TI01 Amazing Stories Is 100!

Welcome to the Tech Imaginarium. Join us as we explore how science fiction made the modern world. So hi there, my name's John Helmer and I'm here with my good friend Esric Carlebach.

Hello everyone.

In this, the first episode of the podcast, we're celebrating an auspicious centenary. It's 100 years this spring since the magazine Amazing Stories hit the newsstands, giving birth in the process to the genre we all know and love so well— scientifiction. Well, of course it's not. We know it's science fiction, or SF, or if we really want to annoy the purists, sci-fi. But scientifiction was what Hugo Gernsback, the publisher of Amazing Stories, wanted to call the thing, though it's not hard to see why it didn't catch on. So 1926 was the first year of this publication's existence, and amazingly, that title is still going. Nowadays it's a website, of course, and on the Amazing Stories website they give Wednesday, March 10th as the date of its first distribution, and it had an April cover date and a lovely lurid cover it was. We'll talk a bit more about that later. But though this date is thought to be the birth of the genre, it certainly wasn't the beginning of science fiction writing or science fiction movies for that matter. Three of the writers featured in that first issue, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, had for some time been writing stories and novels on themes that are are recognizably those we associate with science fiction or speculative fiction. Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, which was published in 1818, might lay claim to be the first science fiction author. And we're going to do an episode covering her creation in this series. But even then, we can trace the sort of themes that she and Poe and Wells and Verne were playing around with right back into myths and religious visions from history and even prehistory. There are also science fiction movies that predate the magazine. A Trip to the Moon, created by Georges Méliès— I'm probably mispronouncing that— in 1902, is often considered to be the first science fiction film. Drew on Jules Verne and H.G. Wells in its depiction of a spacecraft being launched to the moon in a large cannon, and its groundbreaking special effects pioneered the way for future science fiction films. The early decades of cinema treated science fiction literature as something of a writer's room. Edison Studios produced the first film adaptation of Frankenstein in 1910. Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 1916 film. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was adapted in 1913 and again in 1920. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World reached the screen in 1925, which was a year before Amazing Stories launched. Let's not forget a significant European entry from Soviet Russia in 1924. Aelita, Queen of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov. Klondike, which sent a Soviet engineer to Mars to foment workers' revolution. I must admit that last one was new on me, but thank you, Claude, for that. So, Esri, I hope Claude didn't make that up, by the way.

No, it is real. It is a real film, yeah.

Well done, Claude. We do use AI in the production of this series, but we very carefully fact-check it. So, Esri, if science fiction was really already well up and running, why is this anniversary so significant?

I think there are two main reasons, John. First, as you mentioned, it marks the birth of science fiction as a recognized genre, and from the launch of Amazing Stories, SF began to gain its reputation as the literature of ideas, as Isaac Asimov called it. For me though, science fiction's unique character is really based on the what-if framing of its ideas, as well as the core themes: the development and use of technology, the future as the primary orientation of human thought, and the potential evolution of humanity, or in many cases, its potential destruction. Second reason I think this centenary is so important is because of its undoubted influence on the direction of history, of real life if you like, in the 100 years since it appeared, which I call the Amazing Century. For a start, in 1925, just before Amazing was born, less than half of households in the US had electricity. And even though it was a national priority, by 1930, only 10% of US farms had electric power. At the same time, over in Moscow, our friend Lenin was defining communism as Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country. I mean, let's just consider the impact of electrification. Everything we depend on today, from, you know, radiography scans to AI, from transport systems to entertainment, the lights in our homes, all of it depends on electricity.

Cars now as well.

Yes, and cars. With a learning and development hat on, I'd say that domestic industrial electrification in those years leading up to World War II created very familiar debates about the consequences for training and skills and labor markets, as well, of course, the wider social and economic impacts. And the crucial connection here is in the life and career of Hugo Gönsbach, who founded Amazing Stories.

So let's turn our focus now on the man who gave us the science fiction genre, Hugo Gernsback. He was born Hugo Gernsbacher in Luxembourg in 1884, son of a prosperous wine merchant fascinated by electricity from childhood. He emigrated to America in 1904 at the age of 19, reportedly carrying nothing more than a new type of dry battery he'd invented at the age of 19, which is pretty impressive. $100 from his family, which is roughly equivalent to $3,640, which interestingly Claude thought was what you'd spend on a laptop. I've never paid that much for a laptop. We had a bit of an argument about that, me and Claude. Interestingly, he'd been denied patents in both France and Germany for the battery, but he did manage to get it patented in the US. So it was kind of a case of, in so many cases, immigrants to the US going there as a land of opportunity, opportunity to do stuff that stuffy old Europeans wouldn't allow them. Unfortunately, although his battery generated 3 times the currency of American batteries, it turned out to be a bit of a dud because it couldn't be mass-produced. You just couldn't, you know, put it into a factory and produce it at scale. So, so the whole venture, the whole reason he'd gone there, really came to nothing. Nil desperandum. He was a nil desperandum kind of guy. Here you go. He quickly taught himself English and established himself as a publisher and entrepreneur in the booming world of radio and electrical technology, founding Modern Electrics in 1908. Just goes to show, isn't it? Media, the last resort of the helpless. This was the first magazine for radio hobbyists, and he followed it up with Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention. He wrote his own science fiction novel, Ralph 124C41+. You see, he really wasn't that great at titles, was he? It reminds me of the Steve Martin joke. You know, some people have a way with words and some people not have way. It was serialized in 1911 onwards and it apparently reads less as fiction than as an illustrated catalog of future gadgets. Sounds like I'm running him down here, but he was brash, visionary. Gernsback was noted for paying his writers extremely low fees, unfortunately, or not paying them at all. H.P. Lovecraft, who had his first SF story published in Amazing Stories, called him Hugo The Rat, and Barry Maltzberg, another SF writer and editor, said this about him many years later. Gernsback's venality and corruption, his sleaziness and his utter disregard for the financial rights of authors have been well documented and discussed. That the founder of genre science fiction, who gave his name to the field's most prestigious awards— that's the Hugo's to you— was pretty much a crook and a contemptuous crook who stiffed his writer but paid himself $100,000 a year as president of Gernsback Publications has been clearly established. So, Esri, tell us more about Gernsback, probably, you know, preferably stuff on the positive side of the balance sheet. And I'm curious to know to what extent can we say his character, light and dark, might have helped to shape the science fiction genre.

