Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930

This is pulp science fiction in its purest, most berserk form. The September 1930 issue of Astounding Stories captures the genre at its infancy, when writers with more enthusiasm than physics knowledge dreamed up giant tentacled creatures, underwater kingdoms, and societies where rationality has curdled into something sinister. The anthology opens with Miles J. Breuer's "A Problem in Communication," in which a narrator investigates his friend's mysterious new community, a utopia of pure logic that has somehow made the man unrecognizable. Other stories include Ray Cummings's "Jetta of the Lowlands," undersea adventures with Paul Ernst, and Hugh B. Cave's "The Murder Machine" - because of course there is a murder machine. These stories run on vivid imagination and pure serendipity. The science is wrong in ways that would make modern physicists weep, but that's precisely the point. For readers who want to feel the genre being invented in real time, messy and magnificent and utterly unafraid of its own absurdity.