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- In the early days of pulp publication, the artwork provided a literal depiction of the stories' content. Take the famous 1927 Frank R. Paul Amazing Stories "War of the Worlds" cover (it, and many of the other covers I'll mention, is in the slideshow below). The cover for a tale about Martians attacking the Earth shows... well, Martians attacking the Earth. These early sci-fi themes seem easily enough articulated: a general sense of anxiety about technology and space paired with a fear of invasion by The Other. After World War II, the anxiousness and fear remained, magnified by threat of nuclear conflict. Directed towards the Baby Boomers, who were already becoming a formidably large market, material similar to pre-war science fiction was repackaged in a fresh way for its young audiences. As the author and sci-fi expert Robert Horton said in an interview, "...there was a giant new youth culture that emerged in the 1950s, and those kids wanted different kinds of stories, just for them."