page_title: Amazing Stories
section_title: Cele Goldsmith
hierarchical_section_title: Amazing Stories / Contents and reception / Cele Goldsmith
caption_attribution_description: English: Amazing Stories, March 1961. Published by Ziff-Davis. Art by Leo Summers. Advertises Isaac Asimov humorous short story, illustrates James Blish story. Source is isfdb.org. Works copyrighted before 1964 had to have the copyright renewed sometime in the 28th year. If the copyright was not renewed the work is in the public domain. These records are in the online catalog found here: http://www.copyright.gov/records . The original copyright registration for the March 1961 issue of Amazing Stories is B00000889125 on February 9, 1961. Four authors in this issue renewed article copyrights but the magazine was not renewed. "Playboy and the slime god" by Isaac Asimov (RE0000427469 / 1989-01-23) "A Dusk of idols" by James Blish (RE0000437740 / 1989-07-03) "Political machine" by John Jakes (RE0000443111 / 1989-11-02) Various introductions by Sam Moskowitz (RE0000438501 / 1989-05-30) The copyright on this magazine was not renewed and it is in the public domain.
context_page_description: Amazing Stories is an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Science fiction stories had made regular appearances in other magazines, including some published by Gernsback, but Amazing helped define and launch a new genre of pulp fiction.
  As of 2018, Amazing has been published, with some interruptions, for ninety-two years, going through a half-dozen owners and many editors as it struggled to be profitable. Gernsback was forced into bankruptcy and lost control of the magazine in 1929. In 1938 it was purchased by Ziff-Davis, who hired Raymond A. Palmer as editor. Palmer made the magazine successful though it was not regarded as a quality magazine within the science fiction community. In the late 1940s Amazing presented as fact stories about the Shaver Mystery, a lurid mythos that explained accidents and disaster as the work of robots named deros, which led to dramatically increased circulation but widespread ridicule. Amazing switched to a digest size format in 1953, shortly before the end of the pulp-magazine era.
context_section_description: Cele Goldsmith's tenure as editor began with the opportunity to showcase two very well-established writers: E.E. Smith and Isaac Asimov. Smith's The Galaxy Primes began serialization in March 1959. Asimov's first published story, "Marooned off Vesta", had appeared in the March 1939 issue of Amazing, and Goldsmith reprinted it in March 1959 along with a sequel and Asimov's comments on the story. She soon began to publish some of the better new writers. Cordwainer Smith's "Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!" appeared in April; and by the middle of the following year she had managed to attract stories from Robert Sheckley, Alan E. Nourse, Fritz Leiber, Gordon R. Dickson, Robert Bloch, and James Blish. The changes she made were enough to bring Robert Heinlein back as a subscriber; Heinlein read a copy of the June 1961 issue, which, he said, "... caused me to think I had been missing something."
  In September 1960 Amazing began to carry Sam Moskowitz's series of author profiles, which had begun in Fantastic, the sister magazine. The following month the cover and logo were redesigned. In April 1961, the 35th anniversary of the first issue, Goldsmith ran several reprints, including stories by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Goldsmith had little previous experience with science fiction, and bought what she liked, rather than trying to conform to a notion of what science fiction should be. The result was the debut of more significant writers in her magazines than anywhere else at that time. She published the first stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony and Thomas M. Disch, among many others. Award-winning stories published during Goldsmith's editorship include Zelazny's "He Who Shapes", a story about the use of dream therapy to cure phobias. It was serialized in the January and February 1965 issues, and won a Nebula Award, an annual award voted on by science fiction writers. Goldsmith often wrote long, helpful letters to her authors: Zelazny commented in a letter to her that "Most of anything I have learned was stimulated by those first sales, and then I learned, and possibly even learned more, from some of the later rejections". Disch and Le Guin have also acknowledged the influence Goldsmith had on their early careers.
  The cover art for Amazing had been largely supplied by Ed Valigursky during the late fifties, but during the early sixties a much wider variety of artists appeared, including Alex Schomburg, Leo Summers and Ed Emshwiller. Frank Paul, who had painted all the covers for the first few years of Amazing, contributed a wraparound cover for the April 1961 35th anniversary issue; this was his last cover art for a science fiction magazine.
  Goldsmith's open-minded approach meant that Amazing and Fantastic published some writers who did not fit into the other magazines. Philip K. Dick's sales to magazines had dropped, but his work began to appear in Amazing, and Goldsmith also regularly published David R. Bunch's stories of Moderan, a world whose inhabitants were part human and part metal. Bunch, whose stories were "bewildering, exotic word pictures" according to Mike Ashley, had been unable to sell regularly elsewhere.
caption: March 1961 issue, featuring James Blish's "A Dusk of Idols"
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