Fact as fiction

Retelling the sciences, in the USA of the early 20th century

Abstract

Whether writing a poem or writing a novel, these were considered to be the highest human activities until the early 20th century. Along with poets, scientists would have no place. Thanks to the association between materialist philosophy and scientists - considered to be people without imagination - there was a certain disgust in the sciences on the part of literary people. The post-war USA saw the need to unify these two cultures - the same ones pointed out in the 1950s by the English physicist and novelist C. P. Snow. The tension scenario and this need for unification contributed to slowly changing the way the specialized press communicated science to the public: instead of numbers and equations, metaphors, futuristic speculations were incorporated as part of journalistic routines. This was the context in which the editor and writer Hugo Gersnsback launched the pulp magazine “Scientifiction” Amazing Stories, whose first edition was published in April 1926. With the motto “Fiction today, fact tomorrow”, the magazine proclaimed the power of scientific facts and imagination to reconcile sciences and literature, in a process in which several communities and institutions are involved in the formation of a scientific culture, in accordance with the proposal of the scientific culture spiral of the linguist and science disseminator Carlos Vogt.