Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Singular Cases. To Editor Hall, it is elementary that intelligent people all over the world are mystery-story fans, and that many serious writers have a secret hankering to try their hands at mystery fiction. In the neat, literate first issue of his magazine, Hall has brought the intelligent readers and writers together...
...always flung himself heart & soul into the falsification of government statistics. And Party-Member Julia was outwardly so goodthinkful (naturally orthodox) that, after a brilliant girlhood in the Spies, she became active in the Junior Anti-Sex League and was snapped up by Pornosec, a subsection of the government Fiction Department that ground out happy-making pornography for the masses. In short, the grim, grey London Times could not have been referring to Winston and Julia when it snorted contemptuously: "Old-thinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc," i.e., "Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding...
Hungry Fans. Readers of science fiction include a special cult which specializes in collecting the classics in the field and faithfully supports the worthy publishing ventures. The prices which some of the more prized volumes command are steep. H. P. Lovecraft's The Outsider sells for from $50 to $100, Vol. I No. 1 of Astounding Stories of Super Science for as high as $50. Several publishers estimate that from 30% to 40% of their readers are professional men, some of them scientists who read the stories for relaxation but with a sharp eye for scientific errors. Clubs...
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...
...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...