REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg a RELIC of ANTIQUITY

REFLECTIONS Robert Silverberg A RELIC OF ANTIQUITY

When I first discovered science fiction Amazing Stories was printed in what magazines, more than sixty years ago, I is now called the “bedsheet” format— rushed out and bought all the back is- each page 8 by 11 inches in size, approxi- sues of them I could find. That wasn’t mately the dimensions of a sheet of typ- particularly difficult to do back then, be- ing paper, or about twice the size of the cause there was an abundance of second- pages of the magazine you are now read- hand bookshops in New York City, where ing. Those big pages were covered with a I lived, and—though I didn’t realize it— lot of small type, so that each 96-page is- the ancient magazines that I hunted sue contained well over a hundred thou- down weren’t particularly ancient yet. sand words of fiction. But the readers of The oldest of them, Hugo Gernsback’s pi- Gernsback’s new magazine were hungry oneering Amazing Stories, was all of for more and more of what was not yet twenty-three years old when I first be- called science fiction—Gernsback liked to gan collecting the old magazines in use the compound word “scientifiction,” 1949. And, as I wrote in these pages a and today’s more familiar term did not few years ago in an essay called “Al- establish itself until a few years later— addin’s Cave” (January 2008), I had the and so in 1927 he issued an even larger good fortune to stumble upon a veritable experimental one-shot magazine, Amaz- treasure trove of these old magazines in ing Stories Annual, with room in its 128 a Brooklyn antique shop and hauled big pages for a complete Edgar Rice Bur- home package after package of them un- roughs novel, The Master Mind of Mars. til my files were complete. The Annual quickly sold out its hundred I still have those old magazines, and thousand-copy printing, which led Gerns- now and again I pull some of them from back to reinvent it as a quarterly six the shelves and stare at them in wonder. months later. They are true relics of antiquity, strange It was an imposing thing, that Quar- vestiges of science fiction’s earliest years terly. It contained 144 pages, making it of magazine publishing, and they hold ideal for running long novels in a single the same attraction for me that the gi- issue, and sold for a whopping fifty cents gantic fossil skeletons of dinosaurs in the a copy—this at a time when automobiles museum did for me when I was a small cost about six hundred dollars and boy. salaries of ten and fifteen dollars a week Yesterday, for some reason, I got out were pretty much the norm. How the my file of one of the strangest and least generally impecunious young men who known of the early magazines—Amazing were the backbone of Gernsback’s read- Stories Quarterly, which Hugo Gerns- ership could manage to find the huge back founded in 1928 as a companion to sum of half a dollar every three months his instantly popular monthly Amazing for the magazine is beyond me. But plen- Stories, and which lasted twenty-two is- ty of them did, and the new jumbo gave sues until the Depression finally did it in them hours and hours of reading plea- in 1934. I have half a dozen of them on sure in every issue. my desk right now. They are truly di- The novels Gernsback liked to publish nosaurian in every respect: ancient and in the Quarterly tended to be masssive huge and looking like nothing that walks and slow-moving, strong on descriptive the earth today. detail and weak on characterization and 6 Asimov’s dialog. Few of today’s readers would be editor was the venerable T. O’Conor likely to sit still for J. Schlossl’s “The Sec- Sloane, who had been Gernsback’s asso- ond Swarm” from the second issue, or ciate editor from the start. Stanton A. Coblentz’s ponderous satire, Sloane (1851-1940) was, from all ac- “The Sunken World,” from the third, let counts, a highly conservative geezer, sev- alone Gernsback’s own heavy-handed fu- enty-eight years old when he took over turistic novel, “Ralph 124C1+” in number the editorial post, who privately believed five. In fact, the most notable contribution that space travel was a fantasy, impossi- to those early issues may have been a ble to achieve. He was old-fashioned in reader’s letter that earned a fifty dollar his literary tastes and long-winded and prize. It came from a young writer named pedantic in his editorial introductions to Jack Williamson, just setting out on the the stories, and he was so unhurried in seventy-five-year-long career that would deciding to buy material submitted to see him winning Hugos and Nebulas as him that the writers of the day nick- late as the 1990s. “The chief function of named him “T. Oh-come-on Slow-one.” scientifiction,” the teenage Williamson But there is a certain musty charm and wrote, “is the creation of real pictures of grace to the Sloane magazines, and the new things, new ideas, and new ma- Quarterly in particular published some of chines. Scientifiction is the product of the the best science fiction of its day. human imagination, guided by the sug- I’ve been looking with pleasure and gestion of science. It takes the basis of fascination through the stack of the mas- science, considers all the clues that sci- sive things piled up next to me. The cov- ence has to offer, and then