Amazing Stories, Vol. 2 No. 9

Two men in business suits sit amid a jungle of brass apparatus — glass globes, telegraph keys, rotating discs, coiled wires — while wearing goggled headsets that suggest they are transmitting or receiving something beyond ordinary sense. The artist signed Paul in the lower right; this is Frank R. Paul, the Czech-born illustrator whose covers defined early science fiction's visual language. Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, launched in 1926, was the first magazine devoted entirely to what he called "scientifiction." Wood-pulp paper kept the price to 25 cents; lurid, idea-driven painted covers sold the promise of wonder. Stories here by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Miles J. Breuer, M.D. show Gernsback anchoring pulp SF to literary precedent while inventing the genre the comic book would soon inherit.