posted 10-15-2009 12:02 AM               

Chock full of luscious mid-century modern advertising art, this book delves into the hot space race from Sputnik's surprise launch to Kennedy's directive that sent America to the Moon.

The late 1950s and early '60s was the golden age of classic science fiction, an era when the furthest reaches of imagination were fed by the technological breakthroughs of the postwar years. While science fiction writers expressed the dreams and nightmares of the era in pulp print, real-life rocket engineers worked, often in secrecy, on making space travel reality. The imaginations of many Cold War scientists were fed by science fiction literature--but not only from writers such as Arthur C. Clarke. The aerospace industry itself often promoted its future capabilities with fantastical, colorful visions depicted in its advertisements aimed at luring young engineers into their booming workforce.

In trade journals such as Missiles and Rockets and Aviation Week, something new was happening. In between dry articles about program successes and failures, a new visual vernacular sprang up. Companies like Lockheed, B.F. Goodrich, Douglas Aircraft, and Westinghouse encouraged engineers to reach far in their work, farther than their minds had ever gone before. Aerospace industry ads pitched the idea that we lived in a moment where anything was possible--the rocky substrates of Mars and the Moon were the new Western frontier. Gravity was history, and soon so would be the confines of our solar system itself.

The shock of Russia's 1957 Sputnik satellite launch lit a fire in America to get a man in space and onto the moon -- the race was on, and the aerospace industry was hot. Another Science Fiction presents nearly 200 entertaining, intriguing, inspiring, and sometimes even mind-boggling pieces of space-age eye candy of the atomic era.

• Paperback: 240 pages
  
• Publisher: Blast Books (May 1, 2010)
  
• ISBN-10: 0922233357
  
• ISBN-13: 978-0922233359

posted 03-09-2010 10:24 AM               

In the pages of magazines like Aviation Week, Missiles and Rockets and even Fortune, companies, some famous and some now obscure, were engaged in a sort of leapfrog of dreams. And so, for example, Republic Aviation of Farmingdale, N.Y. -- "Designers and Builders of the Incomparable Thundercraft" -- could be found bragging in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine in 1959 about the lunar gardening experiments it was doing for a future Air Force base on the moon.

Or the American Bosch Arma Corporation showing off, in Fortune, its "Cosmic Butterfly," a solar-powered electrically propelled vehicle to ferry passengers and cargo across the solar system.

Most Americans never saw these concoctions, but now they have been collected and dissected by Megan Prelinger, an independent historian and space buff, in a new book, "Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957-1962." It is being published on May 25 by Blast Books.

posted 03-14-2010 10:44 AM               

The book is lovingly crafted and exhaustively researched. Unlike so many “big idea” tomes that skip over the details to deliver the PowerPoint version of reality, Another Science Fiction glories in the details, providing a complex portrait of the nation’s spacefaring ambitions. Prelinger’s analysis reaches outside the narrow confines of space boosterism to reveal the neural connections in the American psyche between the final frontier, the Soviet menace, and good, old industrial engineering.

We caught up with Prelinger at the wonderfully strange library she runs with her husband, Rick, to ogle old space stuff and discuss countercultural space utopias, alternatives to Apollo, and her hopes for a human spaceflight renaissance.