page_title: History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950
section_title: From Gernsback to Campbell
hierarchical_section_title: History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950 / From Gernsback to Campbell
caption_attribution_description: English: Main illustration for the story "The Homicidal Diary". Internal illustration from the pulp magazine Weird Tales (October 1937, vol. 30, no. 4, page 387).
context_page_description: Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters.
context_section_description: Street & Smith was a well-established pulp publisher, with an excellent distribution network, and the revived Astounding was quickly competitive.  It was edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, with assistance from Desmond Hall; both had come to Street & Smith from the wreckage of Clayton.  Tremaine was an experienced pulp editor, and Street & Smith gave him a budget of one cent per word, which was better than the competing magazines could pay.  In December 1933 Tremaine wrote an editorial calling for "thought variant" stories that contained original ideas and did not simply reproduce adventure themes in a science-fiction context.  The early stories identified by Tremaine as "thought variants" were not always particularly original, but it soon became apparent that Tremaine was willing to take risks by publishing stories that would have fallen foul of editorial taboos at other magazines.  By the end of 1934, Astounding was the leading science fiction magazine; important stories published that year include Murray Leinster's "Sidewise in Time", the first genre science fiction story to use the idea of alternate history; The Legion of Space, by Jack Williamson; and "Twilight", by John W. Campbell, writing as Don A. Stuart.  Within a year Astounding's circulation was estimated at 50,000, about twice that of the competition.
  The month after Tremaine announced his "thought variant" policy, Hornig launched his own "New Policy" at Wonder Stories; as with thought variants, the goal was to emphasize originality and bar stories that merely reworked well-worn ideas.  Hornig's rates were lower than Astounding's, and sometimes his writers were paid very late, or not at all; despite these handicaps, Hornig managed to find some good material, including Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey", which appeared in the July 1934 Wonder and has been frequently reprinted.
  Amazing Stories, and its sister magazine, Amazing Stories Quarterly, both of which had been edited by T. O'Conor Sloane since Gernsback lost control of them in 1929, published little of note during the early 1930s, though Sloane did print the first story by several writers later to become well-known, including John W. Campbell, John Wyndham, and Howard Fast.   The Quarterly schedule became irregular in 1932, and it finally ceased publication with the Fall 1934 issue.  Weird Tales had survived a bank failure in 1930 that froze most of the magazine's cash, and was continuing to publish well-received material—mostly fantasy and horror, but still including some science fiction.  H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors, and Margaret Brundage monopolized the covers for a while, becoming perhaps the best-known artist to work for the magazine; almost all her covers included a nude figure.  Virgil Finlay began contributing interior artwork in the mid-1930s; both Finlay and Brundage were very popular with the readers.
  Gernsback experimented with some companion fiction titles in other genres in 1934, but was unsuccessful, and Wonder Stories' decline proved irreversible.  After a failed attempt to persuade his readers to support a subscription-only model, he gave up and sold the magazine to Ned Pines of Standard Magazines in February 1936.  It was retitled Thrilling Wonder Stories to fit in with Pines' other titles such as Thrilling Detective, and given to Mort Weisinger to edit, under the supervision of Leo Margulies, Standard's editor-in-chief.  The format was left unchanged, but the stories and covers became much more action-oriented.  Standard's first issue, dated August 1936, contained stories by several well-known writers, including Ray Cummings, Eando Binder, and Stanley G. Weinbaum, but overall the fiction was unsophisticated compared to what could be found in Astounding.  A comic strip, "Zarnak", was tried, but this only lasted eight issues.
  Two more science-fiction and fantasy magazines were launched in 1936, but neither lasted beyond the end of the year.  Hersey, who had tried the market in 1931 with Miracle, brought out Flash Gordon Strange Adventure Magazine, in
caption: Interior illustration by Virgil Finlay for Earl Peirce's "The Homicidal Diary", in the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales
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