Two astronauts leap across the low-gravity environment of Earth’s moon. We can see that they are astronauts in that their spacesuits, although crude and antiquated, are still broadly recognisable in concept. In detail, though, the two men look less like spacemen of the 1960s and more like deep-sea divers of the 1920s. This is inevitable, as it was May 1929, and the first issue of post-Hugo Gernsback Amazing Stories had reached the newsstands.
New editor T. O’Conor Sloane, Ph.D acknowledges but also downplays the changeover in his first editorial. He recaps the magazine’s development from 1926 onwards, emphasising that it has grown to become far less reliant on reprints. He stresses the variety of scientific disciplines represented by the stories: astronomy is covered by tales of travel to other planets; mathematics, by explorations of the fourth dimension; archeology, geology, chemistry, biology, psychology and others have likewise inspired Amazing ’s stories. He reminds readers of the writers’ stable that the magazine still maintains: Dr. David H. Keller! Dr. Miles J. Breuer! Harl Vincent! Stanton A. Coblentz! Clare Winger Harris! Edmond Hamilton! Frederick Arthur Hodge! Earl L. Bell! And E. E. “Doc” Smith (regrettably misidentified as Dr. Edward B. Smith) has promised a sequel to The Skylark of Space !
The thrust of the editorial is clear: Amazing has a new editor, but it remains the same magazine loved by its readers – who, as Sloane mentions in his conclusion, can continue to give their thoughts in the letters column.
The English at the North Pole by Jules Verne (Part 1 of 2)
The first issue of the Sloane period returns to one of Gernsback’s oldest practices: reprinting work by Jules Verne. This time, we get the opening instalment of Verne’s 1866 novel The English at the North Pole , originally entitled Voyages et aventures du captain Hatteras .
The story opens with excited conversations surrounding a peculiar vessel, the Forward . This brig has unusually large sails; it bears a cannon, despite clearly being otherwise unintended for war; and, strangest of all, there is a rumour that its captain is a dog. This rumour arises from the fact that the ship’s dog is nicknamed Captain; as to the identity of the real captain, this remains a mystery. Not even the chief officer, Richard Shandon, knows the name of his superior, and the rest of the crew treats him as though he is the captain himself.
Obeying a message from the enigmatic captain, Shandon sets sail from Liverpool in the direction of Greenland. What follows is, as per usual for Verne’s tales, intended as much to inform the reader as to entertain them. The dialogue includes such lines as “This certainly proves that America is completely detached from the Polar regions”, while the ship’s voyage past Greenland allows an educational conversation about that country’s history and climate. Meanwhile, various real-life explorers of the nineteenth century are namechecked during the course of the story as the fictional characters witness many of the same sights as their forebears.
Finally, the mysterious captain shows himself. One of the sailors, Garry, reveals that he is none other than the famous Captain Hatteras in disguise, and quells a mutiny with a patriotic speech and a quotation from Nelson. He also reveals his ultimate aim: he hopes to go well past Greenland and reach the North Pole. This was, of course, decades before Frederick Cook and Robert Peary’s (since-disputed) claims to have achieved this goal..
While the speculative fiction in this novel is not as high-flying as Verne’s voyages to the moon, the author still uses science to create some memorable moments. During the journey, superstitious crewmen blame the presence of the ship’s dog for everything from excess ice to failing eyesight. They conspire to leave the unfortunate animal behind on the ice, behind Shandon’s back; they subsequently witness what appears to be a giant, rampaging monster, heading right for their ship; this turns out to be the dog, magnified by the phenomenon of refraction.
The captain’s eventual decision to reveal himself does not entirely set the crew at ease, as Hatteras is notorious for letting his sense of duty outstrip his regard for any life onboard ship, including his own. This first instalment ends with Shandon declaring that the captain is a madman and that the expedition is doomed.
“The Gas-Weed” by Stanton A. Coblenz
“Having just reprinted a Verne story, this issue of Amazing now showcases another favourite trick of the Gernsback years: borrowing ideas from H. G. Wells. “The Gas-Weed” is manifestly derived from The War of the Worlds , with author Stanton A. Coblenz eliminating the Martians so that the invasive red weed that accompanied them in Wells’s story can be elevated to the central threat.
