Hugo Gernsback had a vision. The first all-Science Fiction magazine. It took him several years but in April 1926 he unveiled Amazing Stories onto an America that was ready for SF. The first dozen issues consisted largely of reprints, predominately by two authors: Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. In Hugo’s run as editor of Amazing Stories from April 1926 to April 1929, he would use seventeen short stories and seven novels by Herbert George Wells, including his most influential novels: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, the Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds.
The reasons for Gernsback relying so heavily on reprints was he could not find new authors who wrote Science Fiction of any quality. It took time and the reprints allowed readers (and writers) to see what SF really looked like. Eventually by September 1928, Gernsback would produce issues entirely made up of new stories from authors like G. Peyton Wertonbaker, David H. Keller, Jack Williamson and such classics as Philp Francis Nowlan’s Anthony “Buck” Rogers and E. E. Doc Smith’s Skylark of Space.
We can complain about the early issues being of less interest because they were mostly written before 1900, but I prefer to look at the good news rather than the bad. The other thing Hugo did was he gave us a chance to reimagine classic SF monsters from H. G. Wells in the illustrations from his magazine. The illustrators at Pearsons and The Strand did some good work but Frank R. Paul (1884-1963) at Amazing revamped these creations, giving them a new feeling of reality that few artists before him had. Not only did the stories inspire but the artwork as well. SF magazine illustration made its mark here in the opening pages of Amazing Stories.
