From Gernsback to Campbell

One leading influence on the creation of the Golden age was John W. Campbell, who became legendary in the genre as an editor and publisher of many science fiction magazines, including Astounding Science Fiction. Under Campbell's editorship, science fiction developed more realism and psychological depth to characterization than it exhibited in the Gernsbackian "super science" era. The focus shifted from the gizmo itself to the characters using the gizmo. Most fans agree that the Golden Age began around 1938-39; the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction containing the first published stories of both A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov is sometimes considered the precise start of the Golden Ages.

Developments in the genre

Many of the most enduring science fiction tropes were established in Golden Age literature. Isaac Asimov established the canonical Three Laws of Robotics beginning with the 1941 short story Liar!, as well as the quintessential space opera with the Foundation series. Another frequent characteristic of Golden Age science fiction is the celebration of scientific achievement and the sense of wonder; Asimov's short story Nightfall exemplifies this, as in a single night a planet's civilization is overwhelmed by the revelation of the vastness of the universe. Robert Heinlein's 1950s novels, such as The Puppet Masters, Double Star, and Starship Troopers, express the libertarian ideology that runs through much of Golden Age science fiction.

The Golden Age also saw the re-emergence of the religious or spiritual themes—central to so much proto-science fiction before the pulp era—that Hugo Gernsback had tried to eliminate in his vision of "scientifiction". Among the most significant such Golden Age narratives are: Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles; Blish's A Case of Conscience; and Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Bradbury uses his future visions presented in The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 to express his "deeply emotional reactions to a trauma of his generation: the loss or denial of intellectual freedom" (del Rey 57). Other writers directed their prose against the overwhelming sense of depersonalization found in the 50s, a phase Aldiss calls "The Dehumanization in the Face of Stars" theme (252). All critics, however, describe this post-World War II decade as a period of transition for the genre, and harbinger of the atomic era. One notable hard science example of this atomic-age fiction was a novel by female author Judith Merril called Shadow on the Hearth, published in 1950.

Cultural significance

As a phenomenon that affected the psyches of a great many adolescents during World War II and the ensuing Cold War, science fiction's Golden Age has left a lasting impression upon society. The beginning of the Golden Age coincided with the first Worldcon in 1939 and, especially for its most involved fans, science fiction was becoming a powerful social force. The genre, particularly during its Golden Age, had significant, if somewhat indirect, effects upon leaders in the military, information technology, Hollywood and science itself, especially biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry.

The impression of many parents at the time, however, was often tinged with dismay and intolerance, sometimes sparked by the racy cover illustrations of pulp science fiction. The stereotypical cover of a science fiction pulp magazine depicted a brass-bikini-clad woman at the mercy of a bug-eyed monster.