Amazing Stories was like nothing else when its April 1926 issue appeared on newsstands. Between its lurid painted covers was the first magazine devoted exclusively to the publication of what came to be called science fiction — though its 41-year-old publisher, Hugo Gernsback, called its mindbending contents by a different name: scientifiction.
“By ‘scientifiction,’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story,” Gernsback wrote in a mission statement in the first issue, under the all-caps headline A NEW SORT OF MAGAZINE. “A charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”
His portmanteau never quite made it into port. But Gernsback’s innovation of collecting previously-diffuse bits of literature ruminating on scientific discovery or technological advancement in one place proved to be an idea with staying power. The evidence is all around us, on all your streaming services and movie marquees, if not your bookshelves.
The first issue of Amazing Stories, priced at $0.25 — about $4.60 in today’s money — embodied Gernsback’s formula. Frank R. Paul’s cover painting illustrated “Off On a Comet,” the 1877 Jules Verne tale reprinted, in part, inside. Gernsback, who sold radio gear and already published multiple radio magazines, introduced that story with a five-paragraph note basically saying that he knows the premise of the story is silly: a comet strikes the Earth and carries a slice of our planet along with all of that parcel’s atmosphere and inhabitants to a galaxy far, far away, undamaged and intact. “But once granted the initial and closing extravagance,” Gernsback writes, “how closely the author clings to facts in between! How closely he follows, and imparts to his readers, the scientific probabilities of the universe beyond our earth, the actual knowledge so hard won by our astronomers!”
Gernsback’s preferred name — scientifiction — didn’t stick, but his own moniker did. The Hugo Awards, given annually since 1955 to recognize excellence in sci-fi and fantasy, are named for him. The awards ceremony happens at WorldCon — the World Science Fiction Convention — itself an outgrowth of the fan culture Gernsback aimed to cultivate when he created Amazing Stories a century ago.
That was the product of another Gernsback innovation: He published letters with the full addresses of the correspondents, allowing readers to write directly to one another. He was doing this already in his radio magazines, but replicating the practice in Amazing Stories had a seismic impact.
“Gernsback hit on the idea of using the letter column of his magazine to engender a community,” says Steve Davidson, who obtained the trademark for the Amazing Stories name after Hasbro — the toy company — let it lapse, and has served as the publisher of Amazing Stories since 2011. “His concept was that he would have a community supporting the publication both by subscribing to it and submitting content, and that it would be this internal feedback kind of a system. That’s largely credited with being the impetus that started science fiction fandom.” Clubs with names like The Scienceers and the Science Fiction League were in full flower by the end of the 1930s. That lively letters page was also how Davidson became involved with Amazing Stories, sending his first letter for publication in the magazine in the ’70s and being cited by name in an editor’s letter from 1978.
Gernsback’s literary formula
Before Gernsback, no one had quite settled on a name for the kind of speculative, idea-driven narratives spun by Jules Verne in the 1860s and ’70s (Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas) or H.G. Wells in the 1890s (The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds). That first issue of Amazing Stories kicked off with that previously-mentioned Verne story, “Off On a Comet,” before reprinting a Wells story, “The New Accelerator,” and an Edgar Allan Poe tale, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” In fact, most of the first year of Amazing Stories was devoted to reprinting material that had previously appeared elsewhere, including in Gernsback’s own Science and Invention, previously called Electrical Experimenter. (Near-constant rebranding? Just another way in which Gernsback was a man ahead of his time.)
One such story was written by an adolescent named G. Peyton Wertenbaker, who, decades later, would take a job as a speechwriter for NASA. Wertenbaker’s tale “The Man from the Atom,” which Gernsback had previously published in Science and Invention, is an exemplar of Gernsback’s literary formula, where characterization and interiority take a backseat to dramatizing a scientific concept — relativity, in this case.
