• Preface Acknowledgements List of Tables Chronology Chapter One: Goodbye to all That: The Old Gateways One Step...Forwards? The Gatherings at the Gate The King is Dead... ...Long live the King The Forgotten Editor How the Mighty Fall Sex and Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll The Anchor Mag New Blood, New Clothes Chapter Two: All This and Elwood Too: The Rival Gateways The Threat from Within The British Dimension Experiments in Orbit The Depths of Infinity From Nova to Quark Universe and New Dimensions The New Generations Select Bibliography Index The Female Perspective The Elwood Factor Heroes and Villains The Threat from Without Chapter Three: Small but Dangerous: The Alternate Gateways Little Wonders The Fantastic Dimension Graphic Developments Rival Roles Spawn of the Weird Under Scrutiny Chapter Four: Back to the Future: The Final Gateways The Rise and Fall of Galileo A Fate Worse than Death The Cosmos Experience Asimov Triumphs Asimov Expansion Amazing Days Star Mags Super Science SF Destiny Chapter Five: Looking Back: The Gateways in Perspective Select Bibliography Index.
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This third volume in Mike Ashley's four-volume study of the science-fiction magazines focuses on the turbulent years of the 1970s, when the United States emerged from the Vietnam War into an economic crisis. It saw the end of the Apollo moon programme and the start of the ecology movement. This proved to be one of the most complicated periods for the science-fiction magazines. Not only were they struggling to survive within the economic climate, they also had to cope with the death of the father of modern science fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr., while facing new and potentially threatening opposition. The market for science fiction diversified as never before, with the growth in new anthologies, the emergence of semi-professional magazines, the explosion of science fiction in college, the start of role-playing gaming magazines, underground and adult comics and, with the success of Star Wars, media magazines. This volume explores how the traditional science-fiction magazines coped with this, from the death of Campbell to the start of the major popular science magazine Omni and the first dreams of the Internet.
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• Before the creation
• An amazing experiment
• Towards the golden age
• The golden age
• Unleashing the atom.

Originally conceived as a trilogy, this is the first of five volumes that chart the history of the science fiction magazine from the earliest days to the present. This first volume looks at the exuberant years of the pulp magazines. It traces the growth and development of the science fiction magazines from when Hugo Gernsback launched the very first, Amazing Stories, in 1926 through to the birth of the atomic age and the death of the pulps in the early 1950s. These were the days of the youth of science fiction, when it was brash, raw and exciting: the days of the first great space operas by Edward Elmer Smith and Edmond Hamilton, through the cosmic thought variants by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and others to the early 1940s when John W. Campbell at Astounding did his best to nurture the infant genre into adulthood. Under him such major names as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and Theodore Sturgeon emerged who, along with other such new talents as Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke, helped create modern science fiction. For over forty years magazines were at the heart of science fiction and this book considers how the magazines, and their publishers, editors and authors influenced the growth and perception of this fascinating genre.
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• Introduction. "The Hope of Today and the Reality of Tomorrow": Popular Science, Popular Culture, and Science Fiction PART I. CIRCULATION 1 "Magazines for Morons": Pulp Magazines and the Emergence of Science Fiction 2 Conversations from the "Backyard": Reading and Imagining Community PART II. READING 3 Discovering the Freedom of Facts: Fact, Fiction, and the Authority of Science 4 Involving Adventure, Reassuring Romance: Engendering Science Fiction's Domestic Tranquillity 5 Human Martians and Asian Aliens: The Racial Nature of Wondrous Worlds 6 The Progress of Time: Einstein, History, and the Dimensions of Time Travel PART III. PRACTICE 7 "Fandom Is Just a Goddamn Hobby": The Industry of Fans and Professionals 8 "We Want to Play with Spaceships": Popular Rocket Science in Action Epilogue. Beyond the "Gernsback Continuum": Science Fiction's Community and Social Networks List of Abbreviations Notes Index Acknowledgments.
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When physicist Robert Goddard, whose career was inspired by H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, published "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, " the response was electric. Newspaper headlines across the country announced, "Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon, " while people from around the world, including two World War I pilots, volunteered as pioneers in space exploration. Though premature (Goddard's rocket, alas, was only imagined), the episode demonstrated not only science's general popularity but also its intersection with interwar popular and commercial culture. In that intersection, the stories that inspired Goddard and others became a recognizable genre: science fiction. Astounding Wonder explores science fiction's emergence in the era's "pulps, " colorful magazines that shouted from the newsstands, attracting an extraordinarily loyal and active audience. Pulps invited readers not only to read science fiction but also to participate in it, joining writers and editors in celebrating a collective wonder for and investment in the potential of science. But in conjuring fantastic machines, travel across time and space, unexplored worlds, and alien foes, science fiction offered more than rousing adventure and romance. It also assuaged contemporary concerns about nation, gender, race, authority, ability, and progress-about the place of ordinary individuals within modern science and society-in the process freeing readers to debate scientific theories and implications separate from such concerns. Readers similarly sought to establish their worth and place outside the pulps. Organizing clubs and conventions and producing their own magazines, some expanded science fiction's community and created a fan subculture separate from the professional pulp industry. Others formed societies to launch and experiment with rockets. From debating relativity and the use of slang in the future to printing purple fanzines and calculating the speed of spaceships, fans' enthusiastic industry revealed the tensions between popular science and modern science. Even as it inspired readers' imagination and activities, science fiction's participatory ethos sparked debates about amateurs and professionals that divided the worlds of science fiction in the 1930s and after.
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Ron Rozelle's new novel, ""Touching Winter"", is a four-part evocation of memory and place and the yearning for home. Each part of the novel begins with a meditation on one aspect of the protagonist's life as he watches the unpredictable weather of East Texas. When Will was a young boy, he and his grandfather enjoyed being out in the spectacular East Texas storms. These sessions taught Will many things about life - ranching, weather, character, how to be a man - and bound Will to the family land and to his grandfather. Only at the ranch does Will feel like the person he was, or would like to be, before wrong decisions turned his life down an entirely different path. A powerful, early romance proved disastrous, and the relationship haunts him. To compensate for lost love, Will carved a niche for himself in the competitive concrete industry, inventing a technique to make mixing trucks more efficient and becoming wealthier than he could have dreamed. His marriage to a Houston socialite is thin and brittle, unsatisfying for his wife, Lauren, and for himself. Their daughter Aimee lives in California, as far away from her family as possible. As Will ages, he turns to the ranch as a place of clarity in times of crisis, eventually moving back there entirely. He exchanges the public life he and Lauren led in Houston for the simplicity of walks along the rustic fence, lunch with old friends at the town's only diner, and long evenings on the porch watching the stars. Along the way, a fierce, red-breasted hawk comes to represent the spiritual for Will, and he is forced to face the consequences of earlier decisions.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)