Yeah, I mean, the first thing to say is that the $100,000 a year figure that Maltzberg quotes is not actually true. Oh, okay. It turned out that he and his brother, who was the co-director of the company that owned Amazing, their joint salaries added up to 100 grand. Still a lot more than the authors were getting, to be fair, but I think it's indicative of how— Gernsbach's reputation got tarnished. But really, I consider him to be typical of European immigrants to the US at that period. I mean, he had a qualification in electrical engineering, as we've heard, but he had a liberal arts education too, particularly in literature. And he had that kind of American optimism about the potential of emerging technologies, particularly electricity.

Hmm.

He thought it would lead to improvements for everyone. And actually, he was shocked when he arrived in America to discover how little the general public seemed to know or care about it. But his spirit of optimism, of anticipating the benefits of technology, um, and kind of the potential to wield unprecedented power over nature, that's been a feature of science fiction ever since. Although many would say that the, um, atom bombs of 1945 shattered that illusion. Gernsback's faith in technology was also a big part of his motivation for becoming a publisher. He wanted to promote knowledge of science and technology and encourage people to get the skills they'd need to work in those emerging industries. And actually, you can see that in the first issue of Amazing Stories. It's full of ads for correspondence courses in these new fields, offering big salaries and, you know, great promotion prospects. So Gernsback's techno-optimism went beyond his stated aim as a publisher, which was very wreathian, as we've noted, to entertain and inform. He thought it was actually going to bring about a whole new world. And he imagined a world kind of created by technological marvels. He loved gadgets. And he was quick to see that anyone who had the right skills and the right knowledge could reap the rewards. But before he launched Amazing, He'd been hooked for more than a decade on what were then called scientific romances. And that was when romances still meant any kind of, you know, invented story, not just love stories. So, from 1911 until well into the mid-'20s, he was avidly reading people like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs, who, obviously, most famous for Tarzan of the Apes, but also wrote a series of very popular stories set on Mars. Gernsback devoured these and stories by other less well-known writers, particularly where a specific technological invention was central to the plot. And he published a few of them in his, um, Electrical Experimenter, which was a hobbyist magazine, essentially.

Yeah.

He encouraged stories which dealt with future wars fought with new inventions, not because he was in favor of war, but because they often ended up where the world is ruled by scientists who can ensure peace and prosperity for all. It's a sort of utopian technocracy.

Yeah.

Then in 1920, he changed the name of The Electrical Experimenter to what had been previously its subtitle, Science and Invention. And the editorial he wrote for that issue was a kind of manifesto for what became known as science fiction. He wrote, the public applauds and instantly believes in anything new that is scientific, whereas the true scientist scoffs and jeers. Scoffs and jeers. It matters little that Jules Verne or Nikola Tesla are 100 years ahead of the times, the scientists still scoff and laugh unbelievingly. But happily, the great public today appreciates the fantastic dreamer because it knows from experience that these fantastic dreams have a habit of coming true on the morrow.

Hmm.

So, as you said earlier, Gernsback was a controversial figure amongst SF writers, but there's no doubt that his contribution was absolutely crucial. By introducing Amazing Stories, he really helped to move science fiction beyond those Victorian scientific romances of people like Verne and Wells, um, although they both, of course, appeared in that first issue of Amazing Stories. Hmm. Gernsback was also aware that women needed more opportunities to publish, and he actively sought stories by women. Claire Winger Harris, um, contributed 7 stories to Amazing during the Gernsback years, and that made her the first woman to be published regularly in any science fiction magazine. And when he was looking for appropriate material, Gernsback really wanted a new approach based on some scientific accuracy to back up the action and adventure. He wanted writers who, who could demonstrate what he called prophetic vision, not just describe the application of a new technology in a more or less contemporary setting. That kind of writing was still a rarity, and understandably, because many writers were wary of claiming prophetic vision. Fantastic vision, it does have a habit of going horribly wrong. In fact, ironically, Gönsbach's insistence on scientific accuracy tended to put off the more imaginative or socially aware writers. His business empire eventually went into liquidation in 1929.

So not long after launch, yeah.

Less than 3 years. Yeah. But Amazing Stories got taken over by another company. However, Gönsweig's popular appeal continued, and he went on to launch two more magazines, Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories, by subscription funds or crowdfunding, as we know it today. He raised $20,000, which is about $380,000 in today's money. And that was in the same year as the Wall Street crash. And I think that shows how strongly he tapped into a zeitgeist that was dominated by scientific discoveries and technological inventions.

So much in there is that, you know, a lot of threads to tease out there. But before we move on, and I think we ought to kind of move on to discussing the contents of the magazine, I'd just like to mention a few of the pen names. I just want to kind of drag things down to my level, I'm afraid, after that very interesting disquisition by mentioning a few of the pen names that Hugo Görnsback published under. Here we go. Benno Ruckschag, Erno Schuckbag, Grace G. Hucksnob, Grego Banshuck, Grenno Gashbuck, Gus N. Habergock. I'm reading these very carefully. Kars Guggenchob. Wonderful. What do you notice about all those pen names as?

They are all anagrams of Hugo Gernsback.

5 points.

And it is true that he used them. He actually published stories under all those names. It's bizarre, but he did.

