The Science Fiction Legacy of Marvel

Over the last couple weeks, I might have sounded a bit bullish about Marvel Science Stories and its effect on science fiction. This pulp by Red Circle, the parent company for today's Marvel Comics, certainly brought science fiction to the eyes of more publishers than just Street & Smith. However, I will disagree with Isaac Asimov's assessment of the magazine. Marvel Science Stories was not a spicy; it was a weird menace pulp.

Weird menace was a skin and sadism genre that sparked an increasing backlash by the public. To build upon its thrills, weird menace featured stories of younger and younger women in impending peril. Red Circle as a line reveled in these stories of torture and porn. Public outrage built, and teens and children stopped reading pulps. When a Red Circle pulp ran a story where a crowd of leering men crucified a twelve-year old, with descriptions that bordered on the lascivious, the government stepped in, banned weird menace, and censored the pulps.

The weird manace tale did leave an imprint on the development of the genre. Even as early as the 1930s, science fiction strove for respectability. During the Campbelline Revolution, Jack Williamson recounts that”science fiction had to be pure as snow”. Fandom wanted no trace of weird menace in its science fiction.  And the censors in place after weird menace’s fall kept sexual content out of Amazing, Astounding, and their competitors. Or as much as possible, for:

It became a grim or frivolous game for some of the writers who were, of course, not fools, to see what they could slip by without editorial knowledge or consent. One famously was able to get through J. W. Campbell and Kay Tarrant a description of a tomcat as a “ball-bearing mousetrap” and Asimov’s 1951 “Hostess” in Galaxy reeked of the perversity of sexual attraction between an alien diplomat and a repressed academic’s wife but these triumphs were few and, more to the point, unnoticed. If they had attracted wide attention, the writers would have paid the price.

Malzberg, Barry N.. Breakfast in the Ruins (Kindle Locations 523-528). Baen Books.

Barry Malzberg further explains in Breakfast in the Ruins that “as late as 1965, science fiction was still a genre which in the main denied the existence, let alone the extent, of human sexuality” and that it wasn’t until “the beginning of the nineteen-seventies, [that] novels of great or relative explicitness (Silverberg’s Dying Inside, The Second Trip, and The World Inside, my own Beyond Apollo) bore the label of category science fiction.”

In short, fan and government backlash against weird menace removed sex as a topic of science fiction for over thirty years, until the rise of the New Wave--who then ran the topic into the ground with as much excess as possible.

As for authors who associated with Red Circle and Marvel Science Stories? Henry Kuttner contributed "Time Trap" to Marvel Science Stories, a move that tainted him from then on. In the eyes of many fans, Kuttner was nothing more than a smut merchant from that point onward. He became the second of the Campbelline grandmasters to be scrubbed out of the popular history by fannish contempt.

So the real legacy of Marvel Comics in science fiction is a record of three decades of censorship and the erasure of one of pulp fiction's best from the popular canon.