had an interest in science. She also seems to have had her finger on the pulse of

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the legions of postwar technical workers who wanted to think about the interactions among science, technology, and society and yet had little professional purview to influence the direction of their work. Merril honed her skill at imagining the thoughts and challenges of an individual in a world where science fiction had become a reality and then used her expertise to transform the genre. Before she did so, however, she created a new authorial persona. A clear indication of this new persona was the birth of “Judith Merril” in an ice-cream parlor in 1947, a name she chose because she no longer wished to publish under her father’s or her husband’s surname. A 24-year-­ old former union organizer and burgeoning writer, she brought her young daughter along to a meeting with author Theodore Sturgeon. She had been considering using her daughter’s given name as a surname, but she was having some reservations based on her Jewish identity. As a secular Jew, the professional name Judy Zissman had seemed appropriate, but “Merril” maybe seemed too Aryan. She considered herself to be an ambassador representing the Jewish people and considered other spellings, like Merylstein. Sturgeon reassured her that she was not giving in to racist pressure by pointing out that she would still suffer persecution whatever name she used and that her given name meant “Jewess” (Merril, 2002, p. 85). Sturgeon wrote out the name on a napkin and Merril’s daughter thought it was great. Rejecting patriarchy, Merril took the name of her daughter, initially only as a pen name. Newly divorced from her first husband, in the midst of a pulp publishing bonanza, in 1947 Merril started working as an editor at the new paperback publisher Bantam Books, selecting and editing books for reprinting. Her time at Bantam was brief but impactful, not just on her later career as a science fiction editor but also for the insights she gained into the world of work. Looking back on her time in a corporate job from the perspective of the 1960s, she writes in a letter to a friend how the male editorial staff would make much of their female colleagues’ supposedly emotional behavior, similar to C. L. Moore’s experience (described in Chap. 6, Sect. 6.2). Men would sometimes make women cry in a crisis, Merril remembers in a letter; retrospectively, she was amazed how business culture could accept men’s actions like “shouting at underlings, cursing, going out for a drink, hammering [a] fist on a desk” as

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unemotional and “well within [the] range of normal human behavior.” They would not consider these actions as emotional because they were masculine, and men were presumed not to have emotion. By the time Merril was ready to sell her first science fiction story, “That Only a Mother” (1948c), she was already well experienced in techniques to disrupt the expectations of her readers. Sturgeon liked the story so much that he sent it to his agent, hoping that it would be published in one of the slicks instead of a science fiction magazine. Although the story was not originally intended for the science fiction pulps, Merril attended her first science fiction convention in August 1947 while she was trying to place this story. Sturgeon introduced Merril to Campbell “at a drunken hotel room party”; she told Campbell that she had written a great story, but it was too good for AST (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 96). That being said, after being rejected by mainstream magazines, including Collier’s, six months later she sent it to Campbell. The first story published under the name Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother,” appeared in the June 1948 issue of Astounding. In her correspondence about the story, she signs her name as Merril and adds the note, “from now on hereafter; Zissman is no more.” The printed story is accompanied by a somewhat condescending editorial comment that says it is a new story by a “feminine” author who rehashes old themes to make a “bitter little story” (Merril, 1948c, p. 88). Calling Merril “feminine” is an odd choice, implying softness or loveliness when “feminist” would have been apt and “female” would have been objective. Calling the story “bitter” is another odd choice. When she remembers this story, Merril employs a biographical incident with her daughter. She was visiting a friend who chided her for not wiping “a worm of mucous” from her daughter’s nose, as Merril (2002) describes it. She remembers how, after her friend had gone, she again stopped seeing it. Merril was quarantined at home because her daughter, it turned out, had measles. Merril transforms this experience of a devoted mother who cannot see defects into a story about a mother who was not bothered by her mutant baby’s missing limbs. The story’s protagonists, Maggie and Hank, are a young married couple in a country that may be winning an atomic war. The setting makes direct allusions to the atomic age, like the secret facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the United States produced fuel for the first atomic weapons. Also, the story alludes

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to discredited rumors about possible infanticide in Japan near the blast sites. Merril herself describes the main character as someone who “refuses” to see her baby’s deformities. The feeling that news stories that discredited infanticide in Japan were propaganda, Merril says, encouraged her to write the story (Fulford, 1971, pp.  12–3). Everything should be fine, Maggie is convinced; even though there is a war, it is conducted with precision. This story marks a significant departure from Merril’s other stories in the demands it made on the reader; gone was the plain narration that characterized her pulp fiction. Readers are left on their own to navigate their expectations and the setting that contradicts them. What is most memorable about reading this story is the confusion readers encounter, requiring greater attention than when reading other stories Campbell published. In some spots, the story uses the typically objective third-­ person narration of science fiction. In other stories, this kind of narration is not problematic because the narrators simply support the observations and deductions of the characters. Here, the third-person narration is almost completely restricted to the mother’s experience. This limited point of view in the narrative sections is contradicted by other sources of information in the story, such as letters from her husband, Hank, and reports from medical professionals. As the mother’s consciousness filters out information that she does not want to see, the reader progresses through the story with growing unease. Much like her earlier detective stories, Merril sprinkles significant details as the story progresses. The reader comes to distrust the mother’s point of view—a situation aided by the title of the story—and worries about what she might be concealing. Neither the narrator nor Maggie helps the reader to understand what is happening, exemplifying the experimental fiction that Merril will champion as part of the new wave twenty years later. The story also cleverly disrupts readers’ expectations about atomic technology and science fiction. Campbell’s editorial for this issue matches Maggie’s optimistic outlook, exalting the potential for atomic energy. As noted by Sharp (2007), the story challenges the idea held by Campbell and his writers that atomic energy would bring about a new era. In the story, there is “nothing positive or progressive about nuclear weapons.” The military use of atomic research has “created a world that was

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destroying itself ” (p. 183). The setting reverses some typical themes of science fiction, for example, the use of superior military force does not shock an enemy into submission, and reconsiders others, for example, superhero mutants are desirable. After all of the hints about mutations, a science fiction reader should wonder what sort of abilities the baby has, but the distrust of the mother’s point of view—what Campbell had called the story’s “bitterness”—forecloses that possibility, even as the mother reports that the child is using ESP. Hank’s absence and Maggie’s repeated wish that he come home sets up further tension for readers, but should not the reader condemn the social world that separates them? Finally, when the husband comes home on leave, the narrator’s report on his thinking produces a sense of horror: the reader’s growing suspicions seem justified in the catharsis. Readers feel pity for the delusional mother and fears that something similar might happen in their own family in the atomic age. Nevertheless, this catharsis is subversive because it is based on twisting science fiction themes. In order to feel this pity and fear, a reader has to reconsider a few decades of science fiction tradition. A different combination of narration and plot is seen in staples of golden-age science fiction. Consider A. E. van Vogt’s novel Slan, which had been serialized in AST from September to December 1940. The protagonist, Jommy Cross, is a member of the next evolutionary step of humanity, a slan, who is almost physically identical to a human but possessed with ESP abilities. Slan were created by Samuel Lann, hence the name, who describes slan as “an extraordinary mutation” and “perfection” (p. 145). The rest of humanity, though, views slan as deviant threats; this contradiction sets up sympathy for the mutants. As pointed out by Attebery (1998), Campbell proposed stories of this type to the authors in his orbit; in a 1953 letter to an author, Campbell actually uses the phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” a dictum from the long-outdated theory of recapitulation, and then goes on to say that van Vogt developed Slan based on his comments (p. 63). In the wake of this story’s publication, science fiction fans embrace the slan’s feeling of persecution in conjunction with the idea that fans and slan are outcasts because they are superior humans. Fan handbooks strongly identify with slan, including phrases like “fans are slans” being codified to mean “fans are superman mutants” (Eney, 1959, p. 63). The story of a mutant baby will soon be

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told as some sort of prequel to Robert A. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars (1956), where ESP ability becomes an invaluable resource for interstellar exploration. Merril’s Hank—if one thinks about him as a typical science fiction reader—could have treasured the new mental abilities the mutations have caused instead of reacting in horror. As for Maggie, a parent’s unconditional love for a helpless baby should be honored as central to the human species. The typical science fiction reader, the story suggests, will not love the next generation of superhumans as much as the fiction they read suggests. Merril’s second story for AST, “Death Is the Penalty” (January 1949), also features experimental techniques and a disruption to the typical science fiction reader’s expectations. The frame story, set in the future, jarringly uses what could be called second-person narration. The first word in the story is “you” and readers are addressed as if they are part of a group tour. The group has encountered a clearing, in the middle of which are the remains of two embracing individuals who have been turned into memorial statues. After this frame, a more conventional third-person narrator takes over, but does not help the readers understand what is happening. Readers know the names of the two characters are the same as in the memorial, but there is no other help. The frame had called the two “permanents” and explained that they memorialize “the erection of the Boundaries” (Merril, 2005, p. 21). Unlike other golden-age narrators, the terms are not defined when the third-person narration begins, leaving readers to puzzle out their meaning on their own. Because of the unhelpful narrator, some readers will make mistaken assumptions about what will be the rising action. Some might assume that fossilized corpses hugging each other were casualties of an enemy’s attack during a nuclear war. This expectation, though, will increasingly become difficult to fulfill. Going back in time, the narrator tells how David and Janice met in a public park and found love. The narrator also recounts how Janice was a scientist, but her examination scores were not quite high enough for her to join top scientists. The reader learns that their relationship might bring about unhappy consequences because David is cleared for scientific research at the highest level, but Janice is not. There are no external enemies here; the call for boundaries after some sort of conflict seems out of place. David and Janice love each other, and

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Janice is glad to finally have a partner who matches her intellectual ability. The climax is unexpected: police agents interrupt their rendezvous. The narrator states blandly, “They were themselves a menace to all that held the nation safe” (p. 27). Readers now start to fill in the blanks; an academic paper Janice published resembled David’s secret research, simply because of their shared interests and conversations, not because of espionage. Janice quickly evaluates their future options, none of which are good, so she induces the officers to execute them with precision atomic pistols, leaving their bodies as permanent statues. The reader’s expectations come tumbling down as it is clear that free inquiry in science— something key to the setting of so much fiction—has been abrogated. The frame narrator with its jarring second-person address returns for the denouement, telling the tour group (and the reader) that this case caused the erection of force-field boundaries between the people doing elite research and the rest of the population. Their bodies were transmuted by the crude atomic weapons of the time, the guide explains. Although remains of this type—“permanents” in the euphemism—are usually disposed of, David and Janice were kept in a public space to remind visitors why the boundaries were created. The last paragraph takes a departure from a typical dystopian setting, exhorting readers to examine the roots of their current circumstances: There is much more to see, but you walk away thinking, and do not listen. You were wondering about the wild, romantic days, before the Boundaries, before Civilization, before even Security. (2005, p.  29, capitalization as in original)

The setting of “Death Is the Penalty” is remarkable in several ways in the context of the history of science. Firstly, the story depicts what happens to a woman who has considerable scientific ability in the face of the tests that seek to quantify merit. Even though she does not get the right test score to do the same work as David, her publication makes it clear that she is his peer and the testing procedure may have been faulty. Barriers to women in science thus seem arbitrary. Secondly, the story is prescient about how national security would come to harm coöperation and innovation. Janice and David’s inability to maintain a relationship in a technical community

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is an effective allegory for the ways politicization of science would harm all of the community ties that support and improve science. These stories, as unusual as they are, were judged favorably enough to find their way into AST’s Analytical Laboratory. “That Only a Mother” took second place, narrowly beating out an Asimov story in the same issue. “Death Is the Penalty” placed fifth. These would be the only stories that Campbell took from Merril, but they served as an important testing ground for new thinking about popular fiction that would combine favorably with her professional experience. Meanwhile, for her office job at Bantam, Merril worked on the republication of Bradley’s No Place to Hide (1948), which according to its book jacket is “a straight down-to-earth description of what an atomic bomb can do.” It is presented as a scientific log of a physician who joined a medical team studying the dangers humans faced after the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As an appendix, Bradley wrote a brief “Layman’s Guide” to radiation. This book inspired Merril to do research for her own fictional story, which would become her first novel. At one point in 1949, the manuscript was entitled, “This, My Home”: “I wanted to do a book for women that would contain the same information in a more readable form.” She experimented with titles, including “The Ill Wind,” “Die in Bed,” “The Shocking Pink Cloud,” “Stormy Weather,” and her favorite, “Domestic Fury.” Her publisher, Doubleday, came up with the title Shadow on the Hearth, which Merril calls “dismaying” (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 99). The novel, crafted for the more general-interest readers Merril had been serving at Bantam, has a bare minimum of formal experimentation. The characters at the start of the novel seem to be out of the stock, almost to the extreme of stereotypes in the age of big science. The protagonist is Gladys Mitchell, who lives in Westchester, a suburb north of New York City. Like others before her, Merril does not use a favorable character type for Gladys (similar to Harris’s Margaret, described in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3). The initial characterization of Gladys is shallow, and the narrator suggests that Gladys has not been well educated enough for the technological world. In fact she does not even use household technology, relying instead on a housekeeper. Her husband, Jon Mitchell, is a member of the technological elite, being employed as a civil engineer who works in the

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city. (The husband’s name recalls John Michel, Merril’s love interest from her days with the Futurians. His absence during most of the novel is something of a parable about people with high-minded social  theories failing to pay attention to practical matters.) Their housekeeper calls in sick, so Gladys stays home, with the narrator commenting ominously that the housekeeper saved her life that day. Gladys’s midday routine is interrupted by the news that atomic bombs have struck major U.S. cities. At the start of the novel (Merril, 1950), the reader’s expectations might be that the plot will be some sort of urban horror story. In fact, this is what is highlighted in the television version made by ABC in 1954, “Atomic Attack.” The television version leads the viewers along lines the viewers would expect: a doomsday tale about the need for military preparedness. Phyllis Thaxter, the actor who portrays Gladys, does an admirable job of portraying a housewife whose gentle routine is disrupted by war. In her memoir, Merril (2002, pp.  99–100) notes that Doubleday changed the ending; in Merril’s novel, the husband almost makes it home but is “shot by civil defense patrollers.” Doubleday changed the story so that he makes it home. In the television version, even though Merril’s original resolution is honored, Gladys’s helplessness is highlighted. This seems typical of the reading of this novel for many years. Brians (1987) suggests that Merril gives a rare look at the impact of atomic war on ordinary people; Stableford (2004) says the novel is about “nuclear war from a housewife’s perspective” (p. 227). However, the story is much longer than needed for a tale of a housewife’s suffering. With fiction like Merril’s, it can be easy for readers to miss the fact that the story goes off in a direction that contradicts their expectations. Close reading helps here. Gladys violates the strongly drawn stock characterization as the novel progresses; the initial type is shown to be simply a product of Gladys’s social environment. Her engineering husband may be stuck in New York, but Gladys finds textbooks and reference material in the basement. With her children’s help, she does her own research, supplementing the official, less-than-helpful announcements. The rising action documents her transformation into a capable household leader, and likewise shows the big steps she has to take in order to cross the gender divide that has been exacerbated in the age of big science

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to be arbitrary and even harmful. More than just dramatizing the nonfiction information about atomic weapons, the character of Gladys inspires readers to listen carefully, take notes, and use whatever talents they have to understand the world around them. Certainly, Merril was already well known as an iconoclast, so no one should have expected her to produce an image of a terrified housewife. Instead, she demonstrates how individuals can quickly overcome social stereotypes. Biographically, Merril was writing the novel at a transformative time. She was editing her first anthology and writing Shadow during her first year of marriage to Pohl, yet the partnership was already souring. She attended the World Science Fiction Convention in 1949 (Cinvention), and recounts in her letters, that she knew few people but Pohl seemed to know everyone. She says he had been trying to transform his literary agency into a functioning business to help his friend Dirk Wylie, a paraplegic veteran who died later that year. Pohl, though, was not working on his business. He disappeared into the convention poker game, showing up only once to ask for ten dollars. Merril, nevertheless, had fun meeting new people. She had gained a reputation from “That Only a Mother” and found a line of suitors “playing court” to her. “Make a note here for the future student of the early science-fiction field,” she wrote in a letter, “the Saturday-night (I think) Shasta party at the 1949 Cincy convention was an Historic Occasion … for J. Merril, anyhow.” Given the accusations later made against her, she points out that she does not sleep with anyone. The novel and television broadcast helped Merril’s reputation in science fiction circles, but they were not commercial successes. The New York Times somewhat dismissively reviewed the novel. Merril states that she was more hopeful for reviews from small towns. “I have hopes that in places where sophistication is less at a premium, the book may be better liked,” she writes in a personal letter. One of the strangest reviews is written by Pohl as editor of Super Science Stories. Going beyond the simple admission of their marriage as a potential conflict of interest, Pohl informs his readers that Merril’s legal name is “Mrs. Frederick Pohl.” More insultingly, he tells readers that Shadow is not a science fiction novel but “a tender, moving and sometimes terrifying story of a housewife” (1950, p. 67). With this review, he establishes a theme for the next twenty years, asserting that what Merril writes is not science fiction.

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7.2 Becoming Judith Merril The publication of two stories and a major work put wind into her sails, and Merril made plans for collaborations with her Futurian colleague Cyril M. Kornbluth, mapping out her writing time and potential earnings to find a way to support herself. This fits in with Merril’s contention that she was writing in order to make a living, and yet the 1950s was also when she transformed the lessons she learned into art. The collaborations with Kornbluth were first published under the name Cyril Judd. The given name obviously comes from Kornbluth. The family name, Judd, is a little more complex. This surname was used by English Christians coming back from fighting the Crusades; Judd is a diminutive form of the River Jordan. As a given name, Judd is a German name related to the word jude, meaning Jewish person, reflecting Merril’s desire to be an ambassador of Judaism. The joint personality Cyril Judd engages in is an early example of science fiction counterculture. Writing for an audience that was enamored with the idea of joining an interplanetary militaristic force, Judd deftly engages in satire. Through word choice and a narrator who peers into the psychology of a member of an organization like the Galactic Patrol, the first few chapters of Gunner Cade evoke the mindless devotion that is implied by membership in these forces. Then, when Cade is captured, the plot of the story details the slow process of Cade’s awakening to a complex social reality that is less of a juvenile fantasy. In this way, Merril continues the change led by Leigh Brackett described in Chap. 6; it would become less and less fashionable to portray the space patrol favorably. Kornbluth, who was a prolific writer before his untimely death in 1958, also became known as a theorist of science fiction when the genre started to gain attention from university professors. In a 1957 symposium, he argues that there are famous novels that have marked social changes with their criticism, works like Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Jungle. Although science fiction authors and fans presume that the genre is engaged in some sort of social criticism, Kornbluth (1959) says the criticism is infrequently accomplished, particularly with the Galactic Patrol type of story, where “there is a great deal of crime and vice

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in the world, but no human being is responsible for it.” Kornbluth suggests that this is a juvenile fiction that cannot possibly encourage readers to engage in social criticism. The popularity of typical science fiction, he says, overshadows authors who engage with social issues. What could have been a time of growth and exploration for Merril was not fully realized due to her married life. In her correspondence, Merril writes frankly to friends and fans about her difficulties. One of the challenges was being a mother and a writer. Her solution was to stay up all night, which she admits she sometimes accomplished by using a stimulant, Dexedrine. This drug would allow her to stay focused on her work all night, but it would then take a mental toll for the next few days. With a writing partner like Kornbluth, presumably, she could alternate writing and taking care of daily life. (Pohl, 1978, p. 92, also describes his writing as 24-hour binges followed by 24 hours of sleep, but does not include any other details.) Merril would keep this habit for twenty years until Dexedrine was unavailable, when she switched to Ritalin. She also describes problems with Pohl, saying the relationship lacked physical intimacy. Although she was thinking of children, Pohl did not want to try until after she was done with Shadow. After it was published, he blamed her for the problems in their romantic life because she worked too hard. She asked him how he felt about fidelity and informed Pohl that she had made a date with “an attractive young man” in December; this seems to have knocked Pohl into place because their daughter, Ann, was born in September 1950. After the birth, Pohl gave her permission to do discretely what she wanted, Merril writes. The marriage became rocky, and by the middle of summer 1951 she was thinking of a breakup. Merril would say that she married Pohl because he encouraged her to write, but Pohl had more than altruism as a motive: he represented Merril as her literary agent. She thought it strange that he wanted 10 percent of her earnings and the earnings of her friends, but for a time she acquiesced. Pohl sometimes suggests he brought about a revolution in representing his writers: “I would give them a check when they turned in a manuscript.” This made them write more, he said, but “I found myself running out of money” (Knight, 1977, p.  190). In his memoir, Pohl blames his lack of business acumen for his failure as an agent, which was unexpected because he “was good at it” and he had a “near-monopoly” on

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authors. In seven years as an agent, he writes, “I had managed to lose thirty thousand dollars I didn’t have” (Pohl, 1978, p. 161). Pohl states he was honorable because he paid writers a flat fee for whatever they sent him, which was his way of freeing them from constraints of having to write for an editor. However, this seems to be subterfuge. When Merril asked about her royalty payments, Pohl told her that the publishers had not yet paid, which turned out to be untrue. Asimov’s archival letters also refer to Pohl’s late payments. Merril started to investigate, and she found out that other authors had not been getting paid either. Pohl then blamed Merril, saying that he sent money to her mother, but then she found out that her mother had not received any money and simply had been too embarrassed to tell her. He asked for some time so that he could buy out his partner, but Merril suspected that Pohl was involved with some sort of fence operation. In an undated 1950 letter to her mother, Merril wrote that “the biggest error” of her life was marrying Pohl. By 1951, she was feeling unloved. In September 1951, she was angry, not just about the money he owed her but also that he was intercepting her mail; she writes that she wants to sever all relations with him, both as her agent and in marriage. She writes to Doubleday in November 1951 that the Wylie Agency no longer represented her, and she should be paid separately from Pohl. By the end of 1951, Merril and Pohl had broken up, and he moved in with the woman who would become his fourth wife. Merril went to Mexico for a divorce at the end of 1952. As part of the decree, her legal name after the marriage would become the name she had been using professionally, Judith Merril. Merril admitted to friends that 1952 was not a good time in her life, and her home was the location of parties with guests enjoying themselves in the bedrooms; Merril said she did not participate, but she did not object so long as the children did not see anything. That summer, Pohl was ready to marry his next wife and Merril had been dating science fiction writer Walter M. Miller, Jr. (who was then writing Captain Video scripts but would soon gain acclaim for his 1959 novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz). After some traveling about, including a stay with Robert A. Heinlein, she moved in with Miller in New Jersey. Miller and Pohl soon fought over Merril’s first daughter. Pohl tried to take Annie from Merril’s arms, and Miller physically stopped him. Pohl returned with a

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state trooper, who concluded that Miller was within his rights for protecting his home. Merril said that Pohl kept driving by the house, making her nervous. In his memoir, Pohl (1978, p. 207) states he would have preferred an amicable divorce, like his first two divorces had been, but the problem was that both he and Merril loved their daughter so much. Concerned about Pohl’s behavior, Merril and Miller traveled with their children to Florida, near Miller’s mother. They feared getting any utility bills in her name lest Pohl find her. She heard that Pohl was doing everything he could to ruin her reputation. Although Merril did not tell Pohl her Florida address, she did let the father of her older daughter know. Merril’s first husband came to Florida to convince her to live with him; she refused. Merril (2002) recounts in her memoir that a private detective came to their home and, two days later, a sheriff accompanied Merril’s ex-husband to take her older daughter away. Her ex-husband asserted that Merril was pretending to be married to Miller but was not; the first husband seemed to offer a better environment for their daughter. In the midst of this turmoil, Merril seems to have gathered strength from science fiction community, and particularly the conversations she had at science fiction conventions and continued by mail after. For her, she writes to her friend Les Cole in 1953, science fiction is not just the words on the page, but the “minds that make it.” It is the only community where she can have such complete and satisfactory communication. In October 1953, a Florida judge agreed that Merril’s older daughter would be better off with her father because he was married. After a time trying to make a life in Florida, Merril decided to move back north and settled in Milford, Pennsylvania, in 1954, where she had once lived with her mother. The dispute over custody would continue for several years. About a two hour’s drive from New York City, Milford is busy with tourists on summer vacations. Merril fell in love with the town, imagining that it was one of the last strongholds of town-meeting democracy. She took a job at the Dimmick Inn as a waitress, which she says provided her with some income but also important social connections. For the first time in her life, her best friends were mostly women. “Men are fun,” she writes to Les Cole in 1956, “but a little bit of a strain.” In 1956–7, she worked for the local newspaper, The Milford Dispatch, first as a reporter

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and then the editor; she wrote about local events and published a series of profiles of local people. Nevertheless, she found her love of the community was not always returned. She writes she was confused that everyone was talking about “Jew bastards,” which turned out to be a way of referring to the summer tourists, so she let her coworkers know that she, herself, was Jewish. She began to feel some new toxicity from the science fiction community from which she had drawn so much support; a rumor circulated that a roomful of people watched her have sex at a convention in Los Angeles, even though she had never been to Los Angeles. Her writing output had not been as strong as she wanted, and Merril often writes that such circumstances make her disinclined to write. Then she hears a rumor that people believe only Futurians will publish her work, and her writing only appears when she has a sexual partner who is an editor. This rude suggestion following her breakup with Pohl intimates that he was doing her some sort of favor and her stories never deserved to be published. Additional acrimony came from one of her former Futurian colleagues. Asimov writes about how he publicly humiliated Merril at the 1955 World Science Fiction convention. He notes that Merril was “glooming over an unhappy break in her relationship with a certain writer” (1980, p. 39) and he tried to cheer her up. This is likely a reference to Walter M. Miller, Jr., who won an award for Best Novelette, The Darfsteller (published in AST, Jan 1955). Miller was not present, so the toastmaster suggested that the award be accepted on his behalf by Merril, “by whom he has been so often anthologized” (p. 40). Asimov writes unabashedly that he whispered “always euphemisms” into a hot mic, causing rounds of laughter as Merril came to the stage. Asimov makes himself out to be the victim of embarrassment, but it was Merril who had to endure the calls to “Anthologize you!” and “Go anthologize yourself ” (p.  41). Even though Merril had found so much solace in her relationships with science fiction writers, obviously this sense of community was not returned by its official organizations. Merril’s response to this negativity was to fashion new communities of her own. Much like a union organizer, she founded the first Milford S-F Writers Conference in 1956, a workshop (invitation-only like the Hydra Club) that opened just as the New York convention closed. Forty people crowded into tourist accommodations in Milford to read and discuss

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works in progress and issues important to writers, such as relationships with agents and editors, and the possibilities of a writer’s union (Merril, 1959, p. 12). Hosted by Merril and her Futurian colleagues James Blish and Damon Knight, the attendees included Sturgeon, Boucher, Theodore R. Cogswell, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison. Writers who would become famous feminist science fiction authors attended over the years, like Katherine MacLean, Judith Clingerman, and Carol Emshwiller at the first conference; Anne McCaffrey in 1959; and Joanna Russ in 1961 (Jones, 2019). The conference became an annual event, and the group became known as the “Milford Mafia” both by members and their critics (del Rey, 1979, p. 223; Roberts, 2007, p. 99). In addition to launching several successful careers, the conferences had other notable outcomes. Some short-lived publications, heavy with correspondence, continued the lively discussions at the in-person meetings through the mail. In 1965, Knight and other writers affiliated with the conference established the Science Fiction Writers of America professional association, which restricted membership to current writers of science fiction, although the boundaries of the genre were vague. (The organization later added “and fantasy” to its name.) The SFWA established the Nebula award in 1966 as a complement to the annual Hugo awards. The first two years in Milford helped Merril regain her confidence in being a mother, and she became determined to get custody of both of her children. Both girls said they wanted to live in Milford, apart from their fathers. Merril’s older daughter, who was then 13 years old, had a right to choose which parent she wanted to live with according to Pennsylvania law. Although Pohl had made her feel like she was an unfit mother because of her extramarital cohabitation, Merril came to realize that he was now on his fourth marriage, and his current relationship had started when he was still married to her. Feeling more confident, she initiated a custody suit. Nevertheless, she felt so uncomfortable about the legal scrutiny that she invented a new pen name—Rose Sharon—for two stories so that they could not be used against her. When the custody case came to court in 1959, Pohl, her former co-author Kornbluth, and Milford Conference co-host Blish turned against her, describing to the court how Merril’s sex life supposedly made her morally unsuitable for motherhood.

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Despite these betrayals, Merril was amazed how her new friends in Milford, school teachers and other small town folk, came to her support. Regaining the custody of her children made Merril feel like 1960 would be a banner year for her professional efforts. Although the personal problems had taken a toll, and she blamed her troubles for difficulty in writing, it is not entirely accurate to say that this was a fallow period for her. The successes she was to have in the 1960s built on the personal lessons and her writing during the ten years of relationship turmoil.

7.3  Doubting Homo Superior Merril was up against a new permutation of masculinity theory not faced by her predecessors in science fiction. The theory of white masculine civilization described earlier in this study was, as shown in Chap. 2, Sect. 2.2, founded on the same vestiges of nineteenth-century pseudoscience that supported Hitler’s eugenic policies. During the first half of the twentieth century, these theories were in decline. The idea that white masculinity was a part of the stages of civilization—in the sense that it was an evolutionary hurdle that only an elite group of individuals could pass over— was no longer credible. Starting in the early twentieth century, some biologists protested against the “misuse of science” to exaggerate human racial differences (Bowler, 2003, p. 342). A coalition of scientific discoveries, known as the modern synthesis, in wide-ranging fields such as paleontology, embryology, and endocrinology showed that humans were the same species. In particular, there was no time during human gestation to recapitulate the development of the species. The rise of the culture concept, which showed that all humans had the ability to learn and transmit culture, demolished the idea that certain human biological types had greater aptitudes for innovation and civilization. As described in Chap. 5, Asimov had confronted Campbell with these ideas in the 1950s and 1960s, and Campbell had chosen to retain his outdated beliefs despite new scientific evidence. One clear way to see a connection of golden age’s reliance on the discourse on masculinity is through the lens of Dianetics. As Merril was refashioning her public persona apart from Pohl in late 1951, she sent a

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new story to Campbell who, according to her correspondence, was experiencing marital strife. At this time, Campbell had already spent a year promoting the pseudoscience of Dianetics, which would become the foundation of L. Ron Hubbard’s international science fictional religion, Scientology. These ideas fit in well with Campbell’s thoughts about racial superiority as shown in Chap. 4 and his homophobia. When Campbell and Merril met to discuss her new story in November 1951, she found herself to be the sounding board for Campbell’s upcoming editorial “Proposed History,” which would appear in the January 1952 AST. Campbell had walked back his enthusiasm for Hubbard and Dianetics earlier that year, and he  had resigned from the board of the Dianetics foundation, even though he went on to write additional editorials praising Dianetics. The harsh critical response and Hubbard’s failure to demonstrate his claims had caused Campbell to backpedal, stating that the findings were the start of a new field and worthy of discussion more than they were a definitive science. That being said, even in 1957, Campbell was asserting that “some of ” Hubbard’s work had been confirmed (Chapdelaine, 1993, p.  346). Thus, the essential connection between Hubbard and Campbell could not be so easily erased: they shared a belief that men who were part of a new race they called Homo superior were ready to bring about a new global order. Of course, the horrors of World War II had demonstrated the danger of this ideology. In the wake of the Holocaust, the growing sentiment against the concept of scientific race found new importance. In 1950, UNESCO adopted a “Statement on Race” that tried to discredit the eugenic theories that had led to Nazi Germany’s policies. Stating that humans share a “vast number of genes,” scientists express their consensus does not support the idea that nationalities, religions, languages, or geographic areas can define races (1969, pp. 30–31). The statement added that any sort of racial or ethnic classifications should not be used to infer mental characteristics. Given “similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentials, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is the same.” The characteristic that distinguishes human beings as a species is the ability to use culture (p. 32). Campbell shows no awareness of this consensus, nor of the allied findings in various scientific fields, like population genetics, that were the basis of the statement. These

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were the components of the so-called Darwinian synthesis, which confirmed Darwin’s vision of evolution as not teleological. Campbell’s theory in “Proposed History” (1952) is bizarrely formed for someone who is so committed to scientific inquiry. Campbell says he will rely on the scientific method, but he in fact works deductively from his own preconceived ideas, proposing a hypothesis and then testing it against what he says are historical facts. He seems ignorant of the basic facts of genetic inheritance and new knowledge of mutations, suggesting that the Homo superior mutation can occur in any human, ignoring the concept that mutation like any other genetic information must be passed to offspring. Harkening back to the extreme neo-Lamarckian idea of polygenism that asserted humans developed simultaneously in different environments, Campbell says the Homo superior mutation has appeared in Asia, Africa, and South America without any interbreeding. Indeed, he even calls for a new form of racism, divorced from physical appearance, claiming that he has more in common with George Washington Carver than white people who are not carriers of the Homo superior mutation. In a seemingly egalitarian fashion, he says that “Confucius, Einstein, George Washington, Moses” and others are all the same race, Homo superior (1952, p. 8). This fantasy of a merit-based assessment, ignoring the privilege afforded by history to members of certain groups, will be a hallmark of Campbell’s later opinions about racial conflict. Merril memorialized her meeting with Campbell in her personal correspondence, first in letters to him and later in accounts to her friends. Her letters demonstrate the connection of Campbell’s theory to gender that is not explicitly mentioned in the “Proposed History” editorial. What Campbell called Homo superior results, in Merril’s opinion, from environmental forces. She urged Campbell, who had apparently asserted that men were constant and women were variable, to accept that these differences come from the current form of social organization. In responding to Campbell, Merril cites Margaret Mead’s 1935 classic Sex and Temperament to support her overall point about the culture concept: there is “no natural inevitable role” for gender. Taking the long view, being able to use logic, and the ability to generalize are not innate aptitudes of men, just as detailed memories, practicality, and intuitive understanding are not inborn traits in women, Merril writes. Any friction she

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feels from resisting these roles, Merril continued in her one-sided rejoinders to Campbell, was due to a conflict with social expectations but not a problem within herself. He suggested that the best mental health professionals could do would be to adjust her to a social world she rejects, Merril writes. Merril was somewhat conciliatory when writing to Campbell, which is understandable as she was trying to sell him some work. However, it seems like the discussion was not entirely amicable. In her correspondence, she exhibits extended l’espirt d’escallier. In a letter to a friend in February 1952, she recalls that Campbell had tried to explain her current troubles in terms of a contrast in male and female psychologies, asserting that Merril had not yet embraced her feminine consciousness and suggested she would face grave danger in the future if she took on too much responsibility. To her friend, Merril speaks with more verve: “Life wants I should be masculine just now.” This discussion seems to have ended their professional relationship. In April 1952, Campbell states that Merril is one of three women he thinks can write science fiction well. However, in Merril’s archive are many of his rejection letters from 1948 to 1953 for stories that she would publish elsewhere: “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” (“overstrained”), “Survival Ship” (“not big enough”), “Hero’s Way” (reader does not experience the situation), “Pioneer Stock” (leaves reader dissatisfied). She writes that she stopped talking to him after his unkind rejection of “Dead Center.” Merril did not seem to influence Campbell’s thinking; Merril’s reasoned thinking is absent from his editorial. However, Merril’s fiction becomes a pointed response to the Cold War masculinity revealed in her dispute with him, which was also inherent in so much science fiction, not to mention public discourse, at the time. The story that prompted the meeting between Merril and Campbell may have been part of Daughters of Earth. In her correspondence, Merril describes the genesis of the novella. It was written “on assignment” to Merril and two other authors. Each was to use the setting of two planets created by the editor, John D.  Clark. It was assigned in August 1951, with drafts due in December. Merril reports that in September and October her marriage went “kerfloo,” culminating two months later in a separation agreement. In January 1952, Merril suggested to editors that they find someone else, but they said they would wait. The anthology,

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under the name The Petrified Planet, came out at the end of 1952. Merril returns to her literary experimentation for her contribution, employing multiple narrators. In a manner similar to one of Gertrude Stein’s early publishers, who wondered if the author was fluent in English, Merril’s typist said the story seemed like it was written by six or seven writers. In a personal letter, Merril humorously admits: It was. Judy Pohl, resigned to marriage; Judy Pohl, busting loose again; Judith Merril Pohl, alert crisp mistress of her destiny, and I’ll lick my weight in wildcat husbands; Shmoody-Judy, flat on the bottom without the strength to kick, and making many discoveries about which I will write at length sometime soon—the sum and substance of them being that this gal should have better sense than to listen to other people who don’t have as much sense …; Judith Merril, riding the rest, getting work heaped on her by admiring editors all over, because she was back in stride again, and such a hell of a good writer; and finally, it was finished in a month of furious concentration by me—I—broke, busted, getting worse all the time, and they’re waiting for this and I have to get this off before I do any of the others, and Mines will buy it—he bought Piper’s and Pratt’s—nonsense he won’t be able to buy this—

Merril’s narration in Daughters of Earth is, admittedly, difficult. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before and Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always Coming Home that follows, the story calls attention to itself as a text, with readers encountering multiple layers of the manuscript. The unnamed first-­ person narrator asserts that the current age of space exploration is scientific, in contrast to the previous two hundred years of “madness” marked by the “compulsive evangelism” of Willy Ley, Hugo Gernsback, and Arthur C. Clarke. This direct confrontation with early U.S. science fiction is matched by the subtle challenge of the narration. In this story, six women of successive future generations prepare the document, each assuming the “I” position, and sometimes commenting that their meandering story is better than a straight shot. To add to the confusion, a series of parenthetical asides to the youngest descendent perforate the story. In this way, Merril challenges the authoritative narration of the golden age. The novel demands that readers take flight into the unknown, understanding everything; her readers have to take the time to understand each of the six women who serve as narrators.