Yeah, I love it. I mean, I love the kind of seriousness, the Rethian values, as you say, to entertain and inform, that he talks about, but also the kind of slightly hucksterish edge to all this. And people like Aldiss, I think, have been— writers like Aldiss have been trying for, or tried for decades to elevate the way that science fiction was seen as kind of almost a serious art form. Of course, it's a very serious endeavor, but it's also a lot of fun. So before we get into the actual contents of the first magazine, actually, it's probably worth taking a step back and looking a bit at the context in which it lands because we are doing a kind of circular thing with this pod, which is, you know, you have the science and that generates the fictions and the speculations and those in turn generate technology ideas and products that we live with now. And that's kind of the dynamic we're looking at. So for context, let's look back at what science was actually looking like in 1926. So amazing stories came out. The public relationship with science was like the battery he had invented and brought to the US, highly charged but also hugely contradictory. We tend to think that the changes we've seen in our own lifetime are massive and bewildering. We hear this all the time, especially people like you and me, as you go to too many conferences. People are always saying, You know, there's more data in the world now than there ever was. Everything's moving faster, everything's accelerating, everything's getting faster. But try to put yourself in the shoes of an average person in 1926, and they might not have felt all that different. 'Cause within a single generation, you just said science had electrified homes, but it also projected moving pictures onto screens. It filled the air with radio voices and also filled the trenches with poison gas. For millions of people, the defining experience of science technology in their lifetimes was not the light bulb or the telephone, it was industrial slaughter. The First World War, which ended only 8 years earlier, had introduced the machine gun, the tank, the bomber aircraft, and most viscerally, poison gas. The public was horrified by the results of chemical weapons like mustard gas and phosgene. It's hard to kind of recapture that now because we take it for granted, but it terrified people because it It wasn't like a gun that could fire at them or something that could hit them over the head. It would kind of creep into an entire atmosphere. And the people who invented this stuff in the popular imagination must be a bit unhinged or evil. So the figure of the scientist, the chemist, the engineer, the inventor now carried a new shadow, the wicked inventor. Surely the people who could invent such horrific weapons were horrific themselves. So this feeling of repulsion feeds into the figure of the mad scientist typified by Rotfang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which we'll no doubt do an episode about at some point. And of course, Victor Frankenstein. It becomes a perennial theme and it taps into old atavistic fears that there are devils and demons around. Science was an elemental power, and in the wrong hands, it could be aligned with evil. So this ambivalence is crucial to understanding why science fiction struck such a chord. What will science do to us next? You know, what good things will it bring? What bad things? What will happen next is the crucial question people ask of science fiction and continue to ask to this day. If you go to YouTube, there are thousands of things telling you how evil AI is and how it will kill us. And also loads of things telling telling us about the wonderful products we'll have from this and benefits. It continues, "What will happen next is a big question." However, at the same time as science was becoming huge and scary, it was also becoming deeply weird. I mean, forget about the mustard gas and the bombs. Some of the ideas were really unsettling. The theoretical science of the early 1920s was doing something really unsettling to the educated public, dismantling the Newtonian universe and replacing it with something— well, to call it counterintuitive doesn't really do it justice. So first this hit that educated public, a much smaller proportion of the population in those days, but it rapidly began to spread to the wider population. And when the year 1919 began, Albert Einstein was virtually unknown beyond the world of professional physicists. By the end of that year, he was a household name around the globe. The confirmation of general relativity by the observation of a solar eclipse made Einstein an overnight international sensation. I mean, it's still incredibly famous, but it was a relief to people, I think, to find that he wasn't a mad scientist. Einstein was a pacifist, an internationalist. He was a genius who had rewritten the laws of gravity, but everybody loved him, and they still do. He's even now starring in ads with Angela Rippon in the UK, who is a newsreader, for energy meters, I think. He's sort of cuddly. Relative Frank.

He's a brand, he's everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, he's still a brand. And because we got so used to him being around and being so cited in the media during all that time, you know, he, he had worldwide celebrity really early on, um, and that's to do with the spread of media we talk about later. So relativity, his invention, was weird, however, and hard to understand. Spacetime was weird, but things were about to get a lot weirder. In 1926, the year of amazing stories, at the age of 39, Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger Killed his cat. Well, did he? Science said that until the moment he opened his experimental box, the cat was both alive and dead. This wasn't the foundation of quantum wave mechanics. Actually, I read on the internet that it was originally meant to send up quantum mechanics. It was kind of a reductio ad absurdum by applying the findings of quantum mechanics to a real-world situation, you know, the cat in the box. So it was really slightly, to use the English vernacular, taking the piss, how it's now taken as a way of explaining to people how weird quantum science really is. So it's a universe where particles behaved as waves suddenly and certainty devolved into probability. And this was happening at exactly the moment Amazing Stories launched. Beginning in 1925, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Paul Dirac, and Schrödinger and others created a weird new fuzzy physics culminating in Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. Bertrand Russell, writing in a popular science publication in '28, would confess that it was an impossible task to describe this theory in simple language. One science publication suggested that in the new idea, in the new idea that uncertainty rules the universe, dreamers and mystics will find comfort. So if you can't explain this thing logically, you have to do it through kind of parables and thought experiments like Schrödinger Schrödinger. In a sense, Schrödinger's dead or undead cat in the box is a type of science fiction. And in another sense, by extension, all science fiction is a series and collection of thought experiments. So the boundary between hard science and speculation was blurring, and the response was this upsurge of fiction. Meanwhile, out in space, Edwin Hubble aimed the powerful 100-inch telescope towards the Andromeda Nebula, concluded that it was not merely a gas cloud, but a collection of stars a million light years away from Earth. He went on to show that galaxies are actually moving apart. I mean, how do you kind of, how do you cope with all this stuff? Because it is all so weird and improbable. The first observational evidence, that was, for what would become the Big Bang theory. The universe had suddenly become vast incomprehensibly large. Humanity's cosmic address was no longer the center of creation, but one obscure planet in one of billions of galaxies. For many readers picking up Amazing Stories, the stars were no longer just romantic objects, but perhaps plausible destinations. So how could we get to them? Well, Robert Goddard had an answer. Over to you, Esri.

