On a summer day in 1862, a tall, stammering Oxford University mathematician named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took a boat trip up the River Thames, accompanied by a colleague and the three young daughters of university chancellor Henry Liddell. To stave off tedium during the five-mile journey, Dodgson regaled the group with a story of a bored girl named Alice who finds adventure in the most unexpected places. By the day’s end, Liddell’s middle daughter, also named Alice, was so enthralled by this account that she implored the mathematician to write the story down. Some three years later, Dodgson would publish Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the nom de plume of Lewis Carroll (the pen name is an Anglicized version of “Carolus Ludovicus,” the Latinized form of Charles Ludwidge). The perennial children’s read was immediately popular, counting Oscar Wilde and Queen Victoria among its ardent fans, and has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1865.
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the original version of the book that Carroll presented to Alice Liddell in 1864, is presently housed in the British Library, which has graciously made it freely available online. You can view it here. The handwritten volume includes 37 crisp ink illustrations, all personally drawn by Dodgson. Discerning Alice readers will notice that these illustrations differ from the iconic images (and, to my eyes, very much superior) created by famed Punch magazine political cartoonist John Tenniel.
Title and illustrations aside, the original manuscript is considerably slimmer than the final version, containing roughly 12,000 fewer words.
These days, references to seventies television increasingly require prefatory explanation. Who under the age of 60 recalls, for example, the cultural phenomenon that was Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, an absurdist satire so faithful to the soap-opera form it parodied that it aired every weeknight, putting out 325 episodes between early 1976 and mid-1977? And even for those who do remember the show, it would surely require a stretch of the memory to summon to mind its minor character Garth Gimble, an abusive husband who meets his grisly fate on the sharp end of an aluminum Christmas tree. (We’ll set the question of how many remember aluminum Christmas trees aside for the holiday season.)
Garth Gimble was the breakout role for a musical comedian turned actor called Martin Mull, who died last week at the age of 80. Tributes have mentioned the characters he played on shows from Roseanne and Sabrina the Teenage Witch to Arrested Development and Veep.
But to those who were watching TV in the summer of 1977, Mull has always been — and will always be — not Garth Gimble but his twin brother Barth, host of a low-budget late-night talk show in the small town of Fernwood, Ohio, the setting of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Fernwood-2-Night premiered as a temporary replacement for that show (and thus as yet another expansion of the televisual universe created by mega-producer Norman Lear), but it soon took on a countercultural life of its own.
The fictional talk-show form of Fernwood-2-Night was ahead of its time; more daring still was its occasional arrangement of real-life guests. That roster included a young Tom Waits, himself a living embodiment of the blurred line between reality and fiction. As the show’s announcer Jerry Hubbard, Fred Willard puts all of his distinctive delivery into declaring Waits “very famous for Fernwood.” Mull plays Gimble as the kind of man on which the appeal of Waits’ art is wholly lost: “I know he sells a lot of albums, and he makes about half a million big ones in one year,” he says by way of introduction. “In my book, that spells talent.”
Naturally, Gimble is game to set the liquor-swigging singer up for an old groaner by remarking on the strangeness of talking to a guest with a bottle in front of him. “Well, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” Waits growls in compliance. This comes after his performance of the song “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)” from his then-most recent album Small Change. It’s safe to say that many viewers on Fernwood-2-Night’s wavelength became fans of Waits as soon as they heard it. Nearly half a century later, they no doubt still remember his appearance fondly — at least as fondly as they remember the Wonderblender.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
So begins one translation of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chapter. The sentence captures the frustration that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a profound realization when you just wake up, or moment of clarity in the shower, by the time your mind’s gears start turning and you grope for pen and paper, the enlightenment has evaporated, replaced by muddle-headed, fumbling “what was that, again?”
“Intelligence comes forth. There is great deception.”
The sudden flashes of insight we have in states of meditative distraction—showering, pulling weeds in the garden, driving home from work—often elude our conscious mind precisely because they require its disengagement. When we’re too actively engaged in conscious thought—exercising our intelligence, so to speak—our creativity and inspiration suffer. “The great Tao fades away.”
The intuitive revelations we have while showering or performing other mindless tasks are what psychologists call “incubation.” As Mental Floss describes the phenomenon: “Since these routines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopilot. This frees up your unconscious to work on something else. Your mind goes wandering, leaving your brain to quietly play a no-holds-barred game of free association.”
Are we always doomed to lose the thread when we get self-conscious about what we’re doing? Not at all. In fact, some researchers, like Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu, have observed incubation at work in very creatively engaged individuals, like freestyle rappers. Theirs is a skill that must be honed and practiced exhaustively, but one that nonetheless relies on extemporaneous inspiration.
