Transformations : the story of the science-fiction magazines from 1950 to 1970

425 Pages·2005·8.258 MB·English

by  Ashley, Michael, Ashley, Michael

a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page i
Transformations
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page ii
Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies
General Editor DAVID SEED
Series Advisers:I. F. Clarke, Edward James, Patrick Parrinder and Brian Stableford
A complete listing of titles in this series can be viewed at
www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk
6. Patrick Parrinder Shadows of the Future:H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy
7. I.F. Clarke (ed.) The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871–1914:
Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-to-come
8. Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (Foreword by George Hay,
Introduction by David Seed) The Inheritors
9. Qingyn Wu Female Rule in Chinese and English Literary Utopias
10. John Clute Look at the Evidence:Essays and Reviews
11. Roger Luckhurst ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard
12. I.F. Clarke (ed.) The Great War with Germany, 1870–1914:
Fictions and Fantasies of the War-to-come
13. Franz Rottensteiner (ed.) View from Another Shore:European Science Fiction
14. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (eds) A Very Different Story:
Studies in the Fiction of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
15. Gary Westfahl The Mechanics of Wonder:the Creation of the Idea of Science Fiction
16. Gwyneth Jones Deconstructing the Starships:Science, Fiction and Reality
17. Patrick Parrinder (ed.) Learning from Other Worlds:Estrangement,
Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia
18. Jeanne Cortiel Demand My Writing:Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction
19. Chris Ferns Narrating Utopia:Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature
20. E.J. Smyth (ed.) Jules Verne:New Directions
21. Andy Sawyer and David Seed (eds) Speaking Science Fiction: Dialogues and
Interpretations
22. Inez van der Spek Alien Plots:Female Subjectivity and the Divine
in the Light of James Tiptree’s ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’
23. S.T. Joshi Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction
24. Mike Ashley The Time Machines:The Story of the Science Fiction Pulp Magazines
from the Beginning to 1950
25. Warren G. Rochelle Communities of the Heart:The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction
of Ursula K. Le Guin
26. S.T. Joshi A Dreamer and a Visionary:H.P. Lovecraft in His Time
27. Christopher Palmer Philip K. Dick:Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern
28. Charles E. Gannon, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Setting in
American and British Speculative Fiction
29. Peter Wright, Attending Daedalus:Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page iii
Transformations
The Story of the Science-Fiction
Magazines from 1950 to 1970
The History of the
Science-Fiction Magazine
Volume II
MIKE ASHLEY
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page iv
First published 2005 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2005 Liverpool University Press
The right of Mike Ashley to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, pho-
tocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the
publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 0–85323–769–7 cased
0–85323–779–4 limp
Typeset by Northern Phototypesetting Co Ltd. Bolton
Printed and bound in the European Union by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page v
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements x
Chapter One: A Galaxy of Stars 1
Chapter Two: Saturation and Suffocation 34
Chapter Three: The Best of British? 75
Chapter Four: Creative Chaos 105
Chapter Five: Transformations 161
Chapter Six: The Times they are a-Changing 203
Chapter Seven: The New Wave 229
Chapter Eight: Fantasy versus Reality 259
Chapter Nine: Aftermath 299
Appendix 1: Non-English Language Science-Fiction Magazines 302
Appendix 2: Summary of Science-Fiction Magazines 320
Appendix 3: Directory of Magazine Editors and Publishers 350
Appendix 4: Directory of Magazine Cover Artists 365
Select Bibliography 390
Index 394
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page vi
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page vii
Preface
This second volume of my three-volume history of the science-fiction mag-
azine covers the years 1950 to 1970, and the title, Transformations, sums up
in one word every possible change that happened to sf and the magazines
during that period.
In the first volume I traced the development of the sf magazine from its
earliest days and the creation of the first specialist magazine, Amazing Stories,
by Hugo Gernsback in 1926, through the so-called Golden Age under John
