Episode 31.1 transcription - Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories and H.G. Wells' "New Accelerator"

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(music: Chrononauts main theme)

introduction, Amazing Stories history, genre discussion

JM:

Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm JM, and I'm here today with Nate and Gretchen, and today we have a very special episode for you. We're going to be talking about the first American science fiction pulp magazine, Amazing Stories. 

So before we go into any of that stuff, I'd like to just run down some of our platforms and stuff. We are, as I said, a science fiction literature history podcast. If you stumbled upon us on YouTube or on any of the podcasting platforms, we can be found on anchor.fm at anchor.fm/chrononauts. We can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher. We also have a blogspot, which we think is pretty important because we have some first translations as well as difficult to find first digital issues of certain stories. So you can see us there at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. Also we welcome your feedback and contact. You can email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com or on Twitter @ChrononautsSF. So without further ado, we have a lot to get into this episode and a lot of interesting stuff to cover. 

Weirdly, we're recording this just before Halloween on October 28th, 2022. And this is the first episode in a while that doesn't really have any horror content. 

Nate:

Well, kind of. Maybe some parts of some stories, but yeah, maybe the most part. 

JM:

Yeah, for the most part, I think there is there's a little bit perhaps towards the end of the episode. I think the last couple of stories will be covering maybe that have some. But yeah, this is a surprisingly non-weird fiction oriented episode of Chrononauts. And it's probably high time we diverted away from that because I know not everyone is as into that as we are, although I suspect most people are. But yeah, today we're going to be talking about quite a different magazine. 

Nate:

Yeah, tonight we'll be looking at the beginnings of science fiction or at least in a certain sense. And that Hugo Gernsback, and Amazing Stories is almost universally considered to be one of the major turning points in the history of the genre, with many considering it to be the start of the genre. 

And you may be noticing that this current episode is episode number 31 and not episode number 1, as we've been going through more or less chronologically through this stuff. So there's obviously a lot of background material to get to to this point. And I'm pretty glad that we did it this way because I think to really get the idea of genre and how Gernsback affected it, you really need to understand the early stuff and how it developed up to this point. 

So if you haven't done so already, now might be a good time to pause the podcast and listen to all 100 hours of our previous content to catch up. 

JM:

You guys have a lot of homework to do. 

Gretchen:

A lot of catching up to do. 

Nate:

But it's fun catching up. And this is a fun set of six stories we have ahead of us tonight. And the popular story goes that Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine, and also the first to use the term science fiction altogether and give the genre a name. And this, like all popular stories, is often a vast oversimplification. So we're going to give it a bit of a demystifying look and maybe take another stab at the issue of genre as this episode is a good enough time to do it as any. 

So Mike Ashley states in his excellent book, "The History of the Science Fiction Magazine, part one 1926 to 1935", "Before 1926, there were three types of science fiction. Firstly, the scientific romance epitomized by Burroughs and Merritt that appeared in the Munsey publications. Secondly, the scientific extrapolation of Gernsback. And thirdly, the weird and bizarre science fiction of Weird Tales. These types of science fiction had not come about through authors desire, but through the publishing policies of the magazines, something so easily overlooked today," which I really largely agree with maybe inserting a fourth category in here of the political satire in utopias and dystopias and that sort of thing. 

JM:

Yeah, and an interesting thing is even though there's a lot of mixing and matching going on nowadays, those categories still pretty much exist and some people very much have preference leaning one way or the other. 

Nate:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that we've for the most part covered stuff in the weird fiction and the scientific romance category. So Ashley is one of the premiere scholars on this kind of thing. And this and his other book, "Time Machines: The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950" are really excellent resources if you want to dig more into the magazine story. But for the most part on the podcast, we've really only dealt with the scientific romances in the weird fiction, especially in like the last 10 episodes where it's been almost all weird fiction. And, you know, we like that stuff a lot. And I think that stuff is really great and a lot of fun and it has a very important place in the genre's history. But the wild extrapolation of current technologies and pushing them far out to the future, we really haven't covered a lot of on the podcast up to this point. 

Perhaps some notable exceptions early on, especially, would be the very bizarre first book of "The Mummy!", which we covered all the way back in episode three. But even somebody like a Jules Verne will take an existing technology and perhaps extrapolated out like five or 10 years or so in the hand of a genius inventor rather than creating an entire future fantasy world set like 200 or 300 years in the future with all kinds of every technology extrapolated out through a combination of science speculation and fantasy physics. And perhaps a part of that is selection bias on our part. I mean, we do really like the weird fiction stuff. So I think we naturally have tended to gravitate towards that during our story selection. 

When we started the podcast at the very beginning, we did tons of research into pre-1926 titles just to see what there was out there and what we had to choose from, and while we turned up hundreds and hundreds of interesting titles spanning different themes which we have yet to cover on the podcast and we'll eventually get to, I would still say that the vast majority of them fall into those categories of the pulpy romances or weird fiction. But it's overwhelmingly this third category of scientific far future speculation that people and especially the non-genre fans are going to associate with the term science fiction today. 

So while it's a bit of an oversimplification to state that Gernsback single-handedly got us to that point, he certainly put his thumb on the scale in a measurable fashion, perhaps more than anybody else before or after him. So over the next few minutes before we get into our story selection for tonight, let's take a look at Gernsback the man and his publication empire to see how that might have unfolded. 

Hugo Gernsback was born on August 16th, 1884 in Luxembourg to a Jewish winemaking family. He emigrated to the United States in 1904 and at an early age developed an interest in electrical technologies and literature. We won't get into his full biography here, but he gets involved in publishing very early. Ashley states that, "he launched the first ever radio magazine, Modern Electrics, in 1908." And I think this is something of a misnomer. And I say this not to nitpick Ashley, though certainly we'll see from some of the letters that appeared in Amazing Stories that this kind of pedantics seems like an inherent part of the genre, even going forward into the present day. But we point this out rather to add another layer. And I think it is one of the most important parts of the story, and one that is really not emphasized, in my opinion anyway, nearly enough by the genre histories. So let us overemphasize it. 

Most of the genre histories, like Ashley, but also others too, focus on the fiction part of science fiction. But I think with somebody like a Gernsback, the thing you really need to keep in mind is the science part of science fiction. So Modern Electrics, at least in issue number one, was not solely a radio magazine, but rather a general electric experimenter magazine, which it was one of many serialized publications that were active during this time, which ranged from technical journals to trade journals to general public-oriented magazines. A previous magazine from this time period, for example, is Electrician and Mechanic, which started publishing in 1890. And I want to highlight this, again, not the nitpick, but rather to establish that the publishing field in amateur electrical tinkering was already huge by the time Gernsback gets involved. So there is a built-in market in interest for this kind of stuff, and it wasn't something that Gernsback just built from the ground up in 1908. And it's a bit of a tangent, but if you're at all interested in this era of electrical history, I highly recommend you check out the issues of the publication Electrical World, which was one of the major publications at this time, and by 1908 had been running for a couple of decades. And while it's a trade journal, its writing and level of detail is more aimed at a general public level. It's not overly technical, like an engineering paper, or on the other end, it's not overly simplified like a children's book, where there were a lot of these books being published at the time that were oriented towards children. But it's rather one that provides an easy to understand overview of what was then contemporary new electrical technologies, and also provides general news of the industry itself, which I think is a really fascinating snapshot of both the technologies and the time period. 

But Gernsback's Modern Electrics was definitely in this vein for its technical articles being aimed at more or less the literate adult general public. One interesting thing about its content is that it provided translations of German articles provided by Gernsback himself. It's not an engineering paper, and it's again not aimed at kids, although I think it's very important to note that these two audiences were very much a thing that publications were targeting at the time. There's no shortage of general electrical experiment books aimed at children, and in general the publishing market for nonfiction electrical literature greatly exceeded any sci-fi adjacent publishing market at the time. 

So we tried to quantify this statement and took a look at the Internet speculative fiction database at isfdb.org, which is a really fantastic resource out there to see how many sci-fi adjacent stories appeared in any magazines at all during this time period. So there's a few caveats here, which we'll mention in a bit, but according to them, 31 different magazines published at least one sci-fi adjacent story in 1906, 23 magazines in 1916, and 26 different magazines in 1926. And it's kind of interesting to note that the magazines in each decade are almost completely different titles from one another. There's not a lot of continuity between the three years. But in addition to the genre pulps we've talked about before, like Weird Tales and the Munsey Pulps like Argosy and All-Story, there's also a bunch of the, generally speaking, non-genre magazine like Harper's or Cosmopolitan, which might have published one or two of these sci-fi adjacent stories in any given year. 

JM:

I think we kind of found that as the genre magazine started to take off, the non-genre magazines focused less on those kinds of stories, even than they were initially. 

Nate:

Yeah, especially a magazine like Cosmopolitan. I mean, when's the last time you've heard of Cosmopolitan publishing a sci-fi story? 

JM:

Yeah, I have no idea. But I do know that once Playboy came around, they were quite happy to publish science fiction. 

Nate:

Right, yeah. It's kind of an interesting angle they took. I think there's an anthology out there of sci-fi stories that appeared in Playboy magazine. 

JM:

And there's another one of macabre supernatural kind of stories as well. So there's quite a lot of the fiction in there. It was pretty good actually. 

Nate:

Yeah, and it's an interesting evolution of the format with the pulps really solidifying in the teens and the 1920s. 

