Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories was an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Before Amazing, 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.

Amazing was published, with some interruptions, for almost eighty years. The title first changed hands in 1929, when Gernsback was forced into bankruptcy and lost control of the magazine. In 1931, Bernarr Macfadden purchased the assets of the Mackinnon-Fly magazine publishers (in Canada), which gave him the pioneering sci-fi pulp Amazing Stories and several other titles. They were published under the Teck Publications imprint. Amazing became unprofitable during the 1930s and in 1938 was purchased by Ziff-Davis, who hired Raymond A. Palmer as editor. Palmer made the magazine successful though it was not regarded as a quality magazine within the science fiction community. In the late 1940s Amazing began to print stories about the Shaver Mystery, a lurid mythos that explained accidents and disaster as the work of robots named deros. The stories were presented as fact, and led to dramatically increased circulation but also widespread ridicule. Palmer was replaced by Howard Browne in 1949, who briefly entertained plans of taking Amazing upmarket. These plans came to nothing, though Amazing did switch to a digest format in 1953, shortly before the end of the pulp-magazine era. A brief period under the editorship of Paul W. Fairman was followed, at the end of 1958, by the leadership of Cele Goldsmith. Despite her lack of experience she was able to bring new life to the magazine, and her years are regarded as one of Amazing's most creative eras. She was unable to arrest the declining circulation, though, and the magazine was sold to Sol Cohen's Universal Publishing Company in 1965.

Under Cohen Amazing was filled almost entirely with reprinted stories. Cohen did not pay a reprint fee to the authors of these stories, and this brought him into conflict with the newly formed Science Fiction Writers of America. The conflict cost Amazing two successive editors (Harry Harrison and Barry N. Malzberg) in a short period at the end of the 1960s. Ted White took over as editor after Malzberg, eliminated the reprints and made the magazine a respected name again: Amazing was nominated for the prestigious Hugo award three times during his tenure. White left at the end of the 1970s. The 1980s saw Amazing pass into the hands of TSR in 1983 and Wizards of the Coast (who purchased TSR in 1997), who made intermittent attempts over the next twenty years to create a successful modern incarnation of the magazine. A last attempt was made by Paizo Publishing at the end of 2004, but publication was suspended after the March 2005 issue.

By 2008 Hasbro (which purchased Wizards of the Coast in 1999 ) had allowed the trademarks to expire. Application for the trademarks was made in 2008 and granted to Steve Davidson in September 2011. Publication of the magazine was then resumed in July, 2012 with the first of two 'relaunch prelaunch' issues (Volume 0) (July & August), featuring reprinted and excerpted fiction, new and reprinted non-fiction articles, art galleries and interviews, including works by Robert Silverberg, Barry Malzberg, Patrick L. Price and David A. Hardy. Amazing Stories is scheduled to begin regular publication as a professional online magazine sometime in 2013.

Gernsback's initial editorial approach was to blend instruction with entertainment; he believed science fiction could educate readers. His audience rapidly showed a preference for implausible adventures, however, and the movement away from Gernsback's idealism accelerated when the magazine changed hands in 1929. Despite this, Gernsback had an enormous impact on the field: the creation of a specialist magazine for science fiction spawned an entire genre publishing industry. The letter columns in Amazing, where fans could make contact with each other, led to the formation of science fiction fandom, which in turn had a strong influence on the development of the field. Writers whose first story was published in the magazine include Isaac Asimov, Howard Fast, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Thomas M. Disch. Overall, though, Amazing itself was rarely an influential magazine within the genre. Some critics have commented that by "ghettoizing" science fiction, Gernsback in fact did harm to its literary growth, but this viewpoint has been countered by the argument that science fiction needed an independent market to develop in to reach its potential.