Renowned neuroscientist Alice Flaherty theorizes that the key biological ingredient in incubation is dopamine, the neurotransmitter released when we’re relaxed and comfortable. “People vary in terms of their level of creative drive,” writes Flaherty, “according to the activity of the dopamine pathways of the limbic system.” More relaxation, more dopamine. More dopamine, more creativity.
Other researchers, like Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod at Lancaster University, have undertaken analysis of a more qualitative kind—of “anecdotal reports of the intellectual discovery processes of individuals hailed as geniuses.” Here we might think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem “Kublai Khan”—“a vision in a dream”—he supposedly composed in the midst of a spontaneous revelation (or an opium haze)—before that annoying “person from Porlock” broke the spell.
Sio and Ormerod survey the literature of “incubation periods,” hoping to “allow us to make use of them effectively to promote creativity in areas such as individual problem solving, classroom learning, and work environments.” Their dense research suggests that we can exercise some degree of control over incubation, building unconscious work into our routines. But why is this necessary?
Psychologist John Kounios of Drexel University offers a straightforward explanation of the unconscious processes he refers to as “the default mode network.” Nick Stockton in Wired sums up Kounios’ theory:
Our brains typically catalog things by their context: Windows are parts of buildings, and the stars belong in the night sky. Ideas will always mingle to some degree, but when we’re focused on a specific task our thinking tends to be linear.
The task of showering—or bathing, in the case of Archimedes (above)—gives the mind a break, lets it mix things up and make the odd, random juxtapositions that are the essential basis of creativity. I’m tempted to think Wallace Stevens spent a good deal of time in the shower. Or maybe, like Stockton, he kept a “Poop Journal” (exactly what it sounds like).
Famous examples aside, what all of this research suggests is that peak creativity happens when we’re pleasantly absent-minded. Or, as psychologist Allen Braun writes, “We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity.”
None of this means that you’ll always be able to capture those brilliant ideas before they fade away. There’s no foolproof method involved in making use of creative distraction. But as Leo Widrich writes at Buffer, there are some tricks that may help. To increase your creative output and maximize the insights in incubation periods, he recommends that you:
“Keep a notebook with you at all times, even in the shower.” (Widrich points us toward a waterproof notepad for that purpose.)
“Plan disengagement and distraction.” Widrich calls this “the outer-inner technique.” John Cleese articulates another version of planned inspiration.
“Overwhelm your brain: Make the task really hard.” This seems counterintuitive—the opposite of relaxation. But as Widrich explains, when you strain your brain with really difficult problems, others seem much easier by comparison.
It may seem like a lot of work getting your mind to relax, produce more dopamine, and get weird, circular, and inspired. But the work lies in making effective use of what’s already happening in your unconscious mind. Rather than groping blindly for that flash of brilliance you just had a moment ago, you can learn, writes Mental Floss, to “mind your mindless tasks.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
Even if a student assigned Beowulf is, at first, dismayed by its language, that same student may well be captivated by its setting. While that mythical but somehow both gloriously and dankly realistic realm of kings and dragons, mead halls and bog monsters may feel familiar to fantasy enthusiasts, it’s also strange on a deeper level; this story, any modern reader will feel, is in no sense a product of our own time. In order to concretely envision both the action of that epic and the culture that gave rise to it, it helps to examine artifacts from around the same place and time in history. To find such things, we need look no further than Sutton Hoo.
Beowulf is set in the fifth and sixth centuries; Sutton Hoo is an archaeological site whose contents date from the sixth to seventh centuries. Located “in the eastern part of England, in a county called Suffolk, which at that time was part of the East Anglian kingdom in Anglo-Saxon England,” it consists of “a grave made in the middle of a 27-meter-long ship that was buried beneath a gigantic earth mound, and inside a burial chamber that was placed in the middle of the ship were laid out some amazing treasures drawn from all over the known world at that time.” So says Sue Brunning, curator of the European early medieval collections at the British Museum, in one Curator’s Corner videos that provide close-up views and explanations of a couple of particularly important Sutton Hoo artifacts.
