whole positive in nature, even as nonfiction writers like Coblentz were grappling with the negative ramifications of evolutionary theory. The man who coined the term science fiction, Hugo Gernsback, founded the first magazine dedicated to speculative fiction called Amazing Stories in 1926. Gernsback, an immigrant who came to the United States and became enamored of the American parable of the Edisonian inventor, wanted to publish fiction that would educate readers about science.114 Gernsback had so much faith in the ability of fiction to communicate scientific and technological ideas that he proposed “science fiction writers should be able to take out provisional patents on the devices they predicted in their stories.”115
Gernsback’s faith in technology led him to announce as editorial policy in 1931 that his magazine would not publish stories in which machines subjugated humans or in which scientists used their power to conquer the world.116 This policy implies that such stories were being written and submitted, though rejected by Gernsback, who had a powerful influence on the development of the science fiction genre in the United States. Despite Gernsback’s power, several works of fiction by both science fiction and mainstream writers appeared in the 1930s that projected current trends into the future and saw disaster. The Great Depression of the thirties may have tempered the optimism of science fiction of prior decades; these works resembled the scientific romances of H. G. Wells rather than the preceding American pulp science fiction.
Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, writers who collaborated on six books, described a near encounter with human extinction in When Worlds Collide (1932). The League of the Last Days is the name of the group of scientists who determines that two planets are heading toward Earth and that the larger one will smash into Earth. The reaction of the characters to the threat of destruction is similar to the reaction of later atomic-age characters to the threat of nuclear war. One wealthy character becomes enraptured at the news: “Delicious, isn’t it, to think of the end of all this? I feel stimulated, don’t you? All of it—going to pieces! I feel like saying, ‘Thank God!’ I was sick of it. Everyone was. Civilization’s a wretched parody. Evidently there was a just and judging God, after all.”117 Others also conclude that it must be the work of God, punishing humanity for its sins, or proof that humanity is so insignificant as to mean nothing in the larger natural processes of the world, themes that would recur in post-1945 American science fiction.118
The Earth does not escape destruction, but humans discover that the second planet that passes very close to Earth is capable of supporting life, and a small remnant of humanity is sent there to carry on the species. The survivors decide that they must create a better civilization, saying, “When I recollect the filth of our cities, the greed of individuals and of nations, the savagery of war, the horrors of pauperism permitted to exist side by side with luxury and wealth, our selfishness, hates, diseases, filth—all the hideousness we called civilization—I cannot regret that the world which was afflicted by us is flying in fragments, utterly incapable of rehabilitation, about the sun.”119 In this way the End by natural means leads to a secular millennium, mirroring Christ’s Second Coming and the Final Judgment, followed by an era of peace.120
Not only science fiction authors expressed anxiety in the 1930s over what the future held. Stephen Vincent Benét, an American poet and author, published a short story in 1937 and a poem in 1938 that imagined wars so devastating that they decimate the human race. Benét’s short story “The Place of the Gods,” in the Saturday Evening Post (later republished as “By the Waters of Babylon”), presaged later apocalyptic fiction about humans eking out primitive existences after a nuclear war. The title of the story refers to the ruins of New York City, which the main character visits on a quest to prove his manhood. As he climbs through the remains of “the place of the gods,” he thinks to himself: “When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know. It was fire falling out of the sky and a mist that poisoned. It was the time of the Great Burning and the Destruction.”121
Though the story ends on an optimistic note with the narrator declaring, “We must build again,” Benét followed up the story with a poem the following year in the New Yorker.122 “Nightmare for Future Reference” looked forward to a third world war—“the one between us and them.”123 The poem describes the second year of the war when the birthrate decreases precipitously; as a result, women all over the world destroy the centers of government, and the war ends. Nevertheless, children do not start being born again, and the narrator in the poem concludes, “Well, we had a long run. That’s something.”124 Though not strictly grounded in science, Benét’s anticipation of wars so catastrophic captured the feeling that technology had advanced to the degree that humanity might not be able to withstand any further conflicts.
While promoters of science in the United States only gradually questioned the idea of progress, at the core of Christian premillennialism was the idea that no real progress was possible because sin had doomed the world. In the late nineteenth century, the new notion of progress as the accumulation of knowledge sanctioned rapid urbanization and industrialization. Evangelicals not only rejected the possibility of social progress but also pegged limits to the knowledge humans could attain on their own. For disillusioned Americans who didn’t see a progressive narrative shaping their own lives, the alternative narrative of dispensational premillennialism may have made more sense.125
The growth of dispensationalism occurred during the same time that the white South returned to power after the war. The racist terror in scientific apocalypticism was largely lacking in Bible prophecy, but so was the participation of African American evangelicals. Premillennialism was attractive to black evangelicals in a way that differed from white evangelicals. Premillennialism fit easily into the tradition of seeing the end of racial injustice as part of God’s promise for a new world. Yet premillennialism could also excuse inaction on civil rights. That tension between anticipating the End while still working for betterment in the present was evident among white dispensationalists in other ways, but the white architects of dispensational premillennialism most often just ignored black evangelicals on theological matters.126 White Southerners and Midwesterners’ ecumenical approach to Bible prophecy may have helped heal the sectional divisions within Protestantism that the war created, but it did nothing to further racial relations.
As white conservative evangelicals exchanged dispensationalist ideas in the late 1800s, they also debated whether science could inform their interpretations of Bible prophecy. A congregational minister, E. P. Goodwin, at an 1886 prophecy conference in Chicago, condemned modernists who tried to temper biblical accounts of miracles, creation, and the end of the world with scientific conclusions: “The only question for us is, what do these authorities—these books of God’s revealed will teach? No matter whether we can understand or explain, or harmonize their teachings with our view of things or not. They give us what God says, and we believe them because of that, and not because of our ability to explain or expound them.”127 In addition to believing that the Bible should be read as a God-inspired, infallible source, Goodwin criticized the notion that events in the Bible must be compatible with known physical laws: “With Him nothing is impossible, and the resources of omnipotence are as ample now as when they availed, however unphilosophically, or in contravention of natural law, to create a universe out of nothing, and make the original man out of the dust of the earth.”128 At the same conference, a Baptist minister, J. D. Herr, tackled the subject of a naturalistic end of the world, seizing on the uncertainty of how the world might end without God as a weakness: “Scientists have attempted to demonstrate the peculiar methods by which the present world is to be destroyed, together with the heavenly bodies beyond us. Yet no theory has ever been promulged receiving a hearty and unhesitating approval from intelligent thinkers.… In the Bible alone do we find the sure word of prophecy.”129 American premillennialists in the late nineteenth century, like Goodwin and Herr, were not interested in using scientific data to bolster the Bible; in their opinion, science was only being used to undermine it.
This concern continued into the twentieth century, particularly when conservative evangelicals responded to modernist attacks
