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How Amazing Stories Invented Science Fiction 100 Years Ago

Amazing Stories debuted in April 1926 as the first magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction, then called 'scientifiction' by its 41-year-old publisher Hugo Gernsback. Priced at $0.25, the magazine collected speculative stories by Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe that had previously appeared elsewhere. Gernsback's innovation of publishing reader letters with addresses created science fiction fandom, eventually leading to the Hugo Awards and WorldCon. The magazine changed hands after Gernsback's 1929 bankruptcy but inspired a Golden Age of sci-fi publishing. Today, under publisher Steve Davidson since 2011, Amazing Stories operates as a website and plans to relaunch as a quarterly digital publication.