Avatar. The Avengers. Iron Man 3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon. The Dark Knight Rises.
These are five of the top ten all-time highest grossing movies. Their (arguable) inclusion in the Science Fiction canon begs a question of the genre: is it just the spectacle that we shell out to witness, or is there some more primitive itch that these kinds of events scratch?
This blog is dedicated to figuring out how it is that Science Fiction addresses the problem of defining "human."
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Excerpts from Amazing Stories
Choose some excerpts from this site:
http://www.pulpmags.org/amazingstories_page.html
I suggest reading bits of issues, as they tend to be overly long, then reporting back here with your findings.
Don’t know if anyone else is having trouble with the link, but I was able to find access by googling it. (http://www.pulpmags.org/amazingstories_page.html)
I really enjoyed the concept of these magazines. I’ve always loved the excitement for science in the early 1900’s and how much the everyday person appreciated it. I did not read any of the stories due to a lack of time on my part, however reading the advertisements in the magazine found here http://www.pulpmags.org/PDFs/AMS41926/index.html, was very interesting. I enjoyed that Gernsback had to clarify the purpose of his magazine to the public due to the influx of other similar outlets at the time. He expressed why his line was more worthy of a readers time in only a way a salesman from the 1920’s could. All of the advertisements had this kind of feeling which made them seem more personal to the reader, and had a “too good to be true” quality about them. In almost every regard this is taking advantage of the reader with the promise of wealth, and a good education, however I am curious to know if any of these ads were actually real or produced any results for those who gave into them. The advertisements pertaining to becoming an “Electrical Expert” was the most enjoyable for me, because, as an electrical engineering student, it was the most familiar and showed just how much either the field was in its infancy, or that this ad was total bull. In any event this particular magazine was an interesting read.
I read “A Trip to the Center of the Earth” from the May 1926 collection. I also read here and there from May 1934, but “A Trip to the Center of the Earth” was my favorite. An uncle and nephew are decoding an ancient Icelandic script that gives directions to the center of the Earth. I thought that this sort of mystery of decoding a rather odd looking text and having to read it backwards to solve it was intriguing and maintained my interest. I also particularly liked that this story was imaginative without being as obscure as some of the other stories we have read. The enthusiasm for science and the great mystery it was (still great now, but even greater then) was wonderful to read. The uncle and nephew decide to follow the script down a volcano to the center of the Earth because truly no one had any idea what it was like (except for the person who had written the script). It was interesting and even had a few humorous remarks. When calculating just how far they were beneath the Earth, the uncle says, “either my calculation is correct or there is no truth in figures.” Essentially, either I am correct or all of mathematics is a lie. At the end, you never find out exactly what happened (until the June collection). They mention that the calculations do appear correct, but the temperature is not as expected. The nephew says that this should certainly be taken into consideration, and then it ends just like that. I imagine that if I were reading it at the time, waiting for the June collection to come out would be a wait at the edge of my seat for 30 days. They certainly know how to entice and maintain an audience over time to create a following.
First off, the covers of the stories really creeped me out. I didn't have much time to read them, so I just glanced through them instead. Looking through the magazine, these stories seemed very long, but back in the day what else did you have to keep you entertained? Even though I didn't read any of the stories I know they are about inventions and the future. I think it would have been cool to grow up when these were first coming out because these stories and their ideas were very new to everyone. If I lived back then and hadn't been around all the inventions I've been surrounded by my whole life, I would have thought these stories were amazing and would have made me think a lot about the future and what the future could hold.
I went through some of the advertisements and they all just made me laugh. I’ve read old advertisements before. They all seem exaggerated and too good to be true, but that’s what makes them fun now.
The cover art of “Amazing Stories” is GREAT (not creepy!) and as important as the written content. The August 1927 issue features a “War of the Worlds” scene by artist Frank R. Paul, who is considered the “Father of Science Fiction Art”. This artist and his cover art (which is on most “Amazing Stories” covers) apparently caught the attention of a young Asimov, Clarke, and Forrest J Ackermann (a notable sci-fi fan and advocate) who obviously went on to do cool sci-fi things later in life. ("Frank R Paul: Illustrator of Tomorrow's Visions", Jerry Weist, 2010) Fun fact!
