The Pulp Magazines and Frankenstein
CSUF’s Special Collections has one of the most spectacular troves of old pulp science fiction anywhere. Published on cheap paper, with notoriously lurid covers, pulps magazines play a crucial role in the history of science fiction. Mary Shelley writes the first science fiction novel, but what she writes is not called science fiction, not then; sf only becomes a named genre in the pulp magazines in the US during the 1920s-30s. Mary Shelley calls her novel a “ghost story.” H.G. Wells calls his works “Scientific Romance.” Hugo Gernsback founded the first specialist sf magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926, but first called the genre “scientifiction.” Legendary editor John W. Campbell took over Astounding Stories in 1937, changed the name to Astounding Science-Fiction in March 1938, and ushered in a “Golden Age” of science fiction as a newly emergent field of literature.
Amazing (April, 1926):
Astounding (March, 1938):
Frankenstein is a major influence on the pulps, with countless Mad Scientists destroyed by their ill-considered experiments. Many others recast Shelley’s “sympathetic monster” who wonders if he is human as instead a robot awakening to consciousness. To choose two ready examples: H.P. Lovecraft invents one of the most famous mad scientists to emerge from the the pulps with “Herbert West: Reanimator” (Weird Tales, March 1942), the protagonist of many vivisectionist tales; Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories, among the most famous robot stories, first exist as a series of stories in the pulps, beginning with “Strange Playfellow” (Super Science Stories, September 1940).
Weird Tales (March 1942):
Super Science Stories (September 1940):
Frequent titles reference Shelley’s novel directly, including “Frankenstein—Unlimited” (H.A. Highstone, Astounding Stories, December 1936), “Frankenstein of Flesh and Blood” (J.O. Quinliven, Dime Mystery Magazine, September 1938), “Test-Tube Frankenstein,” (Wayne Robins, Terror Tales, May 1940), “I am a Frankenstein!” (Wayne Rogers, Terror Tales, September 1940), “Dr. Farrell’s Frankenstein” (Lynn Standish, Amazing Stories, September 1950), and many more.
Astounding Stories (December 1936):
Dime Mystery Magazine (September 1938):
Terror Tales (May 1940):
Terror Tales (September 1940):
Amazing Stories (September 1950):
Women Writing Pulps
The pulp magazines are largely written by male writers. Stories by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Allan Poe are frequently reprinted in the earliest pulp magazines as the “roots” of the form are set down. But Mary Shelley precedes them all. According to contemporary reviews of Frankenstein, Shelley, a teenaged young woman when writing her tale, should not have written her “monster” book at all—she is a monster to have done it. Like her Creature, she desires more, and achieves more, than she is allowed to do. Her achievements have been widely influential to other writers, but especially women writers of sf.
Largely written by men, women succeed in the pulps with Mary Shelley as inspiration. Clare Winger Harris is the first woman to write pulp sf under her own name. She published her first professional story in Weird Tales (July 1926). When she took third place in a contest run by ground-breaking editor Hugo Gernsback, he remarked “as a rule, women do not make good scientifiction writers” but Harris was “the exception” that “proves the rule” (Amazing Stories, June 1927). Mary Shelley had also been treated condescendingly, as when H.G. Wells, mindful of his own claims to precedence, dismissed her work as “jiggery-pokery magic.” Frankenstein effects the tradition on sf from 19th century vivisection and scientific breakthrough stories to the ubiquitous mad scientists of the pulps, but not until an influx of women writers enter genre sf in the 1970s does renewed attention to Shelley’s work her place as an important “foremother” of the whole sf enterprise.
Weird Tales (July 1926):
Mary Shelley is first claimed as the origin point for science fiction only in the 1970s. Subsequent scholarly work has since established the solid scientific underpinnings of her speculations. Only the rise of Feminism in the 1970s helped to establish Shelley’s work as a classic. But Shelley succeeded despite the headwinds, and other writers followed her lead.
Clare Winger Harris’ “Menace from Mars” (Amazing Stories, October 1928) marks the first time a woman writer had her name on the cover of a science fiction magazine. She would return with cover stories in December 1928, May 1929, December 1929, and Winter 1929.
Amazing Stories (October 1928):
Amazing Stories (December 1928):
Amazing Stories (May 1929):
Amazing Stories (December 1929):
Amazing Stories (Winter 1929):
Other pulp stories by women writers in The Frankenstein Meme database include Sophie Wenzal Harris, “Creatures of the Light” (Astounding Stories of Super-Science, February 1930), Kathleen Ludwick, “Dr. Immortale” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1930), and Margaret St. Clair, “Lazarus” (Startling Stories, Fall 1955).
Astounding Stories of Super-Science (February 1930):
Amazing Stories Quarterly (Fall 1930):
Startling Stories (Fall 1955):
The major “Golden Age” writer C.L. Moore appears twice, co-writing “The Proud Robot” (Astounding Science-Fiction, October 1943) and writing the classic, oft-reprinted monstrous birth story “No Woman Born” (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1944).
Astounding Science-Fiction (October 1943):
Astounding Science-Fiction (December 1944):
