Super-Science Fiction
Entry updated 16 March 2020. Tagged: Publication.
US Digest-size magazine, 18 bimonthly issues December 1956 to October 1959, published by Headline Publications, New York, edited by W W Scott. Super-Science Fiction was a case of simply one magazine too many, coming in the final wave of interest in sf magazines at the end of the 1950s at a time when readers were already turning to the paperback. Scott, who had no experience in science fiction though he was an old-time Pulp magazine editor, relied instead on the fiction factory of authors who had been supplying so many of the other magazines. Two of them accounted for nearly 40% of all the fiction published in the magazine: Robert Silverberg with 36 stories under his own name and a half-dozen pseudonyms, and Harlan Ellison. Neither supplied them with their best works but simply responded to demands. A few other writers put in occasional appearances, Isaac Asimov, Lloyd Biggle Jr, Robert Bloch, James E Gunn and Jack Vance being the main ones of note; but their work was not enough to add any value to the magazine. Scott saw the growing interest in Monster Movies in the late 1950s and began to published special "Monster" issues. Those alone make the magazine of sufficient interest to monster-movie fans, but otherwise they were of no merit. [MA]
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