Penciled corrections of spelling and wording also appear as more of a proofreading stage, in some cases calling into question the logistics of his scientifiction.
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"A New Sort of Magazine", Amazing Stories: The Magazine of Scientifiction, Gernsback, Hugo, and T. O'Conor Sloane, eds., issue 1, page 3, April 1926. In 1938, publisher Ziff- Davis bought the magazine and moved its production from New York City to Chicago, naming Raymond A. Palmer as Sloane's successor.
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The development of American science fiction as a self-conscious genre dates in part from 1926, when Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories magazine, which was devoted exclusively to science fiction stories. Though science fiction magazines had been published in Sweden and Germany before, Amazing Stories was the first English language magazine to solely publish science fiction. Since he is notable for having chosen the variant term scientifiction to describe this incipient genre, the stage in the genre's development, his name and the term "scientifiction" are often thought to be inextricably linked. Though Gernsback encouraged stories featuring scientific realism to educate his readers about scientific principles, such stories shared the pages with exciting stories with little basis in reality.
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Commercially, McDonald's is known for its fast food burritos — although it has plans to introduce a new ground beef sandwich with cheese, while KFC sells catfish not chicken. Both chains seem ubiquitous within the Confederacy. Science fiction is known by Scientifiction and appears more popular than in the real world. Margaret Mitchell wrote a well known book, Glorious Tomorrows.
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Gernsback's editorial in the first issue asserted that "Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are also always instructive".Quoted in Ashley, Time Machines, p. 50. He had always believed that "scientifiction", as he called these stories, had educational power, but he now understood that the fiction had to entertain as well as to instruct.Ashley, Time Machines, p. 50.
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In 1926 he started the magazine Amazing Stories and coined the term "scientifiction" which became science fiction. Gernsback was an enthusiastic supporter of amateur radio. During the First World War the US government placed a ban on amateur radio and Gernsback led the campaign to lift it. Gernsback started a magazine devoted to radio, Radio Amateur News (July 1919.) The title was shortened to Radio News in July 1920.
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Porter entered science fiction fandom in 1960. He had been calling science fiction writers in the Bronx and Manhattan telephone books to discuss science fiction, and Donald Wollheim put him in touch with local science fiction fandom in New York City. He became active in fan groups including the Lunarians, FISTFA (the Fannish Insurgent, Scientifiction Association) and the Fanoclasts, then hosted by Ted White. In 1960 he had his first news-related column on upcoming paperbacks, printed in James V. Taurasi's Science Fiction Times.
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His idea of a perfect science fiction story was "75 percent literature interwoven with 25 percent science". He also played an important role in starting science fiction fandom, by organizing the Science Fiction League and by publishing the addresses of people who wrote letters to his magazines. Fans began to organize, and became aware of themselves as a movement, a social force; this was probably decisive for the subsequent history of the genre. He also created the term "science fiction", though he preferred the term "scientifiction".
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Roberts, Adam The History of Science Fiction, pp. 196-203, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Algis Budrys in 1965 wrote of the "recurrent strain in 'Golden Age' science fiction of the 1940s—the implication that sheer technological accomplishment would solve all the problems, hooray, and that all the problems were what they seemed to be on the surface". The Golden Age also saw the re-emergence of the religious or spiritual themes--central to so much proto-science fiction before the pulp era--that Hugo Gernsback had tried to eliminate in his vision of "scientifiction".
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Aramis, or the Love of Technology, was written by French sociologist/anthropologist Bruno Latour. Aramis was originally published in French in 1993; the English translation by Catherine Porter, copyrighted in 1996, , is now in its fourth printing (2002). Latour describes his text as "scientifiction," which he describes as "a hybrid genre... for a hybrid task" (p. ix). The genre includes voices of a young engineer discussing his "sociotechnological initiation," his professor's commentary which introduces Actor-network theory (ANT), field documents - including real-life interviews, and the voice of Aramis—a failed technology (Latour, Bruno. (1996).
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Much of what Gernsback published was referred to as "gadget fiction", about what happens when someone makes a technological invention. Published in this and other pulp magazines with great and growing success, such scientifiction stories were not viewed as serious literature but as sensationalism. Nevertheless, a magazine devoted entirely to science fiction was a great boost to the public awareness of the scientific speculation story. Amazing Stories competed with several other pulp magazines, including Weird Tales (which primarily published fantasy stories), Astounding Stories, and Wonder Stories, throughout the 1930s.
