It's the roaring twenties,
the Great War is over!
And in science fiction,
as in world affairs,
America is about to take centre stage.
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Shelley,
Verne, and Wells –
These are all European names.
But as Europe slowly recovers from the devastation of the First World War,
the United States steps forward
to begin its hundred-year dominance of the science-fiction world.
And, fittingly, it does so through the use of a cutting-edge technology:
Pulp!
The ability to efficiently and mechanically manufacture pulp paper
had only really been perfected in the late 19th century.
And it wasn't until the dawn of the 20th century that somebody figured out
that if you combined cheap paper with cheap printing – and cheap authors –
you could make a lot of money!
So, thanks to the existence of the steam printing press,
the fact that widespread public education had made the majority of the populace literate,
and the fact that, like always,
more people wanted to write
than could find work doing so,
magazine fiction was born.
But nobody had the thought of making a magazine just for science-fiction until
an immigrant from Luxembourg set up shop in New York City,
and brought his love of science and engineering to the printing world.
This, of course, was Hugo Gernsback.
The man the Hugo Awards are named after.
The man whose name William Gibson borrowed for his story: The Gernsback Continuum.
Gernsback was an engineer by trade.
He was fascinated by radio.
Working on it, developing patents for it, putting out magazines about it!
And, organizing fan groups around it.
And in some of these magazines he published about engineering and radio technology,
he would, from time to time, include science-fiction stories.
The bug had him – he had a thought he couldn't get rid of!
What if he could teach people about science by making a science-fiction magazine?
So, he did. He called it "Amazing Stories", and people snapped it up!
But he didn't have any authors to write for it.
He was stuck reprinting old stories – mostly Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.
And this did help bring their stories to the attention of American audiences, but it wasn't the future.
It wasn't all Gernsback hoped to do.
By the third month of release,
Gernsback realized
he had art for the cover of the magazine,
but no story to go with it.
So, he put out the call.
There was to be a competition:
$250.00 for a story to go with the next issue's cover art –
and the stories came pouring in.
People started to realize: there was money to be made in writing science-fiction!
Not good money, sure, but you no longer had to be a superstar like Verne or Wells
to make a living writing sci-fi.
And so, the community of writers working in the genre began to grow.
At the same time, Gernsback established a column where he'd print letters from fans.
He would include their full addresses,
and soon, a fan community sprang up with people from towns
all over America.
People from small towns where, perhaps no other single person liked science fiction,
would start writing letters to each other.
But, Gernsback had one failing:
He just wasn't a very good businessman!
He was quite slow to pay his authors.
Whether this was out of greed, as some people claim, or simple mismanagement,
it began to hurt his business.
The best authors turned to other Pulps to get their work published,
and we are going to talk about them over some of the next few weeks.
Gernsback's own philosophy hurt him as well.
In wanting to make science-fiction educational,
he would commission stories with these long, expository sections
where characters would go on and on about the cutting-edge of science.
And while that might not have made for the most engaging stories,
you can at least argue that the decision had some merit.
Or you could, if you ignore the fact that these huge scientific info dumps were frequently inaccurate.
Though he was an engineer and a scientist himself,
Gernsback often published pseudoscience,
regularly falling for the crazes about ESP, telepathy, or communing with the dead.
And even when the big, expository paragraphs found in Amazing Stories were about legitimate scientific topics,
they were often written by writers who had no real background in, or knowledge of, science.
But they did know that Gernsback would publish their stuff if they had a big, long speech about physics in it!
And so, many inaccuracies slipped through.
Then, The [Great] Depression hit (1929.)
Soon, Gernsback was forced to declare bankruptcy,
and to hand control of Amazing Stories over to other people.
But just in that short time,
Gernsback cemented what we, to this day,
think of as the look and feel of sci-fi!
It was his Art Deco, Retro Futurist covers that defined what a raygun, a robot, and a rocket looked like!
It was also his covers which gave us those fonts which still evoke "sci-fi" to us a century later.
By letting people know they weren't alone,
that they weren't "weird" or "deviant" for liking science-fiction,
Gernsback created the fandom that so passionately sustains sci-fi,
and from which so many great sci-fi authors have emerged.
And simply by providing a venue for shorter, smaller pieces of science-fiction,
he created a community of writers who could begin the intellectual discussion around sci-fi,
who could bounce ideas off of each other, and press each other to answer the question
of what it was they were really doing by writing about these marvels.
Were they just writing Westerns with space monsters here, or was there something more to this?
It is for all of that, that we remember Hugo Gernsback.
Despite his failures, despite his business practices.
But, important though he was, he was not the most successful of the Pulp magazine editors.
He inspired a wave of others to get into the game.
Most notably: John W. Campbell.
The man who would usher in what is now commonly known as the Golden Age of Science-Fiction.
But, before we can get to him, we have a few more detours to take,
so join us next week as we venture further into the Pulps,
with "Weird Tales",
and talk about Lovecraft, Howard,
and their effect on sci-fi.
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