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"Amazing Stories" (volume 1, number 1) is a 1926 pulp magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback.

Amazing Stories was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction, or "scientifiction" as Gernsback called the genre. It helped define the field, launched an entirely new brand of pulp fiction, and led to the formation of science fiction fandom as a semi-formal association of people. This, the first issue of the magazine (published April 1926), collected reprints of fiction Gernsback deemed fit into his new category of fiction. This includes three reprints of ninteenth century scientific romances: Jules Verne's "Off on a Comet" (the first part of a serialisation), H. G. Wells' "The New Accelerator" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (both complete). Newer material was reprinted from other magazines. Austin Hall's "The Man Who Saved the Earth" had been published in All-Story Weekly, while G. Peyton Wertenbaker's "The Man from the Atom" and George Allan England's "The Thing from—'Outside'" had both previously appeared in Science and Invention, one of Gernsback's existing magazines.

Another fiction magazine!

At first thought it does seem impossible that there could be room for another fiction magazine in this country. The reader may well wonder, "Aren't there enough already, with the several hundreds now being published?" True. But this is not "another fiction magazine," Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new—entirely different—something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest.

There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of "Scientifiction" is a pioneer in its field in America.

(Read on...)

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