Welcome to this session of the virtual science fiction program which is titled The Rise of
the Pubs 1900s to 1930s.
This is Avra Janisari from Iran.
It is a great pleasure to give this lecture to Dr. Lars Schmein's class.
What does the title of this session suggest?
We will see how science fiction pulp magazines popped up in the early decades of the 20th century.
The magazine dominated the field of science fiction for half a century and the magazine, in fact,
exerted considerable influence on science fiction's form and subject matter through its publishing
and distribution industry.
We can say it shaped the way science fiction was written and read.
The development of English fiction in magazines, by the way, first began in Britain in the hands of
Arthur Cannon Doyle, Grant Allen, George Griffith, and A.G. Wells.
And these writers published their stories in weekly and monthly magazines.
Doyle's stories, for example, were mostly composed of the pseudoscientific elements and mesmerism.
For example, his John Barrington cows, which is the name of his story,
portrays a girl who has the power to will people to death.
And in another story under the title of the great kinds plots experiment,
people's personalities are, in fact, exchanged between their bodies.
But A.G. Wells was the most famous and prolific science fiction writer in Britain.
He greatly contributed to the future war story as a significant such genre of pulp science fiction.
Examples of his works are The War of the Worlds, which was published in 1897,
and The War in the Air, which was published in 1908.
Wells' stories showed a great interest in the details of the process of discovery.
Many of the critics think that early British pulp science fiction is really poor and insignificant
compared with American pulps, but most of them even identify, we can say,
pulp as a unique phenomenon peculiar to American culture.
But the fact is that the science fiction appearing in British magazines was not sufficiently recognized,
partly because most of it was not reprinted in book form,
and some of the British SF writers beside Doyle and Wells, for example,
were M.P. Scheele, William Hill Cotsen, George C. Wallace, Donovan Bailey, James Barr, A.E. Ashford,
Couts, Brisbane, Alan Oliver, Barry Payne, and Sacks Romer.
These were the writers at that time, but we see that not much work has been done on them
in the field of criticism or even historiography.
Among these writers, Wallace had the longest career in science fiction.
He worked from the 1890s to the 1940s.
And two of his best stories, for instance, are The Last Days of Earth, which was published in July 1901,
and The Great Sacrifice, published in 1903.
These stories are comparable to the material published in Gernsback's Amazing Stories and O'Connor's Astoundance Stories.
So the first, we can say, the first genuine British science fiction magazine was titled Peter's Annual,
which was for the first time published in 1919.
And this magazine contained articles and fiction.
Most of the material in the magazine focused on, for instance, predictions for future life.
And we can say the contributors to this magazine were A.A. Milne, G.K. Chesterton, W.L. George,
F. Britton Austin, and Mary Colmanderly.
It is interesting to know that after 1919, British science fiction occupied a trivial portion of British magazines,
while, contrarily, the beginning of the 20th century, particularly the 1920s and 1930s,
was a formative period for pop science fiction in America.
The pop magazine was introduced in America by a person called Frank A. Muncy,
who converted his own dime novel series, The Golden Argosy, into an all-fiction pop magazine,
retitled as The Argosy, in 1896.
Such magazines were to be the home of science fiction adventure writers like Edgar I. Spiros.
American pops, particularly pop science fiction,
which was a unique cultural phenomenon peculiar to the first half of the 20th century,
were sold in between 40,000 and 50,000 newsstands, drug stores, and tobacconists.
As you can see in this slide, there are lots of these magazines in that newsstand.
And, well, as you see, the size of the magazines is, in fact, really large,
compared with the magazines we have today.
And the paper they, we can say, the paper out of which these magazines were made was pulp.
So they were cheaper kind of magazines and more accessible to the public in the United States.
This process gradually, in fact, shaped an important part of American literature
at the beginning of the 20th century, which is usually famous as pulp magazines or the pulp phenomenon.
The United States, at a time, was, in fact, a net importer of linen rags for paper making.
And the high cost of paper was a major publishing problem.
So with the invention of wood pulp paper, the expansion of the railways,
and cheap mail for publications, public access to inexpensive magazines became possible.
