W. Zoglauer, mindofhistory.com
Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, which hit newsstands in April 1926, is largely recognized as the popular primogenitor of science fiction as a new genre in the United States. Though other magazines, including Gernsback’s own publications like Science & Invention, intermittently printed stories in the realm of science fiction, Amazing Stories was the first magazine to focus solely on the new genre frontier. Specially selected stories from literary stalwarts H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe anchored the baptismal issue. Hugo Gernsback’s vision for Amazing Stories as ‘A New Sort Of Magazine’ relied heavily on his concept of “Scientifiction.” That is, stories that educated with at least a similitude of scientific fact, but were prescient and bold in anticipating imaginative and technological future possibilities. For Gernsback, the true prophets of modernity's new mechanizing and industrial era were science fiction writers.
To underscore this idea, Gersnback pointed to Jules Verne’s innovative use of submarines in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from 1870. “He predicted the present day submarine almost down to the last bolt!” Says Hugo. “Extravagant Fiction Today … Cold Fact Tomorrow,” was more than just a catchy banner motto in each issue’s intro, it was the guiding principle to Amazing Stories’ very existence.
Amazing Stories appeared on the scene at just the right time: the horrors of WWI were fading, the American economy of the mid-1920s was prospering, and opportunistic Americans everywhere looked to advances in science and technical entrepreneurialism (like radios, rockets and talkies) as the golden pillars of the age. A dystopian future beginning with ‘The Wall Street Crash of 1929’ was still over three years away.
The monthly debut of Amazing Stories retailed for 25¢ in 1926. How did this compare to other popular magazine titles at the time? The Saturday Evening Post (a weekly) sold for 5¢ a copy. An early iteration of Life magazine priced out at 15¢ per week. The monthly American Cinematographer retailed at 25¢ per issue. The monthly music Etude Magazine cost 25¢. The monthly National Geographic Magazine, which proudly boasted color illustrations, was 50¢. The bulk of content for Amazing Stories, Volume 1, Number 1, was filled by Jules Verne’s Off On A Comet—or Hector Servadac. Can a handful of Europeans from differing nations and backgrounds work together in an extra-terrestrial environment? They are going to have to if they wish to survive their descent back to earth. When The New Accelerator by H.G. Wells appeared in print for the first time back in 1901, it bucked at the current addictive trends that opium dens and legally obtainable laudanum held over the English populace. Instead of promoting a drug that induced lethargy and indolence, Wells’ eccentric Professor Gibberne envisioned a mass-marketed stimulant that would encourage people towards fastidiousness and exactitude in all their endeavors. A statesman or a doctor would have double time to work out pressing matters of life and death.
This new miracle concoction was not without its dangers. It was nothing like the safe invigorator known as Gibberne’s B Syrup. This perfected liquid accelerator that Gibberne and his neighbor (the narrator) drank, granted the duo superspeed “many thousand times” that of regular humans. If they moved too fast in this altered reality, their clothes could burn off, or they could even In this passage, Professor Gibberne spontaneously combust themselves. It also provoked mischievousness. Professor Gibberne states the purpose behind his ‘New used his superspeed to cruelly hurl his next door Accelerator’ elixir: … “if it's an neighbor’s dog into the air. What a naughty bloke! earthly possibility, I mean to have—is a stimulant that stimulates all round, Fast forward to 1926 when the United States was in the midst of the roaring 1920s, and it is easy to that wakes you up for a time from the see why Gernsback thought to include this story in crown of your head to the tip of your his first issue of Amazing Stories. He could have great toe, and makes you go two—or used the wonder drug to edit and manage his even three to everybody else's one. magazines and business interests in double, triple, Eh? That's the thing I'm after." quadruple time—if he didn’t combust first. “I looked down and Professor Martyn, a tiny speck in an automobile far below, waved up to me cheerfully as he started his car and began to speed away. He was fleeing the immediate danger of my growth, when my feet would begin to cover an immense area, until I could be almost entirely in space.” - Kirby
The Man from the Atom by G. Peyton Wertenbaker possesses all the narrative ingredients science fiction fans normally salivate after in a good yarn: questionable and irresponsible scientific experimentation, gigantism, and space travel. Only in this case, everything went so horribly wrong in a matter of mere moments for poor, gullible Kirby, (the narrator), that it is one of the few times eager sci-fi readers, who normally like to identify with space-traveling main characters, would have collectively gasped, “I’m glad that wasn’t me!” Incidentally, G. Peyton Wertenbaker was only 15 years old when he penned The Man from the Atom.
The trauma bedeviling the protagonist occurred in this manner: Professor Martyn invented an atomic-powered machine that could infinitely shrink or enlarge a person, depending on personal choice. Professor Martyn reasoned that an infinitely small human could study molecules in their own local reality, and a super enlarged human could explore the universe unencumbered by vast reaches of space and time. The only thing the Professor lacked was a willing volunteer to conduct the experiment on. That’s where Kirby comes in. Even after being told the inherent dangers, Kirby opted for gigantism. In no time at all after activating Professor Martyn’s machine, Kirby grew to a size so large that he slipped off earth into space; his size proceeded to exceed the stars and even the galaxies that contained them. Untold millions of years transpired during Kirby’s mere minutes of adventure. Eventually, he shrank himself back to normal size, only to be an outcast in a futuristic world and advanced civilization hopelessly different than the one he left a short while before.
