Like their professional counterparts, women who served as science reporters for Palmer often wrote in the standard Science Service manner. For example, articles such as Henrietta Brown’s “Marine Engineering in the Insect World” and Standish’s “Battle of the Sexes” feature eye-catching headlines while providing readers with sober, scientifically accurate accounts of their subject matter. In a similar vein, Standish cites sources in text for all the items featured in “Scientific Oddities” and Hansen, who was formally trained in the subjects she wrote about, provides end notes for her “Scientific Mystery” columns. Authors also foregrounded the human interest angle in their science reporting, although some did this more gracefully than others: in the early short piece “Natural Ink,” Ellen Reed rather awkwardly attaches a final sentence connecting the squid and its natural defense systems to human writing technologies; later authors such as Brown, Fran Miles, and Laura Moore Wright more successfully integrate their subject matter with the concerns of World War II. Finally, Standish and Hansen emphasize the drama of discovery and the role of the scientist as an intellectual pioneer in their science columns. This is particularly evident in “Scientific Mysteries,” where Hansen (with Palmer’s help) casts herself as “something of an Indiana Jones figure” fighting the evils of racism both within and without the scientific community (Nadis 111).

  Even as they imported the techniques of modern science journalism into the SF magazine community, women modified them to better suit their community’s needs. In some cases, this meant acknowledging readers as critical thinkers in their own right. Both Standish and Hansen forsake the tendency of science writers to address readers as a passive “you” distinct from the active scientist and science journalist. Instead, they employ a more inclusive “we” to collapse the hierarchical distance between expert and layperson and include all scientifically inclined people in the process of discovery and invention.

  Women writing for Amazing and Fantastic Stories also departed from the role of science journalist as translator by asserting their own opinions on the topics they covered. This is particularly evident in Wright’s “Sunlight,” where the author explores facts that she suggests are unknown to the scientists but will change nuclear research forever, and in Standish’s “Scientific Oddities” vitamin vignette, where the medical reporter usurps the role of the doctor by providing her own health advice to readers. SF science writers further asserted both the collaborative nature of discovery and their own authoritative contributions to it with anecdotes about their involvement in ongoing scientific debates. In cases such as Standish’s “Scientific Oddities” essay on animal biology, the debates are relatively low-stake, casual affairs about surprising but noncontroversial facts. In other cases, such as Hansen’s “The White Race: Does It Exist?” and “Footprints of the Dragon,” the debates over evolution and racial difference are highly charged and formally documented to better underscore Hansen’s own paradigm-shattering place within them.

  Finally, while the women who wrote science journalism for Amazing and Fantastic Adventures seem to have taken their writing quite seriously, at least one, L. Taylor Hansen, collaborated with Palmer to provoke debate over the relations of science writing and science hoax. Palmer’s interest in occult matters led him to experiment with “graft[ing] science fiction to studies of ‘strange mysteries’” throughout his tenure at Ziff-Davis (Nadis 111). Indeed, Amazing’s circulation peaked at 250,000 in the mid-1940s when the editor encouraged fans to debate the merits of the Shaver Mystery, a series of stories based on letters from a Pennsylvania factory worker, Richard Shaver, who claimed to have discovered an ancient, evil, and technologically advanced civilization located in caverns under the earth. But Palmer’s earliest experiment in this vein occurred several years before in cooperation with Hansen, whose “Scientific Mysteries” column presented readers with a mixture of “mythological lore and anthropological reports” that upset the widespread American belief in white supremacy (Nadis 111). While debate over Hansen’s claims never reached the epic proportions of those associated with the Shaver Mystery, fans did indeed engage critically with her ideas, debating both their scientific accuracy and their aesthetic merit.

  Much like their Science Service counterparts, women who worked as science writers in the early SF magazine community wrote about a wide range of technoscientific topics in both informative and entertaining ways. In doing so, they helped shape new understandings of women as scientific and technological experts. They also anticipated changes occurring in science writing today. As science journalism migrates online, audiences respond more quickly and publicly to science stories, reframing them to better express their own interests and needs. Accordingly, science writers find they must relinquish traditional models of science communication that treat readers as passive blank slates, instead approaching “the audience as a ‘growth medium’ in which the seeds planted by individual stories can grow into two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the sort imagined by the story writers, and knowledge nurtured by the community itself” (Lazlo, Baram-Tsabari, and Lewenstein 865). The women who wrote about science for Amazing and Fantastic Adventures already knew this was the case, and so while authors such as Reed, Miles, and Brown hewed to the conventions of modern science journalism to encourage interest in the knowledge generated by scientists and science writers, others—including Standish and, most spectacularly, Hansen—pushed the limits of those conventions to encourage knowledge production on the part of the SF community itself.