Now, the proliferation of the industry of publication caused a new phenomenon called speciation,
both in American fiction and American magazines in the early 20th century,
the result being the emergence of genre fiction and genre magazines.
The first example of such a phenomenon or speciation was, in fact,
Detective Monthly magazine, which was published in 1915.
As you know, speciation, in fact, helped the versatility of the literature produced at the beginning of the 20th century.
And it was a very important phenomenon for the history of literature.
It helped every field in literature, specifically the detectives, love stories, science, scientific, in fact, stories.
All of these became professionalized in a way, and every one of these, in fact, genres or sub-genres in literature
had their own circle of fans and, in fact, publication centers.
So a concern with science and science fiction in pulp magazines, at that time, in fact, seemed a little bit odd
because such magazines often addressed common people.
I mean, generally pulp magazines addressed common people.
But as Ashley proposes, the only reason for the appearance of a science fiction magazine
was that it was aimed at a very specialist market after magazine speciation began.
And SF pulp magazine was, in fact, purchased not much by the general public,
whose interest was satiated by the stories in the existing magazines, as it was by experimenters and inventors.
Though the first science fiction magazine was launched by an inventor called Hugo Gernsback
for the first time in 1926, the science fiction pulp magazine began to address the general public
and make still more odd claims.
For example, the magazine under the directorship of, we can say, Hugo Gernsback
claimed paternity from science, and also it promised to influence and possibly to create the future.
As for other things, for example, one of the curiosities of history, Hugo Gernsback advanced a theory
whereby science fiction displaced and offered an enlarging and amending critique of science and technology
and created a new synthesis, a statement very suggestive of, for example, Jacques Derrida's supplement,
which means that science fiction, in fact, became a supplement to the notion of science and technology
and the science, in fact, was criticized in the field of science fiction as literature.
This is, of course, far-fetched for considering the early 20th century and somewhat incredible,
but it embodies, this whole project embodies the messianic thought which accompanied early genre science fiction.
Now, this messianic thought is reminiscent of the frontiers' creation or foundation stories as well.
The American frontier tradition was narrated by early settlers who had moved into the wilderness
to create a better Christian community than that in Britain.
They had begun to interpret their situation in different terms and also considered themselves as new chosen people
blessed with a new promised land. Such convictions were carried over into stories,
where entering an undeveloped region devoid of technology, characters deployed their technology to transform the region
and gradually expand their settlement. In these stories, I mean creation stories,
land values, in fact, increased on new settlers' arrival and the original landscapes
succumbed to a second creation under the influence of technology.
This progressive cycle was recapitalated with the settlers' departure from new regions,
often focusing on progress rather than character and style. Foundation stories inculcated the culture of progress into the national mind,
with, for example, implications such as optimism, national transformation, and public-oriented rather than state-oriented triumphs.
The point is that the technology deployed in these foundation stories improved rather than exploited nature.
So we can see a very clear trace of foundation stories within the science fiction stories.
These inclinations, along with stylistic features of the early foundation stories, which were lacking from British culture,
continued into the 20th century American ideology and science fiction magazines with certain degrees of variation.
Thus, despite, for instance, Blyler and Blyler's argument that much of the world of the 1920s and 30s,
particularly the Great Depression and its concomitants were absent in the Gernsback science fiction stories,
one should notice that the pop science fiction of that period heavily drew on thematic and stylistic features of foundation stories as a forerunner.
For a long time, pop science fiction did not enjoy a good reputation because it was viewed as a popular genre,
which was ghettoized in pop magazines, and it was read almost exclusively by a minority audience,
which was, in fact, chiefly comprised of adolescent males who hated literature.
Instead of reading classics of English literature, these audiences read science fiction written by hacks or unpretentious professionals
who just made no claim to being great artists and, in fact, possessed neither authorial pride nor a proprietary sense,
which was characteristic of aspirations to high art in the age of modernism.
These hacks were, in fact, humble people, and based on Fiddler's account, usually wrote under several pseudonyms,
because they were after money rather than fame, and in competition with fellow writers,
they tried to rip off from each other plots, gimmicks, devices, and even basic assumptions about what was to today's story.
