"The Reasons for the Science Fiction Fad"

From Time magazine, May 1949:

There has been some speculation about the reasons for the science-fiction fad. The Saturday Review of Literature's Harrison Smith has speculated about the relation of the "age of anxiety" to the "scientific fantasy story" as "a buffer against known and more conceivable terrors." Publishers' Weekly finds that the appeal of these stories lies "in their free flight of [imagination] . . . uninhibited by present reality, yet sometimes terrifyingly close to the advanced discoveries of modern science."

The reader who reads science fiction dispassionately is likely to be struck by how closely the human imagination is tied to reality, even when it deliberately sets out to violate it. Stanley Weinbaum's loonies and slinkers have been seen before. The shapes may be different, but his dream-beasts come startlingly close to what the human race has been running across, for a good many years, in its childish nightmares.

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