The Pulp Era: Burroughs and Bradbury

ENG 108 · Lecture 7

Erik Fredner

Oregon State University

Thu Oct 15, 2026

Adapted from course materials by Evan Gottlieb.

Text version

Today

The pulp era · Gernsback and Amazing Stories · Two Marses

The pulp magazine era, 1920–1940

Named for the paper: mass-produced on cheap, wood-pulp stock, untrimmed and acidic. Disposable by design, which is why surviving copies are scarce and why the Internet Archive matters to this unit.

The “big four” early pulps

All fiction, all genres, no specialization:

  • The Argosy
  • All-Story
  • The Blue Book Magazine
  • Adventure

Weird Tales (1923): “The Unique Magazine”

Weird Tales vol. 1 no. 1 (March 1923), at the Internet Archive.

Weird Tales and H. P. Lovecraft

February 1928 carried “The Call of Cthulhu” — the first of the Cthulhu mythos stories in the magazine.

Lovecraft is the most influential fantasy author not included in our anthologies, which is worth asking about in itself.

The first single-genre pulps

Specialization arrives in the 1910s and 20s — Detective Story Magazine, Western Story Magazine, Love Story Magazine. One of them ran from 1915 to 1949, well past a thousand issues.

Genre, in the sense we now use the word, is partly an artifact of magazine distribution.

Amazing Stories: the first all-SF pulp

  • Began publication April 1926, founded by Hugo Gernsback
  • The first pulp devoted entirely to science fiction
  • Ran for 609 issues

Vol. 1 no. 8 (November 1926), at the Internet Archive.

Gernsback’s introduction, April 1926

“Another fiction magazine! … But this is not ‘another fiction magazine.’ Amazing Stories is a new kind of fiction magazine! It is entirely new — entirely different — something that has never been done before in this country. Therefore, Amazing Stories deserves your attention and interest.”

“There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of ‘Scientifiction’ is a pioneer in its field in America.”

In the wake of Amazing Stories

Imitators and rivals follow quickly — Science Wonder Stories, Astounding Stories (1930), and the letter columns where fandom organizes itself into existence.

Two Marses

Burroughs and Bradbury

Today’s authors

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950)
  • Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)

Burroughs

Most famous creation: Tarzan (1912 onward) — and the merchandising, film, and comics empire that followed.

Nearly as influential: John Carter of Mars, beginning with A Princess of Mars (1912), the founding text of sword and planet fiction.

The line runs from sword and planet directly to the superhero: a displaced man with powers native to nobody else in the setting.

Bradbury

Best known: The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

And a great deal more — hundreds of stories, screenplays, and adaptations.

On Bradbury’s style

“There is a blending of nostalgic solace and childhood night terrors in Bradbury’s work. Certainties evaporate, and alienness is simultaneously externalized and internalized.”

Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 317.

Reading notes: “September 2005: The Martian”

  • Bradbury’s Mars is nothing like Burroughs’s. For Burroughs, Mars is an exotic setting for John Carter’s heroics, where he can be a prince with superpowers. Bradbury’s Mars is a sad place, where colonists from Earth are more intent on recreating their lives back home than on having adventures.
  • Without the title, you would not necessarily know from the opening that the story is set in the future on another planet.
  • The understated, melancholy treatment of colonization led critics to pan The Martian Chronicles for not being sufficiently science-fictional — and it is true that Bradbury is already moving away from the genre requirement that SF celebrate scientific progress and human ingenuity.
  • Bradbury’s stories represent a new kind of thought experiment: not “how do ordinary people become heroes when transplanted to new worlds?” but “how do ordinary people cope with their ordinariness when transplanted to a new world?”
  • Equally groundbreaking is how the story invites us to sympathize with the alien other as much as — or more than — the human characters. “Tom” first seems a threat; ultimately the humans are more of a threat to him.

For Tuesday

  • “The Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn (BBSF 240)
  • “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov (BBSF 300)