Melville, and the fans who eagerly accepted such pseudo-scientific concepts as the “motionless drive” and “planet staves” from early yarns like “Galaxy Smashers” (Amazing, February 1929), made Boston beans of Gernsback’s misgivings-though some were to say that, in a queer, un-American way, Gernsback resented Melville’s imagination.

Gernsback himself had reservations about Melville’s early stories and their radical departure from the science of the times: they contained no patentable ideas. Modern readers of science fiction, accustomed to a fictional universe where Alpha Centauri is a next-door neighbor and the solar system itself is small potatoes, can little imagine the paucity of daring imagination and truly large objects exhibited by the SF of those early years, before Melville revealed new vistas beyond the Dog Star with his “Open Space” stories of the late twenties.

It was in 1928 that Hugo Gernsback, faced with the declining sales of his Amazing Stories, a magazine subsisting until then almost solely on reprints of Verne and Wells, was rescued from financial ruin by the appearance of a bright young star in the SF firmament: a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, named Herman Melville.

Space opera meaning