How Do You Collect Science Fiction Pulps?
Back when there was no television or Internet and radio was a fledgling medium, people were entertained largely by the written word in low-cost pulp magazines. There were all kinds of pulps—named as such for the low-quality, acid-based paper upon which they were printed—from Western and Romance pulps, to detective, true crime and railroad pulps. And then there were the science fiction pulps. The first one, “Amazing Stories,” made its debut in April 1926 when science fiction didn’t even have a name. The editor, Hugo Gernsbeck, coined the term scientifiction that later became science fiction.SF, as those in the field call it—not sci-fi, not ever—was a ghetto, a place where only “weird” people dwelled. Those “weird” people grew up with the kinds of imaginations that put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon a few decades later.Back then, in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the universe opened with garish-colored covers and science and adventure that took readers across space, acros
