Using the theory of Pierre Bourdieu (the concepts of field, of capital and symbolic goods, of habitus, and illusion), this article provides a study in the sociology of translation applied to the importing of American science fiction into France during the 1950's. Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau and Michel Pilotin are the promotors of an alleged 'new literary genre' within the French sociocultural context. But the massive translation of American SF authors during this period was possible only with the creation of imported institutional structures, in particular specialized magazines and book series, which emerged in the U.S. at the end of the 1920s, and with the naturalization of the American subcultural model which had as its result the constitution of an autonomous field of science fiction in Franco. The crucial question for translation studies is the following: When a new text type or genre is incorporated into a new cultural context, which social group(s) receive(s) this text type or genre within the target culture, and according to what conditions? The author suggests that the 'translation' (in the mathematical sense) of American science fiction (texts and institutional structures) was successful because, on the one hand, there existed in Franco social categories homologous to the technophile American middle class of the 1920s and, on the other hand, because 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.