But with 1926 is the year that Amazing launches, which I guess as we'll see in a bit maybe the first, but we'll take a look into some of those early exceptions. But the caveat here with ISFDB is that one of the 1926 magazines was a Soviet magazine, and not all of its issues are entered in the database. So looking through the magazines, previous issues elsewhere, I noticed that the earlier issues that are not catalog on the site contain Russian translations of works by people like HG Wells and William Hope Hodgson. So it's clear that there is a bit of a hole in the site for Russian stuff and probably Japanese stuff too, although I don't have the language skills to comment in that area. 

But regardless, this area where future work might be needed, so the overall numbers of magazines might be a little higher. But I think the point remains that even if you don't take into account that most of these magazines were primarily not genre focused, the body of published work for any science fiction in magazine format was far, far smaller than the electrical and the radio magazines at the time. Never mind all the books aimed at children. So in the years following 1908, radio would become a huge thing, and a lot of the hobbyist market, especially those aimed at children, would greatly expand. Radio circuits were relatively easy to build yourself, and not only was it fun, but it provided for lots of marketing opportunities for these publishers and other manufacturers of weird knickknacks. So there's tons of things like radio perfume and radio cigar cases and radio valentines, but there's also a lot of radio fiction, a very small portion of which we covered in episode 20. 

JM:

Yeah, "Campfire Girls". 

Nate:

Yeah, right. It's not like we were covering the only titles that existed there. There's dozens and dozens and dozens of titles that we didn't cover in that episode. So if you, for whatever reason, have an interest in that sort of thing, there's a lot of juvenile radio fiction from the 1920s and 1930s. 

Gernsback's electrical publications, likewise, trended towards radio as it became more popular. Radio Amateur News, which was later just called Radio News, was founded in 1919 and was probably the most significant and long running out of all of these. And the point of the over emphasis here on the engineering side rather than the literary side is to note that Gernsback was drawing from an audience primarily interested in the science and engineering end of things rather than the literary end of things. And he started his fiction publication in the aforementioned Modern Electrics in the April 1911 issue where he published his first installment of his novel "Ralph 124C 41+". And we've gone back and forth on whether or not to cover this on the podcast as it is a historically interesting footnote, but virtually everyone back then, and everyone now more or less says it's terrible. So I don't know. Apparently it's very hard science fiction and that it contains all this like wild and wacky predictions for current technology extrapolated to the far future, kind of like "The Mummy!", but I don't know. It's like in 12 installments, it sounds kind of long. 

JM:

It probably has very bad character work. 

Nate:

Yeah, right. 

JM:

It's kind of one of the things that you have to watch out for in these sorts of stories, even if you reading through all the scientific speculation, hoping, I guess, for a little bit of literary content, sometimes you could be disappointed and don't think Hugo was that much of a stylist. 

Nate:

No. And I think the fact that he started publishing in his electrical magazine is pretty indicative of that. His point here was not to express something in a literary fashion to make some kind of statement, but it's rather to like nerd out over the science and think about where could this stuff go in a couple hundred years. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, which is also probably what that audience would have wanted. So it would have accomplished that a lot better. 

Nate:

Right. Especially in that kind of publication, when you buy something like Modern Electrics, you kind of have a sort of expectation on what the content is going to be. 

JM:

People writing in going, "I don't want any of this highfalutin literary stuff in my magazine". 

Nate:

Right. None of the Weird Tales poetry. I think that would have turned off readers of that magazine. 

Gretchen:

I want the cold hard science. 

Nate:

Right. 

JM:

Yeah. 

Nate:

I think that now that we've entered an era of publishing where there's like literally hundreds and hundreds of stories, we can be a little bit more selective as to what we choose to cover versus covering something from previous eras where there's like just like far less amount of stories. So a lot of the coverage is going to be on the same stuff. 

JM:

But we still might unearth some weird oddities here and there for everyone's edification and pleasure. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

It's like it's not every day you come across something like "Arctiq" or "The Mummy!" even. Yeah. I'm glad we did things like that. 

Nate:

No, absolutely. I mean, they're both very strange in their own way. And "The Mummy!" in particular just has like some of the craziest technology extrapolation like I've read. And for how early it is, it's just really impressive in that regard, even though it's not that great of a book overall. 

But as far as "Ralph" goes, Ashley directly contrasted it with the Burroughs, pulps that are coming at things from a totally different angle. And I think Gernsback publishing this in, again, his electrical magazine is significant in that regard. On the term science fiction itself, one of those weird quirks of never saying the word first is that there is a use of the term in 1851. It was used by an author William Wilson in his book of literary criticism, "A Little Earnest Book Upon A Great Old Subject: With The Story Of The Poet-Lover". And there's a chapter in it called "Science Fiction". And he says in it, "we hope it will not be long before we may have other works of science fiction, as we believe such books likely to fulfill a good purpose and create an interest where unhappily science alone might fail."

JM:

So where did you come across this? Because I have never seen that before. That was quite a revelation. Somebody to actually say that, not only use the words, but in such a positive way. We're used to thinking that back in the day, science fiction readers are supposed to be weirdos and people don't take them seriously, even though they might be scientific geniuses of the future potentially. And that's kind of the angle Gernsback was kind of going for almost. 

Nate:

Yeah, absolutely. 

JM:

But here's this guy in 1851 being like, yeah, it's good, actually, we should see more of this. 

Nate:

Yeah. And I have no idea what he could possibly be referring to in 1851. There were stories that we now lump in with science fiction and considered to be at that time. But for the real science-y stuff, there's not a lot to choose from. There's almost no science in "Frankenstein" or the Hoffmann gothic romances. 

JM:

Think about how quickly, though, even guys in the 20s seem to have been to claim Poe as being part of the science fiction. 

Nate:

Oh yeah, right. So there was Poe, definitely. 

JM:

And there's Poe. I don't know. I mean, it would be good to have a little context for that quote, but I can think that there would be a few things that he could be referring to. 

Nate:

But not too many. And it's interesting. So I found this quote that appeared in an article called "A History of Science Fiction Criticism, Collective Works Cited in Chronological Bibliography", which appeared in the journal Science Fiction Studies in the July 1999 issue. And what this is, it's a fantastic resource that is a chronological list of any literary criticism pertaining to science fiction adjacent works very, very broadly construed. And the first entry in here is from 1634, which are Kepler's introductory notes to "Somnium". 

JM:

Good old "Somnium".

Nate:

Yeah, right. So I guess in addition to creating one of the earliest works of sci-fi adjacent stuff, he also created one of the earliest works of sci-fi adjacent criticism. But there's a fair amount of interesting entries from the 1600s and 1700s, mostly talking about the works we covered on the podcast from that time, the Holberg, the Bergerac stuff, all that. But it lists this mention from 1851 with the exact word "science fiction". And I thought that was really interesting. So I looked at the quote as, what Wilson is describing here is basically the exact same thing that Gernsback wanted to do with his magazine. He wanted to use fiction as a tool to bring readers in to make them interested in science. And I think it's pretty unlikely that Gernsback read this, but it seems a fascinating coincidence that nearly exactly 75 years apart, they're thinking the exact same thing. 

And the publishing landscape had completely changed during this time. I mean, yeah, you had Poe and after that you get the Verne and you get the Wells and the pulps in the teens and all that, which greatly expand the field. So yeah, it's pretty interesting that they're thinking more or less the exact same way over two very different periods of time. And that was the approach that Gernsback took with his literary experiments in the electrical publication. 

So "Ralph" appeared over 12 installments and he used space in his publications to publish fiction by some other authors as well as starting to do the reprints of 19th century classics. By 1926, Gernsback had quite the publication empire and the exact lineage of his electric publications is a bit complex with all the retitling, the merging, the splitting off and the selling, etc. But from what I can tell by the time he launched Amazing Stories in 1926, he helmed at least half a dozen different and distinct publications, probably the most significant or at least the longing running of these being Radio News, Everyday Mechanics and Science and Invention. He also published a number of books, service manuals and chapbooks pertaining to radio. A number of these can be easily found online. In particular, the website World Radio History contains a whole section dedicated to Gernsback publications which we'll post a link to in the description of this episode if you want to check them out for yourself. 

JM:

Yeah, and he published some weird stuff too like the "Jewish Joke Book". 

Nate:

So there are like non-sciencey books called the "Jewish Joke Book", "Dunninger's Popular Magic and Card Tricks" as well as "The Home Bartender's Guide and Song Book" which he would of course advertise in the pages of his own magazines. So he was pretty bold and adventurous as a businessman really trying to get his feelers out there for what is going to sell in different markets. 

And it was in April 1926 he took the "scientifiction" into its own publication with Amazing Stories and he says in the first issue, "At first thought it does seem impossible that there could be room for another fiction magazine in this country. The reader may well wonder, 'Aren't there enough already, with the several hundreds now being published?' True. But this is not 'another fiction magazine,' Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new—entirely different—something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest. There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of 'Scientifiction' is a pioneer in its field in America. By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. For many years stories of this nature were published in the sister magazines of Amazing Stories—'Science & Invention' and 'Radio News.' But with the ever increasing demands on us for this sort of story, and more of it, there was only one thing to do—publish a magazine in which the scientific fiction type of story will hold forth exclusively. Toward that end we have laid elaborate plans, sparing neither time nor money."

JM:

Yeah, more on that one later. 

Nate:

Oh, absolutely, yeah. So in addition to drawing its reading audience from the science side, it also drew its advertisers, carrying lots of advertisements for radio and electronic stuff. Equipment courses, publications with many of them being Gernsback's titles. They also had a bunch of ads for the Rosicrucians, which I've always thought was a little weird, but I guess they're paying bills, whatever. 

JM:

Typical early 20th century weird magazine ads. 

