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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} 2000 A.D. Illustrations from the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps by Jacques Sadoul Early Science Fiction Pulp Magazines: Resources in Special Collections: Home. The roots of science fiction go back at least as far as Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein , published in 1818. Many historians look back even farther. Science fiction pulps (at least, those in English) date back to 1926, when Hugo Gernsback started the magazin e Amazing Stories. Most science fiction pulps were published monthly or quarterly. They published short stories and novellas, not full-length novels. And, they were printed on very cheap paper -- hence the name. This resource guide covers our holdings of science fiction pulps from 1926 to 1957, including titles that started before 1957 and continued after. Why 1957? That's the year the Soviet Union successfully launched the Sputnik satellite, and the Space Age became a reality! Term paper ideas. The stories, the advertisements, and the cover illustrations for the pulps all offer material for analysis. In any genre, certain stories and authors tend to be reprinted frequently in anthologies, while others are forgotten. Who is forgotten, and why? The advertisements provide clues about what demographic the publishers and advertisers think is reading the magazine. Is it aimed at young readers, teens, adults? Male or female readers? What other interests or concerns are readers assumed to have? The cover illustrations are almost a genre of their own, and would be seen by many more people than read the actual stories - for example, customers at the newsstand who looked at the magazine but bought something else. Questions you can explore through the illustrations : How are women depicted in these illustrations? Is there a difference between women who seem to be Earth humans, and those who seem to be from alien worlds? How are people of color portrayed? How are men depicted? Is there a difference between those who seem to be Earth humans, and those who seem to be from alien worlds? What different ways are non-humanoid aliens depicted? Are they friendly or threatening? Are they portrayed as being intelligent or not, and how can you tell? Is there a difference between the way groups of aliens are portrayed compared to the way groups of humans are portrayed? Robots show up in many illustrations, as do humans with technology embedded in their bodies . Are they portrayed positively or negatively? What role in society do the illustrators imagine robots might have? What about the humans with embedded technology? Real-world concerns are frequently reflected in science fiction stories, and cover illustrations may hint at them too. You may see references to World War II from 1941 to 1945, or references to the Cold War in the years following. Can you find references to other national or international events? Comparing front cover and back cover illustrations. The front covers always illustrate a story in the magazine. During certain periods, the publishers of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures commissioned art for the back cover instead of selling it as ad space. These pieces weren't tied to specific stories, probably because their use could be postponed if the magazine did need ad revenue that month. See these issues for back cover art: : May, September, and November 1939, plus nearly all issues from August 1942 to October 1945 : nearly all issues from August 1938 to July 1946, plus April-May 1953. More about science fiction illustrations. In the library catalog, search the subject heading science fiction -- illustrations . This link will retrieve books in the Main Library (books that can be checked out) and in Special Collections (books that must be used in the Special Collections reading room.) A few good starting places: 2000 A.D. : Illustrations from the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps. Jacques Sadoul; translated by Eileen B. Hennessy. Chicago: H. Regnery, 1975. Fantastic Science Fiction Art, 1926-1954. Lester del Ray, ed. New York: Ballantine, 1975. Vintage Treasures: Science Fiction of the 30’s edited by Damon Knight. Windy City Pulp and Paper is a fabulous convention and, as its name implies, it’s focused mostly on vintage magazines and paperbacks. Wandering the vast Dealer’s Room is like stepping into a Cave of Wonders for fans of pulp science fiction and fantasy. But it’s also a den of surprises and a pleasant one awaited me while browsing a table piled high with pulps and digest magazines. A hand-written sign proclaimed all items were “3 For $10,” so I decided to spend a few minutes exploring the