I am one of the few people in the world who has subjected themselves to the misery of reading every mainstream newspaper and magazine article on science fiction through the 1950s. More misery than tedium, as the number of such stories that mentioned the field in any other context than possible submissions to pulp magazines probably could be counted on one had before WWII.
Time ran a piece on the field in 1939, two years into John Campbell’s reign.
Scientifiction’s fans, mostly boys of 16 to 20, are the jitterbugs of the pulp magazine field. Many keep every issue, and a copy of the magazine’s first issue often fetches $25 from collectors. Publishers soon discovered another odd fact about their readers: They are exceptionally articulate. Most of these magazines have letters columns, in which readers appraise stories. Sample: “Gosh! Wow! Boyoh-boy!, and so forth and so on. Yesiree, yesiree, it’s the greatest in the land and the best that’s on the stand, and I do mean THRILLING WONDER STORIES, and especially that great, magnificent, glorious, most thrilling June issue of the mosta and the besta of science fiction magazines.”
Condescending as that might be, it wasn’t completely wrong. SF readers were primarily boys of 16-20, with an entry age of around 13. (The Golden Age of science fiction is 13, as the saying goes.) SF was meant to be young adult fiction. Except for a fraction of Campbell’s authors, the writers wrote young adult prose. While YA can at rare moments be literature, the vast majority of it never has been or been intended to.
No other genre, mysteries, westerns, romance, the Big Three at the time, would tolerate such awful writing. SF was read for ideas, thinly slathered with bad prose and flat characters. Ideas went a long way and carried the field for decades. Fortunately for sf, that notion has been mostly squashed. But so has hard sf. Superheroes, fantasy, and horror have crushed it. Since I’m not a teenager any more, I’m glad.
