July 16, 2021 • 18 mins
It's divisive figures week! Holly and Tracy discuss the difficulty in sorting out the reality of Lorenz's work, because of the polarized view of him within the medical community. Then talk turns to Hugo Gernsback, and the ongoing divide over him.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about
Adolph Larenz this week, who is is interesting, fascinating, troubling.
(00:24):
The thing that really struck me in doing research on
him was this whole controversy within the medical community and
how difficult it can be in a situation like that
to tease out the reality from all of the varying
and very vehement opinions. Right that, um I mentioned it,
(00:48):
they're even you know, within statements that criticized his work
also kind of contradicted themselves as saying, we already do
that work, and it's like wait, wait, wait, wait wait.
Um So that was like a fast, neating and tricky
part to me because I'm not a doctor. Might know
that might shock you, but I'm not. Uh, And it's
hard I think even I mean, you see it even
(01:10):
within the medical community for people to evaluate, because there
were some doctors who were like, no, he's great, what
do you do him? And others who were really angry
about it, and and the public loved him, which adds
a whole other layer, because whether any of those people
criticizing or supporting him were conscious of it, they were
surely being impacted by the public opinion of him, and
(01:33):
by the fact that he was literally on the front
pages of papers all the time whenever he came right.
This is one of those cases where it's recent history
and it's still difficult to teach because you can't psychoanalyze
every single person, like even if and even if in
the moment you had psychologists standing by to do that work,
(01:54):
you would probably still not get a full picture. So
those are always interesting to me. I just realized, uh
so as we were talking in that in the episode,
I was talking about my grandmother who had scoliosis, and
I said that she had no treatment for it beyond
adjusting the hems of her skarts. I don't actually know.
It's totally possible that some time before I was born
(02:15):
she did have some kind of treatment, but the end
result was still that she had a pretty pronounced spinal
curvature that uh, you know, required her to alter all
over clothing. But then also I remember she was diagnosed
I think with mitral valve prolapse based on what the
blood flow rushing through her heart sounded like through as
(02:36):
a stethoscope. And it turned out that it was really
that her heart was tipped because of the curvature and
um and uh and so that was like a whole
process of like unexpected side effects. It also reminded me
of whichever, um I think it was Deanie. Was that
(02:57):
the Judy Bloom book that was about scoliosis. Don't remember,
I was like a snooty child who didn't read Judy Bloom.
I was like busy with other things. And let me
just tell you, as an adult, no, no shade of
Judy Bloom, and there as a kid, I had this
weird bias against it, like that's what all of the
(03:20):
mainstream girls read that are not intellectuals. I'm not, which
is just what a pretentious little weasel I was, and
in some ways continue to be. Yeah, well I just
google it on my phone and yes, that is Deany
by Judy Bloom, a book that I probably read more
than once because since scoliosis runs in families really often,
(03:42):
like I was constantly being monitored to see how my
spine was doing, um and so like this was a
book that I read a lot in my teen years
as I was going through that uncertainty. Yeah. The other
thing that is really interesting that became kind of an
in sharp contrast and appearance to me um was that,
(04:06):
you know, I mentioned at the top that this came
up in our Criminalia episode about the person that masqueraded
as a doctor to assist him. And what's very interesting
is that if you look at stories of that person's life,
they definitely kind of couch it as though he was
seeking he was practicing medicine, which he was not actually.