Yeah, well, if you'll pardon another pun, it is an amazing story.

I'm not sure I will, Esri.

Okay, I'll I'll try and avoid them then. Goddard was born in 1882, and fortunately, he always kept detailed notes and diaries, so we actually know a lot about his life and his thoughts. As a teenager, he was deeply affected by the classic H.G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds, which he read when it came out in 1898. He later said that his career in rocket science came about as a direct result of the inspiration he got from reading science fiction.. And he's someone who definitely had a Goernsback-type prophetic vision because he wrote about it in his diary entry for October the 19th, 1899. And that's the day he climbed high into the branches of a tall cherry tree and just became completely transfixed, staring into the sky. As I looked toward the fields at the east, he wrote, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. Lost. When he climbed down again, he knew he'd found his purpose and celebrated October 19th as Anniversary Day every year for the rest of his life. Today, he's known as the father of rocketry because he invented some of the basic aspects of rocket technology. He took out two patents, or patents as we say in the UK, in 1914. One was a multi-stage rocket design, and the other, a rocket fueled by liquid propellant. He went on to register over 200 patents, and others had already kind of thought about the theoretical problem of escaping Earth's gravity, but hadn't really grasped the basic practical challenge, which is building a workable rocket propulsion system. And Goddard devoted himself both to the theoretical and the practical aspects of rockets, um, but never lost sight of his vision, that dream of exploring the stars, of getting to Mars. Um, that ability to combine theoretical principles with practical invention also makes him an ideal educator for the skills sector. Anyway, Goddard was a contemporary of Hugo Gönsberg and shared a lot of Gönsberg's interests. Um, in fact, Gönsberg wrote an article about Goddard's work and published it in the Electrical Experimenter in 1920. Um, but the connection doesn't end there. For the February 1930 edition of Science Wonder Stories, Görnsbach commissioned a group of leading scientists, including Goddard, for a symposium. He asked them to respond to an essay by German scientist Theodor Wolff entitled 'Can Man Free Himself from Gravity?' And Wolff argued that it was impossible. He didn't think there was any kind of vehicle that could gain the kind of velocity needed to leave Earth. But Goddard showed how it could be done using a step rocket principle he'd first proposed in 1916. So that's stacking a rocket in stages and then ejecting the empty propellant tanks as they're exhausted.

Yeah, that's exactly the mechanism that we used in the Apollo Moon launch.

Of course.

Yeah.

And all the subsequent rockets that have launched off the surface of the planet, which are increasing in number incredibly with all the, you know, Starlink satellite launches.

Yeah.

And now NASA's new Artemis project and so on.

Yeah.

Um, so Goddard was proved right, no question. He also went on to meet, um, his great hero H.G. Wells, and they, they wrote to each other. In April 1932, Goddard was running rocket experiments in New Mexico, and he wrote to Wells saying, how many years I shall be able to work on the problem, I do not know. I hope as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing. The aiming at the stars, both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations. No matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning. So that story, Goddard's story, demonstrates, I think, how the development of science and technology and the history of science fiction in the 20th century, they're not just connected, they're inextricably linked.

Of course, it's well documented that Elon Musk was influenced by science fiction in his development.

I mean, yeah.

In a rather snarky way, has to be said, by Jill Lepore, who writes for The New Yorker and did a radio program about it. Don't really object to people being snarky about Musk, but you do kind of have to admire his achievements. And there is that mix of light and shade in all of this stuff. Actually, don't you think that it's weird that Rocketry still is about about that same kind of thing. And it's rather beautiful watching rockets take off. Scary, but also slightly crude, isn't it? It is like kind of firing at something out of a cannon. We never got the anti-gravity stuff and all the rest of it. But yeah, maybe something to talk about later. So that's the scientific context for the birth of science fiction Let's now have a look at what was in the actual magazine itself. And we're going to look at the contributors in two groups. Firstly, the more well-known writers, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe, who've already established themselves with big international audiences of general readers. And two of them, in fact, were already dead by 1926. And then we'll move on to the other group of people who are more more sort of within the genre and more contemporaries of Gernsback. So Wells, Verne, and Poe. And we'll kick off with Jules Verne. I'm going to call him the anglicised version because, you know, Jules Verne is, you know, how he would really say his name. But I've had a had enough nasty looks from Parisian waiters over the years to realize when I attempt French pronunciation, I don't really make any friends. So he stays there 1828 to 1905. He was born in Nantes in France. He trained as a lawyer before abandoning that profession to write plays and eventually the extraordinary adventure novels that made him one of the most widely read authors in history. Working with publisher Pierre-Jules Huxel. He produced his Voyage Extraordinaire. You see, I'm falling into doing it. I can't help it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parisian waiter wouldn't think so. A vast series including Journey to the Center of the Earth, well known, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, really well known, Around the World in 80 Days, even more well known, that blended scientific speculations with gripping adventure. He remains the second most translated author of all time time. And Esri, can you guess who the first, uh, the, the first most translated author of all time is?

Must be William Shakespeare.

