Second Lecture

We are now at the point where recognizable modern science fiction begins. Certainly, by the time H. G. Wells dies in 1946, science fiction had come a long way. It had its name by then, courtesy of Hugo Gernsback who coined the term somewhere during 1929. Gernsback, whom we will explore in depth a little later on, had even characterized what he thought of as science fiction as "fiction written in the mode of H. G. Wells." So even by the late 1920s Wells' influence over the yet-to-be-named genre was quite evident.

But how did we get from The Time Machine in 1895 to the strange literature of the 1920s?

I have stressed throughout these lectures that science fiction (as well as all of the arts) reflects the author's personal life experiences, especially as it reflects his or her cultural milieu. Shelley, Wells and Verne tapped into the culture's growing sense of unease over mankind's technological achievements, and the works of these three giants were (and always have been) very popular because of what they foretold.

However, it wasn't until the late 1890s and the invention of linotype printing that true "popular" fiction came on-line for the masses. This is the beginning of the reign of the great "pulp" magazines. It was in this very inexpensive form of pulp publishing that science fiction was able to reach-and some have said-bulid a wider reading audience. In fact, all of the genres of popular literature (at least as publishers presently distinguish them) began in the era of pulp magazines, which ran roughly from the 1890s to the early 1950s.

The pulps were the first magazines aimed at specific demographics (boys, girls, men, women, etc.) or clear subject genres (the western, the mystery story, war, etc.) rather than a general fiction market. One of the greatest pulp magazines, Argosy, started out as a general fiction magazine, but quickly became a purely "adventure" magazine, aimed at young boys and young adult males, with stories that took place all over the globe. These were often written in the tradition of Jack London and Joseph Conrad but always stressing action.

By the 1930s all of the fiction genres that we're now familiar with were solidified in the minds of both publishers and the public. There were war magazines (Over the Top, War Stories, Battle Cry, etc.); there were aviation magazines (Air Action, Aces, Fighting Aces, Sky Birds, Wings, G-8 and His Battle Aces, Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds, etc.); there were detective magazines by the dozens (Clues Mystery Magazine, Famous Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Underworld, The Black Bat, etc.); there were romance magazines (Love Story Magazine, Magic Love, Cupid's Diary, Ten Story Romance, Ranch Romances, Romantic Range, etc.); there were horror magazines (Horror Stories, Terror Tales, Uncanny Tales, Ghost Stories, etc.); there were fantasy publications as well (Weird Stories, Strange Tales, Unknown Worlds, Fantastic Adventures). There were even pulp magazines full of fiction stories for sports fans such as, Fight Stories, Knockout Stories, Thrilling Baseball Stories and Champion Sports Stories.

And, of course, there were the great science fiction magazines-Planet Stories, Amazing Science Fiction, Astounding Science Fiction, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, etc.

The pulps were known for their garish covers of monsters and women in distress. But they are also well known for their very colorful covers. You can get all kinds of pulp magazines still on ebay (at ebay.com), many of which are in very good shape. Part of this is due to the particular acrylic used in printing covers back then. They have exceptional staying power. Also the actual "pulp" paper used in pulps contains no acids, thus they are also in good shape.

Pulp magazines got their name from the use of extremely cheap paper made from simple wood pulp. These were magazines that were meant to be "consumed" and when you were done with them, you threw them away. These were among the very first artefacts of America's then-evolving throwaway culture. It became just another part of the "mass production" philosophy that Henry Ford was in the process of inventing. Pulps, like newspapers, came out fast and furious, and by the time World War II began in 1939, over 900 different pulp titles had come into existence.

Indeed, pulps were the precursor of the paperback book. Most pulps, especially in the 1930s, often touted a full-length novel in every issue. The hero pulps of the 1930-Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, The Avenger, Nick Carter, G-8, Operator 5, etc.-each had a novel and at least three stories in every issue.

By the late 1940s all the fiction genres we know today--the western, the romance, the mystery, science fiction and fantasy--were all well established by World War II. Indeed, these stories have changed little since then, a sign of their popularity.

