Of War and Beyond

Abstract

Abstract: As a conclusion, this chapter considers how the impact of that popular cinematic imagination changed during the war and immediate post-war years, that is, in the lead-up to SF’s coming of age in the 1950s, a coming of age that would be accompanied by film’s own explosion of SF narratives. The chapter argues that film had, during this period, become much more of a cultural “given,” a fact of life, and one that no longer evoked the same sort of SF-like “wonder” that it had during the pre-war era. While still visible in the rhetoric of SF and to a lesser extent in story content, film and the film industry would increasingly move in a different direction in this time, with SF literature, in both its pulp and hardcover forms, finding a new significance and respectability, while that burgeoning SF cinema would struggle to achieve a similarly respectable status.