  ELLEN REED, FRAN MILES, HENRIETTA BROWN, LYNN STANDISH, AND LAURA MOORE WRIGHT

  With the notable exception of L. Taylor Hansen (featured elsewhere in this anthology), very little is known about the first generation of women who worked as science journalists for the SF community. What information is available comes from their publishing patterns in Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures and the occasional comment from the editor, Ray Palmer. Biographical details are particularly scarce for Ellen Reed, Fran Miles, and Henrietta Brown, all of whom sold one or two short pieces to Palmer before disappearing from the SF community and the historical record altogether. Similarly, while it is possible that the Laura Moore Wright featured in the May 1946 issue of Amazing is the mid-century Canadian poet of the same name, there is currently no concrete evidence to prove that they were one and the same.5 Even Lynn Standish—one of Palmer’s most frequent science contributors, whose name was associated with two regular science columns—is shrouded in mystery. SF historian Eric Leif Davin confirms that Standish was one of the many women who published with Palmer in Amazing and Fantastic Adventures but provides no other information about her (Partners 115). Palmer himself provides one tantalizing clue when he celebrates “Lt. Lynn Standish [stationed] in New Guinea” as one of the many SF writers who deserves recognition for serving both SF and the greater American community in a time of war (“Observatory” 6). However, there seems to be no record of Standish’s service beyond this one comment, and indeed, given that in the same editorial Palmer celebrates the military exploits of “Sgt. Morris J. Steele,” which was a house pseudonym used by Palmer and many other writers, it is difficult to know whether Standish’s service was fact or fiction.

  None of the women featured in this chapter rose to great fame or fortune on the basis of their literary endeavors, but they were instrumental in shaping modern science journalism for the SF magazine community. Like their counterparts at Science Service and the other science news writing organizations that flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, Brown, Miles, and Standish used catchy headlines such as “Marine Engineering in the Insect World,” “Oil for Bombing,” and “The Battle of the Sexes” to get their audiences interested in what might be otherwise mundane facts about bugs, oil production, and human biology. Furthermore, regular contributors such as Standish could depend on provocatively titled monthly columns such as “Scientific Oddities” to catch readers’ attention. Once they had this attention, authors attempted to maintain it by emphasizing the human interest angle in each story. Reed, Brown, and Standish (particularly in “The Battle of the Sexes”) accomplished this by tacking on a single sentence connecting the scientific phenomenon under consideration to everyday human life. Miles and Wright wove together stories of scientific discovery or technological accomplishment with the unfolding drama of World War II itself.

  Also like their mainstream counterparts, some women who wrote about science and technology for the SF magazine community employed a variant of Rensberger’s “Gee-Whiz” model of reporting. This is most evident in Standish’s “Scientific Oddities” column, which celebrates scientists as “miracle” workers while personifying science as a benevolent force naturally allied with doctors and other “famine fighters” in the quest to identify the “magic chemicals” that will produce “greater vigor, increased longevity, and higher cultural development” for all. But it is also apparent in Reed’s filler piece on the sea pigeon, which is, in essence, a verbal translation of a visual display constructed by the curators of the New York Aquarium. Meanwhile, Miles relies heavily on quotations from technologically savvy politicians, and Brown employs passive verb constructions such as “we are told” to reinforce the respectful distance between layperson and scientific expert.

  Even as they hewed to many of the science writing conventions developed in the opening decades of the twentieth century, SF science journalists adapted those conventions to better meet the needs of an audience that saw itself as distinct from other laypeople by virtue of its intellectual ability and engagement with new sciences and technologies. The difficulty of negotiating these two different conceptions of audience is particularly evident in Brown’s writing, which swings back and forth between the use of passive verb constructions to separate scientific experts from their lay counterparts and the use of active ones such as “we find” to involve readers in the process of scientific observation and discovery. Meanwhile, Standish’s “Scientific Oddities” column complicates the relations of scientist and science journalist by beginning with an anecdote that makes the science journalist an equal partner in scientific debate and ending with the dispensation of medical advice, not by “science” or its partner “famine fighters,” but by the science reporter herself.

  But perhaps the most interesting contribution in this respect is that of Wright, who takes on the role of scientist-instructor by guiding her readers through a series of exercises designed to help them understand the scientific phenomenon under consideration in the comfort of their own homes. Wright’s confidence in the layperson’s ability to observe the material world both accurately and imaginatively leads her to generate her own scientific hypotheses regarding spontaneous combustion and the development of nuclear weaponry. While she does so as respectfully as possible—she is careful to present her hypotheses as speculative questions rather than definitive answers—Wright is also confident in her ability to discover amazing new facts “which I felt should be made known, if [they are] already not known amongst scientists.” As such, she unsettles the then-fashionable model of top-down scientific discovery and knowledge dissemination, replacing it with a more democratic one in which anyone with a good eye and open mind can participate in these processes on his or her own terms. Thus SF science writers such as Reed, Brown, Miles, Standish, and Wright demonstrated both the potential and limits of science journalism as it developed in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

  Ellen Reed, “Natural Ink”

  Fantastic Adventures, June 1942

  One of the strangest of many curiosities at the New York Aquarium is the snail-like sea pigeon. The sea pigeon is a shell-less snail, less than a foot long, with a dark reddish-brown color. It moves in the water by means of a pair of wing-like appendages. Its resemblance to a pigeon flying through the water accounts for its name.