It should also be pointed out that pulps gained their popularity because there were very few other entertainment venues around. Though radio was invented in 1895, its real popularity did not take hold until the mid-1920s, where radio shows often broadcast live and featured news, music, and very popular serials, also separated into distinct genres-the western, the detective story, the romance. Movies (replacing touring Vaudeville shows) soon appeared thereafter. It was a heady time, driven by invention. In fact, cinematographer George Melies, a Vaudevillian magician by trade, made the first science fiction movie in 1902 called A Trip to the Moon, complete with special effects . However, radio remained the cheapest venue for family entertainment for a half-century until television sets became available for domestic use in 1949.

In fact, the remnants of live radio entertainment still persist in the form of The Grand Ole Opry and Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Whatever the case, science fiction cannot be divorced from the decades that produced it, whether it's the exuberant Twenties or the gray Depression years of the Thirties.

Just before the pulps came onto the scene, "dime novels" began to appear in both America and throughout Europe in the 1870s. Westerns and boys' adventures were the most popular dime novel at this time, but close on their heals came novels that were in the mode of Jules Verne. These were so-called "invention" stories, the most popular of which were the fictional adventures of Frank Reade, boy genius. Reade was the imaginative product of Harry Enton who based his character on that of Horatio Alger, off in search of adventure in his strange vehicles. Harry Enton's first book was Frank Reade and his Steam Man of the Plains, published in 1876, a time when steam anything was all the rage, especially in America.

When Harry Enton got tired of writing what he thought of as "juvenile" books, a man named Luis P. Senarens was commissioned to write about Frank Reade's son, Frank Reade, Jr. The popularity of this series eventually lead to the even more popular Tom Swift novels, written by Victor Appleton (who was in actuality a man named Howard R. Garis). The Tom Swift books were part of the publishing empire of Edward Stratemeyer (1862-1930) who published a wide range of what we would now call "young adult" stories. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were among the other popular series that Stratemeyer later on published. Every one of these series endured for decades and were immensely popular.

So science fiction stories (in hardbound form) that were about inventors and their inventions persisted well into the 1930s, mostly because this also happened to be a period of extraordinary advances science and technology. The scientist as hero began to appear as a popular motif in pulp fiction. Part of this had to do with the fact that real scientist heroes did exist. Remember that this is the heyday of the great inventor: Thomas Edison (1847-1931), Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923) and the much overlooked Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), to name just a few. The public viewed these people with the kind of celebrity reverence we now give rock stars. Their names were well-known, and so were their exploits.

However, it was the popularity of radio technology that jump-started the science fiction genre in pulp magazines. Hugo Gernsback (1884-1976) was a Luxembourg-born writer and editor who came to America in 1904. His interests were in all things electric; his heroes were inventors, especially Edison and Tesla. Gernsback's first magazine publication in 1908 was Modern Electrics, devoted mostly to radio technologies. A short time later Modern Electrics became Electrical Experimenter and Gernsback started publishing bits of his own fiction in Electrical Experimenter as filler. In fact, he wrote a number of very popular stories based on the fantastic adventures of history's greatest liar, Baron Munchausen (yes, the Baron Munchausen of Terry Gilliam's great movie). Among the Baron's adventures were Munchausen on the Moon (1915) and Munchausen Departs for the Planet Mars (1915).

Gernsback eventually began publishing Science and Invention Magazine in 1920, a much more ambitious journal that aimed for a wider audience than just boys interested in building crystal radio sets in their rooms. In Science and Invention his fiction and that of others began to appear with greater regularly . However, in the August 1923 issue of Science and Invention, Gernsback published only fiction, no articles. This fiction he called scientifiction, and were stories, he claimed, to be in the mode of H. G. Wells.

This one issue of Science and Invention was so popular that in 1926 Gernsback created Amazing Stories, the first true magazine devoted to the new fictional genre called "scientifiction." Later, in the early Thirties, Gernsback revised the term, now calling this new literature "science fiction." Later in his career Gernsback went on to publish Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly.

