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Global Perspectives on Engineering - Clark Abstract

Science Fiction Fandom, Geek Culture, and the Image of the Engineer
Mark Clark (Oregon Institute of Technology)

What is a Slan? Raised in secret, possessed of great mental powers, Slans have to hide their identities from ordinary humans. Slans are a product of evolution – they are man’s replacements, and men are not willing to be replaced. They hunt Slans mercilessly, and only the superior nature of Slans allows them to survive and look forward to the day that they will prevail.

Slans are described in the novel "Slan" by the noted science fiction author A. E. van Vogt, and are clearly metaphors for the science fiction fan himself. Science fiction fans in the 1930s and 1940s thought of themselves as superior beings, in touch with the future and more technologically literate than anyone else. They felt that they should be in charge, and resented the fact that they were seen as juvenile readers of juvenile literature, trapped in a genre that literary critics sneered at. In response, they organized themselves, and waited for their chance to replace ordinary humans.

Historians of engineering, particularly in the United States, have focused on professionalization as the primary measure of self-perception. In works like Edwin Layton’s Revolt of the Engineers and David Noble’s America By Design, engineering professional societies are described as the venue where the struggle between corporate values and broader social responsibility took place. Were engineers to be mere servants of business, or independent professionals in the mode of doctors and lawyers? How these struggles played out, that is, how “professional” engineering societies became, defined the place of the engineer in society as a whole. The social image of the engineer was assumed to reflect his professional status.

This paper seeks to widen the discussion of engineering identity to include other groups that played a role in shaping how engineers saw their place in the world. It argues that men like Hugo Gernsback, who created modern science fiction as a distinct field, played a major role in defining the aspirations of engineers in the 20th century. Out of the pages of his science fiction magazines Gernsback also created, almost by accident, science fiction fandom. The fanzine and the science fiction convention were the places that science fiction fans, many of them engineers, came together for the first time in the 1930s. Ever since, science fiction fans have been a central part of geek culture. Much of what we think of as central to engineering geek culture has its origins in the rituals and forms created by science fictions fans in the 1930s and 1940s within their organizations.