It’s been some months since I did my last marathon of short stories from Amazing Stories, and in the magazine’s own timeline it’s been a couple decades. Not that nothing good was being printed in the ’40s and ’50s, but I only have three months to do this thing and this is a magazine with a really long and messy history.

Last time we saw pretty much the end of T. O’Conor Sloane’s tenure, by which point Amazing Stories wasn’t doing so well, either in sales or the quality of the fiction. There was then a change in publishers and Sloane stepped down, the old man (he was born in 1851) dying in 1940. The next editor was the much younger and more eccentric Raymond A. Palmer, who would do stuff with the magazine that was for both good and ill. Palmer was only 27, and came to the editorship from the perspective of a fan, at a time when the first Worldcon hadn’t even happened yet. Palmer ran Amazing Stories for the next decade and obviously bought some good fiction, but his biggest contribution was the long-running series of hoax stories written by Richard S. Shaver. The so-called Shaver mystery amassed a cult following, but it did little to improve the magazine’s sales overall, and indeed damaged its reputation at a time when it was already treated as thoroughly second-rate. Something had to be done.

When Palmer left to persue other ventures in the field (notably he edited Other Worlds, which printed some pretty good material on a modest budget), Howard Browne, who hitherto worked as managing editor, took over. Up to this point Amazing Stories had languished as a pulp-format magazine, and as the new decade arrived it became clear that the digest format was the way of the future for genre magazines that wanted to be more respectible. So, Browne had it changed to digest, and for a brief time in the early ’50s Amazing Stories was looking good for a second-rate magazine. Notably Browne bought the first story by Walter M. Miller, and we also saw stories from the likes of Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, and even Robert Heinlein. This rise in quality coincided with the debut of a new sister magazine, Fantastic, which Browne also edited. It could be because Browne was reported to dislike SF as a genre, or maybe it’s because fantasy is in some ways less restrictive than SF, but from the beginning it seemed like Fantastic was the favored sibling.

Both magazines had their peaks and valleys, though, especially as money ran tight and Brown eventually stepped down to go back to focus on crime fiction. In the latter half of the ’50s both magazines had resorted to reprints and relying on a deceptively small group of workhorse authors who often got published under pseudonyms. It was not unusual to find, say, two or even three stories by Robert Silverberg under a variety of names in a single issue. Shit was getting ridiculous. Paul W. Fairman acted as caretaker editor for a couple years, but clearly a fresh and ingenious face was needed if the two magazines were to survive.

Cele Goldsmith was only 25 when she took over Amazing Stories, but she had already acted as managing editor under Fairman and so had a good idea as to what the job would entail. Even so, the arrangement ended up being a bit unorthodox, and both magazines went through some big changes. The custom for editors was to write an editorial (as you do) for each issue, but Goldsmith didn’t write editorials; instead that duty went to Norman M. Lobsenz, who also wrote the story blurbs. ISFDB lists only a few times during her six-year tenure where Goldsmith wrote an editorial. This is the reason why we have little insight into what her opinions on anything were, and when she wrote a brief essay that appeared in the March 1983 issue of Amazing Stories, reminiscing about her editorship, she had long since moved on from the field. But she did not forget her roots. To use Goldsmith’s own words from that very essay:

I’m often asked if I miss science fiction. Of course I do. And what I miss most is the contact with the many writers who became my friends. I confess to feeling a bit smug in the private knowledge that much of their success occurred because I was, at one time, their only reader and their most important audience.

Said writers who either submitted early stories or straight up made their debuts in Goldsmith’s magazines included Roger Zelazny, Ben Bova, Piers Anthony, Thomas M. Disch, David R. Bunch, Phyllis Gotlieb, and of course, Ursula K. Le Guin, who would become perhaps the most universally acclaimed American genre author of the 20th century. Fritz Leiber, who had taken a few years off from writing, returned with a vengeance at the tail end of the ’50s, and the magazines he appeared in most were easily Goldsmith’s, especially Fantastic. J. G. Ballard was well-established in the British magazines, but Goldsmith offered him his first consistent market in the US. In the awkward years between the ’50s boom-and-bust and the New Wave of the late ’60s, Goldsmith paved the way for authors who would fully bloom in the latter period. During the six years of Goldsmith’s editorship, Amazing Stories got nominated for the Hugo for Best Professional Magazine five times, with 1960 marking the first time it was ever nominated. Fantastic also got nominated multiple times.

