Issue 1.1, April 1926

A New Sort of Magazine editorial by Hugo Gernsback

Off on a Comet—or Hector Servadac, book 1, by Jules Verne

The New Accelerator by H.G. Wells

The Man From the Atom, part 1, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker

The Thing from—“Outside” by George Allen England

The Man Who Saved the Earth by Austin Hall

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe

OUR COVER depicts an interesting scene from “Off on a Comet” in this issue. Saturn and its rings in a close-up view, are silhouetted against the sky.

A New Sort of Magazine

by Hugo Gernsback, F.R.S.
April 1926 (1.1) p. 3.

Another fiction magazine!

At first thought it does seem impossible that there could be room for another fiction magazine in this country. The reader may well wonder, “Aren’t there enough already, with the several hundreds now being published?” True. But this is not “another fiction magazine,” Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new—entirely different—something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest.

There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America.

By “scientifiction” I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. For many years stories of this nature were published in the sister magazines of Amazing Stories—Science and Invention and Radio News.

But with the ever increasing demands on us for this sort of story, and more of it, there was only one thing to do—publish a magazine in which the scientific fiction type of story will hold forth exclusively. Toward that end we have laid elaborate plans, sparing neither time nor money.

Edgar Allan Poe may well be called the father of “scientifiction.” It was he who really originated the romance, cleverly weaving into and around the story, a scientific thread. Jules Verne, with his amazing romances, also cleverly interwoven with a scientific thread, came next. A little later came H.G. Wells, whose scientifiction stories, like those of his forerunners, have become famous and immortal.

Off on a Comet, 𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬 1

by Jules Verne
Published in French as Hector Servadac, 1877
Published in Amazing Stories, April 1926, pp. 4–56.

INTRODUCTION. Among so many effective and artistic tales of our author, it is difficult to give a preference to one over all the rest. Yet, certainly, even amid Verne’s most remarkable works, his Off on a Comet must be given high rank. Perhaps this story will be remembered when some of his greatest efforts have been obliterated by centuries of time. At least, of the many books since written upon the same theme as Verne’s, no one has yet equaled or even approached it.

In one way Off on a Comet shows a marked contrast to Verne's earlier books. Not only does it invade a region of remotest space, but the author here abandons his usual scrupulously scientific attitude and gives his fancy freer rein. In order that he may escort us through the depths of immeasurable space, to show us what astronomy really knows of conditions there and upon the other planets, Verne asks us to accept a situation which is in a sense self-contradictory. The earth and a comet are brought twice into collision without mankind in general, or even our astronomers, becoming conscious of the fact. Moreover several people from widely scattered places are carried off by the comet and returned uninjured. Yet further, the comet snatches and carries away with it for the convenience of its travelers, both air and water. Little, useful tracts of earth are picked up and, as it were, turned over and clapped down right side up again upon the comet’s surface. Even ships pass uninjured through this remarkable somersault. These events all belong to the realm of fairyland.

If the situation were reproduced in actuality, if ever a comet should come into collision with the earth, we can conceive two scientifically possible results. If the comet were of such attenuation, such almost infinitesimal mass as some of these celestial wanderers seem to be, we can imagine our earth self-protective and possibly unharmed. If, on the other hand, the comet had even a hundredth part of the size and solidity and weight which Verne confers upon his monster so as to give his travelers a home—in that case the collision would be unspeakably disastrous—especially to the unlucky individuals who occupied the exact point of contact.

But once granted the initial and the closing extravagance, the departure and return of his characters, the alpha and omega of his tale, how closely the author clings to facts between! How closely he follows, and imparts to his readers, the scientific probabilities of the universe beyond our earth, the actual knowledge so hard won by our astronomers! Other authors who, since Verne, have told of trips through the planetary and stellar universe have given free rein to fancy, to dreams of what might be found. Verne has endeavored to impart only what is known to exist.

In the same year with Off on a Comet, 1877, was published also the tale variously named and translated as The Black Indies, The Underground City, and The Child of the Cavern, This story, Round the World in Eighty Days was first issued in “feuilleton” by the noted Paris newspaper Le Temps. Its success did not equal that of its predecessor in this style. Some critics indeed have pointed to this work as marking the beginning of a decline in the author’s power of awaking interest. Many of his best works were, however, still to follow.

THE EDITORS.

1. A Challenge

“Nothing, sir, can induce me to surrender my claim.”

“I am sorry, Count, but in such a matter your views cannot modify mine.”

“But allow me to point out that my seniority unquestionably gives me a prior right.”

“Mere seniority, I assert, in an affair of this kind, cannot possibly entitle you to any prior claim whatever.”

“Then, Captain, no alternative is left but for me to compel you to yield at the sword’s point.”

“As you please, Count; but neither sword nor pistol can force me to forego my pretensions. Here is my card.”

“And mine.”

This rapid altercation was thus brought to an end by the formal interchange of the names of the disputants. On one of the cards was inscribed:

Captain Hector Servadac

Staff Officer, Mostaganem.