(04:29):
I mean, obviously he was representing himself as a doctor,
but he wasn't doing hands on care with patients, which
is something that gets left out, and it really wasn't
until I was like looking at old archival newspapers covering
the story that they were the ones pointing out, you know,
and even in because it's much more sensational to think
the worst, even in pretty like buried parts of the
(04:51):
article where it'd be like, oh no, no, he just
he was just writing things down. He wasn't touching patients,
but that's never part of it. And you see how
like depending on what the story is being presented as
how those details shift. And it's just a good reminder
to always be digging and looking in the margins and
finding the buried lead in some cases. Um. Yeah, I
(05:19):
have m many thoughts about the sort of backbiting and
in fighting amongst the medical community, especially, you know, once
it becomes something. We've talked on the show many times
before about um, scientific disagreements and people feeling that they
(05:39):
weren't getting credit or that they had been overlooked in
in discussions of something. But this one is also unique
because it does play out in the papers in a
very public way at a time when the public was
very big on the person involved, and so it's a
it's just an interesting look at how those things get
handled by the press, particularly at that period of time
(06:03):
in the twenties and thirties. Yeah, I could. I could
look at professional disagreements play on the press all day,
every day. As long as they're in the past, that's
more fun. There have been times when I've been trying
to figure out what to do a podcast on next
that I've been googling things like historical scientific disputes. Yeah. Um,
(06:25):
it is also to me really really interesting. Like I said,
we contrade, we talked about the contradiction of of medical
practitioners who simultaneously criticized his work and said they were
doing the same work. But it's also interesting to me
that most of them acknowledge that he had developed all
of these techniques, but then they kind of wanted him
to shut up and get out of the country, which
(06:48):
is a whole other like layer to that whole Like
what is really the crux of the problem, especially when
a lot of a lot of people were so in
favor of his work and in favor of supporting him
that they were willing to like make sure he got
to sit for board exams in a much you know,
(07:09):
quicker process than the average person would be able to
have access to, etcetera. Um. And then it always gets
ruined by somebody being really able at gross in some way. Yeah. Yeah,
that is the other thing about that coverage, and and
we talked about it some in the show, just the
way that language has changed around orthopedic issues, disability of
(07:33):
any kind the medical community. Like, there's so many headlines
from that period talking about his work that just make
you cringe, and you look at them today and you
realize we're still figuring a lot of things out. I'm
sure in another fifty years people will cringe at all
of today's headlines for being incredibly ignorant. Always in motion
(07:58):
is the future. Uh. We talked about Hugo Gernsbach or
Gern's back. I'll see. I'll hear people say all the time.
I sometimes use them interchangeably, just to to roll with
the flow and cover all bases. Yeah. We had a
whole conversation that we cut out of the show that
I say, we are our producer Casey or whoever is
(08:21):
helping Casey with edits. Uh, cut that out for us
how to say it? Yeah, because she'll hear it both ways.
And I think he's it's one of those names that
is common enough, you know, in a particular area that
lots of people have said it lots of different ways.
So I am pronunciation has transcended whatever his lifetime pronunciation was.
(08:44):
In my opinion, he's an obviously an interesting one. But
he's also interesting because there's so much that you've got
to leave out to do an episode on him that
isn't really worth putting in and expanding it to a
two fur because it's really like, boy, he sure was
a nutty eccentric um And it's just more and more
evidence of that. Um, there's one thing that I didn't
(09:05):
mention because again I never found a hard bit of
evidence for it that he apparently went through a period
when he was quite young where he gambled a lot,
but he eventually lost enough that he was like, oh,
I should stop doing that. Yeah, Um, I had. There
was a write up about him in Life magazine in
the nineteen fifties and there's a quote in it that
(09:26):
made me laugh so hard because they're talking about him
as a writer, and you know, he did obviously write fiction,
but was, as we said several times, not known for
being a great writer. And this journalist is specifically mentioning
the novelization that came out of his uh, his initial
modern electric series that he did to fill out pages,
(09:49):
and says to describe the book as a novel is
stretching the definition of that word to the screech point.
You know, it's cute. Alice is from Switzerland. There's no crazy,
very simplified, easy to digest love trope in there. Like
(10:11):
everything is a very simple story to follow. Nothing gets
too confusing. Um, there were a lot of, um, like
I said, details about him that I didn't put in.
One of the things that I saw that I really
enjoyed was that he didn't um believe in funerals um
because he really what he's saying is that he doesn't
(10:33):
believe in our current system of burying people in cemeteries
because in his view, he thought that over time, people
will keep dying until the entire earth has to be
a graveyard. I mean, he's not wrong, right. He came
up with this idea that we should freeze all of
our corpses and shoot him into space at speeds that
(10:55):
are calculated to remove them from our solar system. That
seems uh man, just tossing your garbage in the neighbors. Yeah,
that's have there's levels of problems with that. Um. Somehow,
that reminds me, though of a thing that I was
reading where there are not a lot of places in
the world. I it's I don't want to misspeak, because
(11:19):
I'm like recalling an an article that I read some
stretch of time ago. But it was basically about how
the idea that your loved ones remains are going to
be buried in this cemetery in perpetuity is not a
universal idea, and that there are lots of places where
you basically you pay rent on the grave site, and
(11:41):
if you have no surviving relatives paying the rent on
that grave site anymore, it's going to be somebody else's UM.