“Suddenly I tired of the endless procession of stars coming together, forming ever into new stars that came together too. I was getting homesick. I wanted to see human faces about me again, to be rid of this fantastic nightmare. It was unreal. It was impossible. It must stop.” --- Kirby. The Thing from—"Outside“ by George Allan England is a disturbing piece of work. It really is. Its most redeeming quality (the vagueness of the antagonist) is also its most maddening. The true identity of the murderous adversary hunting a “little *Allan is the correct spelling for the middle name party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay” is never discovered or articulated with clarity. The reader has but few facts and a great deal of fearful suppositions made by the terrified travelers. Something that defies scientific explanation has been leaving four-inch ring-like prints in the ground. The prints are sort of vitrified and permanently frozen at the same time. Is it a robot? Is it sentient? Meanwhile, something or someone has brutally murdered their native wilderness guides.
Are the enigmatic prints and the murders related? The inscrutable combination of events leads the small party to conjecture, some dismissively---both out loud and in their own private thoughts--- if a Thing of superior intelligence, from outer space or the Fourth Dimension, could be responsible for all the madness. In this case, it is the extraordinary evidence that required extraordinary claims. Wallace Jandron, a geologist, who had encountered this technological predator before in Labrador, put forward his unorthodox belief:
"Charles Fort, the greatest authority in the world on unexplained phenomena," persisted Jandron, "gives innumerable cases of happenings that science can't explain, in his 'Book of the "... Out of the door crept something like a Damned.' He claims this earth was once a No-Man's land where all kinds of Things explored and colonized and fought for man. A queer, broken, bent-over thing: a possession.” thing crippled, shrunken and flabby, that whined. This thing—yes, it was still In the end, Jandron, the one person willing to accept an ugly, but Marr—crunched down at one side, impossible truth that their foe is perhaps non-terrestrial is the most inured to the menacing microwave-like machinations quivering, whimpering. It moved its behind the unseen Thing’s presence. What the Thing was hands as a crushed ant moves its exactly, the reader is never told or shown. But what the Thing antennae; jerkily, without significance ..." can do is a horror best soon forgotten. “Not a sound; the whole works a complicated mass covering a hundred acres, driving with a silence that was magic. Not a whir nor friction. Like a living composite body pulsing and breathing the strange and mysterious force that had been evolved from Huyck's theory of kinetics. The four great steel conduits running from the globes down the side of the mountain. In the center at a point midway between the globes, a massive steel needle hung on a pivot and pointed directly at the sun.”
Did a sinister power use a directed-energy weapon against the people of Oakland, California? And what evil toxin, or heretofore unknown natural virus, was released in its wake? All this, and scientific experts at the scene of greatest impact suspected the source of the malady was an exotic new element whose created frequency distortions were capable of sucking all the moisture out of the air. No, this is not a contemporaneous report of the Coronavirus or the roll out of 5G in 2020, this is a description of events transpiring at the beginning of Austin Hall’s 1926 short story, The Man Who Saved the Earth. But this was only the beginning of the beginning. A California cattleman by the name of Pizzozi, completely unaware of the events in Oakland, was plying his trade near the Sierra foothills when he witnessed an aerial energy anomaly completely disappear an entire mountain! To solve these problems, if even possible, the world needed a special kind of hero. Enter Charley Huyck, scientific protégé of one eccentric Dr. Robold. The world did not think much of Dr. Robold in his lifetime. But in death his name would be revered.
After making a series of deep calculations, a very apprehensive Charley Huyck propositioned Bob Winters, a daredevil of a driver, for a herculean bit of chauffeuring: "Five thousand dollars if you can get me to Robold Mountain in twenty hours.” While the two intrepid heroes raced to their destination, other great calamities befell the world. Oceans were being drained of their watery wealth and the planetary seasons were in full reverse. After a nearly fatal mishap, Winters got Huyck to a plane, and the plane got Huyck to his desired Colorado mountain destination. Professor Ed Williams, back at the same Arizona observatory his hasty co-worker had set out from with Bob Winters, read the note Huyck left him. Professor Williams knew at once that the fate of the world hinged on Huyck, Celestial Kinetics and the ability to destroy an adversary on Mars. The energy weapon focused on earth that was draining its vast water reserves was in turn sending that water back to Mars---molecule by molecule. To save earth, Huyck used a massive mountain-top machine designed by Dr. Robold. In effect, Huyck used the sun-harnessing power of Robold’s machine to send a powerfully concentrated sunbeam to the Mars location assaulting earth. The plan worked. Whoever, whatever it was on Mars attacking earth was blown up. Unfortunately, the same intense solar power unleashed on Mars also destroyed the Robold mountain facility, and Charley Huyck along with it. “So much for celestial kinetics.” The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe was the last story featured in Amazing Stories, Volume 1, Number 1. That Gernsback should select a Poe offering from 1845 for a science fiction magazine debuting in 1926 could seem like a curious, if not antiquated, choice.
To loosely borrow a phrase from Poe, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar are, succinctly, these: Poe’s masterful linguistic efficiency and deft use of anatomical empiricism lent a recurrent modernist, technical authenticity to the mesmerist’s efficacy. Ergo, when the mesmerist— who is also the narrator---explains his plans to mesmerize M. Valdemar in articulo mortis (at the point of death), readers are genuinely expectant that something fantastical, and possibly horrific, is certain to occur at the moment of denouement.
The ability to salvage consciousness from the throes of death is as timeless a concept in the early 21st century as it was in Poe’s or Gernsback’s era. The Netflix show Altered Carbon that aired in 2018 is a good example of this plot; the same consciousness is transferrable to new human hosts via a memory storage device. The same show also makes use of an artificial intelligence (AI) with a visual persona of Edgar Allan Poe. All this actually reinforces the idea that Hugo Gernsback made a very shrewd decision in picking The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar for Amazing Stories’ foundational issue. Bibliography
Gernsback, Hugo, ed. Amazing Stories, April 1926. https://archive.org/details/AmazingStoriesVolume01Number01/mode/2up.
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