The Press: Wonder World

The wonderful world of science-fiction pulps is populated with lithe heroes, bosomy heroines, bug-eyed monsters and space-suited villains from Mars. It is also garishly illuminated with the latest pseudo-scientific jargon. Readers of Thrilling Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, etc. take such words as teleportation, parastasis and rhodon-deracts in stride.

Into this world of science and sex this week stepped a new contender, the Magazine of Fantasy, a slickish, 35¢ quarterly. Published by the American Mercury’s bustling Lawrence Spivak, who also runs radio’s Meet the Press program and puts out a string of mystery publications, Fantasy is designed to lift imaginative fiction up to the level of the highest brows.

Fantasy is the idea of Anthony Boucher, 38, a top mystery writer (creator of Sister Ursula, the nun-detective) and J. Francis McComas, 39, onetime radio announcer and wonder-story writer. They will co-edit the new magazine. It took two years to fit Fantasy into Spivak’s small operation, which requires a staff of only six to put out the unprofitable Mercury, the profitable Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and 30 cut-down mystery reprints a year,

Spivak hopes the new magazine will do for fantasy and science fiction what his Ellery Queen (which he says has a 200,000 circulation) has done for the short detective story.

In Fantasy’s first 70,000-copy issue, Boucher and McComas have presented a fine array of chills & thrills, including a story by H. H. Holmes, touted as “a master of evil” (but not also identified as Editor Boucher himself). Though off to a good start, Fantasy faces a major problem : science is making such rapid strides that it is hard for fiction writers to keep ahead of the scientists.

But Editors Boucher and McComas are so confident that they expect Fantasy to become a monthly. Says Boucher: “The detective story is getting into a blind alley of repetition. Science fiction may be the next big escape.”