page_title: Fantastic Adventures
section_title: Palmer
hierarchical_section_title: Fantastic Adventures / Contents and reception / Palmer
caption_attribution_description: Cover of October, 1950 edition of Fantastic Adventures featuring "Masters of Sleep" by L. Ron Hubbard. Artist is Robert Gibson Jones. Copyright was either Jones, or more likely Ziff-Davis, who published the magazine.
context_page_description: Fantastic Adventures was an American pulp fantasy and science fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1953 by Ziff-Davis. It was initially edited by Raymond A. Palmer, who was also the editor of Amazing Stories, Ziff-Davis's other science fiction title. The first nine issues were in bedsheet format, but in June 1940 the magazine switched to a standard pulp size. It was almost cancelled at the end of 1940, but the October 1940 issue enjoyed unexpectedly good sales, helped by a strong cover by J. Allen St. John for Robert Moore Williams' Jongor of Lost Land. By May 1941 the magazine was on a regular monthly schedule. Historians of science fiction consider that Palmer was unable to maintain a consistently high standard of fiction, but Fantastic Adventures soon developed a reputation for light-hearted and whimsical stories. Much of the material was written by a small group of writers under both their own names and house names. The cover art, like those of many other pulps of the era, focused on beautiful women in melodramatic action scenes. One regular cover artist was H.W.
context_section_description: Palmer's goal for Fantastic Adventures was to create a magazine that published fantasy fiction but was the literary equal of the quality magazines—the "slicks", such as The Saturday Evening Post. Although mixing science fiction with fantasy was not popular with sf fans of the era, Palmer consciously promoted the magazine as containing the best of both worlds; the slogan on the cover read "The Best in Science Fiction", but Palmer also wrote blurbs in Amazing Stories for Fantastic Adventures in which he extolled the value to a reader of getting both genres in a single magazine. Fantastic Adventures' competition included Unknown, which had been launched just a couple of months earlier, in March 1939, and Weird Tales, which was first published in 1923; but instead of attempting to emulate either one, Fantastic Adventures focused on adventure stories in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Palmer probably acquired some fantasy-oriented material that had been submitted to Amazing Stories, which gave him an immediate stream of submissions to work with. However, according to Ashley the first issue was quite weak: The cover story was "The Invisible Robinhood" by Eando Binder, and other contributors included Harl Vincent, Ross Rocklynne and A. Hyatt Verrill. Features included a quiz, an author profile, and a comic strip, titled "Ray Holmes, Scientific Detective"; the reader was supposed to solve the mystery based on the clues given in the strip. It was a failure and disappeared after the first issue. The back cover, "The Man from Mars", by Frank R. Paul, was more successful, and illustrated back covers became a regular feature of the magazine.
  The next issue contained "The Scientists' Revolt", by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a name guaranteed to help sales. Ashley comments that the story was unimpressive; it had been written as a palace intrigue set in contemporary Europe, but Burroughs had been unable to find a buyer. Palmer eventually acquired it, and rewrote it, setting it in the future. Despite the weakness of the lead story, the second issue was a marked improvement over the first, with well-received stories by Nelson S. Bond and John Russell Fearn (as "Thornton Ayre"). Burroughs returned to Fantastic Adventures in 1941, with a series of novelettes in his Carson of Venus series; there were four in all between March 1941 and March 1942, each with cover art by J. Allen St. John, and the result was a significant boost to Fantastic Adventures' circulation.
  A majority of the stories in Fantastic Adventures came from a small group of writers who often wrote under house names. The main members of the group were William P. McGivern, David Wright O'Brien, Don Wilcox, Chester S. Geier, Rog Phillips, Leroy Yerxa, Robert Moore Williams, Robert Bloch and Berkeley Livingston. Most of this material was of little lasting value, in Ashley's opinion, but Palmer was often able to get good stories from outside this group: August Derleth sold several stories to Palmer, for example. Ray Bradbury also sold a story to Fantastic Adventures—"Tomorrow and Tomorrow", which appeared in 1947, was his only appearance in the magazine, but Ashley regards it as "among the best stories [Fantastic Adventures] published in the 1940s". An early contributor was Nelson S. Bond, whose story "The Judging of the Priestess" appeared in the April 1940 issue. This was the second in a highly regarded series of three stories about a priestess in the future, after civilization has collapsed; the first and third in the series appeared in Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories respectively. Bond also wrote a humorous short story called "The Amazing Invention of Wilberforce Weems", which appeared in the September 1939 issue and described the consequences of a potion that allowed the instant absorption of knowledge from any book. Palmer encouraged his stable of writers to follow up with more whimsical ideas, and the resulting offbeat stories gave Fantastic Adventures a reputation for light-hearted and entertaining fantasy. These stories often had absurd names; early examples include "Th
caption: Robert Gibson Jones' October 1950 cover for L. Ron Hubbard's Masters of Sleep
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