3 FUTUROLOGY AND SPECULATIVE DESIGN

Chapter 2 looks at sf's relationship to a long tradition of imagining other worlds for purposes of social critique and at academic frameworks for studying sf that have built on this foundation. In the popular imagination, however, sf is synonymous with the pulp magazine tradition pioneered by Hugo Gernsback. The Hugo Awards that honor the best sf achievements annually, voted on by members of the World Science Fiction Society, a global fan organization, are named for him. Yet before he gained fame as the chief promoter of this new literary genre, Gernsback was enthusiastically involved in a number of projects that aimed to usher in the technologized future as quickly as possible, publishing essays in venues such as Scientific American, Modern Electrics, and The Electrical Experimenter, the latter two of which he founded and edited, in 1908 and 1913, respectively. In The Perversity of Things (2016), a compendium of Gernsback's writings on emergent new technologies, tinkering and patent seeking, broadcast regulation, and the promises of wireless radio and television, Grant Wythoff argues that "the project of science fiction as Gernsback understood it" was an extension of his promotion of communication technologies, pioneering "a way of thinking about and interacting with emerging media."1