Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

by John Cheng

When physicist Robert Goddard, whose career was inspired by H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds , published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes," the response was electric. Newspaper headlines across the country announced, "Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon," while people from around the world, including two World War I pilots, volunteered as pioneers in space exploration. Though premature (Goddard's rocket, alas, was only imagined), the episode demonstrated not only science's general popularity but also its intersection with interwar popular and commercial culture. In that intersection, the stories that inspired Goddard and others became a recognizable science fiction. Astounding Wonder explores science fiction's emergence in the era's "pulps," colorful magazines that shouted from the newsstands, attracting an extraordinarily loyal and active audience.

Pulps invited readers not only to read science fiction but also to participate in it, joining writers and editors in celebrating a collective wonder for and investment in the potential of science. But in conjuring fantastic machines, travel across time and space, unexplored worlds, and alien foes, science fiction offered more than rousing adventure and romance. It also assuaged contemporary concerns about nation, gender, race, authority, ability, and progress—about the place of ordinary individuals within modern science and society—in the process freeing readers to debate scientific theories and implications separate from such concerns.

Readers similarly sought to establish their worth and place outside the pulps. Organizing clubs and conventions and producing their own magazines, some expanded science fiction's community and created a fan subculture separate from the professional pulp industry. Others formed societies to launch and experiment with rockets. From debating relativity and the use of slang in the future to printing purple fanzines and calculating the speed of spaceships, fans' enthusiastic industry revealed the tensions between popular science and modern science. Even as it inspired readers' imagination and activities, science fiction's participatory ethos sparked debates about amateurs and professionals that divided the worlds of science fiction in the 1930s and after.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2012

About the author

John Cheng is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century America and the history of science and technology. He earned his A.B. from Harvard College and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and taught at Binghamton University, George Mason University, and Northwestern University. His research interests include popular culture, media, and technology; gender, race, and ethnic relations; the history of earth, life, and human sciences and of computing; and historiography and critical theory. He was a contributor to California Newsreel’s documentary series and web site, Race: The Power of an Illusion. John also holds a patent from youthful summers as a research intern. While he used to play basketball, volleyball, and Ultimate frisbee, he now enjoys scenic bicycle rides and the company of friends and family, particularly his nieces and nephews.

John’s book, Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America , was published in March 2012 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. His new project, Barred Zones: The Strange Geography of Asian America, considers the relationship of race, geography, law and the American nation-state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Fall 2013 he is returning to Binghamton University where he will be Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and History.

Reviews

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a long time science fiction fan and amateur science dabbler, I truly appreciated Cheng's book. Divided into three sections, "Circulation," "Reading," then "Practice," Cheng deftly reveals the importance of the participatory ethos of early science fiction. In "Circulation," Cheng shows how Hugo Gernsback, the originator of Wonder Stories, thought of his periodical as one that would inspire a democratic ethos, which would be "a necessary social condition for the production of innovation and knowledge (106)." Marvelously, Cheng takes a close look at the mechanics of the "pulp" publishing industry, revealing the new characterization of the pulp "writer" as opposed to the more high class "authors" in order to emphasize their work as a craft, not necessarily a high art. Cheng pays special attention to the submitted letters at the end of each edition. Here, sci fi fans could debate all number of factual errors, or make proposals for the future of science, etc. This gave rise to a community of letter-writers who sometimes wrote in to the editors themselves, but more often than not, to one another. Before long, Gernsback's original project got away from him. Amateur writers and sci-fi fans started investigating new printing methods to create their own "fanzines." Cheng argues that these phenomena point to the fact that sci-fi "reading was a dialogic process of production and reception and that it was a social as well as an individual practice (52-3)." Though some worried about the potentially damaging effects of too little reality eroding the mental capacities of the masses, sci-fi fans were constantly innovative and passionately involved in local and national communities of the like-minded. They were anything but passive consumers.

I found the "Reading" section the least interesting, save the first chapter in it called "Freedom of Facts." Here, Cheng presents an ingenious analysis of how sci-fi writers derived their scientific authority, separating knowledge from expertise. This had the effect of bolstering a view of science as totally factual and non-contextual. According to Cheng, these exchanges evoked a view of science that was "factually open and still already made or fashioned." In this way, participants did not believe that they were creating scientific knowledge; rather, they saw their role as pointing towards possibilities for real science. Thus, fans prized actual scientific knowledge, and were eager to display their competencies at any opportunity. The rest of the section deals with gender, race, and time/historical narratives of progress. These are interesting chapters, but don't break new ground on the subjects.

The final section, "Practice," connected the network of sci-fi fans to amateur science societies, especially rocket clubs. The first chapter touches on the fascinating disagreements the occurred amongst fans/amateurs over the role of their hobby in the larger world. Some believed that fans should band together for political action to create a socialist society, since they weren't actually doing science, yet they still viewed their role as fans as important. Others turned toward experimentation. Experimental rocket societies proliferated throughout the 30s. Increasingly, they sought to distance themselves from their sci-fi roots and increased the requirements for technical proficiency to gain membership. Cheng shows how even though these clubs didn't make lasting contributions to rocket science, the networks that developed through these organizations continued to play important roles in many technical industries after the war.

