>>Male Presenter: Welcome to the Authors at
Google presentation of "Another Science Fiction"
by Megan Prelinger. The late 1950s and early
60s were the golden age of science fiction,
an era when the farthest reaches of imagination
were fed by the technological breakthroughs
of the post-war years.
While science fiction writers expressed the
dreams and nightmares of the era in pulp print,
real life rocket engineers worked on making
space travel a reality. The imaginations of
many Cold War scientists were fed by science
fiction literature and companies often promoted
their future capabilities with fantastical,
colorful visions aimed at luring young engineers
into their booming workforce.
[laughter]
Well, engineering anyway. In between the dry
articles of trade journals, a new visual vernacular
sprang up. Aerospace industry ads pitched
the idea that we live in a moment where anything
was possible.
Gravity was history. And soon, so would be
the confines of our solar system. "Another
Science Fiction," presents nearly 200 entertaining,
intriguing, inspiring, and mind-boggling pieces
of space age eye candy. I can tell you this
is true because I have given this book to
a few people as a gift. It's a gorgeous book.
It had been widely praised, in case you don't
know that or didn't read the email I sent
around. William Gibson said it is "a brilliant
tour through the iconography and literature
of America's grandest corporate dream-time--the
Space Age."
The prop master for Mad Men said that he wished
he had this book when he started Mad Men.
"It is a concise visual historical reference
in mid-century advertising, unique and beautiful."
Jonathan Lethem, the author of "Motherless
Brooklyn" and "Fortress of Solitude," called
this book "stupendous."
And one of the founders of the science of
rocketry, who is on the rocket team that actually
built the US Space Program and consulted with
Stanley Kubrick for "2001" said, and I quote,
"To the author of this remarkable work must
go well-deserved laurels for rescuing rocket
space ad artwork from virtual obscurity.
Megan Prelinger's book is a treasure that
should find worldwide readership of space
historians, lovers of space art, and all who
seek to understand the evolution of humanity's
transition to a space-faring species." Which
bring us to Megan Prelinger.
An independent historian and life-long collector
of space history ephemera and science fiction
literature, she is co-founder and architect
of information design of the Prelinger Library--a
private research library--open to the public.
Here in San Francisco, I believe?
>>Megan Prelinger: Just down the street.
>>Male Presenter: Just down the street, which
houses more than 40 thousand books and other
print artifacts on North American regional
and land use, history, media, and cultural
studies and technology, including a space
history collection.
She is also a naturalist and a rehabilitator
of aquatic avian species. She lives and works
in San Francisco. Ladies and gentlemen, please
help we welcome Megan Prelinger.
[applause]
>>Megan Prelinger: Thank you, Chris. Wow.
That's one of the most fulsome introductions,
ever.
>>Chris: We're glad you're here.
>>Megan Prelinger: [laughs] OK. Thank you
all for sticking through that, too. And hanging
out to hear the talk. And I hope you will
have some fun. So, this project. It started
as a project before it was a book.
It was about me being really fascinated, a
kind of a deep-driven history geekish, to
read as if they were a novel. Issues of Aviation
Week and Missiles and Rockets just straight
through, starting at the very early years
of the space era in the mid-1950s. And I was
looking for untold stories that might have
been contained therein.
And just reading the articles, when I noticed
that suddenly, of course, it wasn't sudden--in
'57 something changed. The articles took on
an entirely different tone after Sputnik flew.
Our American Space Program was suddenly funded
and flushed with cash.
Not only did the stories go from being a kind
of cautious and hypothetical to being dramatic
and driven and visionary. But something else
happened on the pages of the papers of the
magazines, which is that advertising really--it
sprang to life.
Almost overnight after Sputnik, the ad artwork
turned into bold colors and started this process
of this kind of five-year process of cross-fertilization
with science fiction literature to start to
depict and drive the space program that was
coming up ahead.
One of the very earliest visual fixations
of artists doing artwork for industry was
the Vanguard Satellite. It was round and cute.
And it was a showcase for the developing miniaturization
of electronics. So, it's often depicted in
this lovely translucence. And I think one
reason Voyager was so attractive was that
its round shape suggested a little Earth,
a little Moon.
It was visually quite distinct from say, the
Explorer satellite, that looked like a missile
or like a bullet. And there was a lot of work
being done in the minds of engineers and artists.
And this was at a time when engineers and
artists started to work closely with one another
to visually differentiate what the peaceful
space program would look like as opposed to
what was really better-funded--the Military
space program we're all familiar with.
And so, shapes that drew attention towards
peaceful explorations tended to have a lot
more weight in the visual narrative. And as
soon as people--. We had the satellites up
in the air, the electronics miniaturization,
enabled satellite technology, people right
away started visualizing lunar exploration.
And here's a radio set. I was always closely
tied to developments in electronics. Here
goes a radio set on the moon. And right along
with that was the assumption that human space
exploration would be enabled by the technological
developments. And there was huge excitement,
of course, about the prospect of lunar colonization,
Martian colonization.
These were widely, broadly, roundly discussed
at the time. This was an artwork by an artist
named Willi Baum, where he's utilizing visual
modernism to depict the idea of agriculture
on the moon. But it act--. Here's another
Willi Baum. It actually wasn't that simple
because at the time, there wasn't this clear
understanding that scientific exploration
and the cultural value of human exploration
were their own separate things.
And people tried to convince scientists that
human space exploration had the same kind
of scientific value as planetary sciences.
And there was this uncomfortable attempt to
align them. And because of that, human space
exploration, it actually really suffered as
a cultural project. It was under contention.
It was politically fraught. Then no less so
than today by a majority of people in Congress
who didn't want to fund it. Majority of scientists
who didn't think it should be funded. I guess
it wasn't an appropriate expression of fiscal
or technological or scientific resources.
And so, when I read the articles--. So, I'm
reading Missiles and Rockets magazine and
watching the visual narrative of this advertising
artwork go by while reading the stories about
how leaders at Caltech and leaders at MIT
and leaders at the National Science Foundation
were all going on record against human space
flight.
And I really started seeing the ads as having
their own--. They're building their own ideological
narrative that human space flight is beautiful
and that it's inevitable and that it's the
kind of cultural totality of its significance
makes in inescapable.
And ultimately, that cultural totalization
expressed in these images did win the day
'cause they spoke where they needed to speak.
And President Kennedy funded the Human Space
Flight Program. But so, the advertising was
convening this cultural ideology.
It was also recruiting engineers at the same
time. And so, you see these different kinds
of dialogues going on. At once, space is peaceful,
welcoming, and inevitable. At the same time,
if you're an engineer and you want to be challenged,
it's got to also look impossible and look
like a series of the biggest, most complicated,
and most exciting engineering problems that
have ever been faced.
So, you see these, what I came to think of
as "the precarious astronaut" series of images
right alongside a lot of other visual ideas
and narratives that were being promulgated
at the same time. And then, sometimes, I'd
take a break from reading Missiles and Rockets
and Aviation Week and go look at something
else.
And this is in Life magazine. And this was
a funny expression of the extent to which
our little cultural debate about space exploration
migrated out into different, and became a
little driver of different kinds of anxieties
or utopian ideas. And all kinds of corners
of culture.
And this is an ad for life insurance. And
it still kills me when I notice that thanks
to the gifted book designer--this was on the
cover of the book--because this is not an
aerospace ad. It's a borrowing of the "are
we in utopia or dystopia if we're floating
in space?" to tap that little wonder ball
in our heads and convince us to buy life insurance.
[pause]
And then the ships started to get designed.
And after a while, astronauts were depicted.
They were both precarious and safe at the
same time. And they're having the grand adventure.
I especially like this one, this grand adventure.
So, 1959, the era of Bonanza, we're more in
the era when the space exploration was replacing
narratives of the West and cowboys and stuff
like that, as our major stuff of our cultural
imagination. And here we are in this one that's
like a cabin. And the console is like a stove-top
and they guy in the back is shaking a cocktail
shaker.
[laughter]
And these guys have all the space in the world
to float around and they're off having the
grand adventure. One thing I learned about
studying these images is you can actually
watch technological change happen in real-time
if you look behind what's behind.
And around about 1960--this ad is from late
in 1959--and early 1960 in the technical aviation
engineering journals, astronautics and aeronautics,
suddenly these huge physics proofs are published
that explain the relationship between volume
and cost in space.
[man chuckles in audience]
And after those calculations are published,
you don't see depictions of spacious space
cabins anymore.
[pause]
So, I also learned some things about rocket
propulsion. Again, so along with electronics
miniaturization, there were also some very
rapid technological changes happening in fuel
systems design at the time. And the design
of fuel systems was going to feed quite a
bit into what interplanetary spacecraft were
going to look like.
And this ad is a negative example 'cause most
of the ones that looked like missiles did
not fly as ideas as visual narratives. So,
most artists working with engineers or working
with marketing people at engineering firms
were--. But artists were given access to engineering
plans and met with engineers about what they
were designing.
But a lot of times, engineers were still working
at the idea level, or at the part level. And
it was up to the artists to figure out what
the whole might end up looking like. And so,
you can some kind of not so missile-like rockets.
