Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930

This is pulp science fiction at its most gloriously earnest: the March 1930 issue of Astounding Stories, the magazine that helped invent the genre we now call SF. The opening story, S. P. Meek's "Cold Light," drops readers into a chilling mystery when an airplane crashes and its pilot and crew are found shattered like glass, leading Dr. Bird to investigate a scientifically inexplicable phenomenon involving mysterious cold. The issue continues with Ray Cummings's "Brigands of the Moon" (the first installment of a four-part serial), R. J. Robbins and Will Smith's "The Soul Master," Sewell Peaslee Wright's "From the Ocean's Depths," and A. T. Locke's "Vandals of the Stars." These are stories written when authors could still imagine space travel as a grand adventure, when the ocean's depths held genuine terrors, and when "super-science" meant machines built with brass, ambition, and blind faith in progress. The prose is stiff, the science is quaint, and the sense of wonder is absolutely genuine. For readers who want to see where science fiction came from, or who crave adventure that doesn't take itself too seriously, this is a time capsule worth opening.