Science Saturday
We are taking a break from out typical Science Saturday post to bring you another title from our large Science Fiction collection: Astounding Stories (also known as Astounding Stories of Super-Science), a monthly magazine that started in 1930. John W. Campbell became the third editor of the magazine in 1938 and is thought to have ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction when the genre gained immense popularity. Campbell was notable in that he wanted to do away with some of the sensationalist aspects of Science Fiction and wanted authors to focus on realism in their futuristic stories. Campbell is also the reason the magazine changed titles from Astounding Stories to Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 1960, and the magazine still exists under that name today.
A few months ago, we featured a different Science Fiction magazine with a similar name titled Amazing Stories focusing on cover art from the 1960s. This week we are looking at Astounding Stories covers from 1930 and 1931 to get a sense of earlier Science Fiction cover art.
Some of the titles of the novelettes are:
“The Beetle Horde” by Victor Rousseau “The Moon Master” by Charles W. Diffin “Marooned Under the Sea” by Paul Ernst “Monsters of Mars” by Edmond Hamilton “Dark Moon” by Charles W. Diffin “The Red Hell of Jupiter” by Paul Ernst “Raiders Invisible” by D. W. Hall “The White Invaders” by Ray Cummings
In the December 1931 “Readers’ Corner” letters to the editor section, there is classic genre debate of science fiction versus fantasy, or in this case fairy tales. John Wolf Leon of Washington D. C. wrote:
“It was my opinion that this magazine is published for persons of mature age, but judging by some of the representative stories published recently, this is not so. In each issue there has been one or two stories which would clearly come under the category of “fairy tale,” being cloaked only in the veil of a few scientific terms or theories.
Usually, I should say, the fault has been merely in the manner in which the story has been written, and appears as though the Author had but recently finished one of Grimm’s tales. Why not get away from some of this childish heroism, these romantic meetings of the hero and the lovely girl from the moon?”
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–Sarah, Special Collections Senior Graduate Intern