And then, there were these discoveries about
you had to have spherical fuel tanks 'cause
of some of the molecular structures and some
of the compounds used in fuels, such as hydrogen,
that didn't fit well into the square or confined
spaces very well at all.
And suddenly, artists started working with
the engineers--"How are we gonna incorporate
spheres into the design of rockets that are
gonna have to periodically be, to some extent,
aerodynamic?" And this was an open question
and this open question is--.
This is the place where art, engineering,
and science fiction merged and swirled together
for a few years. Here's another rocket. And
it's actually just a pile of spheres--a stack
of them going to the moon. And then, this
one. How about it? The Christmas tree rocket.
This was actually what I thought was gonna
go on the cover of the book, but I love that
cover. But how about that one, you know? And
this image is actually the image that gave
me the idea for what to call the book because
I realized that the picture was working.
It was pulling me in as a reader. Here are
these guys. Are they greeting an arriving
ship or waving good-bye to a departing ship?
They're looking onto this desert floor with
something of a millennial fervor. That taps
into a lot of pre-existing stories.
And then, there was this realization that
the pictures were not just pictures, but they
were pulling me and every engineer who was
reading the magazines into something more
than just imagery, but into a story that was
this other--. It was this science fiction--another
science fiction about real-world technological
emergence.
Sphere rockets. Tubes. Whoops. Yup. And then,
the mid-century modernists come in and they
create beautiful abstracts based on the images
of the engineers and other artists. At the
time, there was some truly science-fictional
technologies being proposed, one of which
would be that we could have hybrid nuclear
battery and liquid fuel propulsion vehicles
that would scoot around effectively in interplanetary
space.
Here's one idea. They tended to look like
X-wing fighter pilots from Star Wars. Kinda
funny. Hello. Hello, Star Wars. And then,
I was a life-long reader of science fiction.
And--. Louder? So, if you look at science
fiction over the decades and centuries, it
tends to anticipate technological development
and often to lead to technological development.
And I wondered, when I started to focus in
on this 1957 to '62 time frame, if science
fiction would continue to lead or not. So,
I took a fine-grained view and actually compared
month by month stories, images, and ideas
between magazines of fantasy and science fiction,
analog, and the tech magazines that I was
reading.
And actually found that in these few years,
science fiction had to--there was a reversal
of polarity. And science fiction started to
play the role of the follower for, I think,
the first time. And only for a little while.
But so, this ad was published in 1959. And
then this was a cover of F and SF six months
later.
And I think there's a direct connection. There
were three nuclear rocket programs in the
US--NERVA, Rover, and Orion. There was some
creative visualization of what nuclear rockets
would look like. But the question weren't
as broad as with liquid fuels in terms of--.
There was no question of spheres or anything
like that. So, you get what we think of as
a more conventional rocket shape with these
ideas of nuclear rockets, except when we come
to this, which is an idea based on an Orion
spaceship. So, there's a basic idea for a
nuclear rocket that it would have a little
reactor and it would just lift off and go.
And it would look like a toothpaste tube.
And there it is. Project Orion was something
completely different. It was an attempt by
Manhattan Project engineers to arrive at a
peaceful application of nuclear bomb technology.
And instead of having one core reactor that
runs continuously, like a power plant, that
this ship would actually be powered by ejecting
a series of mini bombs out the back of it
and would be propelled by the force of the
explosion of these bomblets. And this was
a real project.
It was funded. It was totally highly classified
during all the time that it was funded. So,
when this this ad for the atomic pulse rocket
saying, coyly, "a similar project is past
pilot study in the Defense Department," the
Defense Department went to Congress and asked
for veto power over the table of contents
of Missiles and Rockets and Aviation Week
magazines and tried to gain an injunction
against the magazines from publishing anything
that was influenced by leaks of classified
material.
They lost. I'll park here for a minute. This
isn't in the book. Sorry. You can enjoy it
here now. So, we didn't get atomic reactor
powered rockets. They were politically disabled.
Really, as soon as people realized that if
you ever had any launch failure, even once
ever, that ten-mile radius around the launch
facility would be a dead zone for a hundred
years, then that was the end of all three
of our nuclear rocket programs.
But we did develop isotope-powered batteries
that are atomic in the sense that they're
powered by decay and half-life of isotopes.
And they run really well and the first one
was launched in 1961 on a naval navigational
satellite. And this is a poster for the Voyager
spacecraft, which, as we know, is now approaching
the outer limits of our solar system.
