Before science fiction was a genre, Hugo Gernsback was already building the infrastructure for it: radio magazines, hobbyist communities, wild speculative stories, and the first publication devoted entirely to imagining tomorrow. A Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg, he launched Amazing Stories in 1926 and quietly trained a generation of readers and writers to think in futures, long timelines, and unintended consequences. His magazines hosted women in leadership roles, predicted computer dating, video calling, and the social costs of new technology, while also carrying the casual racism and sexism of their era. We place him alongside Einstein, the artists of Vitebsk, and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to ask what it meant for Jewish creators to be building the future from the cultural margins. And we end with the question he would have loved most: who is building that kind of futures literacy today?
Episode Transcript (Auto Generated- some errors might exist)
Welcome back to the Jewish futurism Lab,where we unpack Torah, tech, and tomorrow. I’m Mike Wirth, Jewish futurist, community artist, and design educator coming to you from Crown town Charlotte, North Carolina. Today, we’re going to climb into the paper time machine of a Jewish tinkerer named Hugo Gernsbach, the inventor, publisher who helped teach a generation how to think about the future before science fiction was even a genre. We’ll look at how his pulpy magazines, wild cover art, and hobbyist gadgets turn immigrant kids and radio nerds into amateur futurists, and how all this sits inside a much biggerJewish story. Let’s get into it, y’all.So Hugo Gernsbach is born Hugo Gernsbacher in Luxemborg in 1884. Luxemborg’s a tiny little country in Europe into a Jewish family that will eventually send him across the Atlantic.He lands in the United States in 1904, not as a writer, but as a tinkerer, an importer of radio parts, obsessed with wireless, long before most people had ever heard a broadcast.He founds the Electro importing Company.He ships coils and condensers tohobbyists across the country, then does something quite revolutionary. He starts publishing magazines to teach hiscustomers how to use this strange equipment. In Gernsbach’s world, media and machines always come as a pair, early examples of parametric design. Hisearly magazines mix how-to diagrams with speculative essays and eventually fiction. Shortly into the first few issues of his magazine, he coins the term in which he combines scientific andfiction by the fick. And it’s scientifiction.I know. Stories that are grounded in real science that extrapolate honesty fromwhat we know and that carries a didactic mission. You should walk away not just entertained but feeling upgraded uh alittle bit more future literate than you were before. Greensbach is a Jewish immigrant operating at the edge of respectability frankly in a UnitedStates that is deeply anti-semitic and suspicious of outsiders at the time.Traditional cultural institutions are mostly closed to people like him. But there is room in this liminal in between space of technical hobbies and pulp magazine paper for someone who can think uh like an engineer and hustle like a small time publisher. When I talk about Hugo Gernsbach, I’m not just talking about a researcher. I’m talking as a kid who grew up building futures on my living room floor. I had Legos and if you werea kid of the 80s and Gen X, you had constructs, uh, Lincoln logs, TinkerToys, Kinder Blocks, Brio trains spread out everywhere and just, you know, networks of of different things connecting across and under my coffee table. I glued together Testors model air planes. I packed wading into Este’s rockets and watched them arc over my neighborhood. Later, it was RC modelcars, hobbyist circuit kits from RadioShack. If you’re old enough to rememberthat, God bless you. And eventually opening up my own computer to swap outhard drives, RAM, video cards, and soundcards back in the day. I just I love to tinker. And before the web, my internet were my cataloges. I would feverishly read them page by page like sacred texts of possibility. Just every part like, whoa, what does that do? Radio Shack, Edmund Scientific, Hobby Shops, computer mail orderer lists. For a lot of Gen X kids and more than a few older millennials, those cataloges were our pipeline to the things that we really cared about, right? Like you would find online today. And that was how you discovered gear and and and products and equipment and imagine projects and, youknow, planned out your next build. You know, what was it that you’re going tomake from this? It was just all possible. So when I look at Gernsbach’s