The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  Anyone could find SF now, in its state of special apartness. As a specialized magazine literature, it would be easier to locate and more identifiable than it had ever been before.

  At the same time, magazine SF would be difficult to penetrate. The face that it showed the world would be simultaneously pretentious and childish. The great boast of science fiction was that it was concerned with serious matters of science. Yet what it chose to display on its covers was adolescent fantasy—alien monsters, women in metal breastplates, robots, rayguns and rocket ships.

  To any observer who lacked the necessary empathy to get past these barriers, the science fiction magazines could only appear unrevealing or actively off-putting. If you weren’t either a devotee of science or an eager kid—a big-dome or a fruitcake—then science fiction would shut its door and warn you away.

  The chosen audience of science fiction was bright teenagers, engineers and scientists, and no one else. Only these few would be invited inside to partake of its marvels. All others were barred.

  American magazine science fiction would be a world entirely apart, with its own history, politics, language, ideals and standards. And the ur-event of this special world was the coming of the Gernsback Amazing.

  So central and crucial a happening was the founding of Amazing presumed to be that future generations of SF readers would come to reckon the very creation of science fiction from April 1926, the cover date of the first issue. They would either forget or never even know that Amazing Stories itself was a summation—the completion and integration of a long slow gradual course of development—and take it for the absolute beginning of all things.

  Amazing, of course, was nothing like the absolute beginning of all things science-fictional, but it would be easy for that mistake to be made. Generally speaking, the science fiction that was able to join in the course of special development initiated by Amazing Stories—pretentious, childish American magazine science fiction—was the SF that would survive. In its state of privacy and isolation, it would grow, alter and evolve. Just as generally speaking, the SF that did not follow this path would die.

  The special appeals of ghetto science fiction to brains and to immaturity were present from the first issue of Amazing. They were expressed by the very size, shape and appearance of the magazine.

  All of the many ordinary pulp story magazines on the newsstand were cut to standard dimensions—7 by 10 inches, or “pulp size.” Though Amazing, too, was printed most of the time on pulp paper, it was fully one-third larger than other story magazines—8 1/2 by 11 inches, or “bedsheet size.”

  This significant difference in dimension was intended to set Amazing Stories apart. It emphasized that even though Amazing might have to resort to the expedient of cheap paper, it was no mere ordinary pulp magazine peddling common stories of love and adventure. Rather, Amazing Stories was sister publication to the serious popular science magazines Science and Invention and Radio News.

  The aim of Amazing was always to be scientific, educational and prophetic. Hugo Gernsback put it like this in his first editorial:

  Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are also always instructive. They supply knowledge that we might not otherwise obtain—and they supply it in a very palatable form. For the best of these modern writers of scientifiction have the knack of imparting knowledge, and even inspiration, without once making us aware that we are being taught.

  And not only that! Poe, Verne, Wells, Bellamy, and many others have proved themselves real prophets. Prophesies made in many of their most amazing stories are being realized—and have been realized. Take the fantastic submarine of Jules Verne’s most famous story, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” for instance. He predicted the present day submarine almost down to the last bolt! New inventions pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow. Many great science stories destined to be of an historical interest are still to be written, and Amazing Stories magazine will be the medium through which such stories will come to you. Posterity will point to them as having blazed a new trail, not only in literature and fiction, but in progress as well.204

  With these claims to scientific seriousness and importance established, however, there was almost no compromise that Hugo Gernsback would not make nor tactic that he would not try, to hook a susceptible audience and sell them scientifiction.

  The first such adjustment that he made was in the name of his magazine—not Scientifiction, but Amazing Stories. In an early issue of Amazing, Gernsback wrote quite frankly:

  The plain truth is that the word “Scientifiction,” while admittedly a good one, scares off many people who would otherwise read the magazine. . . . After mature thought, the publishers decided that the name which is now used was after all the best one to influence the masses, because anything that smacks of science seems to be too “deep” for the average type of reader.205

  In a time when science seemed both deep and scary to the average type of reader, Gernsback had to convince fifty thousand or a hundred thousand readers to buy his magazine of scientific fiction from the newsstands each month. So he groped for a title that would not frighten simple folk away, but might lure them closer.

  Gernsback identified the aspect of science fiction that most thrilled and delighted him—“the amazing quality”—and splashed it across the oversized cover of his magazine in two bright colors: AMAZING STORIES. The initial “A” loomed fully 4 1/2 inches high. The rest of the title, in increasingly reduced capital letters, stretched off toward infinity.

  The pictures on the covers of Amazing were also designed to grab attention. The cover paintings were all the work of Frank R. Paul, an Austrian immigrant with architectural training. Paul was more adept at rendering imaginary buildings or machines, or even alien beings, than at drawing people. But he was a brilliant colorist and his stiffly posed visions of cosmic menace were presented with a certain undeniable charm and power.