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", and in another 1936 letter to LeiberFrom a letter to Fritz Leiber on 19 December 1936. Published in Selected Letters V edited by August Derleth and James Turner, p. 375. "I'm glad to hear of your perusal of Last and First Men—a volume which to my mind forms the greatest of all achievements in the field that Master Ackerman would denominate "scientifiction". Its scope is dizzying—and despite a somewhat disproportionate acceleration of the tempo toward the end, and a few scientific inferences which might legitimately be challenged, it remains a thing of unparalleled power.
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Sloane was involved with Amazing Stories from the very beginning, serving as Hugo Gernsback's managing editor. His own role in the magazine production grew and when B. A. MacKinnon purchased Experimenter Publishing in 1929, Sloane was named editor. Sloane published first stories by sci-fi luminaries such as Jack Williamson, John W. Campbell, Jr., Clifford D. Simak, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Howard Fast and a first poem by Frederik Pohl. It is thought that Sloane collaborated with Gernsback in originating the term scientifiction which was superseded by science fiction to describe this genre, as suggested in part by the first issue of Amazing Stories.
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Stong created a 466-page anthology published by Wilfred Funk in 1941, The Other Worlds, later issued with the descriptive subtitle 25 Modern Stories of Mystery and Imagination. It was considered by Robert Silverberg (in the foreword to Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction) to be the first anthology of science- fiction. Compiling stories from 1930s pulp magazines, along with what Stong called "Scientifiction" it also contained works of horror and fantasy. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes it as "about half sf and half horror" and observes that for science fiction the pulp magazines were a new source of material for hardcover reissue.
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Lewis stated in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green:Collected Letters, II, 236f. The other main literary influence was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920): "The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it. I had grown up on Wells's stories of that kind: it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal."The Life and Works of David Lindsay The books are not especially concerned with technological speculation, and in many ways read like fantasy adventures combined with themes of biblical history and classical mythology.
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Ackerman and Morojo at the 1st Worldcon (1939, NYC), in the "futuristicostumes" she created for them Ackerman saw his first "imagi-movie" in 1922 (One Glorious Day), purchased his first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926, created the Boys' Scientifiction Club in 1930 ("girl-fans were as rare as unicorn's horns in those days"). He contributed to both of the first science fiction fanzines, The Time Traveller, and the Science Fiction Magazine, published and edited by Shuster and Siegel of Superman fame, in 1932, and by 1933 had 127 correspondents around the world. His name was used for the character of the reporter in the original Superman story "The Reign of the Superman" in issue 3 of Science Fiction magazine. He was one of the early members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and remained active in it for many decades.
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When Gernsback published Harris's first short story in Amazing Stories, he praised her writing while also expressing amazement that a woman could write good science fiction: "That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited. But the exception, as usual, proves the rule, the exception in this case being extraordinarily impressive." For many years Harris claimed to have been the first woman science-fiction writer in the United States, although later research proved this to be untrue, as Gertrude Barrows Bennett, writing under the pseudonym Francis Stevens, was publishing science fiction stories as early as 1917. Note that the true identity of "Francis Stevens" was not known publicly until 1952, long after the writing careers of both Harris and Bennett were over.
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Krueger began writing letters to science fiction magazines in 1938, at the age of eleven, and was an attendee of the very first “scientifiction” convention held in 1939, officially making him a member of the elite-if-obscure group known as First Fandom.“The Greatest Unsung Hero of Fandom: Kenneth J. Krueger, Jr.” by Earl Terry Kemp, VFW 100, September 4, 2007 As a resident of the New York area, he attended the first World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) on July 2–4, 1939, at age twelve, in New York City, the first science fiction convention ever held. Already an ardent science fiction fan, by age seventeen Krueger was also a member of the Slan Shack crowd (along with a very young Frank M. Robinson, Jr.).“Who is Ken Krueger, Jr.? by Earl Terry Kemp, a biography for the San Diego Comic Fest, October 17, 2012 The Slan Shack, which first appeared at the end of October 1943, was where a batch of active Battle Creek, Michigan, science fiction fans lived for nearly two years.
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