They used to reject us because we were too strange.
I sat across from men in decent suits who could smell a circulation number from three floors away, and I listened to their polite regrets. Too loud. Too quiet. Not quite right for us. We were humans arguing with humans about the messy business of what it meant to be alive.
I miss those days. I really do. Because somewhere along the line, the rejection stopped being about strangeness and started being about friction.
The writers I brought them, the ones who kept me awake, who made me miss my stop on the train, had too much friction. Their voices were jagged. They made mistakes. They sounded like people. And the industry realised they didn't need people anymore. They just needed the shape of a person. They sanded down the edges. They found algorithms that understood what had already sold. They built machines that were very good at perfectly synthesising the past. The magazines got thicker, glossier, and interchangeable. Noise, on beautiful paper.
The readers I knew wanted to be shaken. They wanted fiction that arrived like a phone call at three in the morning, the kind where you know before you answer that something has changed.
Science fiction's true purpose was never to predict flying cars, it was to tell you about the world you are standing in right now, TODAY!
Pulp science fiction did this once. Magnificently. On cheap paper that yellowed before the decade was out, this disreputable little genre told more truth about the human condition than anything published between respectable covers. It was written fast, paid poorly, and largely forgotten. But the ink smeared on your thumbs. You knew a hand had put it there.
Astounding Tales exists for the same reason speakeasies existed. Because the thing you actually want has been made unavailable through official channels.
The writers and artists in these pages have nowhere else to go because they refuse to be smoothed out. They are the friction. They are paying attention.
Inside you will find a serialised novel, short fiction with gristle in it, art that refuses to sit quietly on the page, and somewhere in all of it (if you're listening) the three a.m. phone call. Something has changed.
I can hear it ringing.
Pick up.
Reginald Hollis
Editor, Astounding Tales