No, Agatha Christie. Among the technological developments that Verne predicted were the skyscraper, the submarine, the newsreel, and the lunar spacecraft, though he thought the moon rocket would be fired from a cannon in Florida, which, which is actually fairly close, isn't it? I mean, a bit closer than what Wells thought. So the story that he had in Amazing Stories was actually written in 1877. I should say, I don't think we've said yet that all the stories in Amazing Stories were reprints. So Verne's story was Off on a Comet. A comet called Gallia grazes the Earth near Gibraltar, scooping up a chunk of land along with roughly 40 people of various nationalities. Captain Hector Cerverdac and his companions find themselves hurtling through the solar system, enduring reduced gravity, a 6-hour day, and dwindling temperatures as the comet moves away from the sun. They form a fractious miniature society, squabble over territory, and must devise an audacious plan to return to Earth when Gallia swings back 2 years later. Gernsback chose it for his first issue, though somewhat ironically, as Verne himself acknowledged, it was among the least scientifically rigorous works. And Hugo Gernsback was quite quite hot on having things scientifically rigorous. Anyway, so the next one is H.G. Wells, 1866 to 1946, born in Bromley, Kent, where so many great things come from, including Billy Idol, you know, Susie Sue, to a late— oh, David Bowie— to a lady's maid and a professional cricketer. And the professional cricketer thing's important in placing Wells, because there was this thing of gentlemen and players in cricket. Wells was definitely not from an upper-class background. He was lower-middle-class at best and from a family that had a very precarious existence. His mother was a lady's maid and later housekeeper. But he won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London where his training under T.H. Huxley shaped his scientific imagination. His early science fiction novels, The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, the names ring out, appeared in a burst of creativity in the 1890s and remain foundational to the genre. Most of his really exciting work was done before the First World War. It's not so exciting after that. Unlike Verne, Wells was less interested in the mechanics of technology than its social and moral consequences, but possibly because of that, he was enormously influential on the young. According to George Orwell, thinking people— George Orwell, who of course Elon Musk also venerates, surprisingly— thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation. I doubt whether anyone who's writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Orwell wrote that in 1942. Um, he wrote that Orwell's basic message was science can solve all the ills that humanity is heir to, but that man is at present too blind to see the possibility of his own powers. How often do we see that echoed in science fiction and techno-optimists General H.G. Wells, Republican, atheist, socialist, was also a prolific political writer, essayist, and a serial adulterer of legendary proportions. It's not widely recognized, perhaps, that The War of the Worlds, perhaps his most famous story nowadays, was written partly as a satire on British imperialism. It was about the Martians doing to England what England was doing to the rest of the world at the time. So his story, The New Accelerator, 1901, it was first written. Professor Gibberain, Gibber, Gibber, Gibberne, Professor Gibbon, Professor Gibberne, a physiologist.

Gibberne.

Gibberne, Gibberne, sorry, soft G, has been developing a drug to stimulate the nervous system intended, he says, as a tonic for the exhausted modern age. These kind of nerve tonics were extremely popular around the turn of the century. Century and the first years of the 20th century. What he accidentally creates is something rather more dramatic, a preparation that accelerates the user's metabolism thousands of times over so that the external world appears to freeze while the user moves through it freely. Wells and Giburn take a dose and wander through the eerily still crowds of Folkestone, perceiving the world in suspended animation, before discovering that moving at that speed generates enough friction to risk setting their clothes on fire. Now, it probably would've had other results as well, but he doesn't go into that. Playful and witty, the story is an early prototype of the superhero speed power. Oh, we, we see it a lot in kind of like Action Comics and Marvel Comics. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And a typically Wellsian meditation on technology as both gift and, and hazard. It's just so interesting to see all these tropes that we are so used to in in the Marvel Universe even, for instance, turning up so early in this stuff. Lastly, in this kind of trio of established authors, Edgar Allan Poe, hero of mine, 1809 to 1849, born in Boston, orphaned young. Poe was raised by the wealthy Allan family of Virginia, though the relationship was troubled and he was eventually disinherited. He worked as a magazine editor, critic, and writer. He produced poetry, some great poetry, tales, and literary theory of remarkable remarkable originality despite being chronically underpaid and frequently destitute. Sad story of most writers' lives, as I can attest. He invented the detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He pioneered the psychological horror tale and wrote speculative fiction years before the genre had a name. He's also really a leading light in another genre, which is American Gothic, um, what I'm interested in. He died in Baltimore in 1849 under circumstances still disputed. Many stories about that, either died of rabies, alcohol, and probably foul play. And here's a link forward to our first author, Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, so intrigued Jules Verne that he wrote a sequel to it. So Poe had fan fiction from Jules Verne. The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is the story. In 1845, it's first written. A mesmerist, a practitioner of the fashionable pseudoscience of hypnotism, this is the beginning of the 19th century we're talking about here, post-story, decides to conduct an unprecedented experiment placing a dying man into a mesmeric trance at the precise moment of death to observe what happens. His subject, the consumptive Ernest Valdemar, consents. The experiment succeeds catastrophically. Valdemar lies suspended between life and death for 7 months, his body neither decomposing nor recovering. I had a job like that once. Speaking in a hideous voice from between motionless lips. When the mesmerist finally attempts to wake him, Valdemar's body instantaneously collapses into a nearly liquid mass of loathsome putrescence. Yuck. The story was published without claiming to be fictional, and many readers at the time took it for a factual account account, including British physicians who wrote to Poe asking for details. It's exactly the kind of pseudoscientific horror that Gernsback, with an instinct for the boundary between science and sensation, could not resist. You know, maybe there's an early pre-echo there, Esri, of the radio broadcast that Welles did of— not Welles. Yes, Orson Welles did of War of the Worlds that convinced people that the world was being invaded. Earth was being invaded by Martians. But with that, I'm gonna hand over to you to, to, to do the other contributors to, to this.

Okay. I mean, as you said, they were all reprints, the 6 stories in the first issue of Amazing. And from the less well-known writers, if you like, 2 had previously appeared in Gernsback's magazine, Science and Invention, and the The third was in All-Story Weekly, a mystery and adventure publication which had been around since 1905 and was also the place where the first Tarzan stories were published. So although these other three writers weren't nearly as famous as, as the big three of Wells, Verne, and Poe, they weren't completely unknown or untried either. Let's start with the two reprints from Science and Invention. First up is George Allan England with The The Thing from Outside. I'm sorry, I have to say it like that because the way it's printed in Amazing Stories, the words Thing and Outside are in capital letters.

Yeah.

And there is an emerald, a dash between The Thing and from outside. So it is The Thing from Outside.