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The story subverts pulp science fiction in other ways. For instance, the staff that travels to Pluto to build the interstellar craft that will travel to Uller is multiplanetary and includes both men and women, without making much of this diversity. In addition, the plot’s resolution takes an unexpected turn. The crew encounters creatures they call Ullern, whose physiology relies on silicon rather than on carbon, like the creatures in Stanley Weinbaum’s “Martian Odyssey.” The Ullern become violent, killing one of the narrators’ husbands. In the extensive speculative biology that follows, it becomes clear that the humans had underestimated the Ullern, who are both sentient and resilient. The investigation, though, includes a psychological angle. What is a creature’s response to an attack? When does a creature turn from fear to anger? The crew determines that the Ullern have a capacity similar to a piezoelectric crystal to receive thoughts. Thus, the creatures respond with deadly force when they realize through ESP that an opponent intends to kill. It also becomes clear that this capacity for telepathy might be used to stun the creatures with an energy transmission. As in Leslie F.  Stone’s Into the Void (Chap. 3) and Leigh Brackett’s “Martian Quest” (Chap. 6), Merril here juxtaposes space opera assumptions regarding racial conflict with a different kind of thinking based on peace. Although one of the men wants to create weapons to defeat the Ullern, the narrator of this part, Emma, thinks this is abhorrent, even though she has lost her husband in the violence. In fact, the insights she gained into the Ullern convince her that the creature that killed her husband was acting rationally, given the species’ different physiology, much like the improved understanding of the creatures that is part of the rising action in “Martian Quest.” The narrator’s point of view carries the day  against those who advocated violence, similar to Stone’s Richard Dorr. The denouement is that, while the humans are in stasis for the next part of their journey, a complementary crew of Ullern will care for them. This partnership allows the Ullern, who do not have space travel, to begin an adventure they could not undertake alone; the humans expect that they will adapt to the fluorine-rich atmosphere of Nifleheim. In a healing moment, Emma writes directly to Carla that the purpose of her story is to warn her away from two extreme personalities: one craving rebellious idealism and the other seeking security and safety. It is telling that Merril arranged the timeline so that the date of this entry can be

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written “1/11/52.” Obviously, for the characters in the story, the year must be long after 1952, but January 1952 was the time when Merril had almost abandoned the story in the midst of her breakup with Pohl. Her second daughter, Ann, was still a toddler. As the narrator speaks to Carla, one can imagine that Merril is talking to her own daughter as well. Daughters of Earth exhibits more formal experimentation than the majority of Merril’s writing that follows. Although later stories will challenge readers’ expectations, Daughters of Earth has the formal experimentation that most exemplifies the type of experimental fiction the new wave will champion in the 1960s. As is clear from the biographical and social context, though, the stylistic experimentation is not simply exploring new forms. In science fact, the supremacy of male heroism dominated the U.S. response to the space race; in science fiction, the subordination of women and nonhuman species was already habitual. Crafting an alternative to the authoritarian narrators that are typical of golden-age science fiction—not to mention bridging the gap between autobiography and an image of the future—challenges the presumptions of editors like Campbell and the authors he promoted. In fact, Daughters of Earth would not find serial publication until 1967, even though the other two commissioned stories were serialized in 1952 and 1953. Merril’s work offers a window into both the persistence of old theories of human difference and the way that a new ideology of masculinity came into prominence. Her memoir (2002) notes that her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, was published the same year as the McCarthy Era began in the United States, which was marked by “widespread sensationalist investigations into suspected U.S. communists.” In 1954, the timeline reads, the television version of the novel appeared at a time when “The Communist Party in the United States is virtually outlawed.” The tie between masculinity and civilization outlined in the previous chapters was already quite strong before World War II, with a result that it would persist in a new form afterward. Strengthening masculinity became a tool for fighting communism. During the Cold War, new theories established an unease with men who were not masculine enough. The masculinity of science fiction characters—the well-balanced scientific youth and the organization men who avoided the peril of overcivilization—suddenly matched the standards for national security, even though the racial

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science that marked the theory’s origin was no longer tenable. After the war, masculinity was continually under threat. No longer a stage that young men must navigate, it became something that must be maintained and defended throughout a man’s lifetime. For Merril, committed both to feminism and Marxism, this enhanced masculinity offered opportunities as well as conflicts with the science fiction community. As pointed out by Cuordileone (2005), communism was “policed with an intensity that was unique to the United States” (p. xii). Behind the “excesses and inanities” of the Red Scare’s attention to the “subversive-as-­ homosexual” was “an anxiety about troubling trends at home as well as abroad, not least among them sexual disorder.” The domestic side of the international containment of communism was a domestic struggle to eliminate the influence of subversives, which included gay people (p. xx). As documented in Chap. 4, sociologists like Hall had already presented a pathway for young men to sublimate their innate savagery into public passion. During the Cold War, this thinking was further developed, stating that an adolescent’s successful navigation of homosocial relationships and rejection of homosexuality was necessary to resist communist infiltration. Whereas before the war, the pathway from boyhood to well-­ adjusted adult was a concern for parents and educators, during the Cold War masculinity took on a role in national security. According to new sexual pseudoscience, only vigorous men who successfully passed through the adolescent homosocial phase could be trusted to protect the nation. Golden-age science fiction had already borrowed the idea promoted by sociologists like Stanley Hall that homosocial relations between young men were a necessary precursor to the public passions needed for white manly civilization. Now, the larger culture came to villainize those who did not maintain the proper public passion. Scholars have pointed out that the persecution of alleged communist infiltrators was predated by the investigation of LBGTQ+ government employees. Starting in 1947, gay people were “quietly” purged from the civil service. The influence of international communism seemed to get worse, with the Soviet Union’s rejection of the Marshall Plan, its early explosion of an atomic bomb, and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This situation was ideal for the emergence of what has come to be known as the Lavender Scare in the 1950s, which slightly predates the Red Scare and reveals a

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strong tie between anti-communism and American Cold War masculinity. At the same time McCarthy was publicizing the idea that there were many known communists in the State Department, the State Department denied that it employed communists but pointed out that it had discharged people who were thought to be security risks, including ninety-­ one gay people (Johnson, 2004, p. 2). A communist was thought to be weak-minded and effeminate—the characteristics of the overcivilized individual described in Chap. 2, who could not defend his independence—but now, according to the contagion theory, their weakness might be passed on to others. From the perspective of the privileged majority, the theory of contagion is somewhat accurate; when a closeted gay person or a person facing unfair employment policies meets peers who offer sympathy and support, that person may appear to suddenly find courage to speak openly about their grievances. The common thinking at the time, according to Johnson (2004), was that homosexuality was a lapse in moral judgment and a failure to channel one’s energy appropriately. This was certainly the perception of many people; Alfred Kinsey’s idea of sexuality being on a spectrum meant that apart from two poles of exclusive homosexuals (6) and exclusive heterosexuals (0), a majority of humans ranging from 4 to 2 would feel attraction to either sex. For this majority, the idea that homosociality was a natural stage that individuals should overcome would match their own experience, where homosexuality seemed more like a choice, making it easy for them to feel prejudice against people with less flexible sexuality. Gay people might not be communists, but prejudiced theory against them was that they could be easily swayed and, supposedly, pass on their weakness to others. Cuordileone (2005) notes that the rugged masculinity found in men who loved the outdoors, engaged in physical activity, and were nonconformists was portrayed in cultural products afterward. He writes, “the plight of the American male—trapped, manipulated, struggling against the forces that robbed him of his freedom, his individuality, his will, his sexual potency, and his soul—became a central theme for many postwar cultural critics, novelists, and filmmakers” (p. 134). Widespread cultural products—science fiction included—became a depiction of how difficult it was to be a man.

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7.4 Refashioning Gender in the Cold War People like Merril who were interested in depicting the arbitrariness of gender roles were in a minority that ground against U.S. innovation policy in the age of big science. For decades thereafter, gender conformity would be tied to official policy. It seems that LBGTQ+ people’s growing awareness of each other was, in fact, part of the vitriol against them. As pointed out by Charles (2015), though, the persecution of gay people was, at least in part, due to the fact that they were growing in solidarity: World War II was a time that led “many gays and lesbians to realize they were not alone but were, in fact, a widely scattered minority” (p. 75). At the same time the Rosenbergs were under investigation, gay people were persecuted because of their perceived threat to security. For instance, Alger Hiss, a high-ranking member of the U.S. State Department, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948. Hiss’s alleged crimes were trying to foment dissent among farmers in the 1930s and later passing diplomatic documents to the Soviets. One week after Hiss’s conviction, McCarthy promised to get rid of homosexuals in the State Department. John F.  Kennedy, who made an election-year promise of landing U.S. astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade, demonstrates how thinking about masculinity had changed without repudiating the virtue of manliness. The older version, represented by Nixon and Eisenhower, seemed to represent traditional values: “sentimental, square, reliable, predictable, security-seeking, uxorious” (Cuordileone, 2005, p. 198). The young Kennedy offered an alternative to the masculinity of the old guard, although it is remarkable the extent to which he maintained rather than challenged definitions of manliness. For instance, while president-elect, Kennedy (1960) published the article “The Soft American” in Sports Illustrated. During his campaign, Kennedy had coined the phrase “missile gap” in his effort to demonstrate his opponent’s weakness in defense; in the SI article, he expressed concern for what Cuordileone calls the “muscle gap.” Using the ideal of the Olympics to remind readers of the connection between physical fitness and western culture, Kennedy bemoans the poor physical health of the country’s young men. Observing

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that almost 50 percent of men had been deemed “mentally, morally or physically unfit” by the Selective Service in the Korean War, and noting the increasing number of students who could not pass the “not overly rigorous” physical fitness tests at Yale University over the past decade, Kennedy (1960) directly invokes Theodore Roosevelt. Overall, Kennedy describes health as a matter of national security: We face in the Soviet Union a powerful and implacable adversary determined to show the world that only the Communist system possesses the vigor and determination necessary to satisfy awakening aspirations for progress. … We do not live in a regimented society where men are forced to live their lives in the interest of the state. We are, all of us, as free to direct the activities of our bodies as we are to pursue the objects of our thought. But if we are to retain this freedom, for ourselves and for generations to come, then we must also be willing to work for the physical toughness on which the courage and intelligence and skill of man so largely depend. (pp. 16, 17)

This discourse was evolving as Merril was developing her own aesthetic. Campbell’s heroes Arcot, Morey, and Wade would still fit into this revised paradigm of youthful vigor. As much as Kennedy might seem to have been a transformative choice for president, his valorization of manliness represents a key continuity with the figures he sought to displace. The new generation may have sought to help men escape from the “prescribed conventional roles” that were a “prescription for the totalitarian mass man,” but the new masculinity was an alternative only insomuch as it was defined against the old guard (Cuordileone, 2005, p. 195, 196). Notably, three of Campbell’s stories had been gathered in 1953 under the title The Black Star Passes and the next year his Islands of Space was reprinted in book form as well. Invaders from the Infinite was published in book form in 1961, the first year of Kennedy’s administration. Merril was not alone, of course, in her distaste for this adaptation of masculinity to the Cold War. One early voice in literary studies was Leslie Fiedler. In a 1965 speech “The New Mutants,” Fiedler (1965) marvels at young men who have abandoned traditional masculine values. Not only have they traded whiskey for LSD, but also they have renounced the culture of work. Some young men have put down “the jackknife,

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catcher’s mitt, and brass knuckles” in exchange for “the comb, the pocket mirror, and the bobby pin” (p. 243). Fiedler finds solidarity with them, noting that they are likely to be assaulted by “crew-cut athletes who represent an obsolescent masculine style based on quite other values,” which was the same fate of communists a year before, who revealed to conventional men “that their politics had become obsolete” (p.  244). Fiedler concludes with a paean to science fiction: Poets and junkies have been suggesting to us that the new world appropriate to the new men of the latter twentieth century is to be discovered only by the conquest of inner space: by an adventure of the spirit, an extension of psychic possibility, of which the flights into outer space—moonshots and expedition to Mars—are precisely such unwitting metaphors and analogues as the voyages of exploration were of the earlier breakthrough into the Renaissance. (p. 248)

One way to understand Merril’s antipathy to Cold War masculinity can be seen in her renewed interest in mental telepathy. In 1952, around the same time Merril was finishing Daughters of Earth, author Katherine MacLean came to live with her after Pohl had moved out. Merril writes about their attempts to send and receive thoughts to each other, experiments that continue when they are no longer living together. She also attended a demonstration by Friedrich Marion, author of In My Mind’s Eye, who she says did a pretty good summation of her character based on her handwriting. Writing to a friend, she says that some ESP phenomena are probably valid; she feels that she understands people on a nonverbal level and wonders if ESP derives from some sort of Jungian group subconscious. Merril’s hope to challenge golden-age notions of ESP took some time to come to fruition. Merril notes in a letter to a friend that she was unable to work on what she calls “the termite story” for some time because Walter Miller expected her to keep house while he made money with his television scripts. Although she writes about her trouble with writing in this period in her personal correspondence, in her memoir, Merril says that as a woman she faced hardships, but she does not want to use marital problems as an excuse; she notes that both men and women are subject to “indignities and depravations”  (Merril and Pohl-Weary,

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2002, p. 40). Another way to think about her frustration is to remember her desire to stray away from well-worn conventional paths, like those established for ESP, which took additional time.  Two years after her experiments with MacLean, Merril puts together an anthology of ESP stories, Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time (see Chap. 8). She writes rhapsodically to a friend: Telepathy is a shape of human yearning. The yearning to communicate fully and completely with other human beings is perhaps the most universally compelling desire of mankind [sic], often more urgent than the cravings of the flesh. … [N]o man’s [sic] suffering is equal to that of the prisoner, confined alone, beyond human contact, in the social lightlessness of the dungeon. The lonely walled-off soul, unable to express its feelings and meanings, tends to go ‘stir-crazy’ in its strait-jacket of human skin.

In preparing for the book, Merril sent queries to many authors about their experiences with ESP. One notable response comes from Phillip K. Dick. She replies to his “anti-PSI” letter in May 1954 to state that the problem with people who believe in ESP is that they are often thinking of some sort of new, superior breed. This Merril finds distasteful, and brings her to the conversation with Campbell: I happen to have a particular distaste for superman theories. Among other things, I was born and raised as a Jew. Though not inclined to formal religious observance of any kind, I shall be, till the day I die, psychologically, a Jew. This means a whole lot of things, among them a predisposition to tear down any self-elected elite, and to oppose vigorously any intellectual rationale for ‘supermen.’ … I have gotten myself into some unpleasant social situations from time to time, moving as I have very largely in the ‘s-f crowd’ for the last 10 years or so. One editor [Campbell], for instance, for a while, worked out a very plausible (to him) theory of actual-biological mutants, between whom of homo saps the only real difference was ‘superior mental organization.’

In her preface to Barriers, Merril proposes that there are a variety of points of view, but in her personal correspondence, she is less mollifying. Like Asimov, having lived through a time when Jewish people were persecuted left Merril with a strong disdain for the white supremacist trend in science fiction. For Campbell, the next generation of humans was marked

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by quick deductive thinking, apparent in his fictional heroes. Campbell had included Merril in the “Superman Club,” which consisted of people capable of quick, intuitive thinking. She goes on to point out to Dick that people like them might have well-organized mentalities but they were “pretty lousy flops at the business of living.” Merril’s wit is admirable, but her thinking was well grounded in Marxist theory and feminism. Noting that emotional organization was a trait they both lacked, Merril collapses gender binaries at the same time as she attacks the hierarchical thinking implicit in the paradigm of white masculinity. Campbell also told author Phil Klass that he believed the Jewish people were “homo superior”; Klass tried to explain that all kinds of racialized thinking were offensive, but Campbell was “baffled” (Solstein & Moosnick, 2002, p. 30). The termite story, which is finally published as “Homecalling” (Science Fiction Stories, November 1956), is remarkable for the way that it challenges the possibilities for different sentient species to understand each other with ESP. The story starts in medias res, with a spacecraft that has crash-landed. Two children survive the crash. Their parents, government-­ sponsored geologists and surveyors who were piloting the ship, have perished in a fire. Their two young children must depend on the local population to survive. Newell and Lamont (2012) have pointed out the ways in which Merril has reversed and redeployed typical stereotypes of early science fiction. The story “intercedes” in the trope of giant insects being used as a stand-in for monstrous women, they point out; far from being victims in a threatened family, Deborah and Petey survive because they can overcome their revulsion and accept Daydanda’s “empowered femininity.” What is more, Newell and Lamont suggest, Merril “foregrounds the limitations of the colonial gaze.” Deborah’s success in understanding Daydanda is, in part, because she is the daughter of colonizing parents who have studied other lifeforms. First, the two species must come to an understanding, which does not come automatically from ESP as it had for people like Dr. Seaton in Skylark of Space. Deborah, the eldest child, finds Queen Daydanda repulsive at first. Daydanda, for her part, has to learn to accept that the children are not from her world and that her frames of reference are inadequate. This transference of raw emotions threatens the survival of the children, making the inadequacy of ESP figure strongly into this

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story. At first, Deborah resists the intrusion into her mind by occupying her consciousness with simple multiplication problems, allowing the queen to speak only through her baby brother, Petey. The reader discovers that the queen also has mechanisms for tuning out unwanted voices; as the matriarch, it is natural but distracting that so many of her minions want to talk to her simultaneously, so she uses a relay system and designated surrogates. The kind of mental telepathy Deborah and Queen Daydanda share does not allow for immediate understanding in the same way that the supposedly evolutionary superior humans of the Gernsback and Campbell eras had done. Queen Daydanda, for instance, does not understand the electronic circuitry in what she calls the “Wings-House,” which causes young Deborah some consternation: “Is there one of these creatures … machines … you have seen inside?” [Daydanda asks.] [Deborah had] seen inside of the freeze unit when it was being fixed once. She tried to remember just how that looked; but it was complicated, and the Mother still didn’t seem to understand. “The little pipes?” [Daydanda] asked, and [Deborah] wasn’t sure whether she meant the freezing coils or the wires, but then she was sure it was the wires. “They bring food to the creature so it can work?” “No, I told you, It’s not a ‘creature.’ It doesn’t even ever eat. (2005, p. 455, emphasis in original)

The use of ESP in this story is best understood as a contrast to the concept of Homo superior earlier in this chapter. Daydanda is not a member of a technologically advanced species, and her capacity for ESP is helpful when she needs to coordinate the activities of the hive through her offspring, who are less mentally capable than she is. The communication that occurs between the two species is not intrusive, and it is incomplete. Instead of being a marker of a highly evolved mind, the ESP in this story is based on the mutual respect between two beings and their desire to understand each other better. In a rebuke to readers who might be preoccupied about Cold War men with special abilities, the characters who are able to communicate telepathically are a woman and girl.

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The story as a whole offers a lesson in intercultural understanding. Deborah appreciates the queen’s mothering tendencies but is repulsed by her physical appearance, thinking of her as a hairy bug. These words are hurtful to the queen, who has always been described as beautiful by her underlings, but they cause her to realize the gulf between the species. She wonders why Deborah refuses to enter the ship’s control room, which is now the tomb of her parents; tries to imagine what kinds of society and biology lead to two parents begetting two children; and hypothesizes (incorrectly) that the parents’ death was some sort of coming-of-age ritual that governs the young humans’ behavior. Readers also gain information about Daydanda’s leadership. Here, a mother is shown to be an expert administrator, especially in Daydanda’s effort to optimize the hive’s chances for success in competition with other hives. Daydanda regrets she prevented scientists from developing in her hive, making her rely on the opinions of scientists at an administrative center. The challenges and opportunities in the complicated relationship Merril describes tell a different story than one might expect during the Cold War. Contrast her depiction of an insectoid species with the “bugs” in Robert A.  Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which he began writing two years after the publication of Merril’s Homecalling. The Heinlein novel, which warns that the individualistic Terran Federation will not find easy success against the communal warriors of Klendathu, went on to become one of the most famous and hotly debated stories among science fiction readers. In place of a monomaniacal and uniform enemy, Merril imagines an alien species with a female leader, as well as a civilization that could emerge without the use of technological devices. In this setting, humans are not penetrating a hostile, disordered unknown, but locations already managed by indigenous inhabitants. The choice of characters, as well, disrupts typical Cold War allegories. The children, who are reasonably intelligent but lack physical and technological strength, contrast with the supersoldiers presented by Heinlein. Instead of an investigation related to superiority and preparedness, readers think about survival and cooperation. The resolution of the plot, as now expected from a Merril story, confounds the expectations of many readers. The complication of children being stranded on a planet with a species that has different biology and culture presents a few different alternatives for the rising action. They

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could be chased and persecuted, they could trick the indigenous people into inviting colonizers, or—Swiss Family Robinson style—they could create a tiny colony in a treehouse. The children are not rescued, nor are the aliens obliterated. Instead, there is a gradual realization that the children must come to live in the queen’s household, despite the risks to both sides. One day, Daydanda will die, causing the hive to disperse and the children to be left behind; the children may inadvertently harm members of the household or it may be, as some advisors suggest, that the two are a species of homeless parasites that prey on well-organized hives. Nevertheless, due to the queen’s thirst for new knowledge and Deborah’s ability to accept the queen as a mother, the children find a home in the hive. The resolution of this plot, quite unexpected for a reader of planet-­smashing science fiction, is that Deborah survives by building an alliance and adapting to new circumstances. As a final stab at the expectations of a typical science fiction reader, Deborah leaves a note in the disabled ship for any rescuers who might arrive later. “Please come and get us,” she writes, after describing their location. When the hive tells her that they will know if any ships land in their territory, Deborah adds a postscript: “If some big bugs come around, don’t shoot. They’re friends; they’re taking care of Petey and me” (pp.  464–5). Deborah seems to understand that the rescuers will have been educated on stories from E. E. Smith and not from Merril. Merril continues her challenge to Cold War masculinity in Project Nursemaid (F&SF, October 1955). Indeed, the story does not offer an extrapolation of current science or technology but instead projects the future of existing social mores, resulting in a macabre farce. The story is wrapped around a premise that, in the 1950s, might have turned out to be true: humans who are born in normal gravity cannot withstand long periods in space. This would hamper long-term space exploration, but a solution is found to the syndrome they call low gravity tolerance (LGT). Babies born in zero gravity are free from LGT, which can manifest itself in a number of debilitating conditions. Merril, though, takes this to an extreme. Mothers cannot give birth naturally in zero gravity, or they will be afflicted with LGT. Merril lifts the idea of the space force out of settings by golden-age writing and then reimagines what men will do when confronted by this challenge. She also seems to take particular delight in requiring men to take charge of the home space.

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Merril’s earlier fiction provides plenty of clues that this story probably should not be taken at face value. First and foremost, the somewhat vague manifestations of LGT syndrome, such as mental disturbance and heart disease, are themselves treatable. Instead of conducting research into human health, the space force has designed a program that preys upon women in a precarious situation. (In fact, in her 1960 novel The Tomorrow People, more investigation into the syndrome has led to treatments and the discovery that some people are immune.) In Project Nursemaid, fetuses are removed from people with unwanted pregnancies and shipped off the Earth for gestation and birth outside the body in a low-gravity environment. The men in charge of this bizarre space force operation are caricatured organization men who would find themselves at home in a novel by Campbell, Asimov, or Heinlein. Growling that this is “one hell of a way to run an Army” (2005, p.  290, emphasis in original), they do their bureaucratic best to follow regulations while they recruit pregnant people and women who will work temporarily as nursemaids for the babies born in low gravity. An interview with Ceil Barton, a nineteen-year-old woman who is eleven weeks pregnant, provides the reader with an entry into the world of the project. Readers soon find out that her boyfriend is a cadet at the Space Academy who dreams of being a spaceman. Fathering a baby out of wedlock would cause him to lose his position, and the men convince Ceil and her boyfriend to participate in the project out of their sense of duty. In this way, it seems like Ceil is the flip side of stories of heroism told in a way that describes the girlfriends left behind by the space cadets. It becomes clear that Ceil is just one of many women who are reluctant to keep their babies. The way in which the space force exploits this fact echoes other satirical literature like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” As in Leslie F. Stone’s “Hell Planet,” here Merril illustrates the cost of the glorious space force imagined by authors invested in the paradigm of masculinity. The setting of the story is disquieting in other ways, adding to the suspicion that it is a farce. Ceil is subjected to sexual harassment by the men in the space force, and the repeated references to suggestive comments and casual groping add to the sense that this is a dystopian world. The arrival of Ceil’s boyfriend at the project facility provokes the colonel to feel remorse, bizarrely, at his lack of success in seducing Ceil. Lest the

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reader thought that the mentions of sexual harassment were mistakes, the narrator peers into the colonel’s mind when he encounters the boyfriend: Excuse me for being fifteen years older and two inches shorter. Excuse her for being seductive as hell with a red nose. Excuse you for being so damn handsome! (2005, p. 341, emphasis in original)

The harassment women face in professional situations would ring true with some readers, but so would the transplant procedure. Pregnant people in the 1950s would not have been treated so well; it is only when the militarized space force determines that the fetuses are a valuable resource that the situation for women improves. The details of the procedure to remove the fetuses from the women’s wombs are uncomfortable, even though the medical staff assures Ceil and others that they will not be permanently damaged. It is worth remembering that in many jurisdictions of the United States in the 1950s, abortion was illegal. In addition, in July 1951, Merril had had an abortion and the procedure had made her violently ill. In her memoir (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 106), she reports that hemorrhaging after the abortion had left her bedridden for a time; at the same time, the wife of her writing partner, Cyril Kornbluth, had become pregnant but due to her poor health had had to stay in bed. The callous harvesting of fetuses by the space force—even though it knows that women who undergo this procedure are likely to commit suicide—is a further indication of this story’s dystopian satire. Ceil, her boyfriend, and her baby are not part of the final stages of the plot, however. Instead, the selection process for women and their nursemaids takes over the story in a way that harkens back to Merril’s “Death Is the Penalty.” The men repeatedly discuss their procedure for selecting ideal candidates, which is in conflict with the quotas desired by the space force. In order to recruit more pregnant people and the rotating teams that care for them in zero gravity, the space force reverses several decisions it had made earlier. One is to accept the application of a man to become a nursemaid, who the space force had rejected because it went against social norms. The other is the decision to make recruiting for women more public, which the space force had avoided because the project felt unseemly. The conclusion of the plot is the unexpected formalization of

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the lower standards and the decision to go public with the program overall. Like the epochal story “Trends” by Merril’s Futurian colleague Isaac Asimov (see Chap. 5), part of this story centers on the social acceptance of technology. Whereas Asimov’s story had presented the idea that popular opinion was an ignorant rejection of technology, the concerns of Project Nursemaid’s social acceptability seem justified. The denouement of this story leaves a reader in an uncomfortable place, having watched this bizarre and unsavory project become naturalized. Surely, one might think at the end of this story, better solutions could be found. The catharsis is thus similar to other dystopian works: pity for the abuse of pregnant people, and fear that the reader might not be able to effect meaningful changes in such a situation. Merril’s focus on merit in stories like Project Nursemaid would turn out to be prescient. Just a few years later, the U.S.’s Mercury space project would include only male astronauts, even though a group of women test pilots was available and suitable for the program (see, for instance, Weitekamp, 2004). Project Nursemaid proposes that unfair determinations might be reversed, in the same way that bizarre programs can be naturalized, when faced by exigencies. This slightly hopeful aspect of the story, though, would not be seen in the United States. Two Russian women would be the first in space, Valentina Tereshkova (in 1963) and Svetlana Savitskaya (in 1982). Sally Ride would become the first female U.S. astronaut in space in 1983. As can be seen in letters to the editor and fan letters to authors like Asimov and Heinlein, women readers often participated in science fiction conversations. As the U.S. space program developed, though, women and girls who expressed their enthusiasm for becoming astronauts were curtly dismissed (see, for instance, Day, 2013). However limited acceptance of women had been in the golden age of science fiction, the world of science fact would show no tolerance. Merril’s The Tomorrow People (1960) engages in cultural criticism of the early space race, especially when considered in the wake of Project Nursemaid. She uses the subtitle “A Science Fiction Novel,” seemingly as an effort to proactively respond to the comment that she does not write science fiction. The novel is admirable for its hopeful depiction of an enclave of open-minded people who overcome the Cold War barriers erected to protect political interests in science. Strangely, though, this

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novel was not well received; Merril wrote appreciatively of the novel at the time but gives it short shrift in her memoir. Others panned the novel, but as has been seen before, negative reviews of fiction offer both an opportunity to see how stories jarred readers’ expectations and at the same time point to those elements that need more examination. One of the strongest negative reactions came from Damon Knight, Merril’s Futurian colleague and co-founder of the Milford Conference, who quit his job as a reviewer in 1960 because F&SF refused to print one of his reviews “as written” (1967, p. xii). In his review of The Tomorrow People, which appears in “More Chuckleheads” but not F&SF, he states that the novel is centered on a “sticky marshmallow: Mars is the planet of Love” (p. 104, capital in original). He observes that there are many “political types” in the novel and that their “involved intrigues” occupy a prominent place in the book but “remain totally incomprehensible to the last.” The science in the novel is “a shambles.” Overall, he says, the book lacks any sort of “internal discipline,” either in the writing or in the thinking (pp. 104–105). Knight never considers that the elements of the text that he objects most to are the ones that he should study most carefully. The political intrigues, for one, are comprehensible. The setting of the novel is during humanity’s first effort to visit Mars in a future where the political divisions of the Cold War have been exacerbated. Two teams are based on the Moon to prepare for the trip to Mars, with their simple domes connected by a posher settlement, the World Dome, sponsored by the United Nations World Peace Control and International Scientific Congress. The All America Laboratory for the Investigation of Extra-­ Terrestrial Phenomena, with the tongue-in-cheek nickname Dollars Dome, is sponsored by the United States of All Americas (USAA), which has its capital in Mexico City. The Soviet Union of Asian Republics (SUAR) has its own low-pressure dome for research, with the nickname Red Dome. Dr. Peter Christiansen is the leader of Dollars Dome, and Dr. Chen Lian-Tsu is the leader of Red Dome. International rivalries, however, seem to make little practical difference. The narrator points out that in cultural matters like food and sport, the two men are clearly divided, but their jobs and their professional personalities are “almost absurdly alike.”