  The sea pigeon lives upon sea lettuce, consuming about a teacup-ful every day. The young of the sea pigeon are deposited in long strings of bright yellow eggs composed of a mucous-like substance that hardens into a stiff jelly very quickly. Each string of eggs numbers about one-half million eggs.

  Probably the most interesting fact about the sea pigeon is its means of a defense in case of attack. When danger approaches, the sea pigeon releases a large quantity of dark, inky fluid that covers up its escape. The fluid thus secreted has been found to be as good as our own manufactured ink and will make a durable record on writing paper.

  Fran Miles, “Oil for Bombing”

  Fantastic Adventures, October 1944

  The opening of a new aviation gasoline refinery on Aruba by the Lago Oil Company, Standard Oil of New Jersey subsidiary, was cited by Governor Pieter A. Kasteel of Curacao as the latest example of “the splendid cooperation between the United States and the Netherlands for the prosecution of the war.”

  Speaking at the opening ceremony, the Governor said: “Lago Oil will continue to be most important for our whole territory, for the prosecution of the war and the development of our common task after victory is won. You supply in ever-increasing quantities the vital fuel without which Allied planes cannot fly. It is all a question of teamwork—you over here and the air-men over there working together with all your might to crush forever the ugly monsters of Hitlerism and Japanese aggression.”

  Henrietta Brown, “Marine Engineering in the Insect World”

  Fantastic Adventures, July 1945

  We read of floods and how humans fare when at the mercy of the elements. Our hearts are filled with pity for the suffering and the homeless. We watch with interest on the movie screen the humorous antics as well as the narrow escapes of people caught in flooded areas. We are apt to forget that there are other than human lives involved in the chaos.

  Insects are plagued by floods many more times during the year than humans. A sudden heavy rain will cause a patch of lawn, a meadow, or a field to be vacated by thousands of tiny six-legged creatures. Butterflies, ladybirds, tiger beetles, grasshoppers, ants, and a host of others find themselves flood-bound on tiny islands after a downpour. They must make their escape—but how?

  With the various peculiar, but convenient, features of their anatomies, they travel across the flood by all of the three possible routes—the air, the surface, and the underwater route. The insects that can fly, of course, take the air route. The grasshopper is able to leave his island by taking an enormous jump.

  Some insects cannot fly, but can swim. We are told that ants, for example, make real swimming movements, rowing with their six legs as if they were six-oared boats and steering to the right or left just as the oarsman steers, by varying the strokes of the starboard and larboard oars.

  In contrast to these slow-going ants we find insects that can actually walk and run on the surface of the water. Their tiny legs are supported on the surface film, just as an oily needle if you lay it gently on the water in a glass will rest on the surface film without even getting wet. Since these insects move not through the water, but over it, they encounter no resistance from it, and they can run very rapidly. In this respect they may be compared to our broad, flat motorboats, which, when they are going at full speed, rise up and skim over the surface, thus avoiding the resistance of the water and shooting along at a prodigious rate.

  A fourth group of insects, which includes the heavy and clumsy beetle, cannot escape by any of the three foregoing methods. They fly but poorly or not at all; they cannot swim, and they are not built for walking on the surface of the water. These beetles boldly embark upon the submerged route. They crawl down into the water and walk along the bottom. They probably carry with them a small supply of air in the form of bubbles on the surface of their body. They are able to travel a considerable distance under water before they find it necessary to crawl up on a stick or a grass blade for fresh air.

  Thus Mother Nature has equipped the lowliest of inhabitants of this planet with the means of survival.

  Lynn Standish, “The Battle of the Sexes”

  Amazing Stories, April 1943

  Which sex has the edge on the other? Here are a few facts on the subject that answer (?) the question.

  Universally a topic of heated discussion is the question of the superiority of one sex over the other in a particular field. Unfortunately, of course, emotion has dominated reason in these arguments—and entirely unwarrantedly, for there exists today a great body of knowledge based upon scientific experiments on the differences between men and women in various types of behavior.

  The first such study, made almost 50 years ago, showed that men did better in motor tests of speed and accuracy of movement and quickness in solving problems designed to test “ingenuity.” Women did better in the same motor tests of speed and accuracy when colored cards were used instead of other objects, and they did better in tests of rote memory. In tests of taste, smell, pitch discrimination of sounds, and in the accuracy of judging weights, there were slight or no differences.

  In a later series of tests, school people were rated by teachers on athletic aptitude, intelligence, shyness, conscientiousness, and good temper. Boys were found to be more athletic, more noisy, more self-conscious, and quicker-tempered than girls. Girls were found to be shy and more conscientious. And, as rated by their teachers, no difference in intelligence was noted.

  Hundreds of studies of sex differences have followed these pioneer attempts. Of course, many fields were found where there were no differences or where the differences were too slight to be significant. But major and reliable findings have been published about the topics of differences in physical characteristics, differences in the ability to use the senses, differences in motor and mechanical abilities, and differences in mental and emotional traits. The following have been proved by experiment: