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 Book of the Week :: 20 Million Miles to Earth by Henry Slesar

The Book of the Week is 20 Million Miles to Earth by prolific pulp and screenwriter Henry Slesar, published in 1957 by Amazing Stories. This was the first and only digest novel Amazing Stories issued, and it is the digest-format book most prized by collectors today.

20 Million Miles to Earth is a novelization of the 1957 film of the same title, featuring a rampaging monster created by special effects legend Ray Harryhausen. A great part of the book's appeal to collectors is its campy cover image of the salivating monster. We'll have another digest book that is collectible for its outrageous cover art (and title) next week.

(Oddly enough, after writing this week's BOTW posting, I discovered that the film version of 20 Million Miles to Earth is on television this weekend -- on Saturday, January 12th at 4:30 p.m. Mountain time on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). Check it out for some campy fun, even if you may notice a slight difference in production values between it and the film that follows it on TCM, also made in 1957, The Bridge on the River Kwai.)

Aaron's Magazine of the Week :: Amazing Stories May 1926

The Magazine of the Week is the May 1926 issue of Amazing Stories, the second issue of the first science fiction magazine ever published. (I have yet to acquire the extremely rare first issue, but that is just as well for our purposes, since this second issue has an excellent example of the artwork of famed SF illustrator Frank R. Paul on the cover, depicting a scene from the H.G. Wells story "The Crystal Egg," whereas the first issue's cover is an embarrassingly goofy picture of what appears to be a family of Sasquatch out ice skating.)

Amazing Stories was initially published and edited by Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback had previously published various non-fictional popular science magazines. When he inserted a few fictional futuristic stories (including his own Ralph 124C41+) in those magazines, the very positive reader reaction prompted him to start a magazine specializing in the stuff. As a result of that decision, Gernsback is often called the founder of modern science fiction. While there were novels and stories before 1926 that we now categorize as science fiction, until Gernsback started Amazing Stories, the term science fiction (or the variation Gernsback preferred, "scientifiction") did not exist. More importantly, there was no separate publishing category for the kind of work we now call science fiction. It is not an overstatement to say that with Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback created the genre of science fiction. To this day, the most prestigious award given out annually in the field of science fiction is unofficially called the "Hugo Award" in Gernsback's honor.

As shown on the cover of the Magazine of the Week, Amazing Stories initially consisted largely of reprints of work by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe (whose name is misspelled on the cover). Within a couple years, however, Gernsback shifted the magazine's emphasis to original work by new writers. Amazing Stories was an instant success, and remained consistently in print from 1926 through 1995 (and there have been a couple attempts to resurrect the title in the past decade). Despite the magazine's success, however, the parent company of Amazing Stories went through financial difficulties in the late 1920's, which resulted in Hugo Gernsback losing control of the magazine. So Gernsback turned around and created the second science fiction magazine ever published, an issue of which you will see next week.