Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

5. Human Martians and Asian Aliens: The Racial Nature of Wondrous Worlds

5 HumanMartiansandAsianAliens: TheRacialNatureofWondrousWorlds In 1931 a young reader of science fiction, Howard Lowe of 606 West 137th Street, New York City, wrote a letter of admiration and comment to the editor of Amazing. “Your wonderful and amazing magazine has filled every dull moment for about a year and a half,” he exclaimed; “it was first introduced to me by my pal.” Lowe had both praise and criticism for aspects of the magazine . He commended its artists for the “fine drawings they have been doing,” but he had an objection and a suggestion. “Your artists always draw Martians almost like human beings,” he observed. “They seem to always have two eyes, two arms, a body, and two legs like us earthlings. I would like to see drawings in the future with different looking Martians. . . . I am only a boy of thirteen and Chinese. I am most interested in your stories containing Chinamen as the villains,” he said, asking the editor, “please don’t always pick on them. I am sure others would do.” Despite his criticisms, Lowe was still excited about Amazing. “Our magazine is the best of its kind on the market,” he proclaimed. “I don’t mean maybe!”1 Lowe’s letter is revealing not only for his desire for less human Martians and fewer Chinese villains but also for its juxtaposition of his concerns. His two requests were related, making similar criticisms of science fiction from different perspectives. His appeal for non-Chinese villains addressed science fiction ’s reality, arguing against racial stereotyping and its limitations for science fiction. His desire for less human Martians spoke to science fiction’s potential, particularly its possibility to transcend human concerns—such as racial categories . Both criticisms argued that the conventional nature of science fiction’s creatures and their characterization limited the genre’s full potential. 148 Reading It was no accident that science fiction’s imagined creatures bore the burden of its expectations. Their figures conveyed the specific concerns not only of their being—their bodies, minds, and behavior—but often also of the places they inhabited and that science and readers explored. The tension they embodied drove the adventures within science fiction stories in the 1920s and 1930s and defined the broader dynamics and limits of their depicted possibility. It was also no accident that race figured significantly in their characterization. If gender dynamics grounded familial and familiar difference within and among science fiction’s adventurers, racial dynamics expressed fundamental difference in the nature of the worlds they visited. Although interwar science fiction included a variety of racial characterizations , early twentieth-century racial views of Asians—or more appropriately, of “Orientals” and “Asiatics”—gave its specific concerns, particularly the terrific potential of science and technology, their most powerful expression.2 Asians’ status as inassimilable aliens within America anchored the various associations of science fiction’s creatures, lending them a qualitative “alien” difference at a time when the term “alien” was not yet used in or related to science fiction. The character of Asian aliens and their affinity with human Martians revealed the state of interwar science fiction’s imagined and transformed nature. The attention they attracted spoke to the combination of awe and apprehension with which readers regarded science’s wondrous worlds while demonstrating the place of racial dynamics within that scientific sublime. The defeat of “different” creatures—racially or alien—and assumption of their territories resolved the moral and social dilemmas of science’s adventures while preserving its progressive potential. The inhabitants of interwar science fiction’s imagined worlds found a variety of forms. Most beasts and animals were nondescript with an appearance matching their terrain, marking the fauna to the flora of their role as generic background. Some combined features of known terrestrial animals and were more notable for the specific permutations of their chimeric form than their actual originality. In Charles S. Tanner’s “Tumithak of the Corridors ” and “Tumithak in Shawm,” for instance, the Venusian shelks were tenlegged spiderlike creatures with wasp bodies.3 Occasionally the inspiration for these creatures’ form was drawn from other sources. The geometric shape of the invaders of Earth in P. Schuyler Miller’s “Tetrahedra of Space” gave literal form to their analytic abilities, with a nod to Platonic philosophy. The 149 HumanMartians humanitarian Martian named Tweel in Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” reinforced the distinctive incomprehensibility of its mind with a body that similarly was...