Anyway: One observation I made is a recurring reminder that these stories are just that: stories. In a way, the format in which these stories are told leave something to be desired, perhaps in the suspension of disbelief category. But this is a problematic problem. I will try to explain what I mean with the “Retreat to Mars” story in the Aug 1927 issue. Here, one scientist explains to another that he’s made a groundbreaking discovery: where humanity originated on earth. Instead of revealing his findings –what exactly those origins are or why it’s so groundbreaking- he instead begins a long and exciting tale of exotic African exploration. Eventually this lengthy tale results in revealing what was so ground breaking (Aliens!), but it takes *forever* to get there.
I suppose the problem is that I expect a game-changing conversation between two academics to be a bit more professional. The story as told is neat, it makes for a great reveal, but it sounds too much like a story, less a scientific presentation between to specialists. It’s like writing a fifty page essay but leaving your thesis statement in the conclusion. This is a problematic problem because I imagine too technical of a story can preclude such a cathartic reveal. Something that adheres too close to reality for technicalities’ sake and strays too far from a comfortable storyline as a result can be hard to approach for some readers. I suppose it’s a fine line between reading something enjoyable and reading a bland fictional academic journal. Maybe I just prefer the harder stuff.
That said, the story has all the “signposts” one might expect, and crucially (I think), forces you to consider a huge philosophical question, and perhaps even cause you to question everything you thought you knew.
A side note: It is interesting to find parallels to Sci-fi and realities that followed this. There’s technology in the story that loosely foreshadows the young lady’s illustrated primer in “The Diamond Age”, and water concepts that are at the heart of Herbert’s “Dune”. Even the story that follows “Retreat to Mars” predicts a live version of Google Earth.
Further side note: The story that Méliès film reminded me of in class earlier was Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”, published in 1865. It turned out to be (according to Wikipedia) the inspiration for Georges Méliès film.
I read "The Man from the Atom" from the April 1926 edition, as well as a few bits from June edition from the same year. I quite enjoyed the story I read. The first thing I thought of after finishing it was the last scene in Men in Black when the camera zooms out on the milky way galaxy revealing it all to be contained in a marble that is being played with by an alien. Only in this story instead of being contained inside of a marble, the entire universe is contained inside of one molecule in the ocean of another alien world. The idea that the universe, something that is so big to us we cannot even comprehend it; being small enough to all fit inside of one atom is kind of terrifying, but at the same time enthralling to me. Another thing that I found interesting that Wertenbaker, much like Shelley did in Frankenstein chose to gloss over the details of the shrinking/growing machine that is invented and tested on the narrator. The reason Wertenbaker gave for not providing the details of the device were that the device was just too complicated for the narrator to understand and that he was just anxious to try it out. I suppose though that in a story this imaginative that’s one of the more minuscule details for the reader to get over. Regardless, I thought it was fun to read and the ads were pretty funny as well.
Personally I fell in love with these magazines the minute I saw their cover art. I love the old designs and the comic book font, and the stories included in each issue definitely did not let me down. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are two of my favorite science fiction authors and I wish I had the time to read through every story instead of just skimming through them. The one thing that I thought was extremely interesting was how several of the stories in each issue actually included chapters, as opposed to little snippets that are commonly in magazines today. I have no idea if there are any modern magazines that exist similar to this one, but I feel like they would be extremely popular. I would much rather read a magazine about otherworldly creatures and time travel than what some celebrity wore to an awards show. It was interesting to see how stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth and War of the Worlds were written in several parts, and very cool to see how they were originally published. I didn’t know that these stories were initially printed in this magazine, and reading some of the stories from other authors has inspired me to look further into their work, so the time it took reading them was well spent.
I was planning on doing the bare minimum for this assignment because of "read however much...as you like". YET, two and a half hours later I had push back all of my other obligations to fill my nerd need to be entertained by stories of fantasy and aliens. My top appreciation of these magazines are the ads. perhaps my favorite is the sex-telling swinging apparatus. Ridiculous. i think its cool how these sold for only 25 cents. Which converts to about 3.25 in todays money. That is pretty cheap for about 100 pages of written work. Very cool. I don't know how effective the magazine was in the spread of awareness for the scifi genre but I like the direction it was being took. Not really I lied. I'm not too big of a fan of fantasy scifi. Or simply stories that are made to entertain and not to stimulate thought or discussion. These are mainly stories that are supposed to tickle my imagination abilities. And it does that pretty poorly for the most part. I did make it through "A trip to the Center of the Earth" and most of "Terror out of Space". I do wish that these pieces based their premise more on the philisophical aspects of scifi meaning asking the reader to think about different future possiblities and maybe spark some matches in sticky cogs and get society to start thinking for themselves. Rather this is more like cartoons, and all gets eaten up like butterscotch rather than rather than collard greens and omega-3's.