In addition, at this time, most pulp readers scorned early pulp-esque stories as, for instance, crazy stuff, impossible and undesirable.
These stories were generally isolated from the mainstream literature because they formed a small counterculture against intense social realism in literature thought in the 1920s and 30s.
Furthermore, pulp science fiction magazines, including Science Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, and Astana Stories largely advocated technophilia by demonstrating an uncritical enthusiasm for science and technology.
In fine, if we adopt Jameson's argument, Frederick Jameson's argument, one may suggest that these stories disguised the shameful and private activity of their authors' imagination or primal wish fulfillment in aesthetic or artistic decoration.
Though these claims are true to a large extent, one should bear in mind that respectable science fiction grew precisely out of this melting pot.
Despite their incredible vulgar and naive nature, science fiction stories of the 1920s and 30s were capable of evoking a sense of wonder,
rupture, and even magic, which was alien to many of the polite literary works of the same period.
However, in line with Roger Lockhurst, one should remark that American pulp science fiction of the 1920s and 30s has largely been ignored, ridiculed, or even undervalued by genre historians and science fiction critics.
The 1920s and 30s American pulp science fiction could not emerge but at the time it was worn and with the quality it was produced in the United States.
Because the backdrop which shaped this new genre in the United States contained all the various but related factors for giving birth to it.
Otherwise, the genre should have come into existence either before or after this moment in the history of literature.
One may refer to a set of sporadic science fictional or pseudo-scientific texts produced in diverse epochs, like, for instance, the epic of Gilgamesh, 2000 B.C.
or Lucian's Ecaro Menepets or Kepler's Somnium, 1634, Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages to the Moon and Sun, 1656, and even Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, 1818.
But none of these gained enough momentum in their own time to systematically induce a homogeneous corpus to be called science fiction.
However, 1920s and 1930s America provided such a moment here, Lockhurst identifies four conditions for the emergence of science fiction.
First of all, literacy and primary education was extended to the majority of the population, including the middle class in America.
Second, no cheap magazine formats influencing the invention of modern genre categories like science fiction, we can say, superseded the older forms of mass literature, such as the Penny Dreadful and the Dime Novel.
Then another element or factor to be considered is the Constitution of Scientific and Technical Institutions, which facilitated the training of the lower middle class generation as scientific workers, teachers, and engineers who challenged the traditional cultural authority.
And finally, techno-scientific innovations substantially transformed the American cultural context and saturated everyday life experience with the mechanisms and the idea of the machine.
In this way, new conditions for the development of technology converged at this historical juncture and directly led to the production of science fiction.
Therefore, even the most unreal pop science fiction stories were the direct result of the gigantism and sublimity which was embedded in the American view of science, technology, and progress.
A good representative of this sublimity is the early American electric landscape, which, like any sublime, left the subject with a feeling of weakness and insignificance before the power of an immense and powerful object.
To Louis Mumford and Israel Pound, this landscape was the source of superior self-worth and it promised abundance and personal fulfillment.
Another case is the aviation industry, which became a source of inspiration for many of the space opera stories of the 1920s and 30s.
Purcell declares that between 1914 and 1927, the number of aircraft manufacturers in the United States rose from 16 to 61, which produced up to 1,888 airplanes per annum.
In addition, up to 10.1% of the American population possessed radio sets between 1922 and 1925, that is, prior to the government's monopolization of the radio industry in this country.
And on the other hand, the automobile industry played a similar and even more prosperous role in the life of the Americans.
For instance, factories like General Motors and Ford had manufactured almost half a million cars by 1908.
In fact, in America, which was a nation increasingly under the domination of large liberal corporations that were effectively harnessing science and technology to achieve their goals of growth, stability, and market share,
governments served, in fact, as the focus of efforts to socialize the administration and expense of rationalizing the technological environment.
So the role of government was also important in the promotion of a phenomenon like Hulk magazines.
Along these lines, technology had a substantial role in the formation of American nation, which was in turn reflected in the American power of science fiction.
For instance, Amazing Stories was published in 1926 as the first power of science fiction magazine and sold out 100,000 copies.