magazines, as old as they are, right, I was definitely not old enough to read these. I see a very familiar ecosystem.He was doing for his generation, right,a hundred some odd years ago. What those cataloges and kits did for mine, offering blueprints, part lists, and day dreams, a place where you could seethe future laid out in diagrams and adsand stories, and then try to assemble your own version of it on your kitchen table. Right? Again, great parametric design.So in 1926, uh, Gernsbach launches his,uh, probably most famous magazine,Amazing Stories. Uh, the first magazine devoted entirely to what we now callscience fiction. And I remember in the80s, I think it was Stephen Spielberg who had come out with the AmazingStories uh series, which was a television show that had like very intense uh fantasy science fiction-like stories very much like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. So, um back to Gernbach here and his magazine AmazingStories 1926 on on its surface it just kind of looks like another one that’s come on to the racks. you know, uh, Gernsbach had actually put out several magazines and there were others competing, um, as well. Um, but it hadlike really garish covers and like some wild titles and, you know, it was a mix of some old stuff that he had reprinted and and a little bit of new work. Um,but to, you know, a kid back then picking it up off the drugstore rack, I mean, it is a portal to another dimension. Amazing stories tells you right implicitly that you are allowed tothink in futures, right? It’s like escape this world. Think you can think about uh uh moral questions but nowwe’re in the you know uh alpha centator right system. What’s happening there?What what are the rules there that allowus to examine our own lives but now inthis future setting? The uh the rules inthese magazines are are deceptivelysimple. You take one scientific ideathat exists today and you push itforward, right? show the the the social,the ethical, and the personal impactsand consequences of of something, right?So, like take what we’re dealing withtoday and then, you know, push it intothe future. You could you can see howfeeling about AI uh over the lastcentury having that doomsday scenario,right? um you know the Terminator HAL9000 you know uh um Ort from uh uh theday the earth stood still you know justthese like killer mindless AI deathmachines right um you know in theseplaces there’s no studio budget to worryabout no special effects department nonervous sponsor right uh on the page awriter can build a world on Montrealsrocket ships telepathic radios for theprice of a few thousand birds. Ateenager can walk into that world for adime. That was the tradeoff of thesethese magazines. Pretty straightforward.Gernsbach spells this out in his hiseditorials. He wrote a lot of editorialsum at the end of the magazine. You know,we’ve seen Stan Lee do that over formany decades. Uh scientific fiction, hesays, should be charming romanceintermingled with scientific fact andprophetic vision. The gadgets must makesense. the worlds must obey their ownlogic. The readers should feel on somelevel that this could really happen.What he is quietly doing is teaching nowa generation of readers and writers toprototype the future in narrative form.That that the that the future is a storyspace, right? It’s where you can youbuild anything where anything ispossible. The magazine becomes a labbench uh without a ceiling. You know,there’s there’s nothing holding this in.And Gernsbach’s vision would not havelanded as hard without a collaborator.Um, and that’s the illustrator Frank R.Paul. Uh, Paul trained originally inarchitecture, uh, becomes Gensbach’sgo-to visualizer of the future. Hepaints the cover of Ralph 124C41 Plus,Gensbach’s own gadget stuff novel andthe first cover of Amazing Stories. Hisimages are wild. Uh, super tall toweringmachines. uh just sprawling superfuturistic cities, uh bizarre alienlandscapes, intricate robots, allrendered with an engineers’s love of ofstructure. Um you know, if Gernsbachbuilds the system, the the magazines,the fan culture, you know, the editorialrules, uh Paul is there to create theiconography. Uh his covers teach readerswhat the future looks like, right?chrome domes on top of buildings,struts, beams, cables, and enormouscontrols in in panels. Uh, you know,later uh science fiction giants likeArthur C. Clark um wrote 2001, a spaceodyssey, Ray Bradberry wrote the MartianChronicles, you know, will cite thesecovers as their first glimpse of sciencefiction as a visual universe. And um youknow, Paul isn’t Jewish, so um you know,we don’t uh uh we absorb him. We lovehim, right? Because he really is a partof the ecosystem that that Gernsbach