This helmet and sword (with other Anglo-Saxon swords also brought out for comparison) are associated with King Rædwald of East Anglia. Beowulf, you’ll remember, opens with the funeral of the Danish king Scyld Scefing, and takes place entirely in Scandinavia. But the similarity between the elaborate ornamentation on the Sutton Hoo artifacts and that on comparable objects unearthed in eastern Sweden suggests a connection between those regions in that era, and Beowulf itself may have been composed in East Anglia. It takes some imagination to picture this seventeen-century-old helmet and sword intact and in their prime, but however they looked, one surely wouldn’t have turned down the extra confidence they’d have provided in a showdown with Grendel.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Pablo Picasso, you might start at the Museo Picasso Málaga, located in the artist’s Spanish birthplace. But to understand how his work developed throughout his life, you’ll have to get out of Spain — which is just what Picasso did to accelerate that development in the first place. At the turn of the twentieth century, an ambitious young European painter had to go to Paris, the continent’s art capital. Picasso ended up spending much of his life there, making it the most suitable location for the Musée Picasso, home to the single largest collection of his artworks, from paintings and sculptures to drawings and engravings, as well as an even larger archive of photographs, papers, and correspondence.
Now, you don’t actually have to make the trip to Paris to see these collections, or at least an increasingly large portion of their holdings. As Sarah Kuta reports at Smithsonian.com, thousands of Picasso’s artworks are “now accessible from anywhere with an internet connection, thanks to a new online archive created by the Picasso Museum. The museum has digitized thousands of Picasso’s artworks, essays, poems, interviews and other memorabilia, including items that have never been seen by the public before.” The project began last year, with the digitization of “around 19,000 photos”; if all goes according to plan, the museum will eventually make “an additional 200,000 documents” available online.
Browse the Musée Picasso’s online archive and you’ll find many works that, assuming you haven’t yet achieved full Picasso immersion, you won’t have seen before: Femme couchée lisant from 1953, seen at the top of the post, for instance, or the earlier Massacre en Corée just above. (Despite living in Korea myself, I had no idea that Picasso painted a Korean War-themed picture, much less an episode of history that took place in the very neighborhood where I used to live.) Not everything is by Picasso, a good deal having been made by artists with whom he was associated, like Man Ray, who took this 1937 photograph of Picasso and his Hispano-Suiza car. You can find much more of interest in the archive’s themed sections, like “Féminin / Masculin” and “Picasso iconophage,” which are navigable only in French — a language that, in any case, every Picassophile should learn. Enter the digital archive here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Back in 2016, New York City staged a month-long festival celebrating Albert Camus’ historic visit to NYC in 1946. One event in the festival featured actor Viggo Mortensen giving a reading of Camus’ lecture,“La Crise de l’homme” (“The Human Crisis”) at Columbia University–the very same place where Camus delivered the lecture 70 years earlier–down to the very day (March 28, 1946). The reading was initially captured on a cell phone, and broadcast live using Facebook live video. But then came a more polished recording, courtesy of Columbia’s Maison Française. Note that Mortensen takes the stage around the 11:45 mark. You can read a transcript of “The Human Crisis” here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
If you haven’t heard of Hugo Gernsback, you’ve surely heard of the Hugo Award. Next to the Nebula, it’s the most prestigious of science fiction prizes, bringing together in its ranks of winners such venerable authors as Ursula K. Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Neil Gaiman, Isaac Asimov, and just about every other sci-fi and fantasy luminary you could think of. It is indeed fitting that such an honor should be named for Gernsback, the Luxembourgian-American inventor who, in April of 1926, began publishing “the first and longest-running English-language magazine dedicated to what was then not quite yet called ‘science fiction,’” notes University of Virginia’s Andrew Ferguson at The Pulp Magazines Project. Amazing Stories provided an “exclusive outlet” for what Gernsback first called “scientifiction,” a genre he would “for better and for worse, define for the modern era.” You can read and download hundreds of Amazing Stories issues, from the first year of its publication to the last, at the Internet Archive.
Like the extensive list of Hugo Award winners, the back catalog of Amazing Stories encompasses a host of geniuses: Le Guin, Asimov, H.G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and many hundreds of lesser-known writers. But the magazine “was slow to develop,” writes Scott Van Wynsberghe. Its lurid covers lured some readers in, but its “first two years were dominated by preprinted material,” and Gernsback developed a reputation for financial dodginess and for not paying his writers well or at all.
By 1929, he sold the magazine and moved on to other ventures, none of them particularly successful. Amazing Stories soldiered on, under a series of editors and with widely varying readerships until it finally succumbed in 2005, after almost eighty years of publication. But that is no small feat in such an often unpopular field, with a publication, writes Ferguson, that was very often perceived as “garish and nonliterary.”
In hindsight, however, we can see Amazing Stories as a sci-fi time capsule and almost essential feature of the genre’s history, even if some of its content tended more toward the young adult adventure story than serious adult fiction. Its flashy covers set the bar for pulp magazines and comic books, especially in its run up to the fifties. After 1955, the year of the first Hugo Award, the magazine reached its peak under the editorship of Cele Goldsmith, who took over in 1959. Gone was much of the eyepopping B‑movie imagery of the earlier covers. Amazing Stories acquired a new level of relative polish and sophistication, and published many more “literary” writers, as in the 1959 issue above, which featured a “Book-Length Novel by Robert Bloch.”
