I believe young people can’t imagine what life was like before the Internet, smartphones, or personal computers. I can’t imagine what my parents’ lives were like living before television, or my grandmother’s life before airplanes, cars, radios, movies, and all the inventions that my parents grew up with. My mother’s mother was born in 1881.

Lately, I’ve been trying to imagine what life was like before science fiction. There have always been stories that had science-fictional elements. Isn’t Noah’s Ark really a post-apocalyptic tale? I’m talking about science fiction as a defined category, a genre.

Life Magazine had to explain science fiction to its readers in its May 21, 1951 issue. It covered books, magazines, movies, and even fandom. Science fiction as a term had been used for the genre for about twenty years before that, but mainly in pulp magazines, and with a very small group of Americans. It’s like how the internet and network computers were used by a small subset of the population for a couple decades before the public was introduced to the World Wide Web with Mosaic in 1993. (See my essay: “When Mainstream America Discovered Science Fiction.”)

I’m theorizing it was the paperback book that got America to discover science fiction. The technology of the mass-market paperback was like when the technology of the Netscape browser got America to discover the World Wide Web.

I consider the science fiction pulp magazines of 1926-1950 to be like the internet before the World Wide Web when few people used it and all the tools were text-based. In the late 1940s and early 1950s science fiction fans created small-press publishing houses to reprint pulp magazine science fiction stories in hardback. Print runs were typically 1,500-3000, and the books were sold mainly to fans, and some libraries. I consider this era to be like the short-lived Gopher technology on the internet. (See my essay: “Remember Fantasy Press, Arkham House, Primes Press, Gnome Press, Shasta Publishers, and Others.”)

My guess is the American public noticed science fiction when science fiction movies came out in the early 1950s and when Ballantine Books, Ace Books, Pocket Books, and others brought out lines of paperback books devoted to science fiction in 1953. Movies were everywhere, and twirling paperback racks were everywhere. By the way, there was a time before mass-market paperbacks. Paperbacks as we know them began appearing in the late 1930s, were widely distributed to soldiers during WWII, and exploded on the scene in the early 1950s. Read Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America by Kenneth Davis for an excellent history of the paperback.

My guess is if you asked the average American what science fiction was before 1950 most would not know, and some might say when you mentioned space travel, “You mean that Buck Rogers stuff?” My parents grew up before science fiction. I was born in 1951, and I didn’t understand the term until 1963 when I was eleven. I had encountered plenty of science fiction on television, but I didn’t think of it as a specialized subject, genre, or art form. I didn’t go to a new bookstore until 1967 when I was 16. My first bookstores were all used bookstores, and I didn’t discover them until 1965.

Even though I was born in 1951, after the time I said was the beginning of the time when the American public started to think of science fiction as a thing, I didn’t learn it myself until 1963, and even then I had to figure it out on my own. It wasn’t until 1964 that I discovered science fiction sections in libraries. Because I had trouble comprehending science fiction as a genre in 1963 at age 11, I imagine many people in the 1950s and 1960s still didn’t comprehend it fully either.

I don’t think it was until the 1970s, when shopping malls became common, and chain bookstores were popping up everywhere, that the public began to see science fiction book sections. The used and new bookstores I shopped at in the 1960s had science fiction sections, but the bookstores were tiny, and the science fiction sections were really just two or three shelves of books. Before March 1967 I had no friends who read science fiction. That’s when I met my lifelong friend Jim Connell. Before that, the only science fiction fan I met was on a Greyhound Bus, when I struck up a conversation with a soldier.

I have to wonder what the average American thought when they saw Destination Moon in 1950 or The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951? Was it mind-blowing? Or just silly kid stuff? I remember talking to my grandmother in 1968 about the space program and the planned Moon landing. She said it wouldn’t happen, that God would stop it.

It’s hard for me to imagine life before I was born in 1951. I think it’s harder for anyone growing up in the 21st century. We get our conception of life before 1950 in old movies, mainly ones in black and white. And think about it — have you ever seen any character in any of those old movies ever mention science fiction, or even talk about a science-fictional subject?

It was a different world back then. A much different world. A world most of us can’t comprehend. But try to imagine people of different ages visiting a drugstore back in 1953 and finding these books on a twirling rack. Especially, people who lived in small towns and suburbs. Imagine young kids, working-class men, and young housewives. What would they think if they picked up one of these books? And what would it do if they bought one, took it home, and read it?

When I read Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein in 1964 when I was twelve, that was when I knew science fiction was my genre. I was a convert. Even by 1964, the percentage of science fiction converts in the American population was very small. And the conceptual umwelt I experienced from reading that 1949 book in 1964 must have been far different from the mind-expanding experiences of twelve-year-olds reading it in 1949, or even what Heinlein felt writing it. When did you discover science fiction as a genre, and what was the book that converted you?

I picked 1953 as the year America discovered science fiction because that’s when Ballantine Books and Ace Books began publishing science fiction, and near the beginning of the general paperback boom. Science fiction paperbacks existed before 1953, but they were much fewer. 1953 was also a boom year for science fiction magazines. (See my essay: The 1953 SF&F Magazine Boom.)

I wrote this essay because I’m learning that the umwelt of every person is different. Not only for how we perceive reality but how our biological sensory inputs lead to comprehending different abstract concepts. We have a tendency to assume everyone sees and knows what we know, and that’s so wrong. What’s amusing me to contemplate is thinking about how we perceive things at different ages and in different generations. Science fiction is just one example. What’s weird to grasp is authors work to code their umwelt into a story but the umwelt the reader decodes isn’t the same. I wish I could have gotten my parents and grandparents to read one of my favorite science fiction books when I was a kid and then ask each of them how they interpreted it.

James Wallace Harris, 7/15/23