Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 295we want fi ction not to read a composite thing in which the science di-
verts us from the fi ction, and the fi ction is not more imaginary than the
pseudo- science.” He expressed the vain hope that the scientifi c romance
would not have a bright future.^53 Over the course of the twentieth century,
science fi ction became a hugely popular genre of literature, as well as radio
and television shows and movies. And though the “father of science fi c-
tion,” Hugo Gernsback, did his best to turn it into a means of popularizing
orthodox science, it continued to be a source of worry for those focused
on the eradication of pseudoscientifi c ideas.^54
One of the consequences of depictions of pseudoscience that made it
essentially popular in character (and that sometimes also tended to view
all popular knowledge as potentially pseudoscientifi c) was the perception
of the United States, “always prolifi c in strange types,” as “especially fa-
vored in the development of all sorts of pseudo- scientifi c cults and anti
societies.”^55 In many ways, that perception was facilitated by the associa-
tion of American culture with democracy, heightened by early American
public rhetoric and the impressions of a stream of European visitors dur-
ing the early 1800s. However, well before the American Revolution, many
Europeans and colonials had been aware of the dangers of democracy,
including its potential enshrinement of the lowest common denominator
and the consequent loss of order, disrespect for orthodoxy, and willing-
ness to entertain novel, utopian, or simply weird notions. By the early
1900s, and particularly after the Great War, those concerns were coupled
with increasing worries about the unreliability of the public among Amer-
ican intellectuals, including Walter Lippmann. By the second half of the
twentieth century, assertions that such unorthodoxies as belief in UFOs
or support for scientifi c creationism were uniquely American had become
fairly common, even when those assertions were totally untrue. In fact,
despite claims to the contrary by skeptics and critics, both the UFO phe-
nomenon and scientifi c creationism have become global in extent.^56
The increasingly sharp boundaries of science made the scientifi c ap-
pear more distinct and separate from what it was not, but they also cast
a shaper shadow. Playing off descriptions of science as something unifi ed
and set apart were portrayals of pseudoscience that made it resemble a
shadow science. On occasion such pseudoscience became a kind of semi-
coherent, though still deeply fl awed, collection of pseudo- disciplines with
their own practitioners, sources of support, and methods of working. In
1932, the journalist and acidic wit H. L. Mencken suggested that every
branch of science had an evil twin, “a grotesque Doppelganger” that trans-
muted legitimate scientifi c doctrines into bizarre refl ections of the truth.
Though Mencken did not gather these doppelgängers together into a single