Feminist Ca

36 / The Secret Feminist Cabal
The sex question in sf:
The early years of the pulps, 1920s – 1930s
Debate about the stories that were forming the core of a nascent
sf began as conversations between readers and editors in the pulp
magazines, which printed readers’ addresses to enable communication
between them. Clubs such as the Science Correspondence Club
and Sciences Club (both formed in 1929) began producing amateur
publications (first known as “fanmags”) such as The Planet (1930),
The Time Traveller (1932), and what is generally considered the first
fanzine, The Comet (1930) (Madle 1994: 37; Warner Jr. 1994a: 175).
Hugo Gernsback (editor of Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories) was
the first to identify these more active readers as “fans” (Larbalestier
2002: 23), and in 1934, through his magazine Wonder Stories, he created
the SFL (Science Fiction League), which soon had chapters in
many of the major cities of the US.
Larbalestier’s reading of letters and editorials from 1927-1939 in
magazines such as Amazing Stories (1926-2005) and Astounding reveals
that a number of women readers wrote to the magazines and
participated in overt struggles over the ownership of sf and whether
or not women could be considered “fit” subjects for sf. A debate in the
letter column of Astounding from 1938-39 illustrates, in Larbalestier’s
words, “that science fiction is a masculine space whose borders must
be carefully patrolled to keep the pollution of women out” (2002:
117). Larbalestier’s conclusion that the “battle of the sexes” has been
a constant theme in sf since the genre’s beginnings in the 1920s provides
a very different historiographical view than the truism that, in
the pre-1960s era, women signified in sf only through their absence.
As her analysis demonstrates, debates about the appropriateness of sex
in sf stories (or on the cover of the magazines in the form of scantily
clad women) were always intimately connected with notions about
women’s place in sf.
While traditional histories of sf have emphasized the active rejection
of sex as a topic suitable for sf, they have only rarely noted the
slippage between sex and women (Carter 1977: 174). Although critics
from the 1960s on would be virtually unanimous in their construction
of earlier sf as a “sexless” space, again, reader’s letters show that this
was not a given. Paul Carter cites a series of letters provoked by the