This article on how The 50th anniverary of the Magazine of Fantasty and Science Fiction first appeared in The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Winter 1999, issue #145, under the title "Urbanity, Charm, Wit and Excellence: The Legacy of Mick and Tony."

 

“Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes.  Walter M. Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz.” Shirley Jackson’s “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts.” “And Now the News,” by Theodore Sturgeon.  “Fondly Fahrenheit,” by Alfred Bester, and “Ararat,” by Zenna Henderson, and “Born of Man and Woman,” by Richard Matheson. Wise, witty, satiric, pointed, literate, contemporary in tone, historic in sweep, these are some of the most chillingly memorable stories in our genre.  They have one other common factor.  Each and every one originally appeared in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

 

Where else?  F&SF expanded the field the way inflation expanded the universe, creating space within for both the fantasists of the 19th century and the heirs to Gernsback, for the wild-eyed youngsters touched by the mainstream, the parodists with their mocking eyes, the sad- but clear-eyed humanists who had no other place to go, no home base that understood and nurtured and encouraged them.  No other one home ever gave shelter to a wider swath of our whole genre universe, science fiction and fantasy and horror and all the shadings within, than F&SF, now celebrating its 50th Anniversary.

 

But this year could so easily have been the 53rd anniversary, or even the 56th.  Our beloved and noted F&SF didn’t start out with those initials or even with SF in mind at all. It evolved, and faltered, and took a step in the wrong direction before finally finding its way.  This tale too is a story, with a contributing cast of outsized and improbable characters.

 

Today’s view of sf and the sf magazines in the 1940s is colored by nostalgia and selective vision.  We remember Cleve Cartmill’s visit from the FBI and not the post-Hiroshima stories that beat the atomic bomb theme into the ground. We forget that Unknown Worlds was a casualty of wartime paper shortages and that 1946 dawned with only a handful of pulps and one single digest-sized magazine, Astounding (the only one on a monthly schedule to boot), left to carry the banner of science fiction into the future that the magazines had so confidently predicted in the optimistic 30s.

 

Postwar America belonged to the young and victorious, and – much like today – ferment and change dominated every conversation, old ways of thought were being heaved merrily into history’s dustbin, money was there to be spent and to be made, and the time felt right for ambitious entrepreneurs to take the plunge.

 

Also not unlike today, two such go-getters were up in the San Francisco area. Jesse Francis McComas was Northern California sales manager for Simon & Schuster and had just co-edited the monumental anthology Adventures in Time and Space with Raymond J. Healy. The writer, critic, and reviewer William A. P. White, A.P. to his friends, was better known by his mystery and science fiction pseudonyms, Anthony Boucher and H. H. Holmes. Mick knew sf and publishing; Tony, a force of nature, knew everything.

 

But the idea for a new magazine was Mick’s, first conceived as early as 1943 but waiting for the war’s end for fruition. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, then as now, was the leading mystery mag, a literate outpost for the best in both new stories and reprinted classics. After enlisting Tony in the cause, Mick approached Fred Dannay, the editorial half of the Ellery Queen team, about starting an Ellery Queen’s Fantasy Magazine.  Dannay liked the concept if not the specifics and suggested that the pair write directly to his publisher, Lawrence Spivak. (Spivak ironically kept his money-losing but prestigious flagship publication, The American Mercury, afloat by using the profits from EQMM and a series of digest-sized paperback mysteries.  No doubt he saw an incursion into sf as fulfilling the same function.)

 

A letter, dated March 11, 1946, proposed a magazine, as-yet-unnamed, containing “short stories of the fantasy, supernatural, or ghost genre.”  Well-known authors, including Raymond Chandler and H. F. Heard, were to be asked to clean out their trunks of stories unsellable without a going fantasy market, and to be paid top dollar because writers of their stature “will hardly be content with less than two cents a word.” Contracts, for a flat fee of $100, were mailed out to six writers.  Stuart Palmer returned his first, and on June 24, 1946, his story was stamped as mss. Number 1.

 

Bad timing.  The bottom dropped out of magazine newsstand sales in 1947, and the date for publishing the first test issue slipped and slipped, although Joseph Ferman, then general manager of Mercury Publications, kept renewing the contract for something whose very name was never clear, even internally. Fantasy and Horror became the usual designation, but The Magazine of Fantasy and Terror appears at least once in the archives.

