I stumbled into the tail end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction—i.e., the late 1940s and 1950s. My brother, home on leave from the Navy in 1951, left behind a couple of issues of Astounding Science Fiction. I had seen the lurid covers in the corner drugstore magazine racks that also carried detective pulps and other esoterica like Fate or gaudy romance mags. I assumed, snobbishly, that science fiction inhabited a squalid cranny of imbecile lit. and had scarcely thought about it.
But because I was an indiscriminately voracious reader, I seized the magazines and devoured them in a sitting. At first I felt little response, but in days I found myself trudging to Owen’s Drug Store and riffling through the half-dozen sf magazines on the shelf—Astounding, Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Other Worlds, Amazing Stories, If. Even my rudimentary critical sense detected a vast continuum of quality and subject matter, mirrored in cover artwork and internal illustrations. The more pictures of grotesque aliens (Bug-Eyed Monsters or BEMs, to the trade) and mad robots and death-ray wielding guys in vivid tights and half-clad chorus girls, the more flatulent the stories, more or less.
I shambled into a great philosophico-religious war, of “hard” sf fans vs. “soft” fantasy fans, of old time space-opera buffs (the more rockets, tentacles, blasters the better) and bespectacled 1950s existentialist intellectuals seeking puzzle stories about time-travel paradoxes or thoughtful solutions to the faster-than-lightspeed-travel dilemma or meditations on horrors of nuclear war. An sf writer of the day said he kept realizing with a terrifying jolt that his average reader was an acne-ridden 14-year-old boy with a desperate masturbation jones and a yearning to win the State Science Fair with his large-scale working model of a rotifer. I was not that “fit reader” but close enough.
The editors of the mags waged war in editorials and through writers and stories they backed and printed. John W. Campbell of Astounding was a true believer in sf as “future fact,” and he took up world-class nutjobs like L. Ron Hubbard (inventor of Dianetics and veritable messiah of Scientology), who produced both sf and dubious “interpretations” of real science. Flying saucers were in the air and in everybody’s brains, we knew we were all going up in a mushroom cloud and the only way to escape Joe McCarthy’s
Other editors were more restrained—Anthony Boucher of the Magazine of F & SF was an old-time literary gent. He opined that pure fantasy was as defensible a literary mode as nuts-and-bolts sf. The new Galaxy was brash but obviously a
I was there when most of those guys (and a half-dozen gals) couldn’t write for sour apples but kept bursting out, month after month, in those pulpy pages. Their demonic energy and chutzpah diverted me from the sparrowfarts I was supposed to study and absorb for my English courses.
Because of the muddled utopian/dystopian postwar atmosphere of the ’50s, sf was big-time stuff—movies appeared, mostly even cheesier and less convincing than printed stories, but nonetheless riveting. Flying saucers with big robots who answered to words like “Klactu.” A thing buried in polar ice that turned out to be piloted by—a giant carnivorous carrot! (John W. Campbell’s elegant story “Who Goes There?” beat the movie version, The Thing from Outer Space, all hollow, but the movie still scared the bejeepers out of me!) Grainy black and white movies of gigantic ants, spiders, worms, godknowswhat, pod-people, indescribable (and unfilmable) effects generally lost ground, except for George Pal’s obsessive Mr. Science movies (War of the Worlds, From the Earth to the Moon), themselves exhibits as stiff as the ultimate State Science Fair blue-ribbon winner.
Even TV got into it with Twilight Zone and some imitators, usually doing better than
Most people still didn’t believe rockets could work in the vacuum of space, because “there was nothing to push against,” and had no idea of interplanetary or interstellar distances or the nature of atomic and subatomic structure and figured that maybe time travel would be developed by General Electric in a few years—after all we had transistor radios, hula hoops, fiberglas cars and dishwashers. What couldn’t science and technology do? Better living through chemistry, and what’s good for GM is good for the country! We didn’t need mad sf prophets flown in on saucers to tell us that!
Back in the 1920s a handful of sincerely loony people launched sf, as an odd offshoot of science-fact publications like Popular Science or Popular Mechanics, ahead-of-the-cutting edge speculative journals (“How Soon Robot Lawnmowers?” or “Build Your Next Home of Plexiglass”). One was Hugo Gernsback, a determined writer and editor who sometimes answered to “Ralph 124C41+” (read the numbers) and wrote a classic novel of a robot genie called (yes!) Ralph 124C41+ to lay out his social-literary philosophy. Ur-science fiction like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 had also been at service of utopian philosophy and politics (Bellamy’s novel may have been the most popular nineteenth century work of fiction).
So Gernsbackian sf—one to foresee for one plus—was a social vision designed didactically. The adventure part was the rocket propellant needed to ram the intellectual warhead home. Imagination plus social conscience = Startling Stories. That was the battle raging between sf and fantasy advocates, those with sociopolitical agendas and those who wanted to scribble space-opera libretti. Literary geniuses like George Orwell could use the fabulist side of sf to comment on the world of the present. Most magazine sf writers struggled to plow through the swamps of turgid exposition needed to launch a harmless adventure tale set in another galaxy 1000 years from now.
As I read all this stuff and absorbed TV and movies through my pores, the Korean War rumbled along out of sight and mind, Joe McCarthy cut fascist didoes, the country was led by a bald general as blank-eyed as Daddy Warbucks, black people were weary of a century of unremitting crap dumped on them, radio stations played rhythm and blues (once “race”) records, hipsters listened to cool jazz and smoked reefers, Buicks proliferated useless portholes and Studebakers were bilaterally symmetrical (whatever happened to those promised Tucker cars, anyway?), every Indy car but one used an Offenhauser engine, you could fly cheaply on a DC-3 or a beautiful Constellation airliner, and somebody was going to build autobahns all over so we could move the troops for the invasion to follow the blasts of H-bombs for which we drilled and watched cheesy Civil Defense movies.
So who needed sf, with robots, death rays and space battleships and hordes of invaders who looked like squids and talked like Sam Jaffe playing Gunga Din? For a few years postwar, every sf mag issue ran at least one depressing last-man-on-earth story, retailing the damage likely from nuclear war. Dystopias outnumbered utopias ten to one, and writers vied to ink the most morbid descriptions of radiation sickness, rampant epidemics, grotesque mutations and perpetual anguish.
Was this useful social protest and prophecy (24C41) or titillating pornography of violence and death, wallowing in graveyard gothic? It may have been both, if you look at corollary phenomena like the surge in horror comics and films, especially the supercreepy EC comics Vault of Horror and Crypt of Terror, which make stomach-turning gothic like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk or Lon Chaney’s exquisite horror films seem cheery episodes from Fun with Dick and Jane. Rotting corpses, charnel houses, extruded brains and eyeballs, cannibalism and necrophilia were the mise en scene here!
Still, it was very bliss to be alive then, even if we missed a genuine revolution. In the mix of hope and despair, fervor for tomorrow and sorrow for lost time that marked the 1950s, sf was a keynote humming through the chaos and loss that defines any present reality. We had labored through The War’s promise postponed (“For the Duration”) under the banner with the strange device—“When the War Is Over”—and we expected The World of Tomorrow (NY World’s Fair, 1940) delivered C.O.D. to our doorsteps out in Levittown. The little cheap magazines framing the sf visions were no new technologies, no postwar magic, but the stories relieved our aches over broken promises. The future unreeled as an adventure, not as a sales contract, as imaginative journeying not prefab construction. Ad astra per aspera was the new banner—to the stars through our prison bars! ###
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Inutility
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