Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

3. Discovering the Freedom of Facts: Fact, Fiction, and the Authority of Science

3 DiscoveringtheFreedomofFacts: Fact,Fiction,andtheAuthorityofScience “Amazing Stories to me occupies a unique position among the almost countless number of periodicals which flood the newsstand monthly,” wrote Howard S. Gable, 3950 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri, to Amazing’s editor in 1929. “It is one of the few fiction magazines which I read,” he said, explaining that science was his real interest. “Naturally, I read other magazines, Chemical Society Journals, journals on inorganic chemistry, but no other fiction magazine.” Still, after reading these scientific journals, he enjoyed turning to science fiction. “One can forget Earth and hurry away with the speed of light to Mars, Venus, and to other distant planets,” he explained. Science fiction allowed him “to travel into the depths of space on a mission to save the world” or “to accompany some eminent scientist into his laboratory, where he is perfecting a new invention.” The adventures it provided were especially comforting, he said, “after my own . . . idea is found to be all wrong.”1 Gable’s letter and similar letters from other readers spoke to the way science fiction in the 1920s and 1930s linked science and fiction. The format and editorial practices of the pulps lent their conversational character to promoting and fostering this relationship. Although motivated by commercial interests, interwar science fiction editors also genuinely believed that science held imaginative potential and progressive purpose. Toward that end and to bolster their claims and proclamations for science fiction, they and the writers they published drew from any source available to infuse stories and magazines with scientific content, emphasizing factual details. Readers, in their turn, read science fiction to situate both its facts and its fictions within the circumstances of their lives. In the exchanges circulating within the 84 Reading science fiction community, they testified to their own activity, citing sources for detail and knowledge; demonstrating an ability to reason; and arguing positions about science’s character, purpose, and place. Changing social circumstances for science also situated this exchange. Status, education, and credential informed but did not determine science fiction ’s backyard discussions. The conversations included readers, writers, and editors who were trained, educated, and could otherwise claim expertise and authority, but they also gave voice to amateurs, students, tinkerers, science enthusiasts, and people who admitted they had not yet learned, and certainly not mastered, new knowledge and new devices. Their insistence that their opinions and views mattered revealed a tension about authority, expertise, and distinction in science and society. Holding this tension in balance was interwar science fiction’s democratic ethos of science and discovery. On the one hand, this ethos welcomed everyone to its community and guaranteed them the right to participate in its conversations. On the other hand, it allowed participants to discover science’s wonders for themselves and demonstrate distinction within their common enterprise. Echoing Howard Gable’s sentiments, this participatory ethos was adventure that was also comforting. Organizing and managing its tensions was the particular relationship that interwar science fiction forged between fact, fiction, and science. For interwar science fiction, “amazing,” “astounding,” and “wonder” were more than magazine titles; they were also metaphors for a specific style to imagine science, clarion calls for its conversation. Here again Hugo Gernsback was an important catalyst. Gernsback developed a view of participatory science before he began his science fiction ventures, during his earlier days in amateur radio and radio publishing in the first decades of the twentieth century. His enthusiasm for radio was for its possibilities for communication and technological development . His specific interest was the culture of two-way radio operators who populated the airwaves of early twentieth-century America, which he believed continued a distinctive tradition of popular invention.2 Unlike members of the scientific establishment, these enthusiasts furthered technological progress through creative collaboration: imagining potential innovations, discussing them, and bringing them to fruition. In the era when commercial and corporate interests were combining to make radio overwhelmingly a broadcast medium, he argued for the necessity of two-way radio communication . “It is absolutely necessary,” he wrote arguing against proposed gov- 85 FreedomofFacts ernment regulation of radio, “that the amateur be allowed his freedom of the ether, without it he can accomplish nothing.”3 Gernsback’s passion for radio and technological progress developed into a more general enthusiasm for science and scientific progress, as broadcast radio slowly and successfully removed amateur radio from the airwaves, relegating ham operators to a sliver of...