The Gernsback Continuum

I posted about the Transcultural Fantastic seminar series at the University of Leeds last year and, a few weeks ago, the latest in this series of events took place as an online talk, 'The Ekphrastic Fantastic' by Dr Richard Brown. The talk explored the ekphrastic - understood as a verbal evocation of the visual - in contemporary writing, drawing from selected works by J.G. Ballard, China Miéville and Ali Smith.

There were some also fascinating SF connections made in relation to the William Gibson short story The Gernsback Continuum, which I'd never come across before. Hugo Gernsback, the writer, inventer and SF magazine publisher, has featured more than once on this blog, so the title of the story immediately piqued my curiosity. The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of a US photographer, who's commissioned by a British 'trendy trade paperback publisher' to photograph examples of futuristic American city architecture of the Thirties and Forties. It transpires that this book project - working title The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was - is the brainchild of fashionable pop art historian Dialta Downes. The narrator's mild contempt for the idea is evident in his initial encounter with Downes:

There’s a British obsession with the more baroque elements of American pop culture [...] In Dialta Downes this manifested itself in a mania for a uniquely American form of architecture that most Americans are scarcely aware of. At first I wasn’t sure what she was talking about, but gradually it began to dawn on me [...] She was talking about those odds and ends of ‘futuristic’ Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing: the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminium, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her.

The connection to Gernsback becomes clearer when the photographer is shown a collection of Downes' favourite examples of this architectural style, what she calls 'American Streamlined Moderne':

I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp utopias. Wright’s building looked as though it had been designed for people who wore white togas and Lucite sandals.

Interior of Johnson's Wax Building

Here, we see a reference to Amazing Stories, published by Gernsback, and the cover art of Frank R. Paul, an artist closely associated with this magazine's visual style, who trained as an architect himself. Downes says that we might think of these images and designs 'as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams'. The narrator starts to warm up to the project, and he tries to re-imagine the environment around him according to this aesthetic:

I thought myself in Dialta Downes’s America. When I isolated a few of the factory buildings on the ground glass of the Hasselblad, they came across with a kind of sinister totalitarian dignity, like the stadiums Albert Speer built for Hitler. But the rest of it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the collective American subconscious of the Thirties, tending mostly to survive along depressing strips lined with dusty motels, mattress wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas stations in a big way.

As the photographer tunes in more and more to this 'shadowy America-that-wasn’t', the images begin to take on real forms, a phenomenon his journalist friend Kihn calls 'semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own'. Driving back to Los Angeles, he reflects on this explanation but it troubles him and, exhausted and agitated, he pulls over the car to sleep. Upon waking, he finds a phantom futuristic city looming before him; this is the ekphrastic element Richard highlighted in his talk:

Then I looked behind me and saw the city. The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealised city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me [...] You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters...

Even more troubling is the appearance of a couple, 'white, blond', the 'children of Dialta Downes’s ’80-that-wasn’t', framed by the illuminated shadow city. The narrator imagines the city populated by these creatures 'orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars', deciding 'it had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda'.

The photography for Downes' book ends up being a great success. But, desperate to return to some kind of normality, the story ends with the photographer rushing to the nearest newsstand to buy a paper and read about the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard:

[Newsstand proprietor] ‘Hell of a world we live in, huh?’ [...] ‘But it could be worse, huh?’ 

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’

Overall then, Gibson takes a cynical view of the technophilia and optimism of the 1930s and 1940s, epitomised in the covers of Gernsback's SF magazines. As Bruce Sterling has commented, 'The Gernsback Continuum shows [Gibson] consciously drawing a bead on the shambling figure of the SF tradition'. Nevertheless, his evocative rendering of the 'semiotic phantoms' lurking in American architecture throws a sharp critical and visual lens on one of the country's many futures past.

