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krpalmerSome knowledge of science fiction’s history and a certain weakness for “anniversaries” came together in recent weeks. A little part of me wanted to reach back a century and see just what the first issue of the pulp magazine “Amazing Stories,” cover date April 1926, was like. An awareness “pulp scans” are accessible (and in this case, so far as I understand, now clear of copyright problems) did, though, bump against part of that history just mentioned.
I’m aware Amazing Stories became something SF writers, fans, and scholars made a point of having exceeded; my impression is that dismissive judgment just might have started being proclaimed before half of the century between then and now had passed. There are tales that Hugo Gernsback’s blind spot and tin ear for “literary merit” and general reluctance to pay a fair price for fiction cast SF down from respectability for years if not ever afterwards; there are also accusations of assorted ideological odiousnesses even if John W. Campbell, Jr. has more unfortunate statements on the record. For that matter, too, I had the chance just a few years ago to experience some pulp SF not that many years distant from the magazine’s first issue when I found a copy of the anthology Before the Golden Age. With that anthology having been entirely personal selections from Isaac Asimov’s formative years, though, I suppose I was a little conscious he’d been just a little too young for the first years of Amazing Stories. In the end, while I can absolutely agree with warnings about the potential dangers of “insisting solely on personal experience,” in this particular case I thought the dangers were less extreme.
Eye-catching title and ringed world (when that might have just meant “Saturn” rather than “generic science fiction planet”) against a yellow background aside, the remainder of the first cover mixed a certain quaintness (sailing ships and skaters in furry suits) with peculiarity (the ships were elevated on frozen pillars). Inside the cover there was an ad printed in blue and red offering the chance to “Be a Radio Expert” (“$50 to $250 a week in work that is almost romance”) and a black-and-white ad promising the opening up of “human clams”; I can at least wonder if, indeed, the magazine’s target audience was already clear. Hugo Gernback’s editorial talked up the educational aspect of “Scientifiction” while casting back two hundred and one hundred years itself to invoke life in a new world. (It also mentioned “the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine” while explaining how the fiction market was beginning to divide into genres.)
The fiction itself began with “Off On a Comet” by Jules Verne. The blurb dwelt on assorted scientific weaknesses in the story. A different familiar criticism, this one of the poor contemporary translations of Verne’s work, did come to my mind straight off. I suppose I did have a bit of a slog getting started, wondering when the assorted survivors of different nations on bits of the Mediterranian coast would realise they were, indeed, “off on a comet.” (The original title “Hector Servadec” would have given less away.) Not that long after I then ran into a “gah!” moment, not from the skin colour-based racism I might have been half-braced for but from anti-Semitism. By the end of the excerpt things had at least become a bit more like The Mysterious Island, and I pondered a note from the editor inviting the readership to say whether they wanted part of a novel and short stories or just a novel complete in one issue.
Getting to “The New Accelerator” by H.G. Wells did improve my spirits; the blurb even made a comment or two about the writing itself. I’m not altogether certain I’d read the story before, although the title did seem familiar. The idea of speeding up until all outside motion is just about imperceptible (at the risk of clothing scorching and bursting into flames) was amusing and intriguing even if I didn’t worry too much about scientific plausibility myself; I eventually got to thinking a bit of imagery in The Time Machine and then The Invisible Man.
At that point I got to a story not by an author notable to this day, and I wondered that much more about what I’d be faced with. “The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker at least had an amusing illustration, with an enormous figure in something like a spacesuit and a tiny open-topped car racing away from underfoot. As with “The New Accelerator” it did begin with a scientist explaining things to a layman narrator, if more stodgily and at greater length; this narrator gets recruited to test an enlarging and reducing device while wearing a protective suit described in detail. It got my attention that science fiction was already delving into the “what if our universe was just an atom in some larger one?”, which showed up several times in Before the Golden Age. There’s an aside about enlarging extracting matter from the air, but this doesn’t lead to the nightmare of absorbing the entire Earth and being stuck in the void. Instead, the narrator just winds up lost in space and time, with a little note at the bottom of the last page about “The End of Part One”...
I did wonder if I was familiar with the name George Allen England or just confusing it with the name of a later writer. “The Thing from—‘Outside’” packed a certain amount of the despairing cosmic ominousness of H.P. Lovecraft. Set in the wilds of Canada, it also included some female characters, although they were stuck being decorative girlfriends or wives, sacrificed to make a point or damsels in distress.
The writing got that much more awkward in “The Man Who Saved the Earth” by Austin Hall, which gave a certain amount of its conclusion away while describing in length how an older scientist inspired a young newsboy to become a heroic inventor. After a tossed-off comment the world had reached utopia (not through any overt prescription) cosmic catastrophe threatened; the inventor charged off to his vast device in the story’s illustration via the handy arrival of an expert driver. Despite them already being friends, the inventor was motivated enough to offer thirty thousand dollars, or a hundred and twenty weeks of top income for the radio expert. He did, anyway, save the Earth in the end.
Things did close with one more notable reprint, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allen Poe. After the story’s gross-out ending as a man “mesmerized” on the brink of death is awoken at last, there was an ad for Florida real estate. I have to admit that after all of that, I am curious as to what showed up in the next issue. However, I know that “reading at the rate they showed up to begin with” will mean a year until “The Colour Out of Space” shows up and another year to “The Skylark of Space.” As for even the beginning of the Golden Age, that’s over a decade away. By that point I suppose I’ll be venerable myself.
