The middle of the 20th century was an exciting time for science fiction, filled with experimentation and new ideas, an endeavour helmed by genre icons like Harlan Ellison and Frank Herbert. If magazine, which ran between 1952 and 1974, played home to many of these names along with a myriad of now-historic work. And now, it’s all available for free in a variety of file formats.

According to BoingBoing, all 176 issues of If have been made available via the Internet Archive, including the ones edited by Hugo Award-winning Frederik Pohl. His greatest contribution to the magazine was, perhaps, the introduction of the "If-first" series, which showcased new authors. A number of these writers went on to become extremely well-known, most notably Larry Niven, who published his first story in the magazine.

What’s really interesting about If, however, is how its content parallels the optimism of the era. At the time, science was exciting, not dystopian—a gateway into new possibilities. Even as Russia and the United States rushed to be the first to put a man on the Moon, the world dreamt in unison of a better tomorrow. The stories in If reflected this sensibility to some extent, being very much action-packed and sometimes even geared towards a younger audience.

Not that there weren’t exceptions: Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream was unapologetically apocalyptic in timbre, addressing the idea of murderous artificial intelligences long before it infiltrated pop-culture.

If is just one of many classic pulp magazines that can be now be downloaded for free. The greatest repository for such material is The Pulp Magazines Project, which hosts publications from between 1896 to 1946. The archive boasts a huge spectrum of genres, ranging from science fiction to Western to even sports-themed works.