Ashley argues that this great hit had much to do with the Depression era, when the Americans gladly escaped in dreams of alien worlds, lost lands, or the future.
This nonetheless did not last long for Amazing Stories, fell out of Gernsback's hands in 1929 due to his financial mismanagement.
And, well, the bad habit that he had, he paid not, he didn't pay the writers until he had to do.
Still, the fact remains that Gernsback succeeded in establishing the first science fiction magazine.
And Amazing Stories, in its first three years, we can say, played a significant role in discovering new authors.
This magazine, according to Gernsback's editorial for the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, was the first in its own kind, that is, it was totally different from a sea of Hulk magazines with love, sex, and adventure orientations.
Gernsback claimed that Amazing Stories would publish science fiction of the Joel Verne, A.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type, which was, according to Hugo Gernsback, the definition of science fiction in this regard, was a charming romance which was intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.
So, some elements are important here. First of all, it should be a romance, it should be scientific, and it should be, in fact, it should benefit from prophetic vision.
The combination of these three elements made a science fiction a story which was different from the mainstream literature and the stories which were produced by ordinary writers.
Moreover, this type of fiction would furnish a tremendous amount of scientific education and would fire the reader's imagination more, perhaps, than anything else of which we know.
To redress, of course, this is also the statement that Hugo Gernsback says, to redress the lack of good fiction in his magazine, The Amazing Stories, Gernsback resorted to reprints from Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Verne, A.G. Wells, and some of the more recent authors who had previously proved popular in Gernsback's science magazines.
The first issue of Amazing Stories included the following stories, Verne's often a comet or Hector Cervadek, Wells' The New Accelerator posed the facts in the case of Mr. Waldemar, 16-year-old G. Peyton Wertenbaker's The Man from the Atom, George Allen England's The Thing from Outside, and Austin Hall's The Man Who Saved the Earth.
Here, Wells' reprint was the ideal Gernsback story in many respects and described a new kind of drug that quickened people's perceptions, and this story was both scientific and charming.
The Poe selection, a horror story by today's standards, contained a scientific base and, we can say, represented the possibility that a hypnotized mind might stay alive even after the death of the body, and the rest of the stories were contemporary reprints.
During the first year of Amazing Stories, Gernsback mostly published reprints, but from his readers' correspondence, he learned that Edgar Rice Burrowses and Abraham Merritt, not Vernon Wells, were the most popular writers.
However, the Burrowsian and the Maritesk fiction, Gernsback published, verged on, sorry, the Burrowsian and the Maritesk fiction Gernsback published, in fact the stories that he published from Burrows and Merritt, usually verged on the scientific and the fantastic, rather than on science and invention.
To justify this deviation from his maxims, Gernsback brought excuses and explained away the dilemma. Still, Gernsback sought for authors whose stories were significantly better than others.
These writers were G. Peyton Wharton-Baker, Miles J. Brewer, Bob Olsen, Francis Flagg, David H. Keller, Fletcher Pratt, Harle Vincent, Stanton Commins, R. F. Stars, Edward E. Smith, Jack Williamson, and S. P. Meek.
Most of these writers were not even remembered later. The experimenter publishing company, being in receivership, Gernsback started stellar publishing with the first issue of Science Wonder Stories on 3rd May 1929.
He changed the title of the new magazine to Wonder Stories because he believed that the term science implied a scientific rather than a fiction periodical, thus hampering the progress of the magazine.
Wonder Stories was followed by Wonder Stories quarterly and Air Wonder Stories. The former serialized scientific novels, whereas the latter published aviation stories.
Gernsback brought his former policies, of course, to the new magazine group and employed someone called David Lasser as the editor. Lasser was an influential force behind and the first president of the formation of the American Rocket Society in March 1930.
He brought vitality and commitment to Wonder Stories, elements which amazing stories in fact lacked. Lasser's skill and engineering background were great assets to Gernsback.
He quickly responded to and encouraged authors through lengthy and detailed feedback on their stories in the letter column of the magazine.
Lasser's great contribution to pop science fiction was his emphasis on the development of realistic plots and a strong characterization in the composition of fiction.
Lasser's editorship changed the quality of fiction published in Wonder Stories during the two years 1931 and 1932.
