Interesting article on The Futurians and their legacy.
Mutate or Die: Eighty Years of the Futurians’ Vision
By
Sean Guynes-Vishniac
OCTOBER 30, 1937. Packed into the small meeting space of the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, roughly 20 attendees listened as Donald A. Wollheim delivered a provocative essay written by his friend, fellow New York Fan Association (NYFA) member John Michel, whose stutter was too intense for public speaking. The essay “
Mutation or Death!” was nothing less than a call for a revolution within the nascent science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community. In it, Michel proclaimed, “The Science Fiction Age […] is over.” Despite the fact that it had only been 11 years since Hugo Gernsback began publishing
Amazing Stories and launched the so-called Golden Age of SFF pulps, the genre was, in Michel’s view, “dead” from “intellectual bankruptcy.”
This must have come as a shock to the attendees, who likely assumed science fiction was alive and well, believing that it bore great ideas and predictions about the future of humanity. It soon became clear that what Michel meant by his galling declaration of SFF’s death was that the genre lacked a “politics,” and thus was devoid of a purpose beyond mere entertainment.
If John Michel is remembered for anything in the science fiction community — and he’s certainly not beloved on account of his fiction, which has gone almost entirely uncollected in the 70-ish years since he stopped writing — it’s for his controversial speech that October, because it was this speech that launched the movement toward organized politics in the SFF community. ...
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mutate-or-die-eighty-years-of-the-futurians-vision/