On the other was the title:

Count Wassili Timascheff,

On board the Schooner Dobryna.

It did not take long to arrange that seconds should be appointed, who would meet in Mostaganem at 2 o’clock that day; and the Captain and the Count were on the point of parting from each other, with a salute of punctilious courtesy, when Timascheff, as if struck by a sudden thought, said abruptly: “Perhaps it would be better, Captain, not to allow the real cause of this to transpire.”

“Far better,” replied Servadac; “it is undesirable in every way for any names to be mentioned.”

“In that case, however,” continued the Count, “it will be necessary to assign an ostensible pretext of some kind. Shall we allege a musical dispute—a contention in which I feel bound to defend Wagner, while you are the zealous champion of Rossini?”

“I am quite content,” answered Servadac, with a smile; and with another low bow they parted.

The scene as here depicted, took place upon the extremity of a little cape on the Algerian coast, between Mostaganem and Tenes, about two miles from the mouth of the Shelif. The headland rose more than 60 feet above the sea-level, and the azure waters of the Mediterranean, as they softly kissed the strand, were tinged with the reddish hue of the ferriferous rocks that formed its base. It was the 31st of December. The noontide sun, which usually illuminated the various projections of the coast with a dazzling brightness, was hidden by a dense mass of cloud, and the fog, which for some unaccountable cause, had hung for the last two months over nearly every region in the world, causing serious interruption to traffic between continent and continent, spread its dreary veil across land and sea.

After taking leave of the staff officer, Count Wassili Timascheff wended his way down to a small creek, and took his seat in the stern of a light four-oar that had been awaiting his return; this was immediately pushed off from shore, and was soon alongside a pleasure yacht that was lying to, not many cable lengths away.

The New Accelerator

by H.G. Wells
First published in The Strand, December 1901
Published in Amazing Stories, April 1926, pp. 57–61, 96.

INTRODUCTION. It is enough to say in commendation of this very exciting story that it is worthy of the author. H.G. Wells has achieved a wonderful reputation in the field of serious writing as well as of fiction. Here for the entertainment of the reader we present a scientific story by him, the hero of which story is a physiologist and chemist. And now we deal with the science of the human system and are told the story of a wonderful achievement which must be read in detail to be appreciated. Mr. Wells’ matter is not only vivid and even valuable, but there is a picturesqueness about his language which attracts, as it is distinctively the English of the mother country.

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionize human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations will become apparent enough.

The Man from the Atom, 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 1

by G. Peyton Wertenbaker
First published in Science and Invention, August 1923
Published in Amazing Stories, April 1926, pp. 62–66.

INTRODUCTION. In Alice in the Looking Glass the beautiful play of fancy which gave immortal fame to a logician and mathematician we read of the mysterious change in size of the heroine, the charming little Alice. It tells how she grew large and small according to what she ate. But here we have increase in size and pushed to its utmost limit. Here we have treated the growth of a man to cosmic dimensions. And we are told of his strange sensation and are led up to a sudden startling and impressive conclusion, and are taken through the picture of his emotions and despair.

1.

I am a lost soul, and I am homesick. Yes, homesick. Yet how vain is homesickness when one is without a home! I can but be sick for a home that has gone. For my home departed millions of years ago, and there is now not even a trace of its former existence. Millions of years ago, I say, in all truth and earnestness. But I must tell the tale—though there is no man left to understand it.

I well remember that morning when my friend, Professor Martyn, called me to him on a matter of the greatest importance. I may explain that the Professor was one of those mysterious outcasts, geniuses whom Science would not recognize because they scorned the pettiness of the men who represented Science. Martyn was first of all a scientist, but almost as equally he was a man of intense imagination, and where the ordinary man crept along from detail to detail and required a complete model before being able to visualize the results of his work, Professor Martyn first grasped the great results of his contemplated work, the vast, far-reaching effects, and then built with the end in view.

The Thing from—“Outside”

by George Allen England
First published in Science and Invention, April 1923
Published in Amazing Stories, April 1926, pp. 67–73, 91.

INTRODUCTION. Here is an extraordinary story by the well-known magazine writer, George Allan England. This story should be read quite carefully, and it is necessary to use one’s imagination in reading it.

The theme of Mr. England’s story is unusual and extraordinary. If we can take insects and put them upon the dissecting table in order to study their anatomy, is there a good reason why some super-intelligence cannot do the same thing with us humans?

It may be taken as a certainty that intelligence, as we understand it, is not only of our earth. It is also not necessary to presume that intelligence may have its setting only in a body of flesh and blood.

There is no reason for disbelieving that a super-intelligence might not reside in gases or invisible structures, something which we of today cannot even imagine.