Hugo Gernsback and the Electrical Experimenter Archive

Born in Luxembourg, Hugo Gernsbacher emigrated to New York at the age of 20, in 1904. In the USA, he soon displayed an entrepreneurial spirit, changing his surname to Gernsback and setting up the Electro Importing Co. to sell the latest specialist electronic devices from Europe. Always interested in developments in science and technology, he founded the magazine Modern Electrics in 1908 as a mail-order catalogue, with technical articles and instructions for home electronics enthusiasts. He also registered patents for such exotic items as the Isolator, a sensory-deprivation helmet intended to increase concentration and focus, despite looking more suitable for deep-sea diving.

 

   

Electrical Experimenter, which ran between May 1913 and July 1920, was the successor to Modern Electrics, where Gernsback had serialised his own novel Ralph-124C 41+ between 1911 and 1912. Although, like its predecessor, it concentrated on technical science for amateur hobbyists – particularly in the field of radio, or ‘wireless’ – its scope was expanded to include some early science fiction, among them his own stories. Alongside these were articles by Nikolai Tesla, who also published segments of his autobiography in the magazine during 1919. In a 1916 editorial, Gernsback argued that a “real electrical experimenter, worthy of the name” must have imagination and a vision for the future.

The monthly editions of Electrical Experimenter in 1918 largely focused on technology in warfare, with the First World War still raging in Europe. From January’s ‘Electro-Magnetic Depth-Bombs’ through the ‘Gyro-Electric Destroyer’ to ‘The Automatic Soldier’, Gernsback showed his pragmatic knack of seizing the moment. Although the August issue harked back to a more innocent era of transport speculation, presenting the ‘Aerial Mono-Flyer of the Future’, the year concluded with tanks and barbed wire. The magazine continued to run extensive advertisements for all things electrical, including Gernsback’s own Electro Importing Co., which was still in business. The archives of Electrical Experimenter can be found in several digital repositories; the bulk of them are at American Radio History and the Internet Archive.

Though his magazines were both successful and influential, Gernsback was notorious for his sharp business practices, taking advantage of struggling writers. One of these was H.P. Lovecraft, who referred to him as ‘Hugo the Rat’. He went on to found Amazing Stories in 1926, accepted as the first major science fiction magazine (although Gernsback’s preferred term was ‘scientifiction’, which he initially used). He was declared bankrupt in 1929, losing control of his publishing empire, but recovered to launch Wonder Stories and other popular magazines; he founded over 50 different titles during his lifetime. Gernsback was involved in early radio and television broadcasts, and anticipated the rise of mass media and air travel as early as the 1920s. He continued to envision the future, invent and register patents, until his death in 1967. The prestigious Hugo Awards, inaugurated in 1953 at the World Science Fiction Convention, are named after him in recognition of his contribution to the genre, as is a crater on the Moon.

SF Small Ads 2: Magic, Wonder Cures and Other Fictional Sciences

The last SF Small Ads post was all about Hugo Gernsback publications and the craze for amateur radio that pervaded the pages of SF magazines such as Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories. As part of the research for that topic, I took photos of other small ads, which could perhaps be broadly described as lifestyle themed. In fact, the profile of your average 1920s SF reader could probably be fairly well pieced together from the claims and products advertised. See you what you make of the following...

Science Fiction Theatre: Postcard From Barcelona

The subject of this month’s post was selected based on a temporary move to Spain, and the ‘Postcard from Barcelona’ reference proved impossible to resist! The title is borrowed from episode 30 of the 1950s-60s American science fiction television series, Science Fiction Theatre, a forerunner to programmes like the Twilight Zone, also featured here in a recent post.

Hosted by the film actor and former war correspondent Truman Bradley, each episode would begin with a simple science experiment, related in some way to the theme of the show. The shadow of war loomed large in experiments that would demonstrate the power of electron beams or the destruction of model cities, but this was usually tempered by optimism about the potential scientific advances to be made. For example, the intro to Postcard from Barcelona focuses on the construction of solar powered space stations; Bradley comments, ‘solar power can give man a powerful weapon with which to destroy himself or it can give us scientific opportunities for discoveries that will benefit the world’.