The story begins with the landing of a spectacular meteorite. Spreading from the collision point is a bizarre plant, leafless and consisting of tendrils with the occasional oddly anthropomorphised knob:
[A]mong the wilderness of tendrils, there was an opaque round mass double the size of a man’s head, deep-purple in color, and surmounted by a growth of shoots and stems that bore a remarkable similarity to hair. And, to complete the likeness to a human head, there were several orifices corresponding remotely to mouth and eyes; and these were seen to open and contract for no known reason, giving the illusion of a face grimacing with the most horrible, distorted malevolence and mockery. Scientists were afterwards to explain that these were mere centers of growth, corresponding roughly to the trunk of a tree; but there are thousands who, to this day, remain unconvinced, and contend that the supposed plants were really not plants at all, but represented some inexplicable cross between vegetable and animal life.
The plant continues to rapidly multiply, and those who get too close to it soon perish from either its noxious gases or the lethal blades hidden in its tendrils. The scientists of the world are forced to come up with a means of fighting off the weird new hazard before all is lost.
Much of “The Gas-Weed” is forgettable, the same essential story having been done better not only by Wells but also, subsequently, by sundry B-movies, even if the latter tend to be less grounded in knowledge of plant biology (here, we even get a footnote explaining what a cotyledon is). The ending has a scientist discovering that the plant van be killed with human cancer cultures, the fate of Wells’s Martians receiving an unconvincing update for the age of the Gernsbackian scientist-hero. That said, there is one element that lends the story some historical interest.
Unlike The War of the Worlds , “The Gas-Weed” was written for a readership that had lived during a real world war. Coblenz begins his story in the year 1968, when another global conflict is raging:
The Intercontinental War was blazing more hotly than any other conflict in history; the great trans-Pacific invasion was being undertaken, with the loss of a hundred million lives in India and China; airplanes were laying waste the leading cities of the Pacific seaboard, and poison gas was annihilating whole populaces in Australia and western Europe; and mankind, with one half of the white race and one half of the yellow race ranged against the other half of the white race and the other half of the yellow, was waging a desperate and apparently losing battle for existence.
(The emphasis on race is typical of SF from this period, but note that Coblenz was at least forward-looking enough to put “white” and “yellow” peoples on both sides of the conflict, rather than depicting a whites-versus-Asians war as in Philip Francis Nolan’s Buck Rogers stories).
A major reason that the gas-weed is able to cause so much damage is that humanity has already been busy destroying itself. Rather than an arbitrary alien attack, then, we are seeing the result of Earth’s own hubris, a point that Coblenz makes with utter earnestness: “While Hunger, with its accomplices, Looting and Riot, went rattling its skeleton fingers about the earth, the lords of empires, themselves with ample bread in their pantries, were sill urging their underfed minions forward with bomb and bayonet.”
“The Moon Strollers” by J. Rogers Ullrich
This story introduces us to a shack in the Vermont mountains, which is home to a club (“A truly stag club… where the blue flannel shirt, the old corn cob pipe, and a week’s growth of beard needed no apology”). Harking back to Jules Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club, the members of this group are engineers and manufacturers who share an interest in amateur astronomy. They have much to discuss: in the future depicted by this story, an unmanned rocket has already been successfully sent to the moon.
The next step would be a manned trip, and the members of the club discuss the logistics faced by a human being on the moon in terms of gravity, oxygen and temperature. Frederick Scoefield, the voice of imagination and inspiration, hits on the idea of designing space suits – or, as he calls them, “moon strollers” – similar to the suits worn by deep-sea divers.
The club then begins dividing up this task. Old Man Donnelly, who runs a plant that manufactures cars, will handle the moon strollers’ casings and weldings; chemist Dr. Mueller will tackle the air supply; Burroughs, maker of electric refrigerators, will handle insulation; and Scoefield will put his mind to such matters as arm and leg joints. As for the vehicle that will be used to transport them to the moon, this will be based on the already-extant “German rocket airplanes”. When all is ready, a three-man crew is assembled, Scoefield and Mueller being joined by astronomer-mathematician Professor Kenworthy to become the first men on the moon.