They sat about their campfire, that little party of Americans retreating southward from Hudson Bay before the oncoming menace of the great cold. Sat there, stolid under the awe of the north, under the uneasiness that the day’s trek had laid upon their souls. The three men smoked. The two women huddled close to each other. Fireglow picked their faces from the gloom of night among the dwarf firs. A splashing murmur told of the Albany River’s haste to escape from the wilderness, and reach the Bay.

“I don’t see what there was in a mere circular print on a rock-ledge to make our guides desert,” said Professor Thorburn. His voice was as dry as his whole personality. “Most extraordinary.”

“They knew what it was, all right,” answered Jandron, geologist of the party. “So do I.” He rubbed his cropped mustache. His eyes glinted grayly. I’ve seen prints like that before. That was on the Labrador. And I’ve seen things happen, where they were.”

“Something surely happened to our guides, before they’d got a mile into the bush,” put in the Professor’s wife; while Vivian, her sister, gazed into the fire that revealed her as a beauty, not to be spoiled even by a tam and a rough-knit sweater. “Men don’t shoot wildly, and scream like that, unless—”

“They’re all three dead now, anyhow,” put in Jandron. “So they’re out of harm’s way. While we—well, we’re 250 wicked miles from the C.P.R. rails.”

“Forget it, Jandy!” said Marr, the journalist. “We’re just suffering from an attack of nerves, that’s all. Give me a fill of ’baccy. Thanks. We’ll all be better in the morning. Ho-hum! Now, speaking of spooks and such—”

He launched into an account of how he had once exposed a fraudulent spiritualist, thus proving—to his own satisfaction—that nothing existed beyond the scope of mankind’s everyday life. But nobody gave him much heed. And silence fell upon the little night-encampment in the wilds; a silence that was ominous.

Pale, cold stars watched down from spaces infinitely far beyond man’s trivial world.

The Man Who Saved the Earth

by Austin Hall
First published in The Strand, December 1901
Published in Amazing Stories, April 1926, pp. 74–91.

INTRODUCTION. We read of the days when the powers of radium were yet unknown. It is told us that burns were produced by incautiously carrying a tube of radium salts in the pocket. And here in this story we are told of a different power, opalescence, due to another element. It can destroy mountains, excavate cavities of immeasurable depths and kill human beings and animals in multitude. The story opens with a poor little boy experimenting with a burning-glass. Then he becomes the hero of the story—he studies and eventually finds himself able to destroy the earth. He exceeds Archimedes in his power. And he suddenly finds that he has unlocked a power that threatens this very destruction. And the story depicts his horror at the Frankenstein which he had unloosed, and tells of his wild efforts to save humanity, and of the loss of the cosmic discoveries of the little newsboy grown up to be a great scientist.

1. The Beginning

Even the beginning. From the start the whole thing has the precision of machine work. Fate and its working—and the wonderful Providence which watches over Man and his future. The whole thing unerring: the incident, the work, the calamity, and the martyr. In the retrospect of disaster we may all of us grow strong in wisdom. Let us go into history.

A hot July day. A sun of scant pity, and a staggering street; panting thousands dragging along, hatless; fans and parasols; the sultry vengeance of a real day of summer. A day of bursting tires; hot pavements, and wrecked endeavor, heartaches for the seashore, for leafy bowers beside rippling water, a day of broken hopes and listless ambition.

Perhaps Fate chose the day because of its heat and because of its natural benefit on fecundity. We have no way of knowing. But we do know this: the date, the time, the meeting; the boy with the burning-glass and the old doctor. So commonplace, so trivial and hidden in obscurity! Who would have guessed it? Yet it is—after the creation—one of the most important dates in the world’s history.

This is saying a whole lot. Let us go into it and see what it amounts to. Let us trace the thing out in history, weigh it up and balance it with sequence.

Of Charley Huyck we know nothing up to this day. It is a thing which, for some reason, he has always kept hidden. Recent investigation as to his previous life and antecedents have availed us nothing. Perhaps he could have told us; but as he has gone down as the world’s great martyr, there is no hope of gaining from his lips what we would so like to know.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

by Edgar Allan Poe
First published in The American Review and Broadway Journal, December 1845
Published in Amazing Stories, April 1926, pp. 92–96.

INTRODUCTION. Mesmerism in this gruesome story by Edgar Allan Poe has again been used as a vehicle for telling us his views about the higher philosophy and the future world. Mesmerism in another of Poe’s stories, “Mesmeric Revelations,” is made an agreeable setting for some of his philosophy, which he is willing to tell about without forcing it upon us in the too prevalent modern system. But here we find the same author in a somewhat different character. It is again mesmerism which he employs, it is again a bit of philosophy to be told us, but the story leads up gradually and most skillfully to a denouement, the most horrifying and terrible in all modern storytelling. This very short story in its horror is unique.

Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not—especially under the circumstances. Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had farther opportunities for investigation—through our endeavors to effect this—a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations, and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.

It is now rendered necessary that I give the facts—as far as I comprehend them myself. They are, succinctly, these:

My attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine months ago it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission: no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, whether, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extent, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity—the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.