Anyone who reads the 1939 Doc Savage novel World’s Fair Goblin will come away with a vivid pulp snapshot of a special time and place in history. In the wonderful book 1939: The Lost World of the Fair by David Gelernter (The Free Press, 1995), there is this opening description about the impact of the World’s Fair:
Fairgoers at the most popular exhibit on the grounds, the Futurama, were addressed from “the future” by a deep, portentous narrator’s voice: “Man has forged ahead. New and better things have sprung from his industry and genius.” Fairgoers on the whole credited the voice to be speaking truth, and they were pleased with what it had to say.
Over the course of the April, 1939 Doc Savage novel, we will see idealism, adventure, superlative skill, terror, camaraderie. We will walk inside of the Hall of Medicine, the Perisphere, and all across the magical grounds themselves. So too, I hope, will readers come away from the journey of a somewhat different, but also much the same Doc in the novel Towers, feeling a degree of wonder at the amazing place and time the Fair was.
To close out this visit back to that time, a gallery from Towers of Iason Ragnar Bellerophon’s paintings and collages of the Fair, which include the Trylon and Perisphere, the Dali Dream of Venus, the International Pavilions of the USSR and Poland, the statue of the Astronomer at the foot of the great Helicline causeway, and much, much more. The Fair was a great statement of hope and wonder. As the pin so many fairgoers wore states with courage and optimism, “I have seen the future”.
Doc Talos 