Though these magazines were successful in their day, Gernsback eventually lost financial control of his publishing empire and many of his magazines, with the exception of Amazing Stories, perished. In fact, few pulps survived the paper shortages of World War II and the appearance of comic books. The fledgling National DC company (owners of Superman and Batman) and the early Marvel lines, starting in 1939, took away many of the younger readers who, a decade earlier, would have been devoted pulp fans. But in the science fiction genre itself, Gernsback's influence had endured long enough for science fiction to take root permanently in the American culture.

However, there are critics, (Brian Aldiss and Damon Knight among them), who are critical of Gernsback influence on early science fiction. Gernsback's interest was in gizmos and outlandish tales and less so on literate writing and broader social commentary. Also, the covers to his various publications often showed garish bug-eyed monsters and fantastic space ships not likely ever to be built: It was just the sort of thing that would attract a juvenile male reader with a dime in his hand and no discerning tastes in literature whatsoever. Many critics have said that Gernsback caused a "dumbing down" (my term) of science fiction, shifting it away from the social commentary of Jules Verne and the metaphoric relevance of H. G. Wells and turning science fiction into an escapist---hence, unworthy---literature. What Gernsback did do was make science fiction accessible to a general (and much younger) readership, exploiting the new magazine phenomenon of pulp publishing.

Ralph 124C 41+

Gernsback's novel Ralph 124C 41+ was serialized in 1911 in Modern Electrics, then published in expanded form in 1925. The version shown above comes from a new series of early science fiction reprints called the Bison Frontiers of the Imagination which comes from the University of Nebraska press.

What pulps of the late 1920s and early 1930s did was to give readers stories that emphasized the "gosh-wow!" aspect of new inventions. From these new inventions came (what are now) standard science fiction tropes and icons, whether or not the actual science within them made sense. It's from this period, I have chosen the Edmund Hamilton story in your anthology, "Fessenden's Worlds" which was originally published in Weird Tales in April of 1937. Hamilton was a prolific pulp writer during the Great Depression and his science, if we can call it that, often took back seat to incredible stories written in a florid prose style. Hamilton, along with E.E. "Doc" Smith and Jack Williamson, fostered the "space opera" story, complete with giant spaceship armadas and exploding planets (tropes of which persist in the Star Wars movies). They were just the stories that would capture the mind and imagination of teenage boys in the Great Depression (and quite a few are still readable today). Stories by these authors often appeared in several magazines in any given month throughout the Thirties. They were often written in a single draft, put into the mail and forgotten about as the next deadline (or meal) approached. It was, for some, a good way to beat the gloom of the Depression years.

Sometimes the term "weird science" is often applied to stories like "Fessenden's Worlds", but read it and see how close it comes to being an updated Frankenstein story (with considerably religious overtones). It's gothic and creepy and is something the Gnostic Christians of the first century C.E. believed--which is to say that the "God" of the Old Testament might actually be Satan using humanity's suffering to get back in touch with his estranged Father. God here is often called the Archon and the early Christians believed that this explained evil in the world, especially in a world where God seems not to be listening. Philip K. Dick will write variations on this theme throughout his life, but it particularly shows up in his 1981 novel, VALIS.

Weird Tales often published stories like "Fessenden's Worlds" that were borderline fantasy or pseudo-science fiction. Indeed, this taint of "pseudo-science" has stigmatized the entire science fiction field, especially regarding any sort of academic acceptance of the field's artistic legitimacy. None of this was helped by the cheesy covers of women in distress (and, of course, wearing very little clothing) that continually appeared on the science fiction pulp magazines from their inception well into the 1950s. Covers like these still make people cringe.

Movies and serials that perpetuated racial, gender, and genre stereotypes didn't help the field much either. Both of the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon movie serials in the 1930s, popular though they were to young audiences, nonetheless gave science fiction an ongoing aura of tackiness that only began to change in the 1970s. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) helped bring that change to cinema in a very dramatic way.

However, during this period (approaching 1937 and the important career John W. Campbell, Jr.), avoiding the pulps altogether we find science fiction appearing in novel form, and coming not only from America, but from Europe and England as well.

