Issue 1.1, April 1926
Contents
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.
Introduction
by K.W. Leslie
Well, here’s the first issue of Amazing Stories. Some time ago I realized this is the 100th anniversary of its first publication, so I decided to make a blog of it, and here it is. Every month, new articles from the issue published 100 years ago.
If you only know Amazing Stories as the Stephen Spielberg, Joshua Brand, and John Falsey TV anthology from 1985… well that’s not bad; that’s a fun show. But really it’s the first magazine in the United States wholly dedicated to science fiction. Or “scientifiction,” as editor Hugo Gernsback loved to call it. Yes, he really did try hard to make that word happen. Shouldn’t have. Too awkward. Which syllable do you stress, the “ti” or the “fic”?
For the most part I actually didn’t take the text from scans of the magazine. I got them from Project Gutenberg, then edited them to match what was published in Amazing Stories. The editors—okay, probably just Gernsback—made a few alterations here and there. I also corrected his typos, added a few stylistic choices (let’s use those Harvard commas, people!) used consistent American spellings throughout, and didn’t bother to italicize French words which are now in the American vernacular. We all know what “rendezvous” means, just like the French know what “weekend” means.
Off on a Comet (originally published 1877, translated into English by Ellen Frewer) should really have kept its original title of Hector Servadac, as it’s called in France: The whole bit about being on a comet is a spoiler. Jules Verne doesn’t reveal it till Book 2; it’s meant to be a great mystery to Servadac as to what in blazes happened to Europe and Africa after the odd cataclysm that befell him. There’s some extremely offensive antisemitism in this novel, all too common among the French of Verne’s day, which I didn’t edit out. While the racism was wrong then and wrong now, it’s what he wrote, and let’s not hide that fact and pretend he didn’t. Nor perpetuate those poisonous attitudes. Unfortunately we’re gonna find a lot of racism in century-old stories, and I may have to denounce it regularly. Oh well; if I gotta.
The New Accelerator (1901) is H.G. Wells’s clever and funny story of the first guys to dose themselves with super-amphetamines and run amok.
The Man from the Atom (1923) is G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s novella about a man who discovers when you grow big enough, our galaxy is part of some vastly larger world’s atoms. It’s Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in reverse. Although you never know; maybe he’s from the quantum universe. Or maybe this is all fiction anyway.
The Thing from—“Outside” (1923) by George Allen England comes from the Lovecraftian school of horror, in which people come across something alien and it drives them completely, irrationally, too often violently, bonkers. I never find such stories scary; instead I find them a depressing reminder of how people are regularly stupid like that. But if you love this kind of stuff, here ya go.
The Man Who Saved the Earth (1901) is Austin Hall’s tale of Charley Huyck, the man heavily, heavily foreshadowed to be the savior of the world from a terrifying cosmic force. Really, he’s a big, big deal, as Hall keeps telling us. And then Huyck saves it. Super anticlimactic.
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) by Edgar Allan Poe, was for a long time rumored to be a true story—which really freaked people out, because it’s creepy as hell, which is Poe’s specialty. It’s not properly science fiction, since mesmerism (as they used to call hypnotism) is debatable as science. Still a good story though.