This trend continued into the seventies, as you can see in the issue above, with a “complete short novel by Gordon Eklund” (and early fiction by George R.R. Martin). In 1982, Ferguson writes, Amazing Stories was sold “to Gary Gygax of D&D fame, and would never again regain the prominence it had before.” The magazine largely returned to its pulp roots, with covers that resembled those of supermarket paperbacks. Great writers continued to appear, however. And the magazine remained an important source for new science fiction—though much of it only in hindsight. As for Gernsback, his reputation waned considerably after his death in 1967.
“Within a decade,” writes Van Wynsberghe, “science fiction pundits were debating whether or not he had created a ‘ghetto’ for hack writers.” In 1986, novelist Brian Aldiss called Gernsback “one of the worst disasters ever to hit the science fiction field.” His 1911 novel, the ludicrously named Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 is considered “one of the worst science fiction novels in history,” writes Matthew Lasar. It may seem odd that the Oscar of the sci-fi world should be named for such a reviled figure. And yet, despite his pronounced lack of literary ability, Gernsback was a visionary. As a futurist, he made some startlingly accurate predictions, along with some not-so-accurate ones. As for his significant contribution to a new form of writing, writes Lasar, “It was in Amazing Stories that Gernsback first tried to nail down the science fiction idea.” As Ray Bradbury supposedly said, “Gernsback made us fall in love with the future.” Enter the Amazing Stories Internet Archive here.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
Cellists unwilling to settle for any but the finest instrument must, sooner or later, make a pilgrimage to Cremona — or rather, to the Cremonas. One is, of course, the city in Lombardy that was home to numerous pioneering master luthiers, up to and including Antonio Stradivari. The other, lesser known Cremona is a workshop in Hirakata, an exurb of Osaka. There, a master luthier named Takao Iwai plies his trade, which you can see on detailed display in the ProcessX video above. In just under half an hour, it compresses his painstaking six-month process of making a cello wholly by hand.
The name of Iwai’s shop evokes a rich history of stringed instrument-making, but it also pays tribute to the place where he honed his own skills. He did so under the luthier Gio Batta Morassi, described in a tribute after his death in 2018 as having “made a significant contribution to the revival of Cremona’s modern violin-making,” and indeed having become “the godfather of the modern Italian Cremona school.”
He seemed to have welcomed students no matter their land of origin — France, China, Russia, and of course Japan — and through them “introduced the art of Italian violin making to the world and raised the level of international violin making.”
Iwai is hardly the first dedicated Japanese craftsman we’ve featured here on Open Culture, nor even the first dedicated to a European art form: take the sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, whose decades of work on Sagrada Família has earned him a reputation in his homeland as “the Japanese Gaudí.” After his time in Italy, Iwai chose to return to Japan, bringing his mastery of a foreign craft into a native culture highly conducive to its practice, where traditional Japanese instruments have long been made with the very same sense of detail and technique. If you’d like to witness that as well while you’re in Osaka, do pay a visit to Tsuruya Gakki in the port town of Sakai; maybe you’ll even get to see a shamisen being made.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’ve studied French (or, indeed, been French) in the past couple of decades, you may well have played the card game Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux. Known in English as The Werewolves of Millers Hollow, it casts its players as hunters, thieves, seers, and other types of rural villagers in the distant past. By night, some players also happen to be werewolves, liable to devour the others in their sleep. Though such beings may never actually have existed, they loom fairly large in French popular culture still today — not least, perhaps, because they loomed even larger two and a half centuries ago, such that history now acknowledges a period called the French Werewolf Epidemic.
“In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère),” says the Public Domain Review. “The killer was thought to be a huge animal, which came to be known simply as ‘the Beast’; but while the creature’s name remained simple, its reputation soon grew extremely complex.”
In the press, which speculated on this fearsome creature’s preferred methods of attack (decapitation, blood-drinking, etc.), “illustrators had a field day representing the Beast, whose appearance was reported to be so monstrous it beggared belief.”
By the winter of 1764–65, “the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year.” In September of 1756, a lieutenant named François Antoine “shot the enormous ‘Wolf of Chazes,’ which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.” This didn’t stop the killings, but “by now the Royal Court had lost interest. The story had played itself out, and public attention had moved on to other matters. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.”
