Of War and Beyond

As a conclusion, this chapter considers how the impact of that popular cinematic imagination changed during the war and immediate post-war years, that is, in the lead-up to SF’s coming of age in the 1950s, a coming of age that would be accompanied by film’s own explosion of SF narratives. The chapter argues that film had, during this period, become much more of a cultural “given,” a fact of life, and one that no longer evoked the same sort of SF-like “wonder” that it had during the pre-war era. While still visible in the rhetoric of SF and to a lesser extent in story content, film and the film industry would increasingly move in a different direction in this time, with SF literature, in both its pulp and hardcover forms, finding a new significance and respectability, while that burgeoning SF cinema would struggle to achieve a similarly respectable status.

Introduction

This chapter explores the nature of the science fiction (SF) pulp magazine in the 1910s–1940 period, with a special emphasis on the influence of the most influential editor of the period, Hugo Gernsback. It outlines how the subjects and aims of SF in this period paralleled the larger modernist agenda that was also shaping the development of film, with a special emphasis on the visual impact of early film and early film-viewing practices. The chapter especially emphasizes how cinema’s emphasis on “attractions” or “astonishments,” as film historian Tom Gunning labels them, finds a corollary in the new genre of SF’s concern with “wonders.”

Convergence and the Rhetoric of Scientifilm

Film, Francesco Casetti argues, provided a common “field of convergence for different dimensions” of the popular imagination in the early twentieth century. We can see evidence of the extent of that “convergence” in the sort of discourse that unfolded in various other internal features of the pulps. Editorials, readers’ letters, and film reviews converge to demonstrate a sense of enthusiasm about the ability of films to supplement the work of SF by visualizing or realizing the genre’s ideas for reshaping the world and the self. That enthusiasm would bring repeated calls for the film industry to produce more SF-themed films, even to adapt favorite stories from the pulps. But as reviews of SF films began to proliferate in the pulps, particularly in the late 1930s, they would increasingly attest to a frustration or dissatisfaction with the sense of reality that was being achieved by the SF film and point to a rift beginning between the films and the world of SF literature.

Cover Stories

One of the most famous aspects of early pulps such as Amazing, Astounding, and Wonder Stories was their visually arresting covers, drawn by popular artists like Frank R. Paul, Howard V. Brown, and Hans Wesso. This chapter examines how those covers, as well as the magazines’ interior illustrations, drew on a kind of cinematic logic, with their style recalling that of movie posters, their images evoking the practices of movie-viewing, their subjects often including elements of film technology, and, late in the period, their designs even imitating specific films or film images. Like the movies, these illustrations drew readers out of their everyday experience, while starkly visualizing the ability of both the SF and cinematic imaginations to let us see other worlds, other beings, and other technologies.

The Real Thing

Chapter Three traces out how film and a filmic consciousness entered into the fiction that was, ostensibly, the SF pulps’ primary reason for existence. It begins by recognizing the extent to which a cinematic rhetoric filtered into SF writing, which readily drew metaphors, similes, and key images or references from the world of the movies. The chapter then considers how film technology—cameras, sound recording devices, screens, etc.—took a place alongside other sorts of fascinating modern technology as proper subjects for SF narratives. Finally, it examines a variety of the stories that focus specifically on the film industry—of the present and the future—with a special emphasis on the work of neglected SF author Henry Kuttner.

The Pulps in the Consumer’s Republic

Chapter 2 considers the sort of advertising typically found in the SF pulps. During the formative pre-war years, advertising was seldom about the movies, but it frequently implicated and even exploited a developing film consciousness in the pulp readership. And although some have argued that, in comparison to the numerous “slick” magazines of the period, advertising was not very important to the pulps, this chapter argues otherwise, particularly noting the various film-related ads that were common to all the SF magazines, including education in film-related occupations; placement of film scripts; opportunities for screen tests; and films, cameras, and projectors that were already being marketed to the pulp readers. Those readers were seen as part of what Lizabeth Cohen has termed the new “Consumer’s Republic” of America, with its tastes and desires in consumption already being partly shaped by their experience of the new modernist art of the movies.