ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Constructing the Gernsback Continuum

• In Event: Utopian and Dystopian Sciences

English Abstract

In 1981, the cyberpunk author William Gibson wrote a short story, “The Gernsback Continuum,” in which the protagonist is horrified by visions of the gleaming chrome megalopolis future as seen from the pages of 1930s pulp science fiction magazines. The title references the publisher of many of those pulps, the arch-technocrat and polymath Hugo Gernsback, whose media empire spanning dozens of popular science and SF magazines was instrumental in shaping public understanding of science and technology in the mid-twentieth century.

But as effective as he was at promoting a particular vision of how Americans should regard their increasingly gadget-encumbered world and the people who were bringing it about, Gernsback’s self-appointed role as the arbiter of appropriately rigorous futurist imagination did not derive from a mandate from the audiences he had cultivated for his publications. His vision of machine-mediated societies that glorified inventors (like him) was at odds with the dominant tendency in early short-form science fiction that used miraculous discoveries as means to adventurous ends. Nor did his embrace of technocracy sit squarely with the individualist squabbling of his other core audience of radio hobbyists.

In short, the Gernsbackian future that Gibson accurately identified (and recoiled from) half a century later arose from his systemic and deliberate intervention, both in the pages of his magazines and in behind-the-scenes political maneuvering. Drawing on archival research from his private papers, I elaborate on his techniques and trace their impact through subsequent generations of American scientific discourse.

Author

• Matthew Lavine, Mississippi State University