One opening article called “The Lure of Scientifiction”, seems to have an interesting motive. It is a short article talking about the history of Scientifiction and the place it holds in society today. What I like to think about when reading articles like this is, “Why was this article really written, what is it trying to accomplish.” My answer to that question is credibility. It opens by talking about the vast and unknown history of the genre, citing Edgar Allen Poe as an originator of this type of literature, but then going as far to say that Leonardo divinchi was perhaps one as well. These points are interesting, but as the article goes on I think the drive at the real motive of credibility become apparent. Later in the article, the author is talking about the incredible response that was received from the issues previously put out. He says that they receive between a dozen and fifty letters per day. But whats important is that these are letters suggesting other stories to publish. The author then writes about this idea of a “nerd culture” that is present, people seeking out old and obscure works of scientifiction as a hobby. He is making the argument that this genre is bigger than the magazine, which seems to be an argument for credibility. I am generally on board with this idea until the author says that this culture shows that “Scientifiction, in other words furnishes a tremendous amount of scientific education and fires the reader’s imagination, more perhaps than anything else of which we know.” He is now vying for credibility by asserting that this genre should be used for scientific education, which, in the context he discusses it, I think is ludicrous. As a side note, the ad for the WORLD CLASS radio school was my favorite. “ A Profession that’s almost Romantic!” I believe is the quote on the add.
I think that I enjoyed reading this the most so far. Firstly, the actual website is really cool with how they have all of the books and you can just flip through them all like an actual book, just wasn't expecting that. But the actual reading was nice. I felt a lot less pressured to kind of understand what exactly was going on and a little more relaxed, it was a lot lighter than something like Frankenstein for example. I think the actual books are really cool in general. I like how you have a variety of things to choose from to maybe fit different peoples interests because it seems a lot of people have different opinions on what exactly science fiction is. The Amazing Stories gives everyone a chance to enjoy a story that by their own definition would call science fiction.
Don’t know if anyone else is having trouble with the link, but I was able to find access by googling it. (http://www.pulpmags.org/amazingstories_page.html)
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the concept of these magazines. I’ve always loved the excitement for science in the early 1900’s and how much the everyday person appreciated it.
I did not read any of the stories due to a lack of time on my part, however reading the advertisements in the magazine found here http://www.pulpmags.org/PDFs/AMS41926/index.html, was very interesting. I enjoyed that Gernsback had to clarify the purpose of his magazine to the public due to the influx of other similar outlets at the time. He expressed why his line was more worthy of a readers time in only a way a salesman from the 1920’s could. All of the advertisements had this kind of feeling which made them seem more personal to the reader, and had a “too good to be true” quality about them. In almost every regard this is taking advantage of the reader with the promise of wealth, and a good education, however I am curious to know if any of these ads were actually real or produced any results for those who gave into them.
The advertisements pertaining to becoming an “Electrical Expert” was the most enjoyable for me, because, as an electrical engineering student, it was the most familiar and showed just how much either the field was in its infancy, or that this ad was total bull. In any event this particular magazine was an interesting read.