Yeah, okay.

Gernsback introduced all the stories in Amazing with a little description. And here, I think without any irony, he writes, This story should be read quite carefully, and it is necessary to use one's imagination in reading it. That's probably a bit unfair to Gernsback because, you know, it's obvious to us now that you have to use the imagination when reading this stuff. But as Gernsback mentioned in his inaugural editorial for Amazing, it was a whole new kind of magazine, and he needed to keep his readers on side. The main idea of the thing The Thing from Outside concerns an alien life form completely unlike anything terrestrial. England describes it examining humans in the way a human biologist might examine an insect. To quote one of the main characters, "There are things at work, things that reckon with us no more than we do with ants." There's more than a little foreshadowing here of John Carpenter's classic 1982 horror movie, The Thing.

The Thing.

I mean, the setting is identical. Article. It's set in the icy far north. The alien remains invisible throughout the tale, um, and its terrifying effect causes a group of Americans to turn on each other until only 3 are left alive. And 2 of them are beaten unconscious and tied up by the protagonist to make sure they won't attack him while he escapes. Some of the horror in that story, I think, can still get the pulse racing. Here's an Jandron stumbled away, babbling. Out of the door crept something like a man, a queer, broken, bent-over thing, a thing crippled, shrunken, and flabby that whined. This thing— yes, it was still Mar, the journalist— crouched down, quivering and whimpering. It moved its hands as a crushed ant moves its antennae, jerkily, without significance. So the author of this nightmarish piece was widely published in pulp magazines and in other genres as well. As well. In 1912, he stood for governor of Maine as the Socialist Party of America candidate and came third.

Wow.

When he put aside his pulp writing career, he turned to chicken farming. A man with a, you know, broad mind, obviously. When he died in 1936, rumors quickly spread that he'd just actually disappeared while on some improbable expedition. And I think the thing from outside would not have been out of place in Weird Tales, um, the fantasy and horror magazine that actually predated Amazing Stories and was also the main outlet for the great H.P. Lovecraft. And maybe we can talk a bit about Lovecraft in a future episode.

I think we should definitely do an episode on Lovecraft. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's, it, it, again, somebody with a huge amount of influence that isn't always recognized. But yeah, I confess I am a member of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

I'd like to get that in at some point. Definitely up for some rugose cones and eldritch fish-man creatures dragged from the swamp. Yeah.

Wonderful. We will definitely do that then.

And his dodgy politics. Yeah.

Well, if you want to talk about dodgy politics, a lot of the people that we're talking about today would fit into that category. Anyway, the other carryover from science and invention is The Man from the Atom by G. Payton Wurtenbaker, probably the most science fiction of of the three, both in theme and in tone. Worth Baker's story features a Professor Martin, a scientific genius, as is so often the case in science fiction, who is fascinated by the magic potions that make Alice grow smaller and larger in Alice in Wonderland.

Yeah.

So he develops a machine that can shrink or enlarge a person to vastly different scales. How this is managed by something no bigger than a modern cereal packet is, you know, again left to the reader's imagination. I am afraid, Professor Martin suggested, that you could not understand all the technical details. It is horribly complicated. Um, but he's keen to try his new invention, and he finds a willing guinea pig, um, in a friend called Kirby, who we are told longs to visit other stars. Kirby tearfully puts on the special suit Professor Martin gives him, straps on the shape-shifting device, and hits the enlargement button. And to be fair, Wharton Baker gives actually quite an enthralling description of Kirby's expansion into cosmic space, and some pathos too in Kirby's brief, ultimately forlorn hope of returning to an Earth that has long since vanished because time flows completely differently, as we knew from Einstein, um, at that scale. It's quite an achievement, the story, actually, considering that Wharton Baker was only 15 years old when he wrote it.

Wow.

And it was so popular with the readers that Gernsback commissioned a sequel for the May 1926 issue, which was actually the first original tale, i.e., not a reprint, to appear in Amazing Stories.

Yeah.

But, um, Wertham Baker didn't stay with science fiction after 1930. He wrote a couple of novels, I guess, of mainstream literary fiction, and went on to quite a diverse career. He worked in business journalism. Journalism. He served in air combat intelligence during World War II, and then he went on to write popular science books and TV scripts about aerospace medicine.

Hmm.

So finally, of the three, we have The Man Who Saved the Earth by Austin Hall, which had originally appeared in a 1919 issue of All-Story Weekly. It's about a dreamy and idealistic boy named Charlie Hyke who shows such great ability in science that he gains the attention of reclusive genius Dr. Robold, is another classic character.

Another mad scientist, yeah.

Another mad scientist. Under Robold's tutelage, our hero discovers how to tap immense power from the previously unknown science of celestial kinetics. And just in the nick of time, he manages to stop those pesky Martians from destroying life on Earth by stealing all our water. Although they do manage to get away with a couple of oceans.

Are they significant oceans? I mean, you know, Pacific, Atlantic, Indian?

Yes, big ones, definitely. But I think one of them was the Pacific, which is the biggest ocean on the planet. So it did result in the loss of a significantly large amount of light on Earth, but not all of it. So he did save the Earth and they used this power of so-called celestial kinetics to, to boot the Martians out and send them home. The story says a tremendous force of unlimited potentiality had been loosed to kinetic violent. But when the story ends, the narrator is actually quite sanguine about the Martian attack. "We look to a green and beautiful Mars," he says. "We hold no enmity.

It was but the law of self-preservation." See, these people have nicked the Pacific Ocean. It's very understanding, I think.

Incredibly so. And I think there's a hint there that actually, you know, for the people that are being written about, the loss of, you know, Africa, South America possibly, and bits of East Asia probably wasn't that much of an issue for them. You know, as long as America was still there, they were fine.

That's the main thing.

