What Does It Prove?
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| Title: | What Does It Prove? |
| Creator: | Walter Fleming |
| Date(s): | Printed January 1939 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Science Fiction |
| Topic: | 1938 "War of the Worlds" broadcast |
| External Links: | Hosted online by fanac.org. Spaceways #2 pg. 16. Jan. 1939. |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
What Does It Prove? was an essay by science fiction fan Walter Fleming, written several months after the famous War of the Worlds broadcast by Orson Welles that fooled some viewers into believing an invasion was taking place.
Fleming asked whether public response to the broadcast was a positive or a negative for science fiction fans, who at the time were struggling to bring their interests into the mainstream. He decided that it was probably a good thing.
While it was widely believed at the time that War of the Worlds had caused widespread panic and more than one death, later scholarship proved that while it did fool some people, the idea that it caused mass hysteria was very overstated.
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I am speaking, fellows, of that radio broadcast of last October 30, of H. G. Wells' fantastic masterpiece, "The War of the Worlds". Said broadcast, acted very dramatically and modernistically over a nation-wide hook-up, proved so realistic that our good citizens, dumbbells, scrambled for safety in the hills, really believing the Martians were coming!Now this amazing occurance proves one of two things. Equally good arguments can be provided for either case. I set them both before U. It may prove this:
The public is unready for science-fiction, as we know it, and the type of material that is written under this name. It proves that fandom's efforts to build up the name 'science-fiction' as a type of enjoyable, probable, possible fiction has come to exactly naught! (To borrow a well-known phrase.) And that is tragic! As tragic as the brilliant ancients of historic periods were born hundreds of years too soon! The world is not ready for us! Nor our fiction!
Conventions have been held, enthusiastic fans have had posters made and distributed about in public places, organizations formed and the public invited, science-fiction magazines have been born and died, but for what? Along comes an A-number-one science fiction yarn, done in a super-modern manner, and---well, you read in the newspapers of the reaction. Doesn't it make you just a little tired of it all? Doesn't it seem to penetrate thru your frazzled brain that you have been working for nothing? You have been trying to put science-fiction over, and what happens? You give the public you are pinning your hopes on a first class science fiction story, and look at the result! Yes, be cynical, you were born thirty years too soon!
And now to our second argument, on the other side of the question:
And how we have succeeded! WoW! ...Look what we have done, fellows! We have put science-fiction over with a bang! For years that has been our task, converting newcomers to the ranks, trying desperately to educate the reading public (and the public at large), that science-fiction is THE fiction of the age! That today's fiction is tomorrow's probabilitys (not possibilitys---probabilitys)! What did we think our efforts amounted to? Well, perhaps you read Louis Kuslan's little item in a recent 'Science Fiction Fan' in which he attempted to convert a school chum to science-fiction. Kuslan left feeling a little "oh, to hell with it!" like. But Kuslan now knows how rong he was!
Read the papers! Read how hundreds poured from their homes, to the hills; how thousands frantically reached their families by telephone to bid them pathetic good-byes! How others, living in New Jersey and new York "saw" the Martians advancing across the countryside! Did we put science-fiction over? I'll say we did! We put it over so good that a mere 'news-caster' can throw 'em into a state of panic by announcing Martians have arrived, after a 15 minute ride from Mars.