  Paul’s paintings might show humans reacting to giant flies or beetles, a submarine attacked by flying and swimming reptiles, a disembodied head speaking in a laboratory, Martian machines laying waste to the countryside, or New York City being swept aside by a glacier. These strange scenes would be set against backgrounds of a single intense color—deep blue, or pink, or orange, or violet, or some other unlikely but eye-catching hue.

  The only appeal that Gernsback would not make on the often garish billboard-sized covers of Amazing was to sex. In the attempt to draw impressionable readers close and capture their attention, any other tactic was fair. As Gernsback wrote: “We knew that once we could make a new reader pick up Amazing Stories and read only one story, the cause was won with that reader. . . .”206

  If Gernsback compromised just a little with the hard facts of commercial necessity in designing the exterior of Amazing, other kinds of compromise were at work within the covers of the magazine. Gernsback might talk as though his magazine had infinite resources, but in actuality Amazing was run on a shoestring. It paid very little for the fiction it printed, it paid very late, and then only with the greatest reluctance. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that the best work published in Amazing consisted of classic old stories that could be had for pennies or for nothing.

  The spirit of the times—and Gernsback’s tight purse—ensured that most of the original work printed in Amazing was nothing much to brag about. These new stories were mainly typical Twenties-style SF horror fiction—tales of hostile machines, threatening insect societies, emotionless Big Brains, and disintegrating technological futures.

  This is not exactly the sort of material one would readily expect to captivate and inspire the new reader who might casually pick up a copy of Amazing and sample the pleasures of a single story. Yet Hugo Gernsback expected no less than that.

  It was somehow as though Gernsback did not notice the deficiencies of his beloved magazine—that it was awkward, juvenile, overstated, pretentious
and vulgar, filled with moldy old stories and grimly negative new ones. However anyone else might see it, Hugo Gernsback, at least, was positive that scientifiction was wonderful, inspiring, uplifting, educational, prophetic and clean. He said so over and over again, in editorials, in story blurbs, in letter columns, in quizzes and contests, and in countless schemes and promotional ploys.

  The purity, strength and power of Gernsback’s faith was so great that almost in spite of itself Amazing Stories became something of what he said it was. Hugo Gernsback’s True Belief in science held Amazing together and welded it into a unity that no number of little compromises or deficiencies could alter.

  Hugo Gernsback saw wonder in all science—even in hostile machines, threatening insects, or the prospects of human decline. And he expected others to see it, too, if only they would just once put aside their fears and limitations and look at the truth and beauty that was before them.

  Hugo Gernsback, inventor and prophet of science, was the ultimate example of the all-unwitting Twentieth Century scientific occultist—possessed by the profoundly irrational conviction that there is no Truth other than scientific truth and that nothing lies beyond the reach of science. If only the magical word science was invoked, Gernsback could convince himself that anything at all was possible, or even any number of mutually incompatible things.

  Here is one phrasing of Gernsback’s hopes for science—as usual, presented as though it were not his own special viewpoint, but rather was the natural and inevitable opinion of every man:

  The man in the street no longer recognizes in science the word impossible; “What man wills, man can do,” is his belief.

  Interplanetarian trips, space flyers, talking to Mars, transplanting heads of humans, death-rays, gravity-nullifiers, transmutation of elements—why not? If not to-day, well then, to-morrow. Are they surprises? Not to him; the modern man expects them.207

  Gernsback perceived SF in a highly special way. He saw scientifiction as a kind of invention, a machine of the imagination, a device for anticipating and stimulating scientific wonders-to-come. He felt that since even the most fantastic fiction at some time or other must inevitably come true, then the real role of SF writers was to be prophets—like him.

  For Gernsback, aspects of SF like plot, character and emotion were purely secondary values, no more than so much sugar-coating for the essential scientific pill. It was not fictional values that Gernsback expected to make an impact upon the reader, but prophetic vision. By presenting dramatized visions of the scientific wonders of tomorrow right now, he meant to educate and inspire the youngsters who would be tomorrow’s scientists into bringing those wonders and others into being. He meant to generate both scientists and new science.

  As the official slogan of Amazing Stories had it: “Extravagant Fiction Today—Cold Fact Tomorrow.” That was Gernsback’s dream of scientifiction.208

  It was not unnatural of Gernsback to perceive SF in this mechanistic way. It was his habitual mode of thought. And it is quite possible that only such a narrow, intense, obsessive man as Hugo Gernsback could have conceived of scientifiction, determined to start a magazine like Amazing Stories in a moment like 1926, and brought the job off.

  Hugo Gernsback was born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1884. He grew up in the fevered heyday of the Age of Technology, when one marvelous invention after another was pouring forth from the laboratories and workshops of Europe and America.

  Gernsback was inspired by science. His aim was to become an inventor, too, and help to create the new wonders of the Twentieth Century. In 1904, with an invention under his arm—a battery of his own design—he set off to seek his fortune in America, the native country of the world’s greatest inventor, Thomas A. Edison.

  The Edwardian decade, a moment of maximum scientific optimism, was the perfect hour for Gernsback to arrive in the United States. He was quick to make his mark in this land of golden opportunity.

