I grew up reading a lot of old scifi novels that were popular during the cold war, radiation is uh not treated realistically. I remember first realizing that sometime in my teens when studying what actual fall out of nukes would be like, and how to survive it and what it would actually be like.
With this hoary old nonsense being used in The 100, I’m curious if there was ever push back by scifi authors like there has been with space travel? You’ll now see almost a competition for hard scifi involving space travel, I remember some of the nitpicking on the movie Gravity for instance.
Curious is any author ever said that isn’t how this works!
Not many. Authors back then were interested in the story and were happy to take liberties whenever necessary. Heinlein, for instance, wrote about Venus as habitable even though that was known to be wrong for years.
Science fiction has never been about science, actually. The science elements were just fantasy given a “scientific” justification for the story. John Campbell didn’t ask for accuracy, just plausibility.
Now, of course, scientific accuracy is the great shibboleth that some people think define the genre. It does not and never has. Campbell – who is the one usually pointed to for the concept – published plenty of A. E. Van Vogt, whose science was often laughable, and Doc Smith, who ignored it when inconvenient. Jules Verne insisted on it, but H.G. Wells did not. But pulp SF didn’t bother with it, and it wasn’t until Hal Clement came along that it was even a factor (and Hal didn’t insist that was the only way to write SF; it was just his way).
So to answer your question, no one would have cared if the science was wrong. It was the story that mattered.
Much of the time, science fiction writers need some sort of magic. But it being science fiction, they can’t call it magic, so they just reach out to whatever science is popular but poorly understood. Last century, it was things like radiation and types of rays and atomic whatevers. Now it’s DNA and internets and AI and genetic engineering and chaos theory.