At this time as H.G. Wells continued his writing career and was very much a public figure. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) began to publish a number of significant extrapolative works, notably Brave New World (1932) that contained many now-standard SF tropes, most notably cloning and the use of soporific drugs to keep the population happy. American Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis (1888-1951) wrote perhaps the first alternate history in It Can't Happen Here (1935) about an overthrow of the United States government during the Great Depression, something both Lewis and J. Edgar Hoover believed could happen because of the wave of poverty that had swept the world. Indeed, fantastic literature seemed to flourish in the Great Depression because of this widespread economic downturn. Certainly millions of people in this country and abroad were ready for stories of an escapist bent, even if much of their subtext might be based in reality.

In 1920, Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) wrote We, an anti-utopian novel that is a powerful condemnation of science and technology (which was, in turn, a powerful condemnation of the utopian visions of Joseph "The Plowman" Stalin). Also in 1920 Karel Capek presented his most famous play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) which gave the world the word "robot" for the first time. Another British writer, Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) began writing some of the most visionary novels ever written. His most famous are The Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), and Star Maker (1937). In fact, Odd John is the first novel about a mutant superman whose very existence alone threatens mankind. (This is the conceit behind Marvel Comics' X-Men series, but Stapledon thought of it first and his mutants have some very strange powers indeed.)

But it needs to be pointed out here that none of the works referenced in the previous paragraph were ever published as science fiction, anywhere, under any conditions. They still aren't. Nevertheless they are still considered to be well within the conceptual parameters of just about anyone's definition of science fiction (especially mine). These are books that explore the possible futures open to humankind, now that we've got all manner of advanced technologies.

On closer examination, these stories are essentially horror stories and you'll recall that it's this gothic element, the horror element, that makes science fiction, in Brian Aldiss' belief, so significant. And perhaps the greatest of these "non-SF" science fiction novels of this period is George Orwell's 1984, whose terrifying vision of the future is just as relevant today as it was in 1949, the year it was published.

Overall, it seemed that, by the end of the 1930s, American science fiction was bogged down in cheesy pulp magazines whose covers were blazoned with men in tights clutching blondes in their arms and shooting purple beasts somewhere on the moons of Jupiter. Goofy Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials didn't help much either. This would soon change, however. Science fiction was about to become serious again.

Hugo Gernsback's influence on science fiction was largely gone by 1937 when John W. Campbell Jr. (1910-1971) took over the helm of Astounding Stories (soon to become Astounding Science Fiction). Campbell started writing in his teens and came up through the pulp ranks, publishing stories of "super science" in Gernsback's own Amazing Stories. By the time Campbell took the helm of Astounding Stories in 1937, he had matured enough as a writer and as a social philosopher to begin demanding a different standard of writing from his stable of writers.

This issue of Astounding Stories contained one of H.P. Lovecraft's rare science fiction stories. It also happens to be one of his very best. Lovecraft and all the other writers who appeared in Weird Tales were very much descendants of the gothic tale begun by Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe.

As such, John W. Campbell Jr. is generally credited with formulating or characterizing science fiction as it's understood today (for good or ill). Campbell first of all demanded a no-nonsense approach to both real and extrapolated science. The science had to sound reasonable. In effect, Campbell demanded a keen sense of verisimilitude from his stable of writers. None of this Captain Future "gosh-wow!" stuff. Secondly, he demanded a higher level of professionalism in the actual prose his authors produced and this included verisimilitude in all aspects of how men and women would actually behave even under the most bizarre of circumstances. Campbell demanded that his writers respect the intelligence of the average reader of Astounding Science Fiction while writing as well as they could.

And it shows even in his own fiction. "Who Goes There", published in 1938, was Campbell's own masterpiece of scientists at work. Campbell deftly portrays a group of different scientific types trying to solve the problem of an alien menace among them. The scientists form a microcosm of society at large, and-typical of Campbell-a hero emerges who comes up with the best solution to overcome the creature they've unwittingly unthawed. The Frankenstein monster in "Who Goes There" is not the creature from the ice, but the conflicting dogmas and ideologies of the men in the camp. The real problem for McReady is how to find the right solution to the problem without destroying the unity of the group. Campbell, in effect, suggests that there are certain (perhaps unspoken) laws that humans must adhere to if they are to survive, and these are the laws of community. These themes, popular still, were among the most common in science fiction of the 1940s, especially at a time when the country had to pull together for the war effort (something the country did for all of 10 minutes after the Sept. 11th attacks of 2001).

