Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

1. “Magazines for Morons”: Pulp Magazines and the Emergence of Science Fiction

1 “MagazinesforMorons”:PulpMagazinesand theEmergenceofScienceFiction Art directors say that covers sell magazines; fiction editors insist that people buy magazines for the quality of the short stories and serials; articles editors assert confidently that people today are mainly interested in nonfiction, and the technicians say that typography, make-up and design are important factors in the public’s response to a publication. Experienced editors and publishers who have the responsibility of supervising the overall publication realize that no one feature can be given credit for the sustained success of any given magazine. The risk is naturally minimized by the experience and ability of a good editor and publisher. —Quentin Reynolds, The Fiction Factory1 Hugo Gernsback invented both science fiction and the science fiction magazine , but not at the same time. Although the two words “science” and “fiction ” had probably been used in combination before, it was Gernsback’s use of the phrase that established its popular and sustained presence in public discourse.2 The year was 1929; the occasion, the launch of Gernsback’s new magazine Science Wonder Stories. “Science fiction,” he proclaimed in its inaugural editorial, “is a tremendous new force in America. They are the stories that are discussed by inventors, scientists, and in the classroom. Teachers insist that pupils read them, because they widen the young man’s horizon , as nothing can. Wise parents, too, let their children read this type of 18 Circulation story because they know that it keeps them abreast of the times, educates them, and supplants the vicious and debasing sex story. science wonder stories are clean, clean from beginning to end. They stimulate only one thing—imagination.”3 Gernsback’s invention of the science fiction magazine has a different basis and an earlier chronology. An enthusiast for amateur two-way radio, he began publishing stories of scientific fiction in the 1910s in his radio catalogs and magazines. Following the success in the early 1920s of Science & Invention special issues devoted to what he then called “scientifiction,” he created a new magazine in 1926, Amazing Stories, dedicated exclusively to it. Addressing in its inaugural editorial those readers who wondered, “aren’t there enough [magazines] already, with the several hundreds now being published ?” he declared that Amazing Stories was not merely “another fiction magazine” but a “new kind of fiction magazine!”4 Amazing was amazing, initially . Circulation figures shot quickly beyond one hundred thousand for the monthly, and Gernsback quickly added quarterly and annual versions, the appropriately named Amazing Stories Quarterly and Amazing Stories Annual. After several years of success, however, in early 1929 Gernsback lost financial and editorial control of the enterprise, and he left it, its magazines, and scientifiction.5 They continued under the management of Teck Publications, and his former assistant, Dr. T. O’Conor Sloane, a chemist by training and a relative by marriage to Thomas Edison, ascended to its editorial mantle. Gernsback returned later that year with Science Wonder Stories and its renamed “science fiction” to compete with his earlier creations. Claims to original propriety aside, Gernsback’s publishing adventures spoke to the distinction that the French cultural historian Roger Chartier made between text and print. Books, he observed, were the result of two productive processes: writers’ expression produced text, while printers, informed by editorial opinion and publishers’ concerns, manufactured print. The one was distinct from but required the other. “Whatever they may do, authors do not write books,” the historian of print Roger Stoddard declared. “Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines.”6 Publishing in this sense not only made books from writing but also mediated their relationship and tension. Publishing’s economic concerns underwrote the work of writers and the marketing and sale of books and complicated purely textual ideas of authorship, reading, and the effort and creativity they involved. Editors’ and publishers’ interests explain 19 “MagazinesforMorons” how and why books aimed at readers do not necessarily accord with their authors’ intentions.7 Publishing’s mediation of text and print also applies, perhaps even more so, to magazines and to science fiction. In the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, magazines were a primary source for reading. Although many fiction and nonfiction works were subsequently published as books, most appeared first as stories and articles in magazines whose various forms circulated both widely and...