ABSTRACT
When Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories in 1926 he had reason to believe there was an existing market for stories like those by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. In his other magazines, particularly The Electrical Experimenter (1913–20), Gernsback had discovered a receptive audience with a fondness for both the engineering stories he would champion (and which allied him with Verne) and the more lyrical scientific romances descended from Wells (a contemporary of Gernsback and of many of his readers). Wells and Verne were recorded as staple reading matter by many correspondents of the pulps (if only as complaints about Gernsback’s use of reprints to fill out the early magazines). The “pulp” element of the new sf came not from Gernsback directly (who disapproved of it) but from the nature of the commercial market in the 1920s, and sf’s habit of borrowing, begging, and stealing its clothes from every other popular genre developing contemporaneously. In addition, it came from a change in the market and a wider understanding of what constituted proper literature for adults.
