This article provides a study in the sociology of translation, applied to the process of importing American science fiction into France during the 1950s. Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau and Michel Pilotin promoted science fiction as a ‘new literary genre’ and imported it into the French socio-cultural space. But the massive translation of American science fiction authors during this period could not have taken place without the simultaneous importation of institutional structures, in particular specialized magazines and book series, which emerged in the United States at the end of the 1920s, nor without the naturalization of the American subcultural model, both processes eventually resulting in the creation of an autonomous field of science fiction in France. The crucial question for translation studies is this: when a new text-type or genre is incorporated into a new cultural space, what social groups receive this text-type or genre within the target culture, and under what conditions? This article suggests that the ‘translation’ of American science fiction (texts and institutional structures) was successful in this instance because, on the one hand, there existed in France social categories homologous to the technophile American middle class of the 1920s and, on the other hand, there was a more or less conscious adherence to the American way of life as a social model in large sectors of post-war French society. Translation then contributed to strengthening the American pretension to universality, even though Vian, Queneau and Pilotin had sought rather to exploit the high potential for social change they had recognized in the ‘new genre’ of science fiction.