Hugo Gernsback, one of the most important editors and publishers of science fiction and a founder of the genre (along with Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells), was born on 16 August 1884 in Luxembourg. At this time Poe had been dead thirty-five years, Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-1870) was some fourteen years old, and its sequel, The Mysterious Island (1874-1875), was barely nine. Wells's first science-fiction classic, The Time Machine (1895), was yet to be published. Hugo was the son of Maurice Gernsback, a wealthy wine wholesaler, and Berta Durlacher Gernsback. His early education was supplied by private tutors, and he later attended the Ecole Industrielle of Luxembourg and the Technikum of Bingen, Germany. Gernsback's primary language was German, but he spoke and read both English and French also.

At age nine Gernsback discovered a German translation of Mars as the Abode of Life...