heaped stacks. Buried under a loose pile of Science Fiction Quarterly magazines and Amazing Stories , I found a lone hardcover volume: Damon Knight’s pulp anthology Science Fiction of the 30’s , in much better shape than my tattered copy. Well, that was certainly worth $3.33. It didn’t take much effort to find two other worthy treasures (a July 1948 Fantastic Novel s pulp with a classic Lawrence cover and the January 1956 issue of The Original Science Fiction Stories with a James Blish cover story, which looked like it had just come off the magazine rack.) I plunked down my ten bucks and fled before the vendor changed his mind. Science Fiction of the 30’s was one of two great pulp anthologies I read over thirty years ago — the other being of course Isaac Asimov’s marvelous Before the Golden Age . Those books, together with Jacques Sadoul’s art book 2000 A.D. Illustrations From the Golden Age of Science Fiction Pulps , ignited a love of pulp fiction in me as a young teen that never died. Damon Knight was an early member of the Futurians and edited his first fanzine, Snide , when he was barely a teenager. He grew up reading SF magazines in the 30s and a collection of stories from the Golden Age of the science fiction pulps was something he’d wanted to do for decades… at least, until he abandoned the project as unworkable in the early 70s. Knight famously wrote a cranky essay about the disappearance of SF’s old guard, “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye” in 1972. Kostkos was an early (and now long-forgotten) pulp writer whose first story, “The Meteor-Men of Plaa,” appeared in the August-September 1933 issue of Amazing Stories . But then Asimov’s Before the Golden Age was published in April 1974 and was a major success. The English translation of Sadoul’s 2000 A.D. followed in 1975. Knight’s Science Fiction of the 30’s appeared the next year, in January 1976. I have no hard evidence that Asimov and Sadoul’s volumes directly inspired Knight to reevaluate his own dream project — no evidence besides the book’s Foreword that is, which reads as follows. In compiling this volume I have partially fulfilled an old ambition, one which I thought I had given up years ago — to reread all the old science fiction magazines I loved when I was young and write their critical history. I wrote about this in in essay called “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye” ( Clarion II , edited by Robin Scott Wilson), where I said the project was no longer possible because there was no audience for the old stories, and, in addition, because they were all junk. This was sour grapes. In fact, as you will see, many of the forgotten stories of the thirties are neglected gems. Only a few of these have been previously reprinted; most exist only in the original magazine versions in the hands of collectors and in libraries. Jacques Sadoul, who undertook my project when I announced I had given it up, remarks in Les Meilleurs Recits de Astounding Stories [Editions J’ai Lu, Paris, 1974] that only ninety percent of the stories are worthless and that this confirms to Sturgeon’s Rule (“Ninety percent of everything is crud.”) He is exactly right. I owe grateful appreciation to him, to Howard DeVore, who lent me hundreds of magazines from his immense collection, and to my editor, Barbara Norville. Knight was grateful enough that he dedicated the book to Jacques Sadoul. And the following quote appeared on the back cover: There isn’t a science fiction personality in the business as noted for his good judgement with respect to s.f. literature as Damon Knight. Any anthology he edits is bound to be good, and it is a pleasure to have him turn to the exciting decade of the 30s for one. Isaac Asimov. Science Fiction of the 30’s made quite an impact on me when I first read it. While it’s a very different book than Before the Golden Age , it’s still packed with top-notch tales of pulp adventure and it introduced me to several classic pulp writers. In fact, I’m pretty sure I read my first Murray Leinster story in Science Fiction of the 30’s: the novella “The Fifth-Dimension Catapult,” the first Tommy Reames adventure. Reames, a brilliant mathematician and physicist, responds to an odd summons to the home of Professor Dunham, where he finds the professor and his daughter marooned in the Fifth Dimension… a bizarre and potentially deadly landscape of unearthly flora and fauna. It originally appeared in Astounding Stories of Super-Science , January 1931. I liked the story so much that I reprinted it in Black Gate 9 , with the original artwork by Wesso. I had hoped to reprint the sequel, “The Fifth- Dimension Tube” (from the January 1933 issue of Astounding Stories of Super-Science ), but alas Black Gate didn’t live that long.