Issue 1.7, October 1926
Imagination and Reality, editorial by Hugo Gernsback
Beyond the Pole, chapters 1-5, by A Hyatt Verrill
A Columbus of Space, chapters 16-24, by Garrett P. Serviss
16
The Purchase of the North Pole, chapters 8-20, by Jules Verne
8
The Island of Dr. Moreau, chapters 1-13, by H.G. Wells
1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 ·
Blasphemer’s Plateau, by Alexander Snyder
OUR COVER depicts the story from “Beyond the Pole,” by A. Hyatt Verill, wherein one of the fearful, lobster-like creatures is shown investigating the, to them, strange, human creature which has so suddenly burst into their domain.
Fiction magazines of the 1920s.
by K.W. Leslie
At the time Amazing Stories hit the newsstands, the “dime novel” was on its way out. Nowadays they’re called “mass-market paperbacks,” and just about any successful book can be found in a mass-market paperback edition eventually. But some books can only be found in mass-market paperback: Romance novels, crime and mystery serials, science fiction compilations, and the like. In the 1800s they were printed on newsprint which yellowed easily (and were therefore called “yellow-backed novels” or “yellowbacks”) and sold for a dime (hence “dime novels”).
But in the 1920s, they could be found for 20 cents, and were getting phased out anyway. Dime-novel publishers were instead switching to magazines. You could get people to subscribe to magazines; not so much your dime novels. Since they already owned the rights to many of those old novels, it was free content! They simply serialized them in their magazines.
So this was the environment Amazing Stories stepped into. That’s why you see all the novels serialized in this first year; Jules Verne novels in particular. In this issue, an H.G. Wells novel and a Garrett P. Serviss novel as well. Wouldn’t sci-fi fans already have these novels in their libraries? Well, not always. I don’t. And good luck finding dime novels in the public library, which didn’t typically carry them. (Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, my own local public libraries still had fairly small mass-market paperback sections.)
Amazing Stories was 25 cents an issue, or $2.50 a year. In 2026 money, that’s $4.75 an issue; not too bad for a magazine. Cheaper than a weekday copy of the New York Times. For $2.50 a year you could get several novels. Just… don’t lose any of your back copies. That’s a half, or a third, of multiple novels. (In The Shadow magazine, that’d be an entire Shadow novel.)
Some of these magazines still exist; some of ’em still serialize entire novels. Of course mass-market paperbacks are extremely cheap in used bookstores, and classic novels can be found free online. Lots more options nowadays. Wasn’t so true in 1926.
First published here in Amazing Stories, A. Hyatt Verrill’s “Beyond the Pole” tells of a whaler, shipwrecked off the coast of Antarctica, who crosses a mountain range and discovers a civilization of sentient crustaceans. (Of course you realize what’s actually beyond the South Pole, as the scientists on the base there will tell you, is… well, north.)
The third and last installment of Garrett P. Serviss’s A Columbus of Space (1909) wraps up the story, returns our adventurers to Earth, and explains why no one has told the tale of their adventure to Venus until now.
In Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1889), the public finds out Barbicane, Nicholl, and Maston are plotting to change the axis of the earth—and potentially kill millions—so they can melt the North Pole and get at its precious coal. Can they stop them in time?
In the first part of H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), the lone survivor of a shipwreck comes across Moreau’s island and its weird semihuman inhabitants. Since he’s narrating, he’s clearly lived to tell the tale.
Alexander Snyder’s “Blasphemer’s Plateau,” first published here, tells of a scientist who figured out how to create life, and threatens to use his discoveries to undo religion. Every once in a while I hear someone claim their reasoning or discoveries oughta do that, and they never do. The irreligious constantly underestimate the depth (or, to be fair, stubbornness) of people’s religious belief. Irreligious science fiction authors particularly keep doing this. But then again, they can also create little fictional universes in which their reasoning actually works. The real world is less pliable.