iscreating and you know, a hybrid ofJewish editorial vision and immigrantvisual craft that standardizes the lookand feel of technological future. So, umin many ways, uh uh Paul not beingJewish, Gernsbach being Jewish isn’twe’re always looking for through lensesto see how this makes sense, right? whatinfluences may or may not have comethrough this. Uh so this combinationhere is um you know Gernsbach and Paulboth being immigrants I think is uh anexperience that they both understand.They both get that idea of being theoutsider.So step back and let’s look at the widerpicture here for a second. So the early20th century is a time of mass Jewishimmigration, tightening quotas, andrising anti-semitism in Europe and theUnited States. Conventional culturalpower is locked up. Universitiesestablished publishing houses,prestigious theaters. Gates are closedeverywhere. But on the fringes, there isnew media forming. Pulp magazine, radiostations, comics, and experimentalfilms. These industries are consideredlow prestige, risky, sometimes evendisreputable, which makes them veryaccessible to Jewish and other immigrantand minority peoples at the time. Jewishartists, writers, and entrepreneurscarve out lives in these spaces. Theyinvent superheroes in the comics. Theycraft noir in Hollywood. And inGernsbach’s case, they build a whole newgenre where technology is not just thescenery, but the central driver of theplot. Later, explicitly Jewish sciencefiction will lean hard into these Jewishthemes. Diaspora, Exile, Covenant,Golems, law, memory, writers like IsaacAzimoff, Carol M. Schwiller, Jack Dan,and anthologies like The Wandering Starsmake the Jewishness visible. Gernsbachdoes something more infrastructuraland in a way more subtle. He constructsthe platform on which these stories canexist. He doesn’t fill amazing storieswith rabbis and midash. Instead, hebuilds a space where questions that havelong animated Jewish thought,responsibility, creation, unintendedconsequences can now be explored throughrobots, time machines, and alienempires.To really feel what Hugo Gernsbach isdoing, we have to put him back in hisown sky full of futures. While he’sediting amazing stories in the 1920s,Brit Lang Across the Ocean is in Germanyshooting Metropolis, this monumentaldystopian sci-fi film about a stratifiedcity in the year 2026with robot doubles, skyscraper canyons,and workers fused literally to theirmachines. In Russia, in the town ofVitbsk, Mark Shagal, El Lezitki andtheir circle are trying to invent aJewish modernism that can speak thelanguage of abstraction and revolutionwithout losing its soul, turning Hebrewletters, Passover songs, and villagememories into bold geometric futures.So, this is all happening at the sametime creatively. And hanging over allthis is Albert Einstein, a Jewishphysicist whose ideas years before aboutrelativity are literally rewriting timeand space. Artists and writers feel thatshock wave. Suddenly the universe is nota fixed clock but a flexible dynamicfabric. You can think of these as fourdifferent studios of the future.Einstein is in the lab bending time andspace with math and equations. Theartists of the teps are in the classroomand the street bending Hebrew lettersand village memories into radical newforms. Fritz Lang is on a sound stage inBerlin bending light and shadow into atowering city of 2026. And HugoGernsbach is at his editorial deskbending cheap pulp paper into a publiclaboratory where anyone with a dime canpractice living in tomorrow. Differenttools, different audiences, but the sameunderlying experiment. What happens ifwe start treating this world as a fixedthing and start treating it as somethingwe can redesign?Inside amazing stories and its pulpcousins, you see a interesting paradox.On one side, some stories begin toimagine women as professionals andleaders, scientists, pilots, sometimeseven political actors. They appear asdoctors, lawyers, police figures,soldiers in future wars. This coincideswith the waves of feminist struggle inthe the real world at the time,suffrage, uh, higher education, andentry into maledominated professions.On the other side, the same magazinesare riddled with casual racism andsexism. Racial caricatures and eugenicassumptions show up as backgroundwallpaper. Women are often sexualized,placed in peril, or treated as prizes,even when they also hold very modernroles.A classic example of the first BuckRogers story Armageddon 24/19 ADpublished in 1928 in Amazing Stories. Itintroduces Wilma Dearing who is both acapable adventurer and a romanticinterest. She flies ships, carriesweapons and saves lives, but she is alsoframed uh through a male gaze thatconstantly undercuts her autonomy. Thisis the world of Gernbach