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff in some of those later issues especially. But content-wise, most of the initial issues of Amazing were reprints of people like Wells, Verne and Poe. With the first original story, Wertenbaker's "The Coming of the Ice" only appearing in issue number three. Gernsback certainly has a massive respect for Poe, and in issue number one calls him "the father of scientifiction". And was quite pleased to bring many Verne stories to an American audience for the first time. 

JM:

Yeah, and that's really interesting about Poe too, because I mean, I always thought that Mary Shelley would have been considered the first science fiction author like that early on. And while it seems that she is acknowledged, Poe is a lot more acknowledged than I thought he would be. And it makes sense now when I think about it, and I can kind of see, yeah, I can kind of understand that even when he's not writing really weird stuff like "Pym". A lot of his like kind of detective-ish stories really do hinge on scientific principles, and then you have stuff like the moon hoaxes and all that. So it makes sense to me now, but he's not generally thought of by the general public as an instigator of science fiction. I don't think. It seems like all the genre pundits actually did think of him that way pretty early on. 

Nate:

Yeah, especially how many reprints of Poe appear in the early issues of Amazing. The stuff that we covered in, I think episode 11, the more weird tales, mesmerism type stuff appears in issue number one of Amazing, which I thought was really interesting that he went for one of those stories versus one of the more... 

JM:

I remember sort of questioning us when we were doing that episode of, yeah, I really like this stuff, but should we really be doing this on Chrononauts? And in the end, it was a great episode and I had no doubts about it. But there it is kind of validating us. 

Nate:

Yeah, and I think the genre question here is an interesting one because Gernsback in these early issues talks a lot directly to the reader. And in issue number three, he briefly muses on the pre-Poe scientific fiction, and he doesn't cite Shelley here at all, but he does cite Leonardo da Vinci and Roger Bacon for having these like interesting speculative ideas on science and its future. 

JM:

Does he mention Bergerac as well? I guess he doesn't. 

Nate:

He doesn't mention Bergerac, no, which I thought was another interesting oversight because Bergerac does contain a lot more of that like technological extrapolation of devices that Gernsback clearly likes. I mean, they appear a little more ridiculous to the modern reader because the science of 1660 was just so much more different than even the Victorian era. So things like flying up to the moon with, you know, these effervescent vials or whatever or your light pyramid sail or whatever he had. 

JM:

And a talking he describes a talking book. 

Nate:

Yeah, right. 

JM:

A audio book that you use that has, I don't know, manipulated by strings or something like that. It was weird, but it was cool and pretty wild.

Nate:

No, it's interesting what he doesn't talk about in that column. There is an interesting letter later on from 1932 that does talk about "Frankenstein", which we'll get to in a bit, but that's after Gernsback left the magazine. So I don't get really the sense that Gernsback was more of like a genre historian because Bergerac was definitely translated into English at that time. And you know, the Godwin was written in English to begin with. So there's a lot here that Gernsback is not mentioning, but I think this Shelley omission is a really interesting one because, you know, it's not like "Frankenstein" was an obscure title. It was always popular pretty much after Shelley published it where stuff like the Bergerac and the Godwin you could tell would have fallen into obscurity and might not have been read as well. 

JM:

Even now, though, not everyone considers "Frankenstein" science fiction. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

I actually had an argument about this with somebody not that long ago. It wasn't a real like real serious argument, but it was kind of, "oh, I don't consider Frankenstein science fiction. It's a horror novel." Yeah. Well, can it be both? 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

"Oh, I don't know. I guess maybe, but it's not really a science fiction". Like they were kind of denying it. Like, I don't know why exactly. It seems very clear to me just. I could see the people who are really insistent on science being a major part of it, not considering it science fiction that way because there's almost no science in it. I mean, there are some...

JM:

But there's there's ethics of using science that is only ever discussed in science fiction. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Like you anytime you see something like that, like it just it just is. But I also think that some people are just too fixated on like putting everything into a genre box and that's where it belongs and that's where it has to stay. 

Gretchen:

Not blending genres. I mean, like you said, why can't it be both horror and science fiction? Those two genres can blend together. 

Nate:

And I think we've seen for all the weird tales we've covered on the podcast so far. That's the case in a lot of these early stories, especially. They're not 100% horror. They're not 100% science fiction. They're kind of a weird mixture of both. And I think the two work really well together, especially the whole, I guess, scientific pedantic stuff. Those people that are like really insistent that the science element has to be a huge part of it, not just like the ethics angle, but actually involving correct science or whatever, the people that are very insistent and very loud that "Star Wars" isn't science fiction, that kind of stuff. I could definitely see those same people brushing off "Frankenstein" because I don't know, the method of corpse resurrection, I know it's a pedantic argument, but those are probably the type of people who aren't considering it science fiction are. 

In Shelley's time, it would have probably been seen as an occult process and certainly in the Peake stageplay, which was the first stage production of it, it's explicitly made an occult process. So I don't know. I mean, I get that it's pedantic and it's interesting that Gernsback doesn't mention it, but Gernsback himself does kind of comment on the pedantics of his readers as early as issue number four. And I guess he got a whole bunch of complaints to him from his readers that various elements of the republished Jules Verne stories aren't as realistic as they could be. And again, this is definitely something that extends well into the present day with the nitpicking of realism of science and all that. 

But regardless, it was incredibly popular pretty much right off the bat. Circulation reached around 100,000 within a few months and they got lots and lots of letters. November 1926 was when they published a letter for the first time in its entirety. And this quickly turned it into an entire section of the magazine where both positive and negative feedback would be published with, if the author desired, their full name and address with some editorial commentary back from the magazine. So in a sense, this could arguably be called one of the first, certainly one of the earliest and largest science fiction forums in that Amazing Stories was really in a class of its own for the speaking world. As only real competition were Weird Tales and the Munsey pulps, neither of which were 100% focused on science fiction. 

JM:

Yeah, and I don't think they were community oriented, like especially not the Munsey magazines. These guys actually were starting to build up a fan community and they would exchange addresses besides what was printed in the magazine as well. And one of our authors coming up is Jack Williamson. And I believe that's how we got in touch with Edmond Hamilton and they became best friends. And just so many, now we're starting to really move into an area where so many connections are being made that weren't there before. I mean, like, yeah, you had your groups like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien and you know, E.R. Eddison getting together and stuff like that. But like, that was a very small group of English scholars. 

Nate:

Right. Upper class guys smoking their fancy pipes behind closed doors where this was very I would say globally focused. I mean, definitely published in America and a lot of the people that wrote in were Americans, but it had its global reach. And as the magazine expanded, the readership column expanded to where people would post classified ads, you know, I'm interested in pen pals. I'm interested to buy this book. I'm interested to sell this magazine, like that kind of stuff. So it really did over time develop into this active community where people could easily make friends and buy and sell things and be engaged with the community that way. And it's a really fascinating development. 

JM:

Yeah, and so much came out of that. And the individuals in that community who wouldn't have known each other were not for that community deciding that they wanted to do their own thing. Start up their own magazine, run their own meetings. We'll talk about him more later. But in one of the letters, Jack Williamson wrote to this magazine, Amazing, he's suggesting starting up a fund to do actual experiments. And he thinks that if they get enough people together, they can like rent a laboratory or something like that or do stuff from somebody's house. And it's just this, it's so cool because reading up on him, you know, he's just like 19, 20 year old farm boy living in New Mexico. And he has all these like, he's like, yeah, we can run experiments. It'll be so great then. 

Nate:

The enthusiasm of some of the readers that write in is really fun and just fascinating to read. It's really a snapshot back in time. I think more so than the stories themselves in a way. 

JM:

Yeah, sometimes that's that's the case. I mean, I always say this when I talk about James Bond films. And I was like, yeah, some of the films are pretty good, but it's some of the behind the scenes stuff make them so much more interesting to watch. And it's the same kind of deal here where it's like, where we're seeing like the start of something really cool and special and maybe not everything in this magazine is, I mean, there's people in the community decades later would mock Amazing Stories for the poor quality of its writing. And maybe there is a lot of that, but some of it's still interesting. And yeah, this whole aspect of it being the first of its type and the burgeoning community around it is pretty fascinating. 

Nate:

Yeah. And I think the community around it really does make it the first of its type more so than it being, I guess, the first magazine solely focused on science fiction. Ashley does note a couple other earlier magazines who may be considered being solely focused on scientific fiction, but they were really short lived and they definitely did not have the fan community element attached to them. 

JM:

A lot of them seem to be focused on like single characters, stories. 

Nate:

Exactly. Yeah. 

JM:

Later example of that would be something Edmond Hamilton was responsible for the captain future magazines. And it was like, I guess it wasn't really a comic book. It was like a serial magazine that just kept printing captain future stories for something like 15 years, starting in 1940. And these early magazines seem like they were modeled on stuff like there's definitely some early French examples from like the 19th century and early 20th century where you'd buy a little magazine and it would always contain the same heroes character. And just this little story is probably with some illustrations or something like that. So it seems like those early magazines from the titles anyway, it seems like that that was more their thing. 

Nate:

Yeah. The ones Ashley cites are a German one called Kapitãn Mors, which ran for six years. One called World of Adventures that appeared in Tsarist Russia in 1903 and ran for a couple years. And then a Swedish one called Hugin, which apparently was written entirely by one guy. And Ashley says its fictional quality was negligible. So again, probably not very significant overall, just some kind of interesting footnotes there. 

But Gernsback had the fan community attached to him and his attitudes towards scientifiction and the editorial policy that he guided the magazine would really kind of go on to define the modern culture around the genre. That is an insistence on the plausibility of the scientific facts in a story, which Gernsback describes in issue four as "we reject stories often on the ground that in our opinion, the plot or action is not in keeping with science as we know it today. For instance, when we see a plot wherein the hero is turned into a tree, later on into a stone, and then back into himself, we do not consider the science, but rather a fairy tale. And such stories have no place in Amazing Stories. "

JM:

I wonder what he would have thought of "Voyage to Arcturus." 