While under Gernsback, the magazine printed significant authors and stories, including, among others, Edmund Hamilton's The Man Who Evolved, 1931, John Mark Lemons' The Scarlet Planet, 1931, Clifford D. Simacs' The Voice in the Void, 1932, John Binion Harris' The Venus Adventure, 1932,
Eric Temple Bell's The Time Stream, 1931, Stanley G. Weinbaum's The Martian Odyssey, 1934, and Erlan Otto Binder's The Spore Doom, 1934.
Although Gernsback's pop science fiction business did not last longer than a decade, it influenced the evolution of science fiction as a genre.
His magazines created a cult of technology, even technological fetishism, leading to the production of more refined forms such as heart science fiction in the Campbell era pulp SF.
Now, as a good example of stories published in pulp science fiction magazines, we can talk a bit about Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey, which was in fact a blockbuster when it was published.
So Gernsback asked Weinbaum to write a sequel to that story, and the new story came out under the title of Valley of Dreams.
A Martian Odyssey is about a group of scientists' exploration of Mars where they experience new ecosystems to which they have to adapt.
They encounter a number of aliens and creatures, which are in fact some of the most wonderful, we can say, aliens ever portrayed in the field of science fiction.
The most attractive of them is, and also the most jovial and sympathetic of these aliens, is in fact Weinbaum's tweal, who communicates with men and shows them the Martian culture and civilization.
The significant point about Weinbaum's story is that his style is free from excess verbiage and benefits from direct approach and simplicity.
In an endeavor to achieve realistic dialogue, Weinbaum wrote of ordinary people, similar and apprehensible to most of his readers.
That is, he wrote about ordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances, unlike the many extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances of other science fiction writers.
Alvar Rogers reports that Weinbaum's stories were models of accuracy, in fact, and logic and reason in extrapolation.
American pub-era authors had employed codes which served as established standards for later science fiction writing.
These plots, in fact, standards were plots and stock settings introduced by, for instance, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian exotic semi-barbaric cultures, or George Allen England's post Holocaust stories, or A. Merritt's lost races.
Burroughs was one of the first American pub writers who took astronomy and astronomical potential seriously in the writing of science fiction, but many of his imitators exhausted the Burroughsian tradition of swashbuckling swordsmanship and daring do in space instead of improving the trend he had set.
Still, others imitated Doc Smith's tradition of super-scientific space opera, with Tom Edison's making spaceships, communicators, mechanical mind readers, atomic bombs, and fourth-dimensional translators to dominate other galaxies.
Weinbaum's departure from the pulp SF tradition of his predecessors did not nearly end up in his introduction of new characters and techniques into the genre.
What made Weinbaum swim against the grain was his entirely different apprehension of science and its application in science fiction.
Weinbaum diagnosed one general weakness and also one universal fallacy in the material which was published at that time.
He thought that science was mostly believed to be a savior, a guide to the ultimate hope of mankind.
But Weinbaum personally believed that science was impersonal. It never pointed a way. It never was interested in either the salvation or destruction of the human race.
Indeed, science indicated the road, but it was ethics that chose whether it was to be followed or not.
In Weinbaum's theory, although science was impersonal, science fiction was able to criticize, for it was not science but a branch of literature capable of arguing, rejecting, presenting a thesis, proselytizing, criticizing, or performing other ethical functions.
With this non-Pulpist, or better to say, non-standard principle, Weinbaum deliberately unveiled his epistemology through a veiled but radical dissidence.
From the time Gernsback launched his science fiction magazines, Till Campbell, John W. Campbell, became the editor of Estonian Stories, other major editors were also active in the field of pop science fiction magazine editorship.
These people were, for instance, T. O. Connor Sloan, the editor of Amazing Stories from 1926 to 1938, Harry Bates, the editor of Estonian Stories 1930 to 1933, F. Orland Tremaine, the editor of Estonian Stories 1933 to 1937, Mort Weisinger, the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories 1936 to 1941,
and finally, Ray Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories from 1938 to 1949.