“ The Moon Strollers” is the sort of thing that would now be called hard SF, providing careful measurements of weights and temperatures as it guides the reader through its scientific spectacle. Obviously, we can now see that its predictions were off the mark. The space travellers are able to communicate with earth not via Deep Space Uplink but through using an elaborate system of lenses, flares and silk sheets to broadcast Morse code signals. When real-world astronaut John Glenn became the first person to eat in space, he consumed applesauce and meat-vegetable purees from tubes; this fictional lunar expedition is a little more rustic, dining on “Campbell’s soup and G. Washington coffee heated on an electric stove with the pots bolted down so they won’t float away”. Yet author J. Rogers Ullrich’s commitment to providing a credible vision of a lunar expedition paid off: this remains a genuinely intriguing work of science fiction, albeit for very different reasons than it might have done in 1929.
“ The Moon Strollers” depicts a world where the space programme is led by a gaggle of enthusiastic amateur astronomers, albeit amateurs with connections to the manufacturing industries. There is no suggestion that space travel will necessarily develop as a byproduct of an arms race: Henry Ford popularised the phrase “mass production” in a Britannica article published in 1926, three years after this story appeared; President Eisenhower would not coin the term “military-industrial complex” until 1961.
The story pays homage to past works of SF, specifically mentioning Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine, along with the novels of Jules Verne, while the presence of a minor character named Burroughs may be a nod to the more romantic side of science fiction. And that strain of romanticism is not entirely absent from “The Moon Strollers”, which portrays Earth’s satellite as having once held life. The travellers find fossils of fish and sea life, and later on, the buried remnants of a city, built from lava blocks in the manner of Aztec architecture:
Kenworthy backed off a little and snapped a dozen yards of motion pictures, showing Scoefield digging away the sand and revealing a beautifully carved doorway. It was barricaded with enormous boulders, probably the last stand against an ancient enemy.
The story shows no further interest in exploring the dead civilisation of the moon-people, however. After finding the city, the three protagonists turn their attention back to natural history, while the narrative climaxes on an effort to rescue Scoefield from a pit – although, near the very end, the story touches upon the intriguing notion that at some point in their history, Mars, the moon and even Earth itself communicated using the same through which Scoefield and company send their Morse code.
Ullrich was writing at a time when Percival Lowell’s theories regarding Martian canals were, while controversial, not entirely debunked, and so it could be argued that his portrayal of an extinct lunar civilisation was within the boundaries of hard SF at the time. Even so, when it comes to depicting what that civilisation and its inhabitants may have looked like, his imagination seems to have failed him. The more serious-minded SF writers of the period may have been eager to pare away the silly business of bug-eyed monsters and nubile space princesses – but they were not necessarily capable of finding satisfying replacements.
A sequel to the story, “The Stolen Chrysalis”, would later appear in the July 1931 Amazing .
“ The Diabolical Drug” by Clare Winger Harris
“Twenty-six-year-old chemist Edgar Hamilton is in love with a woman nearly six years his senior named Ellen Gordan; but to Ellen, the age gap is big enough to put paid to any question of a relationship. So, he presents her with a concoction that “will make Ponce de Leon’s fountain of eternal youth look like poison hooch”.
As he explains, various vibrations – including those of sound, sight and touch – run through the the human body, each travelling over a nerve “with something like pressure”. His discovery is that “this pressure, which travels along the nerves to the brain, is very like volts in electricity.” his new drug will reduce this voltage and thereby slow the subject’s aging process: using the drug, Ellen can remain physically thirty-two while Edgar spends a few years catching up with her.
“ Oh, Edgar, if that can be done I shall truly say yes”, declares Ellen. “What a wonderful man you are to have figured out so marvellous a plan!”
