Word: rocketeer
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...life on other planets, was inspired by Jules Verne's and H. G. Wells's fantasies. Father of pseudo-scientific magazines was a shrewd, fat old man named Hugo Gernsback, an old-time radio fan, who in 1926 started Amazing Stories. It zoomed like a moonward rocket. Today the magazines in this prosperous publishing group (chiefly controlled by the big pulp firms of Street & Smith, Standard Magazines and Ziff-Davis), average about 150,000 readers apiece (sometimes much more), make a good living for many a shamo-scientific writer...
...their predictions seriously. Ray Cummings, a veteran pseudo-fictioneer who once was Thomas Edison's secretary, claims to have originated in his stories the word Newscaster and the phrase The World of Tomorrow. Says he: "It is astonishing how many things come true." Chief themes of scientifiction are rocket trips by earth-dwellers to other planets, invasions of the earth by Martians, Mercurians. Authors may be as fantastic as they like in their inventions but publishers warn them not to do violence to the commoner scientific principles lest readers denounce their errors...
Biggest moneymaker: the Shuberts' and Olsen & Johnson's production of Hellzapoppin. Most costly flop: Dwight Wiman's production of Great Lady. Most gored theme: antifascism, which begot four failures. Up the ladder: The Group Theatre, which produced Clifford Odets' intense Rocket to the Moon, revived his brilliant Awake and Sing, presented William Saroyan's over-rated but original My Heart's in the Highlands. Down the chute: Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre which, after its sensational doings last season, collapsed on Broadway with the anemic Danton's Death, on tour with...
...partisanship on both sides that neither play could muster the twelve out of 15 votes necessary to win. After ten fruitless, disputatious ballots,* a weary Critics' Circle decided to make no award. Final score: The Little Foxes, 6 votes; Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 5; Clifford Odets' Rocket to the Moon, 2; William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands...
...breaking up and showering Earth with its fragments. Stuffy astronomers were shocked by this fiction but Stokley defended it as a product of imagination "guided by a knowledge of exact facts." This month Fels visitors were treated to an imaginary trip to the present harmless moon-takeoff in a rocket ship, sound effects, landing in a lunar crater-were even given "tickets" for the voyage...