W. Campbell in the period 1938–42, to the dying of the pulps at the end of
the 1940s. The period saw the first two great generations of sf writers and
the start of a third, which would come into full fruition in the fifties. It also
saw sf evolving from Gernsback’s original gadget story, into the cosmic
science story, space opera, and ultimately into the transcendent sf of the
forties. During this process some writers fell by the wayside, while others
helped create the super-hero pulps and comic-books. Others even created a
religion. It was with the first breath of the new science, dianetics, that I
closed Volume I. Dianetics, created by L. Ron Hubbard, was being champi-
oned in Astounding by John W. Campbell, but to many looked almost as
much a sham as the Shaver Mystery had in Amazing Storiesonly a few years
earlier. It was in this moment of weakness at Astounding that new maga-
zines came along, especially Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction (F&SF) to help transform science fiction and take it into the post-
nuclear age.
That is what this volume covers. It sees the rise and fall and rise again of
science fiction during a period of intense turbulence. At the start we find
publishers switching from the old pulp magazines to the new digest size or
into slick format, or even into pocketbook format. It was difficult to know
which way to go. The public interest in science fiction spawned by the
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page viii
viii PREFACE
nuclear age soon waned in the fifties and the sf boom of 1950–53 gave way
to the bust years of 1954–60. Yet the fifties saw the greatest concentration
of writers the magazine field had ever seen. If ever there was a real Golden
Age of science fiction it was 1950–54, when Galaxy, Astounding, F&SF, If,
Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Amazing Stories, Fantasticand a dozen
or more magazines published some of the best work ever seen, from writ-
ers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Walter M.
Miller, Frederik Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Judith Merril, Robert Sheckley, and
plenty more. The rising talents of Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Frank
Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Thomas M. Disch, Norman Spinrad and Ursula K.
LeGuin were all mustering in the wings.
But around 1960 science fiction lost its way. It needed shaking up.
Authors-turned-editors Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison and Damon Knight
all did their bit, but it was the British new wave under Michael Moorcock
and J. G. Ballard that really shook the field apart. Along with the rise of
interest in fantasy fiction, encouraged by Lord of the Rings and the Conan
books of Robert E. Howard, and the psychedelic era of the ‘swinging six-
ties’, by the end of the sixties, science fiction had transformed, mutated,
reinvented itself.
The history of the science-fiction magazines, at least as far as 1970, is
almost a history of science fiction itself. There was little that emerged in the
field entirely independent of the magazines, though the growth of the orig-
inal paperback novel, especially by the mid-sixties, was starting to change
that.
When I first planned this volume I was originally going to take it right
through to the present day, but I realized that there was just too much to
cover in one volume. There were three different places I could have drawn
the line. 1960 saw science fiction at its lowest ebb. All but six of the sf mag-
azines had folded, the future looked bleak and sf did not know where it was
going. But to stop there meant that the story was only half told. The re-cre-
ation of sf in the early sixties followed on so directly from the end of the
fifties that it had to be followed through. I did consider stopping it at 1964,
just before Michael Moorcock unleashed his new approach to sf, but again
that cut a story in half. The field was just starting to bubble at that point,
with the work that Frederik Pohl was doing at Galaxy and If and the
changes taking place at Analog (the new name for Astounding), and that
felt like pulling the plug at half-time. I had to see it through to a natural
conclusion, and that came in 1970. By then the field was absorbing the
new-wave revolution, adapting to the ‘fantastication’ of sf, in the wake of
Tolkien and Howard, and facing the new interest generated by Star Trek, the
film 2001: A Space Odysseyand, above all, the first manned moon landing in
a01.qxd 14/1/05 3:06 pm Page ix
PREFACE ix
1969. That point coincided with changes in editors at almost all of the mag-
azines, and a feeling that a new age was dawning.
From 1970 onwards the science-fiction scene started to change and the
magazines took on ever more different forms. Indeed the whole concept of
what constitutes a magazine changed. Volume III, Gateways to Forever, fol-
lows that final change.