The drug, once injected, does more than just slow down Ellen’s aging: it reduces her every movement in speed, leaving in a state of what the film industry called slow-motion. “Ellen, Ellen, you can not live at this slow rate for seven years”, exclaims Edgar. “I never realized it could be so gruesome. For heaven’s sake, stop looking at me so fixedly with your mouth open!” Meanwhile, after upwards of half an hour, Ellen writes a message explaining her perspective: to her, Edgar is moving so fast as to become a mere streak, while his voice is only “a fine, piping, whistling note.”
At the suggestion of Ellen’s mother, Edgar sets about concocting an antidote – one with the additional benefit of speeding up his own aging so Ellen might accept him. When he develops his latest concoction, he tests it on a cat; the unfortunate animal begins darting about at high speed before bursting into flames, ignited by friction with the air.
The story heads further into comical absurdity as Edgar, undeterred by the fate of the cat, gives himself a small drop of his speeding-up drug. He finds himself in a seemingly frozen world, and has to deliberately slow down his movements so as not to alarm the housekeeper. After coming across a note written by Ellen’s irate father, revealing that the young woman has been diagnosed with measles that will last for five years, Edgar decides to end it all with an overdose.
Yet Edgar does not suffer the same fate as the cat. The story’s narrative voice informs us that, while 1000 volts of low-frequency electricity can cause death, 100,000 volts of high-frequency electricity can pass through the human body without apparent harm. By the same token, Edgar survives his overdose – although with an unexpected side-effect: he feels himself falling, and sees his surroundings replaced with what appear to be swirling solar systems, but which he then identifies as molecules, atoms, protons and electrons.
He soon realises that his drugs not only change the speed at which the subject lives, but also alter their size. Ellen is getting larger, but at too slow a pace to be noticeable; while he himself is now rapidly shrinking to the point of becoming microscopic. This concept is articulated via a quotation from an unnamed and presumably fictitious professor, theorising that time is the fourth dimension and that a grain of sand might contain minuscule universes that come and go within a second of our time.
The final stretch of the story transplants Edgar to the microscopic land of Luntin, a not-especially-interesting place interchangeable with the various other sketched-out Atlantises to have appeared in Amazing . Here, he stays long enough to marry a local woman and sire a son named Yangar and, later, a grandson named Manly. Luntin is beset by natural disasters, and so Edgar is forced to use his slowing-growing drug to try and save himself and his family.
Back in our world – where scarcely any time has passed at all – Edgar’s household is surprised by the sudden appearance of two people: one is a mysterious old man, the other appears to be Edgar in curious dress. But the old man is actually Edgar, and the younger man his grandson Manly, his son Yangar having been lost. The story ends with Ellen cured and married to Manly, while Edgar’s trauma at losing his son and fanciful claims of the microscopic world are enough to land him in an asylum.
“ The Diabolical Drug” is pieced together from material that would have been familiar to science fiction readers of this period. The central idea of a drug that speeds the user up, so that the outside world appears to exist in slow motion, had been used by H. G. Wells in “The New Accelerator”. The idea of microscopic worlds existing within atoms was also remarkably popular at this time; to pick one example, it appeared in G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s “The Man from the Atom” (which, incidentally, was reprinted alongside “The New Accelerator” in the first issue of Amazing ). This was an era when the fascinating – and seemingly alien – worlds to be seen beneath a microscope appear to have held at least as much interest to SF authors as the outwardly barren planets to be seen through a telescope.
Clare Winger Harris does a good job of synthesising her influences, with the overall tone of her story approaching Wells in how it shifts its mood from comedy to tragedy. Its only major lapse is its failure to build a memorable secondary world out of the microscopic land of Yuntin, which comes off as just another generic pastoral paradise.
“ The Posterity Fund” by Raymond Emery Lawrence
This story opens from the perspective of a futuristic society that has returned to a pre-industrial state. It looks back with contempt on“Civilization, the era of the Wicked” – a time when cities were clogged with advertising billboards and the skies choked with flying machines. According to accepted history, all of this was brought to an end four hundred years earlier by the Angry One, who struck down Civilization and ushered in a new era.
