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In April 1926, a Luxembourgian-American inventor and electrical enthusiast, Hugo Gernsback, published his inaugural issue of Amazing Stories, the first and longest-running English-language magazine dedicated to what was then not quite yet called "science fiction" but scientifiction—a field it would, for better and for worse, define for the modern era.

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In the foreword to Amazing's first number, Gernsback introduced his "New Sort of Magazine," geared as he said to the "entirely new world" of the modern. He cited as his forebears Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells—or the "new romancers," in a phrase that would later catch William Gibson's attention—and delineated a literary form aiming to instruct as well as entertain, to "impart knowledge … without once making us aware that we are being taught."