Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

When Robert Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” appeared in the 8 February, 1947 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, there was cause for celebration. Heinlein had just returned from a four-year hiatus, having spent much of that time helping with the war effort, and when he got back to writing it was as if he had never left. In the years immediately following the war, in which the US immerged as a superpower, there was a burgeoning suburban middle class, and therefore a burgeoning suburban middle-class readership. The Saturday Evening Post was, for much of its existence, a weekly tabloid-format magazine that had already been around for over a century; but by the immediate post-war years it had reached the absolute height of its popularity. By 1948 something like 10% of American adults were reading the Post, which was and still is a ridiculous circulation. The Post was a “slick” magazine, although it didn’t use slick paper; rather it was slick in the sense that it paid well for articles and stories, and the lucky author would enjoy a wide readership. It was a mainstream magazine that occasionally printed genre fiction. When several of Heinlein’s stories appeared in the Post in the late ’40s, corresponding with a book deal he had made with Scribner’s, he knew he had hit the big time.

Heinlein’s experience with gaining mainstream traction was not totally unique to him. There were some other writers of his generation, and even more of the following generation, who started out writing pulp fiction before moving to the slicks. Ray Bradbury, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, Raymond Chandler, Harlan Ellison, and even Stephen King had their first stories published in pulp magazines. King, in the introduction to his story collection Night Shift, thanks (among others) Robert W. Lowndes, who was editor of the cheap and now-forgotten magazines Magazine of Horror and Startling Mystery Stories. Lowndes had also bought King’s first two stories, when the latter was barely out of his teens. Evidently the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree.

Science fiction has infested practically every facet of modern life, so it can be hard to appreciate the fact that it used to be quite a niche interest. We’re constantly being flooded with bestselling novels that are SF, and a disproportionate number of the highest grossing movies ever are SF. For better or worse (it’s easily for the worse) we’re at the mercy of technocrats who grew up reading SF. But going back to the 1940s and ’50s, SF was mostly constrained to magazines with ultimately low circulations, not to mention all the B-movies. Even before that, SF was steeped in the pulp tradition, which is to say being published in pulp magazines. While science fiction as a codified genre became a thing in 1926, with the launch of Amazing Stories, the pulps went back to the tail end of the 19th century, and some fiction from these older pulp magazines even found their way as reprints in Hugo Gernsback’s newfangled “scientifiction” magazine. The pulps started proliferating in the 1900s thanks to a few big publishers, maybe the most famous of them among old SF fans being Street & Smith, who would later print Astounding Stories. By the time Amazing Stories launched, you already had popular pulp magazines that sometimes printed science fiction and fantasy, including Argosy, Adventure, and Blue Book. Most famously there was Weird Tales, which while focused on horror and fantasy also regularly printed SF.

The “pulp” label is easy enough to understand, although it’s not totally consistent. As a rule of thumb, a pulp magazine in the early 20th century had such-and-such dimensions, but more importantly it had to do with the quality of the paper, which was rough and brittle. Sometimes the edges were untrimmed. These magazines were cheaper to buy than their slick counterparts, but correspondingly they also paid less by the word. Also, in terms of class politics and age demographics, it must be said that while the likes of The Saturday Evening Post and Harper’s Weekly appealed to bourgeois readers, adults who while part of the workforce weren’t exactly getting their hands dirty, the pulps appealed more to working-class adults and adolescents. Granted that it’s unwise to generalize a whole era of popular fiction like this, the stories in these magazines tended to be heavy on action and plotting, and with at least a tinge of wish fulfillment. As I said, these stories did not pay well on a word-by-word basis, but if one could crack the code of what a magazine’s editor is looking for, and how to write a reliably solid adventure story, there was some money in it. The luckiest of these pulpsters was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who had taken on writing relatively late in life, already being deep in his thirties and with some odd jobs behind him. In 1912 alone Burroughs cracked the code with such gusto that he basically changed the face of American pulp fiction, with the one-two punch of A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, both appearing in the pulp magazine The All-Story (which later merged with Argosy, it’s confusing). Burrough’s literary reputation is up for contention, but the cultural impact he continues to have is hard to deny.

Most of the authors who appeared in these pulps are now totally forgotten, and in fact got tossed into the dust bin of history decades ago. At the same time, some of the most important American writers of the 20th century got their start writing for the pulps, be they SFF magazines or other genres. Black Mask, founded in 1920, was a crime-oriented pulp magazine that would publish works by such future giants of crime fiction as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The best of these authors eventually moved on from the pulps in favor of better-paying markets, such as getting into novel-writing, but the strictness of magazine protocol encouraged discipline over raw imagination. In the introduction for his collection Trouble Is My Business, Chandler recounts his experiences with writing stories for Black Mask and other pulps in the ’30s as follows:

If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack.

Chandler describes a push-and-pull effect with writing for the pulps that’s by no means unique to crime fiction—in fact it applies to every other genre of magazine fiction, including what appears in the slicks. Editors have their biases, no matter how benign they appear, and there were restrictions regarding censorship in those days that made it so that the language could never be too salty or the sex appeal all that explicit. (The sexiest a fiction magazine could get was Weird Tales, which you have to admit had some pretty erotically charged covers in the ’30s, but even that came with some legal trouble. Pick a random issue of Weird Tales from the year 1935 and juxtapose it with a random issue from 1939 or 1940: you’ll see the difference.) These restrictions encouraged writers to develop formulae that could get their work accepted with more ease, depending on the market. The work itself might not be masterful, but these markets did serve as training grounds for promising writers.

