There is a kind of promotional copy for anything science fiction related that’s aiming at a slightly bigger audience and it goes like this: science fiction used to be about muscle-bound heroes shooting bug-eyed aliens and rescuing half-naked babes on war-torn moons in far-flung space, but no more! Or, if you are Margaret Atwood, in an infamous interview that will no doubt show up in at least one obituary, you say, well, I don’t write science fiction, that’s all space squids.1 Often the satirized era here is “Golden Age” science fiction—a stretch we’ll say goes from sometime in the 1930s to sometime in the 1950s2—but in general there is an idea that science fiction was always stupid adventure stories about blasting aliens and scooping up dames right until… well… yesterday.
I date this line to the sixties, though I went hunting for examples to cite to explain why and all the ones I’ve seen have melted into some soup to which I take objection but for which it’s hard to find specific citations. (This situation is, as will emerge, perhaps ironically appropriate.)3 My gut feeling is that this line starts is when the “New Wave”4 starts to leak over from England, which is also when people begin drawing distinctions between the way genre fiction evolved in England versus America. That is, their claim (and I think also the reality) is that science fiction and fantasy never divided from the rest of publishing in England the way they did in America. Therefore it has always been more respected, more mature, and so on.5
Promotional patter is as promotional patter does.6 There are many science fiction anthologies in the sixties and seventies with the stated purpose of rejuvenating the genre from stale cliche (Orbit, Dangerous Visions, New Dimensions, The Alien Condition, etc), and at times it feels as if each had to pretend the others simply did not exist to get their blurbs done. But that’s marketing, not a sworn statement in court. And as somebody who is fond of the show Neon Genesis Evangelion, I am furthermore very familiar with the belief that “anime is tentacle porn” that has to be refined into “no, anime is busty women in inch long skirts reminding you of your mom.”
But for me, this specific line of patter raises an odd question, which is—
What are these people actually talking about? Because they are talking about something. And yet if you ask yourself what… well, it’s not so clear.
Before we go any further: is there any reason for me to care about this?
No.
OK, come on. You know what they’re talking about.
I feel like I do! It feels true that science fiction used to be about shooting aliens and saving girls. But to go back to anime for a moment, the “tentacle porn” aspect of anime is real. There are specific examples that created that reputation. In the world of jobs I do not personally desire, “hentai historian” probably ranks in the top twenty—it would be more desirable than “janitor at a CIA black site”—but you could be one if you wanted. When it comes to science fiction, on the other hand, these kinds of generalizations are rarely accompanied by a specific memory.
“Golden Age” science fiction was, sure, often shallow and / or sexist—as was science fiction afterward—but was it shallow and / or sexist in this specific way? I haven’t read the Foundation books in mumble mumble years but I don’t think anybody would call Asimov’s work full of babes. If I were asked to make a list of negative qualities I associate with Golden Age science fiction, I’d probably pick “dryness” or “overreliance on explanation.” I would not come up with “overabundance of sex.”
To pick two infamous examples: something like Lester del Rey’s 1938 story “Helen O’Loy”—in which two guys build the ideal robot girlfriend and there is no twist because she really is the ideal robot girlfriend whose only flaw is being too perfect—is sexist in the sense that it presents human women as a technological problem that will eventually be solved. One day the annoying demanding woman who nags you about settling down will be replaced by the patient and infinitely accommodating robot woman who never even ages… though she will pretend she does, for your sake. And Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” (1954) is sexist because it is an experiment designed to figure out an instance where it would be acceptable to eject a girl into the vacuum of space for the crime of being a little dumb and annoying.7
What characterizes both of these stories is hostility to women’s presence in male spaces—which are, in these stories, all spaces, since even the domestic sphere will one day be taken over by perfect robot girlfriends. It’s just that these are stories of machine-building nerds, not square-jawed jocks. After all, classic science fiction was for (and sometimes by) machine-building nerds. Why would their wish fulfillment involve being tough and strong, rather than winning the day through being clever?
Moving on. When I run into this sort of phrasing, it’s often accompanied by lines like you could see this illustrated on practically every magazine cover.
Could you?
The magazine covers.
Here is a randomly selected cover of Astounding from 1934.
There is a hero with a strong jawline preparing to shoot an alien, I’ll admit it. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s exactly what we’ve been promised. Maybe 1934 is too far back. Maybe one issue is too restrictive. Maybe one magazine is too restrictive.… So here are five sets of magazines covers starting from the arbitrary date “January 1954.” Of these magazines, Future is the closest to what I’m envisioning when I read this kind of promo. There are lots of babes on those covers.
Lest I seem disingenuous, I’m certainly aware of Margaret Brundage’s sexy Weird Tales covers and of Frank Frazetta’s sexy paperback Conan covers and the whole slew of sexy covers that accompany the rise of the mass market paperback. I want to put Brundage aside for the moment, though. If every cover were a Brundage cover, I don’t think there would be any question what people meant by these statements. Brundage, however, was one cover artist for one magazine.