Kudos to Cheng for taking a fresh look at early sci-fi from the perspective of networks, media (social technologies) and political aspirations. Science fictions still plays an important role in popular culture, as does amateur science, and Cheng's book encourages us to take it seriously as a topic of historical research.

[Joshua Buhs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Histories of science fiction are not rare, from the personal (Thomas Disch) to the epic (the Panshins). This may the the rightest--how's that for a word?--but it's also probably not worth reading.

As I read him, Cheng makes two claims, one hoary but necessary, the other fascinating but not developed beyond the existing literature on the history of the science fiction. The first argument is that science fiction was created, as a genre, in the interwar periods, and reflected the concerns of the era. The main tendency to this point has been to root the genre in the historical romances of the 19th century (including the Gothic ones by Poe). Cheng notes that these are certainly antecedents to the form, but were fulfilling other roles. Science fiction came about as a way for Americans--that's his focus, America--to interact with science, to imagine and even practice it. The first section (two chapters) called circulation develops this claim--in length. He traces the rise of pulp magazines, the creation of science fiction ones, and the creation of a fan community from those pulps that then extended beyond them with the creation of clubs and correspondence between each other. (It was the fan community, imagining itself into being, that created a different history, in which science fiction had earlier examples.)

The second section then draws out how the new genre of science fiction responded to the cultural currents of the time--thus how science fiction has a history and is not a transcendent category as some of its promoters seem to insist. The first chapter focuses on the importance of 'facts' to the first science fiction fans. Facts sat on a fault line within the community, a fault line that brought together two opposed traditions, one that emphasized the democracy of the fan-base, the other that emphasized authority--those who _knew_ should be given deference. Bringing the facts, as one might say, allowed even amateurs to interact with and counteract authors and other experts. Mastery of facts was also a way to prove competence. And facts shaped the way fans read the magazines--they actually liked the long, interrupting disquisitions of science that, to the mdoern reader, seem disgressive and tiresome. Ultimately, though, facts acted to constrain science fiction--the idea of the time was that science fiction should not violate known facts, however outrageous it might otherwise be. This conservative stance prevented writers from really exploring the way facts were social creations, and so, in the end, authority was valued over democracy.

The next chapter discusses the role of gender in these stories. Women, he argues, were central to the narrative functions of science fiction, although they were rarely characterized and almost always stereotyped. Their role was to coat outlandish stories with the veneer of domesticity, so that in the end, when the hero got the girl, conventional morality came back in to play, and the outlandish was banished. This sense of domesticity, he further argues reasonably, was extended to the state and government, so that these often came to be valued as assurances of order, just as family was.

The third chapter of the section discusses race, especially the way monsters were so often created to reflect Orientalist fears. (He makes the interesting pint that these were monsters, until after World War II, when the idea of aliens really became established.)

In the section's final chapter, he considers the conservative interpretation of Einstein's laws in the pulps, which insisted upon time being linear. That meant progress was part of the fabric of the universe, and satisfied the interest of the fans in science as a modernizing force.

The final section, on practice, turns to the second, and more interesting, thesis, that science fiction was a means of science practice. (He touches on this in places earlier, such as P. Schuyler Miller deriving Einstein's famous E=mc^2 equation in the pages of a pulp letter section.) Some fans, of course, though of their interest in science as merely a hobby. But others built their lives around it. Some read through the scientific literature based on their fascination with the subject, and others joined interest groups. Chief among the interest groups favored by science fiction fans were those that promoted the idea of interplanetary travel and rocketry--ideas that were, for much of the interwar years, seen by the establishment as pie-in-the-sky dreaming (imagination!), but, as we all know, turned out to be an important area of technological development during World War II and in the years after.

The problems with this book are many. On the most basic level,Chen is not a trustworthy writer. His sentences often make no sense; the examples he gives to support his claims don't do that work; he mostly avoids jargon, but his meaning remains obscure. And when he tries to drop technical terms into the discussion, these feel like the old pulp method of introducing science merely for the sake of discussing it, not because it aids comprehension or is needed. He overwrites badly--each chapter is easily a third too long--but even so is not always persuasive. He convinced me because his claims made sense of other evidence I have studied, not because of what he marshaled.

On a larger scale, either he did not read widely in the history of science fiction and the pulps, or is he not a very generous writer. His references tend to go to literary theorists, but not (say) Mike Ashley or Erin Smith, though his ideas are often very similar. He reads historians of science in odd ways, and don't always trust what he has to say about them--a summary of the many problems in the book, I think.

And that is what makes his claims about science fiction being a form of science practice so disappointing. It's a great claim, and something others have eluded to for a long time, but it is never fleshed out anymore than it is in the existing literature. Yes, we already know science fiction fans held the torch for rocketry. But what else did they do? That's the question that's dying to be answered.

Along those same lines, even in earlier chapters, Cheng never breaks new ground. His bit on the creation of pulps and pulp writers is interesting, but Smith go there first; his work on Gernsback is good, but Ashley got there first; his parallels between monsters and the 'other' was already central to Disch. Even if his interpretation is right, rehashing all the seem material in such excruciating detail seems overkill.

Most problematic, for me at least, he never offered a rich discussion of imagination--it was merely conceptualizing what did not exist, but this seems pale and misses a lot of the different ways imagination might work with science.

An example of right answer, wrong method.