uh is helpingbuild one where pulp fiction cansimultaneously prototype women’s agencywhich wasn’t happening at the time. Likethat’s the thing we have to uh talkabout here and reinscribe uh theprejudices of its time. So it’sinteresting paradox there. If you’retelling a story about Jewish futurism,this duality matters. Jewish creatorsare using these platforms to dreambeyond their marginalization. But thesame pages uncritically echo the racialand gender hierarchies of Americanmodernity at the time.So Gensbach’s obsession with howtechnology reshapes daily life is notlimited to rockets and radios. Itextends into the most intimate ofdomains.In 1933, he launches Sexology, a sexscience quote unquote magazine. Okay,but get this. It is the opposite ofPlayboy’s glossy fantasy pages andfoldouts. Think technical manual charts,diagrams, like earnest Q&As’s aboutanatomy, relationships that read likeinstructions for stereos and sexualhealth. It wants to be a clinical andeducational uh uh book and not somethingthat’s salacious. So early in the 1920she had already proposed systematic quasitechnological ways to match couples. Hehe had wired tests uh physiologicalmeasurements early fantasies ofmechanical matchmaking decades beforecomputer dating or swipable apps. He istreating love as an engineering problem,an information flow that could you knowin principle be quantified andoptimized. Okay.Really, really interesting. From acertain angle, this is, you know,incredibly weird. But from another, it’sit’s perfectly Gernbach, right? In hisapproach to things so clinical. He isalways asking, “What happens when a newtechnology, whether radio, telephone, orsome imagined love machine, quoteunquote, insinuates itself into everydayhuman life and relations? How will itchange the way we meet, commit, andcare?” Right? Great question. How hasonline dating, computer dating, if youremember that, and uh uh apps today, howhas that changed the way we meet,commit, and care? Questions that are 100years old here. So, GSB loves gadgets,but he’s also good at noticing theirside effects. He ride he writes about uhthe telephone before it has fullysaturated society, right? You have toremember the time that we’re in. probingwhat it means to converse withdisembodied voices. Right? This is whatthey felt about telephones. You know,you couldn’t see the person’s face. Heimagines devices like the the teleph, anearly fantasy of video calling, a screenin your home that lets you see theperson you were talking to. Long beforeZoom meetings and FaceTime, for ageneration of teenage readers, many ofthem immigrants, outsiders, andtinkerers, this was the first place theywere told. You were allowed to imaginesystems bigger than your own life. Youcan be a kid working a terribly boringjob by day. But then at night, you pickup amazing stories and live in a city ofglass towers and Montreals, argue withalien philosophers, or design a newcommunication device that workstelepathically.The outer worlds is expanding too. By1930, astronomers announced thediscovery of Pluto. And suddenly, evenon the edge of the solar system isfarther out than anyone thought. Insidethe magazine and outside, the map ofwhat’s possible is getting redrawn. AndGernsbach is training you uh to ridethat expansion with your imaginationinstead of being stunned by it. Okay, soback to the telephone real quick. Theexcitement is always paired withconcern. If you can speak or even seeeach other without staring, sharingphysical space, what happens to the dutyof showing up? Will people neglectfriends and family because it’s easierto call them than to go visit? Willdistance relationships become normal?And will that be good or bad for us? Thethese were questions that that he askedabout just the regular telephone thatpeople had in their home, not even amobile phone that we have today. Fromwhere we stand, surrounded bysmartphones with social media feeds onthem and ambient connectivity 247, hisquestions land with an really eeriefamiliarity. We inhabit the world, hepredicted, where our relationships withmachines are so seamless that we mostlystop noticing the machines at all.They’re they become ubiquitous.Gernsbach doesn’t have our vocabularyfor algorithms or feeds, but he insistson a simple habit of mind. Every newmedium changes what it feels like to bepresent with another human being. That’sso interesting. If you don’t think aboutthat, uh, you’re letting someone elsedesign your emotional life. That’sincredibly true. So after the GreatDepression ends, the World’s Fair inChicago and New York begin to showcasethings like robots and streamlinedcities and bizarre electrical devicesthat look like they have steppedstraight off of the covers of amazingstories. Th