Television Science Fiction Genre Course
TOPIC Three: Print: The Genre in Magazines
The related genre of scientific romance began to develop in
reaction to the fact that science fiction had been rather
barren of human emotions; it depended on marvels and tricks
or science/technology. But Burroughs (of Tarzan fame - not
science fiction but captures the same sense of the
different and marvelous) used science fiction as a
background/setting for many of his stories.
Argosy Magazine continued publishing a great deal of
science fiction for many years. The magazine was
eventually bought by Popular Publications and changed into
a higher-class men’s magazine.
During this period many other magazines used science
fiction - The Saturday Evening Post published Lord Dunsay’s
“Our Distant Cousins” - a story of a man who flies to Mars
to discover that the human Martians are only food for the
dominant race. And some specialized horro-fantasy
magazines appear, such as Weird Tales, which used science
fiction as well.
But it was the male adventure pulps that were the major
influence on science fiction from 1895-1925 and most of
today’s science fiction conventions came from the notions
that such stories expounded - conditioning us for what to
expect.
As the world has become so well known - globalized occupations less adventuresome as movies/TV made all
accessible to the viewer, the future still offered strange
worlds or alien invaders and adventure science fiction
developed.
In the early years of the 20th century, hobbyist found that
they could easily tinker within the field of technology
(e.g., every man had to be his own motor mechanic and
before long most were pretty good engineers; no license was
required to build or fly experimental aircraft - after all,
the Wright Bros began in a bicycle shop). Into this world,
Hugo Gernsback was born (1884)and immediately became
involved in the infant science of radio, building his own
set in 1905. In 1908 he began a magazine to explain some of
the technology, Modern Electronics (electronics was a term
not yet heard as most people referred to radio as
wirelesss). He was fascinated with anything involving
science or engineering and he began publishing his dreams
of the Earth as a paradise for humans in his magazine “A
Romance of the year 2660” detailing the life of a man at
that marvelous time - a constant parade of scientific
wonders and forecasts (television, which was named by
Gernsback, microfilm, fluorescent lighting, radar). In 1915
he began writing a series of spoofs based upon real
science, “The Scientific Adventures of Baron Munchhausen”.
Radio grew rapidly and Gernsback brought out Radio News in
1919 and between his 2 publications he reported on
developments in science. His science fiction stories were
so popular that in 1926 he issued the first magazine
devoted solely to “scientifiction” - making him “the father
of science fiction” - maybe not so, but certainly the
father of magazine science fiction and responsible for
making a viable category of it. He founded the first 7
magazines in US.
This discussion is primarily of science fiction in US there was science fiction published in Russia long before
1926, with a magazine devoted exclusively to it from 19031923 (World of Adventure) - but Russian science fiction had
little influence on modern science fiction as we known it,
due to the language barrier and political separation - thus
American/British science fiction became international. Also
Germany had a great deal of science fiction activity before
Hitler and through translation has become part of our
legacy.