Science Fiction Publishing

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Mike Shupp

Science fiction is a popular literary genre, abutting such fictional fields as techno-thrillers, fantasy, horror, and the "lost world" narratives of the early twentieth century. Less frequently it overlaps spy novels, mysteries, and romantic fiction; it occasionally even surfaces as "serious" literature. With varying degrees of success, science fiction narratives and themes have been translated into movies, television, radio dramas, comics, games, and (in one instance) opera. Science fiction has created or popularized such concepts as spaceflight, extraterrestrials, time travel, atomic war, genetic engineering, and ecological disaster. Science fiction mirrors the apprehensions and anticipations of an age; it is increasingly the product of a society that is concerned about the relationship between its continued existence and its dependence upon technological development and scientific knowledge beyond the comprehension of laymen.

Those seeking a worthy pedigree for science fiction have found its ancestors in the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius. All were published in their time as ordinary literature without stigma. Modern science fiction is the natural child of those classics, given birth in the "pulps" of the 1920s and 1930s, neglected and even despised by its legitimate relatives, and occasionally raised to prominence.

Imaginative stories--notably Edgar Rice Burroughs's tales of Tarzan and John Carter's adventures on Barsoom--had appeared for decades in magazines like Munsey's All-Story. In the 1920s fashion changed, however, when general interest fiction magazines lost circulation to more narrowly focused publications, and the remaining readers demanded fiction with ever more conventional settings. Authors without name recognition were thus pushed toward genre magazines, which paid less well but accepted their stories without qualms. Readers with specialized tastes--for interplanetary sagas, plainly told detective yarns, and G-9 and his Battle Aces--defected as well to the newer magazines, which in turn made the general interest publications even more conservative. Ultimately, even Burroughs, Abraham Merritt, and Ray Cummings were banished to the pulps.

By early 1919, Street and Smith's Thrill Book already specialized in imaginative literature; it lasted for 16 issues. Weird Tales, whose metier was blood-curdling fantasy, fared better, circulating from 1923 to 1953. By general agreement, the first true science fiction magazine was Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, which began in April 1926. (The publisher's name is commemorated today in the "Hugos," much-coveted awards presented annually at the official World Science Fiction Convention--a fan-dominated event which Gernsback himself helped institute.) Technically, neither Amazing Stories nor the clones later started by Gernsback (Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories) began as pulp magazines, for they were printed on 8.5" x 11" "bedsheet size" paper instead of 7" x 10" sheets.

The distinction of being the first science fiction pulp waited upon January 1930 and the Clayton chain's Astounding Stories of Super-Science. From the beginning, Astounding outdid its competitors, paying contributors more (with rates of one to two cents per word) and establishing a steady, secure distribution. In addition, Astounding was better edited. Both Harry Bates (1930-1933)--who wrote the story which became the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still--and F. Orlin Tremaine (1933-1937) were only adequate writers, but excelled as editors who believed in the future of the new genre. Their pursuit of quality and encouragement of new writers secured better authors and better stories for Astounding, which helped the magazine build up a higher circulation and to become profitable more quickly than its rivals. These aspects aided Astounding's return from the grave when the Clayton chain fell into bankruptcy in 1933, and the rapid rebuilding of its circulation after the Street and Smith takeover of the Clayton chain in 1933. As of 1998 the magazine was named Analog Science Fiction and Fact and published by Dell Magazines.

Tremaine's hand-picked successor, John W. Campbell Jr. (1937-1971), proved to be brilliant. A 27-year-old, well-regarded, but second-string author of superscientific romances (that he was also the author of the moody "Don A. Stuart" stories was generally unknown), Campbell quickly mastered the editorial skills of his mentor and moved on to shape the magazine's--and for a while, the field's--philosophy. Gernsback, mesmerized by turn-of-the-century experimental science, had favored stories whose narrative element was often little more than sugar coating around a core of semi-imaginable technological achievements. Campbell, better educated, and an inveterate tinkerer, controversialist, and promoter of science fiction, placed equal emphasis upon the science and the impact of science and technology upon human beings. Campbell was also a stern advocate of plots with logical consistency, many of which he devised himself and cast wholesale at his contributors in an unending series of letters which doubled as mini-lectures on writing style and technique.