A century ago, at a Waukegan, Illinois boardinghouse run by his grandparents, an auburn-haired, six-year-old boy named Ray Bradbury used to search for copies of Amazing Stories left behind by the guests. Sitting in the dark Craftsman house some forty miles up the lake from Chicago, reading by the fractured and colorful light radiating through the stained-glass window, Bradbury later recalled how the magazine’s “vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings… fed my hungry imagination.” The magazine where Bradbury would discover the interstellar adventures of Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, where he would realize the possibilities of a certain type of storytelling.
Printed on the smudgy, if colorful, cheap wood-pulp paper that would give an entire genre its name, Amazing Stories first began distribution in April of 1926. Its first cover—as illustrated by Frank R. Paul—depicted an assortment of simian-creatures ice-skating on a frozen world, a marooned ship on a peak behind them, while rising over the horizon is a massive, ringed, red-stripped gas planet.
This initial issue also prominently displayed the names of the seminal authors therein—H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe. Reprints all; in fact, only Wells was still alive, but what the auspicious launch of the periodical lacked in original material, it made up for in historical importance as the first magazine dedicated entirely to what its founder and editor Hugo Gernsback initially called “scientifiction,” later deciding to go with science fiction as the preferred term.
For better (and often worse), Amazing Stories set the template and idiom, language and look, of what people think science fiction is.
A Luxembourgish immigrant, Gernsback was an inventor and entrepreneur who serialized his own 1908 science fiction novel Ralph 124C 41+ (which despite its rather abysmal critical assessment predicted a future of, among other novelties, fax machines, jukeboxes, and Zoom) in his Modern Electrics magazine. With an engineer’s glee, the man who also ran New York’s AM station WRNY (which first experimented with television in 1928) claimed that “What descriptions of clouds and sunsets [were] to the old novelist, descriptions of scientific apparatus and methods [are] to the modern.”
Other than the eponymous industry award derived from his first name, Gernsback hasn’t been particularly well-remembered as a writer (his work was “simply dreadful” said Lester Del Ray), an inventor (regardless of patents on devices such as “The Isolator,” a helmet which provides distraction-free living), or even as an ethical businessman (guilty of “venality and corruption… sleaziness” according to Barry Malzberg). Nonetheless, he was the first to understand the potential for the genre by giving it a dedicated home and name. The editor that, as Daniel Stashower described him in a 1990 Smithsonian Magazine article, “made us fall in love with the future.”
According to Gernsbeck, the perfect ratio of science to literature in the stories he published should be one to three, a mixture which defined the pulp era as it headed into the Golden Age of Science Fiction when themes of physics, astronomy, engineering, robotics, and space travel proliferated. If there were little of those subjects in the Poe story which he conveniently published for free in that first issue, that situation was to be rectified during the editor’s short three year tenure until bankruptcy made him lose ownership (though he’d subsequently publish other pulps like Wonder Stories and Science-Fiction Plus). The magazine’s second editor was nonetheless a Gernsback ally, the unlikely electrical engineer and former editor of Scientific American Thomas O’Connor Sloane.
A steady and professional editor, Sloane was an incongruous editor of a science fiction magazine, a Victorian born in 1851 who commissioned writers to imagine the distant future, and it was under his tenure that much of the aesthetic and style of the publication—space opera, mad scientist tales—was established. Not that all editorial guidance was so stable; for example, Raymond A. Palmer, editor through most of the 40s, developed into a right-wing crank and occultist and was instrumental in the UFO “saucer craze.” Palmer turned Amazing Stories into an organ promoting eccentric theories of a hollow earth where malevolent creatures ruled, a claim promulgated by Richard Sharpe Shaver, a fan of the magazine who was also institutionalized due to paranoid schizophrenia.
Regardless, the influence of Amazing Stories’ founding in 1926 radiated throughout the genre’s history like the light through Bradbury’s grandparents’ window, with authors who had their debut in Amazing Stories running the canonical gamut from Asimov to Zelzany. Like The New Yorker, which is only a year older, Amazing Stories is still extant; unlike The New Yorker, Amazing Stories has not been feted as a standard-bearer of American literary culture, even while science fiction has long been removed from the critical gulag, with “literary” sci-fi from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven rightly celebrated, even while there can be an implication that such titles are good because they aren’t “that kind” of science fiction.
For better (and often worse), Amazing Stories set the template and idiom, language and look, of what people think science fiction is. If Gernsback’s venture sometimes stumbled, the magazine has still endured through the transitions from the Pulp Era to the Golden Age, the New Wave into Cyberpunk.
And while Amazing Stories obviously published some dreck—every magazine does—there are plenty of dilithium crystals hidden in the dross. Fifteen-year-old G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s 1926 “The Man from the Atom,” wherein it’s postulated that our entire cosmos is but a particle in a larger universe; Julian Huxley’s “The Tissue-Culture King” from 1927, among the first treatments of genetic engineering in fiction (the author was notably Aldous’ brother) and Philip Francis Nowlan’s post-apocalyptic hero Buck Rodgers from the 1928 serialized novel Armageddon 2419 A.D.
