If you love reading about the history of science fiction, you should love reading Jim Emerson’s series Futures Past. I’ve previously reviewed the volumes for 1926 & 1927, and 1928. In the early 1990s Emerson started this project as a fanzine focusing on the history of science fiction, and published four issues: 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 before he had to stop. Then a few years ago when he retired Emerson started over with 1926 and expanded each fanzine issue to a softbound book. The latest volume, 1929, is 222 pages. The largest volume yet. Jim says 1929 should be ready to ship in mid-October. You can order pdf, softbound, and hardbound editions here.

Jim writes all the content, and I’m jealous of his knowledge of science fiction’s history. Each volume contains a Year in Review section that covers science fiction books, magazines, plays, and movies of the year, while documenting the people and events related to that year. But more than, that, Emerson includes in each volume a handful of long articles about the history of specific science fictional subjects that lead up to that year.

For example, the 1929 volume has a ninety page overview of women science fiction writers from 1666-1925. I’ve read a lot of SF history and I didn’t know about most of these books or their writers. Our collective culture forgets so much – why did they forget all these women writers?

Other significant articles include the “Evolution of the SF Name” which unearthed far more old examples of the term than I’ve previously known about. In the “Gernsback Bankruptcy” Emerson explains how Hugo Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories and immediated create Science Wonder Stories. Hugo was a wheeler-dealer, and somewhat shady. Besides his magazines he had a radio station, and was an early broadcaster of TV. It blew my mind that Gernsback was paying himself $50,000 a year. That was a tremendous salary in the 1920s when the average worker was proud to make $25 a week.

I’ve always been fascinated by the history of science fiction. We tend to live in an awareness bubble that extends from decade or two before we start reading science fiction to when we lose contact with the genre as we age out. I grew up in the 1950s, starting to read science fiction in 1962, but I was reading stories that were mostly published in the 1950s, and some from the 1940s. I’m in my seventies now, but I’ve mainly lost contact with what’s going on in the genre in the early 2000s. Futures Past portrays the genre in the 1920s, and very early 1930s, and it’s very different. Have you ever thought about what being a science fiction fan in the Roaring Twenties?

One reason I like reading about the history of science fiction is discovering what science fiction fans and writers were like before my bubble of awareness began. The genre has changed several time over the course of my reading lifetime. And reading Futures Past shows how science fiction changed several times before it became the science fiction I knew as science fiction in the 1960s. Reading through the descriptions of the SF books of 1929, or the descriptions of the SF books written by women from 1666 to 1925 reveals that people have always had a fascinating with the fantastic and they’ve always speculated about the possibilities. But how they speculated depended on the common knowledge of the day. In 1929, people still thought there were things and places on Earth still to be discovered, including other intelligent beings.

Well, 1929 was also when the first science fiction clubs and fanzines were formed. Fandom arose concurrently with the early days of rocketry clubs, which were sprouting up around the world, and Emerson has articles covering the histories of both. All of that is fascinating to me. The 1920s and 1930s were when my parents grew up. I wonder if they even knew about science fiction.

For most science fiction fans this history will be too far in the past. So far in the past that it’s an alien landscape. They might be shocked by the weird ideas writers used to create their science fiction, such as lost races, hidden species, about prehistory civilizations like Atlantis and Mu, rejuvenation, utopias, eugenics, future wars, spiritualism, the occult, strange mutations, and so on. They just didn’t have the science we do now. And they believed that all the planets of the solar systems and their moons could harbor intelligent life.

With the aid of the internet, The Internet Archive, and YouTube, you can read the futures past science fiction in old books, magazines, fanzines, and watch the old movies. Emerson summarizes every issue from six SF magazines from 1929: Amazing Stories, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Quarterly, and Weird Tales, and quickly covers several general pulp magazines that featured science fiction. He also reviews the science fiction books that came out that year too. 1929 will go into public domain in January, but most of the magazines are already available online at the Internet Archive. Just search on the magazine’s name plus 1929. Search for book titles on Google and the Internet Archive. Search for the films on YouTube.

By the way, the YouTube channel, Mars Wants Movies, is running a history of science fiction films, and is currently up to the year 1948. It covered the 1920s in six episodes, and devoted a whole episode to 1929. This makes a great supplement to Futures Past with links to those old movies you can watch on YouTube.

Also, you can read the early fanzines at Fanac.org, including The Comet v. 1 n. 1. mentioned in Emerson’s article on the first science fiction clubs.

Here’s Volume 4’s Table of Contents:

I subscribed to Futures Past when it was a fanzine back in the early 1990s. I was disappointed when it stopped publication at 1929. Jim tells me he’s hard at work on 1930 already, and plans to cover many more years in his retirement. I’m really looking forward to the 1930s. I used to think of the 1930s as the early days of science fiction, but Futures Past shows that the origins of science fiction go way back. Emerson’s etomological search for the origins of the phrase science fiction reveals it began way before Amazing Stories.

James Wallace Harris, 10/11/24