A century ago, at a Waukegan, Illinois boardinghouse run by his grandparents, an auburn-haired, six-year-old boy named Ray Bradbury used to search for copies of Amazing Stories left behind by the guests. Sitting in the dark Craftsman house some forty miles up the lake from Chicago, reading by the fractured and colorful light radiating through the stained-glass window, Bradbury later recalled how the magazine’s “vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings… fed my hungry imagination.” The magazine where Bradbury would discover the interstellar adventures of Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, where he would realize the possibilities of a certain type of storytelling.
Printed on the smudgy, if colorful, cheap wood-pulp paper that would give an entire genre its name, Amazing Stories first began distribution in April of 1926. Its first cover—as illustrated by Frank R. Paul—depicted an assortment of simian-creatures ice-skating on a frozen world, a marooned ship on a peak behind them, while rising over the horizon is a massive, ringed, red-stripped gas planet.
This initial issue also prominently displayed the names of the seminal authors therein—H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe. Reprints all; in fact, only Wells was still alive, but what the auspicious launch of the periodical lacked in original material, it made up for in historical importance as the first magazine dedicated entirely to what its founder and editor Hugo Gernsback initially called “scientifiction,” later deciding to go with science fiction as the preferred term.
A Luxembourgish immigrant, Gernsback was an inventor and entrepreneur who serialized his own 1908 science fiction novel Ralph 124C 41+ (which despite its rather abysmal critical assessment predicted a future of, among other novelties, fax machines, jukeboxes, and Zoom) in his Modern Electrics magazine. With an engineer’s glee, the man who also ran New York’s AM station WRNY (which first experimented with television in 1928) claimed that “What descriptions of clouds and sunsets [were] to the old novelist, descriptions of scientific apparatus and methods [are] to the modern.”
Other than the eponymous industry award derived from his first name, Gernsback hasn’t been particularly well-remembered as a writer (his work was “simply dreadful” said Lester Del Ray), an inventor (regardless of patents on devices such as “The Isolator,” a helmet which provides distraction-free living), or even as an ethical businessman (guilty of “venality and corruption… sleaziness” according to Barry Malzberg). Nonetheless, he was the first to understand the potential for the genre by giving it a dedicated home and name. The editor that, as Daniel Stashower described him in a 1990 Smithsonian Magazine article, “made us fall in love with the future.”