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In this way, Merril again returns to the impact of national security on scientific research, as was seen in her second science fiction story, “Death Is the Penalty.” What Knight called incomprehensible political intrigues are, in fact, a careful examination of the political side of space exploration. SUAR’s astronauts make it to Mars, as does the USAA team of Johnny Wendt and Doug Laughlin. The SUAR team is lost in the Lenin, and only Wendt comes back to Earth in the Colombo. Up until Laughlin’s disappearance, everything seemed normal, with both astronauts completing their work. When the Columbo returned to the moon, though, only Wendt was onboard, and four pages were torn out of the ship’s log. Wendt had no memory of what had happened. His reticence starts politicians and journalists speculating; Christiansen upbraids him: “Christ, you read enough science fiction and horror stuff to see the picture.” Facing an unknown danger, politicians could decide the public funding for space exploration might be better spent exploring the oceans, the Arctic Circle, or any other more reliable projects. A bureaucratic inquiry begins. When reading this novel, one must keep in mind Merril’s penchant for sharp satire, particularly when it comes to government organizations devoted to science and technology. The narrator reports, in a deadpan style, that after being thoroughly investigated, Space Academy experts conclude that Wendt’s amnesia comes from guilt because either (a) he somehow was responsible for Laughlin’s death (b) or that strong homosexual feelings had developed. The latter theory is appealing because it also could be the same motivation that led Laughlin to drive off in an exploration vehicle without any explanation: The best guess seemed to be that he [Laughlin] was suffering from the same developing fear of inversion [a coded word for homosexuality] that had afflicted Wendt; that he had been even more horrified at the idea than Johnny was, and had chosen deliberate suicide in preference to involuntary surrender to “degeneracy” [i.e., homosexual activity]; and that, perhaps, he had written something into those four pages that he thought might be revealing, and so removed them before he left. (p. 26)

Unless a reader is in the habit of avoiding the intentional fallacy, one might assume that the homophobia in the setting and the narrator’s

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direct homophobia are representations of Merril’s own bias. As was described in Chap. 5, the U.S. policy of only sending men into space led to questions about the sexuality of the men on long-term voyages. Cold War homophobia, as described above, already had been well articulated. Despite all of the public rhetoric suggesting that men who cannot maintain their manliness were the biggest problem facing society, it seems shortsighted to say this is the biggest problem facing men. The narrator’s presumption that the astronauts’ developing gay feelings that caused them to panic and act irrationally fits in with a reader’s preconceptions, but the reader’s expectations are not upheld by the rising action of the plot. In fact, the narrator eventually admits that the theory makes no sense based on the opinions of the selection team. Later, the narrator reports new information that the theory about gay feelings actually never had credibility: they were a possible outcome that the space cadets had been trained to cope with, and in training neither of them had shown any tendency to panic if feelings developed. The true peril and opportunity here was the interplanetary voyage and the lifeforms the crews encountered. This is clever farce that Merril accomplishes by pitching the narration and the plot against each other. As has been seen with Merril and other authors, finding disunity of the fictional elements points the way to a better insight. The presumption that the mission failed because of sexual feelings between the astronauts is revealed to be a homophobic red herring.  (Brackett’s character Harry Selden is similarly  discredited; see Chap. 6, Sect. 6.4.) Love is, as Knight suggested, an important theme of the novel, although the way love is depicted is in line with Merril’s commitment to community. After the voyage, Wendt finds it hard to adjust to civilian life. He is a famous astronaut with a background in cybernetics, so it should be simple for him to get a job, yet he lacks motivation and feels like something is missing from his life. He indulges in drinking alcohol and living a debauched lifestyle. The one anchor in his life is Lisa Trovi, a woman he had met before his trip to Mars, who had since become a famous actress. She is beautiful but also a caring person, offering dance therapy for some clients of Wendt’s therapist, and she is obsessed with ESP. Trovi articulates some of the research Merril herself conducted, and reports on a fictional future research that proposes mental telepathy is just one aspect of a larger

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set of phenomena called psychokinesis, or PK. Trovi accompanies Wendt to the Moon, kind of a dream come true in a world that denied U.S. women access to specialized training and a place in the space program. The rising action defeats the reader’s expectation that an investigation into Wendt will reveal his secrets. The failed homosexuality thesis, although attenuated, makes the reader feel suspicious that the official investigation could succeed. The next problem relates to the samples of Martian life that Laughlin had collected and Wendt had transported back to the moon. What they call “Mars bugs” become an important aspect of the USAA research project, but soon it is clear that SUAR has also obtained samples. A legislative team from the USAA goes to Dollars Dome to investigate, but nothing proceeds well. Initially, the investigators feel kinship with the men and admiration for the female staff. The lead congressional representative, McLafferty, at first seems to be enjoying himself. “You know, you fellows really have got something here.” McLafferty’s smile should have been engaging; somehow it was not. “One thing,” he said, with a nod at Lee [nickname for Trovi], and a sweep of the arm around the room, “You certainly have the best-looking lady scientists I’ve ever seen!” Thad [a Dollars Dome scientist] grinned. “I can see it now,” he said. “Headline: Congressman Gives Lunar Ladies Blanket Clearance. Or: Selenite Scientists—hmmm—need a verb with an S and something about Security.” (p. 129)

The investigators seem to enjoy their time in Dollars Dome, but when they return to Earth, their conclusions are harsh. A news report reads: “Scientific research is losing out to research in the art of love among the elite inhabitants of the U.S.  Moon Dome, according to Rep. Ramon E. McLafferty, Chairman of the SAC Security Subcommittee.” Knight, in saying that the story is about the love planet, seems to miss the point that McLafferty and his team are not part of the enclave. Despite their initial enjoyment of their time in Dollars Dome, they seem to feel remorse about their bad behavior when they go back home. Expressing a sort of paternalistic, outdated morality, the investigators “suggest a thoroughgoing congressional probe into the personnel of the Moon Dome and the

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moral attitudes and practices prevailing there.” They fear that the open expressions of affection and admiration might become “a national disgrace” and lead to national security breaches. This assessment is completely unfair, but it also reveals the extent to which the team on the moon has found an alternative to the disciplined sexuality of Cold War science. Readers who might have identified with the nationalized space exploration organizations start to feel alienation, in the same way that Gunner Cade began to suspect the authoritarian tendencies of the space patrol. The communal atmosphere on the moon, dedicated to scientific exploration and based in respect for every team member, seems much more appealing than the regimented, cold thinking on Earth. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that Trovi’s presence on the moon is far from trivial, and she plays a central role when Wendt is recalled to Earth. In addition to her ability to organize collectives of people, she gains unexpected awareness from pregnancy. Her lessened sense of individuality as the fetus develops gives her important insight that unlocks the secrets of what happened on Mars. Wendt goes back to his drunken debauchery, but finally feels remorse and writes to Trovi. His explanations fit in with Merril’s troubled relationship with Pohl, but here, Wendt has realized the error of his ways and the couple reconciles. The reconciliation also applies to the international rivalry. Readers are likely to have forgotten about the SUAR team that had piloted the Lenin as the novel moves along, but the politics are not so simple to dismiss. More than two-thirds into the novel, a section of the book is set briefly in Red Dome: a sort of ESP experiment puts pilot Maria Harounian in the middle. Harounian escapes and makes her way to Dollars Dome; she is also pregnant and in ESP contact. The enclave organizes in a remote shed and realizes that the Mars bugs have inculcated a collective consciousness in people who have come in contact with them. Instead of space-opera remasculinization, Merril proposes a sort of countermasculinization. At this late point in the rising action, the reader experiences a two-year flashback to Laughlin’s final hours on Mars. He writes in the log about his suspicions that the people of Mars were transmitting “warm yearnings” and declares his intention to commune with them, then tears out the pages because he did not want Wendt to risk his life if Laughlin were unable to return. The next section of the novel is devoted to the collective

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Mars consciousness, which uses the pronouns I-all/me-all, and which Laughlin calls they-it. The reader learns that the SUAR team, which arrived first on the Lenin, perished because the Martian collective entity had forgotten its prehistory as discrete beings, when air and water were necessary. With Laughlin’s approach, they feel more confident in their-its ability to sustain his life. They commune for ten days after Laughlin ran out of air, with the collective entity sustaining him, during which time Laughlin taught them-it everything he knew about sustaining human life. Then Laughlin chose to expire, a decision that the Martian entity did not approve of but supported nonetheless. The impact of these revelatory episodes, so long after the complication of the plot, helps to demonstrate to readers that there was very little about this story that they could have anticipated. The plot climaxes in the revelation that the enclave is in healthy communion with the Mars bugs. As the team travels back from the shack to Dollars Dome, one of the catamarans runs out of fuel. Trovi learns of the problem telepathically, and the two teams try to troubleshoot. Trovi uses ESP to communicate her proposed solution: use the power of your mind to propel the craft. Clearly, as Trovi is ready to explain, the power offered by the Marian bugs is not just telepathy but a suite of PK abilities. Like Daughters of Earth and Homecalling, the novel proposes that interspecies collaboration will lead to new possibilities. Here, five years before Frank Herbert’s Dune offers a memorable transformation of hyperspace travel into a mental activity of the Guild Navigators, Merril is proposing a new age of science fiction travel based on the science of the mind. The novel also harkens back to Harris’s story “The Menace of Mars,” discussed in in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.3, which suggests a collective consciousness and not a superior military force will threaten white masculinity. This novel offers important synergies with Merril’s other work as well. It forms a shared universe with Project Nursemaid, suggesting that LGT syndrome has been overcome, but also with Trovi admitting that she was unsure she could marry her astronaut lover. As in Daughters of Earth, the novel proposes that collaboration and cooperation with nonhuman species will be the source of technical advance, as opposed to a Lamarckian evolution of the human species.

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The denouement of this novel is not one of conquest or conflict. The leaders of the rival space programs, Dr. Christensen and Dr. Chen, are seated at the same conference table. It has become clear that the fetuses Trovi and Harounian carry are more adaptable to communication with the collective consciousness because they have familiar DNA.  The “extraordinary goodwill” that was witnessed in both Red Dome and Dollars Dome was due to the growth of the mental bonds, and the potential for PK-based transportation seems tremendous. Wendt gets the last lines in the novel. Although he had been traumatized by his experience, he is now feeling repaired enough to volunteer to be a part of the crew that makes the first attempt to use this PK ability for exploration. No matter that Knight had called the theme of love a “sticky marshmallow,” the denouement of this novel presents a striking payoff: an international team now unified by mutual respect and understanding. Tomorrow People deserves more credit than even Merril gave it at the end of her life. For a while, she thought well of it. Writing to Theodore Cogswell, she predicted that 1960 was going to be a great year. In addition to the novel, her short story collection, Out of Bounds, was coming out, and Project Nursemaid was being reprinted in a Dell anthology edited by Groff Conklin. In addition, her Year’s Best science fiction anthology series was moving to a new publisher. Merril writes that she has a “clear understanding that what I am doing is a collection of imaginative-­ speculative literature, and that I am doing it.” As shown in Chap. 8, the next ten years would prove that she would play an important role in a new kind of science fiction.

7.5 Small Frog in a Big Pond Although she continued to write after 1960, The Tomorrow People would be Merril’s last major effort in fiction. Donald A. Wollheim, Merril’s former Futurian colleague who became editor of the influential Ace paperback series, sent Merril a cordial rejection letter in June 1956. He thanks her for two short novels, probably Daughters of Earth and Project Nursemaid, but uses revealing  gendered language to  say Ace is rejecting them.

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Both are much too definitively woman’s angle stories, slow to development and by no means action slanted. We have always felt that our Ace Science-­ Fiction reaches a primarily male market and that the story sequence should move somewhat faster than the more literary type of writing usually involves. Sorry.

Whether the rejection was motivated, at least in part, by Merril’s breakup with Michel and the reorganization of the Futurians is impossible to tell, but he seems to have joined the chorus of men saying that Merril does not write science fiction. The novels Wollheim chose to reprint for Ace were, at least after 1960, diverse enough to include someone like Merril, and a few years later Gunner Cade appears as an Ace Double. Wollheim’s study The Universe Makers (1971), though, is one of the fan histories that cements the idea that there were no significant women writers of science fiction before 1970. The only women he mentions are Merril, Andre Norton, and Leigh Brackett, who are given brief notices, with the rest of the study given over to men who had a superior vision of the future. Of Merril, he says only passingly that the anthologies that she and Michael Moorcock edited were “first heralds” of the new wave (p. 105). He omits Merril’s fiction completely. Over the next ten years, however, Merril will turn Wollheim’s criticism into her call for a new kind of science fiction. As will be described in Chap. 8, Merril turned her primary effort to reviews, editorials, and anthologies. She had a lasting impact in redefining the assumptions about science fiction, but despite her ten years of work, her role is often downplayed by those who chronicle the genre. Authoritative overviews by Wollheim (1971) and del Rey (1979), even when they mimic Merril’s critical insight, fail to give her credit, using metaphors of fathers and uncles to describe the history of the genre. Aldiss (1973) mentions her work as reviewer, albeit as “Miss Merril,” in the context of Moorcock and Knight. Given the praise received by other editors and reviewers, one rightly wonders what happened to her reputation. Sexism is certainly part of the story, but even so, other authors make their way into the post-1970 story of the genre, particularly C. L. Moore. The fact that Merril was a woman may not be the best explanation. Aldiss, for instance, characterizes Merril as a “female incendiary” (p.  284). Merril’s failure to support the mission of men in science fiction may be more relevant than her sex.

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The growing social awareness of the 1960s was certainly a problem for the earlier generation of science fiction writers. As described in Chap. 4, Campbell’s idea of a novel that was conscious to contemporary racial issues was Black Man’s Burden. In private letters and public editorials, his increasingly incomprehensible tirades defending his ideas about race signaled the end of his acceptability among fans and professionals. Pohl, for his part, accepted Heinlein’s bizarre novel Farnham’s Freehold, which he serialized in Worlds of If in 1964. The cover of the July issue proclaimed it to be “the great new science fiction novel,” but it was hard for readers at the time and still for readers today to see its merits. More than any of Heinlein’s novels, Farnham’s Freehold’s effort to promote inclusion falls flat in every respect. Maybe a reader should think about the horrors of race-based slavery when a nuclear apocalypse throws the protagonists into a setting where the black survivors enslave white refugees, but the grotesque racial stereotypes are far more memorable. Any effort to help readers understand racism is thwarted by the protagonists’ ability to master the situation and escape, presenting a simple solution based on white ingenuity that ends up denigrating historical people subjected to race-­ based slavery. A socially conscious author like Merril in this environment—where even some of her allies were showing an inability to awaken their intellects to the civil rights narratives that were playing out around them—would be a fish out of water. Merril’s reputation would have taken further damage based on her sentiment that science fiction was no longer being led by the United States. Writing about her experience at the 23rd World Science Fiction Convention in 1965, she marveled how the London meeting was nearly devoid of bug-eyed monsters and comments sardonically how Penguin books went through a lot of trouble just to get a Dalek to appear. Science fiction “has come of a respectable age,” she writes, and it is increasingly focused on inner space (1966, p.  379). She continues that the most important things happening in science fiction are not happening in the United States. Although some authors match J. G. Ballard’s stature, none is writing anything notable anymore. Kurt Vonnegut is writing a novel a year, but he is not influencing science fiction writers anymore. The most notable achievement, she writes, is Frank Herbert’s Dune, and part of what makes it notable is that it does not break any new ground: it is

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“completely conventional future-historical,” remarkable for its complexity but not for anything original or speculative (p. 383). Her professional assessments about the failures of science fiction in the United States, however honest they might have been, may not have been welcome within the narrow confines of science fiction. In 1965, Merril had written favorably about Harlan Ellison in a personal letter, noting that he tends to antagonize people about hot-button issues but overall seems to be a good person. However, in 1967, she starts to hear about his script for The Man from UNCLE. Ellison includes a character named Judith Merle, a literary critic who is famous for her nasty reviews that disparage authors. She tries to figure out why he was angry with her, noting in a letter that it is true that she did not include his 1965 story “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” in her Year’s Best anthology, despite his lobbying to get it included, and she divulges that her younger daughter Annie spurned his advances a few years back, when she would have been about 16 years old; at the time, he alarmingly told Merril that her daughter is “not as innocent as she seems.” She decides to sue Ellison and MGM for defamation. She gains a cash settlement and MGM declines to add the episode to its rerun list; the BBC runs the episode, but dubs in a different name. The victory is Pyrrhic. She writes to a friend, “I feel more and more alienated from The Science Fiction World anyhow, and am quite content to leave it to Pohl and Ellison and Silverberg and Knight.” She says she stays up at night, wondering what she would do if she were a black person in the United States, whose government takes so little action for civil rights. This antagonism in her professional life does not match what she experiences in her other correspondence. Some of the only fan letters preserved in her papers are from this period. If there are harassing or disrespectful letters, they are not preserved. Women and men write to her in gratitude for her work as an anthologist. A female fan writes that she likes the “non-metallic” point of view—stories about people—and stories that may help humanity find a new path before it is too late. About her own work, a female fan writes that she appreciates Merril’s work because she makes characters most important. Several fans also comment that she has inspired them to write their own fiction.

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Merril was not the only one feeling uncomfortable with the ways the United States used its technological might. The social unrest at the end of the 1960s is known for its anti-war and civil rights protests. However, these protests were in part against big science. Protests against the CIA and military funding for university programs were seen at Stanford in 1966; the administration admitted that the university’s electronic laboratory had been involved with a military surveillance program for eight years (Leslie, 1993, p. 241). In 1969, protesters at MIT decried the millions of dollars of military funding, calling the university “Pentagon East” (Leslie, p.  235). The same mechanism that funded and innovated the space program was responsible for weapons of mass destruction, including, but not limited to, atomic weapons. In a few years, the tide had changed. Stuart W. Leslie points out that the student protests at the end of the decade included protests against the military-industrial complex. On April 4, 1967, The Experiment—a student-run alternative college— published an account of “war research” at Stanford (p. 242). SRI is at the top of the list, showing how big science military research had become larger than the university proper. On April 14, the first anti-war protests are held at Stanford, demanding an end to war research, the disclosure of contracts, and the elimination of trustees with military ties. This unrest would culminate two years later, when 8000 members of the community rally, and the university ends up banning classified research. Similar sentiments led Merril, along with Kate Wilhelm, to organize a full-page advertisement opposing the Vietnam War. Under the heading “We oppose the participation of the United States in the War in Vietnam,” eighty-two authors signed their names: in addition to Merril and Wilhelm, signees included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Ray Bradbury, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Daniel Keyes, Virginia Kidd, Ursula K.  LeGuin, Robert Lowndes, Katherine MacLean, Gene Roddenberry, and Joanna Russ. Robert Heinlein, hearing about the ad, worked with Jack Williamson to organize sixty-eight authors to make a counteroffensive under the heading, “We the undersigned believe the United States must remain in Vietnam to fulfill its responsibilities to the people of that country.” Heinlein, Williamson, Leigh Brackett, Campbell, Edmond Hamilton, Sam Moskowitz, Jack Vance, Harl Vincent were among those who signed the contrary advertisement. The ads appeared

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separately in the March 1968 F&SF issue, and on facing pages in Galaxy’s June 1968 issue, which was edited by Pohl (Fig. 7.2). Merril, according to Franklin (1990), had assumed that “95  percent” of science fiction authors would oppose the war, believing that science fiction was guided by a “global and anti-racist view.” She was shocked, Franklin writes, when Heinlein replied with “America first” sentiments. Pohl, for his part, decried the division of writers in an editorial and seemed unable to take a side in the debate. Michael Moorcock (1978) remembers Merril’s proposal for this advertisement in his “Starship Stormtroopers” essay. The backlash from some members of SFWA caused the advertisement to change from condemning the war in Vietnam to the blander opposition to U.S. participation. Even so, the effort devolved into two advertisements. To Moorcock, many of the writers who supported U.S. involvement were (and remained for years after) the most popular writers, even though “sf readers think of

Fig. 7.2  Merril organized the signatories of the advertisement opposing the Vietnam War on the right; the reactionary advertisement is shown on the left

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themselves as radicals.” To Moorcock, this revealed an unfortunate truth: “The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists” (p. 41). Campbell’s effort to refashion outdated ideologies as cutting-edge, as described in Chap. 4, had a long-lasting impact. Merril’s growing disquiet led her to give up residency in the United States. She describes her determination to become an expat in Canada as a “long, slow decision.” She made another trip to London from 1966 to 1967 with Annie, getting to know the new generation of British authors, leading to her England Swings SF anthology  (Merril, 1968) She began reading the international press, which started to affect her. In addition, she found herself on the defensive as acquaintances asked her how she could justify U.S. actions. “After about the fiftieth time you have said that, you start thinking, ‘well, maybe I ought to be somewhere doing something about it instead of living a lie over here’” (Fulford, p. 1). The reports of rioting after the assassination of Martin Luther King distressed her because she knew there had only been well-organized protests except when police provoked protesters. Merril started to think that a “full Police State” was likely to emerge in a short time. She attended the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago because she wanted to have a chance to compare her firsthand experience with the news reports that would come later. Her daughter, who at the time was working for the Eugene McCarthy campaign, wanted to attend and bring some silkscreen materials with them, so Merril drove them there (Fulford, p. 2). She writes in her memoir that she still has the silkscreened “STOP THE WAR” banner that “her kids” hung from the balcony of the convention, getting some attention on television. Her experience made the stack of science fiction books she brought with her to review seem out of touch. In the midst of the protests during the convention, Merril says she could no longer be a “detached observer,” but she was not ready “join the mob” either. She offered her station wagon and herself as a driver “as a sort of ambulance substitute.” Interviewing a man who had been maced, she gloated when he said that there might be a shootout between Black Panthers and police the following week. This emotion, though, made Merril feel remorse because she herself had been degraded into feeling excitement about people being murdered for wearing a uniform. “I couldn’t see how I could function inside that country any longer” (Fulford, p.  3). She wished to visit a friend in Toronto to

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discuss the events, so they headed back to New Jersey by way of Canada. During this visit, she meets Dennis Lee, a poet who was helping to establish Rochdale College, an experimental institution in Toronto. Crossing the border into Canada had made Merril feel as if the atmosphere were free, but the reentry into the United States was completely different. Her station wagon was covered with McCarthy stickers and the trunk was full of posters and silk screen material. While in Toronto, Merril had picked up a copy of Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada, and this is the first thing the immigration officers saw when they opened her bag: The guy took it out and looked at it and said: “Where did you get that?” and I said “It doesn’t matter where I got it. It’s absolutely legal, and there’s no question of duties or customs, or anything like that.” And he said “well, just a minute” and took it inside and there was a great big thing. They searched that car under the mats, behind the glove compartment, you know, took everyone’s identification. Finally [he] said we could go because they had had a phone call back from higher sources about this injurious book and I couldn’t have the book back because they had to send it back to the FBI. … I went home and packed up. (Fulford, pp. 4–5)

By the end of November, Merril had packed her belongings into a rental van and drove to Toronto. In her memoir, Merril writes she moved to Canada in 1968 because she could “no longer accept the realpolitik of being an American citizen” and because she wanted to get away from the “centres of power [in order] to decide what to do with my uncomfortable portion of it” (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 162). Although she considered moving to England, in Toronto she thought she could offer assistance to people fleeing the draft who did not have the same opportunities she had. “I came to Canada with the draft dodgers because I could no longer be a U.S. citizen. As for hopes and dreams, I had none,” she writes later (p. 199). After being there a few weeks, a friend got a draft notice and asked if he could stay with her. Merril would stay at Rochdale, dubbed Toronto’s “Free University,” or, as Merril describes it, “an eighteen-story high-rise hippie college” (Knight p. 245), for a year or so as a resource person in writing and publishing. She helped students write and create their own publications: helping

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them to make zines like her own experience in the early days of science fiction fandom. She brought her library of science fiction books with her to Rochdale, allowing students to use them. Eventually she donated the collection to the Toronto Public Library. The Spaced-Out Library and its associated reading room made Merril a local celebrity. She started writing radio scripts for the CBC and soon she would be a guest commentator when the  CBC broadcast episodes of Doctor Who. A 1970 trip to the International Science Fiction Symposium in Japan led to an extended stay, collaborative translations with science fiction authors, and a 10-part documentary with CBC when she returned to Toronto. Looking back, the move to Canada was a big change in her life: in the United States, she had been a “very large frog in a very tiny pond”: a big name in science fiction, but not well known outside. In Canada, though, science fiction was less segregated from intellectual life, and she grew into a public intellectual.

References Aldiss, B.  W. (1973). Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday. Asimov, I. (1980). In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978. Doubleday. Attebery, B. (1998, March). Super Men. Science Fiction Studies, 25(1), 61–76. Bowler, P. J. (2003). Evolution: The History of an Idea. U of California Press. Bradley, D. (1948). No Place to Hide. Little, Brown. Brians, P. (1987). Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895–1984. Kent State UP. Campbell, J. W., Jr. (1952, January). Proposed History. AST, 48(5), 6–8. Chapdelaine, P. A., Sr. (1993). The John W. Campbell Letters with Isaac Asimov and A. E. van Vogt: Volume II. AC Projects. Charles, D. M. (2015). Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” Program. University Press of Kansas. Cummins, E. (2006). Judith Merril: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide. The Center for the Bibliography of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cuordileone, K. A. (2005). Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. Routledge.

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Davin, E. L. (2006). Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965. Rowman & Littlefield. Day, D. (2013, July 15). You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby! Retrieved October 1, 2022, from Spacereview.com del Rey, L. (1979). The World of Science Fiction, 1926–1976: The History of a Subculture. Ballantine Books. Eney, R. H. (1959). Fancyclopedia II. Operation Crifanac. Fiedler, L. (1965). The New Mutants. Reprinted in Us vs. Them: American Political and Cultural Conflict from WW II to Watergate (pp.  241–248). R. J. Bresler, ed. SR Books (2000). Franklin, H.  B. (1990, November). The Vietnam War as American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Science Fiction Studies #52, 17(3), 341–359. Fulford, R. (1971?). Fulford Talks to Science-Fiction Writer J.  Merrill [sic] about his [sic] Reason for Leaving the U.S. and his [sic] Life in Canada. Merril Archive Ottawa. Heinlein, R. A. (1956). Time for the Stars. Scribner’s. Johnson, D. K. (2004). The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. University of Chicago Press. Jones, G. (2019). Joanna Russ: The Creative Original Who Helped Open the Door to Feminist SF. U of Illinois Press. Kennedy, J.  F. (1960, December 26). The Soft American. Sports Illustrated, pp. 15–17. Knight, D. (1977). The Futurians: The Story of the Science Fiction “Family” of the 30s that Produced Today’s Top SF Writers and Editors. John Day. Kornbluth, C.  M. (1959). The Failure of the Science Fiction Novel as Social Criticism. In B. Davenport (Ed.), The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. Advent Publishers. Leslie, S. W. (1993). The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-­ Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. Columbia University Press. Merril, J. as J.  Zissman. (1945, July). No Heart for Murder. Crack Detective Stories, 6(4), 43–48. Merril, J. as J.  Zissman. (1946, January). The ‘Crank’ Case. Crack Detective Stories, 7(1), 64–68. Merril, J. as Georgie. (1947, October). According to the Book. Crack Detective Stories, 8(4), 91–96. Merril, J. as E. Thorstein. (1948a, January). Squaw Fever. Blue Ribbon Western, 10(3), 85–93. Merril, J. as E. Thorstein. (1948b, February). Dry Dust. Double-Action Western, 14(4), 93–96.

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Merril, J. (1948c, June). That Only a Mother. AST, 41(6), 88–95. Merril, J. (1950). Shadow on the Hearth. Doubleday. Merril, J. (1951, November). The Hydra Club. Marvel Science Fiction, 3(5), 126–129. Merril, J. (1959, June). Judy Merril Says. In Publications of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies, Special Series 129. T.  R. Cogswell (Ed.). Advent, 1992. Merril, J. (1960). The Tomorrow People: A Science Fiction Novel. Pyramid Books. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1966). The Year’s Best S-F: 11th Annual Edition. Dell. Merril, J. (1967, November). Books. F&SF, 33(5), pp. 28–36. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1968). England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction. Ace Books. Merril, J. (2005). Homecalling and Other Stories. NESFA Press. Merril, J., & Pohl-Weary, E. (2002). Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril. Between the Lines. Moorcock, M. (1978). Starship Stormtroopers. Anarchist Review, 1(4), 40–44. Newell, D., & Lamont, V. (2012). Judith Merril: A Critical Study. McFarland. Pohl, F. (1950, September). Shadow on the Hearth by Judith Merril. Super Science Stories, 7(2), 67. Pohl, F. (1978). The Way the Future Was: A Memoir. Ballantine. Roberts, R. (2007). Anne McCaffrey: A Life with Dragons. UP of Mississippi. Sharp, P. (2007). Savage Perils: Racial Frontiers and Nuclear Apocalypse in American Culture. U Oklahoma P. Solstein, E., & Moosnick, G. (2002). John W. Campbell’s Golden Age of Science Fiction: Text Supplement to the DVD. Digital Media Zone. Stableford, B. M. (2004). Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. Scarecrow Press. Tate, P. (1966?). Judith Merril. Judith Merril Papers in Ottawa. Trotsky, L. (1926). Radio, Science, Technique and Society. Retrieved March 1, 2023, from https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1926/03/science.htm UNESCO. (1969). Four Statements on the Race Question. Oberthur-Rennes. van Vogt, A. E. (1940, December). Slan. Astounding, 26(4), 119–162. Weitekamp, M. (2004). Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program. Johns Hopkins UP. Wollheim, D.  A. (1971). The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today. Harper and Row. Yaszek, L. (2008). Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction. Ohio State UP.

8 The End of Science Fiction

In the years after World War II, a noticeable shift occurred in science fiction. For one, the dominant plot was less often one of a technological elite penetrating the dangerous unknown and more likely to be a story about characters confronting their assumptions about what it meant to be human. Another obvious change was in style, with an emphasis on formal experimentation, fragmentation, and absurdity. The combination of these new plots and styles became a common experience of readers: bafflement and confusion replaced the certainty and knowability of the universe from earlier years. Even though authors would continue to use golden-age innovations, like hyperspace, these would be relegated to the status of background assumptions. By the end of the 1960s, this new brand of science fiction would be called the new wave, and it would break new ground in terms of audience and media. Judith Merril undoubtedly embraced and encouraged the evolution of science fiction. Her career as reviewer and editor provides insight into the path the genre took from one that was primarily directed toward a technical elite to one that embraced a wider readership. One should be careful not to accept new wave authors’ marketing that suggested they turned away from the so-called hard sciences to a more humanistic approach.

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The preceding chapters have already revealed a false dichotomy of hard versus soft science, outer versus inner space. John W. Campbell, despite his training in physics, seemed more interested in cultural anthropology (Chap. 4); Isaac Asimov, the biochemist, was preoccupied with sociology and psychology despite having no formal training in these subjects (Chap. 5). Thus, it might be more useful to say that the dominant trend after World War II was to demand the same rigor in the soft sciences, like sociology, psychology, and linguistics, that had been expected from authors in the so-called hard sciences, like chemistry and physics. The work Merril promoted exemplifies this shift to a certain extent, but more important was her effort to lessen the restrictions on what could be described as science fiction, part of a program to stretch the boundaries of what could be considered part of the genre. Today’s effort to make science fiction more inclusive can be traced back to Merril’s. Merril’s effort to diversify science fiction had started much earlier and on a different trajectory. Supporters of Merril might win a debate about who first noticed and nurtured a new kind of science fiction, but Merril never used the phrase new wave, coming the closest with “the new thing” in her book review column in 1966. For more than ten years before she started writing about “the new thing,” though, she had been offering a space for a greater variety of science fiction in her anthologies. Fan historians and academic studies starting in the 1970s would downplay her involvement, making it seem as if she were just part of a trend that was dominated by the alienating and confrontational fiction promoted by others. One of the moments that marks the apex of the new wave was Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions (1967). In the introduction, he says he hopes the volume will represent “a revolution” based on the need for “new horizons, new forms, new styles, new challenges” (1967b, p. xix). Interestingly, he uses Merril’s phrase, “the new thing,” as well as the French nouvelle vague, to describe the contents, although he suggests that he has diverged from Merril’s vision. The most important divergence, though, seems to be Ellison’s insistence that all of the stories in his anthology had never been published before, unlike the typical practice of the time (including Merril’s). Aside from that, he rehashes her favorite themes: that good fiction avoids the label science fiction, that speculative fiction might be a better name for the genre, and that it is time for this

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kind of fiction to have broader attention. Ellison’s effort as editor can be simplistically likened to Merril’s, which may be why historians in the 1970s felt comfortable mentioning Merril as an “also ran.” One study suggests that the paradox of the new wave is that Merril christened it, but her own writing was not experimental: “in her form and content she could hardly be called radical” (Scholes & Rabkin, 1977, p.  89). The same authors suggest that it was Ellison who introduced the new wave to the United States with his anthology (p. 93). As noted in Chap. 7, though, Merril’s opposition to the Vietnam War and what she felt was a growing authoritarian menace in the United States seem to have played a role in her legacy, which could explain why her experimental fiction was forgotten. As well, Merril’s experience in confronting masculinist bias and her emphasis on communities were significant divergences from the new wave. On closer investigation, the agony of masculinity and the idealization of individuality often seen in the new wave hint that Merril might not have been taking the same road. Bringing Merril back into the history of the genre is worthwhile so that her effort to broaden the definition of science fiction is better known, especially given that her effort to expand what could be included in the canon is consonant with efforts today to recover the many authors outside of the Gernsback and Campbell canon—many of whom happen to be women, nonwhite, of nationalities outside of the United States. That being said, it is worthwhile to consider the alternative tack Merril promoted for its resistance to larger social discourses about masculinity. This comparison helps to show how the new wave, at a time when Cold War pundits employed a discourse of patriarchal masculinity as a defense against social ills and potential communist infiltration, took a stance that was eerily similar to the retrograde gender politics that would be a contentious site of rebellion in the 1970s. Indeed, as was seen in Chap. 5, asking authors raised on the ideologies of the golden age to address themes related to gender did not inevitably result in progressive fiction. Merril’s broadened definition of science fiction and her interest in including a greater variety of writers and readers fit in with the anti-imperialist, anti-racist discourses already seen in her fiction, as discussed in Chap. 7. These same tendencies led fan historians who were not on board with the project to suggest that she was far from the genre of science fiction.

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Putting Merril’s editorial work back into the history of the genre helps to demonstrate the longevity of the desire to create a more inclusive genre and, at the same time, helps to suggest successful strategies to break down resistance to change.

8.1 Changing Markets, Changing Audiences The rise of the new wave is not simply explained, depending as it does on a variety of discourses and commercial realities in the 1950s and 1960s. Although some sort of change was inevitable, the actual paths that authors and editors sought reveal different constellations of meaning. The new wave, although it is described as an important phase of the genre by fan and academic historians, was never an organized group of writers. What is often called new wave is a loosely defined group of authors and editors who adopted the stance of an avant-garde. Although the proponents of the new wave said they were offering something different to readers— supposedly a grown-up sort of science fiction—their vision of men suffering because of attacks on their individuality is not so different from contemporary concerns about the plight of men in the wider culture. The isolated and beleaguered men of the new wave, in the context of the forgoing chapters, seem part of the trajectory of the elite men promoted by Gernsback and Campbell. For them, isolation and retribution for their loyalty can and should be endured. Merril, despite the fact that she is described as part of the new wave, took a different path. Her effort is easier to see as an alternative to the hardline individualism promoted by politicians and new wave authors. Merril’s advocacy of eclecticism and inclusion may not seem like a tool to fight the threat of authoritarianism in the Cold War, but closer examination shows how her big-tent, anti-­ dictatorial practices were thoughtful responses to Cold War masculinity. The less confrontational direction Merril took reflects the persona she crafted for herself as a former union organizer, a single mother, and an author seeking to engage with an audience broader than offered by Campbell’s magazines. In this way, understanding the Cold War discourse about masculinity sets the stage for a more nuanced analysis of how Merril’s path diverged from the evolving concept.

