During the early-mid 1920s, stories about radio appeared in British pulp fiction magazines. These stories display various possible masculine roles through the intervention of radio in domestic life: the tyrannical husband, the thwarted lover, the obsessed hobbyist, the criminal bachelor, the rejected step-father and the new husband. Taking advantage of genre fluidity during this period, the stories mix science fiction with romance, crime and adventure plots.
In this paper I offer the pulp stories as an alternative narrative of radio masculinity to that seen in popular wireless magazines and books of the period. The pulp narrative is one that has more flexibility than those more expository and celebratory works: through the conventions of genre fiction, male authors are able to explore fears about the disruptive presence of radio in the home, in both satirical and moralising modes.
I conclude with some questions about the uses of popular fiction as a resource for accessing non-elite experiences of science and technology. Who are the pulp authors speaking for - their readers, the magazine owners, or themselves? Whose interests do their fictions serve? To what extent does popular fiction subvert or reinforce the messages of expositors?