Nate:

Yeah, it's really hard to say. I mean, a lot of the weird stuff is fantastical in a way that just can't be explained by any means other than supernatural. So it's again kind of genre bending from the start. But on the term for the genre himself, Gernsback says in the September 1926 issue, the plain truth is that the word "scientifiction", while admittedly a good one, scares off many people who would otherwise read the magazine. The word is clearly not a good one, and the publication would gradually shift away from it. 

JM:

Yeah, maybe the covers were scaring some of the people too. 

Nate:

I think so, yeah. 

JM:

We'll get to that as well. 

Nate:

Yeah, we definitely will. But after Gernsback leaves Amazing, the May 1929 issue goes back and forth between "scientifiction" and "scientific fiction" using both interchangeably, though preferring the former. In a response to a reader letter in the May 1932 issue, the editor remarked that "incidentally, do not accept the term scientifiction as a real English word". And October 1932 was the last issue they used both "scientific fiction" and "scientifiction". In November and December of 1932, they dropped "scientifiction" altogether and use both "scientific fiction" and "science fiction" interchangeably. And January 1933, it becomes just "science fiction". 

JM:

Now, this was in Amazing, right? 

Nate:

Yep, in Amazing. 

JM:

Gernsback was gone by then. 

Nate:

So, yeah, Gernsback leaves the magazine quite early in its run. He was forced out of the editor position in 1929 due to a bankruptcy suit that was filed against him from three different creditors representing the printing and paper suppliers. Gernsback didn't fight the suit and defaulted and as such had to sell some of its other magazine titles to pull himself out of the hole and lost control of Amazing. In June, he started up another publication called Science Wonder Stories. And over the years, this would split off into many more science fiction publications. 

JM:

Yeah, there were two of them, right? There was Air Wonder Stories and that became one. Several of Leslie Stone's stories were published in Air Wonder Stories. And those were stories very specifically about, I guess, air flight technology and airplanes and aviators and stuff like that. A very specific niche, I don't know. I mean, I guess some people are just like hobbyists and they're really, really interested in that, especially when it was so new back then. Like I can tell you right now that magazine just devoted to that one thing doesn't really strike me as something I would probably want to buy off the shelf like Amazing might. 

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if the reason he did that was just so we could get cheap reprints for like "Angel of the Revolution" and like some Jules Verne stories and stuff like that. 

JM:

Yeah, but several authors did publish in those. And one thing that Gernsback actually did was when he when he was forced to leave Amazing Stories in the hands of his editor-in-chief, T. O'Conor Sloane, he took a bunch of the stories with him that were in the pile. So he just basically people wrote in expecting their stories to be in Amazing and he would write them back when be like, yeah, I have some bad news. I don't run that magazine anymore. But the good news is I still have your stories and they're going to end up in my new magazine. 

Nate:

Yeah, his science fiction publications post-Amazing are like his electrical publications in that a bunch of them change titles, they split off, they merge into one another. So it's really hard to keep track of what's what. But the Wikipedia list of his publications notes a total of 56 in his lifetime, which no matter how you slice it is a pretty impressive number. The bankruptcy suit is detailed in a much later issue of Amazing, namely the May 1978 issue when it was called Amazing Science Fiction. And it's a really interesting story as it goes through archival documents and completely shreds the previous Sam Moskowitz narrative on what happened and notes that if it weren't for Gernsback's quick action and getting another magazine set up, there was only like a period of two weeks where he had a downtime. The whole thing might have crashed and burned right there as litigation over naming rights over Amazing stories could have taken years. So he was smart to pivot immediately to another publication and take his backlog of stories with him. 

JM:

But the litigation didn't stop many authors who were suing him as well because he had a problem with payments. 

Nate:

Right. But nevertheless, the ball kept rolling and the issues kept coming out, which again led to the fan community and the amount of work published overall being much larger. So Amazing started publishing longer issues first as an annual and then as a quarterly to get longer novels out there aimed at capturing the Munsey audience who more or less did the same thing. And these annuals and quarterlies would contain many of the shorter stories that appeared in earlier issues, but the focus was really on the longer novels. So as mentioned, Thomas O'Connor Sloane takes Amazing Stories forward in the 1930s. In addition to Gernsback's post Amazing publications, a wealth of other science fiction magazines, perhaps notably Astounding Stories follow in the 1930s, more or less creating the science fiction publication landscape that would continue on well into the 1950s and form the base for the golden age of science fiction. 

So before we get into the stories tonight, let's just take a brief look into some of the funny letters that the magazine published. Many of our authors tonight also wrote in the magazine, so we'll cover those during their own segments, but for now enjoy some of these. In January 1927, someone thought the Ark built in the Garrett Serviss novel, "The Second Deluge" was real, and the work itself was a work of nonfiction. So he wrote in saying, "I'm interested in your Ark and wish you would send me a set of plans for a small Ark, which I would like to build and take care of my wife and seven children. So please send them at once." 

In June 1929, someone with a German name writes in from Shanghai, who states that he gets the magazine from a local Chinese dealer, which is a real testament to the magazine's global reach that I thought was just fascinating that the magazine was being sold in China as early as June of 1929. 

In response to a very, very long letter in the September 1929 issue, in part on the plausibility of rocketry and interplanetary travel, the editor writes, "we do not personally believe in the possibility of a rocket reaching the moon. We certainly agree with you that there is no chance that the rocket could ever get out of the attraction of the earth. And as you very properly remark, the moon is subject to that attraction." Rather wrong there. 

But also in the September 1929 issue, someone is nitpicking the details in "The Purple Death" by Jack Barnett and goes up on this rant saying, "one of the main functions of science fiction is to give its readers the correct atmosphere of any science. I know nothing about geology, and I would want to feel that when I read some geological scientifiction, the scientific setting which the author gives me is correct. I do not want to be treated to a lot of his incorrect misconceptions on the subject. When a writer sets out to give us a story on some subject that he does not understand, it is his duty to see that every detail he gives us is true to fact. Otherwise, his story is not scientifiction, but a fairy tale. And it creates a thoroughly disgusted feeling in those of its readers who happen to be working every day in that particular subject." So what is one of the things he's mad about? The author used the singular "lens" when he should have used the plural "lenses". 

There were frequent discussions about the covers and their appropriateness, in which a letter yet again in September of 1929 comments on a certain newsstand refusing to sell the magazine based on the cover, which he says, "this seems so Amazing in itself that I took some very valuable time to investigate as to the reason. Herefore I went directly to headquarters for an explanation where stand clerks evaded the question and was informed that the cover proclaimed it as containing trash and sensationalism. And that such literature was to be suppressed by every means."

JM:

Rockets, monsters, babes, aliens. My God, no, we can't have this. Not in the newsstands. 

Nate:

Yeah. One of our authors tonight also commented on the covers, which we'll get into later. But some of the early ones especially were really quite garish and ugly in a way that I think is quite charming nowadays. But you could definitely see some people feeling a little strange about it in the 1920s. 

JM:

Yeah. I mean, there are some pretty celebrated illustrators in the pulp field. But Frank R. Paul, who drew a lot of those early Amazing covers, doesn't really seem to be one. 

Nate:

Yeah. I think his illustration line work and we'll get to this a little more is better than his cover paintings. The paintings that were on the covers are kind of like garish and ugly in a lot of ways, especially when there's like these creatures on there. I mean, again, it is kind of charming and fun. But you can just picture the reaction of people looking at this stuff for the first time in 1926 or whatever. And they're like, oh, what's this? 

JM:

Well, at least one of our authors tonight seems to have liked them. But another one really did not like them. 

Nate:

Yeah. It really spans the gamut. Personally, I think Weird Tales had better covers than Amazing, but that's just me. 

But finally, for the letters in the July 1932 issue, a reader complains about the newly released Universal film "Frankenstein" saying, "now concerning this hokum about scientific movies, it is a lot of bunk. This picture called 'Frankenstein' to my estimation is a big failure. When a film company takes a story such as 'Frankenstein' and puts it in movies, they make such a mess of it that it becomes disgusting." And both the reader here and the editor clearly consider Shelley's work to be a work of science fiction. So it's an interesting omission that Gernsback doesn't appear to cite at all in those first few issues of Amazing, especially the 1932 film, where you can definitely see the science elements overplayed with those huge AC apparatuses and sparks and the lightning everywhere and all that stuff. 

JM:

It's alive! 

Nate:

Yeah, right. But again, yeah, people considering it science fiction upon the film's release, which again, isn't something that many people might think of today, I mean, "Frankenstein" is clearly part of the horror legacy. But no, people in Amazing were talking about it in 1932, so I thought that was pretty interesting. 

JM:

It does seem like the character of the magazine maybe changed over time. Certainly the different editors of all of these pulp magazines had their own kind of in-house styles and things they wanted to look for and expected from their authors. And I think the last story that we're going to see in the magazine at the end of the episode from 1941 is quite different from the stuff that seems to have been published in 1929. 

Nate:

Sure. 

JM:

And not just because the genre's more advanced, but just because, I guess, the style of what the editorship at that time expected and what perhaps was being printed in other magazines that did exist by then were looking for. And it just kind of goes along with what you quoted earlier from Ashley and how he was saying that the categorization wasn't always necessarily by author's choice, but pertinent to the editorial standards of the particular thing that they were writing for. 