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At the most simplistic level, changes in the genre were due to an awareness that new venues were available that could bypass John W. Campbell, who for ten years had an outsized role as editorial gatekeeper. As described in earlier chapters, both Leigh Brackett and Merril only published a few stories with AST before going on to publish widely in other publications; as well, Campbell summarily dismissed Leslie F.  Stone and Samuel Delany. After World War II, publishers sought to differentiate their magazines. One way was to abandon the large format characteristic of the inexpensive pulps in favor of the digest size of higher-quality magazines (i.e., a size more portable somewhat larger than a paperback book). This transformation was led by AST in 1943. F&SF began publication in 1949, with design and contents that promised a more erudite approach than offered by other titles. Galaxy, which began publication in 1950, also took the digest size. AMZ, which had been founded by Hugo Gernsback, would reduce its size in 1953. F&SF, along with a British fanzine New Worlds, would also seek to be outlets for a new, thoughtful type of science fiction. Under pressure from this competition, and in response to Campbell’s increasing interest in paranormal phenomena, AST gradually changed its name to Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact throughout the year 1960. In addition, major publishers took an interest in publishing science fiction books. During World War II, a new medium had come into being: the paperback. This refinement in publishing came to the United States in 1939, when Pocket Books published low-priced reprints of popular literature, including a collection of Shakespeare’s plays and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In 1943, Futurian Donald Wollheim edited number 214 of the series The Pocket Book of Science Fiction. Wollheim’s book, credited as being the first science fiction anthology, includes pre-­ Gernsback fiction from H.  G. Wells and Ambrose Bierce along with more modern names like Weinbaum, Campbell, Sturgeon, and Heinlein. Fan-authors eyed the anthology market covetously, taking the opportunity to bypass restrictive magazine editors. Perhaps the most famous early anthology, edited by Groff Conklin, was published in 1946 as The Best of Science Fiction, boasting a preface by Campbell. This anthology reprinted authors who reached out to the young men whom Gernsback and Campbell had imagined as their audiences, and like other fan editors,

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Conklin left out others. The contents of this anthology reflect new ideas of the canon without women, even though these authors were never the complete story of the genre’s readership. This canon was presented to larger readerships who had a noble purpose of educating themselves about the world of science and technology. The fan-led quest for golden-age classics to reprint had the unsurprising consequence that most authors crossing the bridge into the new era fit in with the masculinist bias in science and engineering. Conklin would go on to edit dozens of anthologies, and Wollheim took a job editing fiction for Ace Books in 1952, bringing novel-length works to a mass audience. Some long-form stories that had been serialized in the pulps quickly found their way into book publication. Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which gathered and published the stories in three volumes from 1951 to 1953, was published by Gnome Press, founded by two members of the Hydra club (one was also a Futurian). However, Leslie F. Stone’s Out of the Void would not see book publication until the end of the 1960s, and her Wings stories have yet to appear in book form. An anthology of L. Taylor Hansen’s fiction also has yet to appear. The surgical removal of certain types of stories from the pulps for book publication is one way to see the impact of fan prejudices on the memory of the golden age. In this way, the prejudices of the fan community impacted the evaluation in the public sphere. As pointed out by Merril (1960), major publishers’ affection for science fiction began around 1948, the time when Merril was pitching her own anthology. In the following years, it seemed as if the number of magazine titles decreased, but Merril notes that the number of magazine issues actually increased because distributors demanded that publishers come out with one issue every month. The number of science fiction paperback books increased each year, so that by the end of the 1950s, there were as many as seventy titles a year, each of them having a circulation of 100,000 copies, beating out the science fiction magazine titles by 30 percent or more readers. Moreover, she writes, the number of stories in mainstream magazines increased steadily, and each story that appeared in a slick had an audience of more than 100,000 readers. Editors and publishers often comfort these new readers with the idea that what they read is not science fiction but something more serious, even when it

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explicitly builds on aesthetics forged in the science fiction factories of the 1930s and 1940s. Leaving the pulps behind helped the new breed of fan editors assert that science fiction was a literature of ideas rather than sensations. The tawdry company science fiction pulp magazines kept, after all, had made it difficult for men like Isaac Asimov’s father to grant his sons permission to read them. Paperback books also had a questionable pedigree, but their use in World War II as a means to provide masses of people with something worthwhile to read during their leisure time, which helped them to distinguish them from the pulps. Publishers had already found a successful partnership with the U.S. government, both in providing reading materials for soldiers and also serving as ideological tools during the war (Hench, 2010, p. 57). The vogue for reprinting only increased after the war, as soldiers who had been allocated paperback books had developed the habit of reading and demonstrated an audience for longer fiction. The relative respectability offered by paperbacks was helpful as popular entertainment came under attack by a U.S. Senate inquiry into juvenile delinquency. In 1954, this inquiry turned to comic books. Since 1948, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham had been blaming titillating and gruesome images alongside advertisements for weapons as a cause for violent acts perpetrated by youth. Wertham’s book The Seduction of the Innocent, which was released in conjunction with his appearance before the Senate subcommittee, had a compelling thesis. Nevertheless, it did not fit in with mainline sociological theory or standards for analysis. Setting aside Wertham’s simplistic determinism, contemporary sociologists were examining how modern society’s failure to transmit appropriate values was a consequence of American modernity. A decade later, professional attitudes would shift, showing how theorists had mistakenly combined analysis of criminal behavior with “legitimate expressions of a variety of American subcultures” (Gilbert, 1986, pp. 131, 142). In the meantime, however, the popular perception that media could harm young people’s minds captured the public imagination. Science fiction offers a window onto the development of a transformation in the concept of masculine development. As detailed in Part I, men could transform themselves through application of their efforts. As was seen in Part II, sociologists had asserted that play based in the

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imagination of savagery and ritual violence in the form of athletic activity was an important stage in the development of a stable male personality that sublimated its primitive emotions into refined passion for public ideals. After the war, the supporting theory had been thoroughly discredited, but some postulates remained. As if to protect the concept of manly intellect, the stages of civilization were replaced with metaphors of contagion and containment. During the Cold War, the popular thinking was that masculinity needed vigilant surveillance against threats, both internal and external. In tandem with the fear that unchecked communism would spread like a pandemic was the fear that laxity within U.S. borders would prompt social ills, running the gamut through violence, adultery, substance abuse, and homosexuality. An individual had to maintain his masculinity internally and protect himself from disruptive messages from others. The paradigm of containment and contagion can help to distinguish Merril’s fiction from others’. For instance, Heinlein’s juvenile novels of the 1950s are situated within the family amid paternalistic institutions that provide the protagonists with satisfactory socialization and protect them from social ills. Kip and Peewee are abducted in Have Space Suit: Will Travel (1958), but their good upbringing ensures they overcome many obstacles. They are called before an intergalactic federation that seeks to eliminate contamination from negative civilizations. A galactic council sentences the planet of Kip and Peewee’s kidnappers to doom, but after Kip’s youthful oratory, humanity is granted an opportunity to improve itself. This parable of inquiry and containment is seen as a liability in Merril’s The Tomorrow People (1960). As discussed in Chap. 7, humanity is faced with contagion from microbes from Mars. Instead of fearing this pathogen, Merril’s characters embrace the opportunity for ESP and telekinesis, which leads to coöperation and the dissolution of international tensions. The fear of contagion is overcome by Merril’s characters. Heinlein’s novel suggests there is an essential quality imminent in humans that will mark the next stage of their evolution, while Merril finds that the best potential for humanity is cooperation and coevolution. That being said, the impact of Cold War ideologies can be seen beyond Merril’s work as an author. Popular culture became a contested zone in

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the paradigm of contagion and containment. One should recall that Merril’s career as anthologist and reviewer was concurrent with the rise of lawyer Roy Cohn, who came to prominence in 1951 in the prosecution of the espionage case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; went on to inflame fears that communists would exploit gay people’s fear of exposure, making them unsuitable for government work; and aided McCarthy during his infamous hearings in the U.S. Congress, seeking to contain and eliminate supposed communist infiltration of the U.S. government. In 1953, Cohn and his colleague David Schine visited the lending libraries of U.S. consulates abroad, finding 2 million books that, even if authored by U.S. citizens, might support communism: Jean-Paul Sartre, Dashiell Hammett, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. DuBois were caught up in the dragnet (Saunders, 2000, p. 193). Hollywood studios agreed to submit names to the government before employing them so that they could be cleared. The popular rhetoric was that communist influences needed to be contained before they could contaminate others. These actions met some resistance: in 1953, President Eisenhower spoke at Dartmouth University to say that the United States cannot become book burners, and that knowledge of communism was important to defeat it. Librarians took their role seriously, and the American Library Association passed a resolution against blacklists the same year (Cull, 2008, p. 92). The State Department commissioned a study in 1953; its findings advised against efforts, like McCarthy’s, that seem to oppose free expression (Bogart, 1976, p. 83). Of course, this is the atmosphere in which playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. As part of his motivation, Miller (1996) writes that one of his scripts was sent to an FBI agent in 1951, who suggested Miller change it to focus on communist infiltration. The discourse about masculinity also played a role in politics, just as it had with the Theodore Roosevelt campaign. Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s is just as illustrative for postwar assumptions in science fiction. Eisenhower’s successful campaigns discredited his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, because he was effete and unmarried. Eisenhower projected the power of a patriarch, and the Republican Party used the catchphrase “Let’s Clean House.” In the wake of the Joseph McCarthy hearings, this could only mean getting homosexuals and communists out of the federal government. J. Edgar Hoover circulated rumors that Stevenson was gay,

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and a Hoover ally stated on air that a vote for Stevenson was like a vote for Christine Jorgensen, the first U.S. citizen to become widely known for her gender affirmation surgery in 1951 (Johnson, 2004, pp. 121–2). Unlike Roosevelt, who could recover from his supposed lack of masculinity by developing more vigor, Stevenson was portrayed as an unsuitable man. Eisenhower, the epitome of a father, was the best safeguard against communist contagion and offered the necessary paternal framework that would contain the influence of supposedly failed men like Stevenson. One typical response to the need to contain communism and defend against ideological contagion was an ideology of individualism that politicians and culture workers of divergent positions would promote. For instance, Arthur Schlesinger, before he became Stevenson’s speechwriter, wrote in The Vital Center about the anxiety men felt in the postwar period. Schlesinger blamed “capitalist suicide,” oddly similar to the theory of race suicide described in Chap. 3, Sect. 3.2. Capitalism was being defeated by its success. Private property brought an end to feudalism, and then the brave business class made a new world, unafraid of the problems that they might create. Capitalistic mass society, though, reduced the power of private property. “Organization impersonalizes all it touches,” he writes (1949, p. 6). Totalitarian societies are appealing because they promise certain answers to problems that are insoluble. Modern people are well aware that the foundations of society are “uncertain and fragmented,” Schlesinger writes. Totalitarianism offers freedom from anxiety; a free society, he continues, can only offer “alienation and fallibility” (pp. 55–7). Capitalism was becoming notable for its inefficiencies, but one should admire the way that capitalism enforces a moral sense. Schlesinger admits that racism and colonialism make capitalist societies seem unjust, but he suggests that these are challenges best faced by a free society and capitalistic development: Our engineers can transform arid plains or poverty-stricken river valleys into wonderlands of vegetation and power. Our factories produce astonishing new machines, and the machines turn out a wondrous flow of tools and goods for every aspect of living. The [New Deal rural electrification ­program now run by the] Tennessee Valley Authority is a weapon which, if properly employed, might outbid all the social ruthlessness of the Communists for the support of the people of Asia. (p. 233)

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In the meantime, a policy of containment—which he proposes as a middle ground between confrontation and appeasement—is the most logical policy. In the long term, whatever contradictions capitalism demonstrates will pale in comparison to the problems of communism (p.  236). Schlesinger’s proposals are helpful in the way they imagine a personal and cultural response to Cold War ideologies, and due to their success today they seem like common-sense responses to totalitarianism. They also serve as useful background to the new wave and help to differentiate Merril’s own response. Much about high culture aesthetics in the Cold War can be explained with Schlesinger’s insights, and their absence in Merril’s own work and her decisions as editor help to show how she engaged with the Cold War differently. For instance, Schlesinger helps to explain the popularity of art forms that alienate their audience with a fragmented, even absurd, setting. The popularity of novels by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, plays by Bertolt Brecht and Edward Albee, and paintings by Mark Rothko fit in with Schlesinger’s image of the postmodern individual who, after the horrors of World War II, can no longer trust metanarratives of progress and racial evolution. In science fiction, authors like Cordwainer Smith and Kurt Vonnegut would follow in this vein. In this kind of work, the lack of certainty in the outer world and the focus on characters’ inner psychology seem to be a confrontation to the presumptions of the golden age. However, Schlesinger’s comments help to show how, paradoxically, the portrait of a confused man in a world that does not make sense and has few ready answers is, in fact, a carefully considered ideological tool. The theme of patience that undergirds Schlesinger’s analysis—acknowledging the failures of the present system but asserting they will be solved in time—is seen in new wave heroes who persevere in their quest to survive despite unfair and unpredictable incidents. In as much as Merril does not engage with this kind of fiction, one might assume wrongly that she had little interest in the Cold War. However, other aspects of Schlesinger’s analysis show how his ideas fit in well with golden-age science fiction and are not as innovative as they appear. The promise that capitalistic ingenuity could transform “arid planes” and impoverished valleys into “wonderlands” sounds much like the golden-age dreams of technological superiority, similar to Heinlein’s

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promises of a radically transformed environment in Farmer in the Sky. As cultural diplomacy programs picked up pace in the 1950s, traveling performers and art shows seeking to show the depth of the American personality were organized by the United States Information Agency—and other programs optioned books by authors like Asimov and Heinlein for distribution and translation into local languages. Thorby, the beleaguered protagonist of Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy, bridges the gap between the promise of technological advance and the challenges of doing good engineering work in a discontinuous world. No wonder, then, that this was one of the science fiction works that was chosen for cultural diplomacy. Another reason why new-wave aesthetics seem to fit in better with Cold War ideologies is that Schlesinger’s hope for the future turns out to be gendered. He says a “large resolute breed of men” are aware of the problems that face human society and that it will take courage to find solutions that “best secure the freedom and fulfillment of the individual” (p.  256). A few years later, in the article “The Crisis of American Masculinity,” Schlesinger (1958) dismisses claims that women’s emancipation is at fault for men’s confusion and asks men to embrace their freedom. Men are anxious about their masculinity because modern life is making it hard for them to “achieve a full sense of identity” in general. “Free, equalitarian, democratic” society has gotten rid of “ready-made identities.” Returning to his earlier theme, Schlesinger concludes that men must separate themselves from the group, finding “a new belief in apartness.” In art, men must seek liberation from popular entertainment when it offers “prefabricated emotional clichés” (pp.  64–5). Echoing Thoreau and Wordsworth without naming them, and citing Emerson’s nonconformity directly, Schlesinger says men must use experience with art and nature to forge an inward quest for identity. As can be seen, culture became intensely intertwined with politics. In the wake of Schlesinger, a divergence between fragmented, alienating settings and cleaner, realistic representation would play out as the United States designed and refined its cultural diplomacy. As noted by Leja (1993), “psychological discomfort was, for Schlesinger, the mark and price of freedom … Totalitarian governments, both right and left, permitted the individual no choice, and therefore engendered no anxiety”

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(p. 246). This would seem to make abstract and alienating art the most appropriate aesthetic for the Cold War, but not all were willing to sacrifice beauty and realism. One of the first art shows organized for cultural diplomacy, Advancing American Art, was criticized for the works it included (like Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Circus Girl Resting) because they depicted unbeautiful figures in disorienting settings, which some politicians thought of as a communist plot to discredit the country instead of appropriate Cold-War aesthetics. Communists want the world to think that U.S. citizens are “despondent, broken down, or of hideous shape” and “thoroughly dissatisfied with their lot” (qtd. in Littleton & Sykes, 1989, p. 40), leaving politicians to prefer aesthetically pleasing depictions that they thought support the U.S. system. The type of fiction that was suitable to promote U.S. interests was also tied to the biographies of the creators, causing a problem when authors or artists had crossed paths with dissident groups. Certainly, the efforts of McCarthy’s team purged authors connected to communism from the library holdings of U.S. diplomatic missions, but the international backlash to the idea that the United States was burning books (even figuratively) caused second thoughts. After the 1950s, the State Department would establish as an official policy that spirited debate and divergent viewpoints were essential parts of U.S. culture. This is not to say that culture was freed from politics—to the contrary, debate and dissensus would be the new protocol. New wave authors embrace the uncertainty described by Schlesinger and reject the moralism of Wertham. Strangely, although Schlesinger and Wertham seem at first glance to be opposites, there is a commonality between these men when speaking about the role culture has to support society. Momism (described in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5) is implicit in Wertham’s fear of comic books, and Schlesinger’s disdain for a fatherly Eisenhower informed a new form of masculinity. However much Wertham and Schlesinger seemed to represent opposites, they shared an unexpected axiom: popular culture is a tool that would transform the audience through contagion. Wertham feared that violent images would inspire audiences to follow a life of crime; Schlesinger hoped that he could infect others with the idea that anxiety is an understandable reaction to modern freedom. There seems to be no room for intellectual activity among audience members. Danger or opportunity comes from the conduits of mass

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culture, and modern society depends on the judicious selection of what comes down the pike. Either way, culture must be narrowly curated. A review of the eclectic style of Merril’s fiction and her decision to exclude nihilistic fiction from her anthologies might make it seem that she was detached from these Cold War concerns. However, there was more than one way to fight against authoritarianism during the Cold War. A different sort of danger from mass media was flagged by a group of Jewish intellectuals who fled Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. Known as the Frankfurt School, these scholars warned about mass media’s implication in totalitarianism. In particular, they were concerned about how popular culture paved the way for authoritarian control. In 1944, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno published Dialectic of Enlightenment, which suggested that mass media were a precursor to totalitarianism. Their infamous example is of recorded jazz music. Even in a genre known for improvisation, with mechanical reproduction, twists in a live performance became something listeners learn to anticipate at home; the unexpected become mundane. Consumer entertainment products seem as if they offer choice, but instead they are a way for industries to rob people of their individuality. Industries give consumers “an artificial impression of being in command,” but in fact there is nothing for the consumers to do except accept their role as recipients. Rigidity in genre and management of formal products ensures that audiences react “automatically.” Everyone selects the products that are produced for their type; “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (pp. 123–5). In formulaic mass culture, products produce audience reactions from signals “in the worn grooves of association.” One thing leads to another naturally, nothing calls for mental effort, no one is expected to imagine the relationship of the parts to the whole (p. 137). Rigid generic boundaries produce predictable responses in well-trained audiences. Audiences accept rules of genre, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, in the same way they later accept authoritarian rule. Hannah Arendt, another Frankfurt School theorist, was also active in this period. Arendt had been detained by the German secret police in 1933, subsequently fleeing to Paris and emigrating to the United States. Her work is well grounded in the liberal western tradition; in fact, in 1966 readers of her Origins of Totalitarianism had to confront the fact

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that European countries that were well versed in the Enlightenment concept of freedom were misled. For Arendt (1973), the source of totalitarianism is massification of the population. Mass thinking, she writes, did not come as one might expect, from modern education and the transformation of art into popular culture; instead, it was an unintended consequence of eliminating the class system and traditional group-focused institutions. Arendt blames “social atomization” (p.  231)—in other words, the extreme sense of individuality. The suppression of group concerns and making people numb to their everyday problems created large masses who were ready to be recruited into totalitarian culture. “The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships,” she writes (p.  317). Totalitarianism comes when people forget to think of themselves as a group, and not because of some technological tool or organizational structure. In a seeming contradiction to Schlesinger, Arendt suggests that excessive individualism is the precursor to totalitarianism, not the bulwark against it. Arendt’s thinking somewhat resembles Schlesinger’s, particularly in his concept of “capitalist suicide,” in the way that Arendt suggests that the ways of thinking about humanity in the Enlightenment played a part in its destruction. Unlike Schlesinger, though, she is not enamored with the promise of modern technology. In place of Schlesinger’s exuberant praise of the promise of capitalism, which fit in so nicely with golden-age aesthetics, Arendt proposes that large-scale thinking is a form of massification. She suggests that the same mentality that supported the scramble for Africa created mass culture in Europe: imperialists “thought in continents and felt in centuries” (p. 316). The same could be said for the way that golden-age science fiction carried over past the war: readers and writers have assumed the habit of writing about the path of history as if it were inevitable and affected all people globally. The history of the individual is thought to be the history of the race. The kind of individualism promoted by Schlesinger, in the eyes of the Frankfurt School, seems to be a stepping stone toward totalitarian control. What is more, the sensation of freedom afforded by the opportunity for choice in popular culture is, in the eyes of Frankfurt theorists, simply a training ground where individuals find and take comfort in their roles

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in mass society. It is telling that Merril does not employ aesthetics of alienation or uncertainty in her fiction. Although she does champion some authors who—like Ballard and Cordwainer Smith—offer an exsanguinated vision of modern society, she stops short of the nihilistic visions offered by Harlan Ellison and others of the new wave. More prominent in Merril’s editorial work is her ethic of plurality, breaking down the rigid boundaries of the genre. In going so far as to say that “science fiction” is a hollow concept, she fits in with the Frankfurt School’s concern about rigid definitions. Readers of a Merril anthology do not have to force themselves to fit in with mass culture; instead, they are called upon to make science fiction fit in with the worlds they want to inhabit. This is not just a matter of reader comfort, though. In our present time, discourses that promote isolation and short-term survival, like the aesthetics of the new wave, have proven to be dangerous. A different vision, one based on cooperation and community, is more suitable to the challenges facing humanity in the Anthropocene epoch.

8.2 Merril as Anthologist and Reviewer Merril worked to promote a broader definition of science fiction for almost twenty years before anyone was admiring a new direction that would be called the new wave, suggesting that the path she took might have been different. As an editor at Bantam Books at the same time she was writing her first science fiction stories, she also began her effort to bring science fiction to a wider audience. Given Merril’s penchant for new labels in later years, one can expect her editorial work to challenge Campbell-era assumptions about science fiction. What is interesting about her effort is that it shows considerable antagonism to the generic definitions offered by mass culture in concert with the Frankfurt School’s concern about commercial culture. Merril’s insistence on flexibility in what can be included in the genre is an editorial move that resists authoritarianism. In 1948, Merril proposed her first science fiction anthology, which would be published in 1950 as Shot in the Dark by Bantam (Fig. 8.1). From this first effort, Merril challenged assumptions about genre. The

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Fig. 8.1  In 1950, Merril edited her first anthology, the same year when her first novel, Shadow on the Hearth, was published

anthology’s cover, with a woman in an evening gown being held at gunpoint, promises twenty-three “astounding” stories that are a different kind of thrill. One of them, though, is actually a poem: a reprint of a 1935 ballad by Stephen Vincent Benét, with a narrator reporting a takeover by machines. A murder mystery by Theodore Sturgeon, the person who helped Merril choose her name, leads the collection. The other

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authors include one of the people who edited her earliest writing, Futurian John B. Michel (using the alias Hugh Raymond), and Anthony Boucher, with whom she would collaborate for F&FS in later years. Six were written by authors who were well known to the readers of AST: Isaac Asimov, Leigh Brackett (“The Halfling,” discussed in Chap. 6), Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, Lewis Padgett (as also discussed in Chap. 6, one of the pen names of C.  L. Moore and Henry Kuttner), and William Tenn. Another six stories came from writers mostly outside of Campbell’s orbit—including names that are well known today, Ray Bradbury and James Thurber—and less obvious selections, like the UK mystery writers Gerald Kersh and Margery Allingham. Frederick Pohl (as James MacCreigh) and Philip Wylie also appear. To these, Merril added three stories that appeared before Gernsback started publishing science fiction, including a short work by Jack London. Merril’s selection made an effort to inspire wonder and curiosity in her readers. In this way, she avoided what the Frankfurt School would call the hazards of mass culture that aroused predicable reactions from its audience. Another way that Merril’s first anthology should be considered genre-busting is she goes back to reconsider the original formulation of scientifiction made by Hugo Gernsback, as described in Chap. 2. She includes stories by familiar authors like Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells, but also adds selections by others to remind readers that there are many authors who wrote in a speculative vein. The editorial persona here is much different than that of Asimov’s, described in Chap. 5. Whereas Asimov was reporting to the community about what all should agree were the best stories, Merril was breaking down barriers and proposing a redefinition of the genre. This is an intellectual experience for the reader. Merril’s next effort to expand the definition of the genre was published under the name of Robert A.  Heinlein as editor. Today, though, the Doubleday anthology Tomorrow, the Stars (1952) is known to be mostly the product of the editorial choices of Merril and Pohl. Many of the authors were well known from AST and other pulps after World War II, but the choices are surprising in the sense that they drift away from the golden-age love for definitive realism. The introduction makes it clear that the selections were made with an eye for “speculative fiction” (p. 7). Pointing out that many well-known literary authors have penned what

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could be called speculative fiction, the introduction wonders why they have been ignored. The introduction suspects that it is partly due to the fact that literary critics are not well versed in the sciences, making it hard for them to judge. Two of the authors selected by Merril and Pohl—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Fritz Leiber—would go on to careers in the literary mainstream and remain only tangentially connected to science fiction. Again, Merril worked (albeit here behind the scenes) to expand the boundary of science fiction. In the same year, Merril edited Beyond Human Ken (1952), which was notable as a divergent path for several reasons, including the fact that she chose stories that attempt to expand the definition of human life. Consciously extending the reach of her readers beyond English-speaking, bug-eyed monsters, she has included “almost every concept of life as we don’t know it that I have come across in my reading of the field” (p. xi). As was seen before, Merril’s curation is an exploration of a theme, more than a definitive collection that represents consensus. She says the volume is a “study of psychology” and an examination of human “interpersonal or cultural problems”: xenophobia, fear of the group, love of progress, domination and privacy, master versus servants, classes and castes. More than a decade earlier than the new wave, she hopes her collection succeeds in addressing “the very problems of human development that are now being taken in hand by the more forward-looking social scientists” and the latest science fiction magazines as well (p. xii). At the end of the volume, Merril includes biographical statements of the authors and, unexpected based on other editors’ anthologies, a bibliography, so that readers can follow up on building their own collections. This volume includes “The Fittest” by Katherine MacLean, who majored in economics at Barnard and worked as a biochemist, and also has Heinlein’s “Our Fair City” about a living whirlwind. The fourth anthology Merril edited was Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time, which was published in 1954 by Random House and came out in the UK with the title Human? In this volume, Merril put together stories about various forms of ESP, although (as described in Chap. 7) she avoided stories that suggest people with this capability are some sort of superhumans. Sporting a foreword by Sturgeon, the anthology included some of her regulars (such as Katherine MacLean, Walter M. Miller, Jr.,

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Asimov, Boucher, Bradbury, and Wollheim) along with some new stars, like Philip K. Dick, whom she calls “a young West Coast writer of exceptional promise” (p. 75). There are, as usual, a few wildcards: a story by Agatha Christie, the mystery writer; another by Rhoda Broughton, a popular nineteenth-century author; a story by Wil Thompson, which had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post; and finally a story by J. C. Furnas, a journalist and social historian who published a story in Esquire. At this point, she is more overt with her effort to blur the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy. Her introduction to the story by Furnas notes that the distinctions between science fiction and other literature is hard to make, but it does not have anything to do with the subject matter. The editorial patterns in these four anthologies are clear, as Merril seeks to break down barriers around science fiction and show continuities with other types of fiction. Starting with Beyond, Merril writes editorial comments with an intriguing voice. She is the curator of a cabinet of curiosities, introducing her readers to a broader world beyond the more common names and venues of science fiction. Merril’s selections and her comments about them are less about maintaining a rigorous border about what is science fiction and more about offering stories and other literature that she finds interesting. By refusing to assert a dogmatic definition of what is acceptable and suggesting that many authors and styles can be included, these early anthologies disrupt the purity of the genre. In so doing, they avoid the regimented mass culture despised by the Frankfurt School. With these titles under her belt and the increasing validity of science fiction as a mainstream genre, Merril became known for editing a series of Year’s Best anthologies. The first, S-F: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy, was published by Dell in 1956, with the note that the selections came from among 1000 stories published in 1955. She would go on to produce a series of twelve anthologies, with the titles getting shorter and shorter until 1968, when the cover is emblazoned with only four characters: “SF 12.” In line with the critique of genre and totalitarianism described above, Merril also tells the reader that there is no “formula” for science fiction (1956, front matter). In the second volume’s introduction to Kornbluth’s story, Merril makes a bald statement about her objections to the formative aesthetic of the genre, some ten years before anyone started talking about the new wave:

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Even in the heyday of Technocratic Utopianism, when the intellectual elite among the Boosters of Blind Progress were blandly assured that all the ills of man would one day be cured by beating our picks and shovels into pushbuttons, and our church chimes into Pavlovian dinner-bells—when most “scientifiction” was a hash and rehash of behaviorist doctrine and mechanist dogma for the worshipers of the fatted machine—there were still people like Kapek, Forster, and Benet, using the same medium to question the accepted credos. (1957, p. 25; capitalization as in original)

Like her earlier stand-alone anthologies, the first Year’s Best volumes include some stories by authors outside typical science fiction publications, such as E.  C. Tubb, who is “almost unknown in this country” (1956, p.  216). The second volume contains a verse parody of John W. Campbell’s 1938 short story, “The Thing.” That is not to say that the volume eschewed commercial success; in fact, Merril arranged an introduction by a famous name, filmmaker Orson Wells, and put some well-­ known authors on the cover. By 1965, Merril was ready to proclaim that the boundaries between the “once-sequestered science-fictionist” and other professions were breaking down. When she first started the anthology series, most authors were scientific professionals who had written some science fiction as a sideline and wrote nothing else. Most of the authors in her tenth annual had a primary occupation as writers (1965a, p. 375). For the eleventh annual, she states flatly: “This is not a collection of science-fiction stories.” Even though there are some well-known names from science fiction, only half of the stories are from genre magazines, with the rest coming from the general press. She suggests that the 1965 anthology is: a collection of imaginative speculative writing reflecting, I believe, clearly and sharply the problems and conflicts of civilized man [sic] today, and his hopes and apprehensions for the future. (1965a, p. 9)

At the end of the 1966 collection, Merril writes that it has become difficult to draw a line between science fiction and other writing. She approves; the label is “ludicrous” at a time when magazines carry advertisements with a “cheery astronaut” in a space capsule to illustrate the pitch: “the Hohner Harmonica became the first musical instrument to be

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played in outer space” (1966b, p. 380). She takes it as a positive development that Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon had recently been published by a major publisher without any labels. For the fifth Year’s Best anthology, Merril switched publishers; The Best of Sci-Fi 5 was published by Simon and Schuster in 1960. As noted in Chap. 7, she felt that the new publisher would give her more freedom, and certainly she included a little more variety. The fifth volume contains more poetry, an editorial by Campbell, and a nonfiction story from The New York Times about synthetic humans produced for machine tests. It also contained her complaint about the fate of science fiction in the press. Her friend Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz had been reviewed in a newspaper with a cautionary note to the reader that, although the book has a future setting and a rocket ship, it should not be confused with science fiction. Actually, the reviewer writes, it is “original and very serious.” Merril notes also that the publisher claimed that he is an artist-engineer and decorates the dust jacket with quotes from people who are not science fiction people (aside from Bradbury) to confirm that it is not science fiction. If a new name is needed to free good writing from what she calls “the Curse of the Tag,” she concludes, “down with ‘science fiction,’ sez I. Let’s have a new label. Or none at all” (1960, p. 313). Merril’s antagonism to the phrase “science fiction,” which was consistent since the introduction to Tomorrow, the Stars in 1952 and the early Year’s Best anthologies, only intensified. In the 1967 Best of the Best anthology, she states that “science fiction” as a term has lost its validity. The phrase means too many things to many different people. As a result, she has come to prefer SF, which she writes can mean science fable, scientific fantasy, speculative fiction, as well as science fiction (1967a, p. 2). The collection has the then-current writers who use fantastic elements to speculate about or comment on “society, humanity, life, the cosmos, reality” (p. 3). Science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s had been predictive and instructive, she writes. After 1955, new ideas were found in RAND reports and NASA press releases. A new era of writers turned away from hardware and sought to explore “the human factor” with literary sensibility (p. 5). Importantly, she says, the genre had enough legitimacy that it “provided the only widely read medium for protest and dissent in a witch-­ haunted country” (p. 5). These kinds of sentiments are the ones that are

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used describe the new wave, although they are often the inspiration for critical responses that are not attributed to Merril directly. As discussed in Chap. 7, at the end of the 1960s Merril had begun broadening her international horizons, which would lead to her voluntary exile from the United States. In 1967, the Year’s Best series as a whole started to be translated into Japanese. In 1968a, her last year in the United States, she used her experience in London to publish England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction. Because of her extensive correspondence with the authors, Merril often quotes from their letters. Using informal demarcations between the stories and the notes, Merril makes the notes an integral part of the whole book, so that the whole anthology functions as a stylistic experiment, just as individual stories in the anthology do. In addition to her editing of science fiction anthologies, this phase of Merril’s U.S. career is characterized by her book review column in F&SF from 1965 to 1969. One of Merril’s first book reviews in May 1965 begins with a conviction that science fiction is qualified for wider consumption: I sincerely believe that science fiction has been, and continues to be, not a separate flow paralleling the mainstream of modern writing, but a fresh current in it, clearly distinguishable at its point of entry, and eventually so entirely merged with the larger body as to retain existence only in terms of the measurable addition it has made to the content, turbulence, and current speed of the whole. (1965b, p. 70)

For Merril, the main idea in promoting the new wave is so that a larger audience can experience the power of science fiction. It is true that much of the promotion of the new wave is predicated on the idea that science fiction has transcended its humble, common roots in mass culture and is instead a vital project of the humanities. A common theme of those who venerate the new wave is the idea of literary quality. In addition, one of the aims of the new wave publicity is to sever the ties to science, or at least create a contrast to what comes to be called the hard science fiction of the pulp era; in her April 1965 column, for instance, Merril says that the “science” in science fiction is not about laboratories but about a disciplined way of thinking. She expands this idea in her September 1968 column,

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one of her last, by saying: “Science fiction is not science: its job is not getting the answers, but asking the questions” (1968b, p. 18; emphasis in original). This kind of literary and nonscientific writer is the kind Merril suggests can breach the mainstream market. In a column with a dateline of September 1965 but appearing in the December 1966 issue, Merril promotes J.  G. Ballard, among others, because they represent the “rather more subjective, perhaps the more thoughtful, certainly more literary, direction of British s-f in the mid-­ sixties” (1966b, p.  40). Suggesting that only Kurt Vonnegut and Cordwainer Smith in the United States are doing anything similar, she praises authors whose work “represents that area where s-f thinking and surrealist writing meet and marry” (p. 42). In her November 1967 column, she adds that some of the “old thing” writers, Asimov included, are forerunners to the new wave, insisting that anyone who applies experimental literary techniques to contemporary speculation is the “essence of science fiction” (1967b, p. 29). Merril seems to be seeking greater respectability for the genre, much as the F&SF tried to do.

8.3 New Wave or New Thing The “new thing” championed by Judith Merril was taken up by a variety of writers, all of whom sought to revolutionize the ideals of science fiction from the Gernsback and Campbell eras. There were several different lines of attack, but one commonality in the writers’ public statements was the desire to bring science fiction to a wider audience. The proponents seem to agree that science fiction can have an important role in educating the public about science and technology, and in that way it is not so different from Gernsback’s early science magazines. Michael Moorcock, for instance, wrote as a guest editor of the British Magazine New Worlds that he wants to explore “what s-f can become, at its best.” At the time when he was writing, science fiction often lacked “passion, subtlety, irony, original characterization, original and good style, a sense of involvement in human affairs, color, density, depth and, on the whole, real feeling from the writer” (1963, pp. 3, 123). Mentioning some of the authors he admires, including Ballard, he welcomes the new

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scholarly attention being paid to the genre but hopes authors will not devolve into simple sociological fiction. He ends with a jocular schoolboy’s comment: “Watch it, lads, we’re going to need to be good” (p. 127). Based on the fact that mainstream writers were starting to turn to science fiction, as evinced by Clockwork Orange (which had been published as a novel in 1962 by Anthony Burgess but not yet made into the film by Stanley Kubrick), he exhorts an imaginary coterie of male comrades. An exemplar of new wave is Moorcock’s The Black Corridor (1969), which first appeared in the United States as an Ace paperback even though the author is British. Like Ellison, Moorcock demonstrates the loss of the triumphant tone that predominated fiction of the Gernsback and Campbell eras. The new wave was also marked by formal experimentation, which is seen in the novel’s typography: conversations with the computer are misaligned and set off with asterisks and the main character’s inner thoughts sometimes break into typed letters forming into words or shapes, like the postwar genre of concrete poetry. This shift in style, though, is not an abstract experiment. The near-future setting threatens a business leader, Ryan, as the world’s nations are collapsing due to ideological battles. Mobs enthralled by a variety of ideologies, such as nativism and anti-feminism, battle for turf as cities fight civil wars. This nightmare scenario suggests that the outcome of the political idealism of the 1960s results in the destruction of civilization; Ryan secretly builds a spaceship and launches his family and a few close associates toward a distant star with the hope of forming a new civilization based on logic and order. It is difficult to know what to make of Ryan as a character-type without thinking about Cold War masculinity. Ryan was successful in business, like the Jim Barnes character in Destination Moon (1950), which was adapted from fiction by Heinlein. Barnes was an aeronautics magnate, though, and Ryan was a toy manufacturer who had money but little relevant experience. In some ways, Ryan could have been a spacefaring Babbitt, a parodic portrayal of a man with empty bourgeoisie values created by Sinclair Lewis. Ryan prepares for what he assumes is a coming mandate that all workers be British, not so much to gain the tax benefits but because he does not like a staff person who is not British. Like Babbitt, Ryan has an affair, but Ryan murders his mistress because he is afraid she

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will tell the secret of his rocket ship, which is under construction at the time. This inexperienced man who teaches himself how to fly his ship resembles the resourceful man championed since the days of Gernsback. No matter how detestable he is, in the world of the novel he is the only one who can escape the chaos unfolding on Earth. The choices made in the plot allow a long time to be spent on Ryan’s great suffering on the journey, having only the computer and his hallucinations to talk to while the other passengers are in hibernation, and provide time for flashback chapters depicting the hellscape that only his leadership could escape. At this late stage in the genre, the exuberance of privately funded innovation that was seen in Skylark of Space has vanished, as has the charming banter between the married couples. The interstellar voyage seems like it will be successful, and so too might be the attempt to save humanity, but only due to the hard work of the autodidactic organization man. Again, a reader notes the anguish of the protagonist, disconnected from community, who seemingly has no choice but to carry the weight of civilization. Strangely enough, Moorcock’s desire for a new kind of science fiction, one that utilizes new forms and permits readers and authors to explore emotions, seems to follow the lines well established by Gernsback and Campbell. The following year Moorcock takes over as editor of New Worlds. His first editorial (1964) heaps effusive praise on William Burroughs, whom Moorcock crowns as the first science fiction writer to achieve the potential of the medium. He imagines a new kind of science fiction reader who is “dissatisfied” by typical literature, “who looks to SF for something more relevant to his [sic] own life and times.” Moorcock promises as editor to nurture this kind of writing in the future in the same way that Gernsback and Campbell hailed their readers as an elite group of men who deserved better than what modern literature was providing to them. That being said, it is unclear how serious Moorcock was. Moorcock, according to Latham (2006), put on a show against the “Milford axis” (i.e., the authors and editors affiliated with Merril’s workshop, also known as the Milford Mafia) in a way that is not apparent from the printed versions of his editorials.

