Book description
When physicist Robert Goddard, whose career was inspired by H. G.
Wells's War of the Worlds, published "A Method of Reaching
Extreme Altitudes," the response was electric. Newspaper
headlines across the country announced, "Modern Jules Verne
Invents Rocket to Reach Moon," while people from around the
world, including two World War I pilots, volunteered as pioneers in
space exploration. Though premature (Goddard's rocket, alas, was only
imagined), the episode demonstrated not only science's general
popularity but also its intersection with interwar popular and
commercial culture. In that intersection, the stories that inspired
Goddard and others became a recognizable genre: science fiction.
Astounding Wonder explores science fiction's emergence in the
era's "pulps," colorful magazines that shouted from the
newsstands, attracting an extraordinarily loyal and active audience.
Pulps invited readers not only to read science fiction but also
to participate init, joining writers and editors in celebrating a
collective wonder for and investment in the potential of science. But
in conjuring fantastic machines, travel across time and space,
unexplored worlds, and alien foes, science fiction offered more than
rousing adventure and romance. It also assuaged contemporary concerns
about nation, gender, race, authority, ability, and progress-about the
place of ordinary individuals within modern science and society-in the
process freeing readers to debate scientific theories and implications
separate from such concerns.
Readers similarly sought to establish their worth and place
outside the pulps. Organizing clubs and conventions and producing
their own magazines, some expanded science fiction's community and
created a fan subculture separate from the professional pulp industry.
Others formed societies to launch and experiment with rockets. From
debating relativity and the use of slang in the future to printing
purple fanzines and calculating the speed of spaceships, fans'
enthusiastic industry revealed the tensions between popular science
and modern science. Even as it inspired readers' imagination and
activities, science fiction's participatory ethos sparked debates
about amateurs and professionals that divided the worlds of science
fiction in the 1930s and after.
"Science fiction fans have long been the most avid
aficionados in any arena of popular culture. Now with pioneering
research and deep knowledge, John Cheng tells how thousands of
Americans formed and sustained communities to pursue their visions of
a future made better by science. Cheng's book chronicles a generation
of young people inspired, engaged, and transformed by the
possibilities of imaginary new worlds, ideas, and devices, so many of
which inhabit our lives today. We live in a world they dreamed up,
from space travel to cell phones, computers to nanotechnology. Cheng
shows how readers and fans transformed science fiction from a marginal
genre in the pulp magazine industry to a major cultural
force."-Charles McGovern, College of William and Mary
John Cheng lives and writes in Chicago.