Nate:

Right, exactly. And I think the magazine really cultivated its audience that way from the top down rather than the ground up from the author. And tonight we're taking a look at six different stories over the course of 15 years from 1926 to 1941, but most of them are going to be clustering on the early years from the 1920s. So we can really get a feel for how the magazine started and what kind of thing it was publishing in the beginning where it was really in a class of its own and building up the audience that way, not in the same way that Weird Tales or the Munsey stuff was doing. 

Gretchen:

I also did want to mention too that the audience also probably did affect the way that the magazine would choose its stories. You see in a lot of the certain letters, people asking for certain stories by particular writers and more of certain things. So that obviously could have had an effect on what stories would have been chosen. And thinking of the letters, I also did want to bring up thinking of how they said it was impossible that a rocket would go to the moon. Is there also in one of the discussion segments that I was reading through, there is someone who was talking about the possibility of time travel and was defending the idea of time travel and has an entire theory about it. And the editors were saying that that sounds like it would be a pretty correct way of traveling through time. 

Nate:

Yeah, it's interesting some of the reader letters are really long and detailed. The rocketry one could have been its own story and even the editor was like, wow, this is really long. You're going on for an excessively long time about this. So yeah, it's kind of cool that the, I guess, Gernsback idea of using fiction as a hook to get people interested in the science worked. You have people rambling on and on and on about the theoretical possibilities of time travel or interplanetary travel via rocketry or whatever to get people thinking about this stuff. And it's just kind of cool how we got that spark going there. 

JM:

Yeah, and a lot of the readers were definitely interested in science and the writers. Many of the writers had other things going on and were involved. There are at least two medical doctors who wrote regularly for Amazing. One was David H. Keller and the other was Miles Brewer, I believe. And again, leading up to what we'll be talking about much later on, but our author, Jack Williamson, he didn't have that much of a scientific background, but he was very, very interested in science and tried to reflect that in his stories and certainly learned. He kind of said later that the courses in chemistry and physics and such that he took in university, he took so he could write better scientifiction. And he kind of jokes about the name too and how, you know, how it was like, it kind of fell out of favor. But early on, he was quick to adopt it and used it all the time. 

Nate:

Yeah, pretty much everybody did well into the 1930s. And it is interesting how the magazine does actively solicit feedback from its readers, not only in the form of letters, but it asks, which stories did you like? Which stories didn't you like? What authors do you want to see more of? You know, what reprints do you want to see? But also what kinds of stories do you want to see? Do you want to see more of the interplanetary travel stories? Do you want to see more time travel stuff? Do you want to see more weird biological stuff? And it's kind of interesting that the interplanetary stories were like really popular early on. And we'll get to some of the space opera stuff in this episode, but probably more later on. But I think the space opera especially really, really takes off after the 1920s. And I think Amazing had a pretty big hand in that.

JM:

Yeah, it pretty much, I think, got its real start with authors like Edmond Hamilton and E.E. Doc Smith and Jack Williamson, all of whom were pretty much getting their start. If not in Amazing, it was early days for them. Edmond Hamilton got his start in Weird Tales, but I think both Smith and Williamson had their first published stories in Amazing. And these are guys that went on to be heralded in the genre and at Williamson at least kept writing for many, many decades afterwards. And this is where they got their start. So many authors in Amazing did not actually continue writing very much because they had other things going on. And because Gernsback especially was probably paying them about a quarter of a cent for every word. So it's not a very lucrative thing. But a few were inspired enough that they said, well, I want to make writing science fiction my future. I want to make that my life's work. A very few were thinking that at that time. And I think this episode actually is very significant in that, well, there are many reasons why it might be. But one of the reasons is one of the authors, well, two of the authors will be covering tonight actually did that. They actually said, I am a science fiction writer. That is how they classify themselves. Nobody else has done that till now. I mean, they may have written it, but that's not how they thought of it. 

Nate:

And I think those authors had lifelong careers writing this stuff. And so many times we've seen somewhere our favorite authors that we've covered on the podcast, you know, they'll write for a year or two in Weird Tales and then vanish off the face of the earth, where some of the people we're going to be looking at tonight like literally had 70 year careers, which is like, amazing. 

JM:

It really is. It's an Amazing Story. 

Can we just talk briefly about the reprints? So my impression is that early on there were reprints and that he kind of slowly started to phase them out a little bit more in favor of his own stuff, right? And there was an obvious reason for that. A lot of the reprints were from others who were well outside of Amazing's pay grade. Like if those authors were new, maybe he could have been like, Hey, write me a story. And he did actually get Edgar Rice Burroughs to write something for the magazine, "The Master Minds of Mars". And it's kind of one of the late period John Carter books. And he and Burroughs, of course, got into dispute over payment. So that never happened again after that. 

Nate:

Kind of a common theme. 

JM:

Yeah. And early on he was reprinting Burroughs and it's obviously cheaper to buy a reprint than to commission something new from somebody who's well established and already selling really, really well. 

Nate:

Right. Especially like a Poe who's already at that time well in the public domain. So you could just use it for free. 

JM:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And there are a few significant things that were published in the magazine that authors who we mentioned some of them, but like H.P. Lovecraft had "The Color out of Space", which is even now one of his most famous stories. It had his first publication in Amazing in 1926. But he never wrote anything else for them. And we know why. Once again, it's the money. And if people could move on to other things, they tended to just because his payments were not only small, but late, like more often than not. 

Nate:

And that definitely led to his issues with his creditors because it's one thing to push around a young author. But when you're pushing around the people supplying you your paper or actually printing the issues, they're going to get pissed off when you don't pay them. And that was one of the things that the May 1978 story that takes a look into the bankruptcy suit really pushes back against Moskowitz, because Moskowitz apparently says that Gernsback was solvent and he paid all his bills with his paper suppliers and printers on time. And apparently that just wasn't the case. They went after him pretty quickly to get their payment. And it just led to him not fighting the bankruptcy suit. Yeah, it's a common theme with him not paying his bills. 

JM:

Yeah. And people were asking for a lot of reprints. I mean, I noticed so many letters. This can't be stressed enough. And it's funny how people don't talk about him that much now, but I think they talk about him more than they probably did in like the 80s when Williamson wrote his autobiography. But everyone loved Abraham Merritt. They all want to have reprints of Abraham Merritt stories. And "The Moon Pool", which was in one of the early issues of Amazing, was a serial actually. So it was probably in two or three was immensely popular. And Leslie Stone, Williamson and others all wrote in to say before they were actually writers for the magazine, you know, they all wrote in in their letters, "Hey, we want to see more Abraham Merritt, reprint 'The Ship of Ishtar', reprint 'The Face in the Abyss', whatever". And it seems like a lot of people couldn't get this stuff, right? Like it was available from in the magazines. And they're at that time, actual book printings were not as common as they are now. So you would have made me seen those stories in All Story Weekly or whatever, or Argosy magazine. And you wouldn't have seen them since then. And unless you had copies of those issues, you couldn't read those stories again. 

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know about Merritt specifically, but I know with the Burroughs stuff, I think the first book form came like within like 15 or 20 years after the publication in the pulp magazine, something like that. 

JM:

Yeah, I don't remember. We definitely talked about it when we did "At the Earth's Core". 

Nate:

Right. Yeah. 

JM:

But it was, yeah, I think it was like not that long, but at least the 20s or something. So yeah, well, I guess that is about 20 years, really. So yeah, definitely one of the people that Gernsback was printing early on reprinting and somebody that he lost the ability to reprint again. And somebody who was very, very popular among his readers was H.G. Wells. 

Nate:

Yes. Definitely a lot of reprints, both in the magazine and he had his works published in book form as well. 

So with all that out of the way, let's dig into issue number one and our first story for the evening. 

(music: "Saturn Polka Mazurka" by Valentine Dister rendered on bright synths)

H.G. Wells - "The New Accelerator" (1901)

JM:

Hello, this is Chrononauts, and if you're just tuning in, this is part of our episode themed on Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction pulp magazine. If you want some more background, please listen to installment number one. Now we're going to get to H.G. Wells and his story, "The New Accelerator". Take it away Nate. 

Nate:

Amazing Stories #1, April 1926. If you were to pick up either a physical issue or a digital issue on archive.org, who has a complete run for the early days, you will see the cover which depicts a scene from Jules Verne's "Off on a Comet; or Hector Servadac", which is the first story to appear in the magazine and was serialized onto the next issue. It's not bad for an Amazing cover and depicts what looks like people ice skating near two ships raised on glaciers, kind of like the scene in "Sphinx of the Ice Realm", though I haven't read this one, so I have no idea what happens, but in the background is a huge and vibrant Saturn and the words "Amazing Stories" in very futuristic looking 3D letters appear above it. This is not a very well put together cover, but it's at least not grotesque like some of the other ones that appear later on. 

But also advertised on the cover are H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe. The "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" we covered in episode 11 and the Wells we'll of course be discussing more in a minute. Also featured are reprints of "The Man from the Atom" by G. Peyton Wertenbaker, "The Thing from Outside" by George Allan England and "The Man Who Saved Earth" by Austin Hall, none of which I've read. There are also four advertisements, one for a radio course, one for an electrical course, one for land in the Florida Panhandle, pitched as "an ideal for you, undiscovered Florida," and one for a public speaking course that prevents you from becoming a "human clam". 

It also contains the column from Gernsback which we quoted from before about his intentions with starting the magazine and his plans for it, which is really quite an interesting read in and of itself. All the stories are illustrated by, I believe, Frank Paul, but he's not credited anywhere in the issue, I don't believe, for either the cover or the illustrations, but I think he is better at the line drawings than the paintings for the cover, but they do make the magazine stand out in its own unique way. 