As an editor, Campbell is also responsible for starting the careers of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Lester Del Rey, and A. E. Van Vogt, while helping along others who began in other pulp genres such as Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, Clifford Simak, and L. Ron Hubbard. Campbell is credited with co-creating Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics in Asimov's "Robot" stories and for giving Asimov the basic idea for his "Foundation" stories which would eventually become the Foundation Trilogy. He also gave guidance to Robert A. Heinlein when many of Heinlein's stories seemed to be taking place in the same universe. All of these stories, plus one novel, can be found in Heinlein's seminal work, The Past Through Tomorrow (1967). Campbell also published the first (largely positive) article on L. Ron Hubbard's nascent Dianetics ideas in the late 1940s. Heinlein, however, was a star from the beginning until he left off writing to join the war effort.

For the most part Campbell saw science and technology in a positive light, as long as humans behaved themselves. But Campbell did not limit his authors to mere science and technology (mere gizmo SF) as Gernsback had. Campbell encouraged his stable authors to explore aspects of future politics and social change in the pages of Astounding, something Gernsback wasn't interested in. Campbell, a child of the Depression, had a keen suspicion of governments and bureaucracies, and you can see how some of this rubs off in several stories in your anthology. In fact, Campbell saw that a simple idea all on its own could become something like a Frankenstein monster and not just ideas floating around in science and technology. Ideas such as the rightness of any religion or the tyrannies of any majority can be very dangerous ideas indeed. In fact, a very bad idea can bring a nation to its knees and a bad philosophy can ruin an age-old institution, any age-old institution. Campbell even encouraged Robert Heinlein to write a novel called the Sixth Column (published in 1941 under the pseudonym Anson McDonald, then in 1951 as RAH with the title The Day After Tomorrow), wherein a bogus religion overthrows a dictatorship in a future USA. The fear of larger bureaucratic systems stomping on the average individual was a commonly held notion in the 1930s because people alive at that time had actually seen a small group of men in 1929 turn Wall Street into a casino and the government of the United States nearly collapsed because of the outcome.

Heinlein did very well by Signet Books in the early 1960s with some of the most evocative covers the field had yet seen in paperback publishing.

Indeed, one of Campbell's first discoveries was Robert Heinlein and Heinlein's story, "They" contains a typical Heinlein story archetype: the lone individual struggling against a larger system, in this case aliens who may or may not have taken over the entire Earth. Both Campbell and Heinlein were libertarians at heart. They believed in the primacy of the individual and held an enormous suspicion of large-scale institutions, religious, political, you name it. Campbell knew that governments were prone to get out of control (or display no controls whatever, as in the aftermath of the crash of 1929 that precipitated the Great Depression) and the first thing that usually went when governments collapsed were individual rights, or civil liberties. This goes for religious institutions as well. Indeed, "They" can be taken as a metaphor of them versus us (or in case of the story, the lone individual). It should be noted that Campbell never let his writers pick on any one church or religion even though later science fiction writers would later start pointing fingers and naming names. One such writer will be Walter M. Miller Jr. whose A Canticle for Liebowitz of 1959 will take a few pokes at the Roman Catholic Church, or at least its enduring medievalism and its mandate on utter obedience. James Blish's A Case for Conscience (1958) will tackle the simple arrogance of human religion, asking questions about aliens and Christian redemption. That is to say, would it apply to them as well? Or if they were "without sin", what would they be to us? Gods? These may be artificial (and in some ways purely academic) problems, but the would have to be faced if the people at SETI picked up signals from another technological society out among the stars. Certainly there are Christians alive today who would want to know if they were "saved" or not (just as there are Christians alive today who would want to send missionaries there to convert them as soon as possible). Don't laugh. Someday all this will happen. And John W. Campbell Jr.'s writers at Astounding who thought of these things first.

