SCIENCE AND INVENTION

   US monthly BEDSHEET-size popular-science magazine, slick paper. 220 issues May 1913-Aug 1931. Published 1913-29 by Experimenter Publishing Co. ; ed Hugo GERNSBACK until his bankruptcy in 1929, thereafter ed anon. SAIwas not a new magazine but a retitling (from Aug 1920) of Gernsback's Electrical Experimenter, founded May 1913, itself modelled on ModernElectrics, an earlier Gernsback magazine (1908-13), in which his novel Ralph 124C 41+ (1911-12; 1925) had first appeared. The Aug 1923 issue of SAI was a special "Scientific Fiction" number with a cover by Howard V. BROWN, and was effectively Gernsback's first sf magazine. Both before and after this, however, SAI (whose main content was science articles) regularly featured sf stories and novels - notably 3 serials by Ray CUMMINGS and also A. MERRITT's "The Metal Emperor" (1920 Argosy; rev1927-8 SAI; vt The Metal Monster 1946).The most typical writer of Gernsbackian SCIENTIFICTION was perhaps Clement FEZANDIE: almost all of his Dr Hackensaw series - 39 short stories and "A Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1925), a 4-part serialized novel - was published in SAI (2 final stories were published in AMZ). These are wooden as narratives, but contain lively ideas about new inventions, including ROBOTS, tv and brainwashing through dissolution of neural ganglia; Hackensaw even experiences weightlessness, on a trip to the Moon. After founding AMAZING STORIES in Apr 1926, Gernsback naturally used there most of the sf hebought, but sf serials (including Merritt's, noted above) continued in SAI until 1928. SAI was in fact a more commercially successful magazine than AMZ, with a formula not unlike that of OMNI today.

   PN/MJE/FHP