I read “A Trip to the Center of the Earth” from the May 1926 collection. I also read here and there from May 1934, but “A Trip to the Center of the Earth” was my favorite. An uncle and nephew are decoding an ancient Icelandic script that gives directions to the center of the Earth. I thought that this sort of mystery of decoding a rather odd looking text and having to read it backwards to solve it was intriguing and maintained my interest. I also particularly liked that this story was imaginative without being as obscure as some of the other stories we have read. The enthusiasm for science and the great mystery it was (still great now, but even greater then) was wonderful to read. The uncle and nephew decide to follow the script down a volcano to the center of the Earth because truly no one had any idea what it was like (except for the person who had written the script). It was interesting and even had a few humorous remarks. When calculating just how far they were beneath the Earth, the uncle says, “either my calculation is correct or there is no truth in figures.” Essentially, either I am correct or all of mathematics is a lie. At the end, you never find out exactly what happened (until the June collection). They mention that the calculations do appear correct, but the temperature is not as expected. The nephew says that this should certainly be taken into consideration, and then it ends just like that. I imagine that if I were reading it at the time, waiting for the June collection to come out would be a wait at the edge of my seat for 30 days. They certainly know how to entice and maintain an audience over time to create a following.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, the covers of the stories really creeped me out. I didn't have much time to read them, so I just glanced through them instead. Looking through the magazine, these stories seemed very long, but back in the day what else did you have to keep you entertained? Even though I didn't read any of the stories I know they are about inventions and the future. I think it would have been cool to grow up when these were first coming out because these stories and their ideas were very new to everyone. If I lived back then and hadn't been around all the inventions I've been surrounded by my whole life, I would have thought these stories were amazing and would have made me think a lot about the future and what the future could hold.
ReplyDeleteI went through some of the advertisements and they all just made me laugh. I’ve read old advertisements before. They all seem exaggerated and too good to be true, but that’s what makes them fun now.
The cover art of “Amazing Stories” is GREAT (not creepy!) and as important as the written content. The August 1927 issue features a “War of the Worlds” scene by artist Frank R. Paul, who is considered the “Father of Science Fiction Art”. This artist and his cover art (which is on most “Amazing Stories” covers) apparently caught the attention of a young Asimov, Clarke, and Forrest J Ackermann (a notable sci-fi fan and advocate) who obviously went on to do cool sci-fi things later in life. ("Frank R Paul: Illustrator of Tomorrow's Visions", Jerry Weist, 2010) Fun fact!
ReplyDeleteAnyway:
One observation I made is a recurring reminder that these stories are just that: stories. In a way, the format in which these stories are told leave something to be desired, perhaps in the suspension of disbelief category. But this is a problematic problem. I will try to explain what I mean with the “Retreat to Mars” story in the Aug 1927 issue. Here, one scientist explains to another that he’s made a groundbreaking discovery: where humanity originated on earth. Instead of revealing his findings –what exactly those origins are or why it’s so groundbreaking- he instead begins a long and exciting tale of exotic African exploration. Eventually this lengthy tale results in revealing what was so ground breaking (Aliens!), but it takes *forever* to get there.
I suppose the problem is that I expect a game-changing conversation between two academics to be a bit more professional. The story as told is neat, it makes for a great reveal, but it sounds too much like a story, less a scientific presentation between to specialists. It’s like writing a fifty page essay but leaving your thesis statement in the conclusion. This is a problematic problem because I imagine too technical of a story can preclude such a cathartic reveal. Something that adheres too close to reality for technicalities’ sake and strays too far from a comfortable storyline as a result can be hard to approach for some readers. I suppose it’s a fine line between reading something enjoyable and reading a bland fictional academic journal. Maybe I just prefer the harder stuff.
That said, the story has all the “signposts” one might expect, and crucially (I think), forces you to consider a huge philosophical question, and perhaps even cause you to question everything you thought you knew.
A side note: It is interesting to find parallels to Sci-fi and realities that followed this. There’s technology in the story that loosely foreshadows the young lady’s illustrated primer in “The Diamond Age”, and water concepts that are at the heart of Herbert’s “Dune”. Even the story that follows “Retreat to Mars” predicts a live version of Google Earth.
Further side note: The story that Méliès film reminded me of in class earlier was Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon”, published in 1865. It turned out to be (according to Wikipedia) the inspiration for Georges Méliès film.
I read "The Man from the Atom" from the April 1926 edition, as well as a few bits from June edition from the same year. I quite enjoyed the story I read. The first thing I thought of after finishing it was the last scene in Men in Black when the camera zooms out on the milky way galaxy revealing it all to be contained in a marble that is being played with by an alien. Only in this story instead of being contained inside of a marble, the entire universe is contained inside of one molecule in the ocean of another alien world. The idea that the universe, something that is so big to us we cannot even comprehend it; being small enough to all fit inside of one atom is kind of terrifying, but at the same time enthralling to me.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that I found interesting that Wertenbaker, much like Shelley did in Frankenstein chose to gloss over the details of the shrinking/growing machine that is invented and tested on the narrator. The reason Wertenbaker gave for not providing the details of the device were that the device was just too complicated for the narrator to understand and that he was just anxious to try it out. I suppose though that in a story this imaginative that’s one of the more minuscule details for the reader to get over. Regardless, I thought it was fun to read and the ads were pretty funny as well.