Now, as for what I’ll be covering this month, I’ll acknowledge the elephant in the room: it’s all dudes. With the major exception of Le Guin, there was surprisingly not a noticeable uptick in lady authors appearing Amazing, despite a lady editor being in charge. This is by no means indicative of some bias on Goldsmith’s part or unique to her, as much of the ’60s saw an unfortunate drought in women writing for the genre magazines, even when compared the previous decade. Still, I wanted to cover as much ground as I could while also picking stories that look interesting. We’re starting with an early Harlan Ellison story from the December 1958 issue, the first issue credited to Goldsmith as editor, and ending with a Zelazny story from the June 1965 issue, Goldsmith’s last. Ziff-Davis, Amazing‘s long-time publisher, gave up it and Fantastic after the June 1965, and Goldsmith went with Ziff-Davis in the divorce. Both magazines became cheap reprint papers for a few years after, but they eventually recovered.

With all that said, it’s time to get to the fiction.

For the short stories:

1. “Are You Listening?” by Harlan Ellison. From the December 1958 issue. You know him, you love him (or maybe not), but it can’t be denied that Harlan Ellison continues to be a north star by which SF writers guide themselves, even nearly a decade after his death. Eventually he would become famous and an award-winner, but in 1958 Ellison was just another struggling young writer.
2. “First Love” by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. From the September 1959 issue. One of those authors to have fought in WWII, Biggle began writing SF about a decade after the war ended. He studied musicology and even got a PhD out of it, but it’s his SF and involvement in fandom (he founded the Science Fiction Oral History Association) that would occupy much of his time until his death in 2002.
3. “Getting Regular” by David R. Bunch. From the August 1960 issue. Like Harlan Ellison, Bunch anticipated the New Wave by about a decade, making his genre debut in 1957. Bunch specialized in the short-short story, each tending to clock in at only half a dozen pages. His penchant for both quirkiness and brevity goes to explain why he’s the only author to appear twice in Dangerous Visions.
4. “A Dusk of Idols” by James Blish. From the March 1961 issue. Blish was one of the first notable critics of genre SF, at least in the US, and his reviews of fiction specifically as printed in the magazines make his critical work a distant precursor to this very site. He was also pretty good when it came to writing fiction, especially in the ’50s, which saw him win a Hugo for A Case of Conscience.
5. “Thirteen to Centaurus” by J. G. Ballard. From the April 1962 issue. By the early ’60s Ballard was already well-established in the UK, but Goldsmith was an early champion of his work in the US, with him appearing regularly in both Amazing Stories and Fantastic during Goldsmith’s tenure. Ballard is most famous (or infamous) for his novels, including Crash and Empire of the Sun.
6. “Down to Earth” by Harry Harrison. From the November 1963 issue. Harrison started out as an illustrator, but he made his debut as a writer in 1951 and kept at it for decades. He also later became a prolific anthology editor. Given that much of Harrison’s fiction is known for being lightweight, it might come as jarring that his most famous novel is the bleak Make Room! Make Room!
7. “A Game of Unchance” by Philip K. Dick. From the July 1964 issue. To this day Dick is one of my favorite authors, even when taking his faults into account. Dick emerged at one of the best (sometimes funny, other times scary) short-story writers of the ’50s, inside or outside of the field. But ya know, novels make more money. As such we didn’t see as much short fiction from Dick in the ’60s.
8. “The Furies” by Roger Zelazny. From the June 1965 issue. I had to pick at least one major discovery Goldsmith had made, and it was a hard choice since, truth be told, the material in Fantastic during this time was stronger overall than what Amazing Stories offered. Zelazny appeared more often in Fantastic, which makes sense, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a good fit for Amazing Stories.

Let’s do some reading, shall we?