This week we are diving into the realm of science fiction with the magazine series Amazing Stories first published in 1926 in New York by Hugo Gernsback and his Experimenter Publishing company. Amazing Stories is considered to be the first magazine devoted entirely to science fiction. Hugo Gernsback lost ownership of the magazine in 1929, but it continued to be published with varying frequency and slight name changes for 95 years. Wikipedia has an extremely detailed overview of Amazing Stories and the different editors it had over the years.
The magazine covers we are highlighting of Amazing Stories are from the late 1950s to early 1970s. Recently I was tasked with searching our catalog for items related to space exploration for a class instruction session and this got me thinking about fictionalized space travel in popular culture. What is interesting to me is that brief look through the early decades of Amazing Stories shows that there was more variety in the cover stories in the 1930s-1940s, with tales of oversized insects, deep sea creatures, and inventions such as robots. Most of the 1960s covers feature images of space travel and colonization of different planets. That is not to say the earlier decades did not cover outer space topics, but they were not as frequent as in the 1960s. It makes me wonder if living in the “Space Age” influenced the type of material that was popular in Amazing Stories.
UWM Special Collections holds issues of Amazing Stories from 1926-1970. We also have many other Science Fiction magazines, including:
Astounding Science-Fiction
Analog: Science Fiction / Science Fact
Fantasy & Science Fiction
View more Science Saturday posts.
–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern
