The Pulp Era

The earliest issues of Gernsback’s Amazing Stories were devoted largely to reprints of Verne Wells, and other authors of fantasy, but slowly Gernsback developed a group of science-fiction writers, most of them pulp-magazine, Astounding Stories (soon to be called Astounding Science Fiction), was founded in 1930. The science-fiction writer John W. Campbell assumed its editorship in 1937 and was an active force in the field until his death his death in 1971.

During Campbell’s editorship, the first generation of writers in England and America who had been nurtured on Amazing Stories and the early Astounding Stories began to produce their own science fiction literature. Under Campbell’s tutelage, they established science fiction’s “golden age”. Issac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A.E. Van Vogt were among the most important of this generation. In the 1950s they were joined by Arthur Clarke, Frederik Pohl, and others whose work extended the reach of science fiction.

Science Fiction Enters the Mainstream

The sudden and horrifying use of nuclear weapons in a way that had been predicted by science fiction for years brought the field a new prominence. Science was read as serious literature for the first time, largely because it was judged to be attracted to the field and brought out anthologies drawn almost exclusively from Astounding, as well reprinting older science fiction novels and publishing new works.