I’m aware Amazing Stories became something SF writers, fans, and scholars made a point of having exceeded; my impression is that dismissive judgment just might have started being proclaimed before half of the century between then and now had passed. There are tales that Hugo Gernsback’s blind spot and tin ear for “literary merit” and general reluctance to pay a fair price for fiction cast SF down from respectability for years if not ever afterwards; there are also accusations of assorted ideological odiousnesses even if John W. Campbell, Jr. has more unfortunate statements on the record. For that matter, too, I had the chance just a few years ago to experience some pulp SF not that many years distant from the magazine’s first issue when I found a copy of the anthology Before the Golden Age. With that anthology having been entirely personal selections from Isaac Asimov’s formative years, though, I suppose I was a little conscious he’d been just a little too young for the first years of Amazing Stories. In the end, while I can absolutely agree with warnings about the potential dangers of “insisting solely on personal experience,” in this particular case I thought the dangers were less extreme.
Eye-catching title and ringed world (when that might have just meant “Saturn” rather than “generic science fiction planet”) against a yellow background aside, the remainder of the first cover mixed a certain quaintness (sailing ships and skaters in furry suits) with peculiarity (the ships were elevated on frozen pillars). Inside the cover there was an ad printed in blue and red offering the chance to “Be a Radio Expert” (“$50 to $250 a week in work that is almost romance”) and a black-and-white ad promising the opening up of “human clams”; I can at least wonder if, indeed, the magazine’s target audience was already clear. Hugo Gernback’s editorial talked up the educational aspect of “Scientifiction” while casting back two hundred and one hundred years itself to invoke life in a new world. (It also mentioned “the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine” while explaining how the fiction market was beginning to divide into genres.)
The fiction itself began with “Off On a Comet” by Jules Verne. The blurb dwelt on assorted scientific weaknesses in the story. A different familiar criticism, this one of the poor contemporary translations of Verne’s work, did come to my mind straight off. I suppose I did have a bit of a slog getting started, wondering when the assorted survivors of different nations on bits of the Mediterranian coast would realise they were, indeed, “off on a comet.” (The original title “Hector Servadec” would have given less away.) Not that long after I then ran into a “gah!” moment, not from the skin colour-based racism I might have been half-braced for but from anti-Semitism. By the end of the excerpt things had at least become a bit more like The Mysterious Island, and I pondered a note from the editor inviting the readership to say whether they wanted part of a novel and short stories or just a novel complete in one issue.
Getting to “The New Accelerator” by H.G. Wells did improve my spirits; the blurb even made a comment or two about the writing itself. I’m not altogether certain I’d read the story before, although the title did seem familiar. The idea of speeding up until all outside motion is just about imperceptible (at the risk of clothing scorching and bursting into flames) was amusing and intriguing even if I didn’t worry too much about scientific plausibility myself; I eventually got to thinking a bit of imagery in The Time Machine and then The Invisible Man.
At that point I got to a story not by an author notable to this day, and I wondered that much more about what I’d be faced with. “The Man from the Atom” by G. Peyton Wertenbaker at least had an amusing illustration, with an enormous figure in something like a spacesuit and a tiny open-topped car racing away from underfoot. As with “The New Accelerator” it did begin with a scientist explaining things to a layman narrator, if more stodgily and at greater length; this narrator gets recruited to test an enlarging and reducing device while wearing a protective suit described in detail. It got my attention that science fiction was already delving into the “what if our universe was just an atom in some larger one?”, which showed up several times in Before the Golden Age. There’s an aside about enlarging extracting matter from the air, but this doesn’t lead to the nightmare of absorbing the entire Earth and being stuck in the void. Instead, the narrator just winds up lost in space and time, with a little note at the bottom of the last page about “The End of Part One”...
I did wonder if I was familiar with the name George Allen England or just confusing it with the name of a later writer. “The Thing from—‘Outside’” packed a certain amount of the despairing cosmic ominousness of H.P. Lovecraft. Set in the wilds of Canada, it also included some female characters, although they were stuck being decorative girlfriends or wives, sacrificed to make a point or damsels in distress.
The writing got that much more awkward in “The Man Who Saved the Earth” by Austin Hall, which gave a certain amount of its conclusion away while describing in length how an older scientist inspired a young newsboy to become a heroic inventor. After a tossed-off comment the world had reached utopia (not through any overt prescription) cosmic catastrophe threatened; the inventor charged off to his vast device in the story’s illustration via the handy arrival of an expert driver. Despite them already being friends, the inventor was motivated enough to offer thirty thousand dollars, or a hundred and twenty weeks of top income for the radio expert. He did, anyway, save the Earth in the end.
Things did close with one more notable reprint, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allen Poe. After the story’s gross-out ending as a man “mesmerized” on the brink of death is awoken at last, there was an ad for Florida real estate. I have to admit that after all of that, I am curious as to what showed up in the next issue. However, I know that “reading at the rate they showed up to begin with” will mean a year until “The Colour Out of Space” shows up and another year to “The Skylark of Space.” As for even the beginning of the Golden Age, that’s over a decade away. By that point I suppose I’ll be venerable myself.