Science Fiction Publishing

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Mike Shupp

The different emphasis did not make humanists of Campbell and his evolving school of authors--A. E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, George O. Smith, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, etc. Pulp fiction was fast moving, easily comprehensible, and generally devoid of moral ambiguity; its readers were not disposed to look below the textual surface for deconstructive ironies, and if they had been, they would generally have been disappointed. At a penny a word, writers took no pains to be subtle; they seldom found time to do second drafts.

Fortunately, readers were easily satisfied. Rather than avant-garde literary values, readers of science fiction sought the affirmation of moral or ideological views: that justice was obtainable in a corrupt society in the detective magazines, that courage and gentlemanly virtues coexisted in adventure tales. Science fiction magazines promised an expanding technological and technocratic future and provided ever more grandiose descriptions of action and scenery. Whether the readers sought "transcendence" or a "sense of wonder," this fiction had little to do with the private epiphanies that climaxed much "literary" fiction.

Moreover, pulp fiction was ephemeral. Some pulp authors cracked the book market for detective stories, but most writers' work perished as the yellowing, brittle pages of the magazines crumbled away. A handful of specialist reprint publishers--among them Gnome Books, Shasta, Fantasy Press, Prime Press, and Arkham House--appeared to publish imaginative fiction, but their print runs were small and their material limited. No one expected pulp science fiction to last through the ages, and no one expected to make a living writing it. As the 1930s and 1940s wore on, readers and writers of science fiction were increasingly isolated from the literary values that came to prominence with modernism.

Defenders of science fiction's merits are prone to point at certain masterpieces of the genre, works so carefully told not a comma seems misplaced, so heartbreakingly beautiful that it seems their readers must break into tears. Included among these masterpieces are More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker, Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Advocates also list the utilitarianism offered by science fiction as a predictor of inventions used in the modern world--from Verne's Nautilus to Heinlein's waldoes--and the impact of those inventions on modern lives. At the end of 1945, Campbell was predicting in his magazine that men would reach the moon by 1950, and that Astounding would be on sale there in 1955. Robert Heinlein's projections, in a 1947 letter to the Saturday Evening Post, were only slightly paler, with a moon landing in 1952 and a permanent base there in 1962. But science fiction writers were not alone in contemplating how technology impacted modern lives, as Collier's and Walt Disney would demonstrate in the next decade. And science fiction writers had foretold atomic energy, which had become a reality with the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.