that it contained a reflection on 'the pseudo-scientific story': 'In plain words, this means a yarn, based upon solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to a logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact.' 3 The proffered definition was close to the formulations being tried out by Hugo Gernsback, who developed the term 'scientifiction' in his new journal Amazing Stories in 1926, simplified to 'science fiction' three years later. Both Gernsback's Amazing and Henneberger's Weird Tales appealed to the same literary forebears: Poe, Verne and Wells. Gernsback reprinted and serialised their stories, whilst readers of Weird Tales early on demanded 'more pseudo-scientific stories and more H. G. Wells stories.' 4 Poe worked to evoke atmospheres that he explicitly called 'weird'; Wells incorporated these elements into his self-conscious development of the 'scientific romance' in the 1890s (the epithet 'weird' occurs several times in The Time Machine, for instance, the Morlocks described as 'weird and horrible') 5. Weird Tales was not science fiction, however, and never became so. It was also not just a continuation of the late Victorian Gothic revival, but a mutation of it: something on the way to modern horror, which had not quite coalesced. The magazine promised on its front page 'A Wealth of Startling Thrill-Tales' and crossed into the territory of 'weird menace' typical of the so-called 'shudder pulps' that mixed up hard-boiled detective fiction, way-out Westerns and sadistic sexual torture. 6
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