So the story we're looking at tonight, H.G. Wells' "New Accelerator", was initially published in The Strand in 1901. H.G. Wells was frequently republished in Amazing's early years and Gernsback had republished several of his full-length novels in book form, and at the time of Amazing #1, Wells was in the late stages of his career with "The Shape of Things to Come" being a few years down the road. Still at this time, he was considered a classic author of the genre and still incredibly popular, so featuring him prominently in the early issues when the magazine was still trying to launch off the ground was probably a good move on Gernsback's part.

JM:

Yeah, and his stories get mentioned a lot in the letters, too. They continue to be popular even decades after their initial publication. 

Nate:

Everybody likes H.G. Wells. 

JM:

Pretty much. 

Nate:

And like pretty much all H.G. Wells, I thought this one was great. The concept is pretty basic and the story is short, and compared with some of our other authors this time around, you can really appreciate this kind of subject matter in the hands of someone who is very talented and skilled with their prose style. The story is about drugs, and who doesn't like that? Certainly Wells himself wrote a bunch of stories on the subject, which we'll probably cover in later episodes, but there's some great dialogue in here which we'll highlight in a bit when we do the summary. 

Wells touches on some of the ethical and social issues of this sort of amateur chemical engineering, which he's pretty prone to doing in most of his stories. But generally speaking, it's pretty short and revolves around a rather basic concept, so I don't have too much to say for non-spoiler stuff aside from the fact that I really like this one. And as with all H.G. Wells we've done to this point, there's still certainly going to be a lot more to come in the future. 

On that subject, I guess one interesting thing about Wells versus Verne as they both appear in issue number one of Amazing is that we've covered, I guess, roughly the same amount of works on the podcast by each. And I think generally Wells has proven himself to be far more varied than Verne and what he chooses to write about. And I'd imagine the works we have yet to cover by him will also paint an even wider picture of his prose, and I'm looking forward to it. 

Gernsback certainly reprinted a lot of Verne stuff in the early years, and it's works that we haven't covered on the podcast, and I'm not sure how much interest we have in doing those stories, as I think a lot of them are more of the same kind of pulp adventure stories that are more or less the same kind of thing we've covered already with some of the settings and vehicles slightly changed around. And we're not quite done with Verne yet on the podcast, as he does have a few interesting sounding stories that break from that mold possibly, but he certainly must have had a pretty big impression on Gernsback himself. 

JM:

Yeah, I can definitely see how he inspired a lot of the kind of writing that I associate with Amazing both sort of before doing this and now especially after digging more into it where it's kind of the adventures predicated on a new fascinating invention, which you know, was kind of one of Verne's things for sure. I mean, not everything he wrote was like that. Most of it was adventure stories of some kind or other. And yeah, I mean, like you were saying, it was it's the invention extrapolated maybe five, ten years into the future. Usually doesn't seem like it's too improbable given what was around at the time. There are exceptions, but yeah, that's that's Verne. I think Wells is way more into different kinds of speculations. Way more into the social side of sciences, for sure. 

Nate:

Yeah. But speculation isn't really technological extrapolation like with "Sphinx of the Ice Realm" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth", there's really no future technology involved. They're just kind of going to fantastic places. And "Sphinx of the Ice Realm". He gives the Poe ending a more rational science explanation, but he's not taking like technology into the future or anything like that. 

JM:

That's true. That's true. But they're still adventure stories. 

Nate:

Oh, yeah, absolutely. 

JM:

First and foremost. Yeah, right. Whereas Wells is interested in asking questions about ethics and about where we're going in the future and why. And I think this story is a key example of that. I was surprised by this because I thought it would be a little bit different than it was. I thought for some reason, I don't think that I've read it before, but I feel like I had sort of an impression of what the story would be that was not true. And I think that may be based partially on, I don't know if it's later stuff, like the Twilight Zone, maybe, or something like I kind of get to it later, but there's a story by R.A. Lafferty called "The Six Fingers of Time", which kind of has a similar concept. So I guess I kind of thought I knew where this was going. And he didn't take it there. But in the end, I guess the way he ended it was almost more disturbing than what I was expecting. I thought it was going to end with the protagonist kind of stuck in this like weird accelerated time space and not able to leave. But it didn't end like that at all. And it ends with, well, isn't the capitalist dream great? Isn't it awesome? And, you know, he's obviously commenting on that. He's obviously, I think this story and the next story we're going to do, they have some similarities in that they are concerned with sort of questions of ethics around science. 

Nate:

Absolutely. And that's very much Wells's thing. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, I really like the story myself. I have to say that I haven't read too much Wells myself yet. I've only read "War of the Worlds" and "Island of Dr. Moreau", which I think just between those two, I've seen how varied Wells can be and can write. And yeah, I really enjoyed this story. And I do agree that it doesn't turn out the way that I had expected either. And yeah, it is disturbing that it's just like, yeah, we're going to be selling these at each label. It's a different amount of time that you can speed up to. And it's all the implications about it are just kind of left to be dealt with with somebody else. We don't care how that's going to turn out. 

JM:

No. And I think it's very obviously ending on a note of doom, even though the protagonists don't really see it that way. And that's kind of one of the things that I thought it would be a more obvious note of doom. And so at first I was kind of surprised. I'm like, oh, it just ends like that. And then the more I thought about it, the more I'm like, oh, that's pretty bad. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, it does make it worse. 

JM:

Right. It makes it worse because it's worse for the whole human race, basically. Rather than just two people, it's worse for everyone. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. It's because they don't notice how bad it is that it's kind of more horrifying to think of because it isn't caught in time how terrible this could be. 

Nate:

And it's kind of interesting that this one appears in the first issue of Amazing, where Wells in this story describes people who are really pushing forward to maximize the profit they can get out of their inventions. And Gernsback would not paying his authors specifically feuding with Wells, that was kind of one thing he was interested in doing too, is maximizing his own personal profits. 

JM:

Maximizing profits. 

Gretchen:

With no regards for the consequences of that. 

Nate:

Right. 

JM:

Right. 

Nate:

But great cost to sell, maybe. 

JM:

Hey, at least the consequences of this are just like not paying some poor writer. I mean, he's actually quite, I guess I didn't really, even in the first issue, and in the next story we're doing as well from a few years later, he's definitely supporting the writers pointing out that, yeah, science is great, but we need to have some kind of social or moral control over it, some kind of ethical dictation, which says what's right and not right to do perhaps. 

Nate:

Yeah. It's interesting. There was a professional code of ethics for electrical engineers that came out a little bit before this time, but not too much before. I want to say 1908, 1910, somewhere around there, which basically says, don't rip people off. If you're an electrical practitioner, you should be a straight shooter. You shouldn't try to pull money out of people, exaggerating nature of problems and that kind of thing. But what it doesn't talk about is you shouldn't spend your efforts developing technologies like nuclear weapons. You shouldn't spend your efforts developing technologies on bio weapons. 

JM:

Technology that will harm people or basically increase the social class differences, which is what this is. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

This story is about here. 

Nate:

Exactly. And I think that idea of ethics as it pertains to the scientific and engineering community really doesn't get going for several many more decades. The counterculture that emerges in the 1960s where people are protesting against the nuclear proliferation of arms and all that kind of stuff, and you really get that pushback against the scientific community because they haven't been properly thinking about these things. They haven't been taking into account that, well, nuclear bombs are horrible. They kill so many people. 

JM:

But they blame the scientists and not the politicians. But still, there's so much we could go into around this topic. And then you see, you talk about the 1950s and something that's often talked about is how the science fiction movies from that time portray scientists often in a quite negative light. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

And they're portrayed as people who will stop at nothing in the name of science to achieve something and damn the consequences. And so that kind of thinking really took over, I think, after the atomic bombs fell. 

Nate:

Yeah. And that's a pretty huge public display of the point. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

Nate:

You can't get any less subtle than that, I don't think. 

JM:

No. But Wells definitely was thinking about this kind of thing well ahead of time. 

Nate:

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, what did Wells say towards the end of the career, like you're all a bunch of fools or something like that? I've been warning you for years. Yeah. Very, very prophetic in his thinking about not necessarily technology, but society and how it would adopt technology and react to technology. 

JM:

Yeah. That's something that makes him a more interesting writer, I think, is kind of alluding to what we were talking about earlier is that he really does spend a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing. I mean, everything we've done by him so far has gone that way and will do in the future. Gretchen, you mentioned "War of the Worlds" and "Island of Dr. Moreau". It's good that those are the two that you've read because those two, we haven't done on the podcast yet, but we're thinking about it. So we're definitely going to do probably both of them, I would say. 

Nate:

Yeah, I would say too, as well as others by Wells. He's got a couple other major novels as well as a whole glut of short stories that I think would all be really interesting to cover. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think I had seen that we might do "Moreau", but I didn't know about "War of the Worlds", which I suppose that is a classic Wells text. So it makes sense that we'll be covering that one. 

Nate:

Yeah. I mean, somewhere down the road. I mean, they're not going anywhere. 

JM:

And I'm enjoying getting more into the 20th century at this point, but I still look forward to looking back to some of those titles very much. 

Nate:

Oh, yeah. I mean, as we go forward into the 20s, the 30s, and the 40s, we're certainly not going to leave the 19th century behind us. There's going to be plenty of titles from the earlier era that we're still going to cover in our episodes going forward. It's just I think we've reached a point where we can relate those more to modern tropes of science fiction versus the weird stuff that only kind of existed in this micro bubble in the late 1800s. That is kind of neat to cover from a historical footnote, but didn't really carry out into the 20th century versus something like a "War of the Worlds" where an alien invasion story is very much a thing that perpetuates itself throughout a lot of 20th century science fiction. 

