Amazing Stories

Amazing Stories is an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Before Amazing, science fiction stories had made regular appearances in other magazines, including some published by Gernsback, but Amazing helped define and launch a new genre of pulp fiction.

Amazing was published, with some interruptions, for almost eighty years. The title first changed hands in 1929, when Gernsback was forced into bankruptcy and lost control of the magazine. In 1931, Bernarr Macfadden purchased the assets of the Mackinnon-Fly magazine publishers (in Canada), which gave him the pioneering sci-fi pulp Amazing Stories and several other titles. They were published under the Teck Publications imprint. Amazing became unprofitable during the 1930s and in 1938 was purchased by Ziff-Davis, who hired Raymond A. Palmer as editor. Palmer made the magazine successful though it was not regarded as a quality magazine within the science fiction community. In the late 1940s Amazing began to print stories about the Shaver Mystery, a lurid mythos that explained accidents and disaster as the work of robots named deros. The stories were presented as fact, and led to dramatically increased circulation but also widespread ridicule. Palmer was replaced by Howard Browne in 1949, who briefly entertained plans of taking Amazing upmarket. These plans came to nothing, though Amazing did switch to a digest format in 1953, shortly before the end of the pulp-magazine era. A brief period under the editorship of Paul W. Fairman was followed, at the end of 1958, by the leadership of Cele Goldsmith. Despite her lack of experience she was able to bring new life to the magazine, and her years are regarded as one of Amazing's most creative eras. She was unable to arrest the declining circulation, though, and the magazine was sold to Sol Cohen's Universal Publishing Company in 1965.

Amazing Stories (TV series)

Amazing Stories is a fantasy, horror, and science fiction television anthology series created by Steven Spielberg. It originally ran on NBC in the United States from 1985 to 1987.

The series was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards and won five. The first season episode "The Amazing Falsworth" earned writer Mick Garris an Edgar Award for Best Episode in a TV Series. It was not a ratings hit (ranking 40th in Season 1 and 46th in Season 2), however, and the network did not renew it after the two-year contract expired. The 1987 science fiction movie *batteries not included was originally intended to be featured in Amazing Stories, but Steven Spielberg liked the idea so much that he decided to make it a theatrical release.

The series title licensed the name of Amazing Stories, the first dedicated science fiction magazine.

Episodes

The series list below is annotated with the Book numbers as they appeared in the US release on VHS; the Japanese LaserDisc and UK VHS (PAL) releases are indicated with volume numbers. Note that Vol. 7 and 8 are switched for the UK VHS release. All episodes have a running time of around 25 minutes, with the exceptions of "The Mission" and "Go To The Head Of The Class" (both running 50 minutes).