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According to witnesses, Moorcock was either roaring drunk or brilliantly simulating drunkenness, gurgling scotch straight from the bottle as he comically pretended to misplace pages and misconstrue his own meanings (or those of his purported “ghost writer,” whom at one point he threatened to fire for forcing him to recite such gibberish). … The reason why I emphasize the performative nature of Moorcock’s speech is that it highlights the distance between all the stern New Wave rhetoric about transcending genre conventions and the time-honored subcultural realities of fandom, which demanded a playful mockery of sercon [i.e., serious conference] pretension. (Latham, p. 308)

Merril’s experience of promoting the “new thing” spanned two decades; it may have been that Moorcock’s interest was passing. This is not to say that Moorcock’s critiques are invalid; his insights into the sensation of freedom that golden-age authors provided to their readers are astute. Moorcock continues his attacks on golden-age authors even after New Worlds ceases regular publication in 1971. For instance, he presents a scathing condemnation of all things Campbell in a 1978 essay “Starship Stormtroopers,” using Heinlein’s novel as a starting point. Moorcock accuses the writers of the golden age of enthusiastic militarism and ends with a remarkable attack, not on the fiction, but on the idea that readers of golden-age fiction (as represented by Heinlein) are reading something radical: Next time you pick up a Heinlein book think of the author as looking a bit like General Eisenhower or, if that image isn’t immediate enough, some chap in early middleage, good-looking in a slightly soft way, with silver at the temples, a blue tie, a sober three-pieced suit, telling you with a quiet smile that Margaret Thatcher cares for individualism and opportunity above all things, as passionately in her way as you do in yours. And then you might have some idea of what you’re actually about to read. (p. 201)

Moorcock’s concern for individualism fit in with Schlesinger’s commentary. Indeed, New Worlds and new wave authors in general seem to be mostly concerned with the hardships faced by men in the technological society. One obvious deficiency is that editors like Moorcock select few women writers to publish stories or review work. A great feminist

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renaissance of science fiction was underway, the bloc of famous writers before whom many critics had assumed were none. Some of the most famous feminist writers of the 1970s were already reaching print, in addition to Merril. Ursula LeGuin was publishing stories while Moorcock was editing New Worlds, as were such substantial names as Katherine MacLean, Anne McCaffrey, Vonda N.  McIntyre, Joanna Russ, Pamela Sargent, and Kate Wilhelm. These authors were finding homes in a variety of science fiction periodicals, but not with the supposedly radical vision taken up by Moorcock. Although Merril had been advocating for a new kind of science fiction for many years, Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions and his speeches at the World Science Fiction Convention are often credited as defining the new direction. Ellison credits Campbell and other writers in the 1940s for demanding that human beings use the gadgets promoted by Hugo Gernsback, but for Ellison these were limited attempts to work within the genre. What is more, Ellison says, new authors have been held back by the mainstream interest in science fiction: the new wave needs an experimental voice that breaks taboos. Both Ellison and Merril cast the earlier age as some kind of stodgy past over which the new generation must rise. Ellison, though, is more interested in the injuries men face in a technological society. Comparing Dangerous Visions’ table of contents to the authors Merril anthologized, some of whom are described in this chapter, one can see that Ellison was borrowing from her author lists and, in many cases, Milford Conference attendees. The Milford connection is worth considering because of Ellison’s perception of an insult from this group. In a speech he delivered at the 1966 Westercon 19 convention and later transcribed for the fanzine Algol, Ellison relates his experience at the first Milford Conference, which recalls comments about the so-called Milford Mafia. He does not mention Merril, saying that the workshop was organized by Damon Knight. “I could do nothing right,” he writes, as if he is one of his own characters suffering against adversity. “They made me feel like two and a half pounds of dog meat” (p. 28). He returned to the workshop in 1965 and wrote a story in one evening. Knight and a group of his allies panned the story, and he reports unhelpful criticism like it was “dumb and badly typed.” Half of the room, though, thought the story was appealing, and Frederik

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Pohl agreed to publish it in Galaxy. This was none other than the story that caused a rift between Merril and Ellison, “‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticktockman,” as described in Chap. 7. Although Merril declined to anthologize it, precipitating their falling out, the story was anthologized by others and went on to receive accolades. This was one of two nihilistic, Hugo-winning stories published by Frederik Pohl that brought Ellison to prominence. The first was the 1965 “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” that appeared in Galaxy. The second story was the 1967 “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” which Pohl selected for If. “Repent” begins with a quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay “Civil Disobedience,” mimicking the ideas of Schlesinger, except that the setting is a future time when most people serve the state as machines, not as men. The narrator describes a character who is the only one who dares to defy the smooth functioning of a world controlled with timeclock precision. The latter story concerns a character in a world dominated by a sentient supercomputer designed to fight World War III.  The war had ended, so the supercomputer, which can transform reality, amuses itself by torturing the five remaining humans. Although there are other people in the story, the protagonist is alienated from the others, saying he is the only sane one. The computer mutates their bodies and tortures them, denying them agency. The nightmare scenarios in both of these stories depict a technological world where the male protagonist suffers greatly, struggling vainly against an inhuman landscape, barely able to survive. They are quite a distance from the optimism of the typical golden-age setting, and the plots do not suggest that humans have any meaningful way to transform the environment. The protagonist’s isolation due to the ubiquitous device contrasts with earlier visions of community, by Merril and others. One also wonders at the sadism of an author who delights in the depiction of anguish. The frequent reprintings of “Repent, Harlequin!” do not include Ellison’s comments that accompanied his stories in a 1979 anthology. Offering the bona fide that he attended the Freedom March in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, he seeks to proclaim the solidarity for social justice that he once had. In the intervening years, though, he says robberies and rapes committed by black people (apparently against

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people he knew) have made him retreat from the optimism of the 1960s into an individualistic ethos: My days of White Liberal Guilt are gone. My days of championing whole classes and sexes and pigmentations of people [are] gone. … Now I come, after all these years, to the only position that works: each one on his or her own merits. … Isaac Asimov assures me it’s a rational universe, predicated on sanity and order. Yeah? Well, tell me about God. Tell me who He is, why He allows the foulest hyenas of our society to run amuck while decent men and women cower in terror behind Fox locks and Dictograph systems. (1979, pp. 18–9)

This kind of commentary may have endeared Ellison to many people in science fiction audiences at the time, and the theme resembles comments that John W. Campbell made late in his career (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.4). Along these lines, the supposed disruption of the new wave seems more like a continuation of the golden age. Chronologically, the comments fall midway between Moorcock’s 1969 The Black Corridor and Heinlein’s 1982 Friday, suggesting that the new wave’s isolated, alienated protagonists in a setting where social structures are crumbling can be attributed to a sustained reaction against new successes in social justice. It is a historical fact that the first glimpses U.S. audiences had of the new wave were through the standard golden-age pulp  magazines. Greenland (1983) gives AMZ credit for publishing stories of the new type, including the early work by Ballard. He gives Campbell a pass for his “puritanical” AST, suggesting that it was Campbell’s interest in scientific accuracy that “forced to him to rate the head above the heart.” As a result, Greenland repeats the misinformation that women had to use gender-neutral names or male pseudonyms, drawing a false parallel to the “women novelists of the nineteenth century” (p. 26). He gives the credit for the new wave to Moorcock, marking the origin of the movement to the time when he became editor of New Worlds in the summer of 1964. Because of Moorcock, Greenland writes, enthusiasm gathered for the new wave, including from “the eclectic American anthologist Judith Merril” (p.  17). The way he downplays Merril, suggesting she was a mimic rather than an innovator, is indicative of criticism that will follow,

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as is his failure to understand why her anthologies are “eclectic”: Merril’s ideological project of breaking down the rigid definition of the genre and her effort to find good writing outside the typical venues, to Greenland, are unimportant or maybe even self-indulgent. He goes on to suggest that her promotion of British science fiction was for her own purposes. “Few British writers recognized the picture of the movement she attempted in her anthology England Swings SF” (p. 167). He does not offer any sustained evaluation of women writers; he focuses on Aldiss, Ballard, and Moorcock. Merril is usually mentioned as a correspondent of Aldiss (i.e., citations of his letters to Merril); Ursula Le Guin, Dorris Lessing, and Pamela Zoline are mentioned in passing. Given that science fiction was finding increasing attention from university professors in the 1970s, the new wave became ensconced in academic discourse as the latest and greatest of the genre. Critics like Aldiss (1973), for example, prefer science fiction that embraces the indefinite and avoids grand narratives about progress to authors of golden-age science fiction, represented by authors who began their careers in the 1930s. Clareson (1971) declared that earlier writers “disregarded the quality of human experience in order to propagandize for technology,” which became unsuitable after the United States deployed atomic weapons in World War II. The anti-scientific attitude of the new wave authors, he suggests, resulted in the “belated” academic usefulness of the genre (pp. 20–1). Even as this critique spread and changed the reputations of golden-age writers, though, it failed to make a meaningful impact on the baseline assumptions of its most prominent writers. In the context of Cold War discourses about masculinity, the new wave seems—in the main—to be conventional. In the midst of protests for civil rights, ending war, and environmentalism, the new wave’s embrace of individualism—and its acceptance and promotion in academic circles—seems disingenuous. Dismissing Merril’s effort to broaden the genre is not only historically inaccurate but also diminishes her contribution to changing the nature of science fiction. Her work promoting a “new thing” is still instructive today, which can be missed if one assumes she was just a latecomer to the “new wave.”

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8.4 Some of the Authors Merril Saw Merril’s mature statement about the end of science fiction appeared in the May 1966 Extrapolation. Partly building on an editorial in a recent Year’s Best, she makes a longer statement in the academic venue. The title is usually printed as “What Do You Mean Science? Fiction?,” but as shown in Fig. 8.2, the words “science” and “fiction” are on top of each other. As the essay progresses, Merril interrogates each term separately and together: “science,” “fiction,” and “science fiction.” From the start of her twenty-five years of engagement with science fiction, she says, she and the fans she knew had become aware that what they learned about science in high school was inadequate. Modern forms of fiction and major findings of science were both developed in the eighteenth century, she writes, but at the start of the twentieth century, philosophical and scientific disciplines were splitting apart and finding new forms of organization. To Merril (1966a), the first years of science fiction were marked by contradiction: Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was announced when Henry Ford was making a transition from his Model A to Model T automobile; Franz Boaz’s students in cultural anthropology, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, were making strides to promote the culture concept when the first rocket tests were underway. Thus, while technological advances were concrete and visible, the sciences were

Fig. 8.2  After many years of editing the Year’s Best anthologies, Merril extended her musing about the label “science fiction” (1966b). The word “science” appears on top of “fiction,” asking a question about both and the combination as well. She further wonders about the label in her subtitle: “year’s best what?”

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suggesting that the world was less than definite. It would take science fiction some time to move from the former to the latter. This changed in 1948–1949, Merril says, when a broad range of U.S. publishers and readers found a new interest in science fiction. Along with new book projects, magazines like F&SF offered a venue for a different kind of science fiction. Finally, science fiction began to catch up with new developments in science, and at that time, writers had a chance to catch up with literary and scientific standards. As stated above, Merril sought to include a wide variety of authors and styles in her anthologies, so picking just a few of the authors as representatives is vexed. Plurality and variety are the essential characteristics, not just promoting the narrow vision of an elite group. That being said, a few authors were repeatedly included and play important roles in Merril’s autobiographical statements, helping to create a short list. These authors chronicle a range of responses to the Cold War, but also point the way for innovators hoping to create new science fiction. Often, in ways that are reminiscent of Merril’s earliest work, they use fictional techniques to challenge readers’ expectations. Katherine MacLean and Merril met around the time they were trying to place their first stories with Campbell in AST. Based on information he obtained in personal correspondence, Davin (2006) does not accept MacLean’s assessment that Campbell made it difficult for women to publish in AST, stating that all writers faced strongly worded editorial direction from him. Certainly, her first three stories appeared in AST, although it seems unwise to discredit, as Davin does, MacLean’s assessment of her negative experience. MacLean graduated from Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia University that was one of the nineteenth-century colleges established to offer women access to education. She studied psychology and worked in an industrial setting, experiences that bring credibility to her stories. As described in Chap. 7, MacLean lived with Merril for a time after her breakup with Fred Pohl, and they conducted ESP experiments in the 1950s. Unlike Merril, she does not directly address women’s issues; her fiction resembles that of earlier women writers who rarely even portray women characters. That being said, MacLean’s refusal to engage in settings with planet-smashing space opera as a backdrop marks her, like

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Leigh Brackett, as a dissident from the imperialist and masculinist assumptions of the postwar period. Her narrators are notable for their precise descriptions of paranormal phenomena. Merril selected MacLean’s first published story, “Defense Mechanism,” for republication in Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time (1954). In her editorial note, Merril states that this story represents new thinking in psychic abilities. In the past, according to Merril, ESP and other mental abilities were thought to be signs of a small elite group, but now people are more likely to think that they are latent abilities in all humans (this fits in with her opposition toward Homo superior, discussed in Chap. 7). Like Merril’s story “That Only a Mother,” MacLean’s story involves a young family whose child seems to exhibit ESP abilities. This time, the story connects the child and the father, who share a telepathic bond that makes the mother uncomfortable. The child’s telepathic abilities save the father, though, in a confrontation. A hunter has trapped the child’s pet rabbit. The father narrowly escapes a gunshot by anticipating the hunter’s unexpected attack. After the hunter is brought into custody, the narrator concludes that rudimentary telepathic behavior is normal and all of humanity is seemingly normal. Everyday intuition and nonverbal communication between individuals, the story asserts, are manifestations of common psychic abilities and not evidence of the emergence of a new, superior race. Another of MacLean’s stories, “The Fittest,” found its way into Beyond Human Ken (1952). The title itself evokes the social Darwinism in much of early science fiction, but the story deftly subverts two sets of expectations set up by prominent practitioners. The plot of the story involves the terraforming of Venus, which is based on a scientist’s supposition that plant life on Earth is responsible for its life-sustaining ecosystem. In the first part of the story, a simple and gradual method of transformation is imagined. As opposed to sending heavy equipment to Venus to pulverize rock and manufacture atmosphere—the same method advocated in the Heinlein juvenile Farmer in the Sky (1950)—MacLean’s scientist proposes to launch a small rocket filled with carefully selected, simple plants that will gradually transform Venus into a habitable planet. The second half of the story involves an ethical dilemma: what if Venus already harbors indigenous life? The scientist makes the trip to the planet and,

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indeed, does find intelligent life. The indigenous inhabitants are curious and intelligent, but they lack tools to manipulate the rocky environment, limiting their evolutionary and cultural development. The creatures love tools and are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to use Earth technology. In this way, the story tells of a different outcome than one of exploitation and colonial violence. The lifeforms’ lack of tools, in this story, is not suggested to be a reflection of their primitive biology and lower stage of evolution, as was so often done in golden-age fiction (compare this to Tweel in Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey”). The creatures are not stuck on some lower rung of the stages of civilization; once they have access, they are eager to work—in fact, they are too eager. The scientists realize that this species is ripe for exploitation by “the fittest,” or the people of Earth. They choose to conceal their knowledge of the species so that they will avoid exploitation, taking responsibility to limit the destructive impact of the diffusion of their technology. Carol Emshwiller met her husband while they were art students at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. She obtained a Fulbright award to study art in Paris, where she lived with her husband shortly after being married. They traveled throughout Europe by motorcycle. She attended the Milford Conference regularly with her husband, who was better known at the time. Merril writes that, each summer, “Carol pops out of the playpen-and-baby-bottle laden car, an infant (at least figuratively) under one arm, and her newest manuscript under the other” (Merril, 1960, p.  163). Her husband’s career continued with visual arts, but Emshwiller made a transition into a writer and became renowned for her fiction. The stories that Merril selects from Emshwiller involve individuals in near-future settings with complicated narration, in the sense that the narrators and the settings they inhabit cannot easily be understood by the readers. Emshwiller’s “Day at the Beach” appeared in the fifth anthology and also in the Best of the Best compendium in 1970. The protagonists, along with other humans, endured some sort of catastrophe about four years before the time of the story. They describe their privations, scavenging for food and having trouble getting spectacles for their son, who was born after the apocalypse. Daily life has been disrupted, but the characters remember a time when they used to visit the beach on Saturdays.

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They venture out, but encounter thugs trying to steal their supplies. The husband matter-of-factly murders the leader and his companions run off. On their way home, the wife concludes that it was an enjoyable day. From a science fiction context, this story raises a lot of questions, only some of which can be answered by the reader from the information provided in the story. The most understandable aspects of the story involve love and powerful relationships. Emshwiller’s “Chicken Icarus,” which also offers a puzzle for the reader, appeared in SF 12. In some ways, this story is a continuation of Merril’s “That Only a Mother,” except that here the child is male and the mother has grown to feel disdain for him. The first-person narrator tries to explain itself to the reader, which is difficult because the people taking care of him do not want him to look at himself or go outside. Abruptly, the narrator reports that he is raped sometimes by his nurse, and the narrator wonders if his purpose in life is to be used for sexual pleasure. The reader comes to understand that the narrator, below the neck, is or resembles a penis. The story ends with the narrator on the cusp of living a life as a celebrity, a freak-show life similar to Leigh Brackett’s “The Halfling.” Like “Day at the Beach,” the primary experience is one of bewilderment. The reader can puzzle out some of the characteristics of the narrator and his appearance, but the narrator does not readily introduce the reader to an understandable science fiction setting. The most consistent and understandable part of the experience of reading this story is the narrator’s desire to comprehend his identity and take control of his social situation. Emshwiller went on to publish other stories. Her “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” appeared in Ellison’s 1967 anthology, Dangerous Visions, and again in Sargent’s first Women of Wonder anthologies in 1975. Samuel R.  Delany is the same age as  Merril’s elder daughter; they apparently lived in the same commune for a time, and Delany visited them when they were in London. In her autobiography, Merril gives Michael Moorcock the honor of being the person who promoted the work of Samuel R. Delany, who started publishing in 1962 at the age of twenty. However, it is clear that Merril considers Delany something of a family friend. Merril includes “The Star Pit” in her twelfth annual, at a time when his next novel, Nova, was in press with Doubleday—in other words, at the time he tried unsuccessfully to sell the serial rights to

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Campbell (see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.5). In her introduction, Merril praises Delany for being “where it is at: multi-mediumed [sic], trans-cultural, inter-racial, call it multiplicity.” She notes his varied interests in music, languages, mathematics, and writing. “The Star-Pit” features a setting that is the flip side of a space opera: Vyme, the main character, works odd jobs with a group of maintenance workers and others who support the infrastructure of the galactic empire. In this way, he represents the legions of workers who were infrequently depicted in the Gernsback and Campbell eras of science fiction. He feels as if his life is constrained and lacking adventure, but he and his companions lack the physiology to allow them to go to the outer rim and thus are not afforded the privileges of the “golden” people who are not debilitated when they travel away from the galactic center. As a first-person narrator, he lacks the certainty of golden-age narrators. He reaches out to his readers occasionally, wishing he could explain things better, and he expects the readers will not share his worldview. He introduces the reader to the vast galactic network without engaging in an adventure. Overall, “The Star-Pit” seems to lack a plot in a conventional sense. There are many episodes that reveal essential personalities of the characters and some interesting repetitions that depict the shared experiences of the future world, but there is nothing like a rising action. For the ancient Greeks, a plot with a strong tie between complication and resolution was supposed to bring about catharsis, a purging of antisocial emotions during a religious festival. Later writers of fiction left aside the religious aspect but made use of the technique. For some authors invested in the autonomy of their readers’ intellects, the railroad rising action that suggests there is only one solution that can resolve the plot is unsuitable. Surely, space opera’s galactic conflicts start with a threat as the complication and the elimination of the enemy as the resolution. Delany offers an adept modification in this story. Like Vyme, readers are stuck, waiting for a complication and some meaningful events to happen that will lead the way to an adventure. Certainly, events happen and Vyme learns about the universe through unexpected events, but not in a neat tie between complication and resolution that brings about some sort of a catharsis. The end of the story sees Vyme walking home alone, pondering an existence that is made up of a few choices of direction. The plot of this story does

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not transform the main character; that is a privilege afforded only to science fiction adventurers. In her memoir, Merril wishes she could capture the “down and dirty days of ghetto science fiction” when she and other authors were “young, passionate, frail, tough, loving, quarrelling, horny human beings.” Few of her friends’ memoirs have done so, although Merril praises Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast for depicting a community she remembers, even though Delany is the next generation (Merril and Pohl-Weary, 2002, p. 10). Theodore Sturgeon was, of course, the writer who helped Merril create her name, but before that, her admiration for his science fiction led to friction among the Futurians because he had been published in Campbell’s AST. Sturgeon is well represented in Merril’s anthologies, starting with his story “The Sky Was Full of Ships” in her Shot in the Dark. “The Perfect Host” in Beyond Human Ken is one of his most experimental stories, relying on the point of view of eight different entities. The Sturgeon story “Bulkhead” appeared in the first Year’s Best anthology and also was selected for the best of the best volumes. It starts out with that notable trick of experimental fiction, a second-person narration. In fact, the narration resembles the frame narration of Merril’s “Death Is the Penalty” (see Chap. 7). The narrator repeatedly explains to the reader what “you” should feel, hailing the reader as a potential member of a deep space exploratory force. At first, the reader thinks, the story involves two astronauts, separated for safety reasons by a barrier. Eventually, the reader learns that there is just one astronaut on the voyage, but he has been talking to an emanation of his younger self. As with many new wave stories, this story purports to be an investigation of psychology. The astronaut’s antagonism toward his younger self is an interesting twist, undermining the supposed excellence of the superior beings that are selected for the exploratory force. Although the story is told with a great deal of speculative psychology, it is not entirely practical. It is hard to see the insight into human psychology the story delivers. Merril includes Sturgeon’s “The Man Who Lost the Sea” in the fifth annual anthology. Again, the narration is second person, in the place of an omniscient narrator. The opening line of the story is, “Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy” (Merril, 1960,

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p. 258). This narrator’s longing for the dreams of his youth is reminiscent of Leigh Brackett’s “The Halfling.” What the reader encounters in the first paragraphs is a man reminiscing about his days as a boy on the beach, with only interspersed comments about an injured, confused man who is measuring rotations of satellites and watching instrument readouts. It becomes clear, eventually, that the man is clinging to his happy memory because he is dazed from some sort of accident, and the story follows his train of thought as he realizes that Earth does not have satellites that orbit with the frequency he is observing. Finally, at the end of the story, the reader understands that the man is part of an expedition to Mars. Instead of a triumphant astronaut emboldened by the technology of the military-industrial complex, the story ends with his final words: “‘God,’ he cries, dying on Mars, ‘God, we made it!’” (p. 270). This anticlimax contrasts nicely with the triumphant stories of big science depicted in golden-age stories. The story went on to be nominated for a Hugo and was included in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Short Stories in 1960, when it was edited by Martha Foley. J. G. Ballard has an interesting biography, given that he was born and spent his early years in the final years of the Shanghai International Concession created in China during the Opium Wars. Merril includes his first published story in the second Best Of anthology, noting that his Shanghai origin helps to give the volume an international flair. She republished many of his stories over the years, and his fiction figured heavily in England Swings SF. After Merril promoted him, he became prominent in the new wave, providing an interesting bridge between the two groups, the new wave and the new thing. Michael Moorcock explicitly mentions Ballard’s 1962 novel, The Drowned World, in his essay about the new wave, “Play with Feeling.” First published as a novella, two years later the novel version became a Science Fiction Book Club edition in the United Kingdom and the United States. This novel disrupts the faith in the methodology of big science and its large-scale engineering projects, but it does not do so by directly attacking their methodologies or impacts. In The Drowned World, Ballard casts a nightmare that returns the world’s climate to a prehistoric environment, but unlike “The Runaway Skyscraper,” there are no fresh-­faced engineers with the power restore humanity. The opening reflects the golden age in

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that a coalition of scientific and military personnel is investigating a scientific phenomenon. In spite of this overture, the story unexpectedly turns away from those golden-age conventions. In the second chapter the narrator tells us that the climate change is due to an unspecified “succession of gigantic geophysical upheavals” over the past seventy years (p. 20). As the world tries to adapt to the increased temperature, scientists notice that the growth of plant life accelerates and the rate of mutations increases, presenting the nightmare of the Carboniferous period. Fitting in with environmentalist concerns of the 1960s, this novel is also relevant to today’s interest in the Anthropocene epoch. According to the science of the 1960s, regression to earlier forms of life would be impossible, and mutations caused by the environment in a neo-­ Lamarckian fashion would never occur. That being said, it was still common to believe the reverse in science fiction: that new forms of superior life could arise in direct response to environmental change. If one assumes that Ballard understands the science, then the characters are part of a charade. They say that organisms are responding to the rising temperatures, humidity, and radiation by returning to the forms of the Triassic period, the geologic epoch 200 million years ago that was marked by mass extinction of ocean life. Dr. Kerans, the leader of the expedition, learns from his colleague Dr. Bodkin that the complex life forms that are left—amphibians, birds, and humans—are looking out of place as life falls backward to a simpler time. As impossible as it would be scientifically, the novel is clever by turning the golden-age assumptions about the future of the human race around. If humans can quickly slide up a teleological evolutionary scale, then what prevents them from sliding back? The novel also makes a clear shift away from an individualistic aesthetic when the scientific-military expedition decides to vacate the site and return home. Big science is shown as unable to carry forth with saving humanity. The two scientists and Beatrice Dahl, a woman who was living in the looted splendor of London, decide to stay behind and experience these changes without the support of the coalition. They decide that they can survive at the tops of the drowned buildings, scavenging for food and living in the relative comfort of penthouses made enjoyable by air conditioners powered by gasoline generators. However, the novel does not allow them to do so. Just as soon as the expedition leaves and they take up their

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routine, they are besieged by looting pirates who drain a part of the city so they are better able to plunder it. The trio’s effort to probe existence independently is interrupted by the barbarity of the head pirate, Strangman, who announces his vision for reclaiming London. The trio, rescued from the pirates, is now no longer able to explore their psychic dreams. Kearns uses explosives to destroy the pirates’ land reclamation and flees alone by paddleboat toward the south. The end of the novel describes Kearns as scratching his diary into the wall of the boat, marking the twenty-seventh day, and soon the narrator tells us that heat, rain, alligators, and giant bats besiege him. The novel ends here, but in an act of verisimilitude, it does not describe what he finds; after all, novels need dry land and publishers. Ballard was also one of the pioneers of a type of story that becomes known for its mad and dying astronauts. His first effort in this regard is “Cage of Sand” (1994), a story that appeared in the British fanzine associated with the new wave, New Worlds. The story begins with the character Bridgeman, who is waiting for what is described only as a “conjunction” (p. 657). Readers do not immediately learn what a conjunction is, but they hear the story about how a blight caused by a Martian virus has infected the area, bringing an end to the space program and also necessitating a quarantine of deserts (whence the story’s name comes). The same phenomenon befell the Soviets near the Caspian Sea. Eventually, readers learn the “conjunction” is a chance convergence of the orbits of spacecraft in a holding pattern because they were not allowed to return to Earth. This “macabre spectacle of the dead astronauts” (p.  660) causes their friends to wait expectantly for the event. They seem to know the orbits of each particular dead astronaut and can name the American or Soviet corpse that is flying overhead at any time. The climax of the story is the absence of the capsule of an astronaut named Merril, and it soon is learned that the capsule has fallen from Earth orbit. Bridgeman, himself a former member of the space force, comes across the crash first and exclaims, “We made it!” (p. 671). The adventure in space, so prominent in the golden age, is no longer a worthy goal; instead, the astronauts only hope that they can be buried on Earth. Merril does not include these iconic new wave stories in her anthologies, but she publishes many others, including a group of pieces that would be included in Ballard’s 1970 collection The Atrocity Exhibition

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(known as Love and Napalm: Export USA in the United States). Here, the writing looks much less like science fiction than experimental poetry. The stories included in England Swings SF resemble science fiction slightly: “You and Me and the Continuum,” “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” and “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy.” The stories rely on alternate histories and themes of the space age. That being said, they are hardly stories at all. At some times they resemble newsreels, but for the most part they are fragmented lists of ideas. The narrator is unable to weave them together into a coherent whole, requiring the reader to work harder to extract sense from the stories. Cordwainer Smith worked for the U.S. government and wrote under a pseudonym to protect his job. Born in between Asimov and Campbell with the name Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, Cordwainer Smith spent his early years in Asia (the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen was his godfather). During World War II, he helped to start the Office of War Information, and after the war, he wrote the textbook Psychological Warfare in 1948. Merril praises his first science fiction story written as an adult, “Scanners Live in Vain,” from 1950, saying “the impact of the story was tremendous, and baffling” (1966c, p. 15). She says it was the first story she saw that integrated the need for new forms of science with the need for new forms of fiction. Merril tried to get “Scanners Live in Vain” into her anthology with Heinlein, Tomorrow, the Stars, but was not successful. (Pohl included it in his own anthology shortly thereafter.) The story is remarkable for its examination of masculinity. “Scanners” are astronauts who have undergone surgery to create a barrier between their rational minds and their emotions because hyperspace travel is psychologically damaging, harkening back to Campbell’s “Wrongness of Space” in the Cosmos serial. While piloting their spaceships, this barrier allows the scanners to stay cool and calculating. At home, though, the masculinity causes some difficulties; for this reason, the scanners are able to temporarily reengage their emotions when they are with their families. The sacrifice these men have made is severe and permanent, but at the end of the story, they learn that new developments have made the scanner surgery unnecessary. The group of mutilated men, who have directed their public virtue to the

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maintenance of the galactic empire, suddenly find themselves obsolete and tossed aside. Their valor and their honor—the values that helped them justify their exploitation—are now useless. Smith’s science fiction takes place under the aegis of the Instrumentality, an all-powerful hierarchy of elites that not only wields great power but also guides the destiny of the human race. The Instrumentality provides life and protection, but also seems to have eliminated hope, freedom, and equality. In the 1962 novella “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell,” Smith depicts an ambassador from the Instrumentality who hopes to gain civil rights for the “underpeople.” Through his alliance with C’Mell, he is able to make contact with the resistance fighters, and they form a deep bond while achieving a slight, incremental advance in the rights of her people. Smith’s 1964 story “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal” likewise displays the futility of superhuman action; Suzdal, operating on the outer fringes of the galactic empire, is censured for defending himself against a hostile race. This provides a bleak vision of the Instrumentality. Although he thought he had extraordinary freedom to do whatever he needs to do to accomplish his mission, Suzdal is punished by the Instrumentality because of his crime: while under attack, he had modified a temporal device to send cat embryos two million years into the past with the instructions that they should not “breed true.” Instead, they should “become civilized,” “learn speech,” and “serve man.” These instructions change the biology of the cats, and they evolve for two million years before coming to aid Suzdal. The narrator tells the reader: The cats came. Their ships glittered in the naked sky above Arachosia. Their little combat craft attacked. The cats who had not existed a moment before, but who had then had two million years in which to follow a destiny printed right into their brains, printed down their spiral cords, etched into the chemistry of their bodies and personalities. The cats had turned into people of a kind, with speech, intelligence, hope, and a mission. […] ‘This is the day of the year of the promised age. And now come cats!’” (Smith, 1975, pp. 114–5, emphasis in original)

The ludicrousness of cat-sized attack vehicles is matched by the ridiculous reliance on teleological evolution. Although it may have been true

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that this outdated theory of evolution was still popular among some readers, this kind of purpose-driven evolution had been discredited by Darwin. These absurdities underscore that Suzdal is an antihero, not a triumphant, conquering hero of the golden age. He is punished for making a form of life that he sends back in time—because they might be better than humans. In his mandate, he is told that he is allowed to break the rules, but then is stripped of his name, his rank, his life, and even the ability to end his life. In this story, like “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell,” Smith depicts a corps of individuals charged with enhancing the relationship of a superior species with others, and yet the result is chaos. The aims and methods of the organization do not match up with the goals of the individuals involved: they desire to protect life and to fall in love. In Smith’s eyes, something seems to have gone wrong. Far from being the agents of cultural understanding and technical exchange, these ambassadors are in between incommensurate world systems, and their resources do not help them accomplish the goals that they deem worthy. Suzdal is a far stretch from the confident and effective golden-age protagonists of Robert A. Heinlein’s Space Cadet or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Suzdal is a lone representative of the Instrumentality, given extraordinary freedom to do whatever he needs to do to accomplish his mission. Nevertheless, he is punished by the Instrumentality because of his supposed crimes. This absurd and wistful vision of a decrepit federation and a failed astronaut as the story’s protagonist is a far cry from the logical and righteous U.S. science fiction of the pulp magazines forty years earlier. “The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal” represents a distinct shift toward the irrational in the aesthetic of science fiction that occurs in the 1960s. Authors are exhorted to turn away from definitive, technology-­ rich visions of the future that rely on a confidence in big science and instead try their hand at “inner space.”

8.5 Dying Astronauts The fiction that Merril promoted in her anthologies clearly challenges and expands the minds and intellectual capabilities of her readers. Fiction of the new wave, though, seems fascinated with lamenting the sacrifices

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that men made in the name of the technological age, clinging manly civic virtue long past its usefulness, like the Scanners in Cordwainer Smith‘s story. This kind of fiction was not invented by the new wave, and it is based on a general lamentation about the direction of the technological age. With big science, the large teams and big budgets meant that projects seemed to have an inertia of their own, separate from social needs. The optimism that men would be able to work without encumbrance in outer space so often seen in the Gernsback and Campbell eras was no longer tenable. The politicization and bureaucratization occasioned by the space race resulted in the disillusionment of men, who were now more likely to lament their lost masculine freedom. The attempt to tie science to the prestige of the country became a theme of the 1960 presidential election, demonstrating a wholehearted belief in big science even as some were questioning the way resources were used. “The 1960 campaign was not fought on the space and missile gap alone,” according to McDougall (1985), “but no issue better symbolized the New Frontier that the Kennedy/Johnson ticket asked the American people to explore” (p. 221). As President Eisenhower attempted to defend the failures of the U.S. program, Vice President Nixon suggested that Soviet successes were unsustainable due to the Soviet Union’s culture. Nixon’s rival was the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, who won partly based on his criticism of the Republicans’ science and technology policy. Eisenhower, in his 1961 farewell address, warned Americans about the “military-industrial complex,” and Weinberg (1961) coined the phrase “big science” in his critique of the limitations imposed by governmentdirected innovation: big budgets, big staffs, and big projects. Mumford (1961) also published a warning against big science. Scientific knowledge is increasing, but it is directed by the national government and industrial corporations. These entities purport to seek “truth and human welfare,” Mumford writes, but they seem more interested in “riches and power.” Universities cannot provide a check on this tendency because they too have accepted the same imperatives as industry and government. He writes: A good technology, firmly related to human needs, cannot be one that has a maximum productivity as its supreme goal: it must rather, as in an organic system, seek to provide the right quantity of the right quality at the right

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time and the right place for the right purpose. … The center of gravity is not the corporate organization, but the human personality, utilizing knowledge, not for the increase of power and riches, or even for the further increase of knowledge, but using it, like power and riches, for the enhancement of life. (pp. 510–11).

