Strange Angel by George Pendle Read Free Book Online Page B

printed—had been part of a magazine publishing revolution in the 1880s. Magazines had once had relatively small circulations and had been aimed at the upper middle classes, but a universal rise in literacy had created a craze for enjoyable and affordable reads. With gaudy covers and sensational stories, the pulps were the television of their day. The
Argosy,
a 192-page weekly which featured adventure fiction by such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs, the inventor of Tarzan, had a readership by the turn of the century of some 700,000. Along with its numerous competitors, the
Argosy
delivered a weekly diet of shoot-outs, monsters, and murders, and while the majority of stories might not have been very technically competent, the fans’ enthusiasm for them was unmistakable.
    By the time Parsons could read, the pulps had diversified into hundreds of specific genres.
Black Mask,
founded by the literary polymath H. L. Mencken, specialized in crime stories and would later feature the writings of hard-boiled noir writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett.
Ace-High Western Stories
was dedicated to cowboy yarns and gunfights, and
Weird Tales,
which included the macabre fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, spun sword and sorcery and horror yarns. There was as yet no publication devoted to stories like Verne’s scientific romances, so Parsons would have had to content himself with the occasional tales of the future and new technologies that would appear in the other pulps.
    However, when Parsons was twelve years old, a new magazine for boys entered the market. With a garish yellow cover picturing a red-and-white planet and what appeared to be ice-skating aliens,
Amazing Stories
became the first magazine devoted solely to space-age fantasies. Its editor was Hugo Gernsback, a writer and inventor from Luxembourg who harbored deep Utopian leanings for his populist publication; the magazine’s motto was “Extravagant Fiction Today ... Cold Fact Tomorrow.”
Amazing
was to publish stories of what Gernsback named “scientifiction.” “By ‘scientifiction’,” he wrote in his first editorial, “I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allen Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” The most important element of the stories was not the plot or the characters but the landscape in which the story took place, the technological setting. “Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading—they are always instructive.” wrote Gernsback. “They supply knowledge that we might not otherwise obtain—and they supply it in a very palpable form. For the best of these modern writers of scientifiction have the knack of imparting knowledge, and even inspiration, without once making us aware that we are being taught.”
    What was more plausible (or ridiculous), Gernsback asked his readers, Philip Francis Nowlan’s story “Armageddon 2419 A.D.,” in which Anthony “Buck” Rogers was introduced into the twenty-fifth century, or W. Alexander’s story “New Stomachs for Old,” which suggested that one day organ transplants might be a commonplace surgical procedure? Gernsback delighted in pointing out that Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
had predicted the submarine “down to the last bolt” and that H. G. Wells had forseen the development of aerial warfare in his 1908 story, “The War in the Air.” “New inventions pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow,” even such terrifying ones as the apocalyptic bombs made from uranium in Wells’ 1914 tale “The World Set Free.”
    By 1928
Amazing Stories
had garnered a monthly circulation of well over 100,000 and a host of competitors had emerged:
Weird Tales, Miracle Science and Fantasy Stories,
and
Astounding Stories of