Explore every episode of the podcast The Tech Imaginarium

A hundred years ago this spring, a magazine called Amazing Stories hit the newsstands and — almost by accident — gave a name and a shape to the genre we now call science fiction. Its publisher, Hugo Gernsback, was an immigrant electrical engineer, visionary and relentless self-promoter. He wanted his magazine to delight and enthrall – but also to educate.

In this opening episode of The Tech Imaginarium, John and Ezri go back to 1926 to ask why this peculiar pulp magazine matters — and why its mix of techno-optimism, prophetic vision and dystopic warnings still echoes through the way we talk about technology today.

In this episode:

• Hugo Gernsback: Luxembourg-born inventor, publisher of Amazing Stories, and author of stories under at least seven anagrams of his own name
• The strange scientific weather of 1926 — electrification, mustard gas, Einstein, Schrödinger and Hubble — and why it primed the public for "scientifiction"
• The first issue's contributors: Wells, Verne and Poe in one corner; George Allan England, G. Peyton Wertenbaker and Austin Hall in the other
• Robert Goddard, H.G. Wells and the through-line from pulp magazines to the Apollo Moon launches
• Why Gernsback's reputation was contraversial — paying writers poorly, exaggerating circulation, etc.
• The tropes Amazing Stories planted that we're still living with

Links and resources:

• Website: learninghackpodcast.com
• Instagram: @tech.imaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

Music by Nick Dwyer and Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.

In 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that computers would let every person learn what they wanted, in their own time, at their own speed. Forty years on, that vision is more or less the world we live in. So what else might science fiction have to tell us about the future we're already inside?

 

Welcome to The Tech Imaginarium — a new six-part series exploring how science fiction made the modern world. Co-hosts John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach introduce the season ahead, the texts and authors they'll be reading as "skewed mirrors" of our technological present, and why now is exactly the right moment to be paying attention to SF.

 

In this episode:

 

• Asimov's startlingly accurate 1983 prediction about computer-aided learning
• Why science fiction is a form of learning, not just entertainment — Stephen Baxter's "skewed mirror"
• A first look at the six-episode season: Amazing Stories at 100, five foundational SF authors, two episodes on Asimov, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the awkward question of whether SF predicts the future

 

Links and resources:

• Website: learninghackpodcast.com
• Instagram: @TechImaginarium
• Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnHelmerConsulting

  Music by Nick Dwyer and Flintet. The Tech Imaginarium is a Learning Hack podcast, produced and hosted by John Helmer and written by John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach.