Only seven years after The Argosy transferred to an all-pulp paper, all-fiction format, Frank Munsey's magazine was near the top of its game (in three short years it would be selling 500,000 copies per issue). Using a pleasing mixture of serialized stories and short stories of many genres, the title had something to entertain nearly every kind of fiction reader. Under the editorship of Matthew White, Jr. (who also has a funny story published in this issue - a perk of the job), the magazine was uncanny in its instincts concerning what kind of stories would appeal to a broad audience.
Some of the highlights of the January, 1903 issue are "By Mere Chance", a diamond theft caper that could have been written yesterday, "Trapped By the Tong", a police caper in Chinatown written by an author, Frank Lillie Pollack, better known for his science fiction, "The Nurse Maid's Understudy" an amusing divertissement similar in tone to F. Scott Fitzgerald's later humorous short stories, and W. Bert Foster's novella, "By Right of Might", concerning a land surveyor caught up in the land wars involving Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys militia in the days leading to the American Revolution.
Of particular interest to science fiction readers and historians will be the serialized "The Land of the Central Sun", a Jules Verne-like adventure of travels through the underground and through the air, and "Those Fatal Filaments", about a machine which broadcasts thoughts, written by Mabel Ernestine Abbott. The day I read this short story I, coincidentally, read about a not dissimilar A.I. machine on the front page of the New York Times. The short story was also included in editor Mike Ashley's anthology, Envisioning the Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers.
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