Based on Gary Westfall's book, Sloan de-emphasized Gernsback's discipline of science fiction prediction and its inspirational power to influence actual inventions in future.
On the other hand, Bates, Weisinger, and Connor de-emphasized scientific explanations and their educated value.
As for Tremaine, he approved of all Gernsbackian theories but did not improve them.
Instead, he offered a modified version of science fiction audience and improved the literary quality of science fiction stories he published.
None of the above editors significantly challenged or improved Gernsback's science fiction theories.
Campbell, however, did so.
Influenced by Gernsback, though he denied the influence, Campbell tried to repair Gernsback's science fiction formulae.
Campbell agreed with Gernsback that science fiction should entertain, educate, and stimulate new scientific ideas.
However, Campbell accentuated the literary quality and realistic characterization in the fiction of his writers.
Campbell emphasized the avoidance of the Gernsbackian incorporation of lengthy scientific explanations and intrusive lectures on the part of the writer.
Furthermore, advocating a scientific way of thinking, Campbell expected his writers not simply to predict inventions but also to consider the effects of the invention on man's social life.
The significant point about Campbell's science fiction theory is that, unlike Gernsback, who most of the time had considered science fiction for all men, including common people,
Campbell introduced the science fiction readership as a distinguished group.
He believed, and he very assertively in one of his editorials said, no average mind can either understand or enjoy science fiction.
Put it differently, he believed that professionals and scientifically educated readers comprised a science fiction magazine audience.
That is, he was thinking, in fact, of an elite group of readers.
Now, by raising the payment for writers of his magazine, something that, in fact, Hugo Gernsback never did, Campbell attracted better writers while simultaneously he increased the magazine's prestige.
Astounding science fiction kept paying the highest rates in the field of science fiction for many years, even through the war years when many magazines folded.
Besides, Campbell developed a new stable of writers while retaining sufficiently skillful and adaptable authors from Tremaine's stable who could produce stories assigned.
Campbell's authors were required to avoid hackneyed plots and to nourish innovative ideas in their work.
Furthermore, Campbell was looking for stories that could get in and really could twist things in the reader's mind and, in fact, could shock him out of a lifetime pattern and could change him for the rest of his natural existence.
Thus, as a provocative editor with a very definitive idea of what constituted a good story, Campbell was unafraid to press authors into revisions to revise their work himself without their say-so, or often simply to reject their stories in the service of a platonic ideal science fiction story.
The difference between Campbellian stories and other pulp stories was in the fact that he wanted his authors to produce hardcore science fiction.
These are stories usually dealt with hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology and showed little inclination towards softer sciences such as psychology and sociology.
Campbell's early authors included Robert Moore Williams, Lester DeRay, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Williamson, Clifford D. Simak, L. Ron Hubbard, Malcolm Jameson, and Henry Cattner.
Because Campbell was a very devoted editor, he also, we can say, revolutionized the notion of science fiction editorship.
Usually all editors read the stories and made corrections or suggestions and discovered new talents in the pilot stories which were sent to them.
But Campbell's zeal to educate new writers and his discussion of their stories with them over luncheons in a friendly but strident way is well-remembered.
Many of the writers, we can say, nurtured under Campbell won awards.
For instance, Mark Clifton and Frank Riley's story, they'd rather be right, 1954, were Eric Frank Russell, who wrote a story called Alamogusa, 1955, and Clifford Simak, who wrote a story under the title of The Big Front Yard in 1959,
and Frank Herbert with the Prophet of the Dune, 1965. All of these people and these stories won awards.
But at times, we can say Campbell, in fact, over-edited the stories written by his authors.
And this led those same talented writers, he was so good at discovering, to move away from his majesty.
In fact, Campbell's influence was so great in the field of science fiction that his efforts finally led to the golden age of science fiction magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, which, of course, I think will comprise the topic of the next session.
Well, that is a very brief of what I understood from, we can say, Paul Parris' science fiction magazine.
And there is also an appendix about some of the most famous and usually admired stories written by writers under the editorship of Campbell.
I have provided the appendix in the article that I will submit to Dr. Schmein later on, and you will find the appendix in the article, which could be uploaded online.
And that's it. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for listening.