There are four acknowledgements in the Alloway/del Renzio/Holroyd exhibition statement. One is to Wilbur Schramm's The Process and Effects of Mass Communication; the second is to Edmund C. Berkeley's Giant Brains or Machines That Think (1949), a survey of recent computers and developments in artificial intelligence. Schramm and Berkeley were the two “serious” sources cited by Alloway. The two remaining sources were considerably less serious but were none the less as important in formulating his cultural model—Glamor magazine and Galaxy Science Fiction! Alloway had lectured on science fiction at the ICA in 1954 and was to lecture on it again in 1958. He had rediscovered his teenage passion for SF in the early 1950s,

Typical of his IG mentality, SF was not just about escapism and entertainment, it was also an “addition to a fine art-based aesthetic.” He had made a similar point at the time of This Is Tomorrow in an article about SF magazine cover art, reminding readers that “The iconography of the twentieth century is not in the hands of the fine artists alone.” SF illustration was, however, typical of another value over and above that of expanding options. Covers often depicted a contrast of advanced and simple technologies, or the conflict of humans and androids. Alloway's argument in another of his important articles of 1956 was that “The currency of such symbols, drawn easily from a wide range of social and technical sciences, is an index of the acceptance of technological change by the public in the United States. Science fiction alone does not orient its readers in a technological and fast-moving culture but it is important among the attitude-forming channels.”