Rating: ★★★

Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967) casts a legendary shadow over the genre of science-fiction. Gernsback produced the first SF pulp magazine with Amazing Stories in 1926. This brought to prominence several key writers of the era and launched the SF pulp magazine industry, which was where SF was at for the next three decades. Crucially, Gernsback coined the term ‘scientifiction’, which was later trimmed down to become ‘science-fiction’. Gernsback’s prominence was such that the SF community later named its annual awards the Hugos after him. Tune Into the Future is a Documentary about Gernsback.

Tune Into the Future has done its research on Gernsback’s childhood and dug up many family photos, even some archival home movies of the man himself and audio material of his guest appearance at the 1952 Worldcon in Chicago. The documentary follows Gernsback’s emigration from Luxembourg to the US in 1904 and then his setting up a shop and mail order business selling DIY radio parts for people to build their own equipment. There is not much that delves into who Gernsback was as a person outside of his business achievements, although the documentary makes the interesting speculation near the end that he was someone on the autism spectrum.

Gernsback’s ventures into publication grew out of Modern Electrics the radio parts catalogue he sold as part of his business where he at first would suggest ideas for people to invent using the parts listed inside. Gernsback very much wanted youth of the era to become inventors and ride the great wave of new technology. It is stated that Gernsback essentially invented the letters column in a magazine with people writing in to comment and that this led to a network that became the beginnings of the ham radio fad in the US. His ideas became increasingly speculative with Gernsback then publishing Ralph 124C41+ (1925), a purportedly terrible science-fiction novel that describes a vision of the future and the technological marvels that populate it.

From there, Gernsback jumped to publishing with Amazing Stories, commissioning stories about the future he envisioned. The film parades a good many of the covers and the wonderful inventions of super-science that they depicted, while paying tribute to the artwork of the great Frank R. Paul (1884-1963) who was responsible for these.

Tune Into the Future focuses on the number of ideas that Gernsback is said to have predicted – radar, satellites, jetpacks and supposedly Skype, drones and online dating. We get to see illustrations for some of the wonderfully absurd and fanciful ideas that he came up with. In claiming Gernsback an innovator of ideas, what the documentary doesn’t quite see is that when Gernsback was making dozens, maybe hundreds of predictions in his work, the law of averages say that some of these are going to be accurate hits when seen in hindsight, whereas the documentary handily sweeps under the carpet the vast amount more that were absurdly impractical or never came to pass.

The documentary also makes some tenuous stretches, pointing out that the cover for the first Buck Rogers story Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928) in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories inspired Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster to create Superman and then goes on to say that George Lucas wanted to make a Buck Rogers film but couldn’t get the rights so made Star Wars (1977) instead, suggesting that a single cover alone inspired both Superman and Star Wars, which feels it is making a very stretched connection. Another of the tenuous connections is to try and attribute a flying alien object on one Frank R. Paul covers and say that this led to the idea of the flying saucer.

The documentary is interesting when it comes to positing the decline of popularity that Gernsback experienced, having Amazing Stories taken away from him by creditors and making unsuccessful later attempts to launch other magazines. (The documentary never delves into these reasons, nor Gernsback’s purportedly tight-fisted reputation when it came to paying his writers). They place the decline of the magazines down to the rise of SF fandom and conventions where the experience of the future was seen as being able to be lived rather than just imagined on the page. It is also noted that Gernsback only attended a Worldcon once as guest of honour in 1952 and that he never seemed to get the idea of fandom.

Tune Into the Future is certainly fascinating but one of the big minuses about it is the narration from Benny Brown, which comes with an overly comic tone, taking little of what goes on seriously. The opening is a montage of Gernsback’s life where Brown is constantly making fun of him and his inventions. One of the more insulting scenes is where the narrator says “This is going to get technical, bear with us” and then interviewee Grant Wythoff starts into an explanation of Gernsback’s battery invention – only to then get cut off by the narrator a few seconds into his explanation.

Trailer here