The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (28 page)

Paul’s paintings might show humans reacting to giant flies or beetles, a submarine attacked by flying and swimming reptiles, a disembodied head speaking in a laboratory, Martian machines laying waste to the countryside, or New York City being swept aside by a glacier. These strange scenes would be set against backgrounds of a single intense color—deep blue, or pink, or orange, or violet, or some other unlikely but eye-catching hue.

The only appeal that Gernsback would not make on the often garish billboard-sized covers of
Amazing
was to sex. In the attempt to draw impressionable readers close and capture their attention, any other tactic was fair. As Gernsback wrote: “We knew that once we could make a new reader pick up
Amazing Stories
and read only one story, the cause was won with that reader. . . .”
²⁰⁶

If Gernsback compromised just a little with the hard facts of commercial necessity in designing the exterior of
Amazing,
other kinds of compromise were at work within the covers of the magazine. Gernsback might talk as though his magazine had infinite resources, but in actuality
Amazing
was run on a shoestring. It paid very little for the fiction it printed, it paid very late, and then only with the greatest reluctance. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that the best work published in
Amazing
consisted of classic old stories that could be had for pennies or for nothing.

The spirit of the times—and Gernsback’s tight purse—ensured that most of the original work printed in
Amazing
was nothing much to brag about. These new stories were mainly typical Twenties-style SF horror fiction—tales of hostile machines, threatening insect societies, emotionless Big Brains, and disintegrating technological futures.

This is not exactly the sort of material one would readily expect to captivate and inspire the new reader who might casually pick up a copy of
Amazing
and sample the pleasures of a single story. Yet Hugo Gernsback expected no less than that.

It was somehow as though Gernsback did not
notice
the deficiencies of his beloved magazine—that it was awkward, juvenile, overstated, pretentious and vulgar, filled with moldy old stories and grimly negative new ones. However anyone else might see it, Hugo Gernsback, at least, was positive that scientifiction was wonderful, inspiring, uplifting, educational, prophetic and clean. He said so over and over again, in editorials, in story blurbs, in letter columns, in quizzes and contests, and in countless schemes and promotional ploys.

The purity, strength and power of Gernsback’s faith was so great that almost in spite of itself
Amazing Stories
became something of what he said it was. Hugo Gernsback’s True Belief in science held
Amazing
together and welded it into a unity that no number of little compromises or deficiencies could alter.

Hugo Gernsback saw wonder in all science—even in hostile machines, threatening insects, or the prospects of human decline. And he expected others to see it, too, if only they would just once put aside their fears and limitations and
look
at the truth and beauty that was before them.

Hugo Gernsback, inventor and prophet of science, was the ultimate example of the all-unwitting Twentieth Century scientific occultist—possessed by the profoundly irrational conviction that there is no Truth other than scientific truth and that nothing lies beyond the reach of science. If only the magical word
science
was invoked, Gernsback could convince himself that anything at all was possible, or even any number of mutually incompatible things.

Here is one phrasing of Gernsback’s hopes for science—as usual, presented as though it were not his own special viewpoint, but rather was the natural and inevitable opinion of every man:

The man in the street no longer recognizes in science the word impossible; “What man wills, man can do,” is his belief.

Interplanetarian trips, space flyers, talking to Mars, transplanting heads of humans, death-rays, gravity-nullifiers, transmutation of elements—why not? If not to-day, well then, to-morrow. Are they surprises? Not to him; the modern man expects them.
²⁰⁷

Gernsback perceived SF in a highly special way. He saw scientifiction as a kind of invention, a machine of the imagination, a device for anticipating and stimulating scientific wonders-to-come. He felt that since even the most fantastic fiction at some time or other must inevitably come true, then the real role of SF writers was to be prophets—like him.

For Gernsback, aspects of SF like plot, character and emotion were purely secondary values, no more than so much sugar-coating for the essential scientific pill. It was not fictional values that Gernsback expected to make an impact upon the reader, but prophetic vision. By presenting dramatized visions of the scientific wonders of tomorrow right now, he meant to educate and inspire the youngsters who would be tomorrow’s scientists into bringing those wonders and others into being. He meant to generate both scientists and new science.

As the official slogan of
Amazing Stories
had it: “Extravagant Fiction Today—Cold Fact Tomorrow.” That was Gernsback’s dream of scientifiction.
²⁰⁸

It was not unnatural of Gernsback to perceive SF in this mechanistic way. It was his habitual mode of thought. And it is quite possible that only such a narrow, intense, obsessive man as Hugo Gernsback could have conceived of scientifiction, determined to start a magazine like
Amazing Stories
in a moment like 1926, and brought the job off.

Hugo Gernsback was born in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in 1884. He grew up in the fevered heyday of the Age of Technology, when one marvelous invention after another was pouring forth from the laboratories and workshops of Europe and America.

Gernsback was inspired by science. His aim was to become an inventor, too, and help to create the new wonders of the Twentieth Century. In 1904, with an invention under his arm—a battery of his own design—he set off to seek his fortune in America, the native country of the world’s greatest inventor, Thomas A. Edison.

The Edwardian decade, a moment of maximum scientific optimism, was the perfect hour for Gernsback to arrive in the United States. He was quick to make his mark in this land of golden opportunity.

Hugo Gernsback became a pioneer of radio—an inventor, a businessman, a broadcaster and a self-appointed educator. As early as 1906, he was marketing his own inexpensive home radio sets. In 1908, Gernsback’s radio supply catalog metamorphosed into his first popular science magazine,
Modern Electrics.
In 1909, in a prophetic article, he coined the word
television.
²⁰⁹
And in the Twenties, Gernsback would become an actual early experimenter in television broadcast.

