"Sam Moskowitz - Doorway Into Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moskowitz Sam)

STORIES existed and prospered, he contended, because they would graduate
readers to ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION.
Just as medical specialists needed general practitioners to refer patients to them,
ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION needed publications featuring elementary
stories with wide appeal to recruit new readership.
If Campbell's theory was correct, the science fiction field was ideally set up for
him, because while AMAZING printed the most basic science fiction, Standard
Publications, with THRILLING WONDER STORIES, STARTLING STORIES
and CAPTAIN FUTURE, provided a stepladder effect by appealing to the
teenagers. Their mainstays were the big names of the thirties: Eando Binder, Manly
Wade Wellman, John Russell Fearn, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson and
Edmond Hamilton. STARTLING STORIES ran a complete novel each issue as well
as a hall-of-fame reprint, and on an action level was an excellent value for fifteen
cents. CAPTAIN FUTURE was a character magazine, doing for science fiction
what THE SHADOW did for the detective story, and was pegged for average ages
of 14 and below.
There was also a sense of nostalgia and a collecting instinct among science fiction
readers that had not been generally catered to until Munsey issued a magazine of
reprints titled Famous FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, devoted at fait to famous
fantasies from the old ARGOSY, ALL-STORY and CAVALIER. Big name authors
of an era preceding the first science fiction magazine in 1926 paraded across the
contents pages of its issues: A. Merritt, George Allan England, Austin Hall, Charles
B. Stilson, Victor Rousseau, Homer Eon Flint and Ray Cummings. Their style and
their plots were in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition of the scien-tific romance.
They represented pure escape, with adventures on other worlds, in lost valleys and
unknown dimensions with rich and colorful thrills and a strange but lovely princess
frequently the reward of heroic exertions. This magazine also found a solid audience.
As titles proliferated within the science fiction field, spe-cialization became further
evident. One of the most in-teresting such magazines was PLANET STORIES, a
quarterly experiment of the Fiction House pulp chain, made up en-tirely of
interplanetary stories. The quality was very uneven, but the magazine began to take
a direction completely dif-ferent than the others. It wanted action, but it also wanted
the romance and wonder of the spaceways. It began to develop a type of science
that had the feel of the old ARGOSY-ALL-STORY scientific romances featured by
FA-MOUS FANTASTIC MYSTERIES, but was written in a faster style and with
more scientific window dressing. Its editor, Malcolm Reiss, also proved receptive to
the off-trail science fiction and frequently printed stories that were not only unique,
but of exceptional literary quality.
The only new magazines that to any degree followed Campbell's policy were two
edited by Frederik Pohl for Popular Publications titled ASTONISHING STORIES
and SUPER SCIENCE STORIES. ASTONISHING STORIES had the distinction
of being the first science fiction magazine to sell for as little as ten cents. SUPER
SCIENCE STORIES published short novels com-plete, and competed with
STARTLING STORIES. The only prob-lem here was that Pohl could pay only a
half-cent a word. He got the other magazines' rejects, and of these he found
Campbell's authors most acceptable. Practically from the first issues, Isaac Asimov,
Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Clifford D. Simak, as well as lesser lights
from Campbell's coterie, appeared in his publication.
When the editorship of Pohl's publications was assumed by Alden H. Norton in
the summer of 1941 the policy was continued with the addition of scientific fantasies