It should come as no surprise then that Astounding's best years were from 1939 to 1945, which neatly parallels World War II, a time when civil liberties were, by necessity, suspended. This also was a time of a budding "can do" attitude in most Americans as the country entered the war and put our physical and mental muscles to work. Campbell had faith enough in scientists and the "hero" mentality that his stories were filled with optimism and the belief that with the right kind of mental effort (as in a chess game, for example) a solution could be found. Campbell, as such, advocated the "conundrum" story. These were stories were a technological fix was needed to resolve a crisis. Most of the writers appearing in Astounding wrote conundrum stories. But Campbell's greatest writer of "conundrum" stories was Isaac Asimov.

Asimov, a scientist at heart, wrote stories that focused on problems of a technological kind. Later in his career he would explore the societal ramifications of technological problem, but in the early 1940s he dazzled his readers with his immensely popular "Robot" stories. Robots had already become a familiar conceit with science fiction fans; they would have known of robots from Fritz Lang's Metropolis with its gorgeous female android. They would have remembered the 1939 World's Fair and the robot of the Futurama and the wonders they seemed to foretell.

Asimov's robots, however, were different. The Robot stories had specific rules of engagement. Both Campbell and Asimov came up with "Three Rules of Robotics" and all of Asimov's Robot stories operate within the range of these rules, rules that were quite like the rules of chess, beyond which you could not stray. The Rules are:

1) A robot may not harm a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm;

2) A robot must obey the orders of a human being except where they come into conflict with the First Rule;

3) A robot must protect its own existence except where it comes into conflict with the First or the Second Rule.

Therefore, Asimov's Robot stories became scenarios where a robot found itself in conflict with one or more of the Rules and, sometimes with the help of a human, managed to overcome the crisis without breaking any of the rules. Indeed, any of the Robot stories can be seen as archetypal Campbell stories centered around paradoxes and science-based solutions. Asimov's early reputation rested on the popularity of these stories, and so influential were they that other editors would not let their writers write about robots unless they obeyed Asimov's Rules of Robotics. This, of course, no longer applies. Just ask the Terminator.

Asimov also had a flair for the larger problems of a vast galactic society and these are found in the stories that lead up to the Foundation Series. Speaking generally, Asimov's characters always operated with the confines of these large civilizations; Robert Heinlein's characters were often renegades from those societies. A good example of Asimov balancing the life of science with the facts of historical change is found in the story "Nightfall Here Asimov speculates on how a society might change if its very belief system was shown to be in error. The change is horrific and, as in most science fiction, functions as a metaphor for our own scientific arrogance.

Another immensely popular writer of the Campbellian stable was A.E. Van Vogt. Van Vogt's science fiction tended to lean toward space opera and worlds filled with all kinds of peculiar creatures, but he also had a political streak in him that bore a resemblance to some of the ideas embraced by Robert Heinlein. "The Weapon Shop of Isher" stories detail a repressive society where one man (with a gun and some bizarre loops in time) comes to challenge it. Van Vogt's stories, though, were more complexly written (sometimes to a fault) than those of Heinlein and drew from adventure elements common to the freewheeling action pulps of the 1930s before Campbell changed all that.

Harlan Ellison presenting A.E. Van Vogt with the Grand Master Lifetime Achievement award.

Indeed, one of Van Vogt's best novels is actually a collection of four novelettes called The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-1943) and is rumored to be the inspiration for Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. Scientists of the Space Beagle travel hither and yon and encounter a wide range of exotic and very memorable alien beasts.

These issues featured stories of what would become part Van Vogt's classic novel, Voyage of the Space Beagle. The title, of course, is a homage to Charles Darwin whose voyages with the H.M.S. Beagle allowed the young biologist to formulate his theories of evolution in the mid-1800s. Van Vogt's masterpiece has contains many elements familiar to the reader, especially fans of Star Trek. Rumor also has it that elements of the story "Black Destroyer" inspired the movie Alien. Voyage of the Space Beagle is easily one of the classics of science fiction.