Personally I fell in love with these magazines the minute I saw their cover art. I love the old designs and the comic book font, and the stories included in each issue definitely did not let me down. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are two of my favorite science fiction authors and I wish I had the time to read through every story instead of just skimming through them. The one thing that I thought was extremely interesting was how several of the stories in each issue actually included chapters, as opposed to little snippets that are commonly in magazines today. I have no idea if there are any modern magazines that exist similar to this one, but I feel like they would be extremely popular. I would much rather read a magazine about otherworldly creatures and time travel than what some celebrity wore to an awards show. It was interesting to see how stories like Journey to the Center of the Earth and War of the Worlds were written in several parts, and very cool to see how they were originally published. I didn’t know that these stories were initially printed in this magazine, and reading some of the stories from other authors has inspired me to look further into their work, so the time it took reading them was well spent.
ReplyDeleteI was planning on doing the bare minimum for this assignment because of "read however much...as you like". YET, two and a half hours later I had push back all of my other obligations to fill my nerd need to be entertained by stories of fantasy and aliens. My top appreciation of these magazines are the ads. perhaps my favorite is the sex-telling swinging apparatus. Ridiculous. i think its cool how these sold for only 25 cents. Which converts to about 3.25 in todays money. That is pretty cheap for about 100 pages of written work. Very cool. I don't know how effective the magazine was in the spread of awareness for the scifi genre but I like the direction it was being took. Not really I lied. I'm not too big of a fan of fantasy scifi. Or simply stories that are made to entertain and not to stimulate thought or discussion. These are mainly stories that are supposed to tickle my imagination abilities. And it does that pretty poorly for the most part. I did make it through "A trip to the Center of the Earth" and most of "Terror out of Space". I do wish that these pieces based their premise more on the philisophical aspects of scifi meaning asking the reader to think about different future possiblities and maybe spark some matches in sticky cogs and get society to start thinking for themselves. Rather this is more like cartoons, and all gets eaten up like butterscotch rather than rather than collard greens and omega-3's.
ReplyDeleteOne opening article called “The Lure of Scientifiction”, seems to have an interesting motive. It is a short article talking about the history of Scientifiction and the place it holds in society today. What I like to think about when reading articles like this is, “Why was this article really written, what is it trying to accomplish.”
ReplyDeleteMy answer to that question is credibility. It opens by talking about the vast and unknown history of the genre, citing Edgar Allen Poe as an originator of this type of literature, but then going as far to say that Leonardo divinchi was perhaps one as well. These points are interesting, but as the article goes on I think the drive at the real motive of credibility become apparent. Later in the article, the author is talking about the incredible response that was received from the issues previously put out. He says that they receive between a dozen and fifty letters per day. But whats important is that these are letters suggesting other stories to publish. The author then writes about this idea of a “nerd culture” that is present, people seeking out old and obscure works of scientifiction as a hobby. He is making the argument that this genre is bigger than the magazine, which seems to be an argument for credibility. I am generally on board with this idea until the author says that this culture shows that “Scientifiction, in other words furnishes a tremendous amount of scientific education and fires the reader’s imagination, more perhaps than anything else of which we know.” He is now vying for credibility by asserting that this genre should be used for scientific education, which, in the context he discusses it, I think is ludicrous.
As a side note, the ad for the WORLD CLASS radio school was my favorite. “ A Profession that’s almost Romantic!” I believe is the quote on the add.
From Mike:
ReplyDeleteI think that I enjoyed reading this the most so far. Firstly, the actual website is really cool with how they have all of the books and you can just flip through them all like an actual book, just wasn't expecting that. But the actual reading was nice. I felt a lot less pressured to kind of understand what exactly was going on and a little more relaxed, it was a lot lighter than something like Frankenstein for example. I think the actual books are really cool in general. I like how you have a variety of things to choose from to maybe fit different peoples interests because it seems a lot of people have different opinions on what exactly science fiction is. The Amazing Stories gives everyone a chance to enjoy a story that by their own definition would call science fiction.