In the post-Gernsback era there were far-more formidable entries, including Isaac Asimov’s first published short story 1939’s “Marooned off Vesta,” Roger Zelzany’s 1966 serialized novella The Dream Master, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven about a man whose dreams are capable of altering reality. “You don’t speak of dreams as unreal,” writes Le Guin in that book. “They exist. They leave a mark behind them.” As with the genre and tradition that The Lathe of Heaven takes part in.
The science fiction New Wave of the 60s and 70s complicated Gernsback’s notion about the proper relationship between science and literature and in the process produced something new and valuable. British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard once said that “Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn’t matter a hoot,” and New Wave writers in the stead of him, like Le Guin, or Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelanzy, James Tiptree Jr. (née Alice B. Sheldon), Samuel Delaney, Thomas Disch, Frank Pohl, Stanislaw Lew, Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler, and China Mievelle were as concerned with imaginative possibilities – of different means of human arrangement—as they were with elevators that go into orbit or devices that can trigger earthquakes.
As concerns the traditionalism of the form, when you come to the robot in the road, you must kill him. “We are stories,” writes Margaret Atwood in her critical study In Other Worlds: Speculative Fiction and the Human Imagination, “we are also, in part, the stories we tell ourselves.” Fighting over the soul of science fiction is a fight over the soul of the future, over the very nature of humanity.
Because science fiction, whether in the pulps or the New Wave, has always been about possibilities, about the future – it is simultaneously the most personal and the most abstract of literature.
When Palmer was publishing increasingly unhinged conspiratorial editorials about bestial inner-earth creatures controlling the world (latter penning encomiums to Richard Nixon and George Wallace), the left-wing coterie of writers and fans known as the Futurians (which included Asimov and Judith Merril) protested the editor’s influence at conventions while incorporating political themes into their own writing. Science fiction, as Merill said, was “not gimmicks and gadgets, monsters and supermen, but trained wonderment,” an ethos that some may have seen as betrayal but is better understood as a return to fundamentals. As the Golden Age transitioned into the New Wave, the reactionary force in the genre was no longer the washed-up Palmer, but rather author and editor of Astounding Science Fiction John Campbell, who turned his own opinions page over to positions ranging from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics to defenses of antebellum slavery.
In that context, it was women authors and writers of color like Le Guin, Butler, and Delaney whose mere professional success would have been rebellion enough against an ossified order. Of course, they also used the genre to critique the status quo and envision more just, more equitable, more free, and more beautiful futures. Today, we all live under the horrific revenge of the nerds that is the Silicon Valley Leviathan, where ostensible science fiction fans like Palantir’s Alex Karp name their company after a tool from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or when Elon Musk claims that the steadfast socialist Iain M. Banks’ “Culture Series” is his favorite novel.
We’re all victim to the profound misreadings and misinterpretations of engineers and industrialists who’d have done well to pay more attention in humanities classes and consider what those books were actually about. “A guilty system recognizes no innocents” writes Banks in The Player of Games.
Much depends, as Atwood would remind us, of the sorts of stories that we tell. Our culture wars extend everywhere, even to—maybe especial to—science fiction. Not just what or who we read, but how we interpret those books which we hold so close to ourselves. Because science fiction, whether in the pulps or the New Wave, has always been about possibilities, about the future—it is simultaneously the most personal and the most abstract of literature. Much of what Amazing Stories published was forgettable to trashy, but there was still in Gernsback’s own inimitably goofy manner a stunning optimism, a vision that the future could perhaps be better than the present.
Just look at all those covers that Bradbury would trace his fingers over in Waukegan while listening to the technological miracle of the crystal radio bringing in jazz from “far away Schenectady.” Paul’s 1928 cover showing a planet-rise of Jupiter over the horizon of one of its moon, the massive gas giant all swirling red and yellow lighting the sky of a temperate, tropical world framed by vines and palm trees; an attractive couple in radiation goggles from a 1929 edition peering out the window of their ship at a space station beyond; a summer issue from a year earlier where a dapper man in boots, helmet, and tights levitates with the aid of a jetpack above his smiling friends and neighbors to whom he waves below.
Even a hundred years later, in the future that never came to be, there is magic and whimsy, wonder and miraculousness in all of that. Bradbury, in his halcyon pastorals about the Mid-American and Mid-Western eerie sublime, that Dandelion Wine dimension of carnivals and nickelodeons, dated the moment of his becoming a writer to a 1931 Labor Day fair where he received a benediction from a sideshow magician named Mr. Electrico. Seemingly zapped with fifty thousand volts, “Lightning flashed” in the eyes of Mr. Electrico and “his hair stood on end…. [as] he reached down with a flaming sword full of electricity and he tapped me on both shoulders and…. cried ‘Live, forever!’”
After that, Bradbury reported, he went home, began to write, and never quit. No doubt this magician deserves some of the thanks for Bradbury’s career, but there was a different Mr. Electrico that wasn’t mere symbol, the strange little man Hugo Gernsback in his metallic “television goggles,” starring off into a future that can still occasionally be dimly perceived.