this is a time whereAmerica’s back on the rise and we needto look at the future. We began to aswhat began as speculative diagramsbecomes now national spectacle. Thefuture climbs out of the pulps and ontothe fairgrounds.As the decades roll on, science fictiontastes change. New editors and writerswant complex characters, psychologicalnuance, political stakes. The so-calledgolden age and later the new wave pushedthe genre into philosophy, sociology,and inner space. Gensbach’s ownnarrative form, the talky, gadget-centered story built around lectures anddiagrams, starts to feel creaky and alittle old. He continues to push thesame didactic device-driven fiction,even as his readers expectations evolve.Slowly, his magazines lose their centralplace in the field, other editors, othervenues start taking over the future.There is a quiet cosmic joke in kind ofwhat happens next. Fandom and historybegan to call him the father of sciencefiction. Prestigious awards are namedafter him, like the Hugo Award. Writersfight each other for Hugos these days.But this is not how he wanted to beremembered. He saw himself primarily asan engineer and media technologist, as apioneer of radio and electronics, and hewanted to be the father of wireless.with dozens of patents, influentialtechnical magazines, a radio station,even early experiments with TV. Thepulps in his self-image were almost abyproduct.So, Hugo Gernsbach dies in 1967and he donates his body to science atCornell’s medical lab. There’s no graveof his to visit. The honors uh he doesreceive have a strange kind of poeticsymmetry. there’s a uh that there’s thethe major literary prize with his firstname on it. Um and there’s a crater onthe moon also named the Gernsbach craterbut ironically I guess that crater is onthe far side uh the dark side of themoon hidden from the uh not visible fromthe earth. Um and uh yeah kind of aninvisible memorial for a man whoseinfluence is everywhere and whose nameis for most people nowhere. So, wheredoes that leave us? If we want to talkabout Jewish futurism, Greensbachrarely, if ever, puts clearly Jewishthemes or characters into his ownfiction. He doesn’t write Torah in spaceor rabbis on Mars. Rabbis in his time donot line up to declare amazing storiesas a Jewish wake. They don’t say it.They just don’t. His Jewishness, though,plays out a little differently. As aJewish immigrant in a suspiciousAmerica, he builds infrastructure in thecultural margins, magazines, fannetworks, conceptual vocabularies.Those structures become the launch padfor later generations of Jewish creators who do bring Jewish questions, ethics, and symbols explicitly into speculative fiction. In that sense, he behaves likea modern Jewish technologist and artists. He doesn’t always wave theflag. Instead, he helps invent the system through which identity, ethics, and imagination will later flow.So, across his life, Hugo Gernbach keeps offering the same proposition. Here is anew experience. You get to immerse yourself into new media, new machines,new forms of connection. You can walkaway from them or you can learn to usethem. But you should never meet them unprepared. Very wise news. His pulps, his technical magazines, even his awkward sexology experiments all share a didactic core. They assume the future is shapable by you. That technology is nota fate but a field of choices. Learn how things work. He says, think ahead about the consequences. Don’t get left out ofhow technology will reshape your body,your love life, your community, and your sense of what is sacred.Today, in a world of climate emergency,AI hype, conspiracy memes, andcollapsing trust in science, that stancefeels strangely distant. We have the gadgets. We have more processing power in our pocket than Greensbach could have imagined. What we lack is a shared culture of futures literacy that is playful and critical at the same time.Maybe what we need now is not anothercharismatic tech CEO, but a new pulpy Gernbach. Somebody willing to build an unglamorous infrastructure for thinking together about what comes next. Someone who can restore a grounded faith in science, not as dogma, but as a communal practice of curiosity and argument back into our discourse. And until that person shows up, we have his example. aJewish inventor publisher who believed that telling better stories about tomorrow could help us build a wiser, less frightened, and more responsible future starting today.Thank you for listening to the JewishFuturism Lab. If this episode sparked something in for you, share it with a fellow tinkerer, a sci-fi fan, or that friend who is still has a soldering ironin their closet. I’m Mike Worth, and I will see you guys in the next episode. Bezrat HaShem.