Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

4. Involving Adventure, Reassuring Romance: Engendering Science Fiction’s Domestic Tranquillity

4 InvolvingAdventure,ReassuringRomance:Engendering ScienceFiction’sDomesticTranquillity In a second honorable-mention winning entry for a 1929 Science Wonder essay contest, Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., addressed the question “What Science Fiction Means to Me.” Not yet the well-known writer and originator of intergalactic space operas, Smith repeated the sentiment other readers expressed about science fiction’s connection of science and fiction. “Since no mind can be driven at top speed continually and still function efficiently,” he wrote, “it follows that the scientific mind, above all others, requires relaxation. He needs reading that does not necessitate a great deal of concentration and yet material sufficiently deep to hold his interest. To this seeming paradox there is only one answer—science fiction.” Smith elaborated the broader social character such an engaged and relaxed mind held. “In general,” he said, “he is married, perchance has a family grown. He has been married to one woman for years,” and “he knows real marital love, deepening and becoming richer with every passing year.” Marriage’s stability and emotional growth also engendered sound moral and social values. “He is intrinsically decent,” Smith explained, “and knows that the vast majority of his fellow-men are likewise decent.”1 Marriage and family, marked by the presence of women, connected the two sentiments of Smith’s essay. Domestic stability not only established the character of a scientific mind; it also provided reassurance that was central to science fiction’s relaxation. If the freedom of facts allowed readers to demonstrate their scientific aptitude, the stories they read demanded the same of their characters. On its face, however, interwar science fiction was hardly relaxing for either readers or characters. If extrapolated science was the 112 Reading possible means to its adventure, this also drove its drama. The wonders of the one transported protagonists to other worlds where the apprehension of the other involved them in constant contest. Amazing devices and astounding theories were met and matched by awesome knowledge, strange devices, and unfamiliar nature. Triumph within this necessary tension demonstrated characters’ ability, reassured science’s potent adventure, and allowed readers relaxation. Male characters affirmed their heroic virtue, which women, heroines , reinforced. Where victory over alien science and environment could not be won, female characters also provided alternative resolutions to science fiction ’s tension. Their rescue and reunion redeemed men’s heroic efforts and confirmed, indirectly, their virtue. While some readers argued that they were unnecessary and superfluous, female characters marked a broader domestic sensibility within science fiction. Its gendered dynamic connected masculine ideals to feminine concerns; affirmation of the one required the presence of the other. “Sex differentiation must be upheld by whatever means are available ,” observed Deborah Cameron, “for men can be men only if women are unambiguously women.”2 Romance’s figurative redemption assuaged, if it could not actually resolve, the representative anxieties within science fiction’s adventures. The same dynamic reassured science’s modern complication and concomitant implication for individualism. Progress’s redefinition of ability recalled historical transformations of work and home in science fiction and interwar society. While it required individual mental and physical prowess, it also indirectly reminded people of the system of their lives and livelihood, the interconnection and reliance of people on one another and within networks for power, transportation, communication, and commerce. In industry ’s original revolution, science and technology had expanded these networks, spurred manufacturing and wage labor, and reconfigured public sensibilities and convenience. Their modern incarnations, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, promised similarly that convenience would return to the home’s personal privacy. Women’s familiar difference was, in this sense, also familial presence, working doubly to relieve modern turns within science fiction’s expressive tension. The domestic stability they represented reaffirmed men’s anxious individual ability: to prove one’s self and to provide for others. Similarly, figuratively , women integrated the networked extent of modern technologies into a singular, personal sensibility that mirrored marriage’s merging of extended families into one. Dismissing women’s place in science fiction also removed 113 InvolvingAdventure the troublesome issue they incorporated from the genre’s celebration of science and progress. These interrelated dynamics—within which women were the most visible but not sole figures—allowed both men and technology to be unproblematically individual. Indeed and ironically, these gender dynamics were so familiarly present, they worked without the presence of actual women and when the issues they addressed did not involve...