Astounding Wonder by Cheng John;

Author:Cheng, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Figures 8A and 8B. Amazing Stories, April 1928 and September 1928 covers. By permission of the Frank R. Paul Estate.

Interwar time-travel stories, like interwar science fiction in general, were progressive but not utopian. They struck a particular variation of what Raymond Williams called science fiction’s “at once liberating and promiscuous” mode.80 Extrapolating modern science, pulp science fiction prompted readers to examine and explore the possibilities of future societies and imagined worlds. Science, however, promised not only to reveal the unknown but also to comprehend it. By the 1920s and 1930s its broad and potent authority claimed not only space but also time and evolution. Nature’s unknown worlds became science fiction’s other worlds. Particularly in popular discourse, science’s authority exceeded even some of its practitioners’ findings and concerns. Interwar science fiction’s evocation of Einstein to validate time-travel stories that preserved the present and progress, despite implications of his later work to the contrary, illustrated that authoritative determination. The inevitability of its progress gave interwar science fiction a flattened sensibility of fiction and history that the author William Gibson appropriately called the “Gernsback Continuum.”81

Progress’s inevitability also redefined science fiction’s sense of social possibility. Promoting science’s potential sparked readers’ ability to imagine a transformed nature within which all change was possible. At the same time it diminished their sense of historical agency within the scope of progress and change. Modern science’s authority distinguished science fiction’s concerns from those of utopian fiction. Where utopian fiction considered the possibilities that science’s power over nature offered for social change, science fiction placed social possibility within science’s power for natural change. As Williams observed, “while the utopian transformation is social and moral, the science-fiction transformation . . . is at once beyond and beneath: not social and moral, but natural.”82

Nevertheless interwar science fiction reassured readers’ optimism for both scientific progress and adventure. Stories of the period have been described and derided for their optimistic tone and celebration, even glorification, of the wondrous facts and artifacts that progress was sure to produce.83 Science fiction’s devices, however, were only part of its work. Encapsulated theory and knowledge, they were stories’ initial means to possibility, technical portals to adventure. The concerns of modern society and the consequences science might bring them, many dark and dire, provided substantial fuel for those subsequent tales, and resolution of their tensions, not science’s unabashed celebration, provided interwar science fiction’s sense of optimism. Contemporary modern dilemmas—gender relations and family values, race and national citizenship, relations between the state and the individual, labor and the effects of industrialization—found powerful expression in the genre’s panoply of pulp characters: motherly women, mad scientists, Oriental Asian aliens, black-skinned robots, gendered machines, and merely mundane monsters, creatures, and beasts. The social notes within this natural menagerie called for sublime and complex resolution through heroic action. Science fiction’s heroes defeated the denizens of its other worlds in battle while also realizing requited romance with its heroines. Victory in adventure and romance recapitulated values that Americans in the 1920s and 1930s wanted to be traditional and resolved the drama of science’s dystopic potential.

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