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Scientifictionist, v. 1, issue 4, April 1946

Page 4

ATOMS, BOMBS, AND THE MOON
by Col. Dinsmore Alter, T. C.
Director, Griffith Observatory, on Military Leave

There is a group of "pulp paper" magazines which specialize in science fiction stories and which have an extremely wide range of reader interest including among their fans readers from entirely different backgrounds. Some of their readers are untrained in science. Any statement in a story appears plausible to them. Their characteristics show in the letters which they write to the editors and the criticisms they make of the stories. A few of the other readers are famous scientists, men who do research in every type of development and who wish to permit their brains the unfettered roving that these stories bring, a relaxation which they never could permit in their own searchings of the universe. The great majority of the readers know a little of legitimate science. They are men who have taken a course in some branch of science which interested them in school. They may have planned for a few weeks, or perhaps for a year or so, that scientific research would become their life work. The difficulty of attainment of such an ideal or the need of an immediate income has killed the half formed plan but it remained along with the dreams of childhood. In these stories they become for an hour or so the great man of research they had hoped to be, succesful beyond the work of any man actually living. They gain an anodyne to find essential relief from the cheapness and tawdriness of unbearable little lives. Much the same variation exists among the authors. Some show in every paragraph that they have no understanding of science. Other names, well known, are pseudonyms for famous scientists who perhaps sort out their fanciful from their logical thought by giving the former this legitimate field of action.
The stories tell us of travel to the moon and of voyages to the planets which are hundreds of times as far away. They provide insulation by which a car enters the very sun itself and brings its occupants safely back to earth. They have encounters with every imaginable type of animal even on planets in other solar systems and beyond that to foreign galaxies. Animals with strange psychological powers confront the explorer who is wading excitedly thru the pages. One unusual and extremely able story had animals on Mars with silicon as the basic element instead of crbon as for life here. [Weinbaum's MARTIAN ODYSSEY] Some of the stories, getting a hint from the mathematics of relativity, warp space to make the hero appear trillions of miles away in a second or to enter a universe of new dimensions scarcely in contact with our own space.
Stranger still, quite a group of successful stories have found a means of changing the time-scale so that one can enter an atom and live a complete and active life in a quadrillionth of a second. One great story of a dozen years ago reversed this, for in it were beings so gross that the stars of our universe were merely atoms in a part no larger than a nail paring.[Wandrei's COLOSSUS]
Authors with the interest of the economist, the psychologist, the sociologist and other branches of the humanities have taken their reader to visit worlds on whicg civilization developed millions of years before man evolved and on which the inhabitants have gained a detached philosophical attitude toward creation. Strangest of all, many authors, some quite plausibly, have invented machines to travel in time in order to watch the pre-dawn man or perhaps at the other extreme the last generation which will exist of our own descendants. Usually these last writers have a sociological sermon to preach. All possible cerebrations of the human being have been written and published in these wonderful "pulps".
(NOTE: The above is an excerpt published under the above title from the January issue of the Griffith Observer which may be obtained from the Griffith Observatory for 15¢ a copy.) [Thanks to Gail Moreton for spotting this article -- ed.]

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ATOMS, BOMBS, AND THE MOON by Col. Dinsmore Alter, T. C. Director, Griffith Observatory, on Military Leave There is a group of "pulp paper" magazines which specialize in science fiction stories and which have an extremely wide range of reader interest including among their fans readers from entirely different backgrounds. Some of their readers are untrained in science. Any statement in a story appears plausible to them. Their characteristics show in the letters which they write to the editors and the criticisms they make of the stories. A few of the other readers are famous scientists, men who do research in every type of development and who wish to permit their brains the unfettered roving that these stories bring, a relaxation which they never could permit in their own searchings of the universe. The great majority of the readers know a little of legitimate science. They are men who have taken a course in some branch of science which interested them in school. They may have planned for a few weeks, or perhaps for a year or so, that scientific research would become their life work. The difficulty of attainment of such an ideal or the need of an immediate income has killed the half formed plan but it remained along with the dreams of childhood. In these stories they become for an hour or so the great man of research they had hoped to be, succesful beyond the work of any man actually living. They gain an anodyne to find essential relief from the cheapness and tawdriness of unbearable little lives. Much the same variation exists among the authors. Some show in every paragraph that they have no understanding of science. Other names, well known, are pseudonyms for famous scientists who perhaps sort out their fanciful from their logical thought by giving the former this legitimate field of action. The stories tell us of travel to the moon and of voyages to the planets which are hundreds of times as far away. They provide insulation by which a car enters the very sun itself and brings its occupants safely back to earth. They have encounters with every imaginable type of animal even on planets in other solar systems and beyond that to foreign galaxies. Animals with strange psychological powers confront the explorer who is wading excitedly thru the pages. One unusual and extremely able story had animals on Mars with silicon as the basic element instead of crbon as for life here. [Weinbaum's MARTIAN ODYSSEY] Some of the stories, getting a hint from the mathematics of relativity, warp space to make the hero appear trillions of miles away in a second or to enter a universe of new dimensions scarcely in contact with our own space. Stranger still, quite a group of successful stories have found a means of changing the time-scale so that one can enter an atom and live a complete and active life in a quadrillionth of a second. One great story of a dozen years ago reversed this, for in it were beings so gross that the stars of our universe were merely atoms in a part no larger than a nail paring.[Wandrei's COLOSSUS] Authors with the interest of the economist, the psychologist, the sociologist and other branches of the humanities have taken their reader to visit worlds on whicg civilization developed millions of years before man evolved and on which the inhabitants have gained a detached philosophical attitude toward creation. Strangest of all, many authors, some quite plausibly, have invented machines to travel in time in order to watch the pre-dawn man or perhaps at the other extreme the last generation which will exist of our own descendants. Usually these last writers have a sociological sermon to preach. All possible cerebrations of the human being have been written and published in these wonderful "pulps". (NOTE: The above is an excerpt published under the above title from the January issue of the Griffith Observer which may be obtained from the Griffith Observatory for 15¢ a copy.) [Thanks to Gail Moreton for spotting this article -- ed.]