For that reason of like, where we continue to give
each person their own grave site, then eventually it's all
grave sites. It reminds me of UM Did You Uch
Far Escape? When it was on some There was one
(12:03):
episode where Rigel, who was one of the puppet characters,
was sort of having this concept of of UM cemeteries
explained to him. And I won't quote it accurately because
I'm literally going from very distant memory, but he was like,
you keep your dead right there with you. It was
just horrified by the idea. And if you watch Futurama,
(12:26):
eventually we start burying people uh in other places because
we'll have you know, we'll need to have satellite cemeteries
to handle it. Yeah. Well, and there's culturally so many
different UH ways of dealing with death and what to
do with remains after death, Like none of these things
(12:46):
are universal at all. That was a weird little digression.
We just went on the best kind UM. One of
the things I love reading reading Gernsbeck's work is that
you know, at the time him he was writing a
lot of his early stuff, the word technology had not
been coined yet, and so it is that fun. I mean,
(13:08):
to me, this is one of the delights of history,
is seeing the ways that people kind of talked around
concepts that didn't have a name yet. I mean, even
scientifiction is hilarious and charming. This is also a thing
I didn't I didn't get into you, he claimed. I mean,
he came up with the word scientifiction, but he also
(13:28):
claimed that he came up with the word television and
some other things. You know. He was he was not
like the not not afraid to be his own hype man.
He made a lot of claims. He made a lot
of claims, and he I mean, he did have a
lot of um insightful predictions about things that would come
to fruition, but also lots that were completely cockamami. He
(13:53):
apparently also was known to send food back in restaurants
if it didn't arrive at the table in a way
that he liked, like to all be plated perfectly, and
he was not afraid to send it back several times. Yeah,
don't don't do that, which to me is just like
pers nicketty, but um, you know, I'm usually too hungry.
I don't care. It's fine. Fine, is it in front
(14:15):
of me? Do I have a fork? Yeah? I think
the only time I've ever sent something back in a
restaurant like it was literally burns to the point of
not being pleasing to eat anymore, and not a dish
that was supposed to be charred in any way. Right, right. Otherwise,
(14:37):
even if I get something and it's just not so
my taste, I'm I'm not sending it back. Yeah. It
is also just I love sort of doing comparative reads
on what much later people working in the science fiction
space think about him, because it is very polarized. There
are people who still sort of lauded him. Is like
this charming nut of a man who really like created
(15:01):
this this entire you know, the concepts with his his
focus on community of fandom and and this idea of
science fiction is this place where we could think about
the future. But then there are others who are like,
he was a problem in all the ways, and why
are we why are we lauding him as this masterful,
amazing person. Yeah, there's there's so much gatekeeping in the
(15:26):
world of science fiction, both among like the writing aspect
and some in some cases and among the fandom, like
from all sides, there can be a lot of gatekeeping.
And so the idea that somebody who was so central
to establishing the idea that science fiction was its own
(15:46):
genre was like, here's the mathematical formula of what counts
like that drove me up a lall. Yeah, well that
and that it had to be predictive of the future,
when there's a lot of science fiction that is not
that but as you know, uh speculates on on other
(16:07):
things or or is born of a what if scenario
of the past, um, which yeah, it's a little But
then when you read his stuff, as we said, he
would contradict himself all the time, and to him, I
think he was just like, well, I'm just spitballing, And
so he didn't see it as this big contradictory thing.
(16:28):
He didn't even see himself really as like, I don't
think as the arbiter of all these things. He was
just kind of like, bad, this is how I'm thinking
about it, This is how I But it also gets
into that idea of a cult of personality right where
there are people even now who will refer to him
as like uncle Hugo, as though he's still like a
(16:49):
person in their lives even though they have never met
him and he has never been part of their you know,
personal or professional development. And so that's the other thing
of like, how much of that is him saying this
is what I say, and how it has to be
versus that community that he was putting together going well,
Hugo says, So that's the rule. I rolled my eyes, right,
(17:09):
I mean, this is part of the problematic aspect of
things like that, um and and even those two opposing
viewpoints we mentioned regarding changing the name to Wonder Stories,
it's pretty exemplary of how problematic that can be. Right,
when everyone has has a voice, you're going to get
some love that are not great takes. That's just the
(17:32):
bottom line, uh, Which not to say that everyone shouldn't
have their own take, but you have to be able
to discern the good from the bad. Uh. Once again,
thanks for spending time with us this week. If you're
headed into a weekend with time off, having absolutely great
(17:52):
time and and do lots of things that bring you joy.
