Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Amazing Stories August 1941

The Magazine of the Week is the August 1941 issue of Amazing Stories, with an Edgar Rice Burroughs cover story and great BEM cover art by J. Allen St. John.

As discussed in an earlier BOTW (seen here), Amazing Stories was the first of the science fiction pulp magazines. This issue's cover story, "Yellow Men of Mars," is by Edgar Rice Burroughs, probably the most successful of all the pulp writers. Burroughs is best known outside science fiction circles as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes, but most fondly remembered among SF fans for his tales of John Carter of Mars. "Yellow Men of Mars" is a John Carter story, later incorporated into the novel Llana of Gathol, tenth in the John Carter series.

The St. John illustration on the Magazine of the Week is one of my favorite examples of pulp era BEM cover art. Like any specialized community, science fiction fandom has its own peculiar jargon. (You are an SF geek, for example, if you can translate the statement, "I can't decide whether to go check out the filk or just gafiate.") Any serious SF fan will instantly recognize the creature on the cover of the Magazine of the Week as a traditional skiffy BEM, or "bug-eyed monster."

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Captain Future Winter 1941

The Magazine of the Week is the Winter 1941 issue of Captain Future, with cover story "Captain Future and the Seven Space-Stones" by Edmond Hamilton (cover art by Earle K. Bergey).

Captain Future was the only strictly science fictional hero pulp, if you don't count Flash Gordon magazine, which lasted only one issue. The lead story of every Captain Future magazine was by Edmond Hamilton, a respected Golden Age SF author (and husband of another respected Golden Age author, Leigh Brackett, best remembered today for writing the first draft of the screenplay for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back). Hamilton's lead story always starred our hero Captain Future, but each issue was filled out with stories by other authors not involving Captain Future. Notably, one of the filler stories in the Magazine of the Week is "Not Yet the End," the first published story by Fredric Brown, one of my favorites (discussed in the August 16 Magazine of the Week).

We are nearing the end of our introduction to the pulp magazines. There are many other genres and important authors from the pulp era we have yet to discuss, but I have to cut this history off somewhere. However, there is one more figure from the pulps I cannot resist mentioning. Next week's Magazine of the Week will feature one of the most prolific of the pulp authors, someone who certainly was not the best of the pulp writers but may end up having the greatest impact, because he founded a religion that has hundreds of thousands of followers today.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: The Shadow March 15, 1941

The Magazine of the Week is the March 15, 1941 issue of The Shadow. Having discussed the unfortunate racial stereotypes in the old pulp magazines, I felt the need to point out that in some instances the pulps championed racial tolerance. On the cover of the Magazine of the Week, we see our hero The Shadow battling against the Ku Klux Klan in "The White Column." (The KKK is not referred to by name in the story, but then neither is Nazi Germany.)

Many incorrectly believe that the character of The Shadow was introduced in the radio show, narrated by Orson Welles and others, with the famous tag line, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!" The Shadow did first appear on radio, but only as a voice introducing the show Detective Stories. None of that show's stories were about The Shadow. Nevertheless, fans of Detective Stories were intrigued by the mysterious narrator, so Street & Smith decided to turn The Shadow into an independent character, which they did in the pages of The Shadow magazine, beginning in 1931. Most of the contents of The Shadow magazine were written by Walter B. Gibson, under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant. The success of the magazine then inspired the famous Shadow radio show, which premiered in 1937.

In addition to the radio show, The Shadow magazine also triggered an entire genre of "hero pulps." Some of these hero pulps, notably Doc Savage, The Spider, and The Phantom Detective, enjoyed years of success, but none ever quite equaled the popularity of The Shadow. When many pulp genres later made the transition to paperbacks, the hero pulps instead transformed into a genre of comic books. Comic books then gifted most of their heroes with superpowers. The pulp heroes were instead mostly Batman-style heroes, relying on their wits and cleverness and some cool gizmos. The Shadow of the magazines did not even have his mysterious ability to cloud men's minds so they wouldn't see him--in the pulps he was just real good at skulking in corners. The Shadow was given his psychic powers by radio producers, who didn't think "and then I hid under the table" was dramatic enough for radio.

Some of the hero pulps attempted to integrate the hero genre with other pulp genres. My favorite example will be next week's Magazine of the Week, a hero pulp that was also a war pulp that was also a Weird Tales imitator.

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Astounding Science Fiction February 1941

Continuing our tribute to pulp writer Nelson S. Bond (1908-2006), the Magazine of the Week is the February 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, with Nelson Bond cover story "Magic City." That Bond is the sole author mentioned on the cover shows how highly he was regarded during the pulp era, for this magazine also contains stories by science fiction legends Robert A. Heinlein (one story under his real name and a serialized novel under his pseudonym Anson MacDonald), Theodore Sturgeon, and L. Sprague de Camp.

This issue also has a great cover by Hubert Rogers. The film Planet of the Apes (1968), starring Charlton Heston, effectively used the image of a ruined Statue of Liberty to symbolize lost hope in a post-apocalyptic future. But with only one important exception Hollywood science fiction has always been decades behind written science fiction, and so we see that the ruined Lady Liberty concept originated not with Hollywood but with Nelson Bond's story "Magic City." ("Magic City" also takes the reader into the derelict New York subway tunnels, anticipating the best of the film sequels, Beneath the Planet of the Apes.) No need to speculate whether Pierre Boulle, author of the novel on which Planet of the Apes was based, ever saw this magazine growing up in France, for Boulle's novel doesn't contain the Statue of Liberty scene at all -- the novel's twist ending is closer to the ending of Tim Burton's 2001 remake.

And just in case anyone wants to give Hollywood credit for adding power to the image by burying the Statue of Liberty in the sand, we'll dispel that notion with next week's Magazine of the Week.