Featured Essays book culture One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense Classic SF was chock-full of dubius ideas; Martin Gardner supplied the antidote. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on February 18, 2026 Credit: Medical Photographic Library (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0) Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Medical Photographic Library (Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0) Given the science fiction that enthralled me as a teen, you might wonder how I escaped infection with delusions like: Dean drives population paranoia libertarianism Wilsonian occult conspiracies …and all the other nonsensical crap to which SF authors turned for plot (or, in some cases, sincerely believed). How is that I emerged with a glimmering of skepticism and rationality? Any tendency towards libertarianism is of course easily cured simply by spending time with libertarians1. Immunization against the other nonsense, however, was greatly facilitated by my reading of Martin Gardner’s classic 1957 Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. The title says it all. The book is a brief and necessarily incomplete survey of all the pseudoscience, cult lunacy, and all-around bonkers notions with which the world is too well supplied. Now, Gardner had harsh words for science fiction, or at least the sort that appeared in Astounding: “Judging by the number of Campbell’s readers who are impressed by this nonsense, the average fan may very well be a chap in his teens, with a smattering of scientific knowledge culled mostly from science fiction, enormously gullible, with a strong bent toward occultism, no understanding of scientific method, and a basic insecurity for which he compensates by fantasies of scientific power. However, this was not the caustic approbation of an outsider for a genre about which he knew little. Gardner was an SF fan. He read the stuff. He wrote the stuff. He appeared in Asimov’s! His was the critique that flowers from familiarity. In any case, most of his examples came from outside the pages of Astounding… despite John W. Campbell, Jr.’s best efforts to promote every crackpot idea that crossed his desk. Gardner provided an abundance of case studies—on flat and hollow Earths, Velikovskyism, contra-relativity, scientific racism, creationism, Lysenkoism, occult nonsense, pyramid woo-woo, and all that jazz—detailed with humor designed to undermine the gravitas of the various pseudoscientific prophets. While he is clearly aware that there is a human cost to this stuff—ineffective medicine is an obvious example, but Soviet-era crank agricultural theories made what would likely have been unpleasant lives even worse through famine—Gardner seems to have known that laughter is far more caustic to reputation than rebuke. It is hard to present oneself as a heroic iconoclast when everyone thinks of you as a punchline. Even more usefully, Gardner presented a theoretical framework to unify what might otherwise have been a collection of anecdotes. In particular, he concluded that the various eccentrics he featured tended to have two common elements: Cranks tend to be isolated from the scientific community. Cranks tend to be paranoids with delusions of grandeur. Having spent decades on talk.origins2, I would add a third: Cranks almost never settle for a single eccentric belief. Put together, this is a useful lens through which to scrutinize iconoclastic models. Sure, a novel proposition might be the 21st-century answer to continental drift, and maybe the resistance it meets could be analogous to Sir Arthur Eddington kneecapping Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—but if the person proposing it is uncredentialed, has no contact with the field in which they’re dabbling, replies to constructive criticism with insults and rants, and furthermore believes that the Moon is a turnip, that the metric system was invented to sterilize white people, and that Montana is a Coca Cola ad campaign that got out of hand, it probably isn’t. Gardner’s lens is especially useful when what you’re hearing is something you really want to believe. Gullibility is directly proportional to appeal. Wouldn’t it be delightful if this novel suggestion were correct? More reason to peer closely, prod a bit, and hold that notion up to a bright light. It’s no surprise that despite being the product of a previous millennium, Fads and Fallacies remains in print. Pseudosciences come and pseudosciences go… but their general form remains the same. Of course, it would be a mistake to rely on a single source of skepticism, and seven decades is long enough for an abundance of books akin to Fads and Fallacies to appear. Which of them would readers recommend?[end-mark] See also my exposure to back-to-the-land hippies, as well as to the Enver Hoxha-loving baby communists who once used a procedural loophole to take over a campus newspaper. ︎A USENET newsgroup. USENET is a thriving medium of communication that is even healthier than Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the West Indian Federation combined. ︎The post One Way to Immunize Yourself Against Pseudoscience and Other Nonsense appeared first on Reactor.