Issue 1.6, September 1926
Editorially Speaking, editorial by Hugo Gernsback
In the Abyss, by H.G. Wells
A Columbus of Space, chapters 9-16, by Garrett P. Serviss
9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 · 16
The Purchase of the North Pole, chapters 1-8, by Jules Verne
Station X, chapters 15-21, by G. McLeod Winsor
15 · 16 · 17 · 18 · 19 · 20 · 21
The Moon Hoax, by Richard Adams Locke
OUR COVER shows an exciting episode from “In the Abyss,” by H.G. Wells, wherein the explorer first sees the chameleon-like fish people roaming at the bottom of the ocean.
The Problematic Hugo Gernsback
by K.W. Leslie
In these early issues of Amazing Stories, you’ll notice Hugo Gernsback claimed in his editorials he had plenty of sci-fi stories ready for upcoming issues. But you’ll also notice the early issues consist of segments of old sci-fi novels. This issue alone has three of them, plus a 30-year-old H.G. Wells story, plus a collection of fraudulent news articles—they might be fiction, but they’re not stories, and kinda dry at that. The other stories were largely already published in Gernsback’s other magazines. The first two years of Amazing Stories are much like this; there’s little truly original material.
So… was Gernsback telling the truth about his big slush pile of stories? Well I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt. But unfortunately one of the well-known things about Gernsback is he was a dirty liar. He regularly played fast and loose with the truth, with copyrights, with paying his writers, with paying his creditors, with everything really. He was a con man. He helped create the science fiction magazine, and helped popularize the genre; the Hugo Awards are named for him. But yeah, he was not an honest man.
So we have to bear that in mind when we read his editorials, his promotions, his promises for upcoming issues. He lied. A lot. He loved science fiction, and loved science… and that’s pretty much as far as his virtues go.
Gernsback wasn’t even his original name—though let’s be fair; plenty of Jews changed their names to something more Anglo-sounding when they emigrated to the United States. Born in Luxembourg City in 1884 to vintner Moritz Gernsbacher, he went to the Γcole Industrielle in Luxembourg, then the Technikum institute in Bingen, Germany. He emigrated to New York City in 1904, got his U.S. citizenship, and opened an electronics shop. Its catalog evolved into his first magazine, Modern Electrics. A few magazines later we get Amazing Stories.
I previously pointed out he loved to reprint Jules Verne novels, but had a habit of editing the scientific data out of the stories, even though he claimed he loved the science in science fiction, and valued it most. Critics have pointed out he didn’t always have the best literary taste; if a hack writer sent him a story, he’d ignore its many literary flaws and happily publish it. He’d poll his readers, but sci-fi author and historian James E. Gunn (no relation to the director) pointed out if Gernsback didn’t like the results, he’d simply misreport them.
He’d also tell exaggerated stories about his own past, his studies, scientists he knew and interacted with, and the like. He liked to publicize himself and his businesses… and if the truth needed some massaging, he’d get out the lube and massage away. He had no problem with bending the truth whenever he found it more entertaining or convenient. Betcha his wives had a problem with that though.
It’s this sort of casual dishonesty which means if you’re gonna write anything about Gernsback, you need to fact-check everything he says about himself. Everything. Which a good historian should do anyway; sometimes a person’s memories aren’t as accurate as they imagine they are. But when your subject is a habitual liar, he’s not trustworthy source material at all. I’ve been reading Josephine Riesman’s Hugo-nominated 2021 biography True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, in which the same problem constantly comes up. Sometimes a person’s memories are just as much fiction as the stories they publish.
Yeah, we’d like to imagine the people who created the things we love, who accomplished important things, were all good and upstanding people. Sadly, sometimes they weren’t. Gernsback wasn’t. Best we can do is be honest about that.
In H.G. Wells’s “In the Abyss” (1896), a Navy sailor named Elstead takes a steel sphere five miles down to the bottom of the ocean—and discovers intelligent life down there. Why intelligent life?—why not just life, which was hard enough to fathom when you understand how great the water pressure is down there? That’d be an amazing story in itself. But if you want a really amazing story, make the life down there big and scary and threatening to rip your sphere open so they can get to the chewy center.
Part two of Garrett P. Serviss’s A Columbus of Space (1909) deals with the consequences of the Earth explorers’ shooty behavior, after their leader kills a politically important person, yet gets the queen to fall for him. Minor similarities to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, though it predates that book by three years.
Part one of Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889) tells of Barbicane and Matson, the leaders of the U.S. Gun Club who financed the lunar trip in From the Earth to the Moon, and their new scheme to buy and mine the coal fields of an undiscovered arctic continent. There is no such continent, but since when is that gonna stop a fun Jules Verne yarn?
Part three of G. McLeod Winsor’s Station X (1919) concludes the usual way a story of alien invasion does: Big giant battle against superior forces, won either by extreme cleverness or dumb luck.
Lastly The Moon Hoax (1835), also known as the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Richard Adams Locke published six articles in the New York Sun about an amazing new telescope, like we see in The Infinite Vision, which apparently discovered all sorts of wild stuff on the moon. Pure fiction. But since it’s not written as fiction… it’s a little bit of a slog to get through. And it’s really annoying that Gernsback put it in Amazing Stories instead of some actual science fiction.
