by Thomas K. Pendergast
Her family can trace ancestors back to pioneers that settled around the Eugene Oregon area in the 1840s, and she grew up with a strong sense of western lore. As a child, however, author Megan Prelinger’s earliest memories were of the Apollo moon landings on television, plus episodes of “Gunsmoke” and “Star Trek.”
Perhaps, as she browsed a collection of old aerospace industry trade magazines from the early days of the “space race” while sitting in her Richmond District apartment in 2006, it was inevitable she would notice certain connections between cowboys, or pioneers, and space exploration.
The articles were mostly about different projects that various aerospace companies were working on and industry trends, yet the advertisements told a very different story, in which science fiction fantasy dominated.
Two recurring themes of the advertisements showed images of commonplace domestic scenes on some other planet or in future space stations. Frequently, they used a strong western motif.
“It’s not just the domestic environments but also the transference of the sense of the west and westward expansion onto outer space,” said Prelinger. “Like, settling space, it’s about using visual imagery to make space exploration feel natural, inevitable and an extension of things that we’re already doing. And, natural like it’s going to be comfortable when we get there and space is going to somehow warmly receive us.”
She also noticed that the idea of peaceful space exploration was being used as a recruiting tool for companies that had little to do with peace, yet everything to do with building missiles for expanding US nuclear war capabilities.
In 2010 the end result of these insights was the publication of her book “Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 – 1962,” by Blast Books. It’s a slickly produced, glossy-paged documentation of a grand mixing between the realities of a brave new technological world and the scientific fantasies of future possibilities.
“Most of the research, development, manufacturing and funding was focused on weapons systems and a relatively tiny percentage of federal funding for rocket and missile development really got applied to NASA, the first civil space exploration. Think about the Cold War military. It was nothing compared to that,” she said.
While the articles informed her of the reality, the advertisements were about something else entirely.
“In each of the ads there was a picture and the picture was often of a fantastical landscape. The artist maybe imagined a spaceship that did not yet exist. The imagery is a real fantasy space but … the very copy in the ad itself says ‘actually what we’re recruiting for is we need engineers to work on the titan missile and ICBM projects and Nike, Zeus rocket programs.’ What they’re showing is astronauts heading to Saturn or something like that and I was thinking hmmm, there’s a discrepancy there.
“The advertisements are their own body of literature and they’re like science fiction. They’re telling stories. They’re spinning ideas about the future. … And I thought ‘wow somewhere there’s got to be a really beautiful book that’s been done about this artwork. I’m going to see if I can find it.'”
She went online and tried to find a book about aerospace advertising artwork from the Cold War era but found nothing. She asked in bookstores but no one knew about such a book.
“I decided that it actually had not been done and it needed to be done and that I was going to do it. That was my “Eureka” moment.”
Prelinger first discovered San Francisco when she visited City Lights bookstore as an 11-year-old girl, while on a family road trip to Mexico. She lived in the Richmond District briefly in 1985, then after graduating from Reed College with a BA in anthropology, she moved back to the district in 1993.
She met her husband Rick in 1998. The next year they married and moved into the mid-district house where they still live.
In the same room where she was inspired to write the book, she recently talked about the Cold War period and the space race.
“The ads don’t directly reference the Cold War because they tend to be about a fantasy space, about technology and peace and space exploration,” she explained. “The reality was that people didn’t know how many warheads the Soviet Union had and they didn’t know what the space capacity of the Soviet Union was going to be. They just knew that the U.S. had to be on top. Later, intelligence found out that back when we thought we were behind in the ‘missile gap,’ that we were actually ahead but we didn’t know that. We had a sense of being behind and having to just work as hard as humanly possible to close the gap and have the largest nuclear arsenal.”
Prelinger thinks the ads also served to create a cultural mythology and to show off in front of their competitors.
“I think they thought that the space mythology was a very powerful recruitment tool and at the same time … the space mythology really will come true and it’ll get funded and they’ll get the jobs.”
All of this was being fueled by a pervasive fear of nuclear war that was an ever-present fact of life for many during the Cold War.
“I had some awareness of it even when I was six, seven, eight, Watergate era,” she recalled. “I remember thinking when Watergate happened ‘does this mean we’re all going to get killed in a nuclear war if we don’t have a good president?’
Many ideas in the advertisements are obviously prototypes for today’s high-tech weaponry, like flying drone planes that spy and cruise missiles. Other ideas seem downright laughable today.
“I think it’s an interesting look at the rapid pace of the change of technology,” she said. “We think technology is moving fast now but it was also moving really fast back then. Stuff that was very real in 1965 had been complete fantasy in 1955. So, there really were a lot of ideas, especially in the 1950s. Technology moved so fast in the 25 years post war that people really did tend to over-imagine what might be possible.
“Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 – 1962” is available at http://www.Amazon.com, the Booksmith on Haight Street, Green Apple Books on Clement Street and online at http://www.anothersciencefiction.com. For more information, send an e-mail to megan@prelinger.net.
Westside San Francisco 