 

Donald A. Wollheim, at Avon, kept their hopes alive, all unknowingly.  His Fantasy Reader, technically a series of digest-sized paperback reprint anthologies, were truly magazines in all but name, even to their soliciting fan mail from their readership. Although the first issue featured a hoary host of names from the fantasy field, the actual lead and cover spot belonged to Murray Leinster’s “The Power Planet,” a novelette that began with a very unfantasyish, “The war-rocket wasn’t sighted from Earth until it was three million miles out…” Despite a slow start, the Reader’s eventual sales figures drove imitators the way a successful Internet IPO does today.

 

So much so that when Joe Ferman finally gave the okay for a one-shot test of Fantasy and Horror in early 1949, he also suggested the use of a science-fiction story in each issue. Mick and Tony were quick to agree, with the proviso that they wouldn’t be using the “routine gadget-story type of stf or the Interplanetary Horse Opera.” Ferman also soon suggested substituting The Magazine of Fantasy, emphasis surely being placed on the “The,” as a less pulpish name that would be better suited for a publication from Spivak, so mainstream he was a panelist on Meet the Press. The first issue launched with a celebrity-filled luncheon at the Waldorf, not in backwater San Francisco, but in the center of the publishing world, in New York City, ostensibly to also honor the hundredth anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death with a collector’s limited-run edition of “The Masque of the Red Death.” (On his way to the podium, Basil Rathbone was heard to ask, “What’s this about?” “Poe,” he was told. “Ah,” he said, and proceeded to recite "Annabel Lee" to thunderous applause.)

 

The magazine itself drew less acclaim, selling only 57,000 copies, well below expectations.  There were any number of reasons, starting with the cover, a Bill Stone Kodachrome of a red-haired wench in a strapless gown, a grinning cartoon gargoyle drawn awkwardly perched on her shoulders.  The blurry and yellow typeface made the authors’ names nearly unreadable, almost as unreadable as several of the stories themselves.  Percival Landon and Fitz James O’Brien were represented with old-fashioned talky spook stories about scuttling things and lost rooms better suited to the Fantasy Reader audience. Stuart Palmer’s old number 1 concerned a ladies club summoning the devil, a pleasantly lightweight story, still heavier than Cleve Cartmill’s lead piece, its ahead-of-the-curve Dianetics reference (as the Science of Mental Dynamics) notwithstanding.  As late as 1952, in their introduction to the first Best of... anthology, Mick and Tony could still boast that “every issue has contained…at least one professional debut.”), this one’s being Winona McClintic’s, a dystopian future in which a hidden old book is found and cherished by a new generation of readers, a prescient topic.

 

Theodore Sturgeon, an odder choice then than now who wrote back that he’d “much rather be known as a fantasist than a stf writer,” contributed the last-minute sf story.  But “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast,” is a failed alien takeover story so whimsical that it might as well be a fantasy.

 

It might have ended there, with The Magazine of Fantasy no more than a half-remembered footnote in the histories, as are Other Worlds Science Stories, and Future, and Fantasy Fiction, and Out of This World Adventures, all of which also went onto newsstands in late 1949 and early 1950.

 

Instead, Mick and Tony regrouped.  And magically, the kind of magic generated by fine minds, hard work, and true inspiration, it all fell into place.

 

Everything changed, starting with the name. The volume 1, No. 2, Winter-Spring 1950 issue became The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the F&SF known to one and all. The nameless art director [the first cover was done by Bill Stone] was replaced by George Salter, who graced the cover with one of his elegantly stylized aliens and immediately made the typeface legible.  (Joe Ferman, later to be Publisher and Editor, is General Manager; future Editor Robert P. Mills is Managing Editor: in many ways F&SF has been a family publication for its entire run.)

 

Mostly gone too were the octogenarian retreads. Now the reprints were 1940s works taken from the likes of Argosy (Robert Arthur) or Harper’s (Miriam Allen deFord) or The New Yorker (Robert M. Coates). Even the 19th century reprints no longer bore us with draggy spooks.  We get the delightfully twisted tale of an astral body going off on its own from Anthony Hope and early demented sf in W. L. Alden’s piece on how the Krakatoa explosion was caused by an attempt to harness it to generate electricity.

 

Better yet were the homegrown stories. Not one but two of the story cycles whose humorous take on science-fictional clichés would become an F&SF hallmark begin in this issue, the Papa Schimmelhorn stories of R. Bretnor and the Gavagan’s Bar tales from L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt. Add to these the first major stories from Damon Knight and Kris Neville and a Margaret St. Clair transition piece between her earlier adventure stories and her later Idris Seabright fantasies, and you already have a strong, readable, modern issue that compared well to anything on the digest racks.