Wertenbaker’s demonstration is simple but undeniably memorable: A man agrees to test a machine that can shrink or enlarge any object on himself. He grows to galactic size, so vast that he’s soon watching planets in different solar systems do laps around their suns like spokes in a spinning bicycle wheel. By the time it occurs to him to hit the shrink button to try to go home, he realizes he has no way of knowing which itty-bitty speck is his home galaxy, never mind his home planet. And because of relativity, what seemed to our narrator like an experiment of just a few minutes was eons to everyone back on Earth, and everyone he ever knew and most likely Earth and its star are are all “gone, forgotten, non-existent a trillion centuries ago!”
No one would argue that “The Man from the Atom” exhibits insightful characterization or stylish prose. But it does memorably illustrate a concept — relativity — that’s more frequently waved away today in sci-fi movies and TV shows where faster-than-light travel is a storytelling device.
“There’s a great respect for hand waving in the field.”
Steve Davidson, current publisher
“There’s a great respect for hand waving in the field,” Davidson says. “But it has to be presented in a way that doesn’t telegraph that it’s hand waving.” That sort of loophole (that just might be a wormhole) can be justified if it enables a rewarding piece of storytelling. “Honestly, that’s where the really good writing in the field comes from — the people who have found a way to write around those roadblocks and yet keep the reader engaged and not throwing the book against the wall.”
“The genre used to focus on the big, dumb, fascinating object, and [the characters] were just around to witness that,” Davidson says. Over time, the emphasis has “shifted to character studies of people affected by the big, dumb object.”
Faster-than-light travel remains beyond humankind’s current means, but other technological wonders fiction writers first dreamt of in the 19th and 20th centuries — artificial intelligence, journeys to the moon — have come to fruition. (Yet another tagline in the magazine read, “Extravagant Fiction Today … Cold Fact Tomorrow.”) That’s changed what qualifies as science fiction, Davidson says. “If you were to write a story today about a trip to the moon, it would only be fantasy if the means of propulsion were a bunch of geese.”
Gernsback lost control of the Amazing Stories name in a 1929 bankruptcy, though he channeled the concept into a new periodical called Science Wonder Stories — later shortened to Wonder Stories, then expanded once more to Thrilling Wonder Stories — even as Amazing continued publication in other hands.
Rival science fiction magazines quickly materialized to compete with and, arguably, eclipse Amazing Stories and its Gernsback-ed successors, the man having demonstrated there was a market for collected stories dramatizing how scientific discovery or technological advancement might change humankind. Other publishers offered writers more generous rates, and Gernsback’s reputation for occasionally stiffing his creditors became an advantage for his competitors. By midcentury, what came to be called the Golden Age of Science Fiction had arrived. Amazing was part of a thriving genre of periodicals that included Astounding Stories of Super-Science (later Analog Science Fiction and Fact) and Galaxy Science Fiction.Â
During that 1940s-to-1960s era, genre big guns like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon were all publishing regularly in sci-fi magazines.
Amazing Stories todayÂ
The sci-fi convention RavenCon, scheduled to take place in Richmond, Va., this weekend, will include a celebration of the genre’s centennial, as marked by the 100th anniversary of Amazing Stories.Â
The magazine’s most recent iteration is as a website, which has been live since 2013, and which has published a new, free science-fiction story weekly for the last few years. Since 2018, Amazing Stories has published a number of print-on-demand collections. This year it will relaunch as a quarterly digital publication, but with a print-on-demand option for readers who want to feel ink and paper on their fingertips.
It’s a labor of love for all involved, Davidson says, so if it takes a little longer than his hoped-for publication date of June, that’s all right. One thing a century of sci-fi has taught us is that the future will not be rushed.
Transcript:
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Between blockbuster movies, TV series, whole sections of bookstores, sci-fi is seemingly ubiquitous these days, but there was a time when science fiction wasn’t on shelves everywhere. One hundred years ago, the very first science fiction magazine published its very first issue. It was called Amazing Stories. Chris Klimek is a writer and critic, and he has been revisiting old issues for us. Hey there.