The years between the world wars saw the height of the pulps, but America’s involvement in World War II demanded everyone tighten their figurative belts, including a need for paper. The paper shortage during the war saw the deaths of several pulp magazines, maybe the most lamented of them being Unknown, Astounding‘s fantasy-oriented sister magazine. Astounding itself barely survived the paper shortage, being the only one of Street & Smith’s genre magazines to have made it. Even the ones that did survive, including Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, fell on hard times during and immediately after the war, with the former eventually closing its doors (not for the last time) in 1954. This is not to say good fiction wasn’t being published in these magazines, especially in the case of Weird Tales which continued strong more or less until the end, but these were struggling magazines with small (if also devoted) readerships. By the early ’50s the pulp format was on its way out, with former pulps switching over to digest. It didn’t help that there were newfangled magazines at this time, including Galaxy Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which were printed in digest format from the beginning. These magazines were not quite slick, as they were still aimed at the small world of genre readers; but they had decent quality paper, they paid well enough, and they (namely F&SF) even sometimes reprinted material from the slicks.

Of course, pulp writing, along with the format associated with it, is dead, and in fact has been dead since before my parents were even born. Analog Science Fiction, formerly Astounding, is now the only genre magazine still standing which had begun its life as a pulp magazine. What little remains of the pulp years has long since found its way into book form, as novels, story collections, anthologies, what have you. The 1950s saw the extinction of the pulp magazine, with the last of these to have stuck with the format, Science Fiction Quarterly, ending with its February 1958 issue. The digest format, a sort of happy medium between the unsophisticated pulps and the decidedly bourgeois slicks, continued. Now, while the pulps were gone, they were by no means forgotten. If you love Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Tarzan, or a good film noir, just know that these things have their roots in the pulps. Hell, H. P. Lovecraft had much of his fiction published in Weird Tales, and indeed that lurid magazine was often the only market that would take his work. Given that the rates were poor, the paper was brittle, and the readership either very young or not too thoroughly educated, pulp fiction left quite a legacy. And within a couple decades there would be a book counterpart to the digest magazines—that is to say, popular fiction in book form that’s sort of pulpy but also sort of slick. There soon came a mode of writing that would embody the best (and worst) qualities of both its parents, and in part is has to do with paperbacks outselling magazines.

The market for genre magazines has evolved radically over the decades, so that the most successful ones running today are online, subsisting on either Patreon subscriptions or simply donations. There’s no debate, however, that the book, and more specifically the paperback, enjoys a far wider readership than any magazine you can name in [the current year]. Go to any bookstore, be it a Barnes & Noble or that indie place you frequent just around the corner, and you will find rows upon rows of paperbacks and hardcovers; meanwhile there may be a couple stalls for magazines, if any, and only a fraction of those will be magazines focusing on fiction. Now, it’s not exactly cheap to buy a paperback novel, unless you have a publisher’s line of paperbacks, like Oxford World’s Classics or Barnes & Noble Classics, that focus on printing “classic literature” at very reasonable prices. But most paperbacks will cost you something. My paperback copy of R. F. Kuang’s Babel (to use an example of a recent novel that a lot of people have read and liked) ran me $20, which feels almost as if Kuang herself (or rather her publisher in this case, HarperCollins) had beaten me over the head with a stick and called me ugly. Kuang is independently wealthy, even if she weren’t a popular writer; surely she (or rather HarperCollins) didn’t need my $20. Still, she writes for a broad audience, as in she writes popular fiction, and evidently she’s doing something right.

You know who else writes popular fiction? George R. R. Martin. One of our most famous living writers, regardless of genre. I’ve covered a few of his short works on this very site, and will do so again eventually. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is very popular, both in how many people read these books as well as the demographic Martin writes (or wrote) with in mind. But was that always the case? Did you know that the Daenarys chapters of A Game of Thrones first appeared as a novella in an issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, just a few months before A Game of Thrones found its way to bookstore shelves? If you were one of the relatively few people to have been subscribed to Asimov’s in 1996, you would’ve gotten a sneak peek at what has since become one of the most famous and controversial series in all of fantasy. Asimov’s is a digest magazine with, as I said, a healthy but ultimately modest readership. It’s not pulpy, but you also wouldn’t call it slick or popular. It’s sophisticated, but not that sophisticated. Martin himself has made no secret of being influenced by pulp fiction from the days of yore, namely SF published in Astounding before it became Analog. Indeed Martin’s biggest aspiration as a writer at the outset of his career was to get published in Analog, which he succeeded at. Nowadays people tend to overlook Martin’s pre-ASoIaF SFF, maybe because said fiction was not aimed at a general readership for the most part. I do suggest doing some digging and, for instance, reading the short fiction collected in Martin’s Dreamsongs.

Popular genre fiction takes the broad demographic and image of respectability from the slicks and combines that with the juvenile adventurousness of the pulps. The problem we’re now facing is that with the pulps long gone and the slick magazines not much more relevant, the options you have for reading some good SFF have narrowed. This is made worse by the phasing-out of the mass market paperback, which for a few decades served as like a book equivalent to a pulp magazine issue, in terms of paper quality, garishness, and affordability. The mass market paperback is smaller and cheaper than the trade paperback, but the latter has has finer and more flexible paper, not to mention an air of respectability. You can still find Martin’s old books as mass market paperbacks, but the same can’t be said for Kuang, or indeed other SFF authors of her age or even a generation older. Publishers used to get by on selling mass market paperbacks at $9 a pop, or magazine issues at the same price; but now they want your $20 for a trade paperback edition novel you might already have. Pulp and slick writing have merged, or maybe fallen together into a boiling pot, to create popular fiction, but this Frankenstein monster is itself a victim of capitalist greed. Clearly there’s a big audience for fancy trade paperbacks and even fancier hardcovers, but the problem (and I’m sort of paraphrasing Oscar Wilde here) is that audiences tend to be stupid.

My point is that I worry about the future.