I'm seriously out of step with modern life in many respects, of course, and science fiction is one of them. This is the kind of SF I like: rayguns, space babes, and monsters. Just the sort of things PLANET STORIES specialized in. This issue has a nice cover by Parkhurst and stories by Fiction House regulars Emmett McDowell and Wilbur S. Peacock, as well as long-time SF pro Ross Rocklynne. The other authors are unfamiliar to me, but I wonder about one of them, George A. Whittington, who published only a handful of stories, all in PLANET STORIES. Makes me think that might be a pseudonym or house-name. At any rate, this looks like a fine issue to me, although most current SF readers would be either uninterested (at best) or horrified to the point of outrage (at worst).
7 comments:
Actually PLANET STORIES is a better magazine once we look at it in detail. Leigh Brackett had 20 stories in the 71 issues and Ray Bradbury had another 20. Philip K. Dick sold his first stories to PLANET. The covers are gorgeous if definitely over the top. The letter column is very long and full of interesting comments. I love the magazine and have two sets. One set is the Frank Robinson very fine condition set with white paper and the other set is a banged up collection of issues because I'm afraid to degrade the Robinson issues!
Fiction House created a high-quality comic book spin-off of Planet Stories called Planet Comics which covers the same Space Opera type Sci-Fi subgenre. There are scans available online and I like them a lot. The writers are not credited although I'm thinking that it was pretty much the same stable of writers as the Pulp.
One man's horrified to the point of outrage is another man's entertainment bread and butter. (Was it sexist that I said man? I'm sure someone will be horrified by that.)
This day and age, somebody's always horrified about something.
Sci-tech News - Volumi 9-13
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1955 - Visualizzazione snippet - Altre edizioni
A series of papers proposed would cover the following broad fields: the function of the Research-Development ... Mr. George A. Whittington, Editor of Industrial Laboratories, will arrange for presentation of the papers in his magazine, possibly ...
So Whittington was a real person who just didn't publish much fiction. Again, thanks for the information!
Well, it wasn't as if sufficient numbers appreciated PLANET STORIES on its face value at he time, either, particularly the 1950s issues I've read. And the neo-space opera in the field today does tend to bow to its predecessors.
As Walker notes, all those folks...and Rocklynne and Poul Anderson and Charles Harness and Margaret St. Clair and Alfred Coppel and others had nothing to apologize for...even if atrocious stories by the likes of L. Ron Hubbard in ASTOUNDING...and the ''50s stories by him there were atrocious...were matched in their inexplicable acceptance by Stanley Mullen's deposits at PLANET.
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