  Hugo Gernsback became a pioneer of radio—an inventor, a businessman, a broadcaster and a self-appointed educator. As early as 1906, he was marketing his own inexpensive home radio sets. In 1908, Gernsback’s radio supply catalog metamorphosed into his first popular science magazine, Modern Electrics. In 1909, in a prophetic article, he coined the word television.209 And in the Twenties, Gernsback would become an actual early experimenter in television broadcast.

  And yet, despite these accomplishments and his genuine contributions to scientific and technological progress—for which, in time, he would receive due recognition and honor—Gernsback wasn’t above attempting to impress a naive young audience by laying claim to greater distinction as a scientist than he would ever actually enjoy. On the masthead of the first few issues of Amazing Stories, and in one early editorial, he would list himself as “F.R.S.” The obvious implication was that Gernsback was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the most prestigious of Western scientific bodies—but at best this was wishful thinking.210

  From the very outset of his career as a publisher, Gernsback had the notion of using SF stories for purposes of education and prophecy. He included scientific fiction in the contents of each of his popular science magazines. Modern Electrics might be succeeded by Electrical Experimenter in 1913, and Electrical Experimenter might then be altered into Science and Invention in 1920, but this one continuing element in Gernsback’s scientific publishing formula would remain the same.

  Gernsback contributed SF stories of his own to his various magazines—like so many later editors, setting a personal example for others of the fiction he wanted to print. For Modern Electrics, he wrote Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12), a thoroughly clumsy story but a brilliant job of predicting science-to-come. Gernsback’s second serial story, Baron Munchausen’s Scientific Adventures, was first published in his Electrical Experimenter in 1915-16.

  Just as he had coined the word television, so in 1915 did Gernsback, that born promoter, invent the word scientifiction.211 His private hope was that one day it might be included in standard dictionaries.

  In 1923, Gernsback went so far as to devote the entire August issue of Science and Invention to scientific fiction. And the following year, he sent out his circular letter announcing the magazine Scientifiction, which would never be published due to the lack of favorable response.

  In short, when Amazing Stories finally did appear in 1926, it was as the result of nearly twenty years of thought, preparation, experiment and rehearsal on Gernsback’s part. It was not a fluke or aberration. Gernsback had been working up to this move for a long time.

  The great strength of Amazing Stories was the flexibility and scope of Hugo Gernsback’s conception of science. There was almost no story that he could not see fit to print, no matter how fantastic it was, if it but somewhere muttered its allegiance to science.

  There were, however, certain aspects of SF as it had been that were excluded outright from Amazing. Gernsback believed in technological advancement, but he had no faith in human social perfection, so old-fashioned social utopianism had no place in his magazine. Gernsback did not believe in the supernatural, so stories of spiritualism, black magic and occult wisdom were also left out.

  But still, what breadth of material Gernsback did manage to present!

  For the first two years of its existence, Amazing Stories was dominated by a wide range of stories resurrected from the past, a recapitulation of the development of SF during the previous century. Gernsback reprinted Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Balloon Hoax” and Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens.” He unearthed Jules Verne’s very first story, “A Balloon Journey,” and reprinted it as “A Drama in the Air,” and he serialized no less than five novels by Verne. He republished all of H.G. Wells’s classic scientific romances from The Time Machine to The First Men in the Moon, as well as many of Wells’s shorter stories.

  Gernsback cast his net widely. He republished stories that had originally appeared in his own Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention. He reprinted much fiction from the pulps, ch
iefly from All-Story and Argosy. He published The Moon Pool and several other stories by A. Merritt. From Blue Book Magazine he picked up Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1918 novel The Land That Time Forgot. He even published stories in translation from French and German.

  Eventually, Gernsback found new writers with new stories. For the most part, these were eager, clumsy amateurs. Nonetheless, among the new work that he managed to arrange to publish were original stories by Ray Cummings and H.P. Lovecraft. He even solicited new fiction from Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was offered A Weird Adventure on Mars. Gernsback published it as The Master Mind of Mars in Amazing Stories Annual (1927), a one-shot magazine, and praised Burroughs’ story for its “excellent science.”212

  Within the context of the Age of Technology, Hugo Gernsback was a man of considerable vision, the one appropriate person able to serve as an instrument by which far-flung SF might be pulled together, given a single name, and made aware of itself. The pragmatism and elasticity of Gernsback’s synthesis of science made possible the wide-reaching synthesis of SF that was presented in the pages of Amazing Stories. And it was this summarization of all that SF had previously been that was the true glory of the early Amazing, more than compensating for any little awkwardness or pretension that the magazine might chance to display.

  But it should be remembered that the Age of Technology was drawing to a close, and when viewed from the perspective of the emerging era, Hugo Gernsback was not a man of vision and flexibility at all, but rather a highly limited individual with bad habits and firmly fixed ideas. And very shortly, Gernsback’s flaws of character and vision would cause him to be left behind while the literature he believed he had invented continued to alter and evolve.