Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents

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Christopher Leslie is an independent scholar with extensive international experience in the field of science and technology studies. He offers in his volume From Hyperspace to Hypertext: Masculinity, Globalization, and Their Discontents a triple perspective articulated by his work in STS, but also informed by science fiction studies and gender studies. Leslie retells the history of science fiction between the 1920s and the 1970s as a chronicle of how a narrow-minded coterie of white men constrained the genre. Feminist SF scholarship has provided ample evidence of this manipulation, but Leslie’s main merit is that he integrates in a single volume his detailed exposé of the entitled manipulators with a no less detailed exploration of the alternatives.

Leslie’s main thesis is that the consolidation of SF as a recognizable genre relied excessively on the paradigm by which white masculinity was presented as the only guarantor of civilized techno-scientific progress (implicitly imperialist), which prevented a more inclusive version of SF to emerge. His volume, subdivided into three main parts, considers the roles as masculinist gatekeepers of Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, then, in the third part, the alternative, far more progressive work, of author and editor Judith Merrill. As the book blurb announces, the volume aims at showing how a STEM education can be “enhanced by adding the liberal arts, such as historical and literary studies, to create STEAM.” Above all, Leslie invites SF readers and scholars to reconsider the roots of the genre’s official history. His book might be described as a speculative reading of speculative fiction, since Leslie asks readers to consider how much richer SF could have been if its main editors, authors, fans, and historians had been persons with a far more open-minded outlook, instead of sexist, racist, and imperialist white men.

            Leslie has carried out very intensive, solid research for his volume, which is certainly fascinating, though—it must be noted—overlong. Most academic books run today to about 250/300 pages, and it is unusual to find one which is 514 pages long (526 with the introductory notes). This is a consequence of Leslie’s enthusiasm with his research and his method. He announces in the preface that he wishes to use close reading as an ethical tool, to offer proof of how the power-hungry alliance between imperialism, masculinism, and whiteness dominated SF and of the existence of valuable alternatives. However, the long segments on women authors such as Claire Winger Harris, Leslie F. Stone, L. Taylor Hansen, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, or Judith Merrill, while excellent examples of close reading, are too extensive for the purposes of the volume. An additional problem is that although the volume appears to be a chronicle, it often goes back to earlier periods already discussed, slowing down the pace of the main argument. It is, besides, doubtful, whether the title adequately describes the volume. Leslie explains in the preface that ‘hyperspace’ (a term apparently invented by John W. Campbell for his 1931 novel Islands of Space) and ‘hypertext’ (coined in 1965 by Theodore Nelson) are convenient bookends, but this is not obvious. Readers might welcome a more direct title in which keywords such as ‘whiteness,’ ‘masculinity,’ ‘civilization,’ ‘engineering,’ and ‘science fiction’ were visible, and ‘globalization’ (which is not really addressed) absent.

The section on the Gernsback era is focused on destroying the myth of the pioneering editor of Amazing Stories, to present Gernsback instead as a man who endorsed an obsolete model of individualistic science, based on the 19^th century gentleman amateur. The appeal of this old-fashioned model, which Gernsback marketed as an editor between 1926 and 1936, was that it opposed the development of corporate science during the so-called Second Industrial Revolution. The young men being drafted into techno-scientific establishments as mere cogs in the machine, or being educated in the new engineering degrees, Leslie argues, found comfort in the stories of isolated geniuses found in the plots of Gernsback’s authors.

Women, Leslie notes, were not specifically excluded, but their “paucity” as “editorial advisors and inventors reflects a new effort by science and engineering experts to create a masculine domain” (21), which colonized most of 1920s and 1930s SF. Gernsback promoted an SF that showed male readers how to be men, naturalizing the “adaptable autodidact” as a man “capable of action in disparate contexts,” who is “most effective” (21) wherever the rational mind prevails. For Leslie, Gernsback’s main sin is that he espoused obsolete science that smacked of long-rejected Lamarckian and social Darwinist tenets, selling in the process a white supremacism that most male authors and readers embraced. Far from being a force for progress, Gernsback rejected any alternative visions provided by women authors, and backed male authors such as E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, whose inventive space opera lacked scientific accuracy and promoted racial pseudoscience.

