Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini on Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950s
We’ve had some discussion here in the last week on the relative merits of the top science fiction digests of the 1950s.
Bob Silverberg offered his opinion that Galaxy magazine took the lead in the field virtually with its very first issue in October 1950, saying “That first year of Galaxy left us all gasping.” And in his Astounding Science Fiction Testimonial, John Boston generally concurs, saying that 1958 was the last good year under editor John W. Campbell.
Over the weekend, I was surprised to run across an interesting and impassioned defense of Astounding magazine in, of all places, the introduction to The End of Summer: Science Fiction of the Fifties, a 1979 paperback edited by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, which collects ten short stories from Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Alfred Bester, Fritz Leiber, C.M. Kornbluth, and others.
Here’s the complete text of the editors’ Prefatory Note:
Six of the ten stories in this anthology are from John W. Campbell’s Astounding. This preponderance was not a publishing decision — Conde Nast gave us complete editorial decision — but our own.
No 70,000-word anthology devoted to the 1950s can give more than a sketchy representation of that tumultuous and fertile decade in science fiction. Accordingly it was felt that a deliberate bias toward Astounding had purpose and would give this book particular value. Concordance on the decade (which will come under increasing challenge as academia’s tanks roll on and on into our little backwater) overrates the not inconsiderable role of Gold’s Galaxy and the Boucher/McComas Fantasy & Science Fiction while somewhat minimizing Astounding, which is felt to have peaked in the forties.
Not quite so. This book is entered in evidence.
In 1941 comics artist June Tarpé Mills started a new Sunday adventure strip: Miss Fury. It would run until 1952, telling the wild and beautifully-drawn saga of a socialite who donned a magical black cat-suit to fight Nazis and criminals. In 2011 IDW’s Library of American Comics imprint published a selection of Miss Fury strips from 1944 through 1949, edited and with an introduction by comics historian Trina Robbins. Last year Robbins and IDW published a second volume, collecting the series from the start up to the beginning of the earlier collection, again featuring an introduction about Mills and her strip, and as well a brief selection of some of Mills’ earlier work. I had a chance to read the recently-published second collection, and was tremendously impressed.
