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Amazing Stories

The Palmer and Shaver era, Ziff-Davis

United States
Country
1938 to 1950
Published
0
Articles Catalogued

History

Amazing Stories is an American science-fiction magazine, founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback as the first periodical devoted solely to science fiction. This page concerns the years under editor Raymond A. Palmer, who edited the magazine from 1938 to 1949 for its then publisher, Ziff-Davis. During those years Palmer published the writings of Richard Shaver and built them into a sustained feature known as the Shaver Mystery, which carried hollow-earth and lost-civilisation themes that fed into the saucer era that followed.

The Shaver Mystery
The sequence began with a letter from Richard Shaver, printed in the January 1944 issue, and developed into a cover story, "I Remember Lemuria!", in March 1945. Across the following years the magazine printed about two dozen Shaver stories, and the June 1947 issue was given over largely to the subject. The stories described an ancient race and an underground world inhabited by beings Shaver called the Deros and the Teros. Palmer presented this material as factual rather than as fiction, framing it, in the magazine's own terms, as racial memory and as thought records. The feature drew a large reader response and provoked opposition within science-fiction fandom, which held that the magazine was presenting invention as fact.

The magazine's publisher wound the Shaver Mystery down towards the end of the decade. Palmer announced his resignation as editor in the December 1949 issue, and Shaver material continued to appear until January 1950. Palmer had already turned towards the new subject of flying saucers: he co-founded Fate in 1948 and went on to publish Flying Saucers. Kenneth Arnold's sighting of June 1947 was drawn into the Shaver and saucer material as it appeared.

The Palmer era of Amazing Stories belongs to the documentary record as the point where pulp science fiction and the emerging saucer subject met. The hollow-earth and lost-race themes that Palmer promoted through Shaver carried the same readership and the same ideas into the contactee and saucer publishing that followed. For that reason the archive records this period within its popular-culture and hollow-earth coverage rather than among the research periodicals.

A note on scope
This page concerns the Palmer and Shaver years. Amazing Stories continued for decades under other editors and owners, with a long and separate history as a science-fiction magazine, which is outside the scope of this archive.
From the Archive

Palmer carried the same readership and themes into his later saucer magazines. See the Flying Saucers collection and Fate, the magazine he co-founded in 1948.

Browse the Collection

Two ways to explore: by issue (covers, decade-grouped) or by article (search across the run).

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