Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930

This is pulp science fiction in its raw, riotous infancy. The October 1930 issue of Astounding Stories captures a moment when writers were inventing the genre in real time, throwing every wild idea at the page: stolen brains, invisible death rays, electrons containing entire savage worlds, fly above remote lowlands where scientific bandits hold sway. Dr. Bird and Operative Carnes lead the charge in "Stolen Brains," hunting a villainous dwarf named Slavatsky who extracts a mysterious substance called menthium from kidnapped intellectuals, luring them through lookalike doubles and an underground laboratory in the Maine woods. Victor Rousseau offers up "The Invisible Death," where America fights back against an invisible empire with night-rays and darkness-antidote. Robert H. Leitfred strands two earthlings in the savage jungles of an electron. Ray Cummings continues his serial "Jetta of the Lowlands" in part two of three. These stories don't just predict the future - they riotously imagine it, unconstrained by physics or taste, full of the giddy optimism and terror that defined an era staring into the machine age. If you want to understand where science fiction came from, you start here, with these gloriously unhinged progenitors.