The topic of the episode extrapolates from the idea that these space stations already exist and were built by aliens to collect scientific data about Earth. The mysterious postcards from Barcelona (perhaps a suitably exotic and alien location for 1950s America) are received by the scientist Dr Keller, found dead at the beginning of the story, who is described as ‘the greatest scientist of the age’. It transpires that both Keller’s ‘sub-quantum theory of the universe’ and the compound elements for a numerical wonder drug were posted to the doctor exactly a year before he announced them to the world. The episode ends with a final postcard, sent in the code language of cybernetics, from the life forms to whom Keller owes his discoveries. The mantle then passes to his daughter and two former colleagues to keep the secret of the alien space station orbiting Earth.

While the scientific content in the series was minimal by today’s standards, real-world technologies and scientific problems were often the point of departure for the stories. The wider popularisation of science in this period was influenced by the craze for hobbyist magazines, which would usually also publish SF (described then as scientific fiction). Titles such as Modern Electrics, Electrical Experimenter and Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback in the 1930s, were later followed by a proliferation of anthologies and cheap paperback novels during the post-WWII publishing boom. The ascendency of television in the 1950s explains the emergence of a series like Science Fiction Theatre as part of this trend.

It's not surprising, then, that in the re-imagining of 1950s America in Back to the Future, Science Fiction Theatre features as George McFly’s favourite TV programme...

The Reader Speaks

In June last year (see my Digital Library post), I publicised the Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories covers by Frank R. Paul, available to view via the University of Leeds' Digital Library.

In that post, I mentioned that Paul's distinctive style became closely associated with these and other Hugo Gernsback publications. Now more than six months later I wanted to follow up with another Paul-related interest story by going beyond the covers of the magazines and into the obsessive, paranoid, and often downright strange territory of readers' letters. Most of these early pulps had a section devoted to readers' letters and the SF magazines were no different. 'The Reader Speaks' was a forum for fans to show their appreciation, or consternation, at the stories featured in each issue. But it was a letter from a Morris Miller of Brooklyn, NY, in an edition of Wonder Stories from January 1934 that drew my attention, primarily for its subject matter:- the artwork of Frank R. Paul. In his letter, Miller writes:

The attractive cover of the November issue depicts most remarkably the superb ability of its creator, Frank Paul, whose work, by the way is becoming less fantastic and more convincing, as well as within the bounds of reason. But I hate to have to see him draw an insensible picture like the one which appeared on the May 1933 cover. I hope the editors try their best to avoid such absurd means of arousing wonder in those not acquainted with our mag. I guess that is about all it can do. I also note the much improved lifelikeness in the faces of characters drawn by Mr Paul.

This is not the only topic covered in the letter, of course; there's a summary of the reader's favourite stories, a request for a science news section and speculation about the existence of canals on Mars:- 'perhaps they are not canals but some other super-structures which may account for everything...' However, the editors make it their first priority to address the comments relating to the cover artwork, responding with:

You seem to like our covers, like the majority of our readers, but there are a few who claim that they are too ‘gaudy’ or ‘loud’. We do not deny the fact, but we do say that it is necessary in order to have a newsstand sale. These covers are very attractive and draw the eye of passers-by, who may be persuaded to buy the magazine because of this fact, and thereby we acquire many new science-fiction fans who would not now be acquainted with the magazine if it weren’t for this. If we took a vote, we’d probably find that a large percentage of our readers were introduced to science-fiction by the cover of Wonder Stories.

Here, a debt is acknowledged to Paul's covers for drawing the eye and exciting interest in a potential 1930s SF reader. It's easy to imagine how these distinctive images would stand out on a crowded newsstand but perhaps this would be small comfort to a reader like Miller. The oddest thing is that a comparison of the 'attractive' November issue and the 'insensible' May issue reveal (to my eye) few discernible differences, although I could be missing something. For a man that can make sense out of canals on Mars, maybe a robot with tentacles is not too much of an imaginative stretch. But a flying man? That's evidently a bridge too far...

Insensible May issue

Attractive November issue