adds a thing ers are quite handsome: an attractive alien to science—imagination. It goes old-fashioned illustration contained ahead and lights the way. And when sci- within a huge circle, almost as big as a ence sees the things made real in the au- page of this magazine, with a bright bor- thor’s mind, it makes them real indeed. It der, usually yellow or red, enclosing it. deals only with that which it can see, Here is the Winter, 1930 issue, the ninth, weigh, or measure; only with logical hy- leading off with The Birth of a New Re- pothesis, experiment and influence and public, a lengthy novel of interplanetary calculation. Scientifiction begins with the strife written by Miles J. Breuer, M.D., ending of science.” one of the most popular SF authors of the Have there been many better defini- era, in collaboration with none other than tions of science fiction offered since Jack Williamson, no longer a teenage fan young Jack Williamson wrote that in but now a successful writer. (Those who 1928? are curious about it, and I think it will Gernsback’s publishing company went still find appreciative readers after all bankrupt in 1929 and he lost control of these years, will find it reprinted in The his magazines. (He bounced back quickly Metal Man and Others, the first volume with a new string of them, including of Haffner Press’s superb series of vol- Wonder Stories and the corresponding umes collecting the work of Jack Wonder Stories Quarterly.) Amazing and Williamson.) The theme is not unlike its quarterly companion emerged from that of Robert Heinlein’s much later nov- bankruptcy in the hands of a company el The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and its called Radio Science Publications—think final passage is one that could almost of an era when radio was cutting edge have been written by Jack Williamson high technology!—and then quickly about himself at the other end of his passed to Teck Publishing Corporation. ninety-eight-year-long life: “I am an old But throughout these corporate migra- man now—there is no escaping that. . . . tions there was litttle change in the ap- Now, from the eminence of a long life that pearance of the magazines and none in has been for the most part peaceful and their editorial policies, because the new happy, I can foresee for my children a glo- Reflections: A Relic of Antiquity 7 February 2011 rious United Solar System.” One can only The Depression had its impact on all hope. magazines: Amazing Stories Quarterly And here is the Spring-Summer 1932 managed only three issues in 1932, two issue, featuring “Invaders from the Infi- in 1933, and one lone issue, reduced in nite” by John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell, size to 128 pages, before giving up the only twenty-two years old then, would go ghost entirely in 1934. But what a glori- on to become the most influential editor ous run it had, eighty years ago! What a in the history of science fiction, but in fine fat magazine it was, and what splen- 1932 he was highly regarded by readers did epics of science and adventure are en- for a series of gadget-happy space-adven- tombed in those huge, closely printed ture novels, now impenetrably unread- pages! I’ve had a lively archaeological ex- able, featuring three jut-jawed spacemen perience this week, prowling these ante- named Arcot, Morey, and Wade. The early diluvian magazines. Yes, most of these Campbell novels are stiff doses. (“ ‘Each stories seem antiquated now, and the tube will handle up to a hundred thou- look of the magazines, page after page af- sand times the potential of zinc-copper ter page of solid type, can best be de- in the acid of the yellow powder,’ said scribed as quaint. But in order to know Stel Felso Theu. One hundred thousand who we are we need to know something times the potential of a copper-zinc coil of our history, and these musty old mag- in copper sulphate would be of the order azines form the building-blocks on which of 110,000 volts. This was a thing as uni- modern science fiction arose. It’s a plea- versal as the elements themselves.”) sure to own them and to go prowling The Fall 1931 issue leads off with through them now and then. H “Seeds of Life” by John Taine, a great early SF novelist now unjustly forgotten. Copyright © 2010 Robert Silver- (His dinosaur novel, Before the Dawn, berg was one of the formative books of my youth.) White Lily, another splendid Taine novel, had run the year before. And another childhood favorite of mine turns up in the Fall 1929 issue: A. Hyatt Verrill, with the novel The Bridge of Light, telling of a lost civilization in South America. I first encountered Verrill at the age of eight, long before I had ever heard of sci- ence fiction, in his incarnation as a writer of popular history: his Great Conquerors of South America, about the exploits of Cortes, Pizarro, and the other conquista- dores, was a book I read over and over, and I was delighted to find him again as a frequent contributor to the Gernsback and O’Conor Sloane magazines, usually with long novels set in remote corners of Latin America. Simply the titles of other Quarterly stories stir shivers of wonder in me: “The Ant With a Human Soul,” “The Evolutionary Monstrosity,” “When the Moon Ran Wild,” “The Black Star Passes.” Primitive stuff, maybe—but fas- cinating in its way.

8 Robert Silverberg