And it's isotope-powered and it's been isotope-powered
since it launched 33 years ago. And I just
mention the isotope batteries because, actually
right now in the US, we have a crisis of isotope
fuel and NASA only has enough radioisotope
fuel for battery-powered planetary exploration
spacecraft to fuel half of their planned planetary
programs in the next 20 years.
So, remember that. Which--. I used to demonstrate
what I really got out of this literature is
that it offers a sort of a prism for looking
at this relationship between technological
fact and science fiction and the past, the
present, and the future.
And the more I learned about history, the
more unstuck in time our historical moment
of today comes to seem to be because just
as in science fiction, the deeper you get
into it, the closer tomorrow seems to relate
to yesterday. And one case in point is electric
propulsion.
Actually, I met this man. These are real engineers
who were photographed looking at a pinch plasma
engine in a laboratory. And they had their
names published in the ad, so I was able to
look them up and make contact and get to know
them. And one of them came to one of my readings
on the East Coast.
It was awesome. He was like, 90, and it was
very sweet. And they also sent me all this
literature to help me understand ion drives.
Anyway, so ion drives, they tried to test
them in the laboratory in the 1950s and tried
to test them in the 1960s and tested them
in the 1970s and tested them in the 1980s.
And because of materials instability problems,
they didn't work for the first 45 years that
they were developed. No matter how fantastic
the spaceships were that were imagined to
be powered by them. No matter how pretty the
pictures were, the materials instability problems
kept them from flying until 2001 when the
first one flew.
Finally. It took 45 years. And once the bugs
were worked out, we do rely pretty heavily,
regularly on these kinds of engines for a
satellite and low-power interplanetary craft.
So, if I'd been reading the news release in
2001 without having done this research, I
would've actually--.
It was reported as new in 2001. And there's
just an interesting historical window. New
isn't always new. Sometimes, it means that
somebody worked on it for 45 years. Another
case--solar sails and space junk. So, solar
sails were widely promulgated, utopian promise
of swift, fast, and clean interplanetary travel.
They're narrativized by the best of the best,
"The Wind from the Sun," all about solar-powered
spacecraft. At the same time, the utopian
impulse embedded in the civil, the impulse
to civil space exploration anticipated the
problem of space junk and anticipated strategies
for pulling space junk out of orbit at the
same time.
Now, neither being green in space, nor pursuing
technologies that had no military app, neither
of those was really marketable or fundable
in the 1950s, in the Cold War era. So, initiatives
to head off the problem of space junk were
not followed up on as were solar sails--just
not funded.
No military apt. No funding. One of the ideas
was that there would be rescue vessels in
space. And this is a rescue vessel rescuing
people who--. They're in pretty deep doo-doo
of asteroids.
[laughter]
It just hit their space station where they
were living. And then, in 2010--a year ago,
a year and a couple months ago--the first
solar sail was launched by Japan. Thank you,
JAXA.
This was a provable technology here in the
US we've had. The Planetary Society has tried
to launch solar sail spacecraft. And due to
technological difficulties from using ex-Cold
War leftover launch hardware, they had launch
failures and the solar sails were destroyed
on launch.
But the Japan Space Agency got one up last
year. Right at the same time was this idea
that actually originated in Britain, that
if we can get solar sails up, we can use them
to attack the problem of space junk and attach
to--. Like, use the little solar sails. They're
called NanoSails.
Attach them to space junk and pull the space
junk out of orbit. So, 50 years later, these
two ideas--one's just an idea, one's a technology--they
actually converged. So, in 1962--the book
starts in 1957--when the advertising started
to get really interesting and ends in 1962.
What happened? Why? That was the year that
the design decision for the Apollo spacecraft,
including the lunar lander, was announced.
And it was an engineering solution and it
didn't address any of the visual romanticism
of a rocket landing on the moon.
In fact, it didn't end up addressing any of
the visual romance of space exploration at
all. It was this.
[laughter]
And it was really the beginning of the end.
So, it was that. It was this design decision.
And there just wasn't really a way to pretty
it up.
[laughter]
And there was also the hard fact that once
the engineering work and design had gone into
first Mercury, then Gemini, and then Apollo,
all the budgets were plateaued and stopped
growing.
And recruitment slacked off. So, this all
happened at the same time and the two were
tied together. Designers did still try to
make the Apollo visually interesting through
a little minimalism here and there, but it
didn't work. But we did go to the moon.
[pause]
One thing that we do besides run our print
library is historic film archives. And we
collect--. My partner back there is the lead
collector of home movies. And this is actually--.
I like to show this when I talk about "Another
Science Fiction" 'cause both the book and
this movie express a level of heartfelt participation
in space exploration that we need to bring
back.
