The man who foresaw science fiction

It is September 1, 2660, and a genius sits in his study, resting up prior to a remarkable display of his scientific prowess. Tomorrow he will demonstrate to scientists that a dog three years technically dead, but preserved with rare elements, can be resuscitated back to life by a simple blood transfusion. He stretches, revealing a huge frame, much taller than the average human, his height approaching that of extraterrestrials.

“His physical superiority, however, was as nothing compared to his gigantic mind,” explained his biographer. “He was Ralph 124C 41+, one of the greatest living scientists and one of the ten men on the whole planet earth permitted to use the Plus sign after his name.”

So begins Hugo Gernsback’s nearly century-old novel, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660. First published in serial form in April 1911 in his magazine Modern Electrics, it was the magnum opus of the man who popularized the term “science fiction,” and in whose name the Hugo Awards are given to writers to this day.

And romantic it is. No sooner does Gernsback introduce us to Ralph than he has his hero  rescuing the girl of his dreams, Alice 212B423 of Switzerland, from a snow avalanche via high powered radio signals—she pleading for his help over a wireless video screen from 4,000 miles away. The novel ends (spoiler alert) with the scientist jetting around the solar system to save her from a lovesick Martian named Llysanohr’ (that apostrophe is not a typo). She revives following the application of his blood transfusion technique to her traumatized body.

“Dearest,” Alice declares upon awakening. “I have just found out what your name really means… ONE TO FORESEE FOR ONE.”

Indeed, Ralph’s creator took it upon himself to foresee for everyone. Gernsback’s novel is a gradually exhausting cavalcade of canny technological predictions—among them video conferencing, social networking, electrical cars, radar, solar power, and microfilm. Add to the list some that thankfully haven’t been attempted, the “subatlantic tube” among them: “a 3,470-mile underground train system that connects New York and Brest, France, in a direct line through the earth’s crust.”

Despite all this, few sci-fi fans take Ralph 124C 41+ seriously today. “Thoroughly deficient as fiction,” Gernsback’s entry in American National Biography categorically declares. And that is one of the kinder remembrances. “One of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field,” acclaimed novelist Brian W. Aldiss wrote of Gernsback in 1973. “He created dangerous precedents which many later editors in the field followed.”

But as the scholar Gary Westfahl points out, Gernsback, for all his flaws, was one of, if not the first writer to pointedly ponder a question relevant to this day. What is science fiction for?

Smitten by Mars

He was born Hugo Gernsbacher in 1884, the son of a Luxembourg wine wholesaler who hired private tutors to educate the boy. At the age of nine, somebody gave Hugo a copy of the American astronomer Percival Lowell’s controversial book Mars as the Abode of Life. Apparently it made quite an impression. “He was immediately sent home, where he lapsed into delirium,” writes science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, “raving about strange creatures, fantastic cities, and masterly engineered canals of Mars for two full days and nights while a doctor remained in almost constant attendance.”

No surprise then that, upon recovery, the boy glommed onto the burgeoning field of electronics. By his late teens he was applying for patents on his own inventions, most notably a battery for electrical devices. When government offices in Germany and France turned his applications down, he migrated to the United States, where Hugo now-Gernsback blundered through a series of engineering jobs and startups, all of which quickly collapsed.

Finally he made a splash with what Moskowitz calls “the first home radio set in history.” Gernsback’s “Telimco Wireless” didn’t receive the signals of any broadcast radio stations,  since there were almost none before 1920. But it did ring a bell in an adjacent room without any connecting wires. Such was the sensation the device made that local police demanded a demonstration, following up on a fraud complaint. Satisfied that it worked, the Telimco was subsequently sold in many department stores—that is, until the first World War, when the government banned amateur wireless transmission. This reduced its inventor to marketing the gadget as a kit for electrical experiments.

In the end, none of Gernsback’s mechanical innovations got very far. But the magazines he launched to promote them did. The first of these was Modern Electrics, begun as a catalogue of his products in 1908. This was followed by Amazing Stories in 1926, and a slew of others that came and went, among them Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Scientific Detective Monthly.

Cold facts

It was in Amazing Stories that Gernsback first tried to nail down the science fiction idea. “Scientifiction” he initially called it—“charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” The magazine’s masthead went further: “Extravagant Fiction Today—Cold Fact Tomorrow.” Gernsback even boasted that he had researchers fact check the technical validity of the stories he published. So many readers wrote into Amazing Stories that he reserved a large “discussions” section of his magazine for comments—the first of the many thousands of forums that empower the science fiction community to this day.

But the notion that sci-fi’s purpose was to predict the technological future eventually drew passionate opposition from some of the genre’s greatest pens. Six years after Gernsback’s death in 1967, Brian Aldiss went after the entrepreneur’s emphasis on scientism with a vengeance. “Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts,” remains one of Aldiss’ most famous quotes. As for Gernsback’s philosophy, it had “the effect of introducing a deadening literalism into the fiction,” he charged in his history of the genre, Billion Year Spree. ”As long as the stories were built like diagrams, and made clear like diagrams, and stripped of atmosphere and sensibility, then it did not seem to matter how silly the ‘science’ or the psychology was.”

Hugo Gernsback watching a 1.5 inch square television in August 1928. Image from his magazine, Radio News.

This seems a little unfair to the author of Ralph 124C 41+, but taking Gernsback more seriously as a philosopher also has its risks. There’s something a bit scary about Ralph‘s future, with its world government, scientist-as-god overtones. It’s unclear why in Gernsback’s vision Martians and humans are forbidden to marry, but the notion fits in with one of the less attractive aspects of the Progressive Era: its faith in segregation and “scientific” racism. As late as 1963, one of Gernsback’s last publications, Forecast, argued that “chemi-geneticists” could alter the enzymes of African-Americans, allowing them to have white children.