I read lots of old books, written during less enlightened times, published under thankfully long-gone strictures (as much as some people are trying to bring those back) that could have a publishing house shut down on pornography or obscenity charges if a character in a story was clearly portrayed as gay and/or trans, and where publishers would set, in some cases even in written guidelines but at least a pervasive “unwritten rule,” that protagonists must be straight, white, American (or British) men.
Ah… the classic era of American (and British) pulp fiction.
Here are stories of manly men doing manly things and facing off against dastardly villains, many of whom were not white, almost all of whom were not American (or British), all of whom were either straight or, well… the subject of sex just never came up.
How could any decent, reasonable, twenty-first century person even read this stuff, let alone, I don’t know… like it? Or worse, mine it for inspiration, writing tips and examples, or even just think it’s fun?
Well… I can!
And I do—often.
And in precisely the same way that all the slasher movies I went to see when I was in high school in the 80s didn’t turn me into a serial killer, and all the D&D I played at the same time (which was a lot ) didn’t turn me into a Satanist, reading, say, Doc Savage: Meteor Menace by Kenneth Robeson isn’t going to force me to adopt this attitude, which I’ve copied direct from the text:
Never had there been a provision for feminine partnership in Doc’s perilous career. Doc strictly abstained from anything smacking of an affair of the heart. Some amazingly pretty and intelligent young women, smitten by the bronze man’s undeniable handsomeness, had openly sought to captivate him, but always with results strictly nil.
Doc had a good reason for this attitude. He could not allow a woman to share the dangers which accrued from his career of punishing evildoers in the far corners of the earth. His enemies would not hesitate to strike at him through a wife or sweetheart. So Doc was careful to fall for none of the feminine charmers.
Listen, ladies, sometimes by not including you in our stories, we’re protecting you from the dangers of evildoers. Go ahead and admire our undeniable handsomeness from afar but for your own good, don’t participate in our adventures in pursuit of evildoers who are just going to use you against us.
You’re welcome.
This story was originally published in the March 1934 issue of Doc Savage , and it should be of surprise to precisely no one that, creeping up on ninety years later, it feels… I don’t know… ninety years old .
When we sit down to read anything there has to be a moment of engagement with a book that includes some sense of where along the timeline of human history this thing falls—and that includes science fiction. Though Doc Savage stories were set, ostensibly, in the “present day” of the 1930s, lots of the science fiction I read from around the same time period, and through at least the early 1970s, retains much of these basic attributes. They were written (mostly) by white American (or British) men, and were intended to be read (mostly) by white American (or British) men, because that’s how our society worked in 1934.
The fact that this feels weird and dated and sexist and racist doesn’t mean Kenneth Robeson (whose real name was Lester Dent) was a bad guy, or the editor and publisher of Doc Savage magazine were bad guys, it just means they were marketing cheap entertainment to the majority demographic that, at the time, had the most money. This was not rocket science these guys were engaged in here, nor was it any version of social engineering. Doc Savage works like any “potboiler” thriller: bad guy does a bad thing that comes to the attention of the hero, who struggles a bit in the middle but ultimately kicks the bad guy’s ass, once again making the world safe for democracy. This can also be called an “adolescent male power fantasy.”
Y’know, like football, most video games, Wall Street, and Republican politics.
I can fully engage with everything that’s corny and charming and overwrought and weird and surprising about Doc Savage without signing on to the Doc Savage lifestyle. This is a 1970s reprint of a 1930s pulp adventure story I’m reading. It is in no way to be considered “scripture,” and only tangentially as history—the history of genre fiction, that is, not the actual history of Depression era America.
There is value in seeing where we’ve come from—on multiple levels. Read Doc Savage (or old science fiction or old romance or old thrillers, or whatever) and see how far we’ve come as a nation, as a culture, as storytellers, as wordsmiths, as readers, as writers, and as human beings. Otherwise, how, in a time when it seems as though everything is falling apart when it actually isn’t, will we understand that we can continue to change and get better and progress because we’ve seen that in the last ninety years, at least, we have changed, we have gotten better, and we have progressed. If we keep moving forward, sometimes with with one eye on the past, we will continue to get better as people, as writers, as a publishing business… as a global, diverse culture.
But never fear, Doc Savage’s undeniable handsomeness will always be there for us when we need it—just for a quick hundred and forty pages of punishing evildoers in the far corners of the earth.
—Philip Athans
More on Lester Dent and what we can learn from old pulp fiction…
Can You Learn Good Storytelling From a Bad Writer?
Lester Dent’s Wave Those Tags, Part 1: Find a Name
Lester Dent’s Wave Those Tags, Part 2: Find An External Tag
Lester Dent’s Wave Those Tags, Part 3: Find Something To Go Inside
Lester Dent’s Wave Those Tags, Part 4: Now Make Use of Characterization Tricks in Writing the Story
Thoughts on Lester Dent’s “Wave Those Tags”
Fog: Exploring Weird Tales Vol. 5, No. 1—Part 19
Fog: Exploring Weird Tales Vol. 5, No. 1—Part 20
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In Writing Monsters , best-selling author Philip Athans uses classic examples from books, films, and the world around us to explore what makes monsters memorable—and terrifying.
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