“The Beast’s stomach was filled with human remains and, by all posthumous accounts, did not look anything like a typical wolf,” says Dangerous Minds. “They were also able to ascertain that the animal was solely responsible for 95% of the attacks on humans from 1764 to 1767.” As to what the animal actually was, theories abound: maybe an unusually large or rabid wolf, maybe a hyena, maybe even a lion. As for the more fantastical theories that captured the public imagination of the time, they may have passed into the realm of myth, but those myths continue to inspire literature, film, television, and games. And as anyone who’s played Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux a few times understands, the werewolf’s luck usually runs out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
One of the busiest, most in-demand artists of the 19th century, Gustave Doré made his name illustrating works by such authors as Rabelais, Balzac, Milton, and Dante. In the 1860s, he created one of the most memorable and popular illustrated editions of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, while at the same time completing a set of engravings for an 1866 English Bible. He probably could have stopped there and assured his place in posterity, but he would go on to illustrate a 1872 guide to London, a new edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and several more hugely popular works.
In 1884, he produced 26 steel engravings for an illustrated edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s gloomy classic “The Raven.” Like all of his illustrations, the images are rich with detail, yet in contrast to his earlier work, particularly the fine lines of his Quixote, these engravings are softer, characterized by a deep chiaroscuro appropriate to the mood of the poem.
Above see the plate depicting the first lines of the poem, the haunted speaker, “weak and weary,” slumped over one of his many “quaint and curious volume[s] of forgotten lore.” Below, see the raven tapping, “louder than before,” at the window lattice.
By the time Doré’s edition saw publication, Poe’s most famous work had already achieved recognition as one of the greatest of American poems. Its author, however, had died over thirty years previous in near-poverty. A catalog description from a Penn State Library holding of one of Doré’s “Raven” editions compares the two artists:
The careers of these two men are fraught with both popular success and unmitigated disappointment. Doré enjoyed phenomenal monetary success as an illustrator in his life-time, however his true desire, to be acknowledged as a fine artist, was never realized. The critics of his day derided his abilities as an artist even as his popularity soared.
One might say that Poe suffered the opposite fate—recognized as a great artist in his lifetime, he never achieved financial stability. We learn from the Penn State Rare Collections library that Doré received the rough equivalent of $140,000 for his illustrated edition of “The Raven.” Poe, on the other hand, was paid approximately nine dollars for his most famous poem.
Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague De Camp at the Navy Yard in 1944
Robert Heinlein was born in 1907, which put him on the mature side by the time of the United States’ entry into World War II. Isaac Asimov, his younger colleague in science fiction, was born in 1920 (or thereabouts), and thus of prime fighting age. But in the event, they made most of their contribution to the war effort in the same place, the Naval Aviation Experimental Station in Philadelphia. By 1942, Heinlein had become the preeminent sci-fi writer in America, and the 22-year-old Asimov, a graduate student in chemistry at Columbia, had already made a name for himself in the field. It was Heinlein, who’d signed on to run a materials testing laboratory at the Yard, who brought Asimov into the military-research fold.
Having once been a Navy officer, discharged due to tuberculosis, Heinlein jumped at the chance to serve his country once again. During World War II, writes John Redford at A Niche in the Library of Babel, “his most direct contribution was in discussions of how to merge data from sonar, radar, and visual sightings with his friend Cal Laning, who captained a destroyer in the Pacific and was later a rear admiral. Laning used those ideas to good effect in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, the largest naval battle ever fought.” Asimov “was mainly involved in testing materials,” including those used to make “dye markers for airmen downed at sea. These were tubes of fluorescent chemicals that would form a big green patch on the water around the guy in his life jacket. The patch could be seen by searching aircraft.”
Asimov scholars should note that a test of those dye markers counts as one of just two occasions in his life that the aerophobic writer ever dared to fly. That may well have been the most harrowing of either his or Heinlein’s wartime experiences, they were both involved in the suitably speculative “Kamikaze Group,” which was meant to work on “invisibility, death rays, force fields, weather control” — or so Paul Malmont tells it in his novel The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. You can read a less heightened account of Heinlein and Asimov’s war in Astounding, Alec Nevala-Lee’s history of American science fiction.
Their time together in Philadephia wasn’t long. “As the war ended, Asimov was drafted into the Army, where he spent nine months before he was able to leave, where he returned to his studies and writing,” according to Andrew Liptak at Kirkus Reviews. “Heinlein contemplated returning to writing full time, as a viable career, rather than as a side exercise.” When he left the Naval Aviation Experimental Station, “he resumed writing and working on placing stories in magazines.” In the decades thereafter, Heinlein’s work took on an increasingly militaristic sensibility, and Asimov’s became more and more concerned with the enterprise of human civilization broadly speaking. But pinning down the influence of their war on their work is an exercise best left to the sci-fi scholars.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
