Amazing Stories launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback’s Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Science fiction stories had made regular appearances in other magazines, including some published by Gernsback, but Amazing helped define and launch a new genre of pulp fiction.
As of today, Amazing Stories has been published, with some interruptions, for ninety-two years, going through a half-dozen owners and many editors as it struggled to be profitable.
For the last two years, Steve Davidson and his Experimenter Publishing Company has been publishing Amazing Stories as a print magazine. Publisher Davidson and editor Ira Nayman want to keep this 92 year old tradition going. To that end they have launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the funds needed to continue publishing Amazing Stories as a print magazine.
“We love science fiction,” Steve Davidson says. “We’ve each got our own origin stories, our own definitions, our own understanding of that Sense of Wonder and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Our own lists of absolute favorites and passionate dislikes, our own boundary lines for those things that do it for us and those things that don’t.”
In no small way, none of that would be possible had it not been for Amazing Stories. It became the standard bearer for something unique and something very special. A genre called Science Fiction. This new magazine excited and inspired people like Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Jack Williamson, Arthur C. Clarke, C.L. Moore and even a naval midshipman named Robert A. Heinlein.
Since the Experimenter Publishing Company revived Amazing Stories as a fiction magazine in 2018 thay have published new fiction from some of the best known authors working in the field today, including Allen Steele, Julie Czerneda, Paul Levinson, Adam-Troy Castro, David Gerrold, Kameron Hurley, Lawrence Watt Evans and S. P. Somtow. They have also featured stories written by exciting new voices, writers who just might become your new favorites, including: Marie Bilodeau, Noah Chinn, Marc Criley, Kathy Critts, Rosie Smith, Liz Westbrook-Trenholm and Neal Holtschulte.
But the tradition does not just belong to the writers. Over its history Amazing Stories has set the tone for the imagery of the future. The original run gave us two and a half solid years of cover illustrations by the great Frank R. Paul. Amazing Stories continues that tradition today with some of the best cover artists: Tony Sart, M.D. Jackson, Al Sirois, Tom Barber, Yoko Matsuoka, Vincent di Fate and interior graphic artists like Amanda Makepeace, Matt Taggart, Melisa Des Rosiers, Renan Boe, Ron Miller, Tom Miller, Olivia Beelby, Chukwudi Nwaefulu, Steve Stiles, Phil Foglio and many others working today.
“In bringing back Amazing Stories, we had several goals.” says Davidson. “For instance, we wanted to both honor the legacy of Hugo Gernsback’s achievement and make it relevant again for a modern audience. In addition to that, we wanted to go against what we saw as the trend to darkness in science fiction, to promote a vision of the genre that was hopeful, optimistic, a vision of a future that we would want to live in.”
Davidson likes to think that Amazing Stories has succeeded in all of these goals. They‘ve also won an award or two in the process!
The National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F), one of the longest continuously operating fan clubs, co-founded by none other than Damon Knight (Co-founder of SFWA and a SFWA Grandmaster, co-founder of the Clarion and Milford Workshops and SF Hall of Fame inductee) declared Amazing Stories Winner of the Best Magazine category for their Neffy Awards in 2019.
“Amazing Stories deserves to be an ongoing part of our community. It may be a bit worn around the edges, the spine may be cracked a little and it may shed bits of pulp here and there, but those are love scars. Amazing Stories is not just our progenitor, it is the embodiment of the heart and soul of the genre.”
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/amazingstories/amazing-stories-year-two-once-more-dear-friends
Follow the link below to contribute to the Amazing Stories Kickstarter campaign.