And this is a home movie of the lunar landing
shot off the TV. So, I'm showing it not just
to show that this is what it looked like when
we went to the moon, but the film itself is
this piece of evidence of a time when people
would've had their 8- and 16-millimeter cameras
out, stuck them on a tripod, and aimed it
at the TV to hold the moment.
Also, once we knew what the rockets and the
hardware were really going to look like, and
once there was an astronaut core, the live
astronaut core took the place of the live
color TV pictures of the moon, if you had
color TV in 1969.
Not that many people did. But the charisma
of the astronauts and their stories took the
place of what the sci-fi, romantic advertising
had done and spoke to a broader public. A
word about the artists. Most of these artists
were making work for industry and were not
necessarily allowed to sign their work and
remain anonymous.
Some artists had enough of their own identity.
Frank Tinsley was a writer as well as an artist.
And I came to realize in the course of the
research that a lot of the fantastical and
utopian ideas expressed in his artwork probably
originated with him and were less a part of
what any one firm was actually doing.
This was confirmed when I was given this book
for my birthday. Tinsley, he wrote it, as
well as illustrated it. The illustrations
are fantastic. But he's not shy with his vision.
[laughter]
Not shy at all. The first million years. All
right. He should've been a Long Now Fellow.
[laughter]
And then, the work of Willi Baum, which really
stands out visually. He's a classically trained,
Swiss, modern graphic designer. Did absolutely
spectacular work. So, I tried to find these
artists and I tried to--. And I discovered
in my dismay that Frank Tinsley died in 1964,
long before I was born or even before the
moon landing.
So, he never got to see any of that. And I
had been a better researcher, it might not
have taken me four years. But I did find Willi.
And he turned out to live only five miles
from me.
[laughter]
So, we got to be friends. [laughter] And today,
our future in space is in our hands. This
is a home movie made by a guy named Robert
Barnes, who built all the models from model
kits himself. And with string, he animated
them and he told the story in his own movie.
And this is where we're back today. We're
gonna build the future of our space program
and maybe even go to Mars.
[laughter]
Yeah. Moon landing.
[pause]
Whatever we do from now as a society, it's
going to be built with our own hands. We're
not from here on out. And that's my talk.
I did get to go to the shuttle launch last
month, which was one of the most amazing things
I've ever done. And that's the end. So, thank
you.
[applause]
Questions? Come on. Yeah?
>>MALE #1: So, I can't help but wonder if
there's a parallel period of history here
in the Valley, which is the boom years in
Silicon Valley and you have similar trade
magazines that also no longer exist. NewBit?
What did they call it?
But again, there was a sort of optimism about
progress and about what can be built and so
forth. And I'm curious about it's like another,
if there's parallels and also interesting
differences between the, I think--. What comes
to mind is hard to visualize what we're going
to building.
>>Megan Prelinger: What, yeah.
>>MALE #1:[Laughs] You know? No one predicted
Google as it is now even then exactly, except
maybe Larry.
>>Megan Prelinger: Right. There are definitely
economic--.
>>MALE #2: Megan. Could you repeat the question
so it will get on the tape?
>>Megan Prelinger: Oh, right. The question
was whether there are parallels between Silicon
Valley cycles of boom-town eras and the space
boom era. And there are definitely--.
What are the similarities and differences?
There are definitely economic similarities
that are closely tied with economic similarities.
I think in the Cold War era, the economics
was more of an external to the technology.
The technology was reliant on a lot of outside
funding from the Cold War economic surplus.
And in the tech boom years, the technology
drove its own boom, rather than having a boom
imposed on it from the outside. So, that's
the main difference I see. And of course,
the other, yeah, there's a big difference
in how technology is visualized today because
we can blend a design to concepts and phenomena,
like Google is like a phenomena, more than
objects. Exactly. Yes.
>>MALE #3: I was curious what you're working
on since you finished this book, aside from
giving talks about the book itself. Are you
on to similar projects or are you working
on another book?
>>Megan Prelinger: The question is what am
I working on now. And yes, I can't, I don't
want to get anybody too excited, except I'm
so excited. But it won't be out for like,
at least probably three more years.
But it's, I couldn't fit a space electronics
chapter into this book. The material on space
electronics was larger than could fit in any
chapter format in this book. And it's become
its own book. It's called "Inside the Machine:
Electronics in the Modern Century."
Forthcoming in 2014 from W. W. Norton. And
that's what I'm working on. Another project
of a life--. I mean, I thought this was a
project of a lifetime, but I'm 110 percent
as excited and engaged with that as I was
with this. So, yeah. You have any more questions?
OK. Thank you. Thank you. This was a lot of
fun.
[applause]
