The name didn't stick. The fan communities did.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Between blockbuster movies, TV series, whole sections of bookstores, sci-fi is seemingly ubiquitous these days, but there was a time when science fiction wasn't on shelves everywhere. One hundred years ago, the very first science fiction magazine published its very first issue. It was called Amazing Stories. Chris Klimek is a writer and critic, and he has been revisiting old issues for us. Hey there.
CHRIS KLIMEK: Hi, Juana. Nice to be back on the show.
SUMMERS: Great to have you. So start by just telling us a little more about this magazine as well as your relationship to it.
KLIMEK: So my first association with Amazing Stories was the covers. The first three years of issues had these lurid cover paintings by this artist named Frank R. Paul that I imagine in the '20s would have made these things just leap off the newsstands. I knew that some big sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov and Ursula K. Le Guin had had their first works published in Amazing Stories. What I learned is that Hugo Gernsback, who's the radio whiz who founded the magazine, the man for whom the Hugo awards for excellence in sci-fi and fantasy are named now - he published a mission statement in the first issue about this emerging genre that he called scientifiction (ph) (laughter). So these are stories that are meant to entertain, but that keep the focus on future developments in scientific discovery or technological advancement and how that might change us. So we now retroactively have called this science fiction...
SUMMERS: OK.
KLIMEK: ...Because you saw what happened to my face...
SUMMERS: Right.
KLIMEK: ...When I tried to say scientifiction.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
KLIMEK: But there wasn't really a name for that when H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne were writing their stories, and all of whom had old pieces reprinted in that first issue of Amazing Stories, by the way.
SUMMERS: OK. And how did those early stories embody scientifiction?
KLIMEK: Well, like I mentioned, they were, you know, mostly reprints early on, but one that struck me as a good example of this was called "The Man From The Atom." This was a writer who I didn't know named G. Peyton Wertenbaker, who later goes on to work for NASA. But in this story, a man agrees to test a device that can shrink or enlarge anything on himself. So he grows to galactic size, you know, vaster than galaxies. And by the time it occurs to him he should hit the reverse button and try to go home, he realizes he has no way of knowing which of these little points of light is his home galaxy. And also, because of relativity, what seemed to him to be just a few minutes has been eons, and everyone he knows back on Earth - probably the entire planet and the sun - is now dead. So that's a crude illustration of relativity, but you get it, right?
SUMMERS: Right.
KLIMEK: And a lot of the big sci-fi franchises, even now, they tend to ignore relativity and time dilation because it's just difficult to deal with that, right? So that sort of hand-waving is something that even Hugo Gernsback wrote about in that first issue of Amazing Stories. He wrote this five-paragraph introduction to a Jules Verne story that was 50 years old even then, basically saying, well, look, I accept that the premise of this is silly, but if you grant the premise, beyond that, he pretty much sticks to the science.
SUMMERS: I mean, today, we know that sci-fi has a really strong fan community. I take it, it didn't start with one though, right?
KLIMEK: No. And I mean, that's really the most singular reason that Amazing Stories is notable because the letters column would publish the full addresses of the correspondent so they could write to each other.
SUMMERS: Interesting.
KLIMEK: Yeah, it's like the Jazz Age version of Reddit, right? That letter column is how the current publisher, a man named Steve Davidson, told me he got involved. He started writing in to the magazine as a young reader in the '70s. But the development of an organized fandom with clubs and things through the 1930s leads us into a period that's now referred to as the golden age of science fiction, roughly the '40s through the '60s.
SUMMERS: And I take it that other magazines caught onto what Amazing Stories was doing pretty quickly.
KLIMEK: Very quickly - yeah, so other publications like Astounding, which eventually becomes Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and Galaxy Science Fiction, they come along to compete with and even eclipse Amazing Stories. But Gernsback did it first. Amazing Stories is still going. It's operated mostly as a website since 2013, but they are getting ready to relaunch this year as a quarterly that you will be able to order as a print-on-demand physical magazine if you want it on paper.
SUMMERS: Chris Klimek is a writer and critic, and you can hear him often on Pop Culture Happy Hour. Thanks so much.
KLIMEK: Lovely to talk to you, Juana. Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
Accuracy and availability of NPR transcripts may vary. Transcript text may be revised to correct errors or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org may be edited after its original broadcast or publication. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