The central character is a strange man who outwardly appears to be of advanced age, yet retains all the vitality of youth. He purports to have lived for centuries under various names (among them Eugene Mott, Sylvester Krantos, Thomas Smith, Ogilvy Henderson and X3X477) and to have witnessed the fall of the old civilisation first-hand. The villagers around him dismiss his tales – all apart from a young boy and girl, who listen as he tells them the full story.
He explains that, during the twentieth century, the medical establishment found a way to achieve eternal youth. The ending of natural death, however, led to widespread famine, and henceforth to immense resentment among new generations. Those who were naturally young rose up and slew those benefitting from artificial youth, along with the doctors who brought about the state of affairs in the first place. The narrator, Eugene Mott, was the only rejuvenated citizen to survive the cull.
All of this turns out to be an elaborate means for Eugene to witness, and so narrate, the story’s future history, which turns out to hinge on economics. He reveals that, in 1939, cities began establishing “posterity funds”: the idea here being that a bank would open a fund and businessmen would periodically donate to it over the course of two hundred years, after which the fund would be cracked open and used to pay for new buildings. Eugene dismisses the concept as a twentieth-century fad (alongside beauty contests, flappers, mah jong and the phrase “Yes, we have no bananas”) which the banks and businessmen conceived merely as self-promotion.
The whole scheme turned out to be a failure. When the time arrived for the two-century funds to be withdrawn, some major economic shake-ups (the result of synthetic food rendering farmland worthless) mean that the banks could no longer afford to allow the massive withdrawals necessary to fund the magnificent building projects. The public lost faith in the banking secretary, leading to riots.
Eugene’s narrative climaxes as the people march on the headquarters of the bank where he works. The bank’s president, like many people in positions of power during his era, suffers from a nervous disorder which requires constant medication; the attack drives him insane. He wipes out the rioting mob with a poison gas attack launched, rather implausibly, through a radio loudspeaker: we are told that, since the radio can send messages across a 25,000-mile radius, then it can also spread gas across the same space at seemingly the same speed.
As Eugene struggles with his frenzied boss, he is forced to watch in horror as a viewing screen displays pictures of mass death and destruction as the poison gas somehow manages to pollute the entire world. Most of humanity is wiped out, although a few stragglers remain on the surface, while a number of people close to the deceased banking president were able to survive in a submarine – eventually begetting the incredulous villagers, the “new white race”, encountered by Eugene in the story’s present.
Although stories by Raymond Emery Lawrence appeared in a number of magazines, particualrly in the Western genre, “The Posterity Fund” appears to have been his sole contribution to science fiction. The result shows some of the major trends in the genre as it existed circa 1929, with a Wellsian strain of social satire, a Gernsbackian habit of throwing out lists of scientific and technological developments that may or may not have any bearing on the plot, and an interpretation of radio as some sort of all-powerful magic. That Lawrence ends up chucking it all in the bin in favour of a pastoral existence suggests that he was more at home on the wild frontier.
As with many stories of this sort, there is some fascination in noting the hits and misses in the author’s vision of the future. The future history witnessed by Eugene includes widespread use of atomic power, the abolition of firearms as part of a “great crusade against crime” and the presence of flying cars – some of which are large enough to serve as permanent places of residence. A generous reader might take the image of Earth’s atmosphere being turned to poison as a garbled premonition of the atomic bomb, while the fact that such power is put into the hands of a pill-popping oligarch has a certain grim relevance to our present epoch. Lawrence’s most striking prediction of the future, though, comes in a throwaway description of new trends in reading habits:
In nineteen-eighty-six all printed matter was practically out of date; literature of all kinds was dictated to and reproduced from phonographic records housed in a huge central building and accessible by means of radio. Every person carried a pocket instrument designed specially for communication with the great central library. A movable pointer on a dial connected him instantly with whatever department he wished; by voicing the particular subject or title desired, he was automatically put in touch with the record or the part of the record containing it. This was much better than having to dig knowledge or entertainment from bulky printed pages; though of course, when civilization was destroyed, the knowledge became unavailable. The library system could not function without the aid of many mechanisms, all of which were too complex to be understood by barbarians like you and your fathers.
