Here is science fiction before it learned to be anything but fearless. This April 1931 issue of Astounding Stories captures the genre at its most gloriously untamed: wild-eyed adventurers leaping through matter-transmitters to Mars, time travelers snatched from colonial America, alien intelligences lurking behind the moon. Edmond Hamilton sends two friends screaming across the void in 'Monsters of Mars,' while Ray Cummings begins his four-part saga 'The Exile of Time,' where a girl from 1777 appears in 1935 New York with impossible stories of mechanical kidnappers. The remaining stories range from cosmic horror to weird adventure, each one bursting with the sheer joy of imagining the unimaginable. These are not polished tales. They are rough, propulsive, utterly sincere attempts by writers who had barely any rules to follow to invent an entire universe. For anyone curious about where science fiction came from, or why it still matters, this is a time capsule of the moment the genre decided everything was possible.