And yet, despite these accomplishments and his genuine contributions to scientific and technological progress—for which, in time, he would receive due recognition and honor—Gernsback wasn’t above attempting to impress a naive young audience by laying claim to greater distinction as a scientist than he would ever actually enjoy. On the masthead of the first few issues of
Amazing Stories,
and in one early editorial, he would list himself as “F.R.S.” The obvious implication was that Gernsback was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the most prestigious of Western scientific bodies—but at best this was wishful thinking.
²¹⁰

From the very outset of his career as a publisher, Gernsback had the notion of using SF stories for purposes of education and prophecy. He included scientific fiction in the contents of each of his popular science magazines.
Modern Electrics
might be succeeded by
Electrical Experimenter
in 1913, and
Electrical Experimenter
might then be altered into
Science and Invention
in 1920, but this one continuing element in Gernsback’s scientific publishing formula would remain the same.

Gernsback contributed SF stories of his own to his various magazines—like so many later editors, setting a personal example for others of the fiction he wanted to print. For
Modern Electrics,
he wrote
Ralph 124C 41+
(1911-12), a thoroughly clumsy story but a brilliant job of predicting science-to-come. Gernsback’s second serial story,
Baron Munchausen’s Scientific Adventures,
was first published in his
Electrical Experimenter
in 1915-16.

Just as he had coined the word
television,
so in 1915 did Gernsback, that born promoter, invent the word
scientifiction.
²¹¹
His private hope was that one day it might be included in standard dictionaries.

In 1923, Gernsback went so far as to devote the entire August issue of
Science and Invention
to scientific fiction. And the following year, he sent out his circular letter announcing the magazine
Scientifiction,
which would never be published due to the lack of favorable response.

In short, when
Amazing Stories
finally did appear in 1926, it was as the result of nearly twenty years of thought, preparation, experiment and rehearsal on Gernsback’s part. It was not a fluke or aberration. Gernsback had been working up to this move for a long time.

The great strength of
Amazing Stories
was the flexibility and scope of Hugo Gernsback’s conception of science. There was almost no story that he could not see fit to print, no matter how fantastic it was, if it but somewhere muttered its allegiance to science.

There were, however, certain aspects of SF as it had been that were excluded outright from
Amazing.
Gernsback believed in technological advancement, but he had no faith in human social perfection, so old-fashioned social utopianism had no place in his magazine. Gernsback did not believe in the supernatural, so stories of spiritualism, black magic and occult wisdom were also left out.

But still, what breadth of material Gernsback did manage to present!

For the first two years of its existence,
Amazing Stories
was dominated by a wide range of stories resurrected from the past, a recapitulation of the development of SF during the previous century. Gernsback reprinted Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Balloon Hoax” and Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens.” He unearthed Jules Verne’s very first story, “A Balloon Journey,” and reprinted it as “A Drama in the Air,” and he serialized no less than five novels by Verne. He republished all of H.G. Wells’s classic scientific romances from
The Time Machine
to
The First Men in the Moon,
as well as many of Wells’s shorter stories.

Gernsback cast his net widely. He republished stories that had originally appeared in his own
Electrical Experimenter
and
Science and Invention.
He reprinted much fiction from the pulps, chiefly from
All-Story
and
Argosy.
He published
The Moon Pool
and several other stories by A. Merritt. From
Blue Book Magazine
he picked up Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1918 novel
The Land That Time Forgot.
He even published stories in translation from French and German.

Eventually, Gernsback found new writers with new stories. For the most part, these were eager, clumsy amateurs. Nonetheless, among the new work that he managed to arrange to publish were original stories by Ray Cummings and H.P. Lovecraft. He even solicited new fiction from Edgar Rice Burroughs, and was offered
A Weird Adventure on Mars.
Gernsback published it as
The Master Mind of Mars
in
Amazing Stories Annual
(1927), a one-shot magazine, and praised Burroughs’ story for its “excellent science.”
²¹²

Within the context of the Age of Technology, Hugo Gernsback was a man of considerable vision, the one appropriate person able to serve as an instrument by which far-flung SF might be pulled together, given a single name, and made aware of itself. The pragmatism and elasticity of Gernsback’s synthesis of science made possible the wide-reaching synthesis of SF that was presented in the pages of
Amazing Stories.
And it was this summarization of all that SF had previously been that was the true glory of the early
Amazing,
more than compensating for any little awkwardness or pretension that the magazine might chance to display.

But it should be remembered that the Age of Technology was drawing to a close, and when viewed from the perspective of the emerging era, Hugo Gernsback was not a man of vision and flexibility at all, but rather a highly limited individual with bad habits and firmly fixed ideas. And very shortly, Gernsback’s flaws of character and vision would cause him to be left behind while the literature he believed he had invented continued to alter and evolve.

The first of Gernsback’s great limitations was his fundamentally utilitarian attitude toward SF. He did not value it for itself, but only as one more tool of his own making that he was entitled to use in any way that seemed appropriate, whether it be to produce future science or to generate immediate cash.

Even in the boom times of the mid-Twenties, Gernsback had a great need for cash. He knew how to live well. He required money for his experiments. He had all sorts of ongoing businesses and projects, and by no means all of these were financially productive. His radio station and television broadcasts in particular were a heavy continuing financial drain.

Hugo Gernsback was an idealist—but he was always completely ready to be pragmatic. As much as he loved scientifiction and wished to promote it, he was prepared to squeeze
Amazing Stories
for every cent that it would produce. He saw it as a convenient personal pocket into which he could dip as he needed to.

It was authors who first suffered from Gernsback’s pinchpenny tactics. At a time when a pulp magazine might pay as much as five cents a word for fiction, Gernsback was content to pay as little as one-fifth of a cent—if and when an author managed to catch up with him. On more than one occasion, Gernsback would have to be sued before he would pay up.