“ The Invisible Finite” by Robert A. Wait
““ When a Scientist turns ‘Scientifictionist,’ something good is to be expected”, declares this story’s editorial introduction, which plays up author Robert A. Wait’s day job as a chemistry instructor. This background is relevant, as the story starts with a lecture by a university professor – although the subject is not chemistry, but invisibility.
If the spokes of a bicycle wheel seem to disappear in motion, argues Professor Moore, then is it not theoretically possible for such invisibility to be applied to a much larger object, like a car; or a structure of much smaller objects, like the countless threads that make up a piece of cloth? After the class is dismissed and Professor Moore is alone with two graduate students, Jerry and Carlos (who are Irish and Brazilian, Wait being ahead of his time in diverse representation), he gives a short talk about efforts in World War I to build a reflective surface for aeroplane camouflage. He then unveils his Z-ray machine, a device resembling “a freak Roentgen ray generator”, which can make a solid object invisible by altering the size and speed of its particles.
Wait is certainly writing in the mode of a lecturer. He uses his characters in much the same way that Plato used the figures in his dialogues, only with experimental physics instead of philosophy. This excerpt is typical of the story’s density:
“ That,” said the doctor, smiling shyly at the two students, “that is my very latest attempt at a perfect precipitation of colloidal platinum in the sub-microscopic sized particles. You can’t see very much because the light is reflected by the tiny particles in so many millions of ways that nothing but a vague impression of grey existence gets to your retina. As a matter of fact, most of these particles are of dimensions smaller than the wavelength of ordinary visible light, and so it takes a small group of them to reflect even one wave of light. Naturally, they diffuse it greatly since the colloidal nature of the material makes the deposit far from even or solid in surface nature. You will remember that molecules are invisible to the eye, even aided by the microscopes of highest power. Were we to start grinding a material from small chunks down to fine particles, even though we trace the pieces through a microscope, we will sometime have reached, were it possible to grind that fine, the molecular sized particles. Now, limiting ourselves to a single molecule, we would have ground a material from quite visible lumps clear down through the colloidal sized aggregations, and finally we would have ground it into invisibility. Truly, that would be most odd, yet it is theoretically possible, as you can see.”
This rather dry prose is tempered by a touch of melancholy, as when the professor acknowledges that he has only a short time left on Earth, encouraging the two students to continue his research. He turns out to have even less time than he imagined: when he accidentally touches the Z-ray, he disappears from sight. The story ends just as his disembodied voice announces that he has ascended to a new plane of existence, which hints at a more interesting narrative than what we just read – but then, that narrative had already been told by H. G. Wells in “The Platterner Story” .
Discussions
One of the magazine’s writers, Clare Winger Harris, clarifies a few points about her fiction raised by her readers before praising Miles J. Breuer’s “The Captured Cross-Section” . Recent high school graduate Charles Wihe weighs in on the dispute over the continued relevance of Wells and Verne (”The only thing I do not like about these two writers is their tedious style”) and requests a “Hick’s Inventions with a Kick” story in which the unfortunate inventor finally has a success (a request that came too late, Clement Fezandié having wrapped up the Hick series in the previous year).
James McCarthy delivers a string of objections to the March issue ; among other things, he argues that an illustration of a fourth-dimensional object is inaccurate. “[O]ur artist, unfortunately, never saw an object move from the third to the fourth dimension”, replies the editor. “We suppose you did not see it either.” Still, Allen Hensley writes that the publication “looks almost like a new magazine” since the April number, so perhaps McCarthy also felt things to have improved after the March disappointment.
Oral Arnel joins the ranks of those objecting to the magazine’s title (which “fairly reeks of trash, sensationalism”) and requests a reprint of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Maid before commenting on the subjects of interplanetary travel (which he remains skeptical about in reality, but enjoys seeing in fiction), shadows, and inertia. High school freshman Dale Johnson, who began following Gernsback’s exploits with Science and Invention , also derides the title as evoking “lurid thrillers of the cheaper kind” before offering some comments on various contributors (“Please tell Mr. Merritt to tame his stories down a bit. I always need a hair-cut after reading one of his flights of imagination”).
