Fantastic Stories

Having mentioned Amazing Stories the other day, while discussing it's former editor Raymond Palmer's later magazine, Other Worlds, it seems only fitting to take a quick look at Amazing's latter day companion: Fantastic.  This wasn't Amazing's first companion, in 1939 Ziff-Davis had created Fantastic Adventures, also edited by Palmer, as a more fantasy and adventure orientated stablemate, which shouldn't be confused with Fantastic, which made its debut in 1952, the brainchild of Amazing's then editor, Howard Browne.  From the outset, Fantastic was published in digest, rather than pulp, format and was intended to feature more up-market fantasy stories.  Although initially popular (sales sufficiently impressed Ziff-Davis that they switched Amazing to digest size and discontinued Fantastic Adventures), declining sales in the mid-fifties resulted in a  switch to science fiction rather than fantasy, in the form of mainly low quality stories turned out by a stable of writers under house names.  Quality improved in the late fifties under new editor Cele Goldsmith, but in 1965 Ziff-Davis sold its science fiction titles to Sol Cohen, who turned them into reprint magazines, with little new material.  In the late sixties, after Harry Harrison and Barry N Malzberg both edited the magazine in quick succession - cutting down the number of reprints - Ted White took over as editor and presided over what was possible Fantastic's 'golden era' during the early seventies.

Under White there was a renewed focus on fantasy, with sword and sorcery tales featuring prominently for a period, (indeed, for a while the mast head read 'Sword and Sorcery and Fantasy').  The quality of contributing writers and writing improved significantly and the magazine sported many colourful and striking covers during this time.  The above cover, with its comic art style cover, is from September 1973, the magazine's twenty first year of publication.  The author line up includes familiar seventies SF names like former editor Barry N Malzberg, Gordon Eklund, David R Bunch and Alexei and Cory Panshin.  Fritz Leiber, many of whose 'Fafhred and the Grey Mouser' stories had appeared in this incarnation of Fantastic provides fantasy book reviews.  The authors listed were typical of those featured in the magazine during this period, with most of them stalwarts of the publication.  Despite the increase in quality, sales for fiction magazines in general were in decline - by 1976 Fantastic slipped from its mainly bi-monthly schedule to quarterly publication.  In 1978 it was sold to new publishers, who installed a new editor.  By 1980 sales had fallen to the point that the magazine was effectively cancelled when it was combined with Amazing, (which, under various publishers, has survived as a print magazine until the present day).  Fantastic, throughout its twenty eight year existence, always existed somewhat in the shadow of its senior companion, despite, for several years, arguably publishing the stronger fiction.  If nothing else, it should be remembered for helping to establish the 'sword and sorcery' genre in the early seventies.