Histoire des pulps

[Erion]

Sur le site io9 (le meilleur magazine d'info sur la science-fiction accessible sur le net) a débuté une histoire des pulps. La première partie s'arrête à 1937.
http://io9.com/5680191/where-did-scienc ... -the-pulps

On notera quelques éléments intéressants.

Sur Amazing :
In retrospect Amazing Stories is influential because it was the first, not because of any particular content it had. For its first six months, only six of thirty-eight stories were original (the rest were reprints). Throughout Gernsback's reign nearly all of the original material was mediocre; only two stories, Jack Williamson's "The Metal Men" and H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space," can be considered good. Gernsback, whose reputation among professional writers was quite low – Barry Malzberg has written eloquently of Gernsback's "venality and corruption, his sleaziness and his utter disregard for the financial rights of authors" – had trouble attracting better writers, in large part because Weird Tales and Argosy were both paying better. And Amazing's influence was hardly immediate. No other science-fiction-only pulps appeared in 1926 or 1927. In 1928, Gernsback brought out Amazing Stories Quarterly, which lasted a respectable six years and 22 issues but which had generally low quality material.

Amazing contre Astounding :
The field was to change considerably during the 1930-1932 period. 1930 began with the debut of Astounding Stories, which would eventually become the greatest of the science fiction pulps. Astounding (as a pulp, 385 issues, 1930-1963) was of particular importance in 1930 because it was a science fiction pulp entirely independent of Hugo Gernsback. Astounding was backed by the Clayton Magazine publishers, which meant it was free of the financing and distribution problems of American Pioneer Tales and Pioneer Tales. Purely by virtue of its ongoing existence, it provided a reasonable alternative to Gernsback. However, from 1930-1933 Astounding was a poor imitation of Amazing, with formulaic and thoroughly mediocre content-Astounding's glory days were years in the future.

1930 was also the year that Hugo Gernsback would try yet again to recreate the success of Amazing. Gernsback merged Air Wonder Stories and Science Wonder Stories into, simply, Wonder Stories. Thanks to Gernsback's hands-off management techniques, Wonder Stories (66 issues, 1930-1936) was able to run somewhat unusual (for the pulps) material as well as translations of French and German science fiction, and while none of the stories are worth pursuing for a modern reader, at the time Wonder Stories provided a destination for stories that were too different and unusual for the formulaic content of Amazing or Astounding. However, thanks to Gernsback, Wonder Stories' reputation among top-level writers was no better than Amazing's had been, and the best writers sent their stories elsewhere.