Van Vogt was also one of the few SF writers of the early 1940s who pretty much kept writing the same kind of adventuresome SF until the day he died (Asimov also never changed his style). Most of Campbell's other writers either left Astounding (Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, for example) or stayed with it until the paperback novel market began to develop in the early 1950s so that they could make more money publishing novels. Heinlein will then go on to publish some of the best "juvenile" (or "young adult" as they are now called) novels of the 1950s, all of which are still in print.

Many authors, of course, write using pseudonyms; this has been an age-old practice. The pulp era of the 1930s saw such an explosion of markets for the pulps, that some writers often filled entire single issues of a magazine all on their own, using a wide array of nom de plumes. This was no less true of the science fiction magazines. (Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, for example, are rumored to have done this throughout the 1950s and 1960s.) One of the most favorite science fiction writers of the early 1940s was Henry Kuttner. Kuttner was exceedingly prolific. He wrote under a dozen known pseudonyms, but he is most fondly remembered as being part of a team writing under the pseudonym of "Lewis Pagett". His teammate was his wife, Catherine L. Moore, a fine writer all on her own. The Pagett stories are most recognizable by their wry sense of humor and smoothness of prose style (which was probably due to either Kuttner or Moore doing the rare rewrite).

However, the "Lewis Pagett" stories (and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" in particular) had a dark side to them, a dark side that rarely showed up in science fiction pulps usually known for their optimism. For Kuttner this came from his apprenticing under H.P. Lovecraft, with whom he corresponded at length in the early 1930s. Kuttner's SF, when published in Astounding, had an almost Lovecraftian darkness to it. When he published elsewhere, as in magazines such as Planet Stories, Startling Stories, and the like, it did not. Kuttner was a versatile and very adroit writer, able to adjust to any sort of market. This, though, brings to issue the subtle influence of John W. Campbell Jr. as an editor. Campbell encouraged this "dark" side to Kuttner and the field is richer because of it.

As mentioned earlier, many critics have suggested that the pulp era, and Hugo Gernsback in particular, created a "dumbing down" of science fiction. Since this also occurred in an era of grade B movie serials that were very clearly dumb, this has always been an impression hard to overcome. But a close reading of science fiction of the late 1930s, particularly once Campbell takes over Astounding, will show the reader that Campbell was the one person responsible for bringing a more studied seriousness to the genre. Not all science fiction ends unhappily in the pages of Astounding. But the field matured profoundly under Campbell's influence. Campbell showed that science fiction was an excellent proving ground for the exploration of myth, morality, and the things we can expect the future to bring to us---happily or sadly.

Still, you can see that it's almost as if there are two "layers" or strata to science fiction. The one on top, the one visible in cheesy movies and bad television shows, is the version straight out of the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. There, heroes are white, male, and muscular and women are buxom, blond and always helpless. And, arguably, these stereotypes haven't changed. Certainly the values of humanity they put forth haven't changed. They still tend to be Western (in a Judeo-Christian sense) and imperialistic. That is to say, it is still as if men and women from Western Europe (mostly England and mostly white) are still conquering the universe. These ideas currently underlie the Star Trek phenomenon which upholds rather benign notions of imperial conquest through the use of 19th century maritime conventions (ships, captains, first officers, etc.) with an undercurrent of "lite" Christianity. We are a long way yet from Maoist Chinese exploring space or Muslim scholars on Mars pondering life in a very different kind of desert.

Yet, it's this second layer, the layer which is the serious side of the genre, where writers take the art of writing seriously, regardless the kind of story (happy or sad) that comes out as a result. To be sure, serious SF movies and television shows would eventually appear. But it's this sleazy side of the genre, promulgated by the garish covers of the pulp magazines of the 1930s and really bad movies, that has persisted in the consciousness of the public-at-large. If science fiction has finally become "literature" in this day and age, much of it is due to the influence of John W. Campbell Jr. Other editors would soon appear to expand the field's range, but Campbell's influence appeared when the field most needed it if it was going to become respectable.