As is discussed further in Chap. 9, the critique of the agendas of big science and the technological society in general were well underway. Science fiction writers could not help but address these concerns, although the way many presented a critique through a vision of wounded masculinity was not the only path they could have taken. One does not see much of an engagement with themes justice or equity in science fiction, even though the foundation had already been established by authors like C. L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Judith Merril. In April 1961, during Kennedy’s first year as president, a Soviet cosmonaut became the first human to orbit Earth. Nevertheless, the Soviet program continued unrelentingly. Indeed, in 1963, the Soviet Union launched the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkov. The best response the United States could muster was the patronizing comment that it would not put women in danger for publicity purposes, even though, as we know today, there were thirteen female U.S. test pilots who were qualified for space travel (see, for instance, Ackmann, 2003; Sally Ride would be the first female U.S. astronaut in 1983). The fear that political agendas were inappropriately influencing the development of science and technology became clear toward the end of the decade when the ties between military research and the university became clear with the American involvement in Vietnam. As the technological might of the military-industrial complex was brought to bear upon the rural populations of Southeast Asia, student protests disrupted the smooth functioning of big science at U.S. universities (see Leslie, 1993). During this moment of reflection, a new kind of science fiction was named and promoted, but addressing concerns about how science was used or who is deemed eligible to work in technical fields seems missing. The emblem of growing distrust in big science that many authors develop is a subgenre of science fiction that might be called the dead astronaut or mad astronaut story. The authors of these new wave stories

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develop antiheroes to counter popular images of brave and capable pilots. The subgenre was solidified in 1971 with a Playboy paperback The Dead Astronaut, which reprinted stories that appeared in the magazine since the end of the 1950s. This critique was not abstract; it was informed by the facts on the ground. Scott Carpenter was nearly lost during his reentry in May 1962 after numerous problems with his capsule controls and was lost at sea for a few hours after splashdown. Confidence in the space program faltered after three Apollo astronauts died in 1967 in a fire on the launchpad. The space program, so intent on getting U.S. astronauts into space, was fraught with unexpected dangers. These sacrifices of human life should be seen in the context of protests against the military-­ industrial complex. The big budgets needed for the space program and to build arsenals of nuclear weapons could be used for other purposes, such as education and infrastructure. However, the veneration of corpses in science fiction reaches back before the days of Apollo. Some of the most notable dead astronauts were created by Heinlein, who, along with Isaac Asimov and other authors, served as researchers in World War II. After the war, Heinlein sought to write science fiction beyond pulp magazines. He started writing novels for young men that were published by Scribner’s that scholars have come to call the juveniles. Heinlein’s second juvenile, the 1948 Space Cadet, introduces the veneration of dead heroes as part of the backdrop of the interplanetary patrol. In the opening of the novel, readers follow Matt and Tex into the rotunda of the Academy, and they find that it is given over to relics of the Patrol history. At the cardinal points of the room are dioramas of the four heroes of the Patrol as a reminder to the cadets that their life of adventure may one day lead them to their destruction. The Four, as they are called, traded their lives for their sacred honor, and every muster of the patrol ends with the ceremonial call of their names, with volunteers answering for them. The use of these dead astronauts seems particularly militaristic, and it certainly is an attempt to indoctrinate cadets into the military structure of the Patrol. A year after Space Cadet was published, Heinlein’s story “The Long Watch” (1951) detailed the final sacrifice of one of the Academy’s four official martyrs, John Ezra “Johnny” Dahlquist. The story was first published as “Rebellion on the Moon,” in American Legion Magazine, in

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1949; a full version appeared in the Heinlein anthology The Green Hills of Earth in 1951. Dahlquist is concerned when his commanding officer tells him that control of atomic weapons on the moon cannot be left in political hands; he wants to use atomic weapons for “a psychological demonstration, [on] an unimportant town or two” (p.  13). Dahlquist locks himself into the bomb room. He decides to stop the cabal the only way he can, by neutralizing the weapons. He successfully thwarts the conspiracy, but in destroying the bomb mechanism he exposes himself to a lethal dose of radioactivity. The final scene is the escort of the dead astronaut home: encased in a lead casket, Dahlquist is brought back to a reverently thankful people of Earth, who forgo watching television for 98 hours while broadcast networks show the martyr making his last voyage. This is a story of valor, to be sure, but also a story that points to the fragile line of defense from atomic destruction from a cadre of unelected technocrats who could use their position for great harm. The dying astronauts in Space Cadet and “The Long Watch” maintain a sense of valor. After the experience of the 1950s, Heinlein himself seems to write about death differently. In his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which was intended to be part of his juvenile series but was rejected by the publisher, the corpses are mostly young men who die in training. Theirs are not the heroic deaths of space opera, and the thoughtless organization that kills its members as part of training and regrets the failure to recover bullets more than a body strikes the reader as an unhealthy symptom of the military-industrial complex. Although the novel is a striking portrayal of the bankruptcy of a technological war, his critique is lost on many critics, who worried that Heinlein was enthusiastically promoting the militarization of space instead of painting a nightmarish portrait of it. Clearly, a new aesthetic was needed—but the dead astronaut is carried forward. In the same year Starship Troopers was published, the USSR shocked the American public by putting Sputnik I into orbit. In Starship Troopers, corpses enter into the narrative in a different way. Much of the action of the novel, like that of Space Cadet, takes place during training. Heinlein attended the United States Naval Academy, and an experience aboard the USS Lexington is a striking contrast to the action of Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s biographer William Patterson details the

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story of one of Heinlein’s superior officers who threw away his career when he refused to risk harm to his subordinates by conducting a training exercise in blackout conditions (2010). One of the novel’s characters, Breckenridge, dies in training during a wilderness survival test. The suffering and death of astronauts in the new wave are different from earlier images in science fiction. They represent a crisis of masculinity: the golden-age superheroes have lost their power to make change in the universe. The anguish of their failed missions recalls Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream”: they are tortured characters who lack the support of their settings. The technical environments have let them down, and the supportive mechanisms that supposedly do not require their attention have instead caused them to lose their manliness. The anguished man in the machine seems to match the increasingly depersonalized users of technology in the age of big science. In a time when, as Steven Shapin (2008) says, leaders feared big science set the stage for “the destruction of the very idea of science” (2002, p. 166), the idea of the ultimate sacrifice helps to return a sense of purpose into the workaday culture of a technological society. Here, then, the corpse is a physical manifestation of the important place the user of tools has in society. The death of an astronaut seems to indicate the failure of the technological society. The reliance of new wave authors on suffering astronauts can be attributed to distrust in technological culture; the dystopian settings are the ruins of their lost humanity. This theme is present in many of the new wave stories, most obviously in Frank Robinson’s “The Wreck of the Ship John B.” (Playboy, 1971). The longest of the stories in the Playboy anthology, it details an interstellar voyage of ten civilian scientists on the spaceship Cassiopeia who are attempting to become colonists on a faraway planet. Like Moorcock’s The Black Corridor, Robinson’s story suggests that the automated world of the machine threatens to kill the spirit of manly science. The controlled environment demanded by space exploration was an unhealthy place for human beings. As the plot progresses, the captain notices that the crew is becoming disinterested in their trip and withdrawn from each other the longer the voyage continues. They come across a desiccated corpse of an astronaut floating in space and, curious, they continue to investigate

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until they realize that the entire crew of the John B. had jettisoned themselves one after the other into the comforting darkness of space. 1 An investigation ensues, but no explanation can be found, and the Cassiopeia continues on its way to the colony. The crew becomes even more withdrawn and fails to intervene when a crewmate fatally injures himself, stunning the captain. Studying the John B.’s logs, the captain makes a conclusion: the ship’s psychologist had been studying the apathy that overtook citizens of the great cities, and the captain surmises that the same kind of thing is happening onboard his ship. He stuns the crew out of their stupor and then destroys the ship’s food generator, requiring the crew to work together. They break into the cargo hold and use their intellects to create hydroponic bays to grow their own food. In the end, the corpses have taught the crew that improvement is needed. After all, the crew of the John B. were the dead astronauts, but the crew of the Cassiopeia mostly survive. The captain reports his findings to the officials in the colony’s port, and he is surprised to learn that the problem of a disaffected crew is quite common. The civilians on board required an automated system, but this automated system caused the crew to lose interest in their lives because they lacked purpose. The officials on the port hope that the captain will work with them to improve the colonist program, and in the same way one can hope that cities can be revived through careful sociological policy. In this way, Robinson comforts men feeling anxiety, showing how they can navigate the uneven and uncertain postwar world. Some critics write about this subgenre as if it were simply an attempt to bring ethics to science fiction. For instance, Colin Greenland writes about Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard’s effort to develop the theme of the mad astronaut to counter the images of Buck Rogers, the Grey Lensmen, and Dan Dare. Their attitude seems plain: how can we talk about rising above the stars when people are suffering below? Or as stated by Robert Latham, “Does old Ralph 124C 41+ … still believe, after  The deaths of civilians on the John B. call to mind the folk song “The Sloop John B.,” which had been recorded several times, but most recently to the story was the popular Beach Boys recording in 1966. The story is about a crew who longs to go home and is tired of the food, much like the crew of the Cassiopeia. 1

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Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after Chernobyl, that the civilization of the machine is noble and good and, well, dammit, just wonderful?” (1995, p.  195). Latham is in agreement with Rossi (2009), who both suggest that something had to change in science fiction. For Rossi, the politicization of space is a direct cause of the new form of fiction: “Space exploration ha[d] indeed lost its ability to expand the horizons of our imaginations … Predictability [had replaced] the sense of wonder that had characterized the fictional projection of space travel in sf written before the US space program” (p.  101). That being said, even though some of Merril’s favorite authors write dead astronaut stories, they are not represented in her anthologies. The pessimistic view of humanity—and, maybe more importantly, the loss of superhuman masculinity—does not seem to interest her as much as other types of stories. Merril has expressed her enthusiasm for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which premiered at the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention shortly before Merril moved to Canada. Although several astronauts were martyred during the mission, one makes it out alive and experiences a new reality. Perhaps this affirmation of life and community interests Merril more than the anguish of men who seem to have lost their power.

References Ackmann, M. (2003). The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight. Random House. Aldiss, B.  W. (1973). Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday. Arendt, H. (1973). The Origins of Totalitarianism (New Edition with Added Prefaces). Harcourt Brace & Company. Ballard, J. G. (1962). The Drowned World. Berkley Medallion Books. Ballard, J. G. (1994). Cage of Sand. In D. G. Hartwell & K. Cramer (Eds.), The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF (pp. 656–671). Tor. Bogart, L. (1976). Premises for Propaganda: The United States Information Agency’s Operating Assumptions in the Cold War. Free Press. Clareson, T. (1971). The Other Side of Realism. In SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction (pp. 1–28). Bowling Green UP. Cull, Nicolas J. (2008). The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989.

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Davin, E. L. (2006). Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926–1965. Rowman & Littlefield. Ellison, H. (1967). Dangerous Visions: 33 Original Stories. Doubleday. Ellison, H. (1979). The Fantasies of Harlan Ellison. G. K. Hall. Gilbert, J. (1986). A Cycle of Outrage. A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. Oxford UP. Greenland, C. (1983). The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Heinlein, R. A. (1948). Space Cadet. Ace. Heinlein, R. A. (1951). The Long Watch. In The Green Hills of Earth. Signet. Heinlein, R. A. (Ed.). (1952). Tomorrow, the Stars: A Science Fiction Anthology. Doubleday. Heinlein, R. A. (1959). Starship Troopers. Berkeley Medallion. Hench, J. B. (2010). Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II. Cornell UP. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment (p. 2002). Continuum. Johnson, D. K. (2004). The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. U of Chicago Press. Latham, R. (1995). The Men Who Walked on the Moon: Images of America in the ‘New Wave’ Science Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. In J. Sanders (Ed.), Functions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Thirteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (pp. 195–204). Greenwood P. Latham, R. (2006). New Worlds and the New Wave in Fandom: Fan Culture and the Reshaping of Science Fiction in the Sixties. Extrapolation, 47(2), 296–315. Leja, M. (1993). Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s. Yale UP. Leslie, S. W. (1993). The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-­ Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. Columbia UP. Littleton, T. D., & Sykes, M. (1989). Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century. U of Alabama P. McDougall, W. A. (1985). … The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. Johns Hopkins UP. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1952). Beyond Human Ken. Random House. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1954). Beyond the Barriers of Space and Time. Random House. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1956). The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Stories and Novelettes. Dell.

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Merril, J. (Ed.). (1957). The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Second Annual Volume. Dell. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1960). The Best of S-F: 5th Annual Edition. Simon and Schuster. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1965a). The Year’s Best S-F: 10th Annual Edition. Dell. Merril, J. (1965b, May). Books. F&SF, 28, 70–75. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1966a). The Year’s Best S-F: 11th Annual Edition. Dell. Merril, J. (1966b, May 1). “What Do You Mean Science? Fiction?” Part 1. Extrapolation, 7(2), 30–46. Merril, J. (1966c, December 1). “What Do You Mean Science? Fiction?” Part 2. Extrapolation, 8(1), 2–19. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1967a). SF: The Best of the Best. Dell. Merril, J. (1967b, November). Books. F&SF, 33(5), 28–36. Merril, J. (Ed.). (1968a). England Swings SF: Stories of Speculative Fiction. Ace Books. Merril, J. (1968b, September). Books. F&SF, 35(2), 42–49. Miller, A. (1996, October 13). Why I Wrote the Crucible: An Artist’s Answer to Politics. The New  Yorker, Retrieved December 1, 2022, from https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/1996/10/21/why-­i-­wrote-­the-­crucible Moorcock, M. (1963, April). Play with Feeling. New Worlds Science Fiction, 42 (129), 2–3, 123–127. Moorcock, M. (1964, May–June). A New Literature for the Space Age. New Worlds Science Fiction, 48(142), 2–3. Moorcock, M. (1978). Starship Stormtroopers. Anarchist Review, 1(4), 41–44. Mumford, L. (1961). Science as Technology. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105(5), 506–511. Patterson, W. H., Jr. (2010). Robert A. Heinlein in Dialogue with His Century: Volume 1, 1907–1948: Learning Curve. Tor. Playboy. (1971). The Dead Astronaut: 10 Stories of Space Flight. HMH Publishing. Rossi, U. (2009, March). A Little Something About Dead Astronauts. Science Fiction Studies, 36(1), 101–120. Saunders, F. (2000). The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New Press. Schlesinger, A. M. (1958, November 1). The Crisis of American Masculinity. Esquire, 50 (5), 63–65. Retrieved December 1, 2022, from https://classic. esquire.com/article/1958/11/1/the-­crisis-­of-­american-­masculinity Schlesinger, A.  M. (1949). The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. Houghton Mifflin.

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Scholes, R., & Rabkin, E.  S. (1977). Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. Oxford University Press. Shapin, S. (2008). The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. U Chicago P. Smith, C. (1975). The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal. In J. J. Pierce (Ed.), The Best of Cordwainer Smith. Doubleday. Weinberg, A. M. (1961, July 21). Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States. Science, 134, 161–164.

9 Science Fiction and the University

Just thirty-five years elapsed between the coinage of the terms hyperspace and hypertext. In the early days of science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr., imagined a cognitively disruptive jump, hyperspace, that would allow humans to break the known laws of the universe so that they could travel between solar systems. In 1965, at the start of the new wave–sponsored reevaluation of science fiction, Ted Nelson was inspired to use a similar term, hypertext, to describe links in computer files. Many things had changed in this timespan, including the weaponization of racial pseudoscience, the practical development of atomic energy, and the transformation of electronic computers into information machines. Science fiction witnessed all of these developments, but its foundational premises did not fundamentally change. The practitioners of electronic computing and the early versions of science fiction studies in universities shared, without variation, a trust in the public sphere and technological determinism. The previous chapters show that there had been effective challenges to the discourses of white masculinist science and technology in science fiction, but these disruptions were quickly absorbed and did not have a lasting effect. This is not surprising according to Kuhn (1970), given the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3_9

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way he suggests adherents to an existing paradigm resist new data that might render an old paradigm defective. The emergence and rapid submergence of challengers to dominant discourses is readily seen in science fiction, which shows how the genre offers important lessons about the persistence of paradigms. The alienated man seeking to understand the universe emerged as an icon of late 1960s science fiction. Even though this type was promoted as a disruption to current thinking, as shown in Chap. 8, it was less disruptive than its adherents claimed. In fact, this image was quite in line with dominant discourses about masculinity in the Cold War. It seems obvious to state that science fiction maintained its popularity among technical workers and scientists, but the science fiction they were reading was slow to shed the discourses that supported white masculinity. In particular, the technological determinism present in the earliest stories of U.S. science fiction remained constant from hyperspace to hypertext. The idea that the medium of pulp magazines could work as a public sphere to easily break down impediments to manly reason is a symptom of a larger myth: that technology innovators could and should do the same to cut through the social world. Despite the enthusiasm of some practitioners, it is not the case that technological devices can easily cut through cultural and political barriers. This is seen in the diffusion of Internet technology, which still demonstrates the digital divide between the United States and other countries, not to mention among different regions of the United States. Promoters of the genre suggested that it was a mechanism to spread understanding about science and technology, but it is hard to see how reading science fiction can be used to support greater understanding of how science and technology fit in with—and sometimes excuse or exacerbate—existing inequalities, particularly when the dissenters have been omitted. Having access to education and information—and the ability to exercise one’s intellect before a literate public—was supposed to be the ideal of the Enlightenment public sphere. In recent years, one can easily see that the public sphere has not always brought humanity to a higher level of thinking. The vitriolic response to diversity in science fiction—as seen in the Sad Puppies’ cabal to undermine the selection of the 2015 Hugo awards and elsewhere—certainly brings into question the ability of

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science fiction to bring about a better world. In general, though, having access to education and information has not always brought about enlightenment. In the United States and other countries that are founded on the ideals of Enlightenment public sphere, one saw violent resistance to reasonable COVID-19 containment measures, and the anti-vaccine movement in general, calling into question the efficacy of an ideal that suggests people should exercise their reason in front of a literate public. The public sphere might be an arena where one fashions a sense of self, but the response to global climate change requires a collective effort that is betrayed by the individualist ideals of science fiction. Surely, no one can blame science fiction for these problems and the public failure to think as a group. That being said, it is worth considering the ways in which science fiction failed to provide inspiration as an alternative to the dominant discourses of individuality. Finding one’s own truth and thinking for oneself are not always the best ways to combat challenges that threaten the future of the human race. Understanding the interrelationships among science, technology, and society is not always easy to do, but as the preceding chapters have shown, science fiction has promoted the ethic of individualism more than it has inspired people to form into collectives and think of the needs of others.

9.1 Challenges to Technological Determinism The assumption that technical development was paramount and would transcend all manner of social and economic realities has already been observed in the previous chapters, but this mistaken notion can be seen in the dreams of innovators as well. From the beginning, science fiction worked with the presumption that technological devices emerge into the world without incumbrance—and, in fact, stories showed how social organization would adapt to surround Gernsback’s Ralph with adulation or that Campbell’s Arcot, Morey, and Wade could tinker with devices that would result in entirely new balances of power in the universe. The suggestion that science could radically transform the world—and that this transformation was proof of the superiority of white manly civilization—was a hallmark of Arthur Schlesinger’s thought about men in

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the Cold War, but it had already become dubious. Although it was hard to see in the new wave critique, outside of science fiction in the 1960s, effective complaints were being lodged against the advanced industrial society. This is the era when Jane Jacobs, in Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), points out that top-down city planning is stifling civic life; it not being enough for planners to know abstract principles, she writes, they must know “specific places” (p. 335, ff.). This critique had already been seen in Jacques Ellul’s 1954 condemnation of the technological state (translated into English in 1964 as The Technological Society), where he notes abstract ideals of technique have overcome local knowledge. Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man was also published in 1964, with its suggestion that technology erases art’s power to critique culture. Jean Meynaud in Technocracy (1964) goes so far to say that it will be impossible for technics to supplant democracy. Marshall McLuhan published several books in the 1960s, including Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), in which he proclaims that the overt messages in media are really smokescreens that trick viewers into forgetting that they are connected to a vast infrastructure. Theodor Roszak’s subtitle to The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969) ties the social unrest of the 1960s to technocracy. Mumford, continuing his critique from the past decade in The Pentagon of Power (1970), worries that humanity is on the wrong path but sees hope if the imagination of a mechanical world can be replaced with an organic world, “in the center of which stands man himself, in person” (p. 393). Technology might not, as earlier generations of science fiction authors suggested, be the marker of an advanced civilization. In the Gernsback and Campbell eras, technology often represented an opportunity for the elite to progress into its next phase of evolution. Now, though, the unchecked development of technology seemed like it threatened to destroy human civilization. No one can deny that the technological and scientific achievements of the twentieth century have improved the lives of many people. However, the belief that science and technology develop apart from the social world and, once released into the world, have an inevitable and uniform impact wherever they are deployed is mistaken. This became clear as the capitalist first world and the communist second world fought for the hearts and

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minds of the developing third world. Seeking to support economic development, both sides of the Cold War sought to transfer technology as a means of gaining allies and propelling social development, and this technology tended to be large-scale infrastructure, such as dams and transportation (Adas, 2006, p.  256). Even though most people in developing countries lived in rural areas, international development emphasized promoting awe in technological development. Efforts to redirect this kind of thinking are documented but were not widely accepted. After ten years of promoting economic development in Southeast Asia, for instance, economist E. F. Schumacher became convinced that the simple transportation of industrial technology would not help alleviate poverty. In 1966, he was one of the co-founders of the Intermediate Technology Development Group Limited in London. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Schumacher would become famous for promoting “intermediate technology” for poverty alleviation, which he brought to a wider audience in his book Small Is Beautiful (1973). The idea of an “intermediate” technology is one that is somewhere between the third world and the more advanced state of the first or second world. Instead of deploying advanced technology as part of a program of international aid, Schumacher suggested a middle, “intermediate” step that would be more beneficial to the impoverished people in the host country. Schumacher’s ideas did not fit in with the prevailing theory of development that had enamored politicians and bureaucrats from many countries. In the nineteenth century, adherents to the stages of civilization theory had asserted that technological devices were superior and world-­ defining because they were the natural outgrowth of the supposedly superior European mind. These devices were thought to be immediately transformative, and the global transformation they would effect would be one that propelled individuals to a higher state on the evolutionary ladder. This idea was reflected in the work of many science fiction authors, but they were not alone in their faith in technological determinism, which today is known as a fallacy. For instance, in 1957, Wittfogel published a lengthy historical study purporting to show how the history of large-scale public works projects in China and other countries that could not depend on rainfall led inevitably to despotism that was more pervasive than that of the feudal lords in the west because they “penetrated

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more spheres of life” and required “national patterns of cooperation” (p. 44). A few years later, Rostow (1960) published his Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, in which he outlines five stages of growth that mark the path of transformation from a traditional society into a consumer society. As can be seen from his subtitle, he tries to differentiate himself from Marxist thinking, but his reliance on a single path toward development seems indebted to the nineteenth-century thought of Lewis Morgan, which inspired Marx. Indeed, both Wittfogel and Rostow are repurposing the stages of civilization theory. As shown in Chap. 4, even as trust in the stages of civilization paradigm was fading, authors like John W. Campbell continued to invent new perturbations instead of incorporating recent scientific ideas into their worldview. Campbell, too, had made an effort to uphold the old paradigm by transforming the strictly biological stages of civilization to accommodate new thinking in culture. Wittfogel and Rostow, as well, sought to describe the social conditions of developing countries by describing the habits of the people. Although this seems in line with the culture concept, their description of a linear and inevitable path of development—and their insistence that the use of technology is indicative of the mindset of everyone in a society—fits in with nineteenth-century thinking. This theory that science and technology imposed belief systems on society would increasingly come into disrepute; the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a useful marker of the growing interest in constructivist analyses. Scientific beliefs and technological devices do not, after all, eliminate human choice and—especially in modern society—they must fit in with the education, markets, laws, and ideals of the users who adopt them. The notion that science and science fiction were detached from present realities—Asimov’s dream of a science fiction with “no known competitor”—was already seeing significant challenges, which would continue in the ensuing years. As demonstrated by Nelly Oudshoorn, Trevor Pinch, and other advocates of the social construction of technology (SCOT) analytical approach, technological development is a “culturally contested zone,” where designers, users, policymakers, and other intermediaries confront each other’s visions. In what appears to be a strange coincidence, the SCOT group and authors in the early days of science fiction utilize

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Gernsback’s term scientifiction. Sociologist of science Bruno Latour writes that scientifiction is “the resource of fiction can bring—through the use of counterfactual history, thought experiments, and ‘scientifiction’—the solid objects of today into the fluid states where their connections with humans may make sense” (2007, p.  82). In A ram is (1996), Latour states that ordinary “science fiction” will not lead to useful insight, but what can work is the collection of different worlds: the world of culture and the world of technology, as represented by the genres of “the novel, the bureaucratic dossier, and sociological commentary” (p. viii). In this way, one can see that the process of invention is not just a simple plan that one makes and then implements, but a narrative process that combines the techniques of fiction with the procedures of bureaucratic administration and the analysis of the social sciences. It seems like it would have been easy for science fiction authors to adopt to this type of writing, but as seen in Chap. 8, the new wave preferred an understanding of technology that suggested a man enabled by new devices would break through existing socioeconomic norms. Instead of pondering the new lessons about the diffusion of technology, though, science fiction authors in the main continued on the well-established path. The technological society, for them, posed a crisis for masculinity. The failure to attend to the needs of men, according to this group, represented a lost opportunity for transcendence. The world would have to wait until 1985 for Donna Haraway’s statement about the possibility for science fiction to inspire a collective vision for humanity. In the meantime, in computing and in science fiction studies, injured manly individuality would be the prominent discourse.

9.2 Science Fiction Computing The way that science fiction intertwined with the development of electronic computing demonstrates a failure of understanding the interrelationships among science, technology, and society. Certainly, the analytical framework of STS was not available to the early writers of the pulp era, but the failure of science fiction to predict the path of innovation, and the expression of deterministic ideas that suggested technological innovation

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and scientific insight would immediately and uniformly transform society, are curious given the repeated record of failed prophecies. The synergies between the imagination of information technology and what innovators say about their inventions demonstrate a reliance on the imperatives of preserving a white male intellect. At all stages of development, the valorization of the white male intellect and the desire to protect it from the social world are apparent. For all the concern about protecting the thinking man’s excellence, though, the development path of computing went in a different direction. The genre’s mistaken prediction of the development path is somewhat surprising, especially given that Hugo Gernsback and so many others had expertise in electronics and many other writers were technical professionals. Gernsback’s imagination of radio and television devices reasonably led him to imagine the viewer would be in control of site-to-­ site transmissions like a telephone, as shown in Ralph 124C 41+. What he failed to imagine was the drift of innovation toward the existing legal, economic, and technical infrastructures. Radio was transformed into a commercial network and the utilization of television was delayed until after World War II (see, for instance, Wu, 2010). Even fiction billed as prophetic by Hugo Gernsback did not predict the path of innovation. Even so, innovators continued to be invested in the trust that a good idea would quickly and radically transform the social world. Science fiction could have—especially with the inclusion of the dissenters that fan historians had deemed unworthy of reprinting—at least sounded a warning note about this unsophisticated thinking about science and technology’s ability to bypass organizations, economic systems, laws, and other features of the social world. To the contrary, the distrust of the social world and collective action that was a feature of the genre from the start continued into the early years of computing. Gernsback was, in fact, one of the first people to promote the idea of a media-enabled man that would guide the development of information technology. In Ralph 124C 41+, one protagonist’s invention was a device to help him do his work, a “menograph, or mind writer” (1958, p. 25). This device idolizes a man of pure thought. With electrodes held by a leather strap to his temples, Ralph sits back in a chair and thinks of a sentence for a lecture he is preparing. The machine transcribes his thoughts as

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a wavy line on a paper like telegraph tape. In the brief span of Ralph’s life, letters, typewriters, pens, and stenographers have all disappeared. In the 1925 expanded version published as a novel, Gernsback adds a scene of Ralph sitting at his desk, speaking into a device like a typewriter without keys. His words are recorded as a wave on paper, in a way that the narrator says is like a seismograph recording of an earthquake. Aside from the fact that this device can authenticate documents, because no two voices are the same, Ralph points out that it has a labor-­saving aspect. “I do not require my real secretary when I dictate,” he says. “I sit alone in my study or office and simply talk” (p. 86). This invention suits the solitary masculine genius favored by Gernsback, pure thought without encumbrance. Two other figures who have been mentioned in earlier chapters also offered thinking-centric visions. Vannevar Bush, who inspired John W. Campbell with his Integraph and did so much to promote the structures of big science, used modes of science fiction in his writing. In 1933, for instance, he was asked to write about the present day from the perspective of the future. He suggests, without citing Gernsback, that professional men of the future no longer use typewriters, and suggests that in the 1930s “the incessant clatter of typewriters would be especially annoying.” The professor of the future has within his desk microfilmed copies of thousands of books that can be displayed on a screen, making it possible for him to have a vast personal library. The future person also would wonder at the slow development of television, which must have been due to “some corporation’s machinations,” as if the market has inhibited innovation (Zachary, 2022, pp. 13–14). In his famous 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” Bush decries the way that modern scientific workers face a deluge of information, threatening to overwhelm their status as disinterested amateurs. As described in Chap. 5, he proposes the Memex, which adds several new features to the 1933 desk and Ralph’s menograph. Users can annotate the information store in the Memex, and they can easily add vocal or visual information to record their work process. Information has been abstracted from its physical carrier, so the user of the Memex does not have to worry about different document sizes and media. At the end of the essay, Bush points out that the human body is organized by electrical signals, making it possible to eliminate the keyboard by connecting the Memex directly to the nervous system. Bush’s

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geniuses of the future would no longer need physical media, typewriters, or the body itself. The similarities between Gernsback’s and Bush’s desks—and of Bush’s Integraph and Campbell’s computing device—cannot be coincidental, given Gernsback’s promotion of electronic experimentation. Another similarity, though, should be noticed: the attack on the social world. Gernsback, Bush, and Campbell do not describe the people they are seeking to replace, but Gernsback’s desire to be freed from his secretary, Bush’s desire to maintain his own library, and Campbell’s desire to sever the ties to human calculators show their desire to separate themselves from the female workers in the home sphere. Near the end of his life, Bush would make it clear who he thought was the inefficient worker in the office. His thinking machines would mechanize libraries, bringing him “a long way from a girl digging through a file cabinet” (Zachary, p.  327). With a Memex, a man’s cognition would follow the natural process of the mind, following the associative links that are inherent to memory, liberating their thoughts from the office and its systems for creating and storing documents. Instead of seeing how the community in the office adds value to their work, these male intellects think of others as encumbrances that must be shed in order for the modern man to reach higher achievements. Two women authors in this study—C.  L. Moore and Judith Merril— have described their confrontations with the men at their office jobs, suggesting that the motivation of these early promoters of information technology desired to transcend their staff, and their bodies, in their quest for an efficient workplace. Another author who was important in this study is also often cited in the prehistory of information technology: H. G. Wells. Starting in the 1930s, he began a series of lectures about supplementing existing information-­producing entities with a centralized distribution agency, what he came to call the World Brain. An intellectual, Wells proposed, should be able to receive published information easily from the comfort of the office without having to interact with anyone at all. Wells imagined that the transnational organization would gather up the information output of publishers and universities and the contents of libraries and archives and stand by, ready to supply the documents to the world’s geniuses via microfilm. Given that librarians and archivists at this time

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were typically women, again we see a suggestion that in the new age, the republic of letters should be dominated by men; even if women continued to be employed as intellectual workers, they would be sequestered into a centralized and optimized organization that one could reach by mail or phone. Wells and Bush do not cite each other, but their valorization of the thinking man, the elimination of subordinates, and the dissolution of physical media fit in nicely with the Homo superior discussion that would come after World War II (see Chap. 7, Sect. 7.3). Wells’s “brain” metaphor was also commonly used to describe the first computers. Without much difficulty, one can find stories and essays about computers in the 1940s and 1950s, but they are referred to as “brains.” A 1949 nonfiction book, which was reviewed in AST, was titled Giant Brains or Machines That Think. The author prefers the term “mechanical brains” and makes an analogy between the human brain and the computer (Berkeley, 1952, pp. vii, 3). An essay in Startling Stories pointed out that the mechanical brains invented by Vannevar Bush and on display in the movie When Worlds Collide will never think, but “new designs” might make it possible (Gunther, 1953, p. 114). Isaac Asimov’s story “Escape!” refers to a stationary positronic machine as “The Brain” in a 1945 story from AST that was included in I, Robot (1950). Although it operates as a mainframe computer, the brain must obey the Three Laws of Robotics, which causes problems for research on designing a hyperspace spacecraft. Following the ideas promoted by the Cosmos serial, particularly Campbell’s original concept of the “Wrongness of Space,” Asimov’s setting shows how a hyperspace voyage causes a human being to lose consciousness, which conflicts with the First Law. Susan Calvin, who addresses the computer as “Brain,” speaks to the machine as a comforting mother and helps the computer through the crisis; Donovan and Powell survive the trip (1950, p. 150). Overall, these brains were thought of as a bulwark to manly intellect. The visions of Gernsback, Campbell, Wells, and Bush demonstrate a preoccupation with separating the manly intellect from the feminized office space. The word electronic should properly be placed before “computer”; computers were originally human, referring to people who compute. The first computers, as described by Light (1999), were women like Isabel Martin Lewis who, as described in Chap. 1, were professional

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mathematicians. Although women were actively recruited by big science contractors and played an important role in the development and use of the first electronic computers, they were subsequently written out of the history of computing. Abbate (2012) describes the advertising supporting women workers in computing in the 1950s and 1960s: a 1961 corporate advertisement asserts that “women are as good as men” for computer programming (p.  62). As shown by Margo Shetterly (2016) and Mar Hicks (2017)—and dramatized by the movie Hidden Figures based on Shetterly’s history—women faced nontechnical barriers that blocked their participation in technical fields, regardless of merit. Like the women at the turn of the twentieth century, the human computers found themselves suddenly unwelcome. As it became clear that computers could be used by managers and scientists to save time for higher-level thinking, human computers were relegated to support roles and then, through regulations and policies, their initial plurality in the field dwindled. The consistent pressure to eliminate women from professional domains from 1900 to 1960 was largely successful. Even though some women persisted, the perception that the men were analytical leaders and women were helpful staff became the norm, in computing and elsewhere. This transformation indicates the belief that women workers were essentially clerical, and only people (men) with advanced certifications were suitable for leadership. This had significant consequences because the 1960s and 1970s were a pivotal time for the development of computing and the Internet, not to mention for hypertext and the Worldwide Web. The first electronic computers, devices the size of a room, were delicate and required a specialized staff to maintain them. Women, who were the most qualified from their experience as human computers, were important operators of electronic computers, but their presence was quickly forgotten, just like the early women who wrote science fiction. The sardonic memoirs of this era in computing describe something akin to an oracle. They say that men would bring stacks of punch cards to the computer room and unspecified entities would then place the cards into the card reader. Cloistered in air-conditioned rooms, electronic computers were “surrounded by an elaborate priesthood” (Naughton, 1999, p. 142). One chronicle of this time describes this metaphor with greater detail, in some ways sounding like Campbell’s equating a computer to an oracle in “When the Atoms Failed.” The IBM 740 was:

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a collection of mysterious hulking gray cabinets approachable only through the intercession of The Operator. In the specially built computer room, The Operator set switches, pushed buttons, and examined panels of flashing lights, while his Assistants attended various whirring, clanking, and chattering devices, rushing to and fro with stacks of cryptically-printed paper, decks of weirdly-punched cards, and reels of recondite brown ribbon, all to the background hum of The Machine. Add a little incense and a few candles, and you could be forgiven for thinking these were the rites of some oracular shrine. (Graetz, 1981, pp. 57–8)

Isaacson (2014) describes it similarly: “when you wanted a computer to perform a task, you had to submit a stack of punch cards or a tape to the computer’s operators, as if handing an offering to the priests who shielded an oracle.” This popular, ready-to-wear history of the early days of mainframe computers casts the eager young users as demeaned acolytes to technology, one that is set up only to describe a change. What had been called a “mini” computer that could replace giant machines like ENIAC was not, in reality, very small. The PDP-1 computer distributed by Digital Electronics Corporation (DEC) was smaller than the first generation, but still too large to move from room to room. One was installed at MIT in 1961, but the curriculum of the young researchers who had access was not project-based. In their free time, they developed a demonstration program based on their personal interests, much the same way Gernsback had encouraged his readers to develop their own projects. The program that developed, Spacewar! (Fig.  9.1), was inspired by their love of E. E. Doc Smith’s Skylark of Space and other planet-smashing epics of the Gernsback era. Their summary of Skylark was somewhat sophisticated: We were crashing and banging our way through the “Skylark” and “Lensmen” novels of Edward E. Smith, PhD, a cereal chemist who wrote with the grace and refinement of a pneumatic drill. These stories are pretty much all of a piece: after some preliminary foofaraw to get everyone’s name right, a bunch of overdeveloped Hardy Boys go trekking off through the universe to punch out the latest gang of galactic goons, blow up a few p ­ lanets, kill all kinds of nasty life forms, and just have a heck of a good time. … Is that not enough to turn the mind to margarine? (Graetz, p. 56)

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Fig. 9.1  The display used for Spacewar!, a computer game inspired by Skylark of Space

Their love for Skylark is touching, but, unlike Dr. Seaton, they could not find a way to finance their dream independently. To bring their extracurricular project to fruition on a device they could not afford, different programmers took on tasks that interested them, like programming gravity into the space ship, the mapping the background of star constellations, and building hardware to create the controller. A “hyperspace” button allowed a player to escape from a difficult situation. The program was ready for display in May 1962. An academic paper resulted: “Spacewar! Real-Time Capability of the PDP-1” by one of the programmers, J. Martin Graetz. Asimov saw it on a visit to MIT, writing that “it is clever computer work and the best space-ship war game I’ve ever seen.” He encourages them to be included in Analog, which apparently fails, but Pohl writes an editorial about it in the August 1963 issue of Galaxy. MIT is in the habit of borrowing from science fiction magazines for educational opportunities, Pohl suggests. The game is “lovely,” he concludes, but also “educational” for “future computer designers” who

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want to learn “what the darn things [electronic computers] are capable of ” (p. 4). No one would want to criticize the use of inquiry-based pedagogy, but Pohl’s enthusiasm is a bit thin. Praising a game based on a story published almost forty years before seems to indicate that there had been no developments at all in the genre. The best he can say is that the exercise will be a training ground, failing to think about how innovation in computing could be inspired by more recent science fiction ideas, such as Asimov’s Encyclopedia Galactica in the Foundation series. Admittedly, the creators of Spacewar! demonstrate a collaborative spirit reminiscent of the best face of the science fan community. This desire for community was seen in another innovation in the history of computers, an improvement known as time-sharing. The ubiquity of the disdainful tone used to describe mainframe computers comes from the love of a software innovation that fostered community. Based on the insight that human beings were slow operators and the minicomputers were often waiting for them, time-sharing systems split the computer’s attention to multiple users. Each user had the “illusion” of being the “sole user” of the machine, even though there were many people using the computer from terminals, some of them at locations far removed from the actual computer (Samuel, 1965, p. 583). This new concept did not alter the hardware of the mainframe computers, but it used software to better meet user needs. Time-sharing machines, as pointed out by Naughton (1999), “created a sense of community among their users” (p. 75, emphasis in original). In the days of the batch processing priesthood, users were separated from each other and, indeed, in competition. With time-sharing, though, users sought help from each other and became acquainted. Of course, this community consisted of a filtered set of people who were able to enter postgraduate programs in computers, which were increasingly hostile to women and others who were not part of their elite group. The success of the time-sharing concept was the impetus for the first big science contracts that led to the Internet. J. C. R. Licklider, one of the government researchers who supported the early development of the Internet, came out with a manifesto with a scientifiction twist. As head of the information processing office of the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA), he was a leader of a big science agency devoted

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to supporting U.S. speculative research in the wake of Sputnik. Licklider’s 1963 memo, “Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network,” is one of the founding documents of the ARPAnet and is notable for its striking analogy between establishing communications between sentient alien species and the protocols of a working network. Licklider notes that there are some obvious connections among government-funded researchers—they are all using expensive equipment and are interested in information processing—but there is the problem that at each contractor site, there are bespoke operating systems on various computer systems. The title of Licklider’s memo refers to an “intergalactic network” because in the end there will be different centers brought together by the network, and they will be “highly individualistic” and each will have “its own special language and its own special way of doing things.” He puts this problem into terms used by science fiction writers: “how do you get communications started among totally uncorrelated ‘sapient’ beings?” This would be the inspiration for the contracts and research that would be an important source of innovation that led to the modern-day Internet. The metaphor of interspecies communication that Licklider uses to explain the difficulty to his colleagues has more than one connection to science fiction. The research teams under Licklider’s purview balked at the idea of connecting an outside user in a way similar to an ordinary peripheral device; a researcher at another university could cause problems with the delicate system in a way that a printer or card reader could not. This insight led early ARPAnet administrator Larry Roberts to invent the notion of a “Interface Message Processor” (IMP), a peripheral device that would separate the network from the computers that used it. The IMP would be a peripheral device under the control of the local computing center, and it would be an intermediary between the temperamental mainframe computers and the ARPA network. This layered design would be an important step toward the invention of the TCP/IP structure that one still sees in operation today. This compromise demonstrates the limits to the desire to promote community, however. The administrators of research sites nearly derailed ARPAnet because of their insistence that their individual needs would be harmed by outside researchers.

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9.3 The Crime and the Glory of Hypertext Bush’s idea of a tool to capture the associative (and thus non-linear) train of thought in the Memex turned out to inspire several computer science researchers, even though a specific tool to augment the human intellect and serve as a bulwark to the overwhelming influx of information has yet to be developed. Many media historians, though, draw a direct line from the Memex to the Worldwide Web system that is familiar today. Sociologist Ted Nelson started to mention the concept of hypertext in his public addresses as a professor at Vassar College, pointing out that computers had great possibilities for the humanities. Authors do not think in “linear sequences but rather in ‘swirls’ and in footnotes.” For Nelson, as he was recorded in a newspaper account, hypertext is “a more flexible, non-linear presentation of material” (Wedeles, 1965, p. 4). His insights would be published that same year in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery’s twentieth annual conference as “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate.” This paper is also the first location of his neologism hypertext (p. 96). In this paper, he explains that the prefix “hyper-” is meant to refer to the inability of an object to be represented linearly, similar to the term “hyperspace” (p.  98). The desire to name a messy space for thinking after hyperspace is a telling compromise. Although men as a group were supposed to be rational and eloquent, their preparation for a public speech or article was less than organized. In the same way that Campbell proposed that the ability to traverse great distances would be accompanied by a temporary loss of logic he called “The Wrongness of Space,” so too does Nelson suggest that men could be supported by a temporary suspension of organization in hypertext. Nelson was just one of a number of computer enthusiasts who promoted the development of intellectual effort by imagining the potential for cooperation between humans and computers, but they all share a hidden theme of blaming the staff for their failures. Licklider (1960) promoted a new era of symbiosis between man [sic] and computer. Most of his working time, Licklider stated, was devoted to “getting in a position to think,” but these tasks were clerical, like searching for information, plotting graphs, and calculating. What is more, he states that he was held

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back by “clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability” (p.  6). Douglas Engelbart et al. (1973), too, note that the important skills of technical workers, like designing circuits, are used by professionals only for short periods. Their work hours are expended in clerical tasks: writing a design document, communicating with others on the telephone or in writing, putting documents away in a filing system, and recording result. Nelson shares a goal with earlier researchers, which is to eliminate the need for clerical staff. The seemingly exorbitant cost of a small computer in 1965 was $37,000, but if one stretches this expense over time, “this would cost less than a secretary,” and in organizations that employ many writers, the cost is lower still (p. 85). These early researchers, who played pivotal roles in the development of the Internet and laid the background of the Worldwide Web, took as their audience the elite men who were leaders in science and engineering and who thought they were obstructed by the people around them. These innovators believed that computing devices would cut through and transform the social world, but their faith in technological determinism was not rewarded by the actual use of the network. Licklider imagined that ARPAnet would have a transformative effect on research sites at universities and industrial research centers that were connected by ARPAnet. Certainly, it would be simplistic to state that once IMPs were innovated, all that was left was to wire up the network and set it loose on the world. Licklider, Roberts, and others designed the network to fulfill specific goals, such as allowing researchers at separate institutions to share resources, data, and programs, but these did not fit in with the reward and benefit systems at universities and corporations. In fact, as Abbate (1990) points out, ARPA was wrong about the uses to which the network would be put. After the first ARPAnet connections were made in 1969 and as the network reached its planned extent in 1972, there was a disturbing period when there was not much activity on the network itself. Judging by the original goals, ARPAnet was a failure. In the end, the community of users came to ARPAnet’s rescue, developing a robust suite of protocols that allowed diverse equipment to communicate on the same network and paving the way for the Worldwide Web. How did this happen? On mainframe, time-sharing systems, users had gotten into the habit of saving short files for their colleagues, similar to sending a

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message in postal mail or using text files in public areas to record debates about important issues. Discussion about the value of this kind of communication became tied to the future of networked communication. Les Earnest, in a post to the cpsr-history mailing list (on 28 June 1996), points out that there were different forms of communication for computer researchers before ARPAnet. The development of computing technology would follow the practice of individuals and, in this case, would follow the path taken by analog forms of communication. Before there were email discussion groups, there were physical bulletin boards. Earnest writes: Like many academic groups, we began having bulletin board ‘wars’ on both technical and political topics at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) as soon as it was formed in 1966. Someone would ta[p]e up a statement and others would comment in the margins. When there was no space left, they would add sheets of paper for counter-arguments.

Programmers then transferred this activity to the computer. According to Earnest, the first computerized local mail was done on the CTSS time-­ sharing system at MIT around 1964. The first electronic bulletin board at Stanford was created in 1968, called bboard. At SAIL, there were a number of electronic bulletin boards that used a public text file that anyone could read or edit. This love for community, which was not part of the original ARPAnet proposal, then inspired innovators to break the bulletin boards free from local computers. After email programs were developed so that users of the same system could communicate with each other, ARPAnet researches naturally wished to communicate with their peers at other institutions. Richard Tomlinson suggested the “@” naming convention, so that a message could be sent to a user of a different computer system connected to ARPAnet. In addition to person-to-person messages, adding many people to the same computer file allowed for discussions like the bulletin board conversations on time-sharing to have a wider scope. As it had been throughout the history of computing, science fiction was a part of this next transformation. Even though ARPAnet was supposed to be devoted to military research, mailing lists devoted to personal

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topics began to crop up. One of the first was devoted to “wine-lovers.” Richard Brodie, who knew about the wine-lovers list but “didn’t drink back then,” started the SF-LOVERS list in September 1979. In email messages about the origin of the group, Brodie says that there was a “high correlation between computer geeks and SF readers.” Similar to a mailing list today, a user would send a note to SF-LOVERS@MIT-AI and it would go to all members. This kind of activity was familiar to fans of the genre, of course, as being an important part of the early days of science fiction periodicals. In this case, there was no bottleneck of editors or publication schedules: fans could read comments soon after they were submitted to the mailing list. In the early days of the list, one could read rumors about the upcoming movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, suggestions about what books were worth reading and what television was worth watching, reports about science fiction conventions, and reposting and evaluation of mainstream media’s coverage of science fiction. The list became quite popular within only a few weeks of its inception, and with 200 users at different ARPA sites, the load on the IMPs became noticeable. In an email to the group, Brodie asked for volunteers on 8 October 1979 to serve as distributors for messages on the list. A few days later, in collaboration with a network administrator at MIT, the idea of a moderated list was discussed, whereby an editor would assemble and disperse related stories for the list members. These ideas worked well enough to throttle the list volume for a few months, but then Star Trek was released, prompting a “vigorous” discussion that “broke” the list through volume. After that, the list was reformatted to be a “digest” and messages were sent out once a day. That the mailing list could overload some email programs reflected the fact that “software back then was homegrown, and not designed for large numbers”—large numbers being a couple of hundred users at the time. The users of email groups were, as Abbate (1990) points out, the ones who transformed the network into something more like what one thinks of as today’s Internet. The importance of cultural visions of the Internet before the technical means were established to realize them should not be surprising. This phenomenon supports the theory of social constructivism because (as Raymond Williams reminds us in his book on television)

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the dream of a device precedes the technical capability to accomplish it. Science fiction offers us documentation of these dreams, and as one studies the manifestations of different devices before their enabling technologies are stabilized, one can see the different options that were not selected. These examples help to demonstrate the prehistory of the Internet and its eventual transformation, not to mention the possibilities its creators imagined but were unable to implement, providing a ground for new explorations and technological innovation. Aside from the creators of Spacewar!, however, not too many members of this technical community seem to have been interested in classic science fiction. The response to a 1983 request on SF-LOVERS for the best science fiction was “underwhelming,” according to the compiler. Ursula K. LeGuin and J. R. R. Tolkien were the favorites, with many people suggesting that science fiction writers cannot produce lasting literature. Science fiction also appeared on a different mailing list called “Human Nets.” The popularity of two novels represents the ideals and fears of ARPAnet workers: John Brunner’s 1975 The Shockwave Rider and Vernor Vinge’s 1981 True Names. These works were current at the time, although they reflect sensibilities developed during the golden age. In this way, the ideals of Campbell- and Gernsback-era science fiction played a role in the debates on ARPAnet. The setting at the beginning of Brunner’s Shockwave Rider is one where a pervasive computer network has arisen after the proliferation of nuclear weapons made war unthinkable. At the conclusion of the arms race, the brain race began, with national governments creating centers to train and exploit intellects, building on the framework of the command and control interfaces of the war machine. Personal computers had been distributed to society at the end of the twentieth century, allowing everyone to have a personal assistant. The newfound freedom to travel, experiment with social arrangements, and change jobs unmoored society. Voting became impossible because people were too mobile; change was accelerated to a point where some people are bewildered. In a world saturated with information, official sources prevented important facts from coming to the public. This nightmare scenario proved popular with ARPAnet researchers, who were working on speculative research devoted, at least in part, to military preparedness. The orderly collection and distribution of

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information envisioned by Wells has turned into a frightening tool for social control in the name of advancing the progress of humanity. In an email message, one researcher suggests that everyone working in computer networking should read Brunner’s novel. One can imagine the independent-minded researchers being inspired to resist the degradation of their masculinity in the near-future setting where governments and commercial enterprise exploit their hard work to create free information networks. Also appealing is the protagonist, an individual who was recruited by the government to be a superuser. He describes himself as Nickie Haflinger, a celibate 46-year-old man who founded his own religion, but he appears almost schizophrenic in his various identities and occupations. A man who can do everything, he resembles the polymaths of golden-age science fiction. The text unfolds frenetically, with multiple narrative voices mixed in with snippets of conversations, television programs, future history, government memos, and global-political analysis coming one after another. Readers themselves become the riders of the shockwave of information in this oversaturated setting. Haflinger, escaping from the government, works with co-conspirators to send computer programs into the net. They reveal the truth to the world’s computer users: products are toxic, embezzlement has been recorded, a nuclear weapon was diverted, horrifying genetic experiments are underway. The complication of the plot—that Haflinger, shaved and restrained, had been captured—results in the unexpected resolution that civil rights are restored and citizens may vote on the future of their government. One premiere computer science journal, Communications of the ACM, carried a paper about works that mentioned Brunner, albeit with the blithe caveat that his imaginary computer worm was beyond the current capability (Shoch & Hupp, 1982). Brunner’s association with the new wave is clear when one remembers that he was one of the authors mentioned in 1961 as harbingers of the new age of science fiction. Strangely enough, the other science fiction novel recommended by ARPAnet researchers was Vernor Vinge’s True Names, first published in 1981, which sports little evidence of formal experimentation. In fact, the story itself is told in an almost childlike tone. The plot is also unsophisticated; the complication is that the protagonist is accused of a crime he did not commit and the resolution is

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that he uncovers the true perpetrator. Roger Pollack had been spending the morning in his garden when special agents appear, accusing him of “interference with the instrumentalities of National and individual survival” (2001, p. 201). The most interesting element of Vinge’s novel is the setting. Unlike C. L. Moore’s “No Woman Born,” Vinge does not demonstrate any fear for the future of humanity being disembodied. Readers of True Names find an exhilarating passage into an alternate world where the physical bodies of the characters do not matter. Although not the first depiction of users immersed in a virtual reality, this novel is nevertheless one of the immediate predecessors of the cyberpunk genre that would soon be developed. Like the programmers of Spacewar!, each user is in charge of maintaining the program for their virtual selves. The virtual characters use aliases, which are protection from prosecution in the real world; in fact, the narrator reminds the readers at the start of the story that medieval wizards also took protection from anonymity. The special agents had been able to locate the protagonist in the physical world because the real name behind his virtual character had been discovered. This setting promotes a world where the human body is ancillary and the intellect is more important. Building on the 1945 thinking of Vannevar Bush, in Vinge’s world, one can use voice commands to interact with information machines. One of the professors of the Spacewar! computer science students at MIT, Marvin Minsky, writes an afterword to the 2001 publication of True Names, praising the setting in an unexpected way. In the future, Minsky predicts, computer programming will be a lost art. Suggesting that Vinge is looking ahead, and not following a path established by Bush, Minsky says humans will express their commands to intelligent programs by means of gestures and examples. In this new era, Minsky writes, designers will have to be careful not to replicate the problems described by Jack Williamson in “With Folded Hands,” Arthur C. Clark’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the villain in Vinge’s novel. Minsky addresses this concern about abusive systems only to dismiss it. The rest of his afterword is dedicated to the proposition that human beings are always already living in virtual reality. In order to think or navigate the real world, a human intellect manipulates tokens for reality. In Minsky’s rendition, the

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human being caught in a semiotic field is not much different than a person in a virtual reality. The key difference, though, is that the computerized version allows users to monitor and manipulate the mental representations and physical stimuli, even though all of that information would overwhelm human consciousness. Vinge’s story, Minsky concludes, is a great inspiration to focus research on artificial intelligence. Although the danger of disembodied intelligences had been previously explored, readers feel exuberance in Vinge’s setting where no man’s intellect is incumbered by social reality. The myth that computing technology could bypass social realities was not unique to Vinge. Michael Hauben and Hauben (1997), for instance, is a spokesperson for the widespread enthusiasm many users felt about the possibilities of computer-mediated communication. Hauben unabashedly praises what he sees as the liberating potential of technology. A computer center administrator at Columbia University, he became famous for his concept of netizens, new globalized citizens who emerged as the old order faded away: We are seeing a revitalization of society. The frameworks are being redesigned from the bottom up. A new more democratic world is becoming possible. As one user observed, the Net has “immeasurably increased the quality of … life.” The Net seems to open a new lease on life for people. Social connections which never before were possible, or relatively hard to achieve, are now facilitated by the Net. Geography and time are no longer boundaries. Social limitations and conventions no longer prevent potential friendships or partnerships. (p. 3)

Hauben’s enthusiasm in computer technology is charming, but it belies a belief in the supremacy of human intellect and a disregard for the experience of users who are not men. Drawing on the rhetoric of the public sphere, Hauben drew parallels between the experience of programmers on USENET and the ideals of the Enlightenment. USENET users often did not have access to ARPAnet and its mailing lists, but messages were easily ported onto USENET groups so at least they could follow along with the discussions, even if they could not join in. For this reason, USENET became known as the “poor man’s ARPAnet.” Users took on the rhetoric of a populist alternative to the imagined elite at ARPA

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research sites, in parallel with the feeling of science fiction fans who imagined that they were a merit-based, but marginalized, group. The failure to understand the limitations of this public sphere cannot be blamed on science fiction, but the participants certainly fit in with the misguided idea found in the earliest days of the genre. A different kind of science fiction might have at least inspired a different kind of conversation. To say that the office workers at elite U.S. corporations and the students and staff of prominent universities are some sort of revolutionary vanguard seems disingenuous. Rather, they are more like Merril’s Gunner Cade, sorely in need of an awakening, or Brackett’s Matt Carse, who should stop thinking of himself as a plain mercenary. As well, the repeated effort to eliminate women and others deemed as unworthy had, as it still does, its negative effects. One might hope that science fiction would inspire its fans to respect people who are different—and Lavender (2019) has amply demonstrated how this is possible—but this was not the experience of people who interacted with the fan community nor of those on the vanguard of computing technology. The problems of online communities populated by disembodied intellects were quite apparent at the advent of the Worldwide Web. Dibbell (1993) describes a nightmare that was witnessed by users in a Xerox Parc experiment. In what was called a MOO, users dialed in from around the world and entered a fictional room of an early form of text-based virtual reality that was permeated by a fantasy fiction theme. Users could move in different directions, interact with the environment, and converse with other characters. One Monday night, Dibbell reports, a character with the name Mr. Bungle used computer programming to attack the character of legba, a Haitian trickster spirit “of indeterminate gender.” Then, Mr. Bungle moved on to Starsinger, a “nondescript” female, and forced the character to attack others. In this situation, university students interacted in a text-based virtual environment. There was no physical attack or illegal act; everything took place in ephemeral text, yet the users reported that the impact was startlingly real, causing emotional trauma to the participants. Dibbell and others tell this as a story about taming the wild frontier; in the end, the user community created a code of conduct that specified consequences for inacceptable behavior. This story reflects a significant counterexample to the deterministic attitude that

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communication technology would support free conversations. One should note that the attack, which is described as a rape, was first perpetrated on a character described as nonbinary. The presumption that the new online fora were, as instances of the public sphere that carried over from Gernsback and Campbell letters columns, naturally egalitarian, has made it difficult to promote an inclusive atmosphere not only in STEM but also in science fiction. The triumphant attitude of the early days of computers has led to inappropriate responses from analysts who are immersed in the idea that computer networks were available to all and that they transcended social barriers in a healthy way. The experience of  a historian of computing, Joy Lisi Rankin, speaks to this point. Her presentation in advance of the publication of her A People’s History of Computing in the United States (2018) drew the ire of Brian Dear, who was working on his own history based on his firsthand experience as a programmer of the PLATO online community from 1979 to 1984, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture. Rankin’s archival research led her to point out that the environment was far from egalitarian, and through painstaking review of archival evidence, she found records of harassment experienced by users of the interactive system at the University of Illinois. Dear, who had nothing but positive memories of this era, was shocked. Dear wrote a lengthy attack on Rankin that he publicized on a mailing list of SIGCIS, a scholarly association affiliated with the Society for the History of Technology. Dear said he and his colleagues had no memory of the events Rankin described. The ensuing controversy led to the suspension of the SIGCIS mailing list in May 2017 (Rankin 2022), which reopened a few months later with new guidelines for participation. The fact that Rankin was using evidence from the system itself and that Dear’s assertion that he had not heard anything like it only showed the obliviousness of many computer users at that time. Nevertheless, Dear’s hope to cast Rankin as creating a new problem instead of accepting that his point of view was limited was illuminating. Rankin added new details of the hostile environment found in early computing communities. The subtle way misogyny creeps into documentation of this era demonstrates the pervasiveness of the assumption that computing was a male domain. Sharp eyes have found erotic pinups found in publicity

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photos in early computer installations, and there are reports of programs that could display a woman doing a hula dance, swaying her hips or dropping her skirt. Lawrence Roberts used an image from Playboy for his master’s thesis about image encoding in 1960. Rankin also points out degrading images in Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which was published as a zine-like book, readable in both directions like an ACE double, in 1974. Rankin’s critique of Nelson’s zine is somewhat understated when one takes a fresh look at his publication, coming out about ten years after Nelson had coined the term hypertext. The half of the book called “Computer Lib” starts with an image of a militant fist. Urging readers “you can and must understand computers now,” the image mocks women’s lib and other civil rights groups. Nelson states in the introduction that “Man [sic] has created the myth of ‘the computer’ in his own image, or one of them: cold, immaculate, sterile, ‘scientific,’ oppressive,” and urges readers to take computing back from the “priesthood” that seeks to make computers inaccessible (p. 3). Later, Pohl’s Space Merchants is cited as a prediction of the commercialized society (p. 68). In this half there is a pixelated image of a naked woman in high heels (p. 49). The accompanying text states that the image was stored in a public text file. Although the file was eventually deleted, it was not gone before printouts had been made and at least one user had output the file to punch cards, allowing for the file to be re-input at any time. In the “Dream Machines” portion that seeks to inspire creative uses of computers, a reclining nude woman is one of the illustrations (p. 11). Nelson covers the PLATO system thoroughly as a case study of a computer utopia, and he describes his proposal for Xanadu, a screen in the home that will allow users access into the world’s hypertext systems. Nelson never brought his system, named after the setting of the orientalist poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to fruition, but one of the first personal computers was released the following year. The Altair, which users had to assemble from a kit like a device from a Gernsback magazine, was named for a star made famous by the 1956 science fiction film, Forbidden Planet. It is clear from the foregoing that the community formed in the early days of computing was infused with the mythos of pulp science. In all four important developments that marked the transformation of giant

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brains into the personal computing devices that are more recognizable today—so-called mini computers, time-sharing, email, and hypertext— the inspiration of the genre can be seen. The science fiction that inspired the innovators highlighted the independence of users and the belief that the technology would easily cut through the restrictions of the social world. The fact that science fiction was the touchstone that brought these innovators together, though, demonstrates the imperative for rethinking the history of science fiction. The false narrative that science fiction was dominated by men before 1970 simply because only men were interested in science and technology needs to be corrected by the many women writers, scientists, and engineers that were present. The hostile environment they faced should occasion further study, especially as it contradicts the common belief that the genre and technical professions together were open to anyone who wished to participate. Bringing back the debates and challenges to diversity and inclusion that were clearly seen in science fiction can serve as an important starting point for a reevaluation of the history of diversity and inclusion in science and engineering.

9.4 Entering the Classroom The question of who taught the first university course dedicated to science fiction is as vexed as who was the first person to publish a science fiction magazine. Considering the debate itself, though, reveals much about the status of science fiction at the time hypertext was becoming a powerful metaphor for computerized communications. One axis of the controversy is the type of course being offered; does a lecture series at a university count as a college course? Another prominent axis is the type of fiction that is included in the syllabus. As protagonists offered their opinions about best practices, a consensus emerged that would validate the new wave’s disruptive aesthetics and eulogies for tortured men. There are two contenders for the title of the first science fiction course. Sam Moskowitz, in bombastic style, states that he achieved “the impossible dream” when he offered “the first science-fiction course in academe” (1983, p. 3). Moskowitz was teaching in the 1950s, even though it must be mentioned that it consisted of public lectures that did not carry

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academic credit. Under the imprimatur of the General Studies Extension Division of CUNY’s City College, Moskowitz invited writers who were in the area to discuss the field and give tips to students. One interesting aspect of this course was that Moskowitz devoted part of it to the history of the genre and the other part to advice about writing. This made L. Sprague de Camp’s Science Fiction Handbook, published in 1953, the first year of the course, a good textbook. From 1945 to 1953, Moskowitz had been publishing installments of his memoir about science fiction fandom in the fanzine Fantasy Commentary. The full text was published as The Immortal Storm in 1954, as Moskowitz was teaching his City College extension course for the second year. In this volume, Moskowitz shows how the emotional and earnest attempts of science fiction fans to produce, distribute, and argue about amateur publications were central to the fan community in the lead-up to the first World Science Fiction Convention in 1939. As discussed in Chap. 4, the “Great Exclusion Act” was based, in part, on the Futurians’ perception that the organizing committee had betrayed fans by turning over control to science fiction professionals. John W. Campbell’s tacit acceptance of the new organizing committee and his appearance, along with others, meant to some the loss of the ideals of the early community. That being said, Moskowitz’s class seems to harken back to the early days of the community. His insistence that science fiction is not a commercial enterprise but the common heritage of humanity is shown by the wide breadth of texts he considers to be science fiction, certainly. More importantly, though, is the idea that his students themselves should think of themselves as writers, and he sought—with the cooperation of the professionals in his circle—to provide the class with information that would help them transition from fans to published writers. As much as the student-centered, project-based artisanal science fiction class might fit in with today’s pedagogies, the time was not right for Moskowitz’s class. The fan-practitioner model may have been suitable despite his lack of academic credentials and the fact that his students were not required to be matriculated in City College. The offsite venue allowed him to focus on the development of the pulp genre, and as he was preaching to the converted, he did not have to develop a defensive attitude. That being said, Moskowitz was not welcomed into

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the university community, even though he had written and edited significant amounts of science fiction. Professors did not “readily accept him as one of their own,” and professional writers “did not regard him as a colleague.” Instead, his credentials led him to be denigrated as a “fan” (Searles, 1980, p. 174). In the brief biographies of the students Moskowitz includes, it can be seen that about half of them were women who wished to be writers. That being said, the course did reflect the limitations of postwar fans. The guests Moskowitz mentions were not just exclusively men, but male writers of a golden-age imprint, including Hugo Gernsback, Frederik Pohl, Murray Leinster, Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Lester del Rey, and Robert A. Heinlein. The conservation of the old guard seemed of paramount importance in Moskowitz’s selections despite the many avant-garde voices who were nearby (such as Judith Merril and Katherine MacLean). The second person who can claim to have offered the first science fiction course was Mark R. Hillegas. Certainly, he was the first person to breach the walls of the university, but he too is reactionary in his own way. He explains his difficulties with offering what was perhaps the first for-credit science fiction course in a 1967 article that uses the phrase “dream deferred,” akin to the Langston Hughes’ poem that was an icon of civil rights movements. Evoking the sense of a persecuted minority is just one of the ways he reflects new wave sensibilities. Starting in 1962, first at Colgate University and then Southern Illinois University, Hillegas offered popular courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Whereas Moskowitz had been focused on a fan’s overview of the genre, Hillegas writes that his colleagues pressured him to reduce the number of pulp writers, who he calls “professional” writers. Increasingly, due to colleagues’ concerns about the lack of literary merit in science fiction, he felt forced to increase attention on “mainstream” writers like Edward Bellamy, William Golding, and B. F. Skinner. Hillegas finds the rejection of science fiction based in the distrust of progress and “the perfectibility of man” (1967, p. IX-20). As has been seen in earlier chapters, these ideologies are not far away from white supremacy. This is not to defend the narrow canon of university literary studies in universities at the time Hillegas was working—Hillegas is surely justified for his consternation about obsessively narrow curricula. His belief that literary professionals

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sought to restore meaningfulness and certainty to human life shows them to be pitted against the praise of disorder and uncertainty that would become common in the Cold War. He claims that literature professionals wish to return to an idealized vision of the nineteenth century, when there was no specialization, similar to the “gentleman’s” education obtained by Gernsback and others before college curricula devoted to science and engineering emerged. These gentlemen, Hillegas claims, will never be interested in science and technology because they threaten to change the social order. By 1971, Jack Williamson reported that as many as two hundred science fiction courses were being offered. Perusing his list, one can see that a great number of the courses were about fantasy and utopian literature generally. Williamson particularly praises Dennis Livingston’s course at Case Western University. Students spend part of the course reading modern utopias and dystopias, like Skinner’s Walden Two and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Then, he leads teams of students to produce 30-page research papers analyzing various contemporary groups that want to transform society, ranging from free schools to black nationalists and women’s liberation to technocrats. “The student who completes such a course,” Williamson states, “can hardly fail to be a more aware, more tolerant, more effective, and maybe even a happier member of our fluid society” (p. 69). However, these selections were not representative of science fiction as Gernsback, Campbell, or Merril would have recognized it. Science fiction, in this way, enters the university as a way of promoting students to defy conformity and think independently. At the start of the 1970s, using science fiction in a utilitarian way to obtain educational objectives showed how the genre was poised to take on a wider role. Consider four textbooks that appear on the market, suitable for social science college courses. Richard Ofshe edited an anthology The Sociology of the Possible in 1970. Ofshe, on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, says in his introduction that undergraduate pedagogy subjects students to a “painful orthodoxy.” He is not interested in the real interaction or real-world study being promoted in academic circles, but he is similarly dismayed that students are not asked to think “in any creative or serious fashion about the subject.” His book seeks to “provoke” its readers

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to think about sociology in a new way: how things could be, as well as how they are (p. xi). Sociologists, Ofshe writes, have never had the political power to implement their findings; unlike other fields, sociology cannot implement and test its ideas (pp. xi–xii). If a sociologist wants to find new solutions, one cannot “study only existing forms of social organization.” For his anthology, Ofshe puts together materials that deal with the “possible,” distancing him from science fiction, that is, predictions of the future. He says he could not condense Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Jack Vance’s To Live Forever and The Languages of Po, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass, but would have included them if he could. The survey he does include excerpts from Plato and Thomas More to Edward Bellamy and James Blish, and includes authors from the pulps. These are intended to be used for sociological analysis and illustrate what “intelligent and creative men [sic] have thought” (p. xii). The goal is to help students explore the consequences of social changes—“a context in which a student may think about the principles and possible applications of sociology in a creative fashion” (p. xiii). Willis Everett McNelly and Leon E.  Stover make a similar attempt with their 1972 Above the Human Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology. In their afterword, they say that science fiction is a development from the “research revolution”: “Anything can be researched and developed, from a well-ordered society to trouble-free sex relations.” Some writers have optimism in Ellul’s “technique”—others are not so enamored of industrialized science and call for caution (1970, p. 359). Science fiction looks to the present and past and “extends its social awareness from the communities in which we live, from the systems which we serve or which serve us, from the technology which enslaves us or frees us, to the men and women of today who create the realities in which they live” (p. 374). Such a sentiment nicely captures the Cold War endorsement of independent thinking. The third textbook, Worlds of the Future: Exercises in the Sociological Imagination by Bernard S. Phillips, is also published in 1972. His introduction is telling for the way it invokes modern man discourse:

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I find myself now, located in the present, conscious of several alternative futures. In one of these, man’s [sic] problems continue to increase until man himself becomes his own victim. […] In another future, man learns to gain control over those forces which presently are shaping his existence. I believe that the development of this future depends on man’s consciousness of his ability to construct the future. We all construct the future by everything we think, feel, and do, but we tend to do it unconsciously and with a limited special and temporal vision. We are futurist without knowing it, and we tend to extrapolate the limited present into the future. I invite the reader to become another kind of futurist, one who is conscious of the ways in which he [sic] is creating the future, and one who creates a future more conducive to his own development than the present is (p. x).