W. J. Walsmith requests reprints of John Ulrich Giesy’s Palos of the Dog Star Pack and its sequels, which ran in All-Story . K. M. McElroy requests a sequel to E. E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space , preferably one that spends more time exploring the world of Osnome (“the conception of an inhabited planet without sodium chloride leads to speculation”). Jack Hart is another Skylark fan, and expresses hope of becoming a science fiction author himself, despite “a few years’ tough and tumble in Flanders during the scrimmage of 1916-1918” having left him blind.
Robert M. Gerfin demands an apology for George Cookman Watson’s “Cauphul, the City Under the Sea” (“Tell me – where does Mr. Watson obtain such purile, crack-brained ideas such [sic] as transferring muscular pains of human beings by electricity into grey squirrels?”). Erika Fried, on the other hand, recounts showing the issue in question to her high school English teacher, who was impressed: “She said that she had read some Atlantis stories and that the information given in the story ‘Cauphal, the City Under the Sea’ was correct.”
Moving from fiction to general scientific inquiry, Han A. Kunitz has trouble understanding why the void of space would be cold: “This space is assumed to be empty, so there would be nothing to be cold. Explanations are in order.”
A couple of letters respond to earlier criticism of the magazine’s covers. Alfred Beach argues that, if the covers are off-putting to any potential readers, then the contents will also be off-putting: “I will not purchase a magazine when the cover shows a picture of a cowboy or a western scene, because I do not like western stories.” Mrs. H. Snyder says it was precisely the covers that first attracted her to the magazine in the first place. “[W]hen I see another person reading Amazing Stories I know that there is one who like myself, has dared to break away from the so-called ‘popular’ type of fiction and read stories that are full of excitement, daring adventure and in many instances, prophecy […] I feel it stamps one with individuality to be seen carrying Amazing Stories .”
“ I’m just a girl who is interested in scientifiction”, writes Alice K. Crout, prefiguring Gwen Stefani. She goes on to attack an earlier letter asking the magazine to leave out ‘love stories’: “The man who wrote that must be a bachelor, or else one of those ‘cold, machine-like scientists’ we read about, and I can’t agree wth him. Of course, no one wants a lot of ‘soft soap’ in stories of this kind, but a little romance mixed in, properly proportioned, makes the story more human.” The editorial response is most enthusiastic: “We certainly are always glad to get letters of comment on our stories from girls, so we have ventured to call you not only a girl reader, but a girl friend.”
John G. Roche evidently agrees with Alice’s sentiments about romance in science fiction, as he submits an alternative ending to H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes where the protagonist is reunited with his beloved Helen. O. C. Talbert grumbles about the same story, but admits that this animosity possibly stems from being forced to write about Wells in high school (“I have never had any use for him since!”). J. A. Todhunter, a Brazilian reader, is an admirer of Wells’s writing, and singles out “Pollock and the Porroh Man” despite feeling that it would be more at home in Weird Tales ; inspired by that story of a decapitated magician, Todhunter offers an anecdote of an explorer who went hunting for shrunken heads in Peru, only to go missing and subsequently be found a month later as a shrunken head himself.
All of these letters give us glimpses of SF fandom as it existed in 1929, but the letter from Mrs. W. R. Steele is unusual in that it gives us a third-person account of a typical teenage Amazing reader:
My son is fourteen and of a mechanical and inventive mind. He haunts the drug store for several days when it is time for your magazine Amazing Stories to arrive. He reads it from cover to cover and understands it perfectly. The first one I saw I thought was rather a freak magazine, but several times I have heard him talk with men on subjects that were out of my reach. I had scarcely ever heard of them and I now feel that it is a most wonderful educational and interesting magazine.
He just reads by the hour and never leaves a word unread, and besides keeping him out of mischief, I feel that he is acquiring an education at the same time. He likes the few illustrations, but says it is the only magazine that has so much reading and that is the best part of it and he hopes you won’t change it. He helps with dishes or begs for any housework in order to get money to buy it.
Right now he has finished your August magazine and has just talked me out of fifty cents for the new Quarterly . So I am sure you have a very loyal booster in Billie.
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