JM:

Yeah, definitely. Every theme that Wells really brought to light in his major science fiction novels and some of the short stories are things that influenced this whole field for decades to come and continue to do so. 

Nate:

So getting to the story itself, Professor Gibberne is quite the lucky man to have found a guinea when he was looking for a pin, and discovers something which will revolutionize human life while he's looking for small improvements in stimulants. He's been detailed in The Strand a few times before. Wells presumably playing to his readers here as that where this story was initially published. And he's got a bit of a mephistophelian visage to him. He's quite the designer of drugs of all kinds, sort of the Shulgin of his day, it seems, working with a wide range of soporifics, sedatives and anesthetics. 

JM:

I really like the quote he has there about drugs and their usefulness. 

Nate:

Yeah. I mean, at that time they were much more a part of the over-the-counter drug store pharmacy, specifically, you know, sedatives and painkillers and that kind of thing. But still prone to abuse at that time. As far as the drug classes goes, psychedelics were seemingly a few decades away, I think, it would be interesting to see the history of that angle here, but I don't really think it was too much of a thing and European or American cultures until the 60s counterculture. 

JM:

I just want to read this part. This is what he says about the power of drugs. "The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use!" And yeah, I mean, it's just like, obviously people really started to think about this decades from 1901, but to somebody who's interested in how substances, various substances affect the brain, this substance that describes here is it seems kind of incredible that it can do what it does. And yet, when you do some actual psychoactive substances, it certainly does feel almost like what he describes in the story. 

Nate:

Yeah. And it's interesting, I wonder what Wells had taken at that time, because he certainly seems to be writing about the subject a fair amount. You know, LSD was not synthesized until the 1930s. I don't think psychoactive mushrooms were cultivated by English speaking... 

JM:

I don't know. I mean, I'm sure some had some experience with them. 

Nate:

Yeah. I mean, certainly opiates and that kind of thing were a big thing in the Victorian era. You know, cocaine was over the counter, which is kind of similar to what is developed in this story, some kind of super-stimulant or whatever. But I'm not entirely sure about the whole psychedelics thing and how widespread that was. But there are some lines in the story that do make me wonder. 

But yeah, Gibberne has made a lot of chemical advancements here. And the field of chemical engineering around this time, 1901, was pretty new in general. I mean, we didn't even have antibiotics yet. It's that new. So experimenting with these kind of drugs was very much on the forefront of high technology. But he's made some pretty important advancements in particular, his B Syrup is quite notable. But the one he discovers, the New Accelerator will bypass them all. 

So he's set out to design a stimulant, which would not only in effect revitalize one, but increase the speed of thought processes so more can be done in a particular amount of time. And again, this plays into the whole capitalism angle. He wants to make people more productive workers. 

JM:

Yeah, and I can't remember if this is where he says it or if it's at the end. Sorry if I'm spoiling it, but I guess it doesn't really matter that much because the story's pretty short. But is this where he proposes, well, we could have different levels and offer them for different amounts of money. 

Nate:

Yeah, I think that's at the end. But 

Gretchen:

Yeah, that's at the end. 

JM:

Yeah. I mean, that's like, that's kind of almost part of the root of this problem, obviously. Like the more money you have, the more acceleration you'd be able to afford. 

Nate:

Yeah, right, exactly. But he discusses his plans with the narrator, and the narrator is shown a prototype substance, which Gibberne thinks is quite promising. And the New Accelerator seems to grow beyond all expectations. And one day, Gibberne tells the narrator that it's done and offers him a demonstration. It doesn't go twice as fast as he initially had set out, but untold thousands times as fast. And he offers the narrator some. 

JM:

Yeah, he's very insistent about it. Yeah. He's like, you got to try it. Try it now. 

Nate:

Yeah, I kind of wonder of people that like Shulgin who would follow in the decades later were the same way approaching their new creations with this kind of enthusiasm. It's pretty funny here. The solution is mixed with water and Gibberne tells him to just close his eyes to sit back and relax. They clink glasses and knock it back together. And it's like time stops altogether. Gibberne tips a glass window out of the pane and the narrator expects it to fall, but it just hangs in midair. And sounds become incredibly strange. And they have some real classic drug talk here, namely the narrator asking how long will this confounded stuff last. And there's this one fantastic exchange, which I want to highlight, where the narrator says, "'why shouldn't we go out?' I asked. Gibberne, responding, 'why not?'" And then the narrator says, "they'll see us!". 

JM:

Yeah, they'll see how high we are. 

Nate:

So I kind of wonder if Wells has been there before. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, if he's ever had to do anything really important when stoned out of his mind. 

Nate:

Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. But Gibberne says not to worry, they'll be moving so fast they won't be seen. So out the window they go. And it appears that all the figures in the street traffic are frozen in place. And they spy a bee flapping its wings very, very slowly. The various people and how the breezes are affecting them look incredibly strange. And Gibberne spies an elderly neighbor of his who he doesn't like. So he just runs up to her, grabs her dog and starts to run away with it. And some of the effects of the drug are starting to wear off and the drag force of the air against their moving bodies is starting to create heat from the friction. 

Gretchen:

I just wanted to add, wasn't he going to throw the dog off the cliff? 

JM:

Yeah. He was annoyed with the dog because he kept yelping. So he's like, oh, now I'm just going to take the dog and like throw it over the edge of something and she's not even going to notice. 

Nate:

It's like totally insane. 

Gretchen:

Yeah, it's such a bizarre point. 

Nate:

I know, yeah. But the drug is like slowing, I guess, speeding things up. So he throws the dog in the air and it's at this time that it wears off fully. So the world comes back to life again and then the dog crashes through some lady's parasol. And they realize they just must have appeared out of thin air in front of everybody and everybody's looking at them. They're attracting a great deal of attention and it's all very strange. 

One of the inspectors is interrogating the lady whose dog was stolen here and the narrator and Gibberne make their way out of the scene as subtly as they can. And since then, Gibberne has tweaked the formula and the narrator helps him out by dosing, of course. And Gibberne is also developing an inverse to the accelerator, which he calls the retarder, that slows things down instead of speeding them up. Though he doesn't seem to have any good groundwork on this front yet. And it's at this time when Gibberne's Nervous Accelerator is rolling out soon. And three different color dose sizes, one 200 times acceleration, one 900 and one 2000 distinguished by yellow, pink and white labels. 

And it ends with the narrator assuring us, "No doubt its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things possible; for, of course, the most remarkable and, possibly, even criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging, as it were, into the interstices of time. Like all potent preparations it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this is purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and, as for the consequences—we shall see."

Gretchen:

Yeah, so it doesn't matter to us. It's all out of our hands. 

Nate:

Yep. Can't do anything about it. You know, have fun. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Isn't professor Gibberne lucky that he has a friend like this. This guy's basically a PR, the PR for, I don't know, Halliburton weapons manufacturer or something like that. Like he's, he's... 

Nate:

It is very corporate PR too, the language he uses here. 

JM:

Yeah. It's like, well, we discussed that it could be, you know, it could be dangerous, but anything new that's developed has potential to possibly be used for harm. 

Gretchen:

We fully considered our stockholders and we've decided to go through with this. 

JM:

You decided to go ahead with it. After all, Henry Ford probably knew that the automobile could cause lots of problems in the future, but that didn't stop him, right? So. 

Nate:

Well, Henry Ford is also famously not an ethical person. 

JM:

Yeah. And he was also a few years into the future, but still, yeah, like not that long, right? 

Nate:

No, no.  

JM:

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like that. And it's kind of a turn that I wasn't expecting it to take. Like it ends quite abruptly. And I mean, you could tell he could have taken the idea further if he really wanted to, but he didn't have to. It's a short story and just to leave me with that kind of feeling of dread of what's coming in the world. Like, what kind of shit is the human race going to have to deal with now as a result of this thing? 

Gretchen:

It is interesting because it's like surrounded by like the rest of the story is like light hearted and it's got some very funny moments in it. Like the whole idea of taking the dog and throwing it off the cliff. And even the way that they describe like when the effects is wearing off, when they show up out of nowhere, they're like smoking. They're like singed because of the pressure. And it's so funny to think of that image, but then it's like you get that ending that's... 

JM:

But if you think about it, it's horrible because it's like, yeah, the dog thing is funny, but like imagine somebody's annoyed with you. You don't even know the reason and you wouldn't even know what they did to you because like. 

Gretchen:

The whole thing is funny on the surface. And then if you think about it, it has like these really horrifying or like really awful implications. But it's in the moment, it's so absurd, you're just laughing at it. 

Nate:

I think Wells is really good at striking the balance here. 

JM:

Wells is really good at this kind of thing in general. Like there were parts of "War in the Air" that I thought were hilariously funny. But like that was a very apocalyptic kind of doomy book in the end. But like it was just he does kind of do this thing where there's some satire going on. And sometimes it's pretty subtle and sometimes it's really funny. But there's always like a dark thing waiting around the corner. 

Nate:

Yeah. And he does it really well here. I thought this one was great. And it's again, an interesting choice for Gernsback to stick in the first issue of Amazing. Because it does cover the ethical issue of developing new technologies and what the implications could possibly be in a way that a Jules Verne and I don't know about the other reprints as I haven't read them. But I'd imagine they maybe might not get into that issue as much. From the titles they seem more like pulpy adventure type stuff. 

JM:

Meritt, Meritt's more like weird adventure fiction. 

Nate:

Yeah, right. 