But our hero, Charlie, did have a sort of moral backbone and realized that his invention could be used for terrible things. And so he buried it deep underground to prevent that from happening. And Gernsback makes the obvious connection in his introduction to the story. He says, "This story depicts Charlie's horror at the Frankenstein which he had unloosed." So, even then— And when was James Whale's Frankenstein movie? 1924, something like that?

Pack facts. The horror film Frankenstein, directed by English director James Whale, appeared in 1931.

1931.

It was adapted from the 1927 play Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre by Peggy Webling, which in turn was based on Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus.

Or maybe a bit later, a bit later. But that idea of the scientists creating something which then can be used to destroy the scientists and all else is, is clearly already in in, in Gönsbach's mind.

Yeah.

I think the key line in the story, and maybe the one that persuaded Gönsbach to reprint it, is spoken by Dr. Robald, and I think it's a lovely line. He says, "The really great scientist should be a visionary. An inventor is merely a poet with tools." And I think that captures Gönsbach's view of the world ruled by scientists' prophetic vision. And you where there's that combination of, uh, theory with practical innovation for the improvement of humanity. Sadly, due to a rather clunky written style, Austin Hall is not remembered among the greats of science fiction, even in the world of pulp magazines. Um, but his work does get described as being particularly imaginative, and he went on to produce many short stories and novels, um, the best of which are, uh, with the in collaboration with the wonderfully named Homer Eon Flint. Another name to conjure with.

Yeah. And not an anagram, presumably.

I haven't tried that, but it could be of something.

Yeah. So what happened to— thanks for that, Esri. What happened to Amazing Stories in the years subsequently? I've got a number here that the first issue hit 150,000 in circulation by the end of the next year. By the '60s, it was down around the kind of 50,000 mark and kind of declined through to the '90s. But could you talk about some of the people who wrote for it over the years and came to prominence?

Yeah, I think the business aspect is crucial here. It kind of explains some of the reasons for Goernsback's reputation. And as I'll explain, some of the exaggerations about what he did and didn't do. His business empire got into trouble very quickly after the launch of Amazing Stories. And, you know, it is true that he did treat authors badly, and he got sued for non-payment, and eventually he had to file for bankruptcy. But it's worth pointing out in his defense that he actually began publishing fiction in his electrical and radio hobbyist publications. And there, he had a couple of staff writers on salaries, and he used a few freelancers, and they were always properly paid.

Ah.

But he also awarded prizes for the best stories sent in by readers, and these were token prizes, you know, like $1 or $5, because Gernsback realized for these amateur writers, what they cared about was just seeing their name in print.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, I think he carried that attitude over to the pulp writers he hired for Amazing Stories. Stories.

Right. So slightly a vanity publishing operation as it, it would've been called.

It kind of, but he was, you know, he was, he wanted fiction as a means of promoting science education. So in his, you know, ostensibly nonfiction magazines, he offered these prizes as a, as a way of encouraging people to get into writing stories about science and technology.

Yeah.

And, you know, for some writers, like people like H.G. Wells, they could just walk away if they didn't like the rates he was offering. And some didn't bother to argue about the rates in the way that Gernsback had anticipated, but a lot of others did get angry. Gernsback did argue that a new type of magazine like Amazing needed time to get on its feet financially, and he thought the writers would be supportive of that because he assumed that they would see the long-term potential. Um, but unfortunately he came across as arrogant and inflexible, and, you know, we've all seen what people have said about him. His reputation did suffer. Meanwhile, the Experimenter Publishing Company of New York, to give his business its full title, had branched out. He, you know, he was becoming a media conglomerate. He set up a radio station, WRNY, and was starting to get into the new television business as well. Yeah, but he found himself in a legal dispute with another radio station named WRNY, um, and he had to settle out of court. So although the radio station was doing well financially, um, again, like with the idea that he was making $100,000 a year from Amazing Stories— well, from the business as a whole, perhaps— that wasn't true. Um, the circulation figures were, um, a bit debatable. He ordered a print run of 150,000 copies, but it never reached that level, and I think the highest it reached was 130,000. But in typical Goernsback fashion, he was telling potential advertisers that circulation was approaching 300,000. And meanwhile, authors were getting paid late or not at all. Um, and they weren't the only ones. The paper mill and the printing company Goernsback used were after him for unpaid bills as as well. And in February 1929, it was reported in the New York Times that Gernsback's company had been declared insolvent. But from an Amazing Stories point of view, the good news is that the courts appointed the Irving Trust Company as receiver, uh, and they salvaged Amazing Stories. They put together a team including some of Gernsback's former employees, um, because they obviously agreed with him about the market for science fiction magazines. And they were right. You know, less than a year after Gernsback's bankruptcy proceedings, the number of science fiction magazines in America had grown from 2 to 7. And we should say in fairness that there were science fiction magazines in several other countries as well. By this point, there was one in the UK. There was quite a well-known one in Sweden. There were maybe similar publications in Germany and France as well. Um, And as we've heard, Gernsback himself was soon publishing new magazines. Amazing itself continued in one form or another, you know, well into the 21st century, and Steven Spielberg got the rights to the name and created two TV series called Amazing Stories. But as you said, the circulation, while it was still in print, did continuously decline until it became a website. Website. Um, whatever his faults, I think Gernsback definitely paved the way to the so-called Golden Age of science fiction pulp magazines, which was roughly the 1930s to the early '50s. And many famous writers got their start either writing for Gernsback or in the magazines that Amazing inspired. People like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, Roger Malastareff, Anthony Murray Lightfoot, just to name a few. And as you said, it wasn't only the writers, you know, we should mention the contribution made by cover artists and illustrators.

Yeah.

Particularly Frank R. Paul in Amazing Stories, 'cause they brought these crazy new ideas to life so vividly. Gernsback did continue magazine publishing with varying success, I think it's fair to say, and produced his final SF magazine, Science Fiction Plus, in 1953, but it only ran for issues. After that, he turned to writing his own science fiction, um, and continued promoting science education, which was, I think, his, his, his true passion.