With Frazetta, on the other hand, his moment really started in the sixties; that’s when he starts doing the Conan covers. His rise is contemporaneous with this particular strain of “science fiction used to be for horny, bloodthirsty babies.” Similarly, the explosion of the science fiction paperback market goes hand in hand with the more experimental works that start to appear in the sixties. So one answer for what are people talking about when they say that science fiction used to have… but now… is that they are really discussing their present. Frazetta feels like a throwback. What is at stake in these claims about science fiction’s past is really its present and its future.
If we agree that a lot of “old” science fiction was bad, does it really matter how it was bad?
It does… to me.
For one thing, I am wary of relying on these types of cultural shorthands, because what often happens is people are quoting and riffing on each other. So sometimes I’ll run into truly ludicrous claims along the lines of “there wasn’t any ‘good’ science fiction until the eighties,” and I can tell that this is because of inherited narratives about when science fiction “got good” that have been updated slightly.8
But also, the misconception that this particular type of promotional package is meant to correct is a real misconception, not something invented for promotional purposes. This line is not like when somebody has to pretend that a well-known author is being rediscovered for a marketing hook. The more mainstream world of fiction, commentary, academia, etc, with which they are dealing does really think that a muscle-bound hero shooting aliens is “science fiction.” Which is why you also can’t really say “oh those mainstream people, they’re all thinking of this specific book by this Golden Age writer. They’re all thinking of A.E. van Vogt or Doc Smith or Edmond Hamilton or Leigh Brackett.” They are not thinking that. They don’t know who those people are. They have an impression that is not actually formed by reading anything.
I should also say that this way of talking about the benighted past does not only exist when people are trying to sell their work as an innovation; you can find it as a form of affectionate (or, sometimes, embittered) nostalgia, too.9 Everybody remembers the age of the bug-eyed aliens. But when you start looking for it you are forced to consider that it either they happened much further back than you think—well before the “Golden Age” of science fiction—or that, possibly, it didn’t happen at all.
And then there is a secret third option.
So what’s the answer?
The answer is movies. To a lesser extent, television. Maybe also comic books. But mostly, it’s movies. Movies! Always at the scene of the crime.…
One thing I realized reading some very old fan writing is the degree to which movies and television were marginal and embarrassing within fandom—more or less from the jump—while also basically representing science fiction, along with the magazine covers, to everybody who wasn’t really following it.
Anyway, thank you for coming along. I feel sure I’m going to get at least three corrections to this post as soon as I send it out. But that’s okay. That’s why we blog.
Because I was trying to decide if I wanted to talk about the somewhat contentious history of the term “speculative fiction” in the book, I picked up an Atwood essay collection where she tries to correct the record on the space squids. She corrects it by saying…
What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to Earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such—things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books.
…so I’m not sure the record really needed to be corrected.
For a more precise chronology, see Robert Silverberg.
behold in me the contrapasso
for our purposes, this means J.G. Ballard
The “New Wave” in America was always a highly contested category. Many people who were supposed to be writing it insisted did not exist. People who hated it insisted it did exist.
see how every new little magazine launches with a declaration that it will fill a niche by publishing only good and thoughtful things, unlike the other little magazines which publish garbage on purpose
I don’t actually hate this story, by the way, but I think its publication history is useful here—that it was supposed to be a story of how somebody figures out how to save the girl with his technical ingenuity, but Campbell refused to accept it until she got shot out into space. In other words, this story could have been a story in which a guy saves the day and has a girl cooing on his arm, but that version was emphatically not wanted.
This is a real post I saw on Bluesky but I did not bookmark it or anything… it just lives rent free in my mind.
“Remember when science fiction used to be about going to your good union job at the space-faring factory, and then coming home after a long hard day of bug blasting to your beautiful and also naked wife? You can’t do that anymore, because of Woke.…”
I agree with the points you make in this essay, up and down the line. BUT -- you can see the sort of covers you are looking for in the true pulp magazines of, mostly, the late '40s and early '50s. Primarily Thrilling Wonder Stories, its companions Startling Stories and Space Stories, and of course Planet Stories. Try the December 1949 issue of Thrilling for example. (Though I should note that while there was a busty woman on all six 1949 covers of Thrilling, in at least half of those cases, the woman is wielding a sword or blaster, and is in fact the human menacing the invading alien.)
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?61700
I should note that while all those pulps were founded with the intention of appealing to a more juvenile (and definitely male) audience, by the late '40s they were publishing a fair amount of good to very good stuff.
And, boy, is that Atwood quote wrongheaded. I almost wonder if she's actually READ The War of the Worlds.
i think your movies hypothesis here is very good but the thing that makes me wonder if there's something else going on alongside that is that the jacked bro saving girls in space sort of has a cousin in the english professor cheating on his wife who as we all know stars in every novel classified under "literary fiction" ever despite the fact that i personally have only encountered him once, in zadie smith's on beauty where he cannot reasonably be called a self-insert and which also is a book that rules... anyway i don't think there are a lot of movies about english professors cheating on their wives but the two phenomena seem similar to me even though as someone who does not read a lot of sci fi the space version hadn't occurred to me to identify as a myth until today so i can't be said to have much expertise here (this is why we comment?).
--brb, drafting the outline for a novel that will REALLY get the discourse gears churning about an english professor cheating on his wife in space....