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The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast - Vintage Sci-Fi Short Stories

The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker - Humanity’s Last Days Before the Freeze

Ep. 359

Alone in a world buried by endless snow and ice the last man on Earth drifts through a twilight of silence and memory. Time has lost all meaning... The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker. That’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.


The year was 1926 and although there had been science fiction stories in magazines, there had never been an entire magazine devoted to science fiction. Hugo Gernsback was the man who would change the course of science fiction with the birth of Amazing Stories magazine which began publishing in April 1926. In case you were wondering the Hugo Award is named after this sci-fi pioneer. The first two magazines were filled with reprints, stories that had already been published, by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allen Poe among others.


G. Peyton Wertenbaker's short story The Man From the Atom appeared in that first issue but it too was a reprint, having been previously published 8 months earlier in Science and Invention magazine which was also published by Gernsback.


Wertenbaker was born in New Castle, Delaware in 1907, he wrote a handful of sci-fi stories and then turned his attention to other pursuits, literary and otherwise. He served on the editorial board of Fortune magazine from 1933 to 1938, and became a contributing editor to Time Magazine in 1939. During World War Two he served as an air combat intelligence officer in the Pacific. In 1958 he joined NASA as a speechwriter, eventually becoming chief historian of the Aerospace Medical Division. The story you are about to hear was the first original paid story to appear in Amazing Stories in June 1926 on page 232, The Coming of the Ice by G. Peyton Wertenbaker…


Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Of all the irksome, frustrating, maddening discoveries—was there no way of keeping it discovered? Forever by Robert Sheckley.


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