He was really important in, in helping to spawn this, um, amazing genre and to, to kind of form together a lot of stuff that was already in the ether, perhaps, but, um, into a form where it, it became becoming incredibly important in writing, in publishing. It's a big business and movies and beyond. How do we sum this up? How do you say that Amazing Stories influenced the formation of science fiction and prats modern technology itself. How are they influenced by this publication? A couple of things that have seemed to have come up in it for me, so many different threads. One is kind of the idea of the future will be ruled by scientists who are much smarter than us and will know what to do. This kind of technocratic theory of world government, it's there in Asimov as well, isn't it? And we kind of see— a kind of residual form of that in the tech bros of Silicon Valley who, you know, 7 people now rule the world and have all the money. It does feel a bit like something out of science fiction prediction. I mean, it's interesting that that starts so early there. A lot of different tropes in the stories we see turning up in Interestingly for me, there's this kind of collision of high culture and low culture here. You know, H.G. Wells is a very serious writer in some senses, and certainly was Poe. And then you have the kind of pulp element to it. In a way that's never gone away. It's never become an entirely respectable genre, science fiction. And, you know, long may that last, I think. Although some people have kind of fretted at the that, like Brian W. Aldiss, for instance. Another thing that I notice a lot about it in it is that there is this tendency in the stories to do a kind of a lot of technological arm waving around. Well, how did you get from that to that? Oh, well, there's this little invention in a can that does this thing. And it's very convenient in fiction that you can, and we have these things like hyperdrive that are still in the genre that kind of conveniently get you from one side of the galaxy to the other, you know, while evading Einsteinian physics, let alone Newtonian. And that arm waving, I think, is important in science fiction, you know, the transporters and all that stuff in Star Trek. Slightly unfortunate that it kind of leaks into the discourse of popular technology as well. We see a lot of arm waving at conferences about AI. It's AI will be able to do this, AI will be able to do that. We make a kind of leap from a possibility and a capability and a kind of inference from that capability that we then kind of reify in a prediction that yes, this AI is going to do this, it's going to throw us all out of our jobs or it's going to cure cancer or whatever. A person Personally, and this is just personal viewpoint, I think that is, in a way, does come from science fiction. But so those are my kind of, you know, it's my blinding insights. What are yours, Esri, to sum up?

I agree, I think imagination precedes everything. So without imagination, we'd have no science, we'd have no technological discoveries. But what happened with science fiction was the shift into having it, uh, the role of imagination formalized in relation to the development of science and technology, and not always in a good way. You mentioned earlier about Elon Musk being a fan of George Orwell. I think perhaps he confuses 1984 and thinks it's the guidebook rather than a warning. But, um, there are many other examples, perhaps more positive ones, as we've seen with Robert Goddard, of people reading science and then developing real innovations in, you know, scientific discoveries. Because it all comes from the same place. It all comes from the human ability to believe in things that don't exist, which, you know, is always a double-edged sword. And when it comes to the individual contribution of people, it's always hard to kind of sum up what that means. And that's true of Gönsberg. But the historian and editor Mike Ashley, who's written extensively about the history of the science fiction magazines. He tells us, "Gernsback's genius was in identifying a purpose in science fiction as a means of creating tomorrow. He brought science to the general public rather than to other scientists, and he sold to those people a vision that the creation of tomorrow was in their own hands. They could build the future." So I think that gets to the heart of the impact Amazing Stories and then subsequently science fiction has had. Amazing helped to create, as we've said, science fiction as a literary genre. And it kind of stimulated that enormous public appetite for, let's say, speculative stories. And although that has ebbed and flowed, you know, it kind of did lose its appeal a bit in the '70s until Star Wars came out. And then suddenly it was— it was massive again. So, it's always been there, and I don't think it will ever go away completely. And I think that appetite for stories about creating the future, that inspires people from all kinds of backgrounds to describe new ideas, new technologies, and then potentially invent them or inspire other people to invent them. And then those technologies in turn come to dominate our lives, and people write stories about them. Without science fiction, you know, could we honestly say that we'd now have rockets going to the moon, satellites, robotics, the internet, AI, biotech, in short, the modern world.

Podcasts.

Podcasts, absolutely. Although it is of course a mixed blessing, not necessarily podcasts, but some of those other things. I think if we want to keep the benefits of technology and maybe, you know, have fewer downsides from it, we should heed Gernsbach's clarion call that he issued through Amazing Stories. And take tomorrow into our own hands, try and build a better future.

So fiction, as you said, is about believing something that doesn't exist. Science fiction is about believing in something that doesn't exist yet, but very, very well might exist in the near future. So talking of the near future, where are we going from here? What's our next episode going to be about in the series? Serious.

Well, we've talked about some pretty famous authors today. Mm-hmm. Um, I think we'll look at some less well-known science fiction authors, but who have also, you know, nonetheless made a major contribution. Um, and the ones that I've picked are all from the period that I'm kind of obsessed with, which is the 1970s. It's when I started reading science fiction novels and science fiction magazines, Actually, so that may explain it, but I think there's something about it does tend to be very dystopian, but it's more diverse in terms of the backgrounds of the authors and it's endlessly fascinating. So I've picked 5 authors who you may not know, but I think have made an enormous contribution and we'll dig into those.

Yeah. And maybe you should know about them. I'm really looking forward to that. I've really enjoyed this session. Thanks so much, Esri, for for giving your time to this today and your effort in forming the series. Thanks. So you've been listening to Tech Imaginarium, How Science Fiction Made the Modern World. If you enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe on your platform of choice, and it really helps other people to find us if you leave a positive review there too. Tell your friends, tell your enemies as well. Tech Imaginarium is This is a Learning Hack Podcast produced and hosted by Jon Helmer, written by Jon Helmer and Esri Karlabach. Music is by Nick Dwyer and Flintet.