Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America by John Cheng (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America by John Cheng J. P. Telotte (bio) Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America. By John Cheng. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. vi+392. $45. I was initially led to expect something different from John Cheng's Astounding Wonder, for the introduction suggested that the book would offer a chronicle of attitudes toward science and technology in the "interwar" era, that is, from the 1920s to approximately 1941. This subject has been taken up many times in recent years, notably by commentators such as Cecelia Tichi, Miles Orvell, and Gary Westfahl—unfortunately, none of their work is cited here—and always to interesting ends. For this subject, what Cheng describes as "the significance and evolving circumstances for what might be called popular science in the early Twentieth Century" (p. 3) has become a crucial touchstone for explaining how interwar attitudes— along with World War II—helped shape our modern technological world. But Cheng's effort surprised by moving such discussions in a new direction, one that is well worth the effort. As the first chapter clarifies, his real interest lies in linking the development of interwar popular science to that of science fiction, particularly as it took shape in the world of the pulp magazines, such as Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, andWonder Stories (originally Science Wonder Stories), from whose names Cheng draws his own title. Cheng's focus ultimately is on the ways in which scientific thinking and the imagination—particularly what might be termed the literary imagination—were intertwined in this formative period. As he suggests, "imagining science and imagining it passionately were part and parcel" of both cultures (p. 6), that of science and its trained practitioners on the one hand and that of the writers and readers of the new literature of science fiction on the other. Drawing on the examples of early rocket experimenter Robert Goddard and the members of the ambitiously named American Interplanetary Society, he notes that science in early-twentieth-century America was [End Page 417] never really an individual activity; rather, it was presented in newspapers and the pulp magazines as a kind of "inclusive enterprise" (p. 255). Thus, each new breakthrough seemed to catch the public's attention, to open up popular discussion and debate, and even to bring out volunteers eager to participate, as in the case of those who, responding to news stories about rockets possibly being able to reach the moon, volunteered to take the potentially one-way trip. His larger point is that science was part of a "social and progressive sensibility" (p. 4), a sensibility that was mirrored in and furthered by both the writing and the reading of science fiction in this era. While a number of histories of science fiction have made similar connections, Cheng's documentation of the extent to which readers of science fiction tended to see themselves as potential scientists—or even scientists in fact—represents a valuable contribution to our understanding of the place of the pulp magazines in interwar popular culture and in the cultural history of science. For while others have mined the pulp archives to determine what types of stories were written, published, and appreciated in this period, which prominent authors first found their way through the venues of Amazing, Astounding, Wonder, and their less successful brethren, and how much these journals' editors helped set the trajectory for a developing science fiction literature, much less attention has been paid to the readership itself. Here Cheng, in great detail, mines the letters to the editors of the journals, the open letters forums, and even individual correspondence, demonstrating how these various communications "led to exchanges within and through the backyard of their pulps, and for many, to activities beyond them" (p. 215), such as the formation of science clubs, collaboration on rocket projects, the creation of a separate fan fiction and fan-published journals, and eventually to the first fan conventions, or "Cons," as they are familiarly known today. It is this fan engagement that gradually becomes the real focus of Astounding Wonder—as well as its real strength, allowing it...