Issue 1.2, May 1926
Thank You! editorial by Hugo Gernsback
A Trip to the Center of the Earth, chapters 1-15, by Jules Verne
Mesmeric Revelation, by Edgar Allan Poe
The Crystal Egg, by H.G. Wells
The Infinite Vision, by Charles C. Winn
The Man From the Atom, part 2, by G. Peyton Wertenbaker
Off on a Comet—or Hector Servadac, book 2, by Jules Verne
OUR COVER illustrates this month’s story, “The Crystal Egg”, by H.G. Wells. This is a supposed view of the planet Mars, as viewed by Mr. Cave through the Crystal Egg, from the earth.
And of Course There’s a Second Issue
by K.W. Leslie
Hugo Gernsback was a massive Jules Verne fan, as you can tell not just from the many Verne books published in Amazing Stories, but by the image of Verne’s tombstone on the contents page of every issue. At his grave in the La Madeleine Cemetery, Amiens, there’s a sculpture of a man breaking out of his tomb at the resurrection of the dead. It was designed by Albert Roze, using a cast of Verne’s face, and titled Vers l’immortalité et l’éternelle jeunesse/“Towards Immortality and Eternal Youth.”
Public-domain translations of Verne’s works are just the worst. Publishers back then knew his works were hugely popular in France, and just wanted to crank out an English-language version
In the case of the 1864 novel Voyage au centre de la Terre, published here as A Trip to the Center of the Earth, its first English edition was a drastically rewritten version of Verne’s story. Professor Otto Lidenbrock becomes “Otto van Hardwigg,” and the other names are changed as well; whole sequences are rewritten. Amazing Stories contains a slightly abridged version of that edition. If you’d rather read a better translation, Frank Wynne made one in 2009, and Matthew Jonas made another in 2022.
I should confess: This month’s segment of A Trip to the Center of the Earth contains certain passages in “medieval Icelandic” runes, and when I edited it, I didn’t want to use screenshots from the magazine, nor from the copies hosted on Project Gutenberg. Why should I, when Unicode includes runic alphabets? But Unicode doesn’t include that particular runic alphabet, which for all I know Verne made up. So I swapped them out for the runes to the Elder Futhark alphabet. And you probably wouldn’t’ve noticed unless I said something.
Verne’s other story in this issue, the last half of Off on a Comet (1877), tells of how the comet returns to Earth, and how its inhabitants return—in case you were worried they were all killed, which Verne actually planned to do until his editor talked him out of it. Heads up: It contains a number of antisemitic descritions and remarks about the character Isaac Hakkabut, which are understandably offensive, but I’m not gonna bowdlerize the stories in this blog.
“Mesmeric Revelation” (1844) by Edgar Allan Poe is another of his mesmerism (i.e. hypnotism) stories, in which a dying man, under hypnotism, describes what God is really like. Whether that’s what Poe himself believed, I can’t say, but it’s not inconsistent with the popular Transcendentalist beliefs of Poe’s day. The description’s not the creepy part; that comes at the end.
“The Crystal Egg” by H.G. Wells was published in 1897, the same year as his War of the Worlds, and some see it as sort of a prequel to the story; maybe the Martians used these crystal eggs to find out about Earth before invading. Anyway, it’s a fun prediction which Facetime is sorta fulfilling.
“The Infinite Vision” (1924) by Charles C. Winn tells of a man who, once given enough money, builds a really good telescope. How it compensates for Earth’s atmospheric disturbances—which is why we now put telescopes in orbit—is never addressed. Maybe we didn’t throw enough money at the problem.
“The Man from the Atom” (1923) by G. Peyton Wertenbaker concludes. Our hero loses track of Earth, but lands elsewhere, among people smart enough to tell him how to get back to Earth… kinda. After his downer of a beginning, it’s a stab at a happy ending, and I leave it to you as to whether it works.
