page_title: History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950
section_title: Early magazines
hierarchical_section_title: History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950 / Early magazines
caption_attribution_description: Modern Electrics, February 1912. Volume 4 Number 11. The cover story is "Ralph 124C 41 +", written by Hugo Gernsback. This was serialized in 12 installments starting in April 1911. Modern Electrics was the predecessor to Electrical Experimenter magazine. A caption for this image: "Ralph in his space flyer overhauls the Martian, Llysanorh. He will trap him with his Ultra-Generator" Steckler, Larry (2007) Hugo Gernsback, A Man Well Ahead of His Time, pg 245, ISBN:1-4196-5858-1
context_page_description: Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters.
context_section_description: By the end of the 19th century, stories with recognizably science fictional content were appearing regularly in American magazines.  These magazines typically did not print fiction to the exclusion of other content; they would include non-fiction articles and poetry as well.  In October 1896, the Frank A. Munsey company's Argosy magazine was the first to switch to printing only fiction, and in December of that year it began using cheap wood-pulp paper. This is now regarded by magazine historians as having been the start of the pulp magazine era. For twenty years the pulps were successful without restricting their fiction content to any specific genre, but in 1915 the influential magazine publisher Street & Smith began to issue titles that focused on a particular niche, such as Detective Story Magazine and Western Story Magazine, thus pioneering the specialized and single-genre pulps.
  As the pulps proliferated, they continued to carry science fiction (SF), both in the general fiction magazines such as Argosy and All-Story, and in the more specialized titles such as sports, detective fiction, and (especially) the hero pulps.  Science fiction also appeared outside the world of pulps: Hugo Gernsback, who had begun his career as an editor and publisher in 1908 with a radio hobbyist magazine called Modern Electrics, soon began including articles speculating about future uses of science, such as "Wireless on Saturn", which appeared in the December 1908 issue.  The article was written with enough humour to make it clear to his readers that it was simply an imaginative exercise, but in 1911 Modern Electrics began serializing Ralph 124C 41+, a novel set in the year 2660.  In 1913 Gernsback launched another magazine, The Electrical Experimenter (retitled Science and Invention in 1920), which frequently ran science fictional tales, written both by Gernsback and others.
  In 1919, Street & Smith launched The Thrill Book, a magazine for stories that were unusual or unclassifiable in some way, which in most cases meant that they included either fantasy or science-fiction elements.  The Thrill Book ceased publication in October 1919, having lasted sixteen issues; it carried some science fiction, particularly towards the end of its short run, but is not generally regarded as a science-fiction or fantasy pulp.  Two years later, Gernsback launched yet another magazine, titled Practical Electrics, and in 1924 he sent a letter to its subscribers suggesting a magazine that would publish only scientific fiction.  The response was weak, and Gernsback shelved the project.
caption: Ralph 124C 41+, by Hugo Gernsback, serialized in Modern Electrics in 1912
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