From: gharlane@nextnet.csus.edu (Gharlane of Eddore)
Subject: EES/Gernsback/radio (was: Radio-Science Publications)
Followup-To: alt.dev.null
Summary: nope!   A real company!
Keywords: chlorans, hexans, Roeser's Rays, ultrawave.....
Organization: Evil Beings From Planet Eddore, Inc.
Distribution: usa
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 22:17:18 GMT

Dani the Zweig asked:

> Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 17:05:34 GMT
> From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
> Subject: Radio-Science Publications
> Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services
>                                    (408-241-9760 login: guest)
> 
> I recently reread EE Smith's "Spacehounds of IPC" -- one of the best
> "gadget sf" novels -- and noticed that its 1931 copyright was by
> "Radio-Science Publications Inc."  Was that a publisher or simply a
> name under which Smith incorporated his writing?
> 
> (I notice that while every other page is a pseudo-science lecture, of
> course, the subject that's expounded upon at greatest length is radio --
> real, pseudo, and ultra.  Would there have been a particular market for
> radio-oriented sf, or was radio -- like radium -- still something that
> carried an aura of being especially scientific and incompletely understood?)
> 

That was the name of Hugo Gernsback's publishing company, which later 
sold "AMAZING" to Ziff-Davis.   ("AMAZING" was where S.o.I.P.C. was 
first serialized, and in those days the magazines bought copyright 
rights..... you had to pry the repub rights loose with a stick to make
a book sale, and often the magazine took a cut to boot.   Gernsback, by
the way, was notoriously slow in paying his writers anyway!  "SPACEHOUNDS"
was the very first hardback published by Fantasy Press, in '47 or '48,
less than twenty years after first serialization, which shows how
much it was appreciated.)
 
Gernsback ran a number of magazines devoted to science, especially 
radio and electronics.   One of his magazines, aimed at amateur radio
experimenters, was the primary focus of most electronic invention in
the twenties and thirties.   The crossover readership was a very high
percentage, and most of the readers of "AMAZING" were the '20's 
equivalent of our present-day sci.hardware.hackers.........

"Ralph Milne Farley" (a pharmacist and radio amateur in real life) wrote
a series about a man transported to Venus, where all the native life 
forms communicate by radio; much of the original novel, "THE RADIO MAN"
(and the sequel, "THE RADIO BEASTS") deals with what the hero would have
to go through to build a crude radio set, starting with nothing but his
bare hands, in order to communicate with the local intelligent life.
  The kids ate it up.   (Ghawd, I loved those books when I was about 
eight or nine, and just working on my first ham license....) Gernsback
printed follow-up articles on geology, ore roasting, glass-blowing,
quartz crystal cutting, and so forth, demonstrating just how someone really
could pull something like that off.
 
  Some time find an UNedited copy of "ARMAGEDDON: 2419 A.D." from 1928....
it was reprinted in hardback in the fifties, and in a nicely-edited ACE
paperback version in the sixties (editor of that version was Don Wollheim)
and AMAZING reprinted the original version and the sequel, "AIRLORDS OF 
THE HAN," in the early sixties as well....   The writer, Philip Francis
Nowlan, was a sometime radio amateur and electronically literate, by the
standards of the era.   He invented a relatively rational, although 
completely incorrect, extension of physics, and used it well.   (Smith's
"THE SKYLARK OF SPACE" was the cover story in the August, 1928 issue of
"AMAZING," which also just *happened* to contain "ARMAGEDDON: 2419 A.D." 
Kind of an important issue; those two stories set the tenor and style of
SF for the next decade, right up to the start of the Campbell Editorial
Era.) 
 
   You have to remember that in those days, SF was the province of the 
technically literate, the kids who spent all their time in the garage 
messing with a set of type 27A triode tubes, trying to receive signals
of shorter wavelength than forty meters....amateurs were "brass pounders"
rather than talkers, because audio modulation represented huge cost 
increase and drop in output efficiency for the transmitters that could
be built on a private budget.....   This, and narrow-bandwidth efficiency,
is the reason EES' hero in "SPACEHOUNDS" automatically used a code key 
and an unmodulated cw signal to phone home from Titan.

Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written