This hypocritical lack of a solid scientific foundation and the dubious gender and race politics persisted under Campbell’s long reign, from 1938 to 1971, when he died. The Campbell era, which Leslie analyzes in Part II, only ended for good in 2019, when he was finally outed as a bigoted racist and misogynist and his name taken out of the distinction Analog was awarding to honor him since 1973. Leslie explains that Campbell’s fierce control of his authors and their fiction lowered standards, by imposing a model basically derived from boys’ adventures, which he had surreptitiously used in his own fiction. “His work,” Leslie writes, “squarely fits into mainstream ideas about manliness and civilization, directly connecting the burgeoning field of science fiction to the discourse about adolescents, who will be the backbone of a new global civilization” (192), specifically in Cold War times.

Leslie devotes in this Part II a whole chapter to Isaac Asimov, arguably Campbell’s main discovery together with Robert A. Heinlein. Leslie chastises Asimov because, despite being a Jewish man who had endured plenty of anti-Semitism, his own sexism and personal misconduct toward women became obstacles in the necessary transformation of SF into a far more inclusive field, particularly from the 1960s onward. As an editor, Leslie maintains, Asimov could have done much more to promote women authors but his self-presentation as an open-minded man actually masked a deep misogyny, which was not overtly questioned until the early 1970s.

Lacking the ingrained prejudices of men like Gernsback, Campbell or Asimov, Leslie argues, Judith Merrill opened up SF to new authors and readers, selecting for her yearly anthologies, published between 1955 and 1968, authors usually excluded by her male predecessors and colleagues (such as Samuel R. Delany). Although Merrill has been neglected in the official history of SF, Leslie claims, she did plenty to make the genre accessible to a mainstream readership and helped to open it up beyond the link between masculinity and technology, welcoming themes that eventually constituted the core of the New Wave. Instead of the individualism of Cold War masculinity, she promoted community, taking her political protest against the USA to the point of self-exile to Canada in 1969. According to Leslie, “Today’s effort to make science fiction more inclusive can be traced back to Merril’s” (408), and though this may be an exaggerated claim, there are indeed many reasons to celebrate this admirable woman as author and editor.

Part III concludes with chapter 9, “Science Fiction and the University,” in which Leslie openly criticizes how the new Science Fiction Studies of the 1970s relied, essentially, on the same masculinist discourse that Gernsback and Campbell had built. He complains that “It would have saved some time if science fiction’s entry into the university had been better informed about the genre” (500) and if the “filtering effect of fans infatuated by masculinist thinking” (500) had been counteracted much earlier with the identity politics and feminist scholarship that only flourished in the 1990s.

Leslie is adamant that “the false narrative” (488) by which men claimed that women were not interested in science or in science fiction is taking too long to dismantle and he is clearly disappointed that SF has not done more to disassemble it. The pity is that whereas SF offers the possibility of writing alternate history, in Science Fiction Studies we cannot build a wholly different version of the history of the genre. As Leslie does, and as countless feminist scholars have done before him, the version we have can be amended at particular points and corrected in its overall narrative arc, but we will never have an SF that started as a fully inclusive genre and that avoided the white masculinist pitfalls that Leslie describes so well. At least we can hope for a better future for the genre and its readers.

Sara Martín is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Dr Martín specializes in Gender Studies, particularly Masculinities Studies, and in Science-Fiction Studies. Her most recent books are American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film (2023) and Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture (2023, co-edited with M. Isabel Santaulària). Dr. Martín is the translator of Manuel de Pedrolo’s Catalan masterpiece Mecanoscrit del segon origen (Typescript of the Second Origin, 2018).