Amazing Stories

Title:	Amazing Stories
Publisher:	Hugo Gernsback
Editor:
Type:
Date(s):	1926 - ?
Medium:	print, online
Fandom:	science fiction fandom
Language:	English
External Links:	Amazing Stories.com
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Launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback and his media company Experimenter Publishing, Amazing Stories was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. It is still active, now as an online site.

History

The magazine adopted the unusual policy of printing the postal addresses of its correspondents, which allowed them to write to each other. Its readers began to realize that there were other people out there who loved what they loved, and they very much wanted to find them.

Reviews

Despite editor Raymond A. Palmer's origins as a fan, most actifans took a very dim view of the magazine under his tenure from 1938 to 1949.

Fancy preserving a copy of the present-day "Amazing" in the cylinder addressed to our remote posterity! Let's hope the people of that far-off age will not be able to read English.

D.R. Smith: letter printed in Novae Terrae # 28 pg. 11. Dec. 1938.

Most disliked editor: Ray Palmer.

Joe Gilbert: Slan!-der. Fanfare #5 pg. 13 (Dec. 1940)

As to libraries, if anyone in the East wants to start one, I will donate my collection of Amazing Stories, which includes most of the Gernsback, all of the Sloane, and none of the Palmer issues.

Louis Russell Chauvenet: Letter printed in Spaceways #27 pg 24. April 1942.

In 1942 Bob Tucker wrote a short humorous essay that he later explained was a satire on the number of columnists complaining about Amazing Stories while continuing to read it:

Thursday night I sat down in my favorite easy chair, logs glowing in the fireplace, whiskey bottle within easy reach, the September Amazing in my hand. I drank in the cover. I read the magazine from cover to cover. Again I turned back and drank in the cover. I almost caught myself drinking from the bottle. To make sure I didn't miss anything, I read it completely thru again. Editorial, stories, letters, and ads. And then I carefully filed the book away, to preserve and read again the lead novelette another day.

Cripes but the magazine is awful! How Palmer can sit there in his office and turn that stuff out by the ream is beyond me! How anyone can stand the fiction is even more non-understandable. I think it is fit for only morons. I wouldn t be caught dead with the magazine in my hands!

Sitting there, afterwards, thinking of the dear dead days of long ago, when Amazing was in flower, I burst into tears. Actual tears. They cascaded down my shirt front. I was wearing a pale blue shirt with a brown candy stripe I picked up for a bargain. Ah! for those days when Amazing amounted to something! When dear, stuffy old Doc Sloane piloted the book, Morey splashed the covers, and "foreigners" dominated the driedup reader columns. When the circulation was so low it was mistaken for a fanzine, and each issue carried an Edgar Allen Poe reprint ( easily procurable in book form in the most common libraries) to fill space. And now look— gaudy covers, putrid stories, leading circulation ----- I burst into tears anew!

"The Star Stomper" by Bob Tucker writing as "Foot Pad". Le Zombie, issue 42 pg. 11 (Sept. 1941)

Links & Resources

• Amazing Stories, ^{Archived version} at The Pulp Magazines Project
• Wikipedia:Amazing Stories
• Wikipedia:Experimenter Publishing