JM:

He's really good. I like him a lot. His prose is very flowery, which I like a lot. You know, it's just got that kind of... H.P. Lovecraft mocked him a little bit. But like, you know, it's kind of funny that he did that. Right. Like it's it's kind of Lovecraft being a bit damning Merit with faint praise. Like he likes him. But you know, he's like, oh, he's too commercial or something like that. It's just kind of kind of funny. But but yeah, I wouldn't like, again, I wouldn't describe him as being the the scientific extrapolation type so much. So it's interesting that the Amazing readers tended to like him and like those reprints and want more of that. I guess it just kind of shows that even though those categories could be rigorous and people could have their preferences, there's still a lot of crossover. But I'm just thinking I kind of brought this up a little bit earlier. But what's possible things do you think this story might have influenced? 

Nate:

Like stories and films down the line, you mean? 

JM:

Yeah, like stories to come in the future after 1901 kind of thing that might be popular now. Isn't there a Twilight Zone episode about freezing time? 

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think it's a sort of stopwatch or a type of stopwatch. I can't remember the exact title. But that is the one that I know that's when you were mentioned like Twilight Zone, that is the one that I had assumed you were referring to. And yeah, that one does end with like the man being stuck in time. 

JM:

So I'm a really big fan of this author, R.A. Lafferty. His real name is Raphael Aloysius Lafferty. He's Irish descent and author living in Oklahoma. I'll probably figure out a way to sneak him into the podcast at some time. When he did this really fascinating story, just probably what I mean in the 60s I guess, called "The Six Fingers of Time". 

And in this story, it turns out that there are some people who are born with a sixth finger on their hand. And those people with the extra digit have the power to exist in this accelerated time field. So they can do things that most people can't do because the world appears frozen to them. But it's actually moving very slowly. So it's just kind of like this story really. And in that story, which is kind of where I thought this one was going, in that story, it turns out that all the people who are doing this, they have like a cabal and they like the main character slowly comes to learn that he's not the only one with the six finger of time. And then the other guys who have the six finger will have their own agendas and something is going on. And of course, because Lafferty was known as a Catholic writer, there's all this kind of connection with the pit and the fallen angels and stuff. And somehow like that, you know, there's a devilish connotation to it all. It's good. But I mean, you get used to Lafferty's kind of religious symbolism and stuff like that. And it's kind of like, I don't mind it. I don't personally swing that way. But I think he has a really interesting way of expressing it. 

So that was kind of a story that I thought of when I started this. And I kind of thought, oh, it's going to end with them being trapped somehow. But it wasn't like that at all. It ended with them getting ready to fulfill their great capitalist dream. That's like kind of that's H.G. Wells for you in a nutshell. Kind of wanting to comment on that. He certainly subscribed to some things that we wouldn't, I guess we wouldn't associate with left-wing socialism now. But I mean, he was also very quick to change his tune when he realized he was wrong about something. And in general, he kind of kept this sort of very kind of leftist, anti-capitalist stance throughout his very long writing career, even though most of his science fiction was written before the 1910s. 

Nate:

Yeah. And this is definitely one from the early period. I think after this, I haven't read any of his non-science fiction novels, but I think it does deal more with that social commentary type of stuff. 

JM:

"War in the Air" came out after this. But other than that, yeah, "The World Set Free", which I think might come up later this podcast was written in 1913. And in that book, he actually comes up with the concept of atomic bombs, basically. That's something that will come into play later this podcast for sure. 

Nate:

Oh yeah, definitely. 

JM:

But yeah, this was really good. Wells' short stories are interesting because they really feel like they kind of fit that idea sometimes of a thought experiment and, you know, it's like kind of an experiment in a different kind of scenario way of thinking. And this isn't the only time he wrote about a weird drug either. 

Nate:

No, and we're probably going to be covering those later on the podcast as well. But yeah, he revisits this theme a bunch, it seems. And it's again, a very basic idea and a short work, but he does it well. He does it really well, I think. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think it's he does it so well. He's got a long narrative. He's able to get everything well articulated in such a short frame of a narrative. 

Nate:

Yeah, it accomplishes a lot in a short runtime. You get the humor, you get the interesting technology, and you get the commentary on capitalism. 

JM:

Right. And I think that was his point, was the commentary on capitalism. He made that point and he got out. And that's something that, you know, I mean, we'll come to it. But I mean, some of the serials, especially in Amazing, could be criticized for being perhaps longer than they needed to be. So this is not one of those for sure. This is a very concise, well-paced story. 

I actually wanted to mention when you were describing the altered state of them being in the accelerated time field, the band. And that the how he describes the band playing where they're going by the bandstand. And it's like, you can sort of hear that air is passing through the instruments, like the horns and stuff, but it just kind of sounds like this clicking almost. 

Nate:

It's really cool. 

JM:

It is really cool because, I mean, if you look at sound in terms of vibrations, which vibrations are, something creates a sound wave by moving back and forth very quickly. And you're looking at, if you reduce something at pitch, if you take away the fact that you often get a lot of distortion and stuff, the lower you go, but like you sort of with a high pitch note and get lower and lower and lower until that high pitch note just becomes a bunch of clicking sounds. 

Nate:

Yeah. Some of the sounds that I put together for the podcast here have been like that kind of tape manipulation, even though it's like with digital software, just like expanding out and slowing down existing sounds to the point where they're unrecognizable, very slow and low noise. It's an interesting process when the waveform becomes that slowed down and expanded. 

JM:

It is because then you take something like the human voice, like I say something or I say, I sing a note or something like that. And then I can reduce that to the point where it just sounds like percussive, almost like percussive sounds because it's like interesting that he was thinking of this in 1901 before anybody was really doing any tape manipulation. 

Nate:

Oh, it's long before. Yeah. I mean, wire recording, you could kind of do similar things with it, but it was just like a giant pain in the ass. 

JM:

Yeah. 

Nate:

In particular, the stuff we did on the podcast, one of the things I put together for the Charles Hinton segment, we did a couple episodes back. I think the only sounds I used were a very small clip of the two of you speaking and me hitting the lid of my brewing kettle. And that's it. They were just like manipulated and expanded and played around with and they're totally unrecognizable in their initial form. You just get these like weird, eerie effects. I just think it's fascinating how that works out. 

JM:

That was cool. And I picture it very well when he described the two men phasing out of the accelerated time field. It sounded like the band was speeding up. And just the way he described it perfectly made me think of like the record spin-up thing where you're like, you start the record up and it's like, whaaaaa? 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Wow. Yeah. I mean, I just like 1901. That's pretty cool. It was something that I guess doing this old science fiction, people write it off a lot nowadays, like people who don't read this stuff or don't really get into it. They, you don't think a lot about, about what these people were thinking of and how like a hundred years from then, now, we take this kind of stuff for granted. Oh yeah. But at that time it was a new thing. I just thinking of now we actually can, I mean, we can't actually slow down time, but we can certainly like, we have recordings of humans doing all sorts of things and we can watch them at any speed we want. Right? 

Nate:

Yeah. We can record all kinds of things and modulate it into sound. I mean, there's lots of these things floating around the internet where they'll take light data or radio astronomy data from some far away galaxy and then modulate the waves into sound waves. You get this like, ooh, spooky background noise or whatever. It's a very interesting thing that is made a lot easier by modern technology. 

And again, a lot of the stuff that Wells is talking about with the drug creation, I mean, I think that using performance enhancing drugs to benefit the capitalist business owner and increase worker productivity is a thing that again will come up in science fiction stories for decades to come, even bleeding into the real world of, you know, mainstream magazines talking about microdosing to increase corporate productivity. It's almost like kind of parody at this point where Wells was talking about these things and 1901 lambasting it. But now people are considering the subject seriously. It's, I think, a pretty interesting development. 

JM:

Yeah, it really is. And that's a serious thing that's like, you know, I even thought about this a few years ago. I thought, like, what if we could make a drug so that people could sleep in some kind of different time field so that they effectively didn't have to sleep in the real world, right? So they could just keep doing stuff all day and all night. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

And like, some people would think that was great, but I don't know how long they would think that was great for, you know. 

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know. You lose a third of your life to sleep, but at the same time, sleep's kind of nice. So I don't know. 

JM:

Yeah. I feel like there are other things that, there was a story that I kind of queued for a later episode, maybe, which was Clark Ashton Smith's story, "The Plutonian Drug". 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

And that's another story about a drug that affects time and where it's like, it allows you to see a brief time in the future and you can like, sort of keep going through that future time as long as you're still under the influence of the drug. So you can't like interact with it and you can't like do anything, but you can watch whatever's happening. Then you come out of it with the awareness of what's going to happen in the near future. And that's kind of reminded me of that as well. 

Nate:

Yeah. Now we have a whole episode, possibly more than one episode based around these kind of stories for the future. So stay tuned. We're not going to do it anytime soon, but it'll be maybe coming up at some point. 

Gretchen:

Yeah. This is just a taste. 

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah. One of the many future ideas that we have. Yeah. I think for a story that's maybe not even 5,000 words long, this story generates a lot of comment. 

Nate:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah. It's a good one. Highly recommended. 

Nate:

Yeah, absolutely. 

Gretchen:

Yes. 

Nate:

All right. So I think now we're going to take another look into another short story and we'll be back in a minute. 

Bibliography:

Amazing Stories, April 1926 issue https://archive.org/details/amazing_stories_april_1926

Ashley, Michael - "The History of the Science Fiction Magazine - Part 1 (1926-1935)" (1977)

Ashley, Michael - "The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950" (2001)

Perry, Thomas - "An Amazing Story: Experimenter in Bankruptcy", Amazing Stories, May 1978

"A History of Science Fiction Criticism: Collective Works Cited and Chronological Bibliography", Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jul., 1999), pp. 263-283

World Radio History, "Hugo Gernsback Library" https://worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Bookshelf_Gernsback.htm