The end of the nineteenth century brought together a series of events and cultural and political tendencies that left a significant footprint on the literature and popular culture of that era. These included imperial adventures by grasping European powers (and the United States), what might be considered a consumer technological revolution typified by Thomas Edison's inventions, the initial appearance of heavier than air flying vehicles, mass production of cheap magazines and books (and the concomitant development of a large audience for pulp products), and a hardening of the opposing sides in the great debate over Darwinian evolution. Nathaniel Williams's discussion of Gears and God suggests that all of these themes appeared in popular culture, especially stories published in magazines and aimed primarily at boys and young men. Following the lead of the great French science-fiction writer, Jules Verne, many of these stories and popular novels ventured to the center of an imaginary center of the Earth, Africa, the Moon, and Mars where they encountered strange cultures, both more advanced in some respects or more primitive than Europe or America. This literature, in turn, mirrored the very real advances in invention, disputes over science and religion, and imperial encounters that typified the age.

This clash of cultures—so characteristic of this era of imperialist expansion and found its way into the plots of popular fiction—seemed to suggest that the consequences of this world-wide scramble for empire were sometimes best popularized when translated into a genre that only obliquely reflected the real-life consequences of the rapacious reach of colonial empires (unlike Joseph Conrad's bitter Heart of Darkness). Inevitably, as Williams recognizes, the imaginary and real cultural clashes that resulted also involved questions about religion and the proselytizing of Christianity. At the same time (and again reflecting the evangelical urges of the age), this literature posed questions about Darwinism, the origins of mankind, and the way technological innovation might impact less developed societies.

The focus of Williams's interest is the works he calls Edisonades—so named after Thomas Edison and referring to the technocratic science-fiction tales in pulp fiction such as the Frank Reade Jr. stories. Williams makes the interesting point that much of this literature, reflecting larger cultural assumptions, makes a crucial distinction between science and technology. The latter is embraced and glorified in these imaginative plots while science, because of its association with Darwinism and cosmology, could be left open to doubt. Perhaps inevitably this space between technology and science allowed for the intrusion of religion—often in the guise of biblical literalism. Consequently, some popular novels affirmed the stories of the Old Testament, at the same time as they imagined miraculous technological feats of travel and invention. This ideological bifurcation was important, not just in the 1890s and the 1910's, but it has persisted through the presen in the widespread belief in biblical literalism coexisting beside faith in technological advances. Thus science can be portrayed as “just theory” (abstract and therefore questionable), whereas engineering feats are concrete, tangible, and demonstrable.

Williams also makes another important point in his exhaustive consideration of dime novels, youth fiction, and magazine serials. In his examination of these texts, the author focuses on confrontation of the technologically or culturally superior American or European with strange and distant societies, conversion to Christianity seems to be one of common themes of the movies and outcomes of the interchange. In other words, this fiction seems to reflect the contemporary imperial ideology of what the French called the “mission civilatrice” that was to be imposed on new colonial possessions. In the United States, this mission was particularly apparent in the conquest of the Philippines.

The final element of his consideration of this literature is the role of Samuel Clemens. Mark Twain, with his novels, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Tom Sawyer Abroad, looms large over this whole genre as a satirist whose doubts about imperialist adventures and the imposition of Christianity on alien cultures provided an important counterpoint to the enthusiasms of Edisonade fiction.

Taking a cue from Twain, it might be questioned how important the religious elements of pulp fiction were; in other words, how seriously should we take them as integral parts of the whole or to what extent were they universally accepted by these writers? For example, had Williams extended his analysis forward a few years, he could have included perhaps the most significant of all popular authors in this genre of encounters with strange cultures—but someone decidedly secular in his attitudes: Edgar Rice Burroughs. Known today mostly for his Tarzan novels, Burroughs was a prodigious author of popular stories about journeys to the center of the Earth, Mars, and Venus. There his heroes confronted strange societies peopled by creatures created by evolution not the hand of god. Indeed, Burroughs repeatedly affirms the concept of evolution as the transformative process that accounts for the odd creatures he encounters. Although these novels certainly reflected the presumed superiority of its white, American heroes and their cultural and technological superiority, Burroughs, unlike Williams's pulp writers, placed Darwinian evolution as the very motive power and explanation of difference.