'Scientifiction'. NPR article on Amazing Stories at 100.

Amazing Stories was like nothing else when its April 1926 issue appeared on newsstands. Between its lurid painted covers was the first magazine devoted exclusively to the publication of what came to be called science fiction — though its 41-year-old publisher, Hugo Gernsback, called its mindbending contents by a different name: scientifiction.

"By 'scientifiction,' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story," Gernsback wrote in a mission statement in the first issue, under the all-caps headline A NEW SORT OF MAGAZINE. "A charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision."

His portmanteau never quite made it into port. But Gernsback's innovation of collecting previously-diffuse bits of literature ruminating on scientific discovery or technological advancement in one place proved to be an idea with staying power. The evidence is all around us, on all your streaming services and movie marquees, if not your bookshelves.

The first issue of Amazing Stories, priced at $0.25 — about $4.60 in today's money — embodied Gernsback's formula. Frank R. Paul's cover painting illustrated "Off On a Comet," the 1877 Jules Verne tale reprinted, in part, inside. Gernsback, who sold radio gear and already published multiple radio magazines, introduced that story with a five-paragraph note basically saying that he knows the premise of the story is silly: a comet strikes the Earth and carries a slice of our planet along with all of that parcel's atmosphere and inhabitants to a galaxy far, far away, undamaged and intact. "But once granted the initial and closing extravagance," Gernsback writes, "how closely the author clings to facts in between! How closely he follows, and imparts to his readers, the scientific probabilities of the universe beyond our earth, the actual knowledge so hard won by our astronomers!"

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/24/nx-s1-5770426/amazing-stories-science-fiction-magazine-100-years-centennial