Phillips expresses the new wave discourse of science fiction well; the textbook alternates nonfiction articles about sociological principles with science fiction stories that he himself authors to illustrate the point. For further reading, though, Phillips suggests his readers find Radical Man by Hampden-Turner and World of Null-A by Van Vogt, works associated with the pulp era. A final representative textbook is published in 1974: Introductory Psychology through Science Fiction, edited by Harvey A.  Katz, Patricia Warrick, and Martin Henry Greenberg. They reprint stories from the pulps and science fiction magazines that they find “imaginative, fascinating, and absorbing” (p. 10). They divide the stories into units, such as “The Learning Process,” “Sensation and Perception,” and “Personality,” so that students can apply their knowledge of psychological concepts and engage in critical thinking by applying one reading assignment to another. Furthermore, the editors hope that the collection will “energize” the learning process (p. 10). These editors, like the others, are not concerned about the supposed technophilia of the authors, and do not worry that they may be enforcing a totalitarian worldview by asking students to read them. Instead, they see in science fiction an opportunity to develop the imagination in the social sciences. Unlike Hillegas, who lamented his colleagues’ inability to accept science fiction, the editors of these anthologies are unapologetic in their

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suggestion that the genre has a useful place in the university. At a time when Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity was casting aspersions at professors who failed to make their classrooms relevant to a generation that was grappling with the Vietnam War, these anthology editors can be credited for their effort to make college education relevant. That being said, one of the key insights from Postman and Weingartner is based on the dictum of John Dewey, which is that students learn what they do in the classroom. Moskowitz’s pedagogy, based on students producing and critiquing their own writing, is certainly more attuned to this idea. One lonely textbook by Roemer (1981) suggests that educators lead their students in an inquiry-based project to create their own science fiction. Merril,  Moskowitz, and Roemer were prescient in the way they promoted a maker mentality, encouraging readers to become creators in the same way as Gernsback hailed his readers. The anthology editors, it seems, simply believe that reading science fiction will refine their students’ minds.

9.5 A Theory for the New Wave Seemingly in response to the legitimacy crisis Hillegas and others faced when trying to bring science fiction into the university classroom, a new crop of theorists attempted to form an aesthetic theory that justified the study of science fiction.  In general, they decried fiction from the Gernsback and Campbell eras, suggesting that it was too enthusiastic about the technological age; unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of eliminating the chance for any dissenters—in this text represented by Harris, Stone, and Hansen (Chap. 3); Harris and Brackett (Chap. 6); and Merril (Chap. 7).  The first was to dethrone the earlier generation. Knight (1967) proclaims that the underground created by Gernsback is dead, and increasingly critics see the golden age as an unfortunate time when science fiction was ignored by mainstream sources. Clareson (1971) makes the claim that the pro-science attitude of authors before the new wave delayed it from obtaining critical and academic attention. Norman Spinrad (1990) suggests that “serious” science fiction has been tarred by its tangle

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with commerce during the golden age. Similarly, Disch (1998) suggests that the emergence of science fiction from technical professionals shows how writers like Heinlein serve to perpetuate the military-industrial complex. Although these critics are indebted to Merril’s analysis of science fiction, they make scant mention of her. Some critics of the 1970s purport to reject the long view of science fiction promoted by Moskowitz, but they do not offer an alternative to the canon of mostly male writers. Aldiss (1973), for instance, disdains “potted histories” that take critics “cantering briskly though Greek legends” to Moore, Rabelais, Swift. This “Lucian-to-Verne” approach, Aldiss states, is inadequate for modern needs. Instead, he proposes to define science fiction as the “search for a definition of man [sic] and his status in the universe” (pp.  8–10). Starting with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Aldiss draws a line through literary efforts by Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, passing over most of the pulp era. Calling Gernsback “one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field” (p. 209), Aldiss suggests it is impossible to imagine finding great literary fiction like that written by Franz Kafka, Aldous Huxley, or Karel Čapek appearing in AST. He gives some honor to Campbell, Heinlein, and Frank Herbert, all to say that the great tradition of social and moral criticism that he has drawn culminates in the work of new wave writers Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock, Ursula Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut. Aldiss’s rejection of the universal character of science fiction is rather unique, but his canon still represents the masculinist assumptions of historians he rejects. The critique from Michael Moorcock and others from the new wave, described in Chap. 8, is carried forward in the first academic response to the genre. Many standard works about science fiction after 1970 attempt to portray golden-age science fiction as an unfortunate low point. Thus, critics after the 1970s suggest that the new wave, inspired by New Worlds, provides a more humanistic, introspective, and socially relevant fiction of the future. This fiction is supposed to fit in better with long-standing themes of fantasy and utopian literature, providing stories and metaphors that readers can use to fashion their own identities and howl in disgust at the technocratic establishment. This is evident in Robert Silverberg’s “critics’ anthology” from 1970, in which critics write brief introductions

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to what Silverberg considers the thirteen most impactful science fiction stories. Despite this supposed new take on the genre, only one-and-one-­ half of the authors are female. Silverberg includes Pamela Zoline’s 1967 story “The Heat Death of the Universe” from New Worlds. Lewis Pagett, the pseudonym used by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, is also included, although the introduction to the story highlights Kuttner’s legacy, mentioning Moore only to say that she did not know how to craft a plot but helped fill out Kuttner’s stories with “sensory detail” (p. 97). This sexist selection shows how the first academic response was closely tied to fan visions of the genre. Silverberg (1970) is an example of a critic who promotes the theory that science fiction is intrinsic to the western tradition. Although this might have been an effort to generate support from university colleagues, he ends up reinforcing a narrow view of the genre. Saying that science fiction “is as old as dreaming,” he suggests that the “man” who first dreamed of voyaging to the moon was the first to indulge in science fiction. “To reach beyond the set bounds of space and time, to attempt to walk for a moment in infinity’s shadow, is science fiction’s essential goal” (p. vii). He then creates a genealogy of science fiction, stating that Gernsback’s AMZ and Campbell’s AST evolved from a tradition that started with the Odyssey and the speculative works by Plato through works like More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the writings of Jules Verne and H.  G. Wells. Thus, the stories selected for inclusion in the anthology demonstrate that science fiction is not simply “a manifestation of pop culture”; in fact, AMZ and AST were just “a momentary aberration in a literary tradition of high antiquity” (p. x). Aside from decrying Gernsback’s failure to promote good writing, Silverberg does not seem to have added much to the Great Books theory of science fiction that was present at the start of Astounding. He also fails to utilize Merril’s eclecticism to make a more inclusive canon. Silverberg, suggesting that science fiction is a universal human endeavor, has the interesting effect of rendering all other cultural expressions of different eras and in different languages irrelevant. When someone like Silverberg says science fiction is universal, it matters little where or when an author was writing, and he certainly does not take the time to find authors outside the typical western canon. This also takes away how authors fit in (or challenge) with the

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existing social world, such as the obvious goal of so many early writers to establish a paradigm where white men were the natural group to innovate and, as well, the dissenters to this paradigm. Whereas Gernsback had found occasion to include some women in his pages, Silverberg almost entirely omits them. This is unexpected given Silverberg’s interest in the utopian tradition. As discussed in Chap. 1, there were many women who wrote utopian literature, and in Chap. 3, Leslie F.  Stone’s is shown to fit well within this literary tradition. This omission is continued throughout the decade. In 1978, the SFRA and SFWA co-published the first of several anthologies of science fiction that could be used in classrooms. Pohl, writing a preface, continues with the theme of artificial scarcity, presenting science fiction as rare in the same way that Gernsback had: “there are several hundred persons writing science fiction in America today. There are also several hundred persons teaching it” (Warrick et al., 1978, p. ix). The two dozen stories include authors like Gernsback and Campbell, along with newer names championed as part of the new wave. The only woman who contributed a story was Ursula K. Le Guin, even though there are plenty of women listed as section editors, including Pamela Sargent. Setting aside women authors follows the practice of Asimov (described in Chap. 5, Sect. 5.5); at this point, their comments that there were no women writers before 1970 had become reified. This rut of universalizing science fiction and claiming that its best writers reinforce western civilization shows an unexpected kinship of academic study and earlier theories of white civilization. Darko Suvin, for his part, is quite interested in finding a theory of science fiction that accounts for a long swath of literary history. His theory of “cognitive estrangement” was developed, in part, through a presentation of the first meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association in 1970. Similar to Silverberg, Suvin reports that science fiction is akin to literature from Hellenistic Greece to the European renaissance without wondering why this path was so close to the theory of Aryan-driven progress. Suvin nominates Swift and Christopher Columbus as progenitors to science fiction because their texts report fantasy as if it is fact. Yet what is happening in these texts? Columbus was describing the mouth of the Orinoco river as if it were the factual location for the Garden of Eden, bringing a religious

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justification to colonial exploration; in Part Three of Gulliver’s Travels, “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan,” Swift mixes his satirical locations with an actual country to demonstrate the challenges of international trade networks. Surely, after the 1960s, one might have thought a university professor would be more attuned to the need to expose the fallacies of imperialism, yet Suvin’s essay transforms science fiction into a purely mental experience, divorced from social commentary. (Suvin inscribed the reprint of the article he sent to Merril: “To Judy, who helped even when she disagreed.”) Suvin’s universal theory of science fiction is that, like the public sphere, it allows authors to make commentary about the world about them. Great science fiction after World War II, Suvin writes, is a kind of sociological modeling based on extrapolation of the times. This definition allows Suvin to claim that works like Jack London’s Iron Heel and Zamiatin’s We are the forbearers to Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth. Like Swift, Voltaire, and Diderot, Suvin writes, science fiction authors gain an opportunity to comment on “the shortcomings of our workaday world.” These authors may not give readers useful information, but they enable readers’ minds “to receive new wavelengths” (p. 380). Indeed, Suvin expects that the “strange novelty” of science fiction will bring about a transformation of humanity, helping them achieve a “level of cognition higher than its average reader” (p. 381). This superiority of the science fiction reader had already been postulated with the dictum “fans are slans,” described in Chap. 7, Sect. 7.1, and in this essay Suvin hopes that science fiction will transform the educational system in much the same way G. Stanley Hall proposed a half-century before. In Suvin’s study, there are no women authors of science fiction. The only authors from nations outside of the United States and Europe are quite recent. Lazily, Suvin repurposes the theory of globalizing European civilization to suggest that the great books of the western tradition are now catching fire in Japan among people who are also bringing about a new civilization. The engagement with a critical mind is best seen in white male authors, but it can spread to others. Campbell might have said that others will understand it when they  (or their race) are ready.  Campbell’s belief that he could inculcate scientific thinking

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through pseudoscientific thought experiments, described in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3, is an unexpected connection to Suvin.  Works like Silverberg’s and Suvin’s are not isolated from the rest of the first academic studies of the genre. Much like the new wave’s failed promise of revolution, the early university response was not radical or progressive. Suvin and many others of the first academic workers in science fiction studies dressed their great works of European civilization curricula in spacesuits in order to assert that they were important for the technological age. Ignoring work that challenged this tradition of white masculinist civilization that is discussed in the present study, these critics made it seem as if their very narrow canon of science fiction was essential for the next evolutionary stage of humanity. Their universalizing tendency jarred with the ethos of universities after the 1960s. Opposed to metanarratives, university studies increasingly focused on local histories and cultures. In addition, the feeling that university studies did not prepare students for the modern world came partly from the promotion of the idea that white men were the prototype of all humans. After the identity movements of the civil rights era, new canons arose to include literature that reflected a variety of genders and ethnicities. The early responders in universities did bear some similarity of another group responding to diversity. At the same time that new canons demanded attention to the demographic of authors, postmodern theory suggested that the author was irrelevant. Facing encroachment by new literary canons—based on, for instance, authors who were women, Chicanx, queer, or international—many of the first academic critics of science fiction sought a justification for their selection of elite men of European descent. It is perhaps for this reason Donna Haraway includes science fiction in her list of the “Informatics of Domination.” She writes that the “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” of representation, perfection, or eugenics are being replaced by “scary new networks” of simulation, optimization, and population control, respectively (1991,  p. 161). Science fiction, interestingly, makes an appearance on the list of new networks, replacing the bourgeois novel as a mode of domination. Haraway’s network of “oppositional cyborgs” weaves together public and private lives, developing “new couplings, new coalitions” from their groups (p. 170). Haraway proposes this community as an antidote to command and

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control networks of simplified language. Her networked, oppositional users of technology working at home do not seem so far removed from the Judith Merrils and the Sam Moskowitzes of postwar science fiction. Their ideals, though, were so out of sync from the early university response that Haraway did not even consider them as an alternative. It would have saved some time if science fiction’s entry into the university had been better informed about the genre. The filtering effect of fans infatuated by masculinist thinking made its impact known in the 1950s and 1960s, with the result that it seemed as if no one had ever challenged it. The change would be slow, but it would come. Pamela Sargent’s 1975 anthology, Women of Wonder, heralded what was then seen as a new generation of writers, starting with Merril, who had made an effective challenge to the masculinist assumptions of the genre. Sargent’s later anthologies would go back to include C.  L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Margaret St. Clair, Zenna Henderson, and many others. In criticism, books like Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction would signal a change in the conception of the genre, returning the women who had pitched a battle against masculinist assumptions. Significant scholarship in the twenty-first century has continued to replace the erasures committed by fan historians and new wave theorists. As for the SFRA, the organization has made an effort to change with the times, albeit slowly. The organization’s awards for contribution to science fiction scholarship in its first two decades went to many people who venerated the masculinist impulses of the new wave, such as Jack Williamson, Damon Knight, Brian Aldiss, Darko Suvin, Everett Bleiler, and George Slusser. However, in other years the organization managed to support the work of others who spoke to a different vision. In 2011, the organization gave its prestigious award for lifetime contributions to science fiction scholarship to Haraway, and in 2012 Sargent received the same honor. In 2019, the theme of SFRA’s annual conference in Hawaii brought significant attention to the lingering colonial impulse in science fiction and the possibilities for a postcolonial future. At the meeting, the membership discussed the colonial metaphors used by the organization in its awards: “pilgrim” and “pioneer.” The organization subsequently voted to rename the awards descriptively, eliminating the reflection of a colonialist bias.

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References Abbate, J. (1990). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. Abbate, J. (2012). Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing. The MIT Press. Adas, M. (2006). Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. Harvard UP. Aldiss, B.  W. (1973). Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Doubleday. Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. Doubleday. Berkeley, E. C. (1952). Giant Brains, or Machines that Think. John Wiley. Brunner, J. (1975). The Shockwave Rider. Harper and Row. Clareson, T. (1971). The Other Side of Realism. In SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction (pp. 1–28). Bowling Green UP. Dibbell, J. (1993, December 21). A Rape in Cyberspace; or, How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society. The Village Voice. Disch, T.  M. (1998). The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. Free Press. Ellul, J. (1970). The Technological Society (1954, trans. 1964) (J.  Wilkinson, Trans.). Knopf. Engelbart D.  C., Watson, R.  W., & Norton, J.  C (1973). The Augmented Knowledge Workshop. In Proceedings of the June 4–8, 1973, National Computer Conference and Exposition (AFIPS ’73, pp. 9–21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY. Gernsback, H. (1958). Ralph 124C 41+. Fawcett Publications. Reprint 2008 by Wildside Press. Graetz, J.  M. (1981, August). The Origin of Spacewar! Creative Computing, 7(8), 56–67. Gunther, G. (1953, February). Can Mechanical Brains Have Consciousness? Startling Stories, 29(1), 108–116. Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge. Hauben, M., & Hauben, R. (1997). Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. IEEE Computer Society P. Hicks, M. (2017). Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. MIT P. Hillegas, M.  R. (1967, December). The Course in Science Fiction: A Hope Deferred. Extrapolation, 9(1), IX-18–IX-21.

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Index1

A

Achebe, Chinua, 140, 312 Ackerman, Forrest J., 94, 151–153, 162, 167 Afrofuturism, 43–45 All-Story, see Munsey, Frank Amazing Stories, 34, 35, 51, 56, 69, 70, 76, 82, 85, 178, 192, 199, 411, 436 change of publisher, 94, 146, 198, 242 precursors, 53, 66 Anthropocene studies, 64, 80, 111, 132, 138, 237, 320, 422, 446 Anti-Semitism, 211, 240, 246, 368 Argosy, The, see Munsey, Frank Asimov, Isaac, 92, 207, 219, 222, 291, 295, 344–346, 351–353, 361, 382, 387, 389, 400, 408,

413, 418, 424, 426, 430, 436, 448, 453, 471, 474, 490 debate with John W. Campbell, Jr., about race, 223–226, 256–259, 370 as editor, 283, 284, 424 experience with fandom, 92, 211, 214, 242 Foundation series, 230, 251, 262, 311, 331, 412, 450, 475, 492 “Half Breed,” 253 harassment of women, 279–285, 368 nonfiction, 164, 255, 256, 272, 273 relationship with Frederik Pohl, 366 social science fiction, 238, 239, 466

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 C. Leslie, From Hyperspace to Hypertext, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2027-3

505

506 Index

Asimov, Isaac (cont.) Susan Calvin character, 239, 248, 249, 271, 341, 471 “Trends,” 244, 310, 389 Astounding Stories, 94, 177, 198–200, 207, 211, 214, 215, 238, 291, 293–295, 310, 314, 315, 323, 411, 439 Analytical Laboratory feature, 215, 310, 312, 322, 361 Brass Tacks letters column, 210, 214, 215, 315 transition to Analog, 411 Atlantis, lost continent of, 91, 92, 297, 299 B

Ballard, J. G., 398, 422, 430, 436, 437, 445–447, 456 Bates, Harry, 198–200 Big science, 195–196, 263–266, 268–271, 351–354, 361, 362, 379, 400, 445, 450–453, 469, 472, 475 Boas, Franz, 65, 143, 204 Boucher, Anthony, 331, 369, 424, 426 Boy’s series books, 188, 189, 191, 193, 242 Brackett, Leigh, 315, 342, 348, 349, 397, 400, 411, 440, 500 “The Halfling,” 323, 324, 424, 442, 445 “Martian Quest,” 322, 375 Breuer, Miles J., 45, 97, 199 Miss Rae Winters pseudonym (see Gender swapping)

Bush, Vannevar, 89, 178, 181, 182, 263, 270, 312, 469, 471 Integraph, 181, 182, 469, 470 Memex, 263, 313, 469, 477 C

Campbell, John W., Jr., 60, 92, 96, 97, 100, 110, 175–231, 265, 268, 272, 280, 283, 286, 291–293, 295, 296, 304, 308–310, 313, 318, 323, 332, 334, 342, 346, 352–354, 356, 357, 361, 376, 382–384, 387, 398, 400, 402, 409–411, 422, 424, 427, 428, 431–434, 436, 448, 466, 469, 472, 489–491, 495, 497, 498 Arcot, Morey and Wade stories, 183, 187, 239, 252, 262, 380, 463 debate with Isaac Asimov about race, 223–226, 254, 256–259, 370 Don A. Stuart stories, 186, 196, 197, 200, 203–206, 209, 242, 244, 292, 308, 314 first AST issue, 207, 244, 308 hostility to women writers, 135, 315–316, 321, 322, 372, 373, 411, 439 mentorship of Isaac Asimov, 213, 240–252 relationship with Judith Merril, 370–373 suppression of black author, 228, 411, 443 technical credentials, 96, 177, 197, 205, 218, 221, 316, 408

 Index 

“When the Atoms Failed,” 161, 178, 179, 313, 472 Chesnutt, Charles W., 43–45 Clarke, Arthur C., 321, 374 Clarke, Edward H., 121, 134, 241 Cold War, 221, 240, 331, 341, 373, 376, 377, 380, 381, 384, 386, 389, 390, 394, 409, 414, 417–420, 431, 437, 439, 462, 491, 492 Colonialism, 71, 74, 125, 138–140, 157, 223, 229, 230, 252, 291, 299, 310, 320, 324, 330, 331, 383, 441, 498, 500 “Black Man’s Burden,” 229, 398 critiquing representations of, 140 scramble for Africa, 138, 230, 421 strong man’s burden, 63 white man’s burden, 29, 45, 62, 229 Communism, 99, 209, 210, 272, 376–378, 409, 414–417, 419 Red Scare, 377 Young Communist League, 209 Conklin, Groff, 135, 284, 286, 396, 411, 412 Cosmos (fan serial), 93–105, 184, 196 Wrongness of Space, 97, 99, 100, 448, 471, 477 Culture concept, 60, 65, 143, 370, 372, 438, 466

Darwinian evolution, 59, 62, 66, 138, 450 modern synthesis, 65, 66, 370 sexual selection, 122, 123, 130 Delany, Martin, 43 Delany, Samuel R., 228, 229, 257, 400, 411 Du Bois, W. E. B., 43, 45 E

Education barriers to access, 112–120, 142, 316 sex segregation, 121, 241 specialized for science and engineering, 7, 23, 117, 118 Eisenhower, Dwight, 379, 415, 416, 419, 433, 451 Electrical Experimenter, see Gernsback, Hugo Ellison, Harlan, 238, 281, 285, 369, 399, 400, 408, 409, 422, 431, 434–436, 442, 455 Emshwiller, Carol, 369, 441, 442 Extra-sensory perception (ESP), 33, 36, 97, 197, 216–218, 306, 328, 334, 335, 358, 359, 375, 381–384, 392, 394, 395, 414, 425, 439, 440 F

D

Darwin, Charles, 57, 59, 66, 123, 372

507

Fielder, Leslie, 239 First-wave feminism, 117, 140 Frankfurt School, 420, 421, 424, 426

508 Index

Futurian Society of New York, 211, 348, 349, 352, 364, 369, 389, 390, 396, 411, 412, 424, 489 the Great Exclusion Act of 1939, 211, 346, 489 G

Garby, Lee Hawkins, 82, 177 Gender arbitrariness of gender roles, 41 barriers to access, 316, 360 masculinism, 249 nonbinary, 91, 307, 486 social construction of, 3, 125, 130, 136, 142, 295 socialization of boys, 13 See also Masculinity Gender swapping Amy Worth pseudonym, 102, 197 Don A. Stuart pseudonym, 196 Judith Merril’s male pseudonyms, 348 Louisa Carter Lee pseudonym, 76 Miss Rae Winters pseudonym, 97 Stone’s “Out of the Void,” 141 “writing like a man,” 293, 319, 322, 324, 348 Gernsback, Hugo, 3, 24–25, 27–38, 41–46, 51–57, 65–76, 84, 85, 87, 92, 96, 109–111, 117, 120, 121, 126–131, 135, 138, 141, 175, 188, 189, 198–200, 208, 212, 215, 221, 242, 243, 248, 262, 265, 291, 304, 342, 352–354, 374, 409, 411, 424,

431, 432, 434, 468–470, 487, 490, 491, 497 Baron Münchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures, 33, 41, 68 change of reputation, 494–496 Electrical Experimenter, 17 establishing Astounding Stories, 69–79 Huck Gernsbacher pseudonym, 8, 15 Hugo award, 175, 281, 284, 286, 369, 462 invention of the term “science fiction,” 35 Modern Electrics, 14, 17, 27, 55 promotion of outdated science, 66, 125, 177 Radio League of America, 12, 16 Ralph 124C 41+, 27–33, 45, 46, 55, 65, 66, 84, 99, 100, 138, 157, 180, 187, 264, 432, 456, 463, 468 Science and Invention, 16, 20, 26, 34, 35, 53, 56, 66, 67, 70 Science Fiction League, 13, 94, 208 scientifiction, 5, 34, 35, 38, 43, 45, 56, 69, 70, 74, 110, 129, 208, 427, 467, 475 Sexology, 35, 36 sparse inventions, 5 Telimco, 10, 55 Ultimate World, 36, 275 Wireless Association of America, 12 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 39, 40, 102, 124

 Index 

509

H

I

Hall, G. Stanley, 189–192, 198, 221, 377, 498 Hamilton, Edmond, 102, 400 Hansen, L. Taylor, 109, 150–167, 252, 300, 312, 412 masculine pronouns, 151–153, 165, 166 nonfiction, 164, 165 Harris, Clare Winger, 109–111, 120, 126–135, 144, 146, 201, 203, 361, 395 “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” 111, 129, 130 “The Miracle of the Lily,” 131, 132, 143, 200 Heinlein, Robert A., 92, 207, 228, 243, 259, 263, 333, 334, 353, 354, 359, 366, 385, 387, 389, 398, 400, 401, 411, 414, 418, 424, 425, 431, 433, 436, 440, 448, 453–455, 490, 495 breaking into the slicks, 342 juvenile novels, 353, 450, 453 Herbert, Frank Dune, 230, 334, 395, 398 Homosexuality, 238, 377–379, 391, 392, 415 Hopkins, Pauline, 43 Hubbard, L. Ron, 217, 219–221, 371 Dianetics, 216–221, 370, 371 Hydra club, 211, 351, 352, 368, 412 Hyperspace, 81, 93, 96, 97, 183, 275, 333, 334, 395, 407, 448, 471, 474, 477 antagonism to concept, 302, 328

Immigration Act of 1924, see Racial pseudoscience Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, 202 Intentional fallacy, 29, 52n1, 72, 91, 186, 310, 345, 391 J

Jenkins, William, 74–76, 78–80, 98, 303 Louisa Carter Lee pseudonym (see Gender swapping) K

Keller, David H., 35, 74, 96, 101, 102, 110, 197 Amy Worth pseudonym (see Gender swapping) Kennedy, John F., 379, 380, 448, 451, 452 Kinsey, Alfred, 35, 36, 378 Kornbluth, Cyril M., 211, 364, 365, 369, 388 Kuhn, Thomas S., 57, 63, 125, 176, 224, 461, 466 Kuttner, Henry, 306, 424 L

Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 57 Land-grant university, 25, 117, 118, 122, 241 Lane, Mary Bradley, 39 Leinster, Murray, see Jenkins, William

510 Index

Lewis, Isabel Martin, 24–27, 134, 206, 471 Linnaeus, Carl, 38, 58, 113 Lovecraft circle H. P. Lovecraft, 296, 297, 305, 306 R. H. Barlow, 296, 297, 302, 304, 306 Robert E. Howard, 297, 298 Lowell, Percival, 7, 18, 26, 32, 332, 333 Lowndes, Robert, 14, 200, 211, 347–350, 352, 400 M

MacLean, Katherine, 369, 381, 382, 400, 425, 434, 439, 440 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The, 331, 386, 390, 401, 411, 429, 430, 439 Malthus, Thomas, 298 Masculinity deductive logic, 18, 78, 98, 177, 193, 207, 247, 268, 383 homosociality, 187–189, 195, 249, 250, 276, 280, 377 innate ingenuity, 58, 69 manly passions, 21–23, 190, 191, 266, 300, 326 momism, 271 need for wilderness, 192 nineteenth century disinterested amateur, 7, 8, 10–16, 29, 33, 35, 51, 52, 83, 94, 96, 113, 116, 129, 130, 208, 210, 265, 352, 489

overcivilization, 22, 23, 78, 84, 99, 101, 115, 179, 192, 203, 221, 376 remasculinization, 184, 192 success in many domains, 22, 29 supermen, 17, 145, 183, 190, 221, 223, 359, 382, 383, 425 McCaffrey, Anne, 285, 369, 434 McCarthy, Joseph R., 271, 376, 415, 419 Merril, Judith, 195, 205, 211, 219, 221, 231, 283, 286, 315, 341–377, 379–383, 394–404, 407–441, 470, 490, 491, 498, 500 creation of the pseudonym, 355, 356, 366 Milford Conference, 368, 369, 390, 432, 434, 441 and the “Milford Mafia,” 369, 432, 434 new thing, 408, 430, 433, 437, 445 “That Only a Mother,” 356, 361, 363, 440, 442 Michel, John B., 208, 209, 211, 346, 347, 350, 362, 397, 424 Milford, PA, 345, 367–370 See also Merril, Judith Miller, Walter M., Jr., 220, 366–368, 381, 415, 425, 428 Miscegenation, see Racial pseudoscience Mitchell, Maria, 24, 113 Modern Electrics, see Gernsback, Hugo

 Index 

Moorcock, Michael, 228, 315, 397, 401, 402, 430–434, 436, 437, 442, 445, 455, 456, 495 “Starship Stormtroopers,” 228, 401, 433 Moore, C. L., 62, 150, 195, 200, 207, 246, 314–316, 319, 321–323, 328, 333, 334, 355, 397, 424, 452, 470, 483, 495, 496, 500 comparison to Don A. Stuart, 292 Jirel of Joiry, 302–304, 306 myth of hidden sex, 292, 293, 295, 296 Northwest Smith, 200, 297, 300–303, 306–308, 328 “No Woman Born,” 312–314, 483 “Shambleau,” 295–297, 299, 300 Morgan, Lewis, 60, 123, 204, 222, 229 Mumford, Lewis, 268, 451, 464 Munsey, Frank, 54 All-Story, 38, 55, 56 Argosy, The, 38, 40, 55, 56, 76, 78, 82, 199

511

Pohl, Frederik, 94, 209–211, 213, 254, 295, 334, 335, 343–345, 348, 352, 363, 365, 366, 368, 369, 374, 376, 381, 394, 398, 399, 401, 424, 425, 434–435, 439, 448, 474, 475, 487, 490, 497, 498 relationship with Isaac Asimov, 253 relationship with Judith Merril, 342, 351, 365–367, 370 work as literary agent, 365, 366 Public sphere, 5, 9, 15, 17–18, 34, 37, 38, 43, 46, 63, 65, 88, 93, 121, 125, 175, 210, 212, 215, 216, 224, 231, 284, 287, 291, 293, 412 counterpublic, 38, 42, 122, 123, 126 Pulp magazines, 17, 40, 42, 54, 56, 74, 93, 96, 109, 111, 129, 196, 198, 199, 293, 295–297, 317, 348, 356, 411–413, 492, 493 specialization, 56 R

P

Palmer, Raymond A., 95, 97–99 editor of AMZ, 153, 246 editor of first fanzine, 94 organizer of Cosmos, 94 Rae Winters pseudonym, 97 relationship with L. Taylor Hansen, 152, 164–166 Panama Canal, 21, 24, 119

Racial pseudoscience, 21, 21n2, 32, 57, 58, 73, 137, 238, 262, 305 acquired characteristics, 58, 62, 191 Aryan race, 44, 60, 71, 90, 92, 136, 137, 255, 355 eugenics, 31, 72, 73, 85, 87, 88, 91, 120, 136, 137, 226, 261, 370, 371, 499

512 Index

Homo superior, 221, 222, 371, 372, 383, 384, 440, 471 Immigration Act of 1924, 31, 88, 120, 250 Jim Crow laws, 118, 251 miscegenation, 31, 32, 88, 120, 130, 137, 185, 349 neo-Lamarckism, 58–65, 80, 87, 95, 121, 138, 143, 176, 184, 190, 222, 223, 230, 231, 255, 262, 263, 306, 372, 446 polygenism, 32, 58–60, 143, 184, 185, 223, 255, 305, 372 race suicide, 121, 136, 298, 416 recapitulation, 61, 64, 66, 72, 81, 124, 189, 262, 358, 370 social Darwinism, 57, 58, 62–64, 66, 73, 87, 90, 95, 143, 146, 179, 184, 202, 203, 254, 262, 300, 314, 330, 440 stages of civilization, 22, 32, 60, 61, 63, 65, 76, 77, 79, 81, 86–88, 90, 114, 121, 124, 130, 140, 143, 148, 184, 204, 220, 222, 223, 230, 231, 263, 310, 312, 370, 414, 465, 466 supposed superiority of European heritage, 4, 29, 31, 58, 66, 90, 224, 465 Revivification, 33, 38, 44 Roosevelt, Theodore, 21, 22, 24, 29, 121, 179, 415, 416 Rooseveltian masculinity, 21, 22, 99, 115, 179, 189–191, 380 Rousseau, Victor, 71, 72, 199

S

Schlesinger, Arthur, 416–419, 421, 433, 463 Science and technology studies co-construction, 23, 122, 249 paradigms, paradigm shift (see Kuhn, Thomas S.) social constructivism, 125, 354 technological determinism, 354 Whig history, 176 Science fiction anthologies, 42, 93, 110, 111, 133, 135, 238, 258, 274, 284–286, 293, 295, 315, 363, 373, 382, 396, 397, 399, 402, 408, 409, 411, 412, 420, 422–429, 434, 435, 437–439, 441, 442, 444, 445, 447, 448, 450, 454, 455, 457, 491–497, 500 embrace of social sciences, 204, 205, 240, 341, 493 fandom, 94, 208–212, 222, 281, 283, 350, 404, 433, 489 “fans are slans,” 358, 498 fanzines, 94, 97, 208, 210, 212, 285, 295, 348, 411, 489 golden age, 237, 249, 250, 252, 259, 262, 330, 334, 359, 407, 424, 433, 437, 495 inner space, 302, 314, 381, 398, 408, 450 new wave, 4, 39, 53, 54, 237–238, 302, 315, 341, 344, 357, 397, 407–410, 417, 418, 422, 425, 429–431, 433, 434, 436, 437, 444, 445, 447,

 Index 

450–452, 455, 482, 488, 490, 493–495, 497, 500 paperbacks, 184, 355, 396, 411–413, 431, 453 predecessors, 53 space opera, 82, 92–94, 102–104, 132, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 177, 187–188, 205, 206, 254, 300, 302, 309, 310, 312, 333, 439, 443, 454 Scientific accuracy, 3, 18, 28, 33, 51, 73, 74, 77, 85, 96, 133, 198, 200, 216, 249, 316, 318, 436 contrasted with plausibility, 28, 76, 98, 129, 137, 179, 214, 229, 328, 334, 382 Scientifiction, see Gernsback, Hugo Second industrial revolution, 6–7, 10, 14, 23, 28, 54, 83, 84, 86, 114, 138 Shelley, Mary, 38, 39, 45, 110, 162, 313, 374, 495 Smith, Cordwainer, 417, 422, 430, 448 Smith, E. E. “Doc,” 81, 92, 308 Lensmen, 85, 89, 456 Skylark of Space, 81–88, 92, 100, 102, 142, 144, 177, 178, 184, 262, 297, 302, 432, 473, 474 Social science fiction, see Asimov, Isaac Social world, 29, 117, 119, 180, 187, 207, 238, 353, 358, 373, 488 Space opera, see Science fiction Spacewar!, 92, 473, 474, 483 Spencer, Herbert, 58, 179

513

social Darwinism (see Racial pseudoscience) Sputnik satellites, 272, 476 Stages of civilization, see Racial pseudoscience Star Trek, 321, 334, 480 Star Wars, 292, 315, 334 Stevens, Francis, 40, 41, 45 Stoddard, Lothrop, 120, 121, 133, 136, 179, 203, 230, 298, 310 Stone, Leslie F., 109–111, 116, 120, 134–150, 286, 292, 295, 312, 316, 411, 412, 497 “Hell Planet,” 139, 142, 312, 387 Into the Void, 375 Street & Smith, 55, 56, 76, 177, 199, 207, 210, 215, 291, 295, 321 Sturgeon, Theodore, 213, 321, 346, 355, 356, 369, 411, 423, 425, 444 T

Tiptree, James, Jr., 45, 167, 286 U

UNESCO statements on race, 164, 371 V

Vietnam War, 228, 343, 347, 400, 401, 409, 452 Vinge, Vernor, 93, 481–484 Vonnegut, Kurt, 398, 417, 425, 430, 492, 495

514 Index W

Weird Tales, 38, 39, 56, 102, 126, 128, 146, 178, 200, 292, 293, 295–297, 301, 302, 304, 306, 308 Wells, H. G., 35, 39, 45, 55, 69, 70, 72, 73, 80, 133, 179, 181, 203, 209, 261, 411, 424, 427, 470, 471, 482, 495, 496 War of the Worlds, 55, 179

Wiener, Norbert, 178, 221, 312, 313 Wilde, Oscar, 21, 192 Wollheim, Donald, 208, 210, 211, 350, 351, 396, 397, 411, 412, 426 Wonder Stories (including Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories), 4, 35, 94, 136, 151, 161, 178, 198, 237, 274, 297, 323, 328