Hugo Gernsback was an imaginative, insightful, and opportunistic American editor and publisher who not only introduced the first science fiction magazine (Amazing Stories, in April 1926), but the next six successive titles as well (Amazing Stories Annual, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Quarterly , and Scientific Detective Monthly), all before 1930. Seeking a simple, precise name for the narrative genre he packaged and repackaged so profitably, Gernsback gave the field a new literary referent not once, but twice: his first coinage, the 1926 term Scientifiction, being supplanted only by his own second invention, science fiction, of 1929. Gernsback was also the first man to single out science fiction for individual editorial promotion, an undertaking he pursued eagerly in such early popular science journals of his own creation as Modern Electrics, Electrical Experimenter, Science and Invention, and Radio News, gradually building up the audience he would eventually tap...