American Dreams of Mutants: The X‐Men—“Pulp” Fiction, Science Fiction, and Superheroes

R EVIEWING AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO POPULAR CULTURE OF THE twentieth century, the critic Martin Williams identifies ‘‘motion picture drama, jazz, a special kind of musical theater and its associated music and dance, the modern detective story, the comic strip, to name only the most obvious’’ (3). No less obvious, and a glaring omission from these claims, is science fiction, for ‘‘two genres acquired their recognizable form in [American ‘‘pulp’’ fiction magazines]: the detective noir and science fiction’’ (A. Boyer 92). Despite the European/Old World antecedents of H. G. Wells, who wrote scientific romances, and Jules Verne, who wrote merveilleux scientifique, the term ‘‘science fiction’’ was coined by Hugo Gernsback, editor of the American magazine Amazing Stories in the 1920s. From these pulp origins, science fiction moved ‘‘inexorably towards the center of American culture’’ (Franklin 3), a movement marked by the detonation of an atomic bomb at Hiroshima in 1945, when ‘‘thoughtful men and women recognized that [they] were living in a science fiction world’’ (Gunn 174). And, as Bukatman remarks, there can be ‘‘no overstating the importance of science fiction to . . . a moment that sees itself as science fiction’’ (Terminal Identity 3). Reviewing those opinions expressed by critics and commentators in the 1950s, Edward James found acceptance that science fiction was a serious literature—although privileging ideas over literary expression—concerned with mankind’s present plight and problematic future (‘‘Before the Novum’’ 27).