CHRIS KLIMEK: Hi, Juana. Nice to be back on the show.
SUMMERS: Great to have you. So start by just telling us a little more about this magazine as well as your relationship to it.
KLIMEK: So my first association with Amazing Stories was the covers. The first three years of issues had these lurid cover paintings by this artist named Frank R. Paul that I imagine in the ’20s would have made these things just leap off the newsstands. I knew that some big sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin had had their first works published in Amazing Stories. What I learned is that Hugo Gernsback, who’s the radio whiz who founded the magazine, the man for whom the Hugo awards for excellence in sci-fi and fantasy are named now – he published a mission statement in the first issue about this emerging genre that he called scientifiction (ph) (laughter). So these are stories that are meant to entertain, but that keep the focus on future developments in scientific discovery or technological advancement and how that might change us. So we now retroactively have called this science fiction…
SUMMERS: OK.
KLIMEK: …Because you saw what happened to my face…
SUMMERS: Right.
KLIMEK: …When I tried to say scientifiction.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
KLIMEK: But there wasn’t really a name for that when H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne were writing their stories, and all of whom had old pieces reprinted in that first issue of Amazing Stories, by the way.
SUMMERS: OK. And how did those early stories embody scientifiction?
KLIMEK: Well, like I mentioned, they were, you know, mostly reprints early on, but one that struck me as a good example of this was called “The Man From The Atom.” This was a writer who I didn’t know named G. Peyton Wertenbaker, who later goes on to work for NASA. But in this story, a man agrees to test a device that can shrink or enlarge anything on himself. So he grows to galactic size, you know, vaster than galaxies. And by the time it occurs to him he should hit the reverse button and try to go home, he realizes he has no way of knowing which of these little points of light is his home galaxy. And also, because of relativity, what seemed to him to be just a few minutes has been eons, and everyone he knows back on Earth – probably the entire planet and the sun – is now dead. So that’s a crude illustration of relativity, but you get it, right?
SUMMERS: Right.
KLIMEK: And a lot of the big sci-fi franchises, even now, they tend to ignore relativity and time dilation because it’s just difficult to deal with that, right? So that sort of hand-waving is something that even Hugo Gernsback wrote about in that first issue of Amazing Stories. He wrote this five-paragraph introduction to a Jules Verne story that was 50 years old even then, basically saying, well, look, I accept that the premise of this is silly, but if you grant the premise, beyond that, he pretty much sticks to the science.
SUMMERS: I mean, today, we know that sci-fi has a really strong fan community. I take it, it didn’t start with one though, right?
KLIMEK: No. And I mean, that’s really the most singular reason that Amazing Stories is notable because the letters column would publish the full addresses of the correspondent so they could write to each other.
SUMMERS: Interesting.
KLIMEK: Yeah, it’s like the Jazz Age version of Reddit, right? That letter column is how the current publisher, a man named Steve Davidson, told me he got involved. He started writing in to the magazine as a young reader in the ’70s. But the development of an organized fandom with clubs and things through the 1930s leads us into a period that’s now referred to as the golden age of science fiction, roughly the ’40s through the ’60s.
SUMMERS: And I take it that other magazines caught onto what Amazing Stories was doing pretty quickly.
KLIMEK: Very quickly – yeah, so other publications like Astounding, which eventually becomes Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Galaxy Science Fiction, they come along to compete with and even eclipse Amazing Stories. But Gernsback did it first. Amazing Stories is still going. It’s operated mostly as a website since 2013, but they are getting ready to relaunch this year as a quarterly that you will be able to order as a print-on-demand physical magazine if you want it on paper.
SUMMERS: Chris Klimek is a writer and critic, and you can hear him often on Pop Culture Happy Hour. Thanks so much.
KLIMEK: Lovely to talk to you, Juana. Thank you.
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