If you don't have time off and you're working, try
to find those things that bring you joy anyway best
you can. We're cheering for you. We will be right
back here tomorrow with the classic episode and on Monday
with news stories. Stuff you missed in History. Class is
(18:14):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So we talked about
Adolph Larenz this week, who is is interesting, fascinating, troubling.
(00:24):
The thing that really struck me in doing research on
him was this whole controversy within the medical community and
how difficult it can be in a situation like that
to tease out the reality from all of the varying
and very vehement opinions. Right that, um I mentioned it,
(00:48):
they're even you know, within statements that criticized his work
also kind of contradicted themselves as saying, we already do
that work, and it's like wait, wait, wait, wait wait.
Um So that was like a fast, neating and tricky
part to me because I'm not a doctor. Might know
that might shock you, but I'm not. Uh, And it's
hard I think even I mean, you see it even
(01:10):
within the medical community for people to evaluate, because there
were some doctors who were like, no, he's great, what
do you do him? And others who were really angry
about it, and and the public loved him, which adds
a whole other layer, because whether any of those people
criticizing or supporting him were conscious of it, they were
surely being impacted by the public opinion of him, and
(01:33):
by the fact that he was literally on the front
pages of papers all the time whenever he came right.
This is one of those cases where it's recent history
and it's still difficult to teach because you can't psychoanalyze
every single person, like even if and even if in
the moment you had psychologists standing by to do that work,
(01:54):
you would probably still not get a full picture. So
those are always interesting to me. I just realized, uh
so as we were talking in that in the episode,
I was talking about my grandmother who had scoliosis, and
I said that she had no treatment for it beyond
adjusting the hems of her skarts. I don't actually know.
It's totally possible that some time before I was born
(02:15):
she did have some kind of treatment, but the end
result was still that she had a pretty pronounced spinal
curvature that uh, you know, required her to alter all
over clothing. But then also I remember she was diagnosed
I think with mitral valve prolapse based on what the
blood flow rushing through her heart sounded like through as
(02:36):
a stethoscope. And it turned out that it was really
that her heart was tipped because of the curvature and
um and uh and so that was like a whole
process of like unexpected side effects. It also reminded me
of whichever, um I think it was Deanie. Was that
(02:57):
the Judy Bloom book that was about scoliosis. Don't remember,
I was like a snooty child who didn't read Judy Bloom.
I was like busy with other things. And let me
just tell you, as an adult, no, no shade of
Judy Bloom, and there as a kid, I had this
weird bias against it, like that's what all of the
(03:20):
mainstream girls read that are not intellectuals. I'm not, which
is just what a pretentious little weasel I was, and
in some ways continue to be. Yeah, well I just
google it on my phone and yes, that is Deany
by Judy Bloom, a book that I probably read more
than once because since scoliosis runs in families really often,
(03:42):
like I was constantly being monitored to see how my
spine was doing, um and so like this was a
book that I read a lot in my teen years
as I was going through that uncertainty. Yeah. The other
thing that is really interesting that became kind of an
in sharp contrast and appearance to me um was that,
(04:06):
you know, I mentioned at the top that this came
up in our Criminalia episode about the person that masqueraded
as a doctor to assist him. And what's very interesting
is that if you look at stories of that person's life,
they definitely kind of couch it as though he was
seeking he was practicing medicine, which he was not actually.
(04:29):
I mean, obviously he was representing himself as a doctor,
but he wasn't doing hands on care with patients, which
is something that gets left out, and it really wasn't
until I was like looking at old archival newspapers covering
the story that they were the ones pointing out, you know,
and even in because it's much more sensational to think
the worst, even in pretty like buried parts of the
(04:51):
article where it'd be like, oh no, no, he just
he was just writing things down. He wasn't touching patients,
but that's never part of it. And you see how
like depending on what the story is being presented as
how those details shift. And it's just a good reminder
to always be digging and looking in the margins and
finding the buried lead in some cases. Um. Yeah, I
(05:19):
have m many thoughts about the sort of backbiting and
in fighting amongst the medical community, especially, you know, once
it becomes something. We've talked on the show many times
before about um, scientific disagreements and people feeling that they
(05:39):
weren't getting credit or that they had been overlooked in
in discussions of something. But this one is also unique
because it does play out in the papers in a
very public way at a time when the public was
very big on the person involved, and so it's a
it's just an interesting look at how those things get
handled by the press, particularly at that period of time
(06:03):
in the twenties and thirties. Yeah, I could. I could
look at professional disagreements play on the press all day,
every day. As long as they're in the past, that's
more fun. There have been times when I've been trying
to figure out what to do a podcast on next
that I've been googling things like historical scientific disputes. Yeah. Um,
(06:25):
it is also to me really really interesting. Like I said,
we contrade, we talked about the contradiction of of medical
practitioners who simultaneously criticized his work and said they were
doing the same work. But it's also interesting to me
that most of them acknowledge that he had developed all
of these techniques, but then they kind of wanted him
to shut up and get out of the country, which
(06:48):
is a whole other like layer to that whole Like
what is really the crux of the problem, especially when
a lot of a lot of people were so in
favor of his work and in favor of supporting him
that they were willing to like make sure he got
to sit for board exams in a much you know,
(07:09):
quicker process than the average person would be able to
have access to, etcetera. Um. And then it always gets
ruined by somebody being really able at gross in some way. Yeah. Yeah,
that is the other thing about that coverage, and and
we talked about it some in the show, just the
way that language has changed around orthopedic issues, disability of
(07:33):
any kind the medical community. Like, there's so many headlines
from that period talking about his work that just make
you cringe, and you look at them today and you
realize we're still figuring a lot of things out. I'm
sure in another fifty years people will cringe at all
of today's headlines for being incredibly ignorant. Always in motion
(07:58):
is the future. Uh. We talked about Hugo Gernsbach or
Gern's back. I'll see. I'll hear people say all the time.
I sometimes use them interchangeably, just to to roll with
the flow and cover all bases. Yeah. We had a
whole conversation that we cut out of the show that
I say, we are our producer Casey or whoever is
(08:21):
helping Casey with edits. Uh, cut that out for us
how to say it? Yeah, because she'll hear it both ways.
And I think he's it's one of those names that
is common enough, you know, in a particular area that
lots of people have said it lots of different ways.
So I am pronunciation has transcended whatever his lifetime pronunciation was.
(08:44):
In my opinion, he's an obviously an interesting one. But
he's also interesting because there's so much that you've got
to leave out to do an episode on him that
isn't really worth putting in and expanding it to a
two fur because it's really like, boy, he sure was
a nutty eccentric um And it's just more and more
evidence of that. Um, there's one thing that I didn't
(09:05):
mention because again I never found a hard bit of
evidence for it that he apparently went through a period
when he was quite young where he gambled a lot,
but he eventually lost enough that he was like, oh,
I should stop doing that. Yeah, Um, I had. There
was a write up about him in Life magazine in
the nineteen fifties and there's a quote in it that
(09:26):
made me laugh so hard because they're talking about him
as a writer, and you know, he did obviously write fiction,
but was, as we said several times, not known for
being a great writer. And this journalist is specifically mentioning
the novelization that came out of his uh, his initial
modern electric series that he did to fill out pages,
(09:49):
and says to describe the book as a novel is
stretching the definition of that word to the screech point.
You know, it's cute. Alice is from Switzerland. There's no crazy,
very simplified, easy to digest love trope in there. Like
(10:11):
everything is a very simple story to follow. Nothing gets
too confusing. Um, there were a lot of, um, like
I said, details about him that I didn't put in.
One of the things that I saw that I really
enjoyed was that he didn't um believe in funerals um
because he really what he's saying is that he doesn't
(10:33):
believe in our current system of burying people in cemeteries
because in his view, he thought that over time, people
will keep dying until the entire earth has to be
a graveyard. I mean, he's not wrong, right. He came
up with this idea that we should freeze all of
our corpses and shoot him into space at speeds that
(10:55):
are calculated to remove them from our solar system. That
seems uh man, just tossing your garbage in the neighbors. Yeah,
that's have there's levels of problems with that. Um. Somehow,
that reminds me, though of a thing that I was
reading where there are not a lot of places in
the world. I it's I don't want to misspeak, because
(11:19):
I'm like recalling an an article that I read some
stretch of time ago. But it was basically about how
the idea that your loved ones remains are going to
be buried in this cemetery in perpetuity is not a
universal idea, and that there are lots of places where
you basically you pay rent on the grave site, and
(11:41):
if you have no surviving relatives paying the rent on
that grave site anymore, it's going to be somebody else's UM.
For that reason of like, where we continue to give
each person their own grave site, then eventually it's all
grave sites. It reminds me of UM Did You Uch
Far Escape? When it was on some There was one
(12:03):
episode where Rigel, who was one of the puppet characters,
was sort of having this concept of of UM cemeteries
explained to him. And I won't quote it accurately because
I'm literally going from very distant memory, but he was like,
you keep your dead right there with you. It was
just horrified by the idea. And if you watch Futurama,
(12:26):
eventually we start burying people uh in other places because
we'll have you know, we'll need to have satellite cemeteries
to handle it. Yeah. Well, and there's culturally so many
different UH ways of dealing with death and what to
do with remains after death, Like none of these things
(12:46):
are universal at all. That was a weird little digression.
We just went on the best kind UM. One of
the things I love reading reading Gernsbeck's work is that
you know, at the time him he was writing a
lot of his early stuff, the word technology had not
been coined yet, and so it is that fun. I mean,
(13:08):
to me, this is one of the delights of history,
is seeing the ways that people kind of talked around
concepts that didn't have a name yet. I mean, even
scientifiction is hilarious and charming. This is also a thing
I didn't I didn't get into you, he claimed. I mean,
he came up with the word scientifiction, but he also
(13:28):
claimed that he came up with the word television and
some other things. You know. He was he was not
like the not not afraid to be his own hype man.
He made a lot of claims. He made a lot
of claims, and he I mean, he did have a
lot of um insightful predictions about things that would come
to fruition, but also lots that were completely cockamami. He
(13:53):
apparently also was known to send food back in restaurants
if it didn't arrive at the table in a way
that he liked, like to all be plated perfectly, and
he was not afraid to send it back several times. Yeah,
don't don't do that, which to me is just like
pers nicketty, but um, you know, I'm usually too hungry.
I don't care. It's fine. Fine, is it in front
(14:15):
of me? Do I have a fork? Yeah? I think
the only time I've ever sent something back in a
restaurant like it was literally burns to the point of
not being pleasing to eat anymore, and not a dish
that was supposed to be charred in any way. Right, right. Otherwise,
(14:37):
even if I get something and it's just not so
my taste, I'm I'm not sending it back. Yeah. It
is also just I love sort of doing comparative reads
on what much later people working in the science fiction
space think about him, because it is very polarized. There
are people who still sort of lauded him. Is like
this charming nut of a man who really like created
(15:01):
this this entire you know, the concepts with his his
focus on community of fandom and and this idea of
science fiction is this place where we could think about
the future. But then there are others who are like,
he was a problem in all the ways, and why
are we why are we lauding him as this masterful,
amazing person. Yeah, there's there's so much gatekeeping in the
(15:26):
world of science fiction, both among like the writing aspect
and some in some cases and among the fandom, like
from all sides, there can be a lot of gatekeeping.
And so the idea that somebody who was so central
to establishing the idea that science fiction was its own
(15:46):
genre was like, here's the mathematical formula of what counts
like that drove me up a lall. Yeah, well that
and that it had to be predictive of the future,
when there's a lot of science fiction that is not
that but as you know, uh speculates on on other
(16:07):
things or or is born of a what if scenario
of the past, um, which yeah, it's a little But
then when you read his stuff, as we said, he
would contradict himself all the time, and to him, I
think he was just like, well, I'm just spitballing, And
so he didn't see it as this big contradictory thing.
(16:28):
He didn't even see himself really as like, I don't
think as the arbiter of all these things. He was
just kind of like, bad, this is how I'm thinking
about it, This is how I But it also gets
into that idea of a cult of personality right where
there are people even now who will refer to him
as like uncle Hugo, as though he's still like a
(16:49):
person in their lives even though they have never met
him and he has never been part of their you know,
personal or professional development. And so that's the other thing
of like, how much of that is him saying this
is what I say, and how it has to be
versus that community that he was putting together going well,
Hugo says, So that's the rule. I rolled my eyes, right,
(17:09):
I mean, this is part of the problematic aspect of
things like that, um and and even those two opposing
viewpoints we mentioned regarding changing the name to Wonder Stories,
it's pretty exemplary of how problematic that can be. Right,
when everyone has has a voice, you're going to get
some love that are not great takes. That's just the
(17:32):
bottom line, uh, Which not to say that everyone shouldn't
have their own take, but you have to be able
to discern the good from the bad. Uh. Once again,
thanks for spending time with us this week. If you're
headed into a weekend with time off, having absolutely great
(17:52):
time and and do lots of things that bring you joy.
If you don't have time off and you're working, try
to find those things that bring you joy anyway best
you can. We're cheering for you. We will